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Malware Campaigns Attacking Asian Targets Using EternalBlue and Mimikatz



Asian targets are falling prey to a cryptojacking campaign which takes advantage of 'Living off the Land' (LotL) obfuscated PowerShell-based scripts and uses EternalBlue exploit to land Monero coinminer and Trojans onto targeted machines.
At the beginning of this year, a similar malware campaign was identified by the research team of Qihoo 360; reportedly, the campaign was targeted at China at the time. Open source tools such as PowerDump and Invoke-SMBClient were employed to carry out password hashing and execute hash attacks.
The campaign resorts to an exploit which uses SMBv1 protocol which was brought into the public domain by the Shadow Brokers a couple of years ago. It has now become one of the standard tools used by the majority of malware developers.
Referenced from Trend Micro’s initial findings, the aforementioned cryptojacking campaign was only targeting Japanese computer devices but eventually the targets multiplied and now they encompassed Taiwan, India, Hong-Kong, and Australia.
Trend Micro’s research also stated that the EternalBlue exploit, developed by NSA is a new addition into the malware; alongside, they drew a co-relation between the exploit and the 2017 ransomware attacks.  
How does the malware compromise computers?
With the aid of "pass the hash" attacks, it inserts various infectious components into the targeted computer by trying multiple weak credentials in an attempt to log in to other devices which are connected to that particular network.
Upon a successful login, it makes changes in the settings concerning firewall and port forwarding of the compromised machine; meanwhile, it configures a task which is scheduled to update the malware on its own.
Once the malware has successfully compromised the targeted computer, it goes on to download a PowerShell dropper script from C&C server and then it gets to the MAC address of the device and terminates the functioning of all the antimalware software present on the system. Immediately after that, it furthers to place a Trojan strain which is configured to gather the information of the machine such as name, OS version, graphics detail, GUID and MAC address.
“We found the malware sample to be sophisticated, designed specifically to infect as many machines as possible and to operate without immediate detection. It leverages weak passwords in computer systems and databases targets legacy software that companies may still be using,” said Trend Micro.
Trend Micro advises users and enterprises to, “use complicated passwords, and authorize layered authentication whenever possible. Enterprises are also advised to enable multi-layered protection the system that can actively block these threats and malicious URLs from the gateway to the endpoint.”



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Cryptojacking

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Password Hashing

Trojan Attacks