Zeus Sphinx Pushes Empty Configuration Files — What Has the Sphinx Got Cooking?

Lately, IBM X-Force Research has seen the Zeus Sphinx Trojan go through a targetless phase, an exceedingly rare occurrence in the cybercrime arena.

Recent Zeus Sphinx samples have fetched configuration files in which all the target URLs were removed. This means that while Sphinx infection campaigns continue and the malware can infect new machines, it remains idle and lacks attack instructions to target specific banks and banking services.

The only instruction that repeats in all Sphinx configuration is to inject a victim’s “bot ID” into every page he or she visits. In essence, this is a web injection attack: Inject into http*://*, covering any HTTP and HTTPS webpage the victim browses to.

What’s Cooking?

This phase of empty Sphinx configuration files started in March 2017 and increased over the past few months to include all Sphinx samples. This suggests that Sphinx is presently operated by one group, not multiple actors, despite the fact that it was commercially sold in the underground when it was launched in 2015. What are Sphinx’s operators cooking up?

In 2017, the malware was targeting banks in a number of countries, mostly focusing on Australia, the U.S. and Canada. Throughout that time, and to date, Sphinx’s operators have launched different infection campaigns to spread the malware to more users.

According to X-Force research, one of the most interesting phases came in late January 2017, when Sphinx was being delivered by a well-known spam source called Moskalvzapoe. This network was one of the more prominent distributors of the Neverquest Trojan, serving spam for cybercriminal customers.

A notable change came in the week of Jan. 19 to Jan. 24, 2017, when Neverquest delivery via Moskalvzapoe suddenly halted. After that week, Moskalvzapoe got right back into serving banking Trojans, only this time it was spreading Zeus Sphinx, dropping it via Moskalvzapoe’s DELoader, also known as Terdot.

Neverquest has since completely died down, dropping from the second most prevalent financial malware families into oblivion. Zeus Sphinx, on the other hand, has been climbing up the chart ever since, placing fifth in June, right under seasoned organized cybercrime gangs such as Gozi, Ramnit and Dridex, per X-Force data.

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