Beware of Fake Spectre and Meltdown Patches Pushing Malware – Smoke Loader

Crooks trying to take advantage of the infamous bug Meltdown and Spectre which affects almost all the modern processors and pushes Smoke Loader malware as a patch.

Security researchers from Malwarebytes spotted a phishing campaign targetted German users appears to come from the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).

Researchers said “the domain was recently registered and it consists of various external links and details about Meltdown and Spectre” and the phishing site has SSL enabled.

The malicious site consists of a zip file Intel-AMD-SecurityPatch-11-01bsi.zip which consist of the malware file Intel-AMD-SecurityPatch-10-1-v1.exe.

Once the malicious file is executed users will infect themselves with Smoke Loader and it downloads additional malware, it posts infection is encrypted and attempting to connect with various domains. Malware published technical analysis report.

They contacted Cloudflare to report the abuse and the site was taken down by Cloudflare in minutes.”This particular one is interesting because people were told to apply a patch, which is exactly what the crooks are offering under disguise” researchers said.

It is evident that we should not trust HTTPS blindly and the TLS certificate is only to encrypt the connection between the browser and server.

Malicious websites available everywhere over the Internet, it is very difficult to find a trustworthy website. If the URL received from an unknown source, we would recommend cross-checking the URL before clicking on it.

Also Read Is it a Legitimate Website: How to Check if a Website is Safe

Copy the URL to analyzers that available over the Internet and ensure it’s Integrity. If it is a shortened URL you can unshorten it with the site and then analyze the actual URL.

IoC – Smoke Loader

Malicious Website

sicherheit-informationstechnik[.]bid

Smoke Loaded SHA256

CD17CE11DF9DE507AF025EF46398CFDCB99D3904B2B5718BFF2DC0B01AEAE38C