At the recent Shmoocon conference, Billy Hoffman of SPI Labsdescribed a tool he built called Jikto. This tool can scan a Web sitefor different types of Web vulnerabilities. In the hands of a good guy,the tool can point out holes, which can then be fixed. In the hands ofa bad guy, the same tool can be used to find holes, which can then beexploited.

One remarkable aspect of Jikto is that it is written entirely inJavaScript. That means it can be executed in a Web browser (and alsothat it is more-or-less platform independent – with the ability to runon Windows machines, Macs, Linux boxes, etc.) Also, if an attackercreates a Web page that includes the Jikto code, then anyone who visitsthat Web page can effectively run a vulnerability scan on an entirelyseparate Web site. The results of that scan can be reported back to theattacker. On the other hand, from the victim’s perspective thevulnerability scan will not be traced back to the attacker. Insteadthey will point to the perhaps...

One of the principles behind malware is that it follows technologyand mainstream culture. If ninety percent of the world was using theEricOS, the vast majority of threats would be designed to run on theEricOS because otherwise the threat would have nothing to infect.

In China, online computer usage patterns affect the types of malwareSymantec sees there. In particular, if you walk into an Internet cafein China, rarely do you see people using search engines like Google oron Web sites like MySpace. Instead, the vast majority of people haveheadphones on and are playing online games such as Lineage or World ofWarcraft.

Thus, Symantec sees a lot of Infostealers that attempt to stealcredentials for these types of online games. Once credentials arestolen, the hacker logs into the account, steals the virtual items, andthen attempts to sell them for real money through various boardsoutside the virtual gaming world.

An example of this threat is Lingling (...

A threat that we see very frequently in the lab is the back doornamed Backdoor.GrayBird or Backdoor.HuiPigeon. Today, I will shed somelight on this back door both to show how easy it has become to create apowerful back door with a rich feature set, and also to show why we seeso much of this particular back door.

Backdoor.Graybird gets its name from the Chinese company that makesthe product, which translates to Gray Bird. It is a commercial Chineseremote access tool that sells for about $100 for a 100 user license. Itcan be configured to run silently on the victim's machine and isnormally distributed via email or via drive-by downloads. (If sent viaemail, the user still needs to execute the file.) It can be packed tomake each sample unique and, most recently, NsAnti has been the packerof choice.

Backdoor.Graybird is very popular in underground Chinese hackingforums partly because it is all written in Chinese, so it is easilyunderstood, and also because...