The hacker group Turla, which is attributed to the Russian special services, used the comments in the Instagram of the famous American singer Britney Spears to launch the Trojan. It was stated by Slovakian security firm ESET, which is the IT security company that offers anti-virus and firewall products since 1992.
Cybercrime through Firefox
Cybercriminals spread the malicious extension of HTML5 Encoding to the Firefox browser, disguised as an application for safe work on the Web. In the comments to Britney Spears photos, Trojan sought the encrypted address for communication with the developers of the spyware program.
Thus, hackers managed to remain undetected and constantly change addresses to get access to the infected computers.
Smart work with Hashtags
According to ESET researchers, the use of social networks to mask malicious programs will significantly complicate the provision of cybersecurity.
Comments with addresses looked like a regular text with hashtags, and only after decoding took the form of a link. For example, ESET specialists determined that the comment "# 2hotmake to her, uups # Hot # X" had actually been a disguised address. It was noted that only 17 transitions were made on it. It means that the Turla group has only been testing the new system. However, in this phrase, ESET found an encrypted piece of the shortened with the help of bit.ly link.
Hackers are using Britney Spears and other celebrities Instagram accounts to hide the codes in which have millions of followers.
This link leads to the control panel, which gives the virus for further actions, particularly, leading to the data.
That's such a crazy story in the era of high technologies. But an excellent idea is to hide behind the accounts of the public, the number of comments to posts is estimated in the thousands, and sometimes even hundreds of thousands.
Hiding pieces of links in some them is not a big deal, and finding them there is not an easy task for other people.
Turla is the Russian hacking group
A number of researchers believe that Turla is a group of Russian-speaking hackers who attacked websites of embassies and state institutions in different countries.
In late May, experts at Check Point found a vulnerability in popular video players, which allow you to remotely hack your computer. It turned out that attackers can use the technique of downloading and processing files with subtitles for movies and gain control over the system being attacked.
