Mobile APT (mAPT) SpyWaller Re-emerges, May Include Western Targets

Lookout has discovered new variants of the SpyWaller surveillanceware with advanced espionage capabilities. The variants now target Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Google Hangouts among others, suggesting they are being used against Western targets.

SpyWaller's continual evolution and sophistication indicates an actor with significant resources is behind its development. Due to this, and that it appears quite targeted, Lookout considers it an mAPT — an APT that has evolved to focus on mobile devices. All Lookout customers are protected from this threat.

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What is SpyWaller

The SpyWaller family was first discovered in 2014 and came to the attention of security researchers due to its use of iptables in order to drop network connections made by specific antivirus applications. These early samples were capable of retrieving sensitive information from a number of messaging apps and concealed this malicious functionality in encrypted asset files that were loaded during execution. The actors behind SpyWaller have been busy evolving their tool, according to our analysis of the samples in the Lookout dataset, most notably by expanding the number of apps that it can retrieve data from, and reimplementing all information gathering functionality in native code as opposed to the Java layer.

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Affected apps — Applications that the latest versions of SpyWaller targets include AireTalk, BlackBerry Messenger, Coco, Hi, Google Services Framework, Kakao Talk, KeeChat, Zapya, Line, MiTalk Messenger, Oovoo, QQ, Skype, TalkBox Voice Messenger, Telegram, Viber, Voxer Walkie Talkie Messenger, WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook, Google Hangouts, and Wi-Fi credentials. The majority of these apps are for messaging and communication however others are for file sharing.

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The latest SpyWaller variants are capable of accessing the sensitive data of over 20 different apps, in addition to being able to record calls, capture surrounding audio, track a device's location, take pictures with the camera, and retrieve a list of installed packages.

Initial infection is followed by requests to command and control infrastructure for the latest native code component that contains the bulk of SpyWaller's surveillanceware functionality. While we found the native code that is bundled up in the app is somewhat obfuscated, the latest binary served up by attacker infrastructure was not, and contains new code to target Facebook and Google Hangouts. These improvements in capability suggest that the actor behind SpyWaller may be deploying it in campaigns outside of China, where we believe the majority of previous activity to have been conducted.

SpyWaller can attempt to elevate its privileges and most variants have been found to include exploits for local vulnerabilities. Analysis indicates that attacker infrastructure can also provide additional exploits if necessary. If SpyWaller is able to elevate its privileges it attempts to establish persistence by copying various files to the /system/bin/ directory via the dd command. When deobfuscated this full command is:

mount -o remount system /system;dd if=<apk data data directory>/files/update of=/system/bin/update;chmod 6777 /system/bin/update;

The latest versions of SpyWaller primarily communicate on the non-standard port of 5353 to IPs that reside in China. The following addresses are associated to recent SpyWaller variants.

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IP addresses — These IPs can be geolocated to within China, visualized in the map above. 4 IPs are concentrated near the Xinjiang province in northwest China, 2 to the coordinates near Shandong, and 1 to each of the remaining highlighted points.

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SHA-1

f8740bb04fa884a65e16c6bfa0a169bc6e80ada3
e479391f1ab93ade71792011f7b5c146d39cfb52
323868c190dfd57147916ea6cfcd1ab6034d02b6
5a71bfb4625e4f77351563ef1c626f4020946d6c
0d45a20ea6921efc1ec371e076499efb4221d6e8
73d54c9e7a382a37cbeb291ac27b8292dfafa93d
55e7dd8f80f946acf66bd97b2edce712e25fedd5
2bb1f2de60fa18d28b5a39542960d33e03b5b688
17cdb01db464b8b63cb3a74e9e8bd7ddd1dba390
3eddfdc3fd61962c789c581d0f0634e380200bc5
c9e6b17cc5aef4749fc69f6a81a2ab2c99057971
397426e98c080c7f74d0362e538e2fcd2b81e8e7
f101e27d225a7c61444b3fd2b700f8df1f89c2c4
2c3ea07b2600a271868735d31518fb3297945dfa
5c80615b010b261794e14b32a1a2804cc5b04b88

Authors

Michael Flossman

Head of Threat Intelligence

Michael is Head of Threat Intelligence at Lookout where he works on reverse engineering sophisticated mobile threats while tracking their evolution, the campaigns they are used in, and the actors behind them. He has hands-on experience in vulnerability research, incident response, security assessments, pen-testing, reverse engineering and the prototyping of automated analysis solutions. When not analysing malware there’s a good chance he’s off snowboarding, diving, or looking for flaws in popular mobile apps.