The Svpeng Trojan continues to evolve, the last variant includes keylogger capabilities

Security experts at Kaspersky discovered the dreaded Svpeng Trojan has been recently modified to implement keylogger features.

The new strain of the Svpeng Trojan has already infected devices in 23 countries, including Russia (29%), Germany (27%), Turkey (15%), Poland (6%) and France (3%).

The malware researchers noticed that the malware doesn’t perform malicious actions on devices belonging to Russian users.

The Svpeng Trojan distinguish Russian users by checking the device’s language. If the language is Russian, the malware doesn’t perform further malicious tasks.

This circumstance suggests the gang behind the threat is Russian.

The latest variant of the Svpeng discovered in July was being distributed through malicious websites that disguised as a fake Flash Player.

Once installed, the malware asks the device to use Accessibility Services that allows it grants itself device administrator rights, displays an overlay on the top of legitimate apps. The malware is also able to grant itself some dynamic permissions, such as the ability to make calls, send and receive SMS, and access the victim’s contacts.

“Using accessibility services allows the Trojan to get access to the UI of other apps and to steal data from them, such as the names of the interface elements and their content, if it is available. This includes entered text. Furthermore, it takes screenshots every time the user presses a button on the keyboard, and uploads them to the malicious server. It supports not only the standard Android keyboard but also a few third-party keyboards.” states Kaspersky.

“Some apps, mainly banking ones, do not allow screenshots to be taken when they are on top. In such cases, the Trojan has another option to steal data – it draws its phishing window over the attacked app. It is interesting that, in order to find out which app is on top, it uses accessibility services too.”

The researchers intercepted an encrypted configuration file from the malware’s C&C server, the analysis of the file allowed them to identify other apps targeted by the Svpeng Trojan along with phishing URLs to overlay them.

The config file decrypted by the experts contained a phishing URL for the PayPal and eBay mobile apps to steal credentials and URLs for banking apps from different countries:

The file also allows the malware to receive various commands from the C&C server, including instructions:

• To send SMS
• To collect info (Contacts, installed apps and call logs)
• To collect all SMS from the device
• To open URL
• To start stealing incoming SMS

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Svpeng Trojan, Android malware)

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