Bayrob

Bayrob is a Trojan that acts as a proxy for a botnet or decentralized Trojan network, as well as conducting attacks associated with collecting information, hijacking Web pages and mining cryptocurrency. Users should disconnect from the Internet for limiting the Trojan's network communications before proceeding with a standard disinfection routine. After deleting Bayrob with a suitable anti-malware program, users should change all compromised credentials such as passwords and double-check their hardware for any mining-related damage.

A Thief with More Tricks than Just Picking Your Pocket

A botnet can dig up far more than one kind of trick, and the long-running campaign of Bayrob seems especially elaborative on that point. The legal action against Bayrob's Bucharesti threat actors may limit any new commands to the Trojan through its servers but doesn't disinfect the hundreds of thousands of compromised systems retroactively. Windows PCs in the United States are the foundation for much of Bayrob's attacks, which offer a colorful collection of money-making schemes to any criminals in charge of its C&C infrastructure.

The original campaign by its since-arrested administrators made use of undiscriminating e-mail spam for its infection exploits and overall distribution. Instead of the specialized, niche-purpose disguises of a phishing attack against a business's worker or a government agency, these messages ran with fake references to general-purpose companies and their products, such as the US IRS, Western Union or Symantec's Norton AntiVirus. The attached file drops Bayrob, which can spread further through spamming the contact list addresses that it harvests from the infected computer.

Besides self-proliferation, like any 'good' botnet, Bayrob includes several features with very different effects that malware experts don't always link to this class of threat. It monitors the user's Web-browsing activity for accessing sites like eBay and can inject corrupted content, such as payment-hijackings, into them. It can use the system's hardware for generating cryptocurrency, potentially at the expense of stability, performance, and hardware lifespan. Other features give Bayrob spyware capabilities that help remote attackers isolate and collect confidential information, such as credit card numbers.

Stopping Daylight Robbery at Your PC

Some of Bayrob's features aren't highly stealthy, such as Bitcoin mining necessarily, which can spike CPU temperatures or its browser hijackings, which can replace eBay transactions with redirects to fake Escrow agents. In some instances, a sufficiently alert victim may detect some of these attacks as they occur. Others, however, such as the abuse of contact lists and credentials theft, leave behind no symptoms.

With malware analysts rating e-mail as being a continual source of infection for numerous classifications of threats, users always should consider the circumstances before interacting with e-mail-attached files or clicking on e-mail-sent links. Most PC anti-malware products offer various means of detecting harmful content that might deliver a Trojan, including documents with embedded vulnerabilities and mislabeled executables. They also may block sites and IP addresses associated with criminal activity and detect browser redirects. Users should uninstall Bayrob through automated anti-malware services such as general-purpose system scans preferably due to this threat's hiding itself as a crucial Windows component.

Bayrob may be 'beheaded,' with its apparent administrators no longer at large, but its attacks and impact on the security of compromised Windows machines is an issue that won't resolve itself. And just as vitally, users shouldn't forget that a mailed message always can be more than it says on the label.