GravityRAT – The Two-Year Evolution Of An APT Targeting India

This blog post is authored by Warren Mercer and Paul Rascagneres.

Summary

Today, Cisco Talos is uncovering a new piece of malware, which has remained under the radar for the past two years while it continues to be developed. Several weeks ago, we identified the use of the latest version of this RAT (Remote Access Tool). In this article, we will discuss the technical capabilities, the evolution, development and potential attribution of what we are calling GravityRAT.

GravityRAT has been under ongoing development for at least 18 months, during which the developer has implemented new features. We’ve seen file exfiltration, remote command execution capability and anti-vm techniques added throughout the life of GravityRAT. This consistent evolution beyond standard remote code execution is concerning because it shows determination and innovation by the actor.

Throughout our investigation, we observed several malicious documents used to attack victims, which we will discuss. These malicious documents were used by the developer to run several tests on the popular analysis platform VirusTotal. Using VirusTotal allowed the developer to make changes in an attempt to decrease antivirus detection.

Although GravityRAT has not been previously published or discussed, there was some information from the National Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) of India describing GravityRAT as being used in targeted attacks against India. Finally, we will discuss specific attribution elements discovered during our research into GravityRAT as we identify specific information, which we believe to be leaked by the developer, such as location, and potentially their first name.