Raspberry Robin – A a Windows Malware Spreads Using External USB Drives

The security analysts at Red Canary have uncovered recently a brand-new malware that can spread through external USB drives using worm-like capabilities.

In September 2021, malware called Raspberry Robin was first observed associated with a cluster of malicious activity known as ‘Raspberry Robin’. Despite this, the majority of related activities took place during or after January 2022.

The security team of Red Canary found this worm on the networks of several customers, from the technology and manufacturing industries, among others.

As soon as a new USB drive containing a malicious .LNK file is plugged into a Windows computer, Raspberry Robin spreads to the new system. Upon spawning, the worm launches a malignant program that executes a script called cmd.exe on all infected drives in order to spread the infection.

Legit Windows Tools were Abused

To reach its C2 servers, it uses Microsoft Standard Installer (msiexec.exe). They are presumably hosted on compromised QNAP devices, which use TOR exit nodes for C2 communication.

Despite this, it is not clear yet how the malware establishes persistence or what methods it uses, but it is suspected that a DLL file is installed on compromised machines to resist removal.

Using two other legitimate Windows utilities, Raspberry Robin launches this DLL, and here they are:-

• fodhelper: A trusted binary for managing features in Windows settings.
• odbcconf: A tool for configuring ODBC drivers.

Below we have attempted to provide a comprehensive analysis of known raspberry robin behavior, which is accompanied by a checklist of potential detection opportunities.

Even though Red Canary analysts examined closely what the newly discovered malware does on infected systems, but, there are several questions still remaining.

The Raspberry Robin operators’ goal remains an unanswered question since there is no information about end-stage malicious tasks.

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