Bedep Lurking in Angler’s Shadows

This post is authored by Nick Biasini.

In October 2015, Talos released our detailed investigation of the Angler Exploit Kit which outlined the infrastructure and monetary impact of an exploit kit campaign delivering ransomware. During the investigation we found that two thirds of Angler’s payloads were some variation of ransomware and noted one of the other major payloads was Bedep. Bedep is a malware downloader that is exclusive to Angler. This post will discuss the Bedep side of Angler and draw some pretty clear connections between Angler and Bedep.

Adversaries continue to evolve and have become increasingly good at hiding the connections to the nefarious activities in which they are involved. As security researchers we are always looking for the bread crumbs that can link these threats together to try and identify the connections and groups that operate. This is one of those instances were a couple of crumbs came together and formed some unexpected connections. By tying together a couple of registrant accounts, email addresses, and domain activity Talos was able to track down a group that has connections to threats on multiple fronts including: exploit kits, trojans, email worms, and click fraud. These activities all have monetary value, but are difficult to quantify unlike a ransomware payload with a specific cost to decrypt.