Cloud Phones: The Invisible Threat


What began as a simple scheme to inflate social media metrics has evolved into a sophisticated threat that is quietly reshaping the economics of digital fraud. Over the past decade, fraud prevention teams have invested heavily in device fingerprinting and emulator detection and that investment paid off; classic emulators and bot activities became predictable, easy to detect and block.

However, attackers adapted. They moved to cloud phones – remote-access Android devices running in data centers. For all intents and purposes, these are real phones, running genuine firmware, exhibiting natural sensor behavior, and presenting valid hardware attestation. Plus, they’re accessible to anyone with just $10 to spare and an internet connection. What makes this threat unlike any other is its invisibility.

Read more…
Source: Group IB


Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox


Related:

  • Oil & Gas Targeted in Year-Long Cyber-Espionage Campaign

    July 8, 2021

    A sophisticated campaign targeting large international companies in the oil and gas sector has been underway for more than a year, researchers said, spreading common remote access trojans (RATs) for cyber-espionage purposes. According to Intezer analysis, spear-phishing emails with malicious attachments are used to drop various RATs on infected machines, including Agent Tesla, AZORult, Formbook, Loki ...

  • Quick look at CVE-2021-1675 & CVE-2021-34527 (aka PrintNightmare)

    July 8, 2021

    Last week Microsoft warned Windows users about vulnerabilities in the Windows Print Spooler service – CVE-2021-1675 and CVE-2021-34527 (also known as PrintNightmare). Both vulnerabilities can be used by an attacker with a regular user account to take control of a vulnerable server or client machine that runs the Windows Print Spooler service. This service is ...

  • Critical Sage X3 RCE Bug Allows Full System Takeovers

    July 7, 2021

    Four vulnerabilities afflict the popular Sage X3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, researchers found – including one critical bug that rates 10 out of 10 on the CVSS vulnerability-severity scale. Two of the bugs could be chained together to allow complete system takeovers, with potential supply-chain ramifications, they said. Sage X3 is targeted at mid-sized companies ...

  • WildPressure targets the macOS platform

    July 7, 2021

    Our previous story regarding WildPressure was dedicated to their campaign against industrial-related targets in the Middle East. By keeping track of their malware in spring 2021, we were able to find a newer version. It contains the C++ Milum Trojan, a corresponding VBScript variant with the same version (1.6.1) and a set of modules that ...

  • Understanding REvil: The Ransomware Gang Behind the Kaseya Attack

    July 6, 2021

    REvil has emerged as one of the world’s most notorious ransomware operators. In just the past month, it extracted an $11 million payment from the U.S. subsidiary of the world’s largest meatpacking company based in Brazil, demanded $5 million from a Brazilian medical diagnostics company and launched a large-scale attack on dozens, perhaps hundreds, of ...

  • REvil ransomware asks $70 million to decrypt all Kaseya attack victims

    July 5, 2021

    REvil ransomware has set a price for decrypting all systems locked during the Kaseya supply-chain attack. The gang wants $70 million in Bitcoin for the tool that allows all affected businesses to recover their files. The attack on Friday propagated through Kaseya VSA cloud-based solution used by managed service providers (MSPs) to monitor customer systems and ...