LTS Secure Warning: Virobot Ransomware Adds PC to Spam Botnet

Researchers discovered new Virobot Ransomware that distributed along with botnet futures mainly focusing on victims based on the United States. Attackers using spam email botnet to delivery the ransomware into more number of victims and this ransomware doesn’t have a previous Ransomware family.

Technical Details

Ransomware activity in the first half of 2018 proved this to be true, with more innovative methods to raise the ante. Case in point: we have recently observed Viro botnet (detected by Trend Micro as RANSOM_VIBOROT.THIAHAH), with both ransomware and botnet capabilities, affecting users in the United States. Once Viro botnet infects a machine, it also becomes part of a spam email botnet that distributes the ransomware to more victims. Viro botnet is not associated with any known ransomware families.

Impact

Virobot Ransomware Infection Process

Once targeted victims got infected with Virobot Ransomware, it ensures the victim’s machine whether was encrypted before or not by check GUID and product key’s registry key.It using cryptographic Random Number Generator to generates an encryption and decryption key.

Later it shares the gathered victim’s data and sends it to the attackers via the command & control server using the generated key.

Once the ransomware received the required command from the attacker then it starts the encryption process and completely encrypts the disk files using RSA encryption algorithm.

After completing the encryption process, Virobot Ransomware displays the ransom notes which is written in the French language despite the victim’s Geo-location.

Botnet & Keylogging Future

Apart from the ransomware infection Virobot also having keylogging future that connects back to its C&C server and sends the stolen keylogged information to the attacker.

Recommended Actions

Virobot’s botnet capability is evidenced by its use of an infected machine’s Microsoft Outlook to send spam emails to the user’s contact list. Virobot will send a copy of itself or a malicious file downloaded from its C&C server.

During the Analysis of this ransomware, Virobot doesn’t encrypt any files since the Command & control server temporarily taken down, researchers said.

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