The recent Chinese New Year ushered in the Year of the Rat, but from the perspective of the many corporations, government agencies and other organizations around the world who continue to be the targets of Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups acting in the interest of the Chinese government, recent years could aptly be described as the Decade of the RATs - Remote Access Trojans, that is.

The purpose of this document is to briefly describe the features of Necurs malware. During the analysis, we have been able to identify the different “features” and “capabilities” of the Necurs malware.

This report provides new intelligence by the NCSC on two tools used by the Turla group to target the UK. It contains IOCs and signatures for detection by network defenders.

“As a part of our Kaspersky APT Intelligence Reporting subscription, customers received an update in mid-February 2017 on some interesting APT activity that we called WhiteBear. Much of the contents of that report are reproduced here. WhiteBear is a parallel project or second stage of the Skipper Turla cluster of activity documented in another private intelligence report “Skipper Turla – the White Atlas framework” from mid-2016. Like previous Turla activity, WhiteBear leverages compromised websites and hijacked satellite connections for command and control (C2) infrastructure. As a matter of fact, WhiteBear infrastructure has overlap with other Turla campaigns, like those deploying Kopiluwak, as documented in “KopiLuwak – A New JavaScript Payload from Turla” in December 2016. WhiteBear infected systems maintained a dropper (which was typically signed) as well as a complex malicious platform which was always preceded by WhiteAtlas module deployment attempts. However, despite the similarities to previous Turla campaigns, we believe that WhiteBear is a distinct project with a separate focus. We note that this observation of delineated target focus, tooling, and project context is an interesting one that also can be repeated across broadly labeled Turla and Sofacy activity.”

The Qadars Banking Trojan has been observed globally targeting well-known banks since 2013. The research in this white paper provides a detailed analysis of the banking trojan, discussing the obfuscation techniques, domain generation algorithm (DGA), communication protocols and data formatting, and social engineering techniques employed by the trojan.