An Existing Banking Trojan called “QakBot ” attack Windows Active Directory users and leads to locks out the thousands of Active Directory users which caused a big impact for Organizations in terms of access their networked assets.
Windows Active Directory performs a centralized Domain management control to authenticates, authorizes and Policy and Procedure. all users and computers in a Windows domain type network in the organization.
This Trojan caused to the Windows AD which leads users unable to access their endpoints, company servers and networked assets also few other banking malware has account logout capabilities
This “QakBot” locksout will affect Major Windows Active Directory operations including ,authentication and authorization,Certificate Services, Federated Services, and Rights Management Services.
According to IBM X-Force Research,”QakBot is financial malware known to target businesses to drain their online banking accounts. The malware features worm capabilities to self-replicate through shared drives and removable media. It uses powerful information-stealing features to spy on users’ banking activity and eventually defraud them of large sums of money.”
QakBot’s Backdoor Capability
Microsoft found that, QakBot also having Capability of Creating backdoor and steal the information of users such as such as your bank details, and your email user names and passwords.
Also having some capabilities such as attacks SOCKS proxy, extensive anti-research capabilities and the ability to subvert antivirus (AV) tools.
Infecting medium of Qakbot are, network and removable drives, and USB flash drivers.
IBM security intelligence stats that, this is the first time we are seeing Qakbot infected with Windows Active Directory lockouts.
QakBot Trojan infect AD Through Dropper
Dropper purpose is to deliver an enclosed payload onto a destination host computer.once Dropper executed, its simply leads to execute in the memory then extract the malware payload and write it to the file system.
Most Dropper used with the Trojan to delay the time for exicution the used evande technique to avoid Detection.
AD Accounts locksout (Image source :securityintelligence )
Once it Reached to the end points then the dropper opens an explorer.exe instance and injects the QakBot Dynamic Link Libraries (DLL) into that process.
User Credentials Guessing
A remote command from its C&C server help to spread through the affected network and lauch a command “13” called “nbscan”
IBM X force Explined,”To access and infect other machines in the network, the malware uses the credentials of the affected user and a combination of the same user’s login and domain credentials, if they can be obtained from the domain controller (DC)”
“QakBot may collect the username of the infected machine and use it to attempt to log in to other machines in the domain. If the malware fails to enumerate usernames from the domain controller and the target machine, the malware will use a list of hardcoded usernames instead.”
You can find Full Technical Analysis about QakBot in IBM-Xforce
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