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Forbes
Forbes
Technology
Lee Mathews, Contributor

Cybercriminals Are Controlling Malware Through Twitter Memes

You can barely scroll through an entire page on your newsfeeds these days without encountering at least one meme. They’re all over the place, and they’re not just being posted to get a chuckle.

Image: Trend Micro

You’re probably aware that memes played a role in the 2016 election interference. Now, it seems, memes are being used as a stealthy way to send commands to computers that are infected by malware.

Researchers at Trend Micro have identified a Twitter account that’s hiding messages inside images — a technique referred to as steganography. The account was created in 2017, yet it sat mostly idle until two months ago. That’s when the Matrix Morpheus memes appeared.

While it’s not unusual for criminal hackers to use popular sites like Twitter, Google Docs, or Pastebin as a sort of remote control for their malware, the use of steganography in this case is an interesting twist. A jumble of text might arouse suspicions, but a meme isn’t likely to raise too many eyebrows.

Trend happened to observe unexpected interaction with this particular account after finding a new strain of malware. When activated on an infected machine the Trojan began monitoring the Twitter feed for updates. The images contained hidden “print” commands which told the Trojan to take a screen capture and send it back to its criminal controllers. That’s a trick malware creators will employ when they want to steal usernames, passwords, and credit card details from their victims.

The Trojan has other capabilities, too. It can harvest a list of files from an infected computer, see what programs are running, find out who’s logged in on the machine, and capture any data that is copied to the clipboard.

There are clues that indicate that the malware isn’t fully-baked yet. Whoever is behind this new Trojan may still be fine-tuning things, so we probably haven’t heard the last of this malware meme machine.

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