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The observed malicious activity relates to the modification of a file that controls GOM Player updates, spanning the date range 27th December 2013 to 16th January 2014, during which time these alterations are reported to have only manifested themselves for visitors on certain IP ranges; evidence supporting this claim h...
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[]
If this was indeed the case, then the nature of this attack is certainly more targeted than one that would cover the entire userbase of the GOM Player product, with victims comprising of the Japanese Government in addition to those at the Monju nuclear facility.
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[]
The modified file redirected the GOM Player update process to another compromised server (www.fudousankaitori.jp (203.189.101.35)), where a file containing both the legitimate update and the malware was deliver to the victim.
{ "entities": { "entity": [ { "text": "a file containing both the legitimate update and the malware", "start": 138, "end": 198 }, { "text": "the victim", "start": 214, "end": 224 } ], "action": [ { "text": "was deliver",...
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Deployed to the system via a compressed bundle containing the official GOM Player setup binary and a self-extracting RAR archive containing the malicious files, the malware consists of a number of individual pieces.
{ "entities": { "action": [ { "text": "Deployed", "start": 0, "end": 8 } ], "modifier": [ { "text": "to", "start": 9, "end": 11 }, { "text": "via", "start": 23, "end": 26 } ], "entity": [ ...
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Upon extraction from the RAR archive, the installer component (0ae82fd94836815a1e8d284ccb75109d) is automatically launched alongside the GOM Player update, distracting victims from the malicious activity taking place.
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The installer component is referred to by the author as'miansha' which, according to an East Asia Cyber Threat Intelligence Researcher, is likely Miǎnshā (免杀), a phrase commonly used by People's Republic of China (PRC) hackers to mean'anti Antivirus detection' or'Antivirus avoidance'; Symantec have named the detection ...
{ "entities": { "entity": [ { "text": "Miǎnshā (免杀)", "start": 146, "end": 158 }, { "text": "a phrase commonly used by People's Republic of China (PRC) hackers", "start": 160, "end": 226 }, { "text": "'anti Antivirus detection' ...
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The installer is responsible for the malware persistence mechanism, adding entries to the registry in the following locations, depending on Windows Version: The installer will also determine the system architecture (32- or 64-bit) and then deobfuscate the relevant loader DLL to the path'C: \Windows\temp\install.ocx', e...
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Oddly, this file is padded with null bytes, resulting in a 25 megabyte file.
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The main implant code is stored in files named instructions.pdf and instructions64.pdf; not PDF documents but instead DLLs obfuscated with a one-byte XOR with 0x14, similar to the malware loader DLLs.
{ "entities": { "entity": [ { "text": "DLLs", "start": 118, "end": 122 }, { "text": "a one-byte XOR with 0x14", "start": 139, "end": 163 } ], "action": [ { "text": "obfuscated", "start": 123, "end": 133 ...
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The loader, referred to by the malware author as 壳 (shell), reads and deobfuscates the main implant code which then communicates with the attacker-controlled server at testqweasd.tk (211.43.220.89) on TCP port 443.
{ "entities": { "entity": [ { "text": "The loader", "start": 0, "end": 10 }, { "text": "the main implant code", "start": 83, "end": 104 }, { "text": "the attacker-controlled server at testqweasd.tk (211.43.220.89)", "sta...
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The main implant code is referred to as 白加黑 ('Black on White'), a term used in the PRC hacking community to denote the act of Antivirus avoidance through the loading of malicious'black' code via non-malicious or trusted'white' code.
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[]
This is a practice recently illustrated through the deployment of the PlugX trojan, utilising DLL load order hijacking alongside a signed (trusted) executable.
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Analysis of this malware revealed it to be a variant of the Gh0st RAT, often used by Chinese actors (including those who are state-motivated or directly state-sponsored).
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This specific variant shows similarities to that used during the VOHO campaign, where Gh0st RAT was spread via watering hole attacks utilising vulnerable websites belonging to financial services and technology companies.
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Specifically, the initial five bytes of the communications (often used to denote a campaign or victim) are'HTTPS', amended from the original'Gh0st'; the same as the traffic produced by the VOHO Gh0st variant.
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In addition to delivering system-specific details back to the attacker, Gh0st RAT provides the capability to deploy additional malware, enabling the harvesting of sensitive data and enabling the further propagation throughout the infected network.
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To enable rapid response, the following Snort signature can be deployed: Additionally, the following Yara signature should identify both encoded payloads and the active implant in memory:
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The Darkhotel APT is a threat actor possessing a seemingly inconsistent and con- tradictory set of characteristics, some advanced and some fairly rudimentary.
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In- hospitably operating for almost a decade, the threat actor is currently active.
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The actor's offensive activity can be tied to specific hotel and business center Wi‑Fi and physical connections, some of it is also tied to p2p/file sharing networks, and they have been known to spear-phish targets as well.
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Darkhotel tools are detected as'' Tapaoux'','' Pioneer'','' Karba'', and'' Nemim'', among other names.
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The following list presents a set of characteristics for the crew: When unsuspecting guests, including situationally aware corporate executives and high-tech entrepreneurs, travel to a variety of hotels and connect to the internet, they are infected with a rare APT Trojan posing as any one of several major software rel...
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These might be GoogleToolbar, Adobe Flash, Windows Messenger, etc.
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This first stage of malware helps the attackers to identify more significant victims, leading to the selective download of more advanced stealing tools.
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At the hotels, these installs are selectively distributed to targeted individuals.
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This group of attackers seems to know in advance when these individuals will arrive and depart from their high-end hotels.
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So, the attackers lay in wait until these travelers arrive and connect to the Internet.
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The FBI issued advisories about similar hotel incidents; Australian government offi- cials produced similar, newsworthy accounts when they were infected.
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While an FBI announcement related to attacks on hotel guests overseas appeared in May 2012, related Darkhotel samples were already circulating back in 2007.
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And available Darkhotel server log data records connections as early as Jan 1, 2009.
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Addition- ally, seeding p2p networks with widely spread malware and 0-day spear-phishing attacks demonstrate that the Darkhotel APT maintains an effective toolset and a long-running operation behind the questionable hospitality it shows its guests.
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The Darkhotel APT's precise malware spread was observed in several hotels' networks, where visitors connecting to the hotel's Wi-Fi were prompted to install software updates to popular software packages.
{ "entities": { "entity": [ { "text": "visitors connecting to the hotel's Wi-Fi", "start": 91, "end": 131 }, { "text": "install software updates to popular software packages", "start": 149, "end": 202 } ], "action": [ { ...
[]
Of course, these packages were really installers for Darkhotel APT's backdoors, added to legitimate installers from Adobe and Google.
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[]
Digitally signed Darkhotel backdoors were installed alongside the legitimate packages.
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[]
The most interesting thing about this delivery method is that the hotels require guests to use their last name and room number to login, yet only a few guests received the Darkhotel package.
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[]
When visiting the same hotels, our honeypot research systems couldn't attract a Darkhotel attack.
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This data is inconclusive, but it points to misuse of check-in information.
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The Darkhotel actor maintained an effective intrusion set at hotel networks, providing ample access to unexpected points of attack over several years.
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These staging points also provide the attackers with access to check-in/check-out and identity information of visitors to high-end and luxury hotels.
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As a part of an ongoing investigation, our research led us to embedded iframes within hotel networks that redirected individuals' web browsers to phony install- ers.
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The attackers were very careful with the placement of these iframes and executables on trusted resources-the hotels' network login portals themselves.
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The attackers were also very careful to immediately delete all traces of their tools as soon as an attack was carried out successfully.
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Those portals are now reviewed, cleaned and undergoing a further review and hardening process.
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We observed traces of a couple of these incidents in late 2013 and early 2014 on a victim hotel's network.
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The attackers set up the environment and hit their individual targets with precision.
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As soon as their target's stay was over and the attack-frame was closed, the attackers deleted their iframe placement and backdoored executables from the hotel network.
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[]
The attackers successfully de- leted traces of their work from earlier attacks in another hotel, but their offensive techniques were the same.
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[]
Outside reports of the same activity at other hotels provide enough data to confirm the same careful operations there.
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The attack technique blurs the line between a couple of common APT tactics; fairly inaccurate'' watering holes'' or'' strategic web compromises'' and more accurate spearphishing techniques.
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In this case, the Darkhotel attackers wait for their victim to connect to the Internet over the hotel Wi-Fi or the cable in their room.
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There is a very strong likelihood the targets will connect over these resourc- es, and the attackers rely on that likelihood, much like at a watering hole.
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But the attackers also maintain truly precise targeting information over the victim's visit, much like they would know a victim's email address and content interests in a spearphishing attack.
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While setting up the attack, the Darkhotel attackers knew the target's expected arrival and departure times, room number, and full name, among other data.
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This data enables the attackers to present the malicious iframe precisely to that individual target.
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So, here we have yet another unique characteristic of this attacker-they employ a loosely certain but highly precise offensive approach.
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An example of the Darkhotel APT's indiscriminate malware spreading is dem- onstrated by the way it seeds Japanese p2p sharing sites, where the malware is delivered as a part of a large (approximately 900mb) rar archive.
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The archive is also spread over bittorrent, as detailed below.
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Darkhotel uses this method to distribute their Karba Trojan.
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[]
These Japanese archives, translated for Chinese speaking viewers, appear to be sexual in nature, part of an anime sex/military comic scene, exposing the likely interests of potential targets.
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This Darkhotel package was downloaded over 30,000 times in less than six months.
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The p2p bittorrent Darkhotel offering is listed here, posted on 2013.11.22.
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It was spread throughout 2014.
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This torrent serves up an almost 900 mb file.
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The rar archive decompresses to a directory full of encrypted zips, the associated decryptor and a password file for decrypting the zips.
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But what looks like the AxDecrypt.exe decryptor is bound to both the true decryptor and the dropper for the Darkhotel Catch.exe Karba Trojan.
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When a user downloads the torrent and decrypts the zip files, the trojan surrepti- tiously is installed and run on the victim system.
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Catch.exe, detected as Backdoor.Win32.Agent.dgrn, communicates with the fol- lowing Darkhotel command and control servers: Other examples of this Darkhotel backdoor bound within a shared torrent include adult content Japanese anime and more.
{ "entities": { "entity": [ { "text": "Catch.exe", "start": 0, "end": 9 }, { "text": "Backdoor.Win32.Agent.dgrn", "start": 23, "end": 48 }, { "text": "the fol- lowing Darkhotel command and control servers", "start": 68, ...
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There are tens of thousands of down- loads of these individual torrents.
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The associated Darkhotel backdoor was hosted on bittorrent, emule, etc, under a variety of comic names.
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Examples include comics and anime offerings.
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Related Darkhotel command and control server domains include: Darkhotel campaigns involving typical spear-phished Tapaoux implants publicly appeared in bits and pieces several times over the past five years.
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These subproject efforts targeted defense industrial base (DIB), government, and NGO organizations.
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Email content on topics like nuclear energy and weaponry capabilities was used as a lure.
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Early accounts were posted on contagio describing attacks on NGO organi- zations and government policy makers.
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This spear-phishing activity continues into 2014.
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The attacks follow the typical spear-phishing process and in the past couple of months, exploited systems retrieved downloader executables from web servers like Over the past few years the group has emailed links that redirect targets' brows- ers to Internet Explorer 0-day exploits.
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Sometimes the attachment itself includes an Adobe 0-day exploit.
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This crew occasionally deploys 0-day exploits, but burns them when required.
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In the past few years, they deployed 0-day spear-phishing attacks targeting Adobe products and Microsoft Internet Explorer, including cve­2010­0188.
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In early 2014, our researchers exposed their use of cve­2014­0497, a Flash 0-day described on Securelist in early February.
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The crew spear-phished a set of target systems connected to the Internet through Chinese ISPs, and developed capabilities within the 0-day exploits to handle hardened Windows 8.1 systems.
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It's interesting that the Flash objects were embedded in Korean documents titled'' List of the latest Japanese AV wind and how to use torrents.docx'' (loose English translation).
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The dropped downloader (d8137ded710d83e2339a97ee78494c34) delivered malcode similar to the'' Information Stealer'' component functionality summarized below, and detailed in Appendix D.
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The Darkhotel actors typically sign their backdoors with digital certificates of one kind or another.
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However, the certificates originally chosen by this crew are very interesting because of their weak keys and likely abuse by attackers.
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Here is a listing of the certs that were commonly used to sign Darkhotel malcode, requiring advanced mathematical capabilities to factorize the keys at the time.
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They are not the only certificates used by the group.
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[]
More recent activity suggests that the group has stolen certificates to sign their code.
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All related cases of signed Darkhotel malware share the same Root Certificate Authority and Intermediate Certificate Authority that issued certificates with weak md5 keys (RSA 512 bits).
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We are confident that our Darkhotel threat actor fraudulently duplicated these certificates to sign its malware.
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[]
These keys were not stolen.
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Many of the certificates were noted in a 2011 Fox­IT post'' RSA­512 Certificates Abused in the Wild''.
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To further support this speculation please note the non­specific Microsoft Security Advisory below, the Mozilla advisory addressing the issue at the time, and the Entrust responses.
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From Microsoft's security advisory from Thursday, November 10, 2011:'' Microsoft is aware that DigiCert Sdn.
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Bhd, a Malaysian subordinate certifica- tion authority (CA) under Entrust and GTE CyberTrust, has issued 22 certifi- cates with weak 512 bit keys.
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These weak encryption keys, when broken, could allow an attacker to use the certificates fraudulently to spoof content, perform phishing attacks, or perform man­in­the­middle attacks against all Web browser users including users of Internet Explorer.
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While this is not a vulnerability in a Microsoft product, this issue affects all supported releases of Microsoft Windows.
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There is no indication that any certificates were issued fraudulently.
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[]
Instead, cryptographically weak keys have allowed some of the certificates to be dupli- cated and used in a fraudulent manner.
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[]
Microsoft is providing an update for all supported releases of Microsoft Windows that revokes the trust in DigiCert Sdn.
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[]