Unit 42 continuously hunts for new and unique malware samples that match known advanced persistent threat (APT) patterns and tactics. On May 19, one such sample was uploaded to VirusTotal, where it received a benign verdict from all 56 vendors that evaluated it. Beyond the obvious detection concerns, we believe this sample is also significant in terms of its malicious payload, command and control (C2), and packaging.
During our analysis of the Penquin-related infrastructure we reported in our previous post, we paid special attention to the malicious binaries contacting these IP addresses, since as we showed in the analysis, they had been used as C2 of other threats used by Turla.