Malware remains one of the biggest cyberthreats your business needs to watch out for. In fact, cybersecurity company Kaspersky discovered an average of 500,000 malicious files per day in 2025. Even more concerning, spyware, backdoor, and password stealer detections are surging at an alarming rate.
Normally, malware is spread through phishing emails, malicious advertisements, and exploit kits. But now, they're leveraging the social media platform LinkedIn to infect systems.
In this blog post, we’ll break down how this campaign works and identify practical steps to protect your business. Plus, we’ll tackle how Techmedics’ managed security services can bolster your cybersecurity posture.
New research published by ReliaQuest and reported by The Hacker News found that cybercriminals are exploiting private messages on LinkedIn to propagate malicious payloads and deploy remote access malware.
The attack starts with the threat actors approaching high-value individuals like IT administrators and executives on the social platform. Once trust is established, they trick victims into downloading a malicious RAR file, a compressed archive that bundles one or more files into a single package. The archive contains four components:
The malware payload sequence begins when the victim launches the PDF reader application, which then sideloads the DLL file. DLL sideloading is the act of tricking a legitimate application into loading a malicious DLL file instead of the intended one. This is a common technique by cybercriminals to evade detection and conceal signs of malicious activity.
Next, the sideloaded DLL is used to deploy the Python interpreter on the victim’s computer. Python is then configured to automatically run every time the computer starts and runs hidden instructions directly in the device’s memory, meaning traditional antivirus may miss the malware if it’s primarily executing in memory.
Finally, the malware attempts to communicate with an external server, granting the threat actors remote access to the compromised system. This allows them to escalate access privileges, move laterally across networks, and exfiltrate sensitive company data.
Some key insights businesses can learn from this trend include:
Traditional malware drops obvious files onto a victim’s hard drive. In the LinkedIn situation, however, it ran directly in the computer’s memory, leaving little to no evidence of infection.
To the user, everything might look normal at first. Even IT teams relying on signature-based detection may miss it, as there’s no clear file signature to scan. Meanwhile, the malware is already executing malicious instructions in the background.
To protect your business from this type of threat, deploy endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions for real-time monitoring and alerts on endpoints. Additionally, memory scanning can detect threats hiding in your systems’ memory. Finally, regularly check for unusual connections on your network and block them promptly.
Many businesses don’t enforce the same security and visibility safeguards on social media sites like LinkedIn and Facebook as they do with email. This makes them a lucrative delivery channel for malware and phishing campaigns.
As such, organizations must recognize social media as an important attack vector and extend their cyber defenses beyond email security solutions. Some measures you can enforce include:
If a program or tool is “signed,” it means the developer has attached a digital signature that verifies its authenticity and integrity.
But just because a tool is legitimate or signed, doesn’t mean it’s safe. In the aforementioned LinkedIn attack, the threat actors used an open-source PDF reader and a Python interpreter — tools regularly used by business users and technical teams. Because these are typically regarded as safe files, they might become undetected by traditional antivirus software.
Given this, it’s ideal to shift to behavioral monitoring. Instead of looking at what the tool is, observe what it is doing. For instance, if a penetration testing tool is suddenly running on a sales manager’s laptop at 3 a.m., that’s a clear red flag that your security team should address immediately.
As malware and phishing attacks become more sophisticated, your business needs a partner that can always keep you one step ahead. That’s where a managed security services provider like Techmedics comes in. We secure your systems and data through the following services:
We employ local engineers in Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, helping you benefit from personalized, onsite support and ensuring security issues are promptly addressed.
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