Disassembly and reverse engineering view of Flame malware and SpyEye banking trojan source code
application honeypot

Gribodemon on SpyEye 2.x - I expected better

Saturday, I noticed my application honeypot collected an interesting sample. The cracker took my bait and attempt to hack the planet via a SpyEye 2.x variant. Apparently, the limit of

Key takeaways
  • Complex malware architectures reveal the state-sponsored division of labor.
  • Source code dissections expose the sloppy modularity behind sophisticated cyber weapons.
  • Reverse engineering is the only way to strip away attacker mystique.

Saturday, I noticed my application honeypot collected an interesting sample. The cracker took my bait and attempt to hack the planet via a SpyEye 2.x variant. Apparently, the limit of its sandbox testing was to look for known virtualized drivers, mac addresses, and other signatures typically found in / on virtualized sandboxes. Just another arrow to the quiver of changing everything default in a virtualized sandbox. Everything from PCI driver labels to ethernet mac addresses.

I am utterly amazed at the kit’s insecure coding. The small Windows executable is vulnerable to numerous buffer overflows, poor error handling, and poor cryptographic implementation. Don’t even get me started on their alleged “performance optimization.” I traced the outbound calls and dummy data exfiltration a web-based C&C system. Fortunate for me, it is a poorly coded web application. By poorly coded, there are 300+ XSS vulnerabilities, 60+ SQL injections, and numerous other poor secure coding practices. Gribo’s response: “run in a sefe place.”

A typical example from the certificate handling code:

$id = $_GET[‘id’];

if (!$id) exit;

….

$dbase = db_open();

$sql = “SELECT data, bot_guid, name, date_rep FROM cert WHERE id = $id LIMIT 1”;

$res = mysqli_query($dbase, $sql);

Needless to say, the C&C website was taken care of with no effort at all. While I commend Gribodemon and team offering free support, their efforts are better spent securing their kit from other crackers.