Financial institution prospects within the Central Asia area have been focused by a brand new pressure of Android malware codenamed Ajina.Banker since at the least November 2024 with the objective 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 respectable 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 achieve, spreading Android banker malware that targets odd customers,” safety researchers Boris Martynyuk, Pavel Naumov, and Anvar Anarkulov mentioned.
Targets of the continued marketing campaign embrace international locations akin to Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
There’s proof to recommend that some elements of the Telegram-based malware distribution course of could 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 information to unwitting targets.
The usage of hyperlinks pointing to Telegram channels that host the malicious information has an additional advantage 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 respectable providers to maximise an infection charges, the modus operandi additionally entails sharing the malicious information in native Telegram chats by passing them off as giveaways and promotions that declare to supply profitable rewards and unique entry to providers.
“The usage of 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 capable of considerably improve the probability of profitable infections.”
The menace actors have additionally been noticed bombarding Telegram channels with a number of messages utilizing a number of accounts, at instances concurrently, indicating a coordinated effort that probably employs some kind of an automatic distribution instrument.
The malware in itself is pretty easy 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, a listing 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 technique 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 through which 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 consists of 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 exhibits that the identical menace actor is probably going behind each malware households, pointing to a well-coordinated and broad marketing campaign.”
