ZeuS Variant Abuses Legitimate Developer’s Website

The official website of Ukraine-based accounting software developer Crystal Finance Millennium (CFM) was abused for the distribution of a variant of the ZeuS banking Trojan, Talos reports.

The vector is similar to that used in the NotPetya attack in the summer of 2017, when a malicious actor abused the update server of tax software company M.E.Doc to distribute the destructive wiper.

Unlike the NotPetya attack, however, the distribution the ZeuS variant didn’t leverage a compromised server. Instead, the attack relied on accounting software maker CFM’s website being used to distribute malware fetched by downloaders delivered as attachments in an email spam campaign.

The attack happened in August 2016, when information on the malware infection process were made public. Now, Talos has decided to share details on the scope of the attack and associated victims, including the geographic regions affected, based on information the company gathered after it managed to sinkhole command and control (C&C) domains.

The spam emails used in this attack contained a ZIP archive with a JavaScript file inside, which acted as a downloader. One of the domains used to host the malware payload was associated with CFM’s website, which has been also observed distributing PSCrypt ransomware, the researchers say.

The malware used in this attack reused code from the version 2.0.8.9 of the ZeuS banking Trojan, which was leaked in 2011 and already spawned numerous other threats.

The malware would first check whether it runs in a virtualized sandbox environment and would enter an infinite sleep function if virtualization was detected. If not, it would then move to achieve persistence by creating a registry entry to ensure execution at system startup.

After infection, the malware attempts to connect to different C&C servers, one of which hadn’t been registered when Talos first started investigating the attack. The researchers then registered the domain, which provided them with insight into the malware’s C&C communications.

Talos discovered that most of the systems beaconing to the sinkhole server were located in Ukraine, with the United States emerging as the second most affected country. They also found out that PJSC Ukrtelecom, a company governed by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications in Ukraine, was the most affected ISP.

A total of 11,925,626 beacons from 3,165 unique IP addresses were logged by the sinkhole server, the researchers reveal.

“Attackers are increasingly attempting to abuse the trust relationship between organizations and their trusted software manufacturers as a means of obtaining a foothold within the environments they are targeting. As organizations deploy more effective security controls to protect their network environments attackers are continuing to refine their methodologies,” Talos concluded.

Ionut Arghire is an international correspondent for SecurityWeek.

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