Retadupmalware

Retadup virus

Retadup is a Trojan that targets the Windows platform. It is reported that this malware is used for targeted attacks and some variants of the malware come with Keylogger, screen capture, and password-stealing capabilities. The malware is used to mine cryptocurrency on the infected system. It communicates with its remote control server and accepts commands to execute on the infected system. In August 2019, 850,000 infected hosts were cleaned remotely in an operation of the French police. The notorious Retadup malware infects computers and starts mining cryptocurrency by sapping power from a computer’s processor. Although the malware was used to generate money, the malware operators easily could have run other malicious code, like spyware or ransomware. The malware also has wormable properties, allowing it to spread from computer to computer. Since its first appearance, the cryptocurrency mining malware has spread across the world, including the U.S., Russia, and Central and South America.

The Retadup malware, the target of the operation, has spread around the world but was particularly active in South America. It infects computers and uses their processing power to mine for cryptocurrency without the knowledge of the device’s owner. This malware was particularly concerning because it is “wormable,” meaning it can propagate from one computer to another. The police were able to hijack the malware after the Avast security firm discovered a flaw in its command and control (C&C) server. Although Avast is headquartered in the Czech Republic, it contacted the French police as most of the servers hosting the malware were located in France. Avast described the process of identifying the flaw, passing this information to the police, and instructing the police on how to repurpose the botnet to turn the C&C server into a disinfection server in a blog post. By taking over the C&C server and using it to distribute a malware removal script, the police could remove the malware from users’ computers automatically, with no user action required.

Retadup is a malicious worm affecting Windows machines throughout Latin America. Its objective is to achieve persistence on its victims’ computers, to spread itself far and wide and to install additional malware payloads on infected machines. In the vast majority of cases, the installed payload is a piece of malware mining cryptocurrency on the malware authors’ behalf. However, in some cases, we have also observed Retadup distributing the Stop ransomware and the Arkei password stealer.

The security firm got involved after it discovered a design flaw in the malware’s command and control server. That flaw, if properly exploited, would have “allowed us to remove the malware from its victims’ computers” without pushing any code to victims’ computers, the researchers said. The exploit would have dismantled the operation, but the researchers lacked the legal authority to push ahead. Because most of the malware’s infrastructure was located in France, Avast contacted the French police. After receiving the go-ahead from prosecutors in July, the police went ahead with the operation to take control of the server and disinfect affected computers. The French police called the botnet “one of the largest networks” of hijacked computers in the world.

The operation worked by secretly obtaining a snapshot of the malware’s command and control server with cooperation from its web host. The researchers said they had to work carefully as to not be noticed by the malware operators, fearing the malware operators could retaliate.“The malware authors were mostly distributing cryptocurrency miners, making for a very good passive income,” the security company said. “But if they realized that we were about to take down Retadup in its entirety, they might’ve pushed ransomware to hundreds of thousands of computers while trying to milk their malware for some last profits.”With a copy of the malicious command and control server in hand, the researchers built their own replica, which disinfected victim computers instead of causing infections.

“The police replaced the malicious [command and control] server with a prepared disinfection server that made connected instances of Retadup self-destruct,” said Avast in a blog post. “In the very first second of its activity, several thousand bots connected to it in order to fetch commands from the server. The disinfection server responded to them and disinfected them, abusing the protocol design flaw.”In doing so, the company was able to stop the malware from operating and remove the malicious code to over 850,000 infected computers. Jean-Dominique Nollet, head of the French police’s cyber unit, said the malware operators generated several million euros worth of cryptocurrency. Remotely shutting down a malware botnet is a rare achievement — but difficult to carry out.

Version of Retadup

Several years ago the U.S. government revoked Rule 41, which now allows judges to issue search and seizure warrants outside of their jurisdiction. Many saw the move as an effort by the FBI to conduct remote hacking operations without being hindered by the locality of a judge’s jurisdiction. Critics argued it would set a dangerous precedent to hack into the countless numbers of computers on a single warrant from a friendly judge. Since then the amended rule has been used to dismantle at least one major malware operation, the so-called Joanap botnet, linked to hackers working for the North Korean regime.

Further analyzing and correlating them based on their C&C protocol and our own RETADUP detections. These indicate that, at least for now, RETADUP’s operators — despite their history in deploying their malware in targeted attacks — are focusing on cybercriminal cryptocurrency mining.

WORM_RETADUP.A WORM_RETADUP.D WORM_RETADUP.G
Scripting Language AutoIt AutoIt AutoHotKey, with some components in AutoIt
Propagation Worm spawns LNK files, propagates in removable drives Worm spawns LNK files, propagates in removable drives Worm spawns LNK files, propagates in removable drives
Main Payloads Information stealer Cryptocurrency-mining bot Cryptocurrency-mining bot
Related Tools Android backdoor Browsing history viewer
Campaign Cyberespionage Cybercrime Cybercrime

Figure 1. Comparison of RETADUP’s versions

Shifting to AutoHotKey

RETADUP’s AutoHotKey version bears considerable resemblance to its AutoIt variant in terms of the endgame (cryptocurrency mining) and the baselines it uses — the techniques it employs to propagate, evade detection, and install the malicious Monero miner. Apart from the apparent convenience of abusing open-source software, the shift to using AutoHotKey is most likely because of its novelty as a scripting language. This entails the lack of known or prevalent tools that can actively detect and analyze malware written in AutoHotKey.

This is exacerbated by the polymorphism (replicating slightly different versions of itself to avoid one-to-one detection) we observed in RETADUP’s AutoHotKey version. The AutoIt-based variants don’t have this feature as they used AutoIt 3-compiled scripts (.a3x), so they’re compressed and encrypted.

Alternatively, AutoHotKey is dropped and installed if the system didn’t originally have one. It still uses a link/shortcut file (LNK) as its primary launcher, but it now also creates a scheduled task for persistence and privilege escalation.



Figure 3. Components of RETADUP’s AutoHotKey version

The command it executes to create a scheduled task is:
schtasks /create /sc minute /mo 1 /tn bqspogcjposfemiigrgmk /tr
“C:\bqspogcjposfemiigrgmk\bqspogcjposfemiigrgmk.exe C:\BQSPOG~1\BQSPOG~1.TXT”



Figure 4. Scheduled task created by RETADUP

The malicious AutoHotKey script is not compiled, so its authors used some form of obfuscation and polymorphism to help evade detection. The main form of obfuscation employed involves converting string constants (raw values) into hex bytes. During propagation, the malware will append and prepend a line of commented-out alpha string to dropped copies of the script. It also changes every function’s name so each copy of the malware has a different hash.

The Retadup bots sent quite a lot of information about the infected machines to the C&C server. Since we had limited access to a snapshot of the server, we were able to obtain some aggregated information about Retadup’s victims. The most interesting piece of information for us was the exact amount of infections and their geographical distribution. To date, we have neutralized over 850,000 unique infections of Retadup, with the vast majority located in Latin America. Since the malware authors mined cryptocurrency on the victims’ computers, they were naturally interested in the computing power of infected machines. We were able to determine that the most infected computers had either two or four cores (the average number of infected computer cores was 2.94) and that the majority of victims used Windows 7. Over 85% of Retadup’s victims also had no third-party antivirus software installed. Some also had it disabled, which left them completely vulnerable to the worm and allowed them to unwittingly spread the infection further. Because we are usually only able to protect Avast users, it was very exciting for us to also help protect the rest of the world from malware on such a massive scale.

 

Retadup virus removal guide

What is Retadup?

Retadup is the name of a worm, a malicious program that is capable of reproducing itself in order to infect as many computers as possible. Research shows that in most cases Retadup installs cryptocurrency mining software, however, it is possible that it might be used to infect computers with Stop ransomware and/or Arkei password stealing software. Either way, this worm must be removed from the systems as soon as possible.

One of the possible scenarios is that once Retadup is installed on a computer, it will install a cryptocurrency mining program that mines Monero and will spread that software further. The software of this type mines cryptocurrency by solving mathematical tasks. To achieve it, mining software uses computer hardware (such as CPU and GPU) and Internet connection. The more powerful computer hardware is, the more efficiently it can be

used to mine cryptocurrency. However, the mining process usually causes high CPU or/and GPU usage, which means computers that are infected with crypto mining software may run slower or not respond at all. Operating systems/computers might start crashing or shutting down, which could lead to data loss (loss of unsaved information and similar problems). Either way, mining processes cause higher usage of electricity too, users of infected computers are very likely to get higher electricity bills. To sum up, cybercriminals attempt to infect computers with programs of this type to generate revenue on other people’s behalf (using resources of their computer hardware). Furthermore, in some cases, a Retadup worm is used to spread Stop ransomware, malicious software that is designed to encrypt data stored on the victim’s computer. Typically, ransomware developers use programs of this type to extract money from people by forcing them to purchase a decryption tool or/and key that only they have.

Threat Summary

The biggest problem is that files get encrypted with strong cryptographic algorithms and it is impossible to decrypt without the right tools. Typically, the only way to avoid data and financial loss caused by ransomware are to restore files from a backup and not all people have their data backed up. Additionally, Retadup can be used to spread the aforementioned Arkei password stealer as well. Cybercriminals could use this software to steal logins and passwords of banking, email and other personal accounts. Typically, cybercriminals use stolen passwords to hack accounts that could be used to generate revenue in one or another way. Stolen accounts could be used to send fraudulent emails (to extract money from people in the victim’s contact list), make fraudulent transactions and so on.

As a rule, people who have their computers infected with malicious programs like Arkei experience financial loss, privacy issues and other serious problems like identity theft. It is known that Retadup is designed to bypass detection, which means it can infect systems and spread malware without being detected by the installed antivirus program. These are the main malware payloads and reasons why Retadup should be uninstalled from the system immediately.

Threat Summary:
Name Retadup malware
Threat Type Worm
Detection Names Avast (AutoIt:WorMiner-A [Trj]), BitDefender (Generic.Trojan.WorMiner.1.79DDE1D7), ESET-NOD32 (Win32/AutoHK.NAP), Kaspersky (HEUR:Trojan.Win32.Generic), Full List (VirusTotal)
Payload Cryptocurrency mining software, Arkei password stealer, Stop ransomware
Symptoms This worm is designed to stealthily infiltrate the victim’s computer and remain silent thus no particular symptoms are clearly visible on an infected machine. However, a computer might run slower, the operating system might start crashing
Distribution methods Infected email attachments, malicious online advertisements, social engineering, software cracks.
Damage Stolen banking information, passwords, identity theft, computer hardware used to mine cryptocurrency, hardware overheat, data and financial loss
Removal To eliminate Retadup malware our malware researchers recommend scanning your computer with Spyhunter.

Programs like Retadup usually are designed to help people who spread them to generate revenue in various illegal ways. Worm-type malicious programs can be really dangerous because they replicate themselves in order to spread on other computers. Besides, this particular worm is designed to install additional malware payloads on already infected computers, which makes it even more harmful.

How did Retadup infiltrate my computer?

It is very likely that cybercriminals spread this worm in one of these ways: spam campaigns, trojans, untrustworthy software download channels (sources), unofficial software activation (‘cracking’) tools or fake software updating tools. Spam campaigns are used to spread malicious programs by sending people emails that contain attachments. The main purpose of these emails is to trick people who receive them into opening the attached file. If opened, these files cause download and installation of some malicious software, in this case – Retadup. Trojans are malicious programs that spread other programs of this kind. However, it happens only when a computer is already infected with a trojan. Untrustworthy software download channels like Peer-to-Peer networks (torrents, eMule and so on), freeware download websites, free file hosting pages, unofficial sites, and other similar channels can be used to spread malware too. Cybercriminals upload malicious files that are disguised as legitimate and hope that someone will download and open them. When opened, these files download and install malicious software. Unofficial software activation tools (also known as ‘cracking’ tools) can be designed to distribute malware too. People use them with an intention to avoid having to pay for licensed software. However, by using these tools they often cause installations of malicious programs instead. Fake updaters infect computers by exploiting vulnerabilities (bugs, flaws) of outdated software or simply installing malware instead of updates, or fixes.

Leave a Comment

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

three × five =