Poseidon hacker group behind long-running extortion scheme

Kaspersky Lab has linked a single group to a long-known campaign of cyberattacks that appears to be aimed at extorting corporate victims.

The Poseidon Group may have been active since 2001, according to an analysis of malware samples. The group's tools have been designed to function on systems set to English and Portuguese.

Victims are usually sent spear-phishing emails and malware hidden inside office documents. Once on a network, the hackers explore its topology in order to eventually steal intellectual property and commercial information.

"Then the attacker looks for all administrator accounts on both the local machine and the network," Kaspersky wrote in a post on Tuesday. "This technique allows them to map network resources and make lateral movements inside the network, landing in the perfect machine to match the attacker’s interest."

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