Citadel

Yet another Andromeda / Gamarue analysis

Some days ago I read the post about Joe Security's error when they analyzed an Andromeda sample and I also found new samples of this Trojan. Then I decided that I should write something about it. At least, just to remember some tricks of Andromeda for the next time and not starting from scratch. I'm Dory, I forget things ;)

When I analyzed this malware some months ago I thought that it was quite interesting due to the Anti-debugging and Anti-VM tricks it uses. You can also find references to the same malware with the name of Gamarue. It seems it is cool to rename the same malware with different names. Then you can find some families with three different names, like Cridex / Feodo / Bugat. Anyway, I also found these two links with very good and detailed information about analyzing Andromeda:
 

 

Sopelka VS Eurograbber: really 36 million EUR?

Almost one month ago I had the opportunity of giving a talk at Rooted CON for yet another year. Mikel Gastesi and me talked about Sopelka Botnet and the Eurograbber report published by Check Point and Versafe at the beginning of December 2012. You can take a look at the slides here.

 

 

After reading the Eurograbber report and taking into account that there were a lot of similarities with Sopelka Botnet, which I had analyzed some months before, I decided to write a blog post about it. At the same moment, the Rooted CON CFP was closing, so I submitted this subject and then I forced myself to research further to demonstrate that Eurograbber was just a hype. Thanks to the investigations by S21sec and Fox-IT there was more than enough information.

Uncovering the "new" Eurograbber: really 36 million EUR?

Eurograbber is in the news, beware. Some days ago Versafe and Check Point Software Technologies published a “new” threat report titled “A Case Study of Eurograbber: How 36 Million Euros was Stolen via Malware”. A bit sensationalist, yes. If it was well documented and there was real proof of that, I would have nothing to say, but it turns out that this threat is not so new and I wrote about it by the end of September, when I was working at S21sec. I called this Sopelka botnet.

Apart of being new or not (I think all of us thought that we were the first ones when really not), the report throws some data about affected banks/users and, the most important, the amounts stolen from each country by the fraudsters: more than 16 million EUR in Italy, almost 13 million EUR in Germany, almost 6 million EUR in Spain and more than 1 million EUR in Netherlands. In summary, more than 36 million EUR in Europe. Taking into account the sad times we are living in, crisis times, it's pretty noteworthy, isn't it?

This report and, above all, these stolen amounts have been quickly published everywhere and are quite widespread, faster than some of the most infamous Trojans. That's why I would like to say some words about the report and these astonishing amounts:

 

  • It's not a new Trojan, not a new customized ZeuS, it's just Citadel. Citadel, but also Tatanga and Feodo. In this botnet were used at least three different Trojans.
     

Sopelka Botnet: three banking trojans and one banking panel

Sopelka botnet started life in May this year and was taken down by end of September. It has been called Sopelka because of the path used in the distribution of binaries and configuration files, and was an odd mixture of variants of the known banking trojans Tatanga, Feodo and Citadel.

This botnet’s objective was the collection of banking credentials from European entities, mostly banks from Spain and Germany, but also Holland, Italy and Malta. In addition, it made use of different mobile components for Android, BlackBerry and Symbian phones. Symbian was the first operating system where this type of malicious component emerged two years ago.

During the botnet’s lifetime there were at least five campaigns and it’s likely that more were carried out. Of the five known campaigns, three of them installed variants of Citadel (versions 1.3.4.0 and 1.3.4.5), another Feodo, and Tatanga was the chosen trojan in the other one. All the Citadel campaigns carried the name “sopelka” (a flute type in Russian) in their download paths for binaries and configuration files, but this was not the case with Tatanga and Feodo.

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