A new variant of adware was just discovered yesterday. It’s going viral on Twitter and other media, since they use valid Apple developer certificate to sign all packed samples. I’m quite overbusy these days but it got my interest when seeing the name stated in that certificate: “Quoc Thinh”, quite a unique Vietnamese name. So why not take a break from desperate thesis, toss adware in my lame automated MacOS analysis framework and see what our ‘countryman’ doing?
The sample was first noticed by Gavriel State on Aug 7, then Thomas A Reed – the Mac malware boss hunter from Malwarebytes - confirmed it relates to OperatorMac on the next day. I think you all know the famous Mac free security tools’ author: Patrick Wardle, wrote an amazing report on objective-see.com in Aug 9. So I’m not going too deep in reverse engineering - static analysis, just throw in my Grey-cuckoo framework and grab results. In case somebody doesn’t know, it’s my thesis project and and soon to be released right after my judgment day - defense (hopefully).
From Patrick’s report we understand it’s an adware which installs lots of crabs. By default, cuckoo sandbox timeout is 120 sec. Let’s extend it a bit, 300 sec (5 min) would be enough.
First result we got, that Apple developer ID “Quoc Thinh”, and he got his certificate revoked from Apple today by the way 😄.
spctl -avv "Mughthesec-Player(dmg).dmg"
Mughthesec-Player(dmg).dmg: CSSMERR_TP_CERT_REVOKED
From captured screenshots, we can see what this adware apparently executes: Install Adobe flash and offer you a bunch of PUA (potential unwanted applications) – Booking, Advanced Mac Cleaner, SafeFinder Safari extension, and AdBlock (in some relevant samples that will be discussed later).
Behavioral analysis shows the packed DMG sample invoked a ‘mac’ binary, thereafter ‘Mughthesec’ with a persistence ‘I’ binary. Screenshots below already included other analysis variant of this campaign.
Move on to the network DNS feature, we see a lot of queries and some domains look "suspicious". Their DNS servers mostly are pointed to Akamai so I suggest we rather use domain as IOC than IP address, which could be different from viewers location. Filtering system calls logs with some rules of mine, there is no evasion technique been found. It’s quite surprising because Virustotal behavioral analysis shows a shorter execution trace than mine, which usually means its environment was detected at some point and malware stop running. In Patrick’s report he said there might be MAC address verification to detect VM (VM MAC usually starts with ’00:xx’). Fortunately, my VM framework MAC address was modified long ago since my colleague Yorick Koster at Securify used same trick to abuse my lame framework (thanks Yorick). I should add new rule – “MAC address check” later.
Additionally instead of execve(), MacOS sandbox policy usually invokes processes using XPCProxy or launchd services. So we got several processes created with posix_spawn(): delete Safari, iBooks, Mail cache (likely Advanced Mac cleaner doing its job), install mentioned PUAs and we got some new IOCs.
Other great things from Cuckoo sandbox are Network analysis and Dropped files. However previous report detailed it well enough, hence only some screenshots from these features will be showed:
Some dropped binaries like AMCleaner (93dd0c34a4ec25a508cd6d5fb86d8ccc0c318238d9fee0c93342a20759bf9b7e) already marked as malicious on VirusTotal (VT) 7/56, which could be an indication for vigilant users.
Also with some fancy nonsense statistic screenshots, intent to scare analyst (:p)
At this moment, we have got all indicators to make behavioral detection rule and go hunting for other similar adware samples. Reason why I call this blog post – “a campaign”: there are numerous similar packed DMG/Mac apps matched ‘my behavioral rule’: fake Adobe Flash installer, lots of PUAs from subdomain name [cdn, dl, api] and Vietnamese developer certificate ID.
| Developer ID | Number of Samples | Detected (VT) | Apple status | First seen |
| Quoc Thinh
9G2J3967H9
|
6 | 1/6 (Ikarus detected 1 sample) | Revoked ID | 2017-08-05
|
| Pham Huong
2BS26F3ZCP |
7 | 0 | Revoked ID | 2017-07-15 |
| Phan Anh
C7J9SJ95GX |
24 | 0 | Valid | 2017-04-13 |
| Nhien Nguyen | 3 | 1/3 (ESET-NOD32 detected 1 sample) | Valid | 2017-08-09
|
| Thanh Thuy WAA98JBA59 | 17 | 0 | Valid | 2017-07-06
|
| Tran Phong GMFY4TULB3 | 6 | 0 | Valid | 2017-06-27
|
| Minh Duc
7CXE5FM69W |
5 | 0 | Valid | 2017-06-21 |
| Mai Linh
M3XXTCHY66 |
3 | 0 | Valid | 2017-07-12 |
| Total | 71 | 2 (3%) | 2/8 Revoked ID | Staying undetected at least 4 months |
Please note that VT score is an indicator only, people usually fail to judge hardworking AVs by looking at VT score. We can never know if AV would detect those adwares live running whether or not. Also instead of Mughthesec, other adware use different loader names such as SearchWebSvc, TrustedSafeFinder, etc. I don’t think OSX/Mughthesec would be appropriate for the adware name. I suggest it would be OperatorMac because all campaign packages call a simple loader “mac” binary.
Conclusion
Be vigilant, no one needs Flash nowadays it’s dead. Apple Mac is not virus-free even with those fancy Apple protection XProtect, GateKeeper, Mac sandbox, code signing, etc, many security researchers already warned.
It’s likely an affiliation advertising campaign, in which adware authors spent quite some money (~$800) for these 8 Apple developer certificates and only 2 of them are revoked. Some of dropped MachO executables are not signed, and we don’t know what if those can be really dangerous (like the unsigned MachO executable from APT32 Ocean Lotus campaign targeted Vietnamese organizations lately is really a sophisticated one). Based on timeline and periods of certificate registration, and money they have spent, I doubt these adware creators are making lots of money. Last, let me remind you some incidents happened recently and could be related to this campaign:
- Malicious browser extension – fake IDM Downloader harvested around 5M cookies from popular websites, targeted Vietnamese netizens.
- Fake App store AV app – making more than $80K per month.
P/S: I confronted one famous hacker in cyber pirate community – “Quoc Thinh” aka G4mm4, he seriously admitted he's behind the "crime". Not sure that’s true or he was just kidding 😏
IOCs:
appfastplay.com
Created
| 2017-04-08 | New | -none- | 198.54.117.212 |
| 2017-04-23 | Change | 198.54.117.212 | 198.54.117.215 |
| 2017-07-07 | Change | 198.54.117.215 | 198.54.117.210 |
Namecheap domain hosting @ USA.
mughthesec.com
198.54.117.210
SimplyEApps.com
198.54.117.210
(api./dl./cdn.)dynacubeapps.com
198.54.117.210
(api./dl./cdn.)cloudmacfront.com
(api./dl./cdn.)api.airautoupdates.com
(api./dl./cdn.)osxessentials.com
(api./dl./cdn.)api.vertizoom.com
(api./dl./cdn.)macgabspan.com
install.searchwebsvc.com
install.trustedsafefinder.com
searc.trustedsafefinder.com/h?_pg=XXXX-1234-67890
searc.trustedsafefinder.com/s?q=@@@&_pg=XXXX-1234-67890
~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.Mughthesec.plist
~/Library/Application Support/com.Mughthesec
~/Library/LaunchAgents/SearchWebSvc.plist
~/Library/Application Support/SearchWebSvc
~/Library/LaunchAgents/TrustedSafeFinder
~/Library/Application Support/com.TrustedSafeFinder.plist
~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.pcv.hlpramcn.plist (Advanced Mac Cleaner)
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quoc thinh
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pham huong
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nhien nguyen
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minh duc
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tran phong
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mai linh
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thanh thuy
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