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News



'OPERATION MAGALENHA' ATTACKS GIVE A WINDOW INTO BRAZIL'S CYBERCRIME ECOSYSTEM

A campaign against customers of Portuguese banks uses a capable financial
malware strain dubbed PeepingTitle, written in the Delphi programming language.
Nate Nelson
Contributing Writer, Dark Reading
May 25, 2023
Source: Lazyllama via Alamy Stock Photo
PDF


Earlier this year, threat actors carried out a campaign to steal the personal
and financial information of customers of Portuguese banks, including private
and government and institutions.



Researchers from SentinelLabs branded it "Operation Magalenha," in a report
published the morning of May 25. Magalenha is notable both for its payload,
"PeepingTitle" — a multifunctional backdoor written in the Delphi programming
language — and its scattershot approach to cyber espionage.

The researchers assessed "with high confidence" that Magalenha's perpetrators
were Brazilian, as evidenced by their use of Brazilian-style Portuguese in their
code, as well as PeepingTitle's overlaps with the Brazilian Maxtrilha malware
family.

Altogether, the campaign provides a window into the ecosystem of cybercrime in
Brazil today.



"That region is generally underreported or missed throughout the security
industry," says Tom Hegel, senior threat researcher at SentinelOne, "but there's
a lot going on. It's a very messy ecosystem of threat actors."




CYBERCRIME OPERATION MAGALENHA

Operation Magalenha was indiscriminate in its first phase, utilizing phishing
emails, malicious websites with fake app installers, and related forms of social
engineering in order to lure in targets. Infection then began when targets
unwittingly executed a malicious Visual Basic script.

The script did triple duty. On one hand, it opened login pages for Energias de
Portugal and the Portuguese Tax and Customs Authority, with the purpose of
drawing attention away from its second function: dropping a malware loader. If a
victim actually entered their Energias or Customs credentials — in the latter's
case, often government-issued credentials — the program harvested them for
future use.

Next, the malware loader would download PeepingTitle, an info-stealing backdoor
written in Delphi. Delphi is a general purpose programming language that one
rarely hears much about in cyber circles up north.



"It's funny you mention that," Hegel says, when the topic comes up. "When we
first started looking into this campaign, knowing it was linked to Brazil, we
were immediately like: It's probably Delphi." There isn't any identifiable
technical reason for Delphi's relatively localized popularity, Hegel thinks. "A
lot of it's just because of the way that education is done there, because
everyone out in that region tends to know it."

The Delphi-driven PeepingTitle works by tracking the websites a victim has
visited. If someone visited a domain belonging to a Portuguese financial
institution, the malware awakens: connecting to a C2 server, taking screenshots,
exfiltrating data, and potentially staging further malware.

In general, Hegel says, "it's on par with what you expect of a normal financial
malware. It purely focuses on being able to get this data outbound and limit
detection as much as possible."

That said, Magalenha targeted both personal and financial data from individuals
and institutions alike in the government and private sectors. "So there's more
than just your regular financial theft — there are clues to ulterior objectives
that they may be pursuing, like initial access brokering," Hegel adds.


PEEPINGTITLE: A MALWARE IN FLUX

Also notable about PeepingTitle is that it comes in two variants. But the
variants have hardly any meaningful difference between them, besides the fact
that one captured a victim's browser window, while the other captured the entire
screen. Hegel thinks "it may indicate that the attackers evolved to add second
capabilities later on, or it's just purely experimentation."

"I think this points to the fact that it's not extremely well planned out," he
adds.

Besides the alike variants, he points to other evidence of the hackers' lack of
discipline, like their experimentation with different infrastructure — swapping
American provider DigitalOcean for a more lax Russian service, TimeWeb, for
instance — and the relatively unfocused nature of their information stealing.

"If this was somebody more capable," Hegel concludes, "they might go through the
process of thinking about what they want to connect to and steal, and do it in a
single package rather than multiple packages, which increases the potential of
getting caught. Instead, there's just a lot of experimenting, a lot of playing,
and not a lot of deep, strategic planning."

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