Pay-Per-Install | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The  Glupteba  botnet has been found to incorporate a previously undocumented Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ( UEFI ) bootkit feature, adding another layer of sophistication and stealth to the malware. "This bootkit can intervene and control the [operating system] boot process, enabling Glupteba to hide itself and create a stealthy persistence that can be extremely difficult to detect and remove," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers Lior Rochberger and Dan Yashnik  said  in a Monday analysis. Glupteba is a fully-featured information stealer and backdoor capable of facilitating illicit cryptocurrency mining and deploying proxy components on infected hosts. It's also known to leverage the Bitcoin blockchain as a backup command-and-control (C2) system, making it  resilient to takedown efforts . Some of the other functions allow it to deliver additional payloads, siphon credentials, and credit card data, perform ad fraud, and even exploit routers to ga...

The pay-per-install (PPI) malware downloader service known as PrivateLoader is being used to distribute a previously documented information-stealing malware dubbed  RisePro . Flashpoint spotted the newly identified stealer on December 13, 2022, after it discovered "several sets of logs" exfiltrated using the malware on an illicit cybercrime marketplace called Russian Market. A C++-based malware, RisePro is said to share similarities with another info-stealing malware referred to as Vidar stealer, itself a fork of a stealer codenamed  Arkei  that emerged in 2018. "The appearance of the stealer as a payload for a pay-per-install service may indicate a threat actor's confidence in the stealer's abilities," the threat intelligence company  noted  in a write-up last week. Cybersecurity firm SEKOIA, which  released  its own analysis of RisePro , further identified partial source code overlaps with PrivateLoader. This encompasses the string scrambling...

Cybersecurity researchers have exposed new connections between a widely used pay-per-install (PPI) malware service known as PrivateLoader and another PPI platform offered by a cybercriminal actor dubbed ruzki. "The threat actor ruzki (aka les0k, zhigalsz) advertises their PPI service on underground Russian-speaking forums and their Telegram channels under the name ruzki or zhigalsz since at least May 2021," SEKOIA said. The cybersecurity firm said its investigations into the twin services led it to conclude that PrivateLoader is the proprietary loader of the ruzki PPI malware service. PrivateLoader, as the name implies, functions as a C++-based loader to download and deploy additional malicious payloads on infected Windows hosts. It's primarily distributed through SEO-optimized websites that claim to provide cracked software. Although it was  first documented  earlier this February by Intel471, it's said to have been put to use starting as early as May 2021. S...

I had the honor of hosting the first episode of the Xposure Podcast live from Xposure Summit 2025. And I couldn't have asked for a better kickoff panel: three cybersecurity leaders who don't just talk security, they live it. Let me introduce them. Alex Delay , CISO at IDB Bank, knows what it means to defend a highly regulated environment. Ben Mead , Director of Cybersecurity at Avidity Biosciences, brings a forward-thinking security perspective that reflects the innovation behind Avidity's targeted RNA therapeutics. Last but not least, Michael Francess , Director of Cybersecurity Advanced Threat at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, leads the charge in protecting the franchise. Each brought a unique vantage point to a common challenge: applying Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) to complex production environments. Gartner made waves in 2023 with a bold prediction: organizations that prioritize CTEM will be three times less likely to be breached by 2026. But here's the kicker -...

A pay-per-install (PPI) malware service known as PrivateLoader has been spotted distributing a "fairly sophisticated" framework called NetDooka, granting attackers complete control over the infected devices. "The framework is distributed via a pay-per-install (PPI) service and contains multiple parts, including a loader, a dropper, a protection driver, and a full-featured remote access trojan (RAT) that implements its own network communication protocol," Trend Micro  said  in a report published Thursday. PrivateLoader, as documented by Intel 471 in February 2022, functions as a downloader responsible for downloading and installing additional malware onto the infected system, including SmokeLoader, RedLine Stealer, Vidar, Raccoon, GCleaner, and  Anubis . Featuring anti-analysis techniques, PrivateLoader is written in the C++ programming language and is said to be in active development, with the downloader malware family gaining traction among multiple threat ac...