BlueDelta Exploits Ukrainian Government Roundcube Mail Servers to Support Espionage Activities

Recorded Future's Insikt Group, in partnership with Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA), has uncovered a campaign targeting high-profile entities in Ukraine that was cross-correlated with a spearphishing campaign uncovered by Recorded Future’s Network Traffic Intelligence. The campaign leveraged news about Russia’s war against Ukraine to encourage recipients to open emails, which immediately compromised vulnerable Roundcube servers (an open-source webmail software), using CVE-2020-35730, without engaging with the attachment. We found that the campaign overlaps with historic BlueDelta activity exploiting the Microsoft Outlook zero-day vulnerability CVE-2023-23397 in 2022.

The BlueDelta activity, identified by Insikt Group, appears to have been operational since November 2021. The campaign overlaps with activity attributed by CERT-UA to APT28 (also known as Forest Blizzard and Fancy Bear), which multiple Western governments attribute to the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU). In this operation, BlueDelta primarily targeted Ukrainian organizations, including government institutions and military entities involved in aircraft infrastructure.

The BlueDelta campaign used spearphishing techniques, sending emails with attachments exploiting vulnerabilities (CVE-2020-35730, CVE-2020-12641, and CVE-2021-44026) in Roundcube to run reconnaissance and exfiltration scripts, redirecting incoming emails and gathering session cookies, user information, and address books. The attachment contained JavaScript code that executed additional JavaScript payloads from BlueDelta-controlled infrastructure. The campaign displayed a high level of preparedness, quickly weaponizing news content into lures to exploit recipients. The spearphishing emails contained news themes related to Ukraine, with subject lines and content mirroring legitimate media sources.

BlueDelta Outlook and Roundcube spearphishing infection chain overlap

BlueDelta has demonstrated a long-standing interest in gathering intelligence on entities in Ukraine and across Europe, primarily among government and military/defense organizations. The most recent activity very likely represents a continued focus on these entities and specifically those within Ukraine. We assess that BlueDelta activity is likely intended to enable military intelligence-gathering to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and believe that BlueDelta will almost certainly continue to prioritize targeting Ukrainian government and private sector organizations to support wider Russian military efforts.

Recorded Future’s collaboration with CERT-UA further emphasizes the importance of partnerships between industry and governments to enable collective defense against strategic threats — in this case, Russia’s war against Ukraine.

To read the entire analysis with endnotes, click here to download the report as a PDF.

Appendix A — Indicators of Compromise

Domains aneria[.]net armpress[.]net ceriossl[.]info global-news-world[.]com global-world-news[.]net globalnewsnew[.]com infocentre[.]icu mai1[.]namenews[.]info newsnew[.]info runstatistics[.]net sourcescdn[.]net starvars[.]top Target-facing IP Addresses 46.183.219[.]207 (January 2022 - June 2023) 77.243.181[.]238 (March 2022 - June 2023) 144.76.69[.]94 (March 2022 - June 2023) 46.183.219[.]232 (May 2022 - March 2023) 45.138.87[.]250 (December 2021 - March 2022) 144.76.7[.]190 (January 2022 - March 2022) 77.243.181[.]10 (February 2022 - March 2022) 5.199.162[.]132 (January 2022 - March 2022) 185.210.217[.]218 (January 2022 - February 2022) 144.76.184[.]94 (December 2021 - December 2021) 162.55.241[.]4 (November 2021 - December 2021) 185.195.236[.]230 (November 2021 - December 2021) Sender Email Address ukraine_news@meta[.]ua

Appendix B — Mitre ATT&CK Techniques

Tactic: Technique	ATT&CK Code
Initial Access: Spearphishing Attachment	T1566.001
Execution: Exploitation for Client Execution	T1203
Execution: Command and Scripting Interpreter: JavaScript	T1059.007
Defense Evasion: Obfuscated Files or Information	T1027
Defense Evasion: Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information	T1140
Credential Access: OS Credential Dumping: /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow	T1003.008
Discovery: System Information Discovery	T1082
Discovery: System Network Configuration Discovery	T1016
Discovery: System Owner/User Discovery	T1033
Discovery: System Network Connections Discovery	T1049
Collection: Email Collection: Email Forwarding Rule	T1114.003
Command and Control: Application Layer Protocol: Web Protocols	T1071.001
Command and Control: Data Encoding: Standard Encoding	T1132.001
Exfiltration: Exfiltration Over Alternative Protocol	T1048
Exfiltration: Automated Exfiltration	T1020