Cybercriminals Abusing Internet-Sharing Services to Monetize Malware Campaigns
Sep 01, 2021
Threat actors are capitalizing on the growing popularity of proxyware platforms like Honeygain and Nanowire to monetize their own malware campaigns, once again illustrating how attackers are quick to repurpose and weaponize legitimate platforms to their advantage. "Malware is currently leveraging these platforms to monetize the internet bandwidth of victims, similar to how malicious cryptocurrency mining attempts to monetize the CPU cycles of infected systems," researchers from Cisco Talos said in a Tuesday analysis. "In many cases, these applications are featured in multi-stage, multi-payload malware attacks that provide adversaries with multiple monetization methods." Proxyware, also called internet-sharing applications, are legitimate services that allow users to carve out a percentage of their internet bandwidth for other devices, often for a fee, through a client application offered by the provider, enabling other customers to access the internet using ...