Vivin Botnet

Тhe Vivin Botnet is a cryptocurrency mining operation whose activity can be traced back to 2017, but the peak of this campaign occurred in December 20018. Since then, the botnet's activity has been decreasing gradually, but there are still active miners whose hardware resources are being harvested without their approval.

The operators of the Vivin Botnet rely on the public XMRig cryptocurrency miner to mine for the Monero cryptocurrency – naturally, they have reworked the mining client to ensure that it will be able to work in the background, without revealing its dubious activity to the victim. The corrupted copies that deliver the Vivin Botnet's payload were spread throughout pirated software that was distributed via torrent trackers popular in different countries initially. The torrents laced with the Trojanized miner were often disguised as game or software cracks, pirated media and other pirated content.

The Vivin Botnet's Author Asked for Cryptocurrency Help Online

Once the Vivin Botnet is initialized on a computer, it would connect to the attacker's Command and Control server for a short period to register the new miner and receive its configuration in return. The attackers appear to have used several Monero addresses to store the funds in, but they did not seem to do a good job at keeping their business private – several of the addresses that the Vivin Botnet uses were mentioned in Reddit posts made by a user named 'vivin123' (hence the name of the campaign).

In addition to running the Trojanized miner for the first time, the Vivin Botnet also makes sure to gain persistence on all compromised hosts – it achieves this by creating a scheduled Windows task that serves the purpose of executing the miner every 30 minutes.

Despite the rapid descent of cryptocurrency markets, cybercriminals still rely on cryptocurrency mining campaigns to be a great source of revenue. To protect a network from the Vivin Botnet and similar threats, you should avoid downloading pirated software or content from suspicious websites. Of course, the best security measure will always be using a reliable ant-virus product.