USB worm unleashed by Russian state hackers spreads worldwide

A gaggle of Russian-state hackers recognized for nearly solely focusing on Ukranian entities has branched out in latest months both by accident or purposely by permitting USB-based espionage malware to contaminate a wide range of organizations in different international locations.

The group—recognized by many names, together with Gamaredon, Primitive Bear, ACTINIUM, Armageddon, and Shuckworm—has been energetic since at the least 2014 and has been attributed to Russia’s Federal Safety Service by the Safety Service of Ukraine. Most Kremlin-backed teams take pains to fly below the radar; Gamaredon would not care to. Its espionage-motivated campaigns focusing on massive numbers of Ukrainian organizations are straightforward to detect and tie again to the Russian authorities. The campaigns usually revolve round malware that goals to acquire as a lot info from targets as potential.

A kind of instruments is a pc worm designed to unfold from laptop to laptop by way of USB drives. Tracked by researchers from Test Level Analysis as LitterDrifter, the malware is written within the Visible Fundamental Scripting language. LitterDrifter serves two functions: to promiscuously unfold from USB drive to USB drive and to completely infect the units that connect with such drives with malware that completely communicates with Gamaredon-operated command and management servers.

“Gamaredon continues to concentrate on [a] wide selection [of] Ukrainian targets, however as a result of nature of the USB worm, we see indications of potential an infection in numerous international locations like USA, Vietnam, Chile, Poland and Germany,” Test Level researchers reported recently. “As well as, we’ve noticed proof of infections in Hong Kong. All this would possibly point out that very similar to different USB worms, LitterDrifter [has] unfold past its meant targets.”

The picture above, monitoring submissions of LitterDrifter to the Alphabet-owned VirusTotal service, signifies that the Gamaredon malware could also be infecting targets properly outdoors the borders of Ukraine. VirusTotal submissions normally come from folks or organizations that encounter unfamiliar or suspicious-looking software program on their networks and wish to know if it’s malicious. The information means that the variety of infections within the US, Vietnam, Chile, Poland, and Germany mixed could also be roughly half of these hitting organizations inside Ukraine.

Worms are types of malware that unfold with out requiring a consumer to take any motion. As self-propagating software program, worms are infamous for explosive progress at exponential scales. Stuxnet, the worm created by the US Nationwide Safety Company and its counterpart from Israel, has been a cautionary story for spy companies. Its creators meant Stuxnet to contaminate solely a comparatively small variety of Iranian targets taking part in that nation’s uranium enrichment program. As an alternative, Stuxnet unfold far and huge, infecting an estimated 100,000 computer systems worldwide. Non-USB-activated worms akin to NotPetya and WannaCry have contaminated much more.

LitterDrifter gives the same means for spreading far and huge. Test Level researchers defined:

The core essence of the Spreader module lies in recursively accessing subfolders in every drive and creating LNK decoy shortcuts, alongside a hidden copy of the “trash.dll” file.

Upon execution, the module queries the pc’s logical drives utilizing Home windows Administration Instrumentation (WMI), and searches for logical disks with the MediaType worth set to null, a technique usually used to determine detachable USB drives.

For every logical drive detected, the spreader invokes the createShortcutsInSubfolders operate. Inside this operate, it iterates the subfolders of a supplied folder as much as a depth of two.

For each subfolder, it employs the CreateShortcut operate as a part of the “Create LNK” motion, which is accountable for producing a shortcut with particular attributes. These shortcuts are LNK recordsdata which might be given random names chosen from an array within the code. That is an instance of the lure’s names from an array in one of many samples that we investigated:("Bank_accоunt", "постановa", "Bank_accоunt", "службовa", "cоmpromising_evidence"). The LNK recordsdata use wscript.exe **** to execute “trash.dll” with specified arguments " ""trash.dll"" /webm //e:vbScript //b /wm /cal ". Along with producing the shortcut, the operate additionally creates a hidden copy of “trash.dll” within the subfolder.

The methods described are comparatively easy, however as evidenced, they’re lots efficient. A lot in order that they’ve allowed it to interrupt out of its earlier Ukrainian-only focusing on area to a a lot larger realm. Individuals who wish to know in the event that they’ve been contaminated can verify the Test Level submit’s indicators of compromise part, which lists file hashes, IP addresses, and domains utilized by the malware.

“Comprised of two major elements—-a spreading module and a C2 module—it’s clear that LitterDrifter was designed to assist a large-scale assortment operation,” Test Level researchers wrote. “It leverages easy, but efficient methods to make sure it could actually attain the widest potential set of targets within the area.”