Souhail Hammou
Last known affiliation: Intel471
Bio: Souhail Hammou is a Senior Malware reverse engineer with the Intel 471 Technical Intelligence team. His main duties include reverse engineering the latest threats, writing comprehensive malware analysis reports and automating malware configuration extraction procedures to feed emulation and tracking systems.
Jorge Rodriguez 🗣 | Souhail Hammou 🗣
Abstract (click to view)
The Gh0st Remote Access Trojan is a long-standing threat dating back to 2001 that is still active to this day. Following its release to the public in 2008 as version 3.6 Beta, it garnered the attention of Chinese-speaking threat actors in particular who began forking and upgrading the toolset to suit their needs. Various APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) groups targeting Asian countries incorporated modified versions of Gh0st RAT into their own arsenal: GhostNet as the earliest documented instance and GamblingPuppet as one of the most recent ones.
Our deep dive into the subject started when we traced back the origins of a malware family named PseudoManuscrypt directly to Gh0st RAT. Kaspersky first spotted it in July 2021 as being distributed through a network of websites that offer fake cracked software to unsuspecting victims. We also observed it being directly delivered through the PrivateLoader Pay-per-Install (PPI) service.
Souhail Hammou 🗣
Abstract (click to view)
Pay-per-install (PPI) services have been an integral part of the e-crime ecosystem for a considerable amount of time. PPI services monetize wide dissemination of malware by providing the malware operators with mass geo-targeted installs (aka loads) in exchange for money. A malware operator provides payment, malicious payloads and targeting information while the PPI service overlooks or outsources the distribution and delivery. The accessibility and moderate costs of these services serves as another weapon in the arsenal of malware operators for rapid, bulk and geo-targeted malware infections.
Our focus in this research has been on the Privateloader, an undocumented downloader connected to an unidentified PPI service that delivers a panoply of malware payloads into infected systems. The loader is distributed by a network of websites that allegedly offer downloads for cracked versions of popular software.