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The Grandoreiro banking trojan has re-emerged as a large-scale global threat, with researchers reporting phishing-driven campaigns that now target more than 1,500 banking applications and websites across 60+ countries. IBM X-Force said recent activity has used emails impersonating government entities in Mexico, Argentina, and South Africa, while other reporting tied the lures to organizations such as Mexico’s SAT and CFE and South Africa’s SARS. The malware, long associated with Latin America, has expanded into Europe, Africa, and the Indonesia-Pacific region and has been linked to financial fraud affecting multiple sectors.
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IBM X-Force reported that since March 2024 it had tracked several large-scale phishing campaigns distributing Grandoreiro while impersonating government entities in Mexico, Argentina, and South Africa. The activity marked a broader global expansion beyond the malware's traditional Latin America, Spain, and Portugal focus.
Zscaler ThreatLabz said it observed a Grandoreiro campaign beginning in June 2022 that targeted organizations in Mexico and Spain across sectors including chemicals, automotive, construction machinery, and logistics. The campaign used Spanish-language spear-phishing emails and financial or government-themed lures to deliver the malware.
Grandoreiro was first observed as a Windows-based banking trojan. It later evolved into a long-running malware operation associated with banking fraud.
SOCRadar published a report detailing Grandoreiro's phishing delivery, anti-analysis features, credential theft, browser hijacking, DNS over HTTPS, and DGA-based command-and-control resilience. The report also included a YARA rule attributed to Elastic Security and indicators of compromise such as hashes, domains, URLs, and IP addresses.
IBM X-Force reported that the latest Grandoreiro variants introduced major technical changes, including updated string decryption, a reworked domain generation algorithm, and Outlook-based email harvesting and phishing. The report said the malware now targeted more than 1,500 banking applications and websites across more than 60 countries.
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The **Grandoreiro** banking trojan has re-emerged in campaigns targeting Portuguese banks and organizations across Spain, Mexico, and Latin America, showing that the malware remains active despite earlier law-enforcement disruption. Researchers reported phishing-led delivery chains using ZIP archives, loaders disguised as PDFs, **DLL side-loading**, and malicious **VBS** scripts hosted through abused legitimate services. In earlier observed activity, the operators impersonated government entities such as the Attorney General's Office of Mexico City and Spain's Public Ministry to lure employees at manufacturing, automotive, machinery, and chemicals companies into opening malicious attachments. The latest variants use stronger evasion and persistence techniques, including binary padding to roughly **400MB**, CAPTCHA-based execution, Windows Registry persistence, geofencing, and anti-analysis checks. Once installed, Grandoreiro can steal credentials, log keystrokes, monitor the clipboard, enumerate antivirus products, cryptocurrency wallets, and e-banking applications, and display fake banking overlays, while blending command-and-control traffic through trusted cloud services including **Google Cloud**, **Microsoft Azure**, and **Amazon**. Brazilian police previously arrested suspects tied to Grandoreiro operations, but the renewed campaigns indicate the financially motivated group continues to operate across multiple countries.
Jun 29, 2026
Kaspersky reported that the **Grandoreiro** banking trojan has continued operating globally despite law-enforcement disruptions and arrests, expanding from targeting about **900 banks in 40 countries** in 2023 to roughly **1,700 banks and 276 crypto wallets across 45 countries and territories** in 2024. Telemetry recorded more than **150,000 blocked infection attempts** affecting over **30,000 users** worldwide between January and October 2024, underscoring the malware’s sustained scale and resilience. Recent Grandoreiro campaigns used phishing emails, malvertising, **MSI-based loaders**, **DLL sideloading**, oversized padded binaries, and **CAPTCHA-based sandbox evasion** to infect victims. Kaspersky said newer versions also introduced fragmented codebases, stronger encryption, three domain generation algorithms for command-and-control, and mouse-behavior tracking to evade fraud detection, while preserving core capabilities including remote machine control, credential theft, one-time-password harvesting through overlays, clipboard replacement for cryptocurrency theft, and fraudulent banking transactions; some legacy variants are now concentrating on targets in Mexico.
Jun 29, 2026
Grandoreiro has resurfaced in a new campaign targeting Latin America, with Mexico accounting for about 40% of observed detections and additional activity seen in Spain, Peru, Argentina, plus smaller clusters in Europe and North America. Researchers said the banking trojan is being delivered through a DLL sideloading chain that abuses the legitimate Duplicate Files Finder application alongside a malicious `mingwm10.dll`, allowing the malware to launch while hiding the program interface to reduce user suspicion. The malware uses a protected loader with extensive anti-analysis checks before reaching command-and-control infrastructure, including uptime validation, shortcut and process checks, VM artifact detection, geolocation filtering, and username or hostname screening. If a system passes those checks, Grandoreiro resolves its infrastructure through Google DNS-over-HTTPS and attempts to fetch a second-stage payload over TCP port `6432` using encrypted host-specific requests, underscoring how the operation has remained active and shifted toward stealthier, lower-volume tactics despite a major 2024 law-enforcement disruption.
Aug 27, 2026