JOINT REPORT:

Information Warfare Monitor Shadowserver FoundationApril 6, 2010

SHADOWS IN THE CLOUD:

Investigating Cyber Espionage 2.0

INFOWARMONITOR

JR03-2010

WEB VERSION. Also found here:

http://shadows-in-the-cloud.net

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Shadows in the Cloud

FOREWORD

Foreword

Crime and espionage orm a dark underworld o cyberspace. Whereas crime is usually the rst to seek out newopportunities and methods, espionage usually ollows in its wake, borrowing techniques and tradecrat. The

Shadows in the Cloud

report illustrates the increasingly dangerous ecosystem o crime and espionage and itsembeddedness in the abric o global cyberspace.This ecosystem is the product o numerous actors. Attackers employ complex, adaptive attack techniques thatdemonstrate high-level ingenuity and opportunism. They take advantage o the cracks and ssures that open upin the ast-paced transormations o our technological world. Every new sotware program, social networkingsite, cloud computing, or cheap hosting service that is launched into our everyday digital lives creates anopportunity or this ecosystem to morph, adapt, and exploit.It has also emerged because o poor security practices o users, rom individuals to large organizations. Wetake or granted that the inormation and communications revolution is a relatively new phenomenon, stillvery much in the midst o unceasing epochal change. Public institutions have adopted these new technologiesaster than procedures and rules have been created to deal with the radical transparency and accompanyingvulnerabilities they introduce.Today, data is transerred rom laptops to USB sticks, over wireless networks at caé hot spots, and stored acrosscloud computing services whose servers are located in ar-o political jurisdictions. These new modalities o communicating de-concentrate and disperse the targets o exploitation, multiplying the points o exposureand potential compromise. Paradoxically, documents and data are probably saer in a le cabinet, behind thebureaucrat’s careul watch, than they are on the PC today.The ecosystem o crime and espionage is also emerging because o opportunism on the part o actors. Cyberespionage is the great equalizer. Countries no longer have to spend billions o dollars to build globe-spanningsatellites to pursue high-level intelligence gathering, when they can do so via the web. We have no evidence inthis report o the involvement o the People’s Republic o China (PRC) or any other government in the

Shadow

network. But an important question to be entertained is whether the PRC will take action to shut the

Shadow

network down. Doing so will help to address long-standing concerns that malware ecosystems are activelycultivated, or at the very least tolerated, by governments like the PRC who stand to benet rom their exploitsthough the black and grey markets or inormation and data.Finally, the ecosystem is emerging because o a propitious policy environment — or rather the absence o one — at a global level. Governments around the world are engaged in a rapid race to militarize cyber space,to develop tools and methods to ght and win wars in this domain. This arms race creates an opportunitystructure ripe or crime and espionage to fourish. In the absence o norms, principles and rules o mutualrestraint at a global level, a vacuum exists or subterranean exploits to ll.There is a real risk o a perect storm in cyberspace erupting out o this vacuum that threatens to subvertcyberspace itsel, either through over-reaction, a spiraling arms race, the imposition o heavy-handed controls,or through gradual irrelevance as people disconnect out o ear o insecurity.

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Shadows in the Cloud

FOREWORD

There is, thereore, an urgent need or a global convention on cyberspace that builds robust mechanisms o inormation sharing across borders and institutions, denes appropriate rules o the road or engagement in thecyber domain, puts the onus on states to not tolerate or encourage mischievous networks whose activitiesoperate rom within their jurisdictions, and protects and preserves this valuable global commons.Until such a normative and policy shit occurs, the shadows in the cloud may grow into a dark, threatening storm.

Ron Deibert

Director, the Citizen Lab, Munk School o Global AairsUniversity o Toronto

Rafal Rohozinski

CEO, The SecDev Group (Ottawa)

PART 2:Methodology andInvestigative Techniques

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Shadows in the Cloud

PART 2: METHODOLOGY & INVESTIGATIVE TECHNIQUES

2.1

Methodology

The core o the methodology employed in the

Shadows in the Cloud

investigation rests at the nexus o technicalinterrogation, eld investigation, data analysis, and geopolitical, contextual research (See Box 2, page 3). No onemethod alone is capable o providing a comprehensive understanding o malware networks; it is through theircombination that a complete picture is derived. For example, a technical analysis o exploits and malware usedby attackers alone can provide a great deal o insight into capabilities and targets. The command and controlservers used by the malware can be enumerated, and can sometimes reveal additional inormation that can beused to identiy those who have been compromised and data that may have been exltrated rom these targets.However, the technical analysis o exploits and malware samples alone only provides one crucial data set.Field research is a critical, although sometimes neglected, component o malware research. While much o theemphasis in existing malware research is ocused on technical analysis o malware samples, this purely techni-cal approach is unlikely to yield a complete picture. For example, through eld research we have ound com-promised computers checking in with command and control servers that we have not seen in malware samplesdistributed by the attackers. There is some evidence to suggest that attackers may migrate compromised hoststo new command and control servers and/or command compromised computers to install new malware that isnot publicly disseminated through

spear phishing

and other targeted malware attacks. The eld research com-ponent can thus provide an equally important insight into the attackers’ capabilities once the target’s networkis compromised, as well as updated command and control locations. Moreover, it allows or the investigationo the context surrounding the the target and why the victims may have been targeted in the rst place. Finally,the wider geopolitical considerations, derived rom both eld investigations and contextual research, place thecollection o inormation in a broader context that supplies details around issues such as the timing o the at-tacks, the nature o the exploitation, including the use o any social engineering techniques, and potentially theidentity and motivation o the attackers.We present our methodology in the ollowing sequence – eld investigation rst, ollowed by technical investi-gations. However, in practice the two are iterative processes. In some circumstances, eld investigations beginrst, ollowed by technical investigations, while in other cases the opposite is true. In this case, a technical-based investigative technique (sinkhole analysis) is probably the closest to an actual starting point, althougheven that method was inormed by prior knowledge derived rom eld and contextual research reaching backto the

Tracking GhostNet

report. In almost all circumstances, geopolitical and contextual research inorms boththe technical and eld research components. In practice, thereore, usion methodology is a holistic, non-linearapproach, but one that takes place in a very structured and ocused ashion.

2.2

Field Investigation

Our objective is to ultimately understand the capabilities and motivations o those engaged in targeted malwareattacks. Field research provides critical insight into the methods and operations o the attackers. By analyzingcomputers at locations that are routinely targeted by (similar) attackers, we aim to identiy portions o com-mand and control inrastructure that the attackers use or particular targets as well as document the type o data that the attackers exltrate rom the targets. However, our research aims to be more than just extractinginormation rom those who have been compromised.

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Shadows in the Cloud

PART 2: METHODOLOGY & INVESTIGATIVE TECHNIQUES

The

Tracking GhostNet

investigation revealed signicant compromises at Tibetan-exile and Indian targets. Itwas also ound that Indian government related entities, both in India proper and throughout the world, hadbeen thoroughly compromised. These included computers at Indian embassies in Belgium, Serbia, Germany,Italy, Kuwait, the United States, Zimbabwe, and the High Commissions o India in Cyprus and the UnitedKingdom. During the

GhostNet

investigation we had discovered evidence o multiple inections or which theinormation available was incomplete, and to which we wanted to return or ollow up. In particular, we oundone piece o malware uploading sensitive documents. Another report published soon ater

Tracking GhostNet

,entitled “The Gh0st in the Shell: Network Security in the Himalayas,” analysed the network trac o Air Jaldi,a community WiFi network in Dharamsala, India. It ound that computers in Dharamsala were connecting withtwo o the control servers documented in our report (Vallentin et al. 2009).With the aim o ocusing on both these wider pattern o compromises, and the hanging threads rom the previ-ous investigation, we worked with our existing approach, inormed by the view that collecting data as closeto the intended target as possible was likely to yield actionable evidence o breaches that could be ollowedthrough to their source, lead to wider pools o target sets, and yield inormation on the attackers.In conducting the eld research we were infuenced by the Action Research (AR) literature (Lewin 1946; Curle1947) that has evolved since the 1940s, as well as other eld-based investigation and research techniques. TheAR eld-based approach eeds into the usion methodology that guides our overall investigatory process. Itemploys ethical and participatory observations and structured ocused interviews. We combined this groundedresearch with technical interrogation, including network monitoring activities. As with

GhostNet

, we wereortunate to have the cooperation o Tibetan organizations, and beneted tremendously rom the willingness o His Holiness the Dalai Lama and other Tibetans to share inormation with our investigators. As a result, or the

Shadow

investigation we conducted primary eld research in Dharamsala, India rom August until December2009. (Dharamsala is the location o the OHHDL as well as the TGIE).The primary objectives o the eld investigations were to research the wider patterns o compromised Indianand Tibetan related targets, investigate the reports o targeted malware attacks that have emerged rom theTibetan community, and raise inormation and computer security awareness within the Tibetan communityand assist in their security planning and implementation. Throughout the eld investigation process, we alsoinvestigated the broader social, political, military, and intelligence context. We conducted extensive on-siteinterviews with ocials in the Tibetan Government-in-Exile, the Oce o the Dalai Lama and Tibetan NGOs.These interviews allowed us to gain an understanding o the security practices and network inrastructure o compromised locations. We also used network monitoring sotware during eld investigations in order to collecttechnical data rom compromised computer systems and perorm an initial analysis to conrm the existenceo malware and the transer o inormation between compromised computers and command and control serv-ers. The network monitoring tools allowed us to collect samples rom compromised computers and identiycommand and control servers used by the attackers. The network monitoring was undertaken with the explicitconsent o the Tibetan organizations.While monitoring the network trac o a local NGO, Common Ground, as part o an Internet security audit,trac rom a local WiFi mesh network, TennorNet was also captured, revealing malicious activity. An anomalywas detected when analyzing this trac: computers in Dharamsala were beaconing or checking in with a com-mand and control server (jdusnemsaz.com/119.84.4.43) located in Chongqing, PRC. The location o Chongqingis contextually interesting as it has a high concentration o Triads — well known Asian-based organized crimi-nal networks — who have signicant connections to the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party(Lam 2009). The Triads have extended their traditional criminal activities to include technology-enabled crime

SHADOWS IN THE CLOUD: Investigating Cyber Espionage 2.0

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Shadows in the Cloud documents a complex ecosystem of cyber espionage that systematically compromised government, business, academic, and other co... (More)