New botnet hides commands as JPEG images

Security researchers have stumbled on a new botnet that uses an interesting technique to mask its nefarious intentions.

The Monkif/DIKhora botnet, which is pushing out Trojan downloaders to infected machines, is encoding the instructions to appear as if the command-and-control server is returning a JPEG image file, according to SecureWorks researcher Jason Milletary.

The server sets the HTTP Content-Type header to “image/jpeg” and prefaces the bot commands with a fake 32-byte JPEG header. The bot checks if the header matches and decodes the rest of the response to retrieve its commands. The commands are encoded using a single byte XOR with 0×4. The malware that CTU has observed being installed by Monkif is a BHO (Browser Helper Object) trojan commonly referred to as ExeDot, which performs Ad Hijacking and Ad Clicking.

The Trojan associated with this botnet also attempts to disable anti-virus and personal firewall software to maintain its foothold on the system.

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