Swarez Trojan and Dropper Distributed under the Disguise of 15 Popular Games

In April of this year, Kaspersky Lab experts recorded a large-scale campaign to distribute a Trojan and a dropper named Swarez.

The malware was distributed under the guise of 15 popular games, and attempts to download such files were recorded by the company’s products in 45 countries of the world.

The dropper was introduced through various sites that imitate platforms for illegal free software distribution. Many such sites distribute malware under the guise of keys for programs, including antivirus software, photo and video editors, as well as popular games.

Site page with hacked software
An example of a site page with hacked software for distributing Swarez.

The attackers used the following games as bait: Among US, Battlefield 4, Battlefield V, Control, Counter-Strike Global Offensive, FIFA 21, Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto V, Minecraft, NBA 2K21, Need for Speed Heat, PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS, Rust, The Sims 4, Titanfall 2. Multiple tags were used for each post to make landing pages appear at the top of search results.

Search results

The dropper was distributed in a ZIP archive, which contained another password-protected ZIP file and a text file containing this password. The launch of the malware resulted in the decryption and activation of the Taurus stealer Trojan.

Þannig, at the first stage of infection, the Swarez dropper executes an obfuscated CMD script that decrypts the legitimate AutoIt interpreter. Using it, the malware executes the AutoIt script, which is also obfuscated. Several checks are made to ensure that the file is not being executed in an emulated environment, and then the payload is decrypted using the RC4 algorithm. The resulting file is embedded in one of the system processes and executed in its context. This is Taurus, a paid stealer Trojan developed by the Predator hakk hópur, with many features and customization options. It can steal cookies, saved passwords and autofill data from browsers, secrets for accessing cryptocurrency wallets, collect system information, text files from the user’s desktop, and even take screenshots. The Trojan sends all this information to the C&C server.

Users around the world are actively downloading software from dubious sources, and the authors of the Swarez dropper used this to their advantage. Attackers are constantly complicating their techniques and making every effort so that the user does not suspect that he is installing malware while downloading the program. That is why we recommend downloading the software only from the official websites of the developers.athugasemdir Anton Ivanov, cybersecurity expert at Kaspersky Lab.

Let me remind you that I also recently wrote that TrickBot got a new module for monitoring victims.

Helga Smith

Ég hafði alltaf áhuga á tölvunarfræði, sérstaklega gagnaöryggi og þemað, sem heitir nú á dögum "gagnafræði", síðan á unglingsárum mínum. Áður en þú kemur inn í teymið til að fjarlægja veirur sem aðalritstjóri, Ég starfaði sem sérfræðingur í netöryggi í nokkrum fyrirtækjum, þar á meðal einn af verktökum Amazon. Önnur upplifun: Ég hef kennt í Arden og Reading háskólunum.

Skildu eftir skilaboð

Þessi síða notar Akismet til að draga úr ruslpósti. Lærðu hvernig ummælagögnin þín eru unnin.

Aftur efst á hnappinn