By Dancho Danchev
Participants in the dynamic cybercrime underground ecosystem are constantly working on new cybercrime-friendly releases in the form of malware bots, Remote Access Tools (RATs) and malware loaders.
Continuing the “A peek inside…” series, in this post I will profile yet another DIY (do-it-yourself) malware bot, available at the disposal of cybercriminals at selected cybercrime-friendly online communities.
By Dancho Danchev
Security researchers from Webroot have intercepted a currently active, client-side exploits-serving malicious campaign that has already managed to infect 18,544 computers across the globe, through the BlackHole web malware exploitation kit.
More details:
By Dancho Danchev
The thriving cybercrime underground marketplace has a lot to offer. From DIY botnet builders, DIY DDoS platforms, to platforms for executing clickjacking and likejacking campaigns, next to drive-by malware attacks, the ecosystem is always a step ahead of the industry established to fight back.
Continuing the “A peek inside…” series, in this post I will profile yet another freely available DIY Botnet building tool – the Umbra Malware Loader.
By Dancho Danchev
Aiming to ensure that their malware doesn’t end up in the hands of vendors and researchers, cybercriminals are actively experimenting with different quality assurance processes whose objective is to increase the probability of their campaigns successfully propagating in the wild without detection.
Some of these techniques include multiple offline antivirus scanning interfaces offering the cybercriminal a guarantee that their malicious program would remain undetected, before they launch their malicious campaign in the wild.
In the wild since 2006, Kim’s Multiple Antivirus Scanner is still actively used among cybercriminals wanting to ensure that their malicious software is pre-scanned against the signature-based scanning techniques offered by multile antivirus vendors.
Let’s review Kim’s Multiple Antivirus Scanner, and discuss when it’s an important tool in the arsenal of the malicious cybercriminal spreading malware for profit.
By Andrew Brandt
An unusual family of Trojans, apparently of Chinese origin, engages in rootkit-like behavior which seems designed not to hide the presence of the malware on an infected system, but to misdirect or confuse a technical person who might be using system analysis tools on an infected computer.
The Trojans all originated from a server operated by a free Web host in China, and each sample we tested sent profiling data about the infected system to a command-and-control server located on yet another free Web host, also located in China. It appears to have capabilities to receive instructions to download other components, and it scans the system for antivirus products commonly available in China, including products made by Qihoo 360, China’s largest homegrown antivirus company.
But the most interesting aspect of the Trojans was how it managed to fool most of the free tools someone might use to monitor running programs. The Trojan shows up in the list of active programs, but when that list includes a full path to the running executable, that path points at a nonexistent file supposedly in another location. Continue reading
By Marco Giuliani
Among the most infamous kernel mode rootkits in the wild, most of them have had a slowdown in their development cycle – TDL rootkit, MBR rootkit, Rustock are just some examples. The same doesn’t apply for the ZeroAccess rootkit. The team behind it is working quite hard, which we know for a fact because I’ve seen it.
We already talked about this rootkit and its evolutions in several blog posts, along with a white paper that documents more in depth all the technical features of the malware. The last major update released by the team behind ZeroAccess dates back a couple of weeks; That update implemented a strong self-defense routine able to kill security software programs that try to get access to its code, blocking the security software from running by manipulating access control list, or ACL, settings.
Last week ZeroAccess received another update, and again it’s a major one. The rootkit shifted from a hidden encrypted file used as an NTFS filesystem volume to a more comfortable hidden directory created inside the Windows folder, where the rootkit still stores its configuration data and other malware in an encrypted form.
Continue reading
By Marco Giuliani
Last Wednesday, Microsoft published a blog post detailing a significant update to a piece of malware named Popureb. The malware adds code to the Master Boot Record, or MBR, a region of the hard disk that’s read by the PC during bootup, long before the operating system has had a chance to get started. Researchers sometimes refer to these kinds of malware as bootkits, or a rootkit which loads at such a low level during the boot process that it is invisible to the operating system, and therefore very difficult to remove.
Microsoft researcher Chun Feng detailed some of the new features of Popureb.E, which includes a very low-level hook into the Windows driver responsible for disk writes and reads. When the driver on an infected system detects an attempt to write changes into the MBR — the kinds of changes a repair tool might try to make — it simply changes the command from write to read, effectively neutering any kind of tool running within Windows that might try to fix the infection.
(Update 2011-07-08: We’ve published a free command line tool that can remove Popureb.E from the master boot record of an infected computer.)
Microsoft’s initial cleanup guidance on Popureb.E was pretty drastic, and more than a little scary: Full removal of the bootkit requires a full reinstall of Windows, wiping out anything currently on the hard drive. We don’t think this is the case, and the Microsoft folks seem to have moderated their advice to include some manual fixes using the recovery console.
While the whole concept behind the Trojan is valid and technically powerful, the practical implementation of the malware is not as valid as the idea behind it. What follows is a fairly technical write-up that describes both the problem, and one solution we’ve come up with.
By Andrew Brandt
As if we didn’t have enough to deal with this week — after a Microsoft patch Tuesday that brought with it a boatload of security updates for Windows, Office, Silverlight, Visual Studio, and other programs — some enterprising malware distributor is emailing around bogus tracking number malware dressed up in the icon of a PDF document, and that malware is downloading payloads named after the updaters that Windows Update retrieves during an update.
The malware arrived into one of our spam collection points with an attachment named UPS_document.zip. Way to be original there, criminals. Inside the Zip file was an executable downloader named UPS_Document.exe. Upon execution, it retrieves at least three payloads, including a copy of SpyEye (a password stealing Trojan), a tiny agent sending profiling information about the infected system, and a fraudulent “rogue system utility” called (on my XP testbed) Windows XP Restore.
The rogue takes on much of the appearance of a previous Rogue of the Week, named Windows Recovery. In fact, Windows XP Restore looks to be a very slightly modified duplicate of that software. If you’ve been hit with either rogue, there are some cool free tools for you to download that will repair some of the damage; Read on for details.
By Andrew Brandt
Most of yesterday, Threat Research Analyst Armando Orozco and I took a closer look at a piece of malware discovered by a university security researcher, Xuxian Jiang of North Carolina State. The malicious code, which the malware creator named Plankton, is embedded into a number of apps that were briefly posted to Google’s Android Market earlier this week, then rapidly pulled down after the researchers informed Google of their initial findings.
The Plankton code appears in a number of applications that were all focused on the popular game series Angry Birds. Some of the samples we looked at came as Android apps with names like Angry Birds Rio Unlocker v1.0, Angry Birds Multi User v1.00 or Angry Birds Cheater Trainer Helper V2.0.
When executed, the program displays the following text on the screen:
Welcome!
Simply click on the button below to unlock ALL levels in Angry Birds Rio. This will not delete your scores but might change the number of pineapples and bananas you have
None of the programs function as advertised. Instead, the malicious apps install additional code into the Android device into which they’re installed. These additional functions provide remote access and control of the Android device to, presumably, the distributor of the malicious apps, whose identity remains unknown at this time.
By Andrew Brandt
After a prolonged absence, waves of Trojans distributed as Zipped email attachments have been showing up in our spam traps for a few weeks. The spam messages employ the same hackneyed shipping confirmation pretext as many previous iterations of this scam. This technique’s emergence as a common malware distribution method correlates with the emergence of Trojan-Downloader-Tacticlol.
The messages claim to come from various express shippers, including DHL, UPS, and FedEx, as well as one that may have originated in a malware guy’s imagination: Post Express. And even though the distribution method mimics those used by Tacticlol, the payloads haven’t been limited to that Trojan. This time around, the files belong to a wider variety of malware, including not only several new variants of Tacticlol but also Trojan-Downloader-Karagany, Trojan-Relayer-Highport, and SpyEye.
The Trojans’ icons look like Office documents or Acrobat PDFs, which serve to further convince victims that the file isn’t dangerous. The email attachments — Zip files with names such as tracking.zip, Post_Express_Label.zip or DHL_tracking.zip — aren’t dangerous unless you open the attachment, extract the Trojan, and execute it. But once you do, you’re in for a world of trouble.
