Insights blog.

Dridex is a banking trojan that uses an affiliate system for its botnets. We have documented the Dridex communication and P2P protocols in the past. In this post we want to shed some light about all the known botnets, their respective geographic targets, and how they are organized.

In this article, we will be detailing an issue we discovered affecting a number of low-cost devices. It allowed for adversaries to remotely execute commands on the devices as a privileged user if they were in a position to conduct a Man-in-the-Middle attack. The binary responsible appears to be an insecure implementation of an OTA (Over-the-air) mechanism for device updates associated to the software company, Ragentek Group, in China. All transactions from the binary to the third-party endpoint occur over an unencrypted channel, which not only exposes user-specific information during these communications, but would allow an adversary to issue commands supported by the protocol. One of these commands allows for the execution of system commands. This issue affected devices out of the box.

Bolek is a recent malware from the Kbot/Carberp family. We first heard about this malware from the cert.pl blog post in May 2016, and since then, a few others have published additional information about it (links below).

From time to time we have the opportunity to sinkhole domains that have an high volume of traffic and are part of a mobile device botnet. In the beginning of July we registered a domain that we found to be part of the AndroidBauts family with over 550,000 devices for a 24h period, affecting mostly India and Indonesia from a total of 216 countries. The piece of software that triggers this traffic was present in four (already removed) Google Play Store applications.

In June 2016, we observed an all time high of number of infections worldwide, breaking the previous record and raising the number of unique active observed IPs to 20,579,894 measured over a 7 day time window.

Anubis Networks began monitoring Necurs, a malware family known for it's rootkit capabilities, in August 2015. Since then we have been able to observe approximately 50.000 unique IP addresses connecting to our sinkhole over a 24 hour time period. However, we recently discovered that we were only seeing a small part of the whole botnet.

GhostPush is an Android malware that was first discovered in September 2015. Once installed on a user’s device, it will display unsolicited advertising, and install unwanted applications on the user’s device. This malware is also known for rooting the user’s device and making itself very hard to uninstall.

Ransomware is a cash-in machine for criminals and we have just spotted another one come alive this week. Since 16th February, AnubisNetworks Labs team is tracking Locky, a malware that given the high volume of its distribution campaigns will rival with the big ones such as CryptoWall.