Observing the Havex RAT

It has, so far, been publicly reported that three ICS vendors have spread the Havex Remote-Access-Tool (RAT) as part of their official downloads. We've covered the six pieces of software from these three vendors in our blog post ”Full Disclosure of Havex Trojans”. In this blog post we proceed by analyzing network traffic generated by Havex.

Indicators of Compromise

Before going into details of our analysis we'd like to recommend a few other resources that can be used to detect the Havex RAT. There are three Havex IDS signatures available via Emerging Threats. There are also Yara rules and OpenIOC signatures available for Havex. Additionally, the following domains are known to be used in the later versions (043 and 044) of Havex according to Kaspersky:

• disney.freesexycomics.com
• electroconf.xe0.ru
• rapidecharge.gigfa.com
• sinfulcelebs.freesexycomics.com
• www.iamnumber.com

HTTP Command-and-Control

The Havex RAT Command-and-Control (C2) protocol is based on HTTP POST requests, which typically look something like this:

POST /blogs/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-settings/bpsettings-src.php?id=84651193834787196090098FD80-c8a7af419640516616c342b13efab&​v1=043&​v2=170393861&​q=45474bca5c3a10c8e94e56543c2bd

As you can see, four variables are sent in the QueryString of this HTTP POST request; namely id, v1, v2 and q. Let's take a closer look to see what data is actually sent to the C2 server in the QueryString.

Analyzing a Havex PCAP

I had the pleasure to discuss the Havex Malware with Joel Langill, when we met at the 4SICS conference in Stockholm last month. Joel was nice enough to provide me with a 800 MB PCAP file from when he executed the Havex malware in an Internet connected lab environment.

I used the command line tool NetworkMinerCLI (in Linux) to automatically extract all HTTP downloads from Joel's PCAP file to disk. This way I also got a CSV log file with some useful metadata about the extracted files. Let's have a closer look at what was extracted:

$ mono NetworkMinerCLI.exe -r new-round-09-setup.pcap
Closing file handles...
970167 frames parsed in 1337.807 seconds.

$ cut -d, -f 1,2,3,4,7,12 new-round-09-setup.pcap.FileInfos.csv | head

SourceIP   SourcePort  DestinationIP  DestinationPort  FileSize   Frame
185.27.134.100   TCP 80   192.168.1.121   TCP 1238   244 676 B       14
198.63.208.206   TCP 80   192.168.1.121   TCP 1261       150 B     1640
185.27.134.100   TCP 80   192.168.1.121   TCP 1286   359 508 B     3079
185.27.134.100   TCP 80   192.168.1.121   TCP 1311   236 648 B     4855
185.27.134.100   TCP 80   192.168.1.121   TCP 1329       150 B    22953
185.27.134.100   TCP 80   192.168.1.121   TCP 1338       150 B    94678
185.27.134.100   TCP 80   192.168.1.121   TCP 1346       150 B   112417
198.63.208.206   TCP 80   192.168.1.121   TCP 1353       150 B   130108
198.63.208.206   TCP 80   192.168.1.121   TCP 1365       150 B   147902

Files downloaded through Havex C2 communication are typically modules to be executed. However, these modules are downloaded in a somewhat obfuscated format; in order to extract them one need to do the following:

• Base64 decode
• Decompress (bzip2)
• XOR with ”1312312”

To be more specific, here's a crude one-liner that I used to calculate MD5 hashes of the downloaded modules:

$ tail -c +95 C2_download.html | base64 -d | bzcat -d | xortool-xor -s "1312312" -f - -n | tail -c +330 | md5sum

To summarize the output from this one-liner, here's a list of the downloaded modules in Joel's PCAP file:

All three extracted modules are known binaries associated with Havex. The third module is one of the Havex OPC scanner modules, let's have a look at what happens on the network after this module has been downloaded!

Analyzing Havex OPC Traffic

In Joel's PCAP file, the OPC module download finished at frame 5117. Less then a second later we see DCOM/MS RPC traffic. To understand this traffic we need to know how to interpret the UUID's used by MS RPC.

Marion Marschalek has listed 10 UUID's used by the Havex OPC module in order to enumerate OPC components. However, we've only observed four of these commands actually being used by the Havex OPC scanner module. These commands are:

Of these commands the ”IOPC Browse” is the ultimate goal for the Havex OPC scanner, since that's the command used to enumerate all OPC tags on an OPC server. Now, let's have a look at the PCAP file to see what OPC commands (i.e. UUID's) that have been issued.

$ tshark -r new-round-09-setup.first6000.pcap -n -Y 'dcerpc.cn_bind_to_uuid != 99fcfec4-5260-101b-bbcb-00aa0021347a' -T fields -e frame.number -e ip.dst -e dcerpc.cn_bind_to_uuid -Eoccurrence=f -Eheader=y

frame.nr  ip.dst      dcerpc.cn_bind_to_uuid
5140    192.168.1.97  000001a0-0000-0000-c000-000000000046
5145    192.168.1.11  000001a0-0000-0000-c000-000000000046
5172    192.168.1.97  000001a0-0000-0000-c000-000000000046
5185    192.168.1.11  9dd0b56c-ad9e-43ee-8305-487f3188bf7a
5193    192.168.1.97  000001a0-0000-0000-c000-000000000046
5198    192.168.1.11  55c382c8-21c7-4e88-96c1-becfb1e3f483
5212    192.168.1.11  00000143-0000-0000-c000-000000000046
5247    192.168.1.11  000001a0-0000-0000-c000-000000000046
5257    192.168.1.11  00000143-0000-0000-c000-000000000046
5269    192.168.1.11  00000143-0000-0000-c000-000000000046
5274    192.168.1.11  39c13a4d-011e-11d0-9675-0020afd8adb3
5280    192.168.1.11  39c13a4d-011e-11d0-9675-0020afd8adb3
5285    192.168.1.11  39227004-a18f-4b57-8b0a-5235670f4468
5286    192.168.1.11  39227004-a18f-4b57-8b0a-5235670f4468
[...]

We can thereby verify that the IOPCBrowse command was sent to one of Joel's OPC servers in frame 5285 and 5286. However, tshark/Wireshark is not able to parse the list of OPC items (tags) that are returned from this function call. Also, in order to find all IOPCBrowse commands in a more effective way we'd like to search for the binary representation of this command with tools like ngrep or CapLoader. It would even be possible to generate an IDS signature for IOPCBrowse if we'd know what to look for.

The first part of an MSRPC UUID is typically sent in little endian, which means that the IOPCBrowse command is actually sent over the wire as:

04 70 22 39 8f a1 57 4b 8b 0a 52 35 67 0f 44 68

Let's search for that value in Joel's PCAP file:

Image: Searching for IOPCBrowse byte sequence with CapLoader

Image: CapLoader with 169 extracted flows matching IOPCBrowse UUID

Apparently 169 flows contain one or several packets that match the IOPCBrowse UUID. Let's do a “Flow Transcript” and see if any OPC tags have been sent back to the Havex OPC scanner.

Image: CapLoader Transcript of OPC-DA session

Oh yes, the Havex OPC scanner sure received OPC tags from what appears to be a Waterfall unidirectional OPC gateway.

Another way to find scanned OPC tags is to search for a unique tag name, like “Bucket Brigade” in this example.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Wednesday, 12 November 2014 21:09:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #Havex​ #PCAP​ #NSM​ #ICS​ #C2​ #NetworkMinerCLI​ #CapLoader​