Regin: Top-tier espionage tool enables stealthy surveillance

http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/regin-top-tier-espionage-tool-enables-stealthy-surveillance

by r721 • 12 years ago

167 89 12 years ago

Amazing how Symantec use this to push their software rather than providing even a clue to determining whether you're infected or not. Never miss an opportunity to cash in, I suppose.

jmartinpetersen3• 12 years ago

The blog posting includes a link to their whitepaper, which has a couple of pages with "indicators of compromise".

sandstrom2• 12 years ago

There are some details in the whitepaper.

I don't think this post comes off as an attempt to make more money.

Rather, I think it's applaudable that they release information on threats from governments (and not only traditional spyware/virus).

Since this is (probably) built by a government, one can be certain that a government somewhere (presumably Western, given the infected countries) is upset about the release. And they didn't cave in to that, which is good.

ealexhudson• 12 years ago

I would guess they didn't cave because no Government has registered their upset at this. If they did, it would be pretty clear which Government it was - making me think the Government in question has few levers to pull against Symantec.

jmartinpetersen3• 12 years ago

This is equally fascinating and terrifying. The infection vector is still unknown, and they haven't even been able to recover the 64 bit version.

Neither China nor the USA is among the ten countries with most infections.

final2• 12 years ago

Haven't been able or were persuaded not to.

huhtenberg• 12 years ago

The infection vector is most certainly dynamic and varies by case and with time. Just need a fresh zeroday to make target machine execute the dropper.

lifeisstillgood2• 12 years ago

>> Its capabilities and the level of resources behind Regin indicate that it is one of the main cyberespionage tools used by a nation state.

Wow. Just wow.

It should not surprise us, but I wonder what the reaction was when people first realised telephones could be and were being tapped?

spacefight• 12 years ago

> It should not surprise us, but I wonder what the reaction was when people first realised telephones could be and were being tapped?

Outrage?

digi_owl• 12 years ago

Hard to say, radio telegraphs were being sold as "secure" at one point.

erglkjahlkh2• 12 years ago

As are services like Whispersystems RedPhone...

Why bother cracking RedPhone when you can just trigger something remotely on the completely unaccredited radio chip, or the SIM, or the OS platform itself. A modern phone does not have one operating system, but 3-4 and they all can - after you crack one - ask services freely from others.

The whole architecture of cellphones is so broken that installing RedPhone and thinking someone with resources can't do anything about it is plain laughable. Yes, it drops casuals and non-targeted attacks. But targeted? Never.

schoen• 12 years ago

I remember enjoying this blog post on AT&T's amicus brief in the Olmstead case:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/08/how-ma-bell-fought-you...

The most awesome comment from AT&T was that "this telephone system offers a means of espionage to which general warrants and writs of assistance were the puniest instruments of tyranny and oppression".

lifeisstillgood2• 12 years ago

This is pretty good for the 1920's

[I]t is better that a few criminals escape than that the privacies of life of all the people be exposed to the agents of the government, who will act at their own discretion, the honest and the dishonest, unauthorized and unrestrained by courts

Yes.

vezzy-fnord• 12 years ago

On a less related note, beyond the shiny GUI layer, just how advanced is today's antivirus software anyway?

Do they still primarily rely on signature detection? I know that modern systems also perform what's broadly titled "heuristic analysis", but I'm not sure what that specifically entails. Is there any form of system call tracing, sandboxing, file monitoring or what?

philip1209• 12 years ago

A lot of modern malware prevention focuses on monitoring network traffic. Rather than rely on a single machine to self-report its health, technologies monitor the main channel of infection and data transmission, which is communication with the internet.

Examples:

- FireEye

- OpenDNS (where I work)

- Palo Alto Networks

- ZScalar

Case in point - at OpenDNS, we can often identify signs of infection (e.g. communication with DGA domains) before pinpointing the particular malware involved.

SCHiM• 12 years ago

Heuristics look at what a process is doing. For example, a very simple heuristic rule may look like this:

if a process does the following:

   Open another .exe file then

      Writes to that .exe file

         Close that .exe file

Then it's a virus.

Such 'rules' are then used by the detection engine of the anti-virus software, if a program triggers any of these rules it is often labeled as a 'generic' Trojan or virus. Often this tracking is achieved by 'hooking' syscalls of your operating system. But some anti-virus programs also employ emulation and/or sandboxing. Comodo is an example that does sandboxing.

Recent developments in anti-virus are what's called 'host-based protection'. Instead of relying on blacklists, such as heuristics and signatures, a custom made 'profile'(whitelist) of the host is made which looks at which applications are installed and what they should be doing. For example: your browser should never attempts to start another process. If it does it means something is wrong.

Such host based approaches can detect unknown threats/exploits as they happen. If your browser is exploited and tries to download and execute malware, the system will detect it because it was previously established that your browser has no business starting other applications.

xorcist• 12 years ago

Signature based antivirus, as in "after the fact"-heuristics, remains the most useful. Because, as advanced as the other methods may be, their usefulness remains limited by their public existence. Any malware writer checks their creations against VirusTotal and change it as long as anything flags.

mooneater• 12 years ago

Nice story.

But this is HN: Now how do we ensure our servers are unaffected?

throwawayaway3• 12 years ago

Looking at the PDF it appears that it's Windows specific.

rsync2• 12 years ago

Exactly. I read through the page twice trying to simply determine "is this interesting to me at all".

No, it's not. As usual, you can thwart "nation state" malware by simply not running Windows.

Wake me when there's malware for FreeBSD (seriously - it would change my world).

ReinhartHack• 12 years ago

Perhaps antivirus deployment on Linux is low enough that they simply didn't encounter the Linux version. One fairly telltale thing would be if there were indications of a platform abstraction layer, but the report does not mention anything like that.

natch• 12 years ago

[Edit: I missed the PDF whitepaper before writing this comment. It doesn't answer all my questions bit I'll give them credit for a really nice detailed whitepaper.]

This article makes me very suspicious of Symantec. How long have they known about this, really? Are they just releasing this information now as a marketing reaction to recent discoveries by competing firms?

The vaguely written timeline says in passive voice that Regin has been observed since 2008. By who? Why are we just hearing about it now? I wouldn't blame them for keeping some discoveries quiet for a while so they can do some stealth research, but the timing here really smells like they are being PR driven instead of being driven by doing what's best for the overall security community.

What would inspire much more confidence would be a story of how this was discovered, and how the discovery and research played out, as we have seen for some other malware. Instead this looks like they have know about this for a long time, and now for reasons they aren't going to disclose, they have decided, or have been given permission, to reveal some of what they know.

final2• 12 years ago

Well people are sending suspicious files to the AV vendors all the time, so Symantec may have found the backdoor a lot later and then found it existing in their DBs.

throwawayaway3• 12 years ago

the link they have created to "Backdoor.Regin" points to this: http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=...

which looks unrelated to the point of being incorrect.

also quite strange that they say in the PDF it's a kernel mode driver, as my understanding is that windows 7 & co do not allow those to be installed if they are unsigned. EDIT: The pdf covers this later on:

The 64-bit version of Regin’s Stage 1 (wshnetc.dll) is no longer a kernel mode driver, as drivers under 64-bit Windows must be signed. Instead, Stage 1 is a user mode DLL loaded as a Winsock helper when the computer is starting up.

nikcub3• 12 years ago

Why are we just hearing about it now?

Once malware is identified properly antivirus firms will usually go through their detection archives and pull out earlier hits.

The reason why they don't see them sooner is because they get tends to hundreds of thousands of new threats each week and don't have time to go through each one.

Mikko from F-Secure also reported on Twitter that they found Regin[0]. The same thing happen with Stuxnet, and just about every other malware - it is why these firms will keep and check the archives of new detected threats.

As for your general suspicions, this is endemic with infosec since there is a natural conflict of interest where those doing the research and reporting on it are also selling solutions.

If it makes you feel any less suspicious, the research departments within these antivirus firms are generally isolated from parts of the companies involved in sales and marketing. They are usually small teams that just go out and publish information on cool things they find - although there is often a race to be the first to dissect and publish the details of new malware (which is why you wouldn't sit on knowledge of a new threat).

[0] https://twitter.com/mikko/status/536624310035939328

yuhong• 12 years ago

The same thing happen with Stuxnet, and just about every other malware - it is why these firms will keep and check the archives of new detected threats.

My favorite is how Stuxnet was discovered just after Win2000 ended support.

So what made Symantec, McAfee, etc so horrible BTW?

MatthiasP• 12 years ago

The list of infected countries might tell us a thing about the attacker:

Russia and Saudi Arabia at the top: classical US intelligence targets. Pakistan and Afghanistan: Likely anti-islamists effort. Austria, Belgium, Iran: Opec, IEAE, tons of EU-institutions - someone who wants better intel about the nuclear talks with Iran?

Ireland, Mexico, India: Hard to find political reasons for those countries, but if you look at it economically: Ireland is the main hub for US companies into the EU, Mexico is a neighbouring country to the US, India: rival to China

My totally far-fetched guess would be that this trojan comes from the NSA or the GCHQ, I don't see China caring that much about Saudi Arabia and AfPak.

throwawayaway3• 12 years ago

the high percentage of telecoms and private individuals targetted is reminiscent of this:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/uk-spies-continue...

jacquesm3• 12 years ago

And a very fat finger points at the US/UK because if they were simply present in statistically normal quantities in the samples they would be amongst the largest of the groups encountered. The fact that they are not suggests a conscious decision not to target those countries, likely emanating from a law rather than from a desire.

If this were done by China then the US would be represented strongly.

csandreasen• 12 years ago

Likewise, if this were done by the US then China would be represented strongly...

I'm at a loss to guess attribution behind this one.

api2• 12 years ago

I agree that US/UK are most likely but I see other possibilities too: Israel, or one of the other EU states.

Israel might not have any qualms about targeting American targets -- at the very least they would have no legal restriction against doing so. But they might not do so for pragmatic reasons: lack of interest, or to generate the impression that the threat is U.S. based.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

The fact that it's an extremely sophisticated malware (much like Stuxnet was) points to US, as well.

notastartup• 12 years ago

I understand Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan are targets. But Saudi Arabia? It strikes me as odd.

pmorici• 12 years ago

Why? They probably fund as much militant extremism as anyone.

AlyssaRowan11• 12 years ago

Attribution is always thorny - but yes, targeting metadata does match those possible conclusions.

Quite a bit of the other information in the 'technical report' (which isn't as technical as I would like) does seem eerily reminiscent of what we know about the CHIMNEYPOOL framework, and (to some extent) FOXACID. A little overengineered, and a little sloppy in places - and that's everything I'd expect from a pork barrel remote intrusion tool with serious dollars thrown at it.

Go on, match it up and see what tallies! Assume "Stage 0" is the VALIDATOR egg (or a cousin), which is memory-resident, never touches disk, and fetches the rest, and work from there.

In particular, I'd single out as particularly telling the 7a69-CRC ICMP filled with string-literal (and very English) shit, and… a 20-round variant of RC5? That has a strong smell of hamburger to it, although I'd wonder if the analysts perhaps mistook it for RC6, or if this is perhaps an earlier version?

Yes, at first blush, this may indeed be NSA malware!

Are the samples available for analysis, Symantec? Inquiring minds want to take a closer look at this creature, and you have piqued my interest. My email won't be hard to find. Deadlists are fine. https://keybase.io/akr

tptacek11• 12 years ago

Interesting.

Where do you see the overengineering?

What parts seem sloppy?

What else makes you think serious dollars were thrown at it? What evidence would you be looking for of that? We managed to throw 900MM at a health insurance portal. :)

Is it really that unusual for trojans to be elaborately staged? I feel like I was on a CanSec stage with Jose Nazario about 12 years ago talking about malware staging. Staged malware, that is, is 2004 CanSec Jose Nazario levels of sophistication (due respect to Jose).

The Wikipedia page for RC5 says to use 20 rounds, because RC5 sucks and fell to differential cryptanalysis, which NSA knew about in the 1970s.

tptacek11• 12 years ago

It's funny to me that we posit attackers building malware of such sophistication that they can only be nation-state in stature, while at the same time supposing that they know so little about the AV industry that they could be revealed by a heat map of the countries their malware was spotted in.

How about: it's Russia, Russia doesn't care about infecting hosts in its own country (in fact, they may prefer to do so; those might be their targets), and, while Russia surely does have an aggressive program of intrusions into the US [and China], they don't use this particular piece of malware to execute it?

I have no reason to believe it's Russia. I just think: that story is as plausible as the others being tossed around this thread.

If I have a bias about the origin being the US, hand to God, it's that I'd like to believe my tax dollars can pay for better malware than this. I have, for what it's worth to the thread, absolutely no doubt in my mind that the US has stuff like this in the field.

I'd really like to believe it was Latvia.

minimax• 12 years ago

The Saudi infections are obviously a decoy and the main target is clearly Russia. Latvia, as a former SSR and recent NATO addition, is nervous about Putin's next moves in the region. Wasn't there also recently a Russian sub spotted in the Baltic Sea? You'd have to be an idiot not to see Riga's fingerprints all over this thing.

znowi• 12 years ago

Expectedly, tptacek is all over the infosec thread, arrogantly dissuading the public from the notion of a possible involvement of the US intelligence community :)

mobiuscog• 12 years ago

Or it could be Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon...

Any big tech company investing in industrial espionage. It's not as if they don't have the development staff.

tptacek11• 12 years ago

and alternative encryption in the form of a variant of RC5, which isn’t commonly used

RC5 is uncommon because it's a crappy old 1990s cipher. If its use is suggestive of anything, it's probably cryptographic incompetence.

xnull2guest2• 12 years ago

Jack Appelbaum suggests that US sponsored cyberweapons tend to use RC6 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0w36GAyZIA&feature=youtu.be&...) for whatever weight that adds to the case that this isn't the US.

tptacek11• 12 years ago

It's Jacob, not Jack.

I'm really not sure how much credence I give crypto comments from Appelbaum. The idea doesn't make much sense: the NSA has access to tons of different ciphers; why would they use a patented commercial cipher nobody else uses? It's all the downside of COTS (a public target for cryptanalytic research and an idiosyncratic choice that makes it easier to attribute attacks to them) but none of the upside. With RC6 you don't even get good open source library support.

But either way: RC5 and RC6 are very different things.

alister2• 12 years ago

Let's not jump to conclusions. If Symantec's characterization of the sophistication of this malware is accurate, then surely they could have afforded some crypto expertise.

First, can we agree that any encryption algorithm better than a Caesar cipher is good enough for this particular application? That's because nobody who's analyzing this malware is going to bother with cryptanalysis because there's an easier approach. The encrypted data has to get decrypted before it runs. Therefore, you watch the execution with a debugger until it gets decrypted and executed, and then just capture the plaintext data (and the key if you want).

Given that resisting serious cryptanalysis is off the table, I can suggest several reasons for RC5:

- It has much smaller code size (500 bytes vs 15000 for AES).

- It's less vulnerable to fingerprinting. That is, anti-virus software might have checks for AES but not RC5. The malware writer would know this because they actually tested their malware against all the anti-virus products and found that none of them have signature or heuristic checks for RC5 but do against AES. (I'm just fleshing out the thought; I don't know if AV software checks for AES and RC5.)

- AES runs faster than RC5 in general, but maybe the particular platform or instruction set for this malware makes RC5 faster.

tptacek11• 12 years ago

I'm having trouble parsing this comment. Your suggestion is that the author is sophisticated and that's why they chose RC5? RC5 is a broken 1990s cipher. If the authors wanted to minimize code size, they'd have used a native stream cipher, not a 64-bit block cipher.

I'm also having trouble with the idea that the author of this trojan might be GCHQ or NSA (or sponsored by them), but that cryptanalytic techniques from the late 1970s are off the table.

AlyssaRowan11• 12 years ago

The term you're looking for is "crypter". Heuristics may be more sensitive to the executable-packer-like behaviour than the crypter itself. Signatures which look for crypters will obviously target constants if they're around.

Speed is not a factor - size is. Cryptographic security is far less important than fingerprint evasion: rolling your own is not therefore as insane as it usually sounds.

RC5 is therefofe a slightly odd choice. Block function's a small Feistel, but the key schedule is a pain which totes constants around, which is poor especially from a polymorphic/metamorphic crypter's perspective, because that means you'll have to calculate them or include literals, and they're distinctive constants which make it pop out.

AES has a similar issue with the distinctive S-boxes - include or calculate them.

RC4 variants are more common (but you need scratch space), as are smaller more native stream ciphers, right down to good old XOR-based crypters, which will do the job. RC5 is just not the first thing that'd spring to mind to me.

It obviously was what sprang to mind to the author of that particular bit. Code styles differ, as do skill levels. Big team.

They speak English. It's big. They're interested in Ireland. US or UK is a good guess. I don't think this matches the Detica one for GCHQ, so my early suspicion still remains NSA. We're missing huge chunks though.

nikcub3• 12 years ago

probably cryptographic incompetence

and it's been undetected for 7 years, so what does that tell you?

jonah2• 12 years ago

How are these things named?

Is "Regin" or "Stuxnet" a string somewhere? Do the researchers make the names up?

(And, what do the creators think of the name their tool is given vs. what they called it.)

AlyssaRowan11• 12 years ago

Yes, generally malware is named by the researchers who found it - often even if the creators obviously named it otherwise. I wouldn't be surprised if "Regin" was a reference to how the researchers found big chunks of it tucked away in the registry, or something like that.

For example, there's a reference to the name "Myrtus" in Stuxnet, which was (I think) probably the name its creators gave it (and may point to its Israeli origin)?

nikcub3• 12 years ago

Stuxnet: named for files .stub (where config was stored) and mrxnet.sys (main driver), by Microsoft

Duqu: named for the "~DQ-" temporary files it created, by researchers in Hungary who found it and wrote report

Flame: is from a routine called "InstallFlame", so the malware name is likely same between discoverers and writers.

The naming convention is usually to find a unique identifier used in the malware. Portmanteau's are common. We often don't find out what the writers name was, although both Stuxnet and Flame were part of Operation Olympic Games[0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Olympic_Games

jonah2• 12 years ago

From this The Intercept piece[0]:

"In Nordic mythology, the name Regin is associated with a violent dwarf who is corrupted by greed. It is unclear how the Regin malware first got its name, but the name appeared for the first time on the VirusTotal website on March 9th 2011."

Double meaning or coincidence? e.g. did the authors of this piece just google "Regin" and find out about this dwarf?

[0] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/24/secret-regin-m...

datashovel• 12 years ago

I think the thing that's most frightening here is that those who created this thing have had 6 years to iterate and improve on the design before being discovered, so what has been found may just be the tip of the iceberg.

tempodox• 12 years ago

That kind of information should be published by the CIA, FBI, NSA, ... themselves instead of destroying Democracy with their secret gag orders. “I'm not allowed to say that I'm not allowed to say anything”. Can it still get worse than it already is? Any random terrorist is more honorable than the Feds. At least they're not lying about being terrorists.

r721• 12 years ago

"As always, attribution is difficult with cases like this. Our belief is that this malware, for a change, isn't coming from Russia or China."

https://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002766.html

"Securelist - Regin: Nation-state ownage of GSM networks"

http://securelist.com/blog/research/67741/regin-nation-state...

rookonaut• 12 years ago

So... Symantec found this years ago. New version is out. Symantec is allowed to publish the "news"...

junto• 12 years ago

No five eyes in that list.

Regin: Top-tier espionage tool enables stealthy surveillance

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