Trend™ Research has identified an active campaign spreading via WhatsApp through a ZIP file attachment. When executed, the malware establishes persistence and hijacks the compromised WhatsApp account to send copies of itself to the victim’s contacts.

We examine the past tactics used by UNC3886 to gain insight on how to best strengthen defenses against the ongoing and emerging threats of this APT group.

In this blog entry, we uncovered a campaign that uses fake GitHub repositories to distribute SmartLoader, which is then used to deliver Lumma Stealer and other malicious payloads. The campaign leverages GitHub’s trusted reputation to evade detection, using AI-generated content to make fake repositories appear legitimate.