QakBot Malware Resurfaces with New Tactics, Targeting the Hospitality Industry

A new wave of phishing messages distributing the QakBot malware has been noticed, much more than a few months following a legislation enforcement effort saw its infrastructure dismantled by infiltrating its command-and-command (C2) network.

Microsoft, which made the discovery, described it as a low-quantity campaign that began on December 11, 2023, and targeted the hospitality market.

“Targets been given a PDF from a person masquerading as an IRS employee,” the tech huge explained in a sequence of posts shared on X (formerly Twitter).

“The PDF contained a URL that downloads a digitally signed Windows Installer (.msi). Executing the MSI led to Qakbot getting invoked utilizing export ‘hvsi’ execution of an embedded DLL.”

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Microsoft claimed that the payload was produced the exact working day the marketing campaign commenced and that it can be configured with the formerly unseen version 0x500.

QakBot, also identified as QBot and Pinkslipbot, was disrupted as section of a coordinated work identified as Operation Duck Hunt following the authorities managed to attain entry to its infrastructure and instructed the contaminated computer systems to obtain an uninstaller file to render the malware ineffective.

Traditionally distributed through spam email messages that contains destructive attachments or hyperlinks, QakBot is capable of harvesting delicate information as nicely as offering additional malware, which include ransomware.

In Oct 2023, Cisco Talos revealed that QakBot affiliates were being leveraging phishing lures to produce a mix of ransomware, remote access trojans, and stealer malware.

The return of QakBot mirrors that of Emotet, which also resurfaced in late 2021 months immediately after it was dismantled by legislation enforcement and has remained an enduring risk, albeit at a lessen stage.

Even though it remains to be seen if the malware will return to its former glory, the resilience of this kind of botnets underscores the need for organizations to prevent falling sufferer to spam email messages made use of in Emotet and QakBot campaigns.

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Some parts of this article are sourced from:
thehackernews.com