Sony Pictures malware tied to Seoul, “Shamoon” cyber-attacks Elements of the attacks show a common playbook—and possibly a common toolkit.
Wednesday 10 December 2014
Sony Pictures malware tied to Seoul, “Shamoon” cyber-attacks
Elements of the attacks show a common playbook—and possibly a common toolkit.
There are similarities galore between the Seoul (left) and Sony Pictures (right) hacks, right down to the style of their tag image.
The “wiper” malware that knocked Sony Pictures’ corporate network offline for over a week, now being called Destover, bears a striking resemblance not only to the “DarkSeoul” malware that struck South Korean companies last year, but the Shamoon “wiper” that struck Saudi Aramco in 2012, according to analysis by Kaspersky Labs and other security researchers. While there is nothing in the analysis that would tie the three attacks to the same malware developers, they all used similar techniques, as well as some of the same commercial Windows drivers to attack the hard drives of their victims.
In an e-mail exchange with Ars, Kaspersky Lab security researcher Kurt Baumgartner said, “Of the three, the Shamoon and Destover implementations share the most similarities, and based on these similarities it is possible that there was shared guidance or expertise between the two projects. All three share operational similarities.”
The Sony Pictures malware used commercial software to do its damage to the victim computers’ hard drives—the RawDisk library from EldoS, which allows Windows applications to gain direct access to disk hardware without having to run in administrator mode. As EldoS advertises on its website for RawDisk, the library “offers software developers direct access to files, disks and partitions of the disks (hard drives, flash disks, etc,) for user-mode applications, bypassing security limitations of Windows operating systems.” This allowed the malware to skip past any restrictive security permissions in Windows’ NTFS file system and overwrite the data on the drive, including the master boot record (MBR). (Further details of the malware's behavior are in Ars' updated analysis article.)
This is the same technique used in both the 2013 Seoul cyberattack and the Shamoon attack in 2012, according to Baumgartner, who provided a detailed analysis of the similarities between the attacks in a blog post today. The Shamoon attack also used a trial licensed version of the commercial EldoS drivers. And there were other commonalities across all three attacks, Baumgartner noted:
Even the visual elements of the Seoul and Sony attacks are similar. Destover used an internal webserver in the malware to display the message on the screen of affected PCs, just as DarkSeoul did, and the color schemes and themes of the messages displayed in both cases were the same.
The short timeframe between the compilation of the malware and the triggering of the attacks in each case would have precluded the use of shotgun methods like a phishing attack to infect the target networks. The malware would have to have been spread widely across the network days or even hours before it was triggered—indicating that the attackers may have been exploiting the targeted networks for long periods of time before they were brought down by the wiper bugs.
One major difference between the Sony and Seoul malware attacks is that the Seoul attacks included scripts to attack Unix and Linux systems; the Sony Pictures attack lacked these scripts, but it may have been because there were no Unix or Linux systems identified by the attackers prior to the installation of the malware. The Sony malware specifically sought out servers within the company's network by machine name to attack, demonstrating foreknowledge of the network's structure.
Baumgartner said that there was no proof that the three attacks were carried out by the same group, but the “operational and toolset characteristics all carry marked similarities. And it is extraordinary that such unusual and focused acts of large-scale cyber-destruction are being carried out with clearly recognizable similarities.
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