A brand new investigation has unearthed almost 200 distinctive command-and-control (C2) domains related to a malware known as Raspberry Robin.
“Raspberry Robin (often known as Roshtyak or Storm-0856) is a posh and evolving risk actor that gives preliminary entry dealer (IAB) providers to quite a few legal teams, a lot of which have connections to Russia,” Silent Push stated in a report shared with The Hacker Information.
Since its emergence in 2019, the malware has change into a conduit for numerous malicious strains like SocGholish, Dridex, LockBit, IcedID, BumbleBee, and TrueBot. It is also known as a QNAP worm owing to the usage of compromised QNAP units to retrieve the payload.
Over time, Raspberry Robin assault chains have added a brand new distribution technique that includes downloading it through archives and Home windows Script Information despatched as attachments utilizing the messaging service Discord, to not point out buying one-day exploits to attain native privilege escalation earlier than they have been publicly disclosed.
There’s additionally some proof to counsel that the malware is obtainable to different actors as a pay-per-install (PPI) botnet to ship next-stage malware.
Moreover, Raspberry Robin infections have included a USB-based propagation mechanism that includes utilizing a compromised USB drive containing a Home windows shortcut (LNK) file disguised as a folder to activate the deployment of the malware.
The U.S. authorities has since revealed that the Russian nation-state risk actor tracked as Cadet Blizzard might have used Raspberry Robin as an preliminary entry facilitator.
Silent Push, in its newest evaluation undertaken together with Workforce Cymru, discovered one IP deal with that was getting used as a knowledge relay to attach all compromised QNAP units, finally resulting in the invention of over 180 distinctive C2 domains.
“The singular IP deal with was linked by means of Tor relays, which is probably going how community operators issued new instructions and interacted with compromised units,” the corporate stated. “The IP used for this relay was based mostly in an E.U. nation.”
A deeper investigation of the infrastructure has revealed that the Raspberry Robin C2 domains are brief – e.g., q2[.]rs, m0[.]wf, h0[.]wf, and 2i[.]pm – and that they’re quickly rotated between compromised units and thru IPs utilizing a approach known as quick flux in an effort to make it difficult to take them down.
A few of the prime Raspberry Robin top-level domains (TLDs) are .wf, .pm, .re, .nz, .eu, .gy, .tw, and .cx, with domains registered utilizing area of interest registrars like Sarek Oy, 1API GmbH, NETIM, Epag[.]de, CentralNic Ltd, and Open SRS. A majority of the recognized C2 domains have title servers on a Bulgarian firm named ClouDNS.
“Raspberry Robin’s use by Russian authorities risk actors aligns with its historical past of working with numerous different severe risk actors, a lot of whom have connections to Russia,” the corporate stated. “These embrace LockBit, Dridex, SocGholish, DEV-0206, Evil Corp (DEV-0243), Fauppod, FIN11, Clop Gang, and Lace Tempest (TA505).”