clydeiii/cybersecurity · Datasets at Hugging Face

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other attack (Figure 6) targeting Relative of political detainee Steffi
that Guarnieri identified from Bahraini FinSpy C&C
D; in that case, the payload was a freely-available RAT known servers [67, 68]. See Appendix A for details. We then exhaus-
as njRAT, written by the same njq8 as the exploit-poster dis- tively scanned the Internet looking for matches to these finger-
cussed above. However, we did not find any other evidence prints.
suggesting njq8
s involvement in either attack. Gamma documentation advertises that an operator of FinSpy
More SpyNet attacks: The domain hamas.sytes.net, can obscure the location of the C&C server (called the mas-
which we previously saw used by two SpyNet sam- ter) by setting up a proxy known as a relay. In Spring 2013
ples, resolved to 67.205.79.177. Historically, we noticed FinSpy servers now issuing 302 Redirects to
dreems.no-ip.ca also resolved to this address. An google.com. However, we noticed anomalies: for ex-
unidentified dropper using this C&C targeted Journalist F; a ample, servers in India were redirecting to the Latvian ver-
SpyNet attack on Relative of political detainee D also used sion of Google google.lv. We suspect that the server
this C&C. In that latter case, the sample arrived via e-mail in India was a relay forwarding to a master in Latvia. Be-
in a .rar attachment that contained an .scr file disguised cause the master served as a proxy for Google, we could
as a Word document. The .scr file was a self-extracting uncover its IP address using a Google feature that prints a
archive that decompressed and ran both the bait document user
s IP address for the query
IP address.
We created an
and the payload. The SMTP source of the e-mail was additional fingerprint based on the proxying behavior and is-
webmail.upload.bz. sued GET /search?q=ip+address&nord=1 requests to
Appin: In early 2013 UAE H.R. activist E forwarded nu- servers We note some interesting master locations in Table 4.
merous documents that included a particular CVE-2012-0158 Server locations: In all, our fingerprints matched 92 dis-
exploit for Microsoft Word. In all, these totaled 17 distinct tinct IP addresses in 35 different countries. Probing these on
hashes of documents, and 10 distinct hashes of payloads (some 8/8/13 revealed 22 distinct addresses still responding, sited
documents that differed in their hash downloaded the same pay- in: Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Estonia,
load). The exploits primarily downloaded instances of SpyNet Ethiopia, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Macedonia, Mex-
from upload.bz, which for the most part communicated ico, Romania, Serbia, Turkmenistan, and the United States. We
with C&C at sn.all-google.com. This domain was also found servers responding to a number of our fingerprints, sug-
used for C&C in other attacks, including that on Journalist C. gesting either that some servers lag in their updates, or a con-
Two of the other CVE-2012-0158 exploits down- certed effort to vary the behavior of FinSpy servers to make
loaded DarkComet from www.getmedia.us and detection harder.
www.technopenta.com after posting system infor- We found: (1) 3 IP addresses in ranges registered to Gamma.
mation to random123.site11.com. All three domains (2) Servers in 3 IP ranges explicitly registered to govern-
match those used by an Indian cybermercenary group said ment agencies: Turkmenistan
s Ministry of Communications,
to be linked to Appin Security Group [66]. The former Qatar
s State Security Bureau, and the Bulgarian Council of
two domains hosted content other than spyware (i.e., they Ministers. (3) 3 additional IP addresses in Bahrain, all in
may have been compromised). We alerted the owner of Batelco. (4) Servers in 7 countries with governments classified
www.getmedia.us, who removed the payloads. as
authoritarian regimes
by The Economist [69]: Bahrain,
Ethiopia, Nigeria, Qatar, Turkmenistan, UAE, Vietnam.
Additional FinSpy samples: In parallel to our scanning,
5 Empirical characterization we obtained 9 samples of FinSpy by writing YARA [70] rules
for the
malware hunting
feature of VirusTotal Intelligence.
The samples we received afforded us an opportunity to em- This feature sends us all newly-submitted samples that match
pirically characterize the use of FinFisher and Hacking Team our signatures. We located a version of FinSpy that does not
around the world, enabling us to assess their prevalence, and use the normal FinSpy handshake, but instead uses a protocol
identify other country cases that may warrant future investiga- based on HTTP POST requests for communication with the
tion. We analyzed the samples and the behavior of their C&C C&C server. This did not appear to be an older or newer ver-
10
23rd USENIX Security Symposium
USENIX Association
Relay IP Relay Block Assignment Relay Country Master IP Master Block Assignment Master Country
5.199.xxx.xxx SynWebHost Lithuania 188.219.xxx.xx Vodafone Italy
46.23.xxx.xxx UK2 VPS.net UK 78.100.xxx.xxx State Security Building Qatar
119.18.xxx.xxx HostGator India 81.198.xxx.xxx Statoil DSL Latvia
180.235.xxx.xxx Asia Web Services Hong Kong 80.95.xxx.xxx T-Systems Czech Republic
182.54.xxx.xxx GPLHost Australia 180.250.xxx.xxx PT Telekom Indonesia
206.190.xxx.xxx WestHost USA 112.78.xxx.xxx Biznet ISP Indonesia
206.190.xxx.xxx Softlayer USA 197.156.xxx.xxx Ethio Telecom Ethiopia
209.59.xxx.xxx Endurance International USA 59.167.xxx.xxx Internode Australia
209.59.xxx.xxx Endurance International USA 212.166.xxx.xxx Vodafone Spain
Table 4: Deproxifying FinSpy (mapping initial C&C IP addresses to the masters to which they forward).
sion of the protocol, suggesting that our scan results may not Country IPs Provider IPs
reveal the full scope of FinSpy C&C servers. Perhaps, the United States 61 Linode 42
HTTP POST protocol was only delivered to a specific Gamma United Kingdom 18 NOC4Hosts 16
customer to meet a requirement. Italy 16 Telecom Italia 9
Japan 10 Maroc Telecom 7
Morocco 7 InfoLink 6
5.2 Remote Control System (RCS)
We began by analyzing the UAE RCS sample from Ahmed and
Table 5: Top countries and hosting providers for RCS
6 samples obtained from VirusTotal by searching for AV re-
servers active on 11/4/13.
sults containing the strings
DaVinci
and
RCS.
At the time,
several AV vendors had added detection for RCS based on a
sample analyzed by Dr. Web [71] and the UAE RCS sample ing one of our fingerprints in 29 different countries. We sum-
sent to Ahmed. We also similarly obtained and analyzed sam- marize the top providers and countries in Table 5.
ples of FSBSpy [72], a piece of malware that can report system The prevalence of active servers either located in the USA or
information, upload screenshots, and drop and execute more hosted by Linode is striking,8 and seems to indicate a pervasive
malware, Based on these samples, we devised YARA signa- use of out-of-country web hosting and VPS services.
tures that yielded 23 additional samples of structurally similar In addition, we found: (1) 3 IP addresses on a /28 named
malware.
HT public subnet
that is registered to the CFO of Hacking
Fingerprints: We probed the C&C servers of the RCS and Team [76]. The domain hackingteam.it resolves to an
FSBSpy samples, and found that they responded in a distinc- address in this range. (2) An address belonging to Omantel, a
tive way to HTTP requests, and returned distinctive SSL cer- majority-state-owned telecom in Oman. This address was un-
tificates. reachable when we probed it; a researcher pointed us to an FS-
BSpy sample that contained an Arabic-language bait document

other attack (Figure 6) targeting Relative of political detainee Steffi

that Guarnieri identified from Bahraini FinSpy C&C

D; in that case, the payload was a freely-available RAT known servers [67, 68]. See Appendix A for details. We then exhaus-

as njRAT, written by the same njq8 as the exploit-poster dis- tively scanned the Internet looking for matches to these finger-

cussed above. However, we did not find any other evidence prints.

suggesting njq8

s involvement in either attack. Gamma documentation advertises that an operator of FinSpy

More SpyNet attacks: The domain hamas.sytes.net, can obscure the location of the C&C server (called the mas-

which we previously saw used by two SpyNet sam- ter) by setting up a proxy known as a relay. In Spring 2013

ples, resolved to 67.205.79.177. Historically, we noticed FinSpy servers now issuing 302 Redirects to

dreems.no-ip.ca also resolved to this address. An google.com. However, we noticed anomalies: for ex-

unidentified dropper using this C&C targeted Journalist F; a ample, servers in India were redirecting to the Latvian ver-

SpyNet attack on Relative of political detainee D also used sion of Google google.lv. We suspect that the server

this C&C. In that latter case, the sample arrived via e-mail in India was a relay forwarding to a master in Latvia. Be-

in a .rar attachment that contained an .scr file disguised cause the master served as a proxy for Google, we could

as a Word document. The .scr file was a self-extracting uncover its IP address using a Google feature that prints a

archive that decompressed and ran both the bait document user

s IP address for the query

IP address.

We created an

and the payload. The SMTP source of the e-mail was additional fingerprint based on the proxying behavior and is-

webmail.upload.bz. sued GET /search?q=ip+address&nord=1 requests to

Appin: In early 2013 UAE H.R. activist E forwarded nu- servers We note some interesting master locations in Table 4.

merous documents that included a particular CVE-2012-0158 Server locations: In all, our fingerprints matched 92 dis-

exploit for Microsoft Word. In all, these totaled 17 distinct tinct IP addresses in 35 different countries. Probing these on

hashes of documents, and 10 distinct hashes of payloads (some 8/8/13 revealed 22 distinct addresses still responding, sited

documents that differed in their hash downloaded the same pay- in: Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Estonia,

load). The exploits primarily downloaded instances of SpyNet Ethiopia, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Macedonia, Mex-

from upload.bz, which for the most part communicated ico, Romania, Serbia, Turkmenistan, and the United States. We

with C&C at sn.all-google.com. This domain was also found servers responding to a number of our fingerprints, sug-

used for C&C in other attacks, including that on Journalist C. gesting either that some servers lag in their updates, or a con-

Two of the other CVE-2012-0158 exploits down- certed effort to vary the behavior of FinSpy servers to make

loaded DarkComet from www.getmedia.us and detection harder.

www.technopenta.com after posting system infor- We found: (1) 3 IP addresses in ranges registered to Gamma.

mation to random123.site11.com. All three domains (2) Servers in 3 IP ranges explicitly registered to govern-

match those used by an Indian cybermercenary group said ment agencies: Turkmenistan

s Ministry of Communications,

to be linked to Appin Security Group [66]. The former Qatar

s State Security Bureau, and the Bulgarian Council of

two domains hosted content other than spyware (i.e., they Ministers. (3) 3 additional IP addresses in Bahrain, all in

may have been compromised). We alerted the owner of Batelco. (4) Servers in 7 countries with governments classified

www.getmedia.us, who removed the payloads. as

authoritarian regimes

by The Economist [69]: Bahrain,

Ethiopia, Nigeria, Qatar, Turkmenistan, UAE, Vietnam.

Additional FinSpy samples: In parallel to our scanning,

5 Empirical characterization we obtained 9 samples of FinSpy by writing YARA [70] rules

for the

malware hunting

feature of VirusTotal Intelligence.

The samples we received afforded us an opportunity to em- This feature sends us all newly-submitted samples that match

pirically characterize the use of FinFisher and Hacking Team our signatures. We located a version of FinSpy that does not

around the world, enabling us to assess their prevalence, and use the normal FinSpy handshake, but instead uses a protocol

identify other country cases that may warrant future investiga- based on HTTP POST requests for communication with the

tion. We analyzed the samples and the behavior of their C&C C&C server. This did not appear to be an older or newer ver-

10

23rd USENIX Security Symposium

USENIX Association

Relay IP Relay Block Assignment Relay Country Master IP Master Block Assignment Master Country

5.199.xxx.xxx SynWebHost Lithuania 188.219.xxx.xx Vodafone Italy

46.23.xxx.xxx UK2 VPS.net UK 78.100.xxx.xxx State Security Building Qatar

119.18.xxx.xxx HostGator India 81.198.xxx.xxx Statoil DSL Latvia

180.235.xxx.xxx Asia Web Services Hong Kong 80.95.xxx.xxx T-Systems Czech Republic

182.54.xxx.xxx GPLHost Australia 180.250.xxx.xxx PT Telekom Indonesia

206.190.xxx.xxx WestHost USA 112.78.xxx.xxx Biznet ISP Indonesia

206.190.xxx.xxx Softlayer USA 197.156.xxx.xxx Ethio Telecom Ethiopia

209.59.xxx.xxx Endurance International USA 59.167.xxx.xxx Internode Australia

209.59.xxx.xxx Endurance International USA 212.166.xxx.xxx Vodafone Spain

Table 4: Deproxifying FinSpy (mapping initial C&C IP addresses to the masters to which they forward).

sion of the protocol, suggesting that our scan results may not Country IPs Provider IPs

reveal the full scope of FinSpy C&C servers. Perhaps, the United States 61 Linode 42

HTTP POST protocol was only delivered to a specific Gamma United Kingdom 18 NOC4Hosts 16

customer to meet a requirement. Italy 16 Telecom Italia 9

Japan 10 Maroc Telecom 7

Morocco 7 InfoLink 6

5.2 Remote Control System (RCS)

We began by analyzing the UAE RCS sample from Ahmed and

Table 5: Top countries and hosting providers for RCS

6 samples obtained from VirusTotal by searching for AV re-

servers active on 11/4/13.

sults containing the strings

DaVinci

and

RCS.

At the time,

several AV vendors had added detection for RCS based on a

sample analyzed by Dr. Web [71] and the UAE RCS sample ing one of our fingerprints in 29 different countries. We sum-

sent to Ahmed. We also similarly obtained and analyzed sam- marize the top providers and countries in Table 5.

ples of FSBSpy [72], a piece of malware that can report system The prevalence of active servers either located in the USA or

information, upload screenshots, and drop and execute more hosted by Linode is striking,8 and seems to indicate a pervasive

malware, Based on these samples, we devised YARA signa- use of out-of-country web hosting and VPS services.

tures that yielded 23 additional samples of structurally similar In addition, we found: (1) 3 IP addresses on a /28 named

malware.

HT public subnet

that is registered to the CFO of Hacking

Fingerprints: We probed the C&C servers of the RCS and Team [76]. The domain hackingteam.it resolves to an

FSBSpy samples, and found that they responded in a distinc- address in this range. (2) An address belonging to Omantel, a

tive way to HTTP requests, and returned distinctive SSL cer- majority-state-owned telecom in Oman. This address was un-

tificates. reachable when we probed it; a researcher pointed us to an FS-

BSpy sample that contained an Arabic-language bait document