Alien – New Mobile Banking Malware

A new family of malware has been discovered affecting the Android mobile platform. The great similarities with the already known Cerberus make one suspect that this new malware has not been developed from scratch. Alien, which has been named after its discoverers, researchers at the security firm Threat Fabric. They believe that this Trojan began to be distributed in early 2020.

Given the code of its predecessor, anyone can assume the dangers of being infected by this malware. It has been known that apart from being able to impersonate a bank and steal access credentials, as its predecessor did, this new “evolution” has expanded its “target” to a total of more than 200 applications for the Android system. How important applications such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter or Instagram can be today.

As if this weren’t enough, Alien includes new spying and looting features, among which are:

▸Remote Acces

▸SMS Harvesting: SMS Listing

▸Device Information Collector

▸Contact List Collection

▸SMS Sending

▸Keylogging

▸Self-Protection

▸Call Forwarding

▸Access to Location Data

Malware can be distributed through the most common channels, from email to SMS. Many samples of the application have been distributed using the name “Coronavirus”, and according to the study by the security firm, the countries with the greatest impact have been Spain, Turkey, Germany, the United States and Italy.

As recommendations to avoid infections of this type, remember never to install applications outside of official sites, as well as to check the permissions requested by the applications. At the moment there is not much more information about this because it came out recently and the best we can do as we have already said is not to download any application from third-party pages as well as be very careful with the SMS that arrive or simply ignore them in order to avoid possible attacks from this new Malware called Alien.

---