The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has warned Nigerians to be wary of a new email hack on the internet.
According to a statement from NITDA, Microsoft, a world renown multinational technology company has uncovered a widespread malicious email campaign undertaken by the hacking group- NOBELIUM.
“The cybercriminals leveraged the legitimate mass-mailing service to masquerade as a US-based development organisation and distribute malicious URLs to a wide variety of organisations especially government organisations, non-government organizations (NGOs), think-tanks, military, IT service providers, health technology and research, and telecommunications providers.”
Explaining further, NITDA noted that their antics involve the use of emails claiming to be an alert from USAID about new documents published by former President Donald Trump about “election fraud.”
Once users click the link in the email, the URL would direct them to the legitimate Constant Contact Service and then redirect to Nobelium-controlled infrastructure through a URL that delivers a malicious ISO file. This in turn, enables the criminals to execute further malicious objectives, such as lateral movement, data exfiltration and delivery of additional malware.
NITDA therefore advised Nigerians to be wary of such criminals masquerading as USAID and follow the following recommendations:
- Turn on cloud-delivered protection in Microsoft Defender Antivirus or the equivalent to cover rapidly evolving attacker tools and techniques.
- Run EDR in block mode to enable antivirus block malicious artefacts (EDR in block mode works behind the scenes to remediate malicious artefacts that are detected post-breach.)
- Enable network protection to prevent applications or users from accessing malicious domains and other malicious content on the Internet.
- Enable investigation and remediation in full automated mode to allow antivirus take immediate action on alerts to resolve breaches.
- Use device discovery to increase your visibility into your network by finding unmanaged devices on your network and onboarding them
- Enable multifactor authentication (MFA) to mitigate compromised credentials.
- Block all Office applications from creating child processes.
The US national security agencies have called the breach “significant and ongoing.” According to an analysis by Microsoft and security firm FireEye, both of which were infected, the malware gives hackers broad reach into impacted systems.
NITDA further advised users and administrators to review and apply the above mitigations, and report incidences to NITDA CERRT via email support@cerrt.ng or via telephone +2348178774580.
