Hackers Deploy "SUBMARINE" Backdoor in Barracuda Email Security Gateway Attacks

"SUBMARINE comprises multiple artifacts — including a SQL trigger, shell scripts, and a loaded library for a Linux daemon — that together enable execution with root privileges, persistence, command and control, and cleanup," the agency said.

The findings come from an analysis of malware samples obtained from an unnamed organization that had been compromised by threat actors exploiting a critical flaw in ESG devices, CVE-2023-2868 (CVSS score: 9.8), which allows for remote command injection.

Evidence gathered so far shows that the attackers behind the activity, a suspected China nexus-actor tracked by Mandiant as UNC4841, leveraged the flaw as a zero-day in October 2022 to gain initial access to victim environments and implanted backdoors to establish and maintain persistence.

To that end, the infection chain involved sending phishing emails with booby-trapped TAR file attachments to trigger exploitation, leading to the deployment of a reverse shell payload to establish communication with the threat actor's command-and-control (C2) server, from where a passive backdoor known as SEASPY is downloaded for executing arbitrary commands on the device.

SUBMARINE, also codenamed DEPTHCHARGE by the Google-owned threat intelligence firm, is the latest malware family to be discovered in connection with the operation. Executed with root privileges, it resides in a Structured Query Language (SQL) database on the ESG appliance.

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