[First of all Happy New Year to all the readers!
In this summary I would like to briefly describe one component that is part of many parts which form the Internet malware industrial complex. The Exploit Kits (EK’s) which impact users and corporations of all sizes on a daily basis. The article below was possible due to the insights and knowledge received from @Kafeine. ~LR]
The EK’s are powerful and modular weapons that deliver malware in an automated fashion to the endpoint by taking advantage of client side vulnerabilities.
Exploit Kits are not new and have been around at least for the past 10 years or so. Nonetheless, they have evolved and are now more sophisticated than ever. The malware authors behind them enforce sophisticated capabilities that evade detection, thwart analysis and deliver reliable exploits. Basically, by introducing malicious code in a web server an attacker can turn a legitimate web server into a mechanism to deliver malicious code by taking advantaged of client-side vulnerabilities against unpatched browsers and applications. This attack vector is known as watering hole or strategic web compromise when it targets a trustworthy web site. In recent years the Exploit Kits have evolved and became very sophisticated weapons and profitable business for the ones involved. The malware authors continue to develop sophisticated capabilities to prevent detection, analysis and deploy exploits for new vulnerabilities in a very reliable manner.
In the last days I had the chance to look at one recent campaign of drive by download that leverages the Neutrino Exploit Kit to infect systems with CryptoWall. The diagram below illustrates the different components of the Neutrino Exploit Kit and how they work together.
- User browses to the compromised web server.
- Web server contacts the backend infrastructure in order perform various check and to generate malicious java script code. These checks include things like verification of victim IP address and its Geo-location. Furthermore within the malicious JavaScript code there are new domain names and URLs that are generated dynamically by the backend.
- The browser processes and decodes the malicious JS. In the observed infection the malicious JavaScript checks the browser version and if it matches the desired version, it stores a cookie and processes a HTML iframe tag.
- The iframe tag triggers the browser to perform a request to another URL which is the Neutrino Exploit Kit landing page.
- The landing page is hosted in a randomly generated host using DGA which needs to be resolved via DNS. The authoritative domain to answer these domains are owned by the threat actor. The answers received by the DNS server have a time to live (TTL) of a few seconds. The domains are registered on freely available country code top level domains (ccTLD).
- The victim then lands in the exploit kit landing page which by its turn delivers a small HTML page with an object tag defined in its body. This object tag directs the browser to load Adobe Flash Player and then use it to play the SWF file specified in the URL. In case the victim does not have Adobe Flash player installed, the browser is instructed to download it.
- The browser as instructed by the object tag, downloads the malicious Flash file.
- The obfuscated and encrypted SWF file is played by the Flash Player and exploits are triggered based on available vulnerabilities. The Flash file contains exploits for CVE-2013-2551, CVE-2014-6332, CVE-2015-2419 affecting Internet Explorer and CVE-2014-0569, CVE-2015-7645 affecting Adobe Flash.
- If the exploitation is successful, shellcode is executed and the malware is downloaded and launched. In this case we observed that the malware delivered has been CryptoWall.
The threat actors behind Neutrino are finding vulnerable websites in order to host their malicious JS content globally in a repeatable and automated fashion. Furthermore, In the last few days Neutrino has been abusing the registration of free domains registered inside the country code top level domains (ccTLD) such as .top, .pw, .xyz, .ml, .space and others. The different landing pages have been pointing to a server hosted in Germany and in another cases in Netherlands. In another blog post I will go into more details about it.
References:
https://www.trustwave.com/Resources/SpiderLabs-Blog/Neutrino-Exploit-Kit-%E2%80%93-One-Flash-File-to-Rule-Them-All/
http://research.zscaler.com/2015/08/neutrino-campaign-leveraging-wordpress.html
http://www.cert.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Demystifying-the-exploit kit.pdf
http://www.malware-traffic-analysis.net/2015/09/17/index.html
http://malwageddon.blogspot.ch/2015/03/data-obfuscation-now-you-see-me-now-you.html
http://malware.dontneedcoffee.com/2014/11/neutrino-come-back.html
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