In an unusually particular marketing campaign, customers looking concerning the legality of Bengal Cats in Australia are being focused with the GootLoader malware.
“On this case, we discovered the GootLoader actors utilizing search outcomes for details about a selected cat and a selected geography getting used to ship the payload: ‘Are Bengal Cats authorized in Australia?,'” Sophos researchers Trang Tang, Hikaru Koike, Asha Fortress, and Sean Gallagher stated in a report revealed final week.
GootLoader, because the identify implies, is a malware loader that is usually distributed utilizing SEO (website positioning) poisoning techniques for preliminary entry.
Particularly, the malware is deployed onto sufferer machines when looking for sure phrases like authorized paperwork and agreements on search engines like google like Google floor booby-trapped hyperlinks pointing to compromised web sites that host a ZIP archive containing a JavaScript payload.
As soon as put in, it makes means for a second-stage malware, typically an data stealer and distant entry trojan dubbed GootKit, though it has additionally been noticed delivering different households reminiscent of Cobalt Strike, IcedID, Kronos, REvil, and SystemBC previously for post-exploitation.
The newest assault chain is not any completely different in that searches for “Do you want a license to personal a Bengal cat in Australia” floor outcomes that embody a hyperlink to a legitimate-but-infected web site belonging to a Belgium-based LED show maker, from the place victims are prompted to obtain a ZIP archive.
Current throughout the ZIP archive is a JavaScript file that is then liable for kicking off a multi-stage assault chain that culminates within the execution of a PowerShell script able to harvesting system data and fetching further payloads. It is price noting that an an identical marketing campaign was documented by Cybereason earlier this July.
Sophos stated it didn’t observe the deployment of GootKit within the case the corporate analyzed, thereby stopping the obtain of further malware.
“GootLoader is one in all a lot of persevering with malware-delivery-as-a-service operations that closely leverage search outcomes as a method to succeed in victims,” the researchers stated. “Using SEO, and abuse of search engine promoting to lure targets to obtain malware loaders and dropper, are usually not new—GootLoader has been doing this since a minimum of 2020.”
