Hunting for Cobalt Strike in PCAP

In this video I analyze a pcap file with network traffic from Cobalt Strike Beacon using CapLoader.

The pcap file and Cobalt Strike malware config can be downloaded from Recorded Future's Triage sandbox.

Cobalt Strike Beacon configs can also be extracted locally with help of Didier Stevens' 1768.py or Fox-IT's dissect.cobaltstrike.

IOC List

• MD5 99516071d8f3e78e51200948bf377c4c
• SHA1 59fe505b24bdfa54ee6e4188ed8b88af9a42eb86
• SHA256 10e68f3e6c73161a1bba85ef9bada0cd79e25382ea8f8635bec4aa51bfe6c707
• JA3 a0e9f5d64349fb13191bc781f81f42e1
• JA4 t12d190800_d83cc789557e_7af1ed941c26
• IP:port 104.21.88.185:2096 (Cloudflare)
• Domain mail.googlesmail.xyz (Go Daddy)

Network Forensics Training

Are you interested in learning more about how to analyze network traffic from Cobalt Strike and other backdoors, malware and hacker tools? Then take a look at our upcoming network forensics classes!

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Thursday, 04 January 2024 10:12:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #Cobalt Strike​ #CobaltStrike​ #Triage​ #JA3​ #a0e9f5d64349fb13191bc781f81f42e1​ #ThreatFox​ #CapLoader​ #Video​ #videotutorial​

Forensic Timeline of an IcedID Infection

The BackConnect and VNC parsers that were added to NetworkMiner 2.8.1 provide a unique possibility to trace the steps of an attacker with help of captured network traffic from a hacked computer.

In this blog post I use the free and open source version of NetworkMiner to see how GzipLoader downloads IcedID, after which the attacker deploys BackConnect VNC to purchase an iPhone 14 with a stolen credit card and then drops Cobalt Strike on the victim PC.

The analyzed pcap is 2022-10-31-IcedID-with-DarkVNC-and-Cobalt-Strike-full-pcap-raw.pcap from Brad Duncan's malware-traffic-analysis.net blog.

Safety First

I ran NetworkMiner in a Windows Sandbox when analyzing this PCAP file to avoid accidentally infecting my computer with any of the malicious artifacts that NetworkMiner extracts from the network traffic.

Another safe way to analyze Windows malware is to run NetworkMiner in Linux or macOS.

14:47 GzipLoader

This infection starts with GzipLoader (aka “IcedID Downloader”) reaching out to its C2 server on vgiragdoffy[.]com (67.205.184.237:80) to download IcedID.

The “_gat” cookie value in frame number 6 tells us that the victim machine is running a Windows 10 build 19045 (aka 22H2). The long “_u” value contains the victim’s username and hostname in hexadecimal representation and the “__io” value is the logged in user’s SID. NetworkMiner decodes these values from the GzipLoader request and displays them in the Hosts tab.

For more info about the GzipLoader cookie, see IcedID PhotoLoader evolution by Jason Reaves and the eSentire blog post on Gootloader and IcedID.

The response for this GzipLoader request is a 550 kB file (MD5 700c602086590b05dde8df57933c7e68) with a fake gzip header. This file actually contains the IcedID DLL (Odwikp.dll) and license.dat files.

14:47 IcedID

The banking trojan IcedID (aka BokBot) gets launched at 14:47:29 UTC (frame 641) after which it connects to these four IcedID servers used for payload delivery and C2:

• ringashopsu[.]com = 137.184.208.116
• sainforgromset[.]com = 138.68.255.102
• yeloypod[.]hair = 94.140.114.103
• airsaintol[.]beauty = 66.63.168.75

These four IcedID servers all run TLS servers with self signed certificates issued for "localhost" and doing TLS handshakes with JA3S hash ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc. Both these properties can be used as filters in NetworkMiner's Hosts tab to only display the IcedID C2 servers.

14:59 BackConnect and Keyhole VNC

Shortly after the IcedID C2 traffic has been started the IcedID bot also initiates BackConnect C2 connections to 137.74.104.108 on TCP port 8080 (frame 4505 at 14:59:14 UTC).

The BackConnect C2 server tells the bot to sleep for 60 seconds two times before launching a reverse VNC session with command 0x11 (frame 4530 at 15:01.09 UTC).

15:06 Apple Store

The keylog of the attacker above reveals that the attacker is typing “iphone 14 apple store buy”. The VNC graphics that NetworkMiner extracted from the PCAP file additionally reveal that this was a Google search query typed into an Edge browser.

15:10 Credit Card payment

The attacker proceeds to the Apple Store, puts a black iPhone 14 Plus for $987.99 into the shopping cart, enters a delivery address in West Hartford (US) and then inputs credit card details for the payment.

Luckily, the transaction was denied by Apple Store.

15:12 Reverse Shell

After having failed to buy an iPhone through the hacked computer the attacker instead deploys three reverse shell sessions using the BackConnect C2 channel.

These three commands are issued in the first reverse shell session:

In the second shell session the attacker first runs these three commands:

...and then starts a file manager session through the BackConnect C2 channel.

15:40 Deploy Cobalt Strike

The BackConnect file manager is used to upload a Cobalt Strike binary called P2.dll to "C:\ProgramData\" on the victim computer in frame 144535.

The uploaded P2.dll is then executed by running this command in the reverse shell session (frame 144707):

NetworkMiner extracts this uploaded DLL from the BackConnect network traffic.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the MD5 hash of P2.dll is cc69a31a067b62dda5f2076f8ee335e1. This file is flagged as malicious by most AV vendors (P2.dll on VT). However, none of them label it as Cobalt Strike. Luckily I was able to use Triage's malware config extractor to verify that this was indeed Cobalt Strike (P2.dll on tria.ge). Triage also revealed that the CobaltStrike C2 URL was
clouditsoft[.]com:8008/static-directory/mg.jpg

After the DLL gets executed the victim PC establishes Cobalt Strike beacon C2 connections to clouditsoft[.]com on port 8008 (frame 144715).

15:41 MOAR COBALT STRIKE

The BackConnect Reverse Shell log in NetworkMiner's Parameters tab shows that the attacker also attempted to download Cobalt Strike using PowerShell at 15:41:59 UTC (frame 145176) with this command:

IOC List

• IP:port 67.205.184.237:80 (GzipLoader)
• DNS vgiragdoffy[.]com (GzipLoader)
• MD5 700c602086590b05dde8df57933c7e68 (Fake gzip file)
• MD5 f57ab2e5e5720572d5eb19010ec8dcb4 (IcedID Odwikp.dll from fake gzip)
• MD5 57a9d9acb389bd74a7423a16ef81ac18 (IcedID license.dat from fake gzip)
• DNS ringashopsu[.]com (IcedID C2)
• DNS sainforgromset[.]com (IcedID C2)
• DNS yeloypod[.]hair (IcedID C2)
• DNS airsaintol[.]beauty (IcedID C2)
• IP:port 137.184.208.116:443 (IcedID C2)
• IP:port 138.68.255.102:443(IcedID C2)
• IP:port 94.140.114.103:443 (IcedID C2)
• IP:port 66.63.168.7:443 (IcedID C2)
• JA3S hash ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc (IcedID C2)
• IP:port 137.74.104.108:8080 (IcedID BackConnect C2)
• MD5 cc69a31a067b62dda5f2076f8ee335e1 (CobaltStrike P2.dll)
• DNS clouditsoft[.]com (CobaltStrike C2)
• IP:port 198.44.140.67:8008 (CobaltStrike C2)

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Thursday, 12 October 2023 13:23:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #NetworkMiner​ #IcedID​ #GzipLoader​ #BackConnect​ #VNC​ #CobaltStrike​ #Cobalt Strike​ #Windows Sandbox​ #ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc​ #JA3S​

NetworkMiner 2.7.3 Released

NetworkMiner now extracts meterpreter payloads from reverse shells and performs offline lookups of JA3 hashes and TLS certificates. Our commercial tool, NetworkMiner Professional, additionally comes with a packet carver that extracts network packets from memory dumps.

Extraction of Meterpreter Payloads

NetworkMiner 2.7.3 supports extraction of meterpreter DLL payloads from reverse shell TCP sessions deployed with Metasploit. The free version of NetworkMiner will try to extract the meterpreter DLL from TCP sessions going to "poker-hand ports" commonly used for meterpreter sessions, such as 3333, 4444, 5555, etc. The port-independent protocol detection feature available in NetworkMiner Professional additionally enables extraction of meterpreter DLLs regardless which LPORT the attacker specifies when deploying the reverse shell.

Image: Meterpreter DLL extracted from DFIR Madness' case001.pcap

Packet Carving in NetworkMiner Professional

If you try to open anything other than a PCAP, PcapNG or ETL file in NetworkMiner Professional, then you'll be presented with an option to carve packets from the opened file as of this release.

The packet carver can extract packets from any structured or unstructured data, such as memory dumps and proprietary packet capture formats. NetworkMiner Pro's carver is a simplified version of the packet carving feature in CapLoader.

Loading the 1GB "memdump.mem" from Ali Hadi's Challenge #1 - Web Server Case into NetworkMiner Professional takes roughly five seconds, during which 612 packets get extracted.

Image: Information about network hosts carved from memory dump

In this scenario the memory was dumped on the 192.168.56.101 host, which NetworkMiner identifies as "WIN-L0ZZQ76PMUF". The carved packets also indicate that this computer had an outgoing TCP connection to 192.168.56.102, which appears to be a Linux machine called "kali". As you can see in the screenshot, the packets carved from the memory dump also reveal a great deal about other hosts on the network, such as the 192.168.56.1 host, which seems to be a Windows 7 machine called "IT104-00".

Offline Matching of JA3 and X.509 hashes

NetworkMiner 2.7.3 comes with a local copy of the SSL Certificate and JA3 Fingerprint Blacklists from the awesome abuse.ch project. JA3 hashes and extracted X.509 certificates are matched against these lists in order to see if they are associated with any piece of malware or botnet.

Here's one example showing the default Cobalt Strike certificate being identified as "AKBuilder C&C", since that's how it is listed in abuse.ch's SSL certificate database.

Image: Cobalt Strike's default certificate identified as "AKBuilder C&C"
PCAP: Cobalt Strike PCAP from malware-traffic-analysis.net

The port-independent protocol detection feature in NetworkMiner Professional additionally enables X.509 certificates to be extracted even from non-standard TLS ports, such as this certificate, which is identified as "BitRAT" with help of the abuse.ch certificate block-list.

Image: Both X.509 certificate and JA3 hash identified as BitRAT
PCAP: BitRAT PCAP from Joe Sandbox

The client's JA3 hash 8515076cbbca9dce33151b798f782456 is also associated with BitRAT according to abuse.ch.

DBSBL Lookup Detection

DNSBL services are used by servers handling incoming email to verify that the sender's IP address isn't a known SPAM sender and that it isn't from a network that shouldn't be sending emails.

But DNSBL services can also be used by malware and botnets, such as TrickBot and Emotet, to verify that the public IP of a victim is allowed to send emails and that it hasn't already been blacklisted for sending SPAM. We have therefore decided to add DNSBL lookups to the Host Details section in NetworkMiner 2.7.3.

Image: TrickBot victim checks if its public IP is blocked by DNSBL services
PCAP: TrickBot PCAP from malware-traffic-analysis.net

DNSBL lookups are also logged to the "Parameters" tab of NetworkMiner.

Image: NetworkMiner's Parameters tab with "DNSBL" filter
PCAP: TrickBot PCAP from malware-traffic-analysis.net

Additional Features and Updates

We'd also like to mention some additional new features, bug fixes and improvements that have been included in this new release.

• Support for HTTP CONNECT request method to extract artifacts like X.509 certificates and JA3 hashes from HTTPS traffic passing through a web proxy.
• Traffic to TCP ports 3000 and 8000 are now configured to be parsed as HTTP by default in order to handle WEBrick traffic.
• Improved extraction of SMTP credentials.
• JA3 hashes were previously incorrect for clients that supported more than one EC point format (RFC 8422). This has now been fixed.
• Support for SLL2 (Linux cooked capture v2) frames.
• Improved handling of concurrent GUI events, for example when poking around in the "Hosts" tab while loading a PCAP file or doing live sniffing.
• NetworkMiner's GUI no longer reloads between each PCAP file when multiple files are loaded at once.

New Features in NetworkMiner Professional

We have also added a few new features exclusively to NetworkMiner Professional, which is the commercial version of NetworkMiner. Apart from the packet carver feature, mentioned earlier in this blog post, we've also updated the collection of OSINT lookup services available in the GUI. One of the newly added services is Ryan Benson's unfurl, which picks apart URLs to reveal data that might have been encoded into a complex URL. The unfurl lookup can be found by right-clicking an URL in NetworkMiner Professional's "Browsers" tab and selecting the "Lookup URL" sub menu.

Other OSINT services that we've added are FileScan.IO and JoeSandbox lookups of extracted files. These lookups can be performed by right clicking a file in the "Files" tab and opening the sub-menu called "Lookup Hash".

Image: OSINT lookup of an EXE file extracted from network traffic

The command-line version of NetworkMiner Professional, NetworkMinerCLI, has also been updated to allow extracted information to be printed directly on standard output instead of logging everything to files. Here is an example showing this feature while running NetworkMinerCLI in Linux (with help of Mono):

The command above extracts files from a PCAP file, which contains traffic from a Windows PC infected with Qbot. The "-w" switch specifies the output directory for the files extracted from network traffic, and the "-X FileInfos" specifies that metadata for these files should be sent to STDOUT instead of being written to log files. The cut utility was used to show only the filename (column 5) and MD5 hash (column 9) of the file info output.

The MD5 hashes of the extracted files confirm that this is indeed a Qbot infection:

• 124207bc9c64e20e114bcaeabde12a4e (VT)
• ca7ef367c935182a40a95b9ad8b95f42 (VT)
• a9a8366fa6be54b45ca04192ca217b75 (VT)

NetworkMinerCLI previously printed some information about the parsing process to STDOUT. That output has now been moved to STDERR in order to provide the "-X [type]" output with exclusive access to STDOUT.

Credits

We'd like to thank Michael Taggart for noticing that NetworkMiner previously failed to parse HTTP traffic to ports 3000 and 8000.

Upgrading to Version 2.7.3

Users who have purchased NetworkMiner Professional can download a free update to version 2.7.3 from our customer portal, or use the “Help > Check for Updates” feature. Those who instead prefer to use the free and open source version can grab the latest version of NetworkMiner from the official NetworkMiner page.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Monday, 04 April 2022 06:52:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #NetworkMiner​ #carve​ #JA3​ #X.509​ #CobaltStrike​ #Cobalt Strike​ #TrickBot​ #Emotet​ #PIPI​ #Protocol Detection​ #OSINT​ #NetworkMinerCLI​

Detecting Cobalt Strike and Hancitor traffic in PCAP

This video shows how Cobalt Strike and Hancitor C2 traffic can be detected using CapLoader.

I bet you’re going:

😱 OMG he’s analyzing Windows malware on a Windows PC!!!

Relax, I know what I’m doing. I have also taken the precaution of analyzing the PCAP file in a Windows Sandbox, which just takes a couple of seconds to deploy and run.

The capture file I’m looking at is called “2021-05-13-Hancitor-traffic-with-Ficker-Stealer-and-Cobalt-Strike.pcap” and can be downloaded from here: https://malware-traffic-analysis.net/2021/05/13/index.html

CapLoader’s Services tab shows us that the connections to TCP 80 and 443 on 103.207.42.11 are very periodic, with a detected period of exactly 1 minute. CapLoader successfully identifies the protocols for these two services as Cobalt Strike over HTTP and Cobalt Strike over SSL, respectively. The third service in this list is also very periodic, that’s the Hancitor trojan beaconing to its C2 server every two minutes.

CapLoader uses machine learning to identify the application layer protocol based on the behavior of the traffic, not the port number. This means that there can be false positives, i.e. the protocol classification that CapLoader gives a flow or service might be wrong. It is more common, however, for CapLoader to yield false negatives, which means that it can't identify the protocol. The detection of Cobalt Strike inside of HTTP and SSL traffic was recently introduced in the latest 1.9 release of CapLoader. I expected this feature to detect Cobalt Strike traffic in HTTP, but I was delighted to see that CapLoader often detects even TLS encrypted Cobalt Strike beaconing with really good precision!

As shown in the video, the Cobalt Strike beacon config can easily be extracted from the network traffic using NetworkMiner and Didier Stevens’ 1768 K python script.

The output from Didier’s 7868.py tool looks something like this:

As you can see, it uses HTTP for transport with a “sleeptime” of 1 minute (60000 ms) and 0% jitter. This means that a new connection will be made to the Cobalt Strike C2 server every minute. The fact that there was no jitter is what gives this service such a high value in CapLoader’s “Periodicity” column.

Network Forensics Training

Are you interested in learning more about how to analyze network traffic from Cobalt Strike and other backdoors, malware and hacker tools? Then take a look at the live online network forensics classes I will be teaching in September and October!

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Monday, 31 May 2021 08:30:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #Netresec​ #Cobalt Strike​ #CobaltStrike​ #periodicity​ #Protocol Identification​ #PIPI​ #CapLoader​ #1768.py​ #Windows Sandbox​ #PCAP​ #NSM​ #video​ #videotutorial​

Analysing a malware PCAP with IcedID and Cobalt Strike traffic

This network forensics walkthrough is based on two pcap files released by Brad Duncan on malware-traffic-analysis.net. The traffic was generated by executing a malicious JS file called StolenImages_Evidence.js in a sandbox environment.

The capture file starts with a DNS lookup for banusdona.top, which resolved to 172.67.188.12, followed by an HTTP GET request for "/222g100/index.php" on that domain. The following PowerShell oneliner is returned in the HTTP response from banusdona.top:

This oneliner instructs the initial dropper to download a Win32 DLL payload from http://banusdona[.]top/222g100/main.php and save it as "JwWdx.dat" in the user's temp directory and then run the DLL with:

As you can see in the screenshot below, the HTTP response for this second request to banusdona.top has Content-Type "application/octet-stream", but also a conflicting Content-disposition header of "attachment;filename=data.jpg", which indicates that the file should be saved to disk as "data.jpg". Nevertheless, the "MZ" header in the transferred data reveals that the downloaded data wasn't an image, but a Windows binary (dll or exe).

The downloaded file gets extracted from the pcap file by NetworkMiner as "data.jpg.octet-stream".

Right-clicking "data.jpg.octet-stream" in NetworkMiner and selecting "Calculate MD5..." brings up a new window with additional file details, such as MD5 and SHA hashes of the reassembled file.

This file is available on VirusTotal, where we can see that it's a DLL that several AV vendors identify as "Cerbu" or "IcedID". VirusTotal's C2AE sandbox analysis of the DLL also reveals the domain name "momenturede.fun" in the process' memory. As you might expect, a connection is made to that domain just a few seconds later. A nice overview of these connections can be seen in CapLoader's Flow tab.

The momenturede.fun server returns a 500kB file, which NetworkMiner extracts from the pcap file as "index.gzip".

This turns out to be an encrypted IcedID DLL file, which has been analyzed by Ali Aqeel here:
https://aaqeel01.wordpress.com/2021/04/09/icedid-analysis/

Right after the IcedID download we see a series of HTTPS connections towards odd domains like vaccnavalcod.website, mazzappa.fun, ameripermanentno.website and odichaly.space, all of which resolved to IP 83.97.20.176. That host is most likely a command-and-control (C2) server used by the IcedID malware.

CapLoader's "Services" tab also reveals that the TLS connections to port 443 on 83.97.20.176 are very periodic, with a new connection every 5 minutes. Periodic connection patterns like this is a typical indicator of C2 traffic, where the malware agent connects back to the C2 server on regular intervals to check for new tasks.

The traffic to 83.97.20.176 is encrypted, so we can't inspect the payload to verify whether or not it is IcedID C2 communications. What we can do, however, is to extract the HTTPS server's X.509 certificate and the JA3 hash of the client's TLS implementation from the encrypted traffic.

NetworkMiner has extracted the X.509 certificates for vaccnavalcod.website, mazzappa.fun, ameripermanentno.website and odichaly.space to disk as "localhost.cer".

It turns out that all these sites used the same self-signed certificate, which had SHA1 fingerprint 452e969c51882628dac65e38aff0f8e5ebee6e6b. The X.509 certificate was created using OpenSSL's default values, such as "Internet Widgits Pty Ltd" etc. Further details about this certificate can be found on censys.io.

The JA3 hashes used by the IcedID malware agent can be found in NetworkMiner's Hosts tab as well as in the Parameters tab.

The JA3 hashes for the client that connects to the C2 server are a0e9f5d64349fb13191bc781f81f42e1 and 3b5074b1b5d032e5620f69f9f700ff0e. Several legitimate Windows applications unfortunately have the same JA3 hashes, so we can't use them to uniquely identify the IcedID agents.

The IcedID C2 traffic continues for over 19 hours, at which point we suddenly see a connection to a new suspicious domain called "lesti.net" on 185.141.26.140. The first HTTP request to that domain is used to download a 261703 byte file, as can be seen in this Flow Transcript from CapLoader:

NetworkMiner extracts this file as "9r8z.octet-stream". This turns out to be a Cobalt Strike beacon download, which we can decode with Didier Stevens' fantastic 1768.py script.

The output from 1768.py reveals that this Cobalt Strike beacon is using the following URIs for C2 communication:

• GET URI: http://lesti[.]net/userid=
• POST URI: http://lesti[.]net/update.php

We can also see that the Cobalt Strike license-id (a.k.a. watermark) is 1580103814. This ID can be used to link this Cobalt Strike beacon to other campaigns. Below is a list of Cobalt Strike C2 servers using license-id 1580103814 discovered by Tek in December 2020:

• 45.147.229[.]157
• selfspin[.]com
• savann[.]org
• palside[.]com
• server3.msadwindows[.]com
• mapizzamates[.]com
• fixval[.]com
• rackspare-technology[.]download
• 108.177.235[.]148
• matesmapizza[.]com

Update 4 May 2021

Sergiu Sechel published a blog post yesterday, which included a list of Cobalt Strike C2 servers. We fed this list to Tek's scan_list.py script in order to see if license-id 1580103814 is still active. It turned out it was. We found the following 27 domains and IP's running Cobalt Strike C2 servers on TCP 443 using that license-id.

• 151.236.14[.]53
• 151.236.14[.]53
• 172.241.27[.]70
• 193.29.13[.]201
• 193.29.13[.]201
• 193.29.13[.]209
• 194.165.16[.]60
• 193.29.13[.]209
• 193.29.13[.]201
• 194.165.16[.]60
• 194.165.16[.]60
• dain22[.]net
• drellio[.]com
• feusa[.]net
• fut1[.]net
• helle1[.]net
• hars2t[.]com
• kasaa[.]net
• idxup[.]com
• maren2[.]com
• mgfee[.]com
• massflip[.]com
• oaelf[.]com
• repdot[.]com
• scalewa[.]com
• tulls[.]net
• wellser[.]org

The full output from our re-scan of Sergiu's C2 list can be found on pastebin.

Update 8 May 2021

Security researcher Michael Koczwara is tracking Cobalt Strike license 1580103814 as APT actor LuckyMouse (a.k.a. Emissary Panda or APT 27). Michael's Cobalt Stike C2 dataset, which currently contains 25 unique C2 IPs and domains for license-id 1580103814, is available as a Google Docs spreadsheet (see the "LuckyMouse Actor" tab).

Indicators of Compromise - IOCs

• MD5: 8da75e1f974d1011c91ed3110a4ded38
• SHA1: e9b5e549363fa9fcb362b606b75d131dec6c020e
• SHA256: 0314b8cd45b636f38d07032dc8ed463295710460ea7a4e214c1de7b0e817aab6
• DNS: banusdona.top
• IP: 172.67.188.12
• MD5: f98711dfeeab9c8b4975b2f9a88d8fea
• SHA1: c2bdc885083696b877ab6f0e05a9d968fd7cc2bb
• SHA256: 213e9c8bf7f6d0113193f785cb407f0e8900ba75b9131475796445c11f3ff37c
• DNS: momenturede.fun
• IP: 104.236.115.181
• MD5: 96a535122aba4240e2c6370d0c9a09d3
• SHA1: 485ba347cf898e34a7455e0fd36b0bcf8b03ffd8
• MD5: 11965662e146d97d3fa3288e119aefb2
• SHA1: b63d7ad26df026f6cca07eae14bb10a0ddb77f41
• SHA256: d45b3f9d93171c29a51f9c8011cd61aa44fcb474d59a0b68181bb690dbbf2ef5
• DNS: vaccnavalcod.website
• DNS: mazzappa.fun
• DNS: ameripermanentno.website
• DNS: odichaly.space
• IP: 83.97.20.176
• SHA1: 452e969c51882628dac65e38aff0f8e5ebee6e6b
• DNS: lesti.net
• IP: 185.141.26.140
• MD5: 449c1967d1708d7056053bedb9e45781
• SHA1: 1ab39f1c8fb3f2af47b877cafda4ee09374d7bd3
• SHA256: c7da494880130cdb52bd75dae1556a78f2298a8cc9a2e75ece8a57ca290880d3
• Cobalt Strike Watermark: 1580103814

Network Forensics Training

Are you interested in learning more about how to analyze captured network traffic from malware and hackers? Have a look at our network forensic trainings. Our next class is a live online event called PCAP in the Morning.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Monday, 19 April 2021 09:45:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #Cobalt Strike​ #CobaltStrike​ #IcedID​ #NetworkMiner​ #CapLoader​ #Network Forensics​ #JA3​ #X.509​ #1768.py​ #a0e9f5d64349fb13191bc781f81f42e1​

Robust Indicators of Compromise for SUNBURST

There has been a great deal of confusion regarding what network based Indicators of Compromise (IOC) SolarWinds Orion customers can use to self assess whether or not they have been targeted after having installed a software update with the SUNBURST backdoor. Many of the published IOCs only indicate that a backdoored SolarWinds Orion update has been installed, but the question that many security teams are trying to answer is whether or not the installed backdoor has been been used by the threat actor.

Dont trust everything you read!

There is a widespread misunderstanding that receiving a so-called “NetBios” DNS A record (for example an address in 8.18.144.0/23) in response to a *.avsvmcloud.com DNS query would mean that you’ve been targeted. Our analysis of the decompiled SUNBURST code and passive DNS data show that that receiving a “NetBios” response does not necessarily mean that the client has been targeted. Unfortunately this misunderstanding has lead to various sensationalist stories being published with long lists of companies and organizations that are claimed to be “singled out by the hacking group for the second stage of the attack”, “explicitly selected by the SolarWinds hackers for further activities” or “breached via SolarWinds and then specifically targeted by the hackers for additional internal compromise”.

Another common misunderstanding is that clients sending *.avsvmcloud.com DNS queries with encoded timestamps, and optionally a list of installed/running AV products, have been actively targeted. Our analysis of the decompiled SUNBURST code show that the timestamped “Pings” or AV service status reports get exfiltrated in DNS traffic after the client’s internal AD domain has been sent, but before the perpetrators decide whether or not they want to activate the backdoor.

Indicators of a Targeted Attack

So what network based IOC’s can incident responders, blue teams and SOC analysts use in order to see if they have been targeted by the SUNBURST operators?

The following network based events indicate that a client has been actively targeted and the SUNBURST backdoor has progressed beyond the initial mode of operation:

• Received a DNS A record for an *.avsvmcloud.com query, that points to an IP address in any of the following three networks: 18.130.0.0/16, 99.79.0.0/16 or 184.72.0.0/15
• Sent an *.avsvmcloud.com DNS query with the STAGE2 flag encoded in the subdomain.
• Received a CNAME record for a query to *.avsvmcloud.com

Another network based IOC is HTTPS communication to one of the known STAGE3 C2 domains. However, please note that the C2 domain list might not be complete. It is even possible that a unique C2 domain is used for each victim. Nevertheless, here’s a list of the SUNBURST STAGE3 C2 domains we are currently aware of:

• avsvmcloud[.]com
• databasegalore[.]com
• deftsecurity[.]com
• digitalcollege[.]org
• freescanonline[.]com
• globalnetworkissues[.]com
• highdatabase[.]com
• incomeupdate[.]com
• kubecloud[.]com
• lcomputers[.]com
• mobilnweb[.]com
• panhardware[.]com
• seobundlekit[.]com
• solartrackingsystem[.]net
• thedoccloud[.]com
• virtualwebdata[.]com
• webcodez[.]com
• websitetheme[.]com
• zupertech[.]com

Palo Alto was a Targeted SUNBURST Victim

We can now verify that Palo Alto was among the targeted SUNBURST victims, because their DNS request for "5qbtj04rcbp3tiq8bo6t.appsync.api.us.east.1.avsvmcloud.com" contains an encoded STAGE2 flag. The attack took place on September 29 at around 04:00 UTC, according to the timestamp that was also encoded into the avsvmcloud subdomain.

Image: Parsing passive DNS data from Dancho Danchev with SunburstDomainDecoder v1.9 and filtering on GUID “22334A7227544B1E”.

Palo Alto's CEO Nikesh Arora has confirmed that they were hit by SUNBURST (or "SolarStorm" as they call it), but they don’t provide much details. Here’s what Nikesh wrote on December 17:

Recently, we experienced an attempt to download Cobalt Strike on one of our IT SolarWinds servers. [...]

We thought this was an isolated incident, however, on Dec. 13, we became aware that the SolarWinds software supply chain was compromised and it became clear that the incident we prevented was an attempted SolarStorm attack.

Our SUNBURST STAGE2 Victim Table has now been updated to include Palo Alto along side the other targeted victims.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Monday, 11 January 2021 10:30:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #SUNBURST​ #SolarWinds​ #SolarStorm​ #avsvmcloud​ #STAGE2​ #DNS​ #CNAME​ #avsvmcloud.com​ #Cobalt Strike​ #DNS​ #FireEye​