The Web’s classical social-engineering trick of the “missing video codec” tries to lure people into clicking on links or download and install an executable which pretends to be the missing application which is needed in order to watch the movie. The animated picture below is such an example: at first glance, it looks like a typically embedded video which is unable to load. The “picture” states that you’d have to click on it in order to see the movie. And here the lure begins – in this blog entry, we’ll follow it down and outline what kind of traffic management backbones are deployed for malware campaigns nowadays.

In our example the animated image is hosted on a popular blog platform and the link points to a suspicious Flash sample. As a quick analysis reveals, the Flash is compressed and additionally contains some obfuscated JavaScript code to hide its real intention. The script code redirects to another location.

The new location points to a so-called “Traffic Management System”. In this case, if you load the URL several times, the destination rotates and after too many retries you will be always redirected to the homepage of Google. The system remembers your IP address on the server-side for a certain time period. After that time, or when you just use another IP address, you will again see the redirections when visiting the URL.

The redirections are based on a typical HTTP “302 Found” response with a new location from the server where the traffic management system is installed. Another example, which also used Geo-Location, was outlined in this Avert Labs Blog post where a downloader trojan contacted such a system and based on the country, different malware binaries were downloaded.

Such traffic management systems nowadays are configured via web-based administration interfaces. Typically the links for the “incoming traffic” look like http://www.example.com/in.cgi?three or http://www.example.com/in.cgi?default where “three” or “default” stands for different campaign IDs inside the system. A typical rule could look like shown in the following picture.

The administrator is able to define rules for “incoming traffic” which results in different “outgoing traffic” based on different restrictions. For example, the Geo-Location could be used to redirect visitors from a particular country to one location while visitors from another country will be redirected to a different location – just think of localized campaigns targeted to the spoken language in these countries. So users from the United States will not be redirected to a french phishing web site and vice versa.

These traffic management systems can also use more complex rules based on network ranges and the referrer – so lets say that only visitors with a referer from Google will be redirected to a malicious web site as long as the IP address of the visitor doesn’t come from well-known network ranges belonging to security companies.

Why do that? This way, only users searching for the website will get to the malicious redirect, while the websites’ owner or administrator, who usually does not search for it but directly enters the URL into the browser, will see the normal website with no oddities. This helps the attacker to keep the infection under the radar for a longer time.

Other trafic management systems, like shown in the above picture, also feature different logins into the web interface – for the administrator, the “sellers” and the “buyers”. This particular system has different views for sellers of traffic – that is, infected web sites containing an IFRAME that points to the trafic management system -, and buyers of traffic – e.g. the people who run exploit servers and try to install malware on unpatched computers, thus looking for potential victims. Such traffic management systems can be in between the infected web sites and the exploit servers. As you can see in the above picture also payment options can be configured, so the more traffic a seller redirects to a buyer, the more money is paid. With such systems in between, the campaigns can be easily exchanged or the “traffic” can be sold to new buyers which try to install their malware.

So the classical starter, the “missing video codec” trick, can end up in quite a complex system managing modern malware campaigns. Visiting or following a malicious ressource nowadays means that you are redirected based on a complex server-side management system.

The current crisis in Gaza between Palestinians and Israelis marks a renewal of web defacement activities. Various Morocco hacker groups have been pointed out by the press; the best known is “Team-Evil,” which just hacked the Ynet Israeli news site.

This weekend, I read various French posts speaking about ethical hacking and “e-jihad” operations made by “pacifist hackers” motivated only by their political ideology. However, reality is sometimes different from perception, and one hacker may conceal another.

On New Year’s Day various web sites were hacked by people introducing themselves as “Morocco & Gaza Hackers” or the “Team Cruel Boys” group.

On the defaced page, one attacker–whose email address is m0×0m_at_hotmail.fr–introduced himself as “M. SoOoSo.” His message seems clear: “I’m not a saboteur, and I didn’t hack this site as an act of sabotage.” At first glance, this guy could gain some sympathizers of the Palestinians’ cause.

But the story is not so simple. A week before, on Christmas Day, I heard about a phishing attack against Orange.fr, a French Internet Provider. Using a mirror site, hackers tried to intercept user names and passwords to access emails and personal data.

Speaking with the discoverers of this identity theft attempt and looking at the code, I noted the stolen data were sent to the same m0×0m email address. Moreover, the PHP script was named soooso.php. What a curious coincidence!

A second email address pointed to another possible Moroccan. As result of some searches I made today, I would not be surprised if this second guy (if it is not the same as the first) was also involved in some fake auction operations.

Of course I can prove nothing, but it would not be the first time we have heard hackers claiming to be ethical “white hats” who are really engaged in criminal activities.

LinkedIn is a popular social networking site where you can manage business contacts online. Since you can set up a profile with links to your own website, it seems to attract criminals’ attention as well. A Google search reveals that several hundred fake LinkedIn profiles from nude “Kirsten Dunst” to nude “Hulk Hogan” exist already. The rogue profiles look all alike, with a picture of the celebrity and three links to the parts of the “nude video” like shown in the following picture.

This is exactly the lure – don’t follow these links! The linked websites contain obfuscated script code which decodes to a simple browser redirection. This obfuscated script code is proactively detected by McAfee as “Exploit-IFrame.gen.c” already.

If you’d follow the link (don’t do that!) to see how deep the rabbit hole goes, you will end up with a Traffic Management System like described in this Avert Labs blog entry. On every reload the server-side application will point to a different domain.

So when an unsuspecting user gets tricked to follow the lure, he will end up on different malicious websites trying the classical social-engineering tricks of either the “missing video codec” or of showing a fake AV scan and telling that the user his computer was infected with malware and offering a “free” AV scanner software, which in fact is the real threat. So beware when following links, even on trusted Web 2.0 platforms like LinkedIn. Especially when they promise some nude celebrity videos.

Google’s code-hosting project is the latest free service to be abused by web spammers. We’ve seen one or two previously, but over the holidays the situation appears to have got much worse. They are creating lots of new projects with the following type of website on:

Clicking the image will take you to today’s fake codec download site. Repeated clicks will take you to an adult site [both NSFW, you have been warned!].

The difference between this and the MSN Spaces abuse that is now about a year old is that Google appears to automatically index code projects, so any Google-Jedi can generate a good list (Google Search–again, don’t click the links) to start with.

Or the fact that the image is linked from http://bestsextube dot net/video.gif all the time might also be useful to know. The icing on the cake, though, is the link to somewhere/in.cgi … I’ll come back to this later.

The porntube site is also host to a number of other related sites such as fake anti-anything software:

The codec download site, which is in Latvia, also hosts a number of related sites:

The Google Code project owner has a few other projects of a similar nature, too.

A year ago I blogged about MSN Spaces beta with a very similar issue… I even spoke to some very nice folks there about it, and a year later it’s still being abused by spammers [ spamhaus award. ] I trust Google would like to appear less evil and will take more decisive action. I’d suggest mashing code and safe browsing together, but it appears not to find anything wrong with the clickable links, though it did catch on after some redirection took place.

…perhaps I should start consulting on this sort of thing

Anybody suffering deja-vous? “/in.cgi should ring an alarm bell or two. If not, check out my colleague Micha’s blog on traffic management. He explains what happens to those clicks! This is campaign “6.”

Happy new year to all!

Today we at McAfee Avert Labs released the first of our new monthly publications: the “McAfee January Spam Report.”

Within its pages you will find excellent information on current spam trends, campaigns, and maybe even some “winners and losers.” Some of the highlights of the January issue include:

Political Spam
Tax Relief Junk Mail
Unemployment and Diploma Spam Increases
Christmas E-Cards

As well as some 2009 spam predictions! Definitely worth the download and read. Watch for our February issue in about four weeks. All spam reports, as well as other white papers, are available from our whitepaper download area here.

Recently we got some new samples of the W32/Conficker.Worm to analyze. While investigating we found that this worm has an exploit for the recent MS08-067 vulnerability and uses the exploitation method derived from the metasploit ms08_067_netapi module to spread itself. Below is the traffic packet capture snapshot sent by the worm:

As we can see from the image above, there are some random alphanumeric characters in the packet which seem to have been generated from Rex::Text.rand_text_alpha in ms08_067_netapi.rb. And if we do a byte order conversion of data in red box above, we get 3 addresses: 0×00020408, 0×6f8917c2, 0×6f88f807, which are the internal targets of the ms08_067_netapi.rb exploit as listed below (from metasploit):

# Metasploit's NX bypass for XP SP2/SP3
[ 'Windows XP SP3 English (NX)',
	{

                     'Ret'       => 0x6f88f807,
                     'DisableNX' => 0x6f8917c2,
                     'Scratch'   => 0x00020408
	}
], # JMP ESI ACGENRAL.DLL, NX/NX BYPASS ACGENRAL.DLL

The latest metasploit exploit, besides including Windows XP/2003 OS’s; also includes several targets for languages such as English, Arabic, Czech, Danish, German, Greek Spanish Finnish, French, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, etc. The exploit module of ms08_067_netapi in metasploit also provides the “smb_fingerprint()” function to detect the Windows version information, Service Pack information and also the language information of the target OS. This makes programming the worm much easier and can cause much bigger impact. By using the exploit from the metasploit module as the code base, a virus/worm programmer only needs to implement functions for automatic downloading and spreading. We believe that this can be accomplished by an average programmer who understands the basics of exploitation and has decent programming skills. After further analysis of the traffic capture, we found that only the functions for detecting OS version and Service Pack information were embedded into this worm. Hence without the remote OS language determination ‘feature’, this worm only targets the English OS versions at the time of writing the blog.

Here is a packet capture snippet used in this malware to detect the OS version and Service Pack information:

By sending SMB session setup and request, it can detect OS information of target machine. If the OS is Windows Server 2003, then the Service Pack information will also be returned.

Since there are a huge number of Windows XP systems it’s obvious that the worm writer did not want to miss out on this pool, hence this is why the worm determines what the Service Pack level is by accessing \SRVSVC named pipe, which is similar to the method used in metasploit smb_fingerprint() function :

if (os == 'Windows XP' and sp.length == 0)
            # SRVSVC was blocked in SP2
            begin
                         smb_create("\\SRVSVC")
                         sp = 'Service Pack 0 / 1'
            rescue ::Rex::Proto::SMB::Exceptions::ErrorCode => e
                         if (e.error_code == 0xc0000022)
                                 sp = 'Service Pack 2+'
                         end
            end
end

So in this instance it’s obvious that malware/worm writers are abusing open source tools to their advantage to make their work easier.

For those who haven’t patched their machines, we suggest you install the MS08-067 patch ASAP! If you are a McAfee Host IPS or Network IPS user, we’ve verified that you are protected against this worm by our Signatures ID’s 3961 and 0×40709d00 respectively. For VirusScan users, the DAT update version 5444 has coverage to detect this worm.

In less than four days the inauguration of President-Elect Barack Obama will make headlines. At McAfee, we expect cybercriminals to use this event to conduct their typical attacks like they do when the news gives them such opportunity.

Unfortunately, we were right and some sites have already started to circulate fake information on this subject to lure in the crowds in an attempt to infect their computers. Here is one of them we recently discovered. As you can see for yourself this author does not hesitate to make use of sensationalism:

Let me add that if you are lured into this trap and are using an incorrectly protected PC that you will be infected by malware we detect as W32/Waledac.gen.b.

This website was not created by a joker. It is very professionally done. It is protected by a botnet bringing into play the fast-flux technique I have explained here and here.

Once again, be vigilant and do not unwisely follow a link you may have received via email or find upon a search!

Over the years, the window between exploit discovery to its incorporation into a worm candidate has shrunk from months, to weeks, to zero-day. This leaves administrators with very little time to schedule and deploy patches to all servers and workstations on their network. Virus authors, on the other hand, have been at the cutting edge for including exploit code in their creations whenever a critical vulnerability is reported. The chart below shows the time frame between a vulnerability being reported and how long it took for virus authors to incorporate it into a worm candidate.

The year 2007 was the only exception in recent times for a worm not exploiting any critical Microsoft vulnerability.

It’s easy for an outsider to criticize or pass judgment on a network that was hit with a zero-day worm. Spare a thought for the IT administrator; most do not have the flexibility to deploy patches immediately to the network for policy reasons. For example, the organization could be using legacy software, which could break if a new service pack was applied. And keeping these legacy applications running takes precedence over applying the latest Windows hot fixes. Most system administrators, who work in hospitals and other mission critical jobs, don’t have the luxury of doing a Windows update!

To add to these woes, every once in a while a hot fix from Microsoft breaks something in the operating system or adversely affects other applications. Once a patch is rolled out via WSUS (Windows Server Update Service) it cannot be rolled back centrally; a faulty patch from the vendor can prove costly for the organization. For these reasons administrators need more time to deploy these hot fixes in a test environment and QA them properly before deploying them to the enterprise.

So what can an administrator do in these circumstances? Relying solely on mainstream-antivirus desktop protection or firewall-style perimeter protection is insufficient to deal with today’s modern threats. The need of the hour is defense-in-depth. Administrators, who don’t have the luxury of applying patch updates, should seriously consider having a HIPS (host intrusion prevention system) installed on the end point to prevent exploit-based worm infections. Host intrusion prevention systems not only protect systems against zero-day vulnerabilities but also give administrators more time to test and deploy patches. The recent W32/Conficker.worm outbreaks could have been nipped in the bud if more organizations had chosen to protect their systems with HIPS.

Fake alert malware prey on innocent victims by displaying misleading scan alerts. They trick the user into buying fake antivirus, to fix such falsely exaggerated scan reports. This class of “scareware” software depends on extreme social engineering tactics and comes bundled with Backdoors, Password Stealers, Downloaders, Droppers, Browser Helper Objects, etc.

Each of the above class of malware are used either in the distribution of the fake antivirus itself or in the propogation of other kinds of malware once the fake antivirus is installed on the victim’s machine. Working towards a common goal – extorting money from an innocent victim – these scareware applications have added a new class of malware to their armory – rootkits.

Apart from hiding the scareware’s files, rootkits ensure that access to genuine security vendors’ sites is disabled. The rootkit we noticed, named “tdss[random characters].sys” was blogged about by Computer Associates recently and was associated with the AntiSpywareXP2009 scareware. We, however, noticed that this rootkit was protecting rogue components belonging to WinWebSecurity scareware. This implies that:

1. The same author of the rootkit is supplying his code to multiple scareware vendors for money, or
2. The same group is creating and distributing multiple fake antivirus.

McAfee AV, will detect & clean this rootkit component from DAT version 5496 onwards. However, a user stuck with a machine that does not have antivirus with updated signatures, will have to clean this rootkit manually.

If you are a Windows user, apart from the usual safe computing practices that include using a firewall, an updated Windows operating system and an antivirus software, consider the following steps to minimize the chances of getting infected by such scareware:

1. Install a backup software, which can revert your system to a previous known uninfected state
2. Browse the Internet from sandbox software
3. Install and browse the Internet from a Virtual Machine

On a final note, the Federal Trade Commission has recently won a restraining order against Innovative Marketing and ByteHosting Internet Services – companies responsible for marketing the scareware applications WinFixer, WinAntivirus, DriveCleaner, ErrorSafe and XP Antivirus. However, we will have to wait to see if this move actually has any impact on curbing the distribution of scareware.

Igor Muttik just had a parcel arrive whilst I was nearby. McAfee has just won the Lowest False Alarm Rate award from AV Comparatives for VirusScan.

….I didn’t stay for the speech

For those who do not know, false alarms are caused where an anti-virus product detects a clean file as infected and is something all AV companies try hard to avoid. Recognition that we’ve got the lowest false alarm rate on test is awesome.