Zombieboy

Overview

Trojan:Win32/Zombieboy is a highly aggressive, self-propagating cryptomining botnet (Worm) that emerged prominently around 2018. It is infamous for rapidly spreading across enterprise networks by aggressively weaponizing a suite of leaked NSA exploits—most notably EternalBlue (`T1210`) and DoublePulsar. Its primary objective is not data theft or ransomware, but rather to forcibly co-opt the CPU resources of infected machines to mine Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency (`T1496`).

Understanding Zombieboy (Cryptomining Worms)
To an end-user, a Zombieboy infection manifests as severe, unexplained system sluggishness and high CPU temperatures. For a security operations center (SOC), Zombieboy is a 'noisy' but critical threat. While cryptomining is less destructive than ransomware, the fact that Zombieboy successfully exploited a machine indicates a severe vulnerability management failure; the same vector could easily be used to deploy ransomware.

Execution and Propagation Mechanics
Zombieboy is primarily a network worm. Once a single machine on a network is infected (often via phishing or an exposed vulnerability), the bot immediately begins scanning the internal subnet (`T1046`) for port 445 (SMB). When it finds an unpatched machine, it fires the EternalBlue exploit (`T1210`) to gain SYSTEM-level access, subsequently using the DoublePulsar backdoor to install itself. It establishes persistence via WMI event subscriptions (`T1546.003`) or scheduled tasks. It then drops an open-source XMRig miner (often renamed), configures it to point to a mining pool, and begins monopolizing the CPU (`T1496`). To maintain dominance, it often attempts to kill competing cryptominers on the host.

Indicators of Compromise & Impact
The primary impact is massive resource exhaustion and the realization of unpatched critical vulnerabilities. Host-based IoCs include the presence of `XMRig.exe` or heavily obfuscated binaries consuming 90%+ CPU in Task Manager, and the creation of anomalous WMI Event Consumers. Network IoCs are highly prominent: massive spikes in internal port 445 (SMB) scanning traffic originating from standard workstations, and outbound connections to known Stratum mining pool IP addresses over ports like 3333, 4444, or 8080.

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

Sigma Rule

title: Suspicious Zombieboy Activity
id: e35894395857ed9c67f61fdb73867ac6
status: experimental
description: Detects generic indicators of the zombieboy malware family.
logsource:
    category: process_creation
    product: windows
detection:
    selection:
        Image|endswith:
            - '\cmd.exe'
            - '\powershell.exe'
        CommandLine|contains:
            - "*zombieboy*"
    condition: selection
level: medium

Containment & Response Steps

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

1. Immediately apply Microsoft security patch MS17-010 (addressing the EternalBlue SMBv1 vulnerability) to ALL systems on the network.
2. Isolate infected machines to stop the internal scanning and propagation.
3. Block outbound connections to known cryptomining pools at the perimeter firewall (often using the Stratum protocol).
4. Hunt for and remove the WMI event subscriptions and dropped XMRig binaries used by the malware for persistence.

What to Avoid

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

1. Do not treat cryptomining as a 'low priority' alert; a worm moving via EternalBlue means your network is fully exposed to more severe threats.
2. Avoid simply killing the high-CPU process; the WMI persistence mechanism will restart it immediately.

References & External Analysis

• Search "zombieboy" on VirusTotal (External Analysis)

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Families (Category: ransomware)

Explore other malware families in the same category:

• Asym
• Dnguard
• Hangup
• 5Hex
• Pastraw

Machine-readable

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