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:

  • Updates on ThiefQuest, the Quickly-Evolving macOS Malware

    July 17, 2020

    Right as July of this year began, we noticed an emerging malware dubbed by most as ThiefQuest (also known as EvilQuest), a threat that targets macOS devices, encrypts files, and installs keyloggers in affected systems. It has been found in pirated versions of macOS shared on popular torrent sites. Developments on the malware have been ...

  • Conti ransomware uses 32 simultaneous CPU threads for blazing-fast encryption

    July 9, 2020

    A lesser-known ransomware strain known as Conti is using up to 32 simultaneous CPU threads to encrypt files on infected computers for blazing-fast encryption speeds, security researchers from Carbon Black said in a report on Wednesday. Conti is just the latest in a long string of ransomware strains that have been spotted this year. Just like ...

  • New Mirai Variant Expands Arsenal, Exploits CVE-2020-10173

    July 8, 2020

    Researchers at Trend Micro discovered a new Mirai variant (detected as  IoT.Linux.MIRAI.VWISI) that exploits nine vulnerabilities, most notable of which is CVE-2020-10173 in Comtrend VR-3033 routers which we have not observed exploited by past Mirai variants. This discovery is a new addition to the Mirai variants that appeared in the past few months, that include SORA, UNSTABLE, and Mukashi. The case, ...

  • Purple Fox EK Adds Microsoft Exploits to Arsenal

    July 6, 2020

    The Purple Fox exploit kit (EK) has added two new exploits targeting critical- and high-severity Microsoft vulnerabilities to its bag of tricks – and researchers say they expect more attacks to be added in the future. The Purple Fox EK was previously analyzed in September, when researchers said that it appears to have been built to replace the Rig ...

  • TrickBot malware now checks screen resolution to evade analysis

    July 1, 2020

    The infamous TrickBot trojan has started to check the screen resolutions of victims to detect whether the malware is running in a virtual machine. When researchers analyze malware, they typically do it in a virtual machine that is configured with various analysis tools. Due to this, malware commonly uses anti-VM techniques to detect whether the malware is ...

  • Threat Assessment: EKANS Ransomware

    June 26, 2020

    Unit 42 researchers have observed recent EKANS (Snake backward) ransomware activity affecting multiple industries in the U.S and Europe. As a result, we’ve created this threat assessment report for the activities of this ransomware. Identified techniques and campaigns can be visualized using the Unit 42 Playbook Viewer. EKANS, which was first observed in January 2020, has relatively ...