CANCUN – KASPERSKY SECURITY ANALYST SUMMIT – The hackers behind the recent Olympic Destroyer attack planted sophisticated false flags inside their malware in an effort to trick researchers, Kaspersky Lab revealed on Thursday.
The Olympic Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, was hit by a cyberattack that caused temporary disruption to IT systems, including the official Olympics website, display monitors, and Wi-Fi connections. The attack involved Olympic Destroyer, a piece of malware designed to wipe files and make systems inoperable, and steal passwords from browsers and Windows. Compromised credentials are used to spread to other machines on the network.
Kaspersky has also spotted infections at several ski resorts in South Korea. The malware, which leverages a leaked NSA exploit known as EternalRomance to spread via the SMB protocol, temporarily disrupted ski gates and lifts at the affected resorts.
Several cybersecurity firms launched investigations into the Olympic Destroyer attack shortly after the news broke, and while they mostly agreed on the malware’s functionality, they could not agree on who was behind the operation. Some pointed the finger at North Korea, while others blamed China or Russia, leading some industry professionals to warn against this type of knee-jerk attribution.
Kaspersky researchers also analyzed the Olympic Destroyer worm in an effort to determine who was behind the attack. While they have’t been able to identify the culprit, experts have found some interesting clues.
The security firm has found a unique “fingerprint” associated with the notorious Lazarus Group, which has been linked to North Korea and blamed for high profile attacks such as the one on Sony, the WannaCry campaign, and various operations targeting financial organizations.
This fingerprint was a 100% match to known Lazarus malware components and it did not appear in any other files from Kaspersky’s database. While this piece of evidence and the type of attack suggested that Olympic Destroyer could be the work of North Korea, other data gathered by researchers as a result of an on-site investigation at a South Korean target revealed inconsistencies.
Experts determined that the unique fingerprint was likely a sophisticated false flag planted by the attackers to throw investigators off track.
“To our knowledge, the evidence we were able to find was not previously used for attribution. Yet the attackers decided to use it, predicting that someone would find it. They counted on the fact that forgery of this artifact is very hard to prove,” explained Vitaly Kamluk, head of the APAC research team at Kaspersky. “It’s as if a criminal had stolen someone else’s DNA and left it at a crime scene instead of their own. We discovered and proved that the DNA found on the crime scene was dropped there on purpose. All this demonstrates how much effort attackers are willing to spend in order to stay unidentified for as long as possible. We’ve always said that attribution in cyberspace is very hard as lots of things can be faked, and Olympic Destroyer is a pretty precise illustration of this.”
In addition to this apparent link to North Korea, Kaspersky has found evidence that would suggest the involvement of the notorious group known as Sofacy, Fancy Bear, APT28 and Pawn Storm, which is widely believed to be sponsored by the Russian government.
One possible scenario is that the Russian hackers attempted to frame Lazarus for the attack after the North Korean group tried to pin one of its campaigns on Russian actors. It’s also possible that the false flag used in the Olympics attack is part of the hackers’ efforts to improve their deception techniques.
Links to China have been found by Intezer, which specializes in recognizing code reuse. Its analysis led to the discovery of numerous code fragments uniquely linked to threat groups tracked as APT3, APT10 and APT12.
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Related: Long-Term Strategy Needed When Analyzing APTs
Eduard Kovacs is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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