Anyone who’s run a Web site is probably familiar with the term “malvertising,” which occurs when crooks hide exploits and malware inside of legitimate-looking ads that are submitted to major online advertising networks. But there’s a relatively new form of malware-based advertising that’s gaining ground — otherwise harmless ads for illicit services that are embedded inside the malware itself.

At its most basic, this form of advertising — which I’m calling “crimevertising” for want of a better term — has been around for many years. Most often it takes the form of banner ads on underground forums that hawk everything from cybercriminal employment opportunities to banking Trojans and crooked cashout services. More recently, malware authors have started offering the ability to place paid ads in the Web-based administrative panels that customers use to control their botnets. Such placements afford advertisers an unprecedented opportunity to keep their brand name in front of the eyeballs of their target audience for hours on end.

The author of the Blackhole exploit pack is selling ad space on his kit's administration page, as seen in this screenshot.

A perfect example of crimevertising 2.0 is the interface for the Blackhole Exploit Kit, crimeware that makes it simple for just about anyone to build a botnet. The business end of this kit is stitched into hacked or malicious Web sites, and visitors with outdated browser plugins get redirected to sites that serve malware of the miscreant’s choosing. Blackhole users can monitor new victims and the success rates of the compromised sites using a browser-based administrative panel.

In the screen shot above, the administration panel of a working Blackhole exploit kit shows two different ads; both promote the purchase and sale of Internet traffic. And here is a prime example of just how targeted this advertising can be: The most common reason miscreants purchase Internet traffic is to redirect it to sites they’ve retrofitted with exploit kits like Blackhole.

I wanted to find out how much it would cost to place such targeted ads, so I chatted up the author of this kit — a hacker who uses the nickname “Paunch.” He said an ad that would run on administration panels across the entire Blackhole user base would cost me $700 per month. He declined to say just how many “impressions” that money would buy, or exactly how many Blackhole users there are today.

But it’s probably quite an audience: According to security firm Sophos, Blackhole is now by far the most popular method of delivering drive-by attacks. In its 2012 Security Threat Report, the company found that “in the second half of 2011, 67% of [malware] detections were redirections on compromised legitimate sites. Of these, approximately half are believed to be redirections to Blackhole exploit sites.”

Interestingly, when Paunch doesn’t have ads to run from paying customers, he runs ads for his own ancillary services. In the screen shot below (taken from a different working Blackhole exploit kit) Paunch can be seen pitching his subscription-based malware obfuscation service.

I suppose it’s possible that miscreants could try to place malware-laced crimevertisements in a bid to hijack the browsers of other hackers, but that’s probably unlikely to happen as long as malware authors like Paunch are manually reviewing purchased ads and disallowing anything other than plain text. In the end, crimeware kit buyers may have more to fear from a kit’s author himself: The author of the infamous SpyEye botnet creation kit once acknowledged adding a hidden backdoor to his software that let him remotely access all customer installations.

An exploit for a recently disclosed Java vulnerability that was previously only available for purchase in the criminal underground has now been rolled into the open source Metasploit exploit framework. Metasploit researchers say the Java attack tool has been tested to successfully deliver payloads on a variety of platforms, including the latest Windows, Mac and Linux systems.

On Monday, I disclosed how the Java exploit is being sold on cybercrime forums and incorporated into automated crimeware kits like BlackHole. Since then, security researchers @_sinn3r and Juan Vasquez have developed a module for Metasploit that makes the attack tool available to penetration testers and malicious hackers alike. According to a post on the Metasploit blog today, the Java vulnerability “is particularly pernicious, as it is cross-platform, unpatched on some systems, and is an easy-to-exploit client-side that does little to make the user aware they’re being exploited.”

Metasploit also posted the results of testing the exploit against a variety of browsers and platforms, and found that it worked almost seamlessly to compromise systems across the board, from the latest 64-bit Windows 7 machines to Mac OS X and even Linux systems.

This development should not be taken lightly by any computer user. According to Sun’s maker Oracle, more than three billion devices run Java. What’s more, Java vulnerabilities are by some accounts the most popular exploit paths for computer crooks these days. On Monday, Microsoft’s Tim Rains published a blog post noting that the most commonly observed type of exploits in the first half of 2011 were those targeting vulnerabilities in Oracle (formerly Sun Microsystems) Java Runtime Environment (JRE), Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and Java SE in the Java Development Kit (JDK).

From that blog post:

“During the one year period starting in the third quarter of 2010 (3Q10) and ending in the second quarter of 2011 (2Q11), between one-third and one-half of all exploits observed in each quarter were Java exploits[1]. During this one year period, Microsoft antimalware technologies detected or blocked, on average, 6.9 million exploit attempts on Java related components per quarter, totaling almost 27.5 million exploit attempts during the year.”

The exploit attacks a vulnerability that exists in Oracle Java SE JDK and JRE 7 and 6 Update 27 and earlier. If you are using Java 6 Update 29, or Java 7 Update 1, then you have the latest version that is patched against this and 19 other security threats. If you are using a vulnerable version of Java, it’s time to update. Not sure whether you have Java or what version you may be running? Check out this link, and then click the “Do I have Java?” link below the big red “Free Java Download” button. Apple issued its own update to fix this flaw and other Java bugs earlier this month.

According to my server logs, close to 80 percent of the readers of this blog in the last month have some version of Java installed, although my stats don’t list version numbers. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’ll repeat my advice from earlier this week: If you don’t need Java, get rid of it. Most people who have it won’t miss it. For those who need Java for the occasional site or service, disconnecting it from the browser plugins and temporarily reconnecting when needed is one way to minimize issues with this powerful program. Leaving the Java plugin installed in a secondary browser that is only used for sites or services that require Java is another alternative.

In October, I showed why Java vulnerabilities continue to be the top moneymaker for purveyors of “exploit kits,” commercial crimeware designed to be stitched into hacked or malicious sites and exploit a variety of Web-browser vulnerabilities. Today, I’ll highlight a few more recent examples of this with brand new exploit kits on the market, and explain why even fully-patched Java installations are fast becoming major enablers of browser-based malware attacks.

Check out the screenshots below, which show the administration page for two up-and-coming exploit packs. The first, from an unusually elaborate exploit kit called “Dragon Pack,” is the author’s own installation, so the percentage of “loads” or successful installations of malware on visitor PCs should be taken with a grain of salt (hat tip to Malwaredomainlist.com). Yet, it is clear that miscreants who purchase this pack will have the most success with Java flaws.

This blog has a nice writeup — and an additional stats page — from a compromised site that last month was redirecting visitors to a page laced with exploits from a Dragon Pack installation.

The second image, below, shows an administrative page that is centralizing statistics for several sites hacked with a relatively new $200 kit called “Bleeding Life.” Again, it’s plain that the Java exploits are the most successful. What’s interesting about this kit is that its authors advertise that one of the “exploits” included isn’t really an exploit at all: It’s a social engineering attack. Specifically, the hacked page will simply abuse built-in Java functionality to ask the visitor to run a malicious Java applet.

On Dec. 29, the SANS Internet Storm Center warned about a wave of Java attacks that were apparently using this social engineering approach to great effect. The attacks were taking advantage of built-in Java functionality that will prompt the user to download and run a file, but using an alert from Java (if a Windows user accepts, he or she is not bothered by a separate prompt or warning from the operating system).

“If you don’t have any zero-days, you can always go back to exploiting the human!” SANS incident handler Daniel Wesemann wrote. “This is independent of the JRE version used – with JRE default settings, even on JRE1.6-23, all the user has to do is click ‘Run’ to get owned.  The one small improvement is that the latest JREs show ‘Publisher: (NOT VERIFIED) Java Sun’ in the pop-up, but I guess that users who read past the two exclamation marks will be bound to click ‘Run’ anyway.”

Researchers at Kaspersky Lab also have tracked a sizable uptick in attacks leveraging social engineering via Java. Vyacheslav Zakorzhevsky, a senior malware analyst at the Russian security firm, covered this trend in the company’s December 2010 monthly malware statistics report.

In our November review we wrote about the explosive growth of the Trojan-Downloader.Java.OpenConnection family. These programs act in just the same way as exploits do in the latter stages of a drive-by attack, but instead of using vulnerabilities to download malware to victims’ computers, they employ the OpenConnection method of a URL class.”

Two representatives of Trojan-Downloader.Java.OpenConnection (2nd and 7th places) were among the Top 20 malicious programs detected on the Internet in December. At the height of their activity the number of computers on which these programs were detected in a 24-hour period exceeded 40,000.”

As we just mentioned, all the representatives of the Trojan-Downloader.Java.OpenConnection family, instead of exploiting vulnerabilities, use standard Java functionality to download and run files from the web. This is currently one of the prime download methods for malicious programs written in Java. It appears that until Oracle closes the functionality this family uses to download files its popularity will continue to grow.

The graphic below shows the number computers that Kaspersky found were infected with Trojan-Downloader.Java.OpenConnection in the last six weeks of 2010.

I’m not advocating mass abandonment of Java, as some readers have charged. But I continue to urge users who have no reason to use this program to get rid of it, particularly on systems that are shared by less careful Web surfers. I have Java installed on a couple of my PCs where a particular software program requires it to run properly, but I have disconnected the Java plugins from the browsers on those systems.

If you’re a Firefox user and a Web site you frequent requires Java, consider installing and using the excellent NoScript extension, which will block Web sites from running Java applets unless you specifically whitelist them.

Microsoft Corp. today warned that it is seeing a huge uptick in attacks against security holes in Java, a software package that is installed on the majority of the world’s desktop computers.

In a posting to the Microsoft Malware Protection Center blog, senior program manager Holly Stewart warned of an “unprecedented wave of Java exploitation,” and confirmed findings that KrebsOnSecurity.com published one week ago:  Java exploits have usurped Adobe-related exploits as attackers’ preferred method for breaking into Windows PCs.

Image courtesy Microsoft

Stewart said the spike in the third quarter of 2010 is primarily driven by attacks on three Java vulnerabilities that have already been patched for some time now. Even so, attacks against these flaws have “gone from hundreds of thousands per quarter to millions,” she added. Indeed, according to Microsoft’s one-year anniversary post for its Security Essentials anti-malware tool, exploits for a Java vulnerability pushed the Renos Trojan to the top of the list for all malware families (malware and exploits) detected in the United States.

My research shows the reason for the spike, and it precedes the 3rd quarter of 2010: Java exploits have been folded into a number of the top “exploit packs,” commercial crimeware kits sold in the hacker underground that make it simple to seed hacked or malicious sites with code that exploits a variety of browser flaws in a bid to install malware.

Stewart asks, “Why has no one been talking about Java-based exploits?” Then she answers her own question:

Looking back at the chart above, you can see that this exploitation has been happening for some time.  So, why has no one been talking about Java-based exploits?  (Well, almost no one.  Brian Krebs broke the ice this week).

I have a theory about why almost no one has noticed.  IDS/IPS vendors, who are typically the folks that speak out first about new types of exploitation, have challenges with parsing Java code.  Documents, multimedia, JavaScript – getting protection for these issues is challenging to get right.  Now, think about incorporating a Java interpreter into an IPS engine?  The performance impact on a network IPS could be crippling.  So, the people that we expect to notice increases in exploitation might have a hard time seeing this particular spectrum of light.  Call it Java-blindness.

So, if the antimalware people can see it, why aren’t *they* talking about it?  Because, looking at the numbers, Java exploits (and most exploits for that matter) are very low-volume in comparison to the volume of common malware families like Zbot (a family for which we added detection in MSRT just this week).  What we have to remember is that, with exploits, it’s not about volume – they happen in a flash and you have to catch them in the act (with a real-time protection product such as Microsoft Security Essentials) before they open the door to lots of malware.  So, even small numbers, especially when they’re against unpatched vulnerabilities, matter a lot.

If you haven’t done so lately, take a moment to see if you have this program installed, and if you do, please make sure it is up to date. Just last week, Oracle issued another update — Java 6 Update 22 — that fixes at least 29 security flaws in the program.

KrebsonSecurity.com  will continue to post the newest security updates, when they become available. But, your computer installation of Java also includes a built-in updater that you should configure to check for updates as frequently as possible.

Allow me to reiterate my urgent advice from last week:

Java ships with a built-in updater that by default checks for updates on the 14th day of every month. However, this may not be frequent enough to keep users caught up with the latest version. The program can also be set to check for updates every day or every week, although I have found Java’s updater often fails to detect when a new version is available. Alternatively, programs like FileHippo’s Update Checker and Secunia’s Personal Software Inspector can help users stay up to date on the latest security patches.

Exploit packs — slick, prepackaged bundles of commercial software that attackers can use to booby-trap hacked Web sites with malicious software — are popular in part because they turn hacking for profit into a point-and-click exercise that even the dullest can master. I’ve focused so much on these kits because they also make it easy to visually communicate key Internet security concepts that otherwise often fall on deaf ears, such as the importance of keeping your software applications up-to-date with the latest security patches.

One of the best-selling exploit packs on the market today is called Crimepack, and it’s a kit that I have mentioned at least twice in previous blog posts. This time, I’ll take a closer look at the “exploit stats” sections of a few working Crimepack installations to get a better sense of which software vulnerabilities are most productive for Crimepack customers.

Check out the following screen shot, taken in mid-June from the administration page of a working Crimepack exploit kit that targeted mostly German-language Web sites. This page shows that almost 1,800 of the nearly 6,000 people who browsed one of the stable of malicious sites maintained by this criminal got hacked. That means some software component that 30 percent of these visitors were running either in their Web browsers or in the underlying Windows operating system was vulnerable to known software flaws that this kit could exploit in order to install malicious software.

Peering closer at the exploit stats, we see that one exploit was particularly successful: Webstart. This refers to a Java vulnerability that Oracle/Sun patched in April 2010, a powerful and widely-deployed software package that many users aren’t even aware they have on their systems, let alone know they need to keep it updated. (By the way, I got some serious flack for recommending that users who have no need for Java uninstall the program completely, but I stand by that advice.) As seen from the chart, this single Java flaw was responsible for nearly 60 percent of the successful attacks on visitors to these hacked sites.

Let’s have a look another screen shot from a different, working Crimepack administration page:

This Crimepack kit was targeting primarily Web sites in South America, but once again we see the same Java Webstart flaw was the most popular exploit. According to the admin page above, 3,500 out of 16,971 (~21 percent) visitors were successfully attacked, and more than two-thirds were exploited due to this one Webstart flaw.

One other interesting feature built into Crimepack lets customers test various Web reputation services to discover whether any include their exploit sites:

I try to keep this blog updated with news about important security patches, but I simply cannot write about them all. If you want a simple way of staying updated on new software patches, I’d suggest downloading and installing the Personal Software Inspector tool from Secunia, which will scan your system and let you know which programs need updating. It also will periodically remind you about outdated programs, and includes direct links to the newest versions, so you don’t have to go hunting for download pages for all of the software products installed on your PC.

Not long ago, there were only a handful of serious so-called “exploit packs,” crimeware packages that make it easy for hackers to booby-trap Web sites with code that installs malicious software.

These days, however, it seems like we’re hearing about a new custom exploit kit every week. Part of the reason for this may be that more enterprising hackers are seeing the moneymaking potential of these offerings, which range from a few hundred dollars per kit to upwards of $10,000 per installation — depending on the features and plugins requested.

Take, for example, the iPack crimeware kit, an exploit pack that starts at around $500.

Its name and cute logo aside, iPack has nothing to do with Apple’s products. According to Jorge Mieres over at the Malware Intelligence blog, the software vulnerabilities targeted by exploits contained in this package are all for Windows platforms, including:

MDAC (CVE-2006-0003) – (MS06-014)
PDF collab.getIcon (CVE-2009-0927)
PDF Util.Printf (CVE-2008-2992)
PDF collab.collectEmailInfo (CVE-2008-0655)
PDF Doc.media.newPlayer (CVE-2009-4324)

Related Posts:

Crimepack Kit Used in Java Attacks

A Peek Inside the Eleonore Browser Exploit Kit

I have often recommended file-scanning services like VirusTotal and Jotti, which allow visitors to upload a suspicious file and scan it against dozens of commercial anti-virus tools. If a scan generates any virus alerts or red flags, the report produced by the scan is shared with all of the participating anti-virus makers so that those vendors can incorporate detection for the newly discovered malware into their products.

That pooling of intelligence on new threats also serves to make the free scanning services less attractive to virus authors, who would almost certainly like nothing more than to freely and simultaneously test the stealth of their new creations across a wide range of security software. Still, there is nothing to stop an enterprising hacker from purchasing a license for each of the anti-virus tools on the market and selling access to a separate scanning service that appeals to the virus-writing community.

Enter upstart file-scanning services like av-check.com and virtest.com, which bank on the guarantee that they won’t share your results with the anti-virus community.

For $1 per file scanned (or a $40 monthly membership) av-check.com will see if your file is detected by any of 22 anti-virus products, including AVAST, AVG, Avira, BitDefender, NOD32, F-Secure, Kaspersky, McAfee, Panda, Sophos, Symantec, and Trend Micro. “Each of them is setten [sic] up on max heuristic check level,” av-check promises. “We guarantee that we don’t save your uploaded files and they are deleted immediately after the check. Also , we don’t resend your uploaded files to the 3rd person. Files are being checked only locally (without checking/using on other servers.” In other words: There is no danger that the results of these scans will somehow leak out to the anti-virus vendors.

The service claims that it will soon be rolling out advanced features, such as testing malware against anti-spyware and firewall programs, as well as a test to see whether the malware functions in a virtual machine, such as VMWare or VirtualBox. For safety and efficiency’s sake, security researchers often poke and prod new malware samples in a virtual environment. As a result many new families of malware are designed to shut down or destroy themselves if they detect they are being run inside of a virtual machine.

Virtest checks malware suspicious files against a similar albeit slightly different set of anti-virus programs, also promising not to let submitted files get back to the anti-virus vendors: “Your soft isn’t ever sent anywhere and the files being checked will never appear in the fresh AV signature bases after scanning,” the site pledges. “On purpose in all AV-products are turned off all possible methods and initiatives of exchange of files’ info with the AV-divisions.”

The proprietors of this service don’t even try to hide the fact that they have built it for malware writers. Among the chief distinguishing features of virtest.com is the ability for malware authors to test “exploit packs,” pre-packaged kits that — when stitched into a malicious or hacked Web site — serve the visitor’s browser with a kitchen sink full of code designed to install software via one of several known security holes. Many anti-virus programs now also scan Web pages for malicious content, and this service’s “exploits pack check” will tell malware authors whether their exploit sites are triggering virus alerts across a range of widely-used anti-virus software.

But don’t count on paying for these services via American Express: Both sites only accept payment via virtual currencies such as Webmoney and Fethard, services that appear to be popular with the online shadow economy.