A coordinated law enforcement operation, in partnership with private sector companies, including Bitdefender, Bitsight, ESET, and Microsoft, has resulted in the takedown of criminal infrastructure powering Amadey and StealC.
“The main common goal was to disrupt the ‘assembly lines’ cybercriminals use to launch ransomware, financial fraud, and attacks on critical infrastructure,” Europol said in a statement.
The development comes days after authorities from the Netherlands, Canada, Germany, and the U.S. disrupted malicious infrastructure associated with SocGholish and cleaned up nearly 15,000 infected WordPress websites.
As part of the two-week-long action, cryptocurrency assets of criminal origin valued at more than $47 million have been identified, flagged, and restricted from use. In addition, as many as 27 million stolen login credentials have been recovered, and the malware distribution network has been hindered by dismantling 326 servers and 142 domains.
“This takedown is a powerful demonstration of what public and private sector collaboration can achieve in dismantling the infrastructure that enables cybercrime at scale,” Alex Cosoi, chief security strategist at Bitdefender, said in a statement. “It also sends a clear message to those behind malware ecosystems: no matter how sophisticated the tools or how distributed the network, coordinated international action will find them.”
All three malware families are known to be advertised under a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model, allowing customers to deliver additional payloads or steal sensitive information from compromised hosts.
SocGholish and Amadey function as loaders for introducing next-stage malware, with the malware primarily disseminated using compromised WordPress sites and phishing campaigns, respectively. Amadey has also been propagated via other loaders like Emmenhtal and SmokeLoader.
A C++-based modular backdoor, it’s known to be active since October 2018 and advertised by a threat actor known as InCrease. The service is priced at $600 for a single license, with an extra $50 charged per rebuild. The latest version of Amadey is 5.87. Some of the supported commands are listed below –
- Fingerprint the machine
- Downloads files, DLLs, MSI, or PowerShell scripts
- Run commands using “cmd.exe”
- Take screenshots
- Spawn a SOCKS proxy
- Open a VNC or reverse proxy session
- Capture clipboard contents and credentials
- Enable RDP
According to data published by Mitsui Bussan Secure Directions, the daily number of active Amadey command-and-control (C2 or C&C) servers ranged roughly between two and 18 until around September 2022.
“From January 2023 to early December 2023, however, this figure rose to between 5 and 30, suggesting that Amadey had come into widespread use,” the Japanese cybersecurity company said. “In 2024, after a brief dormant period, the daily count gradually declined from a peak of 17 and has continued to fall to the present day.”
The number of malware…
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