Cybercriminals are targeting Windows users with a new variant of the Masslogger trojan, which is spyware designed to swipe victims’ credentials from Microsoft Outlook, Google Chrome and various instant-messenger accounts.
Researchers uncovered the campaign targeting users in Italy, Latvia and Turkey starting in mid-January. When the Masslogger variant launched its infection chain, it disguised its malicious RAR files as Compiled HTML (CHM) files. This is a new move for Masslogger, and helps the malware sidestep potential defensive programs, which would otherwise block the email attachment based on its RAR file extension, said researchers on Wednesday.
“The use of compiled HTML (usually used for Windows help files) can be advantageous for the attacker since the initial infection vector is email,” Vanja Svajcer, outreach researcher with Cisco Talos, told Threatpost. “Many organizations will not consider CHM files to be executables so it is more likely they will evade content filters filtering incoming email messages based on the attachment name or type.”
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Source: ThreatPost