Everyday thousands of people receive emails with malicious attachments in their email inbox. Disguised as a missed payment or an invoice, a cybercriminal sender tries to entice a victim to open the document and enable the embedded macro. This macro then proceeds to pull in a whole array of nastiness and infect a victim’s machine. Given the high success rate, malicious Office documents remain a preferred weapon in a cyber criminal’s arsenal. To take advantage of this demand and generate revenue, some criminals decided to create off-the-shelf toolkits for building malicious Office documents. These toolkits are mostly offered for sale on underground cybercriminal forums.
Announced today, the Dutch National High-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) arrested an individual suspected of building and selling such a criminal toolkit named the Rubella Macro Builder. McAfee Advanced Threat Research spotted the Rubella toolkit in the wild some time ago and was able to provide NHTCU with insights that proved crucial in its investigation. In the following blog we will explain some of the details we found that helped unmask the suspected actor behind the Rubella Macro Builder.
What is an Office Macro Builder?
An Office Macro Builder is a toolkit designed to weaponize an Office document so it can deliver a malicious payload by the use an obfuscated macro code that purposely tries to bypass endpoint security defenses. By using a toolkit dedicated to this purpose, an actor can push out higher quantities of malicious documents and successfully outsource the first stage evasion and delivery process to a specialized third party. Below is an overview with the general workings of an Office Macro Builder. The Defense evasion shown here is specific to Rubella Offi ..
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