ABOUT THIS EPISODE
This week we take a deep dive into the latest Linux malware, GoblinRAT to look at how malware is evolving to stay stealthy and evade detection and how malware authors are learning from modern software development along the way.
GoblinRAT Linux Malware teardown-
Solar 4RAYS team (Cyber Threat Research Center at SOLAR - Russian Cybersecurity firm) describes a new piece of Linux malware which they name GoblinRAT (RAT = Remote Access Trojan) 2023 when contacted by an IT company which provides services to (presumably) Russian government agencies - noticed system logs being deleted off one of their servers and a utility being downloaded to steal account passwords from a domain controller
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Found this malware masquerading as a legitimate process which takes quite careful steps to avoid detection - in fact most of the functionality within the malware is devoted to hiding its presence on the target system
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Doesn’t include automatic persistence but instead appears to be manually “installed” by the attackers with a unique name for each target where it would be named after an existing legitimate process on the target system - similarly even the names of its files and libraries were also unique per-system as well to avoid detection
- e.g. in one case where zabbix was running, the malware named itself
zabbix_agentand setup a new systemd service to launch itself at boot which looks identical to the real zabbix agent (except the real one iszabbix_agentd) and then once running it edits its own command-line arguments after startup to insert standard parameters expected by the realzabbix_agentdso that on aps auxor similar output it appears basically identical to the realzabbix_agentd - in another case it named itself
rhsmdto mimic the Red Hat subscription manager service again using systemd as the launcher, whilst for others asmemcachedusing cron to launch - C2 uses DDNS (Dynamic DNS) and legitimate hacked sites to hide in noise of
“normal” traffic - using DDNS attackers would use specifically named C2
machines per target host - in one case where it was named
chrony_debugto mimic thechronydtime synchronisation service, it would connect to C2 a machine namedchronyd.tftpd.net- attackers clearly went to a lot of work to hide this in plain sight
- e.g. in one case where zabbix was running, the malware named itself
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Automatically deletes itself off the system if does not get pinged by the C2 operator after a certain period of time - and when it deletes itself it shreds itself to reduce the chance of being detected later via disk forensics etc
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Has 2 versions - a “server” and “client” - the server uses port-knocking to watching incoming connection requests on a given network interface and then only actually allowing a connection if the expected sequence of port numbers was tried - this allows the controller of the malware to connect into it without the malware actively listening on a given port and hence reduces the chance it is detected accidentally
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Client instead connects back to its specific C2 server
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Logs collected by 4RAYS team appear to show the commands executed by the malware were quite manual looking - invoking bash and then later invoking commands like systemctl to stop and replace an existing service, where the time lag between commands is in the order of seconds - minutes and so would seem like these were manually typed command rather than automatically driven by scripts
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Malware itself is implemented in Go and includes the ability to execute single commands as well as providing an interactive shell; also includes support for listing / copying / moving files including with compression; also works as a SOCKS5 proxy to allow it to proxy traffic to/from other hosts that may be behind more restrictive firewalls etc; and as detailed above the ability to mimic existing processes on the system to avoid detection
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To try and frustrate reverse engineering Gobfuscate was used to obfuscate the compiled code - odd choice though since this project was seemingly abandonded 3 years ago and nowadays garble seems to be the go-to tool for this (no pun intended)- but perhaps this is evidence of the time of the campaign since these samples were all found back in 2020 which this project was more active…
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Encrypts its configuration using AES-GCM and the config contains details like the shell to invoke, kill-switch delay and secret value to use to disable it, alternate process name to use plus the TLS certificate and keys to use when communicating with the C2 server
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Uses the yamux Go connection multiplexing library then to multiplex the single TLS connection to/from the C2 server
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Can then be instructed to perform the various actions like running commands / launching a shell / list files in a directory / reading files etc as discussed before
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Other interesting part is the kill switch / self-destruct functionality - if kill switch delay is specified in the encrypted configuration malware will automatically delete itself by invoking dd to overwrite itself with input from /dev/urandom 8 times; once more with 0 bytes and finally then removing the file from disk
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Overall 4 organisations were found to have been hacked with this and in each it was running with full admin rights - with some running for over 3 years - and various binaries show compilation dates and golang toolchain versions indicating this was developed since at least 2020
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But unlike other malware that we have covered, it does not appear to be a more widespread campaign since “other information security companies with global sensor networks” couldn’t find any similar samples in their own collections
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No clear evidence of origin - Solar 4RAYS asking for other cybersecurity companies to help contribute to their evidence to identify the attackers
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Interesting to see the evolution of malware mirrors that of normal software development - no longer using C/C++ etc but more modern languages like Go which provide exactly the sorts of functionality you want in your malware - systems-level programming functionality with built-in concurrency and memory safety - also Go binaries are statically linked so no need to worry about dependencies on the target system
