Cerberus payload

Family: Alienbot

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

Family: Cerberus

An Android banker that is being rented to actors beginning in 2019.

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.

Covert microphone or camera capture with exfiltration

Opens audio or camera capture outside any user-facing recording feature and pairs it with file staging and network transmission. The absence of a foreground recording interface alongside these primitives indicates surveillance rather than a legitimate media function.

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

Removes its main activity from the application launcher