New QBot Banking Trojan Campaign Hijacks Business Emails to Spread Malware

A new QBot malware marketing campaign is leveraging hijacked business enterprise correspondence to trick unsuspecting victims into putting in the malware, new conclusions from Kaspersky expose.

The latest action, which commenced on April 4, 2023, has principally specific consumers in Germany, Argentina, Italy, Algeria, Spain, the U.S., Russia, France, the U.K., and Morocco.

QBot (aka Qakbot or Pinkslipbot) is a banking trojan which is recognised to be lively because at minimum 2007. Apart from stealing passwords and cookies from web browsers, it doubles up as a backdoor to inject future-phase payloads this sort of as Cobalt Strike or ransomware.

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Dispersed through phishing strategies, the malware has witnessed constant updates all through its lifetime that pack in anti-VM, anti-debugging, and anti-sandbox procedures to evade detection. It has also emerged as the most widespread malware for the thirty day period of March 2023, for every Check Stage.

“Early on, it was distributed as a result of infected internet websites and pirated software program,” Kaspersky scientists stated, explaining QBot’s distribution approaches. “Now the banker is sent to prospective victims through malware now residing on their personal computers, social engineering, and spam mailings.”

Email thread hijacking attacks are not new. It takes place when cybercriminals insert on their own into existing enterprise discussions or initiate new discussions centered on info beforehand gleaned by compromised email accounts.

The aim is to entice victims into opening destructive inbound links or malicious attachments, in this scenario, an enclosed PDF file that masquerades as a Microsoft Office 365 or Microsoft Azure notify.

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Opening the doc prospects to the retrieval of an archive file from an infected web-site that, in convert, includes an obfuscated Windows Script File (.WSF). The script, for its component, incorporates a PowerShell script that downloads malicious DLL from a distant server. The downloaded DLL is the QBot malware.

The conclusions come as Elastic Security Labs unearthed a multi-stage social engineering campaign that employs weaponized Microsoft Word documents to distribute Agent Tesla and XWorm by means of a tailor made .NET-based mostly loader.

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