When malware plays pretend. [Research Saturday]

CyberWire Daily

N2K Networks, Inc.

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4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2025

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Nicolás Chiaraviglio, Chief Scientist from Zimperium's zLabs, joins to discuss their work on "Behind Random Words: DoubleTrouble Mobile Banking Trojan Revealed." Zimperium’s zLabs team has been tracking an evolving banker trojan dubbed DoubleTrouble, which has grown more sophisticated in both its distribution and capabilities. Initially spread via phishing sites impersonating European banks, it now uses malicious APKs hosted in Discord channels, and boasts features like screen recording, keylogging, UI overlays, and app blocking—all while heavily abusing Android’s Accessibility Services. Despite advanced obfuscation and dynamic evasion techniques, Zimperium’s on-device detection tools have successfully identified both known and previously unseen variants, helping protect users from credential theft, financial fraud, and device compromise. Complete our annual ⁠⁠audience survey⁠⁠ before August 31. The research can be found here: ⁠Behind Random Words: DoubleTrouble Mobile Banking Trojan Revealed Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Cyberwire Network, powered by N2K.
0:09.7	CISOs and CIOs know machine identities now outnumber humans by more than 80 to 1,
0:18.3	and without securing them, trust, uptime, outages, and compliance are at risk.
0:23.6	CyberArk is leading the way with the only unified platform purpose-built to secure every machine identity,
0:30.6	certificates, secrets, and workloads across all environments, all clouds, and all AI agents.
0:38.2	Designed for scale, automation, and quantum readiness,
0:41.7	CyberArk helps modern enterprises secure their machine future.
0:46.2	Visit cyberarc.com slash machines to see how.
0:50.0	Music Hello, hello, and welcome to the CyberWires Research Saturday.
1:05.5	I'm Dave Bittner, and this is our weekly conversation with researchers and analysts tracking down the threats and vulnerabilities,
1:12.6	solving some of the hard problems and protecting ourselves in a rapidly evolving cyberspace.
1:18.6	Thanks for joining us.
1:24.6	We have a pretty V user base at the moment, and we have some malware detection systems
1:33.3	that are purely based in machine learning.
1:36.3	We are constantly verifying samples that we are detecting in the wild that are very different
1:43.3	from things that we've seen before.
1:44.8	So as part of that process, we found some samples that got our attention, and then we started
1:50.8	checking in public sources if we found similar samples.
1:56.4	That's Nicolas Charavilleo.
1:58.8	He's chief scientist from Zimperium's Zee Labs.
2:01.6	The research we're discussing today as titled Behind Random Words,
2:05.6	Double Trouble Mobile Banking Trojan, revealed. So that's how we found around 35 different samples for this campaign.
	...

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