By Dancho Danchev
Relying on tens of thousands of fake “Your transaction is completed” emails, cybercriminals have just launched yet another malicious spam campaign attempting to socially engineer Bank of America’s (BofA) customers into executing a malicious attachment. Once unsuspecting users do so, their PCs automatically join the botnet operated by the cybercriminal/gang of cybercriminals operating it, leading to a successful compromise of their hosts.
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By Dancho Danchev
Over the past 24 hours, we intercepted tens of thousands of malicious emails attempting to socially engineering BofA’s CashPro users into downloading and executing a bogus online digital certificate attached to the fake emails.
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By Dancho Danchev
Cybercriminals are currently mass mailing millions of emails, in an attempt to trick Bank of America customers into clicking on the exploit and malware-serving link found in the spamvertised email. Relying on bogus “Online Banking Passcode Changed” notifications and professionally looking email templates, the campaign is the latest indication of the systematic rotation of impersonated brands in an attempt to cover as many market segments as possible.
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By Andrew Brandt
I didn’t want to let too much time pass before I wrote about a new Zbot-like bank phishing Trojan variant that came across my desk last week. The keylogger started arriving the first week of February as an attachment to a spam email designed to look like it came from United Parcel Service. No, the old malware trope of spammed shipping invoices is not dead yet, Alice, but we’re going to follow this one down the rabbit hole anyhow.
The brief message had a Subject line of “United Parcel Service notification” followed by a random, five-digit number, and a file named USPS_Document.zip attached to the message. Why spammers seem to confuse the US Postal Service with UPS eludes common sense, but I think it has been made abundantly clear by now that, by and large, the people who send these kinds of files around aren’t the sharpest tacks in the box. The HTML body of the message indicated that the .zip file contains a tracking number, but that’s just part of the ruse.
The Trojan is readily identified by its appearance. It uses an old Adobe PDF document icon, but the programmers picked a version of that icon with an X drawn over the top. D’oh. The file also throws an error when run in a virtual machine that forces the VM to bluescreen, but that didn’t affect our ability to analyze the file. We could execute it and observe its behavior without a problem. This new Trojan installs services that remain memory resident after the installer has run, dropped its payloads in the Application Data folder, and deleted the original copy of itself.
By Andrew Brandt
A novel and pretty sneaky Trojan designed to steal financial data appeared on our radar screen last week. The Trojan, once installed on a victim’s computer, rootkits itself to prevent detection, then watches the victim’s browser for any attempt to connect to the secured, HTTPS login page of several online banks. When the victim visits the login page the Trojan has been waiting for, the Trojan generates a form that “hovers” over the login page asking for additional verification information.
“In order to provide you with extra security, we occasionally need to ask for additional information when you access your accounts online,” reads the popup window. Everybody needs extra security, right?
Of course, the additional information that the bank appears to be asking for is all information the bank already should have if you have an account there: The number on your credit and debit cards; a Social Security number; your date of birth and mother’s maiden name; The PIN code for your debit card and the security code printed on the front of any credit card issued by the bank.
The problem is, the form completely blocks the full page, preventing you from logging in — until you fill in all the fields in the form it displays. Then it sends that information (encrypted with SSL, mind you) to a server at the IP address 121.101.216.234, part of the address space allocated to Beijing Telecom.
Your bank may outsource some of its customer service tasks, but stealing your financial identity isn’t part of the normal services your bank provides.
By Andrew Brandt
It was a particularly busy weekend for spammers, especially the creepy, evil ones who are trying to steal information (as opposed to the merely scungy pill vendors and their ilk). Webroot’s Threat Research team has recently seen a glut of phishing messages which, like most, purport to come from banks and ask you to update your account information. But unlike most phishing messages, which contain a link to a Web site, these phishing messages include an attached HTML file which, in essence, puts the phishing page right on your hard drive.
When launched, the HTML file renders a sparse but effective phishing form in the browser. The pages warn the victim that “This account has been temporarily suspended for security reasons” and ask the victim to “confirm that you are the rightful owner of this account” — by providing the “bank” with a wide range of personally identifiable information they should already have, and never would ask you to provide through a Web-based form in the circumstances described in the message.
These pages also pull graphics from the banks’ Web sites–activity that, when it comes from a phishing site hosted on a server not belonging to the targeted bank, typically alerts the banks to phishy behavior. Because the graphics are loaded only once, from the desktop of the targeted victim, the banks can’t put a stop to it before it’s too late.
