Dmitry Bestuzhev, a security expert at Kaspersky Lab, reported about two similar campaigns of spreading Trojan via Skype. In the first case, after being infected the victim’s PC became a part of botnet connecting to C&C server using IRC protocol.
Victims received messages, such as “i don't think i will ever sleep again after seeing this photo http://www.goo.gl/XXXXX?image=IMG0540250-JPG” or “tell me what you think of this picture i edited http://www.goo.gl/XXXXX?image=IMG0540250-JPG”, etc. The frequency of clicks on the malicious links reached 10 thousand per hour (2.7 clicks per second). The largest number of victims was recorded in Russia and Ukraine. Among the victims of the botnet were Chinese, Italian, Bulgarian and Taiwanese users:
In the second case, users also receive a message containing a link. The difference is that infected machine was used to generate Bitcoin money. After being installed, the malicious Trojan executed the following command: bitcoin-miner.exe -a 60 -l no -o http://suppp.cantvenlinea.biz:1942/ -u XXXXXX0000001@gmail.com -p XXXXXXXX. The command abuses the CPU of infected machine to mine Bitcoins.
In this case, the frequency of clicks reached 2 thousand per hour. The largest number of victims seem to originate in Russia, Poland, Costa Rica, Spain, Germany and Ukraine.
According to Bestuzhev, the Trojan is distributed from the server located in India – Hotfile.com service. There is also one C2 server found in Germany.
