GiftGhostBot

GiftGhostBot is a Trojan botnet that collects gift cards by brute-forcing their numbers. Users should protect themselves from infections appropriately, which may abuse their hardware resources for these criminal activities, although they don't target the user's local information. Anti-malware software is a highly-dependable resource for removing GiftGhostBot Trojans before they cause significant harm to third-party customers and businesses.

When Gifts Get Taken Rather than Received

The rise of e-commerce is in tandem with the Trojan black market's efficient machinations increasingly, which would take those profits for itself. In 2017, abuse of non-consensually networked computers resulted in a campaign that ran through over a million possibilities for theft an hour. The botnet that hosted this campaign, GiftGhostBot, searches for easily-lootable funds – at random.

GiftGhostBot obfuscates its identity with JavaScript while using the infected system's resources for externally-focused attacks, as usual, for a Trojan botnet. It includes several means of persisting on the compromised system and evading detection, such as imitating 'normal' Web browser data requests and rotating through various user-agent strings. Many of these features also facilitate its attack, which attempts to circumvent the standard bot detection practices that companies use for preventing data floods and exploits.

GiftGhostBot is atypical for a botnet, in that its attacks don't involve DDoSing or bank account hijacks. This Trojan targets gift cards by brute-forcing, randomly 'guessing,' strings of potentially-compatible numbers for card number entry forms. By doing so, GiftGhostBot's threat actor gains access to both the card's virtual funds and any confidential information linked to it.

Ghostly Presences that Don't Need to Linger

The periodic attacks of threats like GiftGhostBot have caused many companies to become more conservative about exposing customer information, such as addresses or payment details, to gift card accounts by default. Besides helping shore up security practices by exploiting their shortcomings inadvertently, GiftGhostBot mostly is notable for its being another botnet that takes hardware and turns it into a self-serving tool. Usually, victims should expect few symptoms from GiftGhostBot or other Trojan botnet infections, which duck under detection while attacking other entities through the host's graphics card, CPU, and other resources.

Malware experts recommend that users avoid weak passwords like 'admin1234' for their accounts, helping attackers hijack accounts and drop Trojans at their leisure. E-mail lures also are a common issue in multiple types of Trojan campaigns, and most users can reasonably protect themselves by scanning attachments, updating software, and turning off macros. Similarly, features that aren't required for browsing the Web, but can facilitate drive-by-downloads, should be left off, including Flash and JavaScript.

With no significant news on its updates since 2017, effective cyber-security solutions should have few issues with blocking attacks or removing GiftGhostBot from compromised computers.

What makes money is what gets the attention of Trojans. Whether the gift was intended for someone else or not, Trojans like GiftGhostBot work towards snatching it, as invisibly as any ghost.