Operation ShadowHammer: a high-profile supply chain attack

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In late March 2019, we briefly highlighted our research on ShadowHammer attacks, a sophisticated supply chain attack involving ASUS Live Update Utility, which was featured in a Kim Zetter article on Motherboard. The topic was also one of the research announcements made at the SAS conference, which took place in Singapore on April 9-10, 2019. Now it is time to share more details about the research with our readers.

At the end of January 2019, Kaspersky Lab researchers discovered what appeared to be a new attack on a large manufacturer in Asia. Our researchers named it “Operation ShadowHammer”.

Some of the executable files, which were downloaded from the official domain of a reputable and trusted large manufacturer, contained apparent malware features. Careful analysis confirmed that the binary had been tampered with by malicious attackers.

It is important to note that any, even tiny, tampering with executables in such a case normally breaks the digital signature. However, in this case, the digital signature was intact: valid and verifiable. We quickly realized that we were dealing with a case of a compromised digital signature.

We believe this to be the result of a sophisticated supply chain attack, which matches or even surpasses the ShadowPad and the CCleaner incidents in complexity and techniques. The reason that it stayed undetected for so long is partly the fact that the trojanized software was signed with legitimate certificates (e.g. “ASUSTeK Computer Inc.”).

The goal of the attack was to surgically target an unknown pool of users, who were identified by their network adapters’ MAC addresses. To achieve this, the attackers had hardcoded a list of MAC addresses into the trojanized samples and the list was used to identify the intended targets of this massive operation. We were able to extract more than 600 unique MAC addresses from more than 200 samples used in the attack. There might be other samples out there with different MAC addresses on their lists, though.

Technical details

The research started upon the discovery of a trojanized ASUS Live Updater file (setup.exe), which contained a digital signature of ASUSTeK Computer Inc. and had been backdoored using one of the two techniques explained below.

In earlier variants of ASUS Live Updater (i.e. MD5:0f49621b06f2cdaac8850c6e9581a594), the attackers replaced the WinMain function in the binary with their own. This function copies a backdoor executable from the resource section using a hardcoded size and offset to the resource. Once copied to the heap memory, another hardcoded offset, specific to the executable, is used to start the backdoor. The offset points to a position-independent shellcode-style function that unwraps and runs the malicious code further.

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