Zhelatin.KC does the following upon initial installation:

1. Disable Windows File Protection
2. Creates a copy called %WindowsDirectory%spooldr.exe
3. Drop its rootkit component %SystemDirectory%spooldr.sys
4. Infects %SystemDirectory%dllcache cpip.sys
5. Exits current process

The other routines of the malware are continued after the infected system is rebooted.

The following is how the malware is launched during system startups:

1. The infected tcpip.sys gets loaded by the OS
2. The infected tcpip.sys loads spooldr.sys
3. Spooldr.sys injects spooldr.exe to the explorer.exe process

Once loaded, spooldr.exe creates a file called spooldr.cfg which contains its initial list of peers in the current directory of the running process. Since it does not have its own process, it will take the current directory of explorer.exe instead. This usually leads to spooldr.cfg being created in the home directory of the current user. Additionally, Spooldr.sys hides all filenames that start with "spooldr" in the system, therefore you might not find the created files once the rootkit has been loaded.

The malware then tries to communicate with the other peers via the Overnet P2P protocol on how to proceed.The malware has the ability to do the following:

• Harvest email addresses but avoid those that contain certain strings
• Download messages to be use in spam
• Send spam emails

Last update 15 October 2007

 

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