Woool

Overview

Trojan:Win32/Woool (often associated with variants targeting 'Legend of Mir' or 'World of Warcraft') is a highly specialized Password Stealer / Keylogger designed explicitly to target players of online MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games). The objective is to steal account credentials, in-game currency, and high-value virtual items, which the attackers then sell on grey-market forums for real-world fiat currency.

Understanding Woool (Gaming Credential Stealer)
To an end-user, the infection may cause slight system sluggishness or unexpected game crashes, culminating in a hijacked gaming account. For a security analyst, while this malware targets consumers, its presence on a corporate network indicates a severe violation of acceptable use policies and represents a massive endpoint security failure, as the same keylogging techniques (`T1056.001`) that steal a WoW password will easily capture corporate VPN credentials.

Execution and Theft Mechanics
Woool is frequently distributed via malicious 'game cheat' forums, fake game patches, or bundled with pirated gaming software (`T1189`). Upon execution, it establishes persistence via the registry (`T1547.001`). The trojan operates by hooking into the Windows messaging subsystem or dropping a custom driver to monitor keystrokes globally. However, it often specifically targets the memory space (`T1003.001` - applied to game processes) of specific game executables (e.g., `wow.exe`) to scrape credentials and session tokens directly as the user logs in.

Indicators of Compromise & Impact
The impact is the total compromise of targeted gaming accounts and the potential capture of unrelated passwords if the user reuses credentials. Host-based IoCs include the presence of anomalous dropped files in the `%AppData%` or game installation directories, unexpected API hooking detected by EDR, and registry modifications. Network IoCs include outbound connections to known credential-drop servers, often hosted in regions with lax cybercrime enforcement.

MITRE ATT&CK Techniques

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

Tactical Mitigations

Based on the techniques used by this family, consider the following defensive strategies:

• T1003.001: Monitor for LSASS memory dumping or registry SAM extraction. Enable Credential Guard on Windows systems.
• T1056.001: Implement Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) to monitor for suspicious API calls related to keystroke interception. Enforce Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to render stolen passwords useless.

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_WOOOL {
    meta:
        description = "Detects Woool (trojan)"
        author = "SystemHelpdesk Boilerplate Generator"
        date = "2026-07-06"
    strings:
        $s1 = "woool" ascii wide nocase
    condition:
        uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and any of them
}

Sigma Rule

title: Suspicious Woool Activity
id: 23e3ac15296676676763d1b0d8a998e5
status: experimental
description: Detects generic indicators of the woool malware family.
logsource:
    category: process_creation
    product: windows
detection:
    selection:
        Image|endswith:
            - '\cmd.exe'
            - '\powershell.exe'
        CommandLine|contains:
            - "*woool*"
    condition: selection
level: medium

Containment & Response Steps

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

1. Isolate the endpoint to prevent the exfiltration of captured keystroke logs to the attacker's C2 server.
2. Advise the user to immediately change the passwords for their online gaming accounts, as well as any corporate or financial accounts where they reused the same password.
3. Run a comprehensive anti-malware scan to identify and remove the trojan and its associated keylogging components.
4. Enforce organizational policies restricting the downloading and execution of unapproved software, especially gaming-related applications.

What to Avoid

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

1. Do not dismiss the alert simply because it targets a game; a keylogger is a critical threat regardless of its primary target.
2. Avoid letting the user continue working on the machine until it is fully sanitized, as any typed data is compromised.

References & External Analysis

• Search "woool" on VirusTotal (External Analysis)

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Families (Category: trojan)

Explore other malware families in the same category:

• Murofet
• Virtumonde
• Wi0Abyrjybki
• Fraud
• Perfectoptimizer

Machine-readable

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