In mid-March 2021, we observed two new spam campaigns. The messages in both cases were written in English and contained ZIP attachments or links to ZIP files. Further research revealed that both campaigns ultimately aimed to distribute banking Trojans. The payload in most cases was IcedID (Trojan-Banker.Win32.IcedID), but we have also seen a few QBot (Backdoor.Win32.Qbot, also known as QakBot) samples. During campaign spikes we observed increased activity of these Trojans: more than a hundred detections a day.
IcedID is a banking Trojan capable of web injects, VM detection and other malicious actions. It consists of two parts – the downloader and the main body that performs all the malicious activity. The main body is hidden in a PNG image, which is downloaded and decrypted by the downloader.
QBot is also a banking Trojan. It’s a single executable with an embedded DLL (main body) capable of downloading and running additional modules that perform malicious activity: web injects, email collection, password grabbing, etc.
Neither of these malware families are new – we’ve seen them being distributed before via spam campaigns and different downloaders, like the recently taken-down Emotet. However, in the recent campaign we observed several changes to the IcedID Trojan.
Technical details
Initial infection
DotDat
The first campaign we called ‘DotDat’. It distributed ZIP attachments that claimed to be some sort of cancelled operation or compensation claims with the names in the following format [document type (optional)]-[some digits]-[date in MMDDYYYY format]. We assume the dates correspond with the campaign spikes. The ZIP archives contained a malicious MS Excel file with the same name.
The Excel fi ..
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