PureCrypter: A Fully-Functional Loader Distributing Remote Access Trojans and Information Stealers

PureCrypter is actively being developed by a threat actor using the moniker “PureCoder”.
PureCrypter’s first-stage is a simple downloader. In this example, the downloader was disguised as a fake date console application.
The application secretly downloads a .NET assembly from a command and control server in order to bypass security products. The bytes of the assembly are completely reversed and this same technique is used across PureCrypter’s different stages. The second-stage filename typically has a fake extension such as “jpg”, “png” or “log” and/or a legitimate-looking filename.

The second-stage payload is a more sophisticated piece of code and the core component of PureCrypter. On top of that, the .NET assembly is obfuscated with the commercial tool SmartAssembly.
As part of the SmartAssembly’s obfuscation, the module entrypoint first adds an assembly and a resource resolver. An extra assembly resolver is added to handle compressed and/or encrypted data. Basically, when an assembly is referenced the resolver will capture that event and try to load the assembly from its resources.

The main function of the PureCrypter injector starts by reversing, decompressing (gunzip) and deserializing an object into the following protocol buffer (protobuf).
The author of PureCrypter provided an option to send an infection status message on a Discord channel. Using the the DiscordWebHookUrl parameter, the malware can send the dictionary in Table 3 via the WebClient:UploadValues method over TLS 1.2.
New variants of the malware can send a similar message to the author via Telegram. The URL is constructed as follows:
https://api.telegram.org/bot + protobuf_configuration.TelegramToken + /sendMessage?chat_id= + protobuf_configuration.TelegramID.
The message is sent via WebClient:DownloadString over TLS 1.2

Given the StartupSettings members, the PureCrypter injector can achieve persistence using different methods.
Firstly, it takes the Location member as a parameter to the Environment.GetFolderPath method. In this case, it retrieves the %APPDATA% folder and appends the value of the FileName member to it.
The EnumStartup field indicates how to install the malware on the system.
The PureCrypter developer provides three different ways to run the associated malware, which is given by the EnumInjection member. However, all of them retrieve the embedded malicious payload by decompressing and reversing one of the resources mentioned earlier.

Process Hollowing
The process hollowing technique is pretty classic and comes in 32 and 64-bit flavors.
PureCrypter starts by creating a suspended process via CreateProcessA(). The command-line argument is built by concatenating the result of GetRuntimeDirectory(), the InjectionPath and an “.exe” extension. If the CommandLine struct member is set, then it is also concatenated. The remote process memory is unmapped via ZwUnmapViewOfSection() and the associated malware is written to the process memory and executed.

Shellcode
The injector can also run the embedded resource inside its own process by creating a shellcode.

Assembly Loading
The last way the PureCrypter injector can run its payload is by loading the resource as an assembly and invoking its entrypoint.

Extra Anti-* functionalities
Some methods that don’t seem to be referenced, but still are quite interesting in terms of environment detection are the following:

Queries the WMI object Win32_BIOS for the computer’s SerialNumber and Version and checks if it matches the regular expression “VMware|VIRTUAL|A M I|Xen”
Queries the WMI object Win32_ComputerSystem for the computer’s Manufacturer and Model and checks if it matches the regular expression “Microsoft|VMWare|Virtual”
Calls CheckRemoteDebuggerPresent
Checks for the presence of “SbieDLL.dll” module
Checks specific resolutions of the display monitor

Injected code
The sample delivers a SnakeKeylogger variant.
This malware family is just one of many payloads observed by ThreatLabz that is injected via a process hollowing technique