Nigerian Government Warns Of New Iran-based Hacking Group Targeting Telecoms Companies

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has called the attention of the Nigerian public to the existence of another hacking group orchestrating cyber espionage in the African telecoms space.
NCC issued the warning saying that efforts were on to keep stakeholders in the country’s telecoms sector informed, educate and protected.

The commission identified an Iranian hacking group known as Lyceum (also known as Hexane, Siamesekitten, or Spirlin) to have reportedly been targeting telecoms, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFA) in Africa with upgraded malware in a recent politically motivated attacks oriented in cyberespionage.
The information about this cyber attack is contained in the latest advisory issued by the Nigerian Computer Emergency Response Team (ngCERT). 
The ngCERT rated the probability and damage level of the new malware as high.
According to the advisory, the hacking group is known to be focused on infiltrating the networks of telecoms companies and ISPs. 
Between July and October 2021, Lyceum was reportedly implicated in attacks against ISPs and telecoms organisations in Israel, Morocco, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia.
The advanced persistent threat (APT) group has been linked to campaigns that hit Middle Eastern oil and gas companies in the past.
The group now appears to have expanded its focus to the technology sector. 
The APT is also responsible for a campaign against an unnamed African government’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
By the attackers’ mode of operation, Lyceum’s initial onslaught vectors include credential stuffing and brute-force attacks. So, once a victim’s system is compromised, the attackers conduct surveillance on specific targets. In that mode, Lyceum will attempt to deploy two different kinds of malware: Shark and Milan (known together as James).
Both malware are backdoors. Shark, a 32-bit executable written in C# and .NET, generates a configuration file for domain name system (DNS) tunnelling or Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) C2 communications; whereas Milan – a 32-bit Remote Access Trojan (RAT) retrieves data.
Both are able to communicate with the group’s command-and-control (C2) servers. The…