By Dancho Danchev
Cybercriminals are currently mass mailing millions of emails impersonating Microsoft Corporation in an attempt to trick users into clicking on a link in a bogus ‘License Order” confirmation email. Upon clicking on the link, users are exposed to the client-side exploits served by the latest version of the Black Hole Exploit Kit.
More details:
By Dancho Danchev
On Tuesday, Microsoft issued 6 security bulletins, 4 of them critical, and 2 important updates. The bulletins fix a total of 11 vulnerabilities in Windows, Microsoft Office, and Internet Explorer.
According to Microsoft, the company has already observed targeted malware attacks taking advantage of the MS12-027 vulnerability. In order to mitigate the risks posed by these currently circulating targeted attacks, the company is advising users to disable the ActiveX controls via the Trust Center Settings > ActiveX Settings, option.
More details:
As a follow-up to the Blackhole Exploit posting, I thought I would share one aspect of my job that I truely enjoy: Discovery.
While investigating some active urls being served up via a blackhole kit, I noticed something quite odd, as I would end up on sites that had malicious code injected into their webpages.
Once the redirection to the blackhole kit was initiated, I saw the usual exploits taking place, first being Internet Explorer and Adobe Flash, then onto Adobe Reader and Java.
This time, the kit didn’t stop there. Internet Explorer proceeded to launch Windows Media Player. Since I had never used it on this test machine, the Windows Media Player install sequence initiated, causing the windows media player setup screen to appear in order to finalize its installation.
I became curious as to what Windows Media Player is being used for. Unfortunately in this case, I couldn’t see where any files were called down to the machine and did not have any type of network analyzer running.
By Andrew Brandt
Late Monday, after news about the death of troubled pop singer Amy Winehouse had been circling the globe for a little more than 48 hours, we saw the first malware appear that used the singer’s name as a social engineering trick to entice victims to run the malicious file. Abusing celebrity names, news, or even deaths isn’t a new (or even particularly interesting) social engineering tactic, but there was one unique aspect to this particular malware’s behavior that raised some eyebrows around here: It appears that Brazilian phisher-Trojan writers seem to be working more closely with their Chinese counterparts, using servers in China as dead drops for their stolen goods.
The widely-reported case of the malware campaign continues to distribute new, randomized files via a download link managed through a dynamic DNS service, more than a week on. The file’s name, in Portugese, (“103684policia-inglesa-divulga-fotos-do-corpo-da-cantora-amy-winehouse-WVA.exe“) translates roughly to English police divulge photos of singer Amy Winehouse’s corpse, but victims who open this file are only going to see their computer become compromised.
The malware modifies the Hosts file in Windows to redirect traffic from 78 different Web sites — the vast majority of which are Brazilian banks and finance sites such as e-gold, with the rest being American Express, and Microsoft‘s Brazilian and US domains for Hotmail, Live, and MSN — to one of 9 IP addresses, almost all of which point to servers hosted in Chinese networks. One oddball outlier IP address in the modified Hosts file list points to an IP address belonging to the network operated by the Ford Motor Company, but that IP address was not allocated to an operational server when I did some tests.
By Marco Giuliani
Last Wednesday, Microsoft published a blog post detailing a significant update to a piece of malware named Popureb. The malware adds code to the Master Boot Record, or MBR, a region of the hard disk that’s read by the PC during bootup, long before the operating system has had a chance to get started. Researchers sometimes refer to these kinds of malware as bootkits, or a rootkit which loads at such a low level during the boot process that it is invisible to the operating system, and therefore very difficult to remove.
Microsoft researcher Chun Feng detailed some of the new features of Popureb.E, which includes a very low-level hook into the Windows driver responsible for disk writes and reads. When the driver on an infected system detects an attempt to write changes into the MBR — the kinds of changes a repair tool might try to make — it simply changes the command from write to read, effectively neutering any kind of tool running within Windows that might try to fix the infection.
(Update 2011-07-08: We’ve published a free command line tool that can remove Popureb.E from the master boot record of an infected computer.)
Microsoft’s initial cleanup guidance on Popureb.E was pretty drastic, and more than a little scary: Full removal of the bootkit requires a full reinstall of Windows, wiping out anything currently on the hard drive. We don’t think this is the case, and the Microsoft folks seem to have moderated their advice to include some manual fixes using the recovery console.
While the whole concept behind the Trojan is valid and technically powerful, the practical implementation of the malware is not as valid as the idea behind it. What follows is a fairly technical write-up that describes both the problem, and one solution we’ve come up with.
By Andrew Brandt
When you see an online order form that bears Microsoft’s logo and the words “pay to: Microsoft Inc.,” are you any more likely to enter a credit card number into the form and click submit? That’s the psychological experiment currently being undertaken by a company that calls itself DefenceLab, which subjects unsuspecting users to its peculiar blend of fakealert with rogue antivirus.
Last year, our friends at Sunbelt wrote two very interesting blog items about DefenceLab. At the time, DefenceLab was accused of lifting content from the products and Web sites of legitimate comapnies such as Microsoft and AVG, inserting that text into their own Web site. They had stolen AVG‘s “awards” links from that company’s Web site, and posted it on their own; They were also lifting, whole cloth, copy from Microsoft’s Web site, then replacing words in the pages (like “Microsoft”) with “DefenceLab.”
Well these slugs are at it again, only this time they’ve dragged a US-based electronic payment processor into their scam. The payment processor handles the credit card transactions from victims who fall prey to the scam’s fake alert message about a nonexistent infection. Most rogues use fly-by-night processors, based overseas, who provide scant contact information, and never respond to requests for a refund. DefenceLab, however, provides would-be snake oil purchasers with both an email address and toll-free telephone number, in case of a transaction problem.
The only problem I can imagine would be if anyone actually paid perfectly good money to buy their bogus app.
The DefenceLab rogue also uses some time-honored techniques to trap victims, essentially locking nontechnical users out of their computer. Click through to the next page to see exactly how they do it; I’ll even throw in, free of charge, a simple trick that will let you prevent the program from popping up fake antivirus alerts.
By Andrew Brandt
Security Websites are buzzing with news that a new zero-day exploit against Adobe Reader and Acrobat is circulating today, causing computers to become infected with malware simply by visiting certain Web pages. While the exploit itself is worthy of note, nobody is talking about the payload it downloads: It installs a trio of files dressed up to look like Windows system files which have been digitally signed with a security certificate supposedly issued by Microsoft. The digital signature gives the casual user the impression that the two signed files — an executable and a DLL both named “LNETCPL” — are legitimate Microsoft components.
The fake certificates appear in the properties sheets of both the installer and two of the three executable payloads dropped by the installer. One giveaway is that the sheet identifies the signer as Microsoft but lacks both an email address and a time stamp. Legitimate system files digitally signed by Microsoft identify the signer as Microsoft Corporation and always have a time stamp. The bogus signatures are identified as invalid, but only when you click the Details button on the Properties Sheet’s Digital Signatures tab.
A legitimate Microsoft-signed file is issued by the “Microsoft Code Signing PCA” certificate authority, and will also display a countersignature from Verisign; The fakes have no countersignature, and appear to have been issued by “Root Agency” — a made up name for a nonexistent certificate authority the malware creators are using to generate these files. In fact, the malware creators may actually be using Microsoft’s own Certificate Creation Tool (which is supposed to be used for testing) to facilitate generating these signed files.
While we’ve seen a number of digitally signed files come through our research queue over the years, authors of Trojan horse apps rarely go to the trouble of digitally signing files in this way. It’s not clear why they would be digitally signing files, but clearly the person or people behind this are up to no good. We’ve published a new definition to remove both the installer and these payload files; Trojan-Certispaz will be available to help our customers clean up infections in our next definitions update.
By Andrew Brandt
Word came down from our Threat Research team this morning about a new spam campaign that uses upstart Bing search engine’s own redirection mechanism to bypass spam filters and send undesirable links over email. On top of that, the spammers are also abusing MySpace’s lnk.ms link shrinking system to further obfuscate the destination that the spammed link points to.
When you view an RSS feed in Bing (such as their news feed, for example) all the clickable links in the feed use Bing’s internal redirection mechanism, so before you end up on the news story you want to read, your browser first connects to
http://www.bing.com/news/rssclick.aspx?redir=
followed by the full URL of the site you intend to visit.
The thing is, anyone can plug anything into the end of that URL, and it’ll redirect to that site. For instance, you could come back to the front page of this blog. Of course, there’s nothing in place to prevent a criminal from redirecting users to something worse, like a drive-by download or phishing page. But in this case, recipients who click the link end up bounced through MySpace’s link shrinker, and finally into a site selling a “work at home making money from Google” pyramid scheme.
