Steganography is the art of hiding information in plain sight, in another data medium. It was used from ancient times to hide secret information. In 21-st century hackers invented efficient methods to hide malware in images and documents. In 2019 malware was detected in audio files (wav). In [1] it is stated: “The first of these two new malware campaigns abusing WAV files was reported back in June. Symantec security researchers said they spotted a Russian cyber-espionage group known as Waterbug (or Turla) using WAV files to hide and transfer malicious code from their server to already-infected victims. The second malware campaign was spotted this month by BlackBerry Cylance. In a report published today and shared with ZDNet last week, Cylance said it saw something similar to what Symantec saw a few months before.”
In[2] it is stated: “Further analysis reveals that some of the WAV files contain crypto miner script XMRig Monero CPU miner and others include Metasploit code used to establish a reverse shell.
Both of the WAV files use the same infrastructure, which indicates the campaign used to gain remote access over the victim networks and for monetary benefits.”
In the last several years we have seen successful multiple malware attacks on businesses and organizations worldwide (see [3]). In these attacks malware was delivered in audio or video streams to targeted businesses, organizations and individuals. In cases of businesses and organizations the delivered malware encrypted data or paralyzed computer systems and ransoms were requested by hackers. In cases of individuals (as a rule high net worth persons), the malware transferred all encrypted files with passwords or/and private keys to the hackers. Then, the hackers used clusters of super-computers or powerful quantum computers to break the encryption of the stolen files. Once the encryption was broken the hackers were able to stole all financial and crypto assets of the targeted persons.
A simple way to protect yourself against such attacks is to not store any useful information on devices connected to internet and do not store passwords and private keys in encrypted files. Instead, use dynamical passwords generators (DPGs) to generate passwords and/or private keys as the only efficient solution in such cases.
References:
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/wav-audio-files-are-now-being-used-to-hide-malicious-code/
