💬 Telegram plays an important role in many underground businesses. Threat actors commonly stand up channels to market and support malicious activities such as malware-as-a-service (MaaS) subscriptions. While investigating ScreenConnect servers, a remote access support tool commonly abused by threat actors, we found an interesting business that we had never seen before. This actor used telegram as a storefront and support channel for an underground Remote Access Toolkit Online (RATO) platform. Technically RATO is a service that bundles cPanel and ScreenConnect technology to help its cyber criminal customers remotely access victim machines and manage scams, phishing, and malware (e.g. Latrodectus).

🐀 🔴 We discovered several servers that matched a ScreenConnect signature but these instances did not serve the typical ScreenConnect web content. Instead, their service is called "RATO PLATFORM" and the portal page shows the slogan "Can't catch the RAT__". We've found several telegram channels that promote services named "RATO", use the rat head logo (see attached image), or the domain rato[.]to. Based on their telegram chat content, it's clear their business model is focused on enabling cybercrime.

@rato_support
@ratofaqs
@rato_backup
@rato_hosting
@Rato2_bot

Consistent with RATO’s “BulletProof & Anti-Red Hosting” feature, we saw many RATO instances on ASNs with a high concentration of malicious activity (e.g., AS202412). Additionally, RATO infrastructure shows strong ties to Indonesia including Indonesian IP addresses in passive DNS and domains within the same cloudflare account used for serving online gambling to Indonesian-speaking users. Collectively, RATO and its customers operate a large number of domains. Here are some examples:

asakusubinitohas[.]com
bmw320ikaka[.]co
cpusx[.]com
newoneazu[.]com
ratmail[.]pro
rato[.]page
rato[.]to
ratodemo[.]pro
sesrecipt[.]com
silk-gen[.]com
sunostart[.]com
viewyourstatementonline[.]com

#dns #threatintel #threatintelligence #cybercrime #cybersecurity #infosec #infoblox #infobloxthreatintel #scam #phishing #malware #maas #telegram #indonesia #screenconnect #latrodectus #rat #rmm #remotemonitoringmanagement #downloader #spam #rato