In our previous blogpost, we discussed the Madi campaign, uncovered through joint research with our partner Seculert.

In this blogpost, we will continue our analysis with information on the Madi infrastructure, communications, data collection, and victims.

The Madi infrastructure performs its surveillance operations and communications with a simple implementation as well. Five command and control (C2) web servers are currently up and running Microsoft IIS v7.0 web server along with exposed Microsoft Terminal service for RDP access, all maintaining identical copies of the custom, C# server manager software. These servers also act as the stolen data drops. The stolen data seems to be poorly organized on the server side, requiring multiple operators to log in and investigate the data per each of the compromised systems that they are managing over time.

The services at these IP addresses have been cycled through by the operators for unknown reasons. There does not appear to be a pattern to which malware reports to which server just yet. According to sinkhole data and other reliable sources, the approximate locations of Madi victims are distributed mainly within the Middle East, but some are scattered lightly throughout the US and EU. It seems that some of the victims are professionals and academia (both students and staff) running laptops infected with the Madi spyware, travelling throughout the world:

Here is an approximate global map representing the approximate location of Madi victims, dependent on GeoIP data. While the overwhelming percentage of Madi victims in the middle east is not best visualized in this graphic, it helps to understand the Madi reach:

Last night, we received a new version of the #Madi malware, which we previously covered in our blog.

Following the shutdown of the Madi command and control domains last week, we thought the operation is now dead. Looks like we were wrong.

The new version appears to have been compiled on July 25th as it can be seen from its header:

It contains many interesting improvements and new features. It now has the ability to monitor VKontakte, together with Jabber conversations. It is also looking for people who visit pages containing ?USA� and ?gov� in their titles. In such cases, the malware makes screenshots and uploads them to the C2.

Here's a full list of monitored keywords:

"gmail", "hotmail", "yahoo! mail" , "google+", "msn messenger", "blogger", "massenger", "profile", "icq" , "paltalk", "yahoo! messenger for the web","skype", "facebook" ,"imo", "meebo", "state" , "usa" , "u.s","contact" ,"chat" ,"gov", "aol","hush","live","oovoo","aim","msn","talk","steam","vkontakte","hyves", "myspace","jabber","share","outlook","lotus","career"

For almost a year, an ongoing campaign to infiltrate computer systems throughout the Middle East has targeted individuals across Iran, Israel, Afghanistan and others scattered across the globe.

Together with our partner, Seculert, we-ve thoroughly investigated this operation and named it the ?Madi�, based on certain strings and handles used by the attackers. You can read the Seculert analysis post here.

The campaign relied on a couple of well known, simpler attack techniques to deliver the payloads, which reveals a bit about the victims online awareness. Large amounts of data collection reveal the focus of the campaign on Middle Eastern critical infrastructure engineering firms, government agencies, financial houses, and academia. And individuals within this victim pool and their communications were selected for increased monitoring over extended periods of time.

This post is an examination of the techniques used to spread the Madi malware to victim systems, the spyware tools used, and quirks about both. In some cases, targeted organizations themselves don't want to provide further breach information about the attack, so some perspective into the parts of the campaign can be limited.