Kaspersky Lab Experts Reveal In-Depth Analysis Of Flame

Kaspersky Lab recently announced the discovery of a sophisticated malicious program, known as The Flame, which was actively being used as a cyber weapon targeting entities in several countries. The Flame was discovered by Kaspersky Lab’s experts during an investigation prompted by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and the analysis of the malicious program revealed it was the largest and most complex attack toolkit to date.

Kaspersky Lab’s analysis of the malware revealed that it was currently being used for cyber-espionage and it would infect computers to steal data and sensitive information. The stolen data was then sent to one of The Flame’s command & control (C&C) servers.

Kaspersky Lab has been closely monitoring the C&C infrastructure of The Flame and published a detailed research post about the findings.

In collaboration with GoDaddy and OpenDNS, Kaspersky Lab succeeded in sinkholing most of the malicious domains used by The Flame’s C&C infrastructure. The following details summarise the results of the analysis:

• The Flame C&C infrastructure, which had been operating for years, went offline immediately after Kaspersky Lab disclosed the discovery of the malware’s existence last week.

• Currently there are more than 80 known domains used by Flame for C&C servers and its related domains, which have been registered between 2008 and 2012.

• During the past 4 years, servers hosting the Flame C&C infrastructure moved between multiple locations, including Hong Kong, Turkey, Germany, Poland, Malaysia, Latvia, the United Kingdom and Switzerland.

• The Flame C&C domains were registered with an impressive list of fake identities and with a variety of registrars, going back as far as 2008.

• According to Kaspersky Lab’s sinkhole, infected users were registered in multiple regions including the Middle East, Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific.

• The Flame attackers seem to have a high interest in AutoCad drawings, in addition to PDF and text files.

• The data uploaded to the Flame C&C is encrypted using relatively simple algorithms. Stolen documents are compressed using open source Zlib and modified PPDM compression.