Threat Actors Get Crafty With Emojis to Escape Detection

When 🤖 means "bot available," 🧰 signifies "toolkit," or 💰💰💰 translates to "big ransom," bad actors can evade filters and keep it all on the down-low.

Emojis have become more to threat actors than just embellishments in digital messages.

On social media platforms like Telegram and Discord and across underground forums and communities, many are using them increasingly to signal, obfuscate, and coordinate with others around the world.

"Emoji usage reflects a broader shift in how threat actors communicate toward faster, more visual, and more adaptive forms of interaction," Flashpoint said in an analysis this week.

Organizations that incorporate emoji analysis into their threat intelligence flows can better detect emerging campaigns, identify high-value malicious activity, attribute and track threat actors and interpret their intent. "While emojis alone are not decisive indicators, they provide an additional layer of signal that can strengthen overall analysis," the threat intelligence firm said.

Threat actors are increasingly leveraging the ubiquity and benign appearance of emojis in different activities, like concealing command-and-control (C2) communications to obfuscate attacks and sneak malware past defenses.

In one notable campaign, Pakistan-linked APT group UTA0137 used " Disgomoji " malware that translated simple emojis sent over Discord into operational commands. Examples of the symbolic triggers in Disgomoji included use of a camera emoji to capture screenshots, a fire emoji to exfiltrate files, and a skull emoji to terminate processes. Others have noted the emergence of emoji-based C2 operations, where common emojis are repurposed to execute commands, confirm task completion, and orchestrate data movement across compromised systems. In addition, emojis have also appeared in malware code and " emoji smuggling " techniques, where threat actors have embedded malicious payloads in harmless looking emojis to bypass security controls.

The use of emojis for communications serves two purposes for threat actors, according to Flashpoint. Using emojis in place of keywords associated with fraud techniques and other malicious activity allows threat actors to bypass basic keyword filters and reduces visibility in automated environments. Second, emojis enable adversaries to communicate more effectively in high volume environments like Telegram fraud channels, phishing and carding communities, and illicit marketplaces. Importantly, emojis enable more effective multi-lingual communications in the global ecosystems in which cybercriminals often operate.

Flashpoint's analysis showed threat actors most commonly using emojis in communications related to financial fraud and monetization, access, credentials, and compromise, and to signal tooling and service capabilities. For instance, a threat actor might use a card symbol to indicate stolen payment card data or carding activity, a bag of money to indicate profit or payouts, a key for access credentials, and an open lock for a successful breach. "These symbols often appear in sales posts, fraud logs, or success claims, helping actors quickly identify opportunities tied to financial gain," Flashpoint said.

Other use cases include emojis as a vehicle for communicating a threat actor's capabilities: a robot to signal availability of a bot service or automation tools, a gear cog to indicate configuration, setup, or infrastructure services and a toolbox for bundled services and toolkits. Then there are the emojis for indicating a target category or a region, like a building emoji to indicate a corporate or enterprise target and country flags for specific geographic targeting.

When such emojis are used in conjunction with slang, abbreviations, and multilingual phrasing, it "creates a layered form of obfuscation that complicates large-scale monitoring efforts," Flashpoint noted.

On the flip side, because emoji usage tends to fall into specific recognizable patterns over time, they provide an opportunity for threat hunters and researchers to identify and track threat actors and groups. Common patterns include the same combination of emojis in sales posts for instance, or the same formatting styles and message structures. Such patterns enable tracking and linking a threat actor's activity across different channels, platforms, and aliases.

Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld, where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the publication. Over the course of his 20-year career at Computerworld, Jai also covered a variety of other technology topics, including big data, Hadoop, Internet of Things, e-voting, and data analytics. Prior to Computerworld, Jai covered technology issues for The Economic Times in Bangalore, India. Jai has a Master's degree in Statistics and lives in Naperville, Ill.

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