These YouTube gaming movies are spreading malware

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A newly found malicious marketing campaign that distributes the RedLine Stealer infostealer comes with a really fascinating self-propagation mechanism, researchers have discovered.

Cybersecurity consultants from Kaspersky uncovered new malware (opens in new tab) that logs into the YouTube accounts of compromised customers and uploads a video to their channel, which distributes RedLine Infostealer.

A sufferer, ideally a PC gamer, finds a YouTube video on cracks, or cheats, for considered one of their favourite video games: both FIFA, Last Fantasy, Forza Horizon, Lego Star Wars, or Spider-Man. Within the video’s description are hyperlinks that declare to carry these cracks and cheats which, actually, host a number of malware bundled collectively.

Cryptojackers, infostealers

Within the bundle is RedLine Stealer, one of the vital in style infostealers these days, able to stealing (opens in new tab) passwords saved in individuals’s browsers, cookies, bank card particulars, instantaneous messaging conversations, and cryptocurrency wallets.

The bundle additionally holds a cryptojacker, basically a cryptocurrency miner which makes use of the computing energy of the compromised endpoint to mine sure cryptocurrency for the attackers. Cryptocurrency mining normally requires vital GPU energy, one thing most players normally have.

However maybe most curiously, the bundle has three malicious executables, used for self-propagation. These are referred to as “MakiseKurisu.exe”, “obtain.exe”, and “add.exe”. MakiseKurisu is an infostealer that grabs browser cookies and shops them regionally.

Then, obtain.exe would seize the pretend crack video from a GitHub repository, and hand it over to add.exe, which might add it to the sufferer’s YouTube account, after utilizing cookies to log in.

If the sufferer isn’t an avid YouTube person, or has notifications turned off, there’s a good probability the malicious video may sit on their YouTube channel for a very long time, earlier than being taken down.

“When the video is efficiently uploaded to YouTube, add.exe sends a message to Discord with a hyperlink to the uploaded video,” Kaspersky explains.