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Chinese language UEFI Rootkit Discovered on Gigabyte and Asus Motherboards

By Ionut Arghire on July 26, 2022

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Safety researchers with Kaspersky have analyzed a UEFI firmware rootkit that seems to focus on particular motherboard fashions from Gigabyte and Asus.

Dubbed CosmicStrand and sure developed by an unknown Chinese language-speaking menace actor, the rootkit was discovered situated within the firmware pictures of Gigabyte and Asus motherboards utilizing the H81 chipset, suggesting {that a} widespread vulnerability could have been exploited for an infection.

Kaspersky believes that the firmware adjustments may need been carried out with an automatic patcher, which might indicate that the attacker both had bodily entry to the contaminated motherboards or used an implant already working on the motherboards.

The contaminated firmware pictures include a ‘CSMCORE DXE’ driver – which facilitates the system boot in legacy mode by way of the MBR – that had been patched with code that runs at system startup to set off an execution chain resulting in the deployment of a kernel-level implant in Home windows.

A malicious hook arrange within the boot supervisor permits the menace to change the Home windows kernel loader earlier than it runs, to arrange a second hook known as at a later stage of the start-up course of, to take management over the execution course of and inject a shellcode in reminiscence. Subsequent, after a sleep interval, the malware fetches the ultimate payload.

CosmicStrand was additionally seen trying to disable the PatchGuard safety mechanism.

A user-mode pattern Kaspersky’s researchers discovered within the reminiscence of an contaminated machine – and which is probably going linked with CosmicStrand – was designed to run command traces to create a person account added to the native directors group.

The researchers recognized two variants of the rootkit, one used between the top of 2016 and mid-2017, and one other energetic in 2020, every of them with its personal command and management (C&C) server.

The CosmicStrand victims recognized by Kaspersky are personal people from China, Iran, Russia, and Vietnam, none of them associated to a particular group or trade.

Chinese language cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360 analyzed an earlier model of the malware again in 2017 after it had been contacted by a person who had hassle eradicating a extremely persistent piece of malware. The agency, which named the malware ‘Spy Shadow Trojan’, reported that the sufferer had acquired the contaminated motherboard, which had been beforehand owned by another person, from a web based retailer.

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