Rebhip

Overview

Worm:Win32/Rebhip is a stealthy and prolific Windows worm and trojan primarily known for its ability to spread rapidly across removable media and local network shares.

What is Rebhip?
To the average user, a Rebhip infection is often unnoticed until USB drives begin behaving erratically or files appear to go missing. For security analysts, Rebhip is a classic self-propagating worm that poses a significant risk to air-gapped or loosely secured corporate environments. Its primary objective is to infect as many systems as possible, establish a backdoor, and await commands from a remote server.

Infection Vectors & Threat Hunting
Rebhip's signature propagation method involves copying itself to USB flash drives and external hard drives. It heavily utilizes the `autorun.inf` mechanism to execute automatically when the drive is inserted into a new machine. Furthermore, it often hides the legitimate folders on the USB drive and replaces them with malicious shortcuts (LNK files) that bear the folder icon; when a user clicks the fake folder, the worm executes. Once on a host, Rebhip injects into `svchost.exe` and modifies the registry to ensure it starts upon reboot.

Forensic Analysis & Impact
Threat hunters investigating Rebhip will find anomalous `autorun.inf` files, hidden directories, and suspicious `.lnk` files on removable media. EDR platforms frequently flag Rebhip for its unauthorized modifications to <code>HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced (specifically altering the `Hidden` value to prevent users from seeing hidden files). The malware also establishes outbound HTTP connections to its C2 infrastructure to download secondary payloads.

MITRE ATT&CK Techniques

Observed techniques used by this family, mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework:

Tactical Mitigations

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

• T1105: Implement network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) and host-based firewalls to block unauthorized inbound or outbound file transfers.

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

Sigma Rule

title: Suspicious Rebhip Activity
id: 1378f4e7d38c22dda6c01fcb74f816e6
status: experimental
description: Detects generic indicators of the rebhip malware family.
logsource:
    category: process_creation
    product: windows
detection:
    selection:
        Image|endswith:
            - '\cmd.exe'
            - '\powershell.exe'
        CommandLine|contains:
            - "*rebhip*"
    condition: selection
level: medium

Containment & Response Steps

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

1. Disable the Windows 'AutoRun' and 'AutoPlay' features via Group Policy across the entire domain to halt the worm's primary propagation method.
2. Confiscate and forensically wipe any USB drives or removable media that were connected to the infected endpoint.
3. Use EDR or command-line tools to forcefully unhide the legitimate directories on infected USB drives and delete the malicious `.lnk` files.
4. Isolate the endpoint and remove the Rebhip persistence keys from the Windows Registry.

What to Avoid

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

1. Do not insert a potentially infected USB drive into a clean analysis machine unless AutoRun is strictly disabled and the machine is sandboxed.
2. Do not assume the network is clean if one host is infected; Rebhip actively scans for and infects open network shares.

References & External Analysis

• Search "rebhip" on VirusTotal (External Analysis)

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Families (Category: rat)

Explore other malware families in the same category:

• Bladabindi
• Nanocore
• Nanobot
• Sdbot
• Darkkomet

Machine-readable

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