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In the Footsteps of a Sextortion Campaign

October 16, 2019

Research by: Gil Mansharov and Alexey Bukhteyev

Introduction

In its 2018 annual publication, the FBI IC3 (Internet Crime Complaint Center) reported a 242% rise in extortion emails, the majority of which are “sextortion”, with total losses of $83 million in reported crimes.

The idea behind sextortion is simple – an email demanding blackmail payment is sent to a victim, threatening to expose sexual video and private data related to the recipient if payment is not received. You may have received such emails or know others who have. Here’s another disturbing thought: is it possible that this morning you yourself unknowingly distributed 15,000 sextortion emails?

Check Point Research has exposed a botnet that does precisely that: it uses many thousands of infected computers to deliver millions of such threats to innocent recipients.
The Phorpiex (aka Trik) botnet has been active for almost a decade and currently operates more than 500,000 infected hosts. In the past, Phorpiex was monetized mostly by distributing other malware including GandCrab, Pony, Pushdo, and used its hosts to mine cryptocurrency. Recently, Phorpiex added a new form of revenue generation. In this report, we describe the spam bot used by Phorpiex to run large scale sextortion campaigns.

In the 5 month period that we have been monitoring this operation, we recorded transfers of more than 14 Bitcoins (BTC) to the Phorpiex campaign wallets whose current value is over $110,000. This may not sound like a lot, but for a low maintenance operation requiring only a large credentials list and the occasional wallet replacement, this generates $22,000 per month.

Sextortion E-mails

The Phorpiex/Trik botnet uses a spam bot that downloads a database of email addresses from a C&C server. An email address is then randomly selected from the downloaded database, and a message is composed from several hardcoded strings. The spam bot can produce a large number of spam emails – up to 30,000 per hour. Each individual spam campaign can affect up to 27 million potential victims.

The most interesting feature of the last spam campaigns is that the Phorpiex/Trik spam bot uses databases with leaked passwords in combination with email addresses. A victim’s password is usually included in the email message; this exacerbates the threat by showing that the password is known to the attacker. For further shock value, the message starts with a string that contains the password.

Here is an example of a sextorion email created by the Phorpiex spam bot:

From: Save Yourself
Subject: I recorded you – ██████

Hi, I know one of your passwords is: ██████

Your computer was infected with my private malware, your browser wasn’t updated / patched, in such case it’s enough to just visit some website where my iframe is placed to get automatically infected, if you want to find out more – Google: “Drive-by exploit”.
My malware gave me full access to all your accounts (see password above), full control over your computer and it also was possible to spy on you over your webcam.

I collected all your private data and I RECORDED YOU (through your webcam) SATISFYING YOURSELF!

After that I removed my malware to not leave any traces and this email(s) was sent from some hacked server.

I can publish the video of you and all your private data on the whole web, social networks, over email of all contacts.

But you can stop me and only I can help you out in this situation.

The only way to stop me, is to pay exactly 800$ in bitcoin (BTC).

It’s a very good offer, compared to all that horrible shit that will happen if I publish everything!

You can easily buy bitcoin here: www.paxful.com , www.coingate.com , www.coinbase.com , or check for bitcoin ATM near you, or Google for other exchanger.
You can send the bitcoin directly to my wallet, or create your own wallet first here: www.login.blockchain.com/en/#/signup/ , then receive and send to mine.

My bitcoin wallet is: 1Eim8U3kPgkTRNSFKN49jgz9Wv4A1qmcjR

Copy and paste my wallet, it’s (cAsE-sEnSEtiVE)

I give you 3 days time to pay.

As I got access to this email account, I will know if this email has already been read.
If you get this email multiple times, it’s to make sure that you read it, my mailer script is configured like this and after payment you can ignore it.

After receiving the payment, I will remove everything and you can life your live in peace like before.

Next time update your browser before browsing the web!

The spam bot is one of the final payloads in each of the Phorpiex campaigns observed in 2019. The Phorpiex spam bot doesn’t have its own persistence mechanism, as it is downloaded and executed by other Phorpiex modules. Here are some of URLs from which the spam bot was downloaded:

URL Date MD5
hxxp://185.176.27[.]132/5 2019-07-31 fac2fc1b97fc3ab4469e723e501cecef
hxxp://193.32.161[.]73/5 2019-07-28 8d1a1a39fec3efbd1700801266ba2529
hxxp://193.32.161[.]77/5.exe 2019-07-09 f895a1875b3e112df7e4d548b28b9927
hxxp://193.32.161[.]69/6.exe 2019-07-09 39b326e56ab3c48b5bec19ad9300d2cf
hxxp://193.32.161[.]77/4.exe 2019-06-30 586554bb5df08e8cabf54113d76b38e4
hxxp://osheoufhusheoghuesd[.]ru/5.exe 2019-06-13 29d3c08d5f9fcbbef6ea5493907f91d8

Table 1 – Phorpiex Spam Bot pre-infection URLs.

Technical Details

When it starts running, the spam bot performs several checks and initialization steps, similar to the rest of the Phropiex modules. First, to prevent running multiple instances, it tries to create a mutex with a specific name. This name is hardcoded in the sample, but each sample has a unique mutex name:

Spam bot mutex names.

Figure 1: Spam bot mutex names.

If the mutex already exists, the spam bot stops running. Otherwise, it continues the initialization steps: the spam bot deletes the alternative file stream “:Zone.Identifier”, and adds a firewall exception by creating a new value under the registry key:

SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SharedAccess\Parameters\
FirewallPolicy\StandardProfile\AuthorizedApplications\List\

The Spam Bot adds the value “<path_to_spam_bot>:*:Enabled:<hardcoded_ name>” to this key. For example:

%TEMP%\28764.exe:*:Enabled: WDrvConfiguration

Finally, the Phorpiex spam bot queries the MX DNS entry of the domain “yahoo.com” or “aol.com” and tries to connect to its SMTP server at port 25. If the SMTP server is unreachable, it also stops running:

Checking if the Yahoo SMTP server is reachable.

Figure 2: Checking if the Yahoo SMTP server is reachable.

Email Address Databases

The spam bot uses unencrypted HTTP communication with its C&C server. The following user-agent header, although it isn’t unique to the Phorpiex spam bot, is used for performing HTTP requests:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:67.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/67.0, and sends a GET HTTP request using the URL:
hxxp://<C&C Server>/<hardcoded path>/n.txt or hxxp://<C&C Server>/<hardcoded path>/p.txt

Example:

hxxp://193.32.161[.]69/111/n.txt

The response to this request contains a number N of email address databases stored on the C&C server. Follow-up requests are sent to download those databases, and save them under the %TEMP% directory with “.jpg” extensions.

In the infinite loop, the malware generates URLs with the following format:

hxxp://<C&C Server>/<hardcoded path>/<rand>.txt

The <rand> is a random integer between 1 and N.

The final URL of an email database to download looks like this:

hxxp://193.32.161[.]69/111/135.txt

The downloaded database is saved in the %temp% folder with a filename composed of random digits and the “.jpg” extension. For example:

%temp%\5173150314183010.jpg

The downloaded database is a text file which contains up to 20,000 email addresses. In various campaigns, we observed between 325 and 1363 email databases on a C&C server. Therefore, one spam campaign covers up to 27 million potential victims. Each line of this file contains an email address and a password delimited by “:”, as shown below:

[email protected]:secretpassword1
[email protected]:secretpassword2
[email protected]:secretpassword3
[email protected]:secretpassword4

The spam bot creates a total of 15,000 threads to send spam messages from one database. Each thread takes a random line from the downloaded file. The next database file is downloaded when all the spam threads finish. If we consider the delays, we can estimate that bot is able to send about 30,000 emails in an hour:

Creating threads for sending spam emails

Figure 3: Creating threads for sending spam emails.

Distributing Spam

To send emails, the spam bot uses a simple implementation of the SMTP protocol. The address of the SMTP server is derived from the domain name of an email address. After establishing a connection to the SMTP server and receiving an invitation message, the spam bot sends a HELO/EHLO SMTP message with its own external IP address that it obtained using the icanhazip.com service.

The spam bot then tries to generate a valid random domain name with the following format:

“{4 random digits}.com”

The validity of the domain is checked using a DNS query. This leads to a large number of DNS requests being generated before contacting an SMTP server:

Large number of DNS requests produced by the Phorpiex spam bot

Figure 4: Large number of DNS requests produced by the Phorpiex spam bot.

If a domain was successfully resolved, it is used for the sender’s email address. The first part of the sender email (before “@”) is generated from a hardcoded word and 2 random digits. The sender’s host name, IP address, and a domain name of a fake SMTP server are also random values, as shown in the image below:

Example of the Phorpiex spam bot SMTP communication

Figure 5: Example of the Phorpiex spam bot SMTP communication.

To set a subject field, the spam bot concatenates the username or password to randomly chosen strings (may vary from sample to sample):

Email subjects used by the Phorpiex spam bot

Figure 6: Email subjects used by the Phorpiex spam bot.

Therefore, if we assume that [email protected] is the victim’s email address, the subject of the email could be “I recorded you – john_doe”.

Revenue

We saw how threat actors try to use the Phorpiex spam bot to extort money from random victims, but how successful is the campaign indeed?

Check Point Research monitored the campaign and the Bitcoin wallets extracted from every spam bot spotted since April 2019. We found that more than 14 BTC were transferred to those wallets:

BTC Wallet Incoming Transactions Amount
1Eim8U3kPgkTRNSFKN49jgz9Wv4A1qmcjR 2 0.14344608
1LwPAckT7ettEpLEuAU2dBXbqqSd9SrLAD 2 0.01181594
1D1nXbBdPmCpy9rPRdtaXjA5ftGzYPPw51 1 0.00614417
1LZStbAiQYiBGUTEH8mbTYu8pbvmrDprZQ 2 0.02160055
1FLREuhB3U56yJBTTsj6zzEXjNf4BTzeZr 2 0.14981551
1QBfCvZUuA3fbXX9bHeeTpqzkYgikvhtXR 2 0.08108546
1F73edsje5GbjqybTgKAesWfihvp4Q59Eq 2 0.35886416
13HffyTVP8qcYzd5tga4Bc6rCGETNbbZuD 1 0.03664995
1MnUgqSkToq3j7ozwjSh54m1WxWZ3Xqym6 3 0.24167993
12EMaHiZG75ztkjUjuPZhQDcyW89qRJVuR 7 0.5553606
15WGVWt16CzuK3opvJHg6i1XSstbXGEPcZ 2 0.66430707
1PC3q4JgAJvHcpsT2LqwoqVN2ckzAVQoxf 1 0.01966277
1Nq84HeDmd2JGyRtjqh32QRG4zoSrp8bdL 2 0.15959452
16JApT2K6Z9AirkMeBSWyhwuJ8dCfRhY9U 1 0.036712
1GTzcCBW79F3BtBdN9jx7hqNq65ebbt1Wm 1 0.03995683
19naMJAmQq6b9XJaSaWpw2MTBBVeW355Ro 1 0.04334168
1HB3KtKoguFuZ4BdmCv9Fc4tYTwDQgmqmW 8 1.22814147
1PzrJSAhZSiYK93qLZnKsRzQzS49j5Ugzc 2 0.10102945
1BpwthndBC2aDHiztoMtMBnq7ejmNkHnSV 2 0.25592471
1CSDpCjyVHsuTb6i7zZ8dr81iUGL5ff7vM 11 0.4353143
1Lmb3V8PbqTtGmFawu41k9hSXZgJn4G2pS 6 0.35394814
1MX8BUf7R4rE7xLoaVMyiceX8DE8D3aFQg 7 0.42375914
1KDnUbAHkxb57RYjJufdmjYF9F4vFWjm5m 1 0.131684
1BdMo6PKJCR9S6FzLDtE4ChszHdrJdbWJ7 2 0.14633115
12ZyXPMJBAFCfpyYTYo8V6QcG653Lcs9oj 3 0.4714263
154J36DXD2wA512cJRdAJsr1KcKynbVtpM 3 0.26725319
15xdJ5nhwQCTFGs9AqciPGxgf62hGdWog7 1 0.17406292
15w8KYwC76vDRiSZD2LK6dEbHvs7N38mh6 2 0.33377914
1GLJa8dMq9XBaiMhXNJSQjVoNzh2xRanzD 1 0.00001
15dut9dbaZbSKZq27tyuLkjhCEiRaewvvh 1 0.12965713
14VYd5JrPrrXD1qiMxZ5An2VsU5db5ZqS7 1 0.1893836
1PTNbkmQckDTjbhCMtfa5zqY992ZNZ8biG 5 0.38752657
17v35QnAre7Vd2T74SD9xhEGJVwYfTPDhN 7 0.86811787
1HwJeZ5uyNJ6Peq8x1wixKVnurY1yURK8P 1 0.11707884
1Mh8T6eVbP8zCRPzUqbb7b9PiW6Wv3mRPY 1 0.13190313
1LfYcbCsssB2niF3VWRBTVZFExzsweyPGQ 2 0.05092411
1PcZSbbc4u4juK64mpFSWwcR9hESPboRH8 1 0.00026772
1AEb2hcPpxDs89AJojyySyiZdW4vdEumZN 1 0.11631063
17jHsGecV53ro2LGzo53s5trTH6Qf3gksS 6 0.94066411
18jZzWe4Wv4mUNm93rjeWJscqPdhecwsAY 1 0.06811331
1CEi7Py9hNgMwqPMiCphFuF6SF263v7Yqj 1 0.01378845
1AiBJcWZYQrz5Z9S9X7nYNueznU7iU5V5h 2 0.26333251
1EwCEJr5JwpafZx11dcXDtX5QSPJvzth17 2 0.01003783
1HctxwLwjEFCacTPi83me927UBs7aTJ7LF 9 0.40123518
14AuMKdDV5s6xmGa13xw6F9hc1CwntkcfT 1 0.22131225
14poC1Jg97vuvsyoKSZYz7h276LoAZcrtn 1 0.323483
1NpjBxiLhQQ5VVyDMrxESoA5HoHLLQXABa 1 0.13428185
12KkDhdBX2zNv24D7SgBBrEBme7eNddvUj 2 0.07116557
1JrdZLfH6j9KP2GjCJc7PhxwrrYKGYoSEi 1 0.08167012
1Fjg3Q89MawTyfNcMbX6MUnfT923icRuMy 2 0.1682459
1L9H1CtLsDCTtuvdE9hqpm9BD72jYBtvDF 4 1.38988033
1PuxZLDEz2as13NKcTzC2BGadF2g2zhdfo 1 0.00165365
1DZNohaDckSxJu6YxfeGkqCtxDAhtFP3Jq 3 0.44394538
19razyqXme4evPi2wS9Zf8kor3VaYG8dTN 8 0.24317082
1CWHmuF8dHt7HBGx5RKKLgg9QA2GmE3UyL 3 0.23316271
1FqAEDNBFFjBZuVzk7V94tKgGwhVa8qABt 1 0.05575892
1BXavFhbxCpno2dFpS4BU4NvEJjjqCN8Kd 3 0.15631682
1164VJYmR8nP8z1NSPHqQreVWCMq2QdqUJ 5 0.34881132
Total 158 14.4539

Table 2 – BTC wallets used in the sextortion campaign.

Given the number of incoming transactions to these wallets, we can also estimate the total number of victims affected by this campaign. Therefore, we can conclude that approximately 150 victims paid the blackmail demand over the span of five months. Considering the number of emails that the spam bot is capable of generating, despite the low numbers of payments received, this still means this simple scam technique was successful.

On the other hand, passwords from leaked databases, such as those used in the sextortion campaign, are most often not related to victims’ email accounts. Therefore, the value of this data is quite low. Such databases are sold at a low price, or may even be freely accessible. The Phorpiex actors came up with a method of using such low quality data to earn a respectable amount of profit.

Conclusion

Leaked credential lists, containing passwords that are often not compatible with their linked email addresses, are a common and inexpensive commodity. Phorpiex, a veteran botnet, has found a way to use them to generate easy income on a long term basis. This new activity might be connected with the termination of Gandcrab, a ransomware that Phorpiex used to distribute, or just because plain text emails still manage to infiltrate many cyber defense lines. In any case, Phorpiex, which currently operates more than 500,000 infected hosts, is continuously propagating sextortion emails – by the millions.

IOCs

Pre-infection URLs
hxxp://185.176.27[.]132/5
hxxp://185.176.27[.]132/4
hxxp://185.176.27[.]132/3
hxxp://193.32.161[.]73/5
hxxp://193.32.161[.]73/4
hxxp://193.32.161[.]73/3
hxxp://193.32.161[.]69/6.exe
hxxp://193.32.161[.]77/5.exe
hxxp://osheoufhusheoghuesd[.]ru/3.exe
hxxp://193.32.161[.]77/6.exe
hxxp://osheoufhusheoghuesd[.]ru/4.exe
hxxp://ouhfuosuoosrhfzr[.]su/2.exe
hxxp://ouhfuosuoosrhfzr[.]su/3.exe
hxxp://ouhfuosuoosrhfzr[.]su/4.exe
hxxp://osheoufhusheoghuesd[.]ru/5.exe
hxxp://193.32.161[.]77/4.exe
hxxp://193.32.161[.]69/5.exe
hxxp://193.32.161[.]69/7.exe

 

MD5 C&C URL
790b14490eb56622f3cfa768887fcb08 hxxp://193.32.161[.]77/oaa/
b5dffcdf23ea0365c0bbf6e70983d351 hxxp://193.32.161[.]77/from/
a267bf9e58726a34a91c365b61e1424a hxxp://92.63.197[.]153/test2/
5c17496674a49f7ebaa44c5b33d32ae4 hxxp://193.32.161[.]77/3/
f1a69224571f7749f261fd8c08d6d8cb hxxp://193.32.161[.]77/2/
8887f6f532a489fcab28eba80185337b hxxp://193.32.161[.]77/fu/
c58bd54c962d4e236e770df983fd2329 hxxp://193.32.161[.]69/111/
9398682b9740d15dfb7b2996364cd979 hxxp://92.63.197[.]153/sp/
9434796df2d62e4f666525419db86d18 hxxp://193.32.161[.]77/neww/
7f52a1c1d63053bcf02c6225e4245345 hxxp://92.63.197[.]153/t2/
69076366f1a1bd622c0d813709f29e4a hxxp://87.120.37[.]234/
fc729a08001392406565808408cf6166 hxxp://193.32.161[.]77/dsh/
8a74d531fa839caf056a7a9c24237cd7 hxxp://193.32.161[.]77/send/
1f4447c12a0b8f99c1ce5b748c762a9f hxxp://92.63.197[.]153/t/
a2d30294e59cd15304d071c396618fa7 hxxp://193.32.161[.]77/mails/
646c630aa377f414e1e6820916952e1e hxxp://193.32.161[.]77/sorry/
ba24a030bd4d4b89a6ad16249d1674c2 hxxp://193.32.161[.]77/2/
0d7f456f908565fb547438cb402a4eff hxxp://193.32.161[.]77/en/
5b046452db5836deb47e359b4462ee16 hxxp://92.63.197[.]153/sex-pass/
6628c07aadd53f34357b9b63e07d62b8 hxxp://92.63.197[.]153/sex-pass-new/
d7cfd3b8d83ca0af1518267a15f9c249 hxxp://193.32.161[.]77/1/
9af3d711fd4733181fcd78796dd21cfa hxxp://193.32.161[.]77/en2/

 

Email subjects
I know your password –
Your password –
You dirty pervert –
Pervert –
I hacked you –
You got owned –
You better read this –
You better pay me –
Video of you –
I recorded you –
Stop watching porn –
Dirty pervert –
You got hacked –
I know everything –
You got infected –
I infected your pc –
Take care –
Better pay me –
Safe your life –
Safe your privacy –
I can ruin your life –
Read carefully –
I give you one chance –
Recorded you mastrubating –
I seen everything –
Videos of you –
You got recorded –
Infected your computer –
Your life can be ruined –
Take care next time –
Pay –
Few days time –
Don’t wait too long –
I won’t wait too long –
Everyone will know –
No longer private –
Better read –
Read –
Your private data –
Your privacy –

Check Point Anti-Bot blade provides protection against this threat:

Worm.Win32.Phorpiex.C

Worm.Win32.Phorpiex.D

Worm.Win32.Phorpiex.H

 

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