Rubella Macro Builder – A Malware Development Crimeware Kit Selling in Underground Hacking Forum

A Malware development crimeware kit called Rubella Macro Builder activity selling in Russian based underground hacking Forum for $500 per month.

This kit has extremely sophisticated with a lot more capabilities with cheap cost with fast performance and also evade the antivirus detection.

A Malware kit developers also reduce the price since April to $120 USD for a 3-month license and Rubella Macro Builder activities getting various updates, additions, and pricing changes in hacking Forum.

This tool enables to use various social engineering techniques to distribute the malware through office document and enable the macro.

Also, this crimeware kit using various encryption algorithm choices ( XOR and Base64), download methods (PowerShell, Bitsadmin, Microsoft.XMLHTTP, MSXML2.XMLHTTP, custom PowerShell payload), payload execution methods (executable, JavaScript, Visual Basic Script)

Malware Builder Capabilities in Hacking Forum

Office document and Excel-based Email attachment is the main medium of distribution  Rubella-generated malware act as a first-stage loader and it helps to download other malware and install into the target machine.

After the infection, if it doesn’t find any vulnerabilities in the vicitms machine, it relies on social engineering techniques to force victims to enable malicious macro execution to run it.

Also Rubella Macro Builder capable to generate Microsoft Word (.DOC) and Microsoft Excel (.XLS) payloads.

According to flashpoint research, The observed server call request is achieved via the IXMLHTTPRequest method in this specific variant. The macro code contains auto execution when the Word document is opened via an AutoOpen call. Additionally, the code has logic to delete the file if it exists via a Kill call.

Rubella Kit Malware leads to install two banking malware called Panda and Gootkit which has a capacity to perform credential harvesting capabilities, browser infection through webinjects, and remote PC access via a hidden virtual network computing.

Researchers believe that these two banking malware developers gang are customers of the actor offering Rubella on the underground.