Medium
In a resume-themed email campaign analyzed by Cofense, the Hawkeye keylogger was found being used as a first-stage downloader for a cryptocurrency miner. The email claims to have a resume attached in the form of a ZIP archive. Once opened, the ZIP archive delivers the Hawkeye Reborn V9 keylogger to the victim’s system. This keylogger is typically used to monitor systems, gather sensitive information from the machine, and exfiltrate the information to a C2 server. However, despite it not being advertised as loader, the operator behind this campaign leverages its file installation feature (normally used for establishing persistence) to download and execute a cryptocurrency miner. Specifically, it downloads an older version of the open-source CGMiner. Although the current version of CGMiner only mines Bitcoin and removed GPU/CPU mining support, the older version allows the operator to instead mine Litecoin while leveraging the CPU/GPU mining functionality. In their blog post, Cofense provides recommendations for detecting various activities taking place through the infection chain.
Exposure of sensitive information
MD5