NanoCoreRAT Behind an Increase in Tax-Themed Phishing E-mails

Posted on by Anthony Kasza

It seems every mainstream news event or holiday has an accompanying phishing campaign. Opportunistic actors hoping to capitalize on the public's attention are often seen sending phishing e-mails with themes related to the news or the season..

It happened this last holiday season and will likely continue to occur as long as email is around.

Unsurprisingly, as we near the U.S. deadline for filing our income taxes, Palo Alto Networks researchers have seen an increase in phishing emails specifically related to taxes. This blog details some recent trends we have been able to identify. Palo Alto Networks noticed both executable attachments and Microsoft Word documents with macros designed to download and execute files. Continue reading "NanoCoreRAT Behind an Increase in Tax-Themed Phishing E-mails"

T9000: Advanced Modular Backdoor Uses Complex Anti-Analysis Techniques

Posted on by Josh Grunzweig

Most custom backdoors used by advanced attackers have limited functionality. They evade detection by keeping their code simple and flying under the radar. But during a recent investigation we found a backdoor that takes a very different approach. We refer to this backdoor as T9000, which is a newer variant of the T5000 malware family, also known as Plat1.

In addition to the basic functionality all backdoors provide, T9000 allows the attacker to capture encrypted data, take screenshots of specific applications and specifically target Skype users. The malware goes to great lengths to identify a total of 24 potential security products that may be running on a system and customizes its installation mechanism to specifically evade those that are installed. It uses a multi-stage installation process with specific checks at each point to identify if it is undergoing analysis by a security researcher. Continue reading "T9000: Advanced Modular Backdoor Uses Complex Anti-Analysis Techniques"

Emissary Trojan Changelog: Did Operation Lotus Blossom Cause It to Evolve?

Posted on by Robert Falcone

In December 2015, Unit 42 published a blog about a cyber espionage attack using the Emissary Trojan as a payload. Emissary is related to the Elise Trojan and the Operation Lotus Blossom attack campaign, which prompted us to start collecting additional samples of Emissary.

The oldest sample we found was created in 2009, indicating this tool has been in use for almost seven years. Of note, this is three years earlier than the oldest Elise sample we have found, suggesting this group has been active longer than previously documented. In addition, Emissary appears to only be used against Taiwanese or Hong Kong based targets, all of the decoys are written in Traditional Chinese, and they use themes related to the government or military.

Continue reading "Emissary Trojan Changelog: Did Operation Lotus Blossom Cause It to Evolve?"

SpiderMal: Deep PassiveDNS Analysis with Maltego

Posted on by Jeff White

One investigative technique for threat analysis involves pulling information from disparate data sources to start piecing together breadcrumbs of data. This technique forms a more holistic picture of a threat. One of the most basic forms of telemetry used to research a threat is the classic IP address/domain record pair, to which the Maltego platform provides an excellent interface to graph these pairs so that interesting links or clusters standout for further analysis. This has historically been a very manual process and often leads to a dead end, as a lot of threat actors commonly take over legitimate systems to carry out campaigns. Continue reading "SpiderMal: Deep PassiveDNS Analysis with Maltego"

Scarlet Mimic: Years-Long Espionage Campaign Targets Minority Activists

Posted on by Robert Falcone

Executive Summary

Over the past seven months, Unit 42 has been investigating a series of attacks we attribute to a group we have code named “Scarlet Mimic.” The attacks began over four years ago and their targeting pattern suggests that this adversary’s primary mission is to gather information about minority rights activists. We do not have evidence directly linking these attacks to a government source, but the information derived from these activities supports an assessment that a group or groups with motivations similar to the stated position of the Chinese government in relation to these targets is involved. Continue reading "Scarlet Mimic: Years-Long Espionage Campaign Targets Minority Activists"

New Attacks Linked to C0d0so0 Group

Posted on by Josh Grunzweig

While recently researching unknown malware and attack campaigns using the AutoFocus threat intelligence platform, Unit 42 discovered new activity that appears related to an adversary group previously called “C0d0so0” or “Codoso”. This group is well known for a widely publicized attack involving the compromise of Forbes.com, in which the site was used to compromise selected targets via a watering hole to a zero-day Adobe Flash exploit. Compared to other adversary groups, C0d0so0 has shown the use of more sophisticated tactics and tools and has been linked to leveraging zero-day exploits on numerous occasions in combination with watering hole and spear phishing attacks. Continue reading "New Attacks Linked to C0d0so0 Group"

NetTraveler Spear-Phishing Email Targets Diplomat of Uzbekistan

Posted on by Vicky Ray

Unit 42 recently identified a targeted attack against an individual working for the Foreign Ministry of Uzbekistan in China. A spear-phishing email was sent to a diplomat of the Embassy of Uzbekistan who is likely based in Beijing, China. In this report, we’ll review how the actors attempted to exploit CVE-2012-0158 to install the NetTraveler Trojan.

On December 12, 2015, a spear-phishing email was sent to a diplomat of the Embassy of Uzbekistan. The body and subject of the email suggests that the email was spoofed to look like it was sent by the Russian Foreign Ministry and the attachment may contain an official annual report on CHS (Council of Heads of Member States), who form the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization). Continue reading "NetTraveler Spear-Phishing Email Targets Diplomat of Uzbekistan"

Using IDAPython to Make Your Life Easier: Part 5

Posted on by Josh Grunzweig

We continue our series on using IDAPython to make things easier for reverse-engineers by tackling a problem malware analysts deal with on an almost daily basis: extracting embedded executables. Malware will often store embedded executables in a number of ways. Some examples include attaching these files in the file’s overlay, including them as a PE resource, or storing them in a buffer within the malware.

Continue reading "Using IDAPython to Make Your Life Easier: Part 5"

As Usual, Attackers Were Busy Over the Holiday Season

Posted on by Bryan Lee

The holiday season is a time for friends and family, as well as for heightened levels of consumer shopping. It’s also a time of year when threat actors get especially opportunistic, and the 2015 holiday season was no different.

Let’s take a closer look at recent holiday season-themed attacks.

Happy Festivus!

Unit 42 examined the time period from November 25, 2015 through December 29, 2015 and identified nearly 4 million phishing attacks containing malicious attachments using AutoFocus. Out of these phishing email messages, we then searched specifically for holiday-themes, using keywords such as “Christmas,” “holiday,” “Santa,” etc. Amongst the results, 92 percent of the attacks identified to be holiday themed were already found to have a Unit 42 tag associated with it, providing additional context around the malware family in use, indicator sets, and any references that may be of use. Continue reading "As Usual, Attackers Were Busy Over the Holiday Season"

Angler Exploit Kit Continues to Evade Detection: Over 90,000 Websites Compromised

Posted on by Yuchen Zhou

Exploit Kits (EK), arguably the most impactful malicious infrastructure on the Internet, constantly evolve to evade detection by security technology. Tremendous effort has been spent on tracking new variations of different EK families. In this report, we look at an EK from an operational point of view. Specifically, we have been tracking the activity of the notorious Angler Exploit Kit and have uncovered traces of what we believe to be a large underground industry behind this EK.

Given the numerous existing reports from Sophos, Malwarebytes, and USENIX that cover different variants of Angler, we will focus on the new findings in terms of the global operation of Angler in this work. All of the findings are based on the results of our malicious web content detection system.

Key findings include: Continue reading "Angler Exploit Kit Continues to Evade Detection: Over 90,000 Websites Compromised"

Using IDAPython to Make Your Life Easier: Part 4

Posted on by Josh Grunzweig

Earlier installments of this series (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) have examined how to use IDAPython to make life easier. Now let’s look at how reverse engineers can use the colors and the powerful scripting features of IDAPython.

Continue reading "Using IDAPython to Make Your Life Easier: Part 4"

Palo Alto Networks Researcher Discovers Critical Vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash

Posted on by Ryan Olson

Palo Alto Networks was recently credited with discovery of two new vulnerabilities affecting Adobe Flash Player.

Researcher Hui Gao discovered critical vulnerabilities CVE-2015-8443 and CVE-2015-8444. Descriptions of each, as well as details on affected versions and products, are included in an Adobe Security Bulletin dated December 8, 2015. Adobe has released security updates for Adobe Flash Player. Continue reading "Palo Alto Networks Researcher Discovers Critical Vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash"

Using IDAPython to Make Your Life Easier: Part 3

Posted on by Josh Grunzweig

In the first two posts of this series (Part 1 and Part 2), we discussed using IDAPython to make your life as a reverse engineer easier. Now let’s look at conditional breakpoints.

While debugging in IDA Pro, there are often situations where an analyst wishes to break on a specific address, but only when a certain condition occurs. An example of this might include breaking on a call to a particular function, but only when a specific argument is passed to it. Another instance I personally run into is breaking when a specific library is loaded into my analysis virtual machine. Today, I’m going to look at this specific problem and discuss ways to handle it with IDAPython. Continue reading "Using IDAPython to Make Your Life Easier: Part 3"

Using IDAPython to Make Your Life Easier: Part 2

Posted on by Josh Grunzweig

Continuing our theme of using IDAPython to make your life as a reverse engineer easier, I’m going to tackle a very common issue: shellcode and malware that uses a hashing algorithm to obfuscate loaded functions and libraries. This technique is widely used and analysts come across it often. Using IDAPython, we will take this challenging problem and defeat it quite easily.

Background

Reverse engineers most often encounter obfuscated function names in shellcode. The process is quite simple overall. The code will initially load the kernel32.dll library at runtime. Then, it continues to use this loaded image to identify and store the LoadLibraryA function, which is used to load additional libraries and functions. This particular technique employs a hashing algorithm that is used to identify a function. The hashing algorithm is commonly CRC32, however, other variations, such as ROR13, are common as well.

While reverse engineering a piece of malware, I ran into the following technique: Continue reading "Using IDAPython to Make Your Life Easier: Part 2"

The Threat Intelligence Research That Mattered to You This Year

Posted on by Anna Lough

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Unit 42 did some incredible work in 2015 discovering, analyzing and disclosing malware – some new and others making a reappearance. Take a look below at some of their top threat intelligence research from this past year:

XcodeGhost

Unit 42 analyzed XcodeGhost, which modifies Xcode and infects Apple iOS Apps, and its behavior. The team found that many popular iOS apps were infected, including WeChat, one of the most popular messaging applications in the world, and that the XcodeGhost attacker can phish passwords and open URLs through these infected apps. Continue reading "The Threat Intelligence Research That Mattered to You This Year"

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