Cyber Threat Intelligence Report – Trends Q4 2022

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.

Omnium against Omnes (II): Towards political realism

In the previous article we commented on the impact of the possibility of anonymity in cyberspace. In this post we are going to investigate this issue and expose the details that explain the existence of anonymity, as well as the consequences in the geopolitical context.

Anonymity

The five factors make it impossible to directly attribute a cyberwarfare action to a nation are the following:

1.  The fact that the virtual environment is made up of information allows all types of users to create and modify artifacts, limited only by permissions. This means that there is no complete translation of the physical element to the virtual one and, therefore, there is no total control over it. Consequently, it is not possible to guarantee the immutability of the elements of the environment, i.e. what actions have been performed or by whom.

2. There is the factual impossibility of assigning a virtual profile of a nation. The problems related to attribution, based on the previous point, make it impossible to relate two campaigns separated in time only on the basis of their tactics, techniques and procedures. Even with an indicator such as the hash, there is no 100% guarantee that it is exactly the same actor, since the code could have been stolen or manipulated beforehand.

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Omnium against omnes (I): Foucault in cyberwarfare

There is no doubt that, in recent years, the number of politically motivated cyberspace operations has been increasing. Under the analysis of the geopolitical context, we can find one of the causes of the rise of this new model of warfare.

Not since World War II has there been a warlike conflict between two First World nations. This shows how the major nations have shifted the clash of interests to less classical methodologies, such as the use of subsidiary wars, commercial warfare and, in recent years, cyberwarfare.

However, it is the use of cyberwarfare that makes it possible to interpret the current geopolitical context, since it offers a series of particularities, as a conflict, that allow it to be adapted to contemporary international relations.

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Cognitive bias in Threat Hunting tasks

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.

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China: From culture to conflict in the cyberspace

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.

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YaraRET (I): Carving with Radare2 & Yara

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…]

Analysis of Linux.Omni

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…]

Analysis of Linux.Haikai: inside the source code

A few days ago we got the source code of the Haikai malware, which corresponds to one of the many implementations carried out by the continuous recycling of source code belonging to different IoT botnets. Although we have not identified any new developments compared to previous IoT malware versions, it has allowed us to obtain a lot of information on techniques, improvements and authors.

It should also be noted that, according to different records obtained, this botnet has been in operation for most of the last month of June.

In the following lines the code will be analyzed, as well as the possible attributions and the implementations not referenced in the execution thread, which allow us to guess that the code is mutating in different lines in parallel for the same function.

So let’s start by analyzing the structure of the files. [Read more…]

Simple & crazy covert channels (I): Asciinema (en)

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.
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Analysis of Linux.Okiru

In keeping with our campaign of detection and documentation of IoT botnets, a few days ago we found another threat not classified before. It was first uploaded to the VirusTotal platform on November 3 and is only detected as malicious by 4 antiviruses.

During the article, two variants of the malware will be analyzed, which differ fundamentally in their propagation. The first one was detected in our honeypot systems (specifically for the SPARC architecture). The second one is a variant of the first, which was found under the Intel x86_64 architecture, and which the Netlab360 malware lab echoed a few days ago.

As no records of its identification were found, we decided to classify it as Linux.Okiru, due to the name of its binaries.
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