Following the increase in Parallax RAT campaigns -- the new RAT on the block, Morphisec Labs decided to release more technical details on some of the latest campaigns that the Morphisec Preemptive Cyber Defense Platform intercepted and prevented on our customer’s sites.
Parallax is an advanced remote access trojan that supports all Windows OS versions. It is capable of bypassing advanced detection solutions, stealing credentials, executing remote commands, and has also been linked to several coronavirus malware campaigns.
Parallax is mostly delivered through malicious spam campaigns with Microsoft Word documents as the delivery vehicle of choice as will also be described in the following blog post.
Before we dive into the details, we would like to cover the general flow of one of the attack chains we investigated.
The first stage in this campaign is a Microsoft Word document with embedded macros. When macros are enabled, a DLL is dropped to the %Temp% directory. The export function of this dll is then invoked, which injects shellcode to the “Notepad.exe” process. This process is responsible for downloading the next stage from pastebin, which is the Parallax RAT loader.
The Parallax RAT loader does similar things in order to execute the final Parallax RAT payload. It injects a shellcode to the “mstsc.exe” process, which is responsible for downloading the next stage from “i.imgur.com” in the form of a picture. It then decrypts the picture and injects it into the “cmd.exe” process. As part of its persistence mechanism, scheduled tasks will be created to launch the malware at various intervals.
Figure 1 -- The infection process tree
Figure 2 -- The Parallax working directory
Figure 3 -- A downloaded image from Imgur
Below is one example of a Microsoft Word document that’s used to deliver Parallax RAT. Note the low detection rate according to VirusTotal. Morphisec Labs has seen these documents delivered via phishing emails to targeted machines since January 2020.
Figure 4 -- The low detection rate in Virus Total
The content of the document is designed to lure the victim into enabling macros. Once that’s done, the RAT can run and deliver its payload.
If we look at the embedded macros, we can see that there are two interesting calls in between the garbage code.
These calls are responsible for parsing the words in the document itself and converting them back to DLL, 64-bit and 32-bit versions respectively. The words (numbers) in the document are actually the DLL split into decimal values. The first two arguments passed to the function mark the start and the end of the DLL, the third argument stands for the DLL name to be dropped in the %temp% folder, fourth and fifth are garbage and never used.
We found the same behavior in other documents with different names, as well as the same garbage code and the same number of unused arguments.
Figure 7 -- The export function is invoked
The DLL export function is invoked after parsing completes.
The invoked DLL export function is responsible for decoding a shellcode that injects the next stage shellcode into a Notepad.exe process.
In order to hide the use of the low level (Nt* and Zw* functions) process hollowing injection, the shellcode uses direct syscalls. Attackers use this technique to escape debugger breakpoints as well as evade userland hooks. Parallax maps its own copy of ntdll into memory to utilize this technique.
Figure 9 -- Parallax maps its own ntdll copy to memory.
After the new copy of ntdll is mapped, Parallax uses simple offset extraction from the opcode to extract the system calls.
Figure 11 -- Direct syscall invocation.
The injected shellcode (usually injected to Notepad.exe) is responsible for downloading and decoding Parallax RAT from pastebin.
The pastebin content is decoded using base64 and XORed with a key that is generated using CRC32 checksum function on the pastebin URL.
The decoded Parallax payload is then dumped and executed from the %temp% directory. Vitali K covered the loader and image decoder that makes up Parallax RAT, while the pastebin decoder is accessible via Github at https://gist.github.com/osipovar/a80e8b6b3caad209f17616761530302b
This new Parallax RAT campaign is indicative of the trend toward Malware-as-a-Service, or MaaS, one of the most pernicious weapons in the arsenal of threat actors. It’s also the trend that has largely driven the level of innovation in malware available to cybercriminals. Despite this, Morphisec customers can remain confident that they are protected against Parallax RAT and other remote access trojans through the power of Automated Moving Target Defense.
IOCs:
Doc (SHA1):
Pastebin:
PNG: