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Archive for the ‘Mass Web Attacks’ Category

Security researchers warn that a significant number of WordPress websites have been compromised recently as part of what looks to be a money-generating affiliate scheme. The header.php template files are being injected with obfuscated JavaScript code.

“Late last week, I noticed something of a surge in reports of a particular threat: hoards of legitimate pages were being injected with a malicious JavaScript, pro-actively blocked as Mal/ObfJS-H. Thus far, the common link between the affected sites appears to be Wordpress. One user report suggests that the malicious script is being added to the header.php template script used by Wordpress,” Fraser Howard, principal virus researcher at Sophos, writes on the company’s blog.

The obfuscated script is inserted right after the tag and its purpose is to load additional content via an IFrame and to pass visitors through a series of silent redirects. One of these 302 redirects pass the affiliate account of the attacker to a remote script, probably for remuneration purposes.

According to Mr. Howard’s analysis, a cookie for a domain name rich-traffic.com is set in the visitors’ browsers, this site being a Russian affiliate network allowing users to sell or to buy IFrame traffic. “We sell only high quality iframe traffic for your various needs!” is written on the main page. Apparently, this offer refers to huge amounts of unique visitors spread across a wide variety of countries.

The issue of header.php files being modified without authorization has also been discussed in the support forums over at wordpress.org, with users suggesting that compromised FTP accounts might be the cause. This is consistent with the Sophos researcher’s conclusion, who writes that, “In this particular attack however, an out of date Wordpress installation does not appear to be the root cause – many of the sites I checked, appear to be running the latest available version (2.9.1 at time of writing).”

It is worth noting that TechCrunch, one of the most popular technology blogs on the Internet, has recently faced several attacks, which resulted in its home page being altered. At least in one particular attack, the header.php file was modified to include a rogue message.

Credit: Softpedia.com News

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…)

Over thirty websites of various Representatives and House Committees fell victim to mass defacement yesterday. The incident occurred shortly after President Obama gave his State of the Union address.

The attack seems to be politically motivated as it contained an offensive anti-Obama message. All affected websites are from within the house.gov domain and most of them served House Representatives. However, a few, such as gop.cha.house.gov, republicans.financialservices.house.gov, republicans.oversight.house.gov or resourcescommittee.house.gov, correspond to House committees.

According to Web defacement archive Zone-H, the Red Eye Crew is a prominent hacking group responsible for more than 45,000 defacements in 2009 alone. Around 2,000 of the affected websites are listed as special, meaning they belong to governments, military organizations or important corporations.

Determining a specific point of entry for these attacks without any insider knowledge is hard. However, security researchers from Praetorian Security Group determined that all compromised websites use the Joomla content management system. “But not all of the Joomla CMS web sites [on the same server] are affected. This might indicate that it is a Joomla component that is to blame, however that is just speculation,” they write.

It is worth noting that a significant number of websites within the house.gov domain were defaced last August by a different group. At the time, there was information to suggest that the compromise was the result of default passwords that were left unchanged.

“Unfortunately we won’t know that until someone who manages house.gov provides some details. Server access seems unlikely, because while the sites we checked are hosted on dcserver1.house.gov, not every site hosted on that server is defaced (example congressman Joe Sestak’s web site was fine). The sites are not redirecting anywhere,” the Praetorian Security Group experts conclude.

Credit: Softpedia.com News

Scareware distributors are hijacking vulnerable osCommerce websites in order to launch their blackhat SEO campaigns. The attacks leverage a publicly disclosed vulnerability and drop several rogue scripts on the compromised servers.

The vulnerability is known since at least August 31, 2009, when a working exploit was publicly released on Milw0rm. In a security advisory, published by vulnerability management company Secunia, the flaw is described as “an error in the authentication mechanism [which] can be exploited to bypass authentication checks and gain access to the administrative interface in the ‘/admin’ folder.”

According to a report from Unmask Parasites, upon successful exploitation, several rogue PHP scripts will be uploaded on the servers. These are mm.php, sh1.php, betty.php and lname.php.

The betty.php script has the purpose of generating bogus URLs of the form http://compromised_domain.com/bety.php?q=keywords, which get indexed by search engines and poison search results for certain terms. The script also creates HTML landing pages and stores them in a “.cache” directory.

The lname.php script handles the redirection of visitors to the malicious sites that push fake antivirus programs. The scareware distributed through this campaign is fairly new and has a very low AV detection rate on VirusTotal.

Meanwhile, mm.php is used to upload files to the compromised server and sh1.php is a PHP Web shell. Finding any of these files on a Web server is a clear indication of infection. Unmask Parasites also points out that, “Google Webmaster Tools can help you detect this attack. Their ’search queries’ report has also proven to reveal many other security problems, so it’s a good idea to use GWT at least once a week.”

The vulnerability has not yet been patched and affects the latest stable version of osCommerce, 2.2 RC2a. However, this attack can be prevented by restricting access to the /admin directory, through .htaccess or some other way. Renaming this directory and removing the abused file-manager.php script can also enhance the security of your osCommerce website.

Credit: Softpedia.com News

Network Solutions announced that several hundred websites hosted on its infrastructure fell victim in a mass defacement attack during the past several days. Preliminary findings suggest that a remote file inclusion technique was used to compromise several of the company’s Unix servers.

Network Solutions is one of the top five Internet domain name registrars, managing around 6,5 million domains as of January 2009. Apart from its successful domain registration business, the company also offers other services such as Web hosting, ecommerce or online marketing solutions.

The problems began for Network Solutions last weekend when several customers reported their websites being defaced by hacktivists. Most of the attacked websites had anti-Israel messages posted on their home page and displayed violent images.

At first, the Internet firm thought a vulnerability in a Web application shared by these websites might be the culprit. “We are running a scan to see if we can proactively determine if any hosting accounts are impacted. Proponents of malware and hacking commonly look for websites with vulnerabilities. These include weak passwords, third party applications that aren’t up to date or sometimes weakness could emanate from lack of updated anti-virus software on PCs,” Shashi Bellamkonda, the company’s director for social/new media strategy, wrote on Sunday.

However, it appears that these attacks were made possible by the configuration of the hosting servers themselves, which opened a remote file inclusion (RFI) weakness. Such vulnerabilities stem from improper validation of values being passed to the $_GET of $_POST variables under certain PHP configurations.

“Hackers were able to add a file displaying illegitimate content on top of the customer website content. This was an issue on multiple servers and unknown intruders were able to get through by using a file inclusion technique. There was no danger to any personally identifiable or secure information,” Mr. Bellamkonda announced yesterday in an update on the company’s blog.

Network Solutions is working with affected customers to restore their websites and is closely monitoring the threat. It has yet to decide if the best course of action is to make permanent changes to the configuration of its servers, a decision that might affect the functionality of existent websites.

Credit: Softpedia.com News

Malware purveyors are exploiting web vulnerabilities in appleinsider.com, lawyer.com, news.com.au and a dozen other sites to foist rogue anti-virus on unsuspecting netizens.

The ongoing attacks are notable because they use exploits based on XSS, or cross-site scripting, to hide malware links inside the URLs of trusted sites. That’s something application security expert Mike Geide doesn’t see often. As a result, people who expect to visit sites they know and trust are connected to a page that tries to trick them into thinking their computer is infected.

“What’s interesting … is the fact that it’s embedding iframes to redirect people,” said Geide, who is a senior security researcher at Zscaler. “Typically, cross-site scripting is just that - it embeds script tags so it will embed javascript to run.”

The malicious links are blasted out on web forums and typically look something like:

hxxp://lawyers.com/find_a_lawyer/content_search/results.php?sCHRISTINA%AGUILERA%20ANOREXIC%20PICS%3C%2F%74%69%74%6C%65%3E%3C%69%66%72%61%6D%65%20%73%72%63%3D%2F%2F%61%73%6B%35%2E%65%75%3E

The last chunk of test is hexadecimal-encoded HTML that redirects users to ask5.eu (do not visit). A series of redirect links ultimately leads to a site that looks similar to a Microsoft Windows screen with a popup claiming the PC is overrun with malware. The user is prompted to download rogue anti-virus to fix the imaginary problem.

While it’s not the most convincing attack we’ve ever seen, there’s nothing to stop attackers from using the same technique to push web-based exploits, say the Adobe Reader zero-day attack that’s now circulating in the wild.

The links work because appleinsider.com and the rest of the sites being abused fail to filter out harmful characters used in XSS attacks. Here are a few examples with some of the malicious XSS advertisements (do not follow these or other “hxxp” URLs below):

Credit: The Register, Zscaler.com

A security researcher has identified a new attack that has infected almost 300,000 webpages with links that direct visitors to a potent cocktail of malicious exploits.

The SQL injection attacks started in late November and appear to be the work of a relatively new malware gang, said Mary Landesman, a researcher with ScanSafe, a web security firm recently acquired by Cisco Systems. Hacked sites contain an invisible iframe that silently redirects users to 318x.com, which goes on to exploit known vulnerabilities in at least five applications.

At time of writing, this web search showed more than 294,000 webpages that contained the malicious script. Infected sites included yementimes.com, parisattitude.com and knowledgespeak.com.

People who visit infected pages receive an invisible link that pulls code from a series of sites tied to 318x.com. The code looks for insecure versions of Adobe Flash, Internet Explorer, and several other Microsoft applications, and when they are detected it exploits them to surreptitiously install malware known as Backdoor.Win3.Buzus.croo. The rootkit-enabled program logs banking credentials and may do other nefarious bidding, Landesman said.

At the moment, about two percent of the requests ScanSafe sees are for sites infected by the malicious link, an indication the threat is significant, Landesman said.

SQL injection attacks prey on web applications that fail to adequately inspect user supplied input before passing it off to a webserver’s backend database. They are a favorite way of adding malicious links and content to third-party websites and were also the the chink that allowed Albert Gonzalez and other hackers the toehold they needed to steal more than 130 million credit card numbers from card processor Heartland Payment Systems and four other companies.

The fingerprints on this latest attack lead Landesman to believe the perpetrators are new to the SQL injection game. More sophisticated mass attacks using the method, such as the Gumblar infection inject unique, dynamically-generated links that prevent researchers from being able to locate them using web searches.

Gumblar also uploads exploits directly to infected sites, which greatly complicates white hat efforts to clean up the mess. Rather than shutting down a single site that’s hosting the malware, thousands of mom and pop sites must be disinfected one at a time.

“I’m not convinced SQL injection is the method they’re most accustomed to,” Landesman said of the gang behind the most recent mass infection. “It’s almost as if they’re a seasoned attacker but this is their first foray into managing a wide-scale web attack.”

Credit: The Register

Rogue anti-virus slingers are getting even sneakier. Instead of offering to clean up non-existent malware threats as per the traditional approach, one rogue scanner offers to clean up images of porn it claims to have found on a prospective mark’s PC.

In reality, these images get downloaded by the purported clean-up package itself. Victims were exposed to the pitch on behalf of a especially malodorous scareware package called Win Spy Protect simply by visiting a hacked website.

Roger Thompson, chief of research at security firm AVG, ran across the threat months ago but held back on publishing details until Thursday. Heightened concerns about how malware infection could result in presence of image of child abuse on the PCs of non-paedophiles prompted Thompson into publishing a video of the threat (below).

The hacked website linked to the attack was a children’s site and the content strictly adult porn. However, the tactic could result in child abuse images getting dropped onto the machines of surfers whose only mistake was to stray onto hacked websites, as Thompson explains.

Fortunately, LinkScanner detects the rogue-spyware aspects of this and blocks it just fine, but without LinkScanner, these images would now be in the browser cache, and it would sure look like the owner was guilty. Worse still, the images could just as easily be kiddy porn, and just being your cache would be regarded as possession, and therefore highly illegal by most law enforcement agencies.

In related scareware news, hackers have set up 260,000 fake blog pages on compromised sites in preparation for a scareware distribution campaign that relies on manipulating search engine rankings so that booby-trapped sites appear prominently in the search indexes for topical terms.

Between the latest attack (detected this week) and an even larger assault along the same lines detected in September, there are now well over 800,000 fake blog pages. Few of these pages are detected by Google as malicious, net security firm eSoft warns.

A blog post by eSoft explains the mechanism of the scam. “The key to this scheme is JavaScript uploaded to the compromised server and used in the fake blog pages. The file, css.js, contains obfuscated JavaScript which redirect users to Rogue AV [anti-virus] if the site is accessed through certain search engines,” it said.

“Using this technique allows the attackers to quickly and easily change distribution points and payloads. The current payloads have low detection rates among AV [anti-virus] scanners.”

Credit: The Register

Websense Security Labs has reported that the site media-servers.net has been compromised and injected with malicious code. The Web site belongs to a high-profile advertiser on the Internet realm. It’s important to note that media-servers.net serves advertising content from ad.media-servers.net, and that this site is clean.

The injected code is part of an ongoing mass injection campaign that compromised thousands of legitimate Web sites. The exploits associated with this attack are:

Microsoft DirectShow CVE-2008-0015
Microsoft Snapshot Viewer CVE-2008-2463
Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) CVE-2006-0003
AOL ConvertFile() remote buffer overflow exploit

There is also an autoloading malicious PDF file that holds the next vulnerabilites:

Adobe Reader and Acrobat 8.1.1 buffer overflow CVE-2007-5659
Adobe Acrobat and Reader 8.1.2 buffer overflow CVE-2008-2992

If the user’s browser is successfully exploited, a malicious file is downloaded and run in the user’s Windows home directory from another collaborated exploit site. The malicious file (SHA1: 6776489a0ed889fbabb317763c7c913fdc782631) has an extremely low AV detection rate at the time the file was checked.

Credit: Websense Security Labs ThreatSeeker Network

A security researcher has discovered a weakness in a core browser protocol that compromises the security of Google, Facebook, and other websites by allowing an attacker to tamper with the cookies they set.

The weakness stems from RFC 2965, which dictates that browsers must allow subdomains (think www.google.com) to set and read cookies for their parent (google.com). The specification also states that if a cookie for a subdomain doesn’t already exist, the browser should use the cookie belonging to the parent instead.

The arrangement makes it possible for attackers to steal or even alter the cookies that websites use to authenticate their users. Attackers would first have to identify an XSS, or cross-site scripting, bug in some part of the site they are targeting. But because virtually any subdomain will suffice, the scenario isn’t unrealistic, two web security experts said.

“Most websites actually will store session IDs in a cookie and that’s actually how they keep track of users throughout the use of their website,” said Mike Bailey, a senior researcher for Foreground Security who first documented the flaw at last month’s Toorcon hacker conference. “Using the same techniques to attack those cookies, I can really damage sessions and cause some problems.”

Bailey’s paper goes on to demonstrate how he used the technique to bypass a feature Google recently implemented to beef up security on Gmail and other properties. By exploiting a minor vulnerability in sites.google.com, he was able to falsify the contents of his global Google cookie. Google has since fixed the XSS hole in the subdomain.

In turn, that allowed him fool the Google protection, which checks to make sure the value in the cookie matches a hidden parameter of the login page.

Bailey lists several other sites that have been known to be vulnerable to similar attack techniques. Using an XSS hole on www.advertising.expedia.com, he found it was possible to poison the global cookies for the entire expedia.com domain. Because the site didn’t set the cookies with proper escaping, an attacker could have used the weakness to inject malicious javascript into expedia pages.

Chase.com, capitalone.com and chasevisasignature.com either are or were vulnerable to similar attacks because they shared code with images.bigfootinteractive.com, which was vulnerable to XSS exploits.

Bailey said it’s not hard to imagine university websites would be vulnerable to such attacks because the domain names frequently use names such as psychology.school.edu, geography.school.edu and so forth. A single bug in a student-maintained computer science project might be enough to compromise personal data stored on the college’s student enrollment server, he said.

Websites can guard against attacks by regularly checking their pages for bugs, but because the attack exploits the way browsers are supposed to handle cookies, a more comprehensive fix will probably require a change to the underlying protocols. Which means this attack will probably be around for a while to come.

Credit: The Register