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Uncovering the Seven Pointed Dagger

The full report “Uncovering the Seven Pointed Dagger: Discovery of the Trochilus RAT and Other Targeted Threats” can be downloaded here.

Threat actors with strategic interest in the affairs of other governments and civil society organizations have been launching targeted exploitation campaigns for years. Typically, these campaigns leverage spear phishing as the delivery vector and often include malicious attachments designed to bypass typical detection controls. In other cases, spear phish directs users to websites that would otherwise be trusted but actually have been compromised by threat actors seeking greater access to fulfill their actions and objectives.

In late 2015, ASERT began investigations into a Strategic Web Compromise (aka “Watering Hole”) involving websites operated by the government of Myanmar and associated with recent elections. All indicators suggest that the compromises were performed by an actor group known to collaborators at Cisco’s Talos Group as “Group 27”. These initial findings – focused around the PlugX malware – were released by ASERT in a report called “Defending the White Elephant.” Analysis of PlugX malware configuration suggested that Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in Myanmar were of interest.

Following the trail of emergent threat activity, ASERT has discovered a new Remote Access Trojan (RAT) in use Continue reading

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Uncovering the Seven Pointed Dagger

The full report “Uncovering the Seven Pointed Dagger: Discovery of the Trochilus RAT and Other Targeted Threats” can be downloaded here. Threat actors with strategic interest in the affairs of other governments and civil society organizations have been launching targeted exploitation campaigns for years. Typically, these campaigns leverage spear phishing as the delivery vector and often […]

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Amplifying Black Energy

Click here to download the full report. The Black Energy malware family has a long and storied history dating back to 2007. Originally a monolithic DDoS platform, significant advancements were made in 2010 including support for an extensible plugin architecture that allowed Black Energy 2 to more easily expand beyond DDoS into other activities such […]

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Amplifying Black Energy

Click here to download the full report.

The Black Energy malware family has a long and storied history dating back to 2007. Originally a monolithic DDoS platform, significant advancements were made in 2010 including support for an extensible plugin architecture that allowed Black Energy 2 to more easily expand beyond DDoS into other activities such as info-stealing, web-based banking attacks, spamming, etc.

This report examines, in-depth, a new Black Energy 2 plugin (ntp.dll) that allows “BE2” botnets to launch true distributed NTP reflection/amplification attacks. This is significant for a couple of reasons:

• To the best of our knowledge, this may represent one of the first C&C-controlled (not standalone) Windows bots to correctly and effectively implement an NTP-based reflection/amplification attack.
• Reflection/amplification attacks are already responsible for generating the largest of DDoS attacks. Integrating this attack method into traditional Windows botnets could increase the impact of these attacks even further.

In detailing the relatively impressive technical implementation of this new BE2 DDoS attack plugin, this report provides some excellent general networking insights, an understanding of what it takes to really pull off a reflection/amplification attack on the Windows platform, and a somewhat humorous look at some prior attempts by other malware Continue reading