Tag Archives: TRxMS

Malicious PHP Scripts on the Rise

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By Andrew Brandt

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Last week, I gave a talk at the RSA Security Conference about malicious PHP scripts. For those who can’t attend the conference, I wanted to give you a glimpse into this world to which, until last year, I hadn’t paid much attention.

My normal week begins with a quick scan of malware lists — URLs that point to new samples — that come from a variety of public sources. I started noticing an increasing number of non-executable PHP and Perl scripts appearing on those lists and decided to dig a little deeper.

In a lot of ways, PHP is an ideal platform for malicious Web pages. For programmers and techies, PHP is easy to learn. Virtually all Web servers run the PHP engine, so there are vast numbers of potential “victims” (though the numbers aren’t anything close to the number of Windows-using potential malware victims). And just like many forms of executable malware that runs on Windows — the type I’m more familiar with — the most successful malicious PHP scripts permit their users (the criminals) to control and manipulate Web servers for their own benefit and, most commonly, profit.

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Ransomware App Asks Victims to Pay a Phone Bill

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By Andrew Brandt

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Ransomware is nothing new, but a Ukrainian ransomware Trojan that came over the transom last week demonstrated that the concept of “payment” can extend to services other than banking or finance. In this case, the Trojan (which we and several other AV companies call Trojan-Ransom-Krotten) thoroughly locks down the infected system then demands payment—in the form of credit paid to the Ukrainian mobile phone provider Kyivstar, which the victim then has to transfer to the malware distributor’s account.

Yes, Alice, the hacker wants you to pay his cellphone bill.

Once the ransomware has taken hold on a victim’s computer, it locks down the operating system in dozens of different ways, as well as changing several registry keys that add juvenile, profane text to Internet Explorer’s title bar and elsewhere on the desktop and in folders.

Paying the ransom in these cases simply emboldens the malware creator to continue his crime spree. Of course, even once a victim hypothetically pays this ransom, there’s also no guarantee that there’s any way at all for the malware distributor to reverse the damage — which takes the form of significant levels of annoyance — caused by this insipid Trojan.

Fortunately for the victim, the creator of this Trojan isn’t the sharpest tack in the box. Not only were we easily able to tease out the Trojan’s payloads and add signatures which would prevent the Trojan from delivering its payload files to a victim’s computer, but we’re able to see exactly how the author (ineffectively) tries to frustrate the kinds of behavioral analysis we and other antivirus vendors perform.

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