Thursday, April 24, 2025
HomeMalwareHackers Spreading Zeus Sphinx Malware to Hijack Windows Process Using Malformed...

Hackers Spreading Zeus Sphinx Malware to Hijack Windows Process Using Malformed MS Word Documents

Published on

SIEM as a Service

Follow Us on Google News

Researchers uncovered a new malspam campaign through which cyber criminals launching Zeus Sphinx Malware via Coronavirus Lure Malformed MS documents.

Since the novel Coronavirus pandemic rapidly spreading country to country, threat actors taking advantage of the trending news to tempting victims and attack their systems with the large scale of malspam campaign.

Researchers from IBM X-FORCE observed the Zeus Sphinx Malware activities in 2019, since then the activities of this campaign rapidly increased and they are mainly targeting the government relief payments and also continue to focus bank sectors in US, Canada, and Australia.

- Advertisement - Google News

Maldoc Spam Delivery

Cybercriminals taking advantage of trending COVID-19 theme to distributing the Malformed MS word document through phishing, spam campaign.

Spam email urge victims to open the attachment and fill the document to receive the compensation from the Government, and they are distributing a variety of documents and the majority of documents with .doc or .docx files

Later the document request victims to enable executing a macro to trigger the infection chain and ended up hijacking the windows process to fetch the malware downloader.

The malware downloader then communication with the command and control server to fetch the new Zeus Sphinx malware payload.

New Zeus Sphinx variant starts off with the weaponized document that creates a malicious folder under %SYSTEMDRIVE% and writes a batch file into it.

According to the IBM report ” Once on the device, Sphinx establishes persistence via commonly used methods to maintain its grasp on the end user’s machine. In this case, it writes numerous folders and files to disk and adds some Registry keys in order to hide and manage its configuration files over time. “

Sphinx also capable of collecting the online account credentials from banks and a wide range of other websites using a web injection technique that has inherited from its Zeus v2 codebase.

Indicators of Compromise (IoCs)

Maldoc

DFF2E1A0B80C26D413E9D4F96031019CE4567607E0231A80D0EE0EB1FCF429FE

Samples

VBS sample: 2FC871107D46FA5AA8095B78D5ABAB78

Sphinx samples:

C8DFF758FEB96878F578ADF66B654CD7
70E58943AC83F5D6467E5E173EC66B28
7CA44F6F8030DF33ADA36EB35649BE71
8A96E96113FB9DC47C286263289BD667
C6D279AC30D0A60D22C4981037580939

Also Read:

Chinese APT Hackers Exploit MS Word Bug to Drop Malware Via Weaponized Coronavirus Lure Documents

Hackers Attack Windows Users with Info-Stealer Malware via Weaponized MS Word Documents

Major Vulnerabilities in Top Free Android VPN Apps Let Hackers Stealing Passwords, Photos, Messages From 120 Million Users

Balaji
Balaji
BALAJI is an Ex-Security Researcher (Threat Research Labs) at Comodo Cybersecurity. Editor-in-Chief & Co-Founder - Cyber Security News & GBHackers On Security.

Latest articles

Verizon DBIR Report: Small Businesses Identified as Key Targets in Ransomware Attacks

Verizon Business's 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), released on April 24, 2025, paints...

Lazarus APT Targets Organizations by Exploiting One-Day Vulnerabilities

A recent cyber espionage campaign by the notorious Lazarus Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) group,...

ToyMaker Hackers Compromise Numerous Hosts via SSH and File Transfer Tools

In a alarming cybersecurity breach uncovered by Cisco Talos in 2023, a critical infrastructure...

Threat Actors Exploiting Unsecured Kubernetes Clusters for Crypto Mining

In a startling revelation from Microsoft Threat Intelligence, threat actors are increasingly targeting unsecured...

Resilience at Scale

Why Application Security is Non-Negotiable

The resilience of your digital infrastructure directly impacts your ability to scale. And yet, application security remains a critical weak link for most organizations.

Application Security is no longer just a defensive play—it’s the cornerstone of cyber resilience and sustainable growth. In this webinar, Karthik Krishnamoorthy (CTO of Indusface) and Phani Deepak Akella (VP of Marketing – Indusface), will share how AI-powered application security can help organizations build resilience by

Discussion points


Protecting at internet scale using AI and behavioral-based DDoS & bot mitigation.
Autonomously discovering external assets and remediating vulnerabilities within 72 hours, enabling secure, confident scaling.
Ensuring 100% application availability through platforms architected for failure resilience.
Eliminating silos with real-time correlation between attack surface and active threats for rapid, accurate mitigation

More like this

Hackers Exploit Ivanti Connect Secure 0-Day to Deploy DslogdRAT and Web Shell

Threat actors exploited a zero-day vulnerability in Ivanti Connect Secure, identified as CVE-2025-0282, to...

Google Warns: Threat Actors Growing More Sophisticated, Exploiting Zero-Day Vulnerabilities

Google’s Mandiant team has released its M-Trends 2025 report, highlighting the increasing sophistication of...

New Malware Hijacks Docker Images Using Unique Obfuscation Technique

A recently uncovered malware campaign targeting Docker, one of the most frequently attacked services...