# Scenario Overview

In 

This scenario involved an ALPHV BlackCat affiliate orchestrating an attack against the subsidiary of a fictitious global pharmaceutical company. Included below is a diagram outlining the attack sequence and major activities executed. For the detailed emulation plan, refer to the (ALPHV BlackCat Emulation Plan).

# Overview

  1. An Initial Access Broker gains access to a contractor organization, and provides an ALPHV BlackCat affiliate with RDP access to the organization’s network. The discovery of kimeramon, a bastion workstation, makes way for the affiliate to access the corporate subsidiary network through trusted access (Step 1-2 of Bastion Host Diagram). Next the affiliate downloads ADRecon.ps1, and uses it for discovery on Active Directory and the corporate network. The ADRecon output contains information about a backup server datamon, Linux KVM server leomon and server administrators (Step 3 of Bastion Host Diagram).

  1. Next, the affiliate discovers SQL Server Management Studio installed on kimeramon and uses BITSAdmin.exe to download InfoStealer then executes InfoStealer against kimeramon to obtain plaintext credentials for the backup admin account (Step 4 of Bastion Host Diagram). The compromised credentials are used to access the backup server and execute InfoStealer against the NetBNMBackup server datamon (Step 3 of SQL Server Diagram). The decrypted output contains the plaintext passwords for: the workstation local administrator account windesk, Linux KVM server administrator account marakawa, and the domain admin account ykaida.da. Using windesk, the affiliate utilizes several methods in an attempt to disable anti-virus and EDR solutions on the bastion host.

  1. The affiliate utilizes windesk credentials and the RDP session on kimeramon to edit the registry and enable WDigest. The affiliate then dumps credentials via Task Manager and exfiltrates the dump file using rclone(Step 5 of Bastion Host Diagram).

  1. The compromised domain admin account ykaida.da is used to download ExMatter and a network scanning script to identify additional targets via PowerShell (Step 6-7 of Bastion Host Diagram). The affiliate uses PsExec to execute ExMatter against the identified targets to exfiltrate data. After remote execution of ExMatter, the affiliate executes ExMatter on the local workstation.

  1. The affiliate downloads ALPHV BlackCat Ransomware (Linux) to kimeramon, uses SCP to copy ALPHV BlackCat Ransomware (Linux) to leomon and sends an SSH command to the Linux KVM server to execute (Step 1-4 of Linux KVM Diagram).

  1. Next, the affiliate downloads ALPHV BlackCat Ransomware (Windows) to kimeramon (Step 8 of Bastion Host Diagram) and provides the Domain Admin credentials to run the executable with administrative privileges. After encryption, ALPHV BlackCat Ransomware changes wallpaper for logged-in users to an image of the ransom note, unmounts previously mounted partitions, deletes volume shadow copies again, and lists and clears Windows Event logs via API calls.