{"id":319,"date":"2015-05-15T14:36:20","date_gmt":"2015-05-15T14:36:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adlice.com\/?p=319"},"modified":"2022-12-21T10:38:59","modified_gmt":"2022-12-21T10:38:59","slug":"of-pups-and-other-demons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adlice.com\/de\/of-pups-and-other-demons\/","title":{"rendered":"BreakingNews PUP, Study of an aggressive rootkit"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Introduction<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

What is a PUP? PUP means “Potentially Unwanted Program”<\/strong>. They are designated that way (or sometimes “Not-A-Malware”) because they are in theory not harmful for you, just annoying<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few examples: Zeus is a real malware<\/strong>, because it steals your bank account number, your passwords etc… Lot of PUPs are more involved into Ads display, bitcoin mining<\/strong>, etc. This is border line because most of the time people don’t know they have them, but it doesn’t harm them directly<\/strong>. They are usually installed with bundled software<\/strong>, when people don’t uncheck optional options<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But sometimes, PUPs are using badware technics to gain access to the web browser<\/strong>, and to remain undetected. This is what we will study here with the BreakingNews<\/strong> “firefox extension”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Case study: BreakingNews PUP<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\n

Update 05\/18\/2015<\/p>\nIt looks like the technology used is from Injekt (hxxp:\/\/www.injekt.com\/)<\/strong>. They are providing software to inject HTML code in any web browser<\/strong>. This can be seen in the screenshot below with string “Injekt, Injekted, \u2026”. Thanks to @mesa_matt<\/a> for the info.<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

First, the dropper is detected 18\/57 on virus total<\/a>. We can see many Adware labels, or PUP<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That program is intended to display Breaking News on top of Web browser<\/strong>, I didn’t test the feature in details as it’s not really the subject here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m using Firefox, so I was surprised not to see any extension installed in Firefox<\/strong> and having that program just working (that Breaking News banner with blue border)! That makes it very hard to detect and remove<\/strong> from the web browser. Besides, there is no uninstall entry to remove it<\/strong> from the programs manager.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"PUP<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

By running RogueKiller<\/a>, we can see hooks appearing in Firefox<\/strong> (just as a reminder, hooks are code modifications made by a program to filter a function, or an API), on WSARcv API<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This API is called when we receive data from a socket<\/strong> (internet connexion). We can safely assume that whatever program is hooking that API will filter the internet flow<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Capture7\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Also, RogueKiller shows that the hook ends in an unknown module<\/strong> (or shellcode?).
With a debugger attached to Firefox process, we can indeed see the hook in the assembly code<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"hook\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

By looking at the sections map, we see that address (0x45024850) is located in a dynamically created section<\/strong>. If we look sections above and below, we can see a PE header, and according to section permissions we can conclude it’s a DLL that has been loaded in a stealth way and hidden in the process<\/strong>. That technique is used by many malware to inject code<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"injected<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I decided to dump all these sections<\/strong> to look into them for interesting strings. And indeed, we retrieve some interesting things related to BreakingNews PUP<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We see strings related to hooking, BreakingNewsAlert, and tracker data<\/strong>. We also found the main website to trackbreakingnews.com<\/strong> as an evidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"PUP<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Capture61\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"PUP<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n


Conclusion<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

During our test, we were unable to find any persistence item, nor uninstall key<\/strong>, for BreakingNews PUP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fact of hiding code that way in the browser<\/strong>, splice-hooking sensitive APIs (instead of just using Firefox API), and not registering any extension nor uninstall entry<\/strong> is intentional. They just want to be sure their application remains as long as possible on user P<\/strong>C, by hardening the detection and removal process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Should we call that PUP still? They have clearly crossed the red line.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PUPs (for potentially unwanted programs) are harmless by design, most of the time. Here we will study a case where such program behaves like a rootkit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":324,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[50,7,302,194,8,188,43],"class_list":["post-319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analysis","tag-adware","tag-analysis","tag-firefox","tag-hook","tag-malware","tag-pup","tag-rootkit","category-36","description-off"],"views":2402,"yoast_score":73,"yoast_readable":90,"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/www.adlice.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Capture51.png","author_info":{"display_name":"tigzy","author_link":"https:\/\/www.adlice.com\/de\/author\/tigzy\/"},"yoast_head":"\nBreakingNews PUP, Study of an Aggressive Rootkit \u2022 Adlice Software<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Study of the BreakingNews PUP (Potentially Unwanted Program), behaving like a rootkit. 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