December 13, 2021

To help researchers break through QBot distribution chains and combat the threat effectively, Microsoft recently released information about the building blocks of QBot attacks.

To achieve this, Microsoft breaks down the QBot attack chain into unique building blocks, which can sometimes vary depending on the attack used. It is represented by a Lego piece in different colours and begins with an email embedded with malicious links, attachments or embedded images.

After that, the QBot attack chain uses the following building blocks including macro enablement (utilizes malicious macros to deliver the Qbot payload), Qakbot delivery (ensures that QBot is downloaded as an executable and then renamed to non-existent file extensions), process injection for discovery (Qbot payloads are injected as DLLs into other processes), scheduled tasks (here Qbot is launched every time Windows is restarted and a user logs into the device), credential and browser data theft, email exfiltration, additional payloads, lateral movement, and ransomware.

For more information, read the original story in Bleeping Computer.