New botnet alert - Mariposa

October 6, 2009

SonicWALL UTM Research team observed reports of the Mariposa botnet, which has infiltrated half of the Fortune 100 companies, according to Defence Intelligence. It has been speculated that this botnet was created from the Butterfly Bot Kit and it now consists of 200,000 infected hosts, infecting 7,000 more hosts daily. More details can be found on their blog.

Mariposa really is a collection of different malware threats, detected by different names. For instance, F-Secure detects them as either Palevo or Vaklik.

Symantec has added detection for it as W32.Pilleuz.

When executed this threat has the following characteristics:

  • Spreads through removal drives, MSN instant messenger
  • Spreads through peer-to-peer file sharing by copying itself to shared folders for the following programs:
    • Ares
    • BearShare
    • DC++
    • eMule
    • iMesh
    • Kazaa
    • LimeWire
    • Shareaza
  • Gives the attacker control over compromised system
  • Communicates with the following back-end servers:
    • bf2back.sinip.es
    • bfisback.no-ip.org
    • butterfly.BigMoney.biz
    • butterfly.sinip.es
    • lalundelau.sinip.es
    • legion.sinip.es
    • qwertasdfg.sinip.es
    • thejacksonfive.mobi

SonicWALL Gateway AntiVirus provides protection against this botnet via various GAV signatures including: Small.DKC (Trojan), Agent.PT_7 (Trojan), CodecPack.HZE (Trojan), FakeRean (Trojan), Conficker.gen (Worm), Agent.IRB (Trojan), Malagent_2 (Trojan), Rimecud.B (Worm).

SonicWALL UTM Research team is monitoring the situation and update the signatures as necessary to provide complete protection against this and other threats.