Dridex affiliate dresses up as Scrooge

Threat actors are hoping to catch a few more victims before they leave work for the Christmas holidays. The recent malicious spam campaigns (malspam) we and others have observed appear to have been created by someone who wants to play Scrooge and add onto people’s already heightened state of anxiety.

The lures are particularly mean playing on people’s fears for job security and Covid infections. Unsuspecting users will open those attachments and get infected with Dridex a multi-purpose loader that can drop additional payloads, including ransomware.

Dark lures

An email captured by TheAnalyst shows fake termination letters being sent out by a Dridex affiliate. What kind of employer would terminate someone on Christmas eve?

We’ve also seen similar morbid subjects using the latest Covid variant, Omicron, likely from the same threat actor.

The email claims that 80% of the company’s employees have tested positive for Omicron and that you were a close contact. Opening at the so-called test results in the attached document delivers malware.

Maldoc leads to Dridex

The Excel document is password protected in order to prevent sandboxes from analyzing and flagging it as malicious. In fact, it also requires user interaction to click on a pop-up dialog in order to run the macro.

It drops a .rtf file into %programdata% and executes via mshta.exe:

This is used to download the actual payload, hosted on a Discord server.

This binary belongs to the Dridex malware family:

Malwarebytes customers are protected against this attack thanks to our Anti-Exploit layer which automatically closes the malicious attachment before it can deliver its payload.

As always, we recommend users to stay particularly vigilant when opening emails, especially if those sound urgent and require immediate attention. When in doubt, it is best to contact your IT or HR department to ask for more information and confirm whether the email is legitimate.

Indicators of compromise

Malicious documents

Dridex payloads

Network IOCs

cdn[.]discordapp[.]com/attachments/914830201811238985/923509961307357205/cPRBQdzjCbfmuhammadismyfriend.bin

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