Crooks continues to use COVID-19 lures, Microsoft warns

Microsoft discovered a new phishing campaign using COVID-19 lures to target businesses with the infamous LokiBot information-stealer.

Microsoft has discovered a new COVID-19 themed phishing campaign targeting businesses with the LokiBot Trojan.

Lokibot was already employed in Coronavirus-themed campaigns, early of April, security experts at FortiGuard Labs discovered phishing attacks using alleged messages from the World Health Organization (WHO) to deliver the LokiBot trojan.

COVID-19 themed phishing campaigns recently observed by Microsoft was using messages with subject lines like “BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN ANNOUNCEMENT STARTING MAY 2020.”

The LokiBot data stealer is able to collect information from tens of different web browsers, access to browsing data, locate the credentials for more than 15 different email and file transfer clients, and check for the presence of popular remote admin tools like SSH, VNC and RDP.

One of the phishing campaigns observed by Microsoft sees attackers pretending to be from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the messages promise latest information on the COVID-19 pandemic and a new “BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN ANNOUNCEMENT STARTING MAY 2020”.

Another campaign use messages that pretend to be from a vendor asking for updated banking information to process payments due to the COVID-19 virus lockdown.

The emails in both campaigns use ARJ attachments that contain malicious executables disguised as PDF files.

The choice of password-protected ARJ files aims at bypassing some security solutions. Upon opening the enclosed files, the infection process will start to finally deliver the LokiBot Trojan.

Microsoft pointed out that its Microsoft Threat Protection’s machine learning algorithms were able to detect the campaign, Microsoft users are automatically protected by the Microsoft Defender.

“Microsoft Defender’s advanced detection technologies, including behavior learning and machine learning, started blocking this attack right away. We used deeper analysis of the blocked attacks, which helped us to identify the end-to-end campaign detailed,” Tanmay Ganacharya, director of security research of Microsoft Threat Protection, told BleepingComputer.

“We see a lot of benefits of leveraging machine learning and we are in a very unique position here at Microsoft because of the quality and diversity of our 8.2 trillion signals we process daily through the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph.” 

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – COVID-19, hacking)

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