Threat actors are increasingly mimicking legitimate applications like Skype, Adobe Reader, and VLC Player as a means to abuse trust relationships and increase the likelihood of a successful social engineering attack.

Other most impersonated legitimate apps by icon include 7-Zip, TeamViewer, CCleaner, Microsoft Edge, Steam, Zoom, and WhatsApp, an analysis from VirusTotal has revealed.

“One of the simplest social engineering tricks we’ve seen involves making a malware sample seem a legitimate program,” VirusTotal said in a Tuesday report. “The icon of these programs is a critical feature used to convince victims that these programs are legitimate.”

Security researchers found a new service called Dark Utilities that provides an easy and inexpensive way for cybercriminals to set up a command and control (C2) center for their malicious operations.

The Dark Utilities service provides threat actors a platform that supports Windows, Linux, and Python-based payloads, and eliminates the effort associated with implementing a C2 communication channel.

A C2 server is how adversaries control their malware in the wild, sending out commands, configurations and new payloads, and receiving data collected from compromised systems.

One of the primary methods used by malware distributors to infect devices is by deceiving people into downloading and running malicious files, and to achieve this deception, malware authors are using a variety of tricks.

Some of these tricks include masquerading malware executables as legitimate applications, signing them with valid certificates, or compromising trustworthy sites to use them as distribution points.

According to VirusTotal, a security platform for scanning uploaded files for malware, some of these tricks are happening on a much larger scale than initially thought.