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Upatre used for political spam campaign (Mar 19, 2015)

by Security News

The Dell Sonicwall Threat research team have observed a variant of the Upatre Trojan that is used for political spam. In this case the Trojan is used for an anti-drone campaign, urging victims to stand up to the U.S Government against the use of drones in war.

Infection Cycle:

The Trojan uses the following icon to masquerade as a harmless PDF file:

Once infected, the Trojan causes the following PDF file to be displayed on the users desktop:

The Trojan adds the following files to the filesystem:

  • %USERPROFILE%Local SettingsTempNltgLr.exe
  • %USERPROFILE%Local SettingsTempOIgjpLdRXtPDrik.exe
  • %USERPROFILE%Local SettingsTemptemp15.pdf
  • %USERPROFILE%Local SettingsTemptmpB0ED.txt (encrypted file)
  • %SYSTEM32%configsystemprofileApplication Datanr9bqe8cb6.dll (encrypted file)

The Trojan makes the following DNS queries:

      straphael.org.uk
      canabrake.com.mx
      stun.schlund.de
      docs233.com
      smtp.docs233.com

The Trojan obtains the external IP address of the infected system from DynDNS and reports the infection to a remote webserver. It uses the Mazilla/5.0 user agent string that is typical of malware from this family:

It leaks information about the currently logged in user and the version of Windows running:

The Trojan downloads the PDF file to be displayed in encrypted form:

SonicWALL Gateway AntiVirus provides protection against this threat via the following signatures:

  • GAV: Upatre.YYSH (Trojan)
  • GAV: Battdil.O (Trojan)

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The SonicWall Capture Labs Threat Research Team gathers, analyzes and vets cross-vector threat information from the SonicWall Capture Threat network, consisting of global devices and resources, including more than 1 million security sensors in nearly 200 countries and territories. The research team identifies, analyzes, and mitigates critical vulnerabilities and malware daily through in-depth research, which drives protection for all SonicWall customers. In addition to safeguarding networks globally, the research team supports the larger threat intelligence community by releasing weekly deep technical analyses of the most critical threats to small businesses, providing critical knowledge that defenders need to protect their networks.