This New Malware is Putting Facebook and YouTube Users at Risk
A team of researchers who are working at the Advanced Threat Control
Team over at Bitdefender have just discovered a brand new strain of
malware, and it turns out that it might be especially dangerous for
Facebook and YouTube users. The name of the malware is S1deload Stealer
due to its tendency to use DLL sideloading to evade getting detected by
antivirus software with all things having been considered and taken into
account.
It turns out that as many as 600 users have already
been infected by the malware. It is distributed in a zip folder that is
ostensibly supposed to possesses adult content, which makes users more
likely to download it and run it themselves than might have been the
case otherwise.
With all of that having been said and now out of
the way, it is important to note that the zip folder does not contain
any adult oriented content. Instead, it starts to run an infostealer
that will run Facebook and YouTube videos in the background.
Malicious
actors often do this because of the fact that this is the sort of thing
that could potentially end up artificially increasing the view count of
various videos. This can allow them to generate adsense revenue, and it
can also put a major strain on users as well as being quite difficult
to get rid of.
What’s more, this infostealer can delve into
session cookies to steal any login credentials that might be saved
therein. Hundreds of users have already ended up losing access to their
social media accounts, and chances are that many more will suffer unless
steps are taken to prevent that from happening.
The malware also
comes with a cryptocurrency miner, so it clearly possesses all of the
hallmarks of a highly profitable infostealer. Users need to be cautious
about the files that they download and ensure that they only come from
the most trustworthy of sources. Being more discerning about downloads
can often be enough to protect users from such forms of malware that can
end up doing them great harm in the most common scenarios.
H/T: BC / Illustration: Macrovector