A brand new malware marketing campaign is distributing a novel Rust-based data stealer dubbed EDDIESTEALER utilizing the favored ClickFix social engineering tactic initiated by way of pretend CAPTCHA verification pages.
“This marketing campaign leverages misleading CAPTCHA verification pages that trick customers into executing a malicious PowerShell script, which finally deploys the infostealer, harvesting delicate knowledge equivalent to credentials, browser data, and cryptocurrency pockets particulars,” Elastic Safety Labs researcher Jia Yu Chan stated in an evaluation.
The assault chains start with risk actors compromising professional web sites with malicious JavaScript payloads that serve bogus CAPTCHA examine pages, which immediate web site guests to “show you aren’t [a] robotic” by following a three-step course of, a prevalent tactic referred to as ClickFix.
This entails instructing the potential sufferer to open the Home windows Run dialog immediate, paste an already copied command into the “verification window” (i.e., the Run dialog), and press enter. This successfully causes the obfuscated PowerShell command to be executed, ensuing within the retrieval of a next-stage payload from an exterior server (“llll[.]match”).
The JavaScript payload (“gverify.js”) is subsequently saved to the sufferer’s Downloads folder and executed utilizing cscript in a hidden window. The primary purpose of the intermediate script is to fetch the EDDIESTEALER binary from the identical distant server and retailer it within the Downloads folder with a pseudorandom 12-character file identify.
Written in Rust, EDDIESTEALER is a commodity stealer malware that may collect system metadata, obtain duties from a command-and-control (C2) server, and siphon knowledge of curiosity from the contaminated host. The exfiltration targets embody cryptocurrency wallets, net browsers, password managers, FTP shoppers, and messaging apps.
“These targets are topic to vary as they’re configurable by the C2 operator,” Elastic defined. “EDDIESTEALER then reads the focused recordsdata utilizing normal kernel32.dll capabilities like CreateFileW, GetFileSizeEx, ReadFile, and CloseHandle.”
The collected host data is encrypted and transmitted to the C2 server in a separate HTTP POST request after the completion of every activity.
Moreover incorporating string encryption, the malware employs a customized WinAPI lookup mechanism for resolving API calls and creates a mutex to make sure that just one model is operating at any given time. It additionally incorporates checks to find out if it is being executed in a sandboxed setting, and if that’s the case, deletes itself from disk.
“Based mostly on an analogous self-deletion method noticed in Latrodectus, EDDIESTEALER is able to deleting itself via NTFS Alternate Information Streams renaming, to bypass file locks,” Elastic famous.
One other noteworthy characteristic constructed into the stealer is its capacity to bypass Chromium’s app-bound encryption to realize entry to unencrypted delicate knowledge, equivalent to cookies. That is achieved by together with a Rust implementation of ChromeKatz, an open-source device that may dump cookies and credentials from the reminiscence of Chromium-based browsers.
The Rust model of ChromeKatz additionally incorporates modifications to deal with situations the place the focused Chromium browser will not be operating. In such circumstances, it spawns a brand new browser occasion utilizing the command-line arguments “–window-position=-3000,-3000 https://google.com,” successfully positioning the brand new window far off-screen and making its invisible to the person.
In opening the browser, the target is to allow the malware to learn the reminiscence related to the community service little one strategy of Chrome that is recognized by the “-utility-sub-type=community.mojom.NetworkService” flag and finally extract the credentials.
Elastic stated it additionally recognized up to date variations of the malware with options to reap operating processes, GPU data, variety of CPU cores, CPU identify, and CPU vendor. As well as, the brand new variants tweak the C2 communication sample by preemptively sending the host data to the server earlier than receiving the duty configuration.
That is not all. The encryption key used for client-to-server communication is hard-coded into the binary, versus retrieving it dynamically from the server. Moreover, the stealer has been discovered to launch a brand new Chrome course of with the –remote-debugging-port=
“This adoption of Rust in malware improvement displays a rising pattern amongst risk actors looking for to leverage fashionable language options for enhanced stealth, stability, and resilience towards conventional evaluation workflows and risk detection engines,” the corporate stated.
The disclosure comes as c/aspect revealed particulars of a ClickFix marketing campaign that targets a number of platforms, equivalent to Apple macOS, Android, and iOS, utilizing strategies like browser-based redirections, pretend UI prompts, and drive-by obtain strategies.
The assault chain begins with an obfuscated JavaScript hosted on an internet site, that when visited from macOS, initiates a collection of redirections to a web page that guides victims to launch Terminal and run a shell script, which ends up in the obtain of a stealer malware that has been flagged on VirusTotal because the Atomic macOS Stealer (AMOS).
Nonetheless, the identical marketing campaign has been configured to provoke a drive-by obtain scheme when visiting the online web page from an Android, iOS, or Home windows gadget, resulting in the deployment of one other trojan malware.
The disclosures coincide with the emergence of latest stealer malware households like Katz Stealer and AppleProcessHub Stealer focusing on Home windows and macOS respectively, and are able to harvesting a variety of knowledge from contaminated hosts, in keeping with Nextron and Kandji.
Katz Stealer, like EDDIESTEALER, is engineered to bypass Chrome’s app-bound encryption, however differently by using DLL injection to acquire the encryption key with out administrator privileges and use it to decrypt encrypted cookies and passwords from Chromium-based browsers.
“Attackers conceal malicious JavaScript in gzip recordsdata, which, when opened, set off the obtain of a PowerShell script,” Nextron stated. “This script retrieves a .NET-based loader payload, which injects the stealer right into a professional course of. As soon as energetic, it exfiltrates stolen knowledge to the command and management server.”
AppleProcessHub Stealer, alternatively, is designed to exfiltrate person recordsdata together with bash historical past, zsh historical past, GitHub configurations, SSH data, and iCloud Keychain.
Assault sequences distributing the malware entail using a Mach-O binary that downloads a second-stage bash stealer script from the server “appleprocesshub[.]com” and runs it, the outcomes of that are then exfiltrated again to the C2 server. Particulars of the malware had been first shared by the MalwareHunterTeam on Could 15, 2025, and by MacPaw’s Moonlock Lab final week.
“That is an instance of a Mach-O written in Goal-C which communicates with a command and management server to execute scripts,” Kandji researcher Christopher Lopez stated.
