CyberInsecure.com

Archive for February, 2010

The name of the popular file analysis service VirusTotal is being abused by cyber-crooks to infect users with scareware. A recent forum spam campaign tries to trick people into visiting a malicious website hosted at virus-total.in.

VirusTotal.com has been well known as free virus and malware online scan service which allows submitters to test a particular file against a multitude of malware scanners. So, it’s not highly surprising that malware authors would try to use that name to further their gain.

Security researchers from Sophos reported a spam run promoting the rogue virus-total domain, as a private message on a forum. The message employs scare tactics in order to frighten users into visiting the scareware-pushing website.

The message looks like this:

Subject: Warning!

DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL!
***************************

Dear [Redacted forum user name],

You have received a new private message at [Redacted] Forum from [Redacted], entitled “Warning!”.

To read the original version, respond to, or delete this message, you must log in here:
http://[Redacted]

This is the message that was sent:
***************
Dear, [Redacted forum user names]

There are viruses’ activities from your computer! Highly recommend you to scan your computer for malicious and potentially unwanted software. If you do not follow this, I will have to make a complaint to your Internet Service Provider with attached log file (your IP address, etc.). If you want to find a report about your computer’s security and solve every problem with it, please click here: http://www.virus-total.[TLD removed]/detected/[Redacted] This is an online service that you can use for free spyware removal. Use it to scan your computer to help protect, clean, and keep your computer running at its best. Use the free scan to check for and remove viruses, spyware, and other potentially malicious software and to find vulnerabilities or shortcomings in your Internet security.

Thank you. Yours truly, [Redacted].
***************

This attack clearly targets VirusTotal.com, a popular free service which allows users to scan suspicious files with over 40 antivirus engines and other tools. Julio Canto, VirusTotal’s project manager, issued an alert about the rogue virus-total.in website via Twitter.

The site displays bogus security warnings and fake antivirus scans to unsuspecting visitors, tricking them into installing a scareware program called SecurityTool. Rogue security programs such as these are commonly used by cyber-criminals to charge money for useless licenses and steal credit card details.

The above popup would follow by the loading of a fake scanning page inside the browser:

One of the interesting parts of this fake page is that the “Windows Security Alert” pop-up is actually a time-delayed object inside the page. Even though the box looks like a window box from Windows XP, it is not moveable at all.

When the fake scanning completes, another pop-up will be generated asking the user to download a file called security_tool_setup.exe. Needless to say, this file is malicious and is yet another one of the Fake Antiviruses.  This executable has already been proactively detected by Sophos as Mal/FakeVirPk-A.

“An unfortunate side effect of a scam like this is that the real VirusTotal could start to receive emails from irate victims of the fake site claiming they’ve ‘infected my PC’ – fingers crossed it doesn’t get to that stage. Remember: the REAL domain for VirusTotal is Virustotal.com. Don’t fall for this scam!” Sunbelt’s Chris Boyd advises.

Another unusual aspect of this attack is the threat of filing a complaint with a user’s ISP about the virus activity alleged in the spam message. This statement comes at a time when ISPs have announced initiatives to identify compromised computers on their networks and take proactive measures to clean them.

Credit: Softpedia.com News, SophosLabs Blog

Computer scientists at Rutgers University this week are demonstrating ways that rootkits can attack new generations of smart mobile phones. The researchers, who are presenting their findings at a mobile computing workshop in Maryland, are showing how a rootkit could cause a smartphone to eavesdrop on a meeting, track its owner’s travels, or rapidly drain its battery to render the phone useless — all without the user’s knowledge.

“Smartphones are essentially becoming regular computers,” says Vinod Ganapathy, assistant professor of computer science in Rutgers’ School of Arts and Sciences. “They run the same class of operating systems as desktop and laptop computers, so they are just as vulnerable to attack by [malware].”

Ganapathy and computer science professor Liviu Iftode worked with three students to study the use of rootkits in smartphone operating systems. They note that while many PCs carry virtual machine monitors to help detect rootkits, most smartphones cannot support a VM monitor.

Rootkit attacks on smartphones — or upcoming tablet computers — could be more devastating because smartphone owners tend to carry their phones with them all of the time, the researchers say. This creates opportunities for potential attackers to eavesdrop, extract personal information from phone directories, or just pinpoint a user’s whereabouts by querying the phone’s GPS receiver. Smartphones also have new ways for malware to enter the system, such as through a Bluetooth radio channel or via text message.

“What we’re doing today is raising a warning flag,” Iftode says. “We’re showing that people with general computer proficiency can create rootkit malware for smartphones. The next step is to work on defenses.”

In one test, the researchers showed how a rootkit could turn on a phone’s microphone without the owner knowing it happened. In such a case, an attacker would send an invisible text message to the infected phone, telling it to place a call and turn on the microphone, such as when the phone’s owner is in a meeting and the attacker wants to eavesdrop.

In another test, they demonstrated a rootkit that responds to a text query for the phone’s location as furnished by its GPS receiver. This would enable an attacker to track the owner’s whereabouts.

In a third test, the researchers showed a rootkit turning on power-hungry capabilities — such as the Bluetooth radio and GPS receiver — to quickly drain the battery.

The researchers are careful to note they did not assess the vulnerability of specific types of smartphones. They did their work on a phone used primarily by software developers versus commercial phone users. Working within a legitimate software development environment, they deliberately inserted rootkit malware into the phone to study its potential effects.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army.

Credit: DarkReading.com

The Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania is being sued for spying on its students via webcams installed in school-issued laptops. The class action lawsuit was initiated after an image taken with such a device was allegedly cited as evidence for disciplinary action against a high-school student.

The class action complaint was filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania by the parents of Blake J. Robbins, a minor attending the Harriton High School in Rosemont. The Lower Merion School District, of which the high school is part, its board of directors and the administrator are named as defendants, while all affected students and their families constitute the Class.

“Unbeknownst to Plaintiffs and the members of the Class, and without their authorization, Defendants have been spying on the activities of Plaintiffs and Class members by Defendant’s indiscriminant [sic] use of and ability to remotely activate the webcams incorporated into each laptop issued to students by the School District,” was alleged in the complaint.

The gross violation of privacy apparently came to light when Blake Robbins was confronted by Harriton High School Assistant Principal Lindy Matsko, about engaging in “improper behavior in his home.” Ms. Matsko cited a photograph taken with the webcam installed in the laptop given to the student by the school district.

In an open letter sent to parents on Thursday, Superintendent of Schools Christopher W. McGinley, the school district’s administrator, admits that webcams installed in school-issued laptops can be turned on remotely. However, he stresses that this feature that has now been disabled was used strictly for security purposes.

“Upon a report of a suspected lost, stolen or missing laptop, the feature would be activated by the District’s security and technology departments. The security feature’s capabilities were limited to taking a still image of the operator and the operator’s screen. This feature was only used for the narrow purpose of locating a lost, stolen or missing laptop. The District never activated the security feature for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever,” Mr. McGinley explained.

In an update posted yesterday, it is further revealed that the feature was used 50 times during this school year to track laptops. It is also acknowledged that parents were not notified about the existence of this capability. “While certain rules for laptop use were spelled out – such as prohibitive uses on and off school property – there was no explicit notification that the laptop contained the security software. This notice should have been given and we regret that was not done,” the superintendent wrote.

The school district also dismisses accusations made in the class action complaint suggesting that the Harriton High School Assistant Principal accessed the security feature. It is clearly stated that only two people from the school district’s technical department were able to remotely enable the webcams.

Credit: Softpedia.com News

A researcher has unearthed a bug in software used to install Adobe’s ubiquitous Reader and Flash applications that can be exploited to remotely install malicious files on end user PCs.

The Adobe Download Manager is an ActiveX script that is invoked when people install or update Reader or Flash using Internet Explorer. Researcher Aviv Raff has figured out how to exploit it to install any file he wishes simply by tricking a user into clicking on a link on the Adobe.com domain.

The attack combines a vulnerability on Adobe’s website with a defect in the download manager. The result: he was able to install and execute his own instance of the Windows calculator on a Register test machine. Aviv demonstrated the exploit on the condition further technical details be withheld.

“Instead of admitting that this design flaw is indeed a problem which can be abused by malicious attackers, Adobe decided to downplay this issue,” Raff wrote. He was referring to unpublished comments an Adobe spokeswoman made to Zero Day blogger Ryan Naraine.

In part, the comments said the download manager “is designed to remove itself from the computer after use at the next restart,” “can only be used to download the latest version of software hosted on Adobe.com,” and “presents a very large user dialog box when downloading software.”

But because the download manager remains on a machine until it is rebooted, attackers have ample opportunity to exploit the bug. Assuming the typical machine is restarted once every 24 to 72 hours, attacks have a reasonable chance of success as long as they are launched within the first one to three days of a recent update. (We’re guessing a fair percentage of people would be unfazed by the dialog box).

And once that happens, attackers have the ability to remotely install malicious code on an untold millions of PCs.

In response to Raff’s post, Adobe spokeswoman Wiebke Lips wrote: “Adobe is aware of the recently posted report of a remote code execution vulnerability in the Adobe Download Manager. We are working with the researcher, Aviv Raff, and the third party vendor of this component to investigate and resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”

The myriad bugs that over the past few years have routinely imperiled the entire internet have made Adobe the Toyota of the software industry. Company security personnel seem intent of correcting the problems, but the only way for that to happen is to launch a comprehensive initiative that makes a top-to-bottom review of the company’s entire code base.

Credit: The Register

A Russian security researcher on Thursday said he has released attack code that exploits a critical vulnerability in the latest version of Mozilla’s Firefox browser.

The exploit - which allows attackers to remotely execute malicious code on end user PCs - triggers a heap corruption vulnerability in the popular open-source browser, said Evgeny Legerov, founder of Moscow-based Intevydis. He recently added it as a module to Vulndisco, an add-on to the Immunity Canvas automated exploitation system sold to security professionals.

“We’ve played a lot with it in our labs - it was very reliable,” Legerov wrote in an email to The Reg. “Works against the default install of Firefox 3.6. We’ve tested it on XP and Vista.”

The report comes as Mozilla pushed out a Firefox update that tackles three critical vulnerabilities in version 3.5.7. One of those bugs is also described as a heap corruption vulnerability, but Legerov said the flaw is different from the one his code exploits.

Mozilla issued a statement that read in part: “Mozilla takes all security vulnerabilities seriously, and have as yet been unable to confirm the claim of an exploit. We value the contributions of all security researchers and encourage them to work within our security process, responsibly disclosing vulnerabilities to ensure the highest level of security and best outcome for users.”

Legerov said his firm does not provide advanced notification to software makers under an arrangement often referred to as responsible disclosure.

If Legerov’s claim pans out, it would be one of the few times in recent memory that a zero-day vulnerability for Firefox has circulated in the wild. While the exploit is currently available only to those who pay a hefty licensing fee, wider circulation can’t be far behind.

Credit: The Register

Already besieged by complaints of shoddy user privacy, Google Buzz is susceptible to exploits that allow an attacker to commandeer accounts and even learn where victims are located, a security researcher said Tuesday.

The XSS, or cross-site scripting, vulnerability is unusual because it affects google.com, the domain that sets authentication cookies for a variety of popular Google services, including Mail, Calendar and Documents. That means an attacker might be able to hijack victims’ account simply by tricking them into visiting a booby-trapped link.

What’s more, the vulnerability ties into to the much-vaunted Google Location Services, making it possible for the attacker to learn the geographical location of users who have already opted in.

“It’s a pretty nasty vulnerability, actually,” Robert “RSnake” Hansen, CEO of secTheory.com, said. “If you’ve already agreed to that before being exploited, which most people will do, then the attacker also gets to know your location.”

The vulnerability is the result of web applications that fail to adequately scrutinize user input for malicious commands that inject unauthorized content and javascript into browsers visiting google.com addresses. The vulnerability, which Hansen said was reported by a hacker known as TrainReq, is also notable because it works over the SSL, or secure sockets layer, protocol.

The resulting “https” and “google.com” included in the address is likely to lead some victims into believing the address is safe, he said.

Over the years, Google engineers have done a good job at fortifying the site against XSS flaws. In the rare instances the bugs get through, Google personnel are usually quick at stamping them out once they’ve been reported.

Credit: The Register

A popular Twitter service called Twitter Grader was hacked yesterday causing thousands of unauthorized tweets to be posted from the accounts of its users. Twitter Grader, which is normally available from grader.com along with other free grading applications, allows Twitter users to see how influential they are on the micro-blogging platform. The service is developed by an Internet marketing company called HubSpot.

The company’s founder and CTO, Dharmesh Shah, was completely taken by surprise yesterday when Twitter Grader users, including himself, started posting a strange message on their feeds. The unauthorized tweets contained a link to a 2006 video of Biz Stone promoting the micro-blogging platform.

Rik Ferguson, solutions architect at antivirus vendor Trend Micro, analyzed the message and concluded that, “The link that has been endlessly tweeted by grader users does not appear to host any malicious content.” The researcher also launched a possible explanation for the attack. “The domain name of the destination site [seonix.org] however might give us a clue to the motivation behind the attack. Seonix presumably refers to Search Engine Optimisation and perhaps that is the real purpose of this attack,” he wrote.

Access to the entire grader.com domain has been temporarily suspended until the issue is addressed and all applications are moved to more secure servers. The company also stresses that customers of its commercial services have not been affected, as these are hosted on a different infrastructure. Additionally, the usernames and passwords of Twitter users have not been compromised, because the Twitter Grader service used OAuth, a technology that doesn’t require login credentials.

The responses to the official blog post about the attack are overwhelmingly favorable, commending the company for its openness and seriousness in handling the incident. “Ladies and gents, is an object lesson in how to deal with an event like this. Much respect to HubSpot,” Rik Ferguson wrote, while an executive officer with a different company noted that, “How you handled it […] should be a lesson (case study?) for others.”

Credit: Softpedia.com News

Researchers from Atlanta-based security vendor SecureWorks have discovered a new information-stealing trojan facilitating ACH and wire fraud. The trojan has all the capabilities of malware commonly used to steal money from SMBs and non-profits.

An unprecedented wave of Automated Clearing House (ACH) and wire fraud started in 2009, resulting in small and medium-sized companies, public institutions and non-profit organizations losing millions of dollars to cyber-criminals. The problem prompted the FBI and the American Bankers Association to recommend that online banking operations be performed from dedicated computers only.

These attacks start by infecting computers on an organization’s network with the purpose of stealing online banking credentials. The Clampi and Zeus (Zbot) families of trojans have so far dominated this aspect of cyber-crime and positioned themselves as the leading information-stealing computer trojans.

However, it seems other groups are willing to challenge that supremacy, especially since antivirus products are getting better at generically detecting modified Clampi and Zeus variants, which significantly reduces their success rate. The trojan discovered by SecureWorks back in January, which was dubbed Bugat, appears to be one of these new competitors.

“In mid-January, the installer for Bugat had moderate coverage (20/40), according to VirusTotal. The most commonly identified name (Bredolab) corresponds to a family of trojan downloaders. However, its runtime behavior did not match what one would expect from Bredolab. The installed mspdb30.dll file had almost no AV recognition (2/41),” Jason Milletary, SecureWorks’ technical director for malware analysis, explains on the company’s research blog.

Bugat is capable of capturing information entered in Web forms, altering the content of targeted websites or stealing browser cookies, as well as FTP and POP3 credentials. Additionally, the malware can function as a SOCKS proxy server, upload files from the infected computer to a remote server or download and execute programs.

The trojan communicates with a command and control (C&C) server from where it receives instructions and updates to the list of financial websites it targets. This communication can be encrypted in order to thwart traffic inspection tools.

“The emergence of Bugat reinforces that there is a strong demand for new malware to commit financial credential theft and that ACH and wire fraud remains a profitable venture for criminals,” Mr. Milletary concludes. Indeed, just last week, Symantec warned of a new Zeus-like crimeware toolkit called SpyEye.

Credit: Softpedia.com News

Veracode today released Blackberry-specific spyware, which the code-review specialist intends as a “call for defensive research” to show that the BlackBerry is vulnerable to spyware problems.

“The Blackberry ‘sandbox’ keeps you from getting into the operating system level. It’s effective for that,” says Tyler Shields, senior researcher at Veracode Research Lab and author of the Blackberry spyware. “BlackBerry is one of the better operating systems in regards to security,” he says, “but in the sandbox you can steal data.”

Shields says the point in releasing the spyware source code, which he calls TXSBBspy, is to “show how easy it is to write this code.” He calls the source code a blueprint for malware on the BlackBerry, showing how it’s possible to remotely dump all the contents, send the contents via e-mail, and conduct real-time monitoring of phone messages.

Shields says his purpose is to inspire a “call to action” to encourage development of BlackBerry applications to make it clear what these apps do before releasing them.

Credit: IT News

Cryptographers have broken the proprietary encryption used to prevent eavesdropping on more than 800 million cordless phones worldwide, demonstrating once again the risks of relying on obscure technologies to remain secure.

The attack is the first to crack the cipher at the heart of the DECT, or Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications, standard, which encrypts radio signals as they travel between cordless phones in homes and businesses and corresponding base stations. A previous hack, by contrast, merely exploited weaknesses in the way the algorithm was implemented.

The fatal flaw in the DECT Standard Cipher is its insufficient amount of “pre-ciphering,” which is the encryption equivalent of shaking a cup of dice to make sure they generate unpredictable results. Because the algorithm discards only the first 40 or 80 bits during the encryption process, it’s possible to deduce the secret key after collecting and analyzing enough of the protected conversation.

“This standard, as with everything else we have broken, has been designed some 20 years ago, and it is proprietary encryption,” said Karsten Nohl, one of the cryptographers who helped devise the attack. “It relied on the fact that the encryption was unknown and hence could not be broken. This is a case where something that has some potential for being strong is broken by just this one design decision that in any public review would have been spotted immediately.”

Nohl, 28, is the same University of Virginia microscope-wielding reverse engineer to crack the encryption in the world’s most widely used smartcard. In December, he struck again after devising a practical attack for eavesdropping on cellphone calls.

He and fellow researchers Erik Tews of the Darmstadt University of Technology and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann of the University of Luxembourg, plan to present their findings Monday at the 2010 Fast Software Encryption workshop in Korea.

Like several of Nohl’s previous hacks, it began with nitric acid and an electron microscope. After dissolving away the epoxy on the silicon chip and then shaving down and magnifying the section dedicated to the DECT encryption, he was able to glean key insights into the underlying algorithm. He then compared the findings against details selectively laid out in a patent and exposed during a debug process.

The results of all three probe methods revealed the fatally insufficient amount of pre-ciphering in the DECT Standard Cipher.

In practical terms, the attack works by collecting bits of the encrypted data stream with known unencrypted contents. In cordless phones, this often comes from a device’s control channel, which broadcasts a variety of predictable data, including call duration and button responses. Sniffing an encrypted conversation with a USRP antenna and the average PC, an attacker would need to collect about four hours of data to break the key in typical scenarios.

In others - such as where DECT is used in restaurants and bars to wirelessly zap payment card details - the time needed to crack the key could be dramatically shorter, Nohl said. The time can also be sped up in a variety of other ways, including by adding certain types of graphics cards to beef up the power of the attacking PC. In some cases, the attack can retrieve the secret key in 10 minutes.

“We expect that some smarter cryptographers than ourselves will find better attacks, of course. We found the algorithm and then implemented the first attack. It’s almost guaranteed that this is not the best attack.”

The DECT Forum, the international body that oversees the standard, said it takes the attack scenarios laid out in the paper seriously and “continues to investigate their applicability.”

The crack of DECT is only the latest time Nohl has defeated the proprietary encryption of a device with critical mass. His 2008 attack on the Mifare Classic smartcard used similar techniques of filing down a silicon chip and then tracing the connections between transistors. His proposed attack of GSM encryption affects cellphones used by more than 800 carriers in 219 countries.

Credit: The Register