Dubbed InterPlanetary Storm; the malware has been active since May 2019 but its new variant targets both macOS and Android-based devices.
Yesterday, we saw a threat group named APT-C-23 introducing a new Android variant of their malware. Turns out, they’re not the only ones being innovative.
In the latest, a research report from Barracuda reveals how a previously known malware named InterPlanetary Storm, active since May 2019 now has a new variant that targets both macOS and Android-based devices, a step ahead from only Windows and Linux based devices.
See: Monero Mining Malware Infecting Android Smart TVs & Smartphones
Coming to the scope of the malware, it is based on building a huge botnet that targets user machines globally in about 84 countries but predominantly from Asia. In fact, 59% of the 13500 infected machines come from only 3 countries: Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan.
Image: Barracuda
The rest are spread out across the world with the malware currently focusing on IoT devices allowing it to use them later for nefarious purposes such as crypto-mining, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and other vectors that make use of large scale machines.
Examples of the infected devices include televisions for Android-based ones and “routers with ill-configured SSH service” for Linux.
How it works is by attacking machines through brute-forcing SSH servers (just like malware found targeting devices android globally
