I'm sure majority of us are into AI, at least for me I have been trying to learn a lot of tools, like Mid Journey, Capcut, In-video, Leonardo AI, Elevenlabs, Runway and others. So when I say this reports, I was taken aback as how cyber criminals is also leveraging AI tools now to steal our crypto credentiasl as most of them are info stealer.
The way it works is that this threat actor will take over a Facebook account, hack it specially those who have a lot of followers and then turn it into face site similar to the original AI tools.
- Cybercrooks have taken over Facebook profiles to run sponsored malvertising campaigns impersonating Midjourney, Sora AI, DALL-E 3, Evoto, ChatGPT 5 and many others
- The malicious pages on Facebook are meticulously designed to trick users into downloading purportedly official desktop versions of popular AI software. The cybercriminals behind these campaigns regularly change and adapt the malicious payloads in an attempt to avoid further detection from security software
- The links direct users to malicious webpages that download a variety of intrusive stealers to harvest sensitive information from compromised systems, including credentials, autocomplete data, credit card information, and even crypto wallet information.
- The analyzed campaigns employ malicious ads that contain links to executable files that serve Rilide, Vidar, IceRAT, Nova Stealers. The entire batch of malicious software is often offered as malware-as-a-service by threat actors on specialized forums and channels.
- The malvertising campaigns have tremendous reach through Meta’s sponsored ad system and have actively been targeting European users from Germany, Poland, Italy, France, Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, and elsewhere.
- The ads use convincing descriptions alongside generated AI videos and photos to lure potential users into accessing malicious payloads
- One particular Facebook page impersonating Midjourney with a whopping 1.2 million followers was active for nearly a year until it was shut down on March 8, 2024. Since then threat actors have continuously set up more fraudulent pages to deliver malicious ads to users.
- The Midjourney malvertising ad campaign was directed towards male Facebook users aged 25 to 55 and had an ad reach of approximately 500,000 individuals from Europe (demographics and reach of the campaign were obtained by tracking Meta’s Ad Library catalog)
The malware included here and most of them have been reported already in this community,
Rilide Stealer by @The Cryptovator
Vidar by @Lafu
Nova StealerAnd one of the well-known AI tools right now, Mid-Journey, had 1.2 million followers and reach of over 500,000 individuals in Europe before being taken down on March 8, this year.
https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/labs/ai-meets-next-gen-info-stealers-in-social-media-malvertising-campaigns/
I know others will say that we should go and look for the official page and check everything before downloading. But with the recent AI resurgence, including myself joining the picture and taking advantage of it for whatever purpose it may served to me, still there are dangers lurking in the dark specially for us crypto enthusiast and those trying to learn AI.