Fakealerts Target Black Friday Online Shoppers

Posted on November 27, 2009 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

Now that the turkey and pumpkin pie has settled, and everyone’s gotten a good night’s sleep, shoppers are busily hustling the Web for the best deals. I’ve been doing the same thing, and wanted to share some of my tips that may help you avoid becoming snared in the most prolific cyberscam of the moment: fake virus alert messages (otherwise known as fakealerts).

For months, the perpetrators of this fraud have been honing their skills at targeting malicious web pages to rise in search results for whatever is in the popular zeitgeist-of-the-moment. Victims experience a computer that appears to be out of control, seemingly unable to do anything but download whatever application the fakealert forces upon them.

A typical "warning" from a malicious fakealert

Take a look at this video. Earlier in the week I tried searching for news about Black Friday or deals on the toy that appears to be the Tickle Me Elmo of 2009, the hard to find Zhu Zhu Pets. What I found were a flood of fakealert sites mixed in with the legitimate search results.

The good news is, it’s not hard to avoid these fakealert sites, but you have to be an alert Web surfer, and carefully scrutinize the results before you click a link. Read on for my top six tips to shop online safely this Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or anytime this holiday season.

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Fakealerts: Building a Better Mousetrap

Posted on November 25, 2009 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

In general, the use of fakealerts – those bogus warnings that look like your PC has started some sort of antivirus scan on its own, then predict imminent doom if you don’t buy some snake oil product right this minute — is on the rise. Fakealerts constitute a particularly effective social engineering trick, earning the makers of bogus, ineffective “antivirus” programs millions of dollars (and the scorn of victims) in the process. So it should come as no surprise that the fakealerts themselves have gone through some technological advances in the past year.

In the past few months, the fakealert-makers have slowly been migrating their techniques to a new platform: The browser. As recently as six months ago, the majority of fakealerts we saw were generated by small Trojan Horse applications running on a victim’s PC. Today, most fakealerts we see simply reshape the browser to mimic the appearance of a generic antivirus application.

It makes good economic sense for the creators of fakealerts to do this. The Windows application fakealerts only run on Windows (obviously). Like all Windows software, fakealert apps subject to being blocked by both the operating system (which, like the fakealerts themselves, prompts users with warnings in dialog boxes), by real-time detection mechanisms in legitimate antivirus software, and/or by savvy users themselves.

One typical load-sequence for the components of a scripted fakealert

Using a scripting technology such as Javascript to reproduce the “fakealert experience” is a natural extension of the success of fraudulent, rogue antivirus products. After all, a fakealert is no more than an elaborate performance for the targeted victim — the goal of the fakealert is simply to convince the victim to download and run a file, typically a rogue antivirus product. Javascript can run in virtually every browser and operating system (save for special cases, like the Firefox browser with the NoScript Add-On installed).

Scripts such as these bypass most traditional malware protection because, in essence, there is no malware installed until the victim installs it his- or herself. Unlike a static binary executable, the contents of a script can be tweaked, on the fly, to maximize effectiveness (or just to change the name of the fraudulent product). And the scripts themselves which make up the Web fakealert experience are highly obfuscated, which makes them more challenging for automated systems to block.

In the course of researching a new malware sample unrelated to fakealerts — an installer of Trojan-Downloader-Dermo on a page purportedly offering an update to Windows Media Player — I observed one common fakealert script as it ran soon after the testbed PC was infected. I was able to reconstruct its modus operandi.

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Rogues Mug Big Bird on his Birthday

Posted on November 4, 2009 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

In a move sure to raise the ire of Sesame Street fans everywhere, the black hat SEO gangs that have been manipulating Google results for the better part of the year have seized on a new target from which they’ve launched their current salvo of rogue antivirus guano. That’s right, the lovable, giant jaundiced avian friend to child and adult alike is being used to hijack searches and rope unsuspecting users into a vortex of popups and fake scans.

They have besmirched Big Bird. And on his birthday, of all days. Have the rogue AV purveyors no shame?

Actually, they’ve just once again demonstrated that they, too, can take advantage of Google Trends, which rates the ‘hotness’ of searches for “Big Bird’s Birthday” today as “Volcanic.” It’s not surprising, really. Big Bird’s legs replaced the “L” in the Google logo this morning (in honor of the 40th anniversary of the popular character’s first Sesame Street appearance). So of course, people are clicking away at those feathered gams, trying to find out why they’re there.

The fake alerts touting the equally fake Internet Antivirus Pro warns users, through a series of browser popup alerts, that (like a fine strip of beef destined for the jerky factory) “your computer…need to be cured as soon as possible.”

The same advice we’ve given in the past prevails. Parents, also take note that you shouldn’t necessarily click — or let your kid(s) click — any old link that purports to lead to something child-friendly. The first link we saw appeared as the seventh search result on the first page of Google results. Many more appeared lower down. The text beneath the malicious result link read, in part, “Make your child s big day extra special with a personalized birthday banner!”

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Postmortem Michael Jackson Track Dredges Rogues

Posted on October 12, 2009 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

As we’ve discussed so many times in the past, search terms that include the names of celebrities make good targets for malware authors, and search terms that include the name of dead celebrities make great targets for malware authors. Now there’s a new corollary to this postulate: Search terms that include the names of dead celebrities who release new material make fantastic targets for the bottom-feeders of the malware-distribution world.

So, as you’re out there searching for the brand new Michael Jackson track, please be aware that the bad guys are using this opportunity to foist malware onto your machine. The screenshot at left is just one example of what you’ll see when you accidentally click a search result link pointing to a malicious page. The “video” pops up a warning that tells you to download and run the “movie_hd_plugin_update.40014.exe” in order to see…I don’t know, something interesting? Probably more interesting than you would like. I think by now we should all burn into our memories this precise screenshot, with its misspelled “Raiting 8/10” text near the bottom, as an obvious fake that has been repeatedly employed by distributors of rogue security products. Beware!

No Search is Sacred: Fakealerts Flood the Net

Posted on October 7, 2009 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

Search engines appear to be no longer in control of the search results they display at any given moment. That’s bad news not only for the search giants, but for anyone who relies on their results.

How can that be? After all, it’s the search engines’ own servers that are supposed to deliver relevant results based on their super-secret sauce algorithms. But black hat, or rogue, search engine optimization (SEO for short) has ruined the trustworthiness of virtually any search.

Just a few years ago, companies began to spring up making outrageous promises about how they can get a client’s Web site ranked closer to the top of certain search results. Then the purveyors of various worms, fake alerts, and rogue antivirus products got involved, because they quickly discovered that it’s easier to convince someone to infect their own computer by clicking a search result link than to discover and implement an elaborate network vulnerability.

After all, according to our latest research, about one out of every five of surveyed Web surfers implicitly trust whatever a search engine delivers as the first page of search results every time they search.

So, all year long, we’ve seen rogue SEO tricks used to promote malicious search results. Many of those links foist various fake antivirus programs onto unsuspecting Web surfers’ computers. The effect is almost instantaneous, as if it was automated: A breaking news story hits the Internet, and within moments, the rogues have turned their attention to pushing bad links based off of whatever keywords the story-of-the-moment might entail. That’s not really unexpected; Google Trends, for instance, makes it incredibly easy for black hat SEOs to target whatever’s hot. Searches for news as diverse as Indonesian earthquakes, elections in Iran, and the untimely deaths of various celebrities served equally well to deliver victims to the rogues.

Now, even the Internet meme of the moment appears to drive victims to malicious Web pages. One of our researchers pointed out a funny screenshot that was making its way through Digg, the social link-sharing site. The screenshot showed some of Google’s suggested search results that appear when you type “Google will” into the search field. Among the auto-completions were “Google will not search for Chuck Norris,” “Google will eat itself,” and “Google will you marry me?”
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Roman Polanski Arrest Spawns Headline-Hooking Rogues

Posted on September 28, 2009 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt and Brenden Vaughan

As we’ve seen for the past several months, a celebrity ended up the top news story, which started a cascade of malware distributors racing to get their driveby pages to the top of search results. Today’s victim/subject is Roman Polanski, the renowned film director arrested on decades old charges of statutory rape. This kind of gossipy, tabloid headline is like candy for rogue antivirus distributors.

We began our search the minute we found out the news, and yes, within about half an hour of the story breaking, the pages began appearing in the search results on various engines. While some of the malicious pages were linked to search terms based on the name of the director, many also reference his victim, Samantha Geimer. The results redirect you into a fake virus scan page, which in turn leads you to a download of Windows PC Defender, a known rogue in the same vein as Antivirus 2010 and the other scam fantivirus tools so popular among Web criminals this year. Trojan-IM.Win32.Faker, indeed.

Not only does this rogue pretend to be an anti-malware tool, but it throws a monkey wrench into almost any existing protection, adding Image File Execution Options registry keys that prevent nearly all legitimate free and commercial antimalware tools from running. It also drops a Hosts file which prevents infected computers from contacting 12 payment processing domains associated with Antivirus 2010, and redirects all Google (including nearly 200 international Google domains), Yahoo, MSN, and Bing search results through a server belonging to search-gala.com, whose IP address is geolocated to an ISP in Brampton, Ontario, Canada (go Timberwolves!).

Not content to be a single-solution product, Windows PC Defender is a full faux-suite, offering completely fictitious desktop firewall results as well as antivirus. The rogue uses a modified copy of a free tool called Multi Password Recovery to extract your Windows license and display it in the firewall “alert,” presumably to raise the anxiety level of person who sees the “warning” message. The warning claims that “your computer is making an unauthorized personal data transfer” to an IP address assigned to NASA, which is currently not in use. Because everyone knows NASA wants your Windows license key, for, you know, space missions. amirite? Could an imaginary anti-phishing toolbar be around the corner? Who knows what’s next for these enterprising, though predictable, con artists.

Not to be outdone, distributors of black market drugs began using Twitter to spread ads as well, with an under-140-character tagline promising juicy Polanski-arrest news. We’ll keep an eye on the situation, but it’s probably best to steer clear of links to unfamiliar sites, especially those promising revealing or “previously undisclosed” pictures, movies, or other such nonsense.

One Click, and the Exploit Kit’s Got You

Posted on September 18, 2009 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

After all the brouhaha surrounding the NYTimes.com website hosting ads which spawned rogue antivirus Fakealerts last weekend, I spent a considerable amount of time looking at so-called exploit kits this week. These are packages, made up of custom made Web pages (typically coded in the PHP scripting language), which perform a linchpin activity for malware distributors. Namely, they deliver the infection to the victim, using the most effective methods, based on parameters which help identify particular vulnerabilities in the victim’s browser, operating system, or applications.

There’s no indication that an exploit kit was used by the attackers in the NYTimes.com incident, but it easily could have gone that way. All an exploit kit needs in order to begin the process of foisting an infection is for a potential victim to visit its specially crafted Web page. The end result is what we call a drive-by download.

According to reports, the code injected into the Times website’s ad calls simply spawned another browser window, which in turn displayed fake alert and virus scan results messages. It wasn’t even a website hack; the site’s ad sales department were fooled into accepting a paid advertisement containing the code.

This time, that browser window was used to trick the site’s visitors into executing, and eventually buying, the rogue product. It could have been far worse.

After spending a day investigating a relatively new package, which calls itself (with a total lack of irony) the Liberty Exploit System, it’s easy to see how something like what was done on the Times website could have led news enthusiasts down a much deeper, scarier rabbit hole.

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Jackson/Fawcett Malware is Extortion-ware

Posted on June 26, 2009 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

As I reported yesterday, searches for information about the deaths of Michael Jackson or Farrah Fawcett were turning up links to malware. This came as no surprise to anyone, though the speed with which the links spread was astonishing: Within minutes of the first confirmation that Jackson had succumbed to a heart attack, the first malicious blog posts began popping up in search results. We’re continuing to monitor hundreds of malicious sites touting news of Jackson’s demise — and new malicious blogs are coming up as fast as the blog services can shut them off.

The first site we encountered that referenced Jackson appeared to be a personal blog post hosted on Google’s own Blogspot service. However, we quickly determined that something wasn’t right with the post. Just visiting the page spawned a tornado of background and foreground browser activity — over 100 URLs, mostly called from ad-host Yieldmanager by an automated script hosted elsewhere, were pulled down in just the first three seconds after the page loaded; The list grew to 500 URLs by the time 32 seconds had elapsed.

To illustrate the speed that the scripts embedded in the malicious blog post were loading ads, I captured this short video, which shows the amount of activity in about 60 seconds of permitting the page to load. I can only guess that the volume of URLs was limited by the fact that I had to click through some dialog boxes that appeared during the test. Another interesting thing is that between the time I began the video and the time it ended, Google had terminated the malicious blog account — for the moment, at least. The last page to load in the video is a Google ’404′ error message when I attempted to load the initial page a second time.

Some of the sites loaded by these malicious scripts also used browser exploits to damage the test system.

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Our Cup Runneth Over with Farrah Fawcett Files and Michael Jackson Malware

Posted on June 25, 2009 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

With the sad news circulating the globe that 70s sex symbol, TV pitchwoman, and former Charlie’s Angel Farrah Fawcett passed away this morning, it didn’t take long for the malware vultures to execute their attack.

Beginning in the afternoon, our Proactive Research team began finding tons of pages that purportedly offered a Farrah Fawcett poster or photo for download. What you got, when you clicked the link that looks suspiciously like a video player (not a static image), was — you guessed it. A load of junk.

Interestingly, hovering the mouse over the video link causes the browser to display a “preview image” that looks awfully like Google’s front door. But clicking the link to the video brings you to yet another page with something that looks like a video player, and only when you click that link do you end up with an executable on your desktop.

Few antivirus companies have the malware in their definitions. We’re identifying the files pulled down by the Fawcett installer as Trojan-Cognac (they leave, shall we say, a distinctive aftertaste), as well as Trojan-Zoeken and Adware-Sabotch. Zoeken is a nasty downloader, which brings down all kinds of badness on an infected system, and Sabotch tends to tout those wonderful rogue antivirus products we all love so much.

So far, the Fawcett-related malware is all coming from fake pages set up on blog site Vox.com. Until they clean up this mess (which I imagine will be fairly time consuming, as new ones keep popping up), don’t follow any search links headed in their direction.

And this afternoon, as rumors began to circulate that Michael Jackson was ill in hospital, the jackals pounced on that bit of news. More on that in the next post.

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