In Wake Of Resurgence, US-CERT Issues Alert About Dridex

US-CERT issued a technical alert about the Dridex banking Trojan today, about two weeks after the malware was found being used in a large phishing campaign heavily targeted at users in the United Kingdom.

Palo Alto Networks reported they saw this campaign after witnessing a brief decrease in Dridex activity in September, following the arrest of a Moldovan man purported to be a key player in a cybercrime gang that used Dridex.

Dridex typically spreads through phishing messages with malicious Microsoft Office documents attached; those documents trick users into enabling macros, which then call out to attacker-controlled sites, which download the Dridex Trojan. The decoys used in the latest campaign were Word documents pretending to be invoices.

As the US-CERT alert states, "The primary goal of Dridex is to infect computers, steal credentials, and obtain money from victims’ bank accounts. ... Once a computer has been infected, Dridex is capable of stealing user credentials through the use of surreptitious keystroke logging and web injects."

Although this alert is being issued by American authorities, Dridex has previously shown particular interest in British targets. Last month, the British GCHQ issued alerts after Fujitsu stumbled upon a Dridex "hitlist" of 385 million addresses, mostly in the UK. Dridex attacks last year -- the "Peter Pan" attacks of September 2014 -- also focused on the U.K, specifically small- to medium-sized businesses.

For more information, see the US-CERT alert, and research at Zscaler or FireEye.