Modified Zyklon and plugins from India

Streams of malicious emails Talos inspects every day usually consist of active spamming campaigns for various ransomware families, phishing campaigns and the common malware family suspects such as banking Trojans and bots..

It is however often more interesting to analyze campaigns smaller in volume as they might contain more interesting malware. A few weeks ago I became interested in just such a campaign with a smaller number of circulating email messages. The email, first of them submitted from Middle East, purports to be coming from a Turkish trading company, which might further indicate the geographic area where the attacks were active.

Analyzing malware is often like solving a puzzle, you have to do it piece by piece to reach the final image. In this case I spent more time analyzing the campaign than I initially planned. The campaign has many stages of the infection chain and all needed to be unraveled before the final payload level was reached. Furthermore, each of the stages used different development platform and was obfuscated in a different way. But let us start from the beginning.