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Fake Zoom App Dropped by New APT ‘Luminous Moth’ | Threatpost. 

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The novel coronavirus pandemic is to blame for the global migration of workforce into the remote domain, which poses a slew of employee interaction challenges for businesses. The role of virtual meeting tools in this paradigm is to fill the communication void by providing a way for teams to solve day-to-day tasks outside the office.

With organizations relying so heavily on this type of software these days, robust security and privacy implementation is more than welcome. Researchers have recently unearthed several flaws in this application that can be exploited to infect Mac computers with malicious code and eavesdrop on users.

One of the oddities is about the way Zoom executes the installation process on a Mac. When a new participant joins a virtual meeting, they get a prompt to download and install the app onto their machine — so far so good. As a rule, the usual setup workflow includes a number of screens allowing the user to adjust and confirm the intended action.

To top it off, Zoom additionally plays a sketchy trick to escalate its privileges on a Mac as part of the installation.

VMRay analyst Felix Seele who discovered these inconsistencies admits that such a simplification of the install procedure is understandable to an extent, given that it applies to scenarios when a user joins a meeting and needs to get the product up and running as fast as possible.

However, this is still a lame excuse for primitively jumping through the mandatory steps and getting root privileges, which is the exact same tactic commonly used by Mac adware to spread. On the other hand, leaving a loophole behind that can be exploited by an attacker to get this scope of access is a huge concern that needs to be addressed urgently. Hopefully, Zoom engineers will fix this bug before cybercrooks weaponize it to amass sensitive business data on a large scale.

Note that the procedure depends on the Zoom version you are currently using. If the product version installed on your machine is 4. In case the build of Zoom you are using is 4. Was this article helpful? Please, rate this. April 04, Dubious setup with a flavor of privilege escalation One of the oddities is about the way Zoom executes the installation process on a Mac. How to completely remove Zoom from Mac If the product version installed on your machine is 4. Go to the Finder, expand the zoom.

When a confirmation dialog appears, click OK to complete the uninstall process. Drag the item called ZoomOpener to the Trash.

In each folder, find zoom. Find the zoom. Empty the Trash. Previous Post Safari privacy update: a game-changing step forward. Next Post MainReady virus removal from Mac. Authentication required You must log in to post a comment. Log in.

     

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In the long term, Zoom has to conduct regular code reviews and conduct yearly penetration-testing exercises, in which paid hackers try to break through the company's defenses. Only two new things will directly affect consumers. It also has to update its Acceptable Use policies to ban "abusive conduct include hatred against others based on race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, gender, or sexual orientation.

Frankly, these are longstanding standard policies at many other online companies, so we're a little surprised that they weren't already Zoom policies. Yuan announced opens in new tab. The purchase price or other terms of the deal were not disclosed. Keybase makes user-friendly software to easily and securely encrypt messaging and social media posts.

In March, Zoom had to admit that its touted "end-to-end" encryption was not the real thing because Zoom's own servers are always able to access the contents of meetings. Once Keybase's technology is incorporated, that will no longer always be the case. Meeting passwords and waiting rooms will be required by default for all Zoom meetings, free or paid, beginning May 9, Zoom announced.

Only hosts will be able to share their screens by default, but like the other settings, that can be changed. Yuan said the massive increase in Zoom usage since the beginning of the coronavirus lockdown had been "challenging," but also provided "opportunities for us to drive meaningful change and improvement. Yuan admitted that "we failed to set pre-configured security features for our new customers, especially for schools," referring to meeting passwords and waiting rooms.

That resulted in "uninvited, offensive, and sometimes even truly evil people disrupting meetings," Yuan wrote. Such a person disrupted a Zoom meeting on sexual violence opens in new tab in the Bay Area last week. Yuan also addressed rumors about his own, and Zoom's, ties to China. He said he had lived in the U.

A reporter for London's Financial Times resigned after he was caught crashing internal Zoom meetings at rival London newspapers. Mark Di Stefano announced his resignation on Twitter opens in new tab after The Independent opens in new tab documented how Di Stefano had last week joined an Independent staff meeting regarding pay cuts and furloughs, first under his own name, then anonymously. Di Stefano cited his sources as "people on the call," The Independent said.

The Independent also found that Di Stefano's cellphone had earlier been used to access a Zoom meeting at the Evening Standard, another London newspaper. That meeting was followed by a Financial Times piece about Evening Standard furloughs and pay cuts. Zoom isn't the only video-conferencing platform to have questionable privacy policies, Consumer Reports opens in new tab said in a blog post: Cisco Webex, Microsoft's Teams and Skype, and Google's Duo, Meet and Hangouts do too. Consumer Reports said you should know that everything in a video meeting may be recorded, either by the host or another participant.

It also recommended dialing into video-conference meetings over the phone, not creating accounts with the services if possible, and using "burner" email addresses otherwise. After prodding from reporters at The Verge opens in new tab , Zoom admitted that it did not in fact have a recent peak of million daily users, as stated in a blog post last week.

Rather, Zoom had a peak of million daily "participants. Researchers at Trend Micro spotted another Zoom installer file that had been corrupted with malware. In this case, it's spyware that can turn on the webcam, take screenshots and log keystrkes, as well as collecting diagnostic data about the system it's running on. It also installs a fully working version of the Zoom desktop client. You don't need to install any software on your desktop to run Zoom.

Zoom is a prime target for foreign spies, especially Chinese intelligence operatives, the Department of Homeland Security has warned U. Foreign spies would be interested in any internet-based communications medium that saw such a steep increase in growth.

But the DHS report singled out China as a likely meddler in Zoom security because Zoom has a substantial number of staffers in that country. However, Zoom in the past week has given paid meeting hosts the option of avoiding Zoom servers in specific regions, including China and North America. Unpaid Zoom hosts will by default use only servers in their home regions. A new report from Mozilla , the non-profit maker of the Firefox web browser, says that Zoom's privacy and security policies and practices are better than those of Apple FaceTime.

FaceTime got only 4. A new Zoom phishing scam is sure to get the attention of anyone working from home during the coronavirus lockdown. It seems to come from your employer's HR department, and invites you to join a Zoom meeting starting in a few minutes to discuss possible termination of your employment.

If you click on the link in the email to join the meeting, you're taken to a very real-looking Zoom login page.

It's fake. If you enter your credentials, then the crooks can take over your Zoom account. Zoom has finally updated its meeting-client software to version 5. Here's our guide on how to update to Zoom 5. The update is not yet available for iOS, as Apple has to vet the software before the new version of the app can be pushed out. We also couldn't see in the Google Play app store as of Monday afternoon Eastern time April 27 , but odds are it will appear soon.

No other company may have benefited more from the stay-at-home orders during the coronavirus crisis. To put that in perspective, daily usage peaked at million people per day in March, the company said on April 1 opens in new tab.

In December , Zoom usage peaked at 10 million daily users. The new version will include many of the security fixes we've recently seen for the Zoom web interface, including the abilities to kick out Zoom bombers from meetings, make sure meeting data doesn't go through China, and put everyone waiting for a meeting in a "waiting room. We checked the Zoom changelogs opens in new tab and discovered that the update won't be available until Sunday, April Cisco Talos researchers said Zoom's meeting chat function made it too easy for outsiders to find all Zoom users in an particular organization.

If you had a valid Zoom account, Cisco Talos explained in a blog post opens in new tab , you could pretend that you worked at any organization and get the full names and chat IDs of every registered Zoom user whose email address used that organization's email domain. You would not have to verify that you worked there, and you wouldn't even need to be in a Zoom meeting to get the information.

That information "could be leveraged to disclose further contact information including the user's email address, phone number and any other information that is present in their vCard," or digital business card, Cisco Talos wrote. In a blog post opens in new tab April 20, Zoom said the option of excluding certain countries from call routing was now live. This will let Zoom meeting administrators avoid having meeting data routed through Zoom servers in China, the U.

New updates to the Zoom platform opens in new tab for the web interface rolled out April 19 include masking some participant personal information, such as email addresses or phone numbers, during meetings.

Another change is that users who share the same email domain will no longer be able to search for each other by name. The New York Times opens in new tab reported that Dropbox executives were so concerned about security flaws in Zoom that in Dropbox created its own secret bug-bounty program for Zoom flaws.

In other words, Dropbox would pay hackers for security vulnerabilities they found in Zoom. Dropbox staffers used Zoom regularly, and Dropbox was an investor in Zoom. The Times reported that Dropbox would confirm the flaws, then pass them along to Zoom so that Zoom could fix them.

Zoom-meeting video recordings saved on Zoom's cloud servers can be easily discovered and often viewed, a security researcher told Cnet opens in new tab. Phil Guimond opens in new tab noticed that online recordings of Zoom meetings have a predictable URL structure and are thus easy to find. The Washington Post reported last week on a similar issue with Zoom recordings that had been uploaded by users to third-party cloud servers. In those cases, the file names of meeting recordings followed a predictable pattern.

Until Zoom pushed out a series of updates opens in new tab this past Tuesday, Zoom meeting recordings were not required to be password-protected. Guimond built a simple tool that automatically searches for Zoom meeting recordings and tries to open them. If a meeting has a password, his tool tries to brute-force access by running through millions of possible passwords.

If a meeting recording is viewable, so is the Zoom meeting ID, and the attacker might be able to access future recurring meetings. But, Guimond said, the URL pattern is still the same, and attackers could still try to open each generated result manually. Zoom announced it was hiring Luta Security opens in new tab , a consulting firm headed by Katie Moussouris, to revamp Zoom's "bug bounty" program, which pays hackers to find software flaws.

Moussouris set up the first bug-bounty programs at Microsoft and the Pentagon. In her own blog post opens in new tab , she announced that Zoom was bringing in other well-regarded information-security firms and researchers to improve its security. In its weekly webinar, according to ZDNet opens in new tab , Zoom also said it would also let meeting hosts report abusive users, and newly hired security consultant Alex Stamos said Zoom would be switching to a more robust encryption standard after Zoom's existing encryption was found to be lacking.

In other news, a congressman has complained that a congressional briefing held over Zoom on April 3 was "zoom-bombed" opens in new tab at least three times. The head of Standard Chartered, a London-based multinational bank, has warned employees to not use Zoom or Google Hangouts for remote meetings, citing security concerns, according to Reuters opens in new tab.

Standard Chartered primarily uses the rival Blue Jeans video-conferencing platform, according to two bank staffers who spoke anonymously. Hackers are apparently offering to sell two "zero-day" exploits in Zoom to the highest bidder, Vice opens in new tab reports. Zero-days are hacks that take advantage of vulnerabilities the software maker doesn't know about, and which users have little or no defense against. Sources who told Vice about the zero-days said one exploit is for Windows and lets a remote attacker get full control of a target's computer.

The catch is that the attacker and the target have to be on the same Zoom call. This is a reaction to the discovery earlier in April that many Zoom meetings hosted by and involving U. Usernames and passwords for more than , Zoom accounts are being sold or given away in criminal marketplaces.

These accounts were not compromised as the result of a Zoom data breach, but instead through credential stuffing. That's when criminals try to unlock accounts by re-using credentials from accounts compromised in previous data breaches. It works only if an account holder uses the same password for more than one account. Researchers from IngSights discovered a set of 2, Zoom login credentials being shared in a criminal online forum. Maor told Threatpost opens in new tab it didn't seem like the credentials came from a Zoom data breach, given their relatively small number.

It's also possible that some of the credentials were the result of "credential stuffing. Information-security researchers know of several Zoom "zero-day" exploits opens in new tab , according to Vice. Zero-days are exploits for software vulnerabilities that the software maker doesn't know about and hasn't fixed, and hence has "zero days" to prepare before the exploits appear.

However, one Vice source implied that other video-conferencing solutions also had security flaws. Another source said that Zoom zero-days weren't selling for much money due to lack of demand. Criminals are trading compromised Zoom accounts on the "dark web," Yahoo News opens in new tab reported. This information apparently came from Israeli cybersecurity firm Sixgill, which specializes in monitoring underground online-criminal activity.

We weren't able to find any mention of the findings on the Sixgill website opens in new tab. Sixgill told Yahoo it had spotted compromised Zoom accounts that included meeting IDs, email addresses, passwords and host keys. Some of the accounts belonged to schools, and one each to a small business and a large healthcare provider, but most were personal. If you have a Zoom account, make sure its password isn't the same as the password for any other account you have.

Researchers at Trend Micro opens in new tab discovered a version of the Zoom installer that has been bundled with cryptocurrency-mining malware , i.

The Zoom installer will put Zoom version 4. By the way, the latest Zoom client software for Windows is up to version 4. The coin-miner will ramp up your PC's central processor unit, and its graphics card if there is one, to solve mathematical problems in order to generate new units of cryptocurrency.

To avoid getting hit with this malware, make sure you're running one of the best antivirus programs, and don't click on any links in emails, social media posts or pop-up messages that promise to install Zoom on your machine. It can't stop other people from copying and redistributing its installation software. Not only does Zoom mislead users about its "end-to-end encryption" see further down , but its seems to be flat-out, um, not telling the truth about the quality of its encryption algorithm.

Zoom says it use AES encryption to encode video and audio data traveling between Zoom servers and Zoom clients i. But researchers at the Citizen Lab opens in new tab at the University of Toronto, in a report posted April 3, found that Zoom actually uses the somewhat weaker AES algorithm. Even worse, Zoom uses an in-house implementation of encryption algorithm that preserves patterns from the original file. It's as if someone drew a red circle on a gray wall, and then a censor painted over the red circle with a while circle.

You're not seeing the original message, but the shape is still there. Yuan opens in new tab acknowledged the encryption issue but said only that "we recognize that we can do better with our encryption design" and "we expect to have more to share on this front in the coming days. In Zoom's announcement of the upcoming April 26 desktop-software update, Zoom said it would be upgrading the encryption implementation opens in new tab to a better format for all users by May Good software has built-in anti-tampering mechanisms to make sure that applications don't run code that's been altered by a third party.

Zoom has such anti-tampering mechanisms in place, which is good. But those anti-tampering mechanisms themselves are not protected from tampering, said a British computer student who calls himself " Lloyd opens in new tab " in a blog post April 3.

Needless to say, that's bad. Lloyd showed how Zoom's anti-tampering mechanism can easily be disabled, or even replaced with a malicious version that hijacks the application. If you're reading this with a working knowledge of how Windows software works, this is a pretty damning passage: "This DLL can be trivially unloaded, rendering the anti-tampering mechanism null and void.

The DLL is not pinned, meaning an attacker from a 3rd party process could simply inject a remote thread. In other words, malware already present on a computer could use Zoom's own anti-tampering mechanism to tamper with Zoom. Criminals could also create fully working versions of Zoom that have been altered to perform malicious acts.

Anyone can "bomb" a public Zoom meeting if they know the meeting number, and then use the file-share photo to post shocking images, or make annoying sounds in the audio. The FBI even warned about it opens in new tab a few days ago. The host of the Zoom meeting can mute or even kick out troublemakers, but they can come right back with new user IDs. The best way to avoid Zoom bombing is to not share Zoom meeting numbers with anyone but the intended participants.

You can also require participants to use a password to log into the meeting. On April 3, the U. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Michigan said that "anyone who hacks into a teleconference can be charged with state or federal crimes.

Zoom automatically puts everyone sharing the same email domain into a "company" folder where they can see each other's information. Exceptions are made for people using large webmail clients such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or Outlook. Several Dutch Zoom users who use ISP-provided email addresses suddenly found that they were in the same "company" with dozens of strangers -- and could see their email addresses, user names and user photos. STATUS: Unresolved, but an April 19 Zoom software update opens in new tab for Zoom web-interface users makes sure users on the same email domain can no longer automatically search for each other by name.

The Zoom desktop client software will get similar fixes April Several privacy experts, some working for Consumer Reports, pored over Zoom's privacy policy and found that it apparently gave Zoom the right to use Zoom users' personal data and to share it with third-party marketers. Following a Consumer Reports opens in new tab blog post, Zoom quickly rewrote its privacy policy, stripping out the most disturbing passages and asserting that "we do not sell your personal data.

We don't know the details of Zoom's business dealings with third-party advertisers. You can find open Zoom meetings opens in new tab by rapidly cycling through possible Zoom meeting IDs, a security researcher told independent security blogger Brian Krebs. The researcher got past Zoom's meeting-scan blocker by running queries through Tor, which randomized his IP address. It's a variation on "war driving" by randomly dialing telephone numbers to find open modems in the dial-up days.

The researcher told Krebs that he could find about open Zoom meetings every hour with the tool, and that "having a password enabled on the [Zoom] meeting is the only thing that defeats it. Two Twitter opens in new tab users opens in new tab pointed out that if you're in a Zoom meeting and use a private window in the meeting's chat app to communicate privately with another person in the meeting, that conversation will be visible in the end-of-meeting transcript the host receives.

A Kurdish security researcher opens in new tab said Zoom paid him a bug bounty -- a reward for finding a serious flaw -- for finding how to hijack a Zoom account if the account holder's email address was known or guessed.

The researcher, who calls himself "s3c" but whose real name may be Yusuf Abdulla, said if he tried to log into Zoom with a Facebook account, Zoom would ask for the email address associated with that Facebook account. Then Zoom would open a new webpage notifying him that a confirmation email message had been sent to that email address. The URL of the notification webpage would have a unique identification tag in the address bar.

As an example that's much shorter than the real thing, let's say it's "zoom. When s3c received and opened the confirmation email message sent by Zoom, he clicked on the confirmation button in the body of the message. This took him to yet another webpage that confirmed his email address was now associated with a new account.

So far, so good. But then s3c noticed that the unique identification tag in the Zoom confirmation webpage's URL was identical to the first ID tag. Let's use the example "zoom.

The matching ID tags, one used before confirmation and the other after confirmation, meant that s3c could have avoided receiving the confirmation email, and clicking on the confirmation button, altogether. In fact, he could have entered ANY email address -- yours, mine or billgates gmail. Then he could have copied the ID tag from the resulting Zoom notification page and pasted the ID tag into an already existing Zoom account-confirmation page.

And because Zoom lets anyone using a company email address view all other users signed up with the same email domain, e. Zoom is fortunate that s3c is one of the good guys and didn't disclose this flaw publicly before Zoom could fix it. But it's such a simple flaw that it's hard to imagine no one else noticed it before. Zoom has released updates for its Windows , macOS and Linux desktop client software so that meeting IDs will not display onscreen during meetings.

Yuan opens in new tab said that Zoom had discovered "a potential security vulnerability with file sharing, so we disabled that feature. Until this week, participants in a Zoom meeting could share files with each other using the meeting's chat function. Those AES encryption keys are issued to Zoom clients by Zoom servers, which is all well and good, except that the Citizen Lab opens in new tab found several Zoom servers in China issuing keys to Zoom users even when all participants in a meeting were in North America.

Since Zoom servers can decrypt Zoom meetings, and Chinese authorities can compel operators of Chinese servers to hand over data, the implication is that the Chinese government might be able to see your Zoom meetings. That's got to be bad news for the British government, which has held at least one Cabinet meeting over Zoom. Yuan opens in new tab responded to the Citizen Lab report by saying that "it is possible certain meetings were allowed to connect to systems in China, where they should not have been able to connect.

We have since corrected this. Zoom advises meeting hosts to set up "waiting rooms" to avoid "Zoom bombing. The Citizen Lab said it found a serious security issue with Zoom waiting rooms opens in new tab , and advised hosts and participants to not use them for now.

The Citizen Lab is not disclosing the details yet, but has told Zoom of the flaw. In a follow-up to their initial report opens in new tab. Zoom meetings have side chats in which participants can sent text-based messages and post web links. That left Zoom chats vulnerable to attack. If a malicious Zoom bomber slipped a UNC path to a remote server that he controlled into a Zoom meeting chat, an unwitting participant could click on it.

The participant's Windows computer would then try to reach out to the hacker's remote server specified in the path and automatically try to log into it using the user's Windows username and password.

The hacker could capture the password "hash" and decrypt it, giving him access to the Zoom user's Windows account. Mohamed A. Baset opens in new tab of security firm Seekurity said on Twitter that the same filepath flaw also would let a hacker insert a UNC path to a remote executable file into a Zoom meeting chatroom.

If a Zoom user running Windows clicked on it, a video posted by Baset showed, the user's computer would try to load and run the software. The victim would be prompted to authorize the software to run, which will stop some hacking attempts but not all.

After Vice News exposed the practice, Zoom said it hadn't been aware of the profile-sharing and updated the iOS apps to fix this. We learned last summer that Zoom used hacker-like methods to bypass normal macOS security precautions. We thought that problem had been fixed then, along with the security flaw it created. But a series of tweets March 30 from security researcher Felix Seele, who noticed that Zoom installed itself on his Mac without the usual user authorizations, revealed that there was still an issue.

The same tricks that are being used by macOS malware. Yuan opens in new tab tweeted a friendly response. That was a swift and comprehensive reaction. Zoom just released an update for the macOS installer which completely removes the questionable "preinstall"-technique and the faked password prompt. I must say that I am impressed. Other people could use Zoom's dodgy Mac installation methods, renowned Mac hacker Patrick Wardle opens in new tab said in a blog post March Wardle demonstrated how a local attacker -- such as a malicious human or already-installed malware -- could use Zoom's formerly magical powers of unauthorized installation to "escalate privileges" and gain total control over the machine without knowing the administrator password.

Wardle also showed that a malicious script installed into the Zoom Mac client could give any piece of malware Zoom's webcam and microphone privileges, which do not prompt the user for authorization and could turn any Mac with Zoom installed into a potential spying device. Yuan opens in new tab acknowledged Zoom's growing pains and pledged that regular development of the Zoom platform would be put on hold while the company worked to fix security and privacy issues.

Dedicated journalists and security researchers have also helped to identify pre-existing ones. To deal with these issues, Yuan wrote, Zoom would be "enacting a feature freeze, effectively immediately, and shifting all our engineering resources to focus on our biggest trust, safety, and privacy issues.

Among other things, Zoom would also be "conducting a comprehensive review with third-party experts and representative users to understand and ensure the security of all of our new consumer use cases. Zoom now requires passwords by default for most Zoom meetings, although meetings hosts can turn that feature off.

Passwords are the easiest way to stop Zoom bombing. And on April 8, former Facebook and Yahoo chief security officer Alex Stamos opens in new tab said he would be working with Zoom to improve its security and privacy. Stamos is now an adjunct professor at Stanford and is highly regarded within the information-security community.

Zoom claims its meetings use "end-to-end encryption" if every participant calls in from a computer or a Zoom mobile app instead of over the phone. But under pressure from The Intercept opens in new tab , a Zoom representative admitted that Zoom's definitions of "end-to-end" and "endpoint" are not the same as everyone else's. Every other company considers an endpoint to be a user device -- a desktop, laptop, smartphone or tablet -- but not a server. And every other company takes "end-to-end encryption" to mean that servers that relay messages from one endpoint to another can't decrypt the messages.

When you send an Apple Message from your iPhone to another iPhone user, Apple's servers help the message get from one place to another, but they can't read the content. Not so with Zoom. It can see whatever is going on in its meetings, and sometimes it may have to in order to make sure everything works properly.

Just don't believe the implication that it can't. UPDATE: In a blog post April 1, Zoom Chief Product Officer Oded Gal opens in new tab wrote that "we want to start by apologizing for the confusion we have caused by incorrectly suggesting that Zoom meetings were capable of using end-to-end encryption. Gal assured users that all data sent and received by Zoom client applications but not regular phone lines, business conferencing systems or, presumably, browser interfaces is indeed encrypted and that Zoom servers or staffers "do not decrypt it at any point before it reaches the receiving clients.

However, Gal added, "Zoom currently maintains the key management system for these systems in the cloud" but has "implemented robust and validated internal controls to prevent unauthorized access to any content that users share during meetings. The implication is that Zoom doesn't decrypt user transmissions by choice. But because it holds the encryption keys, Zoom could if it had to, such as if it were presented with a warrant or a U. National Security Letter essentially a secret warrant.

For those worried about government snooping, Gal wrote that "Zoom has never built a mechanism to decrypt live meetings for lawful intercept purposes, nor do we have means to insert our employees or others into meetings without being reflected in the participant list.

He added that companies and other enterprises would soon be able to handle their own encryption process. We hope Zoom stops using the term "end-to-end encryption" incorrectly, but just keep in mind that you won't be getting the real thing with Zoom until it fully implements the technology it's buying with Keybase.

Privacy researcher Patrick Jackson noticed that Zoom meeting recordings saved to the host's computer generally get a certain type of file name. The campaign, going back to at least last October and targeting first Myanmar and now mostly the Philippines, is both large-scale and highly active.

The noise of a high-volume attack is a red flag for researchers. The analysts suggested one possible rationale for the splashiness: It could have to do with how LuminousMoth spreads. Namely, it copies itself to removable USB drives. Then again, the higher hit rate in the Philippines could boil down to another, undetected infection vector being used solely in the Philippines, or it could simply be that the attackers are more keenly interested in going after targets there.

The LuminousMoth actors are using a unique set of tools and malware propagation methods, but their network infrastructure shares parts with another notorious Chinese hacking group named Mustang Panda , a. Source: Kaspersky. Luminous Moth was first going after important organizations in Myanmar, where researchers came across about victims. The campaign ramped up in the Philippines, where they found nearly 1, targeted victims.

The true targets were only a subset of that. Those were two of the names researchers found on archives inside two malicious DLL libraries. First, the campaign sends a spear-phishing email to the victim. The email contains a Dropbox download link that fetches a RAR archive. DOCX file. After that initial infection, the second vector kicks in, with the DLLs being sideloaded by two executables to spread to removable devices and also download a copy of Cobalt Strike.

In some cases in the Myanmar attacks, the initial infection was followed by deployment of a signed, fake version of the popular Zoom app. That fake Zoom app was actually malware that enabled the attackers to exfiltrate files from compromised systems.

Valid certificate of the fake Zoom app. The newcomer bears monitoring, analysts said, given that it could just be Mustang Panda trying on new clothes, trying to rub out its tracks by re-tooling and coming up with new, unknown malware implants. Check out our free upcoming live and on-demand webinar events — unique, dynamic discussions with cybersecurity experts and the Threatpost community. Attackers used adversary-in-the-middle attacks to steal passwords, hijack sign-in sessions and skip authentication and then use victim mailboxes to launch BEC attacks against other targets.

The novel threat steals data and can affect all processes running on the OS, stealing information from different commands and utilities and then storing it on the affected machine. Infosec Insider content is written by a trusted community of Threatpost cybersecurity subject matter experts. Each contribution has a goal of bringing a unique voice to important cybersecurity topics.