GoldPickaxe Trojan steals your face!

Well, the GoldPickaxe Trojan does not literally steal your face, but it does steal an image of your face in order to be able to identify as you.

Researchers have found a family of Trojans, attributed to a financially motivated Chinese group, which come in versions for iOS and Android.

Cybercriminals try to trick victims into scanning their faces along with identification documents. The victims are approached through phishing and smishing messages claiming to be from local governments or other trusted sources. They ask the target to install a fake government service app.

At this stage there is a crossroads where Android and iOS infections are different. While Android users go straight to the malicious app, due to measures taken by Apple the criminals ask the iOS users to install a disguised Mobile Device Management (MDM) profile. MDM allows a controller to remotely configure devices by sending profiles and commands to the device. As such MDM offers a wide range of features such as remote wipe, device tracking, and application management, which the cybercriminals take advantage of to install malicious applications and obtain the information they need.

The criminals then request that the victim take a photo of an official ID and scan their face with the app. Additionally, the criminals request the target’s phone number in order to get more details about them, particularly their bank accounts.

Once the criminals have a scan of the face they can use artificial intelligence (AI) to perform face-swaps. Face swapping is a technique that allows you to replace faces in images with others.

With the face swap and the photo of the ID the criminals can identify themselves as the victim to the victim’s bank and withdraw funds from their account. Many financial organizations use facial recognition for transaction verification and login authentication. Although the researchers found no evidence that bank fraud was the goal of the cybercriminals, their story was confirmed by warnings from the Thai police.

Although this group is mainly active in Asia, more precisely in Thailand, it makes sense to expect such a successful method to be copied.

Malwarebytes and ThreatDown solutions detect the GoldPickaxe Trojan as Android/Trojan.Agent.prn1.

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