Pierluigi Paganini
September 24, 2013
Bit9 experts discovered that hackers penetrated their network infecting machine with two variants of the HiKit rootkit.
“One of these Hitkit samples connected to a command and control server at downloadmp3server[.]servemp3[.]com that resolved to 66.153.86.14. This same IP address also hosted www[.]yahooeast[.]net, a known malicious domain, between March 6, 2012 and April 22, 2012. The domain yahooeast[.]net was registered to 654@123.com. This email address was also used to register blankchair[.]com – the domain that we see was pointed to the 180.150.228.102 IP, which is the callback associated with sample 58dc05118ef8b11dcb5f5c596ab772fd, and has been already correlated back to the attack leveraging the CVE-2013-3893 zero-day vulnerability.”
FireEye investigated on the attacks revealing that they targeted organizations in Japan, according evidences collected behind the Operation DeputyDog there is the same threat actor that compromised Bit9 in February 2013, when during the hack were stolen digital certificates used later in further attacks to sign malware. The payload used in these attacks on August 23th 2013 against entities in Japan was hosted on a server in Hong Kong with IP address equal to 210.176.3.130. Despite the payload is named img20130823.jpg in reality it is an executable, once run it writes a dll named “28542CC0.dll” in the following path:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\28542CC0.dll
To be able to execute the malware on every machine restarts the malicious agent also adds this registry key:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\28542CC0 rundll32.exe “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\28542CC0.dll”,Launch
The malware connects to a host in South Korea (180.150.228.102), it is curious that callback traffic is not encrypted HTTP over port 443. The FireEye security experts identified the signature for the attacks that allowed the detection of at least 5 samples that were compiled on 2013-08-19, within 1 second of each other.
| MD5 | Compile Time (UTC) | C2 Server |
| 58dc05118ef8b11dcb5f5c596ab772fd | 2013-08-19 13:21:58 | 180.150.228.102 |
| 4d257e569539973ab0bbafee8fb87582 | 2013-08-19 13:21:58 | 103.17.117.90 |
| dbdb1032d7bb4757d6011fb1d077856c | 2013-08-19 13:21:59 | 110.45.158.5 |
| 645e29b7c6319295ae8b13ce8575dc1d | 2013-08-19 13:21:59 | 103.17.117.90 |
| e9c73997694a897d3c6aadb26ed34797 | 2013-04-13 13:42:45 | 110.45.158.5 |
The malicious domains identified are:
| Domain | First Seen | Last Seen |
| ea.blankchair.com | 2013-09-01 05:02:22 | 2013-09-01 08:25:22 |
| rt.blankchair.com | 2013-09-01 05:02:21 | 2013-09-01 08:25:24 |
| ali.blankchair.com | 2013-09-01 05:02:20 | 2013-09-01 08:25:22 |
| dll.freshdns.org | 2013-07-01 10:48:56 | 2013-07-09 05:00:03 |
Campaign such as the Operation DeputyDog are the demonstration that groups of persistent collectors are very active and use sophisticated techniques for their attacks. The hackers exploited the knowledge of a zero-day during last attacks, circumstance that lets me think of the responsibility of state-sponsored hackers. Governments are primary entities that exploit zero-day flaws during their attack, cybercrime ecosystem in fact is more oriented in the sale of these exploits instead to use it for illegal activities. If you are interested to go deep in the technical analysis of the ATP read the following post published by FireEye.
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(Security Affairs – FireEye, Operation DeputyDog, cyberespionage)
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