FIN4, the hacking crew with a great interest in Wall Street

FIN4 hacking team has targeted over 100 organizations since 2013, all of which are either publicly traded companies or advisory firms.

Researchers at FireEye issued a report on a hacking crew dubbed FIN4 which is specialized in hacking of publicly traded companies with the intent to steal sensitive data, including mergers and acquisitions intelligence.

” FIN4 has pursued targets at more than 100 organizations, over two-thirds of which are public healthcare and pharmaceutical companies. The remaining targets include advisory firms that represent public companies and a handful of public companies in other sectors closely followed by market watchers. ” states the report.

FireEye already reported the attacks to the targeted companies and law enforcement, the experts revealed that the FIN4 group is still active and the experts have discovered recently a new command and control server.

As an attack vector the hackers used well-crafted spear phishing emails aimed to steal legitimate email credentials. The access to email accounts of top executives, legal counsel, researchers and outside consultants, allowed the FIN4 to gain insider information that could influence stock prices and give the attackers a significant trading advantage.

FIN4 crew, which is active since mid-2013, appears to be composed by American due to its deep knowledge of Wall Street dynamics and the used of English, slang.

According to Threat intelligence manager Jen Weedon, the FIN4 is not a state-sponsored ATP

“It appears to me that these guys are stealing information that would give them a leg up in the stock market,” Weedon said. “We don’t know if they’re tied into any broader organized crime; they’re unlike anything we’ve ever actually tracked. Without having a huge amount of visibility into exactly who they are, my impression is that they’re probably guys who worked on Wall Street before and are not career criminals, but perhaps have found a fruitful side project.”

FireEye experts have found nine C&C servers used by the FIN4 group, which moves stolen data over the Tor network.

“FIN4 appears to be heavily reliant on Tor (software that enables users to browse the Internet anonymously by encrypting their internet traffic and routing it through servers around the world) and has been seen using Tor to login to victims’ email accounts after obtaining the compromised user credentials. We have detected at least two User Agents that the actors have used and which can be used to identify potentially suspicious OWA activity in network logs, when paired with originating Tor IP addresses” reports FireEye ” … the access from Tor exit nodes can serve as an indicator of the group’s illicit logins”

The FIN4 is not using any malware to steal sensitive data and user credentials, the experts discovered the usage of phishing email with lures appealing to investor and shareholder concerns. Typically the email contains a Microsoft Office document with a VBA Macros Embedded which pops up a phony Outlook dialog box demanding for the user’s credentials. If VBA macros are disabled, the user is sent a link to a phony Outlook Web Access site.

The experts noticed that attackers used the access on the victim’s account to manipulate discussions on specific topics. Interesting to note that hackers also created specific Outlook rules on victims’ accounts that redirect email messages containing keywords such as “malware,” “hacked,”and “phishing,” to the Deleted folder, probably to avoid that victims are alerted on ongoing attacks.

Lets’ wait for further information.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Wall Street, FIN4)