Actually bringing down command and control networks, wherever they exist, will almost always require collaborating with law enforcement professionals to take action on a case-by-case basis. Email Lures. Some of the capabilities these plugins can provide include: The installers we looked at caught our attention because they all drop the same set of “junk files” (files that are never used by the installed malware) across the initial sample set. All of the analyzed initial loaders are DLL files with only one export, though the name of the loader and the export function vary across the samples. (We’ll discuss newer campaigns using other installers, and the group’s shift in phishing tactics, in an upcoming follow-up report.). 50.116.63.34 was first reported on May 13th 2020, and the most recent report was 4 hours ago.. The shell code checks this structure against hashes of the desired function names, providing a silent way to dynamically resolve the memory address of a function to be called. We’ve detected one more recent campaign using these NSIS installers (from January 13-16). Since then, Proofpoint has identified additional campaigns with matching attributes, including: Bulgarian language email lures, a NetWire payload, the Command and Control … We saw an attack on Autodesk® A360, comparable to the way file-sharing sites are being used to host malware. The latest campaign, which was discovered by IBM X-Force security researchers, involves the typical BEC technique of sending an employee of the targeted organization an email masquerading as a corporate request. One of the most commonly seen techniques of this "fileless" execution is code injection. In the report, researchers have pieced together that PWNDROID4 is remarkably similar to the Android version of a RAT known as NetWire, which has been around since 2017. To make the program crash, you simply need to give the sample a 57-character-long filename (such as “this_is_57_length_filename_in_order_to_do_a_crash_PoC.exe”). These are the dropped junk files for all NSIS installers that belong to campaign 4: Some of the payloads observed associated with campaign 4 included: These are the dropped junk files for all NSIS installers that belong to campaign 5: Sample emails we collected tied to campaign 5: The following graph shows the relation and infection chain for campaign 5 (based on available data on VT). In the email attacks we observed, the targets appeared to all be critical infrastructure providers (or businesses related to critical infrastructure). NSIS is an open source tool for creating Windows installers, designed for Internet-based software distribution. discovered by Proofpoint on December 2019. And many (but not all) of the companies that have been targeted-up are related to critical infrastructure. Abusing A360 as a malware delivery platform can enable attacks that are less likely to … These are the extracted artifacts during the analysis. The malware gathers and sends victim’s system information to its Command and Control (C&C) server and it … Here’s how the workflow of Stage 1 breaks down in depth: The second stage of decryption begins when Loader 2 is loaded in memory by shellcode2. In the first stage of the decryption, done by the shellcode called by initial loader, contains an xor key, a second shellcode (shellcode 2), and a PE file (Loader 2). This IP address has been reported a total of 225 times from 38 distinct sources. The graph above shows the infection chain for some of the analyzed NSIS installers. Although the IBM security researchers were unable to identify the exact details on who was behind this scheme, certain code strings found in the malware variant contained what seemed to be Indonesian text. One of them is Netwire (MITRE S0198), a multiplatform remote administration tool (RAT) that has been used by criminals and espionage groups at least since 2012. Once executed, the malware variant establishes persistence via task scheduling. We considered two possible scenarios: either the malicious NSIS package is a generic packer sold on dark forums; or, the same threat actor is using a custom loader to deploy different payloads in a variety of their attacks. These are the dropped junk files for all NSIS installers that belong to campaign 2: Some of the payloads identified for campaign 2 on a first triage included the following: We found no emails for this campaign, so we were unable to map its intended targets. I think that before I delve into more technical details of Gh0st RAT, let us take a brief look at the capabilities or reach of Gh0st RAT. These are the dropped junk files for all NSIS installers that belong to Campaign 1: These are some of the payloads identified for Campaign 1 on a first triage of the installers. An electrical equipment manufacturer in Romania; A Kuwaiti construction services and engineering company; A Korean telecommunications and electrical cable manufacturer; A Swiss publishing equipment manufacturer; A Japanese courier and transportation company. Users should avoid clicking links or downloading attachments unless they are sure that an email is legitimate and sent from a non-malicious address. ), reads the Cluck file in order to decrypt more artifacts. Based on the payloads used by RATicate, it’s clear that the campaigns run by the group are intended to gain access to and control of computers on the targeted companies’ networks. Loader2 starts executing its DllEntryPoint. 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