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Archive for the ‘Malware’ Category

Vodafone has been blamed for shipping Mariposa botnet malware and other nasties on a HTC Magic Android smartphones it supplied.

The mobile phone giant’s Spanish arm supplied an HTC Magic smartphone preloaded with malware that attempted to establish a backdoor for stealing information on connected PCs during the synchronisation process. Vodafone acknowledged the problem but said that the incident was an isolated and local problem, which came to light because the customer affected works for Spanish anti-virus firm Panda Security.

The extra code was a strain of the Mariposa bot client that attempted to connect to systems not associated with the recent arrests of three suspected botmasters in Spain, according to an analysis of the attack by Panda Security researcher Pedro Bustamante.

“A quick analysis of the malware reveals that it is in fact a Mariposa bot client,” Bustamante explained. “This one, unlike the one announced last week which was run by Spanish hacker group ‘DDP Team’, is run by some guy named ‘tnls’ as the botnet-control mechanism shows.

“Once infected you can see the malware ‘phoning home’ to receive further instructions, probably to steal all of the user’s credentials and send them to the malware writer,” he added.

The same mobile phone was also infected by Confiker and a Lineage password-stealing code, according to Panda. The incident came to light because the infected phone was sold to one of Bustamante’s colleagues in Spain.

In a statement, Vodafone said the problem, which it is investigating, was isolated.

Vodafone takes the security and privacy of its customers extremely seriously and launched an immediate investigation into this incident

Following extensive Quality Assurance testing on HTC Magic handsets in several of our operating companies, early indications are that this was an isolated local incident

Vodafone keeps its security processes under constant review as new threats arise, and we will take all appropriate actions to safeguard our customers’ privacy.

Incidents where computing devices come preloaded with malware are far from unprecedented. Normally problems arise when computers used in manufacturing production lines are themselves infected.

Credit: The Register

A Trojan backdoor found its way into Energizer Duo USB battery charger software downloads.

Malware bundled in a charger-monitoring software download package opens up a back door on compromised Windows PCs. The contaminated file is automatically downloaded from the manfacturer’s website during the installation process, not bundled with an installation CD.

Symantec warns that a file called “Arucer.dll”, which it identifies as Trojan-Arugizer, that is installed on compromised systems is capable of all manner of mischief. This includes sending files to the remote attacker or downloading other strains of malware, as instructed via commands on a back channel controlled by hackers.

It’s unclear how long the potentially malicious file has been offered up for public download or how many have been infected, as a write-up on the threat by Symantec explains:

We were interested in finding out how long this file had been available to the public. The compile time for the file is May 10, 2007. It is impossible to say for sure that this Trojan has always been in this software, but from our initial inspection it appears so. We also suspected that the entire file may have been inserted into the package without the creator’s knowledge, but upon closer inspection we discovered the DLL checks for the USB device.

In a statement, Energizer acknowledged the problem and discontinued sale of the affected device, the Duo Charger (Model CHUSB). The battery maker has also launched an investigation into how backdoor functionality found its way into its software.

Energizer has discontinued sale of this product and has removed the site to download the software. In addition, the company is directing consumers that downloaded the Windows version of the software to uninstall or otherwise remove the software from your computer. This will eliminate the vulnerability. In addition CERT and Energizer recommend that users remove a file that may remain after the software has been removed. The file name is Arucer.dll, which can be found in the Window system32 directory.

Energizer is currently working with both CERT and U.S. government officials to understand how the code was inserted in the software. Additional technical information can be found at http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/154421.

Credit: The Register

International cooperation between law enforcement agencies in Spain and the U.S., as well as several security companies, led to the arrest of three Spanish citizens who controlled one of the largest botnets in history. Dubbed Mariposa, the army of zombie computers connected from more than 12 million unique IP addresses.

The Mariposa (Butterfly in English) botnet was identified in May 2009 by researchers from a Canadian information security company named Defence Intelligence. The malware behind the botnet is an information stealing computer trojan, which has seen more than 200 variants to date.

In order to investigate and track the threat more efficiently, security experts from various organizations, including Defence Intelligence, Georgia Tech Information Security Center and Spanish antivirus vendor Panda Security have established the Mariposa Working Group (MWG). The group closely cooperated with the FBI and their Spanish counterpart, La Guardia Civil (the Civil Guard).

The experts managed to hijack the botnet in December, but the cyber-criminals, who called themselves the Días de Pesadilla Team (the Nightmare Days Team), regained control and retaliated with crippling Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. A second, more successful takeover allowed researchers to count the number of IP addresses trying to access the Command and Control (C&C) servers and get an idea of the threat’s true scope.

“We were shocked to find that more than 12 million IP addresses were connecting and sending information to the C&C servers, making Mariposa one of the largest botnets in history,” notes Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs, Panda Security’s malware intelligence laboratory. It was also discovered that the gang leased parts of the botnet to other cyber-crooks or sold DDoS services.

In addition, on the infected computers, the trojan displayed rogue ads while surfing the Web and altered Google search results. It also stole personal and financial information, such as online banking credentials and other usernames and passwords.

The authorities were able to identify F. C. R., a 31-year-old bot herder known online as “Netkairo,” after he slipped and accidentally revealed his home IP address. He was arrested by the Spanish Civil Guard in his home town of Balmaseda last month.

Data collected from Netkairo’s computer led to the capturing of two other accomplices, identified only as J. P. R., 30, a.k.a. “jonyloleante”, and J. B. R., 25, a.k.a. “ostiator.” A fourth co-conspirator is believed to be located in Venezuela.

Stolen information belonging to 800,000 users was also found, as well as data belonging to companies, government institutions and educational organizations in 190 countries. “It would be easier for me to provide a list of the Fortune 1000 companies that weren’t compromised, rather than the long list of those who were,” commented Defence Intelligence’s CEO Christopher Davis.

Credit: Softpedia.com News

Microsoft has confirmed that an unpatched Internet Explorer vulnerability makes it potentially dangerous to press F1 if you are running earlier versions of Windows.

A security bug in the VBScript technology bundled with Internet Explorer means that it might be possible to create a web site that displays a specially crafted dialog box that pushes malware providing a victim is tricked into pressing the F1 (help menu) key while viewing a booby-trapped site using Internet Explorer. The novel exploit technique works on older versions of Windows (Win 2000, XP and Server 2003). Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 are immune.

Proof of concept code is reportedly in circulation but Microsoft said: “We are not aware of attacks that try to use the reported vulnerabilities or of customer impact at this time.”

Redmond went on to criticise security researchers for not coming to them with the problem first in an advisory, published on Monday.

“Microsoft is concerned that this new report of a vulnerability was not responsibly disclosed, potentially putting computer users at risk. We continue to encourage responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities. We believe the commonly accepted practice of reporting vulnerabilities directly to a vendor serves everyone’s best interests. This practice helps to ensure that customers receive comprehensive, high-quality updates for security vulnerabilities without exposure to malicious attackers while the update is being developed.”

The advisory expands on an earlier holding statement in providing a list of potentially vulnerable systems, a preliminary risk assessment and suggested workarounds. Redmond security gnomes are still investigating the flaw but a decision to develop a patch looks like a big odds-on favourite if past form holds true.

Microsoft gave no indication of when a patch might become available but the next scheduled Patch Tuesday is only six days away, cutting it very fine to develop, much less test, a fix. An April or even May update for IE seems more likely.

Credit: The Register

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

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

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

Two Firefox add-ons available for months on Mozilla’s website infected users with malware that stole passwords and opened a backdoor on Windows machines, the open-source browser maker has confirmed.

The add-ons, available on an experimental section of Mozilla’s official add-on download site carried trojans that have been detected since 2008 by commercial anti-virus products. And yet they weren’t removed until late January and earlier this week because a scanning tool used to vet add-ons during upload failed to catch the malicious files.

“If a user installs one of these infected add-ons, the trojan would be executed when Firefox starts and the host computer would be infected by the trojan,” a note on Mozilla’s add-on blog stated. “Uninstalling these add-ons does not remove the trojan from a user’s system.”

Instead, infected users will need to thoroughly scan their machines with an anti-virus program. Or better yet, use multiple scanners, or simply reinstall the operating system to be on the safe side.

This isn’t the first time Mozilla has served malware-laced add-ons to its loyal base of users. In May 2008, a Vietnamese language pack for Firefox 2 contained a viral infection that resulted in users seeing unwanted ads. The add-on was downloaded almost 17,000 times before it was pulled.

In the most recent case, version 4 of the Sothink Web Video Downloader add-on installed a password sniffer dubbed Win32.LdPinch.gen and was downloaded about 4,000 times between February 2008 and May 2008. A separate add-on called Master Filer was laced with a backdoor trojan known as Win32.Bifrose that was downloaded 600 times between September 2009 and January of this year.

Mozilla removed Master Filer on January 25 and nixed Sothink on Tuesday.

The blog post said Mozilla added two new scanners to its validation chain. It was this change that allowed the organization to detect version 4 of the Sothink Web Video Downloader.

Versions greater the 4.0 of the video downloader add-on were not infected, Mozilla’s blog post stated. Both infections affected only Windows users of the open-source browser.

Credit: The Register

The Central Intelligence Agency, PayPal, and hundreds of other organizations are under an unexplained assault that’s bombarding their websites with millions of compute-intensive requests.

The “massive” flood of requests is made over the websites’ SSL, or secure-sockets layer, port, causing them to consume more resources than normal connections, according to researchers at Shadowserver Foundation, a volunteer security collective. The torrent started about a week ago and appears to be caused by recent changes made to a botnet known as Pushdo.

“What do I mean by massive? I mean you are likely seeing an unexpected increase in traffic by several million hits spread out across several hundred thousand IP addresses,” Shadowserver’ Steven Adair wrote. “This might be a big deal if you’re used to only getting a few hundred or thousands of hits a day or you don’t have unlimited bandwidth.”

It’s not clear why Pushdo has unleashed the torrent. Infected PCs appear to initiate the SSL connections, along with a bit of junk, disconnect and then repeat the cycle. They don’t request any resources from the website or do anything else.

“We find it hard to believe this much activity would be used to make the bots blend in with normal traffic, but at the same time it doesn’t quite look like a DDoS either,” Adair wrote.

Security mavens aren’t sure what targeted sites can do to thwart the attacks. Changing IP addresses may provide a temporary reprieve.

Shadowserver has identified 315 websites that are the recipients of the SSL assault. In addition to cia.gov and paypal.com, other sites include yahoo.com, americanexpress.com, and sans.org. Here is the full list of attacked addresses:
(more…)

Initially perhaps conceived as a prank targeting a small community of bikers in central Slovakian region, the worm Win32/Zimuse.A and Win32/Zimuse.B has achieved worldwide notoriety. It is a type of threat that overwrites MBR (Master Boot Record) of all available drives with its own data, making the data stored on the user’s computer inaccessible. Moreover, the restoration of the corrupted data is complicated, requiring specialized software or a provider.

Since the worm’s inception, ESET has detected it on hundreds of computers of its users. Initially after the outbreak, only users in Slovakia were affected – accounting for over 90% of all infections. Presently, the greatest number of infected computers is in the United States, followed by Slovakia, Thailand and Spain, followed with Italy, Czech Republic and other European countries.

The worm uses two ways to spread – either via embedding in legitimate websites, in the form of a self-unpacking ZIP file or as an IQ test program, or via Exchangeable media, such as USB devices. The fact that it relies on USB devices to propagate is responsible for its rapid dissemination, which is likely to increase even further.

To date, the worm’s two variants - Win32/Zimuse.A and Win32/Zimuse.B differ in the method of spread and the timing of activation. While the A-variant needs 10 days to start spreading via USB devices, its B-variant needs only 7 days since infiltration. Moreover, the time needed for the execution of the destructive routine is shortened in the B-variant from the original 40 days to 20.

Moreover, if the right removal method is not used, the worm shifts to its destructive mode. This is similar to making the right choice on which wire to cut, and in what sequence in a bomb-defusing operation.

There is a widely held suspicion that the worm was intended to infect the computers of fans of a motorcycle club in the central Slovakian Liptov region, however, it has spread beyond this target group once it started attacking company networks. What’s more, the infiltration was reminiscent of the well-known OneHalf threat in the worm’s behavior, the country of origin (both originating in Slovakia), and the inflicted damage – causing the total paralysis of the system it attacks.

The infiltration does not posses a degree of sophistication that would encrypt the data on the disk, instead it was designed to corrupt the MBR (Master Boot Record) of physical disk drives. It emulates the old-time threats in that it is timed to go off – in this case in 40 days since the infiltration.

Credit: ESET.eu