Financial institution clients within the Central Asia area have been focused by a brand new pressure of Android malware codenamed Ajina.Banker since at the very least November 2024 with the aim of harvesting monetary data and intercepting two-factor authentication (2FA) messages.
Singapore-headquartered Group-IB, which found the menace in Might 2024, mentioned the malware is propagated by way of a community of Telegram channels arrange by the menace actors beneath the guise of reliable functions associated to banking, fee methods, and authorities providers, or on a regular basis utilities.
“The attacker has a community of associates motivated by monetary acquire, spreading Android banker malware that targets peculiar customers,” safety researchers Boris Martynyuk, Pavel Naumov, and Anvar Anarkulov mentioned.
Targets of the continuing marketing campaign embrace nations similar to Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
There’s proof to recommend that some features of the Telegram-based malware distribution course of might have been automated for improved effectivity. The quite a few Telegram accounts are designed to serve crafted messages containing hyperlinks — both to different Telegram channels or exterior sources — and APK recordsdata to unwitting targets.
Using hyperlinks pointing to Telegram channels that host the malicious recordsdata has an additional benefit in that it bypasses safety measures and restrictions imposed by many group chats, thereby permitting the accounts to evade bans when automated moderation is triggered.
Apart from abusing the belief customers place in reliable providers to maximise an infection charges, the modus operandi additionally includes sharing the malicious recordsdata in native Telegram chats by passing them off as giveaways and promotions that declare to supply profitable rewards and unique entry to providers.
“Using themed messages and localized promotion methods proved to be notably efficient in regional group chats,” the researchers mentioned. “By tailoring their strategy to the pursuits and wishes of the native inhabitants, Ajina was in a position to considerably enhance the chance of profitable infections.”
The menace actors have additionally been noticed bombarding Telegram channels with a number of messages utilizing a number of accounts, at occasions concurrently, indicating a coordinated effort that possible employs some form of an automatic distribution instrument.
The malware in itself is pretty simple in that, as soon as put in, it establishes contact with a distant server and requests the sufferer to grant it permission to entry SMS messages, telephone quantity APIs, and present mobile community data, amongst others.
Ajina.Banker is able to gathering SIM card data, an inventory of put in monetary apps, and SMS messages, that are then exfiltrated to the server.
New variations of the malware are additionally engineered to serve phishing pages in an try to gather banking data. Moreover, they’ll entry name logs and contacts, in addition to abuse Android’s accessibility providers API to forestall uninstallation and grant themselves extra permissions.
“The hiring of Java coders, created Telegram bot with the proposal of incomes some cash, additionally signifies that the instrument is within the strategy of energetic improvement and has help of a community of affiliated workers,” the researchers mentioned.
“Evaluation of the file names, pattern distribution strategies, and different actions of the attackers suggests a cultural familiarity with the area wherein they function.”
The disclosure comes as Zimperium uncovered hyperlinks between two Android malware households tracked as SpyNote and Gigabud (which is a part of the GoldFactory household that additionally contains GoldDigger).
“Domains with actually comparable construction (utilizing the identical uncommon key phrases as subdomains) and targets used to unfold Gigabud samples and had been additionally used to distribute SpyNote samples,” the corporate mentioned. “This overlap in distribution reveals that the identical menace actor is probably going behind each malware households, pointing to a well-coordinated and broad marketing campaign.”