BlackSquid Malware Uses Eight Exploits to Attack Web Servers, Network Drives, and Removable Drives

A new malware dubbed BlackSquid bags eight notorious exploits to drop XMRig Monero cryptocurrency miner targeting web servers, network drives, and removable drives.

The malware employs several anti-virtualization, anti-debugging, and anti-sandboxing methods to avoid detection. If the malware detects any sandboxes, it immediately cancels the infection process to avoid detections.

Trend Micro observed that BlackSquid targets Thailand and the U.S., based on the samples observed by researchers now it downloads and installs an XMRig Monero cryptocurrency miner, but can be utilized with other payloads in future.

The malware enters into the system through three different initial entry points that include infected webpages, compromised servers, or via removable or network drives.

If the malware doesn’t meet the conditions, then it drops the XMRig Monero malware and processes the malicious cryptocurrency-mining malware routines. It also uses EternalBlue-DoublePulsar exploits for further network propagations.

The malware also gets executed by utilizing the critical vulnerability CVE-2017-8464, that allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on the target machine as a local user.

BlackSquid also exploits the Apache Tomcat exploit CVE-2017-12615, which “enables any code to be executed by the server by uploading a JavaServer Pages (JSP) file via a specially crafted HTTP PUT request.”

It also targets Rejetto HTTP File Server using CVE-2014-6287 “to run mshta.exe via a %00 sequence in a search action. Once abused, this allows attackers to execute arbitrary programs remotely.”

“Among the vulnerabilities abused are three ThinkPHP exploits to support multiple versions of the said framework, using mshta.exe to download and execute the main component of the payload,” reads Trend Micro report.

Along with the attacks, BlackSquid downloads two XMRig cryptocurrency-mining components, that checks for the existence of video card in the target systems, it checks for Nvidia and AMD video cards, if present it downloads the second component to mine for graphics processing unit (GPU) resource.

The BlackSquid is the highly sophisticated malware that allows a threat actor to escalate the privileges, Hardware Sabotage, steal sensitive information form organization and to launch various attacks.

Indicators of compromise

SHA256
 14f8dc79113b6a2d3f378d2046dbc4a9a7c605ce24cfa5ef9f4e8f5406cfd84d
 3596e8fa5e19e860a2029fa4ab7a4f95fadf073feb88e4f82b19a093e1e2737c
 4bc1a84ddbbb360e3026e8ec1d0e1eff02a100cf01888e7e2a2ac6a105c71450    
 aa259b168ec448349e91a9d560569bdb6fabd811d78888c6080065a549f60cb0    
 4abb241a957061d150d757955aa0e7159253b17a1248eaac13490a811cdabf90    
 515caf6b7ff41322099f4c3e3d4846a65768b7f4b3166274afc47cb301eeda98    
8dbd331784e620bb0ca33b8515ca9df9a7a049057b39a2da5242323943d730b4
 8974da4d200f3ca11aa0bc800f23d7a2be9a3e4e6311221888740c812d489116

 URLs 
 hxxp://m9f[.]oss-cn-beijing[.]aliyuncs[.]com/A[.]exe
 hxxp[:]//m9f[.]oss-cn-beijing[.]aliyuncs[.]com/Black[.]hta 

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