Kaspersky researchers have discovered a new Trojan spy called SparkKitty which targets smartphones on iOS and Android.
It sends images from an infected phone and information about the device to the attackers. This malware was embedded in apps related to crypto and gambling, as well as in a trojanized TikTok app, and was distributed on App Store and Google Play, as well as on scam websites.
Experts suggest that the goal of the attackers is to steal cryptocurrency assets from residents of Southeast Asia and China. Users in Egypt are also potentially at risk of facing a similar cyber threat.
Kaspersky has notified Google and Apple about the malicious apps. Certain technical details suggest that the new malware campaign is linked to the previously discovered SparkCat Trojan — malware (the first of its kind on iOS) with a built-in optical character recognition (OCR) module that allows it to scan image galleries and steal screenshots containing cryptocurrency wallet recovery phrases or passwords. The SparkKitty case is the second time in a year that Kaspersky researchers have found a Trojan stealer on App Store, following SparkCat.
iOS
On App Store, the Trojan pretended to be an app related to cryptocurrencies — 币coin. On phishing pages mimicking the official iPhone App Store, the malware was distributed under the guise of TikTok and gambling applications.
“One of the vectors for the Trojan’s distribution turned out to be fake websites where the attackers tried to infect the victims’ iPhones. iOS has several legitimate ways to install programs not from the App Store. In this malicious campaign, the attackers used one of them — special developer tools for distributing corporate business applications. In the infected version of TikTok, during authorization, the malware, in addition to stealing photos from the smartphone gallery, embedded links to a suspicious store in the person’s profile window. This store only accepts cryptocurrencies, which increases our concerns about it,” explains Sergey Puzan, a malware expert at Kaspersky.
Android
The attackers targeted users both on third-party websites and on Google Play, passing off the malware as various crypto services. For example, one of the infected applications — a messenger called SOEX with a cryptocurrency exchange function — was downloaded from the official store over 10,000 times.
