Could 27, 2025Ravie LakshmananMalware / Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a brand new malicious marketing campaign that makes use of a faux web site promoting antivirus software program from Bitdefender to dupe victims into downloading a distant entry trojan known as Venom RAT.
The marketing campaign signifies a “clear intent to focus on people for monetary acquire by compromising their credentials, crypto wallets, and doubtlessly promoting entry to their techniques,” the DomainTools Intelligence (DTI) group stated in a brand new report shared with The Hacker Information.
The web site in query, “bitdefender-download[.]com,” advertises web site guests to obtain a Home windows model of the Antivirus software program. Clicking on the distinguished “Obtain for Home windows” button initiates a file obtain from a Bitbucket repository that redirects to an Amazon S3 bucket. The Bitbucket account is not energetic.
The ZIP archive (“BitDefender.zip”) incorporates an executable known as “StoreInstaller.exe,” which incorporates malware configurations related to Venom RAT, in addition to code associated to the open-source post-exploitation framework SilentTrinity and StormKitty stealer.
Venom RAT is an offshoot of Quasar RAT that comes with capabilities to reap knowledge and supply persistent distant entry to attackers.
DomainTools stated the decoy web site masquerading as Bitdefender shares temporal and infrastructure overlaps with different malicious domains spoofing banks and generic IT providers which were used as a part of phishing exercise to reap login credentials related to Royal Financial institution of Canada and Microsoft .
“These instruments work in live performance: Venom RAT sneaks in, StormKitty grabs your passwords and digital pockets data, and SilentTrinity ensures the attacker can keep hidden and keep management,” the corporate stated.
“This marketing campaign underscores a relentless development: attackers are utilizing refined, modular malware constructed from open-source parts. This “build-your-own-malware” method makes these assaults extra environment friendly, stealthy, and adaptable.”
The disclosure comes as Sucuri warned of a ClickFix-style marketing campaign that employs bogus Google Meet pages to deceive customers into putting in noanti-vm.bat RAT, a closely obfuscated Home windows batch script that grants distant management over the sufferer’s pc.
“This faux Google Meet web page would not current a login kind to steal credentials immediately,” safety researcher Puja Srivastava stated. “As an alternative, it employs a social engineering tactic, presenting a faux ‘Microphone Permission Denied’ error and urging the person to repeat and paste a particular PowerShell command as a ‘repair.'”
It additionally follows a spike in phishing assaults that exploit Google’s AppSheet no-code improvement platform to mount a extremely focused, refined marketing campaign impersonating Meta.
“Using state-of-the-art ways equivalent to polymorphic identifiers, superior man‑in‑the‑center proxy mechanisms and multi-factor authentication bypass strategies, the attackers purpose to reap credentials and two-factor authentication (2FA) codes, enabling real-time entry to social media accounts,” the KnowBe4 Menace Lab stated in a report.
The marketing campaign entails using AppSheet to ship phishing emails at scale, permitting the menace actors to bypass e mail safety defenses equivalent to SPF, DKIM, and DMARC owing to the truth that the messages originate from a sound area (“noreply@appsheet[.]com”).
Moreover, the emails declare to be from Fb Assist and make use of account deletion warnings to trick customers into clicking on faux hyperlinks underneath the pretext of submitting an attraction inside a 24-hour time interval. The booby-trapped hyperlinks lead victims to an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) phishing web page designed to reap their credentials and two-factor authentication (2FA) codes.
“To additional evade detection and complicate remediation, the attackers leverage AppSheets’ performance for producing distinctive IDs, proven as Case IDs within the physique of the e-mail,” the corporate stated.
“The presence of distinctive polymorphic identifiers in every phishing e mail ensures each message is barely completely different, serving to them bypass conventional detection techniques that depend on static indicators equivalent to hashes or recognized malicious URLs.”
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