Pierluigi Paganini
January 22, 2017
Today I report another success of law enforcement, the Spanish police have arrested an alleged Russian Vxer suspected of developing the infamous Neverquest banking Trojan. The malware was developed to target financial institutions across the world.
Lisov is suspected of being the author of the malware and the person who administrated the control infrastructure.
The Neverquest was used by cyber criminals to steal login credentials from banking customers, it leverages on injection mechanisms to provide users fake forms into legitimate banking websites. The banking trojan is able to record keystrokes, to steal passwords stored on the PC, and take screenshots and video from the victims’ machine.
The Neverquest malware is able to log in to the victim’s online banking account and perform fraudulent transactions.
On Friday, the Russian citizen Lisov SV (32) was arrested at the Barcelona airport by the Guardia Civil.
The arrest is the result of the collaboration between the Spanish law enforcement and the FBI.
“The arrest took place at El Prat Airport (Barcelona), when agents controlling their movements observed that they were leaving Spain on a flight to another EU country
The defendant had developed, distributed and used, along with others, malicious software “NeverQuest”, designed to access personal computers and financial institutions in order to steal bank credentials, credit card information and personal and financial information.” reads the statement issued by the Spanish Police.
“The Guardia Civil, in collaboration with the FBI, has detained 32-year-old Russian citizen LISOV SV, wanted by the United States of America through an international detention order, in Barcelona, as responsible for a network conspiring to commit hacking And fraud through the use of electronic means.”
The FBI had been working with the Spanish authorities to track down the suspect through an international arrest warrant, according to a statement from the agency. The FBI, however, declined to comment on the man’s arrest.
The Neverquest banking trojan, , aka Vawtrak, is very popular in the criminal underground.It has been around for several years and was used to target of hundreds of financial institutions worldwide.
The threat evolved over the time, on March 2015 experts from antivirus firm AVG discovered a variant of the malware that was able to send and receive data through encrypted favicons distributed over the Tor network.
One of the last variant discovered in summer 2016 was spotted by experts from Fidelis firm. The new version of the Neverquest malware, aka Vawtrak banking Trojan, includes significant improvements such as the SSL pinning and leverages on a DGA mechanism to generates .ru domains with a pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) discovered in the loader.
In June 2015 experts at Fortinet uncovered a strain of the banking Trojan that was implementing an obscuring mechanism based on the Tor2Web service.
According to IBM Security, Neverquest was the most active financial malware in the world.
According to Spanish law enforcement, the NeverQuest Trojan has resulted in financial losses from victims of about US$5 million. The police discovered on a seized server files with millions of stolen login credentials from bank website accounts.
Russian diplomats have sent a request to the Spanish authorities to receive more information about the arrest and the charges against the Russian citizen.
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(Security Affairs – NeverQuest banking Trojan, malware)
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