The risk actors often known as Golden Chickens have been attributed to 2 new malware households dubbed TerraStealerV2 and TerraLogger, suggesting continued growth efforts to fine-tune and diversify their arsenal.
“TerraStealerV2 is designed to gather browser credentials, cryptocurrency pockets knowledge, and browser extension data,” Recorded Future Insikt Group stated. “TerraLogger, against this, is a standalone keylogger. It makes use of a typical low-level keyboard hook to report keystrokes and writes the logs to native recordsdata.”
Golden Chickens, often known as Venom Spider, is the identify given to a financially motivated risk actor linked to a infamous malware household referred to as More_eggs. It is recognized to be lively since a minimum of 2018, providing its warez below a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) mannequin.
As of 2023, Golden Chickens has been attributed to a web-based persona often known as badbullzvenom, an account that is believed to be operated collectively by people from Canada and Romania. A few of the different malicious instruments developed by the e-crime group embrace More_eggs lite (oka lite_more_eggs), VenomLNK, TerraLoader, and TerraCrypt.
Late final yr, Zscaler ThreatLabz detailed new Golden Chickens-related exercise involving a backdoor referred to as RevC2 and a loader known as Venom Loader, each of that are delivered by way of a VenomLNK.
The newest findings from Recorded Future present that the risk actors are persevering with to work on their choices, releasing an up to date model of their stealer malware that is able to harvesting knowledge from browsers, cryptocurrency wallets, and browser extensions.
TerraStealerV2 has been distributed by way of numerous codecs, reminiscent of executable recordsdata (EXEs), dynamic-link libraries (DLLs), Home windows Installer packages (MSI), and shortcut (LNK) recordsdata.
In all these circumstances, the stealer payload is delivered within the type of an OCX (quick for Microsoft’s OLE Management Extension) payload that is retrieved from an exterior area (“wetransfers[.]io”).
“Whereas it targets the Chrome ‘Login Information’ database to steal credentials, it doesn’t bypass Utility Sure Encryption (ABE) protections launched in Chrome updates after July 2024, indicating the malware code is outdated or nonetheless below growth,” the cybersecurity firm stated.
The information captured by TerraStealerV2 is exfiltrated to each Telegram and the area “wetransfers[.]io.” It additionally leverages trusted Home windows utilities, reminiscent of regsvr32.exe and mshta.exe, to evade detection.
TerraLogger, additionally propagated as an OCX file, is engineered to report keystrokes. Nevertheless, it doesn’t embrace performance for knowledge exfiltration or command-and-control (C2) communication, suggesting it’s both in early growth or meant for use along with one other malware a part of the Golden Chickens MaaS ecosystem.
“The present state of TerraStealerV2 and TerraLogger means that each instruments stay below lively growth and don’t but exhibit the extent of stealth sometimes related to mature Golden Chickens tooling,” Recorded Future stated.
“Given Golden Chickens’ historical past of growing malware for credential theft and entry operations, these capabilities will probably proceed to evolve.”
The disclosure comes amid the emergence of latest stealer malware households like Hannibal Stealer, Gremlin Stealer, and Nullpoint Stealer that are designed to exfiltrate a variety of delicate data from its victims.
It additionally follows the invention of an up to date model of the StealC malware with help for streamlined command-and-control (C2) communication protocol and the addition of RC4 encryption.
“The malware’s payload supply choices have been expanded to incorporate Microsoft Software program Installer (MSI) packages and PowerShell scripts,” Zscaler ThreatLabz stated in a report revealed final week.
“A redesigned management panel gives an built-in builder that allows risk actors to customise payload supply guidelines based mostly on geolocation, {hardware} IDs (HWID), and put in software program. Further options embrace multi-monitor screenshot seize, a unified file grabber, and server-side brute-forcing for credentials.”
The brand new 2.2.4. model (aka StealC V2), launched in March 2025, has been noticed being distributed by way of one other malware loader referred to as Amadey. The management panel additionally helps Telegram bot integration for sending notifications and permits customization of message codecs.
“StealC V2 introduces enhancements, reminiscent of enhanced payload supply, a streamlined communications protocol with encryption, and a redesigned management panel that gives extra focused data assortment,” Zscaler stated.
