Malicious actors associated with the Vietnamese cybercrime ecosystem have unleashed a sophisticated malware campaign using social media giant Facebook as their primary attack vector. These cybercriminals have recently turned to leveraging advertising on Meta-owned Facebook to distribute malware, targeting both individual users and businesses on the platform.
WithSecure researcher Mohammad Kazem Hassan Nejad explained that threat actors have long employed fraudulent ads for various cyberattacks, but the increasing use of social media for advertising by businesses has opened up a highly lucrative avenue for attackers.
This shift has given rise to a surge in cyberattacks against Meta Business and Facebook accounts, with cybercriminal groups like Ducktail and NodeStealer at the forefront of these malicious activities.
The attackers employ a range of tactics, including social engineering and the distribution of malicious software, to gain unauthorized access to user accounts. Victims are approached through multiple platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and even freelance job portals like Upwork.
Additionally, these cybercriminals use techniques like search engine poisoning to promote deceptive software. A common thread among these groups is the abuse of URL shorteners, Telegram for command-and-control operations, and legitimate cloud services, such as Dropbox, iCloud, and OneDrive, to host their malicious payloads.
Ducktail, for instance, utilizes deceptive tactics related to branding and marketing projects to infiltrate individuals and businesses on Meta’s Business platform. These tactics often lead potential victims to fraudulent job postings via Facebook ads or LinkedIn InMail, ultimately resulting in the deployment of the Ducktail stealer malware.
