4 X Security Team

Hackers can create malicious podcasts to hijack usernames and passwords from Apple’s iTunes software.

According to a warning from Apple, a “design issue” in the iTunes podcast feature can be abused via rigged audio files to cause an authentication dialog to be presented to the user. From that dialog, a hacker can hijack iTunes credentials and upload it to the podcast server.

[ SEE: Apple plugs gaping iTunes hole, doesn't tell everyone ]

From Apple’s advisory:

• A design issue exists in the iTunes podcast feature. A subscription to a malicious podcast may cause an authentication dialog to be presented to the user. This dialog may entice the user to send iTunes credentials to the podcast server.

Apple has shipped a patch in iTunes 8.1 to clarify the origin of the authentication request in the dialog box.

The iTunes update also corrects a denial-of-service flaw that can be caused via maliciously crafted DAAP messages.

• An infinite loop exists in the handling of iTunes Digital Audio Access Protocol (DAAP) messages. Sending a message containing a maliciously crafted Content-Length parameter in the DAAP header may lead to a denial of service. This update addresses the issue by performing additional validation of DAAP messages.

The denial -of-service bug does not affect Mac OS X systems.

[Source: zdnet]

After weeks of swinging and missing on proper response to a gaping security hole in its ever-present PDF Reader software, Adobe has finally shipped a patch but only for some affected users.

On the same day Microsoft issued its scheduled batch of patches, Adobe dropped a security bulletin warning of a “critical” vulnerability in Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9 and earlier versions. However, if you are a user of one of those “earlier versions,” you’ll have to wait at least for another week.

[ SEE: Adobe swings and misses as PDF abuse worsens ]

The Adobe bulletin explains the severity:

• This vulnerability would cause the application to crash and could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this issue is being exploited.

Only Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9 is patched.

• Adobe is planning to make available updates for Adobe Reader 7 and 8, and Acrobat 7 and 8, by March 18. In addition, Adobe plans to make available Adobe Reader 9.1 for Unix by March 25.

ALSO SEE:

Unofficial ‘patch’ for Adobe Reader, Acrobat zero-day

[Source: zdnet]

Microsoft today shipped three security bulletins with fixes for at least 8 documented vulnerabilities affecting millions of Windows OS users.

The most serious of this month’s patch batch is rated “critical” and could allow full remote execution attacks if a Windows user is simply lured into viewing a booby-trapped image file.

The skinny on the March 2009 bulletins:

• MS09-006: (CRITICAL) Provides cover for three newly discovered and privately reported vulnerabilities in Windows, which could allow remote code execution if a user viewed a specially crafted EMF or WMF image file from an affected system. These vulnerabilities affect all versions of Windows, including Vista and Windows Server 2008. Microsoft expects to see exploit code for these flaws but reckons the reliability will be “inconsistent.”
• MS09-007: (IMPORTANT): This bulletin includes a patch for a solitary vulnerability in Windows, which could allow spoofing if an attacker gains access to the certificate used by the end user for authentication. Again, Microsoft says “inconsistent exploit code” is likely. The bulletin is available for all versions of Windows — Windows 2000 through Windows Server 2008.
• MS09-008 (IMPORTANT): This update resolves two privately reported vulnerabilities and two publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in Windows , which could allow a remote attacker to redirect network traffic intended for systems on the Internet to the attacker’s own systems. Microsoft says the patches correct the way that Windows DNS servers cache and validate queries, and by modifying the way that Windows DNS servers and Windows WINS servers handle WPAD and ISATAP registration. For these issues, Microsoft warns that “consistent exploit code” is likely.

Windows users should treat the “critical” bulletin with the highest possible priority.

[Source: zdnet]

Can you teach an old employee new phishing protection tricks?

In a recently presented study by the Intrepidus Group, the company behind the PhishMe.com spear phishing awareness service allowing companies to ethically attempt to phish their employees on their way to build security awareness, presents some interesting key findings based on 32 phishing scenarios tested against a total of 69,000 employees around the world. Here they are:

• 23% of people worldwide are vulnerable to targeted/spear phishing attacks
• Phishing attacks that use an authoritative tone are 40% more successful than those that attempt to lure people through reward-giving
• Men and women are both equally susceptible to phishing
• On an average 60% of corporate employees that were found susceptible to targeted spear phishing responded to the phishing emails within three hours of receiving them
• People are less cautious when clicking on active links in emails than when they are requested for sensitive data

Metrics are invaluable, but in this case the obsession with metrics can result in more insecurities since it excludes the possibility of blended threats. For instance, last year I was closely monitoring a similar blended Skype phishing campaign, where the cybercriminals (IkbMan) were attempting to optimize the click-through rate of their campaign by serving client-side exploits to the visitors, “just in case” if they find the site suspicious and do not enter any accounting data. For the time being the exploit is served instantly upon visiting the phishing site, however, the possibility for serving it only if the user hasn’t entered anything and is leaving the site is always there.

• Go through related phishing trends and tactics: Research: 76% of phishing sites hosted on compromised servers; Microsoft study debunks phishing profitability; Phishers increasingly scamming other phishers; DIY phishing kits introducing new features; Phishers apply quality assurance, start validating credit card numbers; Lack of phishing attacks data sharing puts $300M at stake annually

Considering one of the key points from Intrepidus Group’s study, namely that “People are less cautious when clicking on active links in emails than when they are requested for sensitive data“, a phishing email should be treated as spam, namely (in a perfect world) it shouldn’t be even allowed to reach the employee’s mailbox. Otherwise, it appears that the trade-off for coming up with quality metrics on the current degree of security awareness in regard to phishing, is the potential exposure of the tested population against potential blended threats.

With managed localization services in the sense of dedicated translators of messages to be used in spam, phishing, and malware campaigns already a fact, the cybercrime ecosystem will soon be talking in a native language, and with the increasingly automated phishing tools whose features were once available to a more sophisticated crowd of cybecriminals, now available for free - the future of phishing looks promising.

The only threat that can outpace its growth is the threat posed by the much more efficient and sophisticated financial data targeting tactic of using crimeware targeting each and every E-banking site simultaneously upon successful infection.

[Source: zdnet]

According to a security group going under the name of TeamElite, the international sites of Kaspersky Iran (kasperskylabs.ir), Taiwan (web.kaspersky.com.tw) and South Korea (kasperskymall.co.kr) are susceptible to SQL injection attacks, allowing the injection of malicious iFrames and potentially assisting malicious attackers into obtaining sensitive data from the web sites in question.

The group’s analysis comes shortly after the series of posts by a Romanian group of serial pen-testers of security vendors, which discovered similar flaws in the web sites of F-Secure, Symantec, BitDiffender, and Kaspersky USA.

Let’s start from the basics. PR contingency planning in the spirit of total denial is perhaps the worst thing a vendor can do in this case. Despite the fact that these are reseller web sites and are managed by local companies, they still have the license to harness the power of the brand of an information security company, and therefore not demonstrating basic security awareness by taking care of trivial web application vulnerabilities on these sites, can undermine the brand’s integrity and what it stands for at the first place.

From a pragmatic perspective, the licensing company can either exercise pen-testing authority over the locally managed web sites, keep an eye on them through community service warning systems, or introduce obligatory pen-testing before a license is obtained.

Both groups have been notifying the affected vendors according to their posts.

[Source: zdnet]

0The Azerbaijan section at the United States Agency for International Development (azerbaijan.usaid.gov) has been compromised and is embedded with malware and exploits serving scripts approximately around the 1st of March. The malicious script is taking advantage of a series of redirects which are dynamically loading live exploits, or rogue security software and are all currently active. Roger Thompson at AVG Technologies featured a video demonstrating what happens when an unprotected user visits the site.

Let’s dissect the attack, take into consideration the big picture, and bring a skeleton out of the closet — one of the malware’s phone back locations is a domain exclusively used by the Russian Business Network back in January, 2008.

This particular campaign relies on an embedded malicious script that appears to be dynamically creating subdomains within the cybercriminal’s controlled domain. For instance, cs.ucsb.edu.4afad2ceace1e653.should-be .cn/jan10 .cn is where the first redirection in USAID.gov’s attack takes place. From there, the surfer is taken to orderasia .cn/index.php and then to orderasia .cn/iepdf.php?f=old where the exploitation of multiple (patched) Adobe Reader and Acrobat buffer overflows takes place. Upon successful exploitation, a downloader with an improving signatures-based detection rate during the past several hours is served.

It gets even more interesting when the phone back location of the malware fileuploader .cn/check/check.php is revealed. The domain in question was exclusively used by Russian Business Network/customers of the RBN in January, 2008 part of the cybercrime powerhouse’s attempt to throw sand in the eyes of the community by issuing fake account suspended notices whereas the malware campaigns remained active.

USAID.gov’s insecurities appear to be a juicy target for cybercriminals. In 2007, the site’s Tanzanian section was hacked with links redirecting to Zlob malware, followed by another research released the same year putting USAID.gov among some of the key spam doorways which WebmasterWorld analyzed back then.

Moreover, in 2007 cybercriminals indicated their ability and desire to target international governments’ web sites in an attempt to use them as infection vectors in the face of such incidents as the malware embedded French Embassy in Libya; the Syrian Embassy in London; the U.S Consulate in St. Petersburg; the The Dutch Embassy in Moscow; and most recently the Embassy of Brazil in India followed by the Embassy of India in Spain - and the list is prone to expand, that’s for sure.

[Source: zdnet]

Yesterday, Vicente Aguilera Diaz from Internet Security Auditors released proof of concept of a CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) vulnerability in Google’s Gmail, which he originally communicated to Google two years ago. The CSRF flaw affects Gmail’s “Change Password” function, since according to Diaz the session cookie is automatically sent by the browser in every request making the attack possible.

Google’s response came fast, and it’s in the form of - “We do not consider this case to be a significant vulnerability.” :

We’ve been aware of this report for some time, and we do not consider this case to be a significant vulnerability, since a successful exploit would require correctly guessing a user’s password within the period that the user is visiting a potential attacker’s site,” the spokesperson said. “Despite the very low chance of guessing a password in this way, we will explore ways to further mitigate the issue. We always encourage users to choose strong passwords, and we have an indicator to help them do this.

Compared to the futile password guessing attempts in order to execute the attack, nothing can replace flaw-independent approaches like social engineering. From a pragmatic perspective, malicious attackers have an extensive number of tactics to chose from if they were trying to obtain your Gmail password. Starting from plain simple phishing campaigns, and going to a more efficiency-centered approaches - remember the G-Archiver fiasco?

• Related posts: Google downplays Chrome’s carpet-bombing flaw; Google: no evidence of a Gmail vulnerability; Google fixes critical XSS vulnerability

Google’s most recently fixed flaws across its web properties include October 2008’s cross domain frame injection vulnerability, November 2008’s XSS in Google’s accounts SSL login page, and January 2009’s Google sites reflective cross-site scripting flaw.

[Source: zdnet]

ets, Browsers, Hackers, Malware......, Passwords, Patch Watch

Tags: Security, Internet Worm, Remote Code Execution, MS08-067, Conficker......, Downadup, Dancho Danchev

Among the key innovations of the Conficker worm (W32.Downadup) was the pseudo-random domain generation algorithm used for the generation of dynamic command and control locations in order to make it nearly impossible for researchers and the industry to take them down. However, once the domain registration algorithm was successfully reverse engineering, it became possible to measure the estimated number of affected hosts by registering several of the upcoming phone back locations.

What if the Conficker worm suddenly decided that the phone-back locations for March were those of legitimate sites?

According to Sophos, during March, the millions of Conficker infected hosts will attempt to phone back to several legitimate domains, among which is a Southwest Airlines owned wnsux.com, potentially causing a distributed denial of service attack on all of them. Here’s a list of the legitimate domains and dates on which Conficker will attempt to contact/potentially DDoS them:

Music Search Engine - jogli.com on 8th of March
Southwest Airlines - wnsux.com on 13th of March
Women’s Net in Qinghai Province - qhflh.com on 18th of March
Phonetics by Computer - praat.org on 31th of March

In an attempt to mitigate this attack, Southwest Airlines owned wnsux.com domains was modified yesterday and is no longer resolving to a particular IP. However, praat.org is a redirect to the University of Amsterdam’s Institute of Phonetic Sciences and just like qhflh.com and jogli.com is still active.

The reverse engineering of the domain registration algorithm not only made it possible to anticipate the upcoming command and control locations, but also, allowed security companies to pre-register them and lock them under the Conficker Cabal alliance with members such as Microsoft and the ICANN. Moreover, perhaps the most pragmatic mitigation solution implemented on a large scale so far, has been OpenDNS updated Stats System which automatically stops resolving Conficker’s latest domains, a feature which they introduced last month.

For the time being, the Conficker botnet remains in a “stay tuned” mode with the real malicious payload to be delivered at any particular moment. A patch has been available since October, 2008.

Conficker graph courtesy of Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center.

[Source: zdnet]

Opera Software has shipped a high-priority security patch for its flagship Web browser to plug at least three vulnerabilities that expose Windows users to code execution and cross-domain scripting attacks.

The Opera 9.64 upgrade also adds support for DEP (Data Execution Prevention) and ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization), two anti-exploitation mechanisms that helps to limit the damage from malware attacks on the Windows platform.

Opera has only released details on one of the three security vulnerabilities, which was discovered and reported by Google’s Tavis Ormandy.

• Specially crafted JPEG images can cause Opera to corrupt memory and crash. Successful exploitation can lead to execution of arbitrary code.

Opera said the update also fixes an issue where plug-ins could be used to allow cross domain scripting and a third “moderately severe” issue that remains a mystery.

“Details will be disclosed at a later date,” the company said.

* Image source: andyket’s Flickr photostream (Creative Commons 2.0)

[Source: zdnet]

More than two years after Symantec pulled the plug on L0phtCrack, the venerable password cracking tool is being prepped for a return to the spotlight.

The original creators of L0phtCrack has reacquired the tool with plans to release a new version at next week’s SOURCE Boston conference.

A teaser post on the l0phtcrack.com Web site mentions “new features and platform support,” which, according to Space Rogue, includes 64-bit Windows support and upgraded rainbow tables.

• Details on potential additional new features, and pricing have not yet been released but you can bet that it will be better than Symantec’s.

There’s a special session on the return of L0phtCrack scheduled for Thursday March 12 at SOURCE Boston.

Symantec quietly discontinued sales and support for L0phtCrack in 2006 out of concerns that it violated cryptography export controls.

L0phtCrack was a popular tool used to identify and remediate security vulnerabilities that result from the use of weak or easily guessed passwords. It was also used to recover Windows and Unix account passwords to access user and administrator accounts whose passwords are lost or to streamline migration of users to newer authentication systems.

It was originally produced by the L0pht, the Boston-based security research group founded by Peiter “Mudge” Zatko and Chris “Weld Pond” Wysopal.

[Source: zdnet]

Remember last month’s Google Video search results poisoning attack which was hijacking legitimate YouTube titles in order to acquire potential traffic coming from Google Video? Or the massive comment-spam attack on Digg.com?

It appears that the cybercriminals behind both of these campaigns aren’t giving up just yet, and are currently experimenting with a catchy social engineering attack at YouTube which is once again attempting to serve rogue security software under the disguise of a required media codec.

Here’s how the new campaign looks like.

This time their experiment relies on a new “visual social engineering vector”, a message “Click Here to Join the Club” or “Click Here for Free Porn” is embedded within the legitimate video, with a pointer enticing the user into clicking on the PornTube link right next to it. This novel approach slightly differs from previous campaigns involving fake YouTube sites, or the use of the very same malware links this time basically posted within the comments of a video.

The campaign does suffer from a major weakness, and that’s its adult content which YouTube has already — perhaps automatically — started removing. The fake codecs used in the campaign act as downloaders for rogue security software, with the cybercriminals earning revenue in the process. Moreover, not only are the Google Video, Digg.com’s and this latest campaign launched by the same attackers, but the malware campaigners behind them continue using highly toxic net blocks residing within the Latvian DATORU EXPRESS SERVISS Ltd (zlkon.lv), and the Dutch WORLDSTREAM DBM which makes them fairly easy to keep track of - at least for now.

[Source: zdnet]

That was fast. Chinese hackers collaborating with the Chinese Hacking Union, a two-years old training community for wannabe hackers, hacked and defaced the official web site of the General Consulate of the Russian Federation in Shanghai, PRC in response to the recent accusations that a Russian navy vessel has sank a Chinese cargo ship.

The message left on the now “under maintenance” site translates as follows:

“Russia invaded our territory to kill people from the People’s Republic. Hack done for the Chinese crew of controversy! Russia must be punished! ! ! Hacked BY: Yu”

In a related interview, profiling the hacker “Yu” after the Russian Consulate hack, he describes himself as a network security enthusiast that has been defacing Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese and U.S sites for a while, but had to give up his activities due to college studies. Interestingly, he’s also insisting that education is the better choice in the long term, than the web site defacements he’s involved into.

• Go through related hacktivism/political hacking incidents - Pro-Serbian hacktivists attacking Albanian web sites; Hundreds of Dutch web sites hacked by Islamic hackers; 300 Lithuanian sites hacked by Russian hackers; Georgia President’s web site under DDoS attack from Russian hackers; Coordinated Russia vs Georgia cyber attack in progress; Thousands of Israeli web sites under attack

Yu’s hacking group, as well as the Chinese Hacking Union, are a great example of the diverse but highly de-centralized province-based IT underground scene in China. Largely inspired by the glorious China Eagle Union, the Red Hacker’s Alliance and the Hacker Union of China, new training communities keep popping-up like mushrooms - even gender based ones (Chinese female hacking group spotted).

The site of the Russian Consulate in Shangha remains serving a “The site is currently under maintenance! sorry for any inconveniences!” message.

[Source: zdnet]

Yesterday, Adobe confirmed the existence of a critical vulnerability affecting Adobe Reader and Acrobat versions 9.0 and earlier, originally detected by the Shadowserver Foundation last week.

The onging targeted attacks have since been confirmed by both, Symantec and McAfee urging users to disable JavaScript in Adobe Reader and Acrobat until Adobe issues a patch on the 11th of March in the following way - Click: Edit -> Preferences -> JavaScript and uncheck Enable Acrobat JavaScript.

Symantec’s comments on the potential for massive attacks using the exploit:

So far, these attacks appear to be targeted and not widespread. Symantec is continuing to monitor the vulnerability’s use in the wild.

While examining the JavaScript code used for “heap-spraying” in these PDFs, we can see the same comments that show that these separate exploit attempts come from the same source! It seems likely that the people behind this threat are using targeted attacks against high-ranking people within different organizations—for example, locating the CEO’s email address on the company website and sending a malicious PDF in the hope that their malicious payload will run. Once the machine is compromised, the attackers may gain access to sensitive corporate documents that could be costly for companies breached by this threat.

For the time being, cybercriminals chose to generate less noise by launching targeted attacks just like they did earlier this week using IE7’s MS09-002 vulnerability. However, as we’ve previously seen it’s only a matter of time until copycat attackers start using it on a large scale.

With several targeted campaigns currently active, what are the chances that a sample malware campaign would be once again monetizing infected hosts by infecting them with rogue security software similar to Conficker’s first release? Huge.

• Go through related incidents using Adobe exploits: MSN Norway serving Flash exploits through malvertising; CNET’s Clientside developer blog serving Adobe Flash exploits; Rigged PDFs exploiting just-patched Adobe Reader flaw

Upon analyzing the binary served once an infected host gets successfully exploited from a sample campaign, it’s attempting to trick the user into install the very latest rogue security software Spyware Protect 2009. The cute part is that the cybercriminals didn’t manage to successfully configure their campaign resulting in a 404 error.

What’s important to point out is that the original targeted attacks detected by the Shadowserver Foundation are once again using a well known and previously abused Chinese DNS provider (js001.3322.org) with more details about its owner available in a related BusinessWeek article.

[Source: zdnet]

F-Secure and Fortinet are investigating a newly discovered mobile malware identified as SymbOS/Yxes.A!worm or “Sexy View”. The malware is affecting S60 3rd Edition series devices, and has a valid certificate signed by Symbian tricking the mobile device user into thinking it’s a legitimate application. In terms of propagation, “Sexy View” propagates by collecting all the phone numbers from the infected device, and then SMS-es itself to all of them including a link to a web site hosting a copy of it.

SymbOS/Yxes.A!worm is the second mobile malware detected in the wild for 2009, followed by last month’s discovery of Trojan-SMS.Python.Flocker by Kaspersky Labs. A trend, a fad, or opportunists experimenting for mobile malware’s prime time in 2009?

Using spam and phishing as analogies, both, spammers and phishers require huge databases of harvested email address in order to hit them directly. What used to be old-fashioned directory attacks where they were attempting to guess user names and associate them with email boxes, is today’s greatly matured underground market segment offering millions of segmented (on per country, city, industry, email provided basis) emails which cybecriminals easily integrate within their campaign management kits.

What’s particularly interesting about SymbOS/Yxes.A!worm is that it appears that the worm’s main objective is to harvest information from the infected devices such as phone numbers, IMEI, IMSI as well as the phone type. This data harvesting approach is pretty similar to that of email harvesting tools, and in the long term the harvested data will be monetized and resold to phone scammers whose activities are already driving the success of such site as WhoCallsme? and 800notes.

Moreover, Guillaume Lovet, a senior manager of Fortinet’s Threat Research Team is also speculating on the potential for a mobile botnet due to the ways in which Yxes.A!worm spreads: “As far as our analysis goes, the worm currently does not take commands from the remote servers it contacts. However, since the copies hosted on the malicious servers are controlled by the cyber criminals, they may update them whenever they want, thereby effectively mutating the worm, adding or removing functionality. We’re really at the edge of a mobile botnet here.”

With carriers, manufacturers, and service providers clearly aware of the emerging mobile malware threat, thankfully, they seem to be thinking in the right direction - according to McAfee’s 2009’s Mobile Security Report, when asked “Who Should Bear the Cost of Securing Mobile Devices?” 44% of the mobile device manufacturers forwarded the responsibility to themselves instead of their clients.

In times when your mobile number and physical location for a successful scam targeting is prone to become a valuable good in the underground economy, your vigilance remains a cost-effective solution.

[Source: zdnet]

Researchers at TrendMicro have detected a targeted malware attack exploiting last week’s patched critical MS09-002 vulnerability affecting Internet Explorer 7. Upon opening the spammed Microsoft office document, vulnerable users are automatically forwarded to a Chinese live exploit site which still remains active.

The attack has also been confirmed by McAfee and by the ISC, who point out that the cybercriminals appear to have reverse engineered Microsoft’s patch in order to come up with the exploit.

From TrendMicro’s post:

The threat starts with a spammed malicious .DOC file detected as XML_DLOADR.A. This file has a very limited distribution script, suggesting it may be a targeted attack. It contains an ActiveX object that automatically accesses a site rigged with a malicious HTML detected by the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network as HTML_DLOADER.AS.

HTML_DLOADER.AS exploits the CVE-2009-0075 vulnerability, which is already addressed by the MS09-002 security patch released last week. On an unpatched system though, successful exploitation by HTML_DLOADER.AS downloads a backdoor detected as BKDR_AGENT.XZMS.

This backdoor further installs a .DLL file that has information stealing capabilities. It sends its stolen information to another URL via port 443.

The attackers trade-off in this case is to either launch a less noisy targeted attack, or attempt to target as many users as possible by using legitimate web sites as infection vectors, a choice that depends on what they’re trying to achieve, and who are they targeting in particular.

Who’s behind the attack anyway? The web service (9966.org) used as a “phone back” location with the stolen data, is a well known one used primarily by Chinese hackers in previous massive SQL injections attacks, which doesn’t necessarily mean the campaign is launched by Chinese hackers, since it could be international hackers from anywhere using a well known malicious infrastructure in order to forward the responsibility to local hackers.

Moreover, in this particular campaign I can easily argue that the window of opportunity for abusing this vulnerability in a targeted fashion, is just as wide open as attempting to exploit the same hosts by diversifying the use of different exploits. For instance, despite the timely exploitation of MS09-002, based on the number of Conficker affected hosts globally, a situation where once again a patch is present, there’s a great chance that some of the hosts they’re attempting to exploit through the use of MS09-002 are already part of Conficker’s botnet, or remain susceptible to outdated vulnerabilities.

So far, no massive malware campaigns are taking advantage of the exploit, but users are advised to self-audit themselves against known client-side vulnerabilities and MS09-002 in particular.

[Source: zdnet]

A week after a newly launched crimeware tracking service went public, cybercriminals didn’t hesitate to prove its usefulness by launching a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) against it. According to the Swiss security blog, the Zeus tracker came under attack from a previously known source that also attacked abuse.ch over an year ago taking advantage of a well known do-it-yourself DDoS malware.

Just like November 2008’s DDoS attack against the anti-fraud site Bobbear.co.uk — with evidence that the attack was commissioned provided by Zero Day back then — the single most evident proof of the usefulness of your cybercrime tracking service always comes in the form of a direct attack against its availability.

What is the Zeus Tracker anyway, and why is it so special at the first place?

The Zeus Tracker is a full-disclosure project keeping track of known Zeus hosting locations, one of the most ubiquitous crimeware applications cybercriminals take advantage of for years. Moreover, by maintaining a real-time blocklist that allows the community to easily take action against known Zeus domains/IPs it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the service is getting attacked - simply because it exposes active crimeware campaigns.

• Go through more recent DDoS attacks coverage - GoDaddy hit by a DDoS attack; AlertPay hit by a large scale DDoS attack; BBC hit by a DDoS attack; Anti fraud site hit by a DDoS attack; Norwegian BitTorrent tracker under DDoS attack; Georgia President’s web site under DDoS attack from Russian hackers

Once available as a proprietary crimeware tool costing several thousands dollars, today, pirated copies of Zeus are so prevalent, that most of the innovations attempting to to improve its usefulness and abilities to sniff E-banking transaction data come from third parties in a true open source crimeware fashion. In fact, the Zeus crimeware is so popular that cybercriminals themselves are looking for and successfully finding remotely exploitable vulnerabilities within the kit in an attempt to hijack someone else’s botnet.

Moreover, with or without the Zeus Tracker’s real-time data, the Zeus malware is prone to continue dominating the crimeware landscape due to its maturity into a cybercrime-as-a-service proposition. For instance, the increasing number of services offering managed Zeus botnets not only allow less sophisticated cybercriminals easy access to hundreds of thousands of banker malware infected hosts, but also, the relatively low prices the services charge due to the fact that they’re running pirated copies of Zeus ultimately results in the scalability of cybercrime in general.

Attempting to undermine this scalability would mean coming up with ways to shorten the average time a Zeus command and control domain/IP remains online, next to communicating the already known locations as a public service just like the Zeus Tracker does.

[Source: zdnet]

According to PandaSecurity, the social news site Digg.com is among the very latest Web 2.0 services to be targeted by cybecriminals on their way to acquire legitimate traffic to their malware serving domains. The ongoing attack is far more widespread the originally stated, with +500,000 bogus comments

leading to 15 currently active malware domains, where the end user is enticed to install a fake video codec in order to view the video. Once executed, the codec attempts to trick the user that they’re infected with malware, and in order to get rid of it, a rogue security software has to be purchased.

Despite the obvious similarities with last month’s Google Video keywords poisoning attack, the comment-spam campaign at Digg.com is unique in the sense that it appears to have been active for over an year now. Let’s dissect the campaign, and explain how it works.

The cybercriminals are taking advantage of on purposely registrated bogus accounts, in a combination with compromised legitimate accounts to not only post Digg stories directly leading to malware, but also, to heavily comment on legitimate and bogus stories by posting even more malware-serving links.

So basically, you have a catchy title submitted through a bogus account, with a miltitude of bogus accounts commenting on it, and linking to more malware serving domains. Or exactly the opposite - bogus accounts commenting on legitimate stories since January, 2008. This practice of self-recommendation greatly reminds me a similar Ebay bot talk scheme back in 2006, where bogus accounts were automatically giving positive recommendation to fraudulent accounts, all operated by the same person/gang.

• Go through related abuse of Web 2.0 services by cybercriminals: Bogus LinkedIn profiles serving malware; Spammers targeting Bebo, generate thousands of bogus accounts; Malware and spam attacks exploiting Picasa and ImageShack; Twitter being used to distribute malware; Cybercriminals syndicating Google Trends keywords to serve malware; Malware-infected WinRAR distributed through Google AdWords

Interestingly, just like in Google’s keywords poisoning campaign, no client-side vulnerabilities are used. Instead, the cybecriminals are entirely relying on the end user to download and execute the codec on their way to view the video.

Digg.com’s abuse department has already been notified of all the related malware domains used across the site.

UPDATE: The following is a complete list of the malware domains used within the comments posted at Digg.

[Source: zdnet]

A recently released report by BeyondTrust entitled “Reducing the Threat from Microsoft Vulnerabilities” indicates that that according to the company’s analysis of all the security bulletins Microsoft published in 2008, 92% of the critical vulnerabilities could have been mitigated by the principle of the least privilege.

Despite the fact that Microsoft’s products continue topping the “successfully exploited charts” in each and every web malware exploitation kit (go through sample infection rates), long gone are the days when Microsoft’s products are targeted exclusively. Nowadays, in order to better optimize a malware campaign, a web malware exploitation kit is targeting a diverse set of client-side software/browser plugins.

Here are some of the key points from the report :

• 92% of Critical Microsoft vulnerabilities are mitigated by configuring users to operate without administrator rights
• Of the total published Microsoft vulnerabilities, 69% are mitigated by removing administrator rights
• By removing administrator rights companies will be better protected against exploitation of 94% of Microsoft Office, 89% of Internet Explorer, and 53% of Microsoft Windows vulnerabilities
• 87% of vulnerabilities categorized as Remote Code Execution vulnerabilities are mitigated by removing administrator rights

Interestingly, starting from the basic fact that the client-side vulnerabilities exploited through the web exploitation kits have had their associated patches for months, sometimes years, end users appear to not only lack understanding of least privilege accounts, but also, still believe that patching their browser is where the self-auditing process both, starts and ends.

Moreover, the ongoing Conficker/Downadup malware campaign which has already passed the 10 million infected hosts milestone, is a very recent example of another phenomenon - the fact that millions of end users and possibly companies, are on purposely using pirated copies of Windows and are therefore using highly vulnerable, yet Internet connected, versions of it. The proof? Symantec’s geolocated graph of infected Conficker hosts speaks for itself, as the countries having the highest software piracy rate, are in fact the ones most heavily hit by the malware.

However, least privilege accounts can always be used by both, legitimate users and software pirates altogether, which when combined with a decent situational awareness in the sense of knowing the current attack tactics, is prone to decrease their chance of getting successfully compromised.

[Source: zdnet]

Have we reached the phrase when targeted advertising would equal evasive malware campaigns pushed through third-party ad networks, to a geolocated set of visitors only? Could be. During the weekend, rogue antivirus XP pop-ups were served to visitors of Cleveland.com, according to visitors’ complaints which I also managed to verify.

Investigating further reveals that the very same ad network that was used to serve similar Antivirus 2009 pop-ups at AllRecipes.com in November, appears to have been the one (tacoda.net) that cybercriminals once again used in Cleveland.com’s case.

With efficiency-centered ad networks in terms of allowing publishers faster access to their networks, every cybercriminal, no matter the ad network in question, can easily become a publisher - the basics of malvertising whose key advantage from the cybecriminal’s perspective remains the opportunity to target high trafficked web sites which aren’t susceptible to common exploitation tactics.

What ad networks should set as a priority is establishing a more transparent process about what measures — if any — have they undertaken to verify that the publisher’s sites aren’t disseminating malware or client-side exploits. For instance, plain simple cross-checking (for starters) of the rogue security software domains that appeared at Cleveland.com against Google’s Safebrowsing database, indicates that they’re already marked as harmful.

[Source: zdnet]

From the real-time syndication of hot Google Trends keywords, maintaining AdWords campaigns, to the plain simple blackhat search engine optimization tactics, cybercriminals are constantly looking for new ways to acquire traffic by enjoying the clean reputation of each and every Web 2.0 property. From LinkedIn, Bebo, Picasa and ImageShack, to Twitter, everyone’s targeted efficiently using automated account registration tools.

During the last couple of days, a single group involved in a countless number of blackhat SEO campaigns across the Web, started massively targeting Google Video with a campaign that has already managed to hijack approximately 400,000 search queries in order to trick users into visiting a bogus and malware serving (W32/AutoTDSS.BNA!worm) adult web site.

Here’s how the campaign works, and how they’re attempting to cloak it from the eyes of security researchers.

What’s particularly interesting about this campaign relying entirely on Google Video traffic to flourish, is that instead of sticking to the adult content in their keywords inventory, the cybercriminals have been in fact syndicating legitimate YouTube video titles from a variety of topics. Therefore, the number of legitimate videos used is proportional to the comprehensiveness of the campaign, in this case, over 400,000 search queries, a number that is increasing in real-time since they keep having their bogus content crawled by Google Video.

Moreover, based on the fact that they maintain a portfolio of 21 publisher domains with bogus and non-existent video content currently crawled, a simple tactic that they’re using could entirely hijack a search query at Google Video. How come? By simply duplicating the content on their publisher domains, the top 5 search results for a particular video can be easily served from any of the 21 publisher domains, making it look like different sites have the same content.

The search engine results poisoning works as follows. Upon clicking, a Google Video user coming across to any content from any of their 21 publisher domains, is taken to a single redirection point (porncowboys .net/continue.php), then to the well known adult site template abused by cybercriminals (xfucked .org/video.php?genre=babes&id=7375), where the user is told that “Your Flash Version is too old. Your browser cannot play this file. Click “OK” to download and install update for Flash Video Player” and the malware is served if he’s tricked into it (trackgame .net/download/FlashPlayer.v3.181.exe).

The cybercriminals are also taking advantage of a well known evasive technique - http referer checking or “cloaked maliciousness. For instance, the malware redirection to the fake flash player is only served if the potential victim is coming from Google Video. If a researcher is basically browsing around the content of their sites, the legitimate YouTube videos are legitimately syndicated. Excluding this case, it’s worth pointing out that on the majority of occasions cybercriminals do not fully take advantage of the evasive features available within the traffic management kits they use behind the campaigns, making their campaigns easier for analyzing.

Google’s Security Team has been notified and action is expected to be taken anytime now.

[Source: zdnet]