Red October – Java Exploit Delivery Vector Analysis
Since the publication of our report, our colleagues from Seculert have discovered and posted a blog about the usage of another delivery vector in the Red October attacks.
In addition to Office documents (CVE-2009-3129, CVE-2010-3333, CVE-2012-0158), it appears that the attackers also infiltrated victim network(s) via Java exploitation (MD5: 35f1572eb7759cb7a66ca459c093e8a1 – ‘NewsFinder.jar’), known as the ‘Rhino’ exploit (CVE-2011-3544).
We know the early February 2012 timeframe that they would have used this technique, and this exploit use is consistent with their approach in that it’s not 0-day. Most likely, a link to the site was emailed to potential victims, and the victim systems were running an outdated version of Java.
However, it seems that this vector was not heavily used by the group. When we downloaded the php responsible for serving the ‘.jar’ malcode archive, the line of code delivering the java exploit was commented out. Also, the related links, java, and the executable payload are proving difficult to track down to this point.
The domain involved in the attack is presented only once in a public sandbox at malwr.com (http://malwr.com/analysis/c3b0d1403ba35c3aba8f4529f43fb300/), and only on February 14th, the very same day that they registered the domain hotinfonews.com:
Domain Name: HOTINFONEWS.COM Registrant: Privat Person Denis Gozolov (gozolov@mail.ru) Narva mnt 27 Tallinn Tallinn,10120 EE Tel. +372.54055298 Creation Date: 14-Feb-2012 Expiration Date: 14-Feb-2013
Following that quick public disclosure, related MD5s and links do not show up in public or private repositories, unlike the many other Red October components.
We could speculate that the group successfully delivered their malware payload to the appropriate target(s) for a few days, then didn’t need the effort any longer. Which may also tell us that this group, which meticulously adapted and developed their infiltration and collection toolset to their victims’ environment, had a need to shift to Java from their usual spearphishing techniques in early February 2012. And then they went back to their spear phishing.
Also of note, there was a log recording three separate victim systems behind an IP address in the US, each connecting with a governmental economic research institute in the Middle East.
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