Today, the FBI and DOJ announced an operation to dismantle Qakbot infrastructure:
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/fbi-partners-dismantle-qakbot-infrastructure-in-multinational-cyber-takedown
https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/qakbot-malware-disrupted-international-cyber-takedown
Let's take a look at a recent Qakbot sample. Thanks to Brad Duncan for sharing this pcap:
https://www.malware-traffic-analysis.net/2023/05/24/index.html
We did a quick analysis of this pcap on the NEW Security Onion 2.4. If you'd like to follow along, you can install Security Onion 2.4 in a VM and import the pcap using so-import-pcap:
https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/first-time-users.html
https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/so-import-pcap.html#so-import-pcap
The screenshots at the bottom of this post show some of the interesting NIDS alerts, metadata logs, and session transcripts. Want more practice? Check out our other Quick Malware posts at:
https://blog.securityonion.net/search/label/quick%20malware%20analysis
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Screenshots
First, we start with the overview of all alerts and logs:
Next, let's review the alerts:
When we pivot from the EXE alert to the PCAP transcript, we notice that the HTTP request is to a bare IP address instead of a fully qualified domain name, the file requested is a .dat file, and the file returned has the standard MZ file header of an EXE:
Next, let's review all of the network protocol metadata:
Drilling into the Zeek Notices, we see an interesting connection on port 2222:
Here are the SSL/TLS logs including that port 2222 connection noted in the previous screenshot:
Here is an overview of all connections:
Drilling into HTTP logs we notice that, in addition to the EXE that we looked at earlier, there was a ZIP download:
Pivoting on that file transfer, we see the PK file header and that the embedded file appears to be called Claim_A615.wsf:
From there, we pivot to CyberChef and carve the WSF (Windows Script File):
The top of the file seemed innocent enough, but as we scroll down we see something more nefarious:
