By Dancho Danchev
In yesterday’s Firefox 13 release, Mozilla has fixed seven critical security vulnerabilities, four of which are critical. The majority of these vulnerabilities are also fixed in the latest Thunderbird 13 release.
More details on the vulnerabilities:
By Dancho Danchev
According to a newly released report from NSS Labs, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 outperforms competing browsers in protecting against socially engineered malware.
More details:
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.
By Andrew Brandt
Where’s the work ethic, malware geniuses? If this latest example of shenanigans is the best you can deliver, you’re not even trying to generate convincing scams — or even something that makes sense — anymore.
One of our Threat Research Analysts pointed me to a Web page hosting a fake update program for Firefox the other day, and the only thing it was useful for was a pretty good laugh.
In replicating the Firefox “you’re now running…” page, the malware distributor managed only to build something that looks remarkably similar to a more sophisticated, and ultimately more plausible, scam we first described this past summer. But the scam is full of fail.
The malicious page, which had been hosted at firefoxlife.cz.cc (and is now, thankfully, shut down), looks like the page that automatically pops up when you first launch the Firefox browser after you’ve applied an update. Ultimately, it not only fails the smell test, giving the user contradictory information, but also fails at the effective malware test, delivering multiple different samples, all of which crashed when we tried to run them on test systems or in debuggers.
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By Andrew Brandt
In September, I posted an item about a dropper which we call Trojan-Dropper-Headshot. This malware delivers everything including the kitchen sink when it infects your system. It has an absolute ton of payloads, any of which on their own constitute a serious problem. All together, they’re a nightmare.
Among the payloads, we’ve seen this monstrosity drop downloaders (Trojan-Agent-TDSS and Trojan-Downloader-Ncahp, aka Bubnix), adware (Virtumonde, Street-Ads, and Sky-banners), keyloggers (Zbot and LDpinch), clickfraud Trojans (Trojan-Clicker-Vesloruki and at least three other generic clickers), and a Rogue AV called Antivir Solution Pro. So this is one nasty beast that has no qualms about using the shotgun approach to malware infections.
But we also noticed that it has added yet another intriguing installer to its panoply of pests: It’s a small executable named seupd.exe (search engine updater?) that makes two minor (but obnoxious) modifications to Firefox. The result of these modifications changes the behavior of Firefox’s search bar, the small box that lets you send queries directly to search engines, located to the right of the Address Bar.
The modifications are not immediately apparent unless you try to search Google for something, using either the Search Box or the Address Bar: Instead of sending your search to Google, the browser submits search queries to one of six different domains not owned by Google, but which appear to use the Google API to provide results — and, presumably, earn a little ad revenue on the side.
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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.
By Andrew Brandt
A new variant of the Koobface worm started striking out this week, with a twist: Where the older Koobface would steal and use the cookies saved by Internet Explorer which store social network logins in order to spread its infectious messages in the victim’s name, this new variant is pulling down a tool designed to steal credentials saved by Firefox (in the form of cookies and stored passwords). Users of the Firefox browser were, until now, able to thwart the pernicious spy’s ability to hijack a victim’s social network accounts, because the two browsers store their cookies in different locations, and in different formats.
We got wind of the new variant as we saw the characteristic links spreading through various networks yesterday. In our early tests, the worm exhibited similiar skill at spreading over multiple networks: In addition to Facebook, the MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, Tagged and Netlog accounts we use for testing its behavior were used to spread malicious links, posted either to the victim’s “wall” or status, or as messages sent to all of the account-holder’s friends.
Using a well-documented hack to access the Firefox cookie file, the payload (appropriately named ff2ie.exe) looks for a copy of the file sqlite3.dll on the victim’s hard drive, then uses the functionality of that file to pull social network cookie information from the Firefox cookie database (as shown in the screenshot, above), and write an Internet Explorer cookie containing all that information. With the IE cookie(s) in place, the rest of the Koobface payloads work as they did before.
The worm continues to query the download server for payloads targeting 10 social networking services, but for an undetermined reason, it only delivered six targeted payloads. We also saw that, instead of downloading the executable payloads directly, the worm downloaded installers, each of which place various payloads in the Windows folder, then self-delete.
By Andrew Brandt
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.
By Andrew Brandt
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 
that 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.
