Ramnit delivers XMRig Monero Miner

The SonicWall Capture Labs Threat Research Team have come across a variant of the Ramnit trojan dropping a Monero Cryptocurrency miner onto the infected system.   As cryptocurrency prices continue to drop (at the current time of writing), malware authors are still betting on its future success as they steal CPU resources in order to generate long term profits.

Infection Cycle:

The Trojan drops the following files on the infected system:

• explores.exe [Detected as: GAV: XMRig.XMR_3 (Trojan)]
• cresc.log
• can.log
• AutoRunApp.vbs
• <originalfilename>Srv.exe [Detected as: GAV: Ramnit.XMR (Trojan)]

explores.exe and the original Ramnit trojan executable file contain the following metadata:

AutoRunApp.vbs contains the following autorun script:

can.log and cresc.log both contain the following log data.  This file is populated with mining job info and stats when mining is in progress:

explores.exe can be seen using considerable cpu power whilst mining is in progress:

Mining transaction data can be seen between the miner (explores.exe) and the mining pool at mine.ppxxmr.com:

Sonicwall Capture Labs provides protection against this threat via the following signatures:

• GAV: XMRig.XMR_3 (Trojan)
• GAV: CoinMiner.MN_3 (Trojan)
• GAV: CoinMiner.MON (Trojan)
• GAV: Ramnit.Z (Trojan)
• GAV: Ramnit.MN (Trojan)

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.