The anti-malware research team at Kaspersky Labs perceives that the development and prevalence of mobile banking malware will continue to grow in 2016.

Cautioning smartphone users to be extra vigilant and ensure they don’t become a victim of the Asacub Android Trojan, Senior Malware Analyst at Kaspersky Lab (US), Roman Unuchek, said this malware targeted android users for financial gain.

“When first identified, Asacub displayed signs of an information stealing malware. However, some versions of this Trojan are targeting users of online banking in Russia, Ukraine and the US,” Unuchek said.

The first version of the Asacub Trojan – discovered in June 2015, performed all functions that a typical information stealing Trojan did, such as stealing contact list, sending text messages to given numbers, blocking the screen of an infected device and so on.

But later that year, Kaspersky experts discovered several new versions of the Trojan, confirming its transformation into a tool for stealing money.

Lab experts, while admitting to being aware of several versions of this Trojan for some time, assert the company’s threat detection system found almost no sign of active Asacub campaigns until the end of 2015.

However, within just one week, Kaspersky claims to have identified more than 6,500 attempts to infect users, making it one of the five most popular mobile Trojans of that week.

“While analysing this Trojan, we found that the Asacub malware has connections to criminals with links to a Windows-based spyware called CoreBot. The domain used by Asacub’s Command and Control centre is registered to the same person, as tens of domains used by Corebot. It is therefore highly likely that these two malwares are developed by the same gang,” Unuchek observed.

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