Malware

May 6, 2025

Unit 42 researchers recently uncovered a highly focused malicious campaign targeting dozens of Portuguese organizations, particularly in the government, finance and transportation sectors. This campaign was orchestrated by the threat actors behind Lampion malware, an infostealer that focuses on sensitive banking information. This malware family has been active since at least 2019. During our investigation, we ...

April 29, 2025

Unit 42 researchers have identified new information-stealing malware written in C#, called Gremlin Stealer. This stealer’s authors have actively advertised it on a Telegram group since mid-March 2025. This information-stealing malware exfiltrates data from its victims and uploads this information to its web server for publication. It can capture data from browsers, the clipboard and the ...

April 29, 2025

In a recent incident response case in Brazil, we dealt with a relatively simple, yet very effective threat focused on Linux environments. Outlaw (also known as “Dota”) is a Perl-based crypto mining botnet that typically takes advantage of weak or default SSH credentials for its operations. Previous research described Outlaw samples obtained from honeypots. In this ...

April 25, 2025

Older versions of Android contained various vulnerabilities that allowed gaining root access to the device. Many malicious programs exploited these to elevate their system privileges and gain persistence. The notorious Triada Trojan also used this attack vector. With time, the vulnerabilities were patched, and restrictions were added to the firmware. Specifically, system partitions in recent ...

April 24, 2025

Got an Android phone? Got a tap-to-pay card? Then you’re like millions of other users now at risk from a new form of cybercrime – malware that can read your credit or debit card and hand its data over to an attacker. A newly discovered malicious program effectively turns Android phones into malicious tap machines that ...

April 21, 2025

The evolution of Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) has significantly lowered the barriers to entry for cybercriminals, with information stealers becoming one of the most commercially successful categories in this underground economy. Among these threats, Lumma Stealer has emerged as a particularly sophisticated player since its introduction in 2022 by the threat actor known as Lumma. Initially marketed as ...

April 21, 2025

FortiGuard Labs recently discovered a new botnet propagating through TOTOLINK devices. Unlike previous malware targeting these devices, this variant is written in Rust—a programming language introduced by Mozilla in 2010. Due to its Rust-based implementation, we’ve named the malware “RustoBot.” In January and February of 2025, FortiGuard Labs observed a significant increase in alerts related to ...

April 21, 2025

With each passing year, phishing attacks feature more and more elaborate techniques designed to trick users and evade security measures. Attackers employ deceptive URL redirection tactics, such as appending malicious website addresses to seemingly safe links, embed links in PDFs, and send HTML attachments that either host the entire phishing site or use JavaScript to ...

April 16, 2025

In December 2024, Palo Alto Unit 42 researchers uncovered an attack chain that employs distinct, multi-layered stages to deliver malware like Agent Tesla variants, Remcos RAT or XLoader. Attackers increasingly rely on such complex delivery mechanisms to evade detection, bypass traditional sandboxes, and ensure successful payload delivery and execution. The phishing campaign we analyzed used deceptive ...

April 14, 2025

The stealthy rootkit-like malware known as BPFDoor (detected as Backdoor.Linux.BPFDOOR) is a backdoor with strong stealth capabilities, most of them related to its use of Berkeley Packet Filtering (BPF). In a previous article, Trend Micro researchers covered how BPFDoor and BPF-enabled malware work. BPFDoor has been active for at least four years, with a report by ...