Zbot

Overview

Zbot is better known as Zeus, one of the most influential banking trojans in malware history, designed to steal banking information and other sensitive credentials for exfiltration. As MITRE ATT&CK notes for the Zeus Panda variant, the original Zeus source code was leaked in 2011, which let many threat actors build new variants on top of it (including Citadel, Gameover Zeus, and Zeus Panda). It primarily targets Windows and captures credentials through browser-based techniques such as web injection and keylogging.

Known aliases

Threat reports may refer to this family under multiple names:

• Zeus
• Zbot
• Zeus Panda
• Wsnpoem

MITRE ATT&CK Techniques

This family has been observed using the following ATT&CK techniques: T1185 T1071.001 T1056.001

Tactical Mitigations

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

• T1056.001: Implement Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) to monitor for suspicious API calls related to keystroke interception. Enforce Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to render stolen passwords useless.
• 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_ZBOT {
    meta:
        description = "Detects Zbot (banking_trojan)"
        author = "SystemHelpdesk Boilerplate Generator"
        date = "2026-07-06"
    strings:
        $s1 = "zbot" ascii wide nocase
        $s2 = "zeus" ascii wide nocase
        $s3 = "zbot" ascii wide nocase
        $s4 = "zeus panda" ascii wide nocase
        $s5 = "wsnpoem" ascii wide nocase
    condition:
        uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and any of them
}

Sigma Rule

title: Suspicious Zbot Activity
id: 6e5dbc153564966b5ca72ec5fdc961c3
status: experimental
description: Detects generic indicators of the zbot malware family.
logsource:
    category: process_creation
    product: windows
detection:
    selection:
        Image|endswith:
            - '\cmd.exe'
            - '\powershell.exe'
        CommandLine|contains:
            - "*zbot*"
            - "*zeus*"
            - "*zbot*"
            - "*zeus panda*"
            - "*wsnpoem*"
    condition: selection
level: medium

References & External Analysis

• MITRE ATT&CK: Zeus Panda (S0330)
• Search "zbot" on VirusTotal (External Analysis)

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Families (Category: banking_trojan)

Explore other malware families in the same category:

• Carberp
• Goznym
• Bublik
• Snifula
• Shiz

Machine-readable

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