Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav Daemon Tools, a widely used app for mounting disk images, has been backdoored in a monthlong compromise that has pushed malicious updates from the servers of its developer, researchers said Tuesday.
Kaspersky, the security firm reporting the supply-chain attack, said it began on April 8 and remained active as of the time its post went live. Installers that are signed by the developer’s official digital certificate and downloaded from its website infect Daemon Tools executables, causing the malware to run at boot time. Kaspersky didn’t explicitly say so, but based on technical details, the infected versions appear to be only those that run on Windows. Versions 12.5.0.2421 through 12.5.0.2434 are affected. Neither Kaspersky nor developer AVB could be contacted immediately for additional details.
Infected versions contain an initial payload that collects MAC addresses, hostnames, DNS domain names, running processes, installed software, and system locales. The malware sends them to an attacker-controlled server. Thousands of machines in more than 100 countries were targeted. Out of the many machines infected, about 12 of them, belonging to retail, scientific, government and manufacturing organizations, have received a follow-on payload—an indication the supply-chain attack targets select groups.
The incident is only the latest supply-chain attack. Other such attacks include the poisoning of the CCleaner Windows utility in 2017, the Solar Winds app management software for enterprises in 2020, and 3CX VoIP client in 2023. Such attacks are hard to defend against because users are infected when they do nothing more than install digitally signed updates available through official channels. In all three cases it took weeks or months before the compromised update distribution channels were discovered.
“Based on our long-term experience of analyzing supply chain attacks, we can conclude that attackers orchestrated the DAEMON Tools compromise in a highly sophisticated manner,” Kaspersky researchers wrote. “For example, the time it took to detect this attack, which turned out to be about one month, is comparable to the 3CX supply chain attack which we researched together with the cybersecurity community in 2023. Given the high complexity of the attack, it is paramount for organizations to carefully examine machines that had DAEMON Tools installed, for abnormal cybersecurity-related activities that occurred on or after April 8.”
One of the follow-on payloads pushed to about a dozen organizations was what Kaspersky described as a “minimalistic backdoor.” It has the ability to execute commands, download files, and run shellcode payloads in memory—making the infection harder to detect.
Kaspersky said that it observed a more complex backdoor dubbed QUIC RAT, installed on a single machine belonging to an educational institution located in Russia. Initial analysis found that it can inject payloads into the notepad.exe and conhost.exe processes and supports a variety of C2 communication protocols, including HTTP, UDP, TCP, WSS, QUIC, DNS, and HTTP/3.
The 100 infected organizations were primarily located in Russia, Brazil, Turkey, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, and China. Kaspersky’s visibility into the attack is limited because it’s based solely on telemetry provided by its own products.
The analysis shows that 10% of the affected systems belong to businesses and organizations. Attackers attempted to infect most of the affected machines only with the information collector payload. However, the other backdoor payload, which is more complex, has been observed only on a dozen machines of government, scientific, manufacturing and retail organizations located in Russia, Belarus and Thailand. This manner of deploying the backdoor to a small subset of infected machines clearly indicates that the attacker had intentions to conduct the infection in a targeted manner. However, their intent – whether it is cyberespionage or ‘big game hunting’ – is currently unclear.
More recent supply-chain attacks have hit Trivy, Checkmarx, and Bitwarden and more than 150 packages available through open source repositories. Last year there were at least six notable such attacks.
Anyone who uses Daemon Tools should take time to scan the entirety of their machines using reputable antivirus software. Windows users should additionally check for indicators of compromise listed in the Kaspersky post. For more technically advanced users, Kaspersky recommends monitoring “suspicious code injections into legitimate system processes, especially when the source is executables launched from publicly accessible directories such as Temp, AppData, or Public.”
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