Researchers found that hackers are turning to Discord to spread malware, such as password-hijacking and Discord chat bot APIs.
But the greatest percentage of the malware we found have a focus on credential and personal information theft, a wide variety of stealer malware as well as more versatile RATs. The threat actors behind these operations employed social engineering to spread credential-stealing malware, then use the victims’ harvested Discord credentials to target additional Discord users.
Check It Out: Hackers Increasingly Using Discord to Spread Malware
Andrew:
Bad guys and state actors (too often redundant terminology) have been studying platforms like FB (thank you, Mark Zuckerberg, yet again) and Google spaces or whatever it was called, and using machine learning to predict highly successful exploits based on predictable and even stereotyped behaviours. This includes figuring out classes of users likely to lead to credentials of high value – the same analyses used to analyse social interactions to predict potential ‘super-spreaders’ prior to an epidemic or pandemic by social scientists and epidemiologists in order to prevent bad outcome.
Except, it’s bad guys looking for the most parsimonious pathway to high-impact credentials in order to spread bad outcome.
Think of it as dystopic epidemiology; efficient malfeasance.