The Raspberry Robin worm has been utilized in assaults in opposition to telecommunications and authorities workplace techniques throughout Latin America, Australia, and Europe since a minimum of September 2022.
“The primary payload itself is filled with greater than 10 layers for obfuscation and is able to delivering a pretend payload as soon as it detects sandboxing and safety analytics instruments,” Pattern Micro researcher Christopher So mentioned in a technical evaluation printed Tuesday.
A majority of the infections have been detected in Argentina, adopted by Australia, Mexico, Croatia, Italy, Brazil, France, India, and Colombia.
Raspberry Robin, attributed to an exercise cluster tracked by Microsoft as DEV-0856, is being more and more leveraged by a number of menace actors as an preliminary entry mechanism to ship payloads akin to LockBit and Clop ransomware.
The malware is understood for counting on contaminated USB drives as a distribution vector to obtain a rogue MSI installer file that deploys the primary payload answerable for facilitating post-exploitation.
Additional evaluation of Raspberry Robin reveals the usage of heavy obfuscation to stop evaluation, with the malware “composed of two payloads embedded in a payload loader packed six occasions.”
The payload loader, for its half, is orchestrated to load the decoy payload, an adware dubbed BrowserAssistant, to throw off detection efforts.
Ought to no sandboxing and evaluation be noticed, the official payload is put in and proceeds to connect with a hard-coded .onion handle utilizing a customized TOR shopper embedded inside it to await additional instructions.
The TOR shopper course of masquerades as official Home windows processes like dllhost.exe, regsvr32.exe, and rundll32.exe, as soon as once more underscoring the appreciable efforts made by the menace actor to fly beneath the radar.
What’s extra, the malware’s actual routine is run in Session 0, a specialised Home windows session reserved for providers and different non-interactive person functions to mitigate safety dangers akin to shatter assaults.
Pattern Micro mentioned it discovered similarities in a privilege escalation and an anti-debugging approach utilized by Raspberry Robin and LockBit ransomware, hinting at a possible connection between the 2 felony actors.
“The group behind Raspberry Robin is the maker of among the instruments LockBit can be utilizing,” the corporate theorized, including it alternatively “availed of the providers of the affiliate answerable for the methods utilized by LockBit.”
That having mentioned, the intrusions look like a reconnaissance operation, as no knowledge is returned from the TOR area, suggesting that the group behind the malware is “testing the waters to see how far its deployments can unfold.”
