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Google Cloud's Mandiant reported that a likely Iranian threat actor conducted politically motivated disruptive operations against the Albanian government using three malware families: ROADSWEEP ransomware, a ZEROCLEAR wiper variant, and the CHIMNEYSWEEP backdoor. ROADSWEEP encrypted files across discovered drives, appended the .lck extension, and preserved original timestamps while overwriting data in large chunks with RC4. The ZEROCLEAR variant was used to corrupt selected drives by leveraging the RawDisk/ElDos driver stack to overwrite disk data with zeros, indicating an intent to both disrupt operations and destroy systems.
Mandiant said CHIMNEYSWEEP was delivered through a signed self-extracting dropper and provided surveillance and remote-access capabilities through hard-coded command-and-control domains. The backdoor also included multiple privilege-escalation techniques, including abuse of SilentCleanup and CMSTP.exe, a Windows binary previously documented by researchers as a means of bypassing User Account Control. The report published malware hashes, compile times, mutexes, registry paths, infrastructure details, and YARA rules to support detection and response.
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Mandiant reported that the code-signing certificate used in the ROADSWEEP campaign had not been revoked as of 2022-07-28. This was noted in the context of the disruptive malware activity targeting the Albanian government.
Mandiant published an analysis linking ROADSWEEP ransomware, a ZEROCLEAR wiper variant, and the CHIMNEYSWEEP backdoor to likely Iranian politically motivated disruptive activity against the Albanian government. The report included malware behavior, infrastructure, hashes, and detection rules.
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