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Archive for the ‘Trojans & Worms’ 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

World of Warcraft users won’t be happy to hear that hackers have managed to pull a man-in-the-middle attack on several servers hosted in Europe. This happened even with the extra security barriers added by the use of an external authenticator. The attack is suspected to have came from China or/and Malaysia.

The attack basically happened like this: while a regular user accessed a WoW-themed infected site on the web, they installed a trojan, named Malware.NSPack, thinking that they were installing a game add-on. That trojan would then go to install suspicious files on the user’s computer (emcor.dll copied to ../users/username/appdata/Temp) and log all key strokes, sending back data related to WoW authentication credentials.

The data acquired was then employed by attackers to circumvent WoW’s login system and empty the user’s account of all of their in-game (“fake”) money. Subsequently, those sums can be transferred to other accounts, which then can be put up for sale and turn real profit for the hackers.

The keylogger trojans that infected the users were hosted on Chinese-based websites, were graphically cloned after the WoWMatrix website and advertised using Google AdWords service. The spoofed data was relayed using a server hosted in Malaysia. Websites reported by users as being attack sources are cursea.com, deadlybossmodss.com, gamesacca.com and wowmatrixf.com. The sites were taken down, along with the Google AdWords banner.

WoW tech admins were quick to reply and investigate, offering this answer within 24 hours of the first report, “After looking into this, it has been escalated, but it is a Man in the Middle attack. This is still perpetrated by key loggers, and no method is always 100% secure,“ trying to excuse the authenticator’s failure in supplying full protection.

The attacks themselves don’t differ very much from other man-in-the-middle hacks on banking sites, the only difference being that this latest target wasn’t harboring real money like banks do, but fake in-game gold.

Credit: Softpedia.com News

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

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

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

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

The attack began when a victim encountered the image of the near-naked woman on a friend’s profile page along with the words “Want 2 C something hot? Click da button, baby!” Facebookers who took the bait - and were logged in to their accounts at the time - found their profile pages were updated to include the same image. The more people who fell for the come-on, the more the come-on was presented to new potential victims, giving the attack a viral quality.

Researchers who first spotted the ruse attributed it to a CSRF, or cross-site request forgery, vulnerability on Facebook’s site. A spokesman for the social networking site disputed that explanation, saying the attack was really the result of clickjacking.

“This problem isn’t specific to Facebook, but we’re always working to improve our systems and are building additional protections against this type of behavior,” Facebook spokesman Simon Axten wrote in an email. “We’ve blocked the URL associated with this site, and we’re cleaning up the relatively few cases where it was posted (something email providers, for example, can’t do).”

Clickjacking is a vulnerability at the core of the web that allows webmasters to trick users into clicking on a link they didn’t intend to. The exploits are pulled off by superimposing an invisible iframe over a button or link. Virtually every website and browser is susceptible to the technique. Websites that accept user-generated content make especially potent launch pads for such attacks.

This latest attack is a reminder that it’s often impossible to know where a given link will lead, even for careful users. Indeed, Gadi Evron, one of the security researchers who first spotted the exploit, confessed to having his Facebook page briefly display the image after first encountering it on a friend’s page.

“This shows that even experts can become complacent and trust systems when they really shouldn’t,” he wrote.

Facebook administrators have already blocked the clickjacking exploit.

Credit: The Register, AVG Blogs

The second worm to infect jailbroken iPhone users reportedly targets customers of Dutch online bank ING Direct. Surfers visiting the site with infected devices are redirected to a phishing site designed to harvest online banking login details, the BBC reports. ING Direct told the BBC it planned to warn users’ of the attack via its website, as well as briefing front line call centre staff on the threat.

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, said the threat had in any case been neutralised. “It [the worm] was targeting ING. The websites it needed for this to work have now been taken down.”

Anti-virus analysts, still in the process of analysing the malware, caution that the attack is a bit more complex than simple phishing and seems to involve an attempt to snatch SMS messages associated with online banking transactions. We’re yet to hear back from ING Direct on this point but we’ll update this story as and when we hear more.

What is clear is that the “Duh” or Ikee-B worm, like the earlier Rickrolling worm, exploits an SSH backdoor on jailbroken handsets in order to spread.

Part of the process of jailbreaking iPhones to allow unofficial software to be installed can involve installing SSH (secure shell) remote access. Users who go through this step but fail to change the default root password of iPhones from alpine leave a backdoor that wide open to attack.

Although Duh exploits the same SSH backdoor as the original Ikee worm, the latest malware is far more dangerous than its predecessor. Doh turns compromised devices into a botnet under the control of unidentified hackers. The Rickrolling ikee worm, by contrast, only changes users’ wallpaper to an image of cheesy pop warbler Rick Astley.

Duh also searches across a wider range of IP ranges than Ikee, which only ever affected Optus users in Australia. It includes IP ranges allocated to carriers in several countries, including The Netherlands, Portugal, Australia, Austria, and Hungary. All the infections reported thus far have happened in The Netherlands. The attack only came to light after a Dutch ISP noticed unusual traffic and began to investigate.

As previously reported, compromised phones are left under the control of a botnet server in Lithuania. Duh changes the root password of compromised iPhones, allowing crooks to log into compromised units and carry out malicious further actions.

SophosLabs researcher Paul Ducklin used a password cracking tool to discover the malware changes iPhone root passwords from ‘alpine to ‘ohshit’.

In addition to the two iPhone worms, an earlier hacking/extortion attack (targeting iPhone users in the Netherlands) also exploited the default password SSH backdoor on jailbroken iPhones.

Security experts strongly advise users of jailbroken phones to change their passwords from ‘alpine’ immediately to avoid further attacks along the same lines.

Credit: The Register

Trojan attacks are likely in the wake of the Windows 7 product activation system cracks developed last week, less than a month after the release of Microsoft’s latest operating system.

The RemoveWAT (and the similar ChewWGA) utility allow a prospective Windows 7 user to bypass the Windows Genuine Advantage registration procedure. Both hacks circumvent product activation without the need to have OEM keys, unlike earlier hacks on pre-release code.

Security firm Sunbelt Software warns that Trojans posing as Win 7 cracks are very likely to follow.

“RemoveWAT and Chew-WGA… join the grimy world of cracks and key-gens – oft-Trojanised applications that defeat activation passwords or other security on legitimate software,” writes Sunbelt researcher Tom Kelchner.

“Trojanized versions of RemoveWAT and Chew-WGA soon will be available on websites and file-sharing networks near you. Look for them (or maybe we should say ‘look out for them’),” he added.

The release of the Win 7 cracking tools last week came as little surprise to security watchers.

Richard Kirk, European director at application vulnerability firm Fortify, noted that similar types of cracks arrived shortly after the release of Windows Vista in January 2007, and were solved when Microsoft issued an update. “Similar utilities for Windows XP also started appearing in the summer of 2005, shortly after the Windows Genuine Advantage system was made mandatory in July of that year,” he added.

Credit: The Register