Category Archives: Firefox

Threats that target the Mozilla Firefox browser

Rogue AV Payload Blocks Popular Websites

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By Andrew Brandt

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A payload file installed along with some variants of the rogue Internet Security 2010 “antivirus” program modifies victims’ networking settings within Windows, inserting itself into the network stack and preventing victims from visiting some of the Web’s most popular Web sites. More than 40 sites have been targeted, including: Microsoft’s live.com and Bing search engine; social networking giants Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, and YouTube; news organizations including Fox News, The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the UK’s Guardian and BBC news sites; and blogs hosted by blogger.com, livejournal.com, and wordpress.com.

The payload modifies the Layered Service Provider (LSP) so that calls to those Web sites pass through the malicious file, which displays a warning message in the browser instead of the blocked Web site. The message says:

This web site is restricted based on your security preferences

and

Your system is infected. Please activate your antivirus software.

We’ve seen an increase in the number of spies that bollix the LSP chain lately. In cases where this happens, if you simply remove the malicious file that is referenced in the LSP, the computer remains unable to connect to the Internet afterwards. To fully repair the PC, you’ll need to fix that broken chain.

Fortunately, the fix for this spy — which we’re calling Trojan-Annoyinator — is fairly easy. Users of Webroot’s products can simply sweep, and the spy along with its LSP modifications will be removed upon reboot. If you don’t have one of Webroot’s antimalware product installed, you can go through the process manually, which isn’t difficult for someone familiar with Windows tools such as Regedit. The only problem might be getting to Microsoft’s Web site (where the instructions are posted) from an infected computer.
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One Click, and the Exploit Kit’s Got You

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By Andrew Brandt

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20090918_liberty_effectiveness_cropAfter 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

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By Andrew Brandt

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app-warning-72-20pAs 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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Adware Purveyors Panning for Search Gold

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SnappyAdz money nooseBy Andrew Brandt

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We know most adware companies are shameless in their pursuit of revenue, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen anything as bizarre (or hilariously bold) as the sales pitch from a relative neophyte to the world of adware, which calls itself SnappyAds. On its homepage, SnappyAds posits the hypothetical glee of two business-suited online ad men counting the thousands of dollars they’ve allegedly earned from their allegedly lucrative venture.

Behind the SnappyAds facade, however, is an adware client we (and a few other AV companies) call SearchPan. The installer for the adware client application is hosted on SnappyAds’ webserver, and it modifies both the IE and Firefox browsers to add code which redirects searches through a number of search engines of dubious distinction.

There really isn’t a whole lot to discuss technically about SnappyAds. It really only came to our attention because the Threat Research group as a whole just couldn’t stop laughing when we all saw the pictures of the guy leaning back in his cushy leather chair counting out his Benjamins. They do arrive, as SnappyAds claims, by the ton. So make sure you invest in a forklift before you sign up as a SnappyAds affiliate. You’ll need one to move your palette-loads of cash.

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New Malware Ruins Firefox

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By Andrew Brandt

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Late last year, we read all the buzz about ChromeInject, a malicious DLL that was being billed as the first malware specifically targeting Firefox. It was interesting to see Installashunthat someone built a phishing Trojan for a different browser platform, but ChromeInject was also clearly an early phase in Firefox malware development: It was fairly obvious, and it was easy to eliminate, because it generated an entry in the Plugins menu called “Basic Example Plugin for Mozilla” which you could simply disable with a single mouse click.

Well now it looks like the bar’s been raised. In the past few weeks, we’ve seen malware writers up the ante in their bets against Firefox. Two new spies came across the transom in the past week, and easily managed to load themselves into a freshly installed copy of Firefox 3.0.7. I should note that this isn’t due to any problem or negligence on Mozilla’s part; once you execute malicious code on your PC, any application is vulnerable. Firefox just happens to be a big target.

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