Cyber Crime

SeaFlower campaign distributes backdoored versions of Web3 wallets to steal seed phrases

Chinese cybercriminals are using SeaFlower backdoored versions of iOS and Android Web3 wallets to steal users’ seed phrase.

Researchers from Confiant have uncovered a sophisticated malware campaign, tracked as SeaFlower, targeting Web3 wallet users. Chinese crooks are spreading backdoored versions of iOS and Android Web3 wallets to steal users’ seed phrase.

SeaFlower maintains the functionality of the original wallet, but it adds code to exfiltrate the seed phrase.

The threat actors targeted the following web3 wallets:

“SeaFlower is a cluster of activity that we identified earlier this year in March 2022. We believe SeaFlower is the most technically sophisticated threat targeting web3 users, right after the infamous Lazarus Group.” reads the analysis published by Confiant. “SeaFlower drastically differs from the other web3 intrusion sets we track, with little to no overlap from the Infrastructure in place, but also from the technical capability and coordination point of view: Reverse engineering iOS and Android apps, modding them, provisioning, and automated deployments.”

The attackers set up fake cloned websites to distribute backdoored wallets that can be downloaded by users.

The fake sites are promoted via search engine poisoning, attackers mainly targeted Baidu and other Chinese search engines.

Experts didn’t find a backdoored chrome extension delivered from these clone websites, all the links point to the real chrome extension in the Chrome Webstore.

For iOS threat actors are using provisioning profiles, the tainted apps are sideloaded to the victim’s phone and installed.

The researchers reported at very early stage of this campaign all the Apple developer id’s linked to these provisioning profiles to Apple to allow the company to revoke them.

“It seems there was a lot of efforts in the iOS side of things, for example setting up provisioning profiles, automatic deployments, sophisticated backdoor code, etc. More work has been done compared to the Android side of things.” concludes the report. “There are some notable challenges when it comes to SeaFlower attribution, for example figuring out if the provisioning servers are run by the same group, and also identifying more initial vectors of the attack beside the Chinese search engines. All these are difficult challenges due to the geographical and language barrier aspects.”

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, SeaFlower campaign)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

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