An email with the subject of  FW: ICICI Bank Trade Services: SWIFT Copy : 6033SMI00029216(2)  [ probably random numbered] coming or pretending to come from  ICICI Bank Trade Services < zmail@eficaz.cl>  with an encoded HTML attachment which use meta refresh to download a zip file containing the malware payload. I have absolutely no idea ( at this time) what this malware is or does. It doesn’t seem to do anything at all in any sandbox. Based on various strings and basic actions shown in the sandbox reports it appears to be some sort of keylogger.

Update: I am also now receiving other emails coming from different senders with slightly  different body content and imitated companies, about quotations, orders, invoices etc  in the email body  with the keylogger as a zip attachment

Update2: I am being told it is Pony with a C2 /panel at makersbury.ml/web-content/verification/files/gate.php

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.

The link in the very basically encoded html attachment (VirusTotal) ( Anyrun)  goes to http://cottone.academy/wp-content/upgrade/QUOTS__xlm.zip ( VirusTotal)

QUOTS__xlm.zip: Extracts to: QUOTS__xlm.exe   Current Virus total detections:  Hybrid Analysis | Anyrun | Cape Sandbox |

Update 10 April 2018: same email but today with zip attachment containing the .exe

SWIFT Copy_xlm.zip: Extracts to: SWIFT Copy_xlm.exe   Current Virus total detections:  Hybrid Analysis | Anyrun | Cape Sandbox |

C2: http://ruiaer.tk/web-content/file/new/css/gate.php with a 404 not found on http://ruiaer.tk/web-content/file/new/css/shit.exe and a constant redirect on what looks like it should be a phishing site for email credentials http://ruiaer.tk/css/brows/file/verification/upgrade/Agama-AllD0main-Php/index.php

Please Note this version for Pony/Fareit does nothing on a computer when initially run, just sits there waiting until you interact somehow. Something like opening a new folder, or opening a document. This makes it a bit harder for sandboxes to analyse

One of the  emails looks like:

From: ICICI Bank Trade Services < zmail@eficaz.cl>

Date: Mon 09/04/2018 02:09

Subject: FW: ICICI Bank Trade Services: SWIFT Copy : 6033SMI00029216(2)

Attachment: SWIFT Copy.html

Body content:

Dear Sir,
Please find attached copy wire transfer for order P20170610.

 

Please ship  the order to Lintas Setia SIN (address details state in PO) via FEDEX account no. 2534 1749 8 and please provide the trucking number once available.

 

***********************************

SHIPPER:

XIAMEN：STEP：STONE：CO.,LTD.

UNITS1805-1806,NO.6：BUILDING,

XINGLIN：BAY：OPERATION：CENTER,JIMEI

DISTRICT,XIAMEN,：CHINA

TEL:0086-592-5531507

FAX：0086-592-5659071

On behalf of

GUANGZHOU YETA TRADING CO.,LTD
ADD: Room 1702B, Yian Plaza, 33 Jiansheliu Ma Road,
Yuexiu District, Guangzhou, China. 510060″

*********************************

 

Screenshot:

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.

 

Previous campaigns over the last few weeks have delivered numerous different download sites and malware versions. There are frequently 5 or 6 and even up to 150  download locations on some days, sometimes delivering the exactly same malware from all locations and sometimes slightly different malware versions. Dridex /Locky does update at frequent intervals during the day, sometimes as quickly as every hour, so you might get a different version of these nasty Ransomware or  Banking password stealer Trojans.

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.

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