Sea Turtle – Engagement

The Sea Turtle threat actor compromised legitimate cPanel accounts, potentially through brute force attacks or credential stuffing, to gain initial access to target systems. This allowed them to establish a foothold and conduct further malicious activities within the victim’s IT infrastructure.

Subject: Sea Turtle – Engagement

Tactics: TA0001 Initial Access

Technique: T1078 Valid Accounts

Procedure:

The Sea Turtle threat actor compromised legitimate cPanel accounts, potentially through brute force attacks or credential stuffing, to gain initial access to target systems. This allowed them to establish a foothold and conduct further malicious activities within the victim’s IT infrastructure.

Vulnerability: EAV0001 When adversaries interact with the environment or personas, they are vulnerable when they collect, observe, or manipulate system artifacts or information. Manipulated data may cause them to reveal behaviors, use additional or more advanced capabilities against the target, and/or impact their dwell time., EAV0002 When adversaries interact with the environment or personas, they are vulnerable to collecting, or in some way interacting with, manipulated or decoy data. In those cases the data may increase their tolerance for imperfections in the environment and improve the overall believability of the ruse.

Engagement Opportunity:

Deploy honeypots disguised as cPanel login pages to attract and interact with the Sea Turtle threat actor. These honeypots can be used to gather intelligence on their attack techniques, tools, and procedures, and to potentially identify the source of their cPanel credentials. Additionally, implement decoy data within the honeypot environment to further engage the attacker and observe their behavior.

Threat Actor: Sea Turtle (also known as Teal Kurma, Marbled Dust, SILICON, and Cosmic Wolf)

Threat Objective:

Espionage and information theft, primarily targeting public and private entities for economic and political intelligence.

Deception Opportunity:

Plant fabricated data within compromised cPanel accounts or honeypots to deceive the Sea Turtle threat actor and mislead their intelligence gathering efforts. This data could contain false information about political dissidents or minority groups, leading the threat actor to pursue dead ends and waste resources.

Sensor Data Placement: User-Mode

Observable Level: Core to Adversary-Brought Tool

Scoring Rationale:

  • Sensor Data Placement: Application, User-Mode
     
  • Observable Level: Core to Adversary-Brought Tool
     
  • Scoring Rationale: The analytic relies on data collected from cPanel logs and system logs, which are application and user-mode data sources. The observable level is specific to the tools used by the attacker, such as the SnappyTCP reverse shell and Adminer database management tool. These tools are not pre-existing on the system and are brought by the attacker, making them core to their specific toolkit.

Link to Report: https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&source=gmail&q=https://www.google.com/url?sa=E%26source=gmail%26q=https://www.huntandhackett.com/blog/turkish-espionage-campaigns

Link to Report II.:

Additional Comments:

The Sea Turtle threat actor demonstrates moderate sophistication, leveraging publicly accessible tools and vulnerabilities to achieve their objectives. Their operational security can be considered sloppy, leaving behind traces of their activity and utilizing public repositories for their tools.

Possible elements: Deceptive User Account with Canary Tokens

MSG (Pseudocode): 

# Malicious Sub-Graph Standard

# Node Format:
# [Node ID]: [Tactic] - [Technique] - [Procedure] ([Observable Level])

# Edge Format:
# [Source Node ID] --> [Destination Node ID] ([Exploited Vulnerability])

# Sea Turtle Attack Graph

[1]: Initial Access - Valid Accounts: Compromise Accounts - Compromise cPanel accounts (Core to Adversary-Brought Tool)
[2]: Execution - Command and Scripting Interpreter - Execute reverse TCP shell SnappyTCP (Core to Adversary-Brought Tool)
[3]: Persistence - External Remote Services - Establish persistence using SnappyTCP (Core to Some Implementations of (Sub-)Technique)
[4]: Command and Control - Application Layer Protocol: HTTPS - Communicate with C2 server using HTTPS (Core to Adversary-Brought Tool)
[5]: Exfiltration - Exfiltration Over C2 Channel - Exfiltrate email archive over HTTPS C2 channel (Core to Sub-Technique or Technique)

1 --> 2 (Weak and Guessable Credentials)
2 --> 3 (Lack of System Monitoring)
3 --> 4 (Lack of Network Monitoring)
4 --> 5 (Lack of Network Monitoring)

# Pseudocode Standard

# Function Format:
# function [Tactic]_[Technique]([Input]):
# [Procedure]
# return [Output]

# Sea Turtle Pseudocode

function Initial_Access_Valid_Accounts(cPanel_login_page):
# Attempt to compromise cPanel accounts using brute force or credential stuffing
# If successful, gain access to the account
return compromised_cPanel_account

function Execution_Command_and_Scripting_Interpreter(compromised_cPanel_account):
# Download and execute reverse TCP shell SnappyTCP
return persistence_mechanism

function Persistence_External_Remote_Services(persistence_mechanism):
# Establish persistence using SnappyTCP
return C2_communication_module

function Command_and_Control_Application_Layer_Protocol(C2_communication_module):
# Establish HTTPS connection with C2 server
# Receive commands and exfiltrate data
return exfiltrated_data

function Exfiltration_Exfiltration_Over_C2_Channel(exfiltrated_data):
# Send exfiltrated_data to C2 server over HTTPS
return success

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