UNC2447 SOMBRAT and FIVEHANDS Ransomware: A Sophisticated Financial Threat

Mandiant has observed an aggressive financially motivated group, UNC2447, exploiting one SonicWall VPN zero-day vulnerability prior to a patch being available and deploying sophisticated malware previously reported by other vendors as SOMBRAT. Mandiant has linked the use of SOMBRAT to the deployment of ransomware, which has not been previously reported publicly.

UNC2447 monetizes intrusions by extorting their victims first with FIVEHANDS ransomware followed by aggressively applying pressure through threats of media attention and offering victim data for sale on hacker forums. UNC2447 has been observed targeting organizations in Europe and North America and has consistently displayed advanced capabilities to evade detection and minimize post-intrusion forensics.

Mandiant has observed evidence of UNC2447 affiliated actors previously using RAGNARLOCKER ransomware. Based on technical and temporal observations of HELLOKITTY and FIVEHANDS deployments, Mandiant suspects that HELLOKITTY may have been used by an overall affiliate program from May 2020 through December 2020, and FIVEHANDS since approximately January 2021.

Background

In November 2020, Mandiant created UNC2447, an uncategorized group observed using the novel WARPRISM PowerShell dropper to install BEACON at two Mandiant Managed Defense clients. Mandiant Managed Defence quicky neutralized these intrusions and did not observe attempts to deploy ransomware.

In January and February 2021, Mandiant Consulting observed a novel rewrite of DEATHRANSOM—dubbed FIVEHANDS—along with SOMBRAT at multiple victims that were extorted. During one of the ransomware intrusions, the same WARPRISM and BEACON samples previously clustered under UNC2447 were observed. Mandiant was able to forensically link the use of WARPRISM, BEACON, SOMBRAT and FIVEHANDS to the same actor.

Mandiant suspects that HELLOKITTY activity in late-2020 may be related to the overall affiliate program and that usage shifted to FIVEHANDS ransomware beginning in January 2021.

• In April 2021, Mandiant observed a private FIVEHANDS TOR chat using a HELLOKITTY favicon (Figure 1).

Figure 1: FIVEHANDS Hello Kitty icon

When affiliate-based ransomware is observed by Mandiant, uncategorized clusters are assigned based on the infrastructure used, and in the case of UNC2447 were based on the SOMBRAT and Cobalt Strike BEACON infrastructure used across 5 intrusions between November 2020 and February 2021. Generally, Mandiant uses caution even with novel malware such as SOMBRAT and WARPRISM and clusters each use rigorously according to all observed activity. For more information on uncategorized threats, refer to our post, “DebUNCing Attribution: How Mandiant Tracks Uncategorized Threat Actors.”

SonicWall SMA 100 Series Appliance Vulnerability

CVE-2021-20016 is a critical SQL injection vulnerability that exploits unpatched SonicWall Secure Mobile Access SMA 100 series remote access products. A remote, unauthenticated attacker could submit a specially crafted query in order to exploit the vulnerability. Successful exploitation would grant an attacker the ability to access login credentials (username, password) as well as session information that could then be used to log into a vulnerable unpatched SMA 100 series appliance. This vulnerability only impacted the SMA 100 series and was patched by SonicWall in February 2021. For more information on this vulnerability, please refer to SonicWall PSIRT advisory SNWLID-2021-0001.

WARPRISM

WARPRISM is a PowerShell dropper that has been observed by Mandiant delivering SUNCRYPT, BEACON, and MIMIKATZ. WARPRISM is used to evade endpoint detection and will load its payload directly into memory. WARPRISM may be used by multiple groups.

FOXGRABBER

FOXGRABBER is a command line utility used to harvest FireFox credential files from remote systems. It contains the PDB path: C:UserskolobkoSourceReposgrabffobjDebuggrabff.pdb. FOXGRABBER has also been observed in DARKSIDE ransomware intrusions.

BEACON Malleable Profiles

In the initial stages of an intrusion, UNC2447 uses the Cobalt Strike BEACON HTTPSSTAGER implant for persistence to communicate with command-and-control (C2) servers over HTTPS and has been observed using ‘chches_APT10’ and ‘Havex’ Malleable profiles.

UNC2447 Toolbox

During the recon and exfiltration stage of intrusions, UNC2447 has been observed using the following tools: ADFIND, BLOODHOUND, MIMIKATZ, PCHUNTER, RCLONE, ROUTERSCAN, S3BROWSER, ZAP and 7ZIP. UNC2447 may tamper with windows security settings, firewall rules, and antivirus protection.

SOMBRAT Overview

SOMBRAT was first reported by Blackberry Cylance in November 2020 as “The CostaRicto Campaign: Cyber-Espionage Outsourced” as a potential espionage-for-hire criminal group. Mandiant has now observed SOMBRAT alongside FIVEHANDS ransomware intrusions.

The SOMBRAT backdoor is packaged as a 64-bit Windows executable. It communicates with a configurable command and control (C2) server via multiple protocols, including DNS, TLS-encrypted TCP, and potentially WebSockets. Although the backdoor supports dozens of commands, most of them enable the operator to manipulate an encrypted storage file and reconfigure the implant. The backdoor’s primary purpose is to download and execute plugins provided via the C2 server. In contrast to the SOMBRAT version published in November 2020, Mandiant observed additional obfuscation and armoring to evade detection, this SOMBRAT variant has been hardened to discourage analysis. Program metadata typically included by the compiler has been stripped and strings have been inlined and encoded via XOR-based routines.

The SOMBRAT Launcher

This SOMBRAT backdoor variant must be deployed alongside four additional resources that serve as launchers. They are typically installed to the hardcoded directory path `C:ProgramDataMicrosoft`. 

• path: `C:programdataMicrosoftWwanSvc.bat` – launcher for `WwanSvc.txt`
• path: `C:programdataMicrosoftWwanSvc.txt` – decoder and launcher for `WwanSvc.c`
• path: `C:programdataMicrosoftWwanSvc.c` – decoder and launcher for `WwanSvc.b`
• path: `C:programdataMicrosoftWwanSvc.a` – XOR key
• path: `C:programdataMicrosoftWwanSvc.b` – encoded SOMBRAT backdoor
• path: `%TEMP%` – encrypted storage file
• path: `%TEMP%

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