Cybercriminals Abusing Internet-Sharing Services to Monetize Malware

Cybercriminals Abusing Internet-Sharing Services to Monetize Malware Campaigns

Threat actors are capitalizing on the growing popularity of proxyware platforms like Honeygain and Nanowire to monetize their own malware campaigns, once again illustrating how attackers are quick to repurpose and weaponize legitimate platforms to their advantage.

Malware is currently leveraging these platforms to monetize the internet bandwidth of victims, similar to how malicious cryptocurrency mining attempts to monetize the CPU cycles of infected systems," researchers from Cisco Talos said in a Tuesday analysis. "In many cases, these applications are featured in multi-stage, multi-payload malware attacks that provide adversaries with multiple monetization methods."

Proxyware, also called internet-sharing applications, are legitimate services that allow users to carve out a percentage of their internet bandwidth for other devices, often for a fee, through a client application offered by the provider, enabling other customers to access the internet using the internet connections offered by nodes on the network. For consumers, such services are "advertised as a means to circumvent geolocation checks on streaming or gaming platforms while generating some income for the user offering up their bandwidth," the researchers explained.

[Only registered and activated users can see links. Click Here To Register...]