AsyncRAT seeds family of more than 30 remote access trojans

AsyncRAT, the most prevalent remote access trojan observed in the wild, hasspawned more than 30 forks and variantsthat increase the impact of the open-source malware, making it a popular and sometimes disguised tool of choice for cybercriminals, ESET researchers said in a report released Tuesday. The open source remote access tool, which was first released on GitHub in 2019, shows up consistently in cyberattacks, most commonly distributed through spam campaigns, phishing and malicious ads, but also via exploited software vulnerabilities in more targeted operations, Nikola Knežević, malware researcher at ESET, told CyberScoop. “Over the past year alone, we have detected activity consistent with tens of thousands of unique infected machines associated with AsyncRAT and its variants,” Knežević said. AsyncRAT remains the most widely deployed, but other variants have been widely distributed, accounting for a significant number of attacks linked to the tree of remote access trojans. ESET tel...