TrickBooster

Banking Trojans are among the more popular malware as they can offer great monetary gain to cybercriminals. The TrickBot banking Trojan is a threat that is well-known to malware researchers worldwide. It has been active since 2016, but its creators have not remained idle over the years – they have introduced several updates that have improved the TrickBot malware greatly.

250 Million Email Addresses Collected

One of the recent updates to the TrickBot Trojan has been given the name 'TrickBooster.’ The TrickBooster malware does not cause as much direct harm as the TrickBot banking Trojan, but it can prove to be much more threatening in the long run. By providing its operators with tens of millions of email addresses, the malware might enable them to distribute a more prominent cyber-threat around the globe rapidly. The cybersecurity experts that were tracking the activity of the TrickBooster uncovered the database of the TrickBooster operators, and it contained the mind-numbing 250,000,000 email addresses. Some of the emails collected belong to high-ranking politicians and employees of large corporations. Having such a large email database means that the authors of the TrickBooster can propagate all sorts of malware via phishing emails to hundreds of millions of people.

Capabilities

An active TrickBot infection may allow the operator to deploy the TrickBooster to the compromised host. However, it is possible that it also might be delivered as a stand-alone threat via exploit kits, spam emails, or other popular malware propagation channels. When the TrickBooster manages to infiltrate a system, it may use the Microsoft Outlook application to collect the contact list of the victim, as well as their email address. Some experts speculate that this Trojan also may be capable of gathering saved usernames and passwords too. Once the data is transferred to the server of the attackers, the TrickBooster Trojan will use the host to send spam emails to everyone on their contact list and then will cover up its tracks by deleting the messages it had sent and uninstalling itself from the host swiftly. Many victims may never even realize that their systems had been infiltrated by malware.

We recommend you downloading and installing a legitimate anti-malware application, which will keep your computer and your data safe from pests like the TrickBooster Trojan.