Traffic Distribution System | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The threat actors behind the VexTrio Viper Traffic Distribution Service (TDS) have been linked to other TDS services like Help TDS and Disposable TDS, indicating that the sophisticated cybercriminal operation is a sprawling enterprise of its own that's designed to distribute malicious content. "VexTrio is a group of malicious adtech companies that distribute scams and harmful software via different advertising formats, including smartlinks and push notifications," Infoblox said in a deep-dive report shared with The Hacker News. Some of the malicious adtech companies under VexTrio Viper include Los Pollos, Taco Loco, and Adtrafico. These companies operate what's called a commercial affiliate network that connects malware actors whose websites unsuspecting users land on and so-called "advertising affiliates" who offer various forms of illicit schemes like gift card fraud, malicious apps, phishing sites, and scams. Put differently, these malicious traffi...

Potential connections between a subscription-based crimeware-as-a-service (CaaS) solution and a cracked copy of Cobalt Strike have been established in what the researchers suspect is being offered as a tool for its customers to stage post-exploitation activities. Prometheus , as the service is called, first came to light in August 2021 when cybersecurity company Group-IB disclosed details of malicious software distribution campaigns undertaken by cybercriminal groups to distribute Campo Loader, Hancitor, IcedID, QBot, Buer Loader, and SocGholish in Belgium and the U.S. Costing $250 a month, it's marketed on Russian underground forums as a traffic direction system (TDS) to enable phishing redirection on a mass scale to rogue landing pages that are designed to deploy malware payloads on the targeted systems. "Prometheus can be considered a full-bodied service/platform that allows threat groups to purvey their malware or phishing operations with ease," BlackBerry Resear...