State-Sponsored Financially Motivated Attacks

This is a presentation delivered at Melbourne AISA in October 2023 about a nation state investigation targeting the cryptocurrency industry.

1. State-Sponsored Financially Motivated Attacks Connecting the dot to a sophisticated threat actor Thomas Roccia Sr. Security Researcher at Microsoft @fr0gger_
2. Sr. Security Researcher at Microsoft Author of Visual Threat Intelligence https://SecurityBreak.io @Fr0gger_ 🤓 THOMAS ROCCIA
3. The Correlation Between Cryptocurrency Markets and Nation State Interest A Detailed Analysis of a Targeted Attack Examining the Bigger Picture: Connecting the Dots 🔍 What will be covered?
4. 🤑 Cryptocurrency Industry Overview The market size is anticipated to reach $7 billion by 2032 according to predictions. In September 2023, the price of BTC was approximately $26,321.
5. 🏦 Interest in Cryptocurrency Among Nation-States
6. ☠️ Targeted Attack by Citrine Sleet Overview Citrine Sleet North Korea Focus on targeting financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges. Use of social media, supply chain attacks, trojanised apps, lure and decoy.
7. ☠️ Targeted Attack by Citrine Sleet Overview
8. 🤝The Initial Step: Establishing Trust Cryptocurrency investment groups on Telegram In the specific attack, the attackers got in touch with their target on October 19, 2022 Created a secondary Telegram group with the name <NameOfTheTargetedCompany> <> OKX Fee Adjustment> and invited three employees Used fake profiles with details from employees of the company OKX
9. The Compromise Begins 💀 Weaponized Excel document containing further details on the fees to appear legitimate with the name: “OKX Binance & Huobi VIP fee comparision.xls” Used the fee structure discussion as an opportunity to ask the target to open the weaponized Excel file and fill in their information
10. Analysis of Malicious Excel File 💻 The obfuscated macro uses UserForm to store data and variables and drops a second malicious Excel file. The second file retrieves a PNG file that contains two executable files and an encrypted backdoor, which are parsed by the macro.
11. Analysis of Malicious Excel File 💻
12. 👾 Payload Decoding & Execution
13. ☠️ Final Backdoor The backdoor is used to collect information on the targeted machine. All strings and API calls are obfuscated using a custom algorithm. The network request follows this pattern: GET hxxps://strainservice[.]com/resources?a=1666860077&v=1666527365
14. 💥Related Attacks Other attacks has been observed using fake or trojanised applications. The DLL proxying technique is consistent across those campaigns. Name HijackingLib.dll consistent
15. 💎 Diamond Model of Intrusion Analysis Capabilities Infrastructures Adversary Victim The North Korea government has long term interest in the financial industry with more recently a focus on the crypto currency market The target is a crypto currency investment funds which has been DPRK’s targets of interest as reported by the Financial Services Agency of Japan The attackers are using various techniques, such as packaging fake crypto apps in MSI format, exploiting VBA userform, employing DLL side loading, and using the AppleJeus Malware for their attacks. North Korean attackers exploit social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Telegram to target victims and create fake websites that appear to be legitimate cryptocurrency organizations.
16. But wait! There’s more! more! more!
17. 💀 The 3CX Connection
18. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2022/12/06/dev-0139-launches- targeted-attacks-against-the-cryptocurrency-industry/ https://www.volexity.com/blog/2022/12/01/buyer-beware-fake-cryptocurrency- applications-serving-as-front-for-applejeus-malware/ https://securelist.com/gopuram-backdoor-deployed-through-3cx-supply-chain- attack/109344/ https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RW1aFyW https://twitter.com/fr0gger_/status/1641668394155151366 📖 Additional Resources
19. Thank You Thomas Roccia @fr0gger_ Get my Book!