Security News > 2022 > June > MaliBot: A New Android Banking Trojan Spotted in the Wild

A new strain of Android malware has been spotted in the wild targeting online banking and cryptocurrency wallet customers in Spain and Italy, just weeks after a coordinated law enforcement operation dismantled FluBot.

The information stealing trojan, codenamed MaliBot by F5 Labs, is as feature-rich as its counterparts, allowing it to steal credentials and cookies, bypass multi-factor authentication codes, and abuse Android's Accessibility Service to monitor the victim's device screen.

MaliBot is known to primarily disguise itself as cryptocurrency mining apps such as Mining X or The CryptoApp that are distributed via fraudulent websites designed to attract potential visitors into downloading them.

It also takes another leaf out of the mobile banking trojan playbook in that it employs smishing as a distribution vector to proliferate the malware by accessing an infected smartphone's contacts and sending SMS messages containing links to the malware.

Some of the banks targeted by MaliBot using this approach include UniCredit, Santander, CaixaBank, and CartaBCC. Accessibility Service is a background service running in Android devices to assist users with disabilities.

Besides being able to siphon passwords and cookies of the victim's Google account, the malware is designed to swipe 2FA codes from the Google Authenticator app as well as exfiltrate sensitive information such as total balances and seed phrases from Binance and Trust Wallet apps.

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2022/06/malibot-new-android-banking-trojan.html