Description

Researchers from Qihoo 360's Netlab security team have reported that the Orchard botnet is using Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto's account transaction information to generate domain names to hide its command-and-control infrastructure. As per reports, since February 2021, Orchard has undergone three revisions, initially, it used to deliver additional payloads to victims’ machines and execute commands received from C2 servers. Orchard malware was initially created in Golang programming language before returning to C++ in its third variant. This malware is designed to upload device and user information to the server and infect USB storage devices to spread the infection, as well as, it currently employing over 3,000 infected systems in its operation. Moreover, the latest version of the malware integrates features to launch the XMRig mining program, which uses the compromised system's resources to mint Monero (XMR). A third change is the use of the Domain Generated Algorithms, the first two variants use date strings exclusively to generate domain names, while the newer version uses balance information obtained from the cryptocurrency wallet address "1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa". Furthermore, a wallet address, which is believed to belong to Nakamoto, is the address that received the miner rewards for the Bitcoin Genesis Block, which occurred on January 3, 2009. According to the researchers, small amounts of bitcoin have been transferred to this wallet on a daily basis for various reasons over the past decade, so the balance information for this wallet can also be used as input to DGA since it is variable and difficult to predict.