Avast Finds Compromised Philippine Navy Certificate Used in Remote Access Tool

Malware Analysis
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Avast Threat Intelligence Team has found a remote access tool (RAT) actively being used in the wild in the Philippines that uses what appears to be a compromised digital certificate belonging to the Philippine Navy. This certificate is now expired but we see evidence it was in use with this malware in June 2020.  

Based on our research, we believe with a high level of confidence that the threat actor had access to the private key belonging to the certificate.

We got in touch with CERT-PH, the National Computer Emergency Response Team for the Philippines to help us contact the navy. We have shared with them our findings. The navy security team later let us know that the incident has been resolved and no further assistance was necessary from our side.

Because this is being used in active attacks now, we are releasing our findings immediately so organizations can take steps to better protect themselves. We have found that this sample is now available on VirusTotal.

Compromised Expired Philippine Navy Digital Certificate

In our analysis we found the sample connects to dost[.]igov-service[.]net:8443 using TLS in a statically linked OpenSSL library.

A WHOIS lookup on the C&C domain gave us the following:

The digital certificate was pinned so that the malware requires the certificate to communicate.

When we checked the digital certificate used for the TLS channel we found the following information:

Some important things to note:

Based on our research, we believe with a high level of confidence that the threat actor had access to the private key belonging to the certificate.

While the digital certificate is now expired we see evidence it was in use with this malware in June 2020. 

The malicious PE file was found with filename: C:\Windows\System32\wlbsctrl.dll and its hash is: 85FA43C3F84B31FBE34BF078AF5A614612D32282D7B14523610A13944AADAACB.

In analyzing that malicious PE file itself, we found that the compilation timestamp is wrong or was edited. Specifically, the TimeDateStamp of the PE file was modified and set to the year 2004 in both the PE header and Debug Directory as shown below:

However, we found that the author used OpenSSL 1.1.1g and compiled it on April 21, 2020 as shown below:

The username of the author was probably udste. This can be seen in the debug information left inside the used OpenSSL library.

We found that the malware supported the following commands:

  • run shellcode
  • read file
  • write file
  • cancel data transfer
  • list drives
  • rename a file
  • delete a file
  • list directory content

Some additional items of note regarding the malicious PE file:

  • All configuration strings in the malware are encrypted using AES-CBC with the exception of the mutex it uses.That mutex is used as-is without decryption: t7As7y9I6EGwJOQkJz1oRvPUFx1CJTsjzgDlm0CxIa4=.
  • When this string is decrypted using the hard-coded key it decrypts to QSR_MUTEX_zGKwWAejTD9sDitYcK. We suspect that this is a failed attempt to disguise this malware as the infamous Quasar RAT malware. But this cannot be the case because this sample is written in C++ and the Quasar RAT is written in C#.

Avast customers are protected against this malware.

Indicators of Compromise (IoC)

SHA256 File name
85FA43C3F84B31FBE34BF078AF5A614612D32282D7B14523610A13944AADAACB C:\Windows\System32\wlbsctrl.dll
Mutex
t7As7y9I6EGwJOQkJz1oRvPUFx1CJTsjzgDlm0CxIa4=
C&C server
dost[.]igov-service[.]net:8443

The post Avast Finds Compromised Philippine Navy Certificate Used in Remote Access Tool appeared first on Avast Threat Labs.

Article Link: Avast Finds Compromised Philippine Navy Certificate Used in Remote Access Tool - Avast Threat Labs