Avito users were targeted by a dangerous Android Trojan

International company Group-IB, which specializes in the prevention of cyber attacks, has recorded a new Android Trojan campaign, the victims of which are customers of 70 banks, payment systems, web-wallets in the Russian Federation and the CIS. The potential damage from the Trojan, called FANTA, amounted to at least 35 million rubles ($547,000).

FANTA belongs to the Flexnet malware family, which is known to experts since 2015 and studied in detail. The Trojan and its associated infrastructure are constantly evolving: attackers are developing more effective distribution schemes, adding new functionality to more effectively steal money from infected devices and bypass security measures.

According to the company, the Trojan is aimed, in particular, at users who place purchase and sale advertisements on a Russian classified advertisements website Avito.

Attackers find contact details of sellers in a network, and after a while the victim receives personalised SMS about the transfer of full cost of goods to his account. The message contains a link where sellers can find payment details. Then the link opens a phishing page on the Avito website, which notifies the seller of the purchase and contains a description of his goods and the amount received from the sale of the goods. After clicking on the "Continue" bottom, FANTA malware disguised as the Avito application is downloaded to the phone.

The receipt of bank card data is carried out in a standard way for Android Trojans: the user opens phishing site that disguises as legitimate mobile banking application where the victim enters their bank card details", the Group-IB described the scheme of attackers.

Moreover, FANTA analyzes which apps are running on the infected device. Experts found that in addition to demonstrating pre-prepared phishing pages, FANTA also reads the notifications text about 70 banking applications, fast payment systems and e-wallets. In addition, an important feature of FANTA, which the creators paid special attention, is the bypass of anti-virus tools.

According to Group-IB, the latest attack was aimed at Russian — speaking users, most of the infected devices are located in Russia, a smaller part is in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus.
It's interesting to note that FANTA developers are able to hack the devices of users of about 30 different Internet services, such as AliExpress, Youla, Pandao, Aviasales, Booking, Trivago, as well as taxi and car sharing services.

Earlier in another Russian service of free ads Youla stated that the company plan to completely remove the display numbers, keeping all communications within the service.

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