Researchers recently observed that using a weaponized memes in order to communicate with malware for various malicious operations.
Memes are nowadays using for fast communication methods to spreading news which is now abused by to reach victims in a very effective way.
Attackers using Steganography to embed the malicious payload inside of the image to bypass the security solutions to compromise vicitms.
Similarly last year, attackers using 2 memes that posted in twitter that contain embedded link which to the command & control server where malware dropped into victims system.
Currently observed campaign being delivered via legitimate service, a popular social media service where attackers posted a meme that looks like very benign.
Malware Infection Process
Initially, once users infected by malware which download malicious memes from Twitter account to the victim’s machine
analysis reveals that the contain a “/print” command hidden inside that will be extracted and helps malware to take a screenshot of the infected victim’s machine.
The later moment it communicates with Command & control server from and the collected screenshots of the victim’s machine.
Also, observed that Pastebin URL points to an internal or private IP address, which is possibly a temporary placeholder used by the attackers.
Attackers parse the malicious memes from the twitter account where the file posted using a specific pattern.
“<img src=”(.*?):thumb” width=”.*?” height=”.*?”/>”
According to Trend Micro, There where 2 memes were posted which contains a command that helps malware to perform malicious operation such as capture screenshots, collect system information, among others.
Following commands used by malware to retrieve the information from the infected machine.
| Commands | Description |
| Screen capture | |
| /processos | Retrieve list of running processes |
| /clip | Capture clipboard content |
| /username | Retrieve username from infected machine |
| /docs | Retrieve filenames from a predefined path such as (desktop, %AppData% etc.) |
Indicators of Compromise
Hashes (SHA-256)
- 003673cf045faf0141b0bd00eff13542a3a62125937ac27b80c9ffd27bb5c722
- 3579d609cf4d0c8b469682eb7ff6c65ec634942fa56d47b666db7aa99a2ee3ef
- 88b06e005ecfab28cfdbcab98381821d7cc82bb140894b7fdc5445a125ce1a8c
- 8cdb574ba6fcaea32717c36b47fec0309fcd5c6d7b0f9a58fc546b74fc42cacd