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IOCs

Qbot is a banking Trojan — a malware designed to collect banking information from victims. Qbot targets organizations mostly in the US. It is equipped with various sophisticated evasion and info-stealing functions and worm-like functionality, and a strong persistence mechanism.

Trojan
Type
Unknown
Origin
1 January, 2009
First seen
1 December, 2023
Last seen
Also known as
Pinkslipbot
QakBot
Quakbot

How to analyze Qbot with ANY.RUN

Type
Unknown
Origin
1 January, 2009
First seen
1 December, 2023
Last seen

IOCs

IP addresses
50.247.230.33
75.81.25.223
173.79.220.156
47.153.115.154
71.77.231.251
69.92.54.95
100.38.123.22
76.170.77.99
72.29.181.77
47.146.169.85
207.162.184.228
96.37.137.42
216.163.4.91
68.174.15.223
66.26.160.37
75.183.171.155
76.187.8.160
70.174.3.241
173.22.120.11
184.180.157.203
Hashes
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86e602489e6d57d8d8d5473d53e69bbceb2ea75153b3ac00e2966037bd947220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What is Qbot?

Qbot, also known as QakBot, Pinkslipbot, and Quakbot, is a banking trojan — malware designed to steal banking credentials, online banking session information, personal details of the victim, or any other banking data.

Although early versions of Qbot were spotted all the way back in 2009, its creators have maintained this trojan. Today, it continues to be active and features worm-like abilities to spread over networks, supports advanced web-injections techniques, and has a persistence mechanism that some researchers believe to be one of the best in its class. Additionally, the trojan has anti-VM, anti-debug and anti-sandbox functionally that makes research and analysis quite difficult.

Furthermore, Qbot is polymorphic, which means that it can change itself even after it is installed on an endpoint. The Trojan constantly modifies files, and the dropper that the newer version of Qbot continuously cycles through command and control servers.

The combination of these functions makes QakBot highly dangerous malware. Qbot has been used in several successful attacks on organizations and governmental structures and has infected tens of thousands of machines.

General description of QakBot malware

Qbot is dispatched in targeted attacks against businesses. With this trojan, the attackers go after bank accounts of organizations or private users who access their personal online banking cabinets from corporate networks by piggybacking into banking sessions of the victim.

The Trojan uses man-in-the-browser functionality to perform web injections, allowing it to alter what the victims see on the banking website when browsing from an infected machine. Interestingly, while most malware samples that use this technique contain the web injection code in their config file, Qbot can fetch the code from a controlled domain as it performs malicious activity.

Another trait that differentiates Qbot from other Trojans is its worm-like functionality. Qbot can copy itself using shared drives and spread over the network, spreading on its own or after receiving a command from the command and control server. Together with a highly developed persistence mechanism that uses registry runkeys and scheduled tasks, these traits make erasing Qbot from the infected network very difficult. The Trojan is designed to sustain itself despite system reboots and automatically launch itself when the system is turned on again.

This infamous persistence functionality has allegedly caused compromise of sensitive information in two government organizations in Massachusetts in 2011, while worm-like behavior helped the Qbot infiltrate thousands of machines and create a botnet with over 1,500 devices resulting from that attack.

Most of the targets that Qbot goes after are US-based organizations. Only about twenty percent of the new attack businesses are located outside of the United States. Although apart from the government offices, most of the attacks have been directed at banking, tech, and healthcare industries, there is no hard evidence to suggest that the attackers are aiming at specific fields. This means that businesses working in any industry can get hit by QakBot.

It is also important to note that an advanced cybergang operates the malware. Qbot attacks have been appearing on the radar of security researchers periodically, with phases of high activity and intervals when attacks would completely stop. This behavior is likely to avoid attracting too much attention from law enforcement and allows attackers to tweak and improve the malware during their time off.

The group behind Qbot is also notoriously known for pushing out new modified malware samples at astonishing rates. They repack and re-scramble the code daily, making malware identification by means of anti-virus software unreliable.

Unfortunately, people's identities behind Qbot are unknown, but it is widely believed that the cyber gang is based somewhere in Eastern Europe.

Qbot malware analysis

This video recorded in the ANY.RUN interactive malware hunting service shows the execution process of Qbot. You can also research other malware like Netwire and Predator the Thief.

qbot_process_graph

Figure 1: Displays the tree of processes created by the ANY.RUN interactive malware hunting service

QakBot execution process

Since Qbot is mostly targeted at the corporate sector, the main way of its penetration into infected systems is through a malicious document. In our example, maldoc starts several processes, including Powershell through by using a macro. Then, using cmd.exe, this trojan starts a chain of commands and executions, creating folders and temporary files. It utilizes Powershell to download the payload. Notably, the payload's name is as simple as six of the same digits or, less often, letters. Also, the payload often has a .png extension, although it is an executable file.

After that trojan starts its main execution, QakBot tries to evade detection by overwriting itself with the legitimate Windows executable calc.exe using the following commands: cmd.exe /c ping.exe -n 6 127.0.0.1 & type "C:\Windows\System32\calc.exe" > “Path to malware executable.” Qbot also injects explorer.exe and adds itself into autorun for persistence.

Qbot distribution

Qbot uses multiple attack vectors to infect victims. The malware uses email spam and phishing campaigns, as well as vulnerability exploits to infiltrate its targets. One of the more recent versions of the malware was observed being distributed by a dropper.

The dropper that installs Qbot is equipped with a delayed execution function. This means that after the dropper itself is downloaded onto a target machine, it waits around fifteen minutes before dropping the payload, likely in an effort to trick automatic sandboxes and avoid detection.

How to detect Qbot using ANY.RUN?

Sometimes Qbot trojan creates files that allow analysts to detect it with a high degree of certainty. To detect Qbot, open the "Files" tab in the lower part of the task's window and take a look at the created folders. If you see folders with names such as "Zulycjadyc" and "imtaykad" within C:\Users\admin\AppData\ Roaming\Microsoft\ directory and .exe or .dat file with a name "ytfovlym," as shown on the figure below, be sure that it is Qbot in front of you.

how_to_detect_qbot

Figure 2: Detecting Qbot by local files

Conclusion

Security researchers successfully reversed a sample of QakBot in a 2020 investigation. Since the researchers managed to pinpoint a command and control server, they could identify the true scale of the attack. What they uncovered was an active Qbot botnet consisting of over 2,000 computers.

If there was any doubt that Qbot is a severe threat, hopefully, this should clear it. Advanced web injections, sophisticated anti-evasion techniques, worm-like functions, and an experienced cyber gang that constantly updates the malware is a dangerous cocktail.

As security researchers, it is essential to analyze malware like Qbot since code obfuscation makes research complicated. Every investigation has the potential to uncover important data that will help businesses avoid attacks or identify and eradicate this Trojan quicker. At the same time, Qbot avoids dynamic analysis with some automatic sandboxes with the delayed execution of its dropper and other tricks, interactive sandboxes like the one presented by the ANY.RUN malware hunting services are not so easily fooled.

ANY.RUN presents a good opportunity to perform dynamic analysis on this malware from a secure online environment and share your findings with fellow researchers in our public malware database.

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