Dorkbot

Overview

Dorkbot is a botnet that, according to a U.S. CISA Technical Alert (TA15-337A) issued by DHS in collaboration with the FBI and Microsoft, is used to steal online payment and account credentials, participate in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and deliver additional malware to infected computers. Microsoft reported that the malware family behind the botnet infected more than one million computers across over 190 countries. Dorkbot commonly spreads through malicious links sent over social networks and instant-messaging programs, and through infected USB devices. Its backdoor functionality lets a remote attacker download and run files, harvest stored credentials via form grabbing and from FTP, POP3, and browser-cached logins, and block or redirect selected websites such as security vendors' sites.

Known aliases

Threat reports may refer to this family under multiple names:

• Dorkbot
• NgrBot

MITRE ATT&CK Techniques

This family has been observed using the following ATT&CK techniques: T1091 T1185 T1071.001

Tactical Mitigations

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

• T1071.001: Implement web filtering and SSL/TLS inspection to detect malicious command and control (C2) traffic hiding in HTTP/HTTPS.
• T1185: Enforce strong MFA and use browser isolation or hardened browsers for sensitive financial or administrative portals to defeat session hijacking.

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_DORKBOT {
    meta:
        description = "Detects Dorkbot (botnet)"
        author = "SystemHelpdesk Boilerplate Generator"
        date = "2026-07-06"
    strings:
        $s1 = "dorkbot" ascii wide nocase
        $s2 = "dorkbot" ascii wide nocase
        $s3 = "ngrbot" ascii wide nocase
    condition:
        uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and any of them
}

Sigma Rule

title: Suspicious Dorkbot Activity
id: 2935dd4c09df2dd66d897903bdffe18f
status: experimental
description: Detects generic indicators of the dorkbot malware family.
logsource:
    category: process_creation
    product: windows
detection:
    selection:
        Image|endswith:
            - '\cmd.exe'
            - '\powershell.exe'
        CommandLine|contains:
            - "*dorkbot*"
            - "*dorkbot*"
            - "*ngrbot*"
    condition: selection
level: medium

References & External Analysis

• CISA Alert TA15-337A: Dorkbot (DHS, FBI, Microsoft)
• CISA Advisory
• Search "dorkbot" on VirusTotal (External Analysis)

North American Authority Advisory (CISA / NIST)

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has published an official US federal advisory on this family, which can be mapped to NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) incident response controls: TA15-337A

Frequently Asked Questions

Machine-readable

Get this profile as JSON: https://jordan123234-malware-families-explorer.static.hf.space/api/dorkbot.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.