Hackers take over microphones on Windows PCs to stealing hundreds of gigs of data

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Hackers take over microphones on Windows PCs to stealing hundreds of gigs of data

 

 

Hackers targeting people in Ukraine have come up with something unusual: they use the microphones on Windows PCs to steal audio recordings of conversations, screenshots, documents and passwords.

 

It is recording audio near compromised systems by stealthily switching on the computers' microphones.

 

In a blog post, the company said it had confirmed that at least 70 people, from various sectors like critical infrastructure, media and scientific research, had fallen victim to the malware that was carrying out the cyber surveillance.

 

While malware that takes over video cameras on PCs or laptops can be blocked by placing a piece of tape over the camera, the microphone on a PC or laptop requires dismantling to disable.

 

The method of infection is through specially crafted phishing emails that trick users into opening Microsoft Office documents that have malicious macros. The main downloader is then extracted from the document by a malicious VB script; it was detected by just four of 54 anti-virus products that CyberX tested.

 

CyberX said most of the targets had been in Ukraine but there were smaller numbers in Russia, Saudi Arabia and Austria.

 

"Many targets are located in the self-declared separatist states of Donetsk and Luhansk, which have been classified as terrorist organisations by the Ukrainian government," the company wrote.

 

It said that the operation appeared to be well-funded as there would be considerable infrastructure needed at the back-end to store, decrypt and analyse the gigabytes of unstructured data that were being captured each day.

 

The CyberX team said the operation had some similarities to one discovered by anti-virus firm ESET in May last year which was christened Operation Groundbait. But, on closer examination, they had found that Operation BugDrop was more sophisticated.

 

For one, the use of Dropbox was clever because Dropbox traffic would not be normally blocked by firewalls in corporate set-ups.

 

How Is BugDrop being spread?

 

It will not surprise you to learn how BugDrop infects a computer. Like nearly every other strain of malware, you read about today, BugDrop is being spread via phishing emails (just like recent attacks against Gmail and PayPal users). Office documents laced with malicious macros deliver the "dropper" which injects the actual malware to a victim's computer.

 

So far, only a handful of anti-malware scanners detect BugDrop. That is not great news, though security software never has to get involved if users are trained to recognize suspicious emails and resist the temptation to open shady attachments.