Threat Alert: MalSpam

Radware researchers have been following multiple campaigns targeting the financial industry in Europe and the United States. These campaigns are designed to commit fraud via credential theft by sending MalSpam, malicious spam that contains banking malware like Trickbot and Emotet, to unsuspecting users. If the users open the document, they will become infected, and the malware will harvest and extract data from the victim’s machine for fraudulent purposes. Once the data is retrieved from their c2 server, the stolen credentials will be used to commit fraud against the victim’s bank account, leveraged in a credential stuffing attack or quickly sold for profit.

One of the things that make these two pieces of banking malware stand out is their ability to evolve and consistently update their modules to allow additional capabilities. Additionally, we have seen denial of service attacks in the past that have coincided with these security events. Occasionally attackers have been known to launch a flood of malicious traffic, known as a smoke screen attack, to distract network operators from other nefarious activity such as data exfiltration. These attacks typically will not exhaust network resources since the criminals still need access.