GINC-APT-0178 · Criminal

BuhTrap

Also Buhtrap, Buhtrap, Ratopak Spider, Operation “TwoBee”, Ratopak, Ratopak Spider, UAC-0008.

Category
Criminal · Financially motivated: ransomware, fraud and theft.
Origin
Russia(high confidence)
Motivation
Financial crime
Seen
2015
Sources
7 sources carry it
Identifier
GINC-APT-0178 · buhtrap

What it is

Buhtrap has been active since 2014, however their first attacks against financial institutions were only detected in August 2015. Earlier, the group had only focused on targeting banking clients. At the moment, the group is known to target Russian and Ukrainian banks. From August 2015 to February 2016 Buhtrap managed to conduct 13 successful attacks against Russian banks for a total amount of 1.8 billion rubles ($25.7 mln). The number of successful attacks against Ukrainian banks has not been identified. Buhtrap is the first hacker group using a network worm to infect the overall bank infrastructure that significantly increases the difficulty of removing all malicious functions from the network. As a result, banks have to shut down the whole infrastructure which provokes delay in servicing customers and additional losses. Malicious programs intentionally scan for machines with an automated Bank-Customer system of the Central Bank of Russia (further referred to as BCS CBR). We have not identified incidents of attacks involving online money transfer systems, ATM machines or payment gates which are known to be of interest for other criminal groups.

Names

The names each vendor, agency and source gives it. Naming differs by who tracks the actor, so one group carries many.

CERT-UA
UAC-0008
CrowdStrike
Buhtrap, Ratopak Spider, Ratopak Spider
Operations
Operation “TwoBee”
Other names
Buhtrap, Ratopak

Attribution

Each attribution is a claim: who makes it, and to whom. Western and Eastern sources are kept apart, as they often disagree.

Targets

Countries
Russia, Ukraine
Sectors
Bank, Finance, Financial, Government, Payment

Tools

The tools and malware families the sources tie to it.

  • AmmyAdmin
  • Buhtrap
  • CVE-2012-0158
  • Client Maximus
  • ClientMesh
  • FlawedAmmyy
  • LURK
  • Mimikatz
  • NSIS
  • Niteris EK
  • PuntoSwitcher (like Keylogger)

Sources