The audio-based chat app, Clubhouse has become immensely popular, over the last few months. Cybercriminals are misusing the app’s name to spread malware to people’s devices. It was noticed recently that ads urging Facebook users to download a “Clubhouse for PC” app were being distributed by attackers. This fake app, according to TechCrunch, is full of malware links.
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It was noticed recently that ads urging Facebook users to download a “Clubhouse for PC” app were being distributed by attackers
Once the malware has been installed on the target computer, attackers can remotely carry out operations on it
Clubhouse “is now available for PC,” as per the Facebook ad, which also featured a picture of co-founders Paul Davidson and Rohan Seth
The audio-based chat app, Clubhouse has become immensely popular, over the last few months. Cybercriminals are misusing the app’s name to spread malware to people’s devices. It was noticed recently that ads urging Facebook users to download a “Clubhouse for PC” app were being distributed by attackers. This fake app, according to TechCrunch, is full of malware links.
Also read: Clubhouse data leak: Over a million users’ data leaked
According to TechCrunch, malware developers are taking advantage of Clubhouse’s growing popularity by developing what they claim is a Clubhouse client for PCs and then advertising it on Facebook to get users to download the app.
According to the article, the Facebook ads first led users to a series of bogus Clubhouse web pages hosted in Russia. Attackers then urged the users to download what they believed to be the most recent version of Clubhouse for PC from these sites.
The app will start communicating to a Command and Control server once it was downloaded and enabled. Once the malware has been installed on the target computer, attackers can remotely carry out operations on it.
Unfortunately, the app includes links to web pages that posed as the official Clubhouse website and gave users the option to “download the new Clubhouse app for Windows”, which would infect their computers with malware.
The malicious app attempted to infect a device with ransomware when running it in the sandbox.
The audio-chat app is currently available for iOS only.
No official version of Android or other operating system has been released yet.
The advertisements have since been removed from Facebook, and the websites urging users to download the fake Clubhouse app have also vanished. However, the incident highlights the fact that not all online advertising can be trusted, even though they come from popular platforms like Facebook.
Though it’s unclear how the ads got past Facebook’s security checks in the first place, the pages affiliated with them luckily did not gain much traction. Clubhouse “is now available for PC,” as per the Facebook ad, which also featured a picture of co-founders Paul Davidson and Rohan Seth.
While creating fake, malware-infected copies of existing apps and services isn’t a new cybercrime tactic, the use of Facebook ads to draw people in was disturbing.
You might also like: Clubhouse was not hacked, CEO Paul Davidson on Clubhouse data leak