August’s Most Wanted Malware: Banking Trojan Attacks Turn up the Heat

Check Point’s latest Global Threat Index reveals an increase in banking trojan attacks as organizations feel the impact of large scale Ramnit campaign

 

There was a significant increase in attacks using the Ramnit banking trojan during August, according to our latest Global Threat Index. Ramnit has doubled its global impact over the past few months, driven by a large scale campaign that has been converting victim’s machines into malicious proxy servers (detailed in Check Point’s Research blog).

 

During August 2018, Ramnit jumped to 6^th place in the Threat Index. This saw it become the most prevalent banking Trojan in an upward trend in the use of banking Trojans that has more than doubled since June 2018.

 

It marks the second summer running where we have detected hackers increasingly using banking trojans to target victims and make a quick profit. Trends like this should not be ignored as hackers are acutely aware of which attack vectors are most likely to be successful at any given time, suggesting internet users’ browsing habits during the summer months makes them more susceptible to attack than at other times of the year. This underlines that malicious hackers are tenacious and sophisticated in their attempts to extort money.

 

In order to prevent exploitation by Banking Trojans – and other types of attacks – it is critical that enterprises employ a multi-layered cybersecurity strategy that protects against both established malware families cyber-attacks and brand new threats.

During the period Coinhive remained the most prevalent malware, with impact on 17% of organization worldwide. Dorkbot and Andromeda were ranked in second and third place respectively, each with a global impact of 6%.

August’s 2018’s Top 10 ‘Most Wanted’:

*The arrows relate to the change in rank compared to the previous month.

 

1. ↔ Coinhive – Crypto Miner designed to perform online mining of Monero cryptocurrency when a user visits a web page without the user’s knowledge or approval the profits with the user. The implanted JavaScript uses great computational resources of the end users to mine coins and might crash the system.
2. ↑Dorkbot- IRC-based Worm designed to allow remote code execution by its operator, as well as the download of additional malware to the infected system.
3. ↑ Andromeda– Modular bot used mainly as a backdoor to deliver additional malware on infected hosts, but can be modified to create different types of botnets.
4. ↓ Cryptoloot– Crypto-Miner, using the victim’s CPU or GPU power and existing resources for crypto mining – adding transactions to the blockchain and releasing new currency. It is a competitor to Coinhive, trying to pull the rug under it by asking less percents of revenue from websites.
5. ↔ Jsecoin– JavaScript miner that can be embedded in websites. With JSEcoin, you can run the miner directly in your browser in exchange for an ad-free experience, in-game currency and other incentives
6. ↑ Ramnit– Banking Trojan that steals banking credentials, FTP passwords, session cookies and personal data.
7. ↔ XMRig– XMRig is an open-source CPU mining software used for the mining process of the Monero cryptocurrency, and first seen in-the-wild on May 2017.
8. ↓ Roughted– Large scale Malvertising used to deliver various malicious websites and payloads such as scams, adware, exploit kits and ransomware. It can be used to attack any type of platform and operating system, and utilizes ad-blocker bypassing and fingerprinting in order to make sure it delivers the most relevant attack
9. ↓ Conficker- Worm that allows remote operations and malware download. The infected machine is controlled by a botnet, which contacts its Command & Control server to receive instructions.
10. ↑ Nivdort– Multipurpose bot, also known as Bayrob, that is used to collect passwords, modify system settings and download additional malware. It is usually spread via spam emails with the recipient address encoded in the binary, thus making each file unique.

 

Lokibot, an Android banking Trojan and info-stealer, was the most popular malware used to attack organizations’ mobile estates followed by the Lotoor and Triada.

 

August’s Top 3 ‘Most Wanted’ mobile malware:

1. Lokibot –  Android banking Trojan and info-stealer, which can also turn into a ransomware that locks the phone in case its admin privileges are removed.
2. Lotoor– Hack tool that exploits vulnerabilities on Android operating system in order to gain root privileges on compromised mobile devices.
3. Triada – Modular Backdoor for Android which grants super user privileges to downloaded malware, as helps it to get embedded into system processes. Triada has also been seen spoofing URLs loaded in the browser.

 

 

Check Point researchers also analyzed the most exploited cyber vulnerabilities. In first was CVE-2017-7269, with a global impact of 47%. In the second place was OpenSSL TLS DTLS Heartbeat Information Disclosure with a global impact of 41%, followed by CVE-2017-5638 impacting 36% of organizations.

 

August’s Top 3 ‘Most Exploited’ vulnerabilities:

1. 1.↔ Microsoft IIS WebDAV ScStoragePathFromUrl Buffer Overflow (CVE-2017-7269)– By sending a crafted request over a network to Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 through Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0, a remote attacker could execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service conditions on the target server. That is mainly due to a buffer overflow vulnerability resulted by improper validation of a long header in HTTP request.
2. ↑ OpenSSL TLS DTLS Heartbeat Information Disclosure (CVE-2014-0160; CVE-2014-0346)– An information disclosure vulnerability exists in OpenSSL. The vulnerability is due to an error when handling TLS/DTLS heartbeat packets. An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to disclose memory contents of a connected client or server.
3. ↑ D-Link DSL-2750B Remote Command Execution– A remote code execution vulnerability has been reported in D-Link DSL-2750B routers. Successful exploitation could lead to arbitrary code execution on the vulnerable device.

 

The map below displays the risk index globally (green – low risk, red- high risk, grey – insufficient data), demonstrating the main risk areas and malware hot-spots around the world.

 

Check Point’s Global Threat Impact Index and its ThreatCloud Map is powered by Check Point’s ThreatCloud intelligence, the largest collaborative network to fight cybercrime which delivers threat data and attack trends from a global network of threat sensors. The ThreatCloud database holds over 250 million addresses analyzed for bot discovery, more than 11 million malware signatures and over 5.5 million infected websites, and identifies millions of malware types daily.

 

Check Point’s Threat Prevention Resources are available at:  http://www.checkpoint.com/threat-prevention-resources/index.html