A new exploit targeting Internet Explorer was published to the BugTraq mailing list yesterday. Symantec has conducted further tests and confirmed that it affects Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7 as well. The exploit currently exhibits signs of poor reliability, but we expect that a fully-functional reliable exploit will be available in the near future. When this happens, attackers will have the ability to insert the exploit into Web sites, infecting potential visitors. For an attacker to launch a successful attack, they must lure victims to their malicious Web page or a Web site they have compromised. In both cases, the attack requires JavaScript to exploit Internet Explorer.
The exploit targets a vulnerability in the way Internet Explorer uses cascading style sheet (CSS) information. CSS is used in many Web pages to define...
I had the honor recently of moderating a virtual roundtable discussion on the top Internet security trends from 2009 and what we expect to see in the security threat landscape in 2010. Funny thing about security predictions—you hope they won’t come true, but expect them to anyway. The roundtable featured expert panelists Paul Wood (Senior Analyst, MessageLabs Intelligence, Symantec) and Zulfikar Ramzan (Technical Director, Symantec Security Response). They each have unique insights into the world of cybercrime, spam, phishing attacks, and other cyberthreats that plague us all.
We want to give a big thanks to everyone who joined in to listen to our experts, and we hope you found it interesting. For those of you who couldn’t make it, please take a few minutes to listen to the podcast of the actual roundtable.
Zeus is a botnet package that allows for the easy creation and command and control of a botnet. We've discussed Zeus previously in Zeus, King of the Underground Crimeware Toolkits. The main purpose of Zeus is to steal online credentials such as online banking passwords, but it can be configured to steal passwords from any online site.
Today, the BBC is reporting that police in the UK have arrested two suspects in relation to Zeus. While the details are preliminary, the two likely appear to be users of the Zeus botnet package rather than the actual creators, and thus the prevalence and usage of Zeus is likely to continue.
We've created a research paper providing more in-depth information on Zeus, including how the bot is created, what functionality it has, and additional screenshots on...
When trawling the Web today we came across a website that has been compromised and rigged so that it is returned in search engine results for many different search terms. The site in question belongs to a UK-based company that specializes in hiring out holiday homes and is a legitimate business. However, the site has been compromised and is being used in a major ongoing SEO-based misleading applications attack, and has been for some time now. As you can see in the sample search results below, you may wonder what college football, a Ukraine vs. Greece soccer match, Penn State basketball, and Robin Williams have to do with renting a holiday home—and with good reason, too.
The key to identifying malicious pages in the search results is...
The first iPhone worm, known as iPhoneOS.Ikee, recently hit the news everywhere. The purpose of this worm was to show that jailbroken iPhones had a flaw that could be easily exploited. The consequences of this worm were minor since the author decided to simply Rickroll users who became victims of this attack. However, there were many warnings that the publicly released code could easily be altered so that consequences were not so benign.
Given the implications—and this being a hot topic—reports are surfacing about a hacktool that can be used to attack jailbroken iPhones. This tool is taking advantage of the same default SSH password that iPhoneOS.Ikee does, but put plainly, this is not another worm. We’re looking at...
In a nutshell, Clampi is an Infostealer threat. Its executable can be seen as a host for separate modules, containing the real payloads of the threat. These modules are heavily protected from reverse-engineering as well. The functionalities range from banking-site password stealing, to local credential gathering, to a SOCKS proxy. The communication with Clampi’s command & control servers, the “Gates”, uses HTTP and is encrypted. Clampi...
On the heels of a similar iPhone attack by a Dutch teenager, an Australian hacker (using the same technique) has written the first iPhone worm for jailbroken iPhones. The worm has been dubbed “Ikee” and uses the default SSH password of jailbroken iPhones to log in and spread. Please note that this worm does not impact iPhones that have not been jailbroken.
Many users who have jailbroken their iPhones in order to customize them have not changed their SSH password, allowing others to log in to their phone. In the case of Ikee, the worm scans random IP ranges and also specifically targets Optus, Vodafone, and Telstra's IP ranges, which are the common telephony providers in Australia. Once a vulnerable iPhone is found, the worm changes the wallpaper to a picture of Rick Astley (a prank known as Rickrolling), deletes the SSH daemon, and begins scanning the network for other vulnerable phones. Note that some of these telephony networks use NAT (network...
The Fragus exploit pack showed up on our radar a few months ago and has been steadily growing to become one of the most prevalent exploit packs being seen in the wild today by Symantec. It is similar to other popular exploit packs available—such as Unique, YES, Eleonore, and Liberty—but it brings some new and interesting features with it. Exploit packages are generally designed as a means to allow attackers to group and serve exploits from their website against the browsers of unsuspecting visitors. It is done in a nice GUI form, hosted on a Web server, and allows the attacker to generally choose which exploits to run. Once exploited, a final payload is served to the system. All of this is dished up in a control panel with some nice statistics on how successful the campaign has been.
Threats targeting the Macintosh platform are much less common than those targeting Windows. The same can be said about video games, where Windows is the dominate platform of the two. Combining games and malware has happened before, but a Mac game performing malicious activities? That’s something relatively new.
Takashi Katsuki, one of our Tokyo engineers, came across just that today. The game looks to be a throw-back to the classic Space Invaders/Galaga style of games from the early 1980s. However, what brings this game into the realm of malicious code is that for every alien ship you destroy, the game deletes a file from your home directory.
Sure we have heard a lot about bots and botnets. One key component of a botnet is the command-and-control (C&C) server, which as we know can come in several flavours (IRC, Web pages, newsgroups, custom servers, etc.). Yet, here comes Trojan.Whitewell, which, being tired of old C&C channels, decides to pick up Facebook as a coordinator for the C&C server. I use the word “coordinator” because the Trojan only receives some configuration data from its Facebook account—the actual command execution and data reporting is done through a third party Web server.
The Trojan was sent through a popular malware distribution channel that is also related to other prevalent threats such as Trojan.Bredolab. The distribution technique is pretty simple: they send documents (PDF, or MS Office formats) containing exploits for known vulnerabilities. These documents usually...
Symantec Security Response has become aware of a Trojan Horse we detect as Trojan.Ramvicrype. The Trojan uses the RC4 algorithm to encrypt files on compromised computers, rendering them unusable. Presence of files with a .vicrypt extension is a sure-fire sign of infection.
Trojan.Ramvicrype is a little different from most other Ransomware programs we’ve seen in the past. Typically these kinds of threats display a message prompting users to visit a certain Web page or email a specific address. Users will end up paying the online criminals in exchange for keys that can be used to unlock the computer or decrypt the encrypted files.
Previously posted blogs on the subject of Ransomware can be found at:
A Blackberry application called PhoneSnoop was released recently, which resulted in an advisory from US-CERT. The application allows remote users to listen in on a Blackberry user’s surroundings.
The application as seen when installed on a Blackberry
The application is actually quite straightforward and uses standard Blackberry APIs that allow the interception of incoming phone calls. When a call is received from a preconfigured phone number, the call is automatically answered and the speakerphone is engaged. Someone who has had this application installed may not notice the incoming phone call and not realize someone can now listen in on the immediate surroundings.
We’d consider this application just a proof of concept for a variety of reasons, including the author himself...
This chapter in our Clampi saga brings us back to the malware’s logging facility. As we saw before, one of Clampi’s modules, codenamed LOGGER, is responsible for logging outgoing information going to a determined list of URLs – stored in a data file as CRCs.
One problem arises with banking sites that preprocess the user’s personal information before sending it over HTTPS—it’s done using client-side JavaScript. For instance, a hash of the input PIN number could be sent instead of the PIN number itself. This mechanism adds an extra layer of security, preventing malware from sniffing network traffic at one end of the SSL tunnel. But still, it’s only covering one end. It’s more secure than no encryption, but still not great. At least two methods exist to get around this:
Let’s continue our Trojan.Clampi blog series by discussing three more modules downloaded and executed by Clampi. These modules share the common goal of gathering information, private or not, contained on the compromised computer. They don’t intercept network traffic like the Logger module does (described in my previous blog).
The PROT module
This module gathers private information from several sources, including Protected Storage (PStore), which contains user credentials stored by Internet Explorer or Outlook for instance. Interestingly, it also sets specific registry values in order to facilitate the creation of new entries in the PStore.
For instance, it sets the following registry entires:
Trojan.Bredolab is a threat that has been distributed widely and consistently this year. This research paper takes a closer look at the Trojan to discover how it works, why it’s so widespread, and the motivations behind it.
In short, Bredolab is distributed by spam emails and drive-by-download attacks. (In fact, last month we blogged about a wave of spam emails used to distribute it.) Once it’s on a computer, Bredolab downloads and installs a variety of other threats. This process is outlined in the following diagram.
We have seen Bredolab downloading password stealers, bots, rootkits, backdoors,...
