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.
Energetic since 2021, the community has revealed greater than 3,000 malicious movies so far, with the quantity of such movies tripling because the begin of the 12 months. It has been codenamed the YouTube Ghost Community by Examine 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 trying to find them with stealer malware. A few of these movies have racked up a whole bunch 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, security analysis group supervisor at Examine Level, mentioned. “What appears to be like like a useful tutorial can truly be a elegant cyber lure. The dimensions, modularity, and class of this community make it a blueprint for a way menace actors now weaponize engagement instruments to unfold malware.”
The usage of YouTube for malware distribution is just not a brand new phenomenon. For years, menace actors have been noticed hijacking respectable 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 respectable platforms for nefarious functions, turning them into an efficient avenue for malware distribution. Whereas among the campaigns have abused respectable advert networks, akin to these related to serps like Google or Bing, others have capitalized on GitHub as a supply automobile, as within the case of the Stargazers Ghost Community.
One of many fundamental explanation why Ghost Networks has taken off in an enormous means is that they can’t solely be used to amplify the perceived legitimacy of the hyperlinks shared, but additionally preserve operational continuity even when the accounts are banned or taken down by the platform homeowners, because of their role-based construction.
“These accounts reap the benefits of numerous platform options, akin to movies, descriptions, posts (a lesser-known YouTube function much like Fb publish), and feedback to advertise malicious content material and distribute malware, whereas making a false sense of belief,” security researcher Antonis Terefos mentioned.
“Nearly all of the community consists of compromised YouTube accounts, which, as soon as added, are assigned particular operational roles. This role-based construction permits stealthier distribution, as banned accounts will be quickly changed with out disrupting the general operation.”
There are particular sorts 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 offered immediately within the video as a part of the set up course of)
- Put up-accounts, that are answerable for publishing neighborhood messages and posts containing hyperlinks to exterior websites
- Work together-accounts, which like and publish encouraging feedback to offer 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 by way of the YouTube Ghost Community embrace 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 menace actors in bypassing typical security defenses,” Examine 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 respectable accounts and the engagement mechanisms of common platforms to orchestrate large-scale, persistent, and extremely efficient malware campaigns.”
