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Endpoints


WATER ORTHRUS'S NEW CAMPAIGNS DELIVER ROOTKIT AND PHISHING MODULES

Water Orthrus has been active recently with two new campaigns. CopperStealth
uses a rootkit to install malware on infected systems, while CopperPhish steals
credit card information. This blog will provide the structure of the campaign
and how they work.

By: Jaromir Horejsi, Joseph C Chen May 15, 2023 Read time: 9 min (2421 words)

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Since 2021, we have been tracking the activities of a threat actor we called
Water Orthrus, which distributed CopperStealer malware via pay-per-install (PPI)
networks. The threat actor has upgraded and modified the malware multiple times
for different purposes, such as injecting network advertisements, acquiring
personal information, and stealing cryptocurrency. We believe that they are
associated with the threat campaign reported as “Scranos” in 2019.

Figure 1. CopperStealth infection chain

In March 2023, we observed two campaigns delivering new malware that we named
CopperStealth and CopperPhish. Both malware have characteristics that are
similar to those of CopperStealer and are likely developed by the same author,
leading us to believe that these campaigns are likely Water Orthrus’ new
activities.

Figure 2. CopperPhish infection chain

This blog post discusses our analysis of CopperStealth’s and CopperPhish’s
infection chains, and how they are similar to Water Orthrus.

CopperStealth campaign

The first campaign distributed CopperStealth on March 8, 2023, delivering the
malware via installers provided on a popular Chinese software sharing website.
It disguised the malware as free software and targeted the country’s users.

CopperStealth’s infection chain involves dropping and loading a rootkit, which
later injects its payload into explorer.exe and another system process. These
payloads are responsible for downloading and running additional tasks. The
rootkit also blocks access to blocklisted registry keys and prevents certain
executables and drivers from running.

A sample of the installer (SHA-256:
8a21eae144a23fffd35f8714964ff316caaa37fe464e8bbc143f4485119b5575) was
distributed via a popular Chinese software download website. It was previously
reported to provide malicious installers for infecting malware.  The installer
contains numerous encoded URLs; when the installer is run these URLs will be
decoded and the files located at the said URLs will be downloaded and run on the
affected system. One of these files was a dropper that we identified as
CopperStealth.

CopperStealth (after decrypting the custom crypter) contains an export function
called “HelloWorld,” which has been around since earlier versions of
CopperStealer. The dropper then checks if the system architecture is 32-bit or
64-bit, which it uses as a basis to read the corresponding driver from its
resources.

Figure 3. CopperStealth’s code for selecting 32-bit or 64-bit drivers
Figure 4. CopperStealth’s resources contain two versions of the driver

It then creates and starts a new driver service, which begins when the system
starts.

Figure 5. The new driver service created by CopperStealth

Rootkit

The rootkit is registered as a file system filter driver. In the main entry
point (DriverEntry function), the driver has specific handlers for
IRP_MJ_CREATE, IRP_MJ_READ, and IRP_MJ_SHUTDOWN.

When a shutdown request is received, the rootkit driver copies itself to a newly
generated random driver. This is done with a few registry modifications, such as
changing the driver name in the HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services registry
and inserting a “PendingFileRenameOperations” registry value in
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager to automatically move the
file upon reboot.

As for IRP_MJ_READ, this monitors any attempts to read the files on filesystem.
If any attempt to read the current rootkit’s SYS file or executable file in
\windows\temp folder by one of the blocklisted processes (such as \360saf\,
\kingsoft antivirus\, \360SD\, \Windows Defender\) is detected, the driver will
result in a STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED error message, preventing access to those
files.

The rootkit then registers a registry callback routine, which is called every
time a thread performs an operation in the registry. In this case, the routine
monitors attempts to access rootkit’s registry path in
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\<drivername>. Any attempt to delete the
registry key (such as RegNtDeleteKey OR RegNtDeleteValueKey) will result in
STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED, blocking the operation.

An attempt to query the registry key (RegNtQueryKey OR RegNtQueryValueKey) while
any of the blocklisted processes (360safe.exe, 360sd.exe, QQPCTray.exe, and
kxetray.exe) is running will also result in a STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED message.

Figure 6. Rootkit’s code to block querying it’s (rootkit’s) own registry key, if
any of the blocklisted processes is running

The rootkit also sets an image load notification routine, which is called
whenever a new image (i.e., an executable/binary file, like .EXE, .DLL, and .SYS
files) is loaded into memory. If an “image” name corresponds to the hardcoded
filename (\Fix\fixMBR.exe), then a DLL library (embedded inside the driver) is
mapped and run into the newly created process. The 64-bit version of the rootkit
contains a 32-bit and a 64-bit version of the DLL library.

Figure 7. Rootkit’s code that terminates newly executed processes by injected
DLL

In either version, the injected DLL library calls ExitProcess after attaching to
the newly created process, which immediately terminates it.

Figure 8. Termination DLL exits process

If the newly loaded process is a driver, then the rootkit searches for a few
blocklisted byte sequences. If any of those are found, then the driver’s entry
point is patched to return STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED.

Figure 9. Rootkit replaces blocklisted drivers‘ entrypoints to return error code

The blocklisted drivers contain one of the following byte sequences:

 * Beijing Huorong Network Technology Co., Ltd.
 * Beijing Kingsoft Security Software Co., Ltd.
 * Beijing Qihu Technology Co., Ltd.
 * HuoRongBoRui (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd.
 * Qihoo 360 Software (Beijing) Co., Ltd.

Lastly, the rootkit starts a payload injection thread. In the samples we
analyzed, we saw two types of payloads: statistics module and task module. This
thread enumerates all running processes (SystemProcessInformation) and looks for
explorer.exe and another process with SYSTEM integrity having “assign primary
token privilege” and “increase quota privilege.” It also increments the
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\recount registry value, which holds the number of system
restarts since the machine became infected. If the restart recount value is
greater than three, the rootkit decrypts (AES cipher) and unpacks (7-Zip)
embedded statistics in the DLL module, then it patches its statistics URL
address inside the binary (placeholder starting with “cnzz_url”), and finally
injects the patched module into explorer.exe.

Figure 10. Placeholder inside the statistics module, which the rootkit replaces
with its statistics URL

After successful injection into explorer.exe, it makes a GET request to the task
URL to get the task command to be performed. Once the GET request is done by the
driver, then the response to the GET request is then inserted (a place holder
starting with “searching_magic_url”) into the task module, which, like the
statistics module, is embedded in rootkit. It must be AES-encrypted, and then
7-Zip unpacked.And then the task module is injected into the previously found
process with system integrity.

Figure 11. Placeholder inside the task module, which the rootkit replaces with a
response to the task URL

Statistics module

The statistics module is called cnzz (the largest Chinese internet statistics
analysis service), though it has nothing to do with this organization. Each time
it is run it increases the counter in HKCU\Software\Microsoft\count_a0b1c2d3. It
checks the internet connection by trying to access
hxxp://www.msftconnecttest.com/connecttest.txt, and once verified it will get
the computer’s unique machine ID and report the statistics to
hxxp://cnzz_url&m=<machine ID> then exits the module.

In some cases, cnzz_url contains keyword “tongji” (tǒng jì, 統計), which
translates to “statistics.”

Task module

The task module is called curl, even though it has nothing to do with curl
(command line tool for transferring data with URLs). The module then proceeds
with base64 decoding and DES decrypting (key=”taskhost”, IV=”winlogon”, which is
the same encryption as described in previous blog posts) of the task command.
The decrypted task is in JSON format and has the following keys:

Name Type Explanation name string File name created in TEMP directory onlyone
bool Run only once exclude360 bool Exclude machines where 360tray is running
reboot_count int The task should be run every n-th reboot of the system url
string URL with the file to download and execute

Table 1. List of implemented key names and value types in task query response
(in JSON format)

If payload is expected to run only once (with onlyone [sic] key has value =
true), then the hash of the URL is stored in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\<hash>. The
actual count of runs is taken from
HKEY_USERS\<SID>\Software\Microsoft\count_a0b1c2d3, which is set by the
statistics module.


CopperPhish campaign

In April 2023, we noticed another campaign distributing CopperPhish. This
campaign was not geofenced and delivered the malware via PPI networks behind
free anonymous file sharing websites. CopperPhish is an interesting phishing
kit, which uses two different processes for persistence: credential verification
and confirmation code to ensure that valid credentials are phished before the
phishing kits considers its job successful and exits.

CopperPhish’s infection chain starts with downloaders like PrivateLoader
(SHA-256: 48211c6f957c2ad024441be3fc32aecd7c317dfc92523b0a675c0cfec86ffdd9).
Visitors will be redirected to a download page designed by the PPI network after
clicking on its advertisements, which pretended to be a download link. The
downloaded file is PrivateLoader, which downloads and runs many different
malware.

Figure 12. The download page of the pay-per-install network redirected from file
sharing websites.

The downloader downloads and starts a new dropper we identified as CopperPhish.
It decrypts and loads the second stage. This stage is responsible for dropping
and starting the main payload. The main payload is again obfuscated with the
same crypter used by CopperStealer, and then the second stage of the main
payload drops a few files (PNG image with logo, PNG image with QR code, and HTML
page with phishing URL) into %APPDATA%\Roaming\Microsoft.

Figure 13. Dropped phishing files by CopperPhish

These files are stored in the main payload’s second stage’s resources. These
HTML pages are localized to fifty different languages. Each language has its own
HTML file, but since PNG images do not contain any text, they remain the same
for all language versions.

Figure 14. Phishing webpages in different language variants, stored in resources

The main malware then starts the two threads — the persistence thread is
responsible for starting a rundll32 process and injecting a simple program with
a browser window (written in Visual Basic) in it.

Figure 15. The thread responsible for starting processes with a web browser
window

The exit message thread connects to a named pipe and waits for a message
containing a magic string to be received. If the message is received, then the
main program uninstalls itself (and deletes all the dropped phishing files) and
exits. This indicates that the confirmation code (more on this code later)
entered by the victim was correct, which means that the phishing was successful
and it can uninstall itself.

Figure 16. Opened pipe that waits for a message to close and uninstall
CopperPhish
Figure 17. Code that uninstalls the phishing tool after receiving magic values

The web browser program loads an instance of an Internet Explorer object and
uses the web browser control class (SHDocVwCtl) to control the behavior of the
web browser object. It reads the value written by the victim of the input text
field called “checkcode” (which will be explained later). If correct, it then
sends the exit message to the main payload via the pipes mentioned earlier.

Figure 18. Exit message sent to the main payload via pipe

The phishing webpage displayed by the web browser shows the content of the
dropped page with the Microsoft logo and QR code. The window has no controls
that can be used to minimize or close it. The victim could close the browser’s
process in Task Manager or Process Explorer, but they would also need to
terminate the main payload process, otherwise the browser process will happen
again due to the persistence thread. Thus, to proceed, a confirmation code will
be asked (which was stated after Figure 15), and this code will act as proof
that the victim provided the correct details.

Figure 19. Initial phishing webpage displayed by CopperPhish

After scanning and opening the phishing URL, the victim is presented with a
webpage asking to confirm the identity.

Figure 20. Phishing webpage asking to confirm the user’s identity

A follow-up webpage asks for various sensitive details, such as the user’s
credit card number, its expiration date, and the CVV code.

Figure 21. Phishing website asking for sensitive banking details

And after entering the sensitive details and passing checks (such as a credit
card number validity check), the phishing kit displays a success message and
shows the confirmation code, which closes the browser and uninstalls the
phishing kit from the system. This is the “checkcode” mentioned previously.

Figure 22. Confirmation code displayed after credentials were successfully
phished
Figure 23. Code in the phishing webpage to validate the user’s credit card
number, expiration date, and CVV

This is a simple but interesting approach. If the phishing page is displayed in
a standard browser window or tab, the user can simply close the window or tab
and continue working. In this case, two processes are used — one for
persistence, and another for displaying the phishing window. This sort of
persistence, though simple and easy to remove, can remain and display longer,
which could annoy victims enough to force them to enter the credentials just to
get rid of the phishing window.

The credential verification and confirmation code are two useful features that
make this phishing kit more successful, as the victim cannot simply close the
window or enter fake information just to get rid of the window.

Attribution

We classify both previously mentioned campaigns to be related to previously
analyzed campaigns because of the following similarities:

 1. The use of the same crypter, which encrypts the dropper stage (described in
    our previous blog posts).
 2. The use of Data Encryption Standard (DES) with the same key (“taskhost”) and
    initialization vector (“winlogon”).
 3. The use of the same name of the DLL export function (for later versions of
    CopperStealer).
 4. The use of similar mutex naming conventions (previously: exist_sign_cps,
    exist_sign_task_Hello001, exist_sign__install_r3 now: exist_sign_redns,
    dl_exist_sign_cnzz, dl_exist_sign_sys).

Conclusion

We uncovered two new campaigns conducted by the Water Orthrus threat actor. The
actor has not only refined their malware but has also tailored their attacks for
different targets. The CopperStealth campaign, distributed to machines in China,
focuses in installing the rootkit, which later delivers additional malware.
Meanwhile, CopperPhish aims to phish credit card information and is distributed
globally. It is likely that the actor has multiple objectives at the same time.
Our findings also highlight the shift of Water Orthrus’s interests, from
personal information to cryptocurrency, and now targeting credit card
information.

A proactive approach on security can help organizations protect their devices
against these types of threats. Trend Micro Apex One™ employs a variety of
threat detection capabilities, notably behavioral analysis that protects against
malicious scripts, injection, ransomware, and memory and browser attacks related
to fileless threats. Additionally, the Apex One Endpoint Sensor provides
context-aware endpoint detection and response (EDR) that monitors events and
quickly examines what processes or events are triggering malicious activity. 

IOCs

The full list of IOCs can be found here.

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RELATED ARTICLES

 * Codex Exposed: Helping Hackers in Training?
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