A new piece of malware that can spy on a user’s
computer has been discovered, Wired reports,
with researchers also having found a clever way
for the program to communicate with its
creators: Google’s popular Gmail email service.
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Security startup Shape Security says it found a
new strain of malware that’s able to read
instructions from Gmail drafts and respond to
the hacker’s commands without the user
actually noticing anything happening on the
computer.
“What we’re seeing here is command and
control that’s using a fully allowed service, and
that makes it superstealthy and very hard to
identify,” Shape security researcher Wade
Williamson said. “It’s stealthily passing
messages back and forth without even having
to press send. You never see the bullet fired.”
For everything to work, hackers first set up an
anonymous Gmail account, and then infect a
target computer with the malware. After
gaining control of the computer, the hacker
will remotely open an invisible instance of
Internet Explorer in which the Gmail account is
loaded.
Once that’s done, information can be passed
back and forth using the drafts folder. The
malware uses a Python script to retrieve
commands and code entered into the draft
field, and then it can respond in Gmail drafts
and can include the data it wants to steal.
The malware is apparently a variant of an
existing trojan called Icoscript first found by
security firm G-Data in August. Icoscript has
been infecting computers since 2012, using
Yahoo Mail to hide its command and control,
before switching to Gmail drafts recently.
It’s not clear how many machines have been
infected by this malware strain, and there’s no
way of easily detecting it, Shape says.
Google has not said anything about this
particular attack, telling Wired that “our
systems actively track malicious and
programmatic usage of Gmail and we quickly
remove abusive accounts we identify.”
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