Always Another Secret: Lifting the Haze on China-nexus Espionage in Southeast Asia

Mandiant Managed Defense recently identified cyber espionage activity that heavily leverages USB devices as an initial infection vector and concentrates on the Philippines. Mandiant tracks this activity as UNC4191 and we assess it has a China nexus.

UNC4191 operations have affected a range of public and private sector entities primarily in Southeast Asia and extending to the U.S., Europe, and APJ; however, even when targeted organizations were based in other locations, the specific systems targeted by UNC4191 were also found to be physically located in the Philippines.

Following initial infection via USB devices, the threat actor leveraged legitimately signed binaries to side-load malware, including three new families we refer to as MISTCLOAK, DARKDEW, and BLUEHAZE. Successful compromise led to the deployment of a renamed NCAT binary and execution of a reverse shell on the victim’s system, providing backdoor access to the threat actor. The malware self-replicates by infecting new removable drives that are plugged into a compromised system, allowing the malicious payloads to propagate to additional systems and potentially collect data from air-gapped systems.

Mandiant Managed Defense performs continuous threat hunting for customers, discovering evidence of new tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that can evade traditional detection mechanisms

In response to this campaign, Mandiant deployed new real-time detections, enhancing Managed Defense’s protection for our customers from future similar activity. Our Adversary Operations team created and deployed YARA rules and Mandiant Security Validation Actions, shared at the end of the post. This blog post details our initial threat hunting discovery, the newly identified malware families, detection opportunities, and Mandiant’s assessment about the goals and motivations of the threat actor.

Malware Observed

Mandiant observed UNC4191 deploy the following malware families.

Table 1: UNC4191 Malware Families

Initial Detection

Mandiant Managed Defense customers receive Mandiant’s dedicated proactive Threat Hunting service. Mandiant’s threat hunting team leverages the MITRE ATT&CK® framework as a guide for developing Hunt Missions that examine endpoint telemetry data, such as process events, for collection and ATT&CK technique ID tagging. The resulting threat hunting data set provides the team with wide visibility across the customer base. When performing analysis, we augment this data set with more targeted sources, like custom, real-time alerting from our customers’ endpoint detection and response (EDR) technologies.

Mandiant uses custom tooling to identify ATT&CK technique sequences and clusters associated with common threat actor behaviors. A technique sequence is useful for identifying events with a defined order of execution, such as the creation of a local account (T1136.001) and then addition to the local Administrators group (T1098). A technique cluster identifies a grouping of techniques that don’t necessarily occur in a specific order. By focusing on technique sequences and clusters, we reduce the amount of data that needs to be manually reviewed by analysts.

For example, Mandiant has observed threat actors enumerating domain trusts (T1482) and querying domain and local group permissions (T1069.001, T1069.002) within a several minute span (Figure 1). The combined event count for these three techniques occurring on their own can number in the hundreds of thousands, but by applying technique sequencing or clustering we can reduce the number of interesting events to a manageable amount.

Figure 1: Visualization of technique sequencing and clustering concepts

Mandiant identified this UNC4191 campaign by searching for anomalous sequences of events under our “Mandiant Intelligence: Staging Directories” and “Command and Scripting Interpreter: Windows Command Shell (T1059.003)” hunting missions (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Technique sequence that led to UNC4191 detection

The techniques performed by UNC4191 led to the development of additional technique sequences and detection opportunities, as described in the Detection Opportunities section.

UNC4191 Malware Infection Cycle

The overall infection cycle from this campaign can be split into three distinct phases, shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: UNC4191 malware infection cycle

PHASE I: MISTCLOAK

The infection chain begins when a user plugs in a compromised removable device and manually executes a renamed signed binary from the root directory of the storage volume (T1091). The initial binaries—named Removable Drive.exe or USB Drive.exe—are versions of a legitimately signed application called USB Network Gate, developed by the company Electronic Team, Inc. These are used to side-load the MISTCLOAK malware that impersonates a legitimate DLL (Table 2).

Table 2: Legitimate USB Network Gate binaries used to side-load MISTCLOAK malware

The renamed USB Network Gate binaries load a MISTCLOAK DLL named u2ec.dll from the execution directory on the removable device (T1574.002) (Table 3). MISTCLOAK is a launcher for the encrypted file usb.ini, which MISTCLOAK reads from the current directory or the path autorun.inf\Protection for Autorun\System Volume Information\usb.ini. Mandiant identified the PDB file path G:\project\APT\U盘劫持\new\shellcode\Release\shellcode.pdb in the MISTCLOAK sample. Notably, the Chinese characters 盘劫持 translate to “disk hijacking”.

Table 3: MISTCLOAK malware metadata

MISTCLOAK then opens Windows Explorer to the location on the removable device where the user files are stored with the command ‘explorer.exe  “<drive>:\autorun.inf\Protection for Autorun”’.

Phase II: DARKDEW

The file usb.ini contains an encrypted DLL payload called DARKDEW that is capable of infecting removable drives. If executed from a removable drive, DARKDEW will launch explorer.exe via `explorer.exe “<drive>:\autorun.inf\Protection for Autorun”` where <drive> is a removable drive letter, such as “E”. DARKDEW will then check if either C:\ProgramData\udisk\disk_watch.exe or   C:\ProgramData\udisk\DateCheck.exe exist and will create the directory C:\ProgramData\udisk if neither are found.

Table 4: DARKDEW malware metadata

DARKDEW then proceeds to copy every file from <drive>:\autorun.inf\Protection for Autorun\System Volume Information\ to C:\ProgramData\udisk\. Mandiant identified files in this directory, such as Removable Drive (16GB).lnk, that originated from a system that was previously compromised by DARKDEW (T1074.001) and copied to a USB device. The copied data includes the files shown in Table 5 and arbitrary files with the extensions: xlsx, docx, mp4, device, jpg, pptx, pdf, txt, and lnk files.

Table 5: Files that are copied by DARKDEW from the removable drive to a compromised system

DARKDEW will then copy the renamed USB Network Gate binary (e.g., Removable Drive.exe) to C:\ProgramData\udisk\disk_watch.exe and create persistence with a registry key value named udisk under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run (T1547.001). Finally, DARKDEW will launch a file named C:\ProgramData\udisk\DateCheck.exe and then exit.

Table 6: DARKDEW registry persistence

If DARKDEW is executed from a non-removable drive, the behavior is slightly different. DARKDEW will create the directory C:\ProgramData\udisk\, then copy every file in the current directory of the parent executable to C:\ProgramData\udisk\. It will then copy the parent executable to C:\ProgramData\udisk\disk_watch.exe and launch it. The persistence mechanism is identical, and it will also launch C:\ProgramData\udisk\DateCheck.exe.

When DARKDEW is executed within the context of disk_watch.exe, the malware will scan the system every 10 seconds for removable drives by enumerating volumes from A to Z until it finds one that is removable. The DARKDEW malware then creates the directory <drive>\autorun.inf\Protection for Autorun\, sets its attribute to hidden, and copies the contents of the current working directory of disk_watch.exe to that directory or the subdirectory <drive>:\autorun.inf\Protection for Autorun\System Volume Information\. This capability appears to be a method for self-replication and to transfer files that may be collected from air-gapped systems.

Phase III: BLUEHAZE

The binary DateCheck.exe is a renamed version of a legitimate, signed application called Razer Chromium Render Process by Razer USA Ltd. (Table 7).

Table 7: Legitimate Razer USA Ltd. binary used to side-load BLUEHAZE malware

The renamed Razor application, DateCheck.exe, loads the legitimate file rzlog4cpp_logger.dll, which calls the getRoot function from the BLUEHAZE malware RzLog4CPP.dll during C runtime startup (T1574.002).

Table 8: BLUEHAZE malware metadata

BLUEHAZE will create a new directory called C:\Users\Public\Libraries\CNNUDTV\, then it will create the registry key value ACNTV under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run (T1547.001) for persistence. Next, BLUEHAZE copies all the files from its working directory to C:\Users\Public\Libraries\CNNUDTV\ and then executes a renamed NCAT executable wuwebv.exe to create a reverse shell to the hard-coded command and control (C2) address: closed[.]theworkpc[.]com:80 (T1059). Mandiant has not observed evidence of reverse shell interaction; however, based on the age of the activity, this may be a result of visibility gaps or short log retention periods.

Table 9: BLUEHAZE command execution

Outlook and Implications

Based on available data, such as PE compile timestamps for the malware involved in the aforementioned activity, this campaign potentially extends back to September 2021. Given the worming nature of the malware involved, we may have detected the later stages of this malware’s proliferation.

We believe this activity showcases Chinese operations to gain and maintain access to public and private entities for the purposes of intelligence collection related to China’s political and commercial interests. Our observations suggest that entities in the Philippines are the main target of this operation based on the number of affected systems located in this country that were identified by Mandiant.

Campaign Tracking

Mandiant will continue to monitor UNC4191’s campaign and will provide notable and dynamic updates regarding changes in tactics and techniques, the introduction of tools with new capabilities, or the use of new infrastructure to carry out their mission.

For more insights into how Mandiant tracks this and similar campaigns, see our Threat Campaigns feature within Mandiant Advantage Threat Intelligence.

Detection Opportunities

Each Mandiant threat hunting discovery is evaluated for opportunities to create new real-time detections. These detections help Mandiant identify additional activity across our customers’ environments for rapid escalation and triage analysis and aim to reduce threat actor dwell time.

Following our initial campaign discovery, we immediately searched the entire Managed Defense customer base for any activity that matched our atomic indicators of interest, including filenames, file paths, file hashes, IP addresses, domains, and other artifacts. This uncovered activity on systems at multiple customers.

Additionally, we also created or updated real-time Managed Defense detections to identify threat actor methodologies, such as:

• Deployment or usage of NETCAT and NCAT reverse shells
• Modification of registry Run keys for malware persistence, with arguments configured to execute the Windows binary rundll32.exe
• Processes launched from the C:\Users\Public\Libraries\ directory

By combining Mandiant’s threat intelligence service with Managed Defense’s detection engineering and threat hunting capabilities, we can rapidly identify and provide context around malicious activity.

Mandiant Security Validation Actions

Organizations can validate their security controls using the following actions with Mandiant Security Validation.

YARA Rules

MISTCLOAK

DARKDEW

BLUEHAZE

Indicators of Compromise

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Tobias Krueger and Conor Quigley for their assistance with analyzing the MISTCLOAK, DARKDEW, and BLUEHAZE samples and Matthew Hoerger for creating Mandiant Security Validation (MSV) actions. We would also like to thank Tim Martin, Alexander Pennino, Nick Richard, and Sarah Hawley for their technical review and feedback.