Tag Archives: TRxGM

Shorty Worm Spams Links, Hijacks Browsers

Posted on by

By Andrew Brandt & Grayson Milbourne

Add to FacebookAdd to DiggAdd to Del.icio.usAdd to StumbleuponAdd to RedditAdd to BlinklistAdd to TwitterAdd to TechnoratiAdd to Yahoo BuzzAdd to Newsvine

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.
Continue reading →

New Bank Phisher Brings Added Functionality, Problems

Posted on by

By Andrew Brandt

Add to FacebookAdd to DiggAdd to Del.icio.usAdd to StumbleuponAdd to RedditAdd to BlinklistAdd to TwitterAdd to TechnoratiAdd to Yahoo BuzzAdd to Newsvine

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.

Continue reading →

Search Hijacker Adds Files to Firefox Profile

Posted on by

By Andrew Brandt

Add to FacebookAdd to DiggAdd to Del.icio.usAdd to StumbleuponAdd to RedditAdd to BlinklistAdd to TwitterAdd to TechnoratiAdd to Yahoo BuzzAdd to Newsvine

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.
Continue reading →

Civilization 5 Torrent Bonus: Uncivilized Malware

Posted on by

By Andrew Brandt

Add to FacebookAdd to DiggAdd to Del.icio.usAdd to StumbleuponAdd to RedditAdd to BlinklistAdd to TwitterAdd to TechnoratiAdd to Yahoo BuzzAdd to Newsvine

Bootlegged copies of Civilization 5, the highly anticipated, just-released real time strategy game, are already popping up in file sharing services. And, as we’ve come to expect, some of the pirated copies of the game come with that little something special — malicious components.

One of our Threat Research Analysts, who also happens to be an avid gamer, started looking for pirated copies of the game Friday morning and, within five minutes of looking, found Trojans in some of the torrents in circulation. I’ve chosen to focus on one of these files, not only because it was the first we saw, but also the most interesting. The Trojan, bundled in a torrent with the ISO image of the Civ 5 installation disc, is called ‘read me before burn.exe‘ (MD5: 2f7ff2ecef4b5cf1c9679f79d9b72518).

On a typical Windows system, the file appears to be a text document, but only because it uses a file icon of a text document. With the file extension visible, however, it’s clearly an .exe with a mission.

Continue reading →

Blackhat SEO of Google Images Links to Rogue AV

Posted on by

By Andrew Brandt

Add to FacebookAdd to DiggAdd to Del.icio.usAdd to StumbleuponAdd to RedditAdd to BlinklistAdd to TwitterAdd to TechnoratiAdd to FurlAdd to Newsvine

Yesterday, a few of the Threat Research folks and I had a little fun playing with a hack that had, for one day at least, pretty much decimated Google’s Image Search feature. One researcher, who stumbled into the attack purely by chance, found that a Google Images link to a map of the United States was, instead, redirecting hapless Web surfers to pages that deliver an installer of a rogue antivirus in the Security Tool family of fine, fraudulent products.

What really caught our interest was how the hack behaved, depending on the operating system and browser you used. With each different browser configuration, we were treated to one of several different, specially crafted malware delivery Web pages.

I’m not sure when the attack started, but we started analyzing it at around 10am, Mountain time. By late afternoon, the sites were offline and the attack no longer worked.

To test the extent of the hack, we played around with the manipulated search results using five different browsers: Internet Explorer 6 and 8, Safari 5, Google Chrome, and Firefox. All the browsers were set up with default settings in an otherwise identical installation of Windows XP SP3. We then searched for USA Map and clicked the second result that appeared under the header “Images for usa map.” (All but the first image result that appeared on that first page of results linked to the malicious Web site.)
Continue reading →

Starcraft 2 Launch Day Piracy Infects Eager Gamers

Posted on by

By Andrew Brandt

Add to FacebookAdd to DiggAdd to Del.icio.usAdd to StumbleuponAdd to RedditAdd to BlinklistAdd to TwitterAdd to TechnoratiAdd to Yahoo BuzzAdd to Newsvine

While some members of our Threat Research group are attending talks at the Black Hat Briefings, the rest of the team is back at our offices, hard at work watching for novel threats.  That’s good news for gamers, and bad news for malware distributors who might try to take advantage of a confluence of events where many elite members of the security community are temporarily turned away from monitors while they attend the conference. I received a warning about one potential threat facing gamers who might turn to piracy to get a copy of Blizzard’s new real-time-strategy game, Starcraft II.

Apparently, there are a flood of torrents where gamers can download purportedly pirated versions of SC2. While your less ethical gamer might cheer this news, you might be less pleased to find out that some of the SC2 torrents appear to bring along a side order of malware. One of the torrents, for example, touted as a custom game launcher, drops the Zbot keylogger Trojan—albeit a variant we can easily detect and remove.

While this isn’t exactly new, we’re finding that the incredible demand for this game is driving malware distributors to supply something that looks like what the gamers want. We’ll keep an eye on this trend, and update the post if necessary with more details as they become available.

And if you want a copy of the game, just go out and buy it. It may not be the most thrifty use of your money, but it’s the ethical thing to do, and the safest way to get a copy of the game.

(Starcraft 2 logo courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment)

Spammed Trojan Won’t Run Under Windows XP

Posted on by

By Andrew Brandt

Add to FacebookAdd to DiggAdd to Del.icio.usAdd to StumbleuponAdd to RedditAdd to BlinklistAdd to TwitterAdd to TechnoratiAdd to FurlAdd to Newsvine

While it is far from the first Trojan ever to simply fail to execute under Windows XP, it definitely caught our eye that a variant of Trojan-Downloader-Tacticlol distributed last week in a spam campaign only fully executed under Windows Vista or newer operating systems. It may have been just a fluke, but repeated tests with both a virtual machine and real hardware running Windows XP at various patch levels showed that the Trojan we received attached to a spam message simply quit when executed in an XP environment, but ran smoothly and did all its planned dirty work on a Windows Vista testbed.

The Trojan, which is capable of causing a devastating malware infection, drops a DLL with an odd name made up of random letters into the system32 folder, then registers the DLL so it loads the next time the computer boots up. After a reboot, it kicks into full swing, pulling down a variety of malware installers.

The spam message (we got a bunch of different variations, all with the same attachment) came from a variety of falsified return addresses. The message, with a subject of Statement of fees 2009/2010 contains an utterly incomprehensible body, which reads, in part: “The accomodation is dealt with by another section and I have passed your request on to them today.” It looks very similar to a message I get from the toll road authority here in Colorado that uses electronic toll collection. The real entity emails a statement every so often with an attached PDF, though the real toll road statement doesn’t appear to come from the domains “reclusivebillionaire.com” or “reelsolutions.com.” Nice try, sparky.

More interestingly, though, is the idea that this Trojan, which is so prevalent and widely distributed, may signal the start of a trend where malware authors begin turning away from XP as the dominant operating system they target.

Continue reading →