Last year, an Android banking malware strain was found in the open, few organizations called it "Coper," belonging to a new family, however, ThreatFabric intelligence hinted it as a direct inheritance of the infamous malware family Exobot. Found in 2016, Exobot used to target financial institutions until 2018, these campaigns were focused in France, Turkey, Thailand, Germany, Japan, and Australia. Following the incident, another "lite" variant surfaced, named ExobotCompact by the developer famous as "Android" on the dark web.
Analysts from ThreatFabric established a direct connection between ExobotCompact and the latest malware strain, named "ExobotCompact.B." The latest malware strain surfaced in November 2021, named ExobotCompact.D. "We would like to point out that these set of actions that the Trojan is able to perform on victim’s behalf is sufficient to implement (with certain updates made to the source code of the Trojan) an Automated Transfer System (ATS)," says ThreatFabric report. The recent actions by this malware family involve distribution via various malicious apps on Google Play Store.
The apps were installed more than 50k times, targeting financial organizations around the world, including broad and generic campaigns having a high number of targets, along with focused and narrow campaigns across Europe. Earlier this year, experts noticed a post on a dark web forum, a user was looking for an Octo Android botnet. Later, a direct connection was found between ExobotCompact and Octo. Interestingly, ExobotCompact was updated with various features and rebranded as Octo, bringing remote access capability, therefore letting malicious actors behind the Trojan to perform on-device fraud (ODF).
ODF is the riskiest, most dangerous fraud threat. Here, transactions begin from the same device that a target uses on a daily basis. Here, anti-fraud programmes are challenged to detect the scam activity with less in number malicious indicators and different fraud done via different channels. ThreatFabric reports, "to establish remote access to the infected device, ExobotCompact.D relies on built-in services that are part of Android OS: MediaProjection for screen streaming and AccessibilityService to perform actions remotely."
