This post was authored by Edmund Brumaghin with contributions from Angel Villegas

Summary

Talos is constantly monitoring the threat landscape in an effort to identify changes in the way attackers are attempting to target organizations around the world. We identified a unique malware campaign that was distributed via malicious Word documents. The campaign appeared to be targeting victims in Portugal. The malware being distributed was interesting for a variety of reasons. As the author of this malware refers to it as "Athena" in their source code working directory and the fact that the C2 domain used by the malware begins with "athena", we have identified this malware as "AthenaGo". We were unable to locate a detailed analysis of this particular malware.

AthenaGo appears to be a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) that also features the capability to download and run additional binaries on infected systems when instructed to do so by an attacker. The malware was written using the Go programming language. Windows-based malware written in Go is not commonly seen in the wild. Additionally the command and control (C2) communications used by the malware made use of Tor2Web proxies, which is part of a trend of increased reliance on these proxying services by various malware authors. As this was an interesting/unique infection chain, Talos decided to examine the malware itself as well as the campaigns that were distributing it.

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