Wednesday, January 29, 2025
HomeMalwareNew Variant of Dangerous Kronos Banking Malware Spreading via Malicious Word Documents

New Variant of Dangerous Kronos Banking Malware Spreading via Malicious Word Documents

Published on

SIEM as a Service

Follow Us on Google News

A new variant of Kronos Banking Trojan appeared in wild targeting users in Germany, Japan, and Poland. The trojan first appeared in 2014 and disappeared after a few years.

With the new variant of Kronos Banking Trojan, it uses the Tor anonymizing network for establishing communication with the command and control server.

Security researchers from Proofpoint spotted three campaigns targeting German, Japanese, and Polish users. The fourth campaign in progress and being tested.

Kronos Banking Trojan Campaigns

The first campaign observed on June 27, 2018, targeting German users with malicious Word documents contained macro posing it to be from German financial institutions.

Kronos Banking Trojan

The second campaign on July 13, 2018, targeting Japan users, the malvertising campaign sends victims to the page contains malicious javascript, which redirects the users to download the malware.

The third campaign observed on July 15, 2018, targeting Poland users with malicious Word documents with the fake invoices, such as “Faktura 2018.07.16” and the document uses Microsoft Office Memory Corruption Vulnerability (CVE-2017-11882) to download and execute Kronos.

Research spotted the fourth campaign On July 20, 2018, appeared to be a work in progress and still in the testing phase.

Kronos Banking Trojan Functions

The banking Trojan uses man-in-the-browser techniques to inject and modify the web pages of financial institutions to steal credentials, account information, other user information, and money through fraudulent transactions. It also has keylogging and hidden VNC as an added functionality.

With the 2018 version it shares the same similarities with the older versions, the only major change is the C&C URLs anonymized with TOR network.

The new version of Kronos banking trojan observed to have the similar features of new banking Trojan called “Osiris” that advertised on an underground hacking forum.

“Kronos Banking Trojan reappearance is fairly high-profile banking Trojan, Kronos, is consistent with the increased prevalence of bankers across the threat landscape.” researchers said.

Also Read

Beware !! Hackers Deliver FlawedAmmyy RAT via Weaponized Microsoft Word and PDF Documents

US-CERT Alerts Powerful Emotet Banking Malware Attack on Government, Private and Public Sectors

Dangerous macOS Backdoor That Steals User Login Credentials Remained Undetected for Years

Gurubaran
Gurubaran
Gurubaran is a co-founder of Cyber Security News and GBHackers On Security. He has 10+ years of experience as a Security Consultant, Editor, and Analyst in cybersecurity, technology, and communications.

Latest articles

Vulnerability in Airline Integration Service enables A Hacker to Gain Entry To User Accounts

A recent security vulnerability in a widely used airline integration service has exposed millions...

Hackers Seize Control of 3,000 Companies Through Critical Vulnerabilities

In a groundbreaking cybersecurity investigation, researchers identified several critical vulnerabilities in a target system,...

PoC Exploit Released for Critical Cacti Vulnerability Let Attackers Code Remotely

A critical vulnerability in the Cacti performance monitoring framework tracked as CVE-2025-22604, has been...

TorNet Backdoor Exploits Windows Scheduled Tasks to Deploy Malware

Cisco Talos researchers have identified an ongoing cyber campaign, active since mid-2024, deploying a...

API Security Webinar

Free Webinar - DevSecOps Hacks

By embedding security into your CI/CD workflows, you can shift left, streamline your DevSecOps processes, and release secure applications faster—all while saving time and resources.

In this webinar, join Phani Deepak Akella ( VP of Marketing ) and Karthik Krishnamoorthy (CTO), Indusface as they explores best practices for integrating application security into your CI/CD workflows using tools like Jenkins and Jira.

Discussion points

Automate security scans as part of the CI/CD pipeline.
Get real-time, actionable insights into vulnerabilities.
Prioritize and track fixes directly in Jira, enhancing collaboration.
Reduce risks and costs by addressing vulnerabilities pre-production.

More like this

TorNet Backdoor Exploits Windows Scheduled Tasks to Deploy Malware

Cisco Talos researchers have identified an ongoing cyber campaign, active since mid-2024, deploying a...

New Hacker Group Using 7z & UltraVNC Tool to Deploy Malware Evading Detection

A sophisticated cyber campaign targeting Russian-speaking entities has been identified by cybersecurity researchers, unveiling...

Weaponised XWorm RAT Builder Attacking Script Kiddies To Hack 18,000 Devices

A recent cybersecurity attack involving a Trojanized version of the XWorm Remote Access Trojan...