Cyber Risks · Unit 42 Palo Alto Networks

Unit 42 Technical Analysis: Seaduke

Summary: Unit 42 analyzed a sample it labels Trojan.Win32.Seadask, part of the 'Duke' malware family that Symantec described in a blog post mentioning a function named 'forkmeiamfamous'. After removing the UPX packer, Unit 42 found the sample was built with PyInstaller from Python, and its obfuscated code hides a base64- and ZLIB-encoded JSON configuration plus HTTP/HTTPS command traffic encrypted with RC4 using a SHA1-derived key.

Bottom line: Seaduke chains each session's RC4 key to the random string from the previous session, so no single captured HTTP session can be decrypted without the one before it - a design that defeats analysts who only have a partial packet capture.

Read the original at Unit 42 Palo Alto Networks ↗

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Malware
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