A Case Of Mistaken Identity?

Co-authored by Raj Samani, Chief Technology Officer of Intel Security’s Europe, Middle East, and Africa division

Recent reports of electricity outages across the Ukraine have led to significant speculation regarding the specific malware that was used to disrupt supply. Intel Security’s approach to understanding this particular event included making contact with the impacted organization to offer our support and, where possible, retrieving data in order to analyze the true nature of the threat. In this case the impacted organization allowed us to publicly share our findings in order to benefit the entire industry.

Researchers from the Advanced Programs Group within Intel Security were able to analyze multiple samples that were used in an attack, raising questions regarding the role of BlackEnergy malware in disrupting the supply of electricity. We would also like to acknowledge the support we were provided in the technical investigation from our partner BAKOTECH Group.

This post builds upon our initial blog posting that detailed the historical evolution of BlackEnergy.

It Begins With A Phish

Our malware zoo within McAfee Labs contains a wealth of data that can be used to identify the reuse of tools in a particular attack. In this instance, we cross-referenced the initial dropper and collected samples that were used by infected systems. Indeed, this was absolutely necessary because the criminal infrastructure used to host the second malware instance was offline when our initial analysis began. As we began our analysis, we identified a number of similarities with previous campaigns that targeted the energy sector.

In March 2015, an email appearing to be from the Supreme Council of Ukraine (Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine) was sent to multiple state institutions in the Ukraine. One of the targets of this campaign was a power company situated in the western part of the country. The spear-phishing email contained an XLS attachment with a macro in it (see below).

Once the document was opened, a macro was executed, the BlackEnergy dropper was created, and the dropper started to download the final BlackEnergy 2/3 version.

One of the interesting email artifacts was a part of the SMTP header that pointed to an IP address and name of the mail server used to spread the spear-phishing emails.

We received information that, once the attackers were in the network, they compromised a Web server and used it as a beachhead for entering a segment of the company’s network. The attackers were using tools that are freely available on the Internet for download, including Web shells, tunneling tools, and SSH server tools.

If we compare a previous attack to the BlackEnergy attack on the grid reported in December, we can recognize a number of similarities. First, the attack vector is exactly the same, namely a spear-phishing campaign. Below is an example of the content of the email.

The attachment was a weaponized Excel sheet containing a dropper. Once launched, the payload was downloaded from a site hosted in the Ukraine.

We investigated the SMTP headers in this case and found that the attack in December leveraged a mail server with the same IP address and name as a server used in the previously described campaign in March. The energy sector was one of the targets in both campaigns.

Besides these files, we also received a package of suspicious files for analysis. These files were part of a Web template system called Synio. The Synio template is part of the LiveStreet content management system. LiveStreet is a Russian site that allows for the free download of engines for blogging and social networking. It is not known to us whether these files were related to the spear-phishing campaign or part of lateral movement. However, we noticed references to the Synio template being used on the server that hosted the payload for the dropper: “8080/templates/compiled/synio/...” One of the files in the templates was definitely not part of normal content management.

After analysis of this php file, we determined that it was a php Web shell (see below).

These WSO Web shells are often used after compromising a server to keep access. They usually support multiple modules with a variety of features. In this case, the shell included the following modules:

Access to the Web shell was secured with an easy-to-crack md5 password.

One interesting feature was the “search for hash option,” where discovered hashes could be sent to certain sites that might have cracked the value for these hashes (see below).

For both the March and December attacks, there are some similarities:

The use of BlackEnergy for espionage is not new, but prior to the December attack there had been no evidence that campaigns used BlackEnergy for more than stealing confidential information from a victim organization. While the latest attack included a wiper component, we did not find any evidence that this malware specifically targeted SCADA systems. Therefore, it appears unlikely that the BlackEnergy malware was the direct cause of the outage. It is unclear if a single actor both controlled BlackEnergy and also issued a coordinated shutdown of the electrical system.

Meanwhile, the spear-phishing campaigns in Ukraine appear to have continued into January, using Word documents instead of Excel. While available information does not yet point to a clear root cause, additional details are emerging and analysis is ongoing. There is greater confidence that the follow-up phishes were from the same group then this group being responsible for the availability disruption. Not only does this adopt the same modus operandi, but it is more aligned with the level of technical sophistication than we have seen with BlackEnergy. We are continuing analysis as more samples are received and will provide more details in due course.