HIDDEN COBRA – North Korea’s DDoS Botnet Infrastructure
2017-06-13 • USCISA •
DHS and FBI attribute HIDDEN COBRA activity to North Korean government cyber actors targeting media, aerospace, financial, and critical infrastructure sectors in the United States and globally. The alert focuses on DeltaCharlie, a DDoS botnet tool used to manage infected systems and launch DNS, NTP, and carrier-grade NAT attacks. DeltaCharlie runs as a svchost-based service and can download executables, change configuration, update binaries, terminate processes, and start or stop denial-of-service activity. The report provides IP indicators, hashes, network signatures, host-based rules, and YARA content, while noting HIDDEN COBRA use of older Microsoft systems and vulnerabilities in Hangul Word Processor, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Silverlight. Its defensive value is the combination of actor-level warning, botnet infrastructure indicators, and concrete detection artifacts for network and host review.
Indicators of Compromise
| Type | Value | First Seen | Last Seen |
|---|---|---|---|
| IPv4 | 21.0.0.197 | 2017-06-13 | 2017-06-13 |
| IPv4 | 21.0.0.226 | 2016-06-01 | 2017-06-13 |