Nexus: A New Rising Android Banking Trojan Targeting 450 Financial Apps

An rising Android banking trojan dubbed Nexus has by now been adopted by numerous risk actors to goal 450 monetary apps and carry out fraud.

“Nexus seems to be in its early phases of enhancement,” Italian cybersecurity organization Cleafy reported in a report printed this week.

“Nexus offers all the principal options to conduct ATO attacks (Account Takeover) towards banking portals and cryptocurrency providers, these as credentials thieving and SMS interception.”

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The trojan, which appeared in a variety of hacking discussion boards at the commence of the year, is marketed as a membership service to its clientele for a regular monthly charge of $3,000. Aspects of the malware were 1st documented by Cyble previously this month.

Even so, there are indications that the malware could have been applied in genuine-earth attacks as early as June 2022, at minimum 6 months before its formal announcement on darknet portals.

It really is also mentioned to overlap with a further banking trojan dubbed SOVA, reusing sections of its supply code and incorporating a ransomware module that appears to be under lively development.

A level really worth mentioning in this article is that Nexus is the identical malware that Cleafy initially categorized as a new variant of SOVA (dubbed v5) in August 2022.

Curiously, the Nexus authors have laid out express policies that prohibit the use of its malware in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, and Indonesia.

The malware, like other banking trojans, consists of characteristics to consider more than accounts relevant to banking and cryptocurrency providers by carrying out overlay attacks and keylogging to steal users’ credentials.

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Also, it is capable of studying two-factor authentication (2FA) codes from SMS messages and the Google Authenticator application through the abuse of Android’s accessibility products and services.

Some new additions to the record of functionalities is its capacity to remove received SMS messages, activate or end the 2FA stealer module, and update by itself by periodically pinging a command-and-command (C2) server.

“The [Malware-as-a-Service] design makes it possible for criminals to monetize their malware a lot more successfully by furnishing a all set-created infrastructure to their prospects, who can then use the malware to attack their targets,” the scientists reported.

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