Headline
New Mispadu Banking Trojan Exploiting Windows SmartScreen Flaw
The threat actors behind the Mispadu banking Trojan have become the latest to exploit a now-patched Windows SmartScreen security bypass flaw to compromise users in Mexico. The attacks entail a new variant of the malware that was first observed in 2019, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said in a report published last week. Propagated via phishing mails, Mispadu is a Delphi-based information stealer
Malware / Financial Security
The threat actors behind the Mispadu banking Trojan have become the latest to exploit a now-patched Windows SmartScreen security bypass flaw to compromise users in Mexico.
The attacks entail a new variant of the malware that was first observed in 2019, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said in a report published last week.
Propagated via phishing mails, Mispadu is a Delphi-based information stealer known to specifically infect victims in the Latin American (LATAM) region. In March 2023, Metabase Q revealed that Mispadu spam campaigns harvested no less than 90,000 bank account credentials since August 2022.
It’s also part of the larger family of LATAM banking malware, including Grandoreiro, which was dismantled by Brazilian law enforcement authorities last week.
The latest infection chain identified by Unit 42 employs rogue internet shortcut files contained within bogus ZIP archive files that leverage CVE-2023-36025 (CVSS score: 8.8), a high-severity bypass flaw in Windows SmartScreen. It was addressed by Microsoft in November 2023.
“This exploit revolves around the creation of a specifically crafted internet shortcut file (.URL) or a hyperlink pointing to malicious files that can bypass SmartScreen’s warnings,” security researchers Daniela Shalev and Josh Grunzweig said.
“The bypass is simple and relies on a parameter that references a network share, rather than a URL. The crafted .URL file contains a link to a threat actor’s network share with a malicious binary.”
Mispadu, once launched, reveals its true colors by selectively targeting victims based on their geographic location (i.e., Americas or Western Europe) and system configurations, and then proceeds to establish contact with a command-and-control (C2) server for follow-on data exfiltration.
In recent months, the Windows flaw has been exploited in the wild by multiple cybercrime groups to deliver DarkGate and Phemedrone Stealer malware in recent months.
Mexico has also emerged as a top target for several campaigns over the past year that have been found to propagate information stealers and remote access trojans like AllaKore RAT, AsyncRAT, Babylon RAT. This constitutes a financially-motivated group dubbed TA558 that has attacked the hospitality and travel sectors in the LATAM region since 2018.
The development comes as Sekoia detailed the inner workings of DICELOADER (aka Lizar or Tirion), a time-tested custom downloader used by the Russian e-crime group tracked as FIN7. The malware has been observed delivered via malicious USB drives (aka BadUSB) in the past.
“DICELOADER is dropped by a PowerShell script along with other malware of the intrusion set’s arsenal such as Carbanak RAT,” the French cybersecurity firm said, calling out its sophisticated obfuscation methods to conceal the C2 IP addresses and the network communications.
It also follows AhnLab’s discovery of two new malicious cryptocurrency mining campaigns that employ booby-trapped archives and game hacks to deploy miner malware that mine Monero and Zephyr.
Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post.
Related news
Microsoft on Tuesday shipped fixes to address a total of 90 security flaws, including 10 zero-days, of which six have come under active exploitation in the wild. Of the 90 bugs, seven are rated Critical, 79 are rated Important, and one is rated Moderate in severity. This is also in addition to 36 vulnerabilities that the tech giant resolved in its Edge browser since last month. The Patch Tuesday
Microsoft Corp. today pushed software updates to plug more than 70 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related products, including two zero-day vulnerabilities that are already being exploited in active attacks.
Threat actors are leveraging bogus Facebook job advertisements as a lure to trick prospective targets into installing a new Windows-based stealer malware codenamed Ov3r_Stealer. "This malware is designed to steal credentials and crypto wallets and send those to a Telegram channel that the threat actor monitors," Trustwave SpiderLabs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Ov3r_Stealer
By Waqas The new variant of Mispadu Stealer was discovered by Palo Alto's Unit 42 researchers while investigating the Windows Defender SmartScreen vulnerability. This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Mispadu Stealer’s New Variant Targets Browser Data of Mexican Users
Hello everyone! It has been 3 months since the last episode. I spent most of this time improving my Vulristics project. So in this episode, let’s take a look at what’s been done. Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239139 Also, let’s take a look at the Microsoft Patch Tuesdays vulnerabilities, Linux Patch Wednesdays vulnerabilities and […]
Threat actors have been observed leveraging a now-patched security flaw in Microsoft Windows to deploy an open-source information stealer called Phemedrone Stealer. “Phemedrone targets web browsers and data from cryptocurrency wallets and messaging apps such as Telegram, Steam, and Discord,” Trend Micro researchers Peter Girnus, Aliakbar Zahravi, and Simon Zuckerbraun said. “It also
By Deeba Ahmed Attackers Leveraging Windows Vulnerability in Phemedrone Malware Campaign for Enhanced Stealth. This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Windows Defender SmartScreen Vulnerability Exploited with Phemedrone Stealer
A new phishing campaign is leveraging decoy Microsoft Word documents as bait to deliver a backdoor written in the Nim programming language. "Malware written in uncommon programming languages puts the security community at a disadvantage as researchers and reverse engineers' unfamiliarity can hamper their investigation," Netskope researchers Ghanashyam Satpathy and Jan Michael Alcantara
Microsoft has patched a total of 63 vulnerabilities this Patch Tuesday. Make sure you update as soon as you can.
Microsoft has released fixes to address 63 security bugs in its software for the month of November 2023, including three vulnerabilities that have come under active exploitation in the wild. Of the 63 flaws, three are rated Critical, 56 are rated Important, and four are rated Moderate in severity. Two of them have been listed as publicly known at the time of the release. The updates are in
Microsoft today released updates to fix more than five dozen security holes in its Windows operating systems and related software, including three "zero day" vulnerabilities that Microsoft warns are already being exploited in active attacks.
In all, this set of vulnerabilities Microsoft patched includes 57 vulnerabilities, 54 of which are considered “important.”
Windows SmartScreen Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability