This trojan malware is being used to steal passwords and spread ransomware
A newly discovered hacking campaign by a 'sophisticated cyber criminal operation' is targeting healthcare and education organisations with custom-built, Python-based trojan malware which gives attackers almost control of Windows systems with the ability to monitor actions and steal sensitive data. Malicious functions of the remote access trojan , dubbed PyXie RAT, include keylogging, credential harvesting, recording video, cookie theft, the ability to perform man-in-the-middle attacks and the capability to deploy other forms of malware onto infected systems. However, traces of the attacks have been found and detailed by cyber security researchers at Blackberry Cylance, who named the malware PyXie because of the way its compiled code uses a '.pyx' file extension instead of the '.pyc' typically associated with Python. A third stage of the multi-level download sees PyXie RAT leverage something known in the code as 'Cobalt Mode' which connects to a command and control server as well as downloading the final payload.