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The Lizard Brain of LizardStresser

LizardStresser is a botnet originally written by the infamous Lizard Squad DDoS group. The source code was released publicly in early 2015, an act that encouraged aspiring DDoS actors to build their own botnets. Arbor Networks’ ASERT group has been tracking LizardStresser activity and observed two disturbing trends: The number of unique LizardStresser command-and-control (C2) […]

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The Best Of Both Worlds – Soraya

By Matt Bing & Dave Loftus

Arbor Networks’ ASERT has recently discovered a new malware family that combines several techniques to steal payment card information. Dubbed Soraya, meaning “rich,” this malware uses memory scraping techniques similar to those found in Dexter to target point-of-sale terminals. Soraya also intercepts form data sent from web browsers, similar to the Zeus family of malware. Neither of these two techniques are new, but we have not seen them used together in the same piece of malware.

Initialization

Soraya begins by injecting itself as a thread on several system processes, including the Windows Shell explorer.exe. The malware maintains persistence by writing a copy of itself into the AppData directory with the name servhost.exe, and setting itself to execute with the registry key HKCUSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRunWinServHost.

New processes launched from the infected explorer.exe shell, notably web browsers, will have Soraya code injected. The malware does this by hooking calls to the ntdll.dll!NtResumeThread() function, which is responsible for process initialization. The function ntdll!NtQueryDirectoryFile() is also hooked to hide displaying the servhost.exe file. Both of these techniques are similar to functionality found in the Zeus family of malware.

Memory Scraping

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