Parrot is a novel TDS system for online traffic redirection that runs on a few servers hosting over 16,500 sites from government agencies, universities, adult platforms, and personal blogs. The service was apparently also utilized in the context of various cyber-attacks aiming at diverting victims to phishing or sites which result in malware being installed on the systems. Reportedly, all of this is dependent on individual user characteristics such as location, language, operating system, and browser.
TDS services are purchased by threat actors undertaking malicious campaigns to filter incoming traffic and route it to a final destination which serves harmful material. Advertisers and marketers utilize TDS legitimately. Most TDS services are used regularly by professionals in the marketing industry, which is why there are credible reports demonstrating how similar campaigns were executed in the recent past.
Security analysts working with Avast have revealed that the Parrot has been identified as they recently made assertions about how the campaign was used for FakeUpdate, which delivered update warnings regarding remote access trojans, sometimes known as RATs, using fake browsers.
Avast threat experts found Parrot TDS, which is presently being utilized for a campaign called FakeUpdate, which distributes remote access trojans (RATs) via phony browser update alerts. The effort appears to have begun in February 2022, however, there have been traces of Parrot activity dating back to October 2021.
"One of the primary differences between Parrot TDS and other TDS is its broad nature and a large number of possible victims," says Avast in the research. "Apart from servers hosting poorly secured CMS sites, such as WordPress sites, the hijacked websites we discovered appear to have nothing in common."
Avast services prevented more than 600,000 of its users from visiting these compromised sites in March 2022 alone, demonstrating the Parrot redirection gateway's huge reach. The majority of the people who were redirected were from Brazil, India, the United States, Singapore, and Indonesia.
They have been known to accomplish this by redirecting the victim to special URLs with extensive network profiles and meticulously built software. While the TDS may be primarily focused on the RAT initiative, security experts believe some of the impacted servers also serve as hosts for various phishing sites.
Those landing sites seem just like a genuine Microsoft login page, prompting visitors to input there login credentials.
The best strategy to deal with malicious redirections for web users is to keep an up-to-date internet security solution running at all times. Avast advises administrators of possibly compromised web servers to take the following steps:
- Use an antivirus to scan all files on the webserver.
- Replace all original JavaScript and PHP files on the webserver.
- Use the most recent CMS and plugin versions.
- Look for cron jobs or other automatically executing processes on the webserver.
- Always use unique and strong credentials for all services and accounts, and utilize two-factor authentication whenever possible.
- Use some of the security plugins for WordPress and Joomla which are available.
