IT NEWS

A mysterious threat actor has run thousands of malicious servers in entry, middle, and exit positions of the Tor network. Tracked as KAX17, the threat actor ran at its peak more than 900 malicious servers part of the Tor network, which typically tends to hover around a daily total of up to 9,000-10,000.

Tor nodes

The Tor network, as defined by the official website is a group of volunteer operated servers that improve the privacy and security of one’s data. Tor nodes are also referred to as routers or relays. They receive traffic on the Tor network and pass it along. A series of virtual tunnels are created between all nodes of the Tor network, and for each data transmission a random path of tunnels, known as the relay path, is chosen.

Some of these servers work as entry-guards, others as middle-relays, and yet others as exit-nodes from the Tor network. All Tor traffic passes through at least three relays before it reaches its destination.

Servers without contact information

Servers added to the Tor network typically must have contact information included in their setup, such as an email address, so Tor network administrators and law enforcement can contact server operators in the case of a misconfiguration or file an abuse report.

This policy, however, is not policed very strictly, mainly to ensure there’s always a sufficiently large number of nodes. But a security researcher and Tor node operator going by Nusenu told The Record this week that they observed a pattern in some of these Tor relays with no contact information, which they first noticed in 2019 and have traced back as far as 2017.

Grouping the servers by similarities, the researcher arrived at a threat actor they named KAX17. This threat actor has constantly added servers with no contact details to the Tor network in industrial quantities, operating servers in the realm of hundreds at any given point. These servers are typically located in data centers spread all over the world and are typically configured as entry and middle points primarily, although KAX17 also operates a small number of exit points.

The purpose

Given the number of servers run by KAX17 the calculated probability of a Tor user connecting to the Tor network through one of KAX17’s servers was 16%, there was a 35% chance they would pass through one of its middle relays, and up to 5% chance to exit through one.

This would give the threat actor ample opportunity to perform a Sybil attack. A Sybil attack is a type of attack on a computer network service where an attacker subverts the service’s reputation system by creating a large number of pseudonymous identities and uses them to gain a disproportionately large influence. This could lead to the deanonymization of Tor users and/or onion services.

Given the cost and effort put into this and the fact that actors performing attacks in non-exit positions are considered more advanced adversaries because these attacks require a higher sophistication level and are less trivial to pull off, it is highly likely this is the work of a high-level (state-sponsored?) threat actor. As for who is behind this group, neither Nusenu nor the Tor Project wanted to speculate.

A spokesperson for the Tor Project confirmed Nusenu’s latest findings and said it had also removed a batch of KAX17 malicious relays.

“Once we got contacted, we looked through all the relays in the network and identified several hundred relays that are very likely belonging to the same group and removed them on November 8.”

Exit nodes

Other malicious actors have been known to control a great percentage of the exit nodes. These exit nodes were used in man-in-the-middle attacks to remove encryption from web traffic where possible, known as SSL stripping, primarily targeting cryptocurrency-based traffic, especially those visiting Bitcoin and cryptocurrency tumbling services. For example, the attacker can redirect the user to cryptocurrency sites featuring the attacker’s Bitcoin wallet address in the hope that the user won’t notice the difference. If the user doesn’t pay attention, they’ll send the attacker their cryptocurrency rather than the website or service, losing them in the process.

How to stay safe

Especially traffic that runs through Tor exit nodes, using the standard HTTP protocol is unencrypted and will give a malicious exit node complete access to the content.

How you can prevent this:

• The easiest way to stay safe from bad exit nodes is not to use them. If you stay within Tor hidden services (the Dark Web), you can keep all your communications encrypted. This works well when possible, but it isn’t always practical.
• Use end-to-end encryption. More sites than ever are using HTTPS to secure your communications, rather than the old, insecure HTTP standard.
• Use websites and services that don’t report on your activities as a matter of course. As an example, switching from Google search to DuckDuckGo reduces your trackable data footprint.
• Do not use any personally identifiable information. Again, not always practical, but worth limiting it as much as you can.
• Avoid sites and services that require you to log in. After all, sending your login credentials through a malicious Tor exit node would compromise the login.
• Use a VPN. A Virtual Private Network (VPN) keeps you safe from malicious exit nodes by continuing to encrypt your data once it leaves the Tor Network.

Stay safe, everyone!

The post Was threat actor KAX17 de-anonymizing the Tor network? appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Microsoft has taken control of 42 web domains that a hacking group was using to try to breach its targets.

On December 2, the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) filed pleadings with the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia seeking authority to take control of the sites that it discovered belonged to a China-based group it calls Nickel. The court order was unsealed December 6 following completion of service on the hosting providers, and traffic from the websites is now routed to computer servers controlled by Microsoft.

The disruption is unlikely to prevent Nickel from pursuing its hacking activities, but it has put a spanner in its works, effectively removing a key piece of the infrastructure the group has been relying on for its latest wave of attacks. Sadly, any setback to the Chinese hacking group or others will likely be temporary as the hackers will find and build new infrastructure to use in forthcoming attacks.

Nickel

Others in the security community who have researched this group of actors refer to the group by other names, including KE3CHANG, APT15, Vixen Panda, Royal APT, and Playful Dragon. Malwarebytes generally uses the APT15 designation for this group.

The group’s activities have been traced back to 2010 when it performed a cyberespionage campaign directed at diplomatic organizations and missions in Europe.

Targets, methods, and techniques

Nickel’s techniques vary, but in the end the group’s activity has only one objective, namely to implant stealthy malware for getting into networks, stealing data, and spying on government agencies, think tanks, and human rights organizations.

For initial access, the DCU noticed Nickel using older, and patched, vulnerabilities in Microsoft products like Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, but also compromised VPN suppliers or obtained stolen credentials. For lateral movement the DCU saw Nickel actors using Mimikatz, WDigest, NTDSDump, and other password dumping tools during attacks.

Then followed a drop of hard-to-detect malware that enabled intrusions, surveillance and data theft targeting organizations in Argentina, Barbados, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Italy, Jamaica, Mali, Mexico, Montenegro, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Switzerland, Trinidad & Tobago, the UK, US, and Venezuela.

As a result, Nickel achieved long-term access to several targets, allowing the group to conduct activities such as regularly scheduled exfiltration of data. Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) observed Nickel perform frequent and scheduled data collection and exfiltration from victim networks. The group’s activity included looking in directories of interest for new files added since the last time it collected data.

One method Nickel uses to hide malware is to drop it into existing installed software paths. The group did this to make the malware appear to be files used for an installed application. These are backdoors capable of collecting system information and have basic backdoor functionalities, including, but not limited to:

• Launching a process
• Uploading a file
• Downloading a file
• Executing a shellcode in memory

A long list of IOCs can be found at the end of this write-up about Nickel by MSTIC.

International cooperation

The Microsoft blog includes a call-to-action for industry, governments, civil society, and others to come together and establish a new consensus for what is and isn’t appropriate behavior in cyberspace. There are some promising developments in this area, like the United States and the European Union joining the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace, the Oxford Process which has brought together some of the best legal minds to evaluate the application of international law to cyberspace, and the United Nations taking critical steps to advance dialogue across stakeholders. Nevertheless, every entity with the relevant expertise and resources needs to do whatever they can to help bolster trust in technology and protect the digital ecosystem.

Stay safe, everyone!

The post A chink in the armor of China-based hacking group Nickel appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

In recent news, IT security researchers from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and the Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences have disclosed 14 new cross-site leak (also known as XSLeak or XS-Leak) attacks that can affects modern browsers, such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple’s Safari. Although the news and press release regarding this haven’t mentioned other browsers that are Chromium-based and Firefox-based, we can make a cautious assumption that these, too, could be vulnerable to the new XS-Leak attacks.

But what is XS-Leak? Why should internet users be worried about them? And how can they protect themselves from such web threats?

XS-Leak, explained

An XS-Leak is a type of attack that targets inherent side-channels of a web platform, allowing actors to bypass the ‘same-origin’ policy (SOP) in web browsers so they can steal user information in the background from trusted and legitimate websites. A side-channel can operate as an information leakage channel, as it “allows an attacker to infer information about a secret by observing nonfunctional characteristics of a program, such as execution time or memory consumed.” [1]

The “same-origin policy” is a critical security mechanism. Its purpose is to prevent information from being stolen from websites that users trust. It does this by restricting how documents and scripts from one origin (the URL location) can interact with resources on another origin. Without this policy, an attacker who successfully compromises a script could see everything in a user’s browser.

Browsers support various interactions between websites and web applications. XS-Leaks take advantage of a minute amount of data that is exposed every time this interaction happens between websites.

XS-Leaks Wiki further explains: “The principle of an XS-Leak is to use such side-channels available on the web to reveal sensitive information about users, such as their data in other web applications, details about their local environment, or internal networks they are connected to.”

XS-Leaks has been around since at least the year 2000, and 34 of them have been identified and classified. XS-Leaks can be caused by different things, such as browser APIs, browser implementation details and bugs, and hardware bugs (like vulnerabilities in modern processors that Meltdown and Spectre exploit).

What is the XSinator?

The XSinator is a “browser test suite” or online tool that anyone can use to automatically scan for XS-Leaks vulnerabilities in the user’s mobile and desktop browser. XSinator.com has been created as accompanying material for the researchers’ paper entitled, “XSinator.com: From a formal Model to the Automatic Evaluation of Cross-Site Leaks in Web Browsers” [PDF].

How can I protect myself from XS-Leaks?

Mitigating the risks presented by XS-Leaks falls on the hands of web browser developers. And protecting against this, they continue to do so as some browsers have already implemented a number of new defense mechanisms against it.

IT security researchers from both universities have informed the web browser development teams of their findings and are currently fixing the issues. They also made available detailed technical defenses that browser developers can implement against XS-Leaks in their paper.

The post Is your web browser vulnerable to data theft? XS-Leak explained appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Keeping Windows up to date is an important part of warding off malware, exploits, and other attacks. If you’re not running the latest version of your OS, it can give cybercriminals the leverage they need to compromise your system.

Unfortunately not all machines are running automatic updates by default, depending on your operating system. This used to primarily be a problem on older versions of Windows. With something like Windows 10, you can’t hold back the update tide forever. The best you can do is pause updates for up to 35 days, at which point the only way you can pause again is to install new updates.

Outside of the pause/repeat cycle, most folks would resort to registry edits for longer periods of going without an update. This isn’t recommended for most users. If you’re a regular home user, there’s probably not many specific edge-case reasons why you’d want to have updates switched off.

How to check your Windows update status

Your updates should in theory be running in the background.

If you want to check whether they are, type “Windows update” into the search bar from the Start menu, and click into the Updates section. There, you’ll find a wide range of options and information.

At the very top, you’ll see if you’re up to date or not along with the time the computer last checked. From here, you can also manually check for updates.

If there are additional updates soon to be coming down the pipeline, you’ll also be able to see what they are, along with some details about the update. You can download and install manually before the updates are grabbed automatically.

If your system isn’t compatible with Windows 11, there’ll be a big box letting you know, along with the option to grab the Microsoft PC Health Check App. This will explain in more detail why you may not be able to meet system requirements for Windows 11.

Check your Windows update settings

Underneath the Windows 11 status box is a selection of fine tuning options related to Windows updates. These are:

Pause updates for 7 days. The length of pause required can be altered to your liking in the advanced options (to a maximum of 35 days).

Change active hours. This is for letting Microsoft know which time is best for updates, downloads, and so on. Many folks leave their PCs on overnight, so having all the update heavy lifting take place while asleep is ideal for them. Will you be out during the day? No problem, maybe daytime updates would fit your routine better.

View update history. This can be useful for troubleshooting or just keeping up to date with what’s been going on. Maybe a specific update went AWOL somehow. This is where you’d likely begin your search.

Advanced options. This is where you can alter the pause length for updates. You can also tell the device to receive updates for other Microsoft products when you update Windows. There are additional options for downloading over metered connections, restarting the device “as soon as possible” when a restart is required to install an update, and also various rules for on-screen notifications.

Is Windows update free?

Absolutely, and we recommend you make full use of its capabilities. Your devices will be that little bit more secure with regular automatic updates enabled.

The post How to check for Windows updates and install them appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs:

• CronRAT targets Linux servers with e-commerce attacks
• Hackers all over the world are targeting Tasmania’s emergency services
• Massive faceprint scraping company Clearview AI hauled over the coals
• Most people aren’t upgrading to Windows 11: Not the end of the world
• Have you downloaded that Android malware from the Play Store lately?
• Here’s what data the FBI can get from WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, Telegram, and more
• Capcom Arcade Stadium’s record player numbers blamed on card mining
• SideCopy APT: Connecting lures to victims, payloads to infrastructure
• Emotet being spread via malicious Windows App Installer packages
• Attacker unmasked by VPN flubs charged with Ubiquiti hack
• Emotet’s back and it isn’t wasting any time

Stay safe!

The post A week in security (Nov 29 – Dec 5) appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

iPhones of at least nine US State Department employees are said to have been hacked using the Pegasus spyware developed by the Israeli technology company, NSO Group. Pegasus is a proprietary and sophisticated spyware capable of the remote surveillance of smartphones.

The employees targeted by an unknown group using the spyware are either “based in Uganda or focused on matters concerning the East African country,” according to Reuters. The hack, which took place a few months back, is said to be the widest known hack of US officials through NSO technology.

Among those notified by Apple for being targeted by the NSO Group spyware is Norbert Mao, president of Uganda’s Democratic party. He tweeted:

The iPhones were infected using a graphics processing vulnerability that Apple only learned about and patched in September this year. The flaw is said to have been taken advantaged of since at least February.

In an interview with CNN, University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab’s John Scott-Railton, who investigated Pegasus, urged the US Bureau of Diplomatic Security to do more to protect State Department devices. “NSO has been a plain-sight national security threat for years, and the fact that these breaches happened and Apple is required to do the notification, shows that the threat was not being taken seriously enough,” Scott-Railton told the news outfit.

NSO Group controversy

Last month, the US Commerce Department blacklisted NSO Group, accusing it of providing spyware to foreign governments who then used the tools “to maliciously target journalists, embassy workers, and activists.” The blacklisting makes doing business with NSO Group more difficult for US companies.

Weeks after, Apple filed a lawsuit against NSO Group for breaking into its iOS platform to target US citizens.

And then last week, 86 human rights groups and experts issued a joint letter to European states, asking them to sanction NSO Group based on credible reporting that the Pegasus spyware has aided governments in abusing human rights.

According to a senior official of the Biden administration, the government is cracking down on companies like NSO Group to protect its citizens stationed in foreign countries and “pursue new global discussion about spying limits”. Sen. Ron Wyden, who is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is quoted as saying: “Companies that enable their customers to hack US government employees are a threat to America’s national security and should be treated as such.”

Denial

NSO Group released a statement on Thursday denying that its tools were used in this hacking incident, and said it was happy to cooperate with relevant government authorities.

“If our investigation shall show these actions indeed happened with NSO’s tools, such customer will be terminated permanently and legal actions will take place.”

The post NSO Group spyware found on iPhones of US State Department employees appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

In the year 2021, the war for computer superiority has a clear winner, and it is the Macintosh, by Apple. The company’s Pro model laptops are finally, belatedly equipped with ports that have been standard in other computers for years. The company’s beleaguered “butterfly” keyboard has seemingly been erased from history. And the base model of company’s powerhouse desktop tower could set you back a hefty $6,000.

What’s not to love?

Ribbing aside, according to our resident Mac expert at Malwarebytes, Thomas Reed, Apple has made several important decisions about device design in the past few decades to make them more secure, easier to use, and harder to tamper. And that’s a boon to users because, as Malwarebytes discovered just a couple of years ago, the threats to Mac machines increased by 400 percent from the year prior. But threats to Apple devices extend beyond laptop and desktop threats—for years, small companies have been finding vulnerabilities in Apple’s iOS mobile operating system and selling them to the highest bidders.

So, what defenses do Apple users have to prevent the increasing number of threats from impacting them directly? As Reed explained in this week’s Lock and Code episode with host David Ruiz, there’s a lot. Apple keeps bad users out, prevents clueless users from messing things up, and it works somewhat diligently to catch malware when it’s first reported on.

But not everything is as good as it should be, Reed said. In particular, Apple’s ideology about product secrecy has bled into its approach to security updates, meaning that the company has failed to provide transparent, timely communication to its users when it matters most.

“I can understand the secrecy when it comes to new products and new designs. But when it comes to security, communication is really important and Apple could really learn something from Microsoft.”

Thomas Reed, director of Mac and Mobile at Malwarebytes

Tune in to the latest episode of Lock and Code to learn about Mac security successes and failures, and about Mac history and Reed’s first experience with a computer mouse, along with a story about, reportedly, the first-ever ransomware attack in history.

You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, plus whatever preferred podcast platform you use.

The post Why Macs are the best, according to Mac expert Thomas Reed: Lock and Code S02E23 appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Emotet is one of the best known, and most dangerous, malware threats of the past several years.

On several occasions it appeared to take an early retirement, but it has always came back. In January of this year, a global police operation dismantled Emotet’s botnet. Law enforcement then used their control of this infrastructure to send a “self-destruct” update to Emotet executables. Infected organizations were given a few months grace to clean up the the neutered malware before the remaining copies did as they’d been instructed and ate themselves in April.

However, that wasn’t the end of the story.

Last month we reported on how another notorious bit of malware, TrickBot, was helping Emotet come back from the dead. And then yesterday, several security researchers saw another huge spike in Emotet’s activity.

Blinking light

The presence of Emotet in the threat landscape has had the appearance of a blinking red light for years. Emotet started out in 2014 as an information-stealing banking Trojan that scoured sensitive financial information from infected systems (which is why Malwarebytes detects some components as Spyware.Emotet). Over the years, it evolved into a global-scale distribution infrastructure for other malware.

During this time we have seen Emotet disappear and show up again on several occasions. In September 2019, Emotet emerged from a four month hiatus with a new spam campaign, before going back into hiding early in 2020 and reappearing in July of the same year. Its use then declined, with occasional spikes, before it returned just in time for Christmas and was then dealt a massive blow by collective law enforcement action in January this year.

Recent spikes

On the December 1, 2021, our Threat Intelligence team noted a huge spike in Emotet C2 activity.

Other researchers also noted spikes in the number of URLs being used to distribute the malware, and the number of malware samples.

From all the reports and alerts by researchers and analysts we can see a few interesting trends.

• First of all, our own research shows the global distribution of Emotet has a clear focus on the US.

• Looking at the malware URLs that URLhaus has associated with the latest Emotet campaigns, we see a lot of compromised WordPress sites.
• Only yesterday we talked about how Emotet was being spread via malicious Windows App Installer packages. While this was not an entirely new method, it is not something we see every day.
• The spam campaign used to spread the mails with the links leading to the App Installer packages was done by hijacking existing conversations, using stolen reply-chain emails.
• Researchers are seeing an uptick in the number of Emotet C2 servers.

Speculation

From this point on the content of this post is speculation, so feel free to skip it if you have developed your own theories. Or feel free to compare notes and leave your remarks in the comments.

Emotet is growing a lot faster than any newcomer to the scene could do. This seems to indicate that old relationships have been renewed, which usually means that the persons that tied these knots in the past are still working on the project and bringing “old friends” back in.

Given the global distribution and the different campaigns that are ongoing it’s likely there are several different affiliates at work. And looking at their methods we can tell that these are not some “fresh out of their mother’s basement script kiddies” either. They are using sophisticated methods and abusing vulnerabilities that haven’t been patched yet by quite a lot of organizations. For example, some Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities will allow them to hijack existing email threads, which gives the spam messages a higher credibility.

I checked the hosting companies for the WordPress sites, expecting to find a lot of GoDaddy domains that might have been compromised while their credentials were for sale. But I found a lot of different hosting companies, which makes WordPress the common denominator. It’s likely therefore that the attackers are exploiting vulnerable versions of WordPress plugins like OptinMonster, WP Fastest Cache, and WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing and Discounts, all of which were recently patched. (Although there are probably others that we do not know about yet too.)

Hard fact

Emotet is back! For how long is hard to predict, but they don’t behave as if they have any plans to retire again soon.

Stay safe, everyone!

The post Emotet’s back and it isn’t wasting any time appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

A veritable barn-stormer of an insider threat story has recently come to light.

A former employee of Ubiquiti Networks, Nickolas Sharp, has been arrested and charged for allegedly hacking company servers, stealing gigabytes of information, and then rounding it all off with a splash of extortion. This took place in December of last year, but there’s no clear reason (yet) for why he did any of it.

The alleged perpetrator might have gotten away with it too, but for several disastrous choices which ultimately led to their downfall.

Covering his tracks

Sharp clearly put some thought into the attack. Many people would perhaps just blunder across the network, leaving large but unintentional “It was me” footprints all over the place. Not so here… he made use of his network access to alter logs and more, throwing a blanket over what was actually taking place. Cleverly, he used a VPN to hide his details while doing this.

He probably thought he’d gotten away with it. However, breaches do get discovered eventually. The clock was ticking. The question was: Had he done enough?

The answer was no, he hadn’t.

Finding himself on the incident response team investigating his own attack(!), he’s alleged to have threatened to release data stolen from his employer if a ransom demand for 50 bitcoin (roughly $2 million when this all took place) wasn’t paid. According to the US Department of Justice, he then released some of the files when the ransom wasn’t forthcoming. None of this is really conducive to keeping a low profile, and the wheels started to come off.

Anonymous—up to a point

If you’re up to no good and relying on anonymity to protect you, even the slightest connection to your real life can bring the whole scheme crashing down.

Sharp’s attempts to avoid detection apparently rested with his use of a VPN. This, in theory, would keep his real IP address hidden. Law enforcement had other ideas, working out a connection between the VPN account used to attack Ubiquit and one used to create Sharp’s PayPal account.

The real kicker is that when his home internet briefly went down, so too did the VPN, and his real IP showed up as connecting to the previously mentioned workplace Github account.

From bad, to worse, to even worse than that

A visit from law enforcement might deter most people from further antics. If it were me, I’d cut my losses and keep a very low profile. However, this story was made for further antics. The Department of Justice claims the alleged perpetrator posed as a company whistleblower after the FBI had searched his home. This “whistleblower” routine took the form of stories potentially damaging to the Ubiquiti Networks organisation.

This is, frankly, an astonishing chain of events. Especially considering this hack had such a big impact on stock. It remains to be seen what, exactly, would drive someone to this sort of self-destructive cavalcade of disaster. For now, you’ll have to make do with the indictment (PDF).

When insiders attack

We’ve talked about the harms caused by insider threats many times on this blog. Problems can arise from disgruntled employees who’ve gone past the point of no return with scores to settle. Ex-employees who didn’t have their access to systems revoked can be a problem. Even the humble printer can become a battleground for keeping certain types of special paper out of easy reach. Even the FBI aren’t safe from such events.

It’s not possible to eliminate this issue completely, unfortunately. On the bright side, we can see that even in a case as severe as the Ubiquiti attack, the long arm of the law can catch up with criminals eventually—no matter how well prepared they think they are.

The post Attacker unmasked by VPN flubs charged with Ubiquiti hack appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

This blog post was authored by Hossein Jazi and the Threat Intelligence Team.

Last week, Facebook announced that back in August it had taken action against a Pakistani APT group known as SideCopy. Facebook describes how the threat actors used romantic lures to compromise targets in Afghanistan.

In this blog post we are providing additional details about SideCopy that have not been published before. We were able to have unique insights about victims and targeted countries as well as the kind of data the APT group was able to successfully exfiltrate. Among the information that was stolen is access to government portals, Facebook, Twitter and Google credentials, banking information, and password-protected documents.

In addition, we detail how this threat actor had started to use new initial infection vectors for its operations which include Microsoft Publisher documents and Trojanized applications. Finally, we detail a newly-observed stealer that has been used by this actor called AuTo stealer.

Newly observed lures

The SideCopy APT is a Pakistani threat actor that has been operating since at least 2019, mainly targeting South Asian countries and more specifically India and Afghanistan. Its name comes from its infection chain that tries to mimic that of the SideWinder APT. It has been reported that this actor has similarities with Transparent Tribe (APT36) and possibly is a subdivision of this actor. Cisco Talos and Seqrite have provided comprehensive reports on this actor’s activities.

The lures used by SideCopy APT are usually archive files that have embedded one of these files: Lnk, Microsoft Publisher or Trojanized Applications. These lures can be categorized into two main groups:

• Targeted lures: These lures are specially crafted and designed to target specific victims. We believe this category is very well customized to target government or military officials. Here some of the examples:
  • Report-to-NSA-Mohib-Meeting-with-FR-GE-UK.zip:
    This archive file contains a Microsoft Publisher document that is a letter from “Mr Ahmad Shuja Jamal, former DG for International Relations and Regional Cooperation at the National Security Council of Afghanistan” to “Hamdullah Mohib, former National Security Adviser of Afghanistan”. This letter is about a “meeting with representatives of France and UK delegations of Afghanistan”. Most likely this lure has been used to target Afghanistan government officials and especially foreign affair related officials.
  • address-list-ere-update-sep-2021.zip: This archive file contains a malicious lnk file which loads a decoy PDF file. The decoy PDF file is: “Email facility address list of the ERE units: 20 Sept 2021”. This lure seems to be used to target the Indian Army and National Cadet Corps of India.
  • NCERT-NCF-LTV-Vislzr-2022.zip: Similar to the previous one, this includes a malicious lnk that loads a decoy PDF file. The decoy is a curriculum of the course named “Living the values, a value-narrative to grass-root leadership” offered by NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training of India).

• Generic lures: These lures are mostly generic and most likely have been used in spam campaigns to collect emails and credentials to help the actor perform their targeted attacks. In this category we observed the following: (The first three lures are the ones reported as “romantic lures” in a Facebook report)
  • Using girl names as the archive file name such as “nisha.zip“: (showing girl pictures with an application) These archive files contain a list of images with the “.3d” extension and an application named “3Dviewer.exe” that needs to to be executed to load and view images. In fact, the executable is Trojanized and will contact the actor servers to download the malicious payloads.
  • “image-random number.zip“: These zip files contains a malicious lnk file that shows a girl picture as a decoy.
  • “Whatsapp-image-random number.zip“: These zip files contain a malicious lnk file that shows a girl picture as a decoy.
  • “schengen_visa_application_form_english.zip“: This archive file contains a Microsoft Publisher document that loads a Schengen Visa Application Form in English as decoy. This is used to target people who want to travel to European countries.
  • “Download-Maria-Gul-CV.zip“: This archive contains a lnk that loads a resume as decoy. The name of the archive file usually is in this pattern “Download-Name-FamilyName-CV.zip”
  • “New document.zip“: This loads a document as decoy. We were not able to retrieve the lure in this case.

Victimology

As previously reported, the SideCopy APT has mainly targeted defense and armed forces personnel in the Indian subcontinent but there are not many reports about how successful these attacks were and what data was exfiltrated. The Malwarebytes Threat Intelligence team was able to identify some of the successful attacks operated by this APT. It is worth noting that those compromises happened before the Taliban completely took over Afghanistan. In fact, Facebook’s intervention in August matches with the timeline of indicators we recorded.

• Administration Office of the President (AOP) of Afghanistan personnel: This actor has operated targeted spear phishing attacks on members of AOP and was able to gain access to ten of them and steal their credentials from different government services such as mis.aop.gov.af, internal service, bank services (Maiwand Bank) and personal accounts such as Google, Twitter and Facebook.
• Ministry of Foreign affairs- Afghanistan: We have evidence that the actor infected one of the members of the Ministry of External affairs but it seems they were not able to collect any data from this victim.
• Ministry of Finance, Afghanistan: The actor infected two members of MOF but mostly they were able to collect personal accounts such as Google and Facebook and Bank accounts (“worldbankgroup.csod.com”). They also exfiltrated documents that are password protected.
• Afghanistan’s National Procurement Authority (NPA): The actor infected one person in NPA and were able to stead personal credentials including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Google and the mis.aop.gov.af account.
• A shared computer, India: It seems the actor gained access to a shared machine and collected a lot of credentials from government and eduction services. It seems this machine has been infected using one of the generic lures.

The SideCopy APT was able to steal several Office documents and databases associated with the Government of Afghanistan. As an example, the threat actor exfiltrated Diplomatic Visa and Diplomatic ID cards from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Afghanistan database, as well as the Asset Registration and Verification Authority database belonging to the General Director of Administrative Affairs of Government of Afghanistan. They also were able to exfiltrate the ID cards of several Afghani government officials.

The exfiltrated documents contain names, numbers and email addresses associated with government officials. It is possible that they have been already targeted by the actor or will be the future targets of this actor. There are also some confidential letters that we think the actor is planning to use for future lures.

Attacker infrastructure

We have uncovered the main command and control (C2) server used by the attacker to monitor and control their victims. Each archive file that is used by the attacker to send to victims is considered a unique package and each package has its own payloads including hta and executables that usually are hosted on compromised domains. The actor has a system named “Scout” to monitor each package. The Scout system has four users with English nicknames (Hendrick, Alexander, Hookes, Malone). It also defines teams that are responsible to manage each package.

In this system, they have a dashboard that shows all the infected machines. Each row in the dashboard shows one package and its statistics which includes the IP address of the victim, package name, OS version, User-Agent, browser information, country and victim status.

The actor uses a different dashboard called Crusader to monitor the Action RAT statistics.

Analysis of the new attacks

As we mentioned earlier, the actor has used three different methods as its initial infection vector: lnk files, Microsoft Publisher files and Trojanized application. The lnk files have been well studied and what we have observed is very similar to what already has been reported, with only small changes. For example, we observed that they have updated the code of hta.dll and preBotHta.dll and added some more features.

In this section we provide the analysis for the other two variants: Microsoft Publisher and Trojanized Applications.

Microsoft Office Publisher

In this variant, attackers have embedded a Microsoft Office Publisher document in an archive file. We’ve identified two variants of the Office publisher documents:

• Report to NSA Mohib – Meeting with FR, GE, UK – 12 Nov 2020.docx.pub
• schengen_visa_application_form_english.pub

Both of these documents were created in August 2021 and we believe they have been used in the most recent campaign. Both of these documents contains a simple macro that calls Shell function to call mshta.exe to download and execute a specified hta file.

The hta file loads the loader DLL (PreBotHta.dll) into memory and then collects AV product names. The AV name along with the encoded payloads that need to be loaded by this loader are passed to the PinkAgain function.

The loader is responsible for dropping both credwiz.exe and Duser.dll. Unlike what has been reported, in this case Duser.dll is not copied into different locations based on AV products and it is copied into C:ProgramDataShareIt for all AV products.

This loader just does some additional work based on the AV product. For example if the AV product is Avira it tries to download and execute an additional hta file to deploy additional payloads.

After dropping the required files onto the victim, it starts the “credwiz.exe” process. This executable sideloads the malicious payload “Duser.dll”. This payload has been written in Delphi (this is the Delphi variant of Action Rat) and compiled on October 2 2021.

All the commands, strings and domains in this RAT are base64 encoded. The malicious process starts by collecting hostname, username, OS version, OS architecture, Mac address and installed AV products (by executing cmd.exe WMIC /Node:localhost /Namespace:\rootSecurityCenter2 Path AntiVirusProduct Get displayName /Format:List) from the victim and sending them to the command and control server using a HTTP request ("https://afrepublic.xyz/classification/classification.php").
It then goes into a loop and waits for commands from the server to execute them. This RAT has the capability to execute one of the following commands:

• Command: Execute commands received from the server
• Download: Download additional payloads
• Drives: Get drive info
• GetFiles: Get files info
• Execute: Execute a specified payload using CreateProcessW
• Upload: Upload files to server

After execution of each command it reports back the result to its server. The reporting url is different than the C2 url. The report type depends on the command, for example if the payload executes a command, it reports the following information to the server: Victim’s ID, the executed command, the command output and the error message if the command execution was not successful.

Trojanized Image Viewer Application (3DViewer.exe)

In this variant, the attacker has distributed an archive file including an application named 3Dviewer.exe and a set of images with “3d” extension that can be only opened by that executable.

It seems the attacker Trojanized an image viewer application named “3Dviewer” to download and execute a malicious HTA file using Mshta in addition to its normal function that can load and show the pictures. This executable has been compiled on October 26 2021. The rest of the process is similar to what we described in the previous section.

AuTo Stealer

We also came across another Stealer used by this actor that has been written in C++. To the best of our knowledge this is a new Stealer used by SideCopy APT. A Loader has been used to drop and load an executable (credbiz.exe) that side loads the Stealer. We were able to identify two different variants of this Loader that have been used to load an HTTP version and TCP version of the Stealer. Both of these loaders and the Stealer components have been compiled on October 30 2021:

Loader

Based on the functionality, we can say this Loader is a C++ variant of PreBotHta.dll (C# Loader used to load other Rats used by this actor). This Loader is responsible for dropping the following files in C:ProgramDataOracle directory:

• credwiz.exe executable and rename it as credbiz.exe.
• TextShaping.dll (Stealer component that will be side loaded by credbiz.exe)

Similar to PreBotHta.Dll, it checks the installed AV product on the victim’s machine and performs additional actions based on the AV product name. For example if the AV is Avast, Avira, BitDefender or AVG it creates a batch file (sysboot.bat) and executes it by calling cmd.exe. This makes credbiz.exe persistence through the AutoRun registry key. If the installed AV is one of the Kaspersky, Symantec, Mcafee or QuickHeal it creates an lnk file (Win Setting Loader.lnk) for persistency in StartUp directory.

After performing the additional process, it executes credbiz.exe by calling CreateProcessW.

TextShaping.dll (Stealer component)

The actor used two different variants of the Stealer Stealer: HTTP and TCP. The HTTP version performs the exfiltration over HTTP while the TCP variant performs all the exfiltration over TCP. This component also has an interesting unique PDB path: "D:Project AlphaHTTP AutoappReleaseapp.pdb"

This Stealer collects PowerPoint, Word, Excel and PDF documents, text files, database files and images and exfiltrates them to its server over HTTP or TCP. To exfiltrate the data using HTTP, it builds a request that is specific to data files being exfiltrated and sends them over an HTTP server. For example, when it wants to exfiltrate PowerPoint documents it builds the following request and sends them over HTTP:
http://newsroom247.xyz:8080/streamppt?HostName_UserName

For other file types it adds the /stream related to the file type and exfiltrates them to server. Here are the list of them: /streamppt, /streamdoc, /streamxls, /streamdb, /streamtxt, /streampdf, /streamimg.

Before starting the stealing process, it collects the victim’s information including username, hostname, OS info and AV products and sends them to its server by adding “user_details” to the domain. Also, it collects file information from the victim’s machine and stores it in a file “Hostname_UserName.txt” and sends the file by using the “logs_receiver” command.

Conclusion

The SideCopy APT has been actively targeting government and military officials in South Asia. The group mainly uses archived files to target victims in spam or spear phishing campaigns. The archive files usually have an embedded lnk, Office or Trojanized application that are used to call mshta to download and execute an hta file. The hta files perform fileless payload execution to deploy one of the RATs associated with this actor such as AllaKore or Action Rat. Malwarebytes products can identify the initial infection vectors used by SideCopy and block them from execution.

IOCs

Mitre attack techniques

The post SideCopy APT: Connecting lures to victims, payloads to infrastructure appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.