QinYingShieldLicense V10X V121 Lei Peng 20080122

Hunt Hypothesis

This YARA rule targets a specific variant of the QinYingShieldLicense trojan, a legacy Chinese banking trojan that may persist in environments with unpatched legacy applications or dormant malware remnants. Proactively hunting for this signature in Azure Sentinel helps identify low-severity, long-dormant threats that could serve as initial footholds for lateral movement or data exfiltration in systems that have not undergone recent integrity checks.

YARA Rule

rule QinYingShieldLicense_V10X_V121_Lei_Peng_20080122: PEiD
{
    strings:
        $a = { E8 00 00 00 00 58 05 ?? ?? ?? ?? 9C 50 C2 04 00 55 8B EC 56 57 53 34 99 47 49 34 33 EF 31 CD F5 B0 CB B5 B0 A3 A1 A3 A1 B9 FE B9 FE B9 FE B9 FE BF C9 CF A7 D1 BD A3 AC C4 E3 B2 BB D6 AA B5 C0 D5 E2 C0 EF B5 C4 D6 B8 C1 EE CA C7 CA B2 C3 B4 A3 A1 B9 FE B9 FE B9 FE 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 }
    condition:
        $a at pe.entry_point

}

Deployment Notes

This YARA rule can be deployed in the following contexts:

• Microsoft Defender for Endpoint — Custom indicators / advanced hunting
• Email Gateway — Attachment scanning
• File Share Monitoring — Periodic scanning of shared drives
• YARA CLI — Manual threat hunting on endpoints

This rule contains 1 string patterns in its detection logic.

• Source Rule

False Positive Guidance

• Legacy Application Deployment via Group Policy

  • Scenario: An IT administrator deploys a legacy line-of-business application (e.g., an older version of a Chinese ERP system or specialized engineering software) that bundles the QinYingShield licensing component. The file is copied to user profiles or shared network drives during the GPO refresh cycle, triggering the YARA rule on the client machines.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude files located in specific legacy application directories (e.g., C:\Program Files\LegacyERP\licenses\) or exclude files with the specific hash associated with the legitimate build of QinYingShieldLicense.dll if the version is verified.

• Scheduled License Verification Job

  • Scenario: A scheduled task (e.g., QinYingLicenseCheck) runs every 24 hours to validate software licenses for a suite of proprietary tools. This process spawns a short-lived instance of the licensing module in the %TEMP% or %APPDATA% directory, which matches the YARA signature before being cleaned up or moved.
  • Filter/Exclusion: Exclude processes or files originating from known service accounts (e.g., svc_software_mgmt) or exclude paths under %TEMP% where the filename matches QinYingShieldLicense* and the parent process is a known service executable (e.g., svchost.exe or a custom licensingservice.exe).

• Backup and Restore Operations

  • Scenario: During a full system image backup or a file-level restore using tools like Veeam, Acronis, or Windows Server Backup, the licensing DLL is temporarily extracted to a staging area (e.g., C:\BackupStaging\) for compression or verification. The YARA rule scans this temporary copy, flagging it as a new file even