Punkey: New POS malware

The Dell Sonicwall Threats Research team observed reports of a POS bot family named GAV: POS.Punkey.A actively spreading in the wild. Punkey.A malware typically has the capability such as scraping memory to retrieve Credit Card Data during its scan.

Infection Cycle:

The Trojan injects into C:Windowsexplorer.exe and the injector is copied from its drop location to:

The Trojan adds the following key to the Windows registry to ensure persistence upon reboot:

Punkey has versions for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows-based PoS terminals and in addition to stealing payment card data while it’s being processed, it also installs a keylogger to capture what employees type on such systems.

Command and Control (C&C) Traffic

Punkey performs C&C communication over port 80. First, two POST requests are sent to the C&C server.

Using the User-Agent: Example, a GET request is sent to the C&C server:

Now, DLLx64.dll is loaded into memory and any WH_KEYSTROKE message will be intercepted and sent back to this thread. The Keylogger sends the following request:

SonicWALL Gateway AntiVirus provides protection against this threat via the following signature:

• GAV:POS.Punkey.A
• GAV:POS.Punkey.A_2
• GAV:KeyLogger.O_2

Security News

The SonicWall Capture Labs Threat Research Team gathers, analyzes and vets cross-vector threat information from the SonicWall Capture Threat network, consisting of global devices and resources, including more than 1 million security sensors in nearly 200 countries and territories. The research team identifies, analyzes, and mitigates critical vulnerabilities and malware daily through in-depth research, which drives protection for all SonicWall customers. In addition to safeguarding networks globally, the research team supports the larger threat intelligence community by releasing weekly deep technical analyses of the most critical threats to small businesses, providing critical knowledge that defenders need to protect their networks.