A Latin America (LATAM)-based financially motivated actor codenamed FLUXROOT has been observed leveraging Google Cloud serverless projects to orchestrate credential phishing activity, highlighting the abuse of the cloud computing model for malicious purposes. "Serverless architectures are attractive to developers and enterprises for their flexibility, cost effectiveness, and ease of use," Google said in its biannual Threat Horizons Report [PDF] shared with The Hacker News. "These same features make serverless computing services for all cloud providers attractive to threat actors, who use them to deliver and communicate with their malware, host and direct users to phishing pages, and to run malware and execute malicious scripts specifically tailored to run in a serverless environment." The campaign involved the use of Google Cloud container URLs to host credential phishing pages with the aim of harvesting login information associated with Mercado Pago, an online payments platform popular in the LATAM region. FLUXROOT, per Google, is the threat actor known for distributing the Grandoreiro banking trojan, with recent campaigns also taking advantage of legitimate cloud services like Microsoft Azure and Dropbox to distribute the malware. Separately, Google's cloud infrastructure has also been weaponized by another adversary named PINEAPPLE to propagate another stealer malware known as Astaroth (aka Guildma) as part of attacks targeting Brazilian users. "PINEAPPLE used…Read More
