On 25 March, Kaspersky researchers published details of a supply chain compromise involving ASUS, a Taiwan-based computer manufacturer. As part of this compromise, a threat actor pushed malicious code to victims who connected to the company’s servers using the ASUS Live Update feature used to deliver drivers and other updates (this blog notes that such update platforms are common across all manufacturers).
The malicious code in question is a first-stage triage tool, and details of the second-stage code have not yet been uncovered. This post documents this first-stage functionality of one of the identified variants, which compares the victim’s MAC address to a hardcoded list prior to communicating with a C2.
Month: March 2019
JEShell: An OceanLotus (APT32) Backdoor
Recently, various industry and media sources have publicly reported that OceanLotus, a suspected Vietnam state-sponsored adversary, has conducted multiple targeted intrusions against auto manufacturers. This post examines a second-stage tool, JEShell, used during one such intrusion.
JEShell contains code-level overlaps with the OceanLotus KerrDown malware first publicly described in a Medium post and a Palo Alto Unit42 post. At a high level, JEShell is functionally similar to the KerrDown malware: both families decode and run layers of shellcode with the intention of downloading or directly installing a Cobalt Strike Beacon implant. Unlike KerrDown (a Windows DLL), JEShell is written in Java. JEShell is delivered alongside (rather than instead of) KerrDown and other implants and in some cases shares the same C2, likely as a measure of redundancy for the attacker.