Kaspersky Lab Investigation Says the NSA Contractor Computer Already Infected with Huge Number Malwares

Kaspersky hits back saying that the user’s computer has been infected by a backdoor Mokes, which allows attackers to gain access to the device.

Last Month the incident was reported by Wall Street Journal says, Russian hackers Stolen information that are highly Sensitive Data such as how the NSA penetrates foreign computer networks.You can read more detail about the incident here.

Kaspersky conducted an internal investigation to answer all the questions and allegation raised. Their assume that data might be taken already and most likely Equation Group. So they check with malware families of equation group.

According to “Kaspersky Lab” study the malware command and control servers has been registered from September to November 2014 on a supposedly Chinese individual Zhou Lou.

In total, they detected 37 unique files and 218 detected objects, including executables and archives containing malware associated with the Equation Group.

The file paths observed from these detections indicated that a developer of Equation had plugged in one or more removable drives, AV signatures fired on some of the executables as well as archives containing them, and any files detected (including archives they were contained within) were automatically pulled back. At this point in time, we felt confident we had found the source of the story fed to Wall Street Journal and others. Says Kaspersky

They also discover a signature created by a malware analyst in 2015 that was looking for the following patterns:

*saidumlo*
*secret*.*
*.xls
*.pdf
*.pgp
*pass*.*

With further analysis they found a malicious actor on October 4, 2014, at 23:38 local time, specifically by a piece of malware hidden inside a malicious MS Office ISO, specifically the “setup.exe” file (md5: a82c0575f214bdc7c8ef5a06116cd2a4).

Looking at the sequence of events and detections on this system, we quickly noticed that the user in question ran the above file with a folder name of “Office-2013-PPVL-x64-en-US-Oct2013.iso”.And they said Executing the malware would not have been possible with the antivirus enabled.

Based on the detections and alerts found in the investigation, the system was most likely compromised during this time frame by unknown threat actors. We assess this from the fact that the user installed a backdoored MS Office 2013 illegal activation tool.

They concluded the possibility exists that there may have been other malware on the system which our engines did not detect at the time of research.