Agent Tesla delivered by the same phishing campaign for over a year

Published: 2020-04-28. Last Updated: 2020-04-28 06:44:15 UTC
by Jan Kopriva (Version: 1)
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While going over malicious e-mails caught by our company gateway in March, I noticed that several of those, that carried ACE file attachments, appeared to be from the same sender. That would not be that unusual, but and after going through the historical logs, I found that e-mails from the same address with similar attachments were blocked by the gateway as early as March 2019.

The e-mails in question all appeared to come from the address diamond@tnt.com. The sender address was quite interesting in its own way, since, although the messages most certainly didn’t come from TNT, they didn't fail the SPF checks either. The reason for them not being stopped by the Sender Policy Framework checks was not a lack of an SPF record for the domain tnt.com, but the fact that the record in question was set incorrectly, in such a way that it allowed any server to send email for the domain tnt.com.

As you may see, the record ends in “?all” – this means that the record doesn’t specify whether any IP address, which is not listed, may or may not send messages for tnt.com[1]. I have informed TNT of both the problem with the SPF record (which they said they will fix soon) as well as the fact that their domain was misused in this was to send malicious messages.

I originally didn't plan to dig any deeper into it, however after our e-mail gateway caught another e-mail from diamond@tnt.com just yesterday, I decided to take a closer look at these messages and their attachments.

After a while of going through my e-mail quarantine backups, I managed to find 54 e-mails from the last 6 months that appeared to have originated from the same address, all of them with an ACE attachment. The messages were fairly similar to each other – most were variations on the theme of “tomorrow we will deliver your package please find the attached invoice”. You may see that there hasn’t been much of a change in them during the past 6 months from the following two examples – the first one is from August 2019 and the second one was "caught" just yesterday.

A quick search of the logs for diamond@tnt.com showed that from March 15, 2019, the e-mail gateway stopped 94 similar messages. In all these cases, the messages had an ACE attachment and all their subjects were variations on the same theme.

I didn't manage to get the earliest e-mails but I extracted the attachments of all the ones I had access to and after eliminating all of the duplicates I was left with 14 malicious executables (some of them with a fake SCR extension).

Since I didn't have much time to spend on analyzing the files, I upload several of them to Any.Run and to the Intezer Analyze platform and the results were pretty much always the same – the malicious files were droppers or injectors for Agent Tesla (you may find hashes for all of the executables below).

Since I don’t have access to the earliest attachments, I can’t be sure that the actors behind this campaign used it to spread only Agent Tesla for the entire time, however from the available data it seems to be the case. It appears that the same group has been using nearly the same e-mail template and exactly the same simple trick to bypass SPF checks for more than a year.

In my last diary[2], I mentioned that a group behind phishing campaign, that ran for over three months with minimal changes, seemed to go by the old adage “if it ain't broke don't fix it”. After looking at this campaign, it seems that that the first group definitely wasn't alone in adopting this philosophy.

 

Indicators of Compromise (IoCs)

 

MD5

SHA-1

bvnmmmmmm.exe

26765d4965893825b65b7fd029fe4da7

69dda78ca8714e7b35fa06c17cceec93f150f50c

sta5665.scr

8cb501944a7e3afd7f641940834c42d0

f8048f1b072fd0a2ce155f2297b9c4ae0b920056

stan.exe

9c43b1f13e9584a315b1ca6133e52d1d

c6ed0a356bafd83b15f2377aadaa50610ade75ea

stan70.scr

2e9ce406373eb8dff8a4c65b211ade25

cab446082a47f2c860a06aa33f1f8bf927762a43

stannna.exe

f90c78f41aeaf4ee729d9d01af3b4c5b

37b5002429d2122eef4edb86a1dd6f6ccb450b2c

stanooooo.exe

89e3c0ff0b33ca29864a9e92e1f11bee

d85ce6583bdade094716e75fae827258f25656e8

stuuu.exe

f1aae5198131803697199c6f1a58fddc

a19e7a0aeb82dbadbf46bcd1641e41b66b09343a

tsssssssssssssssssssssss.exe

c45551244a11e446b80ae3657091e8fb

07654a0dd309f70e94b2d0c83a50ff886678a00d

tttttnnamdi.exe

35bf4bb31fdf79d238e142130c782190

3cab3b9761f0e7469fce39470a86c2152664b6c3

ddddnnamdi.exe

b13e9c6593b3861653f13016523e0591

9d9c6310aef1a68d0f2f47e35645c945bfba7d04

gllllmmbnbb.exe

be4a72b6df954561c5ce592596fda595

b1a225852b886cae58214847ffdb6de222bc589d

kkkkppppppp.exe

1ad593307367d2855480f77af3cec459

98f8cc243cff4da0f7ac4a1bca745d341c3c8946

lllloooyyyyy.exe

a4f787dc35c4e7ab2fd827cd94174cbf

453aaa4be9476c105fa2d17d3888e35fe427a726

ODDZr20d5ZzP6Yk.exe

ecdedada37ce7ef4c31fd6be32e7ebc7

9bb32473c7f3f0a85a7f6bbf9e74d2505d3ca8d9

[1] https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/Phishing+email+spoofing+SPFenabled+domain/25426/
[2] https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/Look+at+the+same+phishing+campaign+3+months+apart/26018/

-----------
Jan Kopriva
@jk0pr
Alef Nula

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