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1369 points universesquid | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.039s | source
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DDerTyp ◴[] No.45170133[source]
One of the most insidious parts of this malware's payload, which isn't getting enough attention, is how it chooses the replacement wallet address. It doesn't just pick one at random from its list.

It actually calculates the Levenshtein distance between the legitimate address and every address in its own list. It then selects the attacker's address that is visually most similar to the original one.

This is a brilliant piece of social engineering baked right into the code. It's designed to specifically defeat the common security habit of only checking the first and last few characters of an address before confirming a transaction.

We did a full deobfuscation of the payload and analyzed this specific function. Wrote up the details here for anyone interested: https://jdstaerk.substack.com/p/we-just-found-malicious-code...

Stay safe!

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bflesch ◴[] No.45170458[source]
Can you attribute this technique to a specific group?
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pants2 ◴[] No.45172761[source]
Almost certainly Lazarus
replies(1): >>45173246 #
1. sflanagain ◴[] No.45173246[source]
The phishing email comes across a bit too amateur. Specifically the inclusion of:

"we kindly ask that you complete this update your earliest convenience".

The email was included here: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/642adcaf364024654c71df23/...

From this article: https://www.aikido.dev/blog/npm-debug-and-chalk-packages-com...

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2. rurban ◴[] No.45192061[source]
Very amateur. Who would fall that, really? I can only suspect npm people who are used to unprofessional repo hosting practices.

Such a Two Factor Authentication update request would have needed a blog post first, to announce such a fishy request.