Shorty Worm Spams Links, Hijacks Browsers

Posted on March 4, 2011 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt & Grayson Milbourne

A novel worm we’re calling Worm-IM-Shorty appears to be winding its way through Facebook and some instant messaging services, with its come-on disguised as a link to a photograph hosted elsewhere. But when recipients click the link, they receive an executable Trojan instead, dressed up with the name and icon of a JPEG image.

If one double-clicks the file, the Trojan turns the computer into an advertising cash cow for some enterprising malware distributor. The Trojan modifies the active browser’s home page setting to a malicious page on domredi.com, which in turn redirects the browser, at random, to one of several domains hosted on a server in The Netherlands. Each page the browser loads is filled with ads, and when you load an ad-filled page, someone likely gets paid. Follow the money, and you’ll find the perps.
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New Year’s Drive-By Brings a Recursive Rogue

Posted on January 6, 2011 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

On the morning of January 2nd, still bleary eyed, I checked my email to find a charming notification informing me that I’d received an electronic greeting card. Yay! I thought to myself: The first targeted malware of 2011 plopped right into my lap.

I immediately pulled up my research machine, browsed to the URL in the message (don’t try this at home, kids), and found my test system swamped in malware. After classifying the files and their source URLs into our definitions — I didn’t want this to happen to you, after all — I turned the computer back off and slept until Tuesday, when I resumed my analysis.

As it turns out, the payloads delivered by the drive-by download are as common as sand at the beach, but some of the techniques used by the malware’s distributor to obfuscate the true nature of the executable payload files (which may have been stored on what appears to be a hijacked, legitimate server running Joomla) are fairly novel, and also a bit ridiculous.

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10 Threats from 2010 We’d Prefer Remain History

Posted on January 1, 2011 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

With 2010 finally behind us, and an unknown number of cyberattacks likely to come in the new year, I thought I’d run down a brief list of the malicious campaigns criminals pulled off last year that I’d really dread to see anyone repeat. Now that they’re in the past, they should stay there.

Operation Aurora: Google’s accusation (with Adobe, Juniper Networks, Rackspace, Yahoo! and Symantec) that China hacked its servers, allegedly stealing private emails stored on the company’s servers. The big surprise wasn’t that it was happening, but that companies were publicly talking about it.

Abused ccTLDs: 2010 saw lots more malicious content originating from previously un-abused country code top-level domains, which are assigned to national authorities, such as the .in (India) and .cc (Cocos (Keeling) Islands) top-level domains. The Cocos Islands’ .cc domain deserves particular note because the more than 2200 malicious domains (discovered during 2010) hosted under this ccTLD outnumber the approximately 600 human inhabitants of the tiny archipelago by nearly 4-to-1.

Koobface: “the little social network worm that could” employed new URL obfuscation techniques, introduced its own keylogger, and focused efforts on a smaller number of social media sites, while Facebook got more proactive at shutting down the worm’s operations quickly. Maybe this year they’ll disappear altogether.

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Chinese Trojan Turns Infected PCs Into Web Servers

Posted on December 4, 2010 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

A complex and elaborately conceived family of malware that originates in China installs the Apache Web server, as well as half a dozen keylogger and downloader payloads, disguised as components of legitimate apps. We and a few other antivirus vendors are calling this type of malware Taobatuo.

It just so happens that I’ve been setting up a Windows virtual machine with the latest versions of Apache, MySQL, and PHP for an unrelated project. I hadn’t installed these apps onto a Windows box before, and Apache in particular is notoriously finicky about Windows installations, so after several days of trial and error (mostly error) I was somewhat amused to discover, after finally getting Apache to work, that the malware sample I tested actually pulls down its own working, customized Apache installer…along with a bunch of phishing Trojans, keyloggers, and downloaders, all dressed up to look like the services you might see on a Microsoft-based Web server.

It just goes to show how much good these malware creators could accomplish, simply if they wanted to. But that’s clearly not the goal. The malware, along with text files containing instructions for the malware, came from taobao.lylwc.com. That’s not to be confused with Taobao.com, one of China’s most heavily trafficked Internet portals. This site and the real Taobao are not related in any way I can determine, other than the (ab)use of the Taobao name.

The lylwc.com domain itself is quite a piece of work. It claims to offer free downloads or streams of current Hollywood movies, as well as an extensive library of films and TV shows. The operative word is “claims” — when you try to view those movies, the site attempts to push a download of a Trojaned installer for the QVOD media player (a streaming media app that’s popular in China). So let’s just say I wasn’t all that surprised to find the taobao subdomain of this Web site hosting a raft of malware.

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Patchy Phisher Forces Firefox to Forego Forgetting Passwords

Posted on October 6, 2010 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

Every browser can, at the user’s discretion, be set up to remember passwords. In general, Webroot advises most users not to set the browser to store login credentials, because they’re so easily extracted by password-stealing Trojans like Zbot. In Firefox, for example, you can click Tools, Options, then open the Security tab, and uncheck a box that tells the browser to remember passwords entered into Web forms. (The box is checked by default.)

But in the course of taking a more thorough look at a Trojan that came to our attention in July, we were surprised to see the Trojan modify a core Firefox file. Upon closer inspection, the Trojan patches a file named nsLoginManagerPrompter.js. The patch adds a few lines of code (displayed above), and comments-out other portions of code, that dictate whether Firefox prompts the user to save passwords when he or she logs into a secure site.

Before the infection, a default installation of Firefox 3.6.10 would prompt the user after the user clicks the Log In button on a Web page, asking whether he or she wants to save the password. After the infection, the browser simply saves all login credentials locally, and doesn’t prompt the user.

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Civilization 5 Torrent Bonus: Uncivilized Malware

Posted on September 25, 2010 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

Bootlegged copies of Civilization 5, the highly anticipated, just-released real time strategy game, are already popping up in file sharing services. And, as we’ve come to expect, some of the pirated copies of the game come with that little something special — malicious components.

One of our Threat Research Analysts, who also happens to be an avid gamer, started looking for pirated copies of the game Friday morning and, within five minutes of looking, found Trojans in some of the torrents in circulation. I’ve chosen to focus on one of these files, not only because it was the first we saw, but also the most interesting. The Trojan, bundled in a torrent with the ISO image of the Civ 5 installation disc, is called ‘read me before burn.exe‘ (MD5: 2f7ff2ecef4b5cf1c9679f79d9b72518).

On a typical Windows system, the file appears to be a text document, but only because it uses a file icon of a text document. With the file extension visible, however, it’s clearly an .exe with a mission.

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Epic Malware Dropper Makes No Attempt to Hide

Posted on September 21, 2010 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

In the world of first-person shooter games, getting the most headshots – hits on the opponent which instantly take the opponent’s avatar out of the game — is a prized goal. The headshot is the quickest way to dispatch a foe in virtually every shooter, which is why the file name of a malware sample, currently in circulation, stood out.

The file, yogetheadshot.php.exe (VT), is a dropper, a glorified bucket designed to tip over and spill other malware all over a PC. But where other droppers might leave behind a handful of payloads, this one utterly decimated a testbed PC with a malware headshot — an unusually overt infection that, defying conventional wisdom about malware infections, took no apparent effort to mask its behavior or remain low key.

The file, extracted from network traffic recorded while a test system got manhandled by a drive-by download site, was only one of several executable payloads that originated from the same domain hosting the drive-by.

But this sole dropper was more than capable of delivering the terminal blow to a middle aged Windows XP box. We first saw it appear on September 7th, but it has become more widespread since then.

(Update, 22 Sept.: Here’s a video that shows what happens on a system when someone executes this dropper. The dropper is near the upper-left corner of the screen. The rest of the screen is taken up with Process Explorer, which lets you see just how many payloads the dropper delivers.)

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Cracked Trojan-Maker Infects Prospective Criminals

Posted on September 10, 2010 by glhaldeman

By Andrew Brandt

In what seems to be a trend in my September blog posts, the research team has run across a program meant for criminally-minded people which has a nasty surprise inside.

The program in question is called the ZombieM Bot Builder, which is used by the kind of upstanding citizens who spread Trojans in order to build up botnets — a collective of infected computers that can act as one entity. The creators of this program, an Argentinian group called Arhack, sell it for 180 euros. But don’t pull out your stolen credit cards just yet, because Arhack doesn’t take Visa: They sell this garbage exclusively via Western Union money transfer.

Well, someone has cracked both the earlier, 1.0 version of their bot generator and the latest, 2.0 version, and posted it online for other criminals — the cheap kind, who don’t have 180 euros to spare — to use. The cracked version lets you use all aspects of the program to generate bots and manage the botnet without the need for a customized username and password, which you would otherwise need in order to start up the program.

But there’s a hitch: Whenever you run the cracked version, it also installs Trojan-Backdoor-PoisonIvy, a different but equally nasty botnet Trojan. The backstabbing Trojan trifecta is in play.

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Patchy Phisher Forces Firefox to Forego Forgetting Passwords

Cracked Trojan-Maker Infects Prospective Criminals

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