Following public reports of cyber threat activity, it’s generally expected adversary groups behind the activity will take a step back and change their tactics to avoid any further prying eyes from the security community. With regards to TrickBot, that remains to be so. TrickBot is a banking trojan and has been actively targeting mobile phones for financial gain.
Following multiple public reports in September and October, TrickBot operators have continued operating with largely the same domain registration patterns and infrastructure as before.
The relatively unique domain registration patterns shown below isolate on a small set of domains with new domains being registered every week. Most resolve to overlapping IP addresses and host plain login pages.
Previous reports by Cleafy and Zimperium indicated lapses in operational security by the TrickBot operators, which resulted in exposed filestores on their C2 servers. These observed /site/login pages on several of the suspected C2 domains may be an attempt to address those prior security lapses.
Broadening the scope slightly from the identified domain registration details, potentially unrelated domain masquerades were identified with spoofs of online banking websites, pre-paid card services, and malicious files associated with alleged Coinbase passkey setup files.
Domains spoofing as Target’s Circle Card, formerly known as RedCard
Separately, a presumably staged domain with an open filestore was identified. The guide.txt and coinbase.passkeysetup files both resolve the content for a script to invoke a web request to download a malicious file named x.exe at another URL.
Operators of banking trojans like TrickBot are increasingly sophisticated in their approaches to compromise financial security but are not immune to operational security blunders. As this security researcher reminds themself often enough, just because someone does smart things, doesn’t mean they don’t also do dumb things. This has been demonstrated by the operators of TrickBot to the delight of security researchers on multiple occasions.
[1] https://www.cleafy.com/cleafy-labs/a-new-trickmo-saga-from-banking-trojan-to-victims-data-leak
[2] https://www.zimperium.com/blog/expanding-the-investigation-deep-dive-into-latest-trickmo-samples/
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