EvilExtractor Network Forensics

I analyzed a PCAP file from a sandbox execution of the Evil Extractor stealer malware earlier today. This stealer collects credentials and files of interest from the victim’s computer and exfiltrates them to an FTP server. It is designed to autonomously collect and exfiltrate data rather than receiving commands from an operator through a command-and-control channel. The EvilExtractor creators market this feature as a “golden bullet”.

Real hackers don’t use reverse shells right? If you have only one bullet, would you waste with reverse shell? Try Evil Extractor to have golden bullet.

I downloaded the Evil Extractor capture file from Triage to a Windows Sandbox environment, to avoid accidentally infecting my computer when extracting artifacts from the PCAP. I then opened it up in the free version of NetworkMiner.

NetworkMiner shows that after checking its public IP on ipinfo.io EvilExtractor makes an unencrypted HTTP connection to a web server on 193.42.33.232 to download KK2023.zip. This zip archive contains a file called “Lst.exe” which is used to steal browser data, cookies and credentials according to Fortinet.

Twenty seconds later an FTP connection is established to 89.116.53.55 on TCP port 21. The username and password used to authenticate to the FTP server was “u999382941” and “Test1234”.

On the FTP server EvilExtractor creates a directory named after the country and hostname of the victim's PC, such as “(Sweden)DESKTOP-VV03LJ”, in which it creates the following three sub directories:

• 1-Password-Cookies
• 2-Credentials
• 3-Files

After uploading browser cookies, browser history and cached passwords from Chrome, Firefox and Edge to the “1-Password-Cookies” directory EvilExtractor sends a file called “Credentials.txt” to the “2-Credentials” directory. The contents of this text file looks something like this:

Public IP: [redacted]
Location: [lat],[long]
Computer Name: [redacted]
Username: Admin
RAM: 4 GB
OS Name: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
OS Bit: 64-bit
Keyboard Language: en-US
GPU: [redacted]
CPU: Intel [redacted]
MAC Address: [redacted]
Extracted WIFI: [redacted]

The stealer also exfiltrates files with mpeg, docx, jpeg, pptx, zip, avi and rar extensions from the victim PC to the “3-Files” directory on the FTP server. The directory structure of the victim’s PC is maintained on the FTP server, so that files from the victim's desktop end up in a folder called “Desktop” on the FTP server.

The stealer later downloaded a keylogger module (Confirm.zip) and a webcam module (MnMs.zip), but no additional data was exfiltrated from this particular victim PC after that point.

IOC List

• Web server: 193.42.33.232:80
• FTP server: 89.116.53.55:21
• EvilExtractor: 9650ac3a9de8d51fddab092c7956bdae
• KK2023.zip: f07b919ff71fb33ee0f77e9e02c5445b
• Lst.exe: 163d4e2d75f8ce6c838bab888bf9629c
• Confirm.zip: 30532a6121cb33afc04eea2b8dcea461
• Confirm.exe: 0c18c4669e7ca7e4d21974ddcd24fdca
• MnMs.zip: bda0bda512d3e2a81fc9e4cf393091eb
• MnMs.exe: fb970c4367609860c2e5b17737a9f460

Users with an account on Triage can download the analyzed PCAP file from here: https://tria.ge/230424-vv9wvsfb2v/behavioral2

Update 2023-04-27

Jane tweeted a link to an execution of this same sample on ANY.RUN. This execution showed very similar results as the one on Triage, but with an interesting twist. Not only did the ANY.RUN execution exfiltrate images and documents from the Desktop and Downloads folders, it also exfiltrated “vv9wvsfb2v_pw_infected.zip”, which contained the EvilExtractor EXE file that was being run!

The PCAP from the ANY.RUN execution can be downloaded from here: https://app.any.run/tasks/43a11a79-4d1f-406c-86d7-158efb5ede01/

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Wednesday, 26 April 2023 08:50:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #FTP​ #NetworkMiner​ #Sandbox​ #Triage​ #ANY.RUN​

NetworkMiner 2.6 Released

We are happy to announce the release of NetworkMiner 2.6 today! The network forensic tool is now even better at extracting emails, password hashes, FTP transfers and artifacts from HTTP and HTTP/2 traffic than before.

Some of the major improvements in this new release are related to extraction and presentation of emails from SMTP, POP3 and IMAP traffic. On that note, we’d like to thank Mandy van Oosterhout for reporting a bug in our email parser!

I have previously blogged about how to extract John-the-Ripper hashes from Kerberos network traffic with NetworkMiner. We have now added support for presenting LANMAN and NTLM credentials as JtR hashes as well.

We have also improved NetworkMiner’s Linux support. Files, images and folders can now be opened in external tools directly from the NetworkMiner GUI also when running NetworkMiner in Linux using Mono 6 (or later). Linux users previously got a “System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception” error message saying something like “Cannot find the specified file” or “Access denied” due to a breaking change introduced in Mono version 6.

The new release also comes with several updates of how HTTP and HTTP/2 traffic is handled and presented. We have, for example, added better extraction of data sent in HTTP (or HTTP/2) POST requests. Posted JSON formatted parameters are also extracted even if the JSON data has been gzip compressed. The “Accept-Language” header values in HTTP and HTTP/2 are extracted as “Host Details” in order to support forensic analysis of user language settings, as shown by Fox-IT in their “Operation Wocao - Shining a light on one of China’s hidden hacking groups” report.

NetworkMiner has supported decapsulation of tunneling protocols and protocols for network virtualization, like 802.1Q, GRE, PPPoE, VXLAN, OpenFlow, MPLS and EoMPLS, since version 2.1. We have now improved our GRE parser to also support NVGRE (RFC 7637) by adding support for Transparent Ethernet Bridging.

Jan Hesse sent us a feature request on Twitter earlier this year, where asked about support for FritzBox captures. We are happy to announce that NetworkMiner now supports the modified pcap format you get when sniffing network traffic with a FritzBox gateway.

NetworkMiner 2.6 can now also parse and extract SIP chat messages (RFC 3428) to the “Messages” tab. Audio extraction of VoIP calls is still a feature that is exclusively available only in NetworkMiner Professional though.

NetworkMiner Professional

Our commercial tool NetworkMiner Professional has received a few additional updates, such as support for analysis of HTTP/2 traffic in the “Browsers tab”. However, please note that NetworkMiner does not perform TLS decryption, so the HTTP/2 traffic will have to be decrypted by a TLS proxy like PolarProxy prior to being saved to a PCAP file.

We have added a few new great online services to NetworkMiner Pro’s OSINT lookup as well, such as shouldiclick.org, Browserling, MalwareDomainList and VirusTotal lookups of URL’s in the “Browsers” tab. We have also added some additional external OSINT sources for lookups of IP addresses and domain names, such as MalwareDomainList and mnemonic ACT. The JA3 hash lookup menu in NetworkMiner Professional’s “Hosts” tab has also been extended to include GreyNoise.

NetworkMiner Pro previously played back G.722 VoIP audio at half speed. This issue has now been fixed, so that G.722 RTP audio is extracted and played back in 16k samples/s. The bug was due to an error in RFC 1890 that was later corrected in RFC 3551. Thanks to Michael "MiKa" Kafka for teaching us about this!

Excerpt from RFC 3551:

Even though the actual sampling rate for G.722 audio is 16,000 Hz, the RTP clock rate for the G722 payload format is 8,000 Hz because that value was erroneously assigned in RFC 1890 and must remain unchanged for backward compatibility. The octet rate or sample-pair rate is 8,000 Hz.

We’d also like to mention that NetworkMiner Professional now comes with improved analytical support to help investigators detect Tor traffic.

Upgrading to Version 2.6

Users who have purchased a license for NetworkMiner Professional 2.x can download a free update to version 2.6 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 Wednesday, 23 September 2020 09:10:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #NetworkMiner​ #SMTP​ #POP3​ #IMAP​ #email​ #FTP​ #JtR​ #John​ #Mono​ #Linux​ #HTTP​ #HTTP/2​ #JSON​ #GRE​ #SIP​ #VoIP​ #Tor​ #PCAP​

NetworkMiner 2.2 Released

NetworkMiner 2.2 is faster, better and stronger than ever before! The PCAP parsing speed has more than doubled and even more details are now extracted from analyzed packet capture files.

The improved parsing speed of NetworkMiner 2.2 can be enjoyed regardless if NetworkMiner is run in Windows or Linux, additionally the user interface is more responsive and flickers way less when capture files are being loaded.

User Interface Improvements

The keyword filter available in the Files, Messages, Sessions, DNS and Parameters tabs has been improved so that the rows now can be filtered on a single column of choice by selecting the desired column in a drop-down list. There is also an “Any column” option, which can be used to search for the keyword in all columns.

The Messages tab has also received an additional feature, which allows the filter keyword to be matched against the text in the message body as well as email headers when the “Any column” option is selected. This allows for an efficient analysis of messages (such as emails sent/received through SMTP, POP3 and IMAP as well as IRC messages and some HTTP based messaging platforms), since the messages can be filtered just like in a normal e-mail client.

We have also given up on using local timestamp formats; timestamps are now instead shown using the yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss format with time zone explicitly stated.

Protocol Parsers

NetworkMiner 2.2 comes with a parser for the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), which rides on top of COTP and TPKT. The RDP parser is primarily used in order to extract usernames from RDP cookies and show them on the Credentials tab. This new version also comes with better extraction of SMB1 and SMB2 details, such as NTLM SSP usernames.

One big change that has been made behind the scenes of NetworkMiner is the move from .NET Framework 2.0 to version 4.0. This move doesn’t require any special measures to be taken for most Microsoft Windows users since the 4.0 Framework is typically already installed on these machines. If you’re running NetworkMiner in Linux, however, you might wanna check out our updated blog post on how to install NetworkMiner in Linux.

We have also added an automatic check for new versions of NetworkMiner, which runs every time the tool is started. This update check can be disabled by adding a --noupdatecheck switch to the command line when starting NetworkMiner.

NetworkMiner.exe --noupdatecheck capturefile.pcap

NetworkMiner Professional

Even though NetworkMiner 2.2 now uses ISO-like time representations NetworkMiner still has to decide which time zone to use for the timestamps. The default decision has always been to use the same time zone as the local machine, but NetworkMiner Professional now additionally comes with an option that allows the user to select whether to use UTC (as nature intended), the local time zone or some other custom time zone for displaying timestamps. The time zone setting can be found in the “Tools > Settings” menu.

UPDATE: With the release of NetworkMiner 2.3 the default time zone is now UTC unless the user has specifically selected a different time zone.

The Port-Independent-Protocol-Detection (PIPI) feature in NetworkMiner Pro has been improved for more reliable identification of HTTP, SSH, SOCKS, FTP and SSL sessions running on non-standard port numbers.

CASE / JSON-LD Export

We are happy to announce that the professional edition of NetworkMiner 2.2 now has support for exporting extracted details using the Cyber-investigation Analysis Standard Expression (CASE) format, which is a JSON-LD format for digital forensics data. The CASE export is also available in the command line tool NetworkMinerCLI.

We would like to thank Europol for recommending us to implement the CASE export format in their effort to adopt CASE as a standard digital forensic format. Several other companies in the digital forensics field are currently looking into implementing CASE in their tools, including AccessData, Cellebrite, Guidance, Volatility and XRY. We believe the CASE format will become a popular format for exchanging digital forensic data between tools for digital forensics, log correlation and SIEM solutions.

We will, however, still continue supporting and maintaining the CSV and XML export formats in NetworkMiner Professional and NetworkMinerCLI alongside the new CASE format.

Credits

I would like to thank Sebastian Gebhard and Clinton Page for reporting bugs in the Credentials tab and TFTP parsing code that now have been fixed. I would also like to thank Jeff Carrell for providing a capture file that has been used to debug an issue in NetworkMiner’s OpenFlow parser. There are also a couple of users who have suggested new features that have made it into this release of NetworkMiner. Marc Lindike suggested the powerful deep search of extracted messages and Niclas Hirschfeld proposed a new option in the PCAP-over-IP functionality that allows NetworkMiner to receive PCAP data via a remote netcat listener.

Upgrading to Version 2.2

Users who have purchased a license for NetworkMiner Professional 2.x can download a free update to version 2.2 from our customer portal.

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 Tuesday, 22 August 2017 11:37:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #pcap​ #CASE​ #PIPI​ #HTTP​ #SOCKS​ #FTP​ #SSL​ #port​ #forensics​