Tag Archives: facebook

How cybercriminals monetize malware-infected hosts

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By Dancho Danchev

The vibrant cybercrime underground ecosystem offers countless ways to monetize the malware-infected hosts at the disposal of the malicious attacker.

From converting them to anonymization proxies assisting cybercriminals in covering their Web activities, to launching DDoS attacks, and using them to disseminate spam and more malicious threats, cybercriminals have a vast arsenal of monetization tactics in their arsenal.

In this post we’ll profile a recently advertised service offering thousands of Facebook “Likes”, Twitter followers, and YouTube views, all for the modest price of a couple of hundred rubles, entirely relying on malware-infected hosts for supporting their infrastructure.

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Will you take Facebook’s candy?

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By the Webroot Threat Team

It’s a creepy treat, with a serious underlying message. The latest viral website uses a horror movie format to show you just how much the average Facebook application can find out about you.

TakeThisLollipop, which has already received 1.7 million ‘Likes’ on Facebook, uses the social network’s application authentication scheme to find out about users.

Anyone clicking on the lollipop displayed on the site is asked to let the application access a panoply of information about them from Facebook, in addition to other privileges, such as posting as them. If they accept, they get to see the application’s payload: a video in which an unhinged man views their Facebook account, growing increasingly distressed as he looks at their pictures, wall posts, and friends’ status updates.

The whole thing is incredibly well done. It ends with the disturbed Facebook stalker driving towards your location (you knew that Facebook stored your hometown location, right?) and getting out of the car in a menacing fashion. Taped to his dashboard is a Polaroid, containing your profile picture. Chilling stuff.

What is even more chilling is the fact that this website is able to harvest so much information about you after you click the ‘Allow’ button in the dialogue box that it throws up. What else have you allowed access to, and how much do these applications know about you?

There is an even more important question: who is writing these Facebook apps, that harvest your most intimate personal and social data? There are seven million web sites and applications integrated with Facebook, many of which request privileged access to your account data before they will give you what the developers promise. Most people blindly allow these applications access, without thinking about where the information might be going.

It takes almost no effort to become a Facebook developer. The company introduced some basic developer verification procedures last year, such as providing a credit card number, or a mobile phone number. But of course, we know how many credit cards are stolen each year, don’t we? And how many mobile phones are stolen or cloned each week?

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Facebook-Spamming Worm Wants Your Eyeballs

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(Update, July 11, 2011:  On May 25, 2011, we were contacted by representatives of Future Ads, LLC, the parent company of both Playsushi and Gamevance.  Future Ads informed us that they, too, had been victims of a scam perpetrated by rogue affiliates who seemed to be involved with the malicious campaigns we described in this post.  Future Ads claims that it has taken action to prevent this type of abuse from happening in the future.)

By Andrew Brandt

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A worm that has been circulating on Facebook in the form of a Facebook application appears to have been engineered to drive traffic to a sleazy online advertising network which tries to connive people into installing software and disclosing a great deal of personal information about themselves in return for the promise of outrageously large gifts or prizes. As I write this, nearly 5 million people have fallen victim to this scam in just the past two days.

Last month, we published a report about a spam campaign designed to lure people into clicking a link to a bogus YouTube video. In that case, when you tried to play the video, your browser was instead redirected into an advertising network called CPALead. A convoluted series of steps eventually led victims to a page where they were prompted to fill out surveys (with outrageous promises for high-value gift cards or other valuable prizes) or download and install software from a Web site named Gamevance, which publishes online games and promises players cash prizes for high scores.

In this case, the campaign uses a clearly deceptive Facebook app — actually, dozens of duplicate apps with slightly different names — that (when you click the Accept button in Facebook) spams a shortlink to all of the victim’s contacts through Facebook’s chat mechanism. The spam messages all imply that the link leads to some sort of modified photo of the message recipient, but lead into a feedback loop which tries to spread itself further by infecting the Facebook accounts of new victims. Then it displays the ads.

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Shorty Worm Spams Links, Hijacks Browsers

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By Andrew Brandt & Grayson Milbourne

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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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Workplace Social Networking: More Like Antisocial Not-working

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By Ian Moyse, EMEA Channel Director

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Hardly a week goes by when the national press doesn’t carry a story about how social networks represent a threat to privacy or security, or both. These news stories aren’t wrong: Users of social networks face a raft of risks, ranging from malware attacks and identity theft, to cyberbullying, grooming from sexual predators or stalkers, viewing or posting inappropriate content, and the ever-present risk that you (or someone you work with) might end up with your foot (or is it your keyboard?) firmly in mouth.

Using social networks to give out too much information about yourself can also lead to some predictably poor outcomes. One Australian employee, fired from his job, had posted about skiving from work after a night of heavy drinking. A group of call center employees swapped brags about abusing customer information on Facebook and were fired. Is it hard to believe that the employer used the employees’ own Facebook posts as a virtual admission of guilt?

With Facebook adding over 400,000 users a day and LinkedIn 400,000 a week, social networks can no longer be ignored by employers, as employee misuse of social networks accelerate.

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Facebook “Photo Album” Spam Drops Trojans

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By Andrew Brandt

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A spammed link campaign that spread through Facebook rapidly over the weekend delivered a malicious payload designed to take control of the Facebook account of any infected user, steal passwords, and hijack clicks in the victim’s browser. The messages appear as links sent by a friend, accompanied by the brain-damaged text “You? I find it on Google.“

Clicking the link directs recipients to a page on online-photo-albums.org which, at the time, pointed to malware hosted on a server (now offline) based in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This installer drops no fewer than six payloads, including the “clickjacker” Trojan-Bamital, which redirects the browser to a different site when a user on an infected machine clicks a linked result in a very specific subset of search engine Web sites (such as, for example, results on the South Korean version of Google, Google.kr, but not the main Google.com site itself).

In addition, album.exe file also drops Trojan-Downloader-Suurch, which can download and install additional payloads, and leads hapless Web surfers into the abyss by hijacking searches on a broader set of search engines, and injecting its own code into the search results page. The album.exe installer also drops a DLL which captures passwords and other data entered into Web forms in Internet Explorer, and forwards that data on to a different Web domain (which happens to be hosted at the same IP address in Bosnia that was used for the album.exe download — and remains online as I publish this).

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Facebook Spam Leads to Viagra Vendor, Drive-by Download

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By Andrew Brandt

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Annoying as they are, the spam emails circulating that supposedly come from Facebook don’t merely lead the recipient to one of those so-called Canadian Pharmacy pill-vendor websites. They now come with a bonus: An infection, courtesy of a malicious iframe which attempts a series of exploits against the browser, Adobe Reader, and Adobe Flash in an attempt to push a drive-by download down to the victim’s PC.

The messages, which say they come from a service called Facebook Notify (or, sometimes, just Facebook Service) inform the recipient that they’ve received a message. In order to read the message, the recipient is encouraged to click a link in the email that looks like it leads to Facebook.

It’s a sham: The spammers have hotlinked a Facebook URL so it points to another Web site. That Web site redirects the browser to the Canadian Pharmacy page, but that’s not all: In a few cases, while checking out what happens when one visits the page, I found that the test PC was infected afterwards.

As it turns out, a script embedded within the Canadian Pharmacy page loads an iframe that points to yet another site. And that iframe runs through a number of tricks to push down a Trojan installer we classify to Trojan-PWS-Daonol.

Daonol is an obnoxious thief, because in addition to stealing passwords, the Trojan also prevents the browser from loading certain Web sites; redirects the browser to sites other than the one the user clicks in search result pages on Google, Bing, and Yahoo; and prevents Windows from running some applications.

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This PC Will Self-Destruct in Ten Seconds

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By Andrew Brandt

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Phishing Trojans that try to remain below the radar are still prevalent, but a number of files coming through Threat Research point to a disturbing trend: Several new variants of existing malware families are taking a scorched earth approach to infected computers, rendering the PC unbootable (just check out the batch file at left for just one egregious example) once the malware has retrieved whatever data it’s trying to steal, or deliberately crashing it, repeatedly, if you try to remove it.

Since the middle of last year, we’ve seen a sprinkling of malware that also wipes out key files on the hard drive, sometimes preventing a reboot, after an infection. This isn’t hostageware, which overtly threatens to delete the contents of the hard drive if you don’t pay up, but something more sinister.

In some cases, the crashes we saw were the result of poor coding by the malware author. But increasingly it appears that this behavior is deliberate, and occurs without warning. And this unfortunate trend appears to be getting worse, leaving a raft of perplexed, angry victims unable to use their computers in the wake of an infection.

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Social Nets Put Your Privacy at Risk

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By Mike Kronenberg

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Attention Facebook and Twitter users: You’re still at risk. Last year, our survey found that lots of people using social networking sites were taking the risk of financial loss, identity theft, and malware infection. Have things gotten any better? Well, the answer is yes but, unfortunately, not better enough — and potentially a lot worse for some of you.

The results of our 2010 survey reveals that more of you are adhering to some safe behaviors — like blocking profiles from being visible through public search engines. That’s a good thing, but the downside is over 25 percent of you haven’t changed your default privacy settings. And more that three quarters of survey respondents haven’t placed any restrictions on who can see their recent activity.

I worry about this because you can’t escape the fact that rogue operators are always trying to extract details about you. They want access to anything that can help them dig into your private life. They can break into Web mail accounts, get your credit card number, steal your identity, or even attack you through cyber-stalking.

And they’ll do anything to get the info, from attacking you with malware to tricking you into revealing passwords.

With that, and our survey in mind, on the following page I’ve posted a few suggestions you can follow to protect yourself.

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New Research: IT Pros Sound Off On 2010 Security Concerns

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Research from the enterprise security experts at Webroot

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With the explosion of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook in 2009, it’s no surprise cybercriminals have set their sights on these Web sites for new victims. Facebook now has over 400 million active users and Twitter has over six million — a sizeable pool of potential targets.

These new threats are a cause of great concern for IT managers and businesses. Webroot recently surveyed over 800 IT professionals in the US, UK and Australia, at companies ranging from 100 to 500 people in size, to learn what are their biggest concerns for 2010. Eighty percent of those who responded anticipate Web 2.0-based malware threats will be among their biggest challenges, and 73% said these types of malware are much harder to manage than email-based threats.

Many IT admins reported they thought their organizations were sufficiently protected, but that wasn’t always the case: Significant numbers reported attacks from viruses (60%), spyware (57%), phishing attacks (47%), hacking attacks (35%), and SQL injections of their Web sites (32%). What’s more, because malicious hackers have a financial motive, individuals who possess sensitive business data are perfect targets. Increasingly, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) come under attack because they are less likely to have the multpile layers of protection that larger enterprises do.

Data breaches, when they happen, can be devastating to SMBs: According the the FBI, blended Web and email attacks led to approximately $100 million in attempted losses last year. SMBs can take precautions to make sure they aren’t a part of these staggering statistics. It is important to keep up with the latest threat vectors by using a security service with URL filtering, end user policy management and virus protection, and by making sure employees are educated on know to avoid threats in a growing landscape — especially when it comes to social media.

Webroot will address this topic in greater depth when our CTO Gerhard Eschelbeck delivers a Web security trend report at the RSA Conference 2010 Wednesday, March 3, at 4:30 p.m. PST in the Briefing Center on the Expo Hall floor. We’ll continue the conversation at Infosec Wednesday, April 28 at 3:20 p.m. GMT in Earls Court when Eschelbeck  presents Securing the Internet for a Web 2.0 Collaborative Culture.

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