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Introducing Blue Mockingbird

Red Canary Intel is monitoring a potentially novel threat that is deploying Monero cryptocurrency-mining payloads on Windows machines at multiple organizations.

Tony Lambert
Originally published . Last modified .

Blue Mockingbird is the name we’ve given to a cluster of similar activity we’ve observed involving Monero cryptocurrency-mining payloads in dynamic-link library (DLL) form on Windows systems. They achieve initial access by exploiting public-facing web applications, specifically those that use Telerik UI for ASP.NET, followed by execution and persistence using multiple techniques (check out my colleague Jesse Brown’s new blog for details on Blue Mockingbird’s COR_PROFILER persistence mechanism). During at least one incident, the adversary used proxying software and experimented with different kinds of reverse shell payloads to connect to external systems. The earliest Blue Mockingbird tools we’ve observed were created in December 2019.

Gaining entry

In at least two incident response (IR) engagements, Blue Mockingbird has exploited public-facing web applications (T1190: Exploit Public-Facing Application) that implemented Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX. This suite of user interface components accelerates the web development process, but some versions are susceptible to a deserialization vulnerability, CVE-2019-18935. The exploitation of this CVE is not unique to Blue Mockingbird, but it has been a common point of entry.

In exploiting this vulnerability, two DLLs are uploaded to a web application running on a Windows IIS web server. In telemetry, investigators will notice w3wp.exe writing the DLLs to disk and then immediately loading them into memory afterward. In some cases, this will cause w3wp.exe to temporarily freeze and fail to successfully serve HTTP responses.

For a diagnostic to determine whether you are potentially affected by the Telerik CVE, you can search the IIS access logs for the string POST Telerik.Web.UI.WebResource.axd. In victim environments, our IR partners found entries similar to these:

 

2020-04-29 02:01:24 10.0.0.1 POST /Telerik.Web.UI.WebResource.axd type=rau 80 - <external IP address> Mozilla/5.0+(Windows+NT+10.0;+Win64;+x64;+rv:54.0)+Gecko/20100101+Firefox/54.0 - 200 0 0 625

2020-04-29 02:01:27 10.0.0.1 POST /Telerik.Web.UI.WebResource.axd type=rau 80 - <external IP address> Mozilla/5.0+(Windows+NT+10.0;+Win64;+x64;+rv:54.0)+Gecko/20100101+Firefox/54.0 - 500 0 0 46

In the entries, the string 200 refers to HTTP response code 200 where the POST request was successful, and the string 500 refers to HTTP code 500 where the POST request was not processed successfully by the web server. These code 500 entries happened when the w3wp.exe process loaded the uploaded DLLs into memory and temporarily froze.

Searching the IIS access logs for entries like these is a good idea even if you don’t explicitly know whether you use Telerik UI, as some web applications require the suite as a dependency behind the scenes.

If you have endpoint detection and response (EDR) or similar tools, you’ll notice cmd.exe or other suspicious processes spawning from w3wp.exe.

Execution and evasion

The primary payload distributed by Blue Mockingbird is a version of XMRIG packaged as a DLL. XMRIG is a popular, open-source Monero-mining tool that adversaries can easily compile into custom tooling. During the incidents, we noted three distinct uses.

The first use was execution with rundll32.exe explicitly calling the DLL export fackaaxv (T1218.011: Rundll32). This export seems unique to this actor’s payloads and doesn’t seem to happen other places in the wild:

rundll32.exe dialogex.dll,fackaaxv

The next use was execution using regsvr32.exe using the /s command-line option (T1218.010: Regsvr32). Supplying the /s switch executes the DllRegisterServer export exposed by the DLL payload. This export ultimately passed control of execution into the function that fackaax exported:

regsvr32.exe /s dialogex.dll

The final execution path was with the payload configured as a Windows Service DLL (T1569.002: Service Execution). Once configured, execution of the service invoked the export ServiceMain, which again passed control to fackaaxv.

Come for the exploit, stay for the mining

Blue Mockingbird leveraged multiple techniques for persistence during incidents. The most novel technique was the use of a COR_PROFILER COM hijack to execute a malicious DLL and restore items removed by defenders (T1559.001: Component Object Model). To use COR_PROFILER, they used wmic.exe and Windows Registry modifications to set environment variables and specify a DLL payload.

 

wmic ENVIRONMENT where "name='COR_PROFILER'" delete

wmic ENVIRONMENT create name="COR_ENABLE_PROFILING",username="<system>",VariableValue="1"

wmic ENVIRONMENT create name="COR_PROFILER",username="<system>",VariableValue="<arbitrary CLSID>"

REG.EXE ADD HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\CLSID\<arbitrary CLSID>\InProcServer32 /V ThreadingModel /T REG_SZ /D Apartment /F 

REG.EXE ADD HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\CLSID\<arbitrary CLSID>\InProcServer32 /VE /T REG_SZ /D "c:\windows\System32\e0b3489da74f.dll" /F

The payload DLL specified as a COR_PROFILER was simple and gathered few antivirus detections. It executed the following command:

 

cmd.exe /c sc config wercplsupport start= auto && sc start wercplsupport && copy c:\windows\System32\dialogex.dll c:\windows\System32\wercplsupporte.dll /y && schtasks /create /tn "Windows Problems Collection" /tr "regsvr32.exe /s c:\windows\System32\wercplsupporte.dll" /sc DAILY /st 20:02 /F /RU System && start "" regsvr32.exe /s c:\windows\System32\dialogex.dll

Since COR_PROFILER was configured, every process that loaded the Microsoft .NET Common Language Runtime would execute the command above, re-establishing persistence. The command configured the Windows Problem Reports and Solutions Control Panel Support service to execute automatically at boot (T1543.003: Windows Service). In a separate command, the actor modified the existing wercplsupport service to use the miner DLL instead of the legitimate one:

 

reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\wercplsupport\Parameters" /f /v ServiceDll /t REG_EXPAND_SZ /d "c:\windows\System32\wercplsupporte.dll"

Note that the actor used the DLL name wercplsupporte.dll as an attempt to masquerade as the legitimate DLL name, which is wercplsupport.dll (T1036.005: Match Legitimate Name or Location). In addition, more masquerading was used to make malicious Scheduled Tasks blend in with legitimate ones (T1053.005: Scheduled Task).

In some cases, the actor even created a new service to perform the same actions as the COR_PROFILER payload:

 

sc create 8995 binPath= "cmd /c sc config wercplsupport start= auto & sc start wercplsupport & copy c:\windows\System32\8995.dll c:\windows\System32\wercplsupporte.dll /y & regsvr32.exe /s c:\windows\System32\8995.dll" type= share start= auto error= ignore DisplayName= 8995

Escalating privileges and accessing credentials

It’s worth noting that Blue Mockingbird’s initial access does not provide the privileges needed to establish the many persistence mechanisms used. In one engagement we observed, the adversary using a JuicyPotato exploit to escalate privileges from an IIS Application Pool Identity virtual account to the NT Authority\SYSTEM account. JuicyPotato allows an attacker to abuse the SeImpersonate token privilege and Windows DCOM to move from an unprivileged account to the highest level of privilege on a system (T1068: Exploitation for Privilege Escalation). During this engagement, the attacker abused a DCOM class and leveraged the IIS Application Pool Identity’s SeImpersonate privilege to perform the escalation:

 

c:\programdata\let.exe -t t -p c:\programdata\rn.bat -l 1234 -c {8BC3F05E-D86B-11D0-A075-00C04FB68820}

 

In another engagement, we observed the adversary using Mimikatz (the official signed version) to access credentials for logon (T1003.001: LSASS Memory).

Free to move around the network

As with other adversaries that mine cryptocurrency opportunistically, Blue Mockingbird likes to move laterally and distribute mining payloads across an enterprise. We observed Blue Mockingbird move laterally using a combination of the Remote Desktop Protocol to access privileged systems and Windows Explorer to then distribute payloads to remote systems (T1021.001 Remote Desktop Protocol, T1021.002 SMB/Windows Admin Shares). In some cases, Scheduled Tasks were created remotely with schtasks.exe /S to ensure execution.

 

schtasks /create /tn "setup service Management" /tr "c:\windows\temp\rn.bat" /sc ONCE /st 00:00 /F /RU System /S remote_host

A look at command and control

A novel aspect of this adversary is that their toolkit does not appear to be fully defined. In at least one engagement, we observed Blue Mockingbird seemingly experimenting with different tools to create SOCKS proxies (T1090: Proxy) for pivoting. These tools included a fast reverse proxy (frp), Secure Socket Funneling (SSF), and Venom. In one instance, the adversary also tinkered with PowerShell reverse TCP shells and a reverse shell in DLL form (T1059.001: PowerShell).

Take action

We’ve scratched the surface on the XMRIG DLL payload, but we can dive deeper to understand more details (T1496: Resource Hijacking). First, the export fackaaxv has been consistently present in the DLLs. Next, each DLL also contains a PE binary section _RANDOMX. This section appears unique to cryptocurrency-mining payloads because it houses the RandomX proof of work algorithm that XMRIG may use. The network connections made for mining usually involve a nanopool[.]org domain.

We made the assessment that the payload was actually XMRIG based on several pieces of evidence. First, there were multiple references to “xmrig”, including version numbers, in the binary strings. These were accompanied by cleartext references to command-line options common to XMRIG:

  • coin
  • donate-level
  • max-cpu-usage
  • cpu-priority
  • log-file

cryptocurrency mining DLLs blue mockingbird

The final piece of evidence came from a text log written to disk by some versions of the miner DLL. In the text logs, identifying information for XMRIG was output alongside hardware details for the victim system.

* ABOUT       XMRig/5.3.0 MSVC/2015

* LIBS       libuv/1.31.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1c hwloc/2.1.0

* HUGE PAGES       unavailable

* 1GB PAGES       unavailable

* CPU       Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz (1) x64 AES
                 L2:0.3 MB L3:8.0 MB 1C/1T NUMA:1

* MEMORY       1.3/4.0 GB (33%)

* DONATE        0%

* POOL #1       xmr-au1.nanopool.org:14433 coin monero

* COMMANDS       'h' hashrate, 'p' pause, 'r' resume

* OPENCL       disabled

* CUDA       disabled

[2020-04-16 08:30:26.753] [xmr-au1.nanopool.org:14433] DNS error: "unknown node or service"

 

Each payload comes compiled with a standard list of commonly used Monero-mining domains alongside a Monero wallet address. So far, we’ve identified two wallet addresses used by Blue Mockingbird that are in active circulation. Due to the private nature of Monero, we cannot see the balance of these wallets to estimate their success. We’ve seen mining payloads compiled as early as December 2019 and as recently as late April 2020. In each compilation, one of the two wallets has been embedded into the binary. The wallet addresses could be extracted from the binaries easily in earlier versions using a simple strings command. In newer versions, the string is obfuscated.

Even with string obfuscation in the binary, you can observe the wallet addresses in network traffic. During execution of the miner DLLs, unique information is passed in cleartext across TCP streams:

cryptocurrency mining DLLs blue mockingbird

We recommend the following analytics:

  • Process is cmd.exe with command line including sc AND config AND wercplsupporte.dll
  • Any process where command line includes -t AND -c AND -l with network connections from 127.0.0.1 and to 127.0.0.1 on port tcp135 (JuicyPotato)
  • Process is schtasks.exe with command line including /create AND sc start wercplsupport
  • Process is rundll32.exe with command line including fackaaxv
  • Process is regsvr32.exe with command line including /s and having an external network connection
  • Process is wmic.exe with command line including create AND COR_PROFILER
  • Process is cmd.exe and parent process is services.exe

For mitigations, focus on patching web servers, web applications, and dependencies of the applications. Most of the techniques used by Blue Mockingbird will bypass whitelisting technologies, so the best route will be to inhibit initial access. Consider establishing a baseline of Windows Scheduled Tasks in your environment to know what is normal across your enterprise.

Let’s collaborate!

If you’ve been tracking similar activity, we’d love to hear from you and collaborate. Contact blog@redcanary.com with any observations or questions.

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