Skypemageddon by bitcoining

As Bitcoin prices go sky-high, scammers turn to malware to cash in, writes Kaspersky Lab Expert DMITRY BESTUZHEV.

Is it a Skype day? Or maybe a Bitcoin one? Or maybe just both-

I say this because right after I published my previous post about malware ongoing campaign on Skype, a mate from Venezuela sent me a screenshot of her Skype client with a similar campaign in terms of propagation but different in terms of origins and purposes. Here is the original screenshot:

(Translation from Spanish: ?this is my favorite picture of you?)

This campaign is born right today and is ongoing too:

An average clicking is also pretty high with more than 2k clicks per hour. Most of potential victims live in Italy then Russia, Poland, Costa Rica, Spain, Germany, Ukraine and others.

The initial dropper is downloaded from a server located in India. The detection rate on VirusTotal is low. Once the machine is infected it drops to the system many other pieces of malware. Downloads come from the Hotfile.com service. At the same time the malware connects to its C2 server located in Germany.

The IP address of C2 is 213.165.68.138:9000

So what does malware do? To be honest many things but one of the most interesting is it turns the infected machine to a slave of the bitcoin generator. The usage of CPU grows up significantly. Here is an example:

The mentioned process runs with the command ?bitcoin-miner.exe -a 60 -l no -o http://suppp.cantvenlinea.biz:1942/ -u XXXXXX0000001@gmail.com -p XXXXXXXX? (sensitive data was replaced by XXXXXX) It abuses the CPU of infected machine to mine Bitcoins for the criminal.

As I said the campaign is quite active. If you see your machine is working hard, using all available CPU resources, you may be infected.

The initial dropper is detected by Kaspersky as Trojan.Win32.Jorik.IRCbot.xkt.

* Article courtesy of www.securelist.com. Follow Dmitry Bestuzhev on Twitter: @dimitribest