IconDown

Many cyber crooks around the world rely on Trojan downloaders to infiltrate a targeted system and inject additional malware in it. To make the job of malware researchers more difficult, con actors who propagate Trojan downloaders would often obfuscate their code heavily and make their creation seem harmless. This way, the Trojan downloader may avoid detection by anti-malware tools and security checks successfully. Recently, cybersecurity experts have spotted a new Trojan downloader claiming victims online – IconDown. The IconDown downloader is believed to be the creation of a hacking group called BlackTech.

Targets Businesses in Japan

The BlackTech hacking group is believed to originate from Asia, as most of their targets are located in this area. Malware experts have been keeping an eye on the BlackTech group, and it became evident that they tend to go after Japanese companies operating in various industries mainly. The IconDown Trojan downloader does not shine with its capabilities, but the BlackTech hacking group has implemented an interesting technique when it comes to obfuscating the purpose of this threat. This method is called steganography.

Uses Steganography to Carry Out the Attack

The BlackTech hacking group appears to have used carefully-tailored phishing emails to infiltrate the targeted hosts. These emails would contain a corrupted attached document, which, upon launching, would trigger the execution of the IconDown threat’s payload. Next, the IconDown Trojan downloader would grab the secondary payloads, which the threat is meant to plant on the infected system, using steganography. This downloader fetches an image that contains a particular string, which aids in locating the 256 bytes of data that serve as the RC4 key needed by the attackers. Then, the rest of the data that the IconDown downloader needs from the image file will be located and collected into a Portable Executable file and launched.

The obfuscation method used by the BlackTech hacking group is rather impressive, and companies in Japan need to instruct their employees to be very wary when opening emails from unknown sources, as this may end up costing the business dearly.

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