Yet another fake or spoofed DHL delivery notification delivering what looks like Agent Tesla keylogger.

An email with the subject of “Vessel Schedule ETD:AUG 26 ,ETA:SEP 20” coming from  Donald Townsend <comercial@twistermedical.com>   with a zip ( rar)  attachment  which delivers what looks like Agent Tesla keylogger

They use email addresses and subjects that will entice a user to read the email and open the attachment. A very high proportion are being targeted at small and medium size businesses, with the hope of getting a better response than they do from consumers.

At first glance, you think how can somebody be fooled by these, but since I started hosting web and email for a couple of small companies and charities who do deal with various overseas and UK based suppliers, I was really shocked by some of the genuine & legitimate invoices, delivery or dispatch notifications that to me looked exactly like many phishing or malware emails that we have been receiving for years. It is no wonder that so many small ( and somewhat larger) companies or organisations do occasionally get fooled by this sort of email, when they see similar genuine, legitimate ones dozens of times a day.

The alleged sending company twistermedical.com do exist, they are based in Spain. They sell medical equipment. I can’t see any SPF or other email authentication in their DNS records. As you can see from the email headers the sending email servers are ones used by the company. I can’t tell if the email address has been compromised with log-in details stolen or whether there is an open relay on the mail server allowing a spoofed email address to be used to send these. However the details in the email body do not relate to the “sending” company, but it is not unusual to get a dispatch note from the carrier or delivery service, not the supplier.

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DHL.rar: Extracts to:   DHL.exe      Current Virus total detections:  Hybrid Analysis | AnyrunApp |

This drops a small file in user temp folder ( virustotal) that is commonly used in Agent Tesla malware delivery campaigns and that is what I am basing the Agent Tesla detection on, even though neither sandbox or VT do state explicitly Agent Tesla

The  email looks like:

From: Donald Townsend <comercial@twistermedical.com>

Date:  Thu 16/08/2018 02:56

Subject: Vessel Schedule ETD:AUG 26 ,ETA:SEP 20

Attachment: DHL.rar

Body content:

Good day,

Today we will deliver the orders received for tonight’s flight. The guide is no. 901-1213-3030

Attached copy of the documents, including freight invoice no. 47566

 Thanks and regards,

 Gabriela Donald

DHL / Tiger Freight Inc.

1601 NW 93 avenue

Miami FL 33172

Tel: 305-477-3339

Fax: 305-477-2229

 Please note that any action, quote or shipment that is handled by our companies does not include insurance unless it is confirmed and quoted in writing.  The client is responsible for any import permit required by client’s country of destination.

Screenshot:

Email Headers:

IP	Hostname	City	Region	Country	Organisation
82.223.190.46	llsc199-a17.servidoresdns.net			ES	AS8560 1&1 Internet SE
82.223.191.195	llrh090-a.servidoresdns.net			ES	AS8560 1&1 Internet SE
41.190.14.231	www.etisalat.com.ng	Suleja	Niger State	NG	AS37076 Emerging Markets Telecommunication Services (EMTS) Limited

Received: from llsc199-a17.servidoresdns.net ([82.223.190.46]:41830)
by my email server with esmtps (TLSv1.2:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:256)
(Exim 4.91)
(envelope-from <comercial@twistermedical.com>)
id 1fq7Wb-0003W8-GN
for daniel@victimsdomain.com; Thu, 16 Aug 2018 02:56:33 +0100
Received: from serviciodecorreo.es (unknown [82.223.191.195])
by llsc199-a17.servidoresdns.net (Postfix) with ESMTPA id 41rTvw3cSNz2t5V;
Thu, 16 Aug 2018 03:56:28 +0200 (CEST)
Received: from www.etisalat.com.ng ([41.190.14.231])
by serviciodecorreo.es
with HTTP (HTTP/1.1 POST); Thu, 16 Aug 2018 03:56:28 +0200
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary=”=_121cd8700822631c40f95bebcf8dd25f”
Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2018 02:56:28 +0100
From: Donald Townsend <comercial@twistermedical.com>
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: Vessel Schedule ETD:AUG 26 ,ETA:SEP 20
Reply-To: donald.townsend234@gmail.com
Mail-Reply-To: donald.townsend234@gmail.com
Message-ID: <be2ebeed912fdc8785d00f2d131aa974@imap.serviciodecorreo.es>
X-Sender: comercial@twistermedical.com
User-Agent: Roundcube Webmail

DNS records  lookup of twistermedical.com

DNS records

name	class	type	data	time to live
twistermedical.com	IN	SOA	server: dns1.twistermedical.com email: hostmaster@twistermedical.com serial: 2007050838 refresh: 21600 retry: 3600 expire: 2419200 minimum ttl: 1800	86400s	(1.00:00:00)
twistermedical.com	IN	NS	dns2.twistermedical.com	86400s	(1.00:00:00)
twistermedical.com	IN	NS	dns1.twistermedical.com	86400s	(1.00:00:00)
twistermedical.com	IN	A	217.76.131.237	86400s	(1.00:00:00)
twistermedical.com	IN	MX	preference: 10 exchange: mx.serviciodecorreo.es	3600s	(01:00:00)
237.131.76.217.in-addr.arpa	IN	PTR	lwhb519.servidoresdns.net	60s	(00:01:00)
131.76.217.in-addr.arpa	IN	SOA	server: atlante.servidoresdns.net email: hostmaster@servidoresdns.net serial: 2001091911 refresh: 21600 retry: 3600 expire: 2419200 minimum ttl: 86400	259200s	(3.00:00:00)
131.76.217.in-addr.arpa	IN	NS	prometeo.servidoresdns.net	259200s	(3.00:00:00)
131.76.217.in-addr.arpa	IN	NS	atlante.servidoresdns.net	259200s	(3.00:00:00)

These malicious attachments normally have a password stealing component, with the aim of stealing your bank, PayPal or other financial details along with your email or FTP ( web space) log in credentials. Many of them are also designed to specifically steal your Facebook and other social network log in details. A very high proportion are Ransomware versions that encrypt your files and demand money ( about £350/$400) to recover the files.

  All the alleged senders, amounts, reference numbers, Bank codes, companies, names of employees, employee positions, email addresses and phone numbers mentioned in the emails are all random. Some of these companies will exist and some won’t.  Don’t try to respond by phone or email, all you will do is end up with an innocent person or company who have had their details spoofed and picked at random from a long list that the bad guys have previously found. The bad guys choose companies, Government departments and organisations  with subjects that are designed to entice you or alarm you into blindly opening the attachment or clicking the link in the email to see what is happening.  

Please read our How to protect yourselves page for simple, sensible advice on how to avoid being infected by this sort of socially engineered malware.

This is another one of the  files that unless you have “show known file extensions enabled“, can easily be mistaken for  a genuine  DOC / PDF / JPG or other common file instead of the .EXE / .JS file it really is, so making it much more likely for you to accidentally open it and be infected.

 Be very careful with email attachments. All of these emails use Social engineering tricks to persuade you to open the attachments that come with the email. Whether it is a message saying “look at this picture of me I took last night” and it appears to come from a friend or is more targeted at somebody who regularly is likely to receive PDF attachments or Word .doc attachments or any other common file that you use every day.

The basic rule is NEVER open any attachment to an email, unless you are expecting it. Now that is very easy to say but quite hard to put into practice, because we all get emails with files attached to them. Our friends and family  love to send us pictures of them doing silly things, or even cute pictures of the children or pets.

Never just blindly click on the file in your email program. Always save the file to your downloads folder, so you can check it first. Many malicious files that are attached to emails will have a faked extension. That is the 3 letters at the end of the file name. Unfortunately windows by default hides the file extensions so you need to Set your folder options to “show known file types. Then when you unzip the zip file that is supposed to contain the pictures of “Sally’s dog catching a ball” or a report in word document format that work has supposedly sent you to finish working on at the weekend, or an invoice or order confirmation from some company,  you can easily see if it is a picture or document & not a malicious program.

If you see JS or .EXE or .COM or .PIF or .SCR or .HTA .vbs, .wsf , .jse  .jar at the end of the file name DO NOT click on it or try to open it, it will infect you.

While the malicious program is inside the zip file, it cannot harm you or automatically run. When it is just sitting unzipped in your downloads folder it won’t infect you, provided you don’t click it to run it. Just delete the zip and any extracted file and everything will be OK. You can always run a scan with your antivirus to be sure. There are some zip files that can be configured by the bad guys to automatically run the malware file when you double click the zip to extract the file. If you right click any suspicious zip file received, and select extract here or extract to folder ( after saving the zip to a folder on the computer) that risk is virtually eliminated. Never attempt to open a zip directly from your email, that is a guaranteed way to get infected. The best way is to just delete the unexpected zip and not risk any infection.

:

IOC:

DHL.exe
MD5: cc53a5def5fb74e19998c97569707477
SHA-1: 4fc5d6c5981b286aba56852a10c8eabfee4d48df
random.exe
MD5: f683769b947501b5a98376619d5938bb
SHA-1: 6a38e4acd9ade0d85697d10683ec84fa0daed11c

Email from: comercial@twistermedical.com
Sending IPs:
82.223.190.46
82.223.191.195
41.190.14.231