Tag Archives: worm

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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‘Koobfox’ variant digs for Firefox cookies

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By Andrew Brandt

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koobfox_stringsA 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.

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Koobface: Not Just for Facebook, Anymore

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By Andrew Brandt

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smalltweet_obsThe latest generation of Koobface targets its particularly effective brand of social engineering at more social networks than ever. As the worm has evolved, we’ve seen it grow to encompass a pantheon of services, targeting more than just the widely publicized Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, but a host of other Web sites where people meet and (apparently) post links of funny videos for one another to watch.

To illustrate how pervasive the worm has become at propagation, we put together the video below. (And no, you don’t need to download some random codec to watch it, just Flash.) If you’ve got two minutes, check it out, but to get the best view, maximize the video window first (click the little “X” next to “vimeo” in the lower-right corner):

For our test, several members of Webroot’s Threat Research team created profiles on the social networks Koobface attempts to infiltrate, logged into those accounts on test computers, then executed the worm’s main installer application.

The worm checks to see which sites among the ones it targets that you’ve logged in to, and downloads specific payloads for each social networking site it targets. That makes sense: Each of those social networks has its own distinct user interface, which the payload targeting that site interacts with. But the sites all have one thing in common: They all permit members to send one another messages containing hotlinked URLs. And that’s what Koobface is best at: Propagating itself by sending links. Nothing surprised us more than finding that we could actually watch the worm interacting with the interface, filling in forms and clicking buttons, as we stared at the screen. Continue reading →

April 2009 wrapup: Thumbdrives under threat

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By Andrew Brandt

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We’ve just tallied the top 10 threats Webroot’s consumer products detected during the month of April, and some interesting trends appear to be shaping up.

Conficker aside, the first quarter of 2009 seemed to be dominated by worms that spread not only over a network, but to virtually anything you can plug into a USB port to store files. Thumbdrives and portable hard drives immediately come to mind, but so do  MP3 players, digital picture frames and memory cards — like the kind you’d use in cameras, cellphones, or videogame players.

April proved to be no different. It’s very much a case of what’s old is new again, reminiscent of the era when sharing an infected floppy disk could wreak havoc.

We’re also seeing malware distributors still trying to use old vulnerabilities to try to infect computers. Even JPEG image files containing the MS04-028 vulnerability code — a bug that was fixed in Windows four and a half years ago, are still floating around the net trying to take advantage of older, unpatched system, as are scripts attempting to exploit the ADODB.Stream vulnerability. If you ever needed a reason to run Windows Update, this is it.

Click onward to read the entire list. Continue reading →

Inane Shenanigans with Worm-Shiv

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By Andrew Brandt

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It’s been a long time since I’ve worked on a malware file as singularly obnoxious as Worm-Shiv, a new worm we defined a few weeks ago. There isn’t anything especially technically avant-garde or advanced about the worm, nor was it especially difficult to detect or remove. It just exhibits behavior that, to be blunt, is about as annoying as it possibly can be.

The infection process starts with a small self-extracting RAR archive executable. When run, it drops and executes another .exe file, which in turn drops and executes yet another .exe file. Sounds pretty unobtrusive so far, right?

Well, even though the worm might have snuck by unnoticed, it would be hard to characterize its operational behavior as “staying below the radar.” The worm puts a copy of a file named wsock32.dll into every single folder on the hard drive. Every. Single. One. On my test system there were more than 200 copies left behind.

Then the fun begins.

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Someone Confick-rolled the Internet

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By Andrew Brandt

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Well, the big Conficker.c launch day is upon us and…nothing. So far, anyway. Someone should start selling “I blogged about Conficker and all I got was this lousy T-shirt” shirts. Cafepress, are you listening?

We’ve been keeping to the back of the room about Conficker, not joining the rising hysteria chorus. It’s not that we don’t care, but I’ll tell you why we’re not making a lot of noise: Webroot’s malware removal solution effectively deals with Conficker on PCs. That’s it. As long as you’ve got the File System Shield and the Execution Shield enabled in your application (click the Shields button on the left side of the Webroot Antivirus/Internet Security Essentials window, and look for a little picture of a shield next to those labels in the Windows System Shields category), and definitions updated as long as two months ago, we’ve got your PC’s back.

The only people who need to be concerned about this worm are people with no legitimate malware protection — and no, a copy of the rogue application Antivirus 2008/2009/2010 doesn’t count — and who haven’t checked in with Windows Update since last fall. And even those people only need to worry about the worm’s code attaching itself to their PC. As far as we know, that’s the only thing it’s good at. Oh yes, and pranking the computer security community and the world’s press.

So, since we’re mentioning it, now would be a good time to head over to Microsoft and check to make sure you have those updates you so sorely are missing. And if you have a copy of our product, click the Options button, then the Update tab, and make sure you have both the latest definitions files and the latest version of the application. If you need either, or both, it’ll only take a few seconds on a broadband connection to pull them down.

Then you can get back to life, and stop worrying about whether Conficker is going to destroy the world, kick your cat, and push a baby stroller into the street — or fizzle like a wet firecracker.