Netskope Threat Research Labs has observed a new wave of attacks on small- and medium-scale businesses in the Middle East and European regions using the Java-based Adwind RAT. In this new attack, the major targets include shipping and export industries where spam emails are sent containing Windows executable Pif file format as the weaponization file, which drops the Adwind payload. Netskope detects the attachment Pif file as Trojan.GenericKD.5562809 and the dropped Adwind Jar as Trojan.GenericKD.5561478.
We released an earlier blog where Adwind was used to target the hospitality industry to exfiltrate sensitive data. The spam based delivery mechanism is same in both the variants but the major difference is in the obfuscation techniques implemented in the new variant. The email sent to one of the targets is shown in Figure 1.