Augmented Marauder's multipronged banking-Trojan cyber campaigns are targeting Spanish speakers, evading detection, and replicating rapidly.
Brazilian threat actors are aiming to steal banking credentials across Spanish-speaking countries, using highly wormable and slightly elusive infection techniques.
As much as North Korea is known for large-scale cryptocurrency hacks and Israel dominates the spyware market, Brazil has become notorious as the banking malware capital of the world. Hackers there churn out money-stealing Trojans at a rate that challenges analysts' ability to come up with explanations.
The cybercrime operation known as Water Saci, or Augmented Marauder, has been near the heart of this movement for some years now. In more recent months, it has been splitting its time between two financially motivated cyberattack campaigns. One of them has been waged over WhatsApp, focused in Brazil, and tracked by researchers since last year.
BlueVoyant has now identified a parallel, in some ways similar, campaign, but it's being carried out via email, and might well spread through Latin America and Spain. This latest iteration on Water Saci's playbook is characterized by self-propagating malware, email security bypass, and financial information theft.
"This threat group seems as if they have a campaign that they try to launch [roughly] every quarter, and they keep changing it, so it's pretty clear whoever this is [is] very active [and] their end goal is to get access to users' bank accounts within the Latin American region," says Thomas Elkins, SOC security analyst for BlueVoyant. "To me, it's clear that they're going to keep ramping up."
The malicious file attached to the phishing email is password-protected, lending an air of legitimacy to the document and possibly helping it escape scrutiny from secure email gateways (SEGs). That zip file name is randomized for each victim — an obstacle for signature-based detection tools.
Most significant of all, though, is how victims end up with that judicial summons email in the first place. One of the scripts deployed later in the attack chain — a tool called Horabot — is designed to exploit the victim's email account, with the goal of self-propagation. It grabs their contacts, filters them, then blasts a new round of phishing emails to any number of new potential targets, with a modified version of the judicial summons file locked with a new password.
Besides spreading fast and far, this worming element carries a few other distinct advantages. First, because new targets receive their phishing emails from trusted contacts, they might be more likely to click on those malicious attachments. It also means those emails are less likely to be flagged by email security solutions.
"And it's pretty smart because it makes it harder to identify where the attack actually originated from," Elkins points out. Between the wormable emails, and the wormable WhatsApp messages in their concurrent campaign in Brazil, "they're finding new ways to automate their attack chains to not just rely on an attacker-based account," which makes identifying attacker-controlled infrastructure more challenging for cybersecurity defenders.
For Elkins, the phenomenon of Brazilian banking Trojans is a mystery. "It's interesting that they're still hung up on banking Trojans, because a lot of time these newer threat actors are focusing on: How do we gain access to this customer's network? How do we start infiltrating exfiltrating data? How can we use ransomware to get paid?" he says.
Banking Trojans are a more direct way to steal money with malware, and they apparently work often enough to keep this sector of cybercrime chugging along, but "I don't think most of the banking Trojans succeed at this point, in today's environment, because they're so easy to attack now," Elkins says.
With competent, modern cybersecurity protections, he says, "they're getting caught more easily. I mean, Windows Defender itself has so many different rule sets for catching AutoIT executables [like those used by Water Saci] and stopping that behavior. That's why, a lot of the time in my research, we don't see it get all the way to the end in the customer's environment. It's usually stopped at the email stage."
Brazilian threat actors are aiming to steal banking credentials across Spanish-speaking countries, using highly wormable and slightly elusive infection techniques.
As much as North Korea is known for large-scale cryptocurrency hacks and Israel dominates the spyware market, Brazil has become notorious as the banking malware capital of the world. Hackers there churn out money-stealing Trojans at a rate that challenges analysts' ability to come up with explanations.
The cybercrime operation known as Water Saci, or Augmented Marauder, has been near the heart of this movement for some years now. In more recent months, it has been splitting its time between two financially motivated cyberattack campaigns. One of them has been waged over WhatsApp, focused in Brazil, and tracked by researchers since last year.
BlueVoyant has now identified a parallel, in some ways similar, campaign, but it's being carried out via email, and might well spread through Latin America and Spain. This latest iteration on Water Saci's playbook is characterized by self-propagating malware, email security bypass, and financial information theft.
"This threat group seems as if they have a campaign that they try to launch [roughly] every quarter, and they keep changing it, so it's pretty clear whoever this is [is] very active [and] their end goal is to get access to users' bank accounts within the Latin American region," says Thomas Elkins, SOC security analyst for BlueVoyant. "To me, it's clear that they're going to keep ramping up."
A Wormable Banking Attack
On first impression, an Augmented Marauder attack is rather unexceptional. All victims receive the same notice in their inbox of some vague upcoming judicial summons. Victims who fall for the bait land on a site where they end up downloading a malicious zip file. Behind each step in this chain of events, though, is a trick that either modestly helps the attack evade detection, or significantly helps it spread to new targets.The malicious file attached to the phishing email is password-protected, lending an air of legitimacy to the document and possibly helping it escape scrutiny from secure email gateways (SEGs). That zip file name is randomized for each victim — an obstacle for signature-based detection tools.
Most significant of all, though, is how victims end up with that judicial summons email in the first place. One of the scripts deployed later in the attack chain — a tool called Horabot — is designed to exploit the victim's email account, with the goal of self-propagation. It grabs their contacts, filters them, then blasts a new round of phishing emails to any number of new potential targets, with a modified version of the judicial summons file locked with a new password.
Besides spreading fast and far, this worming element carries a few other distinct advantages. First, because new targets receive their phishing emails from trusted contacts, they might be more likely to click on those malicious attachments. It also means those emails are less likely to be flagged by email security solutions.
"And it's pretty smart because it makes it harder to identify where the attack actually originated from," Elkins points out. Between the wormable emails, and the wormable WhatsApp messages in their concurrent campaign in Brazil, "they're finding new ways to automate their attack chains to not just rely on an attacker-based account," which makes identifying attacker-controlled infrastructure more challenging for cybersecurity defenders.
Brazil's Banking Trojans Don't Impress
The point of all this is to drop Casbaneiro, a classic banking Trojan that triggers when victims visit their cryptocurrency or financial service providers online. Its list of targets is extensive, covering major banks in Central and South America — like Santander and Banco do Brasil — plus payment and cryptocurrency platforms like Binance. Per tradition, it uses an overlay to trick users into thinking they're logging into a legitimate site, and logs their keystrokes in order to capture their credentials.For Elkins, the phenomenon of Brazilian banking Trojans is a mystery. "It's interesting that they're still hung up on banking Trojans, because a lot of time these newer threat actors are focusing on: How do we gain access to this customer's network? How do we start infiltrating exfiltrating data? How can we use ransomware to get paid?" he says.
Banking Trojans are a more direct way to steal money with malware, and they apparently work often enough to keep this sector of cybercrime chugging along, but "I don't think most of the banking Trojans succeed at this point, in today's environment, because they're so easy to attack now," Elkins says.
With competent, modern cybersecurity protections, he says, "they're getting caught more easily. I mean, Windows Defender itself has so many different rule sets for catching AutoIT executables [like those used by Water Saci] and stopping that behavior. That's why, a lot of the time in my research, we don't see it get all the way to the end in the customer's environment. It's usually stopped at the email stage."