SharkBot | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The Android banking fraud malware known as SharkBot has reared its head once again on the official Google Play Store, posing as file managers to bypass the app marketplace's restrictions. A majority of the users who downloaded the rogue apps are located in the U.K. and Italy, Romanian cybersecurity company Bitdefender  said  in an analysis published this week. SharkBot, first  discovered  towards the end of 2021 by Cleafy, is a  recurring   mobile   threat  distributed both on the Google Play Store and other third-party app stores. One of the trojan's primary goals is to initiate money transfers from compromised devices via a technique called "Automatic Transfer System" ( ATS ), in which a transaction triggered via a banking app is intercepted to swap the payee account with an actor-controlled account in the background. It's also capable of serving a fake login overlay when users attempt to open legitimate banking apps, stealing the credentials in the proce

The notorious Android banking trojan known as  SharkBot  has once again made an appearance on the Google Play Store by masquerading as antivirus and cleaner apps. "This new dropper doesn't rely on Accessibility permissions to automatically perform the installation of the dropper Sharkbot malware," NCC Group's Fox-IT  said  in a report. "Instead, this new version asks the victim to install the malware as a fake update for the antivirus to stay protected against threats." The apps in question, Mister Phone Cleaner and Kylhavy Mobile Security, have over 60,000 installations between them and are designed to target users in Spain, Australia, Poland, Germany, the U.S., and Austria - Mister Phone Cleaner (com.mbkristine8.cleanmaster, 50,000+ downloads) Kylhavy Mobile Security (com.kylhavy.antivirus, 10,000+ downloads) The  droppers  are designed to drop a new version of SharkBot,  dubbed V2  by Dutch security firm ThreatFabric, which features an updated co

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As many as seven malicious Android apps discovered on the Google Play Store masqueraded as antivirus solutions to deploy a banking trojan called SharkBot . "SharkBot steals credentials and banking information," Check Point researchers Alex Shamshur and Raman Ladutska  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This malware implements a geofencing feature and evasion techniques, which makes it stand out from the rest of malwares." Particularly, the malware is designed to ignore users from China, India, Romania, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. The rogue apps are said to have been installed more than 15,000 times prior to their removal, with most of the victims located in Italy and the U.K. The report complements  previous findings  from NCC Group, which found the bankbot posing as antivirus apps to carry out unauthorized transactions via Automatic Transfer Systems (ATS). SharkBot takes advantage of Android's Accessibility Services permissions to present

Cybersecurity researchers on Monday took the wraps off a new Android trojan that takes advantage of accessibility features on mobile devices to siphon credentials from banking and cryptocurrency services in Italy, the U.K., and the U.S. Dubbed " SharkBot " by Cleafy, the malware is designed to strike a total of 27 targets — counting 22 unnamed international banks in Italy and the U.K. as well as five cryptocurrency apps in the U.S. — at least since late October 2021 and is believed to be in its early stages of development, with no overlaps found to that of any known families. "The main goal of SharkBot is to initiate money transfers from the compromised devices via Automatic Transfer Systems (ATS) technique bypassing multi-factor authentication mechanisms (e.g., SCA)," the researchers said in a report. "Once SharkBot is successfully installed in the victim's device, attackers can obtain sensitive banking information through the abuse of Accessibility S