Android malware Roaming Mantis attacks European users

Android malware Roaming Mantis targets Android and iPhone users in Germany and France using malware and phishing attacks, researchers warn.

Let me remind you that Roaming Mantis was discovered back in 2018. Initially, it attacked users from Japan, Korea, China, India and Bangladesh, but then it “spoke” in two dozen more languages and began to spread rapidly to other countries.

The malware used compromised routers to infect Android smartphones and tablets, redirected iOS devices to a phishing site, and launched CoinHive mining scripts on desktops and laptops. For all this, the DNS hijacking technique was used – DNS spoofing, which is why attacks were often not immediately detected.

Now, malware is also spreading through SMS phishing (sometimes referred to as “smishing”), with which hackers promote malicious Android apps as separate APK files, that is, not from the Google Play Store.

According to Kaspersky Lab, new versions of Roaming Mantis use the Wroba Trojan and mainly target users from France and Germany, sending out malicious SMS and links to infected sites. The purpose of Wroba is to steal information about the victim’s e-banking, and it is automatically distributed via SMS messages to the entire contact list of the infected device.

Clicking on a link from such an SMS, if the URL was opened from an Apple device, redirects the victim to a phishing page where hackers will try to steal the user’s Apple login credentials. If the victim is using an Android device, they are taken to another landing page that offers to install malware disguised as an Android app. The malware usually masks itself as Google Chrome or the Yamato and ePOST apps.

Below is the statistics of malware downloads in just one day in September 2021, that is, we are talking about tens of thousands of APK downloads in European countries.

Compared to previous versions, Wrogba has undergone changes and is now written in Kotlin. In total, the malware can execute 21 malicious commands, including two new ones: get_gallery and get_photo, which are designed to steal photos and videos of the victim. According to the researchers, this can be used for the purpose of financial fraud, identity theft, blackmail and extortion (in the case of confidential data theft).

Let me remind you that we reported that SharkBot Android Trojan Steals Cryptocurrency and Hacks Bank Accounts, and also that AbstractEmu Android malware “roots” smartphones and evades detection.