More than a hundred banks and financial institutions across the world have been infected with a dangerous sophisticated, memory-based malware that’s almost undetectable, researchers warned.
Newly published report by the Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab indicates that hackers are targeting banks, telecommunication companies, and government organizations in 40 countries, including the US, South America, Europe and Africa, with Fileless malware that resides solely in the memory of the compromised computers.

Fileless malware is a piece of nasty software that does not copy any files or folder to the hard drive in order to get executed. Instead, payloads are directly injected into the memory of running processes, and the malware executes in the system’s RAM.

Since the malware runs in the memory, the memory acquisition becomes useless once the system gets rebooted, making it difficult for digital forensic experts to find the traces of the malware.The attack was initially discovered by a bank’s security team after they found a copy of Meterpreter — an in-memory component of Metasploit — inside the physical memory of a Microsoft domain controller.The cyber crooks also used Microsoft’s NETSH networking tool to set up a proxy tunnel for communicating with the command and control (C&C) server and remotely controlling the infected host.