Microsoft: Dexphot Malware infects more as 80.000 Systems

[German]Security researchers from Microsoft have found that more than 80,000 computers have been infected by a malware called Dexphot. The malware is currently being used for crypto mining.


Advertising

It has been running since 2018, with a peak of 80,000 infections in June. I came across the information about the following tweet.

First noticed in October 2018

Microsoft has published the details in this blog post. The malware was noticed in October 2018 when Microsoft's polymorphic outbreak monitoring system recorded a large increase in reports. This suggests that a large-scale malware campaign was developing.

Microsoft's security team then watched the new malware attempt to infiltrate files that changed every 20-30 minutes on thousands of devices. The malware was then named "Dexphot" by Microsoft. 

Tricky infection methods

The Dexphot attack used a variety of sophisticated methods to bypass security solutions. There are different levels of code obfuscation, encryption, and the use of random filenames to hide the installation process.


Advertising

Dexphot uses file-less techniques to execute malicious code in memory, leaving only a few traces that can be used for forensics. The malicious code has hijacked legitimate system processes to camouflage malicious activity. If Dexphot is not stopped during the infection phase, a crypto-miner will eventually run on the device. Monitoring services set up by the malware and scheduled tasks trigger a re-infection as soon as an attempt is made to remove the malware.

Microsoft Defender ATP blocks Dexphot 

In most cases, Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection detection modules blocked Dexphot before execution. If that failed, behavior-based machine learning models provided protection. Given the persistence mechanisms of the threat, the polymorphism, and the use of file-less techniques, behavioral detection, according to Microsoft, was an important part of the comprehensive protection against this malware and other threats that exhibit similar malicious behavior.

According to this Microsoft page, Windows Defender under Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 also detects this malware as Trojan:Win32/Dexphot. Due to the detection capabilities, the infection rate is now greatly reduced. Details can be found in this Microsoft article.


Cookies helps to fund this blog: Cookie settings
Advertising


##1

This entry was posted in Security, Windows and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *