Mandrake spyware sneaks onto Google Play again, flying under the radar for two years


In April 2024, Kaspersky researchers discovered a suspicious sample that appeared to be a new version of Mandrake. Ensuing analysis revealed as many as five Mandrake applications, which had been available on Google Play from 2022 to 2024 with more than 32,000 installs in total, while staying undetected by any other vendor.

The new samples included new layers of obfuscation and evasion techniques, such as moving malicious functionality to obfuscated native libraries, using certificate pinning for C2 communications, and performing a wide array of tests to check if Mandrake was running on a rooted device or in an emulated environment.

Read more…
Source: Kaspersky


Sign up for our Newsletter


Related:

  • FBI: An APT Group Exploiting a 0-day in FatPipe WARP, MPVPN, and IPVPN Software

    November 17, 2021

    As of November 2021, FBI forensic analysis indicated exploitation of a 0-day vulnerability in the FatPipe MPVPN® device software1 going back to at least May 2021. The vulnerability allowed APT actors to gain access to an unrestricted file upload function to drop a webshell for exploitation activity with root access, leading to elevated privileges and ...

  • ‘Trojan Source’ Hides Invisible Bugs in Source Code

    November 1, 2021

    Researchers have found a new way to encode potentially evil source code, such that human reviewers see a harmless version and compilers see the invisible, wicked version. Named “Trojan Source attacks,” the method “exploits subtleties in text-encoding standards such as Unicode to produce source code whose tokens are logically encoded in a different order from the ...

  • TA505 Gang Is Back With Newly Polished FlawedGrace RAT

    October 19, 2021

    The TA505 cybercrime group is whirring its financial rip-off machinery back up, pelting malware at a range of industries in what was initially low-volume waves that researchers saw spiral up late last month. They do bad things, but they’re so tricky that tracking them is a ton of fun, said Sherrod DeGrippo, vice president, Threat Research ...

  • PurpleFox Adds New Backdoor That Uses WebSockets

    October 19, 2021

    In September 2021, the Trend Micro Managed XDR (MDR) team looked into suspicious activity related to a PurpleFox operator. Our findings led us to investigate an updated PurpleFox arsenal, which included an added vulnerability (CVE-2021-1732) and optimized rootkit capabilities leveraged in their attacks. We also found a new backdoor written in .NET implanted during the intrusion, ...

  • Case Study: From BazarLoader to Network Reconnaissance

    October 18, 2021

    BazarLoader is Windows-based malware spread through various methods involving email. These infections provide backdoor access that criminals use to determine whether the host is part of an Active Directory (AD) environment. If so, criminals deploy Cobalt Strike and perform reconnaissance to map the network. If the results indicate a high-value target, criminals attempt lateral movement ...

  • TrickBot Gang Enters Cybercrime Elite with Fresh Affiliates

    October 15, 2021

    The cybercriminals behind the infamous TrickBot trojan have signed two additional distribution affiliates, dubbed Hive0106 (aka TA551) and Hive0107 by IBM X-Force. The result? Escalating ransomware hits on corporations, especially using the Conti ransomware. The development also speaks to the TrickBot gang’s increasing sophistication and standing in the cybercrime underground, IBM researchers said: “This latest development ...