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...
Yes, it’s a cheap trick and not even close to original. But the lesson here is that even obvious social engineering tricks can get people to click on a link. We can’t help ourselves. We love to click. Clicking on links and attachments that are accompanied by just the slightest bit of social engineering appears to be a basic human need. I expect it to show up in a revision of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs any day now—behind love, but certainly ahead of safety.
I do have a point to all this. Two actually. As we compiled the Security Trends to Watch in 2010, what occurred to me is that the people who most needed to read this information never will. At least not without some social engineering on my part. And since social engineering plays such a prominent role in future trends, it seemed appropriate. So I’ve decided to use this little trick to get people to...
The Security Response team has compiled the top security trends of 2009. We pulled data from the Global Intelligence Network and the experiences of the thousands of analysts and security experts at Symantec to come up with the top trends for the year. While none of these trends will be a surprise to anyone even casually following the threat landscape, when compiled and summarized, it is clear that the breadth of security problems in the past year was pretty stunning.
For example:
• Toolkits and threat recycling have made malware easier to create than ever
• Polymorphic technology is being applied to make threats harder to catch
• Botnets, large and small, are used as the foundation of attacks making most attacks complex
• All major news events are used for social engineering
• Major brands are being appropriated by cybercriminals...
On November 4, 2009, Marsh Ray published detailed information about a vulnerability that affects the TLS/SSL protocols and allows for limited man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. We say “limited” because the attack exploiting this issue would be different from traditionally viewed MITM attacks, which would involve an attacker placing themselves in the middle of the SSL session between a client and a server and being able to intercept, view, and modify any requests or responses exchanged by the two communicating parties. In an attack using this recent TLS vulnerability, due to the way SSL-enabled applications handle the session-renegotiation process, an attacker may inject arbitrary plaintext into the beginning of the application protocol stream. This can affect multiple protocols that can communicate over an SSL session, such as HTTPS, IMAP, POPS, SIP, etc. Note that in this attack, the attacker would have no ability (at least...
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...
Hello and welcome to this month’s blog on the Microsoft patch releases. This is a moderate month—the vendor is releasing six bulletins covering a total of 15 vulnerabilities.
Three of the issues are rated “Critical” and affect Web Services on Devices API, License Logging Server, and the Windows kernel. An attacker could exploit these issues remotely to gain complete control of a vulnerable computer.
The remaining issues, rated “Important”, affect Excel, the Windows kernel, Office, and Active Directory. Although these are only rated “Important” by Microsoft, we consider the Office and Excel issues quite serious and advise customers to apply updates as soon as possible.
As always, customers are advised to follow these security best practices:
- Install vendor patches as soon as they are available.
- Run all software with the least privileges required while still maintaining functionality.
- Avoid handling files from unknown or...
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...
One thing I see again and again in this job is that people usually don’t think about security until after they are hit with an incident. Companies create disaster recovery plans after the disaster. They come up with incident response teams after the incident. And consumers get antivirus software after they’ve had a virus infect their system.
People, here is a chance to turn that all around. We’ve seen several incidents of mobile phones being hacked. So far it’s been by old school hackers, those that are doing it just to prove that it can be done. But history shows us that the cyber criminals follow closely behind the old school hackers, and they will not be doing it for kicks—they’ll be doing it to rip you off.
Security professionals approach any situation like this by a risk assessment; in other words, they try to figure out what bad things could happen. Then they can hope for the best, but prepare for the worse. If...
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.
Clampi goes to unusual measures to bypass the local firewall on the compromised computer, such as the Windows Firewall. Usually, such firewalls allow only specific programs to communicate using specific ports and protocols. For instance, your browser would be allowed to use outbound TCP port 80.
As we’ve previously discussed, Clampi needs to communicate with a “Gate” gateway server in order to get its orders and send information. Any firewall would block the program if it tried to connect to the outside world. Bypassing this can be done in many ways, the most common one in the malware world being to add an entry in the Windows registry, added the program to the trusted file list.
The Clampi gang decided to inject their networking code into Internet Explorer, which is granted Web access by any standard firewall configuration out there. Fair enough—that’s another approach, but not a new one. Yet you’ve seen these guys don’t do...
Misleading applications, also known as rogue applications, have always tried to lure users into their traps by using various techniques such as fake security scans, misleading task bar notifications, popup windows, etc. To take this to a new level, developers of these applications are now frequently changing the product name and its associated website name in order to mislead users and antivirus vendors. Clones of the same product—with different names—continue to appear almost every day. Earlier this week Symantec published its Report on Rogue Security Software, which discusses misleading apps in greater detail. A couple of examples of rogue security software are given below. We identify one such family of rogue or misleading applications as WiniGuard:
Rogue security software programs, also known as misleading applications or scareware, are programs that pretend to be legitimate security software, such as an antivirus scanner or registry cleaner, but which actually provide the user with little or no protection whatsoever. Well known examples of rogue security software include AntiVirus 2009, Malware Defender 2009, and System Guard 2009.
The recently published Symantec Report on Rogue Security Software includes a discussion on a number of servers that Symantec observed hosting these misleading applications from July to August 2009....
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:
The Symantec Report on Rogue Security Software includes an in-depth analysis of the methods scammers use to distribute rogue security applications. This blog presents some of the highlights of the research into the distribution of these scams.
In the report, the following distribution and advertising trends were observed:
• Ninety-three percent of the top 50 most prevalent rogue security applications were distributed as intentional downloads. This means that victims are tricked into believing they are downloading legitimate security software and subsequently installing the rogue application.
• Seventy-six percent of the top 50 most prevalent rogue security applications were classified as unintentional downloads. This means that the software may be installed unintentionally through drive-by downloads or...
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