An Android banking Trojan has resurfaced with a new variant that demonstrates a significant evolution toward full device compromise and persistent access, putting at risk not only mobile users but also the enterprise resources accessed from those devices.
ToxicPanda 2.0 expands substantially on its predecessor, adding 167 remote commands and broadening its targeting from 16 financial institutions to 349 banking, e-wallet, and cryptocurrency applications, according to recent research from Zimperium zLabs. The Trojan also adds more sophisticated techniques for compromising Android devices, including privilege escalation and shell-level access through Android’s Wireless Debugging and Android Debug Bridge (ADB), as well as capabilities designed to maintain long-term persistence on infected devices.
ToxicPanda first emerged in November 2024, when it was observed taking over Android devices and facilitating fraudulent mobile banking transactions in Latin America, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Its expansion into 16 countries and the addition of significantly more functionality indicate a more mature and capable threat than the initial version researchers encountered.
Overall, the updated version “demonstrates a significant expansion in targeting scope and capabilities,” Zimperium zLabs researcher Vishnu Pratapagiri wrote in the report.
ToxicPanda Grows Up
One notable change in ToxicPanda 2.0 is its distribution infrastructure. Researchers observed samples being delivered through Amazon Web Services-hosted buckets, suggesting that the operators are leveraging legitimate cloud infrastructure to distribute the malware.
The variant also introduces a lock-screen overlay designed to capture credentials entered by the victim. The capability potentially expands the Trojan’s impact beyond banking fraud by giving attackers access to credentials that can help unlock the device and potentially gain access to other services.
“The device this Trojan takes over is the same device that approves push MFA prompts, holds passkeys, and runs the banking and wallet apps for the employee and the company both,” says Bradley Smith, senior vice president and deputy chief information security officer (CISO) at BeyondTrust. “When malware can steal the lock screen PIN through an overlay and then reset the device password through admin privileges, the attacker walks away with the identity anchor and every account standing behind it.”
ToxicPanda 2.0 also abuses Android’s Wireless Debugging capability, introduced in Android 11, as a mechanism for privilege escalation. Wireless Debugging is normally intended for developers who want to connect to an Android device through ADB without a physical USB connection.
ToxicPanda automates that process using Android’s Accessibility Services. It can enable Developer Options, turn on Wireless Debugging, extract the temporary ADB pairing code, and complete the pairing process with the device’s ADB service, according to Zimperium.
The result is particularly significant because the malware obtains shell-level access, allowing it to execute commands directly on the device. From there, threat actors can grant themselves additional permissions, weaken operating-system restrictions, enable components, and establish persistence. In effect, the malware is abusing legitimate Android administration functionality to move from application-level capabilities toward deeper control of the device itself.
A Broader Enterprise Threat
ToxicPanda 2.0’s evolution reflects a wider trend among banking Trojans. These threats increasingly go beyond compromising individual banking applications for financial gain and instead seek persistent control of the underlying device.
That shift creates a potential enterprise security problem. A compromised employee smartphone can simultaneously serve as a banking device, an authentication device, a repository for passkeys, and a gateway to corporate applications and services.
The risk therefore extends beyond the financial applications directly targeted by the malware. If attackers can establish persistent control of the device, they may have opportunities to interfere with authentication, steal credentials, manipulate applications, or use the compromised endpoint as a stepping stone toward other enterprise resources.
“As mobile banking threats like ToxicPanda become increasingly sophisticated, conventional signature-based security layers are no longer sufficient to protect enterprise mobile endpoints,” Pratapagiri wrote. Zimperium recommended comprehensive, multilayered protection capable of disrupting the malware at multiple stages of its attack chain.
For enterprises, BeyondTrust’s Smith recommends several controls to mitigate the expanded capabilities of banking Trojans like ToxicPanda 2.0. Organizations should block sideloading on devices enrolled in corporate identity systems and treat Accessibility Service grants as privileged-access events that should be logged and reviewed, he says.
Organizations should also alert when Developer Options or Wireless Debugging is enabled on managed mobile devices. “That is a sign your mobile device management can already see,” Smith says, “and few are watching for it.”
