MoonBounce
MoonBounce (canonical Kaspersky GReAT operational naming per January 20, 2022 Securelist + press release canonical disclosure by Mark Lechtik + Denis Legezo) is a UEFI firmware bootkit attributed with considerable confidence to APT41 (Chinese-speaking nation-state actor with cyberespionage and cybercrime mission profile since at least 2012, tracked separately in this curated corpus as apt41_wickedpanda also known as Wicked Panda + Barium + Bronze Atlas + Brass Typhoon + Winnti Group), operationally significant as the third publicly-known UEFI firmware bootkit in the wild per Kaspersky chronology (following LoJax ESET 2018 + MosaicRegressor Kaspersky October 2020) with operational deployment since spring 2021.
signature cluster-defining technical achievement is existing-firmware-component modification approach (per Mark Lechtik canonical comparative statement: "while LoJax and MosaicRegressor utilised additions of DXE drivers, MoonBounce modifies an existing firmware component for a more subtle and stealthier attack", specifically modifies CORE_DXE benign UEFI firmware component to introduce logic to load malware during system startup while preserving boot sequence intact.
per Dark Reading Lechtik: "MoonBounce is more sophisticated than LoJax and MosaicRegressor because of the very subtle nature of the binary level changes it makes to a benign UEFI component")
signature memory-only boot sequence propagation no-disk-traces forensic-evasion tradecraft (per Lechtik: "More notably it makes changes to boot sequence components in memory only, through which it allows malicious code to propagate into the operating system", leaves no traces on disk, making attacks much stealthier than predecessors)
operationally deployed against single high-profile entity for long- term-espionage mission per Kaspersky operational assessment ("aimed at long term espionage against a high-profile entity" + "highly stealthy and persistent storage for malware in the system" capability + documented operator behavior of lateral movement + exfiltration of data + archiving files + gathering network information)
SPI flash storage location (non- volatile storage component external to hard disk, operationally resistant to OS reinstallation + hard disk replacement)
attribution basis included other malware artifacts on same victim system (ScrambleCross APT41-attributed malware loader family + low-confidence Microcin connection per Denis Legezo, operationally significant for APT41-Chinese-speaking-threat-actor toolset-sharing pattern)
previously-unknown backdoor with RESTful API hardcoded IP C2 + hypermedia directory path information exchange per The Stack.
single-victim publicly-documented occurrence (UEFI bootkit found in only single case per Kaspersky, with other affiliated malware on networks of several other victims, operationally consistent with high-value-asset operational use pattern where APT41 deploys MoonBounce against only highest-priority targets)
Kaspersky Firmware Scanner technology integrated into Kaspersky products since beginning of 2019 operationally enabled MoonBounce discovery.
fills the 3rd UEFI/firmware bootkit cell in the curated corpus following CosmicStrand (1st) + MosaicRegressor (2nd) and operationally preceding BlackLotus (4th), operationally significant as the canonical "third publicly-known UEFI firmware bootkit" + signature APT41 UEFI capability industry reference point cited as comparative reference in CosmicStrand (Kaspersky July 2022) + BlackLotus (ESET March 2023) + NSA BlackLotus mitigation guidance (June 2023) disclosures.