Malicious campaign targets South Korean users with backdoor-laced torrents
Fans of Korean TV should be on the lookout for an ongoing campaign spreading malware via torrent sites, using South Korean movies and TV shows as a guise. The malware allows the attacker to connect the compromised computer to a botnet and control it remotely.
The malware is a modified version of a publicly available backdoor named GoBot2. The modifications to the source code are mainly South Korea-specific evasion techniques, which are described in detail in this blogpost. Due to the campaign’s clear focus on South Korea, we have dubbed this Win64/GoBot2 variant GoBotKR.
According to ESET telemetry, GoBotKR has been active since March 2018. The detections are in the hundreds, with South Korea being the most affected (80%), followed by China (10%) and Taiwan (5%).