A nation-state cyber-espionage group linked to India has broadened its targeting beyond regional rivals in Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, and Nepal and is focused on compromising computers and networks at maritime facilities in countries as far away as the Mediterranean Sea.
The group — known variously as SideWinder, Razor Tiger, and Rattlesnake — commonly wages spear-phishing attacks using images of official-looking documents. In its latest campaigns, SideWinder has falsified documents from specific ports, including the Port of Alexandria in Egypt, with high-interest topics such as job termination and salary reductions, researchers from BlackBerry said in a newly published advisory.
While the group has typically focused on rivals closer to home and is less prolific than other cyber spies, the current campaign suggests that they have expanded their targeting, says Ismael Valenzuela, vice president of threat research and intelligence at BlackBerry.
“It’s the first time we have seen SideWinder targeting ports and maritime facilities in EMEA,” he says. “We see a lot of geopolitical turbulence and [changing] environments across the globe on a variety of issues. This often galvanizes threat groups and state-sponsors to specifically strike down critical assets, like those within the maritime industry.”
The maritime industry increasingly has become a target of cyberattacks, posing serious danger to ships and ports. In 2019, the US Coast Guard warned shipping companies that attacks on their systems could lead to accidents and catastrophes. In the past year, following increased Chinese cyber operations against critical infrastructure including maritime systems in and around the South China Sea, various countries in the Asia-Pacific region have banded together to protect their networks and systems.
The cyber warnings also come as physical threats to shipping increase as well. Piracy off the Atlantic coast of Africa and the Arabian Sea, and among the island nations of the Asia-Pacific, has escalated, while ship malfunctions — such as the one the caused a vessel to collide with the Baltimore bridge — have become more frequent.
New Phishing Lures, Old Exploits
SideWinder has conducted attacks since at least 2012. The group is relatively sophisticated, commonly using encrypted malware samples, various obfuscation techniques, and running code in memory to avoid file scanners, according to a presentation at Black Hat Asia in 2022. From 2020 to 2022, the group conducted more than 1,000 attacks, Noushin Shabab, senior security researcher with Kaspersky, said during that presentation.
“I think what truly makes them stand out among other APT [advanced persistent threat] actors is the large tool set they have with many different malware families, lots of new spear-phishing documents, and a very large infrastructure,” Shabab said. “I haven’t seen 1,000 attacks from a single APT” from another group thus far.
However, the current cyberattacks are, in many cases, using older vulnerabilities, such as a flaw in Microsoft Office dating back to 2017. The vulnerability (CVE-2017-0199) allows remote code execution against old versions of Microsoft Office and Windows, and has been a very popular vector of attack, with more than 5,600 malware samples exploiting the issue this year, including 15 malicious samples reported from Egypt, according to BlackBerry.
Like most groups, SideWinder does not like to waste a good exploit, even if it’s seven years old, says Valenzuela.
“Why do we still see old CVEs like these exploited in the wild? Attackers know that many organizations don’t patch their Office software for many years,” he says. “This is especially common in organizations with legacy systems, which are often used in ports and maritime facilities as well as other critical infrastructure.”
BlackBerry documented the use of another very popular — and seven-year-old — vulnerability, in the Microsoft Office Equation Editor (CVE-2017-11882), with more than 9,500 samples of Office documents exploiting the issue since the start of 2024. Both of these vulnerabilities have made the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list maintained by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
Maritime Under Attack
BlackBerry’s threat researchers discovered a variety of domains in the first and second stages of the attack that are likely evidence of their targets, including a long list in South Asia including Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, and the Maldives. Egyptian ports appear to be the only target outside of India’s extended neighborhood.
While the country appears to be extending its reach to other regions of the world, the cyber operations are not actually targeting ports on a global scale, Valenzuela says.
“They’re certainly targeting ports in key countries where this threat actor has geopolitical interests, and that includes the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, [such as] Egypt,” he says. “We don’t have information about other targets in the Mediterranean Sea at this time.”
The researchers have not captured the final payload in the attacks, but based on the group’s previous actions, they believe the goal is intelligence-gathering and cyber espionage, the company stated in its advisory.
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