Incidents

AZORult spreads as a fake ProtonVPN installer

AZORult has its history. However, a few days ago, we discovered what appears to be one of its most unusual campaigns: abusing the ProtonVPN service and dropping malware via fake ProtonVPN installers for Windows.

Screenshot of a fake ProtonVPN website

The campaign started at the end of November 2019 when the threat actor behind it registered a new domain under the name protonvpn[.]store. The Registrar used for this campaign is from Russia.

We have found that at least one of the infection vectors is through affiliation banners networks (Malvertising).

When the victim visits a counterfeit website and downloads a fake ProtonVPN installer for Windows, they receive a copy of the Azorult botnet implant.

The Website is an HTTrack copy of the original ProtonVPN website as shown below.

Once the victim runs the implant, it collects the infected machine’s environment information and reports it to the C2, located on the same accounts[.]protonvpn[.]store server.

In their greed, the threat actors have designed the malware to steal cryptocurrency from locally available wallets (Electrum, Bitcoin, Etherium, etc.), FTP logins and passwords from FileZilla, email credentials, information from locally installed browsers (including cookies), credentials for WinSCP, Pidgin messenger and others.

We have been able to identify a few samples associated with the campaign:

Filename MD5 hash
ProtonVPN_win_v1.10.0.exe cc2477cf4d596a88b349257cba3ef356
ProtonVPN_win_v1.11.0.exe 573ff02981a5c70ae6b2594b45aa7caa
ProtonVPN_win_v1.11.0.exe c961a3e3bd646ed0732e867310333978
ProtonVPN_win_v1.11.0.exe 2a98e06c3310309c58fb149a8dc7392c
ProtonVPN_win_v1.11.0.exe f21c21c2fceac5118ebf088653275b4f
ProtonVPN_win_v1.11.0.exe 0ae37532a7bbce03e7686eee49441c41
Unknown 974b6559a6b45067b465050e5002214b

Kaspersky products detect this threat as HEUR:Trojan-PSW.Win32.Azorult.gen

AZORult spreads as a fake ProtonVPN installer

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

 

Reports

Focus on DroxiDat/SystemBC

An unknown actor targeted an electric utility in southern Africa with Cobalt Strike beacons and DroxiDat, a new variant of the SystemBC payload. We speculate that this incident was in the initial stages of a ransomware attack.

APT trends report Q2 2023

This is our latest summary of the significant events and findings, focusing on activities that we observed during Q2 2023.

Meet the GoldenJackal APT group. Don’t expect any howls

GoldenJackal is an APT group, active since 2019, that usually targets government and diplomatic entities in the Middle East and South Asia. The main feature of this group is a specific toolset of .NET malware, JackalControl, JackalWorm, JackalSteal, JackalPerInfo and JackalScreenWatcher.

Subscribe to our weekly e-mails

The hottest research right in your inbox