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Solving the “VR Goldilocks Problem” in Security Operations

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04
Mar 2019
04
Mar 2019
Security Operations teams face two fundamental challenges when it comes to 'finding bad': visibility and recognition.

First, some context about VR

Security Operations teams face two fundamental challenges when it comes to 'finding bad'.

The first is gaining and maintaining appropriate visibility into what is happening in our environments. Visibility is provided through data (e.g. telemetry, logs). The trinity of data sources for visibility concern accounts/credentials, devices, and network traffic.

The second challenge is getting good recognition within the scope of what is visible. Recognition is fundamentally about what alerting and workflows you can implement and automate in response to activity that is suspicious or malicious.

Visibility and Recognition each have their own different associated issues.

Visibility is a problem about what is and can be generated and either read as telemetry, or logged and stored locally, or shipped to a central platform. The timelines and completeness of what visibility you have can depend on factors such as how much data you can or can't store locally on devices that generate data - and for how long; what your data pipeline and data platform look like (e.g. if you are trying to centralise data for analysis); or the capability of host software agents you have to process certain information locally.

The constraints on visibility sets the bar for factors like coverage, timelines and completeness of what recognition you can achieve. Without visibility, we cannot recognize at all. With limited visibility, what we can recognize may not have much value. With the right visibility, we can still fail to recognise the right things. And with too much recognition, we can quickly overload our senses.

A good example of a technology that offers the opportunity to solve these challenges at the network layer is Darktrace. Their technology provides visibility, from a network traffic perspective, into data that concerns devices and the accounts/credentials associated with them. They then provide recognition on top of this by using Machine Learning (ML) models for anomaly detection. Their models alert on a wide range of activities that may be indicative of threat activity, (e.g. malware execution and command and control, a technical exploit, data exfiltration and so on).

The major advantage they provide, compared to traditional Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and other vendors who also use ML for network anomaly detection, is that you can a) adjust the sensitivity of their algorithms and b) build your own recognition for particular patterns of interest. For example, if you want to monitor what connections are made to one or two servers, you can set up alerts for any change to expected patterns. This means you can create and adjust custom recognition based on your enterprise context and tune it easily in response to how context changes over time.

The Goldilocks VR Matrix

Below is what we call the VR Goldilocks Matrix at PBX Group Security. We use it to assess technology, measure our own capability and processes, and ask ourselves hard questions about where we need to focus to get the most value from our budget, (or make cuts / shift investment) if we need to.

In the squares are some examples of what you (maybe) should think about doing if you find yourself there.

Important questions to ask about VR

One of the things about Visibility and Recognition is that it’s not a given they are ‘always on’. Sometimes there are failure modes for visibility (causing a downstream issue with recognition). And sometimes there are failure modes or conditions under which you WANT to pause recognition.

The key questions you must have answers to about this include:

  • Under what conditions might I lose visibility?
  • How would I know if I have?
  • Is that loss a blind spot (i.e. data is lost for a given time period)…
  • …or is it 'a temporal delay’ (e.g. a connection fails and data is batched for moving from A to B but that doesn’t happen for a few hours)?
  • What are the recognitions that might be impacted by either of the above?
  • What is my expectation for the SLA on those recognitions from ‘cause of alert’ to ‘response workflow’?
  • Under what conditions would I be willing to pause recognition, change the workflow for what happens upon recognition, or stop it all together?
  • What is the stacked ranked list of ‘must, should, could’ for all recognition and why?

Alerts. Alerts everywhere.

More often than not, Security Operations teams suffer the costs of wasted time due to noisy alerts from certain data sources. As a consequence, it's more difficult for them to single out malicious behavior as suspicious or benign. The number of alerts that are generated due to out of the box SIEM platform configurations for sources like Web Proxies and Domain Controllers are often excessive, and the cost to tune those rules can also be unpalatable. Therefore, rather than trying to tune alerts, teams might make a call to switch them off until someone can get around to figuring out a better way. There’s no use having hypothetical recognition, but no workflow to act on what is generate (other than compliance).

This is where technologies that use ML can help. There are two basic approaches...

One is to avoid alerting until multiple conditions are met that indicate a high probability of threat activity. In this scenario, rather than alerting on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th ‘suspicious activities’, you wait until you have a critical mass of indicators, and then you generate one high fidelity alert that has a much greater weighting to be malicious. This requires both a high level of precision and accuracy in alerting, and naturally some trade off in the time that can pass before an alert for malicious activity is generated.

The other is to alert on ‘suspicious actives 1-4' and let an analyst or automated process decide if this merits further investigation. This approach sacrifices accuracy for precision, but provides rapid context on whether one, or multiple, conditions are met that push the machine(s) up the priority list in the triage queue. To solve for the lower level of accuracy, this approach can make decisions about how long to sustain alerting. For example, if a host triggers multiple anomaly detection models, rather than continue to send alerts (and risk the SOC deciding to turn them off), the technology can pause alerts after a certain threshold. If a machine has not been quarantined or taken off the network after 10 highly suspicious behaviors are flagged, there is a reasonable assumption that the analyst will have dug into these and found the activity is legitimate.

Punchline 1: the value of Continued Recognition even when 'not malicious'

The topic of paused detections was raised after a recent joint exercise between PBX Group Security and Darktrace in testing Darktrace’s recognition. After a machine being used by the PBX Red Team breached multiple high priority models on Darktrace, the technology stopped alerting on further activity. This was because the initial alerts would have been severe enough to trigger a SOC workflow. This approach is designed to solve the problem of alert overload on a machine that is behaving anomalously but is not in fact malicious. Rather than having the SOC turn off alerts for that machine (which could later be used maliciously), the alerts are paused.

One of the outcomes of the test was that the PBX Detect team advised they would still want those alerts to exist for context to see what else the machine does (i.e. to understand its pattern of life). Now, rather than pausing alerts, Darktrace is surfacing this to customers to show where a rule is being paused and create an option to continue seeing alerts for a machine that has breached multiple models.

Which leads us on to our next point…

Punchline 2: the need for Atomic Tests for detection

Both Darktrace and Photobox Security are big believers in Atomic Red Team testing, which involves ‘unit tests’ that repeatedly (or at a certain frequency) test a detection using code. Unit tests automate the work of Red Teams when they discovery control strengths (which you want to monitor continuously for uptime) or control gaps (which you want to monitor for when they are closed). You could design atomic tests to launch a series of particular attacks / threat actor actions from one machine in a chained event. Or you could launch different discreet actions from different machines, each of which has no prior context for doing bad stuff. This allows you to scale the sample size for testing what recognition you have (either through ML or more traditional SIEM alerting). Doing this also means you don't have to ask Red Teams to repeat the same tests again, allowing them to focus on different threat paths to achieve objectives.

Mitre Att&ck is an invaluable framework for this. Many vendors are now aligning to Att&ck to show what they can recognize relating to attack TTPs (Tools, Tactics and Procedures). This enables security teams to map what TTPs are relevant to them (e.g. by using threat intel about the campaigns of threat actor groups that are targeting them). Atomic Red Team tests can then be used to assure that expected detections are operational or find gaps that need closing.

If you miss detections, then you know you need to optimise the recognition you have. If you get too many recognitions outside of the atomic test conditions, you either have to accept a high false positive rate because of the nature of the network, or you can tune your detection sensitivity. The opportunities to do this with technology based on ML and anomaly detection are significant, because you can quickly see for new attack types what a unit test tells you about your current detections and that coverage you think you have is 'as expected'.

Punchline 3: collaboration for the win

Using well-structured Red Team exercises can help your organisation and your technology partners learn new things about how we can collectively find and halt evil. They can also help defenders learn more about good assumptions to build into ML models, as well as covering edge cases where alerts have 'business intelligence' value vs ‘finding bad’.

If you want to understand the categorisations of ways that your populations of machines act over time, there is no better way to do it than through anomaly detection and feeding alerts into a system that supports SOC operations as well as knowledge management (e.g. a graph database).

Working like this means that we also help get the most out of the visibility and recognition we have. Security solutions can be of huge help to Network and Operations teams for troubleshooting or answering questions about network architecture. Often, it’s just a shift in perspective that unlocks cross-functional value from investments in security tech and process. Understanding that recognition doesn’t stop with security is another great example of where technologies that let you build your own logic into recognition can make a huge difference above protecting the bottom line, to adding top line value.

DENTRO DEL SOC
Darktrace son expertos de talla mundial en inteligencia de amenazas, caza de amenazas y respuesta a incidentes, y proporcionan apoyo al SOC las 24 horas del día a miles de clientes de Darktrace en todo el mundo. Inside the SOC está redactado exclusivamente por estos expertos y ofrece un análisis de los ciberincidentes y las tendencias de las amenazas, basado en la experiencia real sobre el terreno.
AUTOR
SOBRE EL AUTOR
Max Heinemeyer
Chief Product Officer

Max is a cyber security expert with over a decade of experience in the field, specializing in a wide range of areas such as Penetration Testing, Red-Teaming, SIEM and SOC consulting and hunting Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups. At Darktrace, Max is closely involved with Darktrace’s strategic customers & prospects. He works with the R&D team at Darktrace, shaping research into new AI innovations and their various defensive and offensive applications. Max’s insights are regularly featured in international media outlets such as the BBC, Forbes and WIRED. Max holds an MSc from the University of Duisburg-Essen and a BSc from the Cooperative State University Stuttgart in International Business Information Systems.

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Cloud

Securing the cloud: Using business context to improve visibility and prioritize cyber risk

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26
Mar 2024

Why are businesses shifting to the cloud?

Businesses are increasingly migrating to cloud, due to its potential to streamline operations, reduce costs, and enhance scalability and flexibility. By shifting their infrastructure to the cloud, either as a whole or, more commonly in a hybrid model, organizations can access a wide array of services, such as storage, compute and software applications, without the need for extensive on-premises hardware. However, this transition isn't without challenges.  

Security challenges of cloud migration

Data security, compliance, integration with existing systems, and ensuring consistent performance are critical concerns that need to be addressed. Therefore, companies must develop robust oversight, implement comprehensive security measures, and invest in staff training to successfully navigate the transition to the cloud all while minimizing potential disruptions.

Implementing security measures within a company, however, is a complex endeavour that involves coordination among numerous internal stakeholders two of the most pivotal players involved in cloud security investment, are the security team, entrusted with crafting a business's defensive strategy, and the DevOps engineering team, architects of the infrastructure underpinning the organization's business operations.

Key questions to ask when securing the cloud

Which team is responsible for maintaining the application?  

What do they consider normal?  

How are potential misconfigurations increasing the potential risk of an incident?

Best practices of cloud security

Contextual awareness of the business is a crucial facet for securing a company's cloud infrastructure, as it enables organizations to align security measures with specific business objectives, risks, and regulatory requirements. Understanding the context of the business operations, its goals, critical assets, and compliance obligations, allows security teams to tailor their strategies and controls accordingly.

How does Darktrace help secure the cloud?

In response to the difficulties outlined above, Darktrace has adopted a holistic approach to security with an ActiveAI security platform that is context-aware. This platform enables stakeholders to effectively detect and respond to threats that may arise within their cloud or on premises environments.  

By monitoring your network and identity activity, Darktrace can identify what is considered “normal” within your organization. This however doesn’t tell the whole story. It is also important to understand where these actions are occurring within the context of the business.  

Visibility in the cloud

Without visibility into the individual assets that make up the cloud environment, how these are configured, and how they operate at run time, security is incredibly difficult to maintain. Visibility allows security teams to identify potential vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, or unauthorized access points that could be exploited by malicious actors. It enables proactive monitoring and rapid response to security incidents, ensuring that any threats are promptly identified and mitigated before they can cause significant damage.  

Building architecture diagrams

The cornerstone of our strategy lies in the architecture diagrams, which serve as a framework for organizing resources within our cloud environment. An architecture comprises of interconnected resources governed by access controls and network routing mechanisms. Its purpose is to logically group these resources into the applications they support.  

Achieving this involves compiling a comprehensive inventory of the cloud environment, analyzing resource permissions—including both outbound and inbound access—and considering any overarching organizational policies. For networked devices, we delve into route tables, firewalls, and subnet access control policies. This information is then utilized to build a graph of interconnected assets, wherein each resource constitutes a node, and the possible connections between resources are represented as edges.

Once we have built up an inventory of all the resources within your environments, we can then start building architectures based on the graph. We do this by selecting distinct starting points for graph traversal, which we infer from our deep understanding of the cloud, an example would be a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) - A VPC is a virtual network that closely resembles a traditional network that you'd operate in your own data center.  

All networked devices are usually housed within a VPC, with applications typically grouped into one or more VPCs. If multiple VPCs are detected with peering connections between them, we consider them as distinct parts of the same system. This approach enables us to comprehend applications across regions and accounts, rather than solely from the isolated viewpoint of a single VPC.

However, the cloud isn’t all about compute instances, serverless is a popular architecture. In fact, for many developers serverless architectures offer greater scalability and flexibility. Reviewing prevalent serverless architecture patterns, we've chosen some common fundamental resources as our starting point, Lambda functions and Elastic Container Service (ECS) clusters are prime examples, serving as crucial components in various serverless systems with distinct yet similar characteristics.

Prioritize risk in the cloud

Once we have built up an inventory of all the cloud asset, Darktrace/Cloud utilizes an ‘outlier’ detection machine learning model. This looks to categorize all the assets and identifies the ones that look different or ‘odd’ when compared with the assets around it, this is based on a wide range of characteristics some of which will include, Name, VPC ID, Host Region etc, whilst also incorporating contextual knowledge of where these assets are found, and how they fit into the architecture they are in.  

Once outliers are identified, we can use this information to assess the potential risk posed by the asset. Context plays a crucial role in this stage, as incorporating observations about the asset enables effective scoring. For instance, detecting a misconfiguration, anomalous network connections, or unusual user activity can significantly raise the asset's score. Consequently, the architecture it belongs to can be flagged for further investigation.

Adapting to a dynamic cloud environment

The cloud is incredibly dynamic. Therefore, Darktrace does not see architectures as fixed entities. Instead, we're always on the lookout for changes, driven by user and service activity. This prompts us to dive back in, update our architectural view, and keep a living record of the cloud's ever-changing landscape, providing near real-time insights into what's happening within it.  

Darktrace/Cloud doesn’t just consider isolated detections, it identifies assets that have misconfigurations and anomalous activity across the network and management plane and adjusts the priority of the alerting to match the potential risk that these assets could be leveraged to enable an attack.  

While in isolation misconfigurations don’t have much meaningful impact, when they are combined with real time updates and anomaly detection within the context of the architecture you see a very important and impactful perspective.  

Combining all of this into one view where security and dev ops teams can collaborate ensures continuity across teams, playing a vital role in providing effective security.

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About the author
Adam Stevens
Analyst Technical Director

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Dentro del SOC

Socks5Systemz: How Darktrace’s Anomaly Detection Unraveled a Stealthy Botnet

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22
Mar 2024

What are botnets?

Although not a recent addition to the threat landscape, botnets persist as a significant concern for organizations, with many threat actors utilizing them for political, strategic, or financial gain. Botnets pose a particularly persistent threat to security teams; even if one compromised device is detected, attackers will likely have infected multiple devices and can continue to operate. Moreover, threat actors are able to easily replace the malware communication channels between infected devices and their command-and-control (C2) servers, making it incredibly difficult to remove the infection.

Botnet example: Socks5Systemz

One example of a botnet recently investigated by the Darktrace Threat Research team is Socks5Systemz. Socks5Systemz is a proxy-for-rent botnet, whereby actors can rent blocks of infected devices to perform proxying services.  Between August and November 2023, Darktrace detected indicators of Socks5Systemz botnet compromise within a cross-industry section of the customer base. Although open-source intelligence (OSINT) research of the botnet only appeared in November 2023, the anomaly-based approach of Darktrace DETECT™ allowed it to identify multiple stages of the network-based activity on affected customer systems well before traditional rules and signatures would have been implemented.

Darktrace’s Cyber AI Analyst™ complemented DETECT’s successful identification of Socks5Systemz activity on customer networks, playing a pivotal role in piecing together the seemingly separate events that comprised the wider compromise. This allowed Darktrace to build a clearer picture of the attack, empowering its customers with full visibility over emerging incidents.

In the customer environments highlighted in this blog, Darktrace RESPOND™ was not configured to operate autonomously. As a result, Socks5Systemz attacks were able to advance through their kill chains until customer security teams acted upon Darktrace’s detections and began their remediation procedures.

What is Socks5Systemz?

The Socks5Systemz botnet is a proxy service where individuals can use infected devices as proxy servers.

These devices act as ‘middlemen’, forwarding connections from malicious actors on to their intended destination. As this additional connectivity conceals the true origin of the connections, threat actors often use botnets to increase their anonymity. Although unauthorized proxy servers on a corporate network may not appear at first glance to be a priority for organizations and their security teams, complicity in proxy botnets could result in reputational damage and significant financial losses.

Since it was first observed in the wild in 2016, the Socks5Systemz botnet has grown steadily, seemingly unnoticed by cyber security professionals, and has infected a reported 10,000 devices worldwide [1]. Cyber security researchers noted a high concentration of compromised devices in India, with lower concentrations of devices infected in the United States, Latin America, Australia and multiple European and African countries [2]. Renting sections of the Socks5Systemz botnet costs between 1 USD and 4,000 USD, with options to increase the threading and time-range of the rentals [2]. Due to the lack of affected devices in Russia, some threat researchers have concluded that the botnet’s operators are likely Russian [2].

Darktrace’s Coverage of Socks5Systemz

The Darktrace Threat Research team conducted investigations into campaign-like activity across the customer base between August and November 2023, where multiple indicators of compromise (IoCs) relating to the Socks5Systemz proxy botnet were observed. Darktrace identified several stages of the attack chain described in static malware analysis by external researchers. Darktrace was also able to uncover additional IoCs and stages of the Socks5Systemz attack chain that had not featured in external threat research.

Delivery and Execution

Prior research on Socks5Systemz notes how the malware is typically delivered via user input, with delivery methods including phishing emails, exploit kits, malicious ads, and trojanized executables downloaded from peer-to-peer (P2P) networks [1].

Threat actors have also used separate malware loaders such as PrivateLoader and Amadey deliver the Socks5Systemz payload. These loaders will drop executable files that are responsible for setting up persistence and injecting the proxy bot into the infected device’s memory [2]. Although evidence of initial payload delivery did not appear during its investigations, Darktrace did discover IoCs relating to PrivateLoader and Amadey on multiple customer networks. Such activity included HTTP POST requests using PHP to rare external IPs and HTTP connections with a referrer header field, indicative of a redirected connection.

However, additional adjacent activity that may suggest initial user execution and was observed during Darktrace’s investigations. For example, an infected device on one deployment made a HTTP GET request to a rare external domain with a “.fun” top-level domain (TLD) for a PDF file. The URI also appears to have contained a client ID. While this download and HTTP request likely corresponded to the gathering and transmission of further telemetry data and infection verification [2], the downloaded PDF file may have represented a malicious payload.

Advanced Search log details highlighting a device infected by Socks5Systemz downloading a suspicious PDF file.
Figure 1: Advanced Search log details highlighting a device infected by Socks5Systemz downloading a suspicious PDF file.

Establishing C2 Communication  

Once the proxy bot has been injected into the device’s memory, the malware attempts to contact servers owned by the botnet’s operators. Across several customer environments, Darktrace identified infected devices attempting to establish connections with such C2 servers. First, affected devices would make repeated HTTP GET requests over port 80 to rare external domains; these endpoints typically had “.ua” and “.ru” TLDs. The majority of these connection attempts were not preceded by a DNS host lookup, suggesting that the domains were already loaded in the device’s cache memory or hardcoded into the code of running processes.

Figure 2: Breach log data connections identifying repeated unusual HTTP connections over port 80 for domains without prior DNS host lookup.

While most initial HTTP GET requests across investigated incidents did not feature DNS host lookups, Darktrace did identify affected devices on a small number of customer environments performing a series of DNS host lookups for seemingly algorithmically generated domains (DGA). These domains feature the same TLDs as those seen in connections without prior DNS host lookups.  

Figure 3: Cyber AI Analyst data indicating a subset of DGAs queried via DNS by infected devices.

These DNS requests follow the activity reported by researchers, where infected devices query a hardcoded DNS server controlled by the threat actor for an DGA domain [2]. However, as the bulk of Darktrace’s investigations presented HTTP requests without a prior DNS host lookup, this activity indicates a significant deviation from the behavior reported by OSINT sources. This could indicate that multiple variations of the Socks5Systemz botnet were circulating at the time of investigation.

Most hostnames observed during this time of investigation follow a specific regular expression format: /[a-z]{7}\.(ua|net|info|com|ru)/ or /[a-z0-9]{15}\.(ua)/. Darktrace also noticed the HTTP GET requests for DGA domains followed a consistent URI pattern: /single.php?c=<STRING>. The requests were also commonly made using the “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 9.0; en-US)” user agent over port 80.

This URI pattern observed during Darktrace’s investigations appears to reflect infected devices contacting Socks5Systemz C2 servers to register the system and details of the host, and signal it is ready to receive further instructions [2]. These URIs are encrypted with a RC4 stream cipher and contain information relating to the device’s operating system and architecture, as well as details of the infection.

The HTTP GET requests during this time, which involved devices made to a variety a variety of similar DGA domains, appeared alongside IP addresses that were later identified as Socks5Systemz C2 servers.

Figure 4: Cyber AI Analyst investigation details highlighting HTTP GET activity whereby RC4 encrypted data is sent to proxy C2 domains.

However, not all affected devices observed by Darktrace used DGA domains to transmit RC4 encoded data. Some investigated systems were observed making similar HTTP GET requests over port 80, albeit to the external domain: “bddns[.]cc”, using the aforementioned Mozilla user agent. During these requests, Darktrace identified a consistent URI pattern, similar to that seen in the DGA domain GET requests: /sign/<RC4 cipher text>.  

Darktrace DETECT recognized the rarity of the domains and IPs that were connected to by affected devices, as well as the usage of the new Mozilla user agent.  The HTTP connections, and the corresponding Darktrace DETECT model breaches, parallel the analysis made by external researchers: if the initial DGA DNS requests do not return a valid C2 server, infected devices connect to, and request the IP address of a server from, the above-mentioned domain [2].

Connection to Proxy

After sending host and infection details via HTTP and receiving commands from the C2 server, affected devices were frequently observed initiating activity to join the Sock5Systemz botnet. Infected hosts would first make HTTP GET requests to an IP identified as Socks5Systemz’s proxy checker application, usually sending the URI “proxy-activity.txt” to the domain over the HTTP protocol. This likely represents an additional validation check to confirm that the infected device is ready to join the botnet.

Figure 5: Cyber AI Analyst investigation detailing HTTP GET requests over port 80 to the Socks5Systemz Proxy Checker Application.

Following the final validation checks, devices would then attempt TCP connections to a range of IPs, which have been associated with BackConnect proxy servers, over port 1074. At this point, the device is able to receive commands from actors who login to and operate the corresponding BackConnect server. This BackConnect server will transmit traffic from the user renting the segment of the botnet [2].

Darktrace observed a range of activity associated with this stage of the attack, including the use of new or unusual user agents, connections to suspicious IPs, and other anomalous external connectivity which represented a deviation from affected devices’ expected behavior.

Additional Activities Following Proxy Addition

The Darktrace Threat Research team found evidence of the possible deployment of additional malware strains during their investigation into devices affected by Socks5Systemz. IoCs associated with both the Amadey and PrivateLoader loader malware strains, both of which are known to distribute Socks5Systemz, were also observed on affected devices. Additionally, Darktrace observed multiple infected systems performing cryptocurrency mining operations around the time of the Sock5Systemz compromise, utilizing the MinerGate protocol to conduct login and job functions, as well as making DNS requests for mining pools.

While such behavior would fall outside of the expected activity for Socks5Systemz and cannot be definitively attributed to it, Darktrace did observe devices affected by the botnet performing additional malicious downloads and operations during its investigations.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Darktrace’s anomaly-based approach to threat detection enabled it to effectively identify and alert for malicious Socks5Systemz botnet activity long before external researchers had documented its IoCs and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).  

In fact, Darktrace not only identified multiple distinct attack phases later outlined in external research but also uncovered deviations from these expected patterns of behavior. By proactively detecting emerging threats through anomaly detection rather than relying on existing threat intelligence, Darktrace is well positioned to detect evolving threats like Socks5Systemz, regardless of what their future iterations might look like.

Faced with the threat of persistent botnets, it is crucial for organizations to detect malicious activity in its early stages before additional devices are compromised, making it increasingly difficult to remediate. Darktrace’s suite of products enables the swift and effective detection of such threats. Moreover, when enabled in autonomous response mode, Darktrace RESPOND is uniquely positioned to take immediate, targeted actions to contain these attacks from the onset.

Credit to Adam Potter, Cyber Security Analyst, Anna Gilbertson, Cyber Security Analyst

Appendices

DETECT Model Breaches

  • Anomalous Connection / Multiple Failed Connections to Rare Endpoint
  • Anomalous Connection / Multiple Connections to New External TCP Port
  • Compromise / Beaconing Activity To External Rare
  • Compromise / DGA Beacon
  • Compromise / Beacon to Young Endpoint
  • Compromise / Slow Beaconing Activity To External Rare
  • Compromise / HTTP Beaconing to Rare Destination
  • Compromise / Quick and Regular Windows HTTP Beaconing
  • Compromise / Agent Beacon (Medium Period)
  • Compromise / Agent Beacon (Long Period)
  • Device / New User Agent
  • Device / New User Agent and New IP

Cyber AI Analyst Incidents

  • Possible HTTP Command and Control
  • Possible HTTP Command and Control to Multiple Endpoints
  • Unusual Repeated Connections
  • Unusual Repeated Connections to Multiple Endpoints
  • Multiple DNS Requests for Algorithmically Generated Domains

Indicators of Compromise

IoC - Type - Description

185.141.63[.]172 - IP Address - Socks5Systemz C2 Endpoint

193.242.211[.]141 - IP Address - Socks5Systemz C2 Endpoint

109.230.199[.]181 - IP Address - Socks5Systemz C2 Endpoint

109.236.88[.]134 - IP Address - Socks5Systemz C2 Endpoint

217.23.5[.]14 - IP Address - Socks5Systemz Proxy Checker App

88.80.148[.]8 - IP Address - Socks5Systemz Backconnect Endpoint

88.80.148[.]219 - IP Address - Socks5Systemz Backconnect Endpoint

185.141.63[.]4 - IP Address - Socks5Systemz Backconnect Endpoint

185.141.63[.]2 - IP Address - Socks5Systemz Backconnect Endpoint

195.154.188[.]211 - IP Address - Socks5Systemz Backconnect Endpoint

91.92.111[.]132 - IP Address - Socks5Systemz Backconnect Endpoint

91.121.30[.]185 - IP Address - Socks5Systemz Backconnect Endpoint

94.23.58[.]173 - IP Address - Socks5Systemz Backconnect Endpoint

37.187.148[.]204 - IP Address - Socks5Systemz Backconnect Endpoint

188.165.192[.]18 - IP Address - Socks5Systemz Backconnect Endpoint

/single.php?c=<RC4 data hex encoded> - URI - Socks5Systemz HTTP GET Request

/sign/<RC4 data hex encoded> - URI - Socks5Systemz HTTP GET Request

/proxy-activity.txt - URI - Socks5Systemz HTTP GET Request

datasheet[.]fun - Hostname - Socks5Systemz C2 Endpoint

bddns[.]cc - Hostname - Socks5Systemz C2 Endpoint

send-monitoring[.]bit - Hostname - Socks5Systemz C2 Endpoint

MITRE ATT&CK Mapping

Command and Control

T1071 - Application Layer Protocol

T1071.001 – Web protocols

T1568 – Dynamic Resolution

T1568.002 – Domain Generation Algorithms

T1132 – Data Encoding

T1132 – Non-Standard Encoding

T1090 – Proxy

T1090.002 – External Proxy

Exfiltration

T1041 – Exfiltration over C2 channel

Impact

T1496 – Resource Hijacking

References

1. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/socks5systemz-proxy-service-infects-10-000-systems-worldwide/

2. https://www.bitsight.com/blog/unveiling-socks5systemz-rise-new-proxy-service-privateloader-and-amadey

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About the author
Adam Potter
Cyber Analyst
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