Security News > 2020 > August > Financially-Motivated Iranian Hackers Adopt Dharma Ransomware
Recent Dharma ransomware attacks show that more Iranian hackers have started to engage in financially-motivated operations, threat hunting firm Group-IB reports.
In a report published on Monday, Group-IB revealed that Dharma ransomware attacks observed in June this year were the work of a newly discovered Iranian hacker group, and that organizations in China, India, Japan, and Russia were targeted.
The attackers were observed mixing the ransomware with various publicly available tools and focusing their efforts on companies with Internet-facing RDP systems secured with weak credentials.
The attackers attempted to move laterally using RDP. At the final stage of the attack, they would drop and manually execute a variant of Dharma ransomware onto the compromised hosts.
"The fact Dharma source code has been made widely available led to the increase in the number of operators deploying it," said Oleg Skulkin, senior DFIR analyst at Group-IB. "It's surprising that Dharma landed in the hands of Iranian script kiddies who used it for financial gain, as Iran has traditionally been a land of state-sponsored attackers engaged in espionage and sabotage."
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