trackingteamtnt-fiser2021

2025-02-05

Tracking the Activities of TeamTNT A Closer Look at a Cloud-Focused Malicious Actor Group

by David Fiser and Alfredo Oliveira

TrendMicro Research 2021

https://documents.trendmicro.com/assets/white_papers/wp-tracking-the-activities-of-teamTNT.pdf

Notes
TrendMicro
container
honeypot
cryptocurrency miner
Linux malware
Redis
TeamTNT
financially-motivated threat actor
threat actor
TeamTNT’s members are likely German due to their posts on social media and comments within code written in fluent German
ELF
HildeGard
shell script
Docker
difficulty of guessing precise number of members in a hacking group
Trend Micro estimates 12 members in TeamTNT due to them mentioning having 12 members on social media
Twitter, tweet
attribution
false attribution
penetration tester
security researcher
malware
malware campaign
DDoS
botnet
Docker Daemon
IRC command and control
IRC
TNTbotinger
credential stealer
pandemic
COVID-19
worm
TeamTNT campaigns: Covid-19, Black-T, Competitor Killer, Dual Installer, Kinsing Killer, Meoow, SayHi, Weave Persistent, PWN Redis, Get Some SSH, Docker4Mac, AWS Stealer
INFECT_ALL_CONTAINERS function
deploying malicious containers
DevOps
kirito666/blackt
Kinsing malware
territorial malware
macOS
macOS malware
CSP - Cloud Service Provider
Weave Scope
container orchestration
AWS
SSH
leaked credentials
vulnerability scanning
IRC bot
SSH credential theft
SSH key persistence
~/.aws/credentials
root user
home directory
curl
sayhi.bplaced[.]net
environment variables
command and control
credential harvesting: AWS, Cloudflare, Google Cloud, Git, SMB, FTP, …
backdoor
tshd (tiny shell daemon) https://github.com/orangetw/tsh
reverse engineering
GitHub
Q-shell https://github.com/qianshanhai/q-shell
Blowfish
Diamorphine rootkit
persistence
getdents/getdents64
hooking
signal
SIGINVIS, PF_INVISIBLE
SIGSUPER
SIGMODINVIS
XMRig
systemd service persistence
wget, curl
User-Agent
Using User-Agent to communicate with c2 server
immutable flag
chattr
filesystem permissions
user account persistence
hilde user
base64
UPX
AES
Go malware
Ezuri packer https://github.com/guitmz/ezuri
initialization vector
hard-coded IV
obfuscation
Dorkbot
chatbot
Hydra IoT malware
Kaiten/Tsunami
non-stripped binaries
TeamTNT’s IRC bot is likely based off of kaiten due to symbols observed within samples
decompile
Ziggy StarTux
money laundering
quantity over quality
cryptocurrency wallet
gulf.moneroocean[.]stream
Monero
GPU
principle of least privilege
shared responsibility
use key-based auth on SSH
keep systems patched and up to date
CI/CD
IPS
MITRE ATT&CK
privilege escalation
lateral movement
IoC

Links to this note