SharkBot is an Android banking malware
found at the end of October 2021 by the Cleafy Threat Intelligence Team. At the moment of writing the SharkBot malware doesn’t seem to have any relations with other Android banking malware like Flubot, Cerberus/Alien, Anatsa/Teabot, Oscorp, etc.
The Cleafy blogpost stated that the main goal of SharkBot is to initiate money transfers (from compromised devices) via Automatic Transfer Systems (ATS). As far as we observed, this technique is an advanced attack technique which isn’t used regularly within Android malware. It enables adversaries to auto-fill fields in legitimate mobile banking apps and initate money transfers, where other Android banking malware, like Anatsa/Teabot or Oscorp, require a live operator to insert and authorize money transfers. This technique also allows adversaries to scale up their operations with minimum effort.
The ATS features allow the malware to receive a list of events to be simulated, and them will be simulated in order to do the money transfers. Since this features can be used to simulate touches/clicks and button presses, it can be used to not only automatically transfer money but also install other malicious applications or components. This is the case of the SharkBot version that we found in the Google Play Store, which seems to be a reduced version of SharkBot with the minimum required features, such as ATS, to install a full version of the malware some time after the initial install.
Because of the fact of being distributed via the Google Play Store as a fake Antivirus, we found that they have to include the usage of infected devices in order to spread the malicious app. SharkBot achieves this by abusing the ‘
Direct Reply‘ Android feature. This feature is used to automatically send reply notification with a message to download the fake Antivirus app. This spread strategy abusing the Direct Reply feature has been seen recently in another banking malware called
Flubot,
discovered by ThreatFabric.
What is interesting and different from the other families is that SharkBot likely uses ATS to also bypass multi-factor authentication mechanisms, including behavioral detection like bio-metrics, while at the same time it also includes more classic features to steal user’s credentials.
