Win32/Renocide, the aftermath

On March 8th, we announced the release of our latest Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT), version that included detection and cleaning capabilities for a backdoor enabled worm we are calling Win32/Renocide. If you are not familiar with this threat, we recommend reading our encyclopedia entry here.

According to our telemetry, this new addition was among the top 5 detected threats (in the first week of release), both when when classified based on number of detected files and number of infected machines.

Rank	Family Name	Threat Count
1	Sality	248,250
2	Rimecud	209,208
3	Taterf	178,421
4	Renocide	167,826
5	Frethog	125,781
6	Bubnix	116,772
7	Vobfus	114,850
8	Conficker	88,636
9	Zbot	78,304
10	FakeSpypro	64,904

Chart 1 - Win32/Renocide, detected files

 

Rank	Family Name	Machine Count
1	Rimecud	200,267
2	Taterf	160,632
3	Sality	160,579
4	Renocide	123,413
5	Vobfus	107,866
6	Frethog	104,121
7	Bubnix	88,858
8	Conficker	82,192
9	Zbot	72,669
10	FakeSpypro	62,943

Chart 2 - Win32/Renocide, infected machines

The high tally of affected machines reflects Renocide's relative age; the botnet has been around since 2008 and has slowly but steadily increased its prevalence. Our first detection dates back to the first half of 2008.

If you look at the ranking for machine count you'll notice that the first 2 families are also worms. Rimecud is a backdoor-enabled worm (just like Renocide), while Taterf is an account stealer. Although only third when it comes to machine count ranking, Sality leads in the threat count ranking due to the fact that it is a file infector.

You can read more about all malware families present in this blog from our encyclopedia. We thank you for using MSRT.

Marian Radu,
MMPC Dublin

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