The Russian Shadow in Eastern Europe: Gamaredon ‘s Ukrainian MOD Campaign

Security researchers at Yoroi-Cybaze ZLab uncovered a new campaign carried out by the Russian state-actor dubbed Gamaredon.

Introduction

Few days after the publication of our technical article related to the evidence of possible APT28 interference in the Ukrainian elections, we spotted another signal of a sneakier on-going operation.

This campaign, instead, seems to be linked to another Russian hacking group: Gamaredon.  The Gamaredon APT was first spotted in 2013 and in 2015, when researchers at LookingGlass shared the details of a cyber espionage operation tracked as Operation Armageddon, targeting other Ukrainian entities. Their “special attention” on Eastern European countries was also confirmed by CERT-UA, the Ukrainian Computer Emergency Response Team.

The discovered attack appears to be designed to lure military personnel: it  leverage a legit document of the “State of the Armed Forces of Ukraine” dated back in the 2nd April 2019. 

For this reason, Cybaze-Yoroi ZLAB team dissected this suspicious sample to confirm the possible link with Russian threat actors.

Technical Analysis

The origin of the infection is an executable file pretending to be an RTF document.

Table 1: Information about analyzed sample

Actually, the file is a Self Extracting Archive (SFX) claiming to be part of some Oracle software with an invalid signature. Its expiration date has been set up the 16th of March 2019.

A first glance inside the  SFX archive reveals four different files. One of them is batch file containing the actual infection routine.

Firstly, this batch script looks for the presence of running Wireshark and Process Explorer programs through the tasklist.exe utility. Then it renames the “11326” file in “Document.docx” and opens it. This is the decoy document seen in Figure 1. 

The third step is to extract the contents of the password protected archive named “26710”. The scripts uses the hard-coded password “dcthfdyjdfcdst,tv” to extract its content, placing them it on “%USERPROFILE%\winsetup.exe” and creating a LNK symlink into the “%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\” directory to ensure its persistence.

Table 2: Information about SFX stager

This additional file is a SFX file containing another script and a PE32 binary.

“MicrosoftCreate.exe” file is the UPX-packed version of the “wget” tool compiled for Window, a free utility for non-interactive HTTP downloads and uploads, a flexible tool commonly used by sys-admins and sometimes abused by threat actors.

The actual malicious logic of the Pteranodon implant is contained within the “30347.cmd” script. Besides junk instructions and obfuscation, the malware gather information about the compromised machine through the command “systeminfo.exe”. The results are stored into the file “fnQWAZC” and then sent to the command and control server “librework[.ddns[.net”, leveraging the wget utility previously found.

The malware also schedules the execution of two other actions.

The first one tries to contact “bitwork[.ddns[.net” to download a “setup.exe” file and store it in the same folder. The other file, “ie_cash.exe”, is stored into the  “%APPDATA%\Roaming\Microsoft\IE\” folder. Despite the different name, it actually is another copy of the wget tool.

The second scheduled activity is planned every 32 minutes and it is designed to run the files downloaded by the previous task. A typical trick part of the Gamaredon arsenal from long time: in fact, the recovered sample is part of the Pteranodon implant and matches its typical code patterns, showing no relevant edits with respect to previous variants.

In the end, investigating the “librework[.ddns[.net” domain we discovered several other samples connect to the same C2. All of them appeared in-the-wild during the first days of April, suggesting the command infrastructure might still be fully functional.

Conclusion

The Pteranodon implant seems to be constantly maintained by the Gamaredon APT group since 2013, a tool the attackers found very effective since they are still using it after such a long time. Apart this technical consideration, is quite interesting to notice how strong seems to be the Russian interest towards the East-Europe, along with the other recent state-sponsored activities possibly aimed to interfere with the Ukrainian politics (See “APT28 and Upcoming Elections: evidence of possible interference” and Part II), confirming this cyber-threat is operating in several fronts.

Further details, including Indicators of Compromise and Yara rules, are reported in the analysis published on the Yoroi Blog.  

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Ukraine, Gamaredon)

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