Security researchers have detailed the discovery of a sneaky new variety of malicious software that evades antivirus apps and, notably, uses a JWST image.
In July 2022, NASA released the first images captured by the James Webb telescope. Among them was a stunning capture of the galaxy cluster called SMACS 0723. Back then, NASA called it the deepest infrared image of the universe, while the thousands of galaxies making an appearance in the monumental picture were touted to be the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, the same image is now being weaponized by hackers to seed malware and wreak all sorts of havoc from a remote server.
The folks over at security firm Securonix have detailed a malware seeding campaign called GO#WEBBFUSCATOR that is exploiting the Webb telescope’s famous click to seed malware. The biggest advantage that comes with using Golang programming language is that it is natively cross-platform compatible, which means the same codebase can be deployed across different target platforms such as Linux, macOS, and Windows (via Cyware).
