In late June, multiple researchers and security entities (including researchers from ClearSky, FireEye, and U.S. Cybercom) highlighted APT33 activity in public outlets. Several of these files have already been identified and analyzed as part of ongoing discussions on Twitter regarding this activity.
This blog post examines a file identified through public resources with infrastructure links to these attacks that has not been widely examined.
As part of this activity, researchers identified the C2 domain “backupaccount[.]net” as a C2 used within a malicious HTA file hosted on attacker infrastructure. A PassiveTotal pivot at the time of this writing highlights 11 hashes associated with this domain. PassiveTotal accounts are free, but also do not offer the context behind these hash associations.
Month: July 2019
The Lazarus Injector
In May and June, two files were submitted to VirusTotal that were signed with the same digital certificate and were connected to the SWIFT-heist wing of the DPRK. One file is re-themed version of the fake resume creating tool used in the Redbanc and Pakistan attacks. The second file is a tool used to inject and run payloads inside of explorer.exe.
This brief post documents the capabilities of this second tool.
MD5: b9ad0cc2a2e0f513ce716cdf037da907
SHA1: 1a50a7ea5ca105df504c33af1c0329d36f03715b
SAH256: db0f102af2d350aa1a63772e6ee9b211d78aa962a34f75c8702e71ccd261243e
Emissary Panda DLL Backdoor
Last month’s post on this blog examined a backdoor previously thought to be associated with Emissary Panda (APT27). Recent reporting has instead shown that the HTTP listener examined is likely affiliated with Turla. That post has been updated with the corresponding corrections.
This post is a granular examination of a payload alluded to in a Palo Alto report that is tied to Emissary Panda with much higher confidence. While the payload wasn’t available for analysis in that report, VirusTotal pivoting at the time produced the matching file.
Filename: PYTHON33.hlp
MD5: 19c46d01685c463f21ef200e81cb1cf1
SHA1: ac4a264a76ba22e21876f7233cbdbe3e89b6fe9d
SHA256: 3e21e7ea119a7d461c3e47f50164451f73d5237f24208432f50e025e1760d428
This file is expected to be part of a DLL side-loading chain that involves a component of the legitimate Sublime text editor (plugin_host.exe, also available on VirusTotal: f0b05f101da059a6666ad579a035d7b6) and a malicious DLL that this file will sideload:
Filename: PYTHON33.dll
MD5: bc1305a6ca71d8bdb3961bfd4e2b3565
SHA1: f189d63bae50fc7c6194395b2389f9c2a453312e
SHA256: 2dde8881cd9b43633d69dfa60f23713d7375913845ac3fe9b4d8a618660c4528