Research of the Medichi.exe, murka.dat, medichi2.exe rootkit - Greatis Software

Medichi.exe, murka.dat, medichi2.exe rootkit under a microscope

Medichi rootkit is spread by e-mail or via infected web sites using Internet Explorer Windows vulnerability.
Medichi uses several rootkit methods at the same time to deep hide the rootkit and make removal process harder.
Most of antivirus and anti-spyware programs can detect part of the Medichi rootkit but it usually comes back immediately after reboot.

Infection symptoms:

A user of an infected computer can be surprised by the strange hard disk activity. Suddenly the file copy dialog will be displayed on the screen.
Medichi copies a large number files of the Windows system folder to the temporary folder and after that immediately deletes those files.
In addition Medichi shows the warning:

Medichi tries to download fake Spyware Remover supposedly to resolve the problem.
Of course, Medichi will not delete himself.
The false antispyware software will ask the user to pay money for the remove malware.

How Medichi rootkit works?

Immediately after executing Medichi turns off Windows File Protection service to replace the standard Windows beep.sys driver.
Beep.sys is used only to make simple "beep" sounds even if no sound card is installed.
Windows works absolutely correct without beep.sys driver.
The standard beep.sys is 4224 bytes in size.
The infected beep.sys is about 37 Kbytes.
The copy of the beep.sys, located in the C:\WINDOWS\system32\dllcache is replaced too.
Windows File Protection Service starts again after reboot.
Medichi restarts infected computer and takes the control of it by using the moment when Windows automatically starts the "beep.sys".

The rootkit-beep installs a notify routine for detecting the opening of each process.
Medichi waits for notification of "winlogon.exe" process being loaded.
This is required for 2 reasons:
1) Hiding the changeof the registry startup keys under winlogon.exe.
2) Making sure that the "Software" registry hive is already loaded.
We can see on the disassemled listing of the Medichi driver here, that rootkit installs "medichi.exe" and "medichi2.exe" to the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run.
The executable files are used to notify users about spyware attack and to download new versions.

Also, it tries to turn off some firewall and antiviral tools.
"Murka.dat" is inserted into the "Appinit_dlls" registry value.
Windows automatically loads  DLLs listed in the "Appinit_dlls" into the memory of each new process.
Murka.dat is a user-mode rootkit to hide rootkit files on the disk.
Infected beep.sys creates the "medichi.exe", "medichi2.exe", "murka.dat" in the Windows folder, "user32.dat" in the Windows\System32 folder.

On the registry monitor listing we can see that the "winlogon.exe" creates the registry values before the moment when the process is fully started.
On the picture we can see that "winlogon.exe" did not get control when it changed the registry.
It gives us an idea that the rootkit works from the driver loaded before Windows logon process.

The Microsoft Signature Verifier tool (sigverif.exe) can easily check for the files signed by Microsoft digital sign.
Beep.sys was detected as well. It isn′t encrypted and the signal words "medichi", "murka.dat" can be easily read.

We know that Medichi rootkit was written by Russian speaking virus writers.
Murka is a one of the favorite cat names in Russian.
The text "bljaha muaha zainalo vse!" is actually swear words.

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