A Growing Number of Android Malware Families Believed to Have a Common Origin: A Study Based on Binary Code
Introduction
On Feb. 19, IBM XForce researchers released an intelligence report [1] stating that the source code for GM Bot was leaked to a crimeware forum in December 2015. GM Bot is a sophisticated Android malware family that emerged in the Russian-speaking cybercrime underground in late 2014. IBM also claimed that several Android malware families recently described in the security community were actually variants of GM Bot, including Bankosy[2], MazarBot[3], and the SlemBunk malware recently described by FireEye[4, 5].
Security vendors may differ in their definition of a malware “variant.” The term may refer to anything from almost identical code with slight modifications, to code that has superficial similarities (such as similar network traffic) yet is otherwise very different.
Using IBM’s reporting, we compared their GM Bot samples to SlemBunk. Based on the disassembled code of these two families, we agree that there are enough code similarities to indicate that GM Bot shares a common origin with SlemBunk. Interestingly, our research led us to identify an earlier malware family named SimpleLocker – the first known file-encryption ransomware on Android [6] – that also shares a common origin with these banking trojan families.
GM Bot and SlemBunk
Our analysis showed that the four GM Bot samples referenced by IBM researchers all share the same major components as SlemBunk. Figure 1 of our earlier report [4] is reproduced here, which shows the major components of SlemBunk and its corresponding class names:
- ServiceStarter: An Android receiver that will be invoked once an app is launched or the device boots up. Its functionality is to start the monitoring service, MainService, in the background.
- MainService: An Android service that runs in the background and monitors all running processes on the device. It prompts the user with an overlay view that resembles the legitimate app when that app is launched. This monitoring service also communicates with a remote host by sending the initial device data and notifying of device status and app preferences.
- MessageReceiver: An Android receiver that handles incoming text messages. In addition to the functionality of intercepting the authentication code from the bank, this component also acts as the bot client for remote command and control (C2).
- MyDeviceAdminReceiver: A receiver that requests administrator access to the Android device the first time the app is launched. This makes the app more difficult to remove.
- Customized UI views: Activity classes that present fake login pages that mimic those of the real banking apps or social apps to phish for banking or social account credentials.
Figure 1. Major components of SlemBunk malware family
The first three GM Bot samples have the same package name as our SlemBunk sample. In addition, the GM Bot samples have five of the same major components, including the same component names, as the SlemBunk sample in Figure 1.
The fourth GM Bot sample has a different initial package name, but unpacks the real payload at runtime. The unpacked payload has the same major components as the SlemBunk sample, with a few minor changes on the class names: MessageReceiver replaced with buziabuzia, and MyDeviceAdminReceiver replaced with MDRA.
Figure 2. Code Structure Comparison between GM
Bot and SlemBunk
Figure 2 shows the code structure similarity between one GM Bot sample and one SlemBunk sample (SHA256 9425fca578661392f3b12e1f1d83b8307bfb94340ae797c2f121d365852a775e and SHA256 e072a7a8d8e5a562342121408493937ecdedf6f357b1687e6da257f40d0c6b27 for GM Bot and SlemBunk, respectively). From this figure, we can see that the five major components we discussed in our previous post [4] are also present in GM Bot sample. Other common classes include:
- Main, the launching activity of both samples.
- MyApplication, the application class that starts before any other activities of both samples.
- SDCardServiceStarter, another receiver that monitors the status of MainService and restarts it when it dies.
Among all the above components and classes, MainService is the most critical one. It is started by class Main at the launching time, keeps working in the background to monitor the top running process, and overlays a phishing view when a victim app (e.g., some mobile banking app) is recognized. To keep MainService running continuously, malware authors added two receivers – ServiceStarter and SDCardServiceStarter – to check its status when particular system events are received. Both GM Bot and SlemBunk samples share the same architecture. Figure 3 shows the major code of class SDCardServiceStarter to demonstrate how GM Bot and SlemBunk use the same mechanism to keep MainService running.
Figure 3. Method onReceive of
SDCardServiceStarter for GM Bot and SlemBunk
From this figure, we can see that GM Bot and SlemBunk use almost identical code to keep MainService running. Note that both samples check the country in system locale and avoid starting MainService when they find the country is Russia. The only difference is that GM Bot applies renaming obfuscation to some classes, methods and fields. For example, static variable “MainService;->a” in GM Bot has the same role as static variable “MainService;->isRunning” in SlemBunk. Malware authors commonly use this trick to make their code harder to understand. However this won’t change the fact that the underlying codes share the same origin.
Figure 4 shows the core code of class MainService to demonstrate that GM Bot and SlemBunk actually have the same logic for main service. In Android, when a service is started its onCreate method will be called. In method onCreate of both samples, a static variable is first set to true. In GM Bot, this variable is named “a”, while in SlemBunk it is named “isRunning”. Then both will move forward to read an app particular preference. Note that the preferences in both samples have the same name: “AppPrefs”. The last tasks of these two main services are also the same. Specifically, in order to check whether any victim apps are running, a runnable thread is scheduled. If a victim app is running, a phishing view is overlaid on top of that of the victim app. The only difference here is also on the naming of the runnable thread. Class “d” in GM Bot and class “MainService$2” in SlemBunk are employed respectively to conduct the same credential phishing task.
Figure 4. Class MainService for GM Bot
and SlemBunk
In summary, our investigation into the binary code similarities supports IBM’s assertion that GM Bot and SlemBunk share the same origin.
SimpleLocker and SlemBunk
IBM noted that GM Bot emerged in late 2014 in the Russian-speaking cybercrime underground. In our research, we noticed that an earlier piece of Android malware named SimpleLocker also has a code structure similar to SlemBunk and GM Bot. However, SimpleLocker has a different financial incentive: to demand a ransom from the victim. After landing on an Android device, SimpleLocker scans the device for certain file types, encrypts them, and then demands a ransom from the user in order to decrypt the files. Before SimpleLocker’s emergence, there were other types of Android ransomware that would lock the screen; however, SimpleLocker is believed to be the first file-encryption ransomware on Android.
The earliest report on SimpleLocker we identified was published by ESET in June 2014 [6]. However, we found an earlier sample in our malware database from May 2014 (SHA256 edff7bb1d351eafbe2b4af1242d11faf7262b87dfc619e977d2af482453b16cb). The compile date of this app was May 20, 2014. We compared this SimpleLocker sample to one of our SlemBunk samples (SHA256 f3341fc8d7248b3d4e58a3ee87e4e675b5f6fc37f28644a2c6ca9c4d11c92b96) using the same methods used to compare GM Bot and SlemBunk.
Figure 5 shows the code structure comparison between these two samples. Note that this SimpleLocker variant also has the major components ServiceStarter and MainService, both used by SlemBunk. However, the purpose of the main service here is not to monitor running apps and provide phishing UIs to steal banking credentials. Instead, SimpleLocker’s main service component scans the device for victim files and calls the file encryption class to encrypt files and demand a ransom. The major differences in the SimpleLocker code are shown in the red boxes: AesCrypt and FileEncryptor. Other common classes include:
- Main, the launching activity of both samples.
- SDCardServiceStarter, another receiver that monitors the status of MainService and restarts it when it dies.
- Tor and OnionKit, third-party libraries for private communication.
- TorSender, HttpSender and Utils, supporting classes to provide code for CnC communication and for collecting device information.
Figure 5. Code structure comparison between SimpleLocker and SlemBunk samples
Finally, we located another SimpleLocker sample (SHA256 304efc1f0b5b8c6c711c03a13d5d8b90755cec00cac1218a7a4a22b091ffb30b) from July 2014, about two months after the first SimpleLocker sample. This new sample did not use Tor for private communications, but shared four of the five major components as the SlemBunk sample (SHA256: f3341fc8d7248b3d4e58a3ee87e4e675b5f6fc37f28644a2c6ca9c4d11c92b96). Figure 6 shows the code structure comparison between these two samples.
Figure 6. Code structure comparison between
SimpleLocker and SlemBunk variants
As we can see in Figure 6, the new SimpleLocker sample used a packaging mechanism similar to SlemBunk, putting HttpSender and Utils into a sub-package named “utils”. It also added two other major components that were originally only seen in SlemBunk: MessageReceiver and MyDeviceAdminReceiver. In total, this SimpleLocker variant shares four out of five major components with SlemBunk.
Figure 7 shows the major code of MessageReceiver in the previous samples to demonstrate that SimpleLocker and SlemBunk use basically the same process and logic to communicate with the CnC server. First, class MessageReceiver registers itself to handle incoming short messages, whose arrival will trigger its method onReceive. As seen from the figure, the main logics here are basically the same for SimpleLocker and SlemBunk. They first read the value of a particular key from app preferences. Note that the names for the key and shared preference are the same for these two different malware families: key is named “CHECKING_NUMBER_DONE” and preference named “AppPrefs”. The following steps call method retrieveMessage to retrieve the short messages, and then forward the control flow to class SmsProcessor. The only difference here is that SimpleLocker adds one extra method named processControlCommand to forward control flow.
Class SmsProcessor defines the CnC commands supported by the malware families. Looking into class SmsProcessor, we identified more evidence that SimpleLocker and SlemBunk are of the same origin. First, the CnC commands supported by SimpleLocker are actually a subset of those supported by SlemBunk. In SimpleLocker, CnC commands include "intercept_sms_start", "intercept_sms_stop", "control_number" and "send_sms", all of which are also present in SlemBunk sample. What is more, in both SimpleLocker and SlemBunk there is a common prefix “#” before the actual CnC command. This kind of peculiarity is a good indicator that SimpleLocker and SlemBunk share a common origin.
Figure 7. Class MessageReceiver for
SimpleLocker and SlemBunk variants
The task of class MyDeviceAdminReceiver is to request device administrator privilege, which makes these malware families harder to remove. SimpleLocker and SlemBunk are also highly similar in this respect, supporting the same set of device admin relevant functionalities.
At this point, we can see that these variants of SimpleLocker and SlemBunk share four out of five major components and share the same supporting utilities. The only difference is in the final payload, with SlemBunk phishing for banking credentials while SimpleLocker encrypts certain files and demands ransom. This leads us to believe that SimpleLocker came from the same original code base as SlemBunk.
Conclusion
Our analysis confirms that several Android malware families share a common origin, and that the first known file-encrypting ransomware for Android – SimpleLocker – is based on the same code as several banking trojans. Additional research may identify other related malware families.
Individual developers in the cybercrime underground have been proficient in writing and customizing malware. As we have shown, malware with specific and varied purposes can be built on a large base of shared code used for common functions such as gaining administrative privileges, starting and restarting services, and CnC communications. This is apparent simply from looking at known samples related to GM Bot – from SimpleLocker that is used for encryption and ransomware, to SlemBunk that is used as a banking Trojan and for credential theft, to the full-featured MazarBot backdoor.
With the leak of the GM Bot source code, the number of customized Android malware families based on this code will certainly increase. Binary code-based study, one of FireEye Labs’ major research tools, can help us better characterize and track malware families and their relationships, even without direct access to the source code. Fortunately, the similarities across these malware families make them easier to identify, ensuring that FireEye customers are well protected.
References:
[1]. Android
Malware About to Get Worse: GM Bot Source Code Leaked
[2].
Android.Bankosy:
All ears on voice call-based 2FA
[3]. MazarBOT: Top class
Android datastealer
[4]. SLEMBUNK:
AN EVOLVING ANDROID TROJAN FAMILY TARGETING USERS OF WORLDWIDE
BANKING APPS
[5]. SLEMBUNK
PART II: PROLONGED ATTACK CHAIN AND BETTER-ORGANIZED
CAMPAIGN
[6]. ESET
Analyzes Simplocker – First Android File-Encrypting, TOR-enabled Ransomware
