The Anti-virus Times

Friday, November 24, 2017

There exists an enormous diversity of Trojans. And among them there are particularly notable species—"shape shifters". These are rare and, perhaps, quite instructive phenomena.

This is not the most basic description, but you get the idea. The Trojan takes its time to covertly gather information and steal money, but should the user suspect that something's wrong or start looking for the Trojan's processes and end them, it will bare its teeth and turn into ransomware.

As a banking Trojan, LokiBot is hardly a standout.

This means that in a best-case scenario, a user who attempts to sign in to Skype, Outlook or WhatsApp may be interacting with the applications via the Trojan.

The malicious program also uses social engineering techniques to gather banking information—it puts out a notification about money being credited to the victim's account. By doing so, it lures the user into entering their online banking login and passwords which are instantly intercepted.

The Trojan's authors, following current trends, also seek to profit from selling the Trojan to other criminals.

Interestingly, when acting as encryption ransomware, the Trojan also deceives users—files are merely moved to a different location.