DangerousSavanna is a threat actor targeting Francophone African financial sectors through spear-phishing and open-source tools.
Analyst brief
DangerousSavanna is a threat actor that has been targeting major financial service groups in French-speaking Africa for the past two years. It targets financial institutions in countries including Ivory Coast, Morocco, Cameroon, Senegal, and Togo, using spear-phishing emails with malicious attachments for initial infection. Key TTPs involve deploying relatively unsophisticated tools, both custom-written and based on open-source projects like Metasploit, PoshC2, DWservice, and AsyncRAT. Defenders in the Francophone African financial sector should focus on spear-phishing email security, macro execution controls, and monitoring for C2 traffic associated with these tools.
DangerousSavanna
unknown
Malicious campaign called DangerousSavanna has been targeting multiple major financial service groups in French-speaking Africa for the last two years. The threat actors behind this campaign use spear-phishing as a means of initial infection, sending emails with malicious attachments to the employees of financial institutions in at least five different French-speaking countries: Ivory Coast, Morocco, Cameroon, Senegal, and Togo.
DangerousSavanna tends to install relatively unsophisticated software tools in the infected environments. These tools are both self-written and based on open-source projects such as Metasploit, PoshC2, DWservice, and AsyncRAT. The threat actors’ creativity is on display in the initial infection stage, as they persistently pursue the employees of the targeted companies, constantly changing infection chains that utilize a wide range of malicious file types, from self-written executable loaders and malicious documents, to ISO, LNK, JAR and VBE files in various combinations. The evolving infection chains by the threat actor reflect the changes in the threat landscape seen over the past few years as infection vectors became more and more sophisticated and diverse.
What method does the DangerousSavanna actor use for initial infection?+
DangerousSavanna uses spear-phishing emails with malicious attachments for initial infection.
What are the key tools used by DangerousSavanna?+
Key TTPs involve deploying tools based on open-source projects like Metasploit, PoshC2, DWservice, and AsyncRAT, as well as custom-written software tools.