Insight into Sykipot Operations

Via Symantec Security Response Blog -

The Sykipot campaign has been persistent in the past few months targeting various industries, the majority of which belong to the defense industry. Each campaign is marked with a unique identifier comprised of a few letters followed by a date hard-coded within the Sykipot Trojan itself.In some cases the keyword preceding the numbers is the sub-domain's folder name on the Web server being used.

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These campaign markers allow the attackers to correlate different attacks on different organizations and industries.

The attackers also left additional clues allowing us to gain insight into what appears to be a staging server that is used prior to the delivery of new binaries to targeted users. In addition, we were able to confirm that the server was also used as a command and control (C&C) server for a period of time as well. The server is based in the Beijing region of China and was running on one of the largest ISPs in China. Furthermore, on one occasion one of the attackers connected from the Zhejiang province. The server has hosted over a hundred malicious files from the past couple of months, many of which were used in Sykipot campaigns.

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The Sykipot attackers have a long running history of attacks against multiple industries. Based on these insights, the attackers are familiar with the Chinese language and are using computer resources in China. They are clearly a group of attackers who are constantly modifying their creation to utilize new vulnerabilities and to evade security products and we expect that they will continue their attacks in the future.