Lumma, Raccoon, Aurora, RedLine – these are just a few names behind a recent trend that’s been ruining the internet for us.
A terrifying new trend has been plaguing the digital world for quite a while already. Cybersecurity experts are sounding alarm bells about information stealers – a type of malware designed to steal information from your devices.
“An information stealer is a type of malware that gets in and out of your machine as quickly as possible to steal as much data as it can, leaving no evidence that it ever existed,” Ryan Montgomery, an ethical hacker and founder of cybersecurity technology platform pentester.com, recently told Cybernews.
That means that everything that is or ever was on your computer – passwords, credit card information, and any sensitive files – is up for grabs for threat actors.
"Antivirus or EDR can’t always detect it," Montgomery warned.
How do devices get infected with information stealers?
“Some places that you can be infected with information stealers could be hidden in business opportunities they are sending you. A Word document that may or may not have an information stealer embedded in it. There could be a game hack/modification that your kid is playing, and they want to download one of the modding or hacking tools, which could also contain these stealers,” Montgomery said.
An information stealer then grabs the data, uploads it to a server, and disappears from your computer without you or your security systems suspecting any wrongdoing.
These viruses often have crypto wallet stealers inside, meaning that an infection could lead to a draining of funds.
“They're getting more and more advanced,” Montgomery said.
For educational purposes, he prepared a demonstration of how an infostealer behaves and what information it is able to grab. Check out our video below (starts at 9:57).
The terrifying beauty of this kind of malware is that it can infect thousands of people at once. This allows cybercriminals to hoard vast amounts of data and release it in huge quantities, opening up new attack vectors such as massive phishing campaigns, ransomware, and more.
Your passwords and other information obtained by infostealers often end up on a thriving Russian underground marketplace. A set of stolen credentials is sometimes worth as little as $2, making access to corporate networks disturbingly easy.
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