InfoStealer Malware – A New Operation in The Wild [source: securityaffairs]

Attack attribution is always a very hard work. False Flags, Code Reuse and Spaghetti Code  makes impossible to assert “This attack belongs to X”. Indeed nowadays makes more sense talking about Attribution Probability rather then Attribution by itself. “This attack belongs to X with 65% of attribution probability” it would be a correct sentence.

I made this quick introduction because the following analysis would probably take the reader to think about specific attribution, but it won’t be so accurate, so please be prepared to have not such a clear conclusions.

Today I’d like to show an interesting analysis of a quite new InfoStealer Malware delivered by eMail to many International Companies. The analysis shows up interesting Code Reuse capabilities, apparently originated by Japanese Attackers reusing an English Speaker Attacker source code. Again I have not enough artifacts to give attributions but only few clues as follows. In the described analysis, the original sample was delivered by sarah@labaire.co.za (with high probability a compromised South Africa account) to one of my spamming email addresses.

The obtained sample is a Microsoft Word document within macro in it. The macros were heavily obfuscated by using four rounds of substitutions and UTF-8 encoding charsets (which, by the way, is super annoying). The following image shows the obfuscated macro code with UTF-8 charsets.