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‘Equation’ cyberspies employ NSA-like tools

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18 February 2015

A cyberespionage group with a toolset similar to ones used by US intelligence agencies has infiltrated key institutions in countries including Iran and Russia.

Kaspersky Lab has released a report that said the tools were created by the “Equation” group, but stopped short of linking it to the US National Security Agency.

The tools, exploits and malware used by the group, named after its penchant for encryption, have strong similarities with NSA techniques described in top-secret documents leaked in 2013.

Countries hit the most by Equation include Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and China. Targets in those countries included the military, telecommunications, embassies, government, research institutions and Islamic scholars, Kaspersky said.

Kaspersky’s most striking finding is Equation’s ability to infect the firmware of a hard drive, or the low-level code that acts as an interface between hardware and software.

The malware reprograms the hard drive’s firmware, creating hidden sectors on the drive that can only be accessed through a secret application programming interface (API). Once installed, the malware is impossible to remove: disk formatting and reinstalling the OS doesn’t affect it, and the hidden storage sector remains.

Unique case
“Theoretically, we were aware of this possibility, but as far as I know this is the only case ever that we have seen of an attacker having such an incredibly advanced capability,” said Costin Raiu, director, global research and analysis team, Kaspersky Lab’s.

Drives made by Seagate Technology, Western Digital Technologies, Hitachi, Samsung Electronics and Toshiba can be modified by two of Equation’s hard disk drive malware platforms, “Equationdrug” and “Grayfish.”

The report said Equation has knowledge of the drives that goes far beyond public documentation released by vendors.

Equation knows sets of unique ATA commands used by hard drive vendors to format their products. Most ATA commands are public, as they comprise a standard that ensures a hard drive is compatible with just about any kind of computer. But there are undocumented ATA commands used by vendors for functions such as internal storage and error correction, Raiu said.

“In essence, they are a closed operating system,” he said.

High cost
Obtaining such specific ATA codes would likely require access to that documentation, which could cost a lot of money, said Raiu.

The ability to reprogram the firmware of just one kind of drive would be “incredibly complex,” Raiu. Being able to do that for many kinds of drives from many brands is “close to impossible,” he said. “To be honest, I don’t think there’s any other group in the world that has this capability.”

It appears Equation has been far, far ahead of the security industry. It’s almost impossible to detect this kind of tampering, Raiu said. Reflashing the drive, or replacing its firmware, is also not fool proof, since some types of modules in some types of firmware are persistent and can’t be reformatted, he said.

Given the high value of this exploitation technique, Equation very selectively deployed it.

“During our research, we’ve only identified a few victims who were targeted by this,” Kaspersky’s report said. “This indicates that it is probably only kept for the most valuable victims or for some very unusual circumstances.”

‘Fanny’ worm
Another of Kaspersky’s intriguing findings is ‘Fanny’, a computer worm created in 2008 that was used against targets in the Middle East and Asia.

To infect computers, Fanny used two zero-day exploits — the term for a software attack that uses an unknown software vulnerability — that were also coded into Stuxnet, Kaspersky said. Stuxnet, also a Windows worm, was used to sabotage Iran’s uranium enrichment operations. It is thought to be a joint project between the US and Israel.

It is unlikely the use of the same zero-days was a coincidence. Kaspersky wrote that the similar use of the vulnerabilities means that the Equation group and the Stuxnet developers are “either the same or working closely together.”

“They are definitely connected,” Raiu said.

Both Stuxnet and Fanny were designed to penetrate “air-gapped” networks, or those isolated from the Internet, Kaspersky said. The Equation group also used “interdiction” techniques similar to those used by the NSA in order to deliver malicious software to targets.

Kaspersky described how some participants of a scientific conference held in Houston later received a CD-ROM of materials. The CD contained two zero-day exploits and a rarely-seen malware doorstop nicknamed “Doublefantasy.”

It is unknown how the CDs were tampered with or replaced. “We do not believe the conference organisers did this on purpose,” Kaspersky said. But such a combination of exploits and malware “don’t end up on a CD by accident,” it said.

Tailored access
The NSA’s Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO) specialises in intercepting deliveries of new computer equipment, one of the most successful methods of tapping into computers, wrote Der Spiegel in December 2013, citing a top secret document.

The German publication was one of several that had access to tens of thousands of spy agency documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Kaspersky uncovered the trail of the Equation group after investigating a computer belonging to a research institute in the Middle East that appeared to be the Typhoid Mary for advanced malware.

Raiu said the machine had French, Russian and Spanish advanced persistent threat (APT) samples on it among others, showing it had been targeted by many groups. It also had a strange malicious driver, Raiu said, which upon investigation lead to the extensive command-and-control infrastructure used by Equation.

300 domains
Kaspersky analysts found more than 300 domains connected with Equation, with the oldest one registered in 1996. Some of the domain name registrations were due to expire, so Kaspersky registered around 20 of them, Raiu said.

Most of the domain names are not used by Equation anymore, he said. But three are still active. The activity, however, does not lend much of a clue as to what Equation is up to these days, as the group changed its tactics in late 2013.

“Those three [domains] are very interesting,” Raiu said. “We just don’t know what malware is being used.”

 

 

Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service

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