Entries Tagged "malware"

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ThiefQuest Ransomware for the Mac

There’s a new ransomware for the Mac called ThiefQuest or EvilQuest. It’s hard to get infected:

For your Mac to become infected, you would need to torrent a compromised installer and then dismiss a series of warnings from Apple in order to run it. It’s a good reminder to get your software from trustworthy sources, like developers whose code is “signed” by Apple to prove its legitimacy, or from Apple’s App Store itself. But if you’re someone who already torrents programs and is used to ignoring Apple’s flags, ThiefQuest illustrates the risks of that approach.

But it’s nasty:

In addition to ransomware, ThiefQuest has a whole other set of spyware capabilities that allow it to exfiltrate files from an infected computer, search the system for passwords and cryptocurrency wallet data, and run a robust keylogger to grab passwords, credit card numbers, or other financial information as a user types it in. The spyware component also lurks persistently as a backdoor on infected devices, meaning it sticks around even after a computer reboots, and could be used as a launchpad for additional, or “second stage,” attacks. Given that ransomware is so rare on Macs to begin with, this one-two punch is especially noteworthy.

Posted on July 6, 2020 at 6:43 AM • View Comments

Android Apps Stealing Facebook Credentials

Google has removed 25 Android apps from its store because they steal Facebook credentials:

Before being taken down, the 25 apps were collectively downloaded more than 2.34 million times.

The malicious apps were developed by the same threat group and despite offering different features, under the hood, all the apps worked the same.

According to a report from French cyber-security firm Evina shared with ZDNet today, the apps posed as step counters, image editors, video editors, wallpaper apps, flashlight applications, file managers, and mobile games.

The apps offered a legitimate functionality, but they also contained malicious code. Evina researchers say the apps contained code that detected what app a user recently opened and had in the phone’s foreground.

Posted on June 30, 2020 at 10:15 AM • View Comments

Nation-State Espionage Campaigns against Middle East Defense Contractors

Report on espionage attacks using LinkedIn as a vector for malware, with details and screenshots. They talk about “several hints suggesting a possible link” to the Lazarus group (aka North Korea), but that’s by no means definite.

As part of the initial compromise phase, the Operation In(ter)ception attackers had created fake LinkedIn accounts posing as HR representatives of well-known companies in the aerospace and defense industries. In our investigation, we’ve seen profiles impersonating Collins Aerospace (formerly Rockwell Collins) and General Dynamics, both major US corporations in the field.

Detailed report.

Posted on June 23, 2020 at 6:22 AM • View Comments

Ramsay Malware

A new malware, called Ramsay, can jump air gaps:

ESET said they’ve been able to track down three different versions of the Ramsay malware, one compiled in September 2019 (Ramsay v1), and two others in early and late March 2020 (Ramsay v2.a and v2.b).

Each version was different and infected victims through different methods, but at its core, the malware’s primary role was to scan an infected computer, and gather Word, PDF, and ZIP documents in a hidden storage folder, ready to be exfiltrated at a later date.

Other versions also included a spreader module that appended copies of the Ramsay malware to all PE (portable executable) files found on removable drives and network shares. This is believed to be the mechanism the malware was employing to jump the air gap and reach isolated networks, as users would most likely moved the infected executables between the company’s different network layers, and eventually end up on an isolated system.

ESET says that during its research, it was not able to positively identify Ramsay’s exfiltration module, or determine how the Ramsay operators retrieved data from air-gapped systems.

Honestly, I can’t think of any threat actor that wants this kind of feature other than governments:

The researcher has not made a formal attribution as who might be behind Ramsay. However, Sanmillan said that the malware contained a large number of shared artifacts with Retro, a malware strain previously developed by DarkHotel, a hacker group that many believe to operate in the interests of the South Korean government.

Seems likely.

Details.

Posted on May 18, 2020 at 6:15 AM • View Comments

US Government Exposes North Korean Malware

US Cyber Command has uploaded North Korean malware samples to the VirusTotal aggregation repository, adding to the malware samples it uploaded in February.

The first of the new malware variants, COPPERHEDGE, is described as a Remote Access Tool (RAT) “used by advanced persistent threat (APT) cyber actors in the targeting of cryptocurrency exchanges and related entities.”

This RAT is known for its capability to help the threat actors perform system reconnaissance, run arbitrary commands on compromised systems, and exfiltrate stolen data.

TAINTEDSCRIBE is a trojan that acts as a full-featured beaconing implant with command modules and designed to disguise as Microsoft’s Narrator.

The trojan “downloads its command execution module from a command and control (C2) server and then has the capability to download, upload, delete, and execute files; enable Windows CLI access; create and terminate processes; and perform target system enumeration.”

Last but not least, PEBBLEDASH is yet another North Korean trojan acting like a full-featured beaconing implant and used by North Korean-backed hacking groups “to download, upload, delete, and execute files; enable Windows CLI access; create and terminate processes; and perform target system enumeration.”

It’s interesting to see the US government take a more aggressive stance on foreign malware. Making samples public, so all the antivirus companies can add them to their scanning systems, is a big deal—and probably required some complicated declassification maneuvering.

Me, I like reading the codenames.

Lots more on the US-CERT website.

Posted on May 14, 2020 at 6:29 AM • View Comments

iOS XML Bug

This is a good explanation of an iOS bug that allowed someone to break out of the application sandbox. A summary:

What a crazy bug, and Siguza’s explanation is very cogent. Basically, it comes down to this:

  • XML is terrible.
  • iOS uses XML for Plists, and Plists are used everywhere in iOS (and MacOS).
  • iOS’s sandboxing system depends upon three different XML parsers, which interpret slightly invalid XML input in slightly different ways.

So Siguza’s exploit ­—which granted an app full access to the entire file system, and more ­- uses malformed XML comments constructed in a way that one of iOS’s XML parsers sees its declaration of entitlements one way, and another XML parser sees it another way. The XML parser used to check whether an application should be allowed to launch doesn’t see the fishy entitlements because it thinks they’re inside a comment. The XML parser used to determine whether an already running application has permission to do things that require entitlements sees the fishy entitlements and grants permission.

This is fixed in the new iOS release, 13.5 beta 3.

Comment:

Implementing 4 different parsers is just asking for trouble, and the “fix” is of the crappiest sort, bolting on more crap to check they’re doing the right thing in this single case. None of this is encouraging.

More commentary. Hacker News thread.

Posted on May 7, 2020 at 9:56 AM • View Comments

Malware in Google Apps

Interesting story of malware hidden in Google Apps. This particular campaign is tied to the government of Vietnam.

At a remote virtual version of its annual Security Analyst Summit, researchers from the Russian security firm Kaspersky today plan to present research about a hacking campaign they call PhantomLance, in which spies hid malware in the Play Store to target users in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and India. Unlike most of the shady apps found in Play Store malware, Kaspersky’s researchers say, PhantomLance’s hackers apparently smuggled in data-stealing apps with the aim of infecting only some hundreds of users; the spy campaign likely sent links to the malicious apps to those targets via phishing emails. “In this case, the attackers used Google Play as a trusted source,” says Kaspersky researcher Alexey Firsh. “You can deliver a link to this app, and the victim will trust it because it’s Google Play.”

[…]

The first hints of PhantomLance’s campaign focusing on Google Play came to light in July of last year. That’s when Russian security firm Dr. Web found a sample of spyware in Google’s app store that impersonated a downloader of graphic design software but in fact had the capability to steal contacts, call logs, and text messages from Android phones. Kaspersky’s researchers found a similar spyware app, impersonating a browser cache-cleaning tool called Browser Turbo, still active in Google Play in November of that year. (Google removed both malicious apps from Google Play after they were reported.) While the espionage capabilities of those apps was fairly basic, Firsh says that they both could have expanded. “What’s important is the ability to download new malicious payloads,” he says. “It could extend its features significantly.”

Kaspersky went on to find tens of other, similar spyware apps dating back to 2015 that Google had already removed from its Play Store, but which were still visible in archived mirrors of the app repository. Those apps appeared to have a Vietnamese focus, offering tools for finding nearby churches in Vietnam and Vietnamese-language news. In every case, Firsh says, the hackers had created a new account and even Github repositories for spoofed developers to make the apps appear legitimate and hide their tracks.

EDITED TO ADD (7/1): This entry has been translated into Spanish.

Posted on May 5, 2020 at 6:03 AM • View Comments

Emotet Malware Causes Physical Damage

Microsoft is reporting that an Emotet malware infection shut down a network by causing computers to overheat and then crash.

The Emotet payload was delivered and executed on the systems of Fabrikam—a fake name Microsoft gave the victim in their case study—five days after the employee’s user credentials were exfiltrated to the attacker’s command and control (C&C) server.

Before this, the threat actors used the stolen credentials to deliver phishing emails to other Fabrikam employees, as well as to their external contacts, with more and more systems getting infected and downloading additional malware payloads.

The malware further spread through the network without raising any red flags by stealing admin account credentials authenticating itself on new systems, later used as stepping stones to compromise other devices.

Within 8 days since that first booby-trapped attachment was opened, Fabrikam’s entire network was brought to its knees despite the IT department’s efforts, with PCs overheating, freezing, and rebooting because of blue screens, and Internet connections slowing down to a crawl because of Emotet devouring all the bandwidth.

The infection mechanism was one employee opening a malicious attachment to a phishing email. I can’t find any information on what kind of attachment.

Posted on April 6, 2020 at 11:26 AM • View Comments

Deep Learning to Find Malicious Email Attachments

Google presented its system of using deep-learning techniques to identify malicious email attachments:

At the RSA security conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Google’s security and anti-abuse research lead Elie Bursztein will present findings on how the new deep-learning scanner for documents is faring against the 300 billion attachments it has to process each week. It’s challenging to tell the difference between legitimate documents in all their infinite variations and those that have specifically been manipulated to conceal something dangerous. Google says that 63 percent of the malicious documents it blocks each day are different than the ones its systems flagged the day before. But this is exactly the type of pattern-recognition problem where deep learning can be helpful.

[…]

The document analyzer looks for common red flags, probes files if they have components that may have been purposefully obfuscated, and does other checks like examining macros­—the tool in Microsoft Word documents that chains commands together in a series and is often used in attacks. The volume of malicious documents that attackers send out varies widely day to day. Bursztein says that since its deployment, the document scanner has been particularly good at flagging suspicious documents sent in bursts by malicious botnets or through other mass distribution methods. He was also surprised to discover how effective the scanner is at analyzing Microsoft Excel documents, a complicated file format that can be difficult to assess.

This is the sort of thing that’s pretty well optimized for machine-learning techniques.

Posted on February 28, 2020 at 11:57 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.