Fake DHL email delivers an unknown keylogger coupled with a phishing scam

[Disco Bob]

I was extremely surprised to wake up this Sunday Morning to a whole slew of fake DHL delivery notice emails with a macro enabled  word doc attachment that eventually downloads some sort of Keylogger.

There is some dispute as to what the actual Keylogger is. Some AV on VirusTotal describe it as an AgentTesla generic, whereas Anyrun app calls it Sentinel. I don’t think either are 100% correct.

DHL_FORM.doc       Current Virus total detections: Anyrun |

This malware doc  downloads from https://heritagebank(dot).ga/Quotation.exe  ( Virustotal) which is behind cloudflare and also is  a phishing site for the genuine heritage bank

 

 

This keylogger file first pings to http://icanhazip(dot)com/ where I assume it checks the sending IP against a list of acceptable IPs to continue with its nefarious actions. It then drops 3 other .exe files    [1]  [2]  [3]  All of which are fairly well detected generically or heuristically.  It then alters the firewall settings to allow exfiltration and tries to send the stolen info to somewhere that Anyrun doesn’t show me. What I can see is a failed connection to educationaltools.info which has no DNS records, so is very possibly the drop site that isn’t yet live.

Update 9 September 2017:  Another run of exactly the same email but today they have a .z ( zip ) file attachment extracting to a .exe.

DHL FORM.7z  extracts to DHL FORM.exe  VirusTotal | Anyrun |

They seem to have fixed some of yesterday’s problems and are exfiltrating the stolen info via encrypted email on port 443 to microffice365.ga   They are also sending screenshots today as well as txt files.

I can guarantee that the receiving domain will not stay online very long.

None of these files from yesterday or today will run properly in a sandbox / VM and crash on some actions. Whether the files are buggy or whether there is anti-vm / sandbox protections is unknown at this time. My gut feeling is that a combination of both is happening.

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DHL has not been hacked or had their email or other servers compromised. They are not sending the emails to you. They are just innocent victims in exactly the same way as every recipient of these emails. What has happened is that the criminal bad actors are sending from a  look-a-like domain dhlcourier.us  which doesn’t actually exist.  See email headers

The email looks like:

From:  DHL EXPRESS <[email protected]>

Date:  Sun 08/09/2019 02:37

Subject: RE: DHL DELIVERY

Attachment: DHL_FORM.doc

Body content:

Dear Customer,

We tried to deliver your item to your address this morning 7th September, 2019. (See the attached file) .

The delivery attempt was unsuccessful because no one was present at the delivery address given to us, so the notification is automatically sent.

If the parcel is not scheduled for re-projection or receipt within 72 hours on weekdays, it will be returned to the sender.

Tag number: DB0011622801 / 17BA

Expected delivery date: September 7th, 2019

Packet Services

Agency (s): Delivery Confirmation

Status: Mission sent

Sender: Macy’s Department Store Company

Your package has not been delivered.

Delivery Time: 08:57 AM

Number of Packages: 1

Weight: 5.0 LBS

Dear Customer

See attached form and correct your address.

We apologize and thank you for your confidence.

Thank you,

Customer Service DHL.

2019 © DHL International GmbH. All rights reserved.

 

 

Fake DHL delivery email

 

Email Headers:

IPHostname    City             Region                   Country                             Organisation

157.245.44.61 London      England                    GBAS                          14061 DigitalOcean, LLC

3.84.97.76       ec2-3-84-97-76.compute-1.amazonaws.comVirginia BeachVirginiaUSAS14618 Amazon.com, Inc.

 

Note: Only the final IP address outside of your network in the Received: fields can be trusted as others can be spoofed

Received: from [157.245.44.61] (port=45488 helo=vmin.integratedconsult.ga)
	by knight.knighthosting.co.uk with esmtps (TLSv1.2:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:256)
	(Exim 4.92)
	(envelope-from <[email protected]>)
	id 1i6mrZ-0008RH-Ri
	for [email protected]; Sun, 08 Sep 2019 03:23:37 +0100
Received: from EC2AMAZ-V5IM2BC.ec2.internal (ec2-3-84-97-76.compute-1.amazonaws.com [3.84.97.76])
	by vmin.integratedconsult.ga (Postfix) with ESMTPA id 2F793C3D26;
	Sun,  8 Sep 2019 01:52:30 +0000 (UTC)
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============1894098760=="
MIME-Version: 1.0
Subject: RE: DHL DELIVERY
To: Recipients <[email protected]>
From: "DHL EXPRESS" <[email protected]>
Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2019 01:52:28 +0000

All the alleged senders, companies, names of employees, phone numbers, amounts, reference numbers etc. mentioned in the emails are all innocent and are just picked at random. Some of these companies will exist and some won’t.  Don’t try to respond by phone or email, all you will do is end up with an innocent person or company who have had their details spoofed and picked at random from a long list that the bad guys have previously found .  The bad guys choose companies, Government departments and other organisations with subjects that are designed to entice you or alarm you into blindly opening the attachment or clicking the link in the email to see what is happening.

This email attachment contains what appears to be a genuine word doc or Excel XLS spreadsheet with either a macro script or  an embedded OLE object that when run will infect you.

Modern versions of Microsoft office, that is Office 2010, 2013, 2016 and Office 365 should be automatically set to higher security to protect you.

By default protected view is enabled and  macros are disabled, UNLESS you or your company have enabled them.  If protected view mode is turned off and macros are enabled then opening this malicious word document will infect you, and simply previewing it in  windows explorer or your email client might well be enough to infect you. Definitely DO NOT follow the advice they give to enable macros or enable editing to see the content.

Most of these malicious word documents either appear to be totally blank or look something like these images when opened in protected view mode, which should be the default in Office 2010, 2013, 2016  and 365.  Some versions pretend to have a digital RSA key and say you need to enable editing and Macros to see the content.  Do NOT enable Macros or editing under any circumstances. 

 

https://myonlinesecurity.co.uk/fake-dhl-email-delivers-an-unknown-keylogger-coupled-with-a-phishing-scam/