Bankshot

The Turkish Bankshot In March 2018, McAfee reported the reappearance of the Bankshot implant, a spear-phishing campaign against Turkish financial institutions [25].

One of them is an execution in the command line (see Figure 2), where the action is basically the execution of the console command cmd.exe /c %Source% > %LogFile% 2>&1

The content repeatedly describes threat actors and malware using cmd.exe, the Windows command shell, to execute commands, launch payloads, run batch files, and automate actions on compromised hosts.

The content is a MITRE ATT&CK-style listing of many malware families and threat groups using Windows/native OS APIs for execution, injection, discovery, anti-debugging, and other actions, ending with 'NtCreateProcess' and 'fork()'.

ADVSTORESHELL is capable of setting and deleting Registry values. Agent Tesla can achieve persistence by modifying Registry key entries. APT41 used a malware variant called GOODLUCK to modify the registry in order to steal credentials.

There are several static features that vary between the instances: dynamic Windows API resolution and the obfuscation of procedure and library names... the use of commercial packers, etc.

Dynamic resolution of Windows APIs ... The technique is very typical and has already been described [2, p.59].

This is achieved by sending the bot’s client-server traffic as a part of a fake TLS packet that mimics the TLS protocol and seemingly initiates a legitimate connection.

Many examples describe post-intrusion cleanup, anti-forensics, and removal of artifacts such as logs, scripts, malware components, scheduled tasks, registry keys, and temporary files.

The content repeatedly describes malware and threat actors deleting files, directories, droppers, logs, scripts, temporary files, exfiltrated archives, and uninstalling themselves to cover tracks or reduce forensic artifacts.

APT28 has performed timestomping on victim files. APT29 has used timestomping to alter the Standard Information timestamps on their web shells to match other files in the same directory. APT32 has used scheduled task raw XML with a backdated timestamp... APT38 has modified data timestamps to mimic files that are in the same folder on a compromised host.

The content is a long ATT&CK-style listing of malware and threat groups that 'decrypt', 'decode', 'deobfuscate', 'unpack', or 'decompress' payloads, strings, configuration data, shellcode, and files prior to execution or use.

ADVSTORESHELL is capable of setting and deleting Registry values. Agent Tesla can achieve persistence by modifying Registry key entries. APT41 used a malware variant called GOODLUCK to modify the registry in order to steal credentials.

The content repeatedly describes malware and threat actors querying, enumerating, opening, and reading Windows Registry keys and values, e.g., "APT41 queried registry values to determine items such as configured RDP ports and network configurations" and "Reg may be used to gather details from the Windows Registry of a local or remote system at the command-line interface."

Tasklist can be used to discover processes running on a system. Numerous malware families and threat groups are described as listing running processes, collecting PIDs, checking for specific process names, or enumerating loaded modules.

The content repeatedly describes malware and threat actors collecting OS version, computer name, architecture, CPU, memory, disk, language, and other host details; examples include use of commands such as ver, systeminfo, hostname, uname -m, sw_vers -productVersion, and fsutil.

The content is a long ATT&CK-style listing of groups and malware that can 'list files and directories,' 'search for files,' 'enumerate drives,' 'gather file metadata,' or 'browse file systems' on compromised hosts.

AdFind can enumerate domain users. APT41 used built-in net commands to enumerate domain administrator users. BloodHound can collect information about domain users, including identification of domain admin accounts.

Numerous entries mention enumerating drives, logical disks, disk type, free space, or volume information; examples include 'Babuk can enumerate disk volumes,' 'Cuba can enumerate local drives,' and 'TAINTEDSCRIBE can use DriveList to retrieve drive information.'

Andariel has collected large numbers of files from compromised network systems for later extraction... APT28 has retrieved internal documents from machines inside victim environments... BADNEWS crawls the victim's local drives and collects documents... many listed groups and malware collect files, documents, credentials, payment card data, or other information from compromised hosts.

Agrius used a custom tool, sql.net4.exe, to query SQL databases and then identify and extract personally identifiable information... AppleSeed has automatically collected data from USB drives, keystrokes, and screen images before exfiltration... Ember Bear engages in mass collection from compromised systems during intrusions.

This is achieved by sending the bot’s client-server traffic as a part of a fake TLS packet that mimics the TLS protocol and seemingly initiates a legitimate connection.

The content is a long ATT&CK-style listing showing numerous malware families and threat groups that 'use HTTP,' 'use HTTPS,' 'HTTP POST requests,' 'HTTP GET requests,' or 'HTTP/S' for command and control communications.

The content repeatedly describes malware and threat actors that can "download files from C2," "download additional payloads," "upload and download files," "retrieve payloads from the C2 server," and "copy files to remote machines."

Adversaries may encode data with a non-standard data encoding system to make the content of command and control traffic more difficult to detect. Command and control (C2) information can be encoded using a non-standard data encoding system that diverges from existing protocol specifications.

ADVSTORESHELL exfiltrates data over the same channel used for C2.

ComRAT has modified Registry values to store encrypted orchestrator code and payloads ... QakBot can modify the Registry to store its configuration information ... Volgmer modifies the Registry to store an encoded configuration file ...