Loki Bot Attacks Target Corporate Mailboxes
30.8.2018 securityweek BotNet

Loki Bot’s operators have been targeting corporate mailboxes with their spam messages, Kaspersky Lab reports.

The emails employ various lures to trick potential victims into opening malicious attachments that would deploy the Loki Bot stealer onto the target machines. The messages masquerade as notifications from other companies, or as orders and offers.

As part of the campaign, cybercriminals have been targeting corporate mailboxes that can be obtained from public sources or which are listed on the targeted companies’ websites, Kaspersky discovered.

The spam messages would attempt to deliver the malicious payload via an attached ISO file. The extension is associated with copies of optical discs that can be mounted to access their content. Modern operating systems can mount ISO files directly, but dedicated software that can handle the extension also exists.

ISO files represent complete images of optical discs, and cybercriminals are now abusing them as containers for delivering their malicious applications, it seems. Such occurrences, however, are rare, Kaspersky says.

As part of the recent campaign, the ISO files contained the Loki Bot malware, an information-stealing Trojan designed to harvest usernames and passwords from the victim machines, along with other user data.

“The malware’s key objective is to steal passwords from browsers, messaging applications, mail and FTP clients, and cryptocurrency wallets. Loki Bot dispatches all its loot to the malware owners,” Kaspersky notes.

The new campaign proves yet again that the security measures organizations take should also include training for employees, in addition to technical protection. Employees’ actions can cause irreparable damage to a business, the security firm notes.

“Every year we observe an increase in spam attacks on the corporate sector. The perpetrators have used phishing and malicious spam, including forged business emails, in their pursuit of confidential corporate information: intellectual property, authentication data, databases, bank accounts, etc,” Kaspersky concludes.