A campaign that uses public cloud service providers to spread malware has been discovered by Cisco Talos. The offensive is the latest example of threat actors abusing cloud services like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services for malicious purposes, security researchers Chetan Raghuprasad and Vanja Svajcer wrote in the Talos blog.
To camouflage their activity, the researchers noted, the hackers used the DuckDNS dynamic DNS service to change the domain names of the command-and-control hosts used for the campaign, which started distributing variants of Nanocore, Netwire, and AsyncRATs to targets in the United States, Italy and Singapore, starting around October 26. Those variants are packed with multiple features to take control of a target’s computer, allowing it to issue commands and steal information.