Microsoft Warns of Attacks on Zero-Day IE Bug

November 3, 2010
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Microsoft Corp. today warned Internet Explorer users that attackers are exploiting a previously unknown security hole in the browser to install malicious software. The company is urging users who haven’t already done so to upgrade to IE8, which includes technology that makes the vulnerability more difficult to exploit.

According to the advisory Microsoft published, this is a browse-to-a-malicious-site-and-get-owned vulnerability. The company reports that the exploit code was discovered on a single Web site that is no longer online. But if past attacks against unpatched IE flaws are any indicator, it will probably not be long before the attack is stitched into plenty of other hacked and malicious Web sites.

Redmond says Data Execution Prevention (DEP) technology enabled by default in IE8 helps protect against attacks, and that the same protection is enabled on all supported platforms, including Windows XP Service Pack 3, Windows Vista Service Pack 1, Windows Vista Service Pack 2, and Windows 7. IE9 beta apparently is not at risk from this threat.

In a post to its Microsoft Security Response Center blog, the company said that it is working to develop a security update to address this attack against the flaw, but that at the moment it “does not meet the criteria for an out-of-band release.” Microsoft is expected to issue another round of security updates next week as part of its regular “Patch Tuesday” cycle, which generally occurs on the second Tuesday of each month.

Symantec Corp. has posted a fascinating blog entry that details just how targeted the attacks have been so far. It offers a peek at how these types of critical flaws in widely-used applications can be used in pinprick attacks to extract very specific information from targeted organizations and individuals. From that post:

“One such case started few days ago when we received information about a possible exploitation using older versions of Internet Explorer as targets. Hackers had sent emails to a select group of individuals within targeted organizations. Within the email the perpetrators added a link to a specific page hosted on an otherwise legitimate website.

….Looking at the log files from this exploited server we know that the malware author had targeted more than a few organizations. The files on this server had been accessed by people in lots of organizations in multiple industries across the globe. Very few of them were seen accessing the payload file, which means that most users were using a browser which wasn’t vulnerable or targeted.”

Read more from the Symantec writeup here.

‘Evilgrade’ Gets an Upgrade

November 3, 2010
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“Evilgrade,” a toolkit that makes it simple for attackers to install malicious software by exploiting weaknesses in the auto-update feature of many popular software titles, recently received an upgrade of its own and is now capable of hijacking the update process of more than 60 legitimate programs.

Evilgrade’s creator, Francisco Amato of InfoByte Security Research, says that by targeting widely deployed programs that don’t properly implement digital signatures on their product updates, attackers can impersonate those companies and trick users into believing they are updating their software, when in reality the users may be downloading a package designed to compromise the security of their computer.

Software companies should include these signatures in all of their updates, so that a user’s computer can validate that the update was indeed sent by the vendor. For example, Microsoft signs all of its updates with a cryptographic key that only it knows, and Windows machines are configured to ignore any incoming software update alerts that are not signed with that key. But for whatever reason, many software vendors have overlooked this important security precaution, and have chosen not to sign their updates — or have implemented the signing verification process in a way that can be circumvented.

Among the software products that Amato says EvilGrade can compromise are iTunes, Java, Skype, Winamp — even security applications like Superantispyware, Sunbelt, and Panda Antirootkit (a longer list of vulnerable apps is available in the documentation).

The video above shows how Evilgrade works against even the latest version of Java — Java 6 Update 22.

As the release notes state, this tool is a cross-platform attack suite, meaning that it can be used to attack not only Windows systems, but any vulnerable update mechanism: The attacker need only supply platform-specific payloads designed to run on the targeted user’s operating system.

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Your Money or Your Business

November 2, 2010
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New fees levied by financial institutions are likely to push many small businesses into banking online, whether or not they are aware of and prepared for the types of sophisticated cyber attacks that have cost organizations tens of millions of dollars in recent months.

On the way home from the store last week I caught a Public Radio/Marketplace story in which the radio show interviewed a small business owner who was nudged into banking online after discovering a $9.99 fee had been added to her business banking account for the privilege of continuing to receive paper statements each month.

The angle of the story was the unfairness of the new fees, considering the estimated 12 million people in the United States who have no or only slow access to the Internet. In the following snippet from that program, Marketplace’s David Brancaccio interviewed a woman from Northern New Hampshire:

“The bank with her personal account still sends monthly statements printed on paper, through the mail, for free. Old school. But this year, one of her business accounts started charging money for paper statements.

Johnson: That’s right.

Brancaccio: How much?

Johnson: $9.99 a month.

Brancaccio: Really?

Johnson: Yes.

Brancaccio: When did you actually notice?

Johnson: My bank statement, my paper bank statement! is how I found it!

“It’s a growing trend in banking. For instance, Bank of America has something called the E-banking account where paper statements and routine visits to a human teller cost money. It’s now in more than three dozen states. B of A says techno-savvy customers seem fine with online-only in exchange for no minimum cash balances in the account.”

Johnson didn’t say which bank her commercial account was at.  And for its part, BofA’s eBanking plan only applies to consumer accounts, not businesses. But if this type of trend becomes more mainstream among commercial banking customers, more and more small businesses will be pushed into banking online without knowing how to protect themselves from organized cyber thieves that have stolen at least $70 million from small to mid-sized organizations over the last few years.

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Google Extends Security Bug Bounty to Gmail, YouTube, Blogger

November 1, 2010
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Google on Monday said it was expanding a program to pay security researchers who discreetly report software flaws in the company’s products. The move appears aimed at engendering goodwill within the hacker community while encouraging more researchers to keep their findings private until the holes can be fixed.

Earlier this year, Google launched a program to reward researchers who directly report any security holes found in the company’s Chrome open-source browser project. With its announcement today, Google is broadening the program to include bugs reported for its Web properties, including Gmail, YouTube, Blogger and others (the company says its desktop apps — Android, Picasa and Google Desktop, etc.  are not included in the expanded bounty program).

The program is unlikely to attract those who are looking to get rich selling security vulnerabilities, as there are several less reputable places online where critical bugs in important online applications can fetch far higher prices. But the expanded bounty may just win over researchers who might otherwise post their research online, effectively alerting Google to the problem at the same time as the cyber criminal community.

“We already enjoy working with an array of researchers to improve Google security, and some individuals who have provided high caliber reports are listed on our credits page,” Google’s security team wrote on the company’s security blog. “As well as enabling us to thank regular contributors in a new way, we hope our new program will attract new researchers and the types of reports that help make our users safer.”

The standard reward for bugs will continue to be public recognition and $500, although the search giant said bugs that are particularly severe or clever could earn rewards of up to $3,133.7 (this is leet speek for “elite”).

Google said it won’t pay for bugs that involve overtly malicious attacks, such as social engineering and physical attacks or so-called “black hat search engine optimization” techniques —  and that it wouldn’t count less serious flaws such as denial-of-service bugs, or flaws in technologies recently acquired by Google.

Other companies have established bug bounty programs. For example, Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox Web browser, for years paid researchers $500 for bugs, but recently upped the amount to $3,000.

Charlie Miller, a security researcher who has reported a large number of bugs in a variety of applications and programs, was initially critical of such a tiny bounty from one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful businesses. But reached via e-mail Monday evening, Miller said that while he’d always like to see more money being paid to bug researchers, the relatively few companies that offer bug bounties also deserve recognition.

“With so many companies (MS, Adobe, Apple, Oracle) not paying anything, I’m very happy to see any money going out for these types of programs,” Miller wrote. “It motivates and rewards researchers.  The security of the products (or websites) that the average person uses goes up.  Also, it provides vendors with a level of control they otherwise lack.  If a researcher reports a bug and then decides they think the process is not working well, they’ll think twice about dropping it on full disclosure if they know they’ll lose their finder’s fee.”

Bredolab Mastermind Was Key Spamit.com Affiliate

October 30, 2010
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The man arrested in Armenia last week for allegedly operating the massive “Bredolab” botnet — a network of some 30 million hacked Microsoft Windows PCs that were rented out to cyber crooks — appears to have generated much of his clientele as an affiliate of Spamit.com, the global spamming operation whose members are blamed for sending a majority of the world’s pharmaceutical spam.

Armenian authorities arrested 27-year-old Georg Avanesov on suspicion of being the curator of Bredolab, a botnet that infected an estimated 3 million PCs per month through virus-laden e-mails and booby-trapped Web sites. The arrest resulted from a joint investigation between Armenian police and cyber sleuths in the Netherlands, whose ISPs were home to at least 143 servers used to direct the botnet’s activities. In tandem with the arrest and the unplugging of those servers, Dutch service providers began redirecting local Internet users to a disinfection and cleanup page if their PCs showed signs of Bredolab infections.

Investigators allege that Avanesov made up to US$139,000 each month renting the botnet to criminals who used it for sending spam and for installing password-stealing malicious software. Avanesov, who is thought to have made millions over a career spanning more than a decade, was arrested after hopping a flight from Moscow to his home in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital.

Pim Takkenberg, team leader for the Netherlands Police Agency’s High Tech Crime Unit, said Avanesov frequently used the hacker aliases “padonaque” and “Atata,” and for many years used the e-mail address “i.am@padonaque.info.” The domain padonaque.info has long been associated with a variety of malicious software families, and the malware that once called home to it reflects the varied clientele that investigators say Avanesov attracted over the years.

Atata’s ICQ Avatar

According to information obtained by KrebsOnSecurity, that e-mail address and Atata nickname were used to register at least two affiliate accounts at spamit.com. With online pharmacy sales generating him less than $2,000 each month over the last several years, Atata wasn’t pulling in anywhere near as much as the top earners in the program, some of whom earned six figures monthly promoting counterfeit pills via spam. But Takkenberg and others say it is likely that Atata used Spamit as a place to sign up new customers who were interesting in renting his Bredolab botnet to promote their pharmacy sites.

“The main thing he did was build this botnet — mainly using a lot of hacked Web sites,” Takkenberg said. “Then he sold parts of that botnet to other clients of his, who could upload their own malware loaders, FTP [password] grabbers, whatever they wanted.”

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Critical Fixes for Shockwave, Firefox

October 28, 2010
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Adobe Systems pushed out a critical security update for its Shockwave Player that fixes nearly a dozen security vulnerabilities.  The software maker also is warning that attackers are targeting a previously unidentified security hole in its Acrobat and PDF Reader products.

The Shockwave patch plugs 11 security holes in program, most of which attackers could use remotely to take control over an affected system.  Updates are available for Mac and Windows computers, from this link. The latest version is 11.5.9.615.  Before you blithely click through the process, keep a lookout for pre-checked “free” software that will install alongside this Shockwave update if you simply accept all the default options. When I tested the Shockwave installer, it included a “free PC performance scan from PC Tools’s Registry Mechanic. I opted to untick the check mark next to that option before proceeding with the rest of the install, which was otherwise uneventful.

Due to Adobe’s huge market share and apparent abundance of as-yet-undiscovered security holes, life with Adobe’s products can feel a bit like playing Whac-a-Mole: Just when you’ve patched one Adobe product it seems like there’s another one under assault by attackers. True to form, Adobe released a separate advisory today warning that hackers were targeting a critical flaw in the latest version of its Acrobat and PDF Reader products.

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Demystifying KB976902, a.k.a. Microsoft’s “Blackhole” Update

October 28, 2010
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I’ve received several e-mails from readers concerned about a mysterious, undocumented software patch that Microsoft began offering to Windows 7 users through Windows Update this week. Some Microsoft users have been spinning conspiracy theories about this patch because it lacks any real description of its function, and what little documentation there is about it says that it cannot be removed once installed and that it may be required as a prerequisite for installing future updates.

Normally, when Microsoft offers a patch through Windows Update, it also will publish a corresponding “knowledgebase” article that describes in great detail what the patch does and why users should install it — and how applying the update may impact current and future operations on the system.

This fix went out via Windows Update on Oct. 26 as a “recommended” and “important” patch, but it lacked any additional details, prompting conspiracy theories and speculation on message boards from users wondering whether they should ignore or install this update — which for many users was sandwiched between the dozens of security patches Microsoft began offering earlier this month as part of its regular Patch Tuesday security update cycle.

To make matters worse, many Windows 7 users said the patch was no longer offered after they declined installing it the first time, leading some curious researchers to dub it the “Blackhole” update.

I have verified with Microsoft that this update is designed to smooth the way for the deployment of future updates on Windows 7 systems (read on to the very end if you’d like the official response from Microsoft). The confusion appears to stem from a timing mistake by the folks at Microsoft, but this incident illustrates the hysteria that can ensue when the world’s largest software company fails — for whatever reason — to be fully transparent with a user base that has come to expect detailed advisories with every patch.

When I was researching this patch, I found an amusing thread on the Microsoft Answers forum — where several Microsoft most valuable professional experts urged other forum members to hold off installing the patch until more information was available. Others offered more speculative answers, suggesting that the patch was instead:

-A new service pack for Windows 7

-A “heuristic scanner to the machine that turned on whenever the machine went idle, and searched all attached storage devices for ‘terrorism-related’ information, then alerting ‘somebody’ over the Internet”

-The result of Microsoft having been hacked, with the patch being some kind of malicious third-party code being sent out to infect all Windows machines

-A new anti-piracy check from Microsoft.

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Koobface Worm Targets Java on Mac OS X

October 27, 2010
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A new version of the infamous Koobface worm designed to attack Mac OS X computers is spreading through Facebook and other social networking sites, security experts warn.

Security software maker Intego says this Mac OS X version of the Koobface worm is being served as part of a multi-platform attack that uses a malicious Java applet to attack users. According to Intego, the applet includes a prompt to install the malicious software:

Intego notes that if the download is allowed, “it runs a local web server and an IRC server, acts as part of a botnet, acts as a DNS changer, and can activate a number of other functions, either through files initially installed or other files downloaded subsequently. It spreads by posting messages on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, usually trying to get people to click a link to view some sort of video.”

SecureMac also has a writeup on what appears to be the same threat, which it calls OSX.Boonana.a. SecureMac says that “there have been reports of similar behavior in recent trojan horses targeting Microsoft Windows, but they have not included cross-platform capabilities until now.”

It is not surprising that attackers would begin leveraging Java to attack Mac users with threats that have traditionally only menaced Windows users. My research shows that Java is now the leading vector of attacks against Windows systems, findings that recently were buttressed by oodles of attack data released by Microsoft. Also, Java was designed to be a cross-platform technology that would allow applications to run seamlessly regardless of the operating system relied upon by the user. It makes sense for attackers to consider Java as a platform-agnostic vehicle for delivering platform-specific malicious software.

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Firesheep: Baaaaad News for the Unwary

October 27, 2010
41 Comments

“Firesheep,” a new add-on for Firefox that makes it easier to hijack e-mail and social networking accounts of others who are on the same wired or wireless network, has been getting some rather breathless coverage by the news media, some of whom have characterized this a new threat. In reality, this tool is more of a welcome reminder of some basic but effective steps that Internet users should take to protect their personal information while using public networks.

Most online services use secure sockets layer (SSL) encryption to scramble the initial login — as indicated by the presence of “https://” instead of “http://” in the address field when the user submits his or her user name and password. But with many sites like Twitter and Facebook, subsequent data exchanges between the user and the site are sent unencrypted and in plain text, potentially exposing that information to anyone else on the network who is running a simple Web traffic snooping program.

Why should we care if post-login data is sent in unencrypted plain text? Most Web-based services use “cookies,” usually small, text-based files placed on the user’s computer, to signify that the user has logged in successfully and that he or she will not be asked to log in again for a specified period of time, usually a few days to a few weeks (although some cookies can be valid indefinitely).

The trouble is that the contents of these cookies frequently are sent unencrypted to and from the user’s computer after the user has logged in. That means that an attacker sniffing Web traffic on the local network can intercept those cookies and re-use them in his own Web browser to post unauthorized Tweets or Facebook entries in that user’s name, for example. This attack could also be used to gain access to someone’s e-mail inbox.

Enter Firesheep, a Firefox add-on released this past weekend at the Toorcon hacker conference in San Diego. Eric Butler, the security researcher who co-authored the tool, explains some of the backstory and why he and a fellow researcher decided to release it:

“This is a widely known problem that has been talked about to death, yet very popular websites continue to fail at protecting their users. The only effective fix for this problem is full end-to-end encryption, known on the web as HTTPS or SSL. Facebook is constantly rolling out new ‘privacy’ features in an endless attempt to quell the screams of unhappy users, but what’s the point when someone can just take over an account entirely?”

In his blog post about Firesheep, I believe Butler somewhat overstates the threat posed by this add-on when he says: “After installing the extension you’ll see a new sidebar. Connect to any busy open wifi network and click the big ‘Start Capturing’ button. Then wait.”

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Nobel Peace Prize Site Serves Firefox 0day

October 26, 2010
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The Web site for the Nobel Peace Prize has been serving up malicious software that takes advantage of a newly-discovered security hole in Mozilla Firefox, computer security experts warned today.

Oslo-based Norman ASA warned that visitors who browsed the Nobel Prize site with Firefox while the attack was active early Tuesday may have had malicious software silently installed on their computers without warning.

Mozilla just posted a blog entry saying it is aware of a critical vulnerability in Firefox 3.5 and 3.6, and that it has received reports from several security research firms that exploit code leveraging this vulnerability has been detected in the wild. The software firm isn’t saying much more about the flaw for now.

Mozilla says it is developing a fix, which it plans to deploy as soon as it has been tested. In the meantime, Firefox users can mitigate the threat from this flaw by using a script-blocking add-on like NoScript.

Update, 6:40 p.m. ET: I just heard back from Norman ASA malware analyst Snorre Fagerland via e-mail, and he has provided a bit more technical analysis of what’s going on with this Firefox flaw and with the exploit they discovered. Fagerland says the vulnerability is related to a “use-after-free condition” in certain objects, exploited through Javascript.

“Shellcode and a large heapspray is involved,” Fagerland wrote. “The script that does this checks for the following versions:

firefox/3.6.8
firefox/3.6.9
firefox/3.6.10
firefox/3.6.11

…and it checks that it is NOT running Vista or Win7 (Windows versions 6.0 and 6.1), pretty much limiting the attack to XP-family OS’s. The underlying vulnerability is confirmed to also affect Firefox 3.5x series, but we have not seen exploit code that attacks this.”

Update, Oct. 27, 11:50 p.m. ET: Mozilla has opened up the bug report on this flaw.