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The cyber espionage group known as Bahamut has been attributed as behind a highly targeted campaign that infects users of Android devices with malicious apps designed to extract sensitive information. The activity, which has been active since January 2022, entails distributing rogue VPN apps through a fake SecureVPN website set up for this purpose, Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET  said  in a new report shared with The Hacker News. At least eight different variants of the spyware apps have been discovered to date, with them being trojanized versions of legitimate VPN apps like SoftVPN and OpenVPN . None of these apps are available on Google Play Store. The tampered apps and their updates are pushed to users through the fraudulent website. It's also suspected that the targets are carefully selected, since launching the app requires the victim to enter an activation key to enable the features. This implies the use of an undetermined distribution vector, although past evide...

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 credent...

Companies based in the U.S. have been at the receiving end of an "aggressive" Qakbot malware campaign that leads to Black Basta ransomware infections on compromised networks. "In this latest campaign, the Black Basta ransomware gang is using QakBot malware to create an initial point of entry and move laterally within an organization's network," Cybereason researchers Joakim Kandefelt and Danielle Frankel  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Black Basta, which emerged in April 2022, follows the tried-and-tested approach of double extortion to steal sensitive data from targeted companies and use it as a leverage to extort cryptocurrency payments by threatening to release the stolen information. This is not the first time the ransomware crew has been observed using Qakbot (aka QBot, QuackBot, or Pinkslipbot). Last month, Trend Micro  disclosed  similar attacks that entailed the use of Qakbot to deliver the  Brute Ratel C4  framework, which, in ...

As many as 34 Russian-speaking gangs distributing information-stealing malware under the stealer-as-a-service model stole no fewer than 50 million passwords in the first seven months of 2022. "The underground market value of stolen logs and compromised card details is estimated around $5.8 million," Singapore-headquartered Group-IB  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Aside from looting passwords, the stealers also harvested 2.11 billion cookie files, 113,204 crypto wallets, and 103,150 payment cards. A majority of the victims were located in the U.S., followed by Brazil, India, Germany, Indonesia, the Philippines, France, Turkey, Vietnam, and Italy. In total, over 890,000 devices in 111 countries were infected during the time frame. Group-IB said the members of several scam groups who are propagating the information stealers previously participated in the  Classiscam  operation. These groups, which are active on Telegram and have around 200 member...

The operators of the Ducktail information stealer have demonstrated a "relentless willingness to persist" and continued to update their malware as part of an ongoing financially driven campaign. "The malware is designed to steal browser cookies and take advantage of authenticated Facebook sessions to steal information from the victim's Facebook account," WithSecure researcher Mohammad Kazem Hassan Nejad  said  in a new analysis. "The operation ultimately hijacks Facebook Business accounts to which the victim has sufficient access. The threat actor uses their gained access to run ads for monetary gain." Attributed to a Vietnamese threat actor, the Ducktail campaign is designed to target businesses in the digital marketing and advertising sectors which are active on the Facebook Ads and Business platform. Also targeted are individuals within prospective companies that are likely to have high-level access to Facebook Business accounts. This includes...