Family: Alienbot

Alienbot is a fork of Cerberus banker first seen in January 2020.

Contact harvesting with SMS self-propagation

Reads the device contact list and sends messages to the retrieved numbers, the distribution mechanism behind SMS worm campaigns. The victim's own address book becomes the delivery channel, which is why these campaigns spread rapidly within a region.

Encrypted or packed staged payload inside Android package

Extracted asset shows near-random entropy without a recognised container header, indicating an encrypted secondary payload staged for runtime decryption and loading. Correlate with any runtime class-loading detection on the same sample.

Notification listener abuse for OTP and message theft

Binds a notification listener service and reads posted notification content, optionally dismissing notifications afterwards to hide them. This harvests one-time passcodes and private messages without ever requesting SMS permissions, which is why it has largely replaced SMS interception in modern ban

Silent screen capture via MediaProjection

Acquires a MediaProjection session and pipes the virtual display into an image reader or encoder, enabling continuous capture of everything shown on screen including credentials and one-time codes. Combined with accessibility auto-approval this runs without further user interaction.

Removes its main activity from the application launcher