Rewterz Threat Alert – Government Sector in Central Asia Targeted With New HAWKBALL Backdoor

Severity

Medium

Analysis Summary

HAWKBALL is a backdoor that attackers can use to collect information from the victim, as well as to deliver payloads. HAWKBALL is capable of surveying the host, creating a named pipe to execute native Windows commands, terminating processes, creating, deleting and uploading files, searching for files, and enumerating drives.

The attack involved the new HAWKBALL backdoor being delivered via well-known Microsoft Office vulnerabilities CVE-2017-11882 and CVE-2018-0802.

The decoy file, doc.rtf, contains an OLE object that uses Equation Editor to drop the embedded shellcode in %TEMP% with the name 8.t. This shellcode is decrypted in memory through EQENDT32.EXE. Figure 2 shows the decryption mechanism used in EQENDT32.EXE.

The decrypted shellcode is dropped as a Microsoft Word plugin WLL into C:\Users\ADMINI~1\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word\STARTUP.

Impact

Exposure of information

Indicators of Compromise

URLs

• http[:]//149[.]28[.]182[.]78/?e=0&&t=
• http[:]//149[.]28[.]182[.]78/?e=0&&t=0&&k=
• http[:]//149[.]28[.]182[.]78/?t=0&&s=0&&p=wGH^69&&k=

Malware Hash (MD5/SHA1/SH256)

• ac0eac22ce12eac9ee15ca03646ed70c
• d90e45fbf11b5bbdca945b24d155a4b2

Remediation

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