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Security researchers reported sustained infostealer activity centered on Lumma Stealer and Vidar, with operators distributing malware through fake CAPTCHA lures, pirated software downloads, phishing emails, and poisoned search results. AhnLab said July 2026 campaigns commonly delivered Remus, LummaC2, ACRStealer, and Vidar via cracked software hosted on services including mega.nz, Amazon S3, and MediaFire, while Microsoft and other well-known brands were frequently impersonated. TrendAI separately described fake verification pages that trick victims into pasting malicious commands into the Windows Run dialog, leading to multistage infections that deployed Lumma Stealer, Rhadamanthys, AsyncRAT, XWorm, and Emmenhtal.
The campaigns relied on evasive execution chains using mshta.exe, obfuscated PowerShell, DLL sideloading, temporary Chromium profiles, and even MP3 files carrying injected JavaScript to load payloads in memory and communicate with attacker-controlled infrastructure. Researchers also said Vidar Stealer 2.0 expanded its appeal with a rewritten codebase, multithreaded theft, stronger anti-analysis, and broader credential and wallet theft, helping it gain momentum as some criminals moved away from Lumma after a doxxing incident and Telegram account compromise disrupted Lumma operations and eroded trust in its malware-as-a-service ecosystem. The reporting indicates that infostealer operators are rapidly shifting delivery methods and malware families while continuing to target both enterprises and individual users for credential theft and follow-on attacks.
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During July 2026, AhnLab ASEC observed infostealers including Remus, LummaC2, ACRStealer, and Vidar commonly distributed as cracks and illegal software via services such as mega.nz, Amazon S3, and MediaFire. The report also documented MSBuild-based delivery chains and email campaigns delivering MassLogger and AgentTesla.
On October 6, 2025, the developer known as Loadbaks announced Vidar Stealer v2.0 on underground forums. The update was described as a major rewrite from C++ to C with multithreading, stronger anti-analysis, and a polymorphic builder.
On September 17, 2025, a Lumma Stealer representative reportedly posted on an underground forum that the operation's official Telegram accounts had been stolen. The compromise further disrupted communications with customers and operational coordination.
As Lumma Stealer became unstable and lost support, customers were observed discussing alternatives and migrating mainly to Vidar and StealC. Trend telemetry also showed an upward trend in Vidar file sourcing from September 13 to October 9, 2025.
Trend Micro telemetry began registering a steady decline in Lumma Stealer sample detections and command-and-control activity in early September 2025. The drop also reflected a significant reduction in targeted endpoints.
A targeted underground exposure and doxxing campaign against alleged Lumma Stealer operators began in late August 2025 and ran through early October 2025. The campaign reportedly exposed personal and operational details of five individuals on a site called "Lumma Rats."
Lumma Stealer was targeted by a coordinated international law-enforcement takedown attempt in May 2025. The operation later recovered its infrastructure and customer engagement.
Vidar originated in 2018 as an information stealer on Russian-language underground forums and initially leveraged the Arkei stealer source code.
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Threat actors distributed **LummaStealer** through two social-engineering chains that targeted users seeking pirated software or attempting to pass fake verification prompts. One campaign, active since at least December 2024, used GitHub repositories, cracked-software forums, URL shorteners, and posts on platforms including Facebook, Devpost, TikTok, and Chromium issues to push victims toward malicious JavaScript. That script suppressed referrer leakage, captured page-title context, and redirected users through intermediary domains on `.cfd`, `.click`, `.info`, and `.xyz` before serving password-protected archives from **MEGA** that extracted a LummaStealer executable. A separate delivery chain used counterfeit **CAPTCHA** pages to trick users into opening the Windows Run dialog and pasting a PowerShell command that fetched follow-on instructions from a shortened URL, downloaded a ZIP archive from `vultrcdn[.]com`, and launched a disguised `Setup.exe`. The infection sequence relied on legitimate-looking or signed binaries such as a revoked `Mergecap.exe`, a renamed `BtDaemon.exe` as `StrCmp.exe`, `more.com`, and `searchindexer.exe`, indicating DLL sideloading and process injection for evasion. Investigators observed outbound traffic to suspicious domains including `accentypastedw[.]store` and `onefreex.com`, while analysis of the final payload showed infostealer behavior including scheduled task creation, cryptographic API use, timestamp tampering, and file-permission changes.
Jun 29, 2026
**Lumma Stealer** continued to expand as a prolific malware-as-a-service infostealer, with researchers reporting sharp growth in detections and increasingly diverse delivery chains. Microsoft attributed the malware and its command-and-control ecosystem to **Storm-2477**, which operates Lumma for affiliates that build payloads and run campaigns through a management panel. ESET reported Lumma detections surged **369%** in late 2024, while additional reporting from Netskope and other researchers highlighted ongoing **fake CAPTCHA/ClickFix** lures and fresh payload variants designed to evade detection. Observed campaigns used multiple infection paths, including phishing, malvertising, compromised websites, trojanized software, abuse of trusted platforms such as GitHub, and delivery by other malware including **DanaBot**. Microsoft described an early-April campaign that combined **EtherHiding** hosted through Binance Smart Chain smart contracts with ClickFix social engineering, and an April 7 campaign targeting Canadian organizations that used **Prometheus TDS** redirection plus `mshta` and PowerShell stages to deploy Lumma alongside **Xworm**. The malware was reported stealing credentials and cryptocurrency wallets, using process injection and hollowing, and relying on layered infrastructure with hardcoded domains and fallback channels through **Steam** and **Telegram** behind Cloudflare; Microsoft said its disruption effort led to the takedown, suspension, or blocking of about **2,300 malicious domains** tied to Lumma operations.
Aug 15, 2026
Researchers documented multiple **Lumma Stealer** infection chains that begin with fake CAPTCHA or verification pages and trick Windows users into launching malicious PowerShell from the Run dialog. In one case, victims reached the lure through malicious pop-up ads on a pirated-content site; in another, a page at `you-checked.com` copied a hidden command to the clipboard that fetched follow-on payloads from domains including `ferrydero.com` and `fill-tomap.com`. The malware family, also known as **LummaC2**, is a malware-as-a-service infostealer designed to steal browser data, credentials, cryptocurrency wallets, session tokens, and other sensitive information. The observed chains used `mshta.exe`, obfuscated HTA and JavaScript, layered PowerShell stages, and multiple packed .NET components to retrieve and execute the final payload while evading analysis. Analysts reported AES and XOR decryption, SmartAssembly and .NET Reactor packing, AMSI bypass attempts, anti-sandbox and anti-debugging checks, Windows Defender evasion, and cleanup steps such as deleting downloaded archives after execution. One intrusion created files under `C:\ProgramData`, contacted `iplogger.co`, and launched an infostealer executable named `jegule.exe`, while another sample ultimately communicated through `winhttp.dll` and `ws2_32.dll`; investigators also recovered additional URLs from a Steam Community profile using ROT15 decoding.
Jul 7, 2026