Microsoft has detailed a cryptocurrency-stealing campaign, active since February, that spreads through USB drives and hides its command channel inside the Tor network. Infection starts when someone opens a malicious Windows shortcut on a USB stick; the malware then hides real documents and replaces them with lookalike shortcuts, copies itself to other drives, and sets scheduled tasks for persistence. Its clipper component watches the clipboard about twice a second, swapping copied wallet addresses for the attacker's and grabbing seed phrases and private keys, which it sends out over a bundled Tor client. It can also run attacker-supplied code, doubling as a lightweight backdoor.
Kaspersky researchers uncovered CrystalRAT, a new malware-as-a-service sold via Telegram and promoted on YouTube with a tiered subscription model. Built in Go, it combines remote access via VNC, keylogging, clipboard hijacking for crypto wallet theft, browser credential stealing from Chromium/Yandex/Opera, and data harvesting from Steam, Discord, and Telegram. Each buyer gets a uniquely encrypted build using ChaCha20, making detection harder. Kaspersky warns that new versions are still shipping, and the victim count is likely to grow.
TrustStrike Labs