Count Upon Security

One of the Exploits kits that has been in the news lately is the RIG Exploit Kit. Some of the infections seen by the community seem to be part of a campaign called Afraidgate. I had the chance to capture one infection from this campaign. So, I decided to give it a try and write a small write-up about this multistage weaponized malware kit. The following analysis focus is on a drive-by-download campaign observed few days ago. It leverages the RIG Exploit Kit to infect systems and drop a new version of Locky ransomware (Odin).

Due to the complex nature of Exploit Kits, in order to perform analyses I use a combination of both dynamic and static analysis techniques. For the dynamic analysis part, I used an enhanced version of the setup described here “Dynamic Malware Analysis with REMnux’.

As usual, the infection starts with a innocent victim browsing to a compromised website. The compromised website replies with a HTTP response similar to the one in the figuyre below. The response does not always include the malicious payload. The compromised web server contacts the RIG back-end infrastructure in order perform various checks before it delivers the malicious JavaScript code. Checks include verification of the 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 for each new infection. As you could see in the figure, inside the HTTP response, blended with the page content, there is code to invoke a malicious JavaScript code. In this particular case, the malicious code is retrieved from the URL /js/stream.js” hosted on “monro.nillaraujo.com”. Noteworthy is the fact that for each new request to the compromised site there is a new domain and URL generated dynamically by the Exploit Kit. This is a clever technique and is much more challenging to build defenses that block these sites

To reach out to the server “monro.nillaraujo.com ” the operating system performs a DNS query in order to finds its IP address. The name server (NS) who is authoritative for the domain gives the DNS response. In this case the NS server for this domain is “ns1.afraid.org “. This server belongs to the Free DNS hosting. They provide everyone with free DNS access. In this case the threat actors take advantage of this. I think the name of the Afraidgate campaign might have derived from the fact that the DNS domains used in the gates are being answered by afraid.org. Brad Duncan might be able to answer this! Another interesting fact is that the answer received by the DNS server have a short time to live (TTL). This technique is often leveraged by the threat actors behind the EK because this will make the domain only available for of a limited amount of time, allowing them to shift infrastructure quickly. This makes the blocking and analysis much more difficult. The below figure show the DNS answer for the domain  “monro.nillaraujo.com”.

This particular domain at the time of the analysis was resolved to the IP 139.59.171.176. Then, after the DNS resolution, the browser makes the HTTP request in order to fetch the malicious JavaScript code. The HTTP answer is shown below.

The line of code that contains the <iframe> tag is instrumental in the infection chain. This line of code will instruct the browser to make a request to the URL / ?xniKfreZKRjLCYU=l3SKfPrfJxzFGMSUb-nJDa9BNUXCRQLPh4SGhKrXCJ-ofSih17OIFxzsmTu2KTKvgJQyfu0SaGyj1BKeO10hjoUeWF8Z5e3x1RSL2x3fipSA9weEYQ4U-ZWVE7g-iVukmrITIs0uxRKA4DRYnuJJVlJD4xgY0Q
that is hosted in the server add.ALISLAMEYAH.ORG. This is the server hosting the RIG Exploit landing page for this particular infection and points to an IP address in Russia. When the browser processes this request, the victim lands in the Exploit Kit landing page that in turn delivers a HTML page with an script tag defined in its body. This script tag contains heavily encoded and obfuscated JavaScript code.

The widespread install base of JavaScript allows malware authors to produce malicious web code that runs in every browser and operating system version.  Due to its flexibility, the malware authors can be very creative when obfuscating the code within the page content.  In addition, due to the control the threat actors have over the compromised sites, they utilize advanced scripting techniques that can generate polymorphic code. This polymorphic code allows the JavaScript to be slightly different each time the user visits the compromised site.  This technique is a challenge for both security analysts and security controls.For each new victim request there is a different landing URL and slightly different payload. The figure below shows the JavaScript code inside the HTTP response. This is the RIG Exploit kit landing page.

From an analysis perspective, the goal here is to understand the result of the obfuscated JavaScript. To be able to perform this analysis one needs to have a script debugger and a script interpreter. There are good JavaScript interpreters like SpiderMonkey or Google Chrome v8 that can help in this task. SpiderMonkey is a standalone command line JavaScript interpreter released by the Mozilla Foundation (SpiderMonkey). Google Chrome v8 is an open source JavaScript engine and an alternative to SpiderMonkey (Introduction Chrome V8).

In this particular case, the JavaScript contains dependencies of HTML components. Because of this, it is necessary to use a tool that can interpret both HTML and JavaScript. One tool option is JSDetox created by Sven Taute (JSDetox). JSDetox allows us to statically analyze and deobfuscate JavaScript.

Another great Java Script debugger suite is Microsoft Internet Explorer Developer Tools, which includes both a debugger for JavaScript and VBScript. This tool allows the user to set breakpoints. In this case by stepping through the code using the Microsoft IE Developer tool and watching the content of the different variables, the deobfuscation can be done.  Another option is to use Visual Studio client side script debugging functionality in conjunction with Internet Explorer.

In this case, I used the Microsoft Internet Explorer Developer. After some time analyzing the deobfuscation loop, stepping over the lines of code, inserting breakpoints in key lines and watching the different variables, some of the code is revealed.  The result is JavaScript code that triggers the exploit code based on the browser version and if you have Adobe Flash installed it will trigger the download of a malicious Flash file.

For the IE Browser, the RIG EK should leverage two or more exploits at a given time. In my setup I was limited to the the JavaScript code that seems to leverage CVE-2013-2551. This exploit has a CVSS score of 9.3 and exploits a Use-after-free vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 through 10. This vulnerability was initially discovered by VUPEN and demonstrated during the Pwn2Own contest at CanSecWest in 2013. After the detailed post from VUPEN, different exploit kits started to adopt it. According to the NTT Global Threat Intelligence Report 2015, this highly reliable exploit made its way to the top of being one of the most popular exploits used across all Exploit Kits today.

The code is quite large so I won’t post it here but in the figure above you could see the last part of it. It contains the Shellcode and the URL plus RC4 key that are used to fetch the malicious payload and decrypt it e.g, Locky ransomware.

That’s it for today. In the following post I will cover the malicious Flash file and how to analyze the Shellcode to understand what is done behind the scenes when the exploit is successfully triggered.

References:

Neutrino Exploit Kit Analysis and Threat Indicators