OverviewThis week we take a deep dive into the latest Linux malware, GoblinRAT to lookat how malware is evolving to stay stealthy and evade detection and how malwareauthors are learning from modern software development along the way.

GoblinRAT Linux Malware teardown* https://rt-solar.ru/solar-4rays/blog/4861/ * Solar 4RAYS team (Cyber Threat Research Center at SOLAR - RussianCybersecurity firm) describes a new piece of Linux malware which they nameGoblinRAT (RAT = Remote Access Trojan) 2023 when contacted by an IT company which providesservices to (presumably) Russian government agencies - noticed system logsbeing deleted off one of their servers and a utility being downloaded to stealaccount passwords from a domain controller * Found this malware masquerading as a legitimate process which takes quitecareful steps to avoid detection - in fact most of the functionality withinthe malware is devoted to hiding its presence on the target system * Doesn’t include automatic persistence but instead appears to be manually“installed” by the attackers with a unique name for each target where it wouldbe named after an existing legitimate process on the target system - similarlyeven the names of its files and libraries were also unique per-system as wellto avoid detection

+ e.g. in one case where zabbix was running, the malware named itself`zabbix_agent` and setup a new systemd service to launch itself at bootwhich looks identical to the real zabbix agent (except the real one is`zabbix_agentd`) and then once running it edits its own command-linearguments after startup to insert standard parameters expected by the real`zabbix_agentd` so that on a `ps aux` or similar output it appears basicallyidentical to the real `zabbix_agentd`
+ in another case it named itself `rhsmd` to mimic the Red Hat subscriptionmanager service again using systemd as the launcher, whilst for others as`memcached` using cron to launch
+ C2 uses DDNS (Dynamic DNS) and legitimate hacked sites to hide in noise of“normal” traffic - using DDNS attackers would use specifically named C2machines per target host - in one case where it was named `chrony_debug` tomimic the `chronyd` time synchronisation service, it would connect to C2 amachine named `chronyd.tftpd.net` - attackers clearly went to a lot of workto hide this in plain sight

Automatically deletes itself off the system if does not get pinged by the C2operator after a certain period of time - and when it deletes itself it shredsitself to reduce the chance of being detected later via disk forensics etc
Has 2 versions - a “server” and “client” - the server uses port-knocking towatching incoming connection requests on a given network interface and thenonly actually allowing a connection if the expected sequence of port numberswas tried - this allows the controller of the malware to connect into itwithout the malware actively listening on a given port and hence reduces thechance it is detected accidentally
Client instead connects back to its specific C2 server
Logs collected by 4RAYS team appear to show the commands executed by themalware were quite manual looking - invoking bash and then later invokingcommands like systemctl to stop and replace an existing service, where thetime lag between commands is in the order of seconds - minutes and so wouldseem like these were manually typed command rather than automatically drivenby scripts
Malware itself is implemented in Go and includes the ability to execute singlecommands as well as providing an interactive shell; also includes support forlisting / copying / moving files including with compression; also works as aSOCKS5 proxy to allow it to proxy traffic to/from other hosts that may bebehind more restrictive firewalls etc; and as detailed above the ability tomimic existing processes on the system to avoid detection
To try and frustrate reverse engineering Gobfuscate was used to obfuscate thecompiled code - odd choice though since this project was seemingly abandonded3 years ago and nowadays garble seems to be the go-to tool for this (no punintended)- but perhaps this is evidence of the time of the campaign sincethese samples were all found back in 2020 which this project was more active…
Encrypts its configuration using AES-GCM and the config contains details likethe shell to invoke, kill-switch delay and secret value to use to disable it,alternate process name to use plus the TLS certificate and keys to use whencommunicating with the C2 server
Uses the yamux Go connection multiplexing library then to multiplex the singleTLS connection to/from the C2 server
Can then be instructed to perform the various actions like running commands /launching a shell / list files in a directory / reading files etc as discussedbefore
Other interesting part is the kill switch / self-destruct functionality - ifkill switch delay is specified in the encrypted configuration malware willautomatically delete itself by invoking dd to overwrite itself with input from/dev/urandom 8 times; once more with 0 bytes and finally then removing thefile from disk
Overall 4 organisations were found to have been hacked with this and in eachit was running with full admin rights - with some running for over 3 years -and various binaries show compilation dates and golang toolchain versionsindicating this was developed since at least 2020
But unlike other malware that we have covered, it does not appear to be a morewidespread campaign since “other information security companies with globalsensor networks” couldn’t find any similar samples in their own collections
No clear evidence of origin - Solar 4RAYS asking for other cybersecuritycompanies to help contribute to their evidence to identify the attackers
Interesting to see the evolution of malware mirrors that of normal softwaredevelopment - no longer using C/C++ etc but more modern languages like Gowhich provide exactly the sorts of functionality you want in your malware -systems-level programming functionality with built-in concurrency and memorysafety - also Go binaries are statically linked so no need to worry aboutdependencies on the target system

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