Introduction

Angler exploit kit (EK) has been evolving quite a bit lately.  Recently, this EK has been altering its URL patterns on a near-daily basis.  The changes accumulate, and you might not recognize current traffic generated by Angler.  After two weeks of vacation, I almost didn't recognize it.  This diary provides two traffic examples of Angler EK as we enter July 2015.

Angler EK still pushing a lot of CryptoWall 3.0

Angler pushes different payloads, but we're still seeing a lot of CryptoWall 3.0 from this EK.  We first noticed CryptoWall 3.0 from Angler near the end of May 2015 [1], and we've seen a great deal of it since then [2].  The CryptoWall 3.0 sample for today's diary used 1LY58fiaAYFKgev67TN1UJtRveJh81D2dU as a bitcoin address for the ransom payment.

Traffic examples

Traffic from Tuesday, 2015-07-01 shows Angler EK from 148.251.167.57 and 148.251.167.107 at different times during the day.  Click on the images below for a full-size view of the associated HTTP traffic from the infected Windows hosts.

The people at Emerging Threats do a good job of keeping their Snort-based signatures up-to-date through their ETOpen and Proofpoint ET Pro rulesets.  Below is an image of events from the infection traffic I saw using Suricata on Security Onion.

Preliminary malware analysis

Sample of a CryptoWall 3.0 malware payload delivered by Angler EK on 2015-07-01:

• File size:  240.0 KB ( 245760 bytes )
• MD5 hash:  f52679c115377e42943b0427d968f891
• Detection ratio:  4 / 55
• First submitted:  2015-07-01 23:01:15 UTC
• https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/2dfd43d6776b5712e5fd9d82d3a6b5d0097d2b9371915539ed0b88f4097224a8/analysis/
• https://malwr.com/analysis/ZGYzOTljNGZjY2M1NDliY2FkY2YzNzcxYTQ4OWI4NGQ/
• https://www.hybrid-analysis.com/sample/2dfd43d6776b5712e5fd9d82d3a6b5d0097d2b9371915539ed0b88f4097224a8?environmentId=1

Final words

Pcap files of the 2015-07-01 infection traffic are available at:

• http://www.malware-traffic-analysis.net/2015/07/01/2015-07-01-Angler-EK-sends-CryptoWall-3.0-traffic-example-1.pcap
• http://www.malware-traffic-analysis.net/2015/07/01/2015-07-01-Angler-EK-sends-CryptoWall-3.0-traffic-example-2.pcap

A zip file of the associated malware is available at:

• http://www.malware-traffic-analysis.net/2015/07/01/2015-07-01-Angler-EK-and-CryptoWall-3.0-artifacts.zip

The zip file is password-protected with the standard password.  If you don't know it, email admin@malware-traffic-analysis.net and ask.

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Brad Duncan
ISC Handler and Security Researcher at Rackspace
Blog: www.malware-traffic-analysis.net - Twitter: @malware_traffic

References:

[1] https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Angler+exploit+kit+pushing+CryptoWall+30/19737
[2] https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Increase+in+CryptoWall+30+from+malicious+spam+and+Angler+exploit+kit/19785