Malware News GravityRAT - The Two-Year Evolution Of An APT Targeting India

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Content source

https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2018/04/gravityrat-two-year-evolution-of-apt.html

Today, Cisco Talos is uncovering a new piece of malware, which has remained under the radar for the past two years while it continues to be developed. Several weeks ago, we identified the use of the latest version of this RAT (Remote Access Tool). In this article, we will discuss the technical capabilities, the evolution, development and potential attribution of what we are calling GravityRAT. GravityRAT has been under ongoing development for at least 18 months, during which the developer has implemented new features. We've seen file exfiltration, remote command execution capability and anti-vm techniques added throughout the life of GravityRAT. This consistent evolution beyond standard remote code execution is concerning because it shows determination and innovation by the actor.

This actor is probably not the most advanced actor we've seen. But he or she managed to stay under the radar since 2016. They worked on malicious code, and produced four variants. Each new variant included new features. The developer used the same C2 infrastructure all this time. The developer was clever enough to keep this infrastructure safe, and not have it blacklisted by a security vendor. The actor took their time to ensure they were not within a virtual environment to avoid analysis. However, they did not take any time at all to attempt to obfuscate their .NET code. The code was largely trivial to reverse engineer, which meant static analysis was an easy option for this piece of malware. The Indian CERT published an advisory about this actor, which suggest they targeted Indian entities and organizations.