A Bing advertisement designed to look like a link to install NordVPN was found to lead to an installer for the remote access trojan SecTopRAT.
Malwarebytes Labs
discovered the malvertising campaign on Thursday, with the domain name used for the malicious ad having been created just a day earlier. The URL (nordivpn[.]xyz) was designed to look like a legitimate NordVPN domain. The ad link redirected to a website with another typosquatted URL (besthord-vpn[.]com) and a replica of the real NordVPN website.
The download button on the fraudulent website led to a Dropbox containing the installer NordVPNSetup.exe. This executable included both a real NordVPN installer and a malware payload that is injected into MSBuild.exe and connects to the attacker’s command-and-control (C2) server.