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When threat actors use backdoor malware to comprehend entry to a group, they want to make sure that all their laborious work can’t be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the backdoor with a passive agent that’s nonetheless dormant until it receives what’s acknowledged throughout the enterprise as a “magic packet.” On Thursday, researchers revealed {{that a}} never-before-seen backdoor that quietly took keep of dozens of enterprise VPNs working Juniper Group’s Junos OS has been doing merely that.
J-Magic, the monitoring title for the backdoor, goes one step extra to forestall unauthorized entry. After receiving a magic packet hidden throughout the common circulation of TCP guests, it relays an issue to the machine that despatched it. The issue comes inside the kind of a string of textual content material that’s encrypted using most of the people portion of an RSA key. The initiating celebration ought to then reply with the corresponding plaintext, proving it has entry to the important thing key.
Open sesame
The sunshine-weight backdoor might be notable because of it resided solely in memory, a trait that makes detection harder for defenders. The combination prompted researchers at Lumen Experience’s Black Lotus Lab to sit up and take uncover.
“Whereas this is not the first discovery of magic packet malware, there have solely been a handful of campaigns currently,” the researchers wrote. “The combination of concentrating on Junos OS routers that operate a VPN gateway and deploying a passive listening in-memory solely agent, makes this an fascinating confluence of tradecraft worthy of extra assertion.”
The researchers found J-Magic on Virustotal and determined that it had run contained within the networks of 36 organizations. They nonetheless don’t understand how the backdoor acquired put in. Proper right here’s how the magic packet labored:
The passive agent is deployed to quietly observe all TCP guests despatched to the machine. It discreetly analyzes the incoming packets and watches for actually one in every of 5 specific items of data contained in them. The conditions are obscure adequate to combine in with the traditional circulation of holiday makers that group safety merchandise obtained’t detect a threat. On the similar time, they’re unusual adequate that they’re no more more likely to be current in common guests.