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Cyber criminals are becoming more adept, innovative, and stealthy with each passing day. They have now shifted from traditional to more clandestine techniques that come with limitless attack vectors and are harder to detect. Security researchers have discovered that one of the most dangerous Android banking Trojan families has now been modified to add a keylogger to its recent strain, giving attackers yet another way to steal victims sensitive data. Kaspersky Lab's Senior malware analyst Roman Unuchek spotted a new variant of the well-known Android banking Trojan, dubbed Svpeng , in the mid of last month with a new keylogger feature, which takes advantage of Android's Accessibility Services. Trojan Exploits 'Accessibility Services' to Add Keylogger Yes, the keylogger added in the new version of Svpeng takes advantage of Accessibility Services — an Android feature that provides users alternative ways to interact with their smartphone devices. This change makes...

U.S. has the top Security Agencies like NSA, FBI to tackle cyber crime and terrorism with their high profile surveillance technologies, but even after that U.S is proudly hosting 44% of the entire cloud based malware distribution. With the enhancement in Internet technology, Cloud computing has shown the possibility of existence and now has become an essential gradient for any Internet Identity. Cloud services are designed in such a way that it is easy to maintain, use, configure and can be scaled depending upon the requirement of the service being provided using the CLOUD technology with cost effective manner. Due to the Easy and Cost effective alternative of traditional computing, Malware writers are using the big cloud hosting platforms to quickly and effectively serve malware to Internet users, allowing them to bypass detection and geographic blacklisting by serving from a trusted provider. Hiding behind trusted domains and names is not something new. According to recently ...

Emotet, a notorious email-based malware behind several botnet-driven spam campaigns and ransomware attacks, contained a flaw that allowed cybersecurity researchers to activate a kill-switch and prevent the malware from infecting systems for six months. "Most of the vulnerabilities and exploits that you read about are good news for attackers and bad news for the rest of us," Binary Defense's James Quinn said. "However, it's important to keep in mind that malware is software that can also have flaws. Just as attackers can exploit flaws in legitimate software to cause harm, defenders can also reverse-engineer malware to discover its vulnerabilities and then exploit those to defeat the malware." The kill-switch was alive between February 6, 2020, to August 6, 2020, for 182 days, before the malware authors patched their malware and closed the vulnerability. Since its first identification in 2014, Emotet has evolved from its initial roots as a banking ...

A new disk wiping malware has been uncovered targeting a petroleum company in Europe, which is quite similar to the mysterious disk wiper malware Shamoon that wiped data from 35,000 computers at Saudi Arabia's national oil company in 2012. Disk wiping malware has the ability to cripple any organization by permanently wiping out data from all hard drive and external storage on a targeted machine, causing great financial and reputational damage. Security researchers from Moscow-based antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab discovered the new wiper StoneDrill while researching last November's re-emergence of Shamoon malware (Shamoon 2.0) attacks – two attacks occurred in November and one in late January. Shamoon 2.0 is the more advanced version of Shamoon malware that reportedly hit 15 government agencies and organizations across the world, wipes data and takes control of the computer’s boot record, preventing the computers from being turned back on. Meanwhile, Kaspersky resea...

We are quite aware of the Android malware scanner Google’s Bouncer that tests the apps by running them in a virtualized environment i.e. a simulated phone created in software which automatically scans the apps to watch its real behaviour on users’ devices, before approving them to the Play Store market. To protect its users and their devices from harm, Google launched this apps scanning software tool, two year ago. Bouncer is a security feature for the Android Play store Market that is designed to protect the Android users to not to be a victim of any malicious Android malware app. But does the security tool go far enough? Despite having protective shield factor, we have seen Google play store market is surrounded by many malicious apps which easily by-passes the Bouncer scan test and targets Android users. Security Research from Columbia University have exploited weaknesses in Google's Bouncer service to sneak malicious apps on to the Android market. They publish...

Hacking ATM is now easier than ever before. Usually, hackers exploit hardware and software vulnerabilities to hack ATMs and force them to spit out cash, but now anyone can simply buy a malware to steal millions in cash from ATMs. Hackers are selling ready-made ATM malware on an underground hacking forum that anybody can simply buy for around $5000, researchers at Kaspersky Lab discovered after spotting a forum post advertising the malware, dubbed Cutlet Maker . The forum post provides a brief description and a detailed manual for the malware toolkit designed to target various ATMs models with the help of a vendor API, without interacting with ATM users and their data. Therefore, this malware does not affect bank customers directly; instead, it is intended to trick the bank ATMs from a specific vendor to release cash without authorisation. The manual also mentions an infamous piece of ATM malware, dubbed Tyupkin , which was first analysed in 2014 by Kaspersky Lab and used ...

Trojans were the most prolific malware threat in February-March, and collaboration seems to be the name of the game in malware development and distribution. Trojan-based attacks continue to be the biggest malware threat in February, but PDF exploits aren’t far behind, according to several security reports. About 1 in 290 e-mails in February were malicious, making the month one of the most prolific periods for the threats, according to Symantec’s February 2011 MessageLabs Intelligence Report. The global ratio of spam in e-mail traffic was 81.3 percent, an increase of 2.7 percent since January, the report found. The recent decline in spam appears to have reversed for the time being, according to the report. There was a lot of botnet activity in February, and the perpetrators appeared to be working together to some extent to distribute Trojans, according to Symantec. There were signs of integration across Zeus, Bredolab and SpyEye, as techniques associated with one malware family w...

The threat actors known as Golden Chickens have been attributed to two new malware families dubbed TerraStealerV2 and TerraLogger, suggesting continued development efforts to fine-tune and diversify their arsenal. "TerraStealerV2 is designed to collect browser credentials, cryptocurrency wallet data, and browser extension information," Recorded Future Insikt Group said . "TerraLogger, by contrast, is a standalone keylogger. It uses a common low-level keyboard hook to record keystrokes and writes the logs to local files." Golden Chickens, also known as Venom Spider, is the name given to a financially motivated threat actor linked to a notorious malware family called More_eggs . It's known to be active since at least 2018, offering its warez under a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model. Campaigns distributing More_eggs entail the use of spear-phishing emails to target hiring managers using fake resumes, allowing attackers to steal confidential data. Other campa...

For 6 months, the infamous Emotet botnet has shown almost no activity, and now it's distributing malicious spam. Let's dive into details and discuss all you need to know about the notorious malware to combat it. Why is everyone scared of Emotet? Emotet  is by far one of the most dangerous trojans ever created. The malware became a very destructive program as it grew in scale and sophistication. The victim can be anyone from corporate to private users exposed to spam email campaigns. The botnet distributes through phishing containing malicious Excel or Word documents. When users open these documents and enable macros, the Emotet DLL downloads and then loads into memory. It searches for email addresses and steals them for spam campaigns. Moreover, the botnet drops additional payloads, such as Cobalt Strike or other attacks that lead to ransomware. The polymorphic nature of Emotet, along with the many modules it includes, makes the malware challenging to identify. The Emotet...

Threat actors have been observed leveraging malicious dropper apps masquerading as legitimate applications to deliver an Android SMS stealer dubbed Wonderland in mobile attacks targeting users in Uzbekistan. "Previously, users received 'pure' Trojan APKs that acted as malware immediately upon installation," Group-IB said in an analysis published last week. "Now, adversaries increasingly deploy droppers disguised as legitimate applications. The dropper looks harmless on the surface but contains a built-in malicious payload, which is deployed locally after installation – even without an active internet connection." Wonderland (formerly WretchedCat), according to the Singapore-headquartered cybersecurity company, facilitates bidirectional command-and-control (C2) communication to execute commands in real-time, allowing for arbitrary USSD requests and SMS theft. It masquerades as Google Play, or files of other formats, such as videos, photos, and wedding in...

However, manual lab setup and configuration can prove to be a laborious and time-consuming process. In this article, we'll look at 4 ways to create a reverse engineering lab, discuss how to save time, and, potentially, improve the detection rate using a  sandbox-as-a-service , and a recommended list of tools for a comprehensive setup. What is a malware analysis lab? In essence, a malware analysis lab provides a safe, isolated space for examining malware. The setup can range from a straightforward virtual machine using VirtualBox to a more intricate network of interconnected machines and actual networking hardware. But in this article, we'll look at building a lab tailored for static analysis, so what we will need is a secure environment where we can run disassemblers, edit binary files and debug. There are a couple of ways we can go about creating it: 1 — Virtualization Perhaps the simplest way to create a secure and isolated environment is by using a virtual machine....

Are you sure the WhatsApp app you are using on your Android device is legitimate, even if it's working perfectly as intended? ...Or the JioTV, AppLock, HotStar, Flipkart, Opera Mini or Truecaller app—if you have installed any of these? I'm asking this because cybersecurity researchers just yesterday revealed eye-opening details about a widespread Android malware campaign wherein attackers silently replaced installed legitimate apps with their malicious versions on nearly 25 million mobile phones. Now the important question here is how they're doing it and why? According to researchers at Check Point, attackers are distributing a new kind of Android malware that disguises itself as innocent-looking photo editing, adult entertainment, or gaming apps and available through widely used third-party app stores. Dubbed Agent Smith , the malware takes advantage of multiple Android vulnerabilities, such as the  Janus flaw and the Man-in-the-Disk flaw , and injects malic...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a previously undocumented threat actor called TA585 that has been observed delivering an off-the-shelf malware called MonsterV2 via phishing campaigns. The Proofpoint Threat Research Team described the threat activity cluster as sophisticated, leveraging web injections and filtering checks as part of its attack chains. "TA585 is notable because it appears to own its entire attack chain with multiple delivery techniques," researchers Kyle Cucci, Tommy Madjar, and Selena Larson said . "Instead of leveraging other threat actors – like paying for distribution, buying access from initial access brokers, or using a third-party traffic delivery system – TA585 manages its own infrastructure, delivery, and malware installation." MonsterV2 is a remote access trojan (RAT), stealer, and loader, which Proofpoint first observed being advertised on criminal forums in February 2025. It's worth noting that MonsterV2 is also calle...