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In 2014 the actors behind global cyber espionage campaign “Operation NetTraveler” celebrate ten years of activity. NetTraveler has targeted more than 350 high-profile victims in 40 countries. So it is high time we make our research public .We were able to attribute Netravler to PLA[People liberation Army] military camp in Lanzhou. We provide our analysis in the form of a PPT slide.
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Garage4Hackers
www.Garage4Hackers.comLessons learned tracking an APT
team
Advance Persistent Threats
[APT] Tracking for Dummies
http:/www.Garage4Hackers.com
About Me
[Garage4Hackers ]
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Netravler APT Attribution
This talk would be on how we attributed the APT team behind Netravler .
How we did it and how you could do the same.
Reference:
http://www.kaspersky.com/about/news/virus/2013/NetTraveler_is_back_with_new_tricks
http://www.kaspersky.com/about/news/virus/2014/NetTraveler-Gets-Makeover-for-Tenth-Anniversary
http://kasperskycontenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/43/vlpdfs/kaspersky-the-net-traveler-part1-final.pdf
Tracking an APT TeamAgenda:
Exploit/Malware analysis.
Information gathering .
Finding security bugs in attacker infrastructure.
Taking over attacker Command and Controller servers.
Identifying victims.
Countering attacks.
What ever mentioned in the talk today is based on data collected over an year. This research was done with active participation from g4h members
41.Wariro , rbat , reverser90, fb1.
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The Attack.Spear-phishing :Comes form Spoofed email address via email.
Watering hole technique (browser exploits, drive by downloads) to infect victims surfing the web
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Step 1: Email header analysis .
Evidences to Collect.
http://mxtoolbox.com/Public/Tools/EmailHeaders.aspx
1) Collect sender time, return path, SMTP address etc.
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Step 2: Exploit Analysis
The objective is to identify/extract the malware dropped using the exploit.
Collect Metadata embedded in the exploit .
Find any piece of information that would help in attribution.
Identify CVE using virustotal.com helps when the exploit is not a 0-day .
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Automated: MS-office exploit analysis.
These sites should help.
www.document-analyzer.net/
www.joesecurity.org
http://scan.xecure-lab.com/
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Extracting Malware out of Exploits.
Manual: MS-office exploit analysis.
Run the document file in a virtual machine and use process monitor to watch system level changes [drops at temp file].
Use Sandboxie to execute the document file and extract the binary.
Load office in a debugger and put breakpoints at file write API.
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Evidences Collected from Step 1,2.
Sent from a spoofed email address .
The email contained a malicious attachment, which exploited cve-2010-333 rtf exploit .
Based on initial analysis the same malware samples were used to attacks Korea and Russia.
Campaign that have been active since 2009 .
Opening the exploit drops a legitimate file with
md5: e617348b8947f28e2a280dd93c75a6ad.
File Name: Jallianwala Bagh massacre a deeply shameful act.doc
It drops the following binaries:
c0c093987a55fe9ac61e6e2b5a362d51 netmgr.dll 8dc61b737990385473dca9bfc826727b winlogin.exe
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Step 3: Malware Analysis
Evidences to Collect.
Command and Control Domain names/ IP address.
Whois Information about the IP address.
Registrant Email Address
Malware Activities.
Interesting strings in Malware .
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Automated Malware Analysis
http://anubis.iseclab.org/
https://aerie.cs.berkeley.edu/
http://camas.comodo.com/
http://eureka.cyber-ta.org/
https://malwr.com/submission/
http://www.threatexpert.com/submit.aspx
http://www.threattracksecurity.com/resources/sandbox-malware-analysis.aspx
Source: http://zeltser.com/reverse-malware/automated-malware-analysis.html
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Manual: Malware Analysis.
Reversing Malware:
• Normally controller information would be encrypted or encoded inside the malware.
• Just run the malware in a debugger and then analyze the heap for IP address / Domain patters.
• Alternately put breakpoint at Winsock Functions and analyze the stack . http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms741394(v=vs.85).aspx
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Manual: Malware Analysis.
• You can figure out encryption/encoding algorithms.
• The current malware compressed data and then base64 encoded them before sending them to attacker controlled servers.
• Registry / File system values malwares write for persistence.
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Controller Information: http://www.faceboak.net/2012nt/nettraveler.asp
IP: 110.34.193.13
Request: Compressed+B64 encoded Get request
Evidences Collected from Step 3.
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Domain Information.IP address 110.34.193.13 hosted many domains .
Also each domains we identified were behind the fast flux domain.
Registrant email ID were found using whois and was used to reverse query other domains.
Source: http://blogs.mcafee.com/mcafee-labs/travnet-trojan-could-be-part-of-apt-campaign
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We wrote a Fast Flux Monitor
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• Collected all IP address associated with the group.
• Created another program to get whois info of all these IP address registration information.
Collect information about victims.
Find information about attackers .
Identify stolen information .
Collect tools used by attackers.
Learn about attacker tools and tactics.
Some time you find 0-days on these server, this would give better protection.
“The only real defense is offensive defense” (Mao Zedong)
Step 4: Offensive Attacks on C&C
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Find Vulnerabilities.On the C&C application .
On the hosted server .
Or what ever evil ways you could think about.
We found a lame bug in the controller application and we had our first non-interactive shell on the controller.
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Attack the AttackersGarage4Hackers
ResultHuge no of C&C servers were under control.
Lot of evidences to collect.
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They looked for :
- .ppt(x) , .xls(x) .doc(x) .pdf
Encrypted ??:
• The contents were compressed and unusable.
• Decompression was needed to convert it back to a usable format.
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Lots of Data and Lots of Victims
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Source: http://www.kaspersky.com/about/news/virus/2014/NetTraveler-Gets-Makeover-for-Tenth-Anniversary
Evidences CollectedWebserver logs, System logs .
Activity and admin login logs.
Victim Information.
IP address and Mac Address.
Highlights:
1. Attackers where behind a proxy.
2. Military like working pattern identified 24/7.
3. The controller admins showed lack of technicalskills. (So the developers of Nettravler is not themaintainers of the controllers. )
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M T W T F S SU
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Retaliation by AttackersGarage4Hackers
While analyzing the data on the controllers, we were attacked by the attackers. The attacker attacked from 61.178.77.18 IP and tried to sent Ms08-067 exploit .
61.178.77.* is a notorious IP range and is attributed in many attacks against governments around the world.
Some advance googling, we stumbled upon an interesting discovery, soldiers from PLA Lanzhou camp talking about their experiences and the above IP was there .
http://tieba.baidu.com/f?ct=335544320&lm=0&rn=30&tn=postBrowserN&sc=0&z=65932096&pn=0&word=%C1%D9%D4%F3
The Lanzhou Military Region is one of seven military regions in the People's Republic of China.
Netravler AttributionHuge amount spent for the malware infrastructure [Military funds].
24/7 Working hours [Military working hours] .
Low technical skills, developers of Netravler were different from the maintainers [ Trained users not core hackers].
IP address attribution to PLA[People liberation Army] military camp.
All evidences were leading to PLA IT department Lanzhou .
The EndNot really :D
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Finger print IP address of SMTP server from Email header analysis . Identified an Exploit/Phishing mailer kit named Chilly fisher
Go to step 4, identify vulnerabilities in the server hosting the exploit kit.
Tracking the SMTP server.
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Chilly Fisher Exploit KitThe kit had a frontend and Backend code .
The function of the Front end code was to send mass phishing/exploit emails to targets.
The front end code allowed attackers to mass include target emails, subject and email content.
The phishing email sent has a hyperlink with unique callback to the backend code.
The kit contained a phishing and browser exploit module .
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Victim DatabaseGarage4Hackers
Chillyfisher DatabaseThe backend database used is MS-Access . All collected information is stored in this database.
Chillyfisher instance had "Loginlog" table having information's about ChillyFisher admins who logged into the control panel.
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IP attribution.All the logged in Admins were from China.
There were around 10,000 unique IP address found in target db.
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Chillyfisher Targets.Garage4Hackers
Questions
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