Researchers with Trellix found a OneDrive malware campaign which targets government officials in Western Asia by using Microsoft’s Graph API to leverage OneDrive as a command-and-control server. The researchers have named the malware ‘Graphite’ due to its use of Microsoft’s Graph API. The attack takes advantage of an MSHTML remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2021-40444) to execute a malicious executable in memory. The attack was prepared in July 2021 and eventually deployed between September and November, according to the Trellix report.
Saryu Nayyar, CEO and Founder, Gurucul had this comment:
“As described, this is a multi-stage attack over time that is similar to attacks purported by known threat actor group APT28. Without a strong set of security analytics capabilities that includes behavioral analytics to see abnormal communications, remote code execution, unauthorized file access, and other stages leveraging dwell time to stay hidden, security teams will struggle to identify this campaign quickly enough. This is especially true as most vendor solutions are leveraging rule-based machine learning (ML) models that require updates before being able to identify this variant. Current SIEM and XDR solutions are limited in their ability to do more than produce more indicators of compromise and do not provide the necessary detection for identifying an attack out of the box with both context and confidence”.
This is scary because of the reach of OneDrive within corporate environments. Thus if you’re a user of OneDrive, and let’s be frank, who isn’t using OneDrive, this report is required reading.