mrmoor/cti-corpus-raw · Datasets at Hugging Face

text stringlengths 1 38.9k
028caf3b1f5174ae092ecf435c1fccc2 7732d5349a0cfa1c3e4bcfa0c06949e4 9909f8558209449348a817f297429a48 63698ddbdff5be7d5a7ba7f31d0d592c 7c4e60685203b229a41ae65eba1a0e10 e2112439121f8ba9164668f54ca1c6af .
Attackers in this case made every attempt to launch a clever attack campaign by spoofing legitimate email ids and using an email theme relevant to the targets .
The following factors in this cyber attack suggests the possible involvement of Pakistan state sponsored cyber espionage group to mainly spy on India ’s actions related to these Geo-political events ( Uri terror attack and Jammu & Kashmir protests ) .
Victims/targets chosen ( Indian Embassy and Indian MEA officals ) .
Use of email theme related to the Geo-political events that is of interest to the targets .
Timing of the spear phishing emails sent to the victims .
Location of the c2 infrastructure .
Use of malware that is capable of spying on infected systems .
The following factors show the level of sophistication and reveals the attackers intention to remain stealthy and to gain long-term access by evading anti-virus , sandbox and security monitoring at both the desktop and network levels .
Use of obfuscated malicious macro code .
Use of macro code that triggers only on user intervention ( to bypass sandbox analysis ) .
Use of legitimate site ( Pastebin ) to host malicious code ( to bypass security monitoring ) .
Use of customized njRAT ( capable of evading anti-virus ) .
The Curious Case of Notepad and Chthonic : Exposing a Malicious Infrastructure .
Recently , I ’ve been investigating malware utilizing PowerShell and have spent a considerable amount of time refining ways to identify new variants of attacks as they appear .
This posting is a follow-up of my previous work on this subject in“ Pulling Back the Curtains on EncodedCommand PowerShell Attacks ” .
In a sample I recently analyzed , something stood out as extremely suspicious which led me down a rabbit hole , uncovering malicious infrastructure supporting Chthonic , Nymaim , and other malware and malicious websites .
Throughout this blog post I present my analysis and thought process during this research , but if you would just like a list of the findings , they are over on our Unit42 GitHub .
Most commonly , PowerShell is launched from a Microsoft Office document that uses a VBA macro to launch PowerShell to perform something malicious – typically downloading the “ real ” malware to run .
I focused my hunting on the PowerShell activity with Palo Alto Networks AutoFocus to determine whether it ’s worth digging into further based on “ uniqueness ” and functionality .
In this case , the first sample I looked at stood out for another reason entirely .
If you take a look at the below PowerShell , you ’ll quickly understand why .
Most commonly , PowerShell is launched from a Microsoft Office document that uses a VBA macro to launch PowerShell to perform something malicious – typically downloading the “ real ” malware to run .
I focused my hunting on the PowerShell activity with Palo Alto Networks AutoFocus to determine whether it ’s worth digging into further based on “ uniqueness ” and functionality .
My initial thought was the worst-case scenario – they ’ve been compromised and are distributing malware ! I immediately downloaded the file from the website , but everything looked normal .
Of course , I had to investigate further .
Looking under the hood we see the VBA code that builds thecommand and launches it but something seemed off .
There are a ton of functions that are clearly decoding information from arrays after which it executes an already decoded PowerShell command .
I decided to debug the macro and see exactly what it ’s doing before I made any decisions .
The most likely conclusion that can be drawn here is that an analyst or researcher obtained this file , modified it to see the content ( misspelling the variable name along the way ) post-decoding , and uploaded it to see what it did in a sandbox .
To be sure though , I needed to find other samples and see how they stacked up against this one .
Going back to the PowerShell command , the initial reason I stopped to look at it was due to the way they concatenated variables to form the download command and output .
This also provides a perfect pivot point to hunt for samples .
The dates were all fairly recent , having been received in the past few days since the beginning of August .
The documents shared the same themes for lures but the VBA macro and resulting PowerShell were more along the lines of what I expected .
For sample “ 538ff577a80748d87b5e738e95c8edd2bd54ea406fe3a75bf452714b17528a87 ” the following is an excerpt from the VBA macro building the PowerShell command .
Along with the subsequent Process Activity using the newly built PowerShell command , which aligns with what was commented out of the first sample analyzed .
Given this , I iterated over all 171 samples and extracted the following URL ’s where PowerShell is downloading a payload :After iterating over the 171 samples , we ’re left with this list of hashes for the downloaded files .
Note that there are fewer payloads than there are samples , indicating many of the documents download the same payload .
Below is a table with the compile date and some PDB strings found within a few of the binaries .
Most of the compile times are within the past two months , with 6 in August and a couple from as recently as two days ago at the time of this writing .
29c7740f487a461a96fad1c8db3921ccca8cc3e7548d44016da64cf402a475ad 2016-12-10 01 .
d5e56b9b5f52293b209a60c2ccd0ade6c883f9d3ec09571a336a3a4d4c79134b 2016-12-10 03 C:\RAMDrive\Charles\heaven\reams\Teac.pdb .
dd5f237153856d19cf20e80ff8238ca42047113c44fae27b5c3ad00be2755eea 2016-12-10 16 C:\Cleaner\amuse\rang\AutoPopulate\la.pdb .
a5001e9b29078f532b1a094c8c16226d20c03922e37a4fca2e9172350bc160a0 2016-12-20 18 .
8284ec768a06b606044defe2c2da708ca6b3b51f8e58cb66f61bfca56157bc88 2017-07-05 10 .
f0ce51eb0e6c33fdb8e1ccb36b9f42139c1dfc58d243195aedc869c7551a5f89 2017-07-09 20 C:\TableAdapter\encyclopedia\Parik.pdb .
145d47f4c79206c6c9f74b0ab76c33ad0fd40ac6724b4fac6f06afec47b307c6 2017-07-10 08 C:\ayakhnin\reprductive\distortedc.pdb .
dc8f34829d5fede991b478cf9117fb18c32d639573a827227b2fc50f0b475085 2017-07-11 01 C:\positioning\scrapping\Szets\thi.pdb .
7fe1069c118611113b4e34685e7ee58cb469bda4aa66a22db10842c95f332c77 2017-07-11 02 C:\NeXT\volatile\legacyExchangeDNs.pdb .
5edf117e7f8cd176b1efd0b5fd40c6cd530699e7a280c5c7113d06e9c21d6976 2017-07-12 23 .
2a80fdda87127bdc56fd35c3e04eb64a01a159b7b574177e2e346439c97b770a 2017-07-13 00. a9021e253ae52122cbcc2284b88270ceda8ad9647515d6cca96db264a76583f5 2017-07-18 00 .
dd639d76ff6f33bbfaf3bd398056cf4e95e27822bd9476340c7703f5b38e0183 2017-07-18 00 .
e5a00b49d4ab3e5a3a8f60278b9295f3d252e3e04dadec2624bb4dcb2eb0fada 2017-07-24 17 .
6263730ef54fbed0c2d3a7c6106b6e8b12a6b2855a03e7caa8fb184ed1eabeb2 2017-07-24 22 C:\Snapshot\Diskette\hiding\ROCKMA.pdb .
43bfaf9a2a4d46695bb313a32d88586c510d040844f29852c755845a5a09d9df 2017-07-25 06 .
b41660db6dcb0d3c7b17f98eae3141924c8c0ee980501ce541b42dc766f85628 2017-07-25 06 C:\mdb\Changed\Container\praise.pdb .
9acdad02ca8ded6043ab52b4a7fb2baac3a08c9f978ce9da2eb51c816a9e7a2e 2017-07-25 07 .
2ddaa30ba3c3e625e21eb7ce7b93671ad53326ef8b6e2bc20bc0d2de72a3929d 2017-07-25 20 C:\helpers\better\Expr\Eight\DS.pdb .
b836576877b2fcb3cacec370e5e6a029431f59d5070da89d94200619641ca0c4 2017-07-26 12 C:\V\regard\violates\update\AMBW\a.pdb .
0972fc9602b00595e1022d9cfe7e9c9530d4e9adb5786fea830324b3f7ff4448 2017-07-26 20 .
2c258ac862d5e31d8921b64cfa7e5a9cd95cca5643c9d51db4c2fcbe75fa957a 2017-07-27 01 C:\executablery\constructed\IIc.pdb .
dd9c558ba58ac81a2142ecb308ac8d0f044c7059a039d2e367024d953cd14a00 2017-07-27 02 .
cb3173a820ac392005de650bbd1dd24543a91e72d4d56300a7795e887a8323b2 2017-07-31 14 C:\letterbxing\EVP\Chices\legit.pdb .
a636f49814ea6603534f780b83a5d0388f5a5d0eb848901e1e1bf2d19dd84f05 2017-07-31 18 C:\Biomuse\moment\705\cnvincing.pdb .
677dd11912a0f13311d025f88caabeeeb1bda27c7c1b5c78cffca36de46e8560 2017-07-31 21 .
fdedf0f90d42d3779b07951d1e8826c7015b3f3e724ab89e350c9608e1f23852 2017-08-01 21 .
142bf7f47bfbd592583fbcfa22a25462df13da46451b17bb984d50ade68a5b17 2017-08-02 09 .
6f4b2c95b1a0f320da1b1eaa918c338c0bab5cddabe169f12ee734243ed8bba8 2017-08-02 12 C:\cataloging\Dr\VarianceShadows11.pdb .
fd5fd7058cf157ea249d4dcba71331f0041b7cf8fd635f37ad13aed1b06bebf2 2017-08-04 02 C:\dumplings\That\BIT\Warez\loc.pdb .
5785c2d68d6f669b96c3f31065f0d9804d2ab1f333a90d225bd993e66656b7d9 2017-08-07 12 C:\Lgisys\hypothesized\donatedc.pdb .
675719a9366386034c285e99bf33a1a8bafc7644874b758f307d9a288e95bdbd 2017-08-07 17 C:\work\cr\nata\cpp\seven\seven\release\seven.pdb .
At least one of the binaries compiled in August had a PDB string I was able to locate online in a collection of other PDB files , so they may be introducing their malicious code into these files before compiling someone else ’s project .
Once the file has been downloaded and executed , the new process will launch a legitimate executable , such as “ msiexec.exe ” , and inject code into it .
This code will then download further payloads through a POST request to various websites .
This pattern is shared across the original samples .
These HTTP requests match known patterns for a banking Trojan named Chthonic , which is a variant of Zeus .
A good write-up from 2014 on the malware can be found in this writeup from Yury Namestnikov , Vladimir Kuskov , Oleg Kupreev at Kaspersky Lab here and indicates that the returned data is an RC4 encrypted loader that sets-up the main Chthonic module which can download additional modules or malware .
Iterating once again over the 171 samples and scraping out the HTTP POST requests , I ended up with the below set of domains :amellet.bit danrnysvp.com ejtmjealr.com firop.com gefinsioje.com gesofgamd.com ponedobla.bit unoset.com .
Using this as the next pivot , we have 6,034 unique samples that get returned in AutoFocus having made POST requests to these sites .
Additionally , we can see there were at least 3 very large campaigns where Palo Alto Networks saw activity to these sites in July .
From these distribution sites , we can see that 5,520 samples are making HTTP requests to them and these samples have been identified as another downloader Trojan named Nymaim .
The majority of the overall samples came from the following four sites :ejtmjealr.com gefinsioje.com gesofgamd.com ponedobla.bit .
The ‘ ejtmjealr.com ’ domain is particularly interesting due to a similar domain , ‘ ejdqzkd.com ’ being discussed by Jarosław Jedynak of CERT.PL in this analysis of Nymaim from earlier in the year .
They go on to discuss how Nymaim uses a static configuration to contact that domain , which will return IP ’s that go into a DGA and output the actual IP addresses needed for C2 communication .
Ben Baker , Edmund Brumaghin and Jonah Samost of Talos have a fantastic write-up of this process here .
To continue my analysis , I shifted focus to Maltego so as to visually graph the infrastructure .
For this task , I used PassiveTotal ’s Passive DNS and AutoFocus Maltego transforms .
Pivoting off the five highlighted IP ’s above with a shared infrastructure , I pulled the reverse DNS to see what other sites may be present .
The “ idXXXXX.top ” pattern immediately stands out and may suggest a pattern in the static configuration for the initial domains used by the DGA for Nymaim since the previous two started with “ ejX.com .
Given the level of overlap already , I proceeded to grab all of the passive DNS available for each of the 707 IP addresses .
A full list of the domains can be seen here .
From the first cluster on the left , if we sort by incoming links per node a pattern stands out in the domain names looking similar to the previously mentioned Nymaim ones .
A quick search with the AutoFocus transform to pull tag information shows these are specifically related to Nymaim , most likely for the DGA seed ; however , looking at domains with less links , other malware families begin to emerge .
The cluster on the right is actually collapsing one collection of entities due to the sheer size of it .
All of these connected domains follow a pattern similar to phishing attacks masquerading as legitimate services – in this case “ online.verify.paypal ” ( 588 ) and “ hmrc.secure.refund ” ( 1021 ) .
In addition to domains of that type , there is evidence of other malware distribution being carried out on this infrastructure .
Collapsing the collection back down , note the two domains “ brontorittoozzo.com ” and “ randomessstioprottoy.net ” that fall outside of the collection due to more infrastructure connections .
By pivoting off of one sample we were able to zoom out and identify a sizable infrastructure of what appears to be 707 IP ’s and 2,611 domains being utilized for malicious activity .
As such , these findings represent a collection of compromised websites , compromised registrar accounts used to spin up subdomains , domains used by malware DGA ’s , phishing kits , carding forums , malware C2 sites , and a slew of other domains that revolve around criminal activity .

028caf3b1f5174ae092ecf435c1fccc2 7732d5349a0cfa1c3e4bcfa0c06949e4 9909f8558209449348a817f297429a48 63698ddbdff5be7d5a7ba7f31d0d592c 7c4e60685203b229a41ae65eba1a0e10 e2112439121f8ba9164668f54ca1c6af .

Attackers in this case made every attempt to launch a clever attack campaign by spoofing legitimate email ids and using an email theme relevant to the targets .

The following factors in this cyber attack suggests the possible involvement of Pakistan state sponsored cyber espionage group to mainly spy on India ’s actions related to these Geo-political events ( Uri terror attack and Jammu & Kashmir protests ) .

Victims/targets chosen ( Indian Embassy and Indian MEA officals ) .

Use of email theme related to the Geo-political events that is of interest to the targets .

Timing of the spear phishing emails sent to the victims .

Location of the c2 infrastructure .

Use of malware that is capable of spying on infected systems .

The following factors show the level of sophistication and reveals the attackers intention to remain stealthy and to gain long-term access by evading anti-virus , sandbox and security monitoring at both the desktop and network levels .

Use of obfuscated malicious macro code .

Use of macro code that triggers only on user intervention ( to bypass sandbox analysis ) .

Use of legitimate site ( Pastebin ) to host malicious code ( to bypass security monitoring ) .

Use of customized njRAT ( capable of evading anti-virus ) .

The Curious Case of Notepad and Chthonic : Exposing a Malicious Infrastructure .

Recently , I ’ve been investigating malware utilizing PowerShell and have spent a considerable amount of time refining ways to identify new variants of attacks as they appear .

This posting is a follow-up of my previous work on this subject in“ Pulling Back the Curtains on EncodedCommand PowerShell Attacks ” .

In a sample I recently analyzed , something stood out as extremely suspicious which led me down a rabbit hole , uncovering malicious infrastructure supporting Chthonic , Nymaim , and other malware and malicious websites .

Throughout this blog post I present my analysis and thought process during this research , but if you would just like a list of the findings , they are over on our Unit42 GitHub .

Most commonly , PowerShell is launched from a Microsoft Office document that uses a VBA macro to launch PowerShell to perform something malicious – typically downloading the “ real ” malware to run .

I focused my hunting on the PowerShell activity with Palo Alto Networks AutoFocus to determine whether it ’s worth digging into further based on “ uniqueness ” and functionality .

In this case , the first sample I looked at stood out for another reason entirely .

If you take a look at the below PowerShell , you ’ll quickly understand why .

Most commonly , PowerShell is launched from a Microsoft Office document that uses a VBA macro to launch PowerShell to perform something malicious – typically downloading the “ real ” malware to run .

I focused my hunting on the PowerShell activity with Palo Alto Networks AutoFocus to determine whether it ’s worth digging into further based on “ uniqueness ” and functionality .

My initial thought was the worst-case scenario – they ’ve been compromised and are distributing malware ! I immediately downloaded the file from the website , but everything looked normal .

Of course , I had to investigate further .

Looking under the hood we see the VBA code that builds thecommand and launches it but something seemed off .

There are a ton of functions that are clearly decoding information from arrays after which it executes an already decoded PowerShell command .

I decided to debug the macro and see exactly what it ’s doing before I made any decisions .

The most likely conclusion that can be drawn here is that an analyst or researcher obtained this file , modified it to see the content ( misspelling the variable name along the way ) post-decoding , and uploaded it to see what it did in a sandbox .

To be sure though , I needed to find other samples and see how they stacked up against this one .

Going back to the PowerShell command , the initial reason I stopped to look at it was due to the way they concatenated variables to form the download command and output .

This also provides a perfect pivot point to hunt for samples .

The dates were all fairly recent , having been received in the past few days since the beginning of August .

The documents shared the same themes for lures but the VBA macro and resulting PowerShell were more along the lines of what I expected .

For sample “ 538ff577a80748d87b5e738e95c8edd2bd54ea406fe3a75bf452714b17528a87 ” the following is an excerpt from the VBA macro building the PowerShell command .

Along with the subsequent Process Activity using the newly built PowerShell command , which aligns with what was commented out of the first sample analyzed .

Given this , I iterated over all 171 samples and extracted the following URL ’s where PowerShell is downloading a payload :After iterating over the 171 samples , we ’re left with this list of hashes for the downloaded files .

Note that there are fewer payloads than there are samples , indicating many of the documents download the same payload .

Below is a table with the compile date and some PDB strings found within a few of the binaries .

Most of the compile times are within the past two months , with 6 in August and a couple from as recently as two days ago at the time of this writing .

29c7740f487a461a96fad1c8db3921ccca8cc3e7548d44016da64cf402a475ad 2016-12-10 01 .

d5e56b9b5f52293b209a60c2ccd0ade6c883f9d3ec09571a336a3a4d4c79134b 2016-12-10 03 C:\RAMDrive\Charles\heaven\reams\Teac.pdb .

dd5f237153856d19cf20e80ff8238ca42047113c44fae27b5c3ad00be2755eea 2016-12-10 16 C:\Cleaner\amuse\rang\AutoPopulate\la.pdb .

a5001e9b29078f532b1a094c8c16226d20c03922e37a4fca2e9172350bc160a0 2016-12-20 18 .

8284ec768a06b606044defe2c2da708ca6b3b51f8e58cb66f61bfca56157bc88 2017-07-05 10 .

f0ce51eb0e6c33fdb8e1ccb36b9f42139c1dfc58d243195aedc869c7551a5f89 2017-07-09 20 C:\TableAdapter\encyclopedia\Parik.pdb .

145d47f4c79206c6c9f74b0ab76c33ad0fd40ac6724b4fac6f06afec47b307c6 2017-07-10 08 C:\ayakhnin\reprductive\distortedc.pdb .

dc8f34829d5fede991b478cf9117fb18c32d639573a827227b2fc50f0b475085 2017-07-11 01 C:\positioning\scrapping\Szets\thi.pdb .

7fe1069c118611113b4e34685e7ee58cb469bda4aa66a22db10842c95f332c77 2017-07-11 02 C:\NeXT\volatile\legacyExchangeDNs.pdb .

5edf117e7f8cd176b1efd0b5fd40c6cd530699e7a280c5c7113d06e9c21d6976 2017-07-12 23 .

2a80fdda87127bdc56fd35c3e04eb64a01a159b7b574177e2e346439c97b770a 2017-07-13 00. a9021e253ae52122cbcc2284b88270ceda8ad9647515d6cca96db264a76583f5 2017-07-18 00 .

dd639d76ff6f33bbfaf3bd398056cf4e95e27822bd9476340c7703f5b38e0183 2017-07-18 00 .

e5a00b49d4ab3e5a3a8f60278b9295f3d252e3e04dadec2624bb4dcb2eb0fada 2017-07-24 17 .

6263730ef54fbed0c2d3a7c6106b6e8b12a6b2855a03e7caa8fb184ed1eabeb2 2017-07-24 22 C:\Snapshot\Diskette\hiding\ROCKMA.pdb .

43bfaf9a2a4d46695bb313a32d88586c510d040844f29852c755845a5a09d9df 2017-07-25 06 .

b41660db6dcb0d3c7b17f98eae3141924c8c0ee980501ce541b42dc766f85628 2017-07-25 06 C:\mdb\Changed\Container\praise.pdb .

9acdad02ca8ded6043ab52b4a7fb2baac3a08c9f978ce9da2eb51c816a9e7a2e 2017-07-25 07 .

2ddaa30ba3c3e625e21eb7ce7b93671ad53326ef8b6e2bc20bc0d2de72a3929d 2017-07-25 20 C:\helpers\better\Expr\Eight\DS.pdb .

b836576877b2fcb3cacec370e5e6a029431f59d5070da89d94200619641ca0c4 2017-07-26 12 C:\V\regard\violates\update\AMBW\a.pdb .

0972fc9602b00595e1022d9cfe7e9c9530d4e9adb5786fea830324b3f7ff4448 2017-07-26 20 .

2c258ac862d5e31d8921b64cfa7e5a9cd95cca5643c9d51db4c2fcbe75fa957a 2017-07-27 01 C:\executablery\constructed\IIc.pdb .

dd9c558ba58ac81a2142ecb308ac8d0f044c7059a039d2e367024d953cd14a00 2017-07-27 02 .

cb3173a820ac392005de650bbd1dd24543a91e72d4d56300a7795e887a8323b2 2017-07-31 14 C:\letterbxing\EVP\Chices\legit.pdb .

a636f49814ea6603534f780b83a5d0388f5a5d0eb848901e1e1bf2d19dd84f05 2017-07-31 18 C:\Biomuse\moment\705\cnvincing.pdb .

677dd11912a0f13311d025f88caabeeeb1bda27c7c1b5c78cffca36de46e8560 2017-07-31 21 .

fdedf0f90d42d3779b07951d1e8826c7015b3f3e724ab89e350c9608e1f23852 2017-08-01 21 .

142bf7f47bfbd592583fbcfa22a25462df13da46451b17bb984d50ade68a5b17 2017-08-02 09 .

6f4b2c95b1a0f320da1b1eaa918c338c0bab5cddabe169f12ee734243ed8bba8 2017-08-02 12 C:\cataloging\Dr\VarianceShadows11.pdb .

fd5fd7058cf157ea249d4dcba71331f0041b7cf8fd635f37ad13aed1b06bebf2 2017-08-04 02 C:\dumplings\That\BIT\Warez\loc.pdb .

5785c2d68d6f669b96c3f31065f0d9804d2ab1f333a90d225bd993e66656b7d9 2017-08-07 12 C:\Lgisys\hypothesized\donatedc.pdb .

675719a9366386034c285e99bf33a1a8bafc7644874b758f307d9a288e95bdbd 2017-08-07 17 C:\work\cr\nata\cpp\seven\seven\release\seven.pdb .

At least one of the binaries compiled in August had a PDB string I was able to locate online in a collection of other PDB files , so they may be introducing their malicious code into these files before compiling someone else ’s project .

Once the file has been downloaded and executed , the new process will launch a legitimate executable , such as “ msiexec.exe ” , and inject code into it .

This code will then download further payloads through a POST request to various websites .

This pattern is shared across the original samples .

These HTTP requests match known patterns for a banking Trojan named Chthonic , which is a variant of Zeus .

A good write-up from 2014 on the malware can be found in this writeup from Yury Namestnikov , Vladimir Kuskov , Oleg Kupreev at Kaspersky Lab here and indicates that the returned data is an RC4 encrypted loader that sets-up the main Chthonic module which can download additional modules or malware .

Iterating once again over the 171 samples and scraping out the HTTP POST requests , I ended up with the below set of domains :amellet.bit danrnysvp.com ejtmjealr.com firop.com gefinsioje.com gesofgamd.com ponedobla.bit unoset.com .

Using this as the next pivot , we have 6,034 unique samples that get returned in AutoFocus having made POST requests to these sites .

Additionally , we can see there were at least 3 very large campaigns where Palo Alto Networks saw activity to these sites in July .

From these distribution sites , we can see that 5,520 samples are making HTTP requests to them and these samples have been identified as another downloader Trojan named Nymaim .

The majority of the overall samples came from the following four sites :ejtmjealr.com gefinsioje.com gesofgamd.com ponedobla.bit .

The ‘ ejtmjealr.com ’ domain is particularly interesting due to a similar domain , ‘ ejdqzkd.com ’ being discussed by Jarosław Jedynak of CERT.PL in this analysis of Nymaim from earlier in the year .

They go on to discuss how Nymaim uses a static configuration to contact that domain , which will return IP ’s that go into a DGA and output the actual IP addresses needed for C2 communication .

Ben Baker , Edmund Brumaghin and Jonah Samost of Talos have a fantastic write-up of this process here .

To continue my analysis , I shifted focus to Maltego so as to visually graph the infrastructure .

For this task , I used PassiveTotal ’s Passive DNS and AutoFocus Maltego transforms .

Pivoting off the five highlighted IP ’s above with a shared infrastructure , I pulled the reverse DNS to see what other sites may be present .

The “ idXXXXX.top ” pattern immediately stands out and may suggest a pattern in the static configuration for the initial domains used by the DGA for Nymaim since the previous two started with “ ejX.com .

Given the level of overlap already , I proceeded to grab all of the passive DNS available for each of the 707 IP addresses .

A full list of the domains can be seen here .

From the first cluster on the left , if we sort by incoming links per node a pattern stands out in the domain names looking similar to the previously mentioned Nymaim ones .

A quick search with the AutoFocus transform to pull tag information shows these are specifically related to Nymaim , most likely for the DGA seed ; however , looking at domains with less links , other malware families begin to emerge .

The cluster on the right is actually collapsing one collection of entities due to the sheer size of it .

All of these connected domains follow a pattern similar to phishing attacks masquerading as legitimate services – in this case “ online.verify.paypal ” ( 588 ) and “ hmrc.secure.refund ” ( 1021 ) .

In addition to domains of that type , there is evidence of other malware distribution being carried out on this infrastructure .

Collapsing the collection back down , note the two domains “ brontorittoozzo.com ” and “ randomessstioprottoy.net ” that fall outside of the collection due to more infrastructure connections .

By pivoting off of one sample we were able to zoom out and identify a sizable infrastructure of what appears to be 707 IP ’s and 2,611 domains being utilized for malicious activity .

As such , these findings represent a collection of compromised websites , compromised registrar accounts used to spin up subdomains , domains used by malware DGA ’s , phishing kits , carding forums , malware C2 sites , and a slew of other domains that revolve around criminal activity .