Hackers Abusing Microsoft Azure to Deploy Malware and C2 Servers Using Evasion Technique

Now Microsoft Azure becomes a sweet spot for hackers to host powerful malware and also as a command and control server for sending and receiving commands to compromised systems.

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers.

Initially, this malicious operation was uncovered and reported by @JayTHL & @malwrhunterteam via Twitter in which they provide the evidence that there is a malicious software being hosted in Microsoft Azure.

Researcher’s already reported this malicious operation to Microsoft. however, the original malware (plus additional samples uploaded since) still resided on the Azure site as of May 29, 2019 – 17 days later, Appriver Reported.

This is an evidence of Azure that failed to detect the malware residing on the Microsoft server, but Windows defender is detecting the malicious files if users attempt to download from the malware-hosting server.

Windows defender detects this malware as Trojan:Win32/Occamy.C and the first new sample ( searchfile.exe ) was initially uploaded to VirusTotal on April 26, 2019, and another sample (printer/prenter.exe) was first submitted on April 30, but also remains undetected on Azure servers.

According to appriver, however, it does not appear the service is currently scanning Azure sites or, one could surmise that these files would’ve been detected by now. 

Based on the analysis report using the printer.exe file, attackers uncompiled this malware with the c# .net portable executable file.

Attackers cleverly using an uncompiled file as an attempt to evade the gateway and endpoint security detection by thoroughly examining the downloaded binaries.

” Once running, this malicious agent generates XML SOAP requests every 2 minutes to check-in and receive commands from the malicious actors Azure command and control site at: systemservicex[.]azurewebsites[.]net/data[.]asmx”

This is not a first-time malware operator abusing Azure, but already we reported that attackers abuse Microsoft Azure Blog Hosting and it also attempted to steal the login credentials.

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