Abusing Telegram API for C2 communications
According to the researchers, C2 communication being established by the malware could easily be mistaken for legitimate Telegram API deployments, making its detection difficult.
“Although the use of cloud apps as C2 channels is not something we see every day, it’s a very effective method used by attackers not only because there’s no need to implement a whole infrastructure for it, making attackers’ lives easier, but also because it’s very difficult, from defender perspective, to differentiate what is a normal user using an API and what is a C2 communication,” researchers noted.
The backdoor uses Telegram as its C2 mechanism by using an open-source Go package to interact with it, the blog post added. It initially creates a bot instance using Telegram’s BotFather feature which enables creating, managing, and configuring Telegram Bots.
