An Iran-nexus group has been linked to a “coordinated” and “multi-wave” spear-phishing campaign targeting the embassies and consulates in Europe and other regions across the world.
The activity has been attributed by Israeli cybersecurity company Dream to Iranian-aligned operators connected to broader offensive cyber activity undertaken by a group known as Homeland Justice.
“Emails were sent to multiple government recipients worldwide, disguising legitimate diplomatic communication,” the company said. “Evidence points toward a broader regional espionage effort aimed at diplomatic and governmental entities during a time of heightened geopolitical tension.”
The attack chains involve the use of spear-phishing emails with themes related to geopolitical tensions between Iran and Israel to send a malicious Microsoft Word that, when opened, urges recipients to “Enable Content” in order to execute an embedded Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macro, which is responsible for deploying the malware payload.
The email messages, per Dream, were sent to embassies, consulates, and international organizations across the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas, suggesting that the activity cast a wide phishing net. European embassies and African organizations are said to have been the most heavily targeted.
The digital missives were sent from 104 unique compromised addresses belonging to officials and pseudo-government entities to give them an extra layer of credibility. At least some of the emails originated from a hacked mailbox belonging to the Oman Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris (*@fm.gov.om).
“The lure content consistently referenced urgent MFA communications, conveyed authority, and exploited the common practice of enabling macros to access content, which are the hallmarks of a well-planned espionage operation that deliberately masked attribution,” Dream said.
The end goal of the attacks is to deploy using the VBA macro an executable that can establish persistence, contact a command-and-control (C2) server, and harvest system information.
Cybersecurity company ClearSky, which also detailed some aspects of the campaign late last month, said the phishing emails were sent to multiple ministries of foreign affairs.
“Similar obfuscation techniques were used by Iranian threat actors in 2023 when they targeted Mojahedin-e-Khalq in Albania,” it said in a post on X. “We assess with moderate confidence that this activity is linked to the same Iranian threat actors.”
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