Datasets:

mrmoor

/

cti-corpus-raw

like 0

The second notable cluster comprises of two campaigns that were possibly aimed at gathering information onThe first of these runs used the campaign identifier “ natoinfo_ge ” , an apparent reference to the www.natoinfo.ge website belonging to a Georgian political body that has since been renamed “ Information Centre on NATO and EU ” .

Although the campaign identifier itself doesn’t contain a date , we believe the campaign to have originated around the 7th of June 2009 , which was when the PinchDuke sample in question was compiled .

This belief is based on the observation that in all of the other PinchDuke samples we have analyzed , the date of the campaign identifier has been within a day of the compilation date .

The second campaign identifier , which we suspect may be related , is “ mod_ge_2009_07_03 ” from a month later and apparently targeting the Ministry of Defense of Georgia .

The spring of 2010 saw continued PinchDuke campaigns against Turkey and Georgia , but also numerous campaigns against other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States such as Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan .

Of these , the campaign with the identifier “ kaz_2010_07_30 ” , which possibly targeted Kazakhstan , is of note because it is the last PinchDuke campaign we have observed .

We believe that during the first half of 2010 , the Dukes slowly migrated from PinchDuke and started using a new infostealer malware toolset that we call CosmicDuke .

The first known sample of the CosmicDuke toolset was compiled on the 16th of January 2010 .

Back then , CosmicDuke still lacked most of the credential-stealing functionality found in later samples .

We believe that during the spring of 2010 , the credential and file stealing capabilities of PinchDuke were slowly ported to CosmicDuke , effectively making PinchDuke obsolete .

During this period of transition , CosmicDuke would often embed PinchDuke so that , upon execution , CosmicDuke would write to disk and execute PinchDuke .

Both PinchDuke and CosmicDuke would then operate independently on the same compromised host , including performing separate information gathering , data Exfiltration and communication with a command and control ( C&C ) server - although both malware would often use the same C&C server .

We believe the purpose of this parallel use was to ‘ fieldtest ’ the new CosmicDuke tool , while at the same time ensuring operational success with the tried-and-tested PinchDuke .

During this period of CosmicDuke testing and development , the Duke authors also started experimenting with the use of privilege escalation vulnerabilities .

Specifically , on the 19th of January 2010 security researcher Tavis Ormandy disclosed a local privilege escalation vulnerability ( CVE-2010-0232 ) affecting Microsoft Windows .

As part of the disclosure , Ormandy also included the source code for a proof-of- concept exploit for the vulnerability .

Just 7 days later , on the 26th of January , a component for CosmicDuke was compiled that exploited the vulnerability and allowed the tool to operate with higher privileges .

During 2011 , the Dukes appear to have significantly expanded both their arsenal of malware toolsets and their C&C infrastructure .

While the Dukes employed both hacked websites and purposely rented servers for their C&C infrastructure , the group rarely registered their own domain names , preferring instead to connect to their self- operated servers via IP addresses .

The beginning of 2011 however saw a significant break from that routine , when a large grouping of domain names was registered by the Dukes in two batches ; the first batch was registered on the 29th of January and the second on the 13th of February .

All the domains in both batches were initially registered with the same alias : “ John Kasai of Klagenfurt , Austria ” .

These domains were used by the Dukes in campaigns involving many of their different malware toolsets all the way until 2014 .

Like the “ MiniDuke loader ” , these “ John Kasai ” domains also provide a common thread tying together much of the tools and infrastructure of the Dukes .

By 2011 , the Dukes had already developed at least 3 distinct malware toolsets , including a plethora of supporting components such as loaders and persistence modules .

In fact , as a sign of their arsenal ’s breadth , they had already decided to retire one of these malware toolsets as obsolete after developing a replacement for it , seemingly from scratch .

The Dukes continued the expansion of their arsenal in 2011 with the addition of two more toolsets : MiniDuke and CozyDuke .

While all of the earlier toolsets – GeminiDuke , PinchDuke , and CosmicDuke – were designed around a core infostealer component , MiniDuke is centered on a simplistic backdoor component whose purpose is to enable the remote execution of commands on the compromised system .

The first observed samples of the MiniDuke backdoor component are from May 2011 .

This backdoor component however is technically very closely related to GeminiDuke , to the extent that we believe them to share parts of their source code .

The origins of MiniDuke can thus be traced back to the origins of GeminiDuke , of which the earliest observed sample was compiled in January of 2009 .

Unlike the simplistic MiniDuke toolset , CozyDuke is a highly versatile , modular , malware “ platform ” whose functionality lies not in a single core component but in an array of modules that it may be instructed to download from its C&C server .

These modules are used to selectively provide CozyDuke with just the functionality deemed necessary for the mission at hand .

CozyDuke ’s modular platform approach is a clear break from the designs of the previous Duke toolsets .

The stylistic differences between CozyDuke and its older siblings are further exemplified by the way it was coded .

All of the 4 previously mentioned toolsets were written in a minimalistic style commonly seen with malware ; MiniDuke even goes as far as having many components written in Assembly language .

CozyDuke however represents the complete opposite .

Instead of being written in Assembly or C , it was written in C++ , which provides added layers of abstraction for the developer ’s perusal , at the cost of added complexity .

Contrary to what might be expected from malware , early CozyDuke versions also lacked any attempt at obfuscating or hiding their true nature .

In fact , they were extremely open and verbose about their functionality - for example , early samples contained a plethora of logging messages in unencrypted form .

In comparison , even the earliest known GeminiDuke samples encrypted any strings that might have given away the malware ’s true nature .

Finally , early CozyDuke versions also featured other elements that one would associate more with a traditional software development project than with malware .

For instance , the earliest known CozyDuke version utilized a feature of the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler known as run-time error checking .

This feature added automatic error checking to critical parts of the program ’s execution at the cost , from a malware perspective , of providing additional hints that make the malware ’s functionality easier for reverse engineers to understand .

Based on these and other similar stylistic differences observed between CozyDuke and its older siblings , we speculate that while the older Duke families appear to be the work of someone with a background in malware writing ( or at the least in hacking ) , CozyDuke ’s author or authors more likely came from a software development background .

We still know surprisingly few specifics about the Dukes group ’s activities during 2012 .

Based on samples of Duke malware from 2012 , the Dukes do appear to have continued actively using and developing all of their tools .

Of these , CosmicDuke and MiniDuke appear to have been in more active use , while receiving only minor updates .

GeminiDuke and CozyDuke on the other hand appear to have been less used in actual operations , but did undergo much more significant development .

On the 12th of February 2013 , FireEye published a blogpost alerting readers to a combination of new Adobe Reader 0-day vulnerabilities , CVE-2013-0640 and CVE-2013-0641 , that were being actively exploited in the wild .

8 days after FireEye ’s initial alert , Kaspersky spotted the same exploit being used to spread an entirely different malware family from the one mentioned in the original report .

On 27th February , Kaspersky and CrySyS Lab published research on this previously unidentified malware family , dubbing it MiniDuke .

As we now know , by February 2013 the Dukes group had been operating MiniDuke and other toolsets for at least 4 and a half years .

Their malware had not stayed undetected for those 4 and a half years .

In fact , in 2009 a PinchDuke sample had been included in the malware set used by the AV-Test security product testing organization to perform anti-virus product comparison reviews .

Until 2013 however , earlier Duke toolsets had not been put in a proper context .

That finally started to change in 2013 .

The MiniDuke samples that were spread using these exploits were compiled on the 20th of February , after the exploit was already publicly known .

One might argue that since this took place after the exploits were publicly mentioned , the Dukes simply copied them .

We however do not believe so .

As mentioned by Kaspersky , even though the exploits used for these MiniDuke campaigns were near-identical to those described by FireEye , there were nevertheless small differences .

Of these , the crucial one is the presence of PDB strings in the MiniDuke exploits .

These strings , which are generated by the compiler when using specific compilation settings , means that the components of the exploits used with MiniDuke had to have been compiled independently from those described by FireEye .

We do not know whether the Dukes compiled the components themselves or whether someone else compiled the components before handing them to the group .

This does however still rule out the possibility that the Dukes simply obtained copies of the exploit binaries described by FireEye and repurposed them .

In our opinion , this insistence on using exploits that are already under heightened scrutiny suggests the existence of at least one of three circumstances .

Firstly , the Dukes may have been confident enough in their own abilities ( and in the slowness of their opponents to react to new threats ) that they did not care if their targets may already be on the lookout for anyone exploiting these vulnerabilities .

Secondly , the value the Dukes intended to gain from these MiniDuke campaigns may have been so great that they deemed it worth the risk of getting noticed .

Or thirdly , the Dukes may have invested so much into these campaigns that by the time FireEye published their alert , the Dukes felt they could not afford to halt the campaigns .

We believe all three circumstances to have coexisted at least to some extent .

As will become evident in this report , this was not a one-off case but a recurring theme with the Dukes , in that they would rather continue with their operations as planned than retreat from operating under the spotlight .

As originally detailed in Kaspersky ’s whitepaper , the MiniDuke campaigns from February 2013 employed spear-phishing emails with malicious PDF file attachments .

These PDFs would attempt to silently infect the recipient with MiniDuke , while distracting them by displaying a decoy document .

The headings of these documents included “ Ukraine ’s NATO Membership Action Plan ( MAP ) Debates ” , “ The Informal Asia-Europe Meeting ( ASEM ) Seminar on Human Rights ” , and “ Ukraine ’s Search for a Regional Foreign Policy ” .

The targets of these campaigns , according to Kaspersky , were located variously in Belgium , Hungary , Luxembourg and Spain .

Kaspersky goes on to state that by obtaining log files from the MiniDuke command and control servers , they were able to identify high-profile victims from Ukraine , Belgium , Portugal , Romania , the Czech Republic , Ireland , the United States and Hungary .

After the February campaigns , MiniDuke activity appeared to quiet down , although it did not fully stop , for the rest of 2013 .

The Dukes group as a whole however showed no sign of slowing down .

In fact , we saw yet another Duke malware toolset , OnionDuke , appear first in 2013 .

Like CozyDuke , OnionDuke appears to have been designed with versatility in mind , and takes a similarly modular platform approach .

The OnionDuke toolset includes various modules for purposes such as password stealing , information gathering , denial of service ( DoS ) attacks , and even posting spam to the Russian social media network , VKontakte .

The OnionDuke toolset also includes a dropper , an information stealer variant and multiple distinct versions of the core component that is responsible for interacting with the various modules .

What makes OnionDuke especially curious is an infection vector it began using during the summer of 2013 .

To spread the toolset , the Dukes used a wrapper to combine OnionDuke with legitimate applications , created torrent files containing these trojanized applications , then uploaded them to websites hosting torrent files .

Victims who used the torrent files to download the applications would end up getting infected with OnionDuke .

For most of the OnionDuke components we observed , the first versions that we are aware of were compiled during the summer of 2013 , suggesting that this was a period of active development around this toolset .

Critically however , the first sample of the OnionDuke dropper , which we have observed being used only with components of this toolset , was compiled on the 17th of February 2013 .

This is significant because it suggests that OnionDuke was under development before any part of the Duke operation became public .

OnionDuke ’s development therefore could not have been simply a response to the outing of one of the other Duke malware , but was instead intended for use alongside the other toolsets .

This indication that the Dukes planned to use an arsenal of 5 malware toolsets in parallel suggests that they were operating with both significant resources and capacity .

In 2013 , many of the decoy documents employed by the Dukes in their campaigns were related to Ukraine ; examples include a letter undersigned by the First Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine , a letter from the embassy of the Netherlands in Ukraine to the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign affairs and a document titled “ Ukraine ’s Search for a Regional Foreign Policy ” .

These decoy documents however were written before the start of the November 2013 Euromaidan protests in Ukraine and the subsequent upheaval .

It is therefore important to note that , contrary to what might be assumed , we have actually observed a drop instead of an increase in Ukraine related campaigns from the Dukes following the country ’s political crisis .

This is in stark contrast to some other suspected Russian threat actors ( such as Operation Pawn Storm ) who appear to have increased their targeting of Ukraine following the crisis .

This supports our analysis that the overarching theme in the Dukes ’ targeting is the collection of intelligence to support diplomatic efforts .

The Dukes actively targeted Ukraine before the crisis , at a time when Russia was still weighing her options , but once Russia moved from diplomacy to direct action , Ukraine was no longer relevant to the Dukes in the same way .

In a surprising turn of events , in September 2013 a CosmicDuke campaign was observed targeting Russian speakers involved in the trade of illegal and controlled substances .

Kaspersky Labs , who sometimes refer to CosmicDuke as ‘ Bot Gen Studio ’ , speculated that “ one possibility is that ‘ Bot Gen Studio ’ is a malware platform also available as a so-called ‘ legal spyware ’ tool ” ;therefore , those using CosmicDuke to target drug dealers and those targeting governments are two separate entities .

We however feel it is unlikely that the CosmicDuke operators targeting drug dealers and those targeting governments could be two entirely independent entities .

A shared supplier of malware would explain the overlap in tools , but it would not explain the significant overlap we have also observed in operational techniques related to command and control infrastructure .

Instead , we feel the targeting of drug dealers was a new task for a subset of the Dukes group , possibly due to the drug trade ’s relevance to security policy issues .