Rewterz Threat Alert – The Dustman Malware Hits Bahrain’s national oil company

Severity

High

Analysis Summary

Iranian state-sponsored hackers have deployed a new strain of data-wiping malware on the network of Bahrain’s national oil company. The security incident came to light amid rising political tensions between the US and Iran after the US military killed a top Iranian military general in a drone strike last week. 

THE DUSTMAN MALWARE

Dustman is a so-called data wiper — malware designed to delete data on infected computers, once launched into execution. The main shared component between all three strains is EldoS RawDisk, a legitimate software toolkit for interacting with files, disks, and partitions. The three malware strains use different exploits and techniques to elevate initial access to admin-level, from where they unpack and launch the EldoS RawDisk utility to wipe data on infected hosts. 

Since Dustman is considered an evolved version of ZeroCleare, most of the code is the same, but Saudi CNA officials who analyzed the malware said Dustman comes with two important differences:

• Dustman’s destructive capability and all needed drivers and loaders are delivered in one executable file as opposed to two files, as was the case with ZeroCleare.
• Dustman overwrites the volume, while ZeroCleare wipes a volume by overwriting it with garbage data (0x55).

Successful attacks resulted in all wiped systems showing a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) message.

Impact

Data Destruction

Indicators of Compromise

SHA-256

• 18c92f23b646eb85d67a890296000212091f930b1fe9e92033f123be3581a90f
• f07b0c79a8c88a5760847226af277cf34ab5508394a58820db4db5a8d0340fc7
• 2fc39463b6db44873c9c07724ac28b63cdd72f5863a4a7064883e3afdd141f8d

Remediation

• Block all threat indicators at your respective controls.
• Always be suspicious about emails sent by unknown senders.
• Never click on the links/attachments sent by unknown senders.