During the last quarter of 2022, the Lab52 team has conducted an in-depth analysis of the threats that have been active during the period, focusing on information from both public and private sources, as well as studying the geopolitical context in order to anticipate potential campaigns.

Below is the report for the quarter, which includes the main trends of the period, along with analysis of the most sophisticated threats and the most important geopolitical events.

The intelligence gathering and analysis carried out by the Lab52 cyberintelligence team has led to a series of conclusions and generated intelligence for S2 Grupo’s security services.

As any analyst knows, the very nature of Threat Hunting entails the application of generic approaches for the detection of anomalies. Unlike the reactive positions of rule-based security, proactive analysis delegates a significant percentage of detection to the analyst. This means that, as it happens to a conventional intelligence analyst, errors of interpretation tend to occur, due to the large number of casuistry found on a daily basis, and which the brain tends to classify as legitimate or malicious in hundredths of seconds.

According to Richard Heuer’s definition in “Psychology of Intelligence Analysis“, an analyst has limits in the interpretation of information, determined by his personality, his beliefs and his cognitive biases. After the identification of the anomaly, the analyst must be able to make a prediction. That is to say, it is the interpretation of a detection and its association to a possible threat that represents a security alert.

And not only this, but, as defined by Steven Rieber in his “Intelligence Analysis and Judgmental Calibration“, the analyst must also be capable of weighing the criticality of an anomaly, which also remains within subjective positions in the form of subjective probability.

Since in 2013 the US cybersecurity consultancy Mandiant published its famous report about APT1, showing its links with different agencies presumably associated with the Chinese government, the news about its actions in cyberspace has been significantly increased.

Among others, we find APT15, APT27 or Winnti Group (APT41); the US DoJ’s allegations of cyber espionage towards five Chinese military members associated with the APT1 group; the links that the FBI has established between Zhu Hua and Zhang Shilong and APT10; or the alleged link of PLA unit 61398 (People’s Liberations Army) with APT1.

With the permission of Russia and its popular operation against the DNC, China has become the main actor in cyberspace, developing an uncountable number of operations against all kind of sectors as: IT, military or naval industries and different governmental organizations. Sometimes using more sophisticated malware, and sometimes less, but more and more with its own seal linked to its extensive tradition.

During the management of forensic cases, there are times when we find ourselves in a dead end, where after the detection of a critical compromise indicator, we have to approach an analysis with weak evidence.

That is why I decided to develop a carving tool based on Yara rule detection. This tool also had to handle raw files in and be able to carry out a wide variety of options on this data in a flexible way, so I decided to use Radare2.

From this combination was born YaraRET, a file carving tool developed in Go, whose stable version is available in the repository of YaraRules: https://github.com/Yara-Rules/YaraRET

The development version can be found in the following repository: https://github.com/wolfvan/YaraRET

So, during the next article the resolution of a fictitious forensic case with YaraRET will be presented, which is based on the combination of several cases that I have been finding for a few months. [Read more…]

Following our classification and analysis of the Linux and IoT threats currently active, in this article we are going to investigate a malware detected very recently in our honeypots, the Linux.Omni botnet. This botnet has particularly attracted our attention due to the numerous vulnerabilities included in its repertoire of infection (11 different in total), being able to determine, finally, that it is a new version of IoTReaper.

Analysis of the binary

The first thing that strikes us is the label given to the malware at the time of infection of the device, i.e., OMNI, because these last few weeks we were detecting OWARI, TOKYO, SORA, ECCHI… all of them versions of Gafgyt or Mirai and, which do not innovate much compared to what was reported in previous articles.

So, analyzing the method of infection, we find the following instructions:

As you can see, it is a fairly standard script and, therefore, imported from another botnet. Nothing new.

Although everything indicated that the sample would be a standard variant of Mirai or Gafgyt, we carried out the sample download. [Read more…]

In the preparation of our audits, we often waste a lot of time developing tools that require a lot of work and, in many cases, do not go unnoticed by those users with a more technical profile.
However, there are other simpler (and equally effective) methods to carry out the exfiltration of information, such as through tools that were not initially designed for this purpose and which, with relatively simple adjustments, allow us to carry it out.

Thus, in the following article the analysis of the asciinema tool will be carried out, as well as the different possibilities of use and how it can be integrated with an attack vector.

Asciinema is a very nice tool that I usually use for demos whose sole function is to register the user’s session and to provide a URL that allows us to easily share the user’s activity. Very valuable information that can be used in a malicious way.

Below, we will see if we could use it as a Linux keylogger and what modifications would be necessary to apply.
[Read more…]