Third-Party Chat Apps Being Leveraged for Malware Operations

By Marcos Colon

Threat actors are taking advantage of third-party chat applications to conduct malicious activity and spread malware.

A new research report by security experts at Trend Micro has found that chat platform APIs belonging to applications like Slack, Discord, and Telegram are being turned into a command-and-control (C&C) infrastructure to control malware.

As part of the study, researchers examined chat programs, self-hosted chat clients, and social networks, to determine if the platforms were currently being leveraged to host malware, or if the platform APIs could be leveraged as a C&C server.

The results indicate that these popular platforms being leveraged by businesses as communication tools (77% of Fortune 100 companies use Slack) can be taken advantage of by attackers to communicate with their malware, and ultimately compromise employee machines.