The media frequently speaks about the underground economy and quote price ranges for various private goods available for sale. I recently read the trends were bearish, but let there be no misunderstanding about that, if the quality is here, the price will still be high. It is just like the price of food, you have the hard-discount and the luxury stores!!

With this post, I wish to be more precise regarding the data regarding the prices of some cybercriminal groups around the globe.

Last Friday morning in France, my investigations lead me to visit a site proposing top-quality data for a higher price than usual. But when we look at this data we understand that as everywhere, you have to pay for quality. The first offer concerned bank logons. As you can see in the following screenshot, pricing depends on available balance, bank organization and country. Additional information such as PIN and Transfer Passphrase are also given when necessary:

For such prices, the seller offers some guaranties. For example, the purchase is covered by replacement, if you are unable - within the 24 hours - to log into the account using the provided details.

The selling site also proposes US, Austria and Spanish credit cards with full information:

• ccnumber
• cvv2
• exp.date
• name
• adress
• city
• state/province
• zip/postal
• phone-number
• SSN(US Only)
• DL#
• MMN

It is also possible to purchase skimmers (for ATM machine) and “dump tracks” to create fake credit cards. Here too, cost is in touch with the quality:

Depending on the price, you can choose your bank among various lists; more than 900 choices for North America or European countries:

Many other offers are available like shop administrative area accesses (back end of an online store where all the customer details are stored – from Name, SSN, DOB, Address, Phone number to CC) or UK or Swiss Passport information:

And to convince prospective clients, the site offers some free data to demonstrate their know-how. I partially anonymized some of this data so I could provide an example. If you recognize yourself, do not hesitate to contact the police force so that they may institute legal proceedings.

We have been in contact with one of the German’s Crime Investigating Authorities (LKA). This is a case when a malicious program running on mobile phones was making unauthorised calls. All these calls were connecting to one and the same SMS number which is used to top-up the amount of virtual money for one of the online games. A scheme to top-up in-game cash via SMS messages is frequently used by online game vendors.

This is a really interesting twist because in the past malware writers simply programmed malware (either on a desktop or on a mobile device) to call a premium phone number (one where the cost of a call is high). Of course, with this old method it is easier to trace the destination of funds because for each such call real money is transferred from a phone company to the owner of the premium number. So the principle “follow the money” to track the perpetrators usually works.

This new and indirect way of laundering money through an online game makes it significantly more difficult to track the destination - several in-game assets’ transfers can be made before the money is taken out of the game through real-money trading (RMT - it is a bannable offence in most online games but some games allow that - for example, Second Life).

Our advice is not to use programs for mobile phones that come from untrusted sources (like game forums, Internet newsgroups, Emails, P2P networks, blogs, etc.)

Avertlabs would kindly ask all mobile phone users to be vigilant and submit suspicious programs for our analysis - the easiest way is to use our online Webimmune service www.webimmune.net.

There’s been considerable stink lately about the Race to Zero contest that is to be held at Defcon. I, for one, am a bit perplexed by this. This article from ZDNet Australia is what finally made my eyes cross in confusion/aggravation.

I don’t know at what point the collective “wisdom” became that signature-based AV was ever intended to be about defending against every threat ever devised, before it was ever devised. Signature-based scanners are intended to detect and clean known threats. If you modify a known threat, it’s not really “known” anymore, is it? Now it’s a variant of a known threat.

It’s certainly desirable to have protection against all threats, known and not-yet-known. This is what things like firewalls, Intrusion Prevention Systems, Data Leakage Prevention and all those other wonderful security products are intended to do, in concert with AV. Most AV software now also includes proactive static detection like Generic and Heuristic detection, along with more dynamic detection like emulation or behavioral detection. Many AV programs now also include broader security functionality like a firewall or IPS.

Generic and Heuristic detection is certainly better at picking up unknown threats than simple signature-based scanning, but there are three things that limit it. For one, it’s still reactive, basing detection on known bad techniques. Secondly, it’s static - obfuscation can still muck up the detection, if it causes the file to deviate from the known bad technique. Finally, there’s still a need for these detections not to be false-prone. Heuristics and generics essentially cover known “really, really bad” techniques. The threshold of badness must be quite high to make it into AV products. Consider how many commercial products and widely used administration tools blur those lines, and you may come to appreciate what a very fine line it is.

It’s not clear from what I’ve seen whether the contest’s judges intend to use the most paranoid settings available within the various products, but their description does seem to indicate they’ll only use the static detection, rather than running it real-time through the products. This does not accomplish a full testing of the products capability, it only tests one component. The results they get will not be what an average user will get.

The contest organizers and participants are playing with fire in order to prove what we already know: Signature-based scanners are meant to protect against known threats. That doesn’t mean that AV is dead, or that it’s useless. The industry is evolving, and its products with it. AV is intended to be one tool in a complete security arsenal. Defense in depth is where it’s at, if you’re really looking to protect your network.

There have been a couple of threads lately, one on LifeHacker, one on Ask Metafilter, about whether it’s necessary to use anti-virus software. The comments in both are a very clear indication on how far we have to go in educating users on the real danger of malware. It would appear the average user is operating under assumptions that might have been true 8 years ago. Now, it’s just a recipe for disaster.

The erroneous assumptions are that:

1) Viruses are noisy/easily visible and
2) Viruses are caused by actively bad behavior

To quote What the Geek from the LifeHacker thread,

I have a business client whose website was giving people a trojan for a while because it got hacked - and guess what? if you didn’t have an AV running, you’d never know that it happened. It would just sit on your computer sending your data off to who knows where silently. Just because it doesn’t give you a big skull and crossbones on the screen doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

This really sums up the situation for me - an innocent user was hacked, and might never have known it, as it was silent. It’s like the difference between the demos we give of an “average scary virus” now versus the ones we gave 10 years ago. Back then, the demos were all skulls and message-boxes and file corruption and deletion. Very spooky, very visual and very loud. Now the scary demos are effectively silent. The malware can come in without any user interaction, and you’d never know it was there without specific tools to show you what changes it’s making behind-the-scenes. Off goes your credit card number and your private documents, without you being the wiser.

And this is not something that just happens in the “bad parts” of the internet. Think of the most innocuous content on the internet. Pictures of cute and fluffy animals would certainly qualify, right? At the end of last year, CuteOverload fell victim to a hacking that delivered trojans to its unsuspecting readers. And major sites are supposed to be safe, right? How about the Superbowl website hack from the beginning of last year?

One point that I think needs bringing up specifically is the question of whether to use “on-access” scanning, or if “on-demand” is enough. As Dwroth succinctly put it in the LifeHacker thread:

All time (active protection) = good for the public, but overkill for the geek.

Turning off on-access scanning has never been a great idea, but now it could be a catastrophically bad idea. We’ve already discussed how one’s level of geekiness does not figure into one’s susceptibility to viruses which don’t require human interaction. Personally, if there’s a virus trying to get onto my computer, I’d really rather find out immediately before any changes could be made to my system rather than some time tomorrow or later this week.

A few minutes is plenty of time for malware to transmit my most sensitive data, why give it hours?

Clear protocols such as FTP or SMTP are unsafe. Anyone on the subnet can easily collect login usernames and passwords just by sniffing the network traffic. Even switched networks can be easily attacked to redirect traffic and gather credentials as simply as on a HUB based network. However, FTP is still widely used and often the only protocol provided by hosting providers and it’s for this reason we weren’t so surprised to come across PWS-FerTP – a piece of malware that takes advantage of this situation, collecting FTP credentials and infecting FTP repositories.

To slow down analysis, PWS-FerTP includes some (very simple) anti-debugging tricks and VMWare detection functionality shown below. Not very stealthy though, utilizing some well known VMWare internal mechanisms used mainly by VMware tools to communicate with the host system.

PWS-FerTP bypasses the Windows Firewall (by modifying the registry) and starts to look for three widely used client applications providing FTP support (FAR Manager, CuteFTP and Total Commander). Indeed, these applications unfortunately use weak encryption to save FTP passwords, while other details such as logins and IP addresses are stored in the clear.

In an attempt to gather more FTP credentials, PWS-FerTP switches the first network adapter found on the system to promiscuous mode via the ioctlsocket API call, allowing for a disabling of MAC filtering and thus sniffing all FTP account details passing by the current subnet.

PWS-FerTP sends all gathered credentials within specially crafted HTTP requests to a remote web server.

But PWS-FerTP is more than a password stealer – a quick string search reveals some interesting blocks of obfuscated Javascript as well:

Once decoded, the aim of this script becomes much clearer, redirecting user’s browser via an IFRAME HTML tag pointing to a malicious website.

In fact, PWS-FerTP connects to each previously gathered FTP account and looks for files whose names belong to this list:
- index.htm
- main.htm
- default.htm
- index.php
- main.php
- default.php

When such a file is found, PWS-FerTP retrieves it locally, injects the Javascript code shown above, and put the file back to the FTP repository.

Another good reason to follow well-known best practices: avoid using clear-text protocols and use applications providing strong encryption, like keepass, to store your credentials.

So, on a bright Friday morning here in Brazil, I was analyzing an interesting piece of malware. Well, this piece of malware was sending encoded data to gooqle-analytics.com…hmmmm maybe trying to get infection statistics?

We have seen this before…but something wasn’t quite clear… it seemed that this was all that the malware was doing… hmmmm ok… checking a little closer, I could see the traffic generated… it was encoded traffic… not common for Google Analytics…

A little more research revealed that there was a dll injected in the svchost process, and analyzing this packed dll revealed that its purpose was to steal information and send to gooqle-analytics… but what the heck? Is Google stealing my info? NOT!!! As some of you noticed reading this blog, I did not misspell the name… it was sending the info to gooqle-analytics.com, and not google-analytics.com…

This gooqle thing domain is hosted on a IP in Italy…yea…bad,bad gooQle…!

As I was recently asked about botnet figures, I revisited our collections to establish some trends in this area.

In 2004 and 2005, bots were placed in a separate group of their own, separate from viruses and Trojans. Their names often ended with « bot » (W32/Sdbot, W32/Spybot, W32/Gaobot…). Based on the number of separate variants we had in our collections (the zoos) at the time, statistics showed a constant increase.

We have noted since then that a lot of malware has a remote-control feature (i.e. they are bots). Whether we are dealing with worms, viruses or Trojans, they are designed to receive commands and execute them at some point in their life. As of today, much of this remotely-controlled malware are known under various malware family names (W32/Nuwar, W32/Mytob, Spam-Samburg, Srizbi, Backdoor-DIX, etc.). Consequently our counting methods have to change.

On the Internet, various websites allow us to measure a different aspect of the threat.

For example, the Shadowserver Web Site shows us a botnet count. The following graph is a count of all the active Command and Control (C&C) servers the Shadowserver Foundation is aware of. There are approximately 2900 botnets today compared to 1400 one year ago:

Counting the infected computers is a much more arduous task. In January 2007, I reported on Vinton Cerf’s talk at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and explained that he estimated 100 or 150 millions machines as infected represented over 10% of the PCs connected to the Internet. At the same time, some sources estimated less than 10 millions machines when others say they identify nearly 250000 new bots, or infected IPs each day.

Various techniques can be used to track zombie machines. I will only quote one to allow me the opportunity to give you some interesting links:

1. Observing DNSBL queries
   Method is exposed in a white paper from the College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology. It is based on the insight that botmasters themselves perform DNS-based blackhole list (DNSBL) lookups to determine whether their spamming bots are blacklisted or not. There are techniques and heuristic rules to distinguish botnet DNSBL reconnaissance queries from valid DNSBL traffic performed by legitimate mail servers.
2. Watching IRC traffic
   It is one of the simplest methods of detecting IRC-based botnets. It involves sniffing IRC traffic and searching for any signatures matching known botnet commands.
3. Checking Behavioural Characteristics
   As an example, researcher Stephane Racine demonstrated that IRC bots were idle most of the time on a Chat IRC channel but responded faster than a human upon receiving a command.
4. Searching for malware hashes on P2P networks
   With decentralized Peer-to-Peer botnets, compromised nodes on the network can be identified by their retrieval of hashes known to be associated with botnets. The College of Computing and Informatics University of North Carolina at Charlotte proposed this method for tracking W32/Nuwar (alias Storm) infected machines. To determine which search hashes are pertinent, the bot could either be actively running on a network without a true Internet connection to determine current hashes, or the hash generation algorithm could be extracted from its binary to generate hash sets on the fly based on the limited set of random integers and the current time.
5. Watching attack traffic
   Analysing the traffic linked to massive spam distribution or DDoS attacks can reveal the amount of compromised computers. Since January 2008, the Shadowserver graphs demonstrate a huge increase in this field.

To conclude this post, I have to say that looking at these studies did not help me in calculating how many computers are, at the moment, affected by bots! Extrapolation between 120000 or 150000 items known as active in a botnet at a given moment and a total number is hard to envisage… However, making these searches was not useless. We can certainly predict an increase in DDoS attack will be a 2008 issue and, for sure, more and more botnet will be used in the field ; perhaps 40 or 50% of them.