Anyone interested in playing hide and seek? A newly discovered botnet appeared earlier this month that is using peer-to-peer communication tactics to target and infect mobile devices. Hide and Seek (HNS) received its name after it appeared on January 10th only to disappear soon after and then reappear as a newly designed and more improved Trojan virus. Botnets like Hide and Seek, typically are used by cyber criminals to breach the security of several users’ computers, take control of each computer, and organize all of the infected machines into a network of bots that hackers can remotely manage.
According to Bitdefender, “the HNS botnet communicates in a complex and decentralized manner and uses multiple anti-tampering techniques to prevent a third party from hijacking/poisoning it,” which since its reemergence, has infected over 20,000 devices. Additionally, once a device is infiltrated, HNS has the ability to exfiltrate data, execute code, and interfere with the device’s operations.
Since the reemergence, the malware has been spreading from device to device using a worm-like mechanism to generate IP addresses that are associated with the infected device, and then it attacks the associated devices keylogging tactic. Fortunately, researchers have been able to figure that if a device is affected by Hide and Seek, a simple reboot of the device will remove the malware from the device.
Although HNS appears to be a standard DDoS attack on surface, further digging into this Trojan virus indicates that its potential is far greater than what has been typically seen by this style of attack.
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To read more about Hide and Seek, check out IBT.