A new version of the destructive malware dubbed Shamoon V3 targeting European oil and gas company in Middle East and Asia. Shamoon malware was first identified in the year 2012, it targeted Saudi Arabia’s oil company internal network.
Securitu researchers form Anomali Labs identified a new sample of the destructive malware Shamoon V3 that contains a detonation date of December 12, 2017.
The malware packed with UPX is open source, which gives compatibility for the executable to be opened with of different operating systems.
Shamoon new version shares contains almost 80% characteristic features of the historic version of the Shamoon and uses a historic trigger date, to perform destructive actions on the user’s machine, based on geographical target, sector and codebase researchers beleive Iranian APT groups behind it.
Researchers believe that the detonation dates from 2017 represent attacker efforts to have malware samples detonate immediately upon infection of a victim system. This may be achieved by altering the detonation date to 1 year in the past.
The sample detonation date of December 12, 2017, represents the second malware is active by December 12, 2018, the new sample uses a different version and a different filename. New version it as a copy of the legitimate VMware Workstation and attempts to lure victim.
“Anomali Labs has not correlated this sample to an active cyber-attack at this time, however, analysts believe that it may represent additional targets as part of the Shamoon V3 campaign.”