By Anna Bennett, Nicole Hoffman, Asheer Malhotra, Sean Taylor and Brandon White. 

Cisco Talos is disclosing a new suspected data theft campaign, active since at least 2021, we attribute to an advanced persistent threat actor (APT) we’re calling “LilacSquid.”  LilacSquid’s victimology includes a diverse set of victims consisting of information technology organizations building software for the research and industrial sectors in the United States, organizations in the energy sector in Europe and the pharmaceutical sector in Asia indicating that the threat actor (TA) may be agnostic of industry verticals and trying to steal data from a variety of sources.  This campaign uses MeshAgent, an open-source remote management tool, and a customized version of QuasarRAT we’re calling “PurpleInk” to serve as the primary implants after successfully compromising vulnerable application servers exposed to the internet.  This campaign leverages vulnerabilities in public-facing application servers and compromised remote desktop protocol (RDP) credentials to orchestrate the deployment of a variety of open-source tools, such as MeshAgent and SSF, alongside customized malware, such as "PurpleInk," and two malware loaders we are calling "InkBox" and "InkLoader.”  The campaign is geared toward establishing long-term access to compromised victim organizations to enable LilacSquid to siphon data of interest to attacker-controlled servers. 

LilacSquid – An espionage-motivated threat actor 

Talos assesses with high confidence that this campaign has been active since at least 2021 and the successful compromise and post-compromise activities are geared toward establishing long-term access for data theft by an advanced persistent threat (APT) actor we are tracking as "LilacSquid" and UAT-4820. Talos has observed at least three successful compromises spanning entities in Asia, Europe and the United States consisting of industry verticals such as pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, and technology. 

Previous intrusions into software manufacturers, such as the
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