dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

"Today CrowdStrike is releasing publicly an intelligence report which was circulated to CrowdStrike Falcon Intelligence customers detailing the use of the trojanized ‘Попр-Д30.apk’ application by the Ukrainian military and the deadly repercussions inflicted on that platform by Russian forces. The key points of this report are:

From late 2014 and through 2016, FANCY BEAR X-Agent implant was covertly distributed on Ukrainian military forums within a legitimate Android application developed by Ukrainian artillery officer Yaroslav Sherstuk.

The original application enabled artillery forces to more rapidly process targeting data for the Soviet-era D-30 Howitzer employed by Ukrainian artillery forces reducing targeting time from minutes to under 15 seconds. According to Sherstuk’s interviews with the press, over 9000 artillery personnel have been using the application in Ukrainian military.

Successful deployment of the FANCY BEAR malware within this application may have facilitated reconnaissance against Ukrainian troops. The ability of this malware to retrieve communications and gross locational data from an infected device makes it an attractive way to identify the general location of Ukrainian artillery forces and engage them.

Open source reporting indicates that Ukrainian artillery forces have lost over 50% of their weapons in the 2 years of conflict and over 80% of D-30 howitzers, the highest percentage of loss of any other artillery pieces in Ukraine’s arsenal.

This previously unseen variant of X-Agent represents FANCY BEAR’s expansion in mobile malware development from iOS-capable implants to Android devices, and reveals one more component of the broad spectrum approach to cyber operations taken by Russia-based actors in the war in Ukraine.

The collection of such tactical artillery force positioning intelligence by FANCY BEAR further supports CrowdStrike’s previous assessments that FANCY BEAR is likely affiliated with the Russian military intelligence (GRU), and works closely with Russian military forces operating in Eastern Ukraine and its border regions in Russia.

The following Snort rule matches on the X-Agent-Android C2 beacon request:

alert tcp $HOME_NET any -$EXTERNAL_NET $HTTP_PORTS (\

msg: “CrowdStrike FANCY BEAR X-Agent Android C2 Request”; \

flow: established,to_server; \

content: “lm=”; http_uri; \

pcre: “/\?\&=/U”; \

classtype: trojan-activity; metadata: service http; \

sid: XXXX; rev: 20160815;)"