Description

GoldFactory, a financially driven cybercrime outfit, has launched a renewed wave of attacks across Southeast Asia by distributing tampered versions of popular banking applications. These counterfeit apps are presented as legitimate digital-banking tools and have already compromised more than eleven thousand devices across Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Victims are commonly deceived through direct phone contact or messaging-app prompts, where attackers impersonate trusted authorities and persuade users to install what appears to be an official banking or service application. The modified applications retain their legitimate banking features to avoid suspicion, but they secretly embed malicious modules powered by hooking frameworks such as FriHook, SkyHook, and PineHook. These injected components allow the malware to manipulate runtime behavior, conceal its use of accessibility services, forge application signatures, obscure installation origins, and bypass integrity verification. Once activated, the malware gains extensive control over infected devices capturing sensitive financial data, monitoring user actions, and enabling unauthorized account access. The campaign also incorporates revived variants of earlier GoldFactory malware families, including GoldDigger and GoldDiggerPlus, while experimenting with a new strain known as Gigaflower. Gigaflower significantly expands the group’s capabilities, supporting dozens of commands such as real-time device streaming through WebRTC, screen overlays that imitate system prompts, automated gestures, keystroke logging, and optical-character recognition for extracting identity details. The operators are also testing features targeting regional banking workflows, including identity-card scanning functions aimed particularly at Vietnamese users. Collectively, these enhancements indicate a more sophisticated and targeted approach, allowing GoldFactory to conduct large-scale financial fraud, identity theft, and persistent surveillance across the region.