In January 2022, a new browser hijacker/adware campaign named ChromeLoader (also known as Choziosi Loader and ChromeBack) was discovered. Despite using simple malicious advertisements, the malware became widespread, potentially leaking data from thousands of users and organizations.
Unit 42 continuously hunts for new and unique malware samples that match known advanced persistent threat (APT) patterns and tactics. On May 19, one such sample was uploaded to VirusTotal, where it received a benign verdict from all 56 vendors that evaluated it. Beyond the obvious detection concerns, we believe this sample is also significant in terms of its malicious payload, command and control (C2), and packaging.
Flubot is an Android based malware that has been distributed in the past 1.5 years in
Europe, Asia and Oceania affecting thousands of devices of mostly unsuspecting victims.
Like the majority of Android banking malware, Flubot abuses Accessibility Permissions and Services
in order to steal the victim’s credentials, by detecting when the official banking application
is open to show a fake web injection, a phishing website similar to the login form of the banking
application. An important part of the popularity of Flubot is due to the distribution
strategy used in its campaigns, since it has been using the infected devices to send
text messages, luring new victims into installing the malware from a fake website.
In this article we detail its development over time and recent developments regarding
its disappearance, including new features and distribution campaigns.
Here we go with another episode about our (not so) old friend, BRATA. In almost one year, threat actors (TAs) have further improved the capabilities of this malware. In our previous blog post [1] we defined three main BRATA variants, which appeared during two different waves detected by our telemetries at the very end of 2021. However, during the last months we have observed a change in the attack pattern commonly used.
Introduction Rootkits are dangerous pieces of malware. Once in place, they are usually really hard to detect. Their code is typically more challenging to write than other malware, so developers resort to code reuse from open source projects. As rootkits are very interesting to analyze, we are always looking out for these kinds of samples […]
In July 2021, CPR released a series of three publications covering different aspects of how the Formbook and XLoader malware families function. We described how XLoader emerged in the Darknet community to fill the empty niche after Formbook sales were abruptly stopped by its author. We did a deep technical analysis followed by a description of XLoader for macOS along with common points and differences in how both malware families conceal the heart of the whole operation, the Command-and-Control (C&C) infrastructure. However, the world does not stand still, and this applies to the malware cyber-world as well.
While Windows holds the largest market share on malware, macOS has its fair share of threats that mostly exist in an adware/grayware area. In this post I want to walk through how a Pirrit PKG file installer works. There are lots of more complex threats, but this is a good place to start if you’re just jumping into analysis. If you want to follow along at home, I’m working with this file in MalwareBazaar: https://bazaar.abuse.ch/sample/d39426dbceb54bba51587242f8101184df43cc23af7dc7b364ca2327e28e7825/.