The malware responsible for attacks on at least 30 local governments, universities, and businesses in the Netherlands, Dorifel (XDocCrypt), is still actively spreading and causing new infections, despite a wide net of detection within the anti-Virus market.
Dorifel is interesting, as it has many capabilities including Web injection, logging financial information, and file encryption. It’s not ransomware, but the files are encrypted simply because it’s possible it seems. Word of the malware family started to spread last week, and by the weekend, most AV circles were discussing it. Unfortunately, the hype surrounding it has caused some enterprising scammers to use it for their own gain.
“Martijn Grooten, of Virus Bulletin, tells me that it has attracted the attention of telephone support scammers, who are using it to convince potential victims in the Netherlands that they need to let the scammer ‘clean’ or ‘protect’ their systems. For a price, as always…There’s no indication that these scammers have any connection at all with the gang behind [Dorifel],” commented ESET’s David Harley.
According to Kaspersky Lab, more than 3,000 systems were hit last week, 90% of them in the Netherlands.
“We have seen government departments and hospitals being victims. The other countries with a large amount of infections were detected in Denmark, the Philippines, Germany, the United States and Spain,” noted Kaspersky Labs’ David Jacoby.
“The malware is initially distributed via email to victims. [It] then downloads another malware, which encrypts documents and executes them on the infected computer. Dorifel also attempts to encrypt files found on network shares.”
Investigating further, Jacoby discovered log files with financial records taken from compromised hosts (credit card details, CVV, name, etc.), as well as a collection of Java exploits, Rogue-AV agents, additional malware, infection stats (which is how the security world knows Dorifel is still active), and WebInjects used for Phishing sites.
“As mentioned before, we did find some interesting financial information, which could be an indication that this malware scam is related to for example ZeuS / Citadel, but since we have not yet identified any malware related to ZeuS/Citadel we cannot confirm it. All we can confirm is that the same server does store stolen financial information. We are still investigating this,” Jacoby wrote.
For now, the malware remains active, and because it spreads via targeted email and can attach itself to common document formats (*.doc, *.docx, *.xls, *.xlsx, etc.), and targets mapped network drives and removable storage, it’s spreading rather quickly.
Additional information can be found on Fox-IT’s blog, the company is credited for the initial discovery and research on Dorifel.
McAfee has additional information as well, though they call the malware XDocCrypt.
