Pierluigi Paganini
March 26, 2015
A new powerful variant of the Vawtrak malware, also known as Neverquest or Snifula, appeared in the wild.
The researcher, Jakub Kroustek from AVG anti-virus firm, has published a detailed analysis of the new strain of Vawtrak. The expert has detailed the new features implemented by the authors of the malware.
According to the experts, Vawtrak infects victims via malware downloaders (e.g. Zemot, Chaintor), exploit kits, or through drive-by downloads (e.g. spam email attachments or malicious links).
According to data collected by AVG in Q1 2015, The infections of the Vawtrak malware are most prevalent in the Czech Republic, USA, UK, and Germany.
The popular malware implements several methods to steal victim’s passwords, including the use of the Pony password stealing module.
“As we mentioned in the introduction, Vawtrak supports several methods for stealing a user’s passwords. The first method is based on monitoring the data sent by a web browser. The second method is provided by the Pony password stealing module.” states the report.
According to Kroustek, Vawtrak uses Tor2Web proxy to receive updates from its developers.
“Of particular interest from a security standpoint is that by using Tor2web proxy, it can access update servers that are hosted on the Tor hidden web services without installing specialist software such as Torbrowser,” said the expert. “Moreover, the communication with the remote server is done over SSL, which adds further encryption.”
Once executed on the victim’s machine, Vawtrak performs the following actions:
Stay Tuned for more information and enjoy the report from AVG!
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(Security Affairs – AVG, Vawtrak)
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