Phishers Want You to Have a Coke and a Drive-by

Posted on July 31, 2010 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

As recently as a few months ago, malware distributors went to what looked like great lengths to craft complex, sophisticated Web pages designed to trick visitors into believing they were visiting a page with an embedded video and — oops! — you need to update your copy of Adobe Flash in order to view it.

Well, those days of hard work seem to have faded into memory. All we’re left now is this.

In a recent attack that came to my attention, the guys behind the attack didn’t bother to build a sophisticated Web page. Well, nothing along the lines of pages we’ve seen before, with cool graphics, slick design, or interesting programming. In fact, they hardly built a Web page at all.

In this case, the unknown person or people created an HTML file that loads someone else’s graphic, which happens to be a warning about an outdated version of Flash, that is located elsewhere. Specifically, they load a graphic that just happens to be hosted on the Coca-Cola company‘s Web server. This isn’t a site hack against the Coke people — the graphic is probably legitimate, considering how Flash-heavy the Website is — just an example of how pathologically lazy or incompetent some malware distributors can be.

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Starcraft 2 Launch Day Piracy Infects Eager Gamers

Posted on July 29, 2010 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

While some members of our Threat Research group are attending talks at the Black Hat Briefings, the rest of the team is back at our offices, hard at work watching for novel threats. That’s good news for gamers, and bad news for malware distributors who might try to take advantage of a confluence of events where many elite members of the security community are temporarily turned away from monitors while they attend the conference. I received a warning about one potential threat facing gamers who might turn to piracy to get a copy of Blizzard’s new real-time-strategy game, Starcraft II.

Apparently, there are a flood of torrents where gamers can download purportedly pirated versions of SC2. While your less ethical gamer might cheer this news, you might be less pleased to find out that some of the SC2 torrents appear to bring along a side order of malware. One of the torrents, for example, touted as a custom game launcher, drops the Zbot keylogger Trojan—albeit a variant we can easily detect and remove.

While this isn’t exactly new, we’re finding that the incredible demand for this game is driving malware distributors to supply something that looks like what the gamers want. We’ll keep an eye on this trend, and update the post if necessary with more details as they become available.

And if you want a copy of the game, just go out and buy it. It may not be the most thrifty use of your money, but it’s the ethical thing to do, and the safest way to get a copy of the game.

(Starcraft 2 logo courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment)

“Fingerprint” Helps Identify Malware Authors

Posted on July 29, 2010 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

The Threat Research group sat in on a talk by HBGary CEO Greg Hoglund yesterday where the regular speaker discussed some research he’s been doing over the past year that he hopes will help connect malware samples to known groups of malware creators. While that sounds promising for law enforcement, it’s actually not as helpful for tracking down originators of malware for prosecution as it is for security researchers to preliminarily group and classify the masses of outwardly-dissimilar Trojans we see every day.

In most conventional methods of classification, researchers look for programmatic similarities or behavioral characteristics as a way to group similar pieces of malware into definitions, which then simplify the task of an antivirus tool to clean up an infection. In Hoglund’s talk, he proposed another set of criteria antimalware researchers can use to make these kinds of classifications: the “tool marks” left behind inside of malware samples as a result of compiling tools, languages, and even sloppy coding habits employed by malware creators.

On a technical level, Webroot’s Threat Research team has been using these “tool marks” as guides for some time when they perform manual analysis of malicious files. Hoglund’s talk introduced a tool he created, called Fingerprint, which can process a malware file and, in an automated fashion, provide malware researchers with simplified output they can then add to a database. With a sufficiently large sample set, surprisingly good clustering seems to appear, as shown in the photograph above, which is a snapshot of one of Hoglund’s slides.

While the characteristic “tool marks” alone are probably not sufficient to establish that an arbitrary, unknown file is malicious, it can be a good indicator that the unknown file is related — possibly in several significant ways — to files that have been established to be malicious. It is this predictive ability of the fingerprint that may be its greatest strengths…at least, until the malware authors catch on, and strip this identifiable information out of their files. For the meantime, however, laziness on the part of malware creators, and the difficulty of completely re-coding new malware, means identifiable tool marks should persist for a while, which means this fingerprinting method may remain effective for some time.

Weird Malware on Display at Black Hat

Posted on July 28, 2010 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

I’m at the Black Hat Briefings this week, the annual confab of the best and brightest in computer security, catching up on the trends and tricks malware authors and data thieves employ. I just saw an impressive demo by a pair of security researchers who took a deep dive into the behaviors of four pieces of highly targeted malware.

The researchers, Nicholas Percoco and Jibran Ilyas of Trustwave, ran a live demonstration of four Trojans designed to steal sensitive information and surreptitiously exfiltrate that data to the criminals. Three of the Trojans had been found installed on the servers of retail businesses, and capture credit card information — including the magnetic stripe data recorded by point-of-sale devices (ie., cash registers). The fourth Trojan, found on the computers of a large military contractor, was designed to steal any files in the My Documents folder, as well as any saved passwords on the system.

Of note was the highly targeted nature of the Trojans. In the case of the military contractor, for example, the criminals had obviously done their research, because the attack had targeted several high-level executives within the firm. According to the researchers, the attack started when a maliciously crafted Adobe PDF file was emailed only to the executives in a forged message that appeared to come from the CEO of the company. The forged message even included the CEO’s customized mail “signature” and the message text sounded convincingly similar to the language the CEO might have used.

Most importantly, all four Trojans did an outstanding job of remaining undetected for a significant period of time, which gave them more time to get the job done. Although one Trojan, which used a rootkit driver, had a tendency to “blue screen” their test machines, even a crash might not alert a victim that their computer hosts an infection. After all, Windows can crash for all kinds of reasons, and a crash isn’t necessarily an indication of a malware infection.

I’m looking forward to seeing more talks from other researchers over the course of the coming week. Of particular interest is a talk being given by Greg Hoglund about identifying the perpetrators of malware infections and even the creator(s) of widely distributed types of malware.

Beware Spam With HTML Attachments

Posted on July 20, 2010 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

When it comes to spam messages, conventional wisdom dictates that you shouldn’t follow links or call phone numbers in the message, order products from the spammer, or open files attached to the email. We all should know by now that you should never open attached executable files, and spam filters now treat all .exe files as suspicious. When spammers began flooding inboxes with .zip files containing executables, we caught on pretty quickly as well.

But HTML isn’t executable — it’s just plain text — so does that mean it’s safe to open attachments when they’re just HTML files? Hell no! Case in point: this doozy that came through our spam bucket last week.

The message subject reads Your Funds Will Be Transfered and the body helpfully informs the recipient that I am able to complete the funds transfer late night — I hope that doesn’t mean someone sent Jimmy Fallon $28,126 from my bank account. It continues, Copies of the payment is being attached, and the message indeed has an attachment named Copies of the payment.htm which I can open and…

…uh oh. That’s where the trouble begins.

The end result: Three pieces of malware installed; Two password-stealing copies of the Zbot phishing trojan, and a remote-access backdoor to boot. Considering Zbot’s propensity for stealing bank account logins and other sensitive credentials, I suppose the subject line was correct after all. Your funds will be transferred. Just not where you thought.

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Blog Comment Spam Points to Drive-By Site

Posted on July 9, 2010 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

I just want to take a moment to thank the malware author who posted a spam comment to the Webroot Threat Blog blog the other day. You guys make my job so easy.

The spam comment, which reads Hello. I the beginner. I wish to show to you,scandal story and links to a drive-by download site, is a tremendous help to our researchers, who are always on the lookout for new threats.

Of course, the malware distributor could have employed a more effective hook to convince someone to click a link than the one he used.

The link claims to point to a page hosted on the free Blogspot blog site to a nude video — not of Paris Hilton, Venus Williams, or Erin Andrews — but of…Diane Sawyer, the respected, award-winning anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight.

“Diane Sawyer Nude” — seriously? News anchor porn? Whatever happened to malware authors touting nude photos of starlets as an enticement?
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Ransomware App Asks Victims to Pay a Phone Bill

Posted on July 8, 2010 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

Ransomware is nothing new, but a Ukrainian ransomware Trojan that came over the transom last week demonstrated that the concept of “payment” can extend to services other than banking or finance. In this case, the Trojan (which we and several other AV companies call Trojan-Ransom-Krotten) thoroughly locks down the infected system then demands payment—in the form of credit paid to the Ukrainian mobile phone provider Kyivstar, which the victim then has to transfer to the malware distributor’s account.

Yes, Alice, the hacker wants you to pay his cellphone bill.

Once the ransomware has taken hold on a victim’s computer, it locks down the operating system in dozens of different ways, as well as changing several registry keys that add juvenile, profane text to Internet Explorer’s title bar and elsewhere on the desktop and in folders.

Paying the ransom in these cases simply emboldens the malware creator to continue his crime spree. Of course, even once a victim hypothetically pays this ransom, there’s also no guarantee that there’s any way at all for the malware distributor to reverse the damage — which takes the form of significant levels of annoyance — caused by this insipid Trojan.

Fortunately for the victim, the creator of this Trojan isn’t the sharpest tack in the box. Not only were we easily able to tease out the Trojan’s payloads and add signatures which would prevent the Trojan from delivering its payload files to a victim’s computer, but we’re able to see exactly how the author (ineffectively) tries to frustrate the kinds of behavioral analysis we and other antivirus vendors perform.

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Monthly Archives: July 2010

Weird Malware on Display at Black Hat

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