Of all men’s miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have no power.

That was something attributed to the Greek philosopher Herodotus, who lived in what is now Turkey and Italy more than 2400 years ago. It is a fitting name for a new kind of Android banking trojan that is making the rounds. The trojan works by inserting a small but randomly variable delay between keystrokes, to make them appear as to be typed by a (relatively poor) human typist. It has other features, such as being able to steal 2FA codes sent via SMS (yet another reason not to use this transport method), intercept everything that’s displayed on the screen, grab the lockscreen PIN or pattern, and install executable files. The malware looks like an ordinary mobile banking app but there is nothing ordinary about it.

But Herodotus isn’t the only bad news bear that is out there. How about the RedTiger malware that steals data by flooding targeted systems with hundreds of processes and random files to confuse forensic examiners. That essentially buries any warnings to make it harder for security personnel to figure out where the pony is in this massive alert pile. And another malware that goes by the name CoPhish — it hides Microsoft Copilot commands within phishing the HTML text of emails. That text is designed to not be displayed if you are just reading them in your browser or email client.

What these three attack methods show is that the bad guys are getting better at hiding in plain sight, using AI methods and more subtle mechanisms to distribute their malware and then try to remain out of sight for several months while the attacker moves about trying to document the soft center of your network that will be compromised.

So you have been warned. Pick a better MFA method than SMS texts to get your pin codes. (My favorite is Authy, but there are plenty of others.)  Make sure to carefully vet any downloaded app to your phone before you start using it, and at the install time, please pay attention to the warnings about what permissions it requires to ensure that it isn’t grabbing everything it can. And don’t reply to any text message involving money that comes out of the blue, whether from your bank, your long-lost cousin traveling abroad, or someone who is acting friendly (want to join me for dinner). It’s a jungle out there, and sadly an old Greek guy was spot on about how much we know but still don’t have any power to do anything about it.