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New DarkGate Variant Uses a New Loading Approach

Nov 01 2023

Summary

In the past month, the Netskope Threat Labs team observed a considerable increase of SharePoint usage to deliver malware caused by an attack campaign abusing Microsoft Teams and SharePoint to deliver a malware named DarkGate.

DarkGate (also known as MehCrypter) is a malware that was first reported by enSilo (now Fortinet) in 2018 and has been used in multiple campaigns in the past months. Since its recent update announcement in an underground forum, several campaigns have been conducted to deliver the malware using different methods, such as phishing and SEO poisoning.

DarkGate appeals to many attackers because of its broad feature set, which includes HVNC, keylogging, information stealing, and downloading and executing other payloads. DarkGate can be used as a starting point for bigger attacks, including Ransomware infections.

Netskope Threat Labs recently identified a new DarkGate variant delivered via MSI using a loading approach based on Cobalt Strike Beacon’s default shellcode stub. Correlating the analyzed samples with findings from other researchers, we could determine that this is part of a new version of the DarkGate malware. Let’s take a closer look:

Infection analysis

The infection starts via a fake invoice email delivering a PDF document to the victim. The PDF file contains a DocuSign template that is used as an attempt to lure the user to open a document to be reviewed:

Example of the malicious document sent to the victim

Once the user clicks on the fake document a CAB file is downloaded. The CAB file contains an internet shortcut that once executed downloads an MSI file to the infected machine:

Internet shortcut leading to the MSI download

Once the user executes the MSI file a whole chain of loading mechanisms starts using the files presented in another CAB file inside the MSI:

CAB file content

Stage 1 – DLL Side-Loading

The chain starts via the execution of the windbg.exe binary present in the CAB file. The DLL side-loading technique is used here in order to execute a fake version of the dbgeng.dll DLL file. Since windbg.exe imports functions from dbgeng.dll, this DLL will be included in its import table, causing the Windows loader to map the DLL into windbg.exe’s address space and then execute the DllMain function:

View of Windbg.exe dependencies in the Import Table using DIE

The dbgeng.dll is written in the Delphi programming language and has the internal name of SideLoader.dll, a common name observed in several DarkGate DLLs. It also contains export functions required for different binaries, such as windbg.exe and KeyScramblerLogon.exe, which was also observed being abused to side-load malicious DLLs. 

In the KeyScramblerLogon.exe case, the side-loaded DLL is named KeyScramblerIE.dll and that is also written in Delphi. The loading methods and decoding algorithm are slightly different from the version presented in this blog, which abuses the WinDbg binary.

General overview and Export Table view from the fake dbgeng.dll

Upon execution of its DllMain function dbgeng.dll reads the content of a file named data.bin, present in the same directory, and decodes it using a custom base64 approach using the “zLAxuU0kQKf3sWE7ePRO2imyg9GSpVoYC6rhlX48ZHnvjJDBNFtMd1I5acwbqT+=” alphabet. This approach is the same used in other variants of DarkGate.

The decoded content results in a PE file (also written in Delphi) with a shellcode at the end of the file. The execution flow will then be redirected to the base address (first byte of the DOS header) of the decoded file.

The DOS Header bytes of this file contains a tiny snippet that is responsible for calculating the base address of the current decoded file, adding the RVA of the decoded shellcode to the base address and then calling it via a “call eax” instruction:

Example of the execution being redirected to the decoded file DOS Header using x64dbg
Call to the decoded shellcode entry

The technique employed