Re: Tracking Attacker Email Infrastructure
Nic Fillingham: Hello, and welcome to Security Unlocked, a new podcast from Microsoft where we unlock insights from the latest in news and research from across Microsoft security engineering and operations teams. I'm Nic Fillingham.
Natalia Godyla: And I'm Natalia Godyla. In each episode, we'll discuss the latest stories from Microsoft security, deep dive into the newest threat intel, research, and data science.
Nic Fillingham: And profile some of the fascinating people working on artificial intelligence in Microsoft security.
Natalia Godyla: And now, let's unlock the pod.
Nic Fillingham: Hello, Natalia. Welcome to episode 19 of Security Unlocked. How are you?
Natalia Godyla: I'm doing great. I'm excited to highlight another woman in our series for Woman's History month, so this'll be number two. And I'm excited to talk about email infrastructures.
Nic Fillingham: Yes, I am too. Email, we use it every day. We probably use it more than we, we want. We love it. We can't live without it. What's your first memory of email? What was your first email address?
Natalia Godyla: I was an AOL-er. First email was glassesgirl2002@AOL.com. I'm super proud of that one.
Nic Fillingham: What's the reference to 2002?
Natalia Godyla: I'm pretty sure that's when I got my first pair of glasses (laughs).
Nic Fillingham: Ah. And you-
Natalia Godyla: I was very excited. I threw a cupcake party.
Nic Fillingham: Oh, wow.
Natalia Godyla: (laughs)
Nic Fillingham: So I'm, I'm pretty old. It was sort, sort of the mid 90s, and I remember like, hitting websites where it asked for an email address, and I'm like, what is an email address?
Natalia Godyla: (laughs)
Nic Fillingham: I probably used the internet the best part of, you know, six months before someone explained it to me. And I worked out how to get a Hotmail address, which is called Hotmail because it was actually based on the, the acronym H-T-M-L, and they just put a couple other letters in there to expand it out to say Hotmail. And I remember being, thinking like I was the bees knees, because I was nicf12@hotmail.com.
Natalia Godyla: (laughs)
Nic Fillingham: We should have asked our guest Elif Kaya, who you're about to hear from, about her first email address, but we didn't. Instead, we talked about a blog that she helped co-author, uh, that was published beginning of February called, "What Tracking and Attacker email infrastructure tells us about persistent cyber criminal operations." It's a fascinating conversation, and Elif walks us through all of the research that she did here where we learn about attacker email infrastructure and how it's used and created and managed.
Nic Fillingham: There's a bunch of acronyms you're going to hear. The first one, DGA, domain generation algorithm. You're going to hear StrangeU and RandomU, which are sort of collections of these automatically created domains. And if you sort of want to learn a bit more about them, it's obviously in the blog post as well.
Natalia Godyla: Yes, and in addition to that, you'll hear reference to Dridex. So, as the RandomU and StrangeU infrastructure was emerging, it was parallel to the disruption of the Netcurs botnet, and those same malware operators who were running the botnet were also using malware like Dridex. And Dridex is a type of malware that utilizes macros to deliver the malware. And with that, on with the pod.
Nic Fillingham: On with the pod.
Nic Fillingham: Elif Kaya, welcome to the Security Unlocked podcast. Thank you for joining us.
Elif Kaya: It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Nic Fillingham: Now, you were part of the. uh, team that authored a blog post on February 1st, 2021. The blog post is "What tracking and attacker email infrastructure tells us about persistent cyber criminal operations." Loved this blog post. I've had so many questions over the years about how these malware campaigns work. What's happening behind the scenes? Where are all the, the infrastructure elements? How are they used? And this blog helped answer so much and sort of joined dots.
Nic Fillingham: If you are listening to the podcast here and you're not sure what we're talking about, head to the Microsoft security blog. It is a post from Feb 1st. But Elif, could you sort of give us an overview? What was discussed in this blog post? What was sort of the key take away? What was the research that you conducted?
Elif Kaya: Sure. So uh, I'm part of a, a email research and threat intelligence team, uh, that supports the defender product suite at Microsoft, and what we primarily focus on is tracking email campaigns and email trends over a long period of time and documenting those. So, this blog post kind of came along series of documentation, which we started to bubble up these trends in infrastructure, which is one of my focus areas, starting back in March and running uh, all through the end of the year, where a large series of disparate email campaigns, kind of stretching from very commodity malware that is available for like 15, 20 dollars, to things associated with big name actors, and et cetera, were being delivered with very similar characteristics, despite on the surface the malware being very different, the outcomes being very different, or the cost of the malware targets being very different.
Elif Kaya: And so, we were able to see within each of these individual campaigns that the infrastructure supporting the email delivery was a consistent theme. So, it starts with when these domains that were used as email addresses to send these from, uh, started being registered to the current day and kind of what campaigns they helped facilitate, when they were registered, and et cetera. So, when people usually talk about infrastructure that supports malware, a lot of the terms get used overlapping. So, when people refer to infrastructure, they generally are referring to the see to addresses, call back addresses that the attacker that owns the malware owns.
Elif Kaya: But what we've been seeing much more frequently, and what we wanted to explain with the blog post, is that in really concrete ways like you said with actual examples, is that the malware and cyber crime infrastructure is very modular. And so, when we say infrastructure we could mean who's sending the emails from their servers, who's hosting the email addresses, who's posting the phish kits, who's hosting the delivery pages that deliver the malware, and who's writing the malware. And then later, who's delivering the ransomware.
Elif Kaya: And so these could, in any particular campaign or any particular incident that a sock is looking at, be entirely different people. And so, the reason we wanted to do this blog and detail kind of what we did here and go through each of the cam- malware campaigns that was delivered, was to kind of show like, if you're only focusing on each malware campaign, the next one's going to be right cued up and use all the same infrastructure to deliver maybe something maybe more evasive that, that you'll have to get on top of.
Elif Kaya: And so, by doing this tracking you can kind of up level it once more, and instead of spending all you time trying to evade one particular malware strain that's going through constant development, you could put a higher focus at stopping kind of the delivery itself, which, we actually detail through the blog, was very consistent over nine months or so, but had a lot less attention focused on it.
Elif Kaya: So, some of the cases that we discuss in the blog are cases like Makop, which was used very heavily, and in especially South Korea, all throughout April and all throughout the spring, and is still pretty prevalent in terms of direct delivery ransomware in that region. It's usually delivered through other means, but what we saw and what we theorized is that whenever the standard delivery mechanisms for those malware are interrupted, they'll kind of sample other infrastructure delivery providers, which is what we describe as StrangeU and RandomU in the blog.
Elif Kaya: We use the term StrangeU and RandomU to differentiate two sets of DGA, or domain generation algorithm domain structures that we saw. StrangeU always uses the word strange. Not always, but nearly about 95% of the time. And Random U, couldn't find a better name, but it's just a standard random DGA algorithm, where it's just a bunch of letters and characters. We don't really have a fancy name to give it, but we were able to kind of coalesce around what that was internally, and track the domains as they were registered there. And then, shortly after they would be registered, they would start sending mail from those domains.
Nic Fillingham: Elif, were you and the team surprised by how much interconnected overlap, agility, and sharing, for one of a better term, they were across these different groups and campaigns and techniques? Were you expecting to see lots of disconnected siloed activities, techniques, groups, et cetera, et cetera? Or were you expecting this amount of overlap, which we'll get to when we sort of explain the, the stuff in the blog?
Elif Kaya: So, I think it was less that it was a bit of a surprise, and more that we don't often get a pristine example like this. Frequently, when we look at the connected infrastructure, they don't use domains necessarily. They'll use the botnet itself and IP addresses for delivery or other things. So, when we came across this one, we do normally handle and really do a deep dive in individual incidents and cases, so this was a little bit more of a unique example of like, hey, there's really clear patterns here. What can we learn by tracking it over a long period of time, in ways that other metrics are a little harder to track?
Elif Kaya: But yeah, I, I would say that in general, most email campaigns and phishing campaigns, malware campaigns that you kind of run across, they are gonna have these threads of interconnectivity. They're just going to be at different levels. So, whether that's going to be a level that is kind of more visible for uh, blue teams like the email addresses, the domains themselves, or whether that's going to be something more femoral like IP addresses and hosting providers, or whether that's going to be something that's proxy even more so, like a cluster of compromised domains, similar to, to, you know, what Emotet uses, uh, or use to use, collected in a botnet that has a different way of clustering itself.
Elif Kaya: And so for these, we were able to just kind of have something that bubbled to the top and made it easy to connect the dots, as well as other items in the header in the malware that we were able to identify. But I think through tracking this, we were able to kind of reaffirm and make a good piece of public example for blue teams that this is a very common method. This is a very common modular technique,
Elif Kaya: ... And it's very simple for attackers to stand this kind of thing up and offer their services to other places. And that's part of why we reference the Necurs botnet as well. Dridex makes a big appearance in the StrangeU and RandomU deliveries, especially later on in our tracking of them, and Dridex is also a prominent, um, delivery from a lot of other of these types of delivery botnets that have happened in the future, whether that's CutWail or, uh, Necurs or other, um, botnets like that. So it, it's very common but it's sometimes very hard to kind of keying in on all of the distinct components of it and evaluate like, is it worth it in this instance to key in on it, um, when our main goal is like, what is the most effective thing we can do to stop the deliveries?
Natalia Godyla: I'd love to talk a little bit about the history that was described in the blog for the service infrastructure. So from what I understand, the Necurs takedown created a gap in the market where StrangeU and RandomU were able to step in and provide that in- necessary infrastructure. So why was that the replacement? Was there any connection there? And as a second part to that question, what does the evolution of these infrastructures look like? How are they accessible to operators that want to leverage them?
Elif Kaya: Right. So in this one I can delve a little more into kind of just intuition and, and doing that, because my full-time role is not specifically to, you know, track all the, all the delivery botnets there are and active. The reason that we made the connection to Necurs wasn't because there was an actual connection in terms of affirming this is filling the same role that it was, or this is filling a hole. Because we don't have necessarily a clear picture of every delivery botnet there is. Because the timeframe was very close and because we were able to see shortly after, uh, StrangeU and RandomU started delivering, they initially only had pickup from commodity malware that we could find. So very cheap malware for the first few months of their delivery, such as Makop. Uh, we saw some Agent Tesla, we saw some Diamond Fox.
Elif Kaya: But as it progressed on, it started picking up the bigger names like Dridex and doing larger campaigns that were more impactful as well. And so by the time that Necurs had ended, we had also seen them doing a lot of those bigger name malwares as well. And so the reason why we tried to make that comparison was largely to show that something very simple and kind of perhaps much less sophisticated and lasting for a lot less length of time as Necurs in the environment can get customers quickly. And so while we didn't do a deep dive into any of the amount of like, how is it being advertised, how are they getting the customers, what we wanted to show is that regardless of what methods they're using to get the customers, they're able to get-
Elif Kaya: Basically the, the amount of research that was done for Necurs was much more in depth than the amount of research that was necessarily done here. And it was also done from a different angle, that angle was much more operator focused and our angle was much more, what was delivered, what was the impact, what were the trends between all of the different mails? And so we're mostly trying to just position it as, this fulfilled a similar, uh, outcome and got a lot of coverage of something that was very big, lasted for a very long time, many years, and something where somebody just started registering some domains, setting up some mail servers, was able to kind of get off the ground and running in just a few months for relatively low cost.
Nic Fillingham: So El, if we normally start with an introduction or, or I, I got so excited about this topic that I jumped straight into my first question and I didn't give you an opportunity to introduce yourself. And I wondered, could you do that for us? I know you're, I believe you're a threat analyst or a threat hunter, is that correct?
Elif Kaya: Yeah, so I'm currently a threat analyst, and you've actually had other people, I think, from my team on here already before. But yeah, I, I'm a threat analyst at Microsoft. I've been on this particular team for about a year now, specifically focusing in email threats, web threats, and I do have especially some focus in infrastructure tracking and domain, uh, generation algorithms in general and trying to make sure that our emails and campaigns that we're tracking are properly scoped and that we're able to kind of extract as many TTPs as we can from them.
Elif Kaya: And so the role of our team and the role of myself in particular on the team is, when we do these individualized campaigns we look for the IOCs and things like that in it. We scope it, but what we're really looking for is, um, the trends of what's happening so that we can kind of try and pinpoint and escalate to the other teams internally the most impactful changes we could make to the product, or the most impactful changes we could recommend that customers do, if it's something that we don't have a product for or we don't have a protection for, in order to protect against the campaign. And so in this particular instance with this infrastructure, our goal here was to kind of really reiterate to customers that despite all this complexity, the spaghetti-like nature of this, at the end of the day all these different campaigns used kind of a lot of the same both delivery to deliver the email, but the Word documents that they delivered were also very similar.
Elif Kaya: There, there were a lot of configurations that can be made on the endpoint to kind of really nullify a lot of these campaigns despite what we were able to see and some really evasive techniques that they were developing, the malware operators, over the time.
Nic Fillingham: Yeah, I, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how the research was actually conducted. A lot of these domains were not hosted by Microsoft infrastructure, as I, as I understand it. I think you sort of cover that a little bit in the blog. So how do you as a, in, you know, in your role, how do you go about conducting this research? Are you setting up honey pots to try and, uh, receive some of these, these emails and just sort of be a part of the campaign, and then you, you conduct your analysis from there? What, how do you go about, uh, performing this research?
Elif Kaya: So the bulk of the research I think is performed with various, like some of it is honey pots and some of it's that. A lot of the research that is covered in the blog after we, uh, analyze the malware campaigns, which is a service we offer through, um, MTE, which I think there have been people from MTE that have come on as well, as well as analysis that we do, again, based on, uh, the malware samples that we receive and the email samples that we receive from reports, from externally as well as from open source intelligence. A lot of the domain research here, though, is actually done from, uh, open information. So any domain registrations that there are, the registration fingerprint, as I like to call it, which is all the metadata related to the registration, is publicly available. And so we collect a lot of that information and search it internally.
Elif Kaya: And this is always something that I like to advise and encourage blue teams at any particular organization, you know, if they have a little bit of extra funding, to try and invest in as well. Because it's definitely, even though it's free and publicly available, you're generally gonna have to get a subscription or set up some kind of collection order to query the "who is" databases and the passive DNS databases that you'll need in order to do some of these pivots. But it kind of starts with finding the malware campaigns and then finding the emails, and then pivoting up towards everything else we can do. And once you have kind of a net of what you're looking for, sender domains and et cetera, you can then kind of go backwards and say, "Okay, now show, show me all the malware campaigns that we have investigated that, that have these components to them. Show me all the phishing campaigns that have these components to them."
Elif Kaya: And so it's kind of going up and then going back down, but all clustered around that registration data and that domain data. Uh, because whether an attacker decides to use IP addresses or whether they decide to do domains, there's usually always some component of their campaign that they have to use attacker-owned infrastructure for, if that makes sense. We see a lot and it's very common for attackers to u- use compromised infrastructure, so WordPress sites, things like that, to host a lot of their architecture. But especially for things like C2s for mail delivery and other things, they're gonna want some resilient infrastructure that they'll own themselves. And so at what point in the chain they decide to do that is usually an opportunity for us to be able to see if there's any OPSEC errors on their part, and also see if they've conducted other campaigns with that same infrastructure. Yeah, and so differate- differentiating between attacker-owned infrastructure and compromised infrastructure is an additional critical component.
Natalia Godyla: Now I'm trying to decide which question to go forward with. Can you describe the distinction between those two?
Elif Kaya: Right. So attacker-owned infrastructure would be something the attacker sets up themselves. So they have to think of the, and populate the data in the domain address and the registration and the tenant themselves. So this encompasses both when attackers use free trial subscriptions for cloud services, it's whenever they go log into Namecheap and they register their own domains, as well as when they have dedicated IP hosting or bulk group hosting as well that they have decided like, "For this portion of my campaign," whether that's command and control, whether that's delivery or et cetera, "I need to make sure that I'm in control of this." We have seen examples where compromised infrastructure, which is the reverse of that where especially small businesses, parked domains, and other insecure WordPress sites, sites that have other types of vulnerabilities, will be compromised and used to, again, do any, any component of that kill chain, whether that's sending mails, hosting the malware, and will be used to do those things as well.
Elif Kaya: So compromised infrastructure is when the attacker will utilize someone else. The benefit for attackers is it's definitely a lot harder for defenders to identify or take action against that, especially because they don't know how long it'll be compromised for, if it'll ever not be compromised, if the attacker's only leasing access to the compromised domain through a, a kind of, uh, cyber crime as a service provider or not. It becomes harder for the defenders to defend against and detect, because it has less points of contact and familiarity with other compromised domain. If somebody compromises a blog about kittens and a blog about race cars, it's gonna be pretty hard for a lot of things to pick up exactly what's similar about them, because some
Elif Kaya: ... other human worlds apart has made the whole blog but if one attacker has-
Nic Fillingham: Probably Natalia Godyla
Elif Kaya: ... made five to 15 different sites in a day. (laughs) Yeah, it's a, it's going to have a lot more in common. But the downside of compromised domains for attackers is a, they often have to lease them from the people that initially compromise them and c, those compromised domains could become uncompromised, they have to now maintain access to something they didn't make. And we did also see that with OMO Tech, over the summer when it had come back after being quiet for very long, and people had replaced their payloads on compromised sites with, uh, I think chips with CAATs, something like that. We're back to CAATs.
Nic Fillingham: You're speaking our language here, like we're, we're, we're on the edge of our seat, you said CAAT like twice in like a minute.
Natalia Godyla: (laughs)
Elif Kaya: But when an attacker comprises a lot of their infrastructure on compromised infrastructure, other attackers could compromise it, defenders could compromise it, anyone can kind of... They have to now protect it, whereas if they made it from nowhere and no one owned it, except for them, it's kind of a lot easier for them to just hang out. Because then the kind of only person that's looking out for them a lot of the time, is if somebody is connecting the dots on the infrastructure or the hosting providers, like I think the ones that we cover here is like, IronNet, Namecheap, et cetera, if they're looking out for somebody hosting on their, their infrastructure. But if somebody is just sitting there, they're just being quiet, they're just sending mail, nobody's going to notice that they're compromised probably. Whereas if you're a small business owner and your site ends up on a block list, you're going to go start asking questions, you're going to start trying to get that fixed or take your site down.
Nic Fillingham: Elif, I'd love to come back to what you talked about with the way that you conducted this research and you, you, you said that getting subscriptions to Huawei Services and DNS records, this is all public record. But there is still some tools required to pass through that information and, and create the pivots. We were talking offline, before we started recording, I'll paraphrase here and please correct me, that you didn't utilize really machine learning as a tool to discover this techniques. Is that, is that correct? Can you talk more about what techniques you did use and didn't use and why something like machine learning or unsupervised learning was not either necessary in this space or wasn't necessary to discover these techniques?
Elif Kaya: Yeah, I mean, I could talk to the, the techniques that I used and well, I can't say explicitly like why machine learning would or would not be helpful here because I'm not an expert on machine learning. I think in the different campaigns that I've worked on in my career in security, whether it's this one or before I came to Microsoft, I did some more independent research on a large set of Chrome extensions that were also connected by various, uh, commonalities to get those taken down. A lot of this research that can be pretty impactful and pretty widespread doesn't require ML in order to parse and to navigate. And I think part of the reason that ML is a bit unsuited for this at the moment, is because there hasn't been as much manually focused research. And there's been a lot of research done by independent researchers and people in the security community but I have seen a lot less focus in terms of data from tech companies in doing and making publicly available some of this infrastructure surrounded research.
Elif Kaya: And so what I mean by that is that a lot of security companies focus a lot on the actor name. They focus a lot on the reverse engineering of the malware and those are critical components. In part because that's what the products that they're sometimes selling is AV Surfaces and things like that and that's the point in time that they are protecting against the threat. But when it comes to the infrastructure, companies that would be the most positioned to protect against that threat or have products to protect against that threat, aren't necessarily doing the manual body of research currently necessary I think, in order to guide ML to kind of identify this work. And so right now to say, " Oh, would this be something that ML would be suited to step in?"
Elif Kaya: And I think that it could in the future be suited to step in slightly but I also think that the way that this works, is currently operating at a level that actually does benefit from, from manual analysis at this time. In part, because it, it doesn't actually take tools that are generally above or beyond what is in a lot of analyst tool set with basic scripting and things like that. Because right now there has been such a non focus from security companies and blue teams, I think on infrastructure and infrastructure commonalities and the way that these campaigns are so modular that, for lack of a better word, there's not a lot of sophistication in it. Most of the sophistication we see in these campaigns are designed to evade automated technology. They're designed to evade ML. They're designed to evade phish filters. They're not really designed to evade humans looking at them, because I think you and me looking at those strange new domains, like you can look at a cluster of them and be like, "These aren't real sites, they're not real."
Natalia Godyla: (laughs)
Nic Fillingham: Yeah. I'm not, I'm not going to visit a website called, I'm gonna pick one up here like, eninaquilio.u... Maybe I would actually, that, that looks really cool. (laughs) Okay, gonesa.usastethkent, it's got like no vowels, like he replies strange secure world.
Elif Kaya: And so we don't actually see a lot of, I guess, advancement in that space from attackers. A lot of the advancement is there in different parts that aren't necessarily bubbled up, but it's happening in the malware itself, in order to evade AV in order to not get alerts that fire on them. It's not necessarily happening to use something other than a macro or send from something other than an obvious phishing email or if obvious phishing source. And a lot of times, uh, one part that's one of my favorite part is these, these registrations frequently use the, .us domain. Many top level domains actually prohibit different parts of obfuscation for the registration record. And so when you register a domain, obviously the attacker kind of doesn't want to use real data, it's not the real name. But they'll use like memes and other things in the registration information, because it's fake data but then you can go and pivot and find where they've used the same meme before. And so-
Nic Fillingham: Look for old domains registered by Rick Astley.
Natalia Godyla: (laughs)
Elif Kaya: Yeah, I think there was one-
Nic Fillingham: You might be too young for that, me and my friend-
Elif Kaya: There was, there was one that I think was used, I forget for which one of these malware campaigns where a lot of the registrations were actually happening under a registered email, that was something like, hiIhateantiviruspleaseleavemealone@gamer.com or something (laughs)or like, youcan'ttakethisdown.com. And I was like-
Nic Fillingham: Try me.
Natalia Godyla: Challenge accepted.
Nic Fillingham: It's like a big red, a big red arrow pointing at them.
Elif Kaya: What is happening in the infrastructure space for a lot of these things is happening pretty rapidly, it's happening at pretty low costs. And it's also happening and looking a lot different and is in a way a lot less glamorous, than a lot of the reverse engineering that is necessarily done but it's very critical. Or the more nation state tracking that is, uh, very popular when or companies are selling threat intelligence products to customers. But when it comes to like security, kind of in a sock, a lot of put is going to get through the doors, regular phishing emails.
Natalia Godyla: So if the campaigns are targeting the automation that's built in, like you said, the phishing filters, what should organizations be doing to protect themselves? What solution should they have in place, processes?
Elif Kaya: So some of the big things that I remember from these particular campaigns, um, is if you are rolling any kind of mail protection service or mail service in general, please periodically check your allow lists. The allow lists will frequently have entire IP ranges, entire domain ranges and so even domains like these ones that are very randomized and they're strange and you've never received an email before in your life. Sometimes the configurations of your allow lists for emails can completely cause the mails to bypass other filters. So definitely whether you're running Microsoft for your mail protection or not, please periodically check your allow lists and your filters and kind of have a good understanding of like, do I have any instances where phishing or malware would bypass other protections? Have I set that up? So that's one thing that I think does cut down a lot on some of these, making it to inboxes.
Elif Kaya: And other as we... And part of the reason why we highlighted at each of the malware campaigns involved here is, uh, the suite of... I always forget the acronym, ASR rules, advanced security rules or configurations that Microsoft offers for office in particular for macro executions and malicious office executions, routinely outside of this blog and other, it's still office word documents, it's still Office Excel documents, it's still macro buttons. And so re-evaluating your controls there and your protections there, especially looking at some of the automatic configurations that we have available now to just turn on, that is going to help there a lot as well. I think are the two biggest like controls that I would recommend people for these kind of items, is checking kind of your allow lists pretty periodically and what your filtering policies are. And checking your, specifically, if you are using Office 365 internally, whether you have configurations set up to not necessarily even just restrict but there are more granular configurations now that you can set up to specifically restrict DLL and other execution from office macros as well.
Nic Fillingham: Elif, in the section of the blog where it talks about the dry decks campaigns big and small June to July and beyond. It reads here, that it feels like you uncovered a section of sort of experimentation and testing of sort of new techniques. There's references to Shakespeare, there's something I've never heard of called, VBA stomping. Can you talk a little bit about what kinds of experimentation and creativity that you stumbled upon as part of this research? First of all, and what is VBA stomping?
Elif Kaya: Uh, so VBA stomping, I think we might've actually met VBA purging in the blog. I'm trying to remember
Elif Kaya: ...whether, I think it might've been VBA purging, but surprisingly VBA stomping and purging are separate, but they fulfill the same kind of function, which is to try and make that macro, that like spicy button that everybody wants to press a little harder for malware detection engines to detect. So VBA stomping and purging both operate a little bit differently, but their main goal is to kind of obfuscate the initial VBA code from the actual amount malicious code in general. So that when antivirus engines try and examine it, they're going to see all that Shakespeare text and they're not going to see the malware. And as for the Shakespeare text, (Laughs) it's actually still on virus total. I think if people go and check for any of the files that reach out to the bethermium.com and DFIR, the blog did a great writeup called I believe "Tried X toward dominance" which actually covers in their sandbox what happened after they ran this doc. Which was eventually moved to a PowerShell empire attempts within their sandbox.
Elif Kaya: But yeah, as far as I can tell from the Shakespeare use for this, it's actually not the first time that poetry (Laughs) and kind of Shakespeare has been used to obfuscate malware. There have been other rats in the past that have used this. Uh, we couldn't find any similarity like this, this was not those. But oddly enough, there is occasionally every now and then poetry or Shakespeare, other things that is used as obfuscation techniques to kind of pat out documents. And in this case, what we actually found is every iteration of the word document that we could find, had all of the functions and pretty much all the code within the document was replaced by different random lines.
Elif Kaya: So there wasn't actually any contiguous lines within it. So if you looked at two docs, one might have some lines from Hamlet, one might have some lines from some other kind of literature document as well. But I imagine that it was more so just additional stuff to make it. If you're looking for a function in this document, it's gonna look different in this one. If I had to guess, I would say it's probably something similar to an actual defensive technique that we, we being, I guess, myself-
Nic Fillingham: (Laughs)
Elif Kaya: ...had a few talks on conferences before called I believe Polyverse the company, um, coined the term, but Poly scripting where you use each iteration of something is gonna have a different function name and a different code. But it's all internally, um, it's all going to, the interpreter is going to still interpret it, even though it's random text from externally. In order to help protect against in the case of polyverse and polyscripting, protect WordPress sites from easy exploit. But in the case of the Shakespeare document, probably to prevent against easy YARA rules and things to detect their code, don't click the spicy button. (Laughs)
Nic Fillingham: Elif. What do we know about these domains that have all been identified? The StrangeYou, the RandomYou, are, they still active? Have they been shut down? Do they get sent back to the DNS registrar? What's the process? What does it look like?
Elif Kaya: So we have made sure that at least on our end, and turn to our products, that these domains and any new iterations of them, of these particular strains that we identify are blocked, as well as the malware we cover in the report. Those are within our products. As for the domains, because they're not hosted on Microsoft infrastructure, we kind of report them and that's, that's about as much as we can do in terms of their activity. I have no doubt that the operators behind this, will probably just create a new strain, but is also not necessarily set in stone, that the operators behind RandomYou and StrangeYou are the same operators. It could be that they are just operating in a similar kind of space and time to fulfill similar functions.
Elif Kaya: There was a few campaigns where they both sent the same campaign, which lends a bit of credence to them potentially being at least similarly operated, but nothing concrete. So it is very highly likely that, that they'll just continue to operate under new strains. Uh, and probably the next strain that they'll have will either be more of these, uh, or they'll create a new one. And by a new one, I mean, instead of the word strange, maybe they'll use the word. I don't know, doc.
Nic Fillingham: How about cat?
Elif Kaya: Could be cat.
Nic Fillingham: Or has that been exhausted.
Elif Kaya: It could be cat. We haven't exhausted the number of cat domains that there could be.
Nic Fillingham: So it sounds like, uh, you know, one of the things you said in the blog, and I think you mentioned it earlier that paying attention to infrastructure can actually allow uh, Defenders, SOCs, Blue teams to get ahead of a new campaign if a campaign is leveraging existing infrastructure. And so is that the takeaway from this blog post for those folks listening to the podcast right now and reading the blog, is your one sentence takeaway here, like pay attention to infrastructure? Don't forget about the infrastructure? Is that, is that sort of what you'd like folks to come away with?
Elif Kaya: Yeah, I absolutely. And that's kind of my secret wish with the blog and my secret wish with most of the work that I do, is that it'll make Defenders and Blue teams focus less on the glamor and less on the kind of actor attribution and more on what is working right now. What do I need in my environment? What do I not need environment, my environment? And one of the key points I'll hone in on in order to kind of demonstrate that is these .us domains .us is a, a t- top level domain frequently used, uh, maliciously, but it's also frequently used for reasonable good purposes. What some of our tracking internally does and tracking that I've done before I went to Microsoft, is that attackers have trends of top level domains that they prefer to use from month to month. Certain malware strains, like using some top level domains, other, over others for a variety of reasons.
Elif Kaya: But if you are running SOC and you were running Blue team get kind of creative about how you can take different steps to either monitor track or block infrastructure that is unnecessary to your organization. Not to impede or cause any kind of interference from productivity, but to kind of keep an eye on attacks and trends that you don't know about yet. For example, .su domains or .icu domains, uh, you might not have almost any benign presence for that in your environment. And so you might want to create custom alerts or custom rules to say like, "Hey, if I see this, maybe this could be the next malware campaign that Microsoft or somebody else hasn't written about but I'm a target of." And so kind of get creative about that, uh, especially if you have those kinds of capabilities within your network to filter on a mail comes in or mail comes out.
Natalia Godyla: So just stepping away from the block for a minute, what about yourself personally speaking, what are you most passionate about in your work right now? What are you looking to achieve? What is your big goal I guess?
Elif Kaya: So for myself and the reason that I, I'm still kind of in this field and at Microsoft doing the job that I'm doing right now is, I, I would really like to use these kinds of examples to bubble up what Blue teams that have less funding that are less glamorous and individual people can use in order to find threats. So I really want to try and shift the focus away from big groups or big actors or attribution and more towards what I consider the end goal for security. For me, which is how can I stop people from getting impacted. And so for myself and my own passions and interests insecurity outside of just what I do for work, I'm very focused in web security and browser security, I think there is a big gap that a lot of people focused as well as consumer security.
Elif Kaya: A lot of these issues that we consistently pop up over and over again, kind of happen in part because of a lack of focus in consumer security. And by consumer, I kind of mean individual non corporations or small corporations. And so kind of the lack of focus in that and leaves a lot of people with the knowledge, but without the tools and resources easily available in order to kind of set themselves up for success. That's kind of a state of compromised websites that are used for botnets and et cetera. Right now, as well as, you know, privacy and security issues that individual users face in their regular day-to-day life with browser extensions and et cetera, where a lot of times browser extension research and browser research in general might get deprioritized due to its focus on individual consumer privacy versus things like malware, which focus a lot of the time on enterprise.
Elif Kaya: But at least from my perspective, I'm very passionate about malvertising and, and the ways the advertising and web security and email security kind of coalesce around using a lot of the success that they have on individual people in order to leverage those attacks against bigger corporations later. That's where I like to focus a lot of my energy and research.
Nic Fillingham: Uh, Elif Kaya, thank you so much for your time and thank you for, uh, contributing this great blog posts and helping us wrap our heads around email infrastructure.
Elif Kaya: Thanks for having me.
Natalia Godyla: Well, we had a great time unlocking insights into security from research to artificial intelligence. Keep an eye out for our next episode.
Elif Kaya: And don't forget to tweet us at msftsecurity or email us at securityunlocked@microsoft.com with topics you'd like to hear on a future episode. Until then stay safe.
Natalia Godyla: Stay secure.
