{"id":573888,"date":"2026-08-19T15:20:08","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T15:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/573888\/"},"modified":"2026-08-19T15:20:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T15:20:08","slug":"grandoreiro-resurfaces-in-mexico-with-new-dll-sideloading-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/573888\/","title":{"rendered":"Grandoreiro Resurfaces in Mexico With New DLL Sideloading Campaign"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n\tGrandoreiro has resurfaced in a campaign targeting Latin American users, with Mexico accounting for 40% of observed detections and attackers using DLL sideloading to execute the banking trojan through legitimate software.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tThe Brazilian-origin malware remains active despite a major law-enforcement operation in January 2024 that disrupted parts of its infrastructure.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tAcronis\u2019 Threat Research Unit (TRU) observed the renewed campaign in May 2026, while telemetry from the last 30 days of June showed Mexico as the largest source of detected samples.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tThe findings add to previous Grandoreiro <a href=\"https:\/\/www.infosecurity-magazine.com\/news\/grandoreiro-banking-trojan-major\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">campaigns targeting Mexico<\/a> and the malware&#8217;s earlier <a href=\"https:\/\/www.infosecurity-magazine.com\/news\/grandoreiro-targets-spain\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">expansion into Spain.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\tGrandoreiro Abuses Legitimate Software<\/p>\n<p>\n\tThe latest campaign abused the legitimate Duplicate Files Finder application as part of a DLL sideloading chain. Attackers renamed the application and placed a malicious mingwm10.dll alongside legitimate dependencies, causing the trusted executable to load the malicious library.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tThe initial loader also used extensive anti-analysis checks. It looked for virtualization and sandbox artifacts, security and analysis tools, system characteristics and specific user and machine configurations before attempting to contact its command-and-control (C2) infrastructure.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tIt also checked the victim&#8217;s public IP address and geolocation, while traffic from several countries was blacklisted.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tAcronis said the malware&#8217;s initial delivery vector could not be confirmed, although an invoice-like ZIP filename and Grandoreiro&#8217;s historical distribution patterns led them to assess with moderate confidence that spam had been involved.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tThe malware used encrypted strings to complicate analysis and contacted its C2 infrastructure only after completing its environmental checks. The C2 server was offline during the researchers&#8217; analysis, but static examination indicated that the loader would attempt to retrieve a second-stage payload after establishing communication.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tMexico accounted for 40% of detections in the analyzed telemetry, followed by Spain at 17%, Peru at 13% and Argentina at 10%. Activity remained concentrated in Latin America, with smaller detection clusters in Europe and North America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Grandoreiro has resurfaced in a campaign targeting Latin American users, with Mexico accounting for 40% of observed detections&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":573889,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[111,139,69,145],"class_list":["post-573888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=573888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573888\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/573889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=573888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=573888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=573888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}