Marian Gusatu is working as a Specialist Threat Researcher for NortonLifeLock Inc. in Romania. His expertise lies in reverse engineering, malware analysis and vulnerability research from both offensive and defensive perspective.

Techniques of a prevalent banker over the years through an offensive perspective

The BlackMoon malware has been targeting Windows customers since 2014 to steal banking credentials. Samples from this family are laying in the banker malware category by attempting to steal credentials from banking institution’s clients and gain access to their financial information. Some versions of BlackMoon are also being used for delivering malicious payloads to the targeted users. In the course of time, different techniques were used within this malware family to escape detection and compromise its victims.

This presentation will focus on an offensive interpretation of the latest techniques and tactics used in BlackMoon variants that are still targeting Windows users in 2022 as well as a comparison with other variants. The techniques covered in this presentation are commonly adopted by threat actors and used to evade detection, trick the users and create persistence to ensure the malware is running on long term. A brief introduction of this malware family is going to be presented at first, being followed by the infection chain and technical details for the latest samples found in the wild. Subsequently a comparison with the techniques used over the years is going to be made. While discussing the technical details we will focus on the offensive perspective of the tactics used by adversaries for the identified samples to provide a brief introduction into the bounding between offensive and defensive thinking.