- McAfee scientists find number of malicious GitHub -Stockers
- The repositors change every week but always promise games cracks, hacks or free access to commercial software
- But instead of the cracks, the victims become infected with lumma stealer
Cybercrimals use GitHub to target children with infostealing malware, a new McAfee report has claimed it has discovered that it discovered a continuous malicious campaign at the popular coding storage site.
In an analysis, the researchers said they observed many storage sites that took place to be game hacks, cracks or free versions of otherwise commercial software. Instead of providing these programs, the depots were actually hosting the Lumma Stealer, a well -known Infosteals -Malware.
“McAfee labs encountered several stocks and offer gaming hacks for top -selling video games such as pointed legends, minecraft, Counter Strike 2.0, Roblox, Valorant, Fortnite, Call of Duty, GTA V and or offer broken versions of popular software and services such as Spotify Premium, FL Studio, Adobe Express, Sketchup Pro, Xbox Game Pass and Discord to name a few, ”the researchers said.
Deactivation of AV
This “network of stocks”, as McAfee described it, changes the description every week and creates new depots as the old ones are marked and removed by GitHub. However, the payload always remains the same.
“These warehouses also include distribution licenses and software screen images to improve their appearance of legitimacy,” concluded McAfee.
The descriptions also include instructions on how to download and run malware and how to disable any antivirus programs on the computer before running it. The attackers said antivirus solutions mark these programs as false positives and can certainly be ignored.
McAfee says this social engineering technique combined with confidence GitHub enjoys with its users works well and that the campaign infected many users. The researchers did not share any numbers, but emphasized that the goals are mostly on the younger side:
“Children are often targeted at such scams as malware writers take advantage of their interest in gaming hacks by highlighting potential features and benefits, making it easier to infect multiple systems.”
