VERY IMPORTANT

Qbot, also known as Qakbot, is a network-aware worm with backdoor capabilities, primarily designed as a credential harvester. It is an old threat and was well-described by Symantec back in 2009.1 The company later released a whitepaper which described Qbot version 910 in great detail.2 In December 2015, several researchers reported that websites hosting the Rig Exploit Kit were serving an updated version of Qbot.3 4 5 Then in January 2016, over 500 devices at a large public organisation were infected with Qbot: the worm was back, and it was both more and less effective. While all versions of Microsoft Windows the worm touched in the attack were compromised, a number of Windows XP machines crashed and failed to restart: despite its renewed potency, the programmers behind Qbot hadn’t built their bot to be compatible with older versions of Windows.