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Context: American cybersecurity firm released a report on ModifiedElephant.

What is ModifiedElephant?

• It is a hacking group that allegedly planted incriminating evidence on the personal devices of Indian journalists, human rights activists, human rights defenders, academics and lawyers.
• It maliciously targeted specific groups and individuals, including the activists arrested in the Bhima Koregaon case of 2018.

How does ModifiedElephant deploy malware to its targets?

• ModifiedElephant operators have been infecting their targets using spearphishing emails with malicious file attachments.
• Spearphishing refers to the practice of sending emails to targets that look like they are coming from a trusted source to either reveal important information or install different kinds of malware on their computer systems.
• It typically weaponises malicious Microsoft Office files to deliver malware to their targets.

What does ModifiedElephant do to its victims’ devices?

• It obtains remote access to and unrestricted control of victims’ devices.
• NetWire and DarkComet, two publicly-available remote access trojans (RATs), were the primary malware families deployed by ModifiedElephant.
  • NetWire is a RAT focused on password stealing, keylogging and remote control capabilities.
  • DarkComet is another RAT that can take control of a user’s system using a convenient graphical user interface.

How to protect devices from ModifiedElephant?

• Ensure multi-factor authentication (MFA) to ensure that you or your associates’ email IDs and other accounts aren’t compromised in the first place.
• Educate people about the dangers of cyberattacks such as spearphising and ensure that they remain suspicious about emails from unknown and known sources.
• Encrypt any sort of file that one sent over the internet. Attackers often use legitimate documents in order to trick their targets into downloading files that contain a malware payload. If they can’t access these documents in the first place, they won’t be able to package malware along with it.
• Be alert and aware of digital behavior

https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-what-we-know-of-hacking-group-modifiedelephant-7770228/

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