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The team selected targets for ransomware attacks based on the company’s finances — the bigger, the better. | [] | LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It |
The location also did not matter. | [] | LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It |
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.” | [] | LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It |
[Note that Unit 42 case data does include indications that threat actors using LockBit 2.0 have targeted healthcare organizations at times.] | [] | LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It |
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. | [] | LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It |
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. | [] | LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It |
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. | [] | LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It |
LockBit 2.0 operators allegedly almost always offered discounts to their victims since the goal was to streamline attacks. | [] | LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It |
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. | [] | LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It |
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. | [] | LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It |
Ransomware operators usually recruit negotiators, who coerce victims to pay ransom, since professional penetration testers allegedly lack the time for chatter. | [] | LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It |
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! | [] | LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It |
Sign up to receive the latest news, cyber threat intelligence and research from us | [] | LockBit 20 How This RaaS Operates and How to Protect Against It |
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... | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1566.001"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
The banking trojan can collect the victim’s login credentials for various online accounts, operating system information and keystrokes. | [
"T1056.001",
"T1078",
"T1082",
"T1566.001"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
It also steals one-time security codes or soft tokens from the victim’s online banking applications. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
VictimologyThe attacks predominantly target users in Mexico, with a few infections in Uruguay, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Guatemala and Panama. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1566.001"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1071.001"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1105"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
Another malicious server, 216[.]238[.]70[.]224, hosted the ZIP file containing the payloads. | [
"T1105"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1090"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
The attacker also used lookalike domains in this campaign to carry out malicious activities and evade network detection. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
This domain name also resembled the legitimate Mexican Tax Agency domain, a tactic the attacker likely adopted to disguise malicious traffic. | [
"T1036.005"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
The DNS requests to tributaria[.]website, as observed in Cisco Umbrella, are shown below. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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 | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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 si... | [
"T1059.003",
"T1566.001",
"T1574.002"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1204.002",
"T1566.001"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
Sample phishing email. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1027",
"T1090"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
The content displayed on the victim’s browser lures them to click an embedded malicious hyperlink which downloads a RAR file. | [
"T1105",
"T1204.002"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
Disguised malicious web page. | [
"T1105"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
The RAR file contains a batch file with a CMD extension that is executed when the victim opens the contents of the file. | [
"T1059.003",
"T1204.002"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
The batch file downloads the PowerShell downloader script from an attacker-controlled server and executes it through the PowerShell commands. | [
"T1059.003",
"T1105"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
The PowerShell downloader script will download a ZIP file that contains the payload DLLs and a few legitimate executables and DLLs. | [
"T1055",
"T1105"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1547.001"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1059.003",
"T1105",
"T1574.002"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
One is the PowerShell downloader script, which the attacker attempts to execute to re-infect the victim’s machine, and another is Horabot. | [
"T1059.003"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1059.003"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1059.003",
"T1204.002"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
Downloader batch script. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
PowerShell script downloads the payloadsThe malicious PowerShell downloader script launches several processes that download the payloads and reboots the victim’s machine. | [
"T1105",
"T1543.003"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
The script is heavily obfuscated with random symbols that substitute the instructions during the run-time and base64-encoded strings. | [
"T1027"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
In the initial stage of the execution, the script decodes the base64-encoded strings and initializes them. | [
"T1140"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1027"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
The random name generated by the sample during our analysis was “_upyqta2_J”. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
The script uses this random name eventually to create other folders and files. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
The script creates two other malicious batch scripts with the extension .cmd | [
"T1059.003"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
in the folder “/Users/Public.” | [
"T1059.003"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1547.001"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
<deskto_name>S.cmd and <desktop_name>Sy.cmd are the naming conventions used. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
A snippet of the PowerShell downloader script. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1547.001"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
The attacker used the Internet Explorer icon for the dropped shortcut files. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
Talos compiled a table showing the malicious Windows shortcut files and their relative paths with the command line arguments. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
Shortcut filesRelative pathCommand line arguments_upyqta2_JAA.lnk..\.. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
\..\_upyqta2_J\_upyqta2_Ji7.exe_upyqta2_JAT.lnk .. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
\_upyqta2_J\_upyqta2_J.exeC:\_upyqta2_J\_upyqta2_J.at_upyqta2_JEX.lnk..\.. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
\_upyqta2_J\_upyqta2_J.exeC:\_upyqta2_J\_upyqta2_J.ai_upyqta2_Jy.lnk..\.. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
\Public\DESKTOP-UT9NJ4Sy.cmd_upyqta2_J.lnk..\.. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
\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. | [
"T1105"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
The script renames the downloaded file with a random name and deflates its contents. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
The deflated contents are renamed using random characters, then the malicious ZIP file is deleted. | [
"T1070.004"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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 | [
"T1112"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
10”. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
The deflated contents of the malicious ZIP file are shown in the below table with their description. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
Files dropped Description_upyqta2_J.aiCompiled AutoIt script_upyqta2_J.atCompiled AutoIt | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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 Powe... | [
"T1547.001"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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_J... | [
"T1027",
"T1574.002"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
script “_upyqta2_J.ai” by running the executable “ _upyqta2_J.exe”, which is a legitimate AutoIt interpreter. | [
"T1027",
"T1036.005"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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”. | [
"T1105",
"T1140"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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.” | [
"T1574.002"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1056.001",
"T1113"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1140"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
Then, the AutoIt script sideloads the DLL to the AutoIt interpreter process and executes the malicious function “B080223_AT” with the parameter “STRUCT”. | [
"T1574.002"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
The malicious DLL “_upyqta2_J.mdat.a1” is a spam tool with information-stealing capability. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
A snippet of the AutoIt code _ | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
Upyqta2_J.at_upyqta2_J.lnk | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
This link file executes one of the dropped batch files, “<desktop-name>S.cmd.” | [
"T1059.003"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1059.003",
"T1105"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
The attacker uses the PowerShell downloader to reinfect the victim’s machine. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
upyqta2_Jy.lnkThis | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1059.003",
"T1105"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1027",
"T1566.001"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1056.001",
"T1078"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
The trojan also has anti-analysis and anti-detection capabilities to evade the sandbox and virtual environments. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1078",
"T1082"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
This trojan is based on a tool called Delphi_Remote_Access_PC, which is publicly available on GitHub. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
It also uses similar techniques as Brazilian banking trojans reported by other security researchers at ESET and Check Point in the past. | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1082",
"T1518.001"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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 | [
"T1041"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
software> | [] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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. | [
"T1083",
"T1105"
] | New Horabot campaign targets the Americas |
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