Revisiting the SpyEye/ZeuS Merger

February 3, 2011
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In October 2010, I discovered that the authors of the SpyEye and ZeuS banking Trojans — once competitors in the market for botnet creation and management kits — were planning to kill further development of ZeuS and fuse the two malware families into one supertrojan. Initially, I heard some skepticism from folks in the security community about this. But three months later, security experts are starting to catch glimpses of this new hybrid Trojan in the wild, with the author(s) shipping a series of beta releases that include updated features on a nearly-daily basis.

It probably didn’t help that the first report of a blended version of SpyEye/ZeuS (referred to as SpyZeuS for the remainder of this post) — detailed in a McAfee blog post — turned out to be a scam. But a little more a week ago, Trend Micro spotted snapshots and details of SpyZeuS components, noting that the author appears to have received help from other criminals in polishing this latest release; in particular, an add-on that grabs credit card numbers from hacked PCs, and a plugin designed to attack the anti-Trojan tool Rapport from Trusteer. (Trusteer’s Amit Klein addresses this component in a blog post here).

Seculert, a new threat alert service started by former RSA fraud expert Aviv Raff, includes some screen shots of the administrative panel of SpyZeuS that show the author trying to appeal to users of both Trojans, by allowing customers to control and update their botnets using either the traditional ZeuS or SpyEye Web interface.

The hybrid SpyZeuS Trojan lets users interact with bots via the ZeuS control panel (left) or the SpyEye interface.

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Spammers Hijack Internet Space Assigned to Egyptian President’s Wife

February 1, 2011
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Egyptian citizens calling for besieged President Hosni Mubarak to step down may have been cut off from using the Web, but spammers have been busy cutting the government off from its own Internet address space: Earlier this month, junk e-mail artists hijacked a large swath of Internet addresses assigned to Mubarak’s wife.

According to Spamhaus.org, well known spammers commandeered a chunk of more than 4,000 IP addresses that were assigned years ago to Suzanne Mubarak and the Suzanne Mubarak Science Exploration Center. Spamhaus reports that those addresses have been used recently to promote a variety of dodgy Web businesses, and that the hijacked block is under the control of an organization that has ties to alleged spammer Michael Lindsay and iMedia Networks. iMedia did not respond to requests for comment.

The high profile land grab is the latest example of how spammers are becoming more brazen in their quest for non-blacklisted Internet address space from which to send spam, said Rod Rasmussen, president and chief technology officer of Internet Identity.

Rasmussen said Internet address space hijackers tend to target chunks of addresses assigned to governments and defense contractors, because those allocations are less likely to be reported missing, and very few of them are blocked by anti-spam tools.

“The spammers doing this look for chunks of [Internet] space that are dormant, but most of all blocks of IP addresses that are whitelisted,” by anti-spam groups, Rasmussen said. “Their spam gets through anti-spam filters nicely after that, or least until the hijacking is detected.”

Sometimes, the scammers are able to hijack IP space by snatching up expired domain names that were used to register the addresses years earlier. The attackers then send an e-mail from that domain to the regional Internet registry that assigned the block of IP, requesting whatever changes they need to assume control over the addresses.In other cases, spammers use forged letters and bogus corporate fronts to impersonate the rightful owner of the addresses.

Another chunk of addresses that Spamhaus found were recently hijacked by spammers — 255 IPs originally assigned in 1994 to the now defunct Claremont Technology Group — appears to have been stolen sometime after the organization let its domain claretech.com lapse. That domain now redirects to Falls Church, Va. based government contractor Computer Sciences Corp (CSC), which acquired Claremont in 1998.

Rasmussen believes we are likely to see a spike in this type hijacking activity as global supply of unassigned IPv4 addresses continues to dwindle and unallocated blocks become more valuable. Experts disagree on exactly when the pool of IPv4 addresses will be drained: Some says as mid- to late 2011, and others claim it’s only a few more days.

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PlentyofFish.com Hacked, Blames Messenger

January 31, 2011
89 Comments

Hackers have breached the database of online dating site PlentyOfFish.com, exposing the personal and password information on nearly 30 million users. In response, the company’s founder has implied that the editor of KrebsOnSecurity.com was involved in an elaborate extortion plot.

Getting hacked is no fun. Learning that you’ve been hacked when a reporter calls is probably even less fun. But for better or worse, I have notified dozens of companies about various breaches over the years, and I’ve learned to read between the lines in how victims respond. Usually, when the company in question replies by implicating you in an alleged extortion scheme, two things become clear:

1) You’re probably not going to get any real answers to your direct questions about the incident, and;

2) The company almost certainly did have a serious breach.

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ATM Skimmers That Never Touch the ATM

January 31, 2011
59 Comments

Media attention to crimes involving ATM skimmers may make consumers more likely to identify compromised cash machines, which involve cleverly disguised theft devices that sometimes appear off-color or out-of-place. Yet, many of today’s skimmer scams can swipe your card details and personal identification number while leaving the ATM itself completely untouched, making them far more difficult to spot.

The most common of these off-ATM skimmers can be found near cash machines that are located in the antechamber of a bank or building lobby, where access is controlled by a key card lock that is activated when the customer swipes his or her ATM card. In these scams, the thieves remove the card swipe device attached to the outside door, add a skimmer, and then reattach the device to the door. The attackers then place a hidden camera just above or beside the ATM, so that the camera is angled to record unsuspecting customers entering their PINs.

The crooks usually return later in the evening to remove the theft devices. Armed with skimmed card data and victim PINs, skimmer thieves are able to encode the information onto counterfeit cards and withdraw money from compromised accounts at ATMs across the country.

On July 24, 2009, California police officers responded to a report that a customer had uncovered a camera hidden behind a mirror that was stuck to the wall above an ATM at a bank in Sherman Oaks, Calif. There were two ATMs in the lobby where the camera was found, and officers discovered that the thieves had placed an “Out of Order” sign on the ATM that did not have the camera pointed at its PIN pad. The sign was a simple ruse designed to trick all customers into using the cash machine that was compromised.

Bank security cameras at the scene of the crime show the fake mirror installed over the ATM on the right.

Here’s a front view of the hidden camera, which probably would appear to most ATM users as nothing more than a parabolic mirror designed to give customers a view of anyone standing behind them.

Behind the glass, however, was a battery-operated hidden camera. A tiny hole was cut out of the bottom of the mirror housing to enable the camera to record PIN entries.

Below are several images showing the key card door lock that was compromised in this attack. The top left image shows the device as it would appear attached to the door securing access to the ATM lobby. The other two pictures show the skimmer device with the electronic components added by the thieves.

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Microsoft: Exploit Published for Windows Flaw

January 28, 2011
20 Comments

Microsoft warned today that hackers have published instructions for attacking a previously unknown security hole in all versions of Windows that could be exploited to siphon user data or trick users into installing malicious code.

Redmond published an advisory about a vulnerability in the way Windows handles MHTML code that could let attackers run Javascript code if the user is browsing a malicious site using Internet Explorer. As Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer at Qualys notes, that means that IE is the only known exploit vehicle for this flaw, and that other browsers such as Firefox and Chrome are not affected in their default configuration because they don’t support MHTML without the installation of specific add-ons.

Microsoft said it may issue a patch to fix the flaw, but that in the meantime IE users who are concerned about this threat can use a supplied “FixIt” tool to help shore up the way Windows handles MHTML documents. The enable that fix, visit this link and click the FixIt icon.

Egypt Unplugged from the Internet

January 28, 2011
26 Comments

As many readers no doubt know, the Egyptian government on Thursday severed the nation’s ties with the rest of the Internet, in an apparent effort to disrupt political protests calling for an end to the 30-year rule of Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak.

I’ve been tweeting about new developments as they arise, but I wanted to point to a few of the more dramatic graphs that different sources have drawn up to show the precipitous decline in Internet traffic and connectivity to and from Egypt as leaders there sought to isolate phone and computer networks from the rest of the world.

Arbor Networks put together this graphic, which shows what happens when 80 million people are disconnected from the Web all at once:

The Extraexploit blog looked at the Internet routing situation around Egypt before and after the disconnection, using the handy (but tricky) tool available here. This Java-based tool charts the routing activity between and among separate networks on the Internet. The first image below shows what some of the main routes to and from Egypt’s various networks looked like just before the incident.

Check out the same route view from today, and it’s clear that Egypt has isolated itself from the rest of the Internet.

As the folks at Renesys.com wrote, there are still a handful of Internet connections that remain live in Egypt, but the comments to that post suggest that those connections may have been left tightly in the grip of the Egyptian government. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, and Etisalat Misr — all have been blocked, Renesys found.

In response to the Egyptian government’s crackdown on protesters there, Wikileaks released new State Department cables that reveal human rights abuses and political arrests in the country. Too bad nobody in Egypt is going to be able to see those cables.

Have you discovered a graphic that shows the network isolation of Egypt in a compelling way? Post a link in the comments below, please.

Update, 11:19 a.m.: A reader wrote in with a link to a decent graph maintained by RIPE (French for “European IP Networks”), which shows the disconnection starting on Jan. 27.

Update, Jan. 29, 7:34 p.m. ET: A relatively new data leak prevention firm called Unveillance sent a pointer to their blog post, which chronicled the disconnection of Egypt from a slightly different perspective: The drop in network activity from computer systems within Egypt that were infected with malicious software or controlling other infected hosts.

Battling the Zombie Web Site Armies

January 26, 2011
27 Comments

Peter Bennett first suspected his own Web site might have been turned into a spam-spewing zombie on the night of Nov. 11, when he discovered that a tiny program secretly uploaded to his site was forcing it to belch out ads for rogue Internet pharmacies.

Bennett’s site had been silently “infected” via an unknown (at the time) vulnerability in a popular e-commerce software package. While most site owners probably would have just cleaned up the mess and moved on, Bennett — a longtime anti-spam vigilante — took the attack as a personal challenge.

“Spammers always know it is me attacking their resources in whatever form that takes,” Bennett said. “In other words, I make myself a target because I have a clue or two about server security and defense and just love taunting them to crank them up.”

And taunt them he has. For years, the New Zealand resident was part of a ragtag band of anti-spam activists, or “antis,” that helped to bring down infamous pill spammer Shane Atkinson and other junk e-mail purveyors. After taking a break from anti activity in 2007 to pursue other professional goals, Bennett – now 50 – seems eager to jump back into the fray.

In the interim, however, spammers have been refining their techniques. Like reluctant conscripts in a global guerilla army, hundreds  — sometimes thousands — of legitimate Web sites are now enslaved each month and sold to criminals who use them to blast out spam and host spam sites. The attackers Bennett is tracking mainly pick on orphaned Web sites running Linux with insecure, unpatched software packages (Bennett says his site was hacked thanks to a zero-day bug in OScommerce, a popular e-commerce software program).

Bennett found that his Web site was part of a larger botnet of at least 1,200 compromised sites that was being used to send roughly 25 million junk e-mail messages each day, although he said it appears the botnet is used for spam runs only intermittently.

“They only run the botnet once a week or so at a time, and then shut it off,” Bennett said.

An ad soliciting EvaPharmacy affiliates.

The hacked sites in the botnet Bennett identified mainly advertise one of three types of rogue pill sites: MyCanadianPharmacy, Canadian Family Pharmacy, and Canadian Health&Care Mall. The latter has been tied to a pharmacy affiliate program called EvaPharmacy, one of the few remaining pharmacy affiliate programs that pays members to promote fly-by-night pill sites via spam.

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Ready for Cyberwar?

January 21, 2011
41 Comments

Amid all of the media and public fascination with threats like Stuxnet and weighty terms such as “cyberwar,” it’s easy to overlook the more humdrum and persistent security threats, such as Web site vulnerabilities. But none of these distractions should excuse U.S. military leaders from making sure their Web sites aren’t trivially hackable by script kiddies.

Security vendor Imperva today blogged about a hacker who claims to have access to and control over several top dot-gov, dot-mil and dot-edu Web sites. I’ve seen some of the back-end evidence of his hacks, so it doesn’t seem like he’s making this up. Perhaps out of deference to the federal government, the Imperva folks blocked out the best part of that screen shot — the actual names of the Web site domains that this hacker is selling. For example, the hacker is advertising full control and root access to cecom.army.mil, a site whose stated purpose is “to develop, acquire, provide and sustain world-class…systems and Battle Command capabilities for the joint warfighter.” It can be yours, for just $499 (sorry, no credit cards accepted; only the virtual currency Liberty Reserve).

Here is an unredacted (well, mostly) shot of that site:

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Experi-Metal vs. Comerica Case Heads to Trial

January 19, 2011
90 Comments

A lawsuit headed to court this week over the 2009 cyber theft of more than a half-million dollars from a small metals shop in Michigan could help draw brighter lines on how far banks need to go to protect their business customers from account takeovers and fraud.

The case is being closely watched by a number of small to mid-sized organizations that have lost millions to cyber thieves and have been waiting for some sign that courts might be willing to force banks to assume at least some of those losses.

Nearly two years ago, cyber crooks stole more than $560,000 from Sterling Heights, Mich. based Experi-Metal Inc. (EMI), sending the money to co-conspirators in a half-dozen countries.

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ATM Skimmers, Up Close

January 17, 2011
36 Comments

Recently, I found a guy on an exclusive online scammer forum who has been hawking a variety of paraphernalia used in ATM skimmers, devices designed to be stuck on the outside of cash machines and to steal ATM card and PIN data from bank customers. I wasn’t sure whether I could take this person seriously, but his ratings on the forum — in which buyers and sellers leave feedback for each other based on positive or negative experiences from previous transactions — were good enough that I figured he must be one of the few people on this particular forum actually selling ATM skimmers, as opposed to just lurking there to scam fellow scammers.

Also, this seller’s profile showed that he was a longtime member, and had been vouched for as a “verified” vendor. This meant that forum administrators had vetted him by checking his reputation on other fraud forums, and that he’d paid a fee to use its escrow service if any potential buyers insisted.

Anyway, I wasn’t looking to purchase his skimmers, just to check out his wares. I chatted him up on ICQ, and he said he only sold the plastic housings for the skimmer devices, but that he could show me pictures and videos of what some of his customers had done with them. Above is a video of the seller demonstrating how one of his card skimmer housings fits over the mouth of the card slot on a working Diebold Aptiva ATM.

Below are images he sent that demonstrate two very different skimmers made with his housings. The device on the top in the picture below is a flash-based spy camera nested in a beige plastic molding meant to be attached directly above the ATM PIN pad to steal the customer’s personal identification number. The image on the bottom is the skimmer itself. To the right of each are instructions for configuring the skimmer devices and for harvesting the stolen data stored on them.

A hidden camera (top) and ATM card skimmer (bottom), along with instructions for their use.

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