Malware


NEWS 
  • Backdoor, Devil Shadow Botnet Hidden in Fake Zoom Installers

    May 21, 2020

    Cybercriminals are taking advantage of “the new normal” — involving employees’ remote working conditions and the popularity of user-friendly online tools — by abusing and spoofing popular legitimate applications to infect systems with malicious routines. We found two malware files that pose as Zoom installers but when decoded, contains the malware code. These malicious fake ...

  • Silent Night Banking Trojan Charges Top Dollar on the Underground

    May 21, 2020

    A descendant of the infamous Zeus banking trojan, dubbed Silent Night by the malware’s author, has emerged on the scene, with a host of functionalities available in a spendy malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model. Custom builds can run as much as $4,000 per month to use, which researchers say is now placing the code out of the range ...

  • COMpfun authors spoof visa application with HTTP status-based Trojan

    May 14, 2020

    You may remember that in autumn 2019 we published a story about how a COMpfun successor known as Reductor infected files on the fly to compromise TLS traffic. If you’re wondering whether the actor behind the malware is still developing new features, the answer is yes. Later in November 2019 our Attribution Engine revealed a new Trojan with ...

  • QNodeService: Node.js Trojan Spread via Covid-19 Lure

    May 14, 2020

    We recently noticed a Twitter post by MalwareHunterTeam that showed a Java downloader with a low detection rate. Its name, “Company PLP_Tax relief due to Covid-19 outbreak CI+PL.jar”, suggests it may have been used in a Covid-19-themed phishing campaign. Running this file led to the download of a new, undetected malware sample written in Node.js; this trojan ...

  • UK electricity middleman hit by cyber-attack

    May 14, 2020

    Elexon, a crucial middleman in the UK power grid network, reported that it fell victim to a cyber-attack earlier today. In a short message posted on its website, the company said the incident only impacted its internal IT network and employee laptops. The company’s email server was also impacted and had been taken down, cutting employees off from crucial ...

  • COVID-19 Themed Malware Within Cloud Environments

    May 11, 2020

    Unit 42 researchers found that public cloud infrastructure has communicated with domains known to distribute COVID-19 themed malware. On March 24, 2020, Unit 42 published a blog discussing attack patterns used by malicious actors in relation to the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). Taking these findings a step further, researchers attempted to uncover if there are malicious COVID-19 related ...

  • Zeus Sphinx revamped as coronavirus relief payment attack wave continues

    May 11, 2020

    The Zeus Sphinx banking Trojan is now receiving frequent updates and upgrades to its malicious arsenal while being deployed in active coronavirus scams. On Monday, IBM Security researcher Nir Shwarts said the company has been tracking the evolution of the malware which is based on the leaked codebase of the well-known Zeus v.2 Trojan. Zeus Sphinx — also referred ...

  • North Korean hackers infect real 2FA app to compromise Macs

    May 9, 2020

    Hackers have hidden malware in a legitimate two-factor authentication (2FA) app for macOS to distribute Dacls, a remote access trojan associated with the North Korean Lazarus group. Dacls has been used to target Windows and Linux platforms and the recently discovered RAT variant for macOS borrows from them much of the functionality and code. The threat actor planted the ...

  • Threat Brief: Maze Ransomware Activities

    May 8, 2020

    Since the beginning of the calendar year, Palo Alto Networks has detected an uptick in Maze ransomware samples across multiple industries. As a result, we’ve created this general threat assessment post on the Maze ransomware activities and a full visualization of these techniques can be viewed in the Unit 42 Playbook Viewer. Maze ransomware, a variant of ChaCha ...

  • Naikon’s Aria

    May 8, 2020

    Our colleagues at Checkpoint put together a fine research writeup on some Naikon resources and activity related to “aria-body” that we detected in 2017 and similarly reported in 2018. To supplement their research findings, we are summarizing and publishing portions of the findings reported in our June 2018 “Naikon’s New AR Backdoor Deployment to Southeast Asia”. This ...