For a subset of compromised accounts, the attackers used AzureHound and ROADtools, two open-source frameworks that can be utilized to conduct reconnaissance in Microsoft Entra ID (previously Azure Energetic Listing) environments by interacting with the Microsoft Graph and REST APIs with the aim of exfiltrating information of curiosity from a sufferer’s cloud account.
“AzureHound and Roadtools have performance that’s utilized by defenders, purple groups, and adversaries,” Microsoft mentioned in its report. “The identical options that make these instruments helpful to official customers, like pre-built capabilities to discover and seamlessly dump information in a single database, additionally make these instruments enticing choices for adversaries looking for details about or from a goal’s surroundings.”
To realize persistence, the attackers arrange new Azure subscriptions on victims’ tenants, which had been used to determine command-and-control communication with infrastructure operated by the group. In addition they put in the Azure Arc shopper on gadgets in compromised environments and linked it to an Azure subscription they managed, giving them distant management capabilities over these gadgets. Azure Arc is a functionality that permits the distant administration of Home windows and Linux methods in an Azure AD surroundings.
Different post-compromise instruments and strategies
After attaining persistence, the Peach Sandstorm attackers deployed a wide range of publicly obtainable and customized instruments, together with AnyDesk, a business distant monitoring and administration (RMM) software, and EagleRelay, a customized site visitors tunneling software that the attackers deployed on newly created digital machines in sufferer environments.
Different strategies employed by the group embrace abuse of the distant desktop protocol (RDP), executing malicious code by performing DLL hijacking with a official VMWare executable and launching a Golden SAML assault.
“In a Golden SAML assault, an adversary steals personal keys from a goal’s on-premises Energetic Listing Federated Providers (AD FS) server and makes use of the stolen keys to mint a SAML token trusted by a goal’s Microsoft 365 surroundings,” Microsoft mentioned. “If profitable, a risk actor may bypass AD FS authentication and entry federated companies as any person.”
