May 6, 2019 By David Bisson 2 min read

Security researchers observed recent Qbot attack campaigns using a new persistence mechanism that helps the banking Trojan avoid detection.

In early April, Cisco Talos observed a new Qbot campaign that infected users’ machines with a dropper. The campaign used the infected machine to create a scheduled task that executed a JavaScript downloader. This asset, in turn, made a request from one of several hijacked domains.

Specifically, the downloader requested the uniform resource identifier (URI) /datacollectionservice[.]php3 from the domains, which were XOR-encrypted at the beginning of the JavaScript. A successful communication attempt yielded obfuscated data that the campaign saved in two files: the first 1,000 characters in (randalpha)_1.zzz and the remainder in (randalpha)_2.zzz.

At that point, the campaign created a scheduled task designed to execute a batch file. This process used the two .zzz files to assemble a Qbot executable before deleting them. Finally, the campaign ran the malware payload, enabling it to target financial information on the infected machine.

Tracing the Attack Trail of Qbot

Qbot has gotten up to all kinds of trouble over the past few years. Back in 2017, IBM X-Force observed a campaign in which the malware (also known as Qakbot) locked hundreds of thousands of Active Directory users out of their company’s domain, preventing them from accessing their employer’s servers or network assets.

Fast-forward to 2019: In March, Varonis spotted an operation leveraging a new variant of the malware that compromised and took over thousands of victims around the world. That same month, the SANS Internet Storm Center (ISC) discovered a malspam campaign in which Emotet served up Qbot as its follow-up payload.

Use UEM and AI to Defend Against Sophisticated Malware

Security professionals can help their organizations defend against sophisticated malware like Qbot by using a unified endpoint management (UEM) solution to monitor how devices report to the environment and take the necessary precautions if anything appears to be malicious in nature. Organizations should also consider enlisting the help of artificial intelligence (AI) to help fill the defense gaps created by rule-based security tools.

More from

FYSA — VMware Critical Vulnerabilities Patched

< 1 min read - SummaryBroadcom has released a security bulletin, VMSA-2025-0004, addressing and remediating three vulnerabilities that, if exploited, could lead to system compromise. Products affected include vCenter Server, vRealize Operations Manager, and vCloud Director.Threat TopographyThreat Type: Critical VulnerabilitiesIndustry: VirtualizationGeolocation: GlobalOverviewX-Force Incident Command is monitoring activity surrounding Broadcom’s Security Bulletin (VMSA-2025-0004) for three potentially critical vulnerabilities in VMware products. These vulnerabilities, identified as CVE-2025-22224, CVE-2025-22225, and CVE-2025-22226, have reportedly been exploited in attacks. X-Force has not been able to validate those claims. The vulnerabilities…

SoaPy: Stealthy enumeration of Active Directory environments through ADWS

10 min read - Introduction Over time, both targeted and large-scale enumeration of Active Directory (AD) environments have become increasingly detected due to modern defensive solutions. During our internship at X-Force Red this past summer, we noticed FalconForce’s SOAPHound was becoming popular for enumerating Active Directory environments. This tool brought a new perspective to Active Directory enumeration by performing collection via Active Directory Web Services (ADWS) instead of directly through Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) as other AD enumeration tools had in the past.…

Smoltalk: RCE in open source agents

26 min read - Big shoutout to Hugging Face and the smolagents team for their cooperation and quick turnaround for a fix! Introduction Recently, I have been working on a side project to automate some pentest reconnaissance with AI agents. Just after I started this project, Hugging Face announced the release of smolagents, a lightweight framework for building AI agents that implements the methodology described in the ReAct paper, emphasizing reasoning through iterative decision-making. Interestingly, smolagents enables agents to reason and act by generating…

Topic updates

Get email updates and stay ahead of the latest threats to the security landscape, thought leadership and research.
Subscribe today