Tag Archive for: Spotify

Fake Microsoft and Spotify Ads Lead to Ficker Malware

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People tend to be less guarded when they’re dealing with something familiar. Digital attackers know this, which explains why they set up malware behind ads pretending to be for Microsoft Store products and Spotify.

Bleeping Computer learned from ESET that the attackers were using malicious advertisements as part of their attack chain. Once clicked, those ads sent users to the Spotify or Microsoft Store scam websites harboring samples of the Ficker stealer family.

Read on to learn how these websites enticed visitors to infect themselves with malware.

Want a Legit App? Well, Here’s Some Malware Instead…

The attackers used malicious ads to lure in users with promotions for real apps.

Security researchers spotted one ad promoting an online chess app, for example. When clicked, the ad sent users to a fake Microsoft Store page. Clicking on the ‘Download Free’ button retrieved a malware payload disguised as xChess_v.709.zip from an Amazon AWS server.

Some of the other malicious ads directed users to a landing page offering a free bundle of Spotify Music and YouTube Premium for 90 days. No such bundle existed as of this writing.

The website then instructed visitors to click on a ‘Download Free App (1 MB)’ button. It’s worth noting that no music player is that small in size. At this time, the actual size of the real Spotify mobile and desktop apps was at least 150 MB.

Both of those apps downloaded Ficker onto a victim’s device. This malware is capable of stealing users’ passwords, taking screenshots of their computers and lifting documents.

Other Recent Attacks Involving Ficker

Malware analysts took to Twitter to expose Ficker in October 2020. At that time, they observed the malware developer renting out Ficker on Russian-speaking cracker forums.

In the months that followed, researchers learned more about how the digital threat works and observed the malware in action. One of the first eureka moments came from Minerva in early March, when its researchers witnessed Ficker download the Kronos RAT in a lab setting.

A few weeks later, Infoblox detected a malspam campaign that used DocuSign-themed lures to install the Hancitor Trojan…

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EU rules Apple’s a monopoly, Spotify and Facebook team up, ATT arrives – TechCrunch

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Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.

The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020.

Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. And in the U.S., app usage surged ahead of the time spent watching live TV. Currently, the average American watches 3.7 hours of live TV per day, but now spends four hours per day on their mobile devices.

Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re also a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus. In 2020, investors poured $73 billion in capital into mobile companies — a figure that’s up 27% year-over-year.

This week we’re looking at the launch of Apple’s ATT, the Facebook and Spotify team-up and the latest from the EU’s antitrust investigation against Apple.

This Week in Apps will soon be a newsletter! Sign up here: techcrunch.com/newsletters

Here Comes ATT

Apple’s public debut of App Tracking Transparency, or ATT, is the news of the week and possibly of the year. Through a small pop-up message asking users if the app can track them, Apple has disrupted a multibillion-dollar adtech industry, altered the course of tech giants like Facebook and drawn possible lawsuits and antitrust complaints, all in the name of protecting consumer privacy. Apple does believe in privacy and user control — you can tell that from the way the company has built its technology to do things like on-device processing or permissions toggles that let people decide what their apps can and cannot do.

But Apple will also benefit from this particular privacy reform, too. Its own first-party apps can collect data and share it with other first-party apps. That means what you do in apps like the App Store, Apple News, Stocks and others can be used to personalize Apple’s own ads. And the company is prepared to capitalize on this opportunity too, with the addition of a new ad slot on the App Store (in the Suggested…

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Over 300K Spotify accounts hacked in credential stuffing attack

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Spotify

Hackers have been attempting to gain access to Spotify accounts using a database of 380 million records with login credentials and personal information collected from various sources.

For years, users have complained that their Spotify accounts were hacked after passwords were changed, new playlists would appear in their profiles, or their family accounts had strangers added from other countries.

Spotify users saying their accounts were hacked
Spotify users stating their accounts were hacked

A new report detailing how a database containing over 380 million records, including login credentials, is actively used to hack into Spotify accounts may shed some light on these account breaches.

300 million records with user info for hacking Spotify accounts

A common attack used to hack into accounts is called a credential stuffing attack, which is when threat actors make use of large collections of username/password combinations that were leaked in previous security breaches to gain access to user accounts on other online platforms.

Today, VPNMentor released a report about a database exposed on the Internet that contained 300 million username and password combinations used in credential stuffing attacks against Spotify.

Each record in this database contains a login name (email address), a password, and whether the credentials could successfully login to a Spotify account, as shown below.

Record in exposed database
Record in exposed database

It is not known how the 300 million records were collected, but it is likely through data breaches or large “collections” of credentials that are commonly released by threat actors for free.

The researchers believe that the 300 million records listed in the database allowed the attackers to breach 300,000 to 350,000 Spotify accounts.

VPNMentor contacted Spotify on July 9th, 2020, about the exposed database and its threat to accounts and received a response on the same day.

“In response to our inquiry, Spotify initiated a ‘rolling reset’ of passwords for all users affected. As a result, the information on the database would be voided and become useless,” the researchers stated.

It is not clear what is meant by a “rolling reset,” as Spotify account holders that BleepingComputer has spoken to did not recently…

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Giving An Old Mac Spotify

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You could theoretically get the Mac to speak … This is a continuation of one of [ants] earlier hacks that basically put a WiFi to Ethernet bridge inside an SE/30. Tie that together with …
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