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    • Posts Tagged: sophos

    A Little Sunshine / The Coming Storm / Web Fraud 2.0 — 2 Comments
    8
    Feb 12

    Crimevertising: Selling Into the Malware Channel

    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.

    Continue reading →

    Latest Warnings / The Coming Storm — 12 Comments
    22
    Dec 11

    Amnesty International Site Serving Java Exploit

    Amnesty International‘s homepage in the United Kingdom is currently serving malware that exploits a recently-patched vulnerability in Java. Security experts say the attack appears to be part of a nefarious scheme to target human rights workers.

    The site’s home page has been booby trapped with code that pulls a malicious script from an apparently hacked automobile site in Brazil.  The car site serves a malicious Java applet that uses a public exploit to attack a dangerous Java flaw that I’ve warned about several times this past month. The applet in turn retrieves an executable file detected by Sophos antivirus as Trojan Spy-XR, a malware variant first spotted in June 2011.

    A woman who answered the phone this morning at Amnesty International’s research and policy branch in the U.K. declined to give her name, but said she would pass on the information about the break-in. The site remains compromised.

    This is hardly the first time Amnesty International’s sites have been hacked to serve up malware. The organization’s site was hacked in April 2011 with a drive-by attack.  In November 2010, security firm Websense warned Amnesty International’s Hong Kong Web site was hacked and seeded with an exploit that dropped malware using a previously unknown Internet Explorer vulnerability.  Continue reading →

    A Little Sunshine / The Coming Storm — 31 Comments
    28
    Sep 11

    Inside a Modern Mac Trojan

    Mac malware is back in the  news again. Last week, security firm F-Secure warned that it had discovered a Trojan built for OS X that was disguised as a PDF document. It’s not clear whether this malware is a present threat — it was apparently created earlier this year — but the mechanics of how it works are worth a closer look because it challenges a widely-held belief among Mac users that malicious software cannot install without explicit user permission.

    Image courtesy F-Secure.

    F-Secure said the Mac malware, Trojan-Dropper: OSX/Revir.A, may be attempting to copy the technique implemented by Windows malware, which opens a PDF file containing a “.pdf.exe” extension and an accompanying PDF icon. F-Secure was careful to note that the payload installed by the dropper, Backdoor:OSX/Imuler.A, phones home to a placeholder page on the Web that does not appear to be capable of communicating back to the Trojan at the moment.

    I wanted to understand a bit more about how this Trojan does its dirty work, so I contacted Broderick Aquilino, the F-Secure researcher who analyzed it. Aquilino said the sample is a plain Mach-O binary — which we’ll call “Binary 1″, that contains PDF file and another Mach-O binary (Binary2). Mach-O, short for Mach object, is a file format for executable files on OS X.

    According to Aquilino, when you run Binary1, it will extract the PDF file from its body, drop it in the Mac’s temporary or “tmp” directory, and then open it. This is merely a decoy, as Binary1 continues to extract Binary2 from itself — also into the “tmp” directory — and then runs the file.

    Upon execution, Binary2 downloads another binary from [omitted malware download site] and saves it as /tmp/updtdata. For the sake of continuity, we’ll call this latest file “Binary3.” Binary2 then executes and downloads the third binary, which opens up a backdoor on the OS X host designed to allow attackers to administer the machine from afar.

    “All of this happens without the user needing to input their password,” Aquilino said.

    Continue reading →

    Other — 18 Comments
    13
    Feb 10

    Warning About ZeuS Attack Used as Lure

    Criminals have co-opted a column I wrote last week about ZeuS Trojan attacks targeted at government and military systems: Scam artists are now spamming out messages that include the first few paragraphs of that story in a bid to trick recipients into downloading the very same Trojan, disguised as a Microsoft security update.

    Hat tip to security firm Sophos for spotting this vaguely elliptical attack. It is sometimes said tongue-in-cheek that plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery, but I wish these crooks would find some other way of expressing their admiration.

    The thing is, these sorts of copycat scams also serve as as a sort of token reputation attack, a sly dig that is often aimed at security researchers. For example, Jeffrey Carr, the author of the recent book Inside Cyber Warfare and a frequent publisher of information on the sources of large scale cyber assaults, told me that a similar spam campaign a few days ago that mimicked the targeted .mil and .gov Zeus attacks was made to look like it came from his e-mail address. Carr said the campaign that abused his name probably was in response to his recent blog post about the .mil and .gov attacks.