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Designing A Windows Registry Autorun

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MSC.BAT was used to initialize the persistent installation of the other two binaries, NTLHAFD.GCP and NTSVCHOST.EXE, and cleanup the installation. A Windows registry Autorun key was set to provide persistence. NTLHAFD.GCP was the backdoor and was encrypted with RC4 stream cipher and compressed using the Zlib library (GReAT, 2013a). Before executing the decryption and memory load routines, the loader, NTSVCHOST.EXE, first attempted to connect to legitimate Microsoft domains (update.microsoft.com, www.microsoft.com, and support.microsoft.com) to determine if the victim computer was able to route to the internet. If the infected computer was not online, the loader would not decrypt the backdoor, NTLHAFD.GCP. When online, the loader would execute the decryption and memory load routines, and the backdoor would communicate periodically with the designated Command-and-Control server. From an antivirus perspective, the backdoor that was on disk was encrypted, and the more nefarious code was only in its unencrypted form while in memory. In order to reverse engineer the malware, it required either connecting to the internet or tricking the malware into believing it was on the internet.
Red October’s Second Stage – Command-and-Control and Loaded Modules After successfully establishing a connection to one of the three hardcoded Command-and-Control servers built into every installation of Red October, the backdoor was capable of loading additional modules. Some of these

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