Roaming Mantis part III: iOS crypto-mining and spreading via malicious content delive

[harlan4096]

In Q2 2018, Kaspersky Lab published two blogposts about Roaming Mantis sharing details of this new cybercriminal campaign. In the beginning, the criminals used DNS hijacking in vulnerable routers to spread malicious Android applications of Roaming Mantis (aka MoqHao and XLoader), spoofing legitimate applications such as Facebook and Chrome. During our research, it became clear that Roaming Mantis has been rather active and has evolved quickly. The group’s malware now supports 27 languages, including multiple countries from Asia and beyond, Europe and the Middle East. In addition, they have started using web crypto-mining for PC, and an Apple phishing page for iOS devices.
You can check previous chapters of this research here:

• Roaming Mantis uses DNS hijacking to infect Android smartphones (April 2018)
  
• Roaming Mantis dabbles in mining and phishing multilingually (May 2018)
  

In addition we would like to thank and credit security researchers from LAC Co. Ltd. for a very insightful article describing how vulnerable routers were compromised by the Roaming Mantis group, which was disclosed in their Japanese blogpost in June 2018. According to this research, the threat actor logged in to their router using default ID and password, and changed legitimate DNS settings to rogue DNS settings, where the router’s control panel was accessible over the Internet.
The Roaming Mantis group did not stop its activities after publication or our reports. We have confirmed several new activities and changes to their illegal profit-gaining methods such as web crypto mining for iOS devices, spreading via malicious content delivery system and so on. This blogpost reveals some details of our new findings related to Roaming Mantis, based on our research.

Full reading: https://securelist.com/roaming-mantis-part-3/88071/