A malicious community of YouTube accounts has been noticed publishing and selling movies that result in malware downloads, primarily abusing the recognition and belief related to the video internet hosting platform for propagating malicious payloads.
Lively since 2021, the community has revealed greater than 3,000 malicious movies up to now, with the amount of such movies tripling because the begin of the 12 months. It has been codenamed the YouTube Ghost Network by Test Level. Google has since stepped in to take away a majority of those movies.
The marketing campaign leverages hacked accounts and replaces their content material with “malicious” movies which are centred round pirated software program and Roblox sport cheats to contaminate unsuspecting customers looking for them with stealer malware. A few of these movies have racked up lots of of hundreds of views, starting from 147,000 to 293,000.
“This operation took benefit of belief alerts, together with views, likes, and feedback, to make malicious content material appear secure,” Eli Smadja, safety analysis group supervisor at Test Level, mentioned. “What seems like a useful tutorial can really be a elegant cyber entice. The dimensions, modularity, and class of this community make it a blueprint for a way risk actors now weaponize engagement instruments to unfold malware.”
Using YouTube for malware distribution is just not a brand new phenomenon. For years, risk actors have been noticed hijacking professional channels or utilizing newly created accounts to publish tutorial-style movies with descriptions pointing to malicious hyperlinks that, when clicked, result in malware.
These assaults are a part of a broader development the place attackers repurpose professional platforms for nefarious functions, turning them into an efficient avenue for malware distribution. Whereas a few of the campaigns have abused professional advert networks, equivalent to these related to engines like google like Google or Bing, others have capitalized on GitHub as a supply car, as within the case of the Stargazers Ghost Community.
One of many primary the reason why Ghost Networks has taken off in an enormous approach is that they can’t solely be used to amplify the perceived legitimacy of the hyperlinks shared, but in addition preserve operational continuity even when the accounts are banned or taken down by the platform homeowners, because of their role-based construction.
“These accounts benefit from varied platform options, equivalent to movies, descriptions, posts (a lesser-known YouTube function much like Fb submit), and feedback to advertise malicious content material and distribute malware, whereas making a false sense of belief,” safety researcher Antonis Terefos mentioned.
“The vast majority of the community consists of compromised YouTube accounts, which, as soon as added, are assigned particular operational roles. This role-based construction allows stealthier distribution, as banned accounts will be quickly changed with out disrupting the general operation.”
There are three particular varieties of accounts –
- Video-accounts, which add phishing movies and supply descriptions containing hyperlinks to obtain the marketed software program (alternatively, the hyperlinks are shared as a pinned remark or supplied immediately within the video as a part of the set up course of)
- Submit-accounts, that are chargeable for publishing neighborhood messages and posts containing hyperlinks to exterior websites
- Work together-accounts, which like and submit encouraging feedback to present the movies a veneer of belief and credibility
The hyperlinks direct customers to a variety of companies like MediaFire, Dropbox, or Google Drive, or phishing pages hosted on Google Websites, Blogger, and Telegraph that, in flip, incorporate hyperlinks to obtain the supposed software program. In lots of of those instances, the hyperlinks are hid utilizing URL shorteners to masks the true vacation spot.
A number of the malware households distributed through the YouTube Ghost Community embody Lumma Stealer, Rhadamanthys Stealer, StealC Stealer, RedLine Stealer, Phemedrone Stealer, and different Node.js-based loaders and downloaders –
- A channel named @Sound_Writer (9,690 subscribers), which has been compromised for over a 12 months to add cryptocurrency software program movies to deploy Rhadamanthys
- A channel named @Afonesio1 (129,000 subscribers), which was compromised on December 3, 2024, and January 5, 2025, to add a video promoting a cracked model of Adobe Photoshop to distribute an MSI installer that deploys Hijack Loader, which then delivers Rhadamanthys
“The continuing evolution of malware distribution strategies demonstrates the exceptional adaptability and resourcefulness of risk actors in bypassing typical safety defenses,” Test Level mentioned. “Adversaries are more and more shifting towards extra refined, platform-based methods, most notably, the deployment of Ghost Networks.”
“These networks leverage the belief inherent in professional accounts and the engagement mechanisms of in style platforms to orchestrate large-scale, persistent, and extremely efficient malware campaigns.”
