Compromised Sites Conceal StealRat Botnet Operations

Advances in spam detection meant that spam operators had to find ways to circumvent new technologies. For instance, Asprox made significant improvements in their spam and module architecture whereas Pushdo made use of decoy network traffic. Recently, we have discovered a new simple method used by a spam botnet we named StealRat. It consists of 3 essential things:

Compromised website for sending spam
Compromised systems for harvesting and delivering the spam data
Compromised website for delivering the payload

Figure 1. StealRat method

In this set up, the actual spam server is hiding behind three layers of unsuspecting victims: two compromised websites and an infected machine. The infected machine acts as a liaison between the spam server and the compromised website. As there is no interaction between the spam and server, it will appear the email have originated from the infected machine. The spam mail itself does not spread the malware, so there is no visible link between the two as well. In essence, they have separated the core functions and minimized interactions among them to cut-off any threads that could link them to each other. A compromised website has the payload link and a spamming script. The payload is typically porn or an online pharmacy webpage. The spamming script is coded in PHP and waits for data from an infected machine (malware victim). The infected machine connects to the malicious spam server to collect the spam data which includes the following:

backup mail server
"sender" name
recipient address
email template

A compromised website will typically have a randomly named folder with several PHP scripts.

Figure 2. Sample of a compromised website

Another interesting behavior is that it uses the compromised website’s domain as its email service domain. For instance, if xyz.com is hosting the spamming script, the email will appear to have come from [sender name]@xyz.com. In a compromised system (infected machine), the malware component also exhibits some conspicuous traits. For instance, some variants attempt to cloak its network traffic by modifying the host name to google.com while receiving its instructions from its C&C server. If the C&C is example.com, instead of directly connecting to it, it queries for the domain’s mail server (eg. mx1.example.com) and connects there instead. The network traffic won’t show an established connection to either example.com or mx1.example.com, the hostname would appear to be google.com instead.

Figure 3. Connection to google.com

During the course of our investigation, we have identified the following:

about 85,000 unique IPs/domains that sent out spam emails in 1 month
each IP/domain contains an average of two spamming scripts
each infected machine sends at least 8,640 spam data to compromised websites per day
they are currently rotating around seven million email addresses to send spam to

While exploiting vulnerable websites to send out spam has already been exhausted by other botnets, StealRat stood out because it used simple yet subtle methods to improve the botnet’s resiliency. Its operators set very clear boundaries. They used compromised sites to send out spam. They also made use of compromised machines but only as mediators between the compromised sites and the spam server. This allowed them to cover their tracks, as they left no clear evidence of a connection between the sites and their server. They also used legitimate mail servers and modified hosts to mask their traffic. This operation certainly proves that cybercriminals are always out looking for ways to evade the security defenses. For more details about StealRat, you may read the full paper Stealrat: An In-Depth Look at an Emerging Spambot.