Poisoned peer-to-peer app kicked off Dofoil coin miner outbreak

[Len]

On March 7, we reported that a massive Dofoil campaign attempted to install malicious cryptocurrency miners on hundreds of thousands of computers. Windows Defender Antivirus, with its behavior monitoring, machine learning technologies, and layered approach to security detected and blocked the attack within milliseconds.Windows 10 S, a special configuration of Windows 10 providing Microsoft-verified security, was not vulnerable to this attack.

Immediately upon discovering the attack, we looked into the source of the huge volume of infection attempts. Traditionally, Dofoil (also known as Smoke Loader) is distributed in multiple ways, including spam email and exploit kits. In the outbreak, which began in March 6, a pattern stood out: most of the malicious files were written by a process called mediaget.exe.

This process is related to MediaGet, a BitTorrent client that we classify as potentially unwanted application (PUA). MediaGet is often used by people looking to download programs or media from websites with dubious reputation. Downloading through peer-to-peer file-sharing apps like this can increase the risk of downloading malware.

During the outbreak, however, Dofoil didnt seem to be coming from torrent downloads. We didnt see similar patterns in other file-sharing apps. The process mediaget.exe always wrote the Dofoil samples to the %TEMP% folder using the file name my.dat. The most common source of infection was the file %LOCALAPPDATA%\MediaGet2\mediaget.exe (SHA-1: 3e0ccd9fa0a5c40c2abb40ed6730556e3d36af3c).

Tracing the infection timeline

Our continued investigation on the Dofoil outbreak revealed that the March 6 campaign was a carefully planned attack with initial groundwork dating back to mid-February. To set the stage for the outbreak, attackers performed an update poisoning campaign that installed a trojanized version of MediaGet on computers. The following timeline shows the major events related to the Dofoil outbreak.



MediaGet update poisoning

The update poisoning campaign that eventually led to the outbreak is described in the following diagram. A signed mediaget.exe downloads an update.exe program and runs it on the machine to install a new mediaget.exe. The new mediaget.exe program has the same functionality as the original but with additional backdoor capability.



The malicious update process is recorded by Windows Defender ATP. The following alert process tree shows the original mediaget.exe dropping the poisoned signed update.exe.