Dark Utilities – A C2aaS Platform Leveraged By Hackers To Implant Malware

Dark Utilities is a new service that has been discovered recently by security researchers at Cisco Talos. In order to set up a C2 center for their malicious operations, cybercriminals can use this service to provide them with an easy and inexpensive means of doing so.

With the Dark Utilities service, threat actors are able to deliver a wide range of payloads, including those based on Windows operating systems, Linux operating systems, and Python scripting languages. 

This reduces the time and effort that would otherwise be involved in implementing a C2 communication channel between two parties.

Dark Utilities

In order to take advantage of all the features and functions available through the Dark Utilities operation, a customer would only have to pay just EUR 9.99 for an anonymous, reliable, and secure C2 infrastructure and all the necessary additional functions.

The cybersecurity researchers recently found that around 3,000 active subscribers are currently using the service, which would generate about EUR 30,000 in revenue for the operators.

Dark Utilities has been offering full-fledged C2 capabilities on both the Tor network and the clear web since early 2022. As a storage and sharing method, it uses IPFS to host payloads.

In addition to supporting multiple architectures, it appears that the operators are planning on making the list larger in order to provide a broader range of devices to which the services can be applied.

In order to facilitate the retrieval and execution of the payload on the victim machines, threat actors usually embed a command string generated by selecting the OS into PowerShell or Bash scripts they produce.

A Registry key is also created on the target system by the selected payload in order to enable persistence.

Among the many features available within the administrative panel, there are modules for preventing DDoS attacks, cryptojacking attacks, and other forms of attacks.

Dark Utilities is expected to attract an even larger crowd of less-skilled adversaries given the fact that tens of thousands of threat actors have already subscribed and the low price point.

There is evidence that Dark Utilities was created and is currently managed by an individual who goes by the appellation “Inplex-sys.”

As Talos began exploring the history of the person, several instances were discovered where it was claimed that the person was French-speaking.

In order to help companies defend against malware running on Dark Utilities, Cisco Talos has assembled the IOCs (indicators of compromise).

The following indicators of compromise have been observed associated with malware campaigns leveraging the Dark Utilities platform.

Hashes (SHA256)

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