EventBot

Context:

Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has issued a detailed warning to people against the trojan called EventBot.

About:

• EventBot is a mobile-banking Trojan and info-stealer that abuses Android’s in-built accessibility features to steal user data from financial applications, read user SMS messages and intercept SMS messages, allowing malware to bypass two-factor authentication.
• The EventBot trojan has over 200 different financial applications under its target, including banking applications, money-transfer services, and cryptocurrency wallets, or financial applications based in the US and European region.
• The tricky part about a trojan such as EventBot is that it seems to be a trusted application, as per India’s federal cyber-security agency.

What is Trojan?

• A Trojan horse, or Trojan, is a type of malicious code or software that looks legitimate but can take control of your computer.
• A Trojan is designed to damage, disrupt, steal, or in general, inflict some other harmful action on your data or network.
• A Trojan acts as a bona fi de application or file to trick you. It seeks to deceive you into loading and executing the malware on your device. Once installed, a Trojan can perform the action it was designed for.

Important terms

• Malware: Malware covers all sorts of software with nasty intent. Not buggy software, not programs you don’t like, but the software that is specifically written with the intent to harm.
• Virus: This is a specific type of malware that spreads itself once it’s initial run. It’s different from other types of malware because it can either be like a parasite that attaches to good files on your machine, or it can be self-contained and search out other machines to infect.
• Worm: In the malware sense, they are viruses that are self-contained (they don’t attach themselves like a parasite) and go around searching out other machines to infect.
• Exploit: The strange behavior that can be used to create a hole for hackers or malware to get through generally requires someone to use a particular sequence of actions or text to cause the right (or is that wrong?) conditions. To be usable by malware (or on a larger scale by hackers), it needs to be put into code form, which is also called exploit code