Smominru

Overview

Worm:Win32/Smominru is one of the most prolific and resilient botnets in operation, primarily dedicated to large-scale cryptojacking (mining Monero). What sets Smominru apart from simple miners is its aggressive, self-propagating worm capabilities. It actively scans the internet and internal networks, heavily leveraging the EternalBlue (MS17-010) exploit to breach unpatched Windows servers and workstations, spreading laterally without any user interaction (`T1210`).

Understanding Smominru (EternalBlue Botnet)
To an end-user, an infected server will experience extreme CPU utilization, leading to severe performance degradation or total unresponsiveness. For a security architect, a Smominru outbreak is a massive red flag indicating a systemic failure in patch management and internal network segmentation, as the worm will rapidly compromise every unpatched machine it can reach.

Execution and Lateral Movement Mechanics
Smominru uses a multi-stage architecture. After exploiting EternalBlue (`T1210`) or brute-forcing MS-SQL/RDP (`T1110`), it drops a PowerShell payload or uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) (`T1047`) to execute commands filelessly. It downloads the XMRig mining software and a secondary credential stealer (often Mimikatz) to harvest passwords for further lateral movement (`T1003.001`). Persistence is established via robust WMI event subscriptions (`T1546.003`), making it notoriously difficult to eradicate, as the WMI triggers will re-download the malware even if the binaries are deleted. The botnet uses a highly decentralized C2 infrastructure, often hiding behind proxies and DGA domains.

Indicators of Compromise & Impact
The impact is a massive drain on corporate computing resources and the exposure of internal credentials. Host-based IoCs include EDR alerts for anomalous WMI activity (e.g., `scrcons.exe` consuming high CPU), the execution of known mining binaries (`xmrig.exe`), and unexpected PowerShell scripts running as SYSTEM. Network IoCs include a massive volume of outbound SMB traffic (TCP 445) as the infected host scans for other vulnerable machines, and persistent Stratum protocol connections to mining pools.

MITRE ATT&CK Techniques

Observed techniques used by this family, mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework:

Generated Detections (Boilerplate)

These YARA and Sigma rules are auto-generated based on the family name and aliases. They must be heavily tuned before deployment in a production environment.

YARA Rule

rule MALWARE_WIN_SMOMINRU {
    meta:
        description = "Detects Smominru (advanced_threat)"
        author = "SystemHelpdesk Boilerplate Generator"
        date = "2026-07-06"
    strings:
        $s1 = "smominru" ascii wide nocase
    condition:
        uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and any of them
}

Sigma Rule

title: Suspicious Smominru Activity
id: 8694912a3d3ac4634ec200fd66d85be4
status: experimental
description: Detects generic indicators of the smominru malware family.
logsource:
    category: process_creation
    product: windows
detection:
    selection:
        Image|endswith:
            - '\cmd.exe'
            - '\powershell.exe'
        CommandLine|contains:
            - "*smominru*"
    condition: selection
level: medium

Containment & Response Steps

Ordered checklist for responders. Adapt to your environment and engage professional support for active incidents.

1. Isolate infected machines from the network immediately to halt the aggressive SMB scanning and lateral movement.
2. Prioritize patching all Windows systems against MS17-010 (EternalBlue) across the entire enterprise.
3. Use specialized tools (like Sysinternals Autoruns) to identify and delete the malicious WMI event consumers and filters used for persistence.
4. Segment the network to restrict SMB traffic (TCP 445) from flowing freely between workstations.

What to Avoid

Common mistakes during response to this family that can destroy evidence, spread the infection, or worsen recovery.

1. Do not assume deleting the mining executable fixes the problem; the WMI persistence will reinstall it within minutes.
2. Avoid leaving MS-SQL servers exposed to the internet with weak or default SA passwords, as this is a common secondary ingress vector.

References & External Analysis

• Search "smominru" on VirusTotal (External Analysis)

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Families (Category: advanced_threat)

Explore other malware families in the same category:

• Realspy
• Bobax
• Regcurepro
• Globalacces
• Restoro

Machine-readable

Get this profile as JSON: https://jordanricky1604-ship-it.github.io/malware-families-catalog/api/smominru.json

Ecosystem & Interactive Environments

This profile is part of the Malware Families Catalog, a public dataset of 2,899 malware families. The catalog is also published across our ecosystem: Hugging Face, Kaggle, Zenodo, Replit, StackBlitz, CodeSandbox, and CodePen.