Read the original article: Live off the Land? How About Bringing Your Own Island? An Overview of UNC1945
Through Mandiant investigation of intrusions, the FLARE Advanced
Practices team observed a group we track as UNC1945 compromise managed
service providers and operate against a tailored set of targets within
the financial and professional consulting industries by leveraging
access to third-party networks (see this blog
post for an in-depth description of “UNC” groups).
UNC1945 targeted Oracle Solaris operating systems, utilized several
tools and utilities against Windows and Linux operating systems,
loaded and operated custom virtual machines, and employed techniques
to evade detection. UNC1945 demonstrated access to exploits, tools and
malware for multiple operating systems, a disciplined interest in
covering or manipulating their activity, and displayed advanced
technical abilities during interactive operations.
Mandiant discovered and reported to Oracle CVE-2020-14871,
which was addressed in Oracle’s October
2020 Critical Patch Update. Mandiant recommends staying current
on all current patch updates to ensure a high security posture. We
will discuss this vulnerability in greater detail in a follow up blog post.
UNC1945 Attack Lifecycle
The threat actor demonstrated experience and comfort by utilizing
unique tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) within Unix
environments, demonstrating a high level of acumen in conjunction with
ease of operability in Microsoft Windows operating systems. They were
successful navigating multiple segmented networks and leveraging
third-party access to extend operations well beyond the initial
victim. Furthermore, UNC1945 operated from several virtual machines
pre-configured with post-exploitation tools in addition to their
custom toolset to evade detection and forensics.
Initial Compromise
In late 2018, UNC1945 gained access to a Solaris server and
installed a backdoor we track as SLAPSTICK in order to capture
connection details and credentials to facilitate further compromise.
The SSH service of this server was exposed to the internet at the
time, the same time we observed first evidence of threat activity.
Unfortunately, due to insufficient available evidence, the next
indication of activity was in mid-2020 at which time a different
Solaris server was observed connecting to the threat actor
infrastructure. This indicates a dwell time of approximately 519 days
based on recovered artifacts.
- Although we were unable to determine how the late-2018 initial
access was accomplished, we did observe successful UNC1945 SSH
connections directly to the victim Solaris 10 server, since the SSH
service was exposed directly to the internet at the time. - In mid-2020, we observed UNC1945 deploy EVILSUN—a remote
exploitation tool containing a zero-day exploit for
CVE-2020-14871—on a Solaris 9 server. At the time, connections from
the server to the threat actor IP address were observed over port
8080.- Mandiant discovered and reported CVE-2020-14871, a
recently patched vulnerability in the Oracle Solaris Pluggable
Authentication Module (PAM) that allows an unauthenticated
attacker with network access via multiple protocols to exploit
and compromise the operating system. - According to an
April 2020 post on a black-market website, an “Oracle Solaris
SSHD Remote Root Exploit” was available for approximately $3,000
USD, which may be identifiable with EVILSUN. - Additionally, we confirmed a Solaris server exposed to the
internet had critical vulnerabilities, which included the
possibility of remote exploitation without authentication.
- Mandiant discovered and reported CVE-2020-14871, a
Establish Foothold and Maintain Persistence
The threat actor used a Solaris Pluggable Authentication Module
backdoor we refer to as SLAPSTICK to establish a foothold on a Solaris
9 server. This facilitated user access to the system with a secret
hard-coded password and allowed the threat actors to escalate
privileges and maintain persistence (see Figure 1).
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Figure 1: SLAPSTICK logs
At the initial victim, UNC1945 placed a copy of a legitimate
pam_unix.so file and SLAPSTICK in the /lib64/security folder. A day
later, the threat actor positioned a custom Linux backdoor, which
Mandiant named LEMONSTICK, on the same workstation. LEMONSTICK
capabilities include command execution, file transfer and execution,
and the ability to establish tunnel connections. (see Figure 2).
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Figure 2: UNC1945 emplacement of SLAPSTICK
UNC1945 obtained and maintained access to their external
infrastructure using an SSH Port Forwarding mechanism despite the host
lacking accessibility to the internet directly. SSH Port Forwarding is
a mechanism implemented in SSH protocol for transporting arbitrary
networking data over an encrypted SSH connection (tunneling). This
feature can be used for adding encryption to legacy applications
traversing firewalls or with malicious intent to access internal
networks from the the internet. The UNC1945 configurations we observed
are similarly structured with respect to the host alias, specified
options, and option order (see Figure 3).
| config1 | config2 |
| Host <redacted> HostName <redacted> Port 900 User <redacted> IdentityFile <redacted> KbdInteractiveAuthentication no PasswordAuthentication no NoHostAuthenticationForLocalhost yes StrictHostKeyChecking no UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null RemoteForward 33002 127.0.0.1:22 |
Host <redacted> HostName <redacted> Port 443 User <redacted> IdentityFile <redacted> KbdInteractiveAuthentication no PasswordAuthentication no NoHostAuthenticationForLocalhost yes StrictHostKeyChecking no UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null ServerAliveInterval 30 ServerAliveCountMax 3 RemoteForward 2224 <redacted>:22 |
Figure 3: SSH config files used by UNC1945 at
different incidents
As part of this multi-stage operation, UNC1945 dropped a custom QEMU
Virtual Machine (VM) on multiple hosts, which was executed inside of
any Linux system by launching a ‘start.sh’ script. The script
contained TCP forwarding settings that could be used by the threat
actor in conjunction with the SSH tunnels to give direct access from
the threat actor VM to the command and control server to obfuscate
interaction with customer infrastructure. The VM was running a version
of the Tiny Core Linux OS with
pre-loaded scripts and tools. Also, we analyzed the Virtual Machine
file system timestamps, which coincided with UNC1945’s overall
operational timeline.
The VM contained numerous tools such as network scanners, exploits
and reconnaissance tools. Tiny Core Linux pre-loaded tools included
Mimikatz, Powersploit, Responder, Procdump, CrackMapExec, PoshC2,
Medusa, JBoss Vulnerability Scanner and more.
Efforts to decrease operational visibility included placing tool and
output files within temporary file system mount points that were
stored in volatile memory. Additionally, UNC1945 used built-in
utilities and public tools to modify timestamps and selectively
manipulate Unix log files.
UNC1945 employed anti-forensics techniques with the use of a custom
ELF utility named LOGBLEACH. The actor used built-in Linux commands to
alter the timestamps of files and directories and used LOGBLEACH to
clean logs to thwart forensic analysis, as seen in Figure 4.
| $ ./b -C -y -a $ mv b /usr/lib64/libXbleach.so.1 $ cd /usr/lib64/ $ touch -acm -r librpmio.so.3.2.2 $ touch -acm -r libyaml-0.so.2 |
Figure 4: LOGBLEACH
To further obfuscate activity, a Linux ELF packer named STEELCORGI
was executed in memory on the Solaris system. The malware contains
various anti-analysis techniques, including anti-debugging,
anti-tracing, and string obfuscation. It uses environment variables as
a key to unpack the final payload.
Escalate Privileges and Lateral Movement
After successfully establishing a foothold, UNC1945 collected
credentials, escalated privileges, and successfully moved laterally
through multiple networks.
UNC1945 obtained credentials via SLAPSTICK and open source tools
such as Mimikatz, which enabled easy lateral movement throughout
networks to obtain immediate access to other segments of the network
and third-party environments. Stolen credentials collected by
SLAPSTICK were used to traverse the customer network via SSH and
deploy SLAPSTICK to additional hosts. After successfully
authenticating, SLAPSTICK displays a welcome message, as seen in
Figure 5.
Figure 5: SLAPSTICK backdoor welcome banner
UNC1945 used ProxyChains to download PUPYRAT, an open source,
cross-platform multi-functional remote administration and
post-exploitation tool mainly written in Python.
At one target, the threat actor used a virtual machine to initiate a
brute-force of SSH targeting Linux and HP-UX endpoints. Beginning with
seemingly random usernames and shifting to legitimate Linux and
Windows accounts, the threat actor successfully established SSH
connections on a Linux endpoint. After successfully escalating
privileges on an HP-UX endpoint and a Linux endpoint, UNC1945
installed three backdoors: SLAPSTICK, TINYSHELL, and OKSOLO.
We observed UNC1945 use IMPACKET with SMBEXEC in a Microsoft Windows
environment to execute commands remotely without the need to upload a
payload to the target. SMBEXEC allows the threat actor to operate like
PsExec, but without using RemComSvc. There are two main modes of using
this tool that benefits attackers. Share mode allows the specification
of a share that everything will be executed through. Server mode
permits the output of the executed commands to be sent back by the
target machine into a locally shared folder.
At one victim, we observed UNC1945 moving laterally via Remote
Desktop Protocol (RDP) to a Windows server before viewing the Server
Manager Panel, viewing and modifying RDP-related system firewall rules
and checking the application settings of two endpoint security services.
Internal Reconnaissance
Mandiant investigations found that the threat actor maintains
various tools to interact with victim networks. In addition to custom
tools, the UNC1945 VMs contained various tools (e.g. network scanners,
exploits and reconnaissance; see Associated Tools and Malware section).
In some intrusions, UNC1945 employed a SPARC executable identified
as a reconnaissance tool. Based on publicly available information,
this executable could be referred to as Luckscan or BlueKeep, the
latter of which is part of the BKScan toolkit (see Figure 6).
Figure 6: SPARC executable recon tool
command line used by the threat actor
According to open sources, BlueKeep, aka “bkscan”
scanner, works both unauthenticated and authenticated (i.e. when
Network Level Authentication is enabled). BlueKeep (CVE-2019-0708) is
a security vulnerability that was discovered in Microsoft’s Remote
Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation, which allows for the
possibility of remote code execution.
Complete Mission
Despite this multi-staged operation, Mandiant did not observe
evidence of data exfiltration and was unable to determine UNC1945’s
mission for most of the intrusions we investigated. In at least one
case, we observed ROLLCOAST ransomware deployment in the final phase
of the threat actor activity, but Mandiant didn’t attribute this
activity to UNC1945. At this time, it is likely that access to the
victim environment was sold to another group.
Conclusion
The ease and breadth of exploitation in which UNC1945 conducted this
campaign suggests a sophisticated, persistent actor comfortable
exploiting various operating systems, and access to resources and
numerous toolsets. Given the aforementioned factors, use of zero-day
exploits and virtual machines, and ability to traverse multiple
third-party networks, Mandiant expects this motivated threat actor to
continue targeted operations against key industries while taking
advantage of operating systems that likely have inadequate security
visibility.
Associated Tools and Malware Families
EVILSUN is a remote exploitation tool that gains access to Solaris
10 and 11 systems of SPARC or i386 architecture using a vulnerability
(CVE-2020-14871) exposed by SSH keyboard-interactive authentication.
The remote exploitation tool makes SSH connections to hosts passed on
the command line. The default port is the normal SSH port (22), but
this may be overridden. EVILSUN passes the banner string
SSH-2.0-Sun_SSH_1.1.3 over the connection in clear text as part of handshaking.
LEMONSTICK is a Linux executable command line utility with backdoor
capabilities. The backdoor can execute files, transfer files, and
tunnel connections. LEMONSTICK can be started in two different ways:
passing the `-c` command line argument (with an optional file) and
set
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Read the original article: Live off the Land? How About Bringing Your Own Island? An Overview of UNC1945