Floki Bot Strikes, Talos and Flashpoint Respond

This blog post was authored by Ben Baker, Edmund Brumaghin, Mariano Graziano, and Jonas Zaddach

Executive Summary

Floki Bot is a new malware variant that has recently been offered for sale on various darknet markets. It is based on the same codebase that was used by the infamous Zeus trojan, the source code of which was leaked in 2011. Rather than simply copying the features that were present within the Zeus trojan “as-is”, Floki Bot claims to feature several new capabilities making it an attractive tool for criminals. As Talos is constantly monitoring changes across the threat landscape to ensure that our customers remain protected as threats continue to evolve, we took a deep dive into this malware variant to determine the technical capabilities and characteristics of Floki Bot.

During our analysis of Floki Bot, Talos identified modifications that had been made to the dropper mechanism present in the leaked Zeus source code in an attempt to make Floki Bot more difficult to detect. Talos also observed the introduction of new code that allows Floki Bot to make use of the Tor network. However, this functionality does not appear to be active for the time being. Finally, through the use of the FIRST framework during the analysis process, Talos was able to quickly identify code/function reuse between Zeus and Floki Bot. This made sample analysis more efficient and decreased the amount of time spent documenting various functions present within the Floki Bot samples we analyzed.

Talos worked in collaboration with Flashpoint during the analysis of Floki Bot. This collaborative effort allowed Talos and Flashpoint to quickly communicate intelligence data related to active campaigns distributing Floki Bot as well as data regarding the technical functionality present within the malware. Additionally, Talos is making scripts available to the open source community that will help malware analysts automate portions of the Floki Bot analysis process and make the process of analyzing Floki Bot easier to perform.