ESET Analysis, Menace Stories
A view of the H1 2024 menace panorama as seen by ESET telemetry and from the angle of ESET menace detection and analysis consultants
27 Jun 2024
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2 min. learn
These previous six months painted a dynamic panorama of Android Monetary threats – malware going after victims’ cellular banking funds – be it within the type of “conventional” banking malware or, extra lately, cryptostealers.
A curious newcomer on this scene is GoldPickaxe, new cellular malware able to stealing facial recognition knowledge to create deepfake movies utilized by the malware’s operators to authenticate fraudulent monetary transactions. Armed with each Android and iOS variations, this menace has been concentrating on victims in Southeast Asia via localized malicious apps. As ESET researchers dug into this malware household, they found that an older Android sibling of GoldPickaxe, referred to as GoldDiggerPlus, has additionally tunneled its technique to Latin America and South Africa by actively concentrating on victims in these areas.
Maintaining with the occasions, infostealing malware can now be discovered impersonating generative AI instruments as effectively. In H1 2024, Rilide Stealer was noticed misusing the names of generative AI assistants, similar to OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Gemini, to entice potential victims. In one other malicious marketing campaign, the Vidar infostealer was lurking behind a supposed Home windows desktop app for AI picture generator Midjourney – regardless that Midjourney’s AI mannequin is barely accessible by way of Discord. Since 2023, we’ve got been more and more seeing cybercriminals abusing the AI theme – a pattern that’s anticipated to proceed.
Gaming fanatics who enterprise out from official gaming ecosystems might sadly uncover that infostealer threats have additionally discovered a technique to spoil their favourite interest: some cracked video video games and dishonest instruments utilized in on-line multiplayer video games have been lately discovered to include infostealer malware similar to Lumma Stealer and RedLine Stealer.
RedLine Stealer noticed a number of detection spikes in H1 2024, brought on by one-off campaigns in Spain, Japan, and Germany. Though this “Infostealer-as-a-Service” suffered a disruption in 2023 and seems now not to be underneath energetic growth, its latest waves have been so important that RedLine Stealer detections in H1 2024 surpassed these from H2 2023 by a 3rd.
Balada Injector, a gang infamous for exploiting WordPress plugin vulnerabilities, continued to run rampant within the first half of 2024, compromising over 20,000 web sites and racking up over 400,000 hits in ESET telemetry for the variants used within the gang’s latest marketing campaign.
On the ransomware scene, former main participant LockBit was knocked off its pedestal by Operation Chronos, a world disruption carried out by legislation enforcement in February 2024. Though ESET telemetry recorded two notable LockBit campaigns in H1 2024, these have been discovered to be the results of non-LockBit gangs utilizing the leaked LockBit builder.
The Ebury botnet, beforehand examined in ESET’s 2014 white paper Operation Windigo, stays harmful even ten years later: latest investigation by ESET researchers uncovered that this menace has compromised practically 400,000 servers since 2009. Though Ebury’s toolkit was already substantial on the time of the unique analysis, these newest findings revealed expanded functionalities of the botnet, focusing totally on monetization strategies similar to cryptocurrency and bank card theft.
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