Rare spying platform TajMahal discovered after 5 years

Researchers with cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab have uncovered a sophisticated spying platform, TajMahal, that has been active for more than five years now and appears to be unconnected to any known threat actors. The TajMahal framework features around 80 malicious modules and includes functionality never before seen in an advanced persistent threat, such as the ability to steal information from printer queues and to grab previously seen files from a USB device the next time it reconnects, the researchers said.

Kaspersky Lab has so far seen only one victim, a foreign-based central Asian embassy, but it is likely that others have been affected.  "It seems highly unlikely that such a huge investment would be undertaken for only one victim. This suggests that there are either further victims not yet identified, or additional versions of this malware in the wild, or possibly both," said Alexey Shulmin, Lead Malware Analyst at Kaspersky Lab.

"The distribution and infection vectors for the threat also remain unknown. Somehow, it has stayed under the radar for over five years. Whether this is due to relative inactivity or something else is another intriguing question. There are no attribution clues nor any links we can find to known threat groups," Shulmin added.

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The name "TajMahal" comes from the name of the file used to exfiltrate the stolen data, Kaspersky Lab said.  The TajMahal framework is believed to include two main packages, self-named as "Tokyo" and "Yokohama".

Tokyo is the smaller of the two, with around three modules. It contains the main backdoor functionality, and periodically connects with the command and control servers. Tokyo leverages PowerShell and remains in the network even after the intrusion has moved to stage two. Stage two is the Yokohama package: a fully armed spying framework. Yokohama includes a Virtual File System (VFS) with all plug-ins, open source and proprietary third-party libraries, and configuration files.

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There are nearly 80 modules in all, and they include loaders, orchestrators, command and control communicators, audio recorders, keyloggers, screen and webcam grabbers, documents and cryptography key stealers.  TajMahal is also able to grab browser cookies, gather the backup list for Apple mobile devices, steal data from a CD burnt by a victim as well as documents in a printer queue, the researchers said.

It can also request the theft of a particular file from a previously seen USB stick, and the file will be stolen the next time the USB is connected to the computer. The targeted systems found by Kaspersky Lab were infected with both Tokyo and Yokohama. This suggests that Tokyo was used as first stage infection, deploying the fully-functional Yokohama package on interesting victims, and then left in for backup purposes.