Even though cloud computing isn’t all that new anymore, learning how to use it effectively can be overwhelming. It’s unfortunately very easy to make mistakes.

The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the massive increase in using cloud computing services. As the world progresses through its online evolution, cloud computing services have become more of a necessity. However, along with businesses, cybercriminals have also seen this virtualization as a means of snagging more prey. The rapid increase in cloud computing services has made organizations face novel security challenges.

BazarLoader (sometimes referred to as BazaLoader) is a popular downloader among criminals, used to distribute multiple malicious payloads including Ryuk and Conti ransomware. According to a recent report by Phishlabs, during Q3 2021 this malware accounted for 24.7% of all attacks, earning the unwelcome accolade of being the most common payload.

67% of the malware downloads Netskope blocks come from popular cloud applications being abused by attackers. One of the services commonly abused by threat actors is Discord, which is abused to host malware such as TroubleGrabber using public attachment URLs. In this blog post, we will analyze a recent DBatLoader (a.k.a. ModiLoader) sample that uses this technique on Discord to deliver a malware known as Warzone (a.k.a. Ave Maria), a Remote Access Trojan created in 2018.

Over the last 18 months, cloud application use has skyrocketed, with the average organisation with 500-2,000 employees now using 805 different cloud applications. This is a staggering level of new risk for CISOs to get their heads around. At the same time that cloud use has grown, so too have the efforts of malicious actors to target cloud applications which are all too often poorly secured and present a constant opportunity of unsecured data to compromise.