Automating Intelligence: Discovering Recent PlugX Campaigns Programmatically

One of the hardest things to do when you are receiving malware that have “anonymized” (e.g. name-is-hash) names or general samples that lack any indication of the infection vector is to determine the origin of the file and its intended target. Even harder is when you do not receive telemetry data from products that contains information about infected machines. To that end, I have been working on automating ways to help ASERT better understand the context around samples so we can answer question about what may have been targeted, why it was targeted and when it was targeted. This post will use the PlugX malware as an example (PlugX is well known and has had its various iterations analyzed many times), due in part to its ongoing activity and will focus on  leveraging metadata from VirusTotal due to it being publicly accessible.



Automating Intelligence: Discovering Recent PlugX Campaigns Programmatically