Mar 2014, Black Hat Asia 2014
https://www.blackhat.com/asia-14/archives.html#Haruyama
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRxCXbGZyFg
PlugX is one of the most notorious RAT used for targeted attacks and the author still extends its implementation aggressively.
So far, some excellent malware researchers published reports about PlugX's behavior and decryption of important binaries like config data. The information included in PlugX config can be used for identifying attacker groups, but parsing the configs of many specimens is tough work because the config has more than one version, and the algorithm for decrypting it also changes due to the author's continual update.
This presentation shows the result of an approach categorizing PlugX variants based on detailed analysis of config data and code. The result seems to indicate multiple attacker groups using common information such as C2 hostname/IP, installed service name, config size, debug string, characteristic double word value, and so on.
I will also introduce the latest variant with several anti-reversing techniques.