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New observations on BlackEnergy2 APT activity
The BlackEnergy malware is crimeware turned APT tool and is used in significant geopolitical operations lightly documented over the past year. An even more interesting part of the BlackEnergy story is the relatively unknown custom plugin capabilities to attack ARM and MIPS platforms, scripts for Cisco network devices, destructive plugins, a certificate stealer and more. Here, we present available data – it is difficult to collect on this APT. We will also present more details on targets previously unavailable and present related victim profile data.
These attackers are careful to hide and defend their long-term presence within compromised environments. The malware’s previously undescribed breadth means attackers present new technical challenges in unusual environments, including SCADA networks. Challenges, like mitigating the attackers’ lateral movement across compromised network routers, may take an organization’s defenders far beyond their standard routine and out of their comfort zone.
Brief History
BlackEnergy2 and BlackEnergy3 are known tools. Initially, cybercriminals used BlackEnergy custom plugins for launching DDoS attacks. There are no indications of how many groups possess this tool. BlackEnergy2 was eventually seen downloading more crimeware plugins – a custom spam plugin and a banking information stealer custom plugin. Over time, BlackEnergy2 was assumed into the toolset of the BE2/Sandworm actor. While another crimeware group continues to use BlackEnergy to launch DDoS attacks, the BE2 APT appears to have used this tool exclusively throughout 2014 at victim sites and included custom plugins and scripts of their own. To be clear, our name for this actor has been the BE2 APT, while it has been called “Sandworm Team” also.
The Plugins and Config Files
Before evidence of BlackEnergy2 use in targeted attacks was uncovered, we tracked strange activity on one of the BlackEnergy CnC servers in 2013. This strangeness was related to values listed in newer BlackEnergy configuration files. As described in Dmitry’s 2010 Black DDoS’ analysis, a configuration file is downloaded from the server by main.dll on an infected system. The config file provides download instructions for the loader. It also instructs the loader to pass certain commands to the plugins. In this particular case in 2013, the config file included an unknown plugin set, aside from the usual ‘ddos’ plugin listing. Displayed below are these new, xml formatted plugin names “weap_hwi”, “ps”, and “vsnet” in a BlackEnergy configuration file download from a c2 server. This new module push must have been among the first for this group, because all of the module versions were listed as “version 1”, including the ddos plugin:
