SharpCovertTube – Covert Command Execution Via YouTube

SharpCovertTube is a program created to control Windows systems remotely by uploading videos to Youtube.

The program monitors a Youtube channel until a video is uploaded, decodes the QR code from the thumbnail of the uploaded video and executes a command.

The QR codes in the videos can use cleartext or AES-encrypted values.

It has two versions, binary and service binary, and it includes a Python script to generate the malicious videos. Its purpose is to serve as a persistence method using only web requests to the Google API.

Usage

Run the listener in your Windows system:

It will check the Youtube channel every a specific amount of time (10 minutes by default) until a new video is uploaded. In this case, we upload “whoami.avi” from the folder example-videos:

After finding there is a new video in the channel, it decodes the QR code from the video thumbnail, executes the command and the response is base64-encoded and exfiltrated using DNS:

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Varshini

Tamil has a great interest in the fields of Cyber Security, OSINT, and CTF projects. Currently, he is deeply involved in researching and publishing various security tools with Kali Linux Tutorials, which is quite fascinating.