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BotConf 2013 - #Kelihos: Payload+Domain Analysis, Actor's ID Disclosure, Stopping Payload (as Crime PoC)

11 Dec 2013

3years Silence for Disclosure Changelog:

Note2: Considering: The attack of Kelihos botnet to my country and several countries is still un-stoppable and on-going, Yet I was told to censored Kelihos investgation on 2013 without getting good follow up from law enforcement in this planet, no matter how hard we tried and providing evidences in each badness they made. And this post, also was asked to be ion censor AGAIN, and right now we also did not see the stopping result either. Concluded: It is time for the people as victims of this evilness to know the truth. I opened all censorship from its seal[link].

THIS is the one of many badness evidence conducted by Kelihos botherder: Peter Severa with his real ID and address we reported and is known by law enforcement (PS: it is NOT the ID that Brian Krebs announced). Use it by your own will. If the action of this borherder will continue, we will keep on disclosing further and further. God gave us strength to put right thing to the right place - @unixfreaxjp - Sat Feb 6 12:58:38 JST 2016

Vive la BotConf!

On the 5th December 2013 I am honoured to represent MalwareMustDie, NPO group to do a short talk about Kelihos fast flux botnet. The talk was shared between myself as MalwareMustDie OP Kelihos team leader and paired with Mr. Dhia Mahjoub of OpenDNS Umbrella Lab, and we are "supposed" to finish the talk in 20 minutes, meaning I must wrap up my part on 10 minutes.. Therefore I really thank the BotConf for the adjustment in time, and saving me from chocking my self :-))

You can see the presentation PDF data in the BotConf.EU linked -->>[HERE], and the video is under process on editing, which will be announced soon.
Involving in the process of the event itself, I am assuring you all that BotConf is the purest and the coolest botnet/malware event on 2013 as per expected by the hard work of BotConf team (salute!), with pure research materials, no marketing buff, and is really "OK we all see that & those codes so WTF is the point?" kinda conference, :-) thank you again to Eric and his team who did the terrific work.

If you don't have a chance to see the presentation review page yet, now is the time then, the link is-->>[HERE]
And recently the VIDEO of the presentation (sorry for the "heavy" censorship) is published too-->>[HERE]

The Background

MalwareMustDie team recently launched a classified & important operation against Kelihos botnet. The operation was called OP Kelihos (obviously..) started from August 2013 as per initiated in our blog posted-->>[HERE]; Following by the series of Kelihos affiliates malware payload domain blocking and CnC servers takedown effort to PoC the link between CnC list and the Kelihos payloads; which also explaining a "HowTo" to effectively stopping Kelihos botnet serving its payloads (we executed those takedown starting from 1st December in Netherlands and 2nd-3rd December 2013 in Germany, NOTED: we were busy with this so please bear the mistakes by media news that saying we were launching operation against CryptoLocker); And in the end: The Disclosure of the recent facts of the botnet, which showing the botnet's structure weaknesses and the disclosure of the botherders ID (the owner of those CNC servers PoC'ed above) in the BotConf, Dec 5th 2013 in Nantes, France. The presentation is exclusivity made to support the success of BotConf 2013.

Pictures?? :-) (thank's to BotConf folks!)

Bless them who read the codes and read them with the ☩Lord guidance.

The presentation

We spitted the presentation between myself and our OP member Mr. Dhia Mahjoub under the below outline, and I did the Kelihos talk for the Part 2,3,4 as per shown in the slide. We wrapped the OP in systematic & as scientific as it can be, it has many PoC points made actually, but I have to wrap all stuff in 10 minutes (++) time as per provided by the team.


Practically domain analysis, trends, botnet work hours, payload statistic, numbers & statistic was presented very good by Dhia, and I was handling the kelihos botnet binary investigation,that leads to many disclosure in structure, scheme and disclosure of PoC's mentioned above. There were stuff that we all do not want to leak to internet to prevent the "currently stressful moronz" mitigating our method, which explaining the hard censore in presentation materials and the cut of video online stream. This explaining many "Picture??" words burped out during the talk.

The point of my part of presentation is: (1) A good coordination between simply good folks to see the bad stuff taken down can leap very far, which are systematically monitor and communicate, supporting by GREAT intel work we have, with the cool support and backup from other legit entities make this happen (Thank you to all!). The Link of CNC and payload was clearly demonstrated by takedowns, the botherder ID of the CnC owner was nailed good by contract basis. Now is time for the LE's move for "finalization" part. People in BotConf are witnesses for all of the evidence we collected are all in there, so let's see how far the legal follow will be executed about this case. (2) The MO of this operation can be applied to many other botnets, since they are all dependable on internet services to run, WE OWN internet and bad guys DON'T, so all we should do is stop them using internet LEGALLY.
OK, here we go to details:

Kelihos is a very well-known botnet with the long history of surviving some taking down efforts. Technically known as the fast flux botnet, among the various functions (DNS, SpamBot, peer-to-peer) Kelihos is spreading malware affiliates binaries via its infected peers, which it's been covered by the multiple encryption to hide the core of service that they are actually really depending into, the botnet as service for malware affiliation.

This post is explaining what we presented in BotConf, about how MalwareMustDie team fights against Kelihos Botnet and aiming botnet's payload delivery scheme as the most weak point to attack. The writing is based on BotConf 2013 slides part 2, 3, and 4, the part that I presented in BotConf, but now with the compilation for the public purpose. I will not share the "too sensitive" information (the "picture??" part) in this post, and all of the related data is the cyber crime evidence for the law enforcement to follow, within a month the full report of this crime will be sent to Europol ECC, Interpol DCU, and GroupIB, it will be official report back up by damage report stated from multiple CERT all over countries which victimized by this botnet.

Since the time is so limited during the botconf (well it's a short-talk technically, I should do it within 10 minutes anyway). There are so many functions in Kelihos botnet that I couldn't cover, like: its independent (splendid malware affiliate support customized) DNS scheme to support the botnet's fast flux functions, multiple encryption between each C2 comm between peers-job-servers-CnC-motherships, the spambot functions with templates and its encryption, the blacklist checking functions, and so on, but we will stick to the HTTP function that serves the payloads. My co-presenter, Dhia posted his part of presentation to explain the detail Kelihos fast flux monitoring in IP, domains and trend, in the separated post-->>[HERE]

The Encryption

None of the communication extracted from a Kelihos botnet infected peer and/or proxy that are not encrypted, as per snapshot below:

Since we are all read many previous good people's description and definition of Kelihos on the above description, I will skip the boring part and go to the point of investigation started. Mr. Kyle Yang of Fortinet was the first one who published the Kelihos encrypted CnC communication in Blackhat Europe in Amsterdam 2012, link-->>[HERE], and what he explained during the presentation about the encryption of communication between Kelihos job servers and CnC is the fact that actually shouldn't be ignored. And our project in fighting Kelihos was starting from this point. You'd better see Mr. Yang's work in his blog-->>[HERE] to understand the details before continue reading the rest of details.

The most important fact that you will get after decrypting Kelihos CnC communication is, the botnet commands/method and the service to spread the malware payloads that's being served under its peers via the registered domains and file names. Yes they need internet to fetch the payloads which bonnet upgrades scheme will be depending on this bins. The picture below is the sample of the encrypted communications in Kelihos:

Well, as you can see, the domain name and the payload name exists in the communication. The captured data in the pic above was captured in the session of post-infected where the data between peer of infection (proxies) to job servers and CnC was hooked.

The question raised from my side, how is the logic for a new pre-infection of then? The question is answered by the existence of the "loaders" (read: downloader) binaries that has been delivered during infection to download the payload from the domains stated s per pic above. If you may want to take a look at what I analysed on the Texas Explosion Malvertisement in April, 2013 -->>[HERE] this is the sample of the download scheme for the pre-infection with the downloader which will call the domains and payloads as per below:

Practically the usage of directory for serving payloads is a thing that can be set easily during upgrading the botnet, so currently the root, modXXX and loaders is the place where you can fetch what moronz serves in the botnet. The payloads.

The Key of BotNet as Service: the Payloads

As per I explained in the BotConf. The pattern for the domains and payloads are having same logic as per below slides (see the first slide as the logic and next slides as PoC), fortunately this is the thing that Kelihos moornz can not change immediately for the spaces used for encryption is so limited:

Furthermore we figured the payloads distribution of this botnet and implement the "generic" samples (for PoC used for suspension domains) in the URLQuery as per regex below:

And also we implement same logic too in Kelihos BotNet monitoring IRC channels per country:

And also use the same logic for the evidence of damage report of Kelihos infection in specific countries:

A bit About Kelihos Payload

In every peer infection Kelihos botnet, there is root and loader directories that sharing the payloads. The root directory contains of original and malware affiliates binaries (related to the pay-per-install scheme), and the loader one contains of the downloader binaries to the affiliates malware. Dhia was making good statistic on the previous sample and I made conclusion about it. See the two slides below to see the explanation of differences between the payloads served in the root directories. It explained why there are payloads with the high detection rates and why there are payloads with the very low detection rates.

Systematic Investigation to Reveal the Botherder ID

Since the BotNet will need payloads to serve and by the technical scheme of Kelihos the payloads needs the ALIVE domains to distribute them, the ID cracking of Kelihos Botherder is not difficult in theory but is a really delicate work in our intel department.

On July 19th, 2013 I announced the activity of MalwareMustDie in cleaning up all .RU domains used by the Kelihos as per posted-->>[HERE]. Up to that time we saw a lot of Kelihos distributed by RedKit exploit kit as their main infector, together with the PHP redirection tool of ESD.PHP (see the write up about it-->>HERE). RedKit is quietly disappeared now, and ESD envolved into the CookieBomb, and Kelihos infector also shifted to this new infection tool. OK..back to the rail, after the .RU domains sacked down Kelihos moronz was shifting to the common TLD (read: internet domains) all over the world, abusing many ICANN credited registrars by using lame domain reseller to registered the Payload domain of Kelihos. This is where the point when we started the current operation.

First of all, since we started the investigation from zero ground of the new trend in payload's TLD (on early August 2013), we need to have as much reference as possible, at that point, when Kelihos started to use INTERNET.BS as the registrar for their payloads our reference was also zero. Yes, with the help of abuse.ch (with so many thank's for the GREAT effort of Roman), we sinkholed the domains, and then with the wonderful cooperation from CERT organizations, LE and registrars we also have ability to suspend the domains. The recorded domains used has the below picture characteristic, which we PoC explanation on the Kelihos payload domains in the blog post-->>[HERE]

The distribution of the domains itself is varied in some registrars all over the world with the list on the presentation slide I presented in BotConf below (the total data so far is 913 domains from August until 3rd December 2013, but the pic below is the data until mid October 2013):

Once we know the encrypted used and cracked its payload access pattern, the monitoring for new kelihos payload domains can be done without entering its front-end and DNS has wonderful tools that can be used for the monitoring purpose, one of the method that I used is using Umbrella Labs tool to see every timing/reference sue to new domains started and end as per mentioned in the slide below:

The team was having good coordination, to seek and to destroy new domains. It was pretty hard to do on the beginning, under mock and grins from some researchers.. our group is keeping on detecting, checking and taking down the domains to force the trails of evidence for the data cross-check comparison until we have overall positive ID for the third party domain resellers (noted the "s", is plural and more than two) used by this crime action.

Cross-checking the email ID above to the (1) domain-snopping sites, (2) promotion of the Kelihos BotNetin some black forum, and the way the botherder do the AV scanning new payloads domains before release the new domains/payloads in the CnC communication and push it to the peers, we connected the dots and all lead to the one important communication centre owned by the botherders. Below is some limited snapshots during the disclosure in BotConf:

The "black forum that promoting Kelihos" SQL Dump for confirming the domain reseller email address to Kelihos:

Information leads to a "well-known AV and URL scanner checks for the bad domains" that being used by the Kelihos botherders to check the new Domain (URL) and its payloads itself:

Which the above data is lead to the main communication ID :-)

The PoC to link the ID to the Payload of Kelihos

With the legal entity collaboration with our partner (GroupIB) to build evidence data to be reported to law enforcement we conducted heavy surveillance to the bad actor communication ID to find :-) "every evidence" we need.

In BotConf we displayed the spam templates orders (w00t), the orders/invoice/payment for the Hosting of CNC (w00t), and other communication they use like twitter account (w00t), with also some extra ++ information. But for special information we pass only to LE like: Webmoney they used, hoster contracts and etc data. Below is a list of the CnC & Mothership servers of Kelihos served in Netherlands and Germany they used before BotConf 2013:

OP Netherlands & OP Morgenerwachen for PoC

We launched two operations on December 1st 2013 for proving to the eyes of law that the list of CNC we extracted from suspected botherder's communication is the Kelihos payload list. We basically work under good coordination between OP team, MMD members, and law enforcement channel in both countries (Nether lands and Germany) to takedown the listed CNC and safe the data for the evidence purpose accordingly. The PoC to be approved is: "If after takedown the CnC and the payload stopped, the botherder suspect is beyond any doubt to be responsible to all Kelihos payload activities"

Below is twitter time-line is the evidence of the activities during the Operations:

The PoC Positive Result, with Snapshot Images & Videos

The operation was successfully executed. And as the result of the operation, after the CnC was completely down, the Kelihos botnet is not having ANY payloads to serve, or to be precise, having errors in serving payloads, evidence is as per tweeted below:

The video below was taken during we shutdown half of CnC (in Netherlands), the peers IP address of the Kelihos proxy looks still giving response to provide infection of the payload, but the payload itself is not accessible with the HTTP error 502. (Please compare to the first Video which showing the normal payload download)

The below video was taken after full CNC was shutdown, that time the botnet can not even reach the peer anymore (see the READ ERROR & NO DATA RECEIVED message shown in every wget request in my script to download the payload):

Yes, for some time between 3-4 days (During the beginning of BotConf) the Kelihos was running without serving any payloads at all :-) The PoC between the CnC list extracted from the "suspected-yet-proven-guilty" botherder's communication, link to the payload system of the Kelihos is perfectly proven as per expected. The ID's owner, beyond any doubt, is the BotHerder's ID of Kelihos botnet in this case, really deserves to sleep in Jail soon.

In the BotConf short talk we went to slides to explain this PoC since my 10minutes time is not enough to explain all of the fact, below is the slides explaining this PoC point:

The CrimeBoss, Kelihos BotHerder ID

All of the above written data are coming from one single communication owned by a individual which his ID I exposed in the BotConf, 2013. This Russian nationality of 37 years old male is responsible to all activity in Kelihos.

So if you have the picture of it, please pass it to your country's law enforcement to be process further:-) . For your information I will not expose the information in here, the information was actually passed to the related country's law enforcement from September, 2013.

Additionally, he is also responsible the Pump-and-Dump spam which we recorded his communication in ordering the template from the translators as per shown in the below slides:

And also for your information, @kafeine wrote an excellent report about iframe "CookieBomb" injection tool in-->>[HERE], and in the contact section was written the email address with the domain that pointed to the IP address in the CnC server list describe above:

There are also many more information which is very sensitive and confirming more malicious activities and connection of this moronz behind Kelihos, is a subject to be passed to all LE channels:

Conclusion

1. What is the best way to stop the Kelihos botnet? We can not make it stop by the taking down the infection peers. This threat can be stopped only by the arrest of the bad actors, or make a way to stop the Kelihos botnet serving malware payloads for the disruption level. :-)
Taking down domains and peers won't help much unless you need to do the investigation reference data like we did to find the pattern to start dotting the lines.

2. With the good coordination between security researchers as one team-work, we can detect, monitor, investigate, build evidence, pull some PoC to proof the crime scheme, and pass the information to the LE in a good wrap. This level of information is what actually needed to make sure the arrest will be executed on the rails. We will and still always need your help, to push and to be sure that the ID that proven guilty and disclosed in BotConf to go to jail accordingly.

3. The video and presentation will be shared after the editing is finished.

Thank you

As MalwareMustDie, NPO, we thank The BotConf team, who was so kindly offer us place and great hospitality to do the "stage", I personally like very much the idea of Botnet Conference, and will do the very best to support the event for the future also, I guess we have to prepare to crack another botnet's moronz ID to be presented in the BotConf 2014. Count us in, we will be there. Thank you again Eric, Seb and the team! God bless your good effort!

I thank to all OP Kelihos friends involved to this operation that helped us out to make this operation into the success from day one. Without your trust and being with us since beginning this coordination will never happen, for some security purpose discussed with my lawyer it will be the best way not to reveal your ID in this post. At least, as researcher we did what we could do, and I'd say we do not bad about this case. Respect to you all. :-)) Glad to work together with a solid team work.

I would thank GroupIB who is trying hard to push the case to the law enforcement, I really wish you guys to see the PoC that we want to confirm here, the CnC list and the Kelihos payload is connected in the most understanding way, so there will be no doubt left to aim the suspect into jail to pay his sins. I thank Mr. Christiaan Beek from McAfee, who did the great great work in taking down CNC. To fellow crusaders (Markus Fritz, @wopot) in Germany, with the help of LKA Hessen to perform the help to support this PoC in taking down the CnC. Respect to you all also.

Thank you also to the US team of MMD who's helping monitoring the case and the shutdown, specially to Mr. Andre Dimino, Mr. Dave Marcus, @rjacksix, @Cephurs and @Malmouse ; for your advice, confirmation and patience in dealing with stubborn researchers in MMD.

I specially personally thank so much to one person : @kafeine who help me a lot and stay behind the scene of this operation. And also great thank to the great intel conducted by our intel team (I can not reveal their ID yet, but he is always with me in BotConf..if you know what I mean..) .. and all of the supporter of MalwareMustDie (including Paul with his new Templar robe), YOU ARE ALL THE BEST!!

Kudos BotConf 5-6 Dec, 2013, Nantes, France - Nice Memory!

Please support BotConf 2014!

The BotConf event was a success! The below list of posts of the fellow speakers (in random sorts, really) show the fact about it. Please support the QUALITY and PURITY of botnet research materials in BotConf by preparing your best papers on what you're doing against any botnets, i.e.: method and shares instead product marketing. BotConf is the event of researchers, by researchers and for "LE" and researchers! 

http://blog.crimenumerique.fr/2013/12/14/botconf-premiere-conference-sur-la-lutte-contre-les-botnets-bilan/
http://blog.rootshell.be/2013/12/06/botconf-2013-wrap-up-day-1/
http://blog.rootshell.be/2013/12/07/botconf-2013-wrap-up-day-2/
http://bl0g.cedricpernet.net/post/2013/12/12/Botconf-2013-A-real-success
http://www.virusbtn.com/blog/2013/12_10.xml
http://tomchop.me/2013/11/botconf-the-botnet-fighting-conference/
http://blog.gdatasoftware.com/blog/article/fighting-botnets-acdc-and-botconf.html
http://www.n0secure.org/2013/12/botconf-2013.html
http://www.n0secure.org/2013/12/botconf-2013-jour-2.html
http://labs.umbrella.com/2013/12/18/operation-kelihos-presented-botconf-2013/
http://www.lexsi-leblog.fr/cert/botconf-la-sweet-orange-conference.html
http://blog.prakharprasad.com/2013/12/update-on-botconf13-slides.html
http://www.sensepost.com/blog/10030.html


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