First of all, we are going to analyze the forecasts we made at the end of 2020 and see how accurate they were. Then we will go through the key events of 2021 relating to attacks on financial organizations. Finally, we will make some forecasts about financial attacks in 2022. Analysis of forecasts for 2021 The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to cause a massive w

Nethanella Messer and James Kilner contributed to the technical editing of this blog. IBM Trusteer researchers continually analyze financial fraud attacks in the online realms. In recent research into mobile banking malware, we delved into the BrazKing malware’s inner workings following a sample found by MalwareHunterTeam. BrazKing is an Android banki

Spain’s Ministry of the Interior has announced the arrest of 16 individuals connected to the Grandoreiro and Melcoz (also known as Mekotio) cybercrime groups. Both are originally from Brazil and form part of the Tetrade umbrella, operating for a few years now in Latin America and Western Europe. Grandoreiro is a banking Trojan malware family that initi

Bizarro is yet another banking Trojan family originating from Brazil that is now found in other regions of the world. We have seen users being targeted in Spain, Portugal, France and Italy. Attempts have now been made to steal credentials from customers of 70 banks from different European and South American countries. Following in the footsteps of Tetrade, B

Guildma, a threat actor that is part of the Tétrade family of banking trojans, has been working on bringing in new techniques, creating new malware and targeting new victims. Recently, their new creation, the Ghimob banking trojan, has been a move toward infecting mobile devices, targeting financial apps from banks, fintechs, exchanges and cryptocurrencies i

Introduction Brazil is a well-known country with plenty of banking trojans developed by local crooks. The Brazilian criminal underground is home to some of the world’s busiest and most creative perpetrators of cybercrime. Like their counterparts’ in China and Russia, their cyberattacks have a strong local flavor, and for a long time, they limited

IBM X-Force Incident Response and Intelligence Services (IRIS) has been tracking cybercrime capitalizing on the coronavirus pandemic since January, and has observed the geographical areas of this activity shift over time. In February, cybercriminals were focusing on Asia, and we observed threat actors targeting potential victims in Japan with coronavirus-rel

IBM X-Force research recently analyzed a new Android banking Trojan that appears to be targeting users in countries that speak Spanish or Portuguese, namely Spain, Portugal, Brazil and other parts of Latin America. This Trojan, which was created atop an existing, simpler SMSstealer.BR, was supplemented with more elaborate overlay capabilities. That portion o

A little more than one month after the European Union enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to extend new data privacy rights to its people, the governor of California signed a separate, sweeping data protection law that borrowed several ideas from GDPR, sparking a torch in a legislative data privacy trend that has now spanned at least 10 cou

The malware discussed in this blog saw input from X-Force researchers Andre Piva and Ofir Ozer. It was initially described in a blog post by X-Force’s Maor Wiesen and Limor Kessem. The IBM Trusteer cybercrime research labs specialize in the detection and counteraction of the crimeware and attacks operated by organized cybercrime gangs. In one of our re

RevengeHotels is a targeted cybercrime malware campaign against hotels, hostels, hospitality and tourism companies, mainly, but not exclusively, located in Brazil. We have confirmed more than 20 hotels that are victims of the group, located in eight states in Brazil, but also in other countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, France, Italy, Me

“BRATA” is a new Android remote access tool malware family. We used this code name based on its description – “Brazilian RAT Android”. It exclusively targets victims in Brazil: however, theoretically it could also be used to attack any other Android user if the cybercriminals behind it want to. It has been widespread since Janua

A hacker using the online moniker of ‘Kuroi’SH’ defaced the Google Brazil domain on Tuesday afternoon, this isn’t the first high-profile target he breached. A hacker using the online moniker of ‘Kuroi’SH’ defaced the official Google Brazil domain on Tuesday afternoon. The defaced page displayed a message greeting his friends for

In January 2017, IBM X-Force research reported the development of a new remote-access malware code targeting Brazilian banks. The malware, dubbed Client Maximus, was observed in ongoing campaigns and continues to target online banking users in the country. The development of Client Maximus, which is believed to be commercially available in Brazilian fraud an

While we have previously written on the now infamous XPan ransomware family, some of it’s variants are still affecting users primarily located in Brazil. Harvesting victims via weakly protected RDP (remote desktop protocol) connections, criminals are manually installing the ransomware and encrypting any files which can be found on the system. Interesti