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ThreatFabric reported that malware long grouped under the BRATA name is better understood as three separate Android banking malware families: the original BRATA, AmexTroll, and Copybara. The firm said AmexTroll and Copybara were active in parallel from late 2021 into 2022, share some development traits such as use of Basic4Android (B4A), and both support on-device fraud through screen streaming, abuse of Android AccessibilityService, and remote factory reset. But the two families diverge in targeting and delivery: AmexTroll expanded from Italy to nearly 50 financial institutions in Great Britain and Australia, including distribution through a Google Play dropper, while Copybara stayed focused on Italian banks and relied heavily on SMiShing and telephone-oriented attack delivery (TOAD).
Separate reporting tied Copybara and earlier BRATA activity to fraud operations that combine phishing pages, spoofed SMS messages, and follow-up phone calls to coach victims into installing malicious Android apps. In the Italian TOAD campaigns, phishing sites harvested account numbers, PINs, phone numbers, and other answers before operators called victims and pushed a fake security app that downloaded the malware payload. Once installed, the malware enabled remote actions including opening apps, clicking, swiping, entering text, sending SMS, capturing screenshots, overlaying screens, intercepting one-time passwords, and validating stolen credentials for fraudulent banking transactions; newer Copybara samples could also generate fake forms on-device to collect more data. Researchers said the campaigns reflect a broader shift in mobile banking malware toward real-time, on-device fraud.
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13 events from the most recent confirmed update back to the earliest known activity.
ThreatFabric observed the two malware families being distributed simultaneously through different channels during the first half of 2022. This parallel activity supported its conclusion that they were distinct operations.
ThreatFabric said it first observed Copybara samples in November 2021. The malware was later linked to Italian-bank fraud campaigns using TOAD and downloader apps.
Cleafy detected a new BRATA variant in June 2021 and later tied customer incidents to the same campaign. The operation used spoofed bank SMS, phishing pages, malicious Android apps, and follow-up calls to facilitate banking fraud.
ThreatFabric noted that reports at the end of 2021 described a new strain of BRATA targeting Italy with two variants. ThreatFabric later assessed these were actually separate families rather than the original BRATA.
ThreatFabric said Copybara had also been active since the second half of 2021, focused on Italian banking targets. It later became more fully visible in 2022.
ThreatFabric said AmexTroll had been active since the second half of 2021, initially using limited test samples against Italian institutions before moving to more refined campaigns.
ThreatFabric reported that it observed no new samples of the original BRATA after the end of 2019, marking the apparent end of that family’s known activity.
ThreatFabric said the original BRATA malware first appeared in mid-2019 in campaigns targeting victims in Brazil by abusing a WhatsApp vulnerability. The malware used Android Accessibility Services to keylog victim data.
ThreatFabric reported that newer Copybara versions could dynamically generate fake input forms on infected devices to collect additional victim data. It also linked parts of the campaign infrastructure to a separate SMS-stealing trojan used to intercept banking one-time passwords.
ThreatFabric investigated a fraud campaign targeting customers of multiple Italian banks using phishing sites and telephone-oriented attack delivery to install Copybara. Victims submitted banking data on fake sites and were then called and coached into installing a downloader that fetched the malware payload.
In its August 2022 report, ThreatFabric assessed that malware commonly grouped as BRATA should be separated into the original BRATA, AmexTroll, and Copybara. It concluded that AmexTroll and Copybara differ in implementation, targeting, and distribution and may be operated by different actors.
ThreatFabric observed a recent AmexTroll campaign delivered through a dropper on Google Play that targeted institutions in Australia and Great Britain. The campaign was live only for a few days and achieved thousands of downloads in those geolocations.
ThreatFabric reported that the actor behind AmexTroll publicly advertised the malware in a beta rental scheme after previously operating it privately. After that announcement, the number of samples increased along with impersonation of more applications, including Brazilian institutions and generic security apps.
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