Security News > 2020 > August > Researchers shine light on hackers-for-hire op that hit estate agent with malicious plugin for Autodesk 3ds Max
A hacker crew targeted a luxury estate agency involved in multimillion-pound property deals by deploying malicious plugins for 3D design software Autodesk 3ds Max as part of a potential hacks-for-hire operation.
"The Bitdefender investigation revealed the cybercriminal group infiltrated the company using a tainted and specially crafted plugin for Autodesk 3ds Max," the company said in a statement.
As for the malware itself, once deployed into the target network it collects information from the host machine, takes screenshots, steals video, images and compressed files, as well as capturing details of saved passwords and browsing history - and beaming all of those back to HQ. Bitdefender suspected the loader was capable of requesting other malicious binaries from the C2 infrastructure but were only able to obtain one sample during their investigation.
Autodesk itself warned of the malicious plugin, called PhysXPluginMfx, in an advisory note published a couple of weeks ago.
The file, it warned users, "Can corrupt 3ds Max software's settings, run malicious code, and propagate to other [.max files] on a Windows system if scene files containing the script are loaded into 3ds Max".