ESET researchers discovered a Ballistic Bobcat campaign targeting various entities in Brazil, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates, using a novel backdoor we have named Sponsor.

We discovered Sponsor after we analyzed an interesting sample we detected on a victim’s system in Israel in May 2022 and scoped the victim-set by country. Upon examination, it became evident to us that the sample was a novel backdoor deployed by the Ballistic Bobcat APT group.

Ballistic Bobcat, previously tracked by ESET Research as APT35/APT42 (aka Charming Kitten, TA453, or PHOSPHORUS), is a suspected Iran-aligned advanced persistent threat group that targets education, government, and healthcare organizations, as well as human rights activists and journalists. It is most active in Israel, the Middle East, and the United States. Notably, during the pandemic, it was targeting COVID-19-related organizations, including the World Health Organization and Gilead Pharmaceuticals, and medical research personnel.

Overlaps between Ballistic Bobcat campaigns and Sponsor backdoor versions show a fairly clear pattern of tool development and deployment, with narrowly targeted campaigns, each of limited duration. We subsequently discovered four other versions of the Sponsor backdoor. In total, we saw Sponsor deployed to at least 34 victims in Brazil, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates, as outlined in Figure 1.

Key points of this blogpost:

• We discovered a new backdoor deployed by Ballistic Bobcat that we subsequently named Sponsor.
• Ballistic Bobcat deployed the new backdoor in September 2021, while it was wrapping up the campaign documented in CISA Alert AA21-321A and the PowerLess campaign.
• The Sponsor backdoor uses configuration files stored on disk. These files are discreetly deployed by batch files and deliberately designed to appear innocuous, thereby attempting to evade detection by scanning engines.
• Sponsor was deployed to at least 34 victims in Brazil, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates; we have named this activity the Sponsoring Access campaign.

Initial access

Ballistic Bobcat obtained initial access by exploiting known vulnerabilities in internet-exposed Microsoft Exchange servers by first conducting meticulous scans of the system or network to identify potential weaknesses or vulnerabilities, and subsequently targeting and exploiting those identified weaknesses. The group has been known to engage in this behavior for some time. However, many of the 34 victims identified in ESET telemetry might best be described as victims of opportunity rather than preselected and researched victims, as we suspect Ballistic Bobcat engaged in the above-described scan-and-exploit behavior because it was not the only threat actor with access to these systems. We have named this Ballistic Bobcat activity utilizing the Sponsor backdoor the Sponsoring Access campaign.

The Sponsor backdoor uses configuration files on disk, dropped by batch files, and both are innocuous so as to bypass scanning engines. This modular approach is one that Ballistic Bobcat has used quite often and with modest success in the past two and a half years. On compromised systems, Ballistic Bobcat also continues to use a variety of open-source tools, which we describe – together with the Sponsor backdoor – in this blogpost.

Victimology

A significant majority of the 34 victims were located in Israel, with only two located in other countries:

• Brazil, at a medical cooperative and health insurance operator, and
• the United Arab Emirates, at an unidentified organization.

Table 1 describes the verticals, and organizational details, for victims in Israel.

Table 1. Verticals and organizational details for victims in Israel

Attribution

In August 2021, the Israeli victim above that operates an insurance marketplace was attacked by Ballistic Bobcat with the tools CISA reported in November 2021. The indicators of compromise we observed are:

• MicrosoftOutlookUpdateSchedule,
• MicrosoftOutlookUpdateSchedule.xml,
• GoogleChangeManagement, and
• GoogleChangeManagement.xml.

Ballistic Bobcat tools communicated with the same command and control (C&C) server as in the CISA report: 162.55.137[.]20.

Then, in September 2021, the same victim received the next generation of Ballistic Bobcat tools: the PowerLess backdoor and its supporting toolset. The indicators of compromise we observed were:

• http://162.55.137[.]20/gsdhdDdfgA5sS/ff/dll.dll,
• windowsprocesses.exe, and
• http://162.55.137[.]20/gsdhdDdfgA5sS/ff/windowsprocesses.exe.

On November 18^th, 2021, the group then deployed another tool (Plink) that was covered in the CISA report, as MicrosoftOutLookUpdater.exe. Ten days later, on November 28^th, 2021, Ballistic Bobcat deployed the Merlin agent (the agent portion of an open-source post-exploitation C&C server and agent written in Go). On disk, this Merlin agent was named googleUpdate.exe, using the same naming convention as described in the CISA report to hide in plain sight.

The Merlin agent executed a Meterpreter reverse shell that called back to a new C&C server, 37.120.222[.]168:80. On December 12^th, 2021, the reverse shell dropped a batch file, install.bat, and within minutes of executing the batch file, Ballistic Bobcat operators pushed their newest backdoor, Sponsor. This would turn out to be the third version of the backdoor.

Technical analysis

Initial access

We were able to identify a likely means of initial access for 23 of the 34 victims that we observed in ESET telemetry. Similar to what was reported in the PowerLess and CISA reports, Ballistic Bobcat probably exploited a known vulnerability, CVE-2021-26855, in Microsoft Exchange servers to gain a foothold on these systems.

For 16 of the 34 victims, it appears Ballistic Bobcat was not the only threat actor with access to their systems. This may indicate, along with the wide variety of victims and the apparent lack of obvious intelligence value of a few victims, that Ballistic Bobcat engaged in scan-and-exploit behavior, as opposed to a targeted campaign against preselected victims.

Toolset

Open-source tools

Ballistic Bobcat employed a number of open-source tools during the Sponsoring Access campaign. Those tools and their functions are listed in Table 2.

Table 2. Open-source tools used by Ballistic Bobcat

Batch files

Ballistic Bobcat deployed batch files to victims’ systems moments before deploying the Sponsor backdoor. File paths we are aware of are:

• C:\inetpub\wwwroot\aspnet_client\Install.bat
• %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\Install.bat
• %WINDOWS%\Tasks\Install.bat

Unfortunately, we were unable to obtain any of these batch files. However, we believe they write innocuous configuration files to disk, which the Sponsor backdoor requires to function fully. These configuration filenames were taken from the Sponsor backdoors but were never collected:

• config.txt
• node.txt
• error.txt
• Uninstall.bat

We believe that the batch files and configuration files are part of the modular development process that Ballistic Bobcat has favored over the past few years.

Sponsor backdoor

Sponsor backdoors are written in C++ with compilation timestamps and Program Database (PDB) paths as shown in Table 3. A note on version numbers: the column Version represents the version that we track internally based on the linear progression of Sponsor backdoors where changes are made from one version to the next. The Internal version column contains the version numbers observed in each Sponsor backdoor and are included for ease of comparison when examining these and other potential Sponsor samples.

Table 3. Sponsor compilation timestamps and PDBs

The initial execution of Sponsor requires the runtime argument install, without which Sponsor gracefully exits, likely a simple anti-emulation/anti-sandbox technique. If passed that argument, Sponsor creates a service called SystemNetwork (in v1) and Update (in all the other versions). It sets the service’s Startup Type to Automatic, and sets it to run its own Sponsor process, and grants it full access. It then starts the service.

Sponsor, now running as a service, attempts to open the aforementioned configuration files previously placed on disk. It looks for config.txt and node.txt, both in the current working directory. If the first is missing, Sponsor sets the service to Stopped and gracefully exits.

Backdoor configuration

Sponsor’s configuration, stored in config.txt, contains two fields:

• An update interval, in seconds, to periodically contact the C&C server for commands.
• A list of C&C servers, referred to as relays in Sponsor’s binaries.

The C&C servers are stored encrypted (RC4), and the decryption key is present in the first line of config.txt. Each of the fields, including the decryption key, have the format shown in Figure 3.

These subfields are:

• config_start: indicates the length of config_name, if present, or zero, if not. Used by the backdoor to know where config_data starts.
• config_len: length of config_data.
• config_name: optional, contains a name given to the configuration field.
• config_data: the configuration itself, encrypted (in the case of C&C servers) or not (all the other fields).

Figure 4 shows an example with color-coded contents of a possible config.txt file. Note that this is not an actual file we observed, but a fabricated example.

The last two fields in config.txt are encrypted with RC4, using the string representation of the SHA-256 hash of the specified decryption key, as the key to encrypt the data. We see that the encrypted bytes are stored hex-encoded as ASCII text.

Host information gathering

Sponsor gathers information about the host on which it is running, reports all of the gathered information to the C&C server, and receives a node ID, which is written to node.txt. Table 4 lists keys and values in the Windows registry that Sponsor uses to get the information, and provides an example of the data collected.

Table 4. Information gathered by Sponsor

Sponsor also collects the host’s Windows domain by using the following WMIC command:

wmic computersystem get domain

Lastly, Sponsor uses Windows APIs to collect the current username (GetUserNameW), determine if the current Sponsor process is running as a 32- or 64-bit application (GetCurrentProcess, then IsWow64Process(CurrentProcess)), and determines whether the system is running on battery power or connected to an AC or DC power source (GetSystemPowerStatus).

One oddity regarding the 32- or 64-bit application check is that all observed samples of Sponsor were 32-bit. This could mean that some of the next stage tools require this information.

The collected information is sent in a base64-encoded message that, before encoding, starts with r and has the format shown in Figure 5.

The information is encrypted with RC4, and the encryption key is a random number generated on the spot. The key is hashed with the MD5 algorithm, not SHA-256 as previously mentioned. This is the case for all communications where Sponsor has to send encrypted data.

The C&C server replies with a number used to identify the victimized computer in later communications, which is written to node.txt. Note that the C&C server is randomly chosen from the list when the r message is sent, and the same server is used in all subsequent communications.

Command processing loop

Sponsor requests commands in a loop, sleeping according to the interval defined in config.txt. The steps are:

1. Send a chk=Test message repeatedly, until the C&C server replies Ok.
2. Send a c (IS_CMD_AVAIL) message to the C&C server, and receive an operator command.
3. Process the command.
   • If there is output to be sent to the C&C server, send an a (ACK) message, including the output (encrypted), or
   • If execution failed, send an f (FAILED) message. The error message is not sent.
4. Sleep.

The c message is sent to request a command to execute, and has the format (before base64 encoding) shown in Figure 6.

The encrypted_none field in the figure is the result of encrypting the hardcoded string None with RC4. The key for encryption is the MD5 hash of node_id.

The URL used to contact the C&C server is built as: http://<IP_or_domain>:80. This may indicate that 37.120.222[.]168:80 is the only C&C server used throughout the Sponsoring Access campaign, as it was the only IP address we observed victim machines reaching out to on port 80.

Operator commands

Operator commands are delineated in Table 5 and appear in the order in which they are found in the code. Communication with the C&C server occurs over port 80.

Table 5. Operator commands and descriptions

Updates to Sponsor

Ballistic Bobcat coders made code revisions between Sponsor v1 and v2. The two most significant changes in the latter are:

• Optimization of code where several longer functions were minimized into functions and subfunctions, and
• Disguising Sponsor as an updater program by including the following message in the service configuration:

App updates are great for both app users and apps – updates mean that developers are always working on improving the app, keeping in mind a better customer experience with each update.

Network infrastructure

In addition to piggybacking on the C&C infrastructure used in the PowerLess campaign, Ballistic Bobcat also introduced a new C&C server. The group also utilized multiple IPs to store and deliver support tools during the Sponsoring Access campaign. We have confirmed that none of these IPs are in operation at this time.

Conclusion

Ballistic Bobcat continues to operate on a scan-and-exploit model, looking for targets of opportunity with unpatched vulnerabilities in internet-exposed Microsoft Exchange servers. The group continues to use a diverse open-source toolset supplemented with several custom applications, including its Sponsor backdoor. Defenders would be well advised to patch any internet-exposed devices and remain vigilant for new applications popping up within their organizations.

For any inquiries about our research published on WeLiveSecurity, please contact us at threatintel@eset.com.
ESET Research offers private APT intelligence reports and data feeds. For any inquiries about this service, visit the ESET Threat Intelligence page.

IoCs

Files

File paths

The following is a list of paths where the Sponsor backdoor was deployed on victimized machines.

%SYSTEMDRIVE%\inetpub\wwwroot\aspnet_client\

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp\file\

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp\2\low\

%USERPROFILE%\Desktop\

%USERPROFILE%\Downloads\a\

%WINDIR%\

%WINDIR%\INF\MSExchange Delivery DSN\

%WINDIR%\Tasks\

%WINDIR%\Temp\%WINDIR%\Temp\crashpad\1\Files

Network

IP	Provider	First seen	Last seen	Details
162.55.137[.]20	Hetzner Online GMBH	2021-06-14	2021-06-15	PowerLess C&C.
37.120.222[.]168	M247 LTD	2021-11-28	2021-12-12	Sponsor C&C.
198.144.189[.]74	Colocrossing	2021-11-29	2021-11-29	Support tools download site.
5.255.97[.]172	The Infrastructure Group B.V.	2021-09-05	2021-10-28	Support tools download site.

MITRE ATT&CK techniques

This table was built using version 13 of the MITRE ATT&CK framework.