Kaspersky warns sub-Sahara African banks on looming cyber threats


 
Multinational cyber security and antivirus expert – Kaspersky has warned banks in Sub Sahara Africa about looming cyber threats and loss of finances that could be made possible by a silent hacking group.
 
In a statement distributed by APO Group on behalf of Kaspersky media contact Mbali Fikeni, the malware used in the attacks indicates that the threat actors are most likely to be an infamous Silence hacking group.
The attacks detected began in the first week of January 2020 and indicated that the threat actors are about to begin the final stage of their operation and cash out the funds. To the date, the attacks are ongoing and persist in targeting large banks in several SSA countries.
 
“We urge all banks to stay vigilant, as apart from the large sums Silence group also steal sensitive information while monitoring the Banks activity as they video record screen activity. This is a serious privacy abuse that might cost more than money can buy.”
 
Kaspersky security researchers have reported on thousands of notifications of attacks on major banks located in the sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) region. 
 
The Silence group is one of the most active Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actors, which has carried out a number of successful campaigns targeting banks and financial organisations around the globe.
 
Kaspersky researchers attribute the attacks to the Russian speaking Silence group based on the malware used in the attacks, which was previously used solely in the group’s operations. In addition, the language of the malware is Russian: threat actors attempted to slightly cover this fact by typing Russian words using the English keyboard layout.
 
“The typical scenario of the attack begins with a social engineering scheme, as attackers send a phishing e-mail that contains malware to a bank employee. From there the malware gets inside the banks’ security perimeter and lays low for a while, gathering information on the victim organisation by capturing screenshots and making video recordings of the day to day activity on the infected device, learning how things work in the targeted banks. Once attackers are ready to take action, they activate all capabilities of the malware and cash out using, for example, ATMs. The score sometimes reaches millions of dollars.
 
“Silence group has been quite productive in the past years, as they live up to their name; their operations require an extensive period of silent monitoring, with rapid and coordinated thefts. 
 
We noticed a growing interest of this actor group in banking organisations in 2017 and since that time the group would constantly develop, expanding to new regions and updating their social engineering scheme,” said Sergey Golovanov, security researcher at Kaspersky. 

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