More on the defense contractor RUAG breach previously noted on this site. Melani has issued a technical report on the breach that may be of interest to some.
From the summary:
The attackers have been using malware from the Turla family, which has been in the wild for several years. The variant observed in the network of RUAG has no rootkit functionality, but relies on obfuscation for staying undetected. The attackers showed great patience during the infiltration and lateral movement. They only attacked victims they were interested in by implementing various measures, such as a target IP list and extensive fingerprinting before and after the initial infection. After they got into the network, they moved laterally by infecting other devices and by gaining higher privileges. One of their main targets was the active directory, as this gave them the opportunity to control other devices, and to access the interesting data by using the appropriate permissions and group memberships. The malware sent HTTP requests to transfer the data to the outside, where several layers of Command-and-Control (C&C) servers were located. These C&C servers provided new tasks to the infected devices. Such tasks may consist of new binaries, configuration files, or batch jobs. Inside the infiltrated network, the attackers used named pipes for the internal communication between infected devices, which is difficult to detect. This way, they constructed a hierarchical peer-to-peer network: some of these devices took the role of a communication drone, while others acted as worker drones. The latter ones never actually contacted any C&C servers, but instead received their tasks via named pipes from a communication drone, and also returned stolen data this way. Only communication drones ever contacted C&C servers directly.
It is difficult to estimate the damage caused by the attackers; this is by any means beyond the scope of this report. However, we observed interesting patterns in the proxy logs. There were phases with very few activity, both in terms of requests and amount of data transferred. These quiet phases were separated by high-activity periods with many requests and big amounts of exfiltrated data.
Access the full report here (pdf).