{"id":217184,"date":"2026-02-24T09:21:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T14:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/24\/uac-0050-targets-european-financial-institution-with-spoofed-domain-and-rms-malware\/"},"modified":"2026-02-25T05:05:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-25T10:05:08","slug":"uac-0050-targets-european-financial-institution-with-spoofed-domain-and-rms-malware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/24\/uac-0050-targets-european-financial-institution-with-spoofed-domain-and-rms-malware\/","title":{"rendered":"UAC-0050 Targets European Financial Institution With Spoofed Domain and RMS Malware"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/02\/uac-0050-targets-european-financial.html\">UAC-0050 Targets European Financial Institution With Spoofed Domain and RMS Malware<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/02\/uac-0050-targets-european-financial.html\">https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/02\/uac-0050-targets-european-financial.html<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-02-24 09:21:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"thehackernews.com\">thehackernews.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"p-author\">\ue804<span class=\"author\">Ravie Lakshmanan<\/span>\ue802<span class=\"author\">Feb 24, 2026<\/span><\/span><span class=\"p-tags\">Cyber Espionage \/ Malware<\/span><\/p>\n<p>A Russia-aligned threat actor has been observed targeting a European financial institution as part of a social engineering attack to likely facilitate intelligence gathering or financial theft, signaling a possible expansion of the threat actor&#8217;s targeting beyond Ukraine and into entities supporting the war-torn nation.<\/p>\n<p>The activity, which targeted an unnamed entity involved in regional development and reconstruction initiatives, has been attributed to a cybercrime group tracked as <strong>UAC-0050<\/strong> (aka DaVinci Group). BlueVoyant has designated the name Mercenary Akula to the threat cluster. The attack was observed earlier this month.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The attack spoofed a Ukrainian judicial domain to deliver an email containing a link to a remote access payload,&#8221; researchers Patrick McHale and Joshua Green said in a report shared with The Hacker News. &#8220;The target was a senior legal and policy advisor involved in procurement, a role with privileged insight into institutional operations and financial mechanisms.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The starting point is a spear-phishing email that uses legal themes to direct recipients to download an archive file hosted on PixelDrain, a file-sharing service used by the threat actor to bypass reputation-based security controls.<\/p>\n<p>The ZIP is responsible for initiating a multi-layered infection chain. Present within the ZIP file is a RAR archive that contains a password-protected 7-Zip file, which includes an executable that masquerades as a PDF document by using the widely abused double extension trick (*.pdf.exe).<\/p>\n<p>The execution results in the deployment of an MSI installer for Remote Manipulator System (RMS), a Russian remote desktop software that allows remote control, desktop sharing, and file transfers.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The use of such &#8216;living-off-the-land&#8217; tools provides attackers with persistent, stealthy access while often evading traditional antivirus detection,&#8221; the researchers noted.<\/p>\n<p>The use of RMS aligns with prior&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/02\/uac-0050-targets-european-financial.html\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>UAC-0050 Targets European Financial Institution With Spoofed Domain and RMS Malware https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/02\/uac-0050-targets-european-financial.html Publish Date: 2026-02-24&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":217185,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEiMR8uMyTA6j9P1KBgNFXf7uKvuD9CpolHGiMuaTIMOc87IKSqoGXWxea4Hs3unk1kLewzUd0hyOxpk6AsnEy1WmKwQwW8QV2zFBJiCi6PLOMi5zxAD_C2_DZytczAcPCSA_JGN9Se8arByQlLzoTiDaX1qJiA0Q6IT2Sfeg7BgkeQZ2ptQcjo_RX8jMgs1\/s1600\/bank-cyberattack.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[35,32,25,34],"class_list":["post-217184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-hacker","tag-malware","tag-phishing","tag-threat-actor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217184"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217184"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":217186,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217184\/revisions\/217186"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}