<![CDATA[[SecurityRatty] tag: worms]]> http://securityratty.com/tag/worms Tue, 20 May 2008 20:00:00 +0000 iRatty Engine http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss <![CDATA[The Twitter Malware Campaign Wants to Bank With You]]> http://securityratty.com/article/0a86c9e6b40c8995b8c3f84a2d12480a http://securityratty.com/article/0a86c9e6b40c8995b8c3f84a2d12480a
In what appears to be a lone gunman malware campaign -- where the malware spreader even left his email address within the binary - the now down Twitter malware campaign managed to attract only 69 followers before it has shut down, using a trivial approach for launching an XSS worm - Cross-site request forgery (CSRF). More info :

"This week it’s Twitter’s turn to host an attack - one that is targeting both Twitter users and the Internet community at large. In this case it's a malicious Twitter profile twitter.com/[skip]/ with a name that is Portuguese for ‘pretty rabbit’ which has a photo advertising a video with girls posted. 

This profile has obviously been created especially for infecting users, as there is no other data except the photo, which contains the link to the video. If you click on the link, you get a window that shows the progress of an automatic download of a so-called new version of Adobe Flash which is supposedly required to watch the video. You end up with a file labeled Adobe Flash (it’s a fake) on your machine; a technique that is currently very popular."

Let's analyze the campaign before it was shut down. The original Twitter account used twitter.com/video_kelly_key basically included a link to player-video-youtube.sytes.net (204.16.252.98) which was using a URL shortening service fly2.ws/NilOMN3 in order to redirect to the banker malware located at freewebtown.com/construimagens/ Play-video-youtube.kelly-key.com. It's detection rate is as follows :

Scanners Result: 14/36 (38.89%)
Trojan-Spy.Win32.Banker.caw
File size: 88064 bytes
MD5...: 25600af502758ca992b9e7fff3739def
SHA1..: 9262ca501ef388e0fe42c50a3d002ddbd6e254f2

Twitter isn't an exception to the realistic potential for XSS worms though CSRF that could affect each and every Web 2.0 service, which as a matter of fact have all suffered such attempts, namely, Orkut, MySpace (as well as the QuickTime XSS flaw), GaiaOnline, Hi5, and most recently the XSS worm at Justin.tv, demonstrate that trivial vulnerabilities come handy for what's to turn into a major security incident if not taken care of promptly.

Related posts:
XSS The Planet
XSS Vulnerabilities in E-banking Sites
The Current State of Web Application Worms
g0t XSSed?
Web Application Email Harvesting Worm
]]> Tue, 05 Aug 2008 03:14:42 +0000 twitter twitter malware campaign xss xss vulnerabilities original twitter account xss worms xss worm twitter users worm The Twitter Malware Campaign Wants to Bank With You <![CDATA[Summarizing July's Threatscape]]> http://securityratty.com/article/2860027a1eaa69350d814429c3bf6070 http://securityratty.com/article/2860027a1eaa69350d814429c3bf6070
July's threatscape -- consider going through June's summary as well -- once again demonstrated that nothing is impossible, the impossible just takes a little longer where the incentive would be the ultimate monetization of the process.

Russian hacktivists attacking Lithuania and Georgia, several Storm Worm campaigns, a couple of new malware tools, Neosploit team abandoning support for their web malware exploitation kit, CAPTCHA for several of the most popular free email providers getting efficiently attacked in order to resell the bogus accounts registered in the process, several copycat SQL injects next to the evasion techniques applied by the copycats, botnets continuing to commit click fraud and generate revenue for those who own or have rented them, an infamous money mule recruitment service taking advantage of the fast-fluxed network provided by the ASProx botnet - pretty interesting month indeed.

01. Decrypting and Restoring GPcode Encrypted Files -
The GPcode authors read the news too, and are catching up with the major weaknesses pointed out in their previous release in order to come with a virtually unbreakable algorithm. And since more evidence of who's behind the GPcode ransomware was gathered, vendors and independent researchers realized that the latest release is also susceptible to a plain simple flaw, namely the encrypted files were basically getting deleting and not securely erased making them fairly easy to recover.

02. Chinese Bloggers Bypassing Censorship by Blogging Backward -
When you know how it works, you can either improve, abuse or destroy it in that very particular order. Chinese bloggers are always very adaptive in respect to spreading their message by obfuscating their messages in a way that common keywords filtering software wouldn't be able to pick them.

03. Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail’s CAPTCHA Broken -
This has been an urban legend for a while, but with more services starting to offer hundreds of thousands of pre-registered accounts at these providers, it's surprising that spam and phishing emails coming from legitimate email providers is increasing. The "vendors" behind these propositions are naturally starting to "vertically integrate" by offering value-added services for extra payments, namely, scripts to automatically abuse the pre-registered accounts for automatic registration of splogs and anything else malicious or blackhat SEO related.

04. The Antivirus Industry in 2008 -
If it were anyone else but a security vendor to come up with such a realistic cartoon aiming to stimulate innovation by emphasizing on how prolific and sophisticated malware groups have become, it would have been a biased cartoon. However, this one is courtesy of a security vendor, and it's pretty objective.

05. Lithuania Attacked by Russian Hacktivists, 300 Sites Defaced -
This attack is a good example of a decent PSYOPS operation. Of course they have already build the capabilities to deface and even execute DDoS attacks against Lithuania, so why not put them in a "stay tuned" mode, by speculating on the upcoming attack and then executing it making it look like they delived what they've promised? This a lone gunman mass defacement given that the sites were all hosted on a single ISP, with no indication of any kind of coordination whatsoever. The same for the Georgia President’s web site which was under DDoS attack from Russian hackers later this month. Despite that the hacktivists behind it dedicated a separate C&C for the attack, one that hasn't been used in any type of previous attacks so far, they did a minor mistake by using a secondary command and control location that's known to have been connected with a particular "botnet on demand" service in the past. The second attack once again proves that you don't need to build capacity when you can basically outsource the process to someone else.

06. The ICANN Responds to the DNS Hijacking, Its Blog Under Attack -
The ICANN finally issued a statement concerning the DNS hijacking of some of their domains, which is in fact what Comcast.net and Photobucket.com should have done as well, next to stating it was a "glitch". The ICANN also took advantage of the moment and also pointed out that their blog has also been under attack during the month. There's no better example of how the combination of tactics can result in the hijacking of the domains of the organizations implementing procedures aiming to protect against these very same attacks. And while Photobucket.com remained silent during the entire incident, the hosting provider that was used by the Netdevilz team in the two attacks, since they were also responsible for the ICANN and IANA DNS hijackings, technological and social engineeringissued a statement.

07. The Risks of Outdated Situational Awareness -
Security vendors are often in a "catch-up mode" and if I were an average Internet user not knowing that real-time situational awareness speaks for the degree to which my vendor knows what going on online, I'd be pretty excited. However, I'm not. Prevx were catching up with a service which I covered approximately two months ago, I even had the chance to constructively confront with one of the affected sites on how despite their security measures in place, this attack was still possible. Recently Prevx have once again demonstrated an outdated situational awareness by coming across a banking malware in July 2008, whereas the malware has been around since July 2007, and earlier depending on which version you're referring to.

08. Fake Porn Sites Serving Malware - Part Two -
Yet another domain portfolio of fake porn sites serving rogue codecs and live exploit URLs, just the tip of the iceberg as usual, however their centralization is greatly assisting in tracking them down.

09. Storm Worm's U.S Invasion of Iran Campaign -
Stormy Wormy is once again making the headlines with their ability to actually make up the headlines on their own.

10. Mobile Malware Scam iSexPlayer Wants Your Money -
The best scams are the ones to which you've personally agreed to be scammed with without even knowing it. Like this one, which was tracked down and analyzed a couple of hours once a uset tipped on it.

11. The Template-ization of Malware Serving Sites -
The increase of fake porn and celebrity sites is due to the overall template-ization of these, with the people behind them basically implementing several malicious doorways to ensure that the domains get rotated on the fly. Despite that they all look the same, they all sever different type of malware, and zero porn of celebrity content at all except the thumbnails.

12. Violating OPSEC for Increasing the Probability of Malware Infection -
No better way to expose your affiliations and several unknown bad netblocks so far, by adding the netblocks and the malicious domains as trusted sites upon infecting a PC with the malware. Of course, the usual suspects lead the "trusted netblocks".

13. Monetizing Compromised Web Sites -
Several years ago, a script kiddie would install Apache on a mail server, they claim that they defaced it. Today, these amusing situations are replaced by monetization of the compromised sites, by reselling the access to them to blackhat SEO-ers, malware authors, phishers, or personally starting to manage a scammy infrastructure on them, by earning money on an affiliate based model, like this particular attack.

14. Malware and Office Documents Joining Forces -
A recent DIY malware kit, sold as a proprietary tool basically crunching out malware infected office documents, whose built-in obfuscation makes them harder to detect. It will sooner or later leak out, turning into a commodity tool, a process that's been pretty evident for web malware exploitation kits as well.

15. Are Stolen Credit Card Details Getting Cheaper? -
Depends on who you're buying them from, and whether or not they offer discounts on a volume basis, namely the more you buy the cheaper the price of a card is supposed to get. With the current oversupply of stolen credit card details, what used to be an exclusive good once where they could enjoy a higher profit-margin, is today's commodity good.

16. The Neosploit Malware Kit Updated with Snapshot ActiveX Exploit -
Since alll the web malware exploitation kits are open source, and leaked in the wild at large, their modularity allows everyone to easily embed any type of exploit that they want to, resulting in Neosploit's single most beneficial feature, the fact that certain versions include all the publicly available exploits targeting Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. Moreover, the open source nature of the kit is resulting in a countless number of modified versions yet to be detected and analyzed, therefore keeping track of the exploits included in a malware kit can only be realistic if you take into considered the exploits that come with the default installation.

17. Obfuscating Fast-fluxed SQL Injected Domains -
Now that's a very good example of different tactics combined to attack, ensure survivability, and apply a certain degree of evasion in between.

18. The Unbreakable CAPTCHA -
There's never been a shortage of ideas, there's always been an issue of usability.

19. The Ayyildiz Turkish Hacking Group VS Everyone -
That's a pretty inspiring mission if you are to ensure your future in the next couple of years, by targeting everyone, everywhere that has ever publicly stated their disagreement with the Turkish foreign policy.

20. Money Mule Recruiters use ASProx's Fast Fluxing Services -
A true multitasking in action with a botnet that's been crunching out phishing emails, SQL injecting and now hosting a well known money mule recruitment service.

21. SQL Injecting Malicious Doorways to Serve Malware -
Constantly switching tactics and combining different ones to achive an objective that used to be accomplished by plain simple techniques, is only starting to take place. In this case, instead of a hard coded SQL injected domain, we have the typical malicious doorways the result of the converging traffic management tools with web malware exploitation kits.

22. Impersonating StopBadware.org to Serve Fake Security Warnings -
Typosquatting popular security vendors and services is nothing new, by having HostFresh providing the hosting for the parked domains promoting the rogue security software, is a privilege and flattery for the success of the Stopbadware initiative.

23. Coding Spyware and Malware for Hire -
Customerization -- not customization -- has been taking place for a while, that's the process of tailoring your upcoming products to the needs of your future customers, compared to the product concept myopia where the malware coder would code something that he believes would be valuable to the potential customers. End user agreements, issuing licenses for the malware tool, as well as forbidding the reverse engineering of the malware so that no remotely exploitable flaws could be, are among the requirements the coder assists on.

24. Lazy Summer Days at UkrTeleGroup Ltd -
Taking a random snapshot of the current malicious activity at a well known provider of hosting services for rogue security applications, live exploit URLs and botnet command&control locations, always provides an insight into what are their customers up to. In this case, centralization of their scammy ecosystem, and parking a countless number of rogue domains on the same server.

25. Email Hacking Going Commercial -
Cybercrime is in fact getting easier to outsource, and while the number of scammers trying to offer non-existent services, or at least services where they cannot deliver the goods, the business model of this service that is that you only pay once they show you a proof that they've managed to hack the email address you game them. How are they doing it? Social engineering and enticing the user to click on live exploit URL from where they'll infect the PC and obtain the email password, of course, next to definitely abusing it for many other purposes in the process.

26. Vulnerabilities in Antivirus Software - Conflict of Interest -
You can easily twist the number of vulnerabilities found in your antivirus solution, but not recognizing them as vulnerabilities at the first place. It's all a matter of what you define as a vulnerability, or perhaps what you admit as a serious vulnerability - remote code execution through a security software, or a flaw that's allowing malware to bypass the security solution itself.

27. Counting the Bullets on the (Malware) Front -
Emphasizing on the number of malware/threats/viruses/worms/slugs your solution detects may be marketable in the short-term, but is damaging the end user's understanding of the threatscape in the long-term. So, by the time he catches up with what exactly is going on, he'll recall the moment in time where he was using the number of threats his solution was detecting as the main benchmark for its usefulness. In reality through, the number is irrelevant from a pro-active point of view, with zero day malware like the one coded for hire undermining the signatures based scanning model.

28. Smells Like a Copycat SQL Injection In the Wild -
It was pretty obvious that copycats seeing the success of SQL injections the the huge number of sites susceptible to exploitation, would also starting taking advantage of the practice. Some are, however, targeting local communities and trying to avoid detection by using targeted SQL injections.

29. Click Fraud, Botnets and Parked Domains - All Inclusive -
The scheme is nothing new, what's new is that the botnet masters are trying to limit the revenues that used to go out to affiliate networks they were participating in, and are trying to own or rent the entire infrastructure on their own.

30. Over 80 percent of Storm Worm Spam Sent by Pharmaceutical Spam Kings -
With access to Storm Worm sold and resold, and new malware introduced on Storm Worm infected hosts used as foundation for the propagation of the new malware in this case, it's questionable whether or not the Storm Worm-ers themselves are sending out the junk emails, or are they people who've rented access to the botnet doing it.

31. Neosploit Team Leaving the IT Underground -
Pretty surprising at the first place, but in reality it clearly demonstrates that when you cannot enforce the end user agreement on your crimeware kit, but continue seeing it used in a very profitable malware operations, you basically shut down the support for the public version. The team is not going to stop innovating for their own purposes, and in the long-term they may in fact re-appear with an updated malware kit that's converging different services next to the product itself.

32. Dissecting a Managed Spamming Service -
Managed spamming services using botnets as the foundation for the campaigns are starting to introduce improved metrics for the delivery, as well as experienced customer support ensuring the spam messages make it through spam filters, or at least increase the probability of making the happen. This is an example of a random service emphasizing on the improved metrics they're capable of delivering.

33. Storm Worm's Lazy Summer Campaigns -
Looks like a "cybercrime intern" launched this campaign, lacking any of the usual Storm Worm evasive practices, no exploitation of client side vulnerabilities, as well as no survivability offered by their usual fast-flux nodes.
]]> Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:08:24 +0000 malware profitable malware operations malware authors malware tools malware coder malware kit malware infection neosploit malware kit spam Summarizing July's Threatscape <![CDATA[MySpace And Facebook Users Targeted By New Worms]]> http://securityratty.com/article/4d809174d365be423426ff372787f924 http://securityratty.com/article/4d809174d365be423426ff372787f924 Fri, 01 Aug 2008 06:51:19 +0000 facebook users myspace worms kaspersky lab reports attack myspace net-worm worm zombie computers form botnets MySpace And Facebook Users Targeted By New Worms <![CDATA[Impersonating StopBadware.org to Serve Fake Security Warnings]]> http://securityratty.com/article/f4988806c23605425ad4d4182fb247ad http://securityratty.com/article/f4988806c23605425ad4d4182fb247ad
Malware is known to have been hijacking search results, take for instance the rogue Antivirus XP 2008 as a recent example, but it's even more interesting to see other rogue security software impersonating Stopbadware.org in order to server fake security warnings that ultimately lead to fake security software.

stopbadware2008 .com (58.65.238.171) is one of these examples, where stopbadware2008 .com/antivirus.php  redirects to infectionscanner .com and attempts to trick the user into installing download.infectionscanner.com /AntvrsInstall.exe.  The message used :

"Reported Insecure Browsing: Navigation blocked. Due to insecure Internet browsing your PC can easily get infected with viruses, worms and trojans without your knowledge, and that can lead to system slowdown, freezes and crashes. Also insecure Internet activity can result in revealing your personal information. To get full advanced real-time protection for PC and Internet activity, register Antivirus 2008. We recommend you to protect your PC now and continue safe Internet browsing."

There's in fact even more rogue software using the same IP (58.65.238.171), courtesy of HostFresh :
virus-scanner-online .com
security-scanner-online .com
viruses-scanonline .com
virus-scanonline .com
antivirus-scanonline .com
download.antivirus-scanonline .com
topantivirus-scan .com
topvirusscan .com
virusbestscan .com
virus-detection-scanner .com
antivirus-scanner .com
infectionscanner .com
virusbestscanner .com
internet-security-antivirus .com

It would be interested to monitor whether or not the template for the fake security warning would start getting used on a large scale.

Related posts:
A Portfolio of Fake Video Codecs 
Fake PestPatrol Security Software
Got Your XPShield up and Running?
Localized Fake Security Software
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software
RBN's Fake Security Software
]]> Sun, 20 Jul 2008 23:30:51 +0000 fake security fake security software insecure internet activity internet activity insecure internet insecure lead fake video codecs portfolio Impersonating StopBadware.org to Serve Fake Security Warnings <![CDATA[Biggest security threats are from inside: survey]]> http://securityratty.com/article/3fcfcda77ae1d0dfbdec48fe16fb0e01 http://securityratty.com/article/3fcfcda77ae1d0dfbdec48fe16fb0e01 Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:00:00 +0000 security senior executives responsible internal threats privacy survey firms cios concern csos worms Biggest security threats are from inside: survey <![CDATA[XSS Worm At Justin.tv Affects 2525 Profiles]]> http://securityratty.com/article/627414fccaaab4b0161436148a39deb5 http://securityratty.com/article/627414fccaaab4b0161436148a39deb5 Tue, 15 Jul 2008 08:03:07 +0000 tv justin xss worm tv fixed insufficient input sanitization worms activities obsolete location field users profiles xss vulnerability XSS Worm At Justin.tv Affects 2525 Profiles <![CDATA[Chinese Cyber Attacks]]> http://securityratty.com/article/6da7a571e68f430abd0a03fd33ea55f7 http://securityratty.com/article/6da7a571e68f430abd0a03fd33ea55f7 originally appeared on the Discovery Channel website.
]]> Mon, 14 Jul 2008 03:08:18 +0000 chinese chinese military ignores chinese military government chinese government military hacker tools hackers anti-chinese forces Chinese Cyber Attacks <![CDATA[Setting up a Tarpit (Teergrube) to slow worms and network scanners using LaBrea (The "Sticky" Honeypot and IDS)]]> http://securityratty.com/article/8be009c22d1de6d686445b07de6edceb http://securityratty.com/article/8be009c22d1de6d686445b07de6edceb New Video:Setting up a Tarpit (Teergrube) to slow worms and network scanners using LaBrea (The "Sticky" Honeypot and IDS)
A network Tarpit, sometimes know by the German word Teergrube, is a service or set of hosts that deliberately try to slow malicious network connections down to a crawl. The idea is to put up unused hosts or services on the network that respond to an attacker, but do things to waste their time and greatly slow their scanning (or spreading in the case of Worms). For this video I’ll be using a package called LaBrea by Tom Liston and tarpitting unused IP addresses on my home LAN.

Also, DecaffeinatID Intrusion Detection System ver. 0.07 is out.

]]> Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:14:22 +0000 tarpit network teergrube slow worms network scanners worms network tarpit labrea german word teergrube Setting up a Tarpit (Teergrube) to slow worms and network scanners using LaBrea (The "Sticky" Honeypot and IDS) <![CDATA[Opera adds anti-malware to nearly final browser]]> http://securityratty.com/article/8931004ab30a5143bdd29d821572f211 http://securityratty.com/article/8931004ab30a5143bdd29d821572f211

]]> Mon, 09 Jun 2008 09:00:00 +0000 serve trojan horses malicious code malware host warn users messages visit feature worms site Opera adds anti-malware to nearly final browser <![CDATA[Mobile-related security threats on the rise]]> http://securityratty.com/article/65f7f11832f84e5960365da057501ed2 http://securityratty.com/article/65f7f11832f84e5960365da057501ed2 Tue, 20 May 2008 20:00:00 +0000 security threats awareness mobilewireless skills mobile security study mobile devices survey findings stories abc remote workers business info half Mobile-related security threats on the rise