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Archive for October, 2009

Swedish authorities are no closer to discovering who may have been behind two distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that downed the websites of the police and some 40 media sites on Thursday.

The media companies affected by the initial attack all rent server space from Swedish IT service provider Basefarm. According to Baseform, the attack was specifically aimed at one of its clients, media IT development company Adeprimo. “Normally, a website with relatively high traffic will receive around 800 requests per second,” said Basefarm CEO Sara Murby Forste in a statement. “During the attack on Adeprimo, we were registering around 400,000 requests per second,” she added.

News websites affiliated with the Stampen media group, which uses Adeprimo’s media platform, were among those hardest hit. These include main Gothenburg newspaper Göteborgs-Posten, whose site was inaccessible from early morning until lunchtime on Thursday.

Basefarm said it did not receive any warning or threat prior to the attack. The company is preparing to submit a report to the police and is continuing an internal investigation into the attack.

“We know from the nature of the attack that they possess a lot of knowledge. This took place in a planned manner, outside Europe, and with serious force,” said Basefarm’s technical manager Stefan Månsby. “There is much to suggest that the traffic came from Asia and the United States. It could well be Asian, bouncing via the US.”

A second attack later in the day knocked out the website of the Swedish police, which was down for a couple of hours hours in the late afternoon. Police IT experts believe the two attacks are almost certainly linked. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” said Ann-Marie Alverås, head of the national police’s web security division. “The amount of traffic was exactly the same in both attacks and we too witnessed traffic from the United States. But the saboteur could be anywhere in the world,” she added.

Thursday’s attacks are to be investigated by the police’s IT crimes unit. Ann-Marie Alverås said the purpose of the attacks remained a mystery. “But I can hazard a guess that it was to attract attention,” she said.

Credit: thelocal.se

Researchers from CA have intercepted a new ransomware variant encrypting popular file extensions (.zip; .rar; .pdf; .rtf; .txt; .jpg; .jpeg; .waw; .mp3; .db; .xls; .docx; .xlsx; .doc) and demanding a $100 for the decryption software.

According to the message which replaces the desktop’s background upon execution, the files are encrypted with 256-bit AES encryption, and that “there’s a 0% chance that you will be able to manually decrypt the files without the encryption key“. However, this particular cybercriminal appears to be bluffing since the ransomware encrypts the data using the XOR cipher.

Naturally, by doing so he allowed CA’s researchers to release a free decryptor for Win32/Gpcode.J. Despite that compared to previous campaigns, this one looks rather primitive, ransomware is clearly a trend, one that has already started converging with popular delivery channels such as scareware, and utilizing efficient payment processes such as the ubiquitous SMS micro-payment.

Throughout the entire 2009, cybercriminals have indicated their long-term interest in the development of alternative extortion tactics in order to efficiently earn as much micro-payment revenue as possible. The most recent case of such an alternative extortion tactic, was the introduction of SMS ransomware variant that was displaying persistent inline ads within the browsers of infected victims, often showing disturbing adult content, while requiring a premium-rate SMS for removal.

With the ever-decreasing price for do-it-yourself SMS ransomware building tools within the underground marketplace (average price is between $15 and $30), new market entrants will inevitably prompt the vendors of these releases to “innovate” and introduce new features in an attempt to compete with one another.

Interestingly, despite GPCode’s and LoroBot’s practice of encrypting popular file extensions, the majority of SMS-based ransomware releases currently offered for sale, emphasize on the practice of locking down an infected party’s computer using “Unlicensed copy of Windows” themes, instead of encrypting files.

Credit: ZDNet.com Security Blogs

A recently conducted ethical phishing experiment impersonating LinkedIn by mailing invitations coming from Bill Gates, has achieved a 100% success rate in bypassing the anti-spam filters it was tested against.

The experiment emphasizes on how small-scale spear phishing campaigns are capable of bypassing anti-spam filters, and once again proves that users continue interacting with phishing emails.

The scenario was an invitation from Linkedin, posing as an invitation from Bill Gates to join his network. Linkedin was selected due to availability, and the fact that it is a social network recognized by most executives. The selection of Linkedin was also based on the fact that linked-in email should be already identified by most existing email system(s), and this may have helped delivery through into the mailbox.

The Phishing site was based on the Linkedin sign in page. The form action was changed so that the user would be redirected to a subsequent page on our site. No usernames or passwords were collected during this assessment. All targeted users were contacted before the phishing email was sent, and were expecting a Linkedin invitation from Bill Gates.”

A similar study was conducted by ethical phishing vendor PhishMe.com in March this year, pointing out that based on the 32 phishing scenarios tested against 69,000 employees, people are less cautious when clicking on active links in emails than when they are requested for sensitive data. This behavior is not surprisingly cited by PhishCamp as a possible opportunity for the introducing of blended threats, similar to known cases where phishing and scareware sites were also serving client-side exploits.

With the average price for a thousand active Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail accounts decreasing due to the economies of scale achieved by the vendors of CAPTCHA-solving services, and the numerous tools available at the spammer’s disposal to take advantage of these accounts, in the long-term all spammers will start abusing the already established DomainKeys trust among the most popular free email service providers.

Credit: ZDNet.com Security Blogs

An estimated 5.8 million pages belonging to 640,000 websites were infected with code designed to launch malware attacks on visitors, according to a report released Tuesday.

The numbers, compiled over the third quarter by security firm Dasient, represent a significant jump in number of legitimate websites that have been compromised. According to numbers Microsoft released on April, some 3 million pages were infected. The number of sites blocked by Google more than doubled between December and August, to almost 350,000.

“The bad guys are significantly taking advantage of attacking servers so they can distribute their malware to a very, very large number of clients,” said Dasient co-founder Ameet Ranadive. “A lot of these infections are complex and often pretty obfuscated, so it’s difficult for experienced webmasters to figure out what parts of their site have been infected and then to remediate it.”

To understand just how hard it is for webmasters to clean up the mess, consider this: In the third quarter, 39.6 percent of compromised sites had been reinfected after trying earlier to clean up the malware. Criminals are often able to attack a site repeatedly because webmasters fail to change passwords or patch vulnerable web applications that led to the initial exploit.

Eleven days ago, ScanSafe, a separate security firm that announced Tuesday it is being acquired by Cisco, reported that more than 2,000 websites were compromised by a mass web infection known as Gumblar. Many of those sites were likely hit in earlier waves and simply reinfected, a ScanSafe researcher said at the time.

An estimated 54.8 percent of the attacks observed by Dasient involved malicious javascript that was injected into compromised sites. iFrames that silently redirected users to malicious sites came in second at 37.1. Dasient has cataloged more than 72,000 unique malware infections involving websites.

The attacks are growing in popularity because they allow criminals to reach large numbers of victims with a minimum amount of effort. For end users who fail to install the latest versions of Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash and other software on their machines, the attacks often result in a “browse and get compromised” scenario, in which their systems are surreptitiously infected simply by visiting the site.

“Hackers are starting to see some success from these attacks and whenever they see success, they continue to invest more,” Ranadive said.

Credit: The Register

Tech blog Gizmodo has been suckerpunched by cyber scoundrels, who placed malware-loaded web ads on the site.

Gizmodo is the latest online publication to have been targeted by villainous hackers. The site coughed to the nasty scam and issued an apology today.

“Guys, I’m really sorry but we had some malware running on our site in ad boxes for a little while last week on Suzuki ads,” wrote Gizmodo’s Brian Lam. “They somehow fooled our ad sales team through an elaborate scam. It’s taken care of now, and only a few people should have been affected, but this isn’t something we take lightly as writers, editors and tech geeks.”

Lam added that staffers at Gizmodo, which is owned by Gawker Media, might’ve spotted the malware sooner but for the fact that everyone uses Mac OS X or Linux machines.

“Everything should be cleared up but you should be checking ‘qegasysguard.exe’ if you’re experiencing random popups,” he said. “Be careful, load up some antivirus and make sure your system is clean. I’m sorry.”

A similar scam fooled the New York Times into hosting malware on its homepage in September this year.

“By hitting one of the biggest blogs in the world, these hackers are aiming high,” said Sophos tech guru Graham Cluley. “Their plan was to infect as many computer users as possible with their malicious adverts.

“They know Gizmodo gets a huge amount of traffic - once they infected the site through their adverts they could just lie in wait for their victims to visit.

“What is particularly audacious about this plot is that the criminals appear to have posed as legitimate representatives of Suzuki in order to plant their dangerous code on Gizmodo’s popular website.”

Credit: The Register

People who use public WiFi to make iPhone calls or conduct video conferences take heed: It just got a lot easier to monitor your conversations in real time.

At a talk scheduled for Saturday at the Toorcon hacker conference in San Diego, two security researchers plan to show the latest advances in the open-source UCSniff tool for penetrating voice-over-internet-protocol systems. With a few clicks of a mouse, they will eavesdrop on a call between two audience members using popular iPhone applications that route the calls over the conference network.

For more than a year, UCSniff has provided everything a hacker needs to plug a laptop into a network and within seconds begin intercepting VoIP transmissions. But until now, the program has allowed eavesdroppers to reassemble the conversations only after they were concluded, a limitation that was far from the elite bugging capabilities shown in Mission Impossible and other spy thrillers.

“As the private call is in progress, we can see and hear what is happening,” said Jason Ostrom, a developer of UCSniff and director of Viper Labs, the research arm of security firm Sipera Systems. “There’s real-time violation of confidentiality.”

In addition to monitoring voice conversations as they happen, UCSniff can also bug video conferences in real time. Ostrom said he and fellow Viper Labs researcher Arjun Sambamoorthy plan to show those capabilities at Toorcon as well.

With the proliferation of iPhones and other smartphones, plenty of businesses and individuals have sought to save money on roaming charges by routing calls over the internet instead of over carrier networks. Adam Boone, a vice president at Sipera, said one large, unnamed client logs more than 1 million minutes per month in such VoIP calls.

The problem, he added, is that many of the iPhone apps for VoIP calls don’t provide encryption capabilities, making the conversations ripe for eavesdropping. (Sipera plans to unveil a new product to protect such users next week).

No doubt, traffic traveling over unsecured networks has always been vulnerable to snoops. UCSniff just streamlines their work by bundling a hodgepodge of tools that previously were only available piecemeal.

It turns any laptop into a man-in-the-middle node. A VLAN hopper then traverses the virtual local area network until it accesses the part that carries VoIP calls. UCSniff automatically injects spoofed address resolution protocol packets into the network, allowing all voice and video traffic to be routed to the laptop.

Ostrom said the tool is designed to help penetration testers quickly assess the security of clients’ networks and to help security providers to stay abreast of the latest attacks.

“If we can do this, there are many, many people out there who can do this. It’s not rocket science,” he said. “The end game here is to help them improve their products, to know what types of attacks can happen so they can build security features into their products.”

Credit: The Register

Malware-infected computers are increasingly being used to perpetrate click fraud, according to a study released Thursday that found their contribution was the highest since researchers began compiling statistics on the crime.

In the third quarter of this year, 42.6 percent of fraudulent clicks were generated by computers that were part of botnets, compared with 36.9 percent the previous quarter and about 27.6 percent in the same period of 2008. The increase comes as criminals trying to profit from click fraud take advantage of new advances in malware that make the practice harder to detect.

“As the botnets get more sophisticated, they’re able to perpetrate more click fraud,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics, the advertising auditing firm that prepared the report. “They’re finding new ways of being distributed, and that’s reflected in the data.”

The jump in botnet use over the past year comes as the overall amount of click fraud dropped, from 16 percent of all paid ads in Q3 of 2008 to 14.1 percent last quarter. That means manual forms of click fraud, in which large numbers of individuals engage in the practice, has decreased by an even larger margin. Many of those people get paid to knowingly gin the advertising results, while others are tricked into it.

The data was compiled by monitoring pay-per-click campaigns on more than 300 ad networks and on advertisers’ web sites.

Click fraud attempts to siphon away the commissions advertisers pay web site operators each time an ad on one of their pages is clicked on by a legitimate visitor. Fraudsters often set up websites with little or no content and then pocket big profits when ads from Google and other providers are viewed through the process.

Automated click fraud has existed for years, but over the past few months, researchers have identified several botnets that prominently offer such capabilities. Both the web-based infection known as Gumblar and the so-called Bahama Botnet contain malware that causes infected PCs to return altered Google results. When users click on them, they are taken to a series of intermediate links before arriving at their final destination.

“It’s in everyone’s best interest in the online community to find and stamp out click fraud,” Pellman said. “The fraudsters are trying to stay a step ahead of those efforts.”

Credit: The Register

The Guardian newspaper’s jobs website has warned 500,000 users that hackers may have got hold of private information held on the site after a “sophisticated and deliberate” attack.

The paper said not all users were at risk, and it has emailed those who are. The email, sent on Saturday, said data relating to job applications “may have been accessed”. It said the incident was now being investigated by the central e-crime unit at New Scotland Yard.

The mail advised people to:

1) Contact your creditors, even if they have not been affected, so that they can monitor your accounts to ensure they remain protected.

2) Contact a credit reference agency: Callcredit, Equifax or Experian provide suggested steps to resolve the situation and prevent it happening again.

3) Contact CIFAS protective registration: If you think you have been a victim of identity theft you should consider subscribing to CIFAS. This places a notice on your credit file indicating that your name and address may be used to perpetrate identity fraud.

It also provided links to various websites for further advice on identity fraud.

The paper said it had been assured by its provider, Madgex, that the site was now secure and that it had contacted, or tried to contact, everyone at risk.

The US version of the site was not affected. The paper declined to give any technical details of the attack until the police investigation was over.

Although no financial information is believed to have been lost, even a standard CV and covering letter can provide a decent start for identity theft.

Hackers have previously gone after recruitment sites like Monster.com to harvest data for ID fraud or for “spear phishing attacks” - personalised email scams.

Credit: The Register

A free software program released Thursday turns everyday BlackBerry smartphones into remote bugging devices. Dubbed PhoneSnoop by creator Sheran Gunasekera, the software sits quietly on a targeted BlackBerry and monitors the phone number of each incoming call. When it detects a number set up in the program’s preferences section, it silently turns on the speakerphone, allowing an attacker to monitor all conversations within earshot of the device.

Although programs such as FlexiSPY have long claimed to do much the same thing, Gunasekera said he believes PhoneSnoop is the first software to bring those capabilities to the BlackBerry free of charge.

“What I wanted to do was bring some awareness to this problem, so I’m releasing it pretty much for free and trying to show them that this can be done,” said Gunasekera, who is director of security for Hermis Consulting in Jakarta, Indonesia. “It’s not well known that these threats exist.”

Gunasekera said he was inspired to write PhoneSnoop after witnessing an attempt in July by United Arab Emirates mobile operator Etisalat to sneak snooping software onto customers’ Blackberry handsets. Subscribers reported receiving an SMS message from the carrier instructing them to install an official patch.

An analysis and reverse engineering of the update made it clear that the update installed a program that had the ability to forward all outgoing emails to a server under Etisalat’s control, Gunasekera said. He added that it’s not known if the spyware was ever activated. Because the software cloaked itself from users, it may never have been discovered were it not for a bug that drained batteries in as little as 30 minutes.

The carrier denied the software spied on its customers, but even BlackBerry maker Research in Motion warned users of the SMS message and took the unusual step of offering an application that removed the Etisalat software.

Unlike FlexiSPY and the spyware that was installed on Etisalat customers’ handsets, PhoneSnoop doesn’t try to hide itself. But Gunasekera said it would be trivial for him to modify the program to hide all its processes and icons from casual users. He plans to release a free utility in a week or two that will make it easy for users to list all software and processes running on their BlackBerries.

PhoneSnoop complements a previous program Gunasekera released at this month’s Hack in the Box security conference that silently forwards emails to an attacker. Eventually, he plans to release companion software that will forward all SMS messages and monitor a user’s location using the BlackBerry’s built-in GPS features.

Unlike Apple’s iPhone and other smartphones, the BlackBerry hasn’t suffered from known vulnerabilities over the past couple of years that would allow an attacker to remotely install snooping software onto the device. That means attackers need physical access to the device they want to bug or somehow trick its user into installing it.

A RIM spokesman responds:

“Security has always been, and continues to be, a core part of the BlackBerry solution. BlackBerry is widely recognized for the high level of security built into BlackBerry smartphones and, as this article points outs, this type of software relies on tricking an unsuspecting user into downloading, installing and running a malicious application.”

Users should download apps only from trusted sources, he added.

Credit: The Register

Two major Australian atheist websites were taken offline by distributed denial of service attacks earlier this week.

The organisations, the Atheist Foundation of Australia and Global Atheist Convention, have been in the news down under for organising a Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne early next year.

The attack, on Tuesday, took the sites offline for about 24 hours. It is not clear where the attack originated - Australia lacks a violent religious minority. The group also tried to run an atheist bus advert campaign but had their slogans rejected.

Admins added extra RAM and improved caching to get the site back online.

The attack has been reported to the Australian Federal Police, the Sydney Morning Herald said.

Credit: The Register