DPRK Targeting Researchers II: .Sys Payload and Registry Hunting

In an earlier post, this blog examined malware from a DPRK-affiliated campaign targeting security researchers. Since the initial public post about this activity from Google, multiple vendors have corroborated and supplemented the technical details in this attack.

Whereas the previous post examined a DLL file delivered via social engineering and VisualStudio, this post examines the inner-workings of a malicious .sys file likely delivered through a watering hole. In addition to reverse engineering, this post offers possible threat hunting avenues for identifying data associated with this file hidden in the registry of a compromised system.

For those purely interested in the hunting portion of this post (the malware reads, and likely executes, data from the registry), click here to skip ahead. As a disclaimer, the hunt workflow proposed is merely hypothetical, and should not be considered any sort of official security guidance.

(2/1 Update, Stage 2 can be found here)

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