ESET Analysis, Risk Stories
A view of the H1 2024 menace panorama as seen by ESET telemetry and from the angle of ESET menace detection and analysis consultants
27 Jun 2024
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2 min. learn
These previous six months painted a dynamic panorama of Android Monetary threats – malware going after victims’ cellular banking funds – be it within the type of “conventional” banking malware or, extra not too long ago, cryptostealers.
A curious newcomer on this scene is GoldPickaxe, new cellular malware able to stealing facial recognition information to create deepfake movies utilized by the malware’s operators to authenticate fraudulent monetary transactions. Armed with each Android and iOS variations, this menace has been focusing on victims in Southeast Asia by way of localized malicious apps. As ESET researchers dug into this malware household, they found that an older Android sibling of GoldPickaxe, referred to as GoldDiggerPlus, has additionally tunneled its method to Latin America and South Africa by actively focusing on victims in these areas.
Maintaining with the instances, infostealing malware can now be discovered impersonating generative AI instruments as nicely. In H1 2024, Rilide Stealer was noticed misusing the names of generative AI assistants, equivalent to OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Gemini, to entice potential victims. In one other malicious marketing campaign, the Vidar infostealer was lurking behind a supposed Home windows desktop app for AI picture generator Midjourney – though Midjourney’s AI mannequin is just accessible through Discord. Since 2023, we have now been more and more seeing cybercriminals abusing the AI theme – a development that’s anticipated to proceed.
Gaming fanatics who enterprise out from official gaming ecosystems may sadly uncover that infostealer threats have additionally discovered a method to spoil their favourite passion: some cracked video video games and dishonest instruments utilized in on-line multiplayer video games have been not too long ago discovered to include infostealer malware equivalent to Lumma Stealer and RedLine Stealer.
RedLine Stealer noticed a number of detection spikes in H1 2024, brought on by one-off campaigns in Spain, Japan, and Germany. Though this “Infostealer-as-a-Service” suffered a disruption in 2023 and seems now not to be underneath lively improvement, its latest waves have been so vital that RedLine Stealer detections in H1 2024 surpassed these from H2 2023 by a 3rd.
Balada Injector, a gang infamous for exploiting WordPress plugin vulnerabilities, continued to run rampant within the first half of 2024, compromising over 20,000 web sites and racking up over 400,000 hits in ESET telemetry for the variants used within the gang’s latest marketing campaign.
On the ransomware scene, former main participant LockBit was knocked off its pedestal by Operation Chronos, a world disruption performed by legislation enforcement in February 2024. Though ESET telemetry recorded two notable LockBit campaigns in H1 2024, these have been discovered to be the results of non-LockBit gangs utilizing the leaked LockBit builder.
The Ebury botnet, beforehand examined in ESET’s 2014 white paper Operation Windigo, stays harmful even ten years later: latest investigation by ESET researchers uncovered that this menace has compromised almost 400,000 servers since 2009. Though Ebury’s toolkit was already substantial on the time of the unique analysis, these newest findings revealed expanded functionalities of the botnet, focusing totally on monetization strategies equivalent to cryptocurrency and bank card theft.
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