Since the Tatanga Trojan (TSPY_PINCAV.GEK) made it to the news last week, thanks to the terrific work of fellow researchers at S21Sec, the Trend Micro research team has been hard at work to find out more about this malware. Luckily, we managed to obtain access to a command-and-control (C&C) server, giving us the opportunity to gather some thoughts on this new malware family:
- Although TSPY_PINCAV.GEK/Tatanga is mainly a banking Trojan, it gathers all sorts of Web tracking logs, including passwords. It’s unusually verbose. Some Web logs for a single client take hundreds of MBs.
- TSPY_PINCAV.GEK/Tatanga is capable of hijacking a user’s banking session to automatically transfer money to mules. Not only does it capture the credentials of users logging in to banking sites but also makes videos. This way, if someone uses an out-of-band storage utility for his/her passwords, the cybercriminals running the botnet will still be able to see what they want to. The botnet master can set up multiple mule accounts and specify how much to transfer and when.
- It can also arrange distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks for a specified amount of time against a list of targets.
- It keeps an inordinate amount of information about each client, including all the installed software, city/region/country information, process list, and uptime. TSPY_PINCAV.GEK/Tatanga not only logs data from HTTP sessions but also from FTP sessions. The formatting of the logs is not typical of ZeuS or SpyEye so reading and searching the logs for what you may be looking for is harder.
- In the server we accessed, most infected clients were from Spain although most of the victims of the banking session-hijacking were German possibly because of the prevalence of TANs in Germany but not in Spain.
- The criminals can send any “command” to infected clients individually or in groups. These commands include remote control, shell access, uninstalling the client, host file modification, and a long list of other options.
- The server keeps track of each client’s version and build number, OS, and something called “malware count,” which is presumably the number of other malware installed. We don’t know who may be detecting them so it’s a puzzling statistic. Also, it looks like the server can detect whether an incoming request comes from a real client or not and blacklist it. It has a special statistic for those, tagging them as “honeypots.”
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We’re sure there’s much more we haven’t listed but the above is what we’ve seen so far after peeking into Tatanga’s server side. Also, the server has been running since July 2010 so it’s likely that this malware has been staying under the radar for quite a while.
