Description

From January to April 2025, researchers at Insikt Group observed two new malware variants TerraStealerV2 and TerraLogger originating from the financially motivated threat actor Golden Chickens, also known as Venom Spider. This group has previously been linked to high-profile cyberattacks targeting companies such as British Airways and Ticketmaster UK. Their Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) offerings remain popular among notorious groups including FIN6, Cobalt Group, and Evilnum, highlighting their continued influence in the cybercriminal ecosystem. TerraStealerV2 is primarily engineered to extract browser-stored credentials and information from cryptocurrency wallets and browser extensions. It employs tactics like terminating the chrome.exe process to bypass file locks and gain access to sensitive data. Once collected, the stolen data is packaged typically in ZIP archives like output.zip—and exfiltrated through Telegram or the command-and-control (C2) domain wetransfers[.]io. Despite its advanced capabilities, TerraStealerV2 currently cannot decrypt data protected by Chrome’s Application Bound Encryption (ABE), suggesting that either the malware is outdated or still undergoing active development. This stealer variant spreads through multiple formats, such as LNK, MSI, DLL, and EXE files, and takes advantage of trusted Windows binaries like regsvr32.exe and mshta.exe to evade detection. Social engineering remains a core tactic for its distribution, especially via spearphishing emails disguised as job offers. Between January and March 2025 alone, researchers discovered ten different builds of TerraStealerV2, indicating a rapid and aggressive expansion campaign. On the other hand, TerraLogger is designed as a keylogging tool, capturing user keystrokes using low-level API functions such as SetWindowsHookExA. It records detailed input data including keystrokes, window titles, and modifier keys, saving logs locally in files like save.txt. Unlike TerraStealerV2, it does not yet communicate with remote servers, implying that it may be part of a larger, modular framework still under active development. From January through April 2025, analysts identified five distinct compiled versions of TerraLogger. These tools are part of a broader suite maintained by Golden Chickens, which also includes malware like VenomLNK, TerraLoader, and TerraCrypt. While TerraStealerV2’s current limitation against ABE-secured credentials provides a temporary advantage to defenders, the malware’s evolving distribution strategies and TerraLogger’s potential integration into wider campaigns underline a growing threat. Given the group’s role in cyber incidents linked to over $1.5 billion in damages globally, experts recommend that organizations bolster their defenses by restricting the execution of suspicious files, monitoring abnormal process activity, and blocking network traffic to known malicious domains like wetransfers[.]io.