SUNSPOT is an implant that injected the SUNBURST backdoor into the SolarWinds Orion software update framework. It was used by APT29 since at least February 2020.[1]
12
Techniques54th pct
6
Tactics53rd pct
1
Threat groupunranked
1
Campaignunranked
Enterprise ATT&CK only. Any Mobile or ICS rows on the same ATT&CK page are not carried.
SUNSPOT encrypted log entries it collected with the stream cipher RC4 using a hard-coded key. It also uses AES128-CBC encrypted blobs for SUNBURST source code and data extracted from the SolarWinds Orion <MsBuild.exe</code> process.2
SUNSPOT monitored running processes for instances of MsBuild.exe by hashing the name of each running process and comparing it to the corresponding value 0x53D525. It also extracted command-line arguments and individual arguments from the running MsBuild.exe process to identify the directory path of the Orion software Visual Studio solution.4
Following the successful injection of SUNBURST, SUNSPOT deleted a temporary file it created named InventoryManager.bk after restoring the original SolarWinds Orion source code to the software library.5
SUNSPOT used Windows API functions such as MoveFileEx and NtQueryInformationProcess as part of the SUNBURST injection process.7
Execution14 detection rules
Standing S0562
Reach is how much of ATT&CK this malware touches. Coverage is how well defended each thing it does is, as a median per technique rather than a total — a total would just restate the reach. Each figure is ranked against all 825 ATT&CK software entries only where that population actually spreads. Where most of the population shares one value, a percentile would rank the tie instead of the entity, so the raw value is shown and no rank is claimed.
Reach
Techniques1254th pct
54th percentile · 54% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have this many Enterprise techniques or fewer.
Tactics653rd pct
53rd percentile · 53% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have this many tactics spanned or fewer.
Threat group161% tie · 22 values
61% of the population shares a single value across only 22 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
Campaign185% tie · 8 values
85% of the population shares a single value across only 8 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
Coverage
Rules / technique17med40th pct
40th percentile · 60% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have more detection rules per technique.
Tests / technique4med28th pct
28th percentile · 72% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have more atomic tests per technique.
Data comps / technique5med54% tie · 11 values
54% of the population shares a single value across only 11 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
Mitigations / technique1.5med65th pct
65th percentile · 65% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have this many mitigations per technique or fewer.
5 of 8 axes carry an honest rank on this page. Coverage medians are taken across this malware’s 12 Enterprise techniques.
Range
Technique Campaign use over its cumulative rule count.
The following analytic detects the execution of tools commonly exploited by cybercriminals, such as those used for unauthorized access, network scanning, privilege escalation, password dumping or data exfiltration. (...)
Detects the Linux-specific execution chain of the plain-crypto-js malicious npm dependency by Axios NPM package, including payload download via curl and detached execution using nohup and python3. (...)
Detects the macOS-specific execution chain of the plain-crypto-js malicious npm dependency in Axios NPM Package, including AppleScript execution via osascript, payload download, permission modification, execution, and cleanup.
The following analytic detects the use of CertUtil.exe with the 'decode' argument, which may indicate an attempt to decode a previously encoded file, potentially containing malicious payloads. (...)
This analytic identifies Snort intrusion signatures that have been triggered by ten or more distinct internal IP addresses within a one-hour window. (...)
The following analytic detects the execution of the curl utility where the command line includes percent-encoded characters and explicit file output options (such as -o or --output). (...)