Switzerland is one of the main targets of the Retefe banking trojan since its first appearance in November 2013. At that time, it changed the local DNS resolver on the computer (See also blog post “Retefe Bankentrojaner” in German only). Almost a year went by until they changed to the still current approach of setting a proxy auto-config (PAC) URL (See also blog post “The Retefe banking Trojan has targeted Switzerland“). To understand the story of this blog post, it helps to understand the modus operandi of the Retefe malware. We recommend you read up on it on our blog links posted above if you are not familiar with it.
While the Retefe actors are constantly changing tactics, for example their newest campaigns also target Mac OS X users, their malware still works the same. One of notable changes was the introduction of Tor in 2016. At first, they started using Tor gateway domain names such as onion.to, onion.link within the proxy auto-config URLs, later on they switched to Tor completely. The advantage of using Tor is of course, anonymity and the difficulty to block or take down the infrastructure.
Onion domain names don’t use DNS or do they?
The Tor network can use .onion domain names but these names are not resolved over DNS but instead work only in the Tor network. RFC 7686 (The “.onion” Special-Use Domain Name) goes into more details on the special case of .onion domain names. However, the fact is that .onion domain names do leak into the DNS system. For potential reasons and more information on this subject we recommend the paper by Versign Labs “Measuring the Leakage of Onion at the Root” (PDF).
Continue reading “Why the most successful Retefe spam campaign never paid off”
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