Shiotob

Overview

Trojan:Win32/Shiotob (also known as Urlzone or Bebloh) is a highly advanced, stealthy banking trojan that gained notoriety for its pioneering use of real-time balance manipulation to actively conceal its financial theft from the victim.

Understanding Shiotob (Urlzone)
To the victim, a Shiotob infection is completely invisible—even when they check their bank account balance. For threat intelligence analysts, Shiotob represents a significant evolution in banking malware. Older trojans would steal funds, but the victim would see the missing money immediately upon logging in. Shiotob utilizes advanced Man-in-the-Browser (MitB) techniques not just to steal credentials, but to dynamically rewrite the HTML of the bank's webpage in real-time, displaying a fake, un-altered account balance to the user while the funds are secretly siphoned off in the background.

Execution and Evasion Strategies
Shiotob is typically distributed via targeted spearphishing or exploit kits. Upon execution, its primary goal is deep stealth. It utilizes rootkit functionality to hide its files, registry keys, and network connections (`T1564.001`). It injects its core payload directly into the browser process (`iexplore.exe`, `firefox.exe`, `chrome.exe`) (`T1055`). Once injected, it hooks core networking APIs (`T1185`). When the user logs into a targeted bank, Shiotob intercepts the incoming HTTP traffic. It checks the real balance, initiates a fraudulent wire transfer to a money mule, and then seamlessly rewrites the HTML displayed on the victim's screen to hide the transaction and show the expected, pre-theft balance.

Indicators of Compromise & Impact
The impact is severe, prolonged financial fraud, as the victim may not realize they have been robbed until they receive a physical bank statement. EDR platforms are critical, as standard AV often misses the rootkit. EDR will flag the aggressive hooking of browser APIs (`NtWriteVirtualMemory`, `NtResumeThread`). Network logs will reveal encrypted POST requests to Shiotob C2 domains, transmitting stolen credentials or receiving updated web injects. Memory forensics is essential to extract the unhooked payload.

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:

• 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_SHIOTOB {
    meta:
        description = "Detects Shiotob (trojan)"
        author = "SystemHelpdesk Boilerplate Generator"
        date = "2026-07-06"
    strings:
        $s1 = "shiotob" ascii wide nocase
    condition:
        uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and any of them
}

Sigma Rule

title: Suspicious Shiotob Activity
id: ee83f24195e60fb14fcd3fb3ff7032f8
status: experimental
description: Detects generic indicators of the shiotob malware family.
logsource:
    category: process_creation
    product: windows
detection:
    selection:
        Image|endswith:
            - '\cmd.exe'
            - '\powershell.exe'
        CommandLine|contains:
            - "*shiotob*"
    condition: selection
level: medium

Containment & Response Steps

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

1. Instantly isolate the endpoint from the network to halt the active Man-in-the-Browser interception and prevent further financial data exfiltration.
2. Do NOT trust any web session initiated from the infected machine; Shiotob actively alters the HTML presented to the user.
3. Assume all financial portals accessed from the machine are compromised; initiate mandatory password resets and contact relevant banking institutions immediately.
4. Due to the rootkit capabilities, formatting the hard drive and rebuilding the OS is the only guaranteed method of eradication.

What to Avoid

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

1. Do not rely on the victim's online bank statement to determine if funds were stolen; the malware actively falsifies this display.
2. Avoid relying solely on basic AV removal tools; they frequently fail to eradicate the underlying rootkit persistence mechanism.

References & External Analysis

• Search "shiotob" on VirusTotal (External Analysis)

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Families (Category: trojan)

Explore other malware families in the same category:

• Eyestye
• Peflog
• Siplog
• Computty
• Wisbipuf

Machine-readable

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