Operation Sharpshooter
Intelligence Profile
The McAfee Advanced Threat Research team and McAfee Labs Malware Operations Group have discovered a new global campaign targeting nuclear, defense, energy, and financial companies, based on McAfee® Global Threat Intelligence. This campaign, Operation Sharpshooter, leverages an in-memory implant to download and retrieve a second-stage implant—which we call Rising Sun—for further exploitation. According to our analysis, the Rising Sun implant uses source code from the Lazarus Group’s 2015 backdoor Trojan Duuzer in a new framework to infiltrate these key industries.
Operation Sharpshooter’s numerous technical links to the Lazarus Group seem too obvious to immediately draw the conclusion that they are responsible for the attacks, and instead indicate a potential for false flags. Our research focuses on how this actor operates, the global impact, and how to detect the attack. We shall leave attribution to the broader security community.
Threat Analysis
Operation Sharpshooter is a high-sophistication threat actor of undetermined national origin, engaged in cyber operations with a primary motivation of financial.
Financially motivated threat actors like Operation Sharpshooter prioritize monetary gain through methods such as ransomware deployment, banking trojans, cryptocurrency theft, BEC scams, or credential harvesting for resale on underground markets.
With high sophistication, Operation Sharpshooter is capable of targeted intrusions using adapted commodity tools alongside custom implants, maintaining operational security and evading standard detection mechanisms.