Naikon’s Aria

[harlan4096]

Our colleagues at Checkpoint put together a fine research writeup on some Naikon resources and activity related to “aria-body” that we detected in 2017 and similarly reported in 2018. To supplement their research findings, we are summarizing and publishing portions of the findings reported in our June 2018 “Naikon’s New AR Backdoor Deployment to Southeast Asia”. This malware and activity aligns with much of what the Checkpoint researchers brought to light today.

The Naikon APT became well-known in May 2015, when our public reporting first mentioned and then fully described the group as a long running presence in the APAC region. Even when the group shutdown much of their successful offensive activity after years of campaigns, Naikon maintained several splinter campaigns.

Matching malware artifacts, functionality, and targeting demonstrates that the group continues to wage cyber-espionage campaigns in the South China Sea region during 2018.

“Aria-Body” or “AR” is a set of backdoors that maintain compilation dates between January 2017 and February 2018. It can be particularly difficult to detect, as much of this code operates in memory, injected by other loader components without touching disk. We trace portions of this codebase back to “xsFunction” exe and dll modules used in Naikon operations going back to 2012, as their compiled modules implement a subset of the xsFunction feature set. In all likelihood, this new backdoor and related activity is an extension of or merge with the group’s “Paradir Operation”. In the past, the group targeted communications and sensitive information from executive and legislative offices, law enforcement, government administrative, military and intelligence organizations within Southeast Asia. In many cases we have seen that these systems also were targeted previously with PlugX and other malware. So, the group has evolved bit since 2015, and their activity targeting these same profiles continues into 2018. We identified at least a half dozen individual variants from 2017 and 2018.

Technical Details

It seems clear that the same codebase has been reused by Naikon since at least 2012, and recent AR backdoors were built from that same code. Their use was tightly clustered in previously and heavily Naikon-targeted organizations, again lending confidence to clustering these resources and activity with previous “Naikon”.
Naikon’s new AR backdoor is a dll loaded into any one of multiple processes, providing remote access to a system. AR load attempts have been identified within processes with executable images listed here:

• c:\windows\system32\svchost.exe
  
• c:\windows\syswow64\svchost.exe
  
• c:\program files\windows nt\accessories\services.exe
  
• c:\users\dell\appdata\roaming\microsoft\windows\start menu\programs\startup\acrobat.exe
  
• c:\alphazawgyi\svchost.exe
  

Because this AR code is injected into processes, the yara rule provided in the Appendix is best run against memory dumps of processes maintaining a main image in the list above. The AR modules have additionally been seen in some others, including “msiexec.exe” processes.

Below are characteristics of the oldest AR and the newest known AR component in our collection.
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