Researchers at Symantec spotted a Java remote access tool being used as part of a campaign targeting government agencies by sending phishing emails with malicious attachments.
The phishing emails are using recent news coverage about the NSA PRISM surveillance program as a lure. So far, the majority of the targets are located in the United States.
The emails contain two legitimate non-malicious PDF documents and one Java file that mimics the name of a legitimate document, explained Andrea Lelli, a researcher with Symantec.
“If a user is tricked into clicking this fake document, the Java applet will be run (providing that Java is installed on the user’s computer),” the researcher blogged. “This applet is a RAT named jRat, it is available for free and Symantec detects it as Backdoor.Jeetrat. This threat can give full control of the compromised computer to a remote attacker. More importantly, because it is a Java applet the threat is able to run on multiple operating systems, not just Windows. In fact, the threat has a builder tool that allows you to build your own customized versions of the RAT, and we can see that when it comes to the targeted operating systems, the choice is very broad.”
The RAT can target Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Solaris machines.
“We searched our archives for other threats using the same command-and-control (C&C) server used in this specific attack and found an RTF document,” Lelli blogged. “This malicious RTF document exploits the Microsoft Windows Common Controls ActiveX Control Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2012-0158), detected by Symantec as Bloodhound.Exploit.457. This shows that the same attackers were previously using the usual attack method of sending malicious documents that exploit some vulnerability in order to drop an executable payload but recently shifted to sending malicious Java payloads directly.”
“The attack has been simplified as it does not involve the use of an exploit, nor an executable shellcode/payload, but simply relies on a Java applet,” Lelli continued. “Nonetheless, it is no less dangerous than the older attacks and it can spread more easily since exploits are usually limited to work on specific versions of the vulnerable software and operating system, while this RAT can spread on any system where Java runtime is installed.”