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...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

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...