Divide and conquer: how the new Keenadu backdoor exposed links between major Android botnets


In April 2025, Kaspersky reported on a then-new iteration of the Triada backdoor that had compromised the firmware of counterfeit Android devices sold across major marketplaces.

The malware was deployed to the system partitions and hooked into Zygote – the parent process for all Android apps – to infect any app on the device. This allowed the Trojan to exfiltrate credentials from messaging apps and social media platforms, among other things. This discovery prompted Kaspersky researchers to dive deeper, looking for other Android firmware-level threats.

Read more…
Source: Kaspersky


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


Related:

  • The Value of Dark Web Coverage for Third-Party Risk Management

    October 9, 2019

    Everyone knows that a key ingredient to an effective third-party risk program is comprehensive, high-quality risk information. This includes details on supply chain risk, financial risk, legal risk, cyber risk, and more. With growing third-party ecosystems, it’s easier said than done for risk management teams to collect, organize, and prioritize their own risk information along ...

  • Report: Nation state hackers and cyber criminals are spoofing each other

    October 4, 2019

    Nation-state hackers and cyber criminals are increasingly impersonating each other to try and hide their tracks as part of advanced attack techniques says Optiv Security in its 2019 Cyber Threat Intelligence Estimate report. The top industries being targeted are retail, healthcare, government and financial institutions. Cryptojacking and ransomware are new exploits that join the traditional list of computer ...

  • New Reductor Malware Hijacks HTTPS Traffic

    October 3, 2019

    Researchers have discovered a new malware strain, dubbed Reductor, that allows hackers to manipulate Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) traffic by tweaking a browser’s random numbers generator, used to ensure a private connection between the client and server. Once infected, Reductor is used to spy on a victim’s browser activity, said the Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) ...

  • PKPLUG: Chinese Cyber Espionage Group Attacking Asia

    October 3, 2019

    For three years, Unit 42 has tracked a set of cyber espionage attack campaigns across Asia, which used a mix of publicly available and custom malware. Unit 42 created the moniker “PKPLUG” for the threat actor group, or groups, behind these and other documented attacks referenced later in this report. We say group or groups ...

  • The Eye on the Nile

    October 3, 2019

    Back in March 2019, Amnesty International published a report that uncovered a targeted attack against journalists and human rights activists in Egypt. The victims even received an e-mail from Google warning them that government-backed attackers attempted to steal their passwords. According to the report, the attackers did not rely on traditional phishing methods or credential-stealing payloads, but rather ...

  • Hack Breaks PDF Encryption, Opens Content to Attackers

    October 2, 2019

    Researchers in Germany have invented a new hack that can allow someone to break the encryption of PDF files and access their content  — or even forge signed PDF files under certain circumstances. A team from Ruhr University Bochum, FH Münster University of Applied Sciences and Hackmanit GmbH developed the attack, called PDFex, that can allow an attacker to view the ...