Clipboard injectors, on the contrary, can be silent for years, show no network activity or any other signs of presence until the disastrous day when they replace a cryptowallet address.Īnother factor is detection of the malware payload. While worms and viruses may not connect to the attacker’s control servers, they generate visible network activity, or increase CPU or RAM consumption. But this is the most dangerous and harmful kind: self-replicating malware, such as destructive viruses and network worms ransomware that silently encrypts local files, and so on. It’s only a small fraction of malware that exist on their own and do not require any communication channel. Backdoors require a control channel, spying trojans require a way to pass stolen data, cryptominers need network communication too, etc. Just think of it, most malware is only efficient when there is a communication channel established between the malware operator and the victim’s system. And not only because it creates irreversible money transfers, but because it is so passive and hard to detect for a normal user. Why it is dangerousĭespite the attack being fundamentally simple, it harbors more danger than would seem. We even made a generic detection for some of such families, naming them Generic.ClipBanker. They were replicated and reused in other malware too.
So, this is where we started seeing the first clipboard attacks on cryptocurrency owners. Adding increased value of cryptocurrencies made it a very lucrative target. Focusing on something global and provider-independent, such as a cryptocurrency wallet, made it much more efficient for cryptothieves. However, such attacks required detecting a particular internet banking environment, and their success depended also on other fields being filled correctly (i.e. Here is a report from CERT Polska that warned Polish users about such a threat targeting users of local banks in 2013. It all started from banking trojans focused on specific banks and replacing bank account numbers in the clipboard. This technique of replacing clipboard contents is more than a decade old. In a nutshell, the attack relies on malware replacing part of the clipboard contents once it detects a wallet address in it. As long as such attacks continue to thrive in the modern ecosystem of the cryptocurrency world, it’s worth explaining how they work and where the danger lies. The only way to prevent such attacks is to be extremely cautious and attentive, or use a decent anti-malware solution to detect a piece of malicious code.
Although we have written about a similar malware attack in 2017 in one of our blogposts, the technique is still very relevant today as it doesn’t have any perfect solution from the perspective of operating system design. We have come across a series of clipboard injection attacks on cryptocurrency users, which emerged starting from September 2022. It is often the case that something new is just a reincarnation of something old.
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